Chapter Seven

Sunday can best be described as a contained disaster. You know those days when, through nobody’s fault, you are desperate to be somewhere else but are forced to go on with a kind of ritual? Katie said that summed up her wedding day to a T. I couldn’t tell Luke or OC what I’d discovered hidden in the matchbox, not yet. Not until, well, not yet. In consequence I was a bit distracted. OC was cross with Paddy who hadn’t yet returned home from his conference, which left poor Luke the only one of us fit to hold a civilised conversation. But, on the plus side, he really hit it off with my sister who, when she’d stopped clutching her bump and complaining that Paddy’s absence was causing her Braxton-Hicks contractions, hissed to me over the sprouts, “Don’t let this one get away, Wills.”

“What do you suggest, a high-pressure containment field?”

“You know what you’re like with men. They’re there one minute and gone the next.”

“I don’t exactly release them into the wild.”

OC made a face and passed Luke the potatoes. “Will never has much luck with men,” she said.

“What is this? Just because Sophie and Iain aren’t here, you feel that you have to go all parental on me? For God’s sake, OC, next thing you’re going to be showing him photos of me having my nappy changed.”

(Sophie and Iain are Mum and Dad. They brought us up to call them by their given names. Sickening, isn’t it? I blame the parents.)

Under the table, Luke squeezed my knee. “Well, I’m not going anywhere.”

I had to dash into the garden room and be sick. I blamed it on the dogs.

And then it was Sunday night and I was on stage, wearing the band uniform black and white, belting out eighties’ classics, feeling all warm and powerful with my boys behind me (best place for Jazz who, in defiance of the whole androgynous-Goth thing, was growing a goatee and therefore looked like a penguin with its dinner round its mouth) and Luke somewhere in the dark audience in front of me. I mean, forget releasing an album and have it enter straight at number one, this was what I was in music for.

We finished with “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” and exited to applause. Luke was waiting for me. “Will you be all right to get home?”

“Yes, in a bit. Got to give the lads a hand with the equipment first.”

“Oh. Right. Good.” Then he gave me a swift kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow then. About eight?” Without waiting for an answer, he was gone. I stood and gawped after him, watching his trendily cut blond hair as it walked off out of the bar. “But,” I muttered to myself, “but.” What had I done? What had gone wrong? All right, so I’d not actually got round to asking if he’d stay over, but, was it me? Did I look, in my white lacy top, less like a celebrity and more like a set of net curtains? Did the black and white ensemble make him think of some ill-advised liaison with a waitress? Or a Friesian cow?

Sadly I began helping the band pack away their instruments, coil wires and box amps.

“Wonder Boy gone then, has he?” Jazz appeared at my elbow, parts of his keyboard over his shoulder.

I thought about lying, but not seriously. I might manage to get away with fibbing to Jazz, but Katie would get the truth out of me in seconds. “He had to go.” I drooped, but rallied quickly. “He’ll have loads of work to get on with. He and his brother have found some premises and they’re dead keen to start shipping some cars in.”

“Has he shagged you yet?”

“Ah, this will be the famous Jazz tact and diplomacy.” I half-heartedly rolled some wire in my hands, before Bob, the bass player, snatched it off me.

“He hasn’t then. Only three reasons I can think of, he’s married, he’s gay, or he could be gay and married I suppose, or he belongs to some religious sect that doesn’t believe in sex and thinks everyone should be smooth plastic below the waist. You know, like Action Man and Gareth Gates.”

“Action Man and Gareth Gates? Members of a religious sect?” I was baffled.

“Smooth plastic. Well, nearly smooth, just this kind of seam thing.”

“You’re weird, Jazz.”

“You’re sex-starved. I know which I’d rather be.” With that he hefted his synth into his arms and walked off. I think he might have been grinning, but that could have been his goatee slipping.

 

 

 

Date: Monday morning. Time: Nine fifteen. Place: Council offices—Roads department. I know, not exactly glamorous, not exactly Mission Impossible, but what were you expecting? If you’re looking for people jumping out of aeroplanes and defusing bombs, you are so in the wrong place.

