‘Have you thought about who you’ll have as a birthing partner?’ said Annie to Palma in the car.
‘I’m going to ask Iris if she’s free,’ replied Palma.
She sounded so serious that Annie had to say, ‘Really?’
Palma smiled. ‘I don’t need anyone, only the doctors and nurses,’ she said. She wasn’t being stoic, she really didn’t want anyone but professionals to be there. Professionals who knew what they were doing.
Palma had a hot chocolate, watched half an hour of TV and then went to bed. She curled up into a ball and felt her baby moving around inside her. She’d decided to call her Gracie, after the most wonderful, loving woman she’d ever known. If there was a heaven, she would be looking down on her now and saying to her in a kind, but concerned voice, ‘Oh, Palma Collins, what have I told you about letting people into your heart? Open the doors, love. Don’t keep the sunshine outside.’ But she’d let Grace Beresford into her heart and she’d left her and it had broken her. In the end, the only person you can really rely on is yourself, so someone wise once said. Palma’s comfort zone had room for just one person in it. That way she didn’t get let down, but her baby would always be able to rely on her. She smoothed her hand over the compact mound of her stomach. She spoke to Gracie all the time. She lay in the dark and told her how much she loved her and would do anything for her. What she couldn’t imagine was Gracie being born, leaving her ultimate protection, when she wouldn’t be able to keep her safe anymore.
She was in a deep sleep by ten and so she didn’t hear the quiet first knock on her door, or the insistent second one or the steps walking away when it seemed as though there was no one at home.
*
After the club meeting, Annie and Joe watched some TV and halfway through a repeat of Cracker, she found herself thinking about prawn crackers which revved up a compulsive craving for a Chinese meal. And when Annie craved something at the moment, she craved it. Her cravings were legendary and something they’d still laugh about in years to come: toasted currant teacakes slathered in Nutella and slices of banana, hard-boiled eggs dipped in Marmite, crispy lettuce leaves soaked in vinegar – which did nothing for her heartburn but she didn’t care – and cauliflower mashed up with double cream, Laughing Cow cheese triangles and tuna. Up until her pregnancy, Annie had hated cauliflower. It was on her list of ‘vegetables to be outlawed’, but for some reason, she was eating her way through the cauliflowers of the UK single-handed. Tonight her passion was for sweet and sour pork balls with noodles and a side order of crispy won tons. Her mouth was slavering at the prospect of her teeth crunching into the fried pastry.
The best takeaway around by far was the Great Wall of China on the High Street in Dodley but they didn’t deliver.
‘Oh Joe, it doesn’t matter,’ said Annie, watching him slip off his dressing gown and put on his trousers.
‘Of course it matters,’ he said, pulling his black jumper on. ‘My God, look at me. I am like a burglar. All I need is a baka . . . balal . . .’
‘Balaclava,’ laughed Annie. He never could say the word. That and ‘certificate’.
‘I’ll be back in about half an hour,’ he said, threading his feet into his trainers – also black.
*
Clint O’Gowan was full of cocaine and walking brazenly up Dodley High Street towards his car. Fuck the Webbs, he thought. They’d gone soft anyway. Fat from all their fancy meals. Who the fuck did they think they all were, telling him to stay away from Dodley or else. If they’d really meant business, they’d have come after him but they hadn’t. Spineless bastards.
Palma was obviously at the boxer’s house which was a nuisance. If she hadn’t changed her phone number he wouldn’t have had to come.
The High Street was empty apart from a man across the street getting into a black Audi. Nice. Dressed head to foot like a fucking ninja, a thought that made him snigger to himself. Out of the far corner of his eye, he saw the man cross the road to his side. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, swinging him round.
‘Oy. What the . . .’
He looked into ninja man’s face and it took a long second for his brain to travel from faint to full recollection. His smile spread to its widest potential.
‘Well well well. We meet again, Mr Pandoro.’
*
Joe returned over an hour after setting off. Annie had rung him once but he hadn’t picked up.
