The first part of the morning in the Franklins’ house went by without any sign of the man of the house, Richard. As the minutes ticked on, it became clear that Janet was trying to avoid sustained periods of time in my company, but at least she bothered to show some effort. Along with two mugs of tea, I was also treated to some (seriously good) homemade sourdough with chickpeas and extra virgin olive oil. I should start getting more creative with my breakfast choices, I thought to myself, thinking guiltily of the sugary cereal I had in the cupboard. Although I didn’t feel exactly comfortable in my surroundings, I found just being in the company of others did have a rejuvenating effect on me. There was something comforting about being amidst the bustle, the comings and goings, with Janet carrying piles of towels upstairs or Mimi moaning about a missing bracelet. Even Jonathan returned, eventually, although he still looked wary of me. He still hadn’t bothered to get properly dressed, and was still in the T-shirt he must have slept in, although now with the addition of some loungewear or pyjama trousers of a similar burgundy tartan design to his boxer shorts.
Even when he did make an appearance he didn’t linger long, and would disappear into the kitchen, calling out things like ‘Where are the cornflakes?’
After his mother responded, and he shuffled off, I heard more words coming from somewhere out of sight: a whispered conversation that sounded as if it was in full flow before Jonathan had interrupted them. He must have left the door open to whatever room Janet was in, and it quickly became obvious she was talking about me.
‘I mean, I don’t want to appear heartless. It’s all tragic – nobody would say it isn’t. But she’s just… well… settled herself in the lounge and shows no sign of going.’
‘Maybe you could offer to walk her back to her house?’ said a man’s voice. Richard. They must have been in his study, having a quiet summit about me. I had no idea his work office was downstairs. I presumed it would be one of the unused bedrooms above.
‘Oh, that’s so lovely to hear you’d happily send your wife out into some apocalyptic disaster—’ Janet snapped, forgetting to whisper.
Richard mumbled something about having forgotten about the situation outside.
‘Forgot? People have died. It said so on the Guardian website just now. I saw it on my phone. Two people who worked at the power station.’
More mumbling from Richard. I think he may have said the words miles away, perhaps implying that the imminent threat to ourselves here in Oak Tree Close was being exaggerated. After this, further eavesdropping had to be abandoned because Jonathan came wandering back in, cereal bowl in hand. He showed signs of heading straight for the door at the side of the lounge which led back out to the stairs and up to his safe haven, but I stopped him.
‘Jonathan, is there any chance you could join me for a moment?’ I patted the seat next to me and smiled, then regretted it since it probably looked creepy.
It was instantly obvious he didn’t want to, as his eyes shot around the room as if looking for an escape route.
‘Just for a moment,’ I said, now sounding a bit pleading and desperate. He seemed to take pity on me and came to take a seat, opting for the sofa opposite.
‘I’ve been wanting to have a word with you, Jonathan, about…’ I took a deep breath. ‘…about Danny.’
This seemed to confirm his worst fears. His eyes widened, then he looked quickly at the floor, as if afraid he’d give something away through merely looking at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a small voice.
I leant forwards. ‘What are you sorry about?’ I tried to meet the boy’s gaze, but he was staring resolutely at the carpet, his mouth clenched, both hands gripping the cereal bowl tightly in his lap.
‘That he died,’ he said, in little more than a whisper.
I blinked back some tears that were threatening to spill over. ‘I’m… I’m sorry too. I know you lost a friend. And you’ve got nothing to be sorry about with all that. His death wasn’t your fault.’
Jonathan also seemed to be fighting the need to cry, and I heard his breathing coming out slow and heavy, his eyes blinking rapidly. ‘The guy who smashed into their car… he… he deserved to die,’ he said, a harder, harsher look taking over his face. ‘I mean, I’m glad… What he did was terrible. He was a drunk, wasn’t he? Something like that. He deserved what happened to him.’