I was sitting on a badly designed chair, swinging my legs. Katie had gone in search of a coffee machine, and when the door opened, I thought it must be her coming back. I’d ordered a Kit Kat and was beginning to pine.

But it wasn’t Katie. It was a woman I vaguely recognised, carrying a pile of buff files, which she lowered onto the desk and turned, with an expression which only missed being loathing because she didn’t have the right kind of face for it. She had one of those pretty-pretty insipid faces which start off when they’re young being peaches and cream, but rapidly degenerate into whisky and ginger.

“Oh my God, it’s Nadine, isn’t it? Nadine Mitchell?” The face stared back. Although she showed no sign of acknowledgment, I had the feeling she recognised me. “You were up at York with Katie and I. We did English and you were doing Drama. Remember that performance of The Crucible? When everyone got riotously drunk and Tituba fell off the stage?” Still absolutely nothing. Behind me Katie came back in.

“Oh! Hello, Nadine. I haven’t seen you since that night at St. John’s. Did that poor guy ever get his wig back, do you know?”

To my horror, Nadine’s eyes were suddenly overflowing. For a couple of seconds, she stared at Katie and I, tears making canal tracks through her stiff makeup, then she flung an arm against the pile of filing and shot out of the office making little snuffling noises.

“Whoa, distressed pig alert.” Katie handed me the long-overdue Kit Kat.

A woman came into the room and eyed us suspiciously, as though she suspected us of having poked Nadine until she cried, in some bizarre local-government testing experiment. “Miss Cayton?”

“That’s me.”

“My name is Vivienne Parry. I apologise for Nadine. She’s been a little unwell lately. Very highly strung. Now, what can I do for you?”

I unfolded my paper. “My grandfather, Mr. Edward Cayton, he left me this, in his will.” I pushed the crinkled sheet forward. “I was wondering, can you tell me what it’s about?”

Vivienne Parry, who was the approximate shape and colour of a cottage loaf, bent her head over the page, then reached behind her into the filing pile and pulled out one of the card files. On it was my grandfather’s name, crossed out, and mine written over the top. She opened the file.

“Again, I can only apologise,” she said. “Nadine has typed up the letter, but clearly forgotten to post it to you. Here, maybe this will answer your queries.”

Together Katie and I hunched over the headed paper, scanning and then reading the words properly, letting them sink in. After the third time, Katie let out a little squeal.

“God, Will, looks like you’re a rich bitch!”

I couldn’t get the words to settle in my head. As soon as I thought I’d made sense of them, another paragraph would come along and panic them all into the air again, whirling and twittering. “I think it says that I could be. Eventually. When they finish testing?”

The gist, because I know you’ll be agog to find out, was this. My grandfather had patented a new form of road-surfacing material. It was simple, easy to produce and, above all considerations for local councils, cheap. As far as I could tell from the associated paperwork, it seemed to consist of a substance like sequins being introduced to the tarmac before laying, which caused the entire road to reflect oncoming headlights like millions of tiny cats’ eyes. The council was currently testing the material, and was prepared to pay an initial sum of (and this was where my eyes swam around) fifty thousand pounds. Upon successful completion of said testing, they would pay an additional four hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the rights to produce and market the material. Preliminary testing, continued the letter, looked extremely encouraging, with night visibility on treated surfaces being increased by up to thirty-five percent.

“Gah,” went my mouth.

“This is soooo coooool!” shrieked Katie, as though the previous twenty years had never happened and she was twelve again. “You’ve got loads of money, Will—what are you going to do with it?” Then a short pause for oxygen before “Well, we’ll clean out the designer shops, obviously. Ooh, and there was that bag, that pink one, remember, the one you said you’d give up eating for?”

I couldn’t seem to process it, was still waiting for the catch. Still waiting, I suppose, for the gift horse to turn around and bite my hand off.

“We can transfer the initial payment into your account today.” Vivienne was businesslike, despite having an overexcited mother-of-two gyrating around her office. “You only have to sign some paperwork. Most of the formalities were dealt with by Mr. Cayton before he…er…passed on.”

