The answerphone was on. Natasha listened to her own voice (gratingly bright and overeager, as if she was about twelve) asking her to leave a message after the beep, decided she couldn’t, on the spur of the moment, think of the appropriate attitude to come up with and hung up quickly.
‘They’ve only bloody gone out, haven’t they? You know, like they don’t care?’ she complained to Claire. They were sitting in Claire’s kitchen where they’d been for the past two hours. Scattered remains of pizza base lay strewn about on the table among several empty Coke cans. Claire picked up a shaving of pizza crust and put it in her mouth.
‘They could be trawling through the streets looking for you,’ Claire said. ‘It’s only eight o’clock. You could have left them a message, let them know you’re OK. We’re the ones who should be going out.’
Natasha pulled a face and slumped over the table, her head in her hands. ‘I don’t feel like going anywhere. I’m too depressed. I can’t believe Tom was with Mel, how does he even know her?’
Claire gathered up the pizza debris, loaded it into the box it arrived in and went to squash it all into the bin.
‘You keep going over the same old stuff, Tash, you’re beginning to sound like one of those whingers off Neighbours or something. It’s getting boring. Can’t we just go into Richmond or Putney and see what’s going on? I want a life, I don’t want to waste a Saturday night, even if you do.’
‘OK, OK, I’ll come.’ Natasha ran her hands through her hair. ‘My hair feels filthy though. I only washed it yesterday.’
‘That’s town living for you. You were out in the rain this morning, getting pollution poured all over your head.’
‘And aircraft fuel and other stuff.’ Natasha giggled. ‘Eddy-up-the-road’s always saying we’re being bombed from holiday flights with shit and kerosene. You’ll have to lend me something to wear,’ she said. ‘I only brought stuff to be warm sleeping in a car in, not stuff to go up the pub.’
Talking about Eddy reminded Natasha of the day she and Tom had climbed into his house. Tom might be in someone else’s house right now. He might be pulling Mel onto another crease-free embroidered duvet cover. Maybe there were loads of other girls too: other people’s homes where he got friendly with the mum so he could have a permanent supply of good food and somewhere warm to be. He hadn’t climbed in through her window every night, and he hadn’t died of cold in the Sierra, so perhaps he had a sort of rota. She didn’t want to think about it. Claire was right, they should go out and get themselves some life.
It wasn’t easy to convince Angie that there was a problem. Jess didn’t blame her – it must be a nice comfortable life having her children tidied away at school in the termtime. The school was being paid to take care of Emily and Angie had trusted them to do exactly that, assuming they would not let her merely limp through the term with a growing eating disorder and then send her home to have a serious health crisis. Luke never had any problems, Angie tried to reason, and she’d brought them up the same, so what had to be so different about Emily? Emily, persuaded with difficulty to drink some orange juice, eat (tediously slowly, barely a crumb at a time) half a slice of toast and then forced to stay sitting at the kitchen table until it was too late for her to go and sick it up, was now in Zoe’s room complaining that there was nothing wrong with her.
‘Why did nobody say anything? Why haven’t I had a letter?’ Angie wailed to Jess. Jess could hear denial in her voice: if there hadn’t been a letter, if whoever had been allocated the role of Emily’s pastoral carer hadn’t got in touch, Angie was reasoning that surely it wasn’t that serious.
‘But you can see for yourself. Look how her clothes hang on her, and how her face has caved in. And next time she passes out she might not be in the safety of her own home, with people who care about her.’ Jess was trying to keep her patience. At the back of her mind she was still thinking about Natasha and the morning’s row. Helping Angie come to terms with Emily’s problems, it occurred to her that maybe they should just swap daughters, see if they could do any better with each other’s than they had with their own. At least now she knew where Natasha was, and was hugely relieved she hadn’t run off with Tom. Claire’s mother Veronica had phoned and said (very quietly, for fear the two girls would hear her) that it was all right for Natasha to stay one night, but after that she was going to have to tell her to go home. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to be a refuge for runaways, she’d admitted. ‘My older daughter’s best friend once had a family, er, upheaval, and moved in for three months, which was not convenient, so of course, you can quite understand …’
Jess was uncomfortably conscious of being pushed towards expressing excessive gratitude while at the same time being warned off from expecting any more than the one stingy night’s bed and board for her daughter. Claire, over the years, had spent many a whole weekend giggling nights away in Natasha’s bedroom and she’d spent a damp week in a Devon cottage with them one summer. But then that was when times were good and easy, not to mention more innocent. Perhaps, Jess had thought, attempting to feel charitable, Veronica was concerned that Natasha shouldn’t think she was taking sides. Less charitably, she also suspected that Veronica might not want her darling daughter to be infected with whatever bad behaviour her friend was up to. Veronica, a pillar of the local Conservative party and an eager school PTA participant, would not wish to be mistaken in any sense for a liberal parent.