This isn’t a subject I wanted to get into, although I was moved by the force of his words. ‘It wasn’t alcohol. He’d been smoking cannabis, but, well, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.’ It was my turn to take some steady deep breaths. Now I had what I wanted – an audience with Jonathan, alone – I was finding it much harder than I’d expected. ‘You see, the thing is, Danny was… not himself just before his death. I think something had been bothering him for a while.’
Jonathan clenched his eyes, as if trying to rid himself of this situation, or perhaps push back a bad memory that had swum to the surface. Whatever it was, I didn’t have a chance to find out, because at that moment someone walked in from the archway behind him and said, ‘What’s going on?’
Mimi was standing there, looking quizzically over at us both. Jonathan still had his eyes closed, and she turned her gaze to me as if to say, What have you done to him?
‘Jonathan and I were just having a chat. About… my son. Danny.’
The reference to my deceased child either didn’t register with Mimi or she decided it was best to ignore it, because she just prodded the boy until he opened his eyes. ‘What?’ he said, looking up, annoyed.
‘Mother just said that there still seems to be hot water, but it might not last. So you should be quick if you want to shower.’
He gave a half-shrug in response to this.
She then looked over at me. ‘He showers every day just to make sure his hair doesn’t go curly, you know. He combs it and everything.’
She said this fact conversationally, as if we were two friends sharing quirky details about our families.
‘Fuck off,’ Jonathan muttered and got up.
Mimi let herself drop onto the sofa seat he’d just vacated. ‘Oh shush. Just because you’re ashamed of being ginger.’
This was clearly a sensitive subject as Jonathan threw an angry glance towards his sister and thudded out of the room and up the stairs. The whole thing was, of course, more than a little ludicrous, since Jonathan was clearly blonde, albeit the darker of the two.
‘Now, now, Mimi,’ I heard Janet’s voice say in light admonishment. She came strolling into the lounge, carrying a large stack of what looked like magazines. ‘It isn’t nice to tease your brother. People of minority hair pigmentation shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed about their natural colouring.’
The phrase people of minority hair pigmentation would normally have made me laugh – the sort of thing Pete and I would have giggled over together when I relayed it back to him. To anyone else, the unbearably clunky and jargonistic choice of language might be confusing, but for me it was just a reminder of one of Janet Franklin’s less endearing qualities. The policing of language, and the phrases we should all stick to, was an obsession of hers. For the first couple of school terms when we moved to Oak Tree Close, I decided to go along to a few of the PAFOF meetings (Parents and Friends of Fletcher House School). I thought showing an interest in the way my son’s school was run was a good, productive thing to do and I even hoped – though I was unwilling to admit it at the time – that I would make some friends with the other mums. These meetings were never officially hosted by Janet. That unhappy task fell to a largely silent, ineffectual woman named Cynthia, a retired bookbinder from Cleethorpes who wasn’t very interested in discussing anything other than the amount of swearing and violence in some of the ‘more modern fiction’ on the curriculum. But Janet seemed to think she should be chair, and regularly held court in such a boldly confident way that all the other attendees (five mums, two dads and Mrs Murray, a science teacher, representing the staffing body) seemed too terrified to nudge her out of the spotlight, especially given Janet’s favourite subject: diversity.
She championed the cause with the vehemence of a prosecutor persuading the jury of a serial killer’s wickedness, although in this case it wasn’t clear if we were all meant to be the jury or the serial killer. We were told we were ‘inherently sexist’ because the English Literature classes studied two works by women and three by men. The school was ‘endemically anti-gay’ because the History GCSE syllabus was populated exclusively by ‘heterosexual dictators or oppressors, like Winston Churchill’, something not helped by ‘the lack of an after-school club for LGBTQI+ pupils’. When asked politely by one timid parent named Annie what all those letters stood for, Janet pointed a severe finger at the scared-looking woman and proclaimed her to be ‘the embodiment of the problem we’re facing’. On the subject of race, Janet repeatedly mentioned how guilty she felt about the actions of her ancestors, and in one particularly embarrassing moment, apologised to ‘the attendees of colour at the meeting’ for how overwhelmingly white the school was. When it was suggested by Mrs Murray, whose parents were from Nigeria, that her little speech could be regarded as ‘somewhat patronising’, Janet quickly moved the subject on to the school’s lack of gender-neutral bathrooms.
