A Gingerbread House

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Your sister?’ Laura said. ‘So this is a family business?’

  ‘Just us sisters,’ she said. ‘Think of us as your sisters. We do. The gentlemen are our clients, our customers. But the ladies are sisters.’

  Laura opened her mouth; she usually had a ready answer for pretty much anything. But not this time.

  Kate laughed a tinkling little laugh. ‘You caught me,’ she said. ‘I’m the fanciful one. The dreamer.’

  She had led Laura into a stone-floored scullery that looked too old-fashioned to be a working service-kitchen. There was an open bottle of prosecco sitting on the draining board, and a glass, almost full, the bubbles still rising. Kate took a second glass from a shelf and poured a healthy measure, much more than a tasting sample.

  Laura sniffed and then sipped. If she’d been nearer the sink she’d have spat. ‘Good news and bad news,’ she said. ‘Your palate is excellent. But that wine is not good.’

  Kate put her own glass to her lips again. ‘Not nice?’ she said. ‘But OK for Kir Royales? Or actually not good?’

  Against her instincts Laura took another mouthful. ‘It’s not corked,’ she said. ‘And it’s not rancid. But I don’t think liqueur would cover it. Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll return the case,’ Kate said. ‘And hit the offy before it shuts tonight. Thank you. And now, for the flowers.’

  She beamed at Laura and opened the back door, leading the way out into the garden. It was even longer than the front, but with no apple trees or paths. It was just a stretch of close-mown grass crisscrossed with washing ropes.

  ‘My sister says we should have silk flowers and she thinks it would be easier to tumble-dry our tablecloths and napkins,’ Kate was saying. ‘Hand towels too. But there’s no substitute for line-drying, I always say. You take a good deep lungful of your napkin tomorrow night and tell me I’m wrong.’

  Laura looked around the drying green, to be polite, and as she was turning back she saw a movement at the window above her. She couldn’t be sure; the glass had net curtains over it. Maybe they had moved in a draught. Or – Laura squinted harder – was there a face there? Just there where the net seemed thicker? Was there a blurred, grey face? She shook her head and blinked. Could two mouthfuls of wine really have made her feel this woozy?

  Kate had doubled back on herself and was now picking her way down some mossy steps that led to a basement.

  ‘Mind how you go in those lovely shoes,’ she said.

  Laura put her hand against the cool stone wall beside her and edged down, setting both feet together on each tread before reaching one down to the step below. Her head was definitely not as clear as it should be, but looking at her feet made it worse.

  Kate was opening a door now, a door surprisingly well locked if it was only keeping a few flowers safe. It juddered and scraped on the stone step as she wrenched it. ‘We need to get this sanded off a bit. But when you work in hospitality, you do tend to focus on the public face and let the rest go. Do you work with the public, Laura?’

  ‘Not really,’ Laura said. ‘Not physically. Online. But I suppose I make sure and have nice headed paper and decent packing materials. You don’t want to look small even when you are small. The eBay whiff, you know?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kate. ‘You understand. You really are one of us. You’re perfect.’

  Laura found herself frowning and again wondering what to say. Then, although she wouldn’t have been able to account for it, she looked down the long garden to the back wall, wondering if there was a gate, a back way out of here. She could see a door, but also a padlock glinting.

  ‘Oh! I can smell the flowers already,’ Kate said. ‘Can’t you?’

  Laura took a sniff and couldn’t smell anything except crushed grass and damp stone.

  ‘No?’ Kate was inside some sort of anteroom to the cellar now, lying under the scullery, just a little vestibule with another door at the back of it. ‘Maybe my nose is attuned. They’re through there. Breathe all the way out and then take a deep sniff when you go in.’ She was unlocking the inner door now.

  Laura thought about the way back to her car, up these stone steps, in at the back door, through the house and out the front, down the path to the gate. She half-turned, but she could still see Kate, with her hand on the inner door, just about to open it up and let her drink in all those beautiful flowers. One sniff, Laura told herself, then I’m out of here. A little voice inside her said: and I’m never coming back.

  What harm would one sniff of some roses do?

  She breathed out, blowing the air out of her lungs until her throat croaked, then, when Kate swept the door open, she stepped inside.

