by Drew Davies
JoJo begins at Selfridges, arriving when the store opens and scurrying past the perfume hawkers, already wafting around their tester cards, and down the escalator to the basement (there are already Christmas decorations up, in early November! she notes exasperatedly). At Wine & Spirits, next to the Harry Gordon bar (not yet open), she’s met by a tall, drawn-looking man in his forties, who’s finishing a mouthful of something – his breakfast perhaps? – and seems, at first glance, to be rather pompous. But maybe this is unfair – it might be his suit or the surroundings; either way, JoJo puffs out her chest, standing as erect as she dares around so many glass bottle phalluses.
‘Whisky,’ she says to the man, forgoing any pleasantries.
The assistant – he has a name tag: Barry, the assistant Barry – nods and walks to the middle of three alcoves lined with glass cabinets, unlocking one of them and taking out a dark green bottle reverently.
‘This has just come in,’ Barry says, holding it out for JoJo to inspect. ‘Ten years, single malt.’
‘How much is it?’
Barry’s eyebrows rise ever so slightly – he has to turn back to the shelf and read the price tag, bending from the waist as he does so. He’d make a very good butler in a murder mystery, thinks JoJo. Knife in the back. Maybe two.
‘The Glen Cathan Gold Label is sixty-four ninety-nine.’
JoJo grunts.
‘And what’s your most expensive bottle?’
Without a beat, Barry replies: ‘That would be the Royal Salute Tribute to Honour.’
‘How much is that?’
‘£150,000.’
After JoJo has stopped laughing, Barry adds, slightly defensively: ‘A total of twenty-one bottles have been produced in the world. It’s so rare that only one person – the Master Blender – has ever tasted it.’
‘If only one person has tasted it,’ says JoJo, ‘how do you know it’s any good?’
Taking a deep breath, Barry gives an approximation of a smile (JoJo can see something bread-like stuck between his teeth) and asks: ‘Is madam buying the whisky for herself or as a gift?’
‘Both. I mean, no – it’s a gift.’ (Or a bribe, she thinks – a tool to pacify and inebriate.)
‘Do you have a country in mind? There are some interesting malts coming out of Italy. And we have an exciting new ten-year-old from Japan…’
‘Let’s stick with Scotland,’ JoJo says, aware she’ll have to cook up a story about the whisky to keep Frank from getting suspicious, so best to keep the facts simple.
‘Would you prefer one with a lighter, fresher palette, or smoky and peaty?’
‘Smoky and peaty,’ replies JoJo. She’s had enough of lighter and fresher things in her life, thank you.
Barry walks to another cabinet and removes an amber bottle.
‘Dhonn Druim is a rare eighteen-year-old single malt from Islay,’ he gives a brief pause, ‘which is two hundred pounds.’
JoJo takes the bottle. Deer antlers. Embossed gold lettering. Tartan.
‘Done,’ she says, passing the bottle back to him.
At the register, Barry asks JoJo how she would like to pay.
Blast, she hasn’t thought of this – Frank will see the purchase on their monthly statement if she uses the joint account. JoJo rummages through her purse, but she can’t use her credit cards for the same reason. The problem with marrying an accountant (or a former accountant – he had now peaked at managing director, having passed up the offer of CEO many times as he enjoyed working in the trenches too much) is that nothing goes unseen.
‘I’ll have to get cash out,’ she tells Barry, who nods as if he predicted this would happen. Probably assumes I don’t have the money, thinks JoJo as she rushes up the escalators and out onto Oxford Street to find a nearby bank – buying the whisky is a matter of principle now – but when she returns fifteen minutes later, a younger, scruffier assistant has replaced him.
‘Where’s Barry?’ she asks.
The new assistant gives a sly grin, as if about to say something impolite, but thinks better of it. ‘On a break,’ he says.
His name tag reads ‘Stuart’, and JoJo decides she likes him.
‘I need to pay for some whisky.’
‘This one?’ asks Stuart, lifting the bottle from beneath the counter. ‘Why did you decide on this bottle?’
‘Your colleague recommended it.’