It was a curious phenomenon, all this, since at the end of one of the PAFOF gatherings, Annie walked with me to the car park and shared some details of the Janet of yesteryear.
‘She wasn’t always like this,’ Annie said. ‘She actually used to be quite the opposite.’
Interested in this rare nugget of gossip, I listened to how Annie’s two kids had gone to the same playgroup as Jonathan and Mimi back in the 2000s, and how Janet was one of the types who moaned about how ‘political correctness had gone mad’. Apparently, she had liked nothing better than to complain to the other parents about how the children weren’t allowed to sing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ anymore, how the word ‘Christmas’ would probably be banned in schools and nurseries any second because of ‘the Muslims’, and how they should hold on tight to terms like ‘Mum and Dad’ even if it ‘offended the gays’.
I found this insight fascinating, and it led me to wonder why she had flipped so far the other way. Was it, perhaps, that having spent past years of her adult life spreading racist and homophobic untruths and mocking those trying to be sensitive to others, she was now doing penance by fighting performatively for equality? Maybe she felt guilty about the people and groups she had casually slandered and sneered at? Or it could, rather depressingly, just be Janet gravitating towards her two favourite things: to be the one in control, and the one with the loudest voice in the room.
Part of me was tempted to ask her about all this outright, as I sat opposite her in her lounge. But I decided riling her wouldn’t be an effective way of getting what I wanted.
She had settled the large stack of magazines down next to her daughter, who shifted aside, looking irritated at the intrusion. ‘I thought I’d go through these now to see if any of them could be donated to the school’s charity sale in the summer,’ Janet explained as she flapped about with the pages, ‘but I think some have been stained with tea – Richard can be awfully clumsy.’
She flicked through the pages of Waitrose Food and Country Living, pausing occasionally to read the odd article or flash me an image of a stately home, remarking, ‘Richard and I had dinner there once – the veal was terribly overdone.’ Perhaps she found my clear lack of interest in her excursions rather difficult, because after a while she suggested putting the radio on. ‘I think we have a battery one somewhere,’ she said, laying a hand lovingly on an off-white Bose sound system that sat on a table near the bookshelves, clearly sad she couldn’t put it to good use. An old, slightly tatty battery-powered radio was produced from somewhere beyond the kitchen and placed on the mantlepiece. I noticed how its grilled front was flecked with what looked like white paint. ‘The builders used it a lot when they came to extend the conservatory,’ Janet explained, after seeing me staring at it. A loud blast of what sounded like Rhianna’s song ‘S&M’ immediately filled the room, leaving Janet looking scandalised, and she hurriedly tried to tune it to Radio 4. Mimi, who had been watching her mother with a look of bored semi-interest, got up and tried to help, but only succeeded in finding Heart FM. Eventually Janet settled for Radio 3, and some music started to fill the room, low and seductive, growing into a melody I knew well. Far too well.
‘Oh I love this,’ said Janet, settling herself down on the sofa with the remaining magazines, ‘although I can’t quite remember the name… Oh, it will come to me.’
‘It’s Mahler,’ I said, keeping my eyes on the floor in front of me.
‘Oh yes, so it is.’ I could tell Janet was put out I’d got there first, ‘“The Quartet for Strings and Piano in A Minor”, I believe.’ She probably thought it would be out of my range of cultural appreciation, but I couldn’t let that bother me now. There was a scent in the room that was growing stronger: cinnamon candles… and red wine. And a touch on my left hand. The feel of flesh against flesh. Pete’s fingers interweaving with mine, nudging against the plates of the dinner we’d just had. One of our first at his London apartment.
I was vaguely aware of a far-off voice. A woman maybe.
It was Janet. Asking if I was all right. If everything was OK. But it wasn’t OK. Because the room was growing very dark.
Then I felt a softness and stillness carry me off. And nothing but silence followed.