‘They’d given me the wrong order and I had to wait until they made the right one,’ he explained.
‘What have you done to your hand?’ asked Annie. His knuckles were bleeding.
‘I fell over the pavement,’ he said. ‘I hurt my knee as well.’
Annie laughed. ‘I bet you were glad you volunteered to go and get me a Chinese.’
Surprisingly the contents of the containers needed heating up in the microwave. She didn’t think anything more about it. Not until she heard the news about Clint O’Gowan.
Chapter 49
Gill popped up on FaceTime to see how everyone was doing. She couldn’t believe how big Annie’s bump had grown.
‘Right little fatty now, aren’t you?’ she chuckled. ‘How’s your weather?’
‘We’re having a bit of a cold snap,’ returned Iris.
‘So are we,’ said Gill. ‘I’ve had to put a thin cardi on today. There was an actual cloud in the sky this morning. I’d forgotten what they looked like.’
‘Really,’ said Iris, trying not to sound too jealous. ‘How’s Penn and Teller?’
‘Oh, we don’t bother with them anymore. All they did was brag. Handmade bras and handmade shoes and Jag this, Porsche that.’ She leaned in close so her face filled the screen and whispered, ‘That sort are only bothered about being the top dogs. We’ve hooked up with the people across the complex – Dougie and Maureen – who are exactly like us except they’re from Birmingham. They don’t look down on you for owning a set of pans from Argos.’
Annie smiled. ‘They sound more like your sort of people.’
‘Oh, they are, Annie. And they’ve got a lovely pool. If the weather picks up, we might have a swim there later after our lunch but it’s dropped to twenty-two degrees.’ And she shuddered.
‘I’m surprised it’s not snowing, aren’t you, Joe?’ Iris turned to Joe who had deposited a coffee in front of her.
‘What?’
‘I’m saying . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Where are you going for lunch then? McDonald’s?’ snipped Iris, turning back to the iPad screen.
As Iris and Gill continued to gossip, Annie quietly observed her husband. There was something troubling him and there had been for a few days now. She’d asked him and he’d replied that she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. Him and Palma both. They smiled, they talked, they were sociable but occasionally the façade slipped and she could see the hint of something dark underneath that was eating at them.
*
That evening, Palma had just sat down to her tea when there was a timid knock at the door and her heart did not know whether to rise or sink. She looked through the window and the disappointment felt like a rock in her stomach. Nicole. She’d have to be hard now, no more pay-offs. No more Mr Nice Guy.
She threw open the door and Nicole lifted up her hands as if to ward off the unfriendly words she knew were about to come her way.
‘I’m not here for any money, before you say. I thought you might want to know about Clint,’ she said.
‘Nicole, I really don’t want to know anything—’
‘He’s dead, Palma.’
‘What?’
‘Can I come in?’
It was dark and raining and bitter. With an outward breath of annoyance, Palma moved aside. As Nicole stepped past her, Palma could smell her pronounced odour – fishy and sweaty as if she hadn’t washed for a long time. She had a sudden flashback: she and Nicole shopping in Boots on a Saturday afternoon, testing out all the perfumes. Nicole always had some Impulse in her ba
g which she would spray into the air and then step into. She took pride in herself back then.
‘You didn’t know?’ asked Nicole, sitting straight down on the sofa, after moving a carrier bag full of baby clothes onto the carpet. ‘Nice and warm in here.’ She was shivering. She had lost weight since Palma had last seen her, her legs were like sticks in her jeans.
‘Can I get you a coffee or a cup of tea?’ Palma asked, immediately cross with herself for being so damned polite.
‘A tea would be good,’ said Nicole. ‘Four sugars and plenty of milk.’
The kettle had not long been boiled. She put a teabag in a cup whilst trying to keep a discreet eye on Nicole and her light fingers, but Nicole remained on the sofa with her hands pressed between her knees. When Palma delivered the mug to her hands she noticed how bitten down her nails were. Another memory: being in Nicole’s bedroom with a big box of nail varnishes, nicked from various chemists and the market. Palma hadn’t understood the exhilaration that Nicole found in shoplifting. She didn’t want to be around her when she did stupid things like that. Those stolen nail varnishes had hammered the first nail into the coffin of their friendship.