‘So what do I do?’ Angie sat chewing her nail extensions and looking desperate. ‘I’m supposed to be going out with Steve tonight. Can Emily be left? Do I have to stay in with her and get her to nibble biscuits every ten minutes?’
Jess felt quite sorry for her, but sorrier for Emily. Angie hadn’t a clue about any illness that couldn’t be cleared up with a couple of paracetamol and a few extra hours in bed.
‘I’ll find some phone numbers for you,’ she said, rummaging through the filing drawer in her desk where she kept a bulging file of references that might come in useful for work. ‘There are people who can help but you have to trust them. I can’t pretend the process is likely to be easy. She might have to stay in a hospital for quite a while.’
‘Oh she won’t want to do that,’ Angie laughed. ‘It’s the holidays. She wants to be out having fun. But then …’ Angie pulled on a piece of her hair. ‘She hasn’t got the energy, really, has she? Poor girl. If only she’d said something.’
‘She couldn’t have. That’s part of the problem,’ Jess told her gently. ‘If she’d been able to do that she’d have been halfway to getting herself better.’ She pushed a sheet of paper at Angie. ‘Here, take this, make the calls. Steve will still be around tomorrow.’
Matt finished his beer and wondered about having another one. He was quite hungry but didn’t want to order food from Ben. That would feel too much like having sneaked out for a solitary supper to avoid being at home, and besides, he quite fancied the idea of going out to eat a bit later with Jess, if she could tear herself away from the house. He thought about phoning her and getting her to come and join him, but she might think it was Natasha and get frantic or furious when she found it was only him.
The Leo wasn’t very busy, but then it was still quite early in the evening. On Saturdays the tables filled slowly and the place was rarely full before ten. Even Eddy wasn’t in: Matt wondered if he was seeing Paula again tonight. If he started having a regular thing with her he might not be around so much, which would be a pity. If he really worked on this theme Matt could make himself feel very much like a small boy whose best mate had gone off with someone else. Eddy’s won’t-grow-up humour and general air of permanent bad behaviour was such an entertaining novelty after all those years spent in a job where arriving in the office twenty minutes late was interpreted as some kind of suspect political manoeuvre.
Matt strolled over to the counter. ‘Hey, Ben have a drink with me.’ Maybe that would stave off the hunger, especially combined with some of the olives off the bar. He’d give it a bit longer before he went back. Perhaps Angie would have gone back across the road by then, maybe Natasha would have come home, made up with Jess and decided to concentrate on her GCSE coursework and give up boys for the next year. Perhaps fat pink piggies were formation-flying over the Grove. He waved a tenner at Ben who pulled a single Heineken from the cold cabinet, opened it and handed it to Matt. ‘Not for me thanks mate, got a whole evening to get through. Micky’s off tonight, some cousin of his died and he’s gone to see the family. Anyway, haven’t you got a home to go to, or does that sound too much like a proper pub landlord?’
‘It does, and frankly at the moment I don’t think I have. It’s full of women having traumas. It’s like living in the middle of some God-awful problem page. I had to get out, it’s definitely no place for a man.’
* * *
On Sunday morning Natasha walked home very slowly from the bus stop. The extra few minutes were to give Tom a last chance to show up. He should have been waiting for her, lurking in the square or even behind the laurels outside Claire’s house. There was no reason for him to have known she was there, Natasha knew that, but as he’d so far had a knack of turning up where she was when she didn’t expect him, it didn’t seem too much to hope for.