“Um, all right,” I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this was all a huge joke. When she handed me a pen I stared for ages into the ballpoint end, waiting for a little flag to pop out with “sucker” written on it.

Nothing, as they say, continued to happen.

“I thought you were going to refuse to sign in there for a minute,” Katie said afterwards, as we enjoyed a celebratory pack of Thornton’s Toffee-Chocs on a bench in the middle of town. “What were you waiting for, divine guidance?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking, I suppose.”

“Thinking? Someone says here’s a cheque for half a million and you say, hang on, I need to think about it? In what universe is that normal behaviour?”

“It’s not half a million, it’s only fifty thousand.” Then I grinned at her, a lunatic grin. “Listen to me, ‘only fifty thousand’. What am I like? That’s more money than we’d make in, what, three years? Even if you take off tax and my overdraft and these Toffee-Chocs, I’m still left with…”

“Loads.” Katie stuffed another sweet in her mouth. “So, what were you thinking about?”

“The others.”

“What, the film?”

“No, the others. My brothers and OC. What are they going to say when they find out that Ganda didn’t just leave me that nose, that there was real money, and they didn’t get any of it?”

Katie chewed thoughtfully. “Well. For one thing, we don’t know that what he left them didn’t have any money attached. I mean, maybe those books that Bree got will turn out to be worth millions. Has he tried eBay?”

“Bree thinks eBay is a place in Bermuda.”

“All right, but you never know. And that allotment, maybe there’ll turn out to be oil, or diamonds or something underneath it.”

“Katie, I think all this talk of money has turned your brain. Even if—and it is an if so enormous that you probably can’t even comprehend its size—that did turn out to be the case, I don’t think that anyone would pay anything for Ash’s boots. And the dogs…cute, yes. Crufts winners, no.”

Katie shrugged and tossed another ball of chocolate into her mouth. “Okay then.” She cudded like a bovine for a few seconds. “So, are we dossing off work then, or what? I mean, come on, Willow, there is a time and a place for sensible discussions and family loyalty and I am here to tell you that right now is not it.”

“What, not go in? How will they manage?”

“Wills, darling, you’re the ad sales manager at the local free paper. One where the headline ‘Man Finds Cheese’ once ran for three weeks. They will manage, trust me. Neil and Clive will cover for us.”

Her enthusiasm was catching and, do you know, once I’d started spending money it became a lot easier. We didn’t exactly clean out the local shops, but we left a lot of clear floor space and bare shining chrome in our wake. I bought Katie some clothes, and then we hit Mothercare and I splashed out on the twins, bought myself a gorgeous leather jacket which I’d coveted secretly for months, had an enormous lunch in a bistro neither of us had dared enter before, but did so now with our Monsoon bags held up like status badges and I rolled home just before dark. My arms were full of fresh flowers from the market. Their smell was enough to send my spirits soaring, let alone the knowledge that, even when this lot came off my credit card, and with all the other considerations taken into account, I was still going to have an indecent amount of money left. Plus, and I hardly dared even to whisper the prospect to myself, if Ganda’s invention went well, there would be another four hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Dear God, I’d never have to work again. I pushed open the front door with my shoulder. I could run off to some Greek island and sell shell creations on the beach, or buy myself a little cottage in the Highlands and write a bestseller. Or—I began sorting through the flowers, grouping them into vases—I could buy that smallholding I’d always been on about. Only the need to earn a living and pay the bills had forced me to stay at the paper. Ever since I’d seen The Good Life, aged about ten, the idea of being self-sufficient had called to me. Having chickens and geese and growing herbs to sell, and wearing flowing dresses and big sunhats and wandering dreamily barefoot through an orchard of flowering cherry trees with an impossibly perfect man on one arm and an immaculate and silent child on the other.

There was a knock at the door and my dream bubble took flight. Standing alongside a pristine convertible Morgan, bearing a hefty amount of flowers, was Luke. I had completely forgotten about him.

“Oh!”

“Sorry, did I take you by surprise? I’m a few minutes early, I know, but something’s come up and…are you all right?”

“Umm, yes. Luke, I’ve had some news.”