‘Been shopping?’ said Nicole, looking around the room.
‘Yeah,’ but Palma wasn’t interested in talking about that.
‘Your dinner’ll get cold,’ said Nicole, nodding to the table.
‘I’m not that hungry anyway. What happened?’
‘They found his body in a wheelie bin up by the railway track. Awful, innit.’
An undignified end to suit his undignified life. She was more shocked than she thought she might have been. ‘Where?’
‘Here. Dodley. They found him last Thursday morning. Police had had a tip-off, apparently.’
‘What was he doing over here? I thought he had to stay away from the Webbs?’
‘That’s Clint for you, in’t it? Once he gets some snow inside him, he thinks he’s fucking Iron Man.’ Nicole slurped on her tea. ‘Nice this, thanks.’
‘You told him where I lived, didn’t you? After swearing you wouldn’t.’
Nicole shrugged. ‘I didn’t set out to but he found out I’d been here and . . . you know what he’s like. Was like.’
She was lying and Palma had lost all patience with her.
‘You talk a load of crap, Nicole. Is this another of your stories? Is he really dead?’
‘He was over here to see you. He had someone who wanted to . . . do a sort of deal. I did tell him you wouldn’t be interested,’ Nicole added hurriedly.
‘He’d already been round to say that,’ said Palma. The night that Tommy had come round and found Clint in her house. Come around here again and I’ll kill you, Tommy had said. Palma felt something dark and chilly pass like a cloud over her heart.
‘He doesn’t take no for an answer easily though.’
‘He didn’t come here again.’
‘Well that’s why he was in Dodley. I’m glad you said no. I heard what they wanted to buy it for.’
Her words conjured up something horrible in Palma’s head and she tried to expel it before the picture took root. An impatient car horn bipped outside.
‘I got a lift,’ said Nicole. She stood up, opened the door, called outside to someone, ‘Gimme five minutes.’ Then she came back inside and said, ‘Sorry, patience isn’t his virtue.’
‘Who did it, do they know?’ asked Palma.
Nicole shrugged her shoulders but she was looking at Palma with non-blinking eyes.
‘You don’t think it was me?’ Palma laughed, a dry humourless sound. ‘What planet are you on?’
‘I never said that. It was a single blow to the head, I heard.’ She didn’t miss a beat before adding. ‘You still seeing that boxer?’
Palma swallowed, tried not to show that Tommy’s possible involvement had even crossed her mind. ‘You think that Tommy Tanner would risk everything he’s worked towards for that piece of—’
Again Nicole started waving madly. ‘I didn’t mean him, but he’s friendly with the Webbs, isn’t he? I told Clint not to come here but he thought he was Teflon. “Fuck the Webbs,” he said. I thought you might have heard something.’ She tilted her head, looking at Palma as if she expected her to give something away in her expression, but there was nothing to give away.
‘I’m not going out with him anymore. I haven’t been for a couple of months.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’
Again the car horn sounded.
‘I better go before he wakes up all the neighbours,’ said Nicole. ‘I had to find out if you knew about Clint.’
‘Are you still having his baby?’
Nicole’s eyebrows gave the slightest quizzical dip before she answered. ‘Oh, I lost it.’ And Palma knew then that she had never been pregnant at all.
Nicole’s eyes travelled over Palma’s shopping-cluttered lounge. ‘I hope everything goes all right with you and your baby,’ she said. ‘It’ll not want for anything will it?’ A small smile. Just a hint of the girl she’d been showing in the curve of her once-beautiful lips.
Palma stood there long after she had heard the exchange of voices outside, long after she heard the impatient wheels spin off, looking at the room through Nicole’s eyes: the bags of clothes, the baby bath, the bouncy chair, the toys and books made out of material, the car seat. She didn’t even have a car and she’d bought a car seat. Every single item bought with more love than money and with more hope than both of those put together.