Natasha wasn’t particularly keen on Sundays. It was a day that didn’t really count. She always felt as if she was merely hanging around waiting for Monday when real life could kick in again. Jess was a firm believer in a proper roast lunch on Sundays; all the family had to be there, unless, like Oliver being in Australia, or when Zoe went on the school ski trip, they had a really sound reason not to be. It meant that the day was broken in half – there wasn’t time to do anything before lunch except hang about sleeping for as long as possible, and the afternoon sort of drifted by into the evening filled with nothing but last-minute homework and really bad television. The parents slopped about, cooked, read the papers all day, did bits of gardening and fell asleep early in the evening, bad-tempered from too much wine. Other families went out and did things, trawled round the shops as if it was just some ordinary day, went swimming or out on visits to places. Jess and Matthew had never quite got themselves round the fact that Sunday had moved on from the static non-day it had been in their youth, and seemed to be doing their best to pass this feeling on to their children.
There was laughter coming from the square by the Leo. Natasha could hear people mucking about before she could see them. There was the sound of a can being kicked, a yell of ‘Goal!’ Her heartbeat’s pace picked up a bit: the laughter was young, some of it might be from Tom. She turned the corner feeling as nervous as if she was about to have her BCG shot all over again, but Tom wasn’t there. There was just the usual bunch of Briar’s Lane year tens, including Mel who was leaning against the bench, wearing a very short black skirt (with bare legs even though it wasn’t warm enough yet and she was winter-pale) and smoking a cigarette. She glanced across at Natasha and gave her a broad grin and a wave. ‘Y’all right Tasha?’ she yelled. Natasha smiled and nodded back. If there’d been no-one else around she might have gone up to Mel and asked her about Tom, how she knew him, how well she knew him. With the others there it would take too much nerve. They’d crowd round, wanting to know the full story. Mel might go challenging, ask things that made her sound hard, like ‘Whad’you wanna know for?’ Natasha, on balance, was glad it was just the grin and the wave. Mel might tell her things she’d prefer not to know.
George hadn’t a clue that anything unusual had been going on. For this Jess was thoroughly thankful, as it meant that the atmosphere over lunch could almost border on the normal.
‘So did you find him then? That young lad you were looking for yesterday?’ George asked Natasha as soon as they sat down. There was a brief tense moment, for George was possibly the only one who wasn’t that interested in her reply, and then Natasha grinned at him and said, ‘No. I wasn’t really looking though. Went to my mate Claire’s and later we went into Richmond and met up with some friends from school. It was a bit boring really.’ Shrugging, she made a fast start on her roast lamb and didn’t meet anyone’s eye, but somehow it was acknowledged that enough information had been given about what she’d been up to and the subject didn’t need to be pursued.
‘Emily’s in a hospital with a special anorexic unit. She had to go in last night, like an emergency?’ Zoe told her as the two of them cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. ‘She’s way under six stone and she’s got to stay in till she’s at least six and a half.’
‘Jesus, poor her. Still, at least she’ll get sorted.’ Zoe glanced at her sister, wondering. Natasha looked miles away, her mind gone off to some place where she didn’t seem to be very happy. She wished there was school tomorrow so the two of them could go on the bus together and get back to being like proper friends again. Somehow she didn’t think Tom would be climbing in through the windows any more. Natasha looked as if she’d been dumped, but was just that bit too moody and distant to be asked about it. Stuff would work out though, she assumed. It had over Emily, it would with Tash.
… foolish parents thinking holidays give an opportunity for a few uninterrupted hours of coursework. A couple of hours in the evening, with time off for EastEnders, cups of coffee, the video that has to be watched now because it’s due back tomorrow, plus several phone calls to sympathize with their friends over how much homework is making them suffer doesn’t really add up to much that’s down on paper. Two maths questions and Zoe requires Nurofen and a lie-down on the sofa. Natasha specializes in preparation techniques, in which the right pen, paper, selection of paper clips, hole puncher have to be arrayed on the desk top. Some may have to be shopped for …
Paula wasn’t going to like this. She was expecting a blow-by-blow account of whatever trauma there’d been at the weekend, not a cop-out little piece about homework in the school holidays. She’d already called twice this Monday morning to ask ‘Is everything all right now?’ using that voice of profound sympathy to disguise shameless curiosity. It was all Jess could do to stop her calling in, hoping to catch the entire family at each other’s throats. Paula with her single life, in her perfect Kensington apartment with her clean perfect furniture, flowers of the latest and best taste and her slinky-sleek cat that never seemed to shed fur, must be feeling the lack of a turbulent family battleground and be strangely keen to acquire one second-hand.