But Luke didn’t let me finish. He pushed the flowers forward at me. “I’m really, frantically sorry about this. These are for you, by the way. But I have to fly out to New York first thing in the morning. James has had some kind of emergency and, look, I won’t bore you with the details but…”

He looked perfect, with his hair artfully disarranged, pale linen jacket over cream chinos. So perfect it almost hurt.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “’S okay.”

“No, Willow, it’s not.” Luke stepped up close, pressing the flowers against me with his body. The smell of crushed rose petals was almost overwhelming. “That’s why I, God, I hope I haven’t taken the most awful liberty here, but, look, I’ve booked a hotel. For us? Next weekend? In the Lake District? If, and please, tell me if I’m really out of order here, if it’s all right?”

A picturesque breeze ruffled his hair and lifted the edges of some lilies. They brushed against my wrist like a kiss. “I think that would be perfect,” I half-whispered.

Then he had to dash off, something to do with paperwork and visas and suchlike, but it didn’t matter. I was practically orbital, hugging the bouquets to me and whirling around the living room, scattering bits of foliage as I went. Next weekend! A hotel, double room, I hoped. I mean, a man wanting to go away for the weekend was hardly anticipating brisk walks and nightly cold baths, was he? And, even better, I had a whole week to prepare. And, even better—in fact I nearly wet myself with how sensationally brilliant the timing was—I had enough money to buy some quite staggeringly lovely clothes. Underwear, shoes, oh, and I must buy some gorgeous perfume so that, even naked, I’d be classy.

I wandered around, dazed by the faultless synchronicity of it all, and slightly stupefied by the flower scents in the air. The dining table looked like a florist’s practice room, with half-made-up bunches and vases solely filled with daffodils or catkin stems. And some of these flowers had been bought for me by a man. A proper, good-looking, affluent man, who I fancied and wasn’t sick on all the time. God, life was good.

A sudden roar from the road outside indicated that life was about to get worse by a factor of ten, as Ash pulled his bike up onto the pavement and came stomping through the open front door. “Willow? Oh, fuck, did somebody die?”

“Shut up, Ash. So, to what do I owe the total nonpleasure? Don’t tell me, you forgot to take the power cable for the laptop this morning.”

“Nah. Well, kind of. Cal wanted to have a word with you about the laptop, that’s all. Reckons there’s more to it than just a faulty connection.”

“Have either of you ever heard of the telephone?” I wanted to be left alone to hug my secrets to me, possibly to ring Katie and hold a hushed, wondrous conversation about designer knickers.

“I was on my way over there, thought I’d pick you up as I came past.”

“All right,” I sighed, and thrust some floppy stems into the sink. “Just a minute.” Then a thought struck me. “Ash, have you moved in with him?”

“Who, Cal?”

“Well, I hear the Archbishop of Canterbury’s spoken for.”

Ash looked coy for a second. “Weeellll, early days yet. But, fuck me, he’s gorgeous though, isn’t he? And cute with it. I mean, don’t you just love the way his hair is all kinda over his face and he’s got those huge eyes? He’s a bit thin though, needs feeding up. Some tender loving care.”

“And you’re the man to give it to him?”

Ash smiled a secretive grin. “I hope. Look, I didn’t come over here to tart about, are you coming?”

“I suppose.”

 

 

 

Cal’s flat was not what I’d expected. He lived over two shops in a select, pedestrian area of York, in what at first appeared to be an open-plan room. The parts of the floor not occupied by computer things were piled high with books and magazines, all science fiction. It looked like Nerd Ground Zero.

I stood awkwardly behind Ash as we came in. There was something relentlessly male about this flat in a utilitarian, everything-has-a-function way. Although it looked untidy, I bet Cal could put his hand on a memory card or a modem without a second thought.

“Cal!” Ash bellowed. He’d let himself in with his own key, I noted. Cal might be good with computers, but he was obviously a sucker for a blond. “Callum!”