Stuart makes a face. He has a hole in his left nostril, and three in each earlobe. He must have to take out the rings before his shift and put everything back again afterwards.
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘You wouldn’t what?’
‘Buy this one.’ He lowers his voice; beside them the Harry Gordon bar is opening for business. ‘Dhonn Druim tastes like crocodile piss.’
‘And how would you know what crocodile piss tastes like?’
Stuart grins again. ‘Six months in New South Wales. It’s the local speciality, their version of a snakebite.’
JoJo doesn’t know if she believes Stuart, but she admires his gall.
‘I stand corrected.’
‘Can’t have one of our more discerning customers buying a complete dud.’
‘How do you know I’m discerning?’
‘I can tell.’
Is he flirting with me? thinks JoJo. Not out of the question, she supposes. It’s happened in the past, usually with a combination of machismo and pity. Give the old girl a bit of a thrill. JoJo understands there are men who have a thing for much older women, but Stuart is all of twenty-five.
‘Who are you buying the whisky for?’ he asks.
‘My husband.’
‘Lucky man! What’s the occasion?’
‘I’m trying to make him leave his mistress permanently.’
Stuart takes this information in his stride.
‘Fair enough,’ he says, coming out from behind the register and walking into the middle alcove, scanning the glass cabinets. ‘What’s his regular tipple?’
‘Ale mostly. Guinness.’
‘Is he a sleeper?’
‘A what?’
‘Does he nod off after a couple of drinks?’
‘Yes – sometimes.’
‘You don’t want anything too heavy in that case.’
He gets the nearby ladder and launches himself up it to access one of the higher cabinets (JoJo tries not to look at Stuart’s pert backside, but it’s directly in her eyeline).
‘This one is filtered with coca leaves from Peru. Gives it a bit of a kick.’
‘I don’t want him climbing the walls.’
Stuart shakes his head.
‘It’s a mellow buzz – wears off in an hour. Or, if you want to spice things up, try this: Liquid Viagra. We only have one bottle left – a Russian guy comes in once a week and buys all our stock.’
‘Do you have anything…?’ JoJo wants to ask if he has anything that will make a man feel – what? regretful? nostalgic? But it’s a bottle of whisky, she reminds herself, not a time machine. And nostalgia is not the right weapon here.
JoJo clears her throat. ‘Do you have anything that will blow his socks off?’
Stuart moves the ladder right and climbs to the very top, opening the highest cabinet.
‘This,’ he says, passing a bottle to her from the ladder. ‘This is the good shit. Smooth finish, but deadly. He won’t know what’s hit him.’
‘Perfect,’ JoJo says.
They head back to the register and as she takes the wad of notes from her purse, Barry reappears, back from his break. JoJo waves the cash around lavishly for him to see and slips a twenty to Stuart when no one’s watching – it’s not customary to leave a tip, but this morning he’s more than earned it.
The dummy run into central London had not exactly gone well. After Dylan finally stopped vomiting, Chris tried to tie the handles of the plastic bag together, splashing blue coloured sick on their shoes. It was pretty gross. When the train arrived at Victoria station, Chris and Dylan visited the to
ilets to clean up (sadly, Chris’s moccasins would never be the same), but afterwards Dylan was still feeling nauseous, so instead of heading into the West End, they’d boarded the first train back to Croydon. The trip was officially a bust.
Analysing the journey later, Dylan tried to pinpoint what had gone wrong. The energy drinks were a mistake – he could see that now; hindsight was always twenty-twenty. But was the motion of the train the trigger? Would it be different if he’d travelled by car? Should he have tried breathing exercises? And would everything have turned out better if he’d travelled with someone less infuriatingly Chris-like?
It was hopeless. How could Janelle possibly depend on him if he couldn’t even make it out of Croydon? Dylan hears her voice in his head, berating him cheerfully: It’s only hopeless if you think it’s hopeless. You have to visualise to prioritise. No slouching, no shirking.