‘I’ll be seeing Eddy later,’ she confided to Jess on the phone. ‘I could just pop round if you like, have a quiet word with Natasha, woman to woman, sort of thing.’ The implication ‘I’m nearer her age than you are’ was unmissable. Paula appeared to be going for a new vocation: Friend to the Teenager, as if it went hand in hand with Rock Chick, or would it be Rock Hen, Jess wondered, seeing as Eddy was so far past his peak. Tactfully, Jess had dissuaded her, saying she was busy working on Nelson’s Column.
‘Oh goody, I’ll catch up when I get the copy,’ Paula had enthused, leaving Jess in no doubt that she expected a full and factual report to be shared with the Gazette-reading populace.
‘Are you writing about me?’ Natasha slid into the room while Jess was working at the computer.
‘Do you have to?’ Natasha sat down on the sofa and flicked through Sunday’s Comfort Zone section.
‘No, I suppose I don’t have to. Would you rather I didn’t?’ This day had had to come some time. It probably came to all columnists who used their family life as material: years before it had happened to Hunter Davies with his column in Punch. The word ‘exploitation’ lingered in the air.
‘If you’re using us for something to write about, shouldn’t we get paid?’ Natasha asked.
‘It depends. If you were supplying the ideas and the words, then yes. But I’m the one putting all this together, arranging what I choose to use, coming up with the words and the style to express them. And,’ she turned to look at Natasha properly, ‘don’t forget you get the benefit.’ She smiled at her. ‘It’s not as if I rush off all by myself and spend my earnings on fancy holidays in health farms in California or something.’ Though sometimes I wish, she thought. ‘This column pays for you to go to school …’
‘I don’t have to go there. Now Dad’s not working me and Zoe could go to Briar’s Lane. I hate that school if you really want to know. Being with just girls gives you weird ideas about boys.’
‘What sort of ideas?’ Jess was intrigued, and also aware that they were getting neatly close to the Tom subject. If there was anything Natasha wanted to talk about, it could well be now.
‘Ideas that they’re actually trustable, that they’re people just like us.’
Matthew came into the room at that point. ‘Ha! You don’t want to go thinking like that!’ he laughed. ‘We are men!’ he roared, beating his chest, gorilla-like. ‘We will not be tied, we’ll not be tamed!’
‘You will not grow up!’ Jess grinned. Natasha was distinctly unamused and stood up, slamming the newspaper back down onto the sofa. ‘Why don’t you take anything seriously? Why do you have to make a joke out of everything? Nothing’s funny!’ she yelled, racing out of the room. Matt and Jess stared at each other as the footsteps clattered up the stairs and Natasha’s door slammed shut.
‘Are you writing about her?’ Matthew asked at last.
‘No, well not about the stuff at the weekend. That wouldn’t be fair.’
‘No it wouldn’t. You know, people she knows read your pieces. It’s worth being a bit careful what you say. I can imagine the school head’s face if you did write about that boy climbing in through the window to sleep with Tash. She’d probably get expelled.’
‘Well that’s partly why I’m keen to branch out and write about the other things, going out on the jaunts that Paula keeps coming up with. On the phone earlier she asked me to think of a sport that I really, really hate. She seems to think I should go off and find out a bit more about it and then write a piece about how I changed my mind.’
Matt thought for a moment. ‘Well, what do you hate?’
‘Since hockey at school which was like sheer bloody torture? Nothing particularly. And don’t go telling Paula about the hockey, I’m definitely never going to play wing three-quarter ever again. The only grown-up women still playing are the sort like my school archenemy Jenny Humphreys who flattened everyone in her path.’
‘My sort of woman …’ Matt chuckled. ‘Choose something you don’t have to get muddy and frightened for, then. What about motor racing?’
