‘Look, I can assure you it isn’t. I work for the Crown Prosecution Service, I cannot be seen to have anything to do with drugs or I would be sacked,’ Nick reasoned. Maybe I was imagining the smell at his house after all. But I wasn’t imagining this. The smell wasn’t overpowering but it was unquestionably there.
‘So I’m supposed to just put up with it?’ Norman glared at us.
‘But it’s in your house, and it’s in this cupboard, nowhere else – how is it affecting you?’ Nick asked him. ‘Apart from the towels smelling, is your life ruined by it? You’ve been trying to invite yourself in to my house now for a year because of your smell. Hopefully you’ll leave me alone now.’
Norman opened and closed his mouth, Nick’s cogent argument shutting him down.
‘Growing drugs is illegal,’ Norman said darkly.
‘Bye, Norman. I hope you have a great rest of the evening.’
‘Just keep the airing cupboard shut if you’re worried,’ I said, feeling slightly sorry for him, but also uneasy because I could tell this wasn’t over. I followed Nick down the stairs and back into his house.
‘Was he on about the smell again?’ Linda asked once we were in the kitchen.
Nick nodded.
‘You should just tell him the truth.’
‘Mum, I can’t, and you know that. He’s like the bloody Mews Gazette.’
‘I’m not stupid, Nick, so I’m just going to go as this feels massively awkward now. Whatever you’re up to, I don’t want to know.’ I made to leave the house.
‘Nick grows marijuana in his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, but dries it in the airing cupboard.’ Linda’s hand was shaking. ‘He does it for me. It helps with the constant pain and spasms.’
‘Mum!’ Nick’s stricken face burned red.
‘You’re not Pablo Escobar?’ I asked him light-heartedly.
‘No, am I fuck.’
Linda’s face pinched at the use of the F word, but it was fine that her son grew illegal drugs that could get him thrown in jail.
‘Why all the secrecy, apart from the fact you could end up in prison?’
‘If I tell Norman, he’ll tell everyone else and I just can’t have anyone knowing. Apart from that, Norman might shop me out of spite for lying to him.’
‘I don’t think Norman would be that bitter, especially as it’s for your mum.’
‘No matter, I can’t have the information out there. My job would be on the line.’ Linda sipped her wine slowly. I could tell Nick wanted to talk, so I sat down next to her and picked up my wine.
‘When Mum was having a particularly bad attack last year after a few years in remission, Dad and I looked into alternative therapies. I’d always known about cannabis; there are derivatives of it around but doctors won’t prescribe it. We’re hoping one day it might be legal, but at the moment, this is the simplest way to get hold of it. And we absolutely have to keep it secret, because Dad is completely against it.’
‘How come? Apart from it being illegal.’
Nick sighed and sat at the table, draining his small glass of wine.
‘My husband, John, is a retired deputy commissioner in the police. He is avidly anti-drugs, having seen the violence committed in their name. He is very black-and-white about it and if he knew about this he would hit the roof.’
‘OK. So how does the operation work?’
‘John thinks that Nick takes me to an MS support group, staying the night here for ease, then Nick drops me on the way to work in the morning. Nick usually puts the dried flower buds in an omelette for me. Oh, you should have seen the first time we tried it, he got the dose wrong and I was babbling nonsense and was awake for hours seeing things. I felt like such a rebel. I had to stay an extra night.’ She giggled at the memory. ‘But because of the smell and the greenhouse, we’ve stopped John from coming here for a year. We’re running out of excuses, to be honest.’
‘Can’t your sister help out? Or a friend? Store the stuff when he’s due to come round?’
‘No way. My sister is a barrister and super straight. The fewer people who know about this, the better. It’s too big an ask for someone else to step in and help.’
‘I could have the dried flowers for you in an emergency, if you wanted. But my garden has no room to hide the plants.’
‘That’s so kind of you,’ Nick said, smiling properly so his eyes twinkled. ‘I couldn’t impose on you, though.’