Over the past few days, Dylan has become increasingly worried about Janelle. She hasn’t replied to any of his emails, even the one he’d titled: ‘Important’. ‘Just checking you’re okay,’ he’d written, but there was no response. What if her ex-boyfriend had hacked into her email, and was reading all her messages? Maybe that’s why she wasn’t replying…? Then later, Dylan was checking Janelle’s Facebook for updates, when he discovered she’d closed down her account. If that wasn’t a cry for help, what was?
Something else was worrying Dylan – the package Janelle said she was sending still hadn’t shown up – and perhaps it would offer more clues? He’d rung all the delivery places he could think of, but none of them were helpful. What really concerned him was a recent article he’d read about depression. Apparently, when someone became very low, they started to tidy up and give away all their prized possessions – especially when they were contemplating suicide. Suicide. Janelle couldn’t possibly be thinking about that, could she?
Dylan decides he has to send Janelle a message somehow and if she won’t respond to her email, he’ll have to communicate with her another way. This is easier said than done – her jealous ex might be monitoring his blog too, so the message needs to be disguised. Dylan decides to use codes and carefully writes a new post:
Otis has this annoying habit of whining in his sleep. If I kick him with my foot to wake him up, he looks at me like I’m mad. And when I’m on the computer, he jumps onto my keyboard to see what I’m staring at and presses all the buttons. bsfzpvplbzkbofmmf? – see, he did it just now. Sometimes I wish dogs had those communicator devices from the film Up to decode what they’re thinking. It would make life so much easier.
----- --.. --.. --..----. ...-- ..... ...-- ...-- ---.. .----
Hopefully, Janelle will see the reference to decoding and dig deeper. With any luck she will find the cipher – bsfzpvplbzkbofmmf? – translated into ‘areyouokayjanelle?’ (if you moved every letter back one step in the alphabet) and the line of dots and dashes are a phone number in Morse code (Dylan didn’t use his own number – he isn’t stupid – he ordered a free SIM card and activated it in an old unlocked phone).
Dylan looks at the live post for a very long time. Would Janelle really be able to figure out the codes? Were they too obscure? He didn’t want to leave anything to chance…
Opening up another new post, Dylan writes:
Janelle, call me.
He types his number and hits ‘publish’.
It’s done. Now all he can do is wait.
JoJo turns right out of Selfridges and walks the short distance to her next stop. So, this is it, she thinks as she enters Mothercare. The name has a sinister ring to it: Mothercare is watching you. Mothercare cares. At the entrance, an assistant tries to give her a basket, but she declines the offer – she wants one hand free to protect herself from the torrent of pastel blues and pinks – but she’s mistaken, the bibs and babygros are in this season’s bright tropical colours: reds, oranges, yellows.
JoJo heads downstairs – thankfully, things are more muted here – and wanders the aisles, unsure of what to buy. She picks up something called a Prenatal Listening System – it comes with a ‘heartbeat sensor’ and ‘two sets of earbuds’. How cosy, she thinks. Would it be too obvious to buy Belinda a surveillance system? Belinda was smart, Frank was right about that. JoJo’s usual mode of head first, guns blazing wouldn’t work this time – Belinda was too outwardly reasonable, she’d make JoJo seem hysterical, or worse – toxic. Her gambit had to be different. Although anything JoJo presents to Belinda will probably be received with the same disbelieving apprehension. To be fair, JoJo is not entirely sure of her own motivations – to protect against Belinda’s potential allegations of cruelty to Frank, that was certain, but there was something deeper too. JoJo recalled an old quote she must have read once: ‘Take this little gift,’ it went, ‘in the spirit I send it,’ but, tellingly, she couldn’t remember if it was the Buddha who’d said this, or Machiavelli. All she knew was her instincts were telling her to get close to this woman – ingratiating herself would eventually lead to acquiring something useful. Call it a hunch. She’d also be able to assess the truthfulness of Frank using this second information source (however trustworthy Belinda might be). JoJo had used up all her tactics with Frank – there were only so many heartfelt letters you could write, only so many declarations of love – hence these gifts. She needed a new way in, collateral to keep herself in the race. It would be easy for Frank to drift off with Belinda once the baby came – JoJo had to do everything in her power to stop this from happening. One last push, you could call it.