‘That’s a thought. Though it might take some fixing up. One thing I really can’t see the point of is golf. All those rules about women not being allowed in some of the bars and having to give way to men on the greens, all that.’
‘Well there you are then. Now, it’s nearly lunchtime, come with me to the Leo and hang out for a while with my dodgy new mates.’
They were all there in the Leo: Ben and Micky of course who were working, Eddy, who from the bottles in front of him was on at least his third lager, the sorrowful-looking architect from next door to Angie, and even Wandering Wilf had taken a break from pacing the streets to amuse himself with the day’s newspapers. The men looked up from their table by the window and greeted Matt effusively, calming with bizarre suddenness when they realized he was accompanied by his wife. Jess immediately felt as if she’d been cast in the role of a rather bossy minder.
‘What on earth do you tell them about me? I feel as if they think I’m some kind of witch,’ she whispered as they went to the bar to look at the day’s menu on the blackboard.
‘Nothing!’ Matt protested too firmly. ‘I hardly say a thing, do I Ben?’ Ben, with a look of wide-eyed over-innocence, backed him up. ‘Honestly, he never mentions home, truly.’
‘We’ve got other things to discuss, believe me,’ Matt added. She could see him looking over her shoulder, winking at his collection of dropout mates.
‘Come and sit with us! Plenty of room over here!’ Eddy called.
Reluctantly, feeling she was stepping into enemy territory, Jess sat at the chair Eddy had pulled out for her.
‘How are you?’ she asked, as if she hadn’t heard only an hour before about the mind-blasting seeing-to that he’d given Paula the night before.
‘Never better darlin’,’ Eddy chuckled, picking up his drink in a mock toast, ‘thanks to you donating your sexy friend Paula to the cause of the sad old rocker. Tee-hee.’ The others joined in the sniggering, exactly like, she thought, silly young teenage boys. Just like teenage boys in fact, they had nothing better to do or to think about. She tried hard not to contemplate what Matt would be like if he went on much longer spending his days roaming around with this lot. It was like watching someone walking backwards towards childhood.
‘Poor Micky’s in a bit of a state,’ Wandering Wilf told her. She was quite startled, hardly able to recall that Wilf had ever been known to talk to anyone before.
‘Oh, why’s that?’ she enquired.
‘Dead cousin,’ Wilf explained. ‘Can’t find a funeral place that he’d be seen dead in, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
Matt returned to the table carrying plates with their lunch, baguettes with lavish supplies of chicken and salad and garlic mayonnaise. ‘Why? What’s the problem?’
Micky, overhearing himself being discussed, took a break from cleaning the glasses and came to sit with them.
‘He was an old hippy, Geoff was. He wouldn’t want to be stuck in some twiddly little oakette box lined with ruched polyester. You go in those places, and it’s, like, somewhere for seriously old people. All anaglypta magnolia walls and dried flower arrangements in horrible little fluted vases. And filing cabinets with fake wood fronts and horrible, horrible net curtains.’
‘Ugh, curtains.’ Eddy shuddered.
‘I mean, where, where is the Richard Branson of the undertaking business?’ Micky was on a roll now. ‘Where is Terence Conran when you need him, a bloke with design sense who can sharpen the trade up a bit? Get up to speed with the kind of people who buy their sofas at Heal’s and their fabrics from Designers Guild? There’s a lot of us about and our mates die too, not just ancient grannies. Geoff would be spinning in his shroud if he’d seen the Georgian-style brass-effect handles on offer for his coffin.’ He leaned forward, looking intense. ‘I said, “Haven’t you got a tasty straight-edged chrome? Something a bit more Philippe Starck?” Bloke in black thought I was crazy.’
For once, Jess could see that they had a point. She couldn’t think of any undertaker’s shopfront that didn’t look like a relic from a Dickensian novel. It was the one high-street business that didn’t seem to have moved on, certainly in her lifetime; some of them still referred to themselves as ‘funeral parlours’. The word ‘parlour’ should have gone the way of ‘scullery’ and ‘wash-house’ by now. She remembered when her mother had died, going into the hushed front office of Shearing Brothers, Undertakers and Monumental Masons and having to ask if the clerk would mind turning off the sombre taped music that seemed to make the whole proceedings even more depressing than they already were. The carpet had been a dingy grey and black check, and although she was only the thickness of the dusty window away from a lively spring day out on the road beyond, it had felt as if time had stopped, and the air was barely breathable. The hush and gloom that were perhaps supposed to pacify fragile emotions seemed something of an insult, as if the atmosphere of supreme respect for the dead (or ‘loved one’ as the woman taking down the details had called her, reminding Jess of Evelyn Waugh and making her want to giggle) was entirely false.