‘Do you take it too?’ I asked, unable to imagine him letting go and having fun. I know I would have to lock the cupboard and give the key to an adult in case Bad Ali started adding it to everything I cooked on a daily basis, so probably it would be best I didn’t store it for him at all.
‘No way! I have to stay compos mentis in case Mum feels funny.’ I didn’t believe that someone with a huge stash in their airing cupboard wasn’t going to try it another time.
‘Where did you buy the plants?’
‘On the Dark Web. You can get anything there.’
‘Why didn’t you just buy the drugs on there?’
‘Because I couldn’t have a trail leading to me, even if it was on the Dark Web. It all felt so seedy. I thought a one-off purchase would be fine and then I would grow it myself. I had to learn all sorts. How to cross-pollinate and all that. I reckon I could now teach people how to grow their own drugs so they never have to go to a dealer again.’
‘So how come your family are all from the North but live down here?’
‘We followed the kids to London when I started to go downhill. John had retired years ago and so it didn’t matter where we lived. We live in Bromley and Nick’s sister lives in Crystal Palace with her husband and two kids, so it’s easy for us to see them both.’
‘I think that’s lovely. I wish my mum was near me.’
‘You won’t say anything, will you?’ Nick asked me cagily.
‘Of course not. Your secret’s safe with me.’
‘You’ll still pop by, won’t you?’ Linda asked me in a worried tone. ‘I don’t see many people other than immediate family. When I start feeling stronger it might be nice to join something.’
‘Would you not go to a proper support group?’ I asked her.
‘Nooooo, I went once, years ago, and everyone was acting like they were on Death Row. I want to feel alive, not on borrowed time.’
‘We’re all on borrowed time,’ I said, and smiled, patting her hand.
22
Debbie
Debbie swished her tea bag, the boiling water bleeding brown against the white. She squashed the bag on the side of the mug, completely staining the water, then added some soya milk. People who added milk first should be rounded up and shot, or sent on a tea-making awareness course, at the very least. There was nothing worse than milky tea in Debbie’s book.
Through the window she saw the sky was patchy with clouds, allowing for some sporadic sun to break through. Debbie needed sunbeams today – she was finally celebrating cutting the cord from He Who Shall Not Be Named (Matthew), the man formerly known as her husband. Of course the children weren’t as happy as she was with the arrangement. They didn’t like living a week with him and then one with her, carrying school books and clothes between homes like Bedouins. She wasn’t allowed in his new house so had to drop them round the corner, even if they had lots to carry. She’d noticed Ali and her ex earlier execute a peaceful handover. Well, there was no shouting like the first time she’d tried to drop the kids at Matthew’s front door. She knew that they would probably never reach those civilised dizzy heights of normality. She could bet her future happiness on the fact that in twenty years from now, he would still be a bubbling cauldron of bitterness because she’d been the one to call it a day. His ego couldn’t take the bruises.
When they’d met at Liverpool University in the mid-eighties, Debbie had been all-consumed by Matthew’s idealistic notions about changing the world, working as an A and E doctor, helping people in crisis. His easy charm and altruism had sucked her in and
before she knew it, she was deeply in love with him. They married before they hit thirty, but while her career developed successfully in immunology, he appeared to show signs of what could only be described as jealousy. It worsened after Charlie was born. It appeared Matthew couldn’t handle that she was both a wonderful mother and a professor in her field, eclipsing what he saw as his own glittering trajectory. It was a side of him she’d never experienced and she naturally assumed it was stress-related. Stress played a part but it also seemed to be Debbie-related…
She’d tried everything – books, couples counselling, anger management, anything to save the marriage – because she hoped the man she’d fallen in love with would return. He’d try things for a bit, then dismiss them as New Age shit. Matthew saved people’s lives daily, but couldn’t see he was killing his relationship. She sighed – no one should have to be less to appease anyone else’s sense of self. It was amazing how time had dealt her the ability to fully untie her heart from his. When she’d been madly in love with him she couldn’t imagine not feeling that way. Now it was the complete opposite. So much wasted promise…
‘Why can’t we just stay here all the time?’ Charlie insisted once the custody agreement had been thrashed out between five pointless two-hundred-and-fifty-pound lawyers’ letters. She couldn’t be in the same room as Matthew after years of his controlling unreasonable behaviour. Even now, his underhand machinations twisted things so that she felt as if she was going crazy and he was the sane one, her heart galloping like a bolting horse. He’d even tried to shoehorn an outrageous clause into their divorce whereby if she met anyone else within a year, she had to pay back her share of the house. Deluded. As if she was going to meet anyone, she’d thought at the time. The last thing I want is another man in my life.