She watches a mother and her daughter browse the cots. The girl is seventeen, eighteen? What was JoJo doing when she was eighteen? Avoiding places like this, she thinks. There were christenings – later, birthdays, a few funerals. But really, when JoJo’s friends started to have children, she’d left them to it, or that was how she appeared at least. She either made new friends or relegated herself to the few annual get-togethers (which JoJo made sure were extravagant feasts to prove who was actually missing out), and then, as soon as the children were teenagers, the marriages collapsed, while she and Frank seemed set to sail smoothly into their twilight years… (JoJo smiles. How smug I was). Deep down though, deeper than she normally liked to go – all those babies, all of those children, not every one of them was noisy, ugly and annoying, not all of them had been so easy to dismiss. JoJo had worked so hard over the years to wall-off any covetous emotions – the envy, the sadness, the fear she was missing out – that now those feelings had calcified, and she could no longer trust them. Who will take care of you in your old age? her mother had asked. What will you leave in this world? Nothing. JoJo hadn’t planned to leave anything behind. No plaque on a bench. No legacy. The future had been none of her business. Did she still believe that now? Were the cracks finally beginning to show?
JoJo remembers Frank’s niece, Shelly – a lovely girl with straw coloured hair – Frank had doted on her until the family emigrated to Australia in the early nineties. When they eventually did see Shelly again, years later, she was all grown up, and aloof – no sign of the capricious girl who had loved them, the bond gone. Frank had been crushed. But soon, he would have a capricious child of his own to love…
JoJo picks up a baby’s rattle and gives it a terse shake, as if to ward off evil spirits. A woman, roughly her own age, browsing the toys nearby, smiles.
‘Shopping for your grandchild?’
‘No, a friend.’
The woman nods.
‘I don’t know why my daughter wants half of this stuff. She already has every gadget and widget and she’s not even six months yet.’
JoJo grunts.
‘Different in our day,’ the woman continues. ‘You were lucky if you got hand-me-downs. It’s all so space-age looking. Half of this stuff, I have no idea what it’s for.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘I’ve said to my Charlotte time and again, don’t worry about the gizmos, dear. They won’t help you at four in the morning, when you’ve been up two nights st
raight. You won’t remember your own name, let alone how to turn on the bottle maker, or whatever it is. And no amount of potions and lotions can prevent stretch marks. But she won’t listen, it’s like we never had babies ourselves.’
‘Isn’t it?’
They both fall silent.
‘I mean, what’s this?’ the woman asks, picking up a plastic tub.
‘A wine cooler? Nana needs her drinky!’
They both laugh.
JoJo picks up a horn-like contraption. ‘And what’s this thing?’ she asks.
‘Oh,’ says the woman, ‘I think that’s a breast pump.’
JoJo holds it to her breast. ‘Honk, honk!’, and they fall about laughing, weeping like schoolgirls.
As soon as Dylan’s overall health improved, his father introduced a sit-down meal on Fridays – part of Operation: Normal Family – which meant no TV, phones or any other distractions. Tonight’s menu is cannelloni. The pasta is rubbery and oozes a stodgy white sauce, so Dylan surreptitiously circles the plate, trying to find the least offensive mouthful to load onto his fork.
‘We’ll have to check if your trousers still fit,’ his dad is saying, ‘take down the seams if the legs are too short.’
Dylan nods, but he can’t seem to muster up any excitement about returning to school. He stabs a cannelloni with his fork and it haemorrhages sauce.
‘Anything you want me to buy at tomorrow’s shop?’
Dylan shrugs. ‘We’re out of Coco Pops.’
Under the table, Otis yawns.
Resting his cutlery on the side of his plate, his father takes a swig of beer (he hasn’t eaten much of the cannelloni either, Dylan notes), wiping the foam from his moustache.
‘Dylan, I want to ask you something.’
‘I’ll clean Otis’s bowl after dinner, I promise.’
‘Good, but that’s not what I meant. I noticed your Xbox has gone from your room. Have you packed it away?’