Chapter 50
Relations had been strained between Cariad and Effin for a while but after the fire in the office, Effin took a long hard look at himself and didn’t like what he found. He didn’t want to worry his wife about his memory loss but he also realised that keeping it all in wasn’t doing him any good either. Then he’d mended the snow machine and tested it and it was working fine, but the day after it wasn’t again. The screw that he’d replaced was missing and it seemed to be indicative of a screw missing in himself too. That had finally pushed him to visit the doctor, expecting to be given some pills and sent on his way; which is what had happened the last time he’d seen the doctor about anything, too many years ago to count. But Effin was sent for a dementia test, which he passed with flying colours. And surprisingly his blood pressure was rock solid too. The doctor recommended he speak to a therapist – maybe there was an underlying reason why he felt he was – to quote himself – ‘losing it’?
Speaking to a total stranger was something Effin would never have considered in a million years, but he needed to function competently, and something was obviously standing in the way of that. He had become a danger to other people and himself and so it was definitely time to drop the macho act and meet with someone, though he’d keep it under wraps and not tell anyone. So he’d booked a session with Dr Alex Cousins, a stress counsellor. He’d found his name on the internet when he typed in ‘recommended therapists for memory loss near Penistone’ in the search bar. He had his first session tomorrow and he was terrified at what they might uncover. Or not, because if there was no underlying psychological reason then it had to be a medical one.
Effin waited until the ice-cream parlour was empty of customers before going in with a box of chocolates.
‘Helo, Cariad, cariad. Shwd wyt ti?’ ‘Hello, Cariad, love. How are you,’ he asked, meekly, worried that she would tell him that she wasn’t speaking to him. What business had he to try and run her life for her when he couldn’t even run his own properly? But she didn’t, because she was Cariad and she loved her uncle. Interfering old sod that he was, she knew that he only had her best interests at heart.
‘Hello, Uncle Effin. Haven’t seen you for a while.’
‘No.’ Never before had he been tongue-tied in front of family. He really wasn’t himself. ‘Er . . . how’s the new flat?’
‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Next time Auntie Angharad is up, you should bring her round. I’ll make us tea.’
She waited for
him to suggest inviting Dylan Evans as well, but he didn’t. All he said was, ‘Great.’ Then, as if a hand from behind had pushed him forwards, he took a step towards her and held his hand out. ‘I brought you some chocolates. Truffles from the place in Penistone that makes their own. I know you like them. Just a little box because I know they’re fattening.’ Adding quickly: ‘Not that you’re fat or I’m tight, mind.’
‘Oh, that’s very nice of you. Do you want to take a seat and have some ice-cream?’
‘No, I can’t. I’m going over to look at the grotto. There’s been a leak and it’s saturated all the wooden floorboards and made a big hole.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Can’t have Santa falling down it and breaking his neck, can we?’ He smiled, hesitantly for him.
‘No, we can’t.’ Cariad smiled back at him.
‘Anyway, nice to see you.’ He turned to the door.
‘Uncle Effin.’ Cariad ran over to him, put her arms around his bulldog-like neck and planted a large kiss on his cheek. ‘You can always count on me if there’s anything on your mind, you know.’
‘Nothing on my mind, love,’ he said and exited the ice-cream parlour, thinking that these therapy sessions were going to be hell when he couldn’t even open up a chink to his nearest and dearest.
Chapter 51
Palma had been in two minds whether to tell Annie and Joe about Clint. She didn’t want to dredge up anything unpleasant for them, especially now they were going to have the child they thought they’d never have and life was good; but at the same time maybe it would be cathartic and they’d feel that the universe had punished him when they couldn’t. Before she had worked out what to do for the best, fate delivered. The front page of Friday’s Chronicle carried the story and the headline was suitably ignominious.
LOCAL MAN FOUND DEAD IN BIN
The Mother of All Christmases Page 27