‘I’m sorry it has to be like this,’ Debbie had replied guiltily to Charlie. She omitted to say his father would bleed her of any more money and patience, trying to claim a stake in the remaining years of their children’s childhoods if she hadn’t settled it this way. Of course the children were old enough to say what they wanted now, but when the divorce had started, three years ago, they hadn’t been. Isabelle resolutely wanted to please both of them, so she just went along with it, but Charlie, who had always preferred his mum, finding his father’s stern manner and regular unhinged outbursts too much to handle, resisted to the last.
‘It’s not fair,’ he had objected. Debbie wasn’t a fan of the final conclusion either, wishing the children could stay with her for the majority of the time, but she could see that there might be some advantages, especially now.
*
It was Jo who’d found the lump, or rather voiced concern regarding what she’d thought was an undetected anomaly. Debbie may have known it was there but was choosing to prioritise her list of worries that week, especially as her divorce was about to be signed off, amid a desperate eleventh-hour addendum (even more extreme than the previous one). Debbie was still trying not to think about the lump a few weeks later, especially today, though she had gone to the doctor. She’d had lumps before and they’d always been benign cysts. She had particularly lumpy breasts, according to the specialist who saw her last time. Why would this one be any different? She could think of several reasons why it could be different, the main one being the breasts cover the heart chakra and somewhere during her marriage, her heart had given up, rolled over and died. It was quite an upheaval to go through a divorce and the body throws up all sorts of signals and warning signs that something may not be going to plan. She’d lost so much weight that even Jo had said she was looking a bit like a supermodel from the nineties. ‘Heroin chic doesn’t turn me on, darling,’ she’d said in bed the other morning when the kids were at Matthew’s. ‘Are you eating? I’m worried about you.’
But she was eating when she remembered. Most days felt like she was wading through waist-high mud, but wasn’t that what a divorce was supposed to make you feel like? It wasn’t supposed to be a party; she’d expected difficulties and pain when she’d at last mustered up years’ worth of courage to say the monumental words out loud. It also didn’t help that her mum had finally been allocated a place in a care home miles away in Birmingham near her brother (at least they had got her out of Glasgow). She had to help empty her mum’s flat the next weekend. Her to-do list was already escaping off the page.
Anyway, she would know on Tuesday. The mammogram was at eleven and Jo and Samantha were coming with her. She’d had several before so she wasn’t nervous; she had the party to prep for. Guests were arriving at two to raise a glass to her new chapter and she had made a chocolate roulade with fresh cherries, whipped cream and brandy, her special roast vegetable salad with fresh basil, tomato and feta tart, and various other bits and bobs. People were also bringing dishes and Ali was making her special Marmite whirls – she could never make enough of them: they always vanished in the first five minutes. Jo was popping back over to help set up and collect all the glasses and fizz from Majestic Wine. Today was going to be about new beginnings, fresh starts, freedom. No, she wasn’t worried about the mammogram.
23
Francesca’s Secret
‘So, hang on,’ Jacqui said, her voice cracking as if the excitement was proving just so much she might self-combust. ‘Let me get this straight, you found out there’s a secret lesbian relationship going on up there, someone might have breast cancer and someone else is having an affair? Are you sure this isn’t EastEnders? Is someone about to be kidnapped or dramatically find out their older sister is actually their mum?’
‘Exactly! It is like a soap opera!’ Amanda cried, shaking her head in disbelief at the latest Mewsflash. ‘I wonder if that place is built on a ley line? It might explain all the drama triangles that seem to constantly spring up.’