  The inner door slammed shut behind her, as she choked on the stench and the sound of clamouring screams filled her ears. She stood in the dark, gagging and stumbling, and didn’t hear the sound of the outside cellar door banging shut and the bolts going home.

  Then the screams died down to ragged breaths. Laura stood stock-still keeping her own breathing silent and shallow.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said a voice.

  ‘She left something though,’ said another.

  Laura licked her lips, but her tongue caught on them, suddenly dry and sour. ‘She did,’ she said. There was a sharp burst of scrabbling, like small creatures taking cover. ‘She did leave something. She left me.’

  ‘And then there were three,’ said one of the voices, with a queer kind of relish in it, a crack in it that was almost a cackle.

  Laura felt for the wall at her side, leaned one hand against it for support as her head reeled and her legs trembled. She managed to stay on her feet, managed not to buckle and fall. She stood breathing deeply through her mouth, trying not to taste the smell, waiting for her eyes to adjust before she felt her way towards whoever it was in here with her. Wherever she was. Whatever this was. For over a hundred careful shallow breaths, she simply stood there waiting.

  TWELVE

  I knew I’d be in trouble if I took too long dropping them back home and getting the transporter to the depot, but we were like a little pirate ship, the six of us, and it was unanimous. Ahoy for the ocean wave! Or at least the Irish Sea. Actually, only the prom overlooking it, but it did them a power of good in my view, as much good as the chemo in a different way.

  And on a day like this, a perfect May afternoon, with a fresh breeze sending just a few cottonwool clouds scudding across the sky, the gulls squabbling, kids with bare feet and coat sleeves pushed up to let them guddle in the shallows, you’d need a heart of stone to take someone straight from the hospital pick-up bay back to their houses for the start of the fall-out. I’d even got them ice creams. Good Italian ice cream from Renaldo’s, out of my own pocket.

  ‘You don’t need to finish it if you’re feeling dodgy already,’ I said, handing the cones round, ‘but it’s not the seaside without an ice cream.’

  ‘You’re a good lass, Nettie,’ said Bobby the Bum-pincher.

  I’d been warned about him. ‘Old goat,’ my trainer had said. ‘He plays the cancer card like it’s going out of business – I’ll not do you any harm these days, hen – but what do you bet he’s been the same his whole life and this is just his latest excuse.’

  ‘Of course, you don’t belong here,’ said Suzanne, or Mrs Brierly as she preferred to be called. She lived off Racecourse Road and it thrilled her to bits that she got dropped off first so everyone else on the Cancer Express got to see the size of her house and the length of her drive. ‘When you’re Ayr born and bred, you don’t think of it as the seaside. The seaside is Cornwall, or Lake Como.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be the lakeside?’ said Siobhan, half under her breath.

  ‘We call it the sands,’ Mrs Brierly went on. ‘We used to exercise our ponies on the sands when we were girls. Did I tell you we had ponies?’

  ‘I think – wait, yes, I think you mentioned it,’ Bobby said, catching my eye in the driving mirror and winking.

  ‘And we actually used to promenade on th
e promenade,’ Mrs Brierly said. ‘Dressed up in our best after lunch on a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Nothing like a walk after all that rich food,’ said Art, Bobby’s friend. He’d had part of his jaw taken out and his days of rich food were suspended for the duration, if not for good.

  ‘It was nothing like now,’ Mrs Brierly said. ‘Look at them!’ She waved her cone at a string of teenagers huddled on the seawall, all of them puffing on ciggies and taking drags of fizzy juice, hoods up, shoulders hunched, crowing laughter breaking out regularly as the wags in the line-up took the piss, and took the piss, and took the piss, as relentless as the waves hitting the sand.

  ‘But then look at them,’ said Mrs Brierly, turning away from the hoodies, her voice softening. Down on the beach a huge family was making the most of their Saturday, the big kids digging deep into the wet sand, the mums and dads swinging wee kids high over the waves, making out they might dunk them, laughing at the squeals, trouser bottoms and sari hems getting soaked and nobody caring.

  ‘You could be worse, Suzanne,’ said Bobby. ‘You’re not mumping about immigrants anyway.’

  ‘My grandad worked under the last viceroy of the Punjab,’ Mrs Brierly said.

