by Daisy Tate
Call Handler: Can you tell me your friend’s name please?
Caller: Yeah, um … it’s Amber, but you’re not going to write that down or anything are you? There’s not a record of this?
Call Handler: We do record all of our calls for training and quality purposes. Okay. Why did Amber ask you to ring in today?
Caller: She didn’t.
Call Handler: No?
Caller: No. I mean, yeah, she totally did. She’s just … she won’t get out of bed.
Call Handler: Would you be able to put that into context for me please?
Caller: I don’t understand.
Call Handler: How long has Amber been in bed?
Caller: Four days.
Call Handler: Is she not feeling well?
Caller: No, she’s fine. Healthwise. She’s depressed.
Call Handler: Has she seen her GP about her symptoms?
Caller: No, that’s why I’m calling you. I don’t even know if she has one. She does this sometimes. Crawls into bed, doesn’t get out for a few days. Loses whatever lame-ass job she’s had. It’s not what I signed up for when I moved in here. Are you able to section her or put her in hospital anonymously or something?
Call Handler: No, I’m sorry. We’re a health advisory service.
Caller: I thought you were the NHS.
Call Handler: We are, but we can only advise you on the best way to treat your situation.
Caller: Uhhh … hello! Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the girl’s depressed. She needs medication or something. Medication she ain’t gonna get lying in bed!
Call Handler: Madam, sorry. I did mention these calls are monitored, right?
Caller: I don’t give a flying fuck if they’re monitored. I want you to help me find a way to help my flatmate and I don’t want her screwed-up family finding out because if they do they’ll stop paying her rent and they’re the ones who signed the lease agreement and I don’t have the money to put down a deposit if they take her out and then we’d both be up shit’s creek. C’mon. Please. Can you help me out here?
Call Handler: I can offer you the number of a service your friend can call. There’s LifeTime which has a number you can ring—
Caller: Have you been listening to a word I’ve said? She’s lying in bed like a zombie. She’s not going to call anyone.
Call Handler: Maybe if you rang for her and brought the phone in, she might listen?
Caller: Wow. They’ve really plumbed the gene pool for staff haven’t they?
Call Handler: Madam, I’m only trying to help. LifeTime has seasoned counsellors who—
Caller: I’m twenty-fucking-five. Don’t call me Madam. Forget it. Just forget it. You obviously can’t help. Buh-bye! Have a nice day! [Call ends]
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘… and finally, we thought we’d close today with a couple of updates on our upcoming His and Hers adventures.’ Kev rubbed his hands together. ‘I never knew having a good time could be so competitive, eh, Kath?’
Kath gave Kev a winning smile. She’d been sleeping in the guest room at home for a week now. ‘He’s not wrong there. Now that you’ve all seen me sweat just a few buckets as I’ve been put through my paces, tomorrow our Kev will begin two months of being put through his paces by the various Commonwealth teams here in the UK. Tomorrow? We’ll see what Kev got up to over the weekend in Blackpool. Who knew it would be volleyball and not dancing that got him back to our old stomping ground?’ She reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. He didn’t respond.
She’d already seen some of the VT. It had been ruddy hilarious. Kev out in a windstorm on the beach in Blackpool being absolutely slaughtered by a pair of Amazonian goddesses from Northumberland.