‘We should take it on,’ Matt suggested. ‘Smarten up the death trade a bit. Bring in something like the Ikea factor, some smart paint along with the cardboard-box and wicker-casket options. After all, you’re never going to run out of clients …’
‘Hang on a bit, in theory you’ve got a point but …’ Jess could see him starting to get the kind of excitement going that he’d had over the ludicrous Cat Sat idea. It would lead to hours on the Internet and a week of one-subject supper conversations.
‘But what?’ Ben joined in. ‘It wouldn’t be a joke thing you know, there’s serious mileage in this, I’ve been talking to Micky about it.’
‘We’d have an empire in no time.’ Matt was getting excited. Bits of chicken and mayonnaise were dropping all over the table as he talked and waved his baguette about. ‘It’s just a matter of getting the right name.’
‘Dead Reckoning,’ Micky suggested.
Eddy giggled into his beer. ‘Nah, that would be what you call the bill, put it on the invoice heading. I think it should be something musical, like, let me think: what about Knocking on Heaven’s Door?’
‘It’s good, but then you wouldn’t get any atheists.’ Jess, rather amazed, found herself joining in.
‘Paint it Black?’ the architect, his face still suitably gloomy, said.
Matt laughed loudly. ‘How about Going Underground?’
‘They’d think we don’t do cremations,’ Ben said.
‘Final Countdown?’ Eddy suggested.
‘Oh I like that one,’ Matt agreed.
‘I’d better get back to work. Keep thinking about it though.’ Micky stood up and walked over to the bar. ‘Because I’m serious. I want something else to do. Can’t run a back-street bistro all my grown-up life.’
‘What’s got into him?’ Matt murmured to Ben as soon as Micky was occupied serving a customer.
‘Jaded. The cousin going has shaken him and he wants to travel and things. I don’t want him to go, I need a partner to run this place and I don’t want to take up with someone I don’t know. I need someone with a business brain like his – I can mostly take care of the food and the stock. Whatever. It’ll work itself out. Things do.’
Tom was back by the railway, looking up at Natasha’s window. She pulled the curtain back and waved down to him. Jess and Matt had gone out for lunch but she didn’t dare let Tom into the house again. This time her dad might just decide to murder him. She hoped he’d got the message to wait for her and ran off to get her coat. Since coming home the day before Natasha had spent most of the time in her room. Her parents would be amazed to see how much of her homework she’d got done. When it really came down to it, there wasn’t much else to do when you were in there all by yourself. Jess was of the completely dated (in the view of all three of her children) opinion that it was bordering on a mortal sin for teenagers to have televisions in their rooms, considering that anyone bored and on their own should occupy themselves reading a book.
Leaving her books open and spread out on the desk in an impressive display of ongoing diligence, Natasha slipped down the stairs and out of the back door. At the end of the garden she twisted the rotting fence plank sideways and wriggled out through the gap to the long damp grass on the railway’s embankment. She felt quite scared to be there: from the time five years before when they’d first moved to this house they’d all been told Never Ever to go out to the railway line. She felt as if a train was going to veer off the track any second and rip her to shreds, just because she was doing the one big dangerous thing she’d always been warned about.
‘Hi.’ Tom had been waiting for her. She hadn’t been sure he would, he might have just been hanging about there waiting for Mel or someone else and hoping she wouldn’t be looking out of the window.
‘Hi,’ she said to him. Tom got hold of her arm and pulled her towards him, holding her tight against his chest. She relaxed and grinned to herself, breathing in the heady scent of the leather jacket again. It felt like the right place to be. She didn’t care what the parents said. If Tom asked her right now to run off to Paris or even Peckham with him, she knew she’d go.