“Hey.” Cal emerged from another doorway. “I’m here. Do you want something to eat?” In his own environment, Cal’s limp was less noticeable. Though maybe it was the reason for all the empty space. As he led us inside, I could see that he didn’t use a stick here. “Hi, Willow. I was in the darkroom. Do you want to have a look?” Through another door we entered a tiny room, windowless and illuminated only by a dim red bulb overhead. It looked like the bedroom of a light-sensitive prostitute. “Right. I don’t usually go into small, dark rooms with women I’ve not been formally introduced to, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get a bit overexcited.” Cal rummaged around among some papers. “Now, what do you think of these?” He handed me a sheaf of glossy photographic paper. “I just developed them. What do you think they are?”

“You mean you took photos of something without knowing what it is?”

“Well, duh. Of course I know what it is—I want to know if you do.”

“If this is pornography, I warn you, my brother has a black belt in karate and will defend my honour with his dying breath.”

Cal chuckled. “Willow, your brother couldn’t get a black belt in sushi, I don’t think he gives a stuff about your honour, and why the hell do you think I’d bring you in here to show you porn?”

“Um, I don’t know. Maybe you got a bit overexcited?”

Cal gave me a huge grin. It lit up his glorious eyes, made him look less tired. “Aha! Now you’re getting the hang of humour. What do you make of it?” He indicated the paper in my hand.

The photographs seemed to be images of a cityscape. Tiny beads of light shone out in complicated patterns scattered randomly across an otherwise dark surface. Smudged streaks of glow could have been the lights of cars captured in motion. “Is it New York? From a helicopter?”

“It’s a motherboard.” Cal took the pictures from me.

“A…?”

“Motherboard. The thing that makes a computer a computer. Lots of chips, all stuck together on a board. I take pictures of computer parts from unfamiliar angles, close-ups, that kind of thing. I’ve got a great one of a USB port, looks exactly like the Channel Tunnel.”

“Why?”

“Just a hobby. I don’t…” He hesitated. “I spend a lot of time at home, what with…” He stopped again, dropped his eyes, then his head.

“Yes, I imagine the old war wound must make life a bit awkward,” I supplied.

A grateful smile crinkled his eyes and the corners of his mouth. “Precisely. I’ve had to resign myself to never dancing salsa again.”

“Bet mountaineering’s a bit tricky, too.”

“Ah, dear Everest. How I miss her cloudy heights.”

I decided that I rather liked this odd man. “Please, tell me that none of these pictures feature intimate portraits of my laptop.”

“Not at all. I have special machines to pose for me. Yours is in the living room, the coy little thing. I think you might have a problem with your fan. It could be overheating that’s making it cut out.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Do you want me to?” The red light made his face all angles, deep shadows under his eyes and cheekbones, like a Halloween mask, but a sad one.

“Please.”

“Then, my dear young lady, I shall be only too delighted. Now, let us leave here, before I become overexcited again and you call for your brother to sort me out using only his exquisite black belt.”

Cal held open the door of the dark room and we went back into the suddenly too-harshly-lit hallway. “I’ll have it mended by the weekend. You can come over and collect it, if you like.”

“Great. Oh, I’m away this weekend. Monday?” Just the thought made me tingle.

Cal made a face. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll chuck a blanket over it on Friday, use it as a picnic table.” Then he gave another of his sudden enormous grins. “Come Monday. It’ll be fine.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” I surprised myself by meaning it. Cal was strange to the nth degree with a weird kind of hyperactive melancholy, but he was fun, charming and seemed to like me. This was at least three points up on Ash’s previous boyfriends, who’d either been illegally odd, suicidal or had hated me in the kind of bitchy, supercilious way that some gay men do so well.

Ash decided to sleep over on Cal’s sofa. (Yeah, like I was going to fall for that one. What did they think, that I’ve never watched Queer as Folk?) So I made my own way home. The streets were dark, the road dull and bleak under the tyres of passing cars and I wondered what Ganda’s invention actually looked like.

His voice echoed in my head. “Remember, Willow, you have to see the whole picture,” he’d always said, whilst inventing. “Don’t just think in the here and now, try to think forwards. You don’t have to think about what people want, you have to think about what people need. Sometimes, they don’t even know themselves.”

All very well, Ganda, I thought as I headed down my own familiar road, but it’s hard to think about what people need, when you don’t even know what you want.