  Bobby caught my eye again and twinkled. ‘Work that one out with a paper and pencil, eh hen?’ he said.

  ‘Does anyone want to get out for a wee stagger around?’ I said. ‘Or a wheel up and down?’

  That sobered them all. Siobhan and Bobby kept licking at their cones but a cloud passed over their faces, and the faces of Art and Mrs Brierly, plus Mrs Cooke who never spoke, and the youngster, Lawrence, who kept his earbuds in and wouldn’t meet your eyes. They didn’t want to get out and walk on the prom, much less go down on the sands. They were tired and they knew they’d get even tireder before the latest course was done.

  ‘Actually, hen,’ Bobby said. ‘I can hear the cavalry coming over the hill.’

  Bobby had a hundred different expressions for what chemo did to his insides.

  ‘Aye, let’s go,’ said Siobhan. ‘It’s Saturday night and Nettie doesn’t need any special cleaning.’

  ‘I keep telling you I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind, I mean. Of course, I care, but I’ve got a cast-iron stomach and it’s part of my job.’

  ‘It’s embarrassing,’ said Mrs Brierly, in a small voice. ‘It was unheard of in my day. Not like the Sandgate at chucking-out time these days.’

  ‘Chucking-up time!’ said Bobby.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Siobhan. ‘Nettie, love, goan take this cone away, please. There’s a wee star that you are. Quickly!’

  I gathered all the half-eaten cones in a carrier and dumped them in the nearest bin. As early in the season as this, at least there was room. Come August the bins would be invisible under a mound of chip papers and nappies. I’d have to take my band of pirates along the far end, away from the swings and kiosks, or they’d be scunnered from the start and not want a single lick. If I was still here. Which I wouldn’t be. I kept having to remind myself that driving the Cancer Express was only the glue in my plan, like the kids on the special bus had been braces, after the belt of the medical transit. Wait, no, that wasn’t fair. It was important to be racking up the experience and gathering clearances too. It would all help me weather the stink, when the shit hit the fan. As I knew it would, because I was personally going to switch the fan on and lob the shit at the blades. I was more determined than ever to do it. This lot had had such a bum hand dealt out to them and they were so endlessly bloody decent in the face of it. Just like Janelle’s mum, and Steven’s dad and the classroom assistants.

  ‘Off we go with a ho-ho-ho,’ I said. ‘Slow and steady. Soon have you home, my hearties.’ I swept a look over all of them as I drew away, comparing them with Big Garry: a perfectly respectable business, plenty money and no real cares, and yet he’d dipped his hand into that filthy business, trading on misery, totting up the profits on units of stock as if they weren’t people just the same as him. ‘Seventeen of the forty individuals are being cared for in hospitals in Calais.’ If I ever started to chicken out of what was coming, I only had to repeat those words to myself to make my spine regrow.

  ‘Ho! Nettie?’ Bobby’s voice brought me back. I was startled to find myself parked at the ramp at Mrs Brierly’s house, with Mrs Brierly’s husband waiting outside the van in his slippers.

  ‘You were miles away,’ Siobhan said. ‘You’re were on total autopilot there.’

  ‘It’s a wonder we’re not all on our way back to the hospital, on stretchers,’ Mrs Brierly put in.

  ‘Ocht, no,’ said Art. ‘You’re not a driver, Suzie-Q. If you were a driver you’d know you can zone right out and still be as safe as houses. I used to come home on the M6 over Shap and never know a thing about it. Never so much as hit a rumble strip.’

  ‘Thanks, Art,’ I said, trying to keep the giggle out of my voice. Suzie-Q! Mrs Brierly’s mouth had pursed up like the neck of a duffel bag. I tugged the handbrake on, killed the engine and slipped round to the back door to start manhandling her wheelchair on to the lift.

  ‘Piece of bloody nonsense,’ Mrs Cooke said. It was the first time she’d spoken all day, on the journey out or, now, on the way back. Mrs Cooke used a wheelchair all the time and it irked her to see the others delivered home on wheels when they could all have walked off the transporter on their own feet.

  ‘Elfin safety,’ Bobby said, like he usually did.