It was Tuesday morning and the kids were all back at school after the late May Bank Holiday. Jacqui was busy drinking wine on the screen propped up on Amanda’s laptop and Amanda and I were chastely sipping coffee at the butcher’s block island in her kitchen.
‘Obviously I am still the new girl so the information overload was a lot to take in. I think they were supposed to drip-feed me stuff; instead it was a baptism of fire.’
‘And?’ Amanda asked. ‘Spill the beans.’
‘Well, Debbie’s divorce party was fun, Nick the Spy actually came for an hour with his mum! She wore one of the outfits I’d given her – she looked adorable.’
‘Oh, how cute!’ Jacqui said. ‘Did you snog anyone, man, woman, spy?’
‘No! It wasn’t that kind of party. Grace fell asleep upstairs in Isabelle’s bed and I asked if I could stay in Charlie’s room rather than drag her kicking and screaming home. Debbie’s kids had stayed at their dad’s. She had felt rubbing the divorce in their faces wasn’t the work of a good parent.’
The girls nodded as I let them in on the weekend’s events…
*
The sun had woken me by slowly boiling my eyeballs like eggs in their sockets. I’d forgotten to close the curtains last night and I’d foolishly slept with my lenses in so my eyes were like milky cataracts. I blinked twenty times until I could jiggle them with my finger. I was still wearing my yellow dress and I’d passed out on top of Charlie’s Yoda duvet. Drunk, you were.
I wobbled down the stairs to find Grace in the living room watching TV, and Francesca in the kitchen initiating the clear-up. Debbie was sitting at the kitchen table; she smiled at me, but the sentiment didn’t reach her eyes. She looked as rough as I felt.
‘Do you want coffee?’ Francesca asked me.
‘Yes. I can make it. I’ll help in a sec; I just need to find my feet. Coffee will sort me out. Where’s all the stuff?’
‘I’ll get it,’ Debbie said in a quiet voice and stood, only to immediately fold in on herself. I dived forward and caught her before she hit the deck. She was out cold. Francesca dropped the bin bag and grabbed her round the waist. She was surprisingly light: I guess stress had worked its way inside and whittled aw
ay at her body. Amanda had looked like a cadaver when Sam left her. The heartbreak diet was drastic; one I was only too familiar with myself.
‘Here, on the chair, head between your legs,’ Francesca soothed Debbie as she surfaced, her face a startling impression of ripe brie. ‘Deep breaths. Can you get Jo, Ali?’
I nodded and headed in the direction of the front door.
‘No, she’s upstairs, in Debbie’s room.’
I hastily changed direction and took the stairs two at a time, slipping on the top step: bastard trendy hessian carpet, it was like skinning yourself on gravel. I pushed open the main bedroom door and found a supine Jo passed out on the bed, the blue stripy duvet scrunched in a heap in the floor. She was completely naked, and on closer inspection, was entirely bald in her fanny region. I tried not to look, but it was kind of magnetising. I snapped my eyes away.
‘Jo! Wake up!’ She groaned. ‘Debbie’s fainted.’ The magic words forced her to sit bolt upright.
‘Where is she?’ She scooted over to the edge of the bed where I was standing, reached over towards me – I ducked, just avoiding being boffed by one of her tits – and grabbed the white towelling dressing gown off the back of the door.
‘In the kitchen.’ She barged past me down the stairs, her face red and blotchy. I took a more considered approach, knowing the carpet was evil.
I entered the kitchen to find Debbie sobbing into Jo’s arms and Francesca rubbing her back. I felt like an intruder and didn’t know what to say for the best.
‘I’m sorry you’re feeling so shit, Debs. Divorce is awful. Maybe now it’s final you’ll start to move on.’ It was a bit of a lame offering.
‘It’s not the divorce,’ she cried, looking at me, ‘though that doesn’t help. I have a mammogram tomorrow and I’ve been pretending I was OK about it but I’m not…’
‘Shit. Fuck, that’s awful.’ The blood drained from my own head as the spins took hold. ‘You have a lump?’
She nodded.
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