  ‘There’s my angel!’ said Mr Brierly, when I had released the chair and handed it over. ‘There’s my bride, as pretty as a picture.’

  ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ I told her, tucking her bag on to her lap. ‘He hasn’t got a brother, has he?’

  Mrs Brierly smiled, but it was wan.

  ‘She looks the same as the day I met her,’ he said. ‘Never lost her girlish figure and look at that cloud of red curls!’

  He meant well, but I wondered how Mrs Brierly managed not to scream or whack him with her good crocodile handbag. Her girlish figure was courtesy of a double-mastectomy and three rounds of chemo. And her cloud of red hair had been bought online with a prescription discount.

  ‘That man’s a twat,’ said Siobhan when the bus was underway again.

  Bobby tutted. ‘I hate to hear a lady swear. You’re right, though.’

  ‘Oh I love to hear a game old girl whip up a blue cloud,’ said Art.

  ‘Less of the “old”,’ said Siobhan. ‘I’ve got ten years on you and your colostomy bag.’

  ‘Good guess but wrong,’ said Art. He had never told the rest of the patients on the transporter where his cancer was, which of course made them all assume it was somewhere in the lower middle. I wished he wouldn’t hide it. I reckoned life was better now people talked about their cancers. Siobhan asked for a puke bag if she needed one and Bobby had a change of incontinence pad in a carrier bag on his wheelchair handles, just in case. Never turned a hair if I saw it when I was fishing out his house keys. And the middle-aged nurses at the chemo centre kept their wee fans round their necks for blowing away hot flushes too. Couldn’t care less. Not like my granny who had hidden in the house, weeping from the shame of it. And the pregnancy bumps sticking out, belly buttons like pumpkin stalks, instead of that stupid way women up the duff used to wear flowery dresses and Peter-Pan collars, trying to look virginal, which was completely nuts any way you spun it.

  I tuned back in to the chat on the back of the bus and found that my thoughts and their talk had run along the same channel.

  ‘… go too far the other way,’ Siobhan was saying. ‘Tinder and Grinder and Xtube.’

  ‘Who are they when they’re at home?’ said Art but Bobby hooted with laughter. He knew.

  ‘There’s no romance,’ Siobhan said. ‘No courting. No wooing. Nettie, what do you do with your young man of a Saturday night? What are your plans this evening?’

  ‘I’ve not got a young man, Siobhan,’ I said.

  ‘Or a young lady. I di
dn’t mean to presume.’

  ‘No young man at the moment.’ I was navigating the narrow entrance to Siobhan’s row of townhouse apartments. I hadn’t had a man, young or otherwise, since I’d put the white hat on my head and gone to Fraserburgh. Too complicated.

  ‘But look at that!’ I said, as we pulled into the disabled parking space right by the door. A woman had stepped out of the next-but-one townhouse. She was wearing a floaty dress in smudged shades of peach and cream like a watercolour and she had her hair up in a bun and sparkly earrings on. She had driving shoes on her feet but she was carrying a shoe-bag that she opened to show Siobhan a pair of ridiculous sandals, with hardly a strap to hold them on, soles like paper.

  ‘Aye,’ said Bobby. ‘She’s not away round the bars to see if some bloke’ll swap her a kebab for a stand-up trembler.’

  He was shouted down by everyone else save Lawrence, who’d missed all of it. But even Lawrence turned his head as he caught sight of the dress-ruffles or maybe the sparkling earrings. He watched the woman – who must be twice his age, thirty-odd to his seventeen – until she stepped into her car, aggressively clean outside and suspiciously tidy inside, I could see from my vantage point in the driver’s seat. Bit different from the van, although that was deliberate. With my treasure still safe in my locker at Icarus Overland, and the Easter eggs tucked in the student transport records down in Lockerbie, there was just this one last stash to be squirrelled away in South Ayrshire County Council’s Patient Transport Service, Unit 11. And the way I saw it was, if I left things tidy, whoever came after me might go through the crate of boring-looking official papers in the luggage store, to make it their own, kind of thing. But, if I left a midden of receipts and wrappers, elastic bands, odd gloves and scrunchies, they’d tidy down to the crate and leave that sitting.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ Art said suddenly, behind me.

  ‘What’s that in aid of?’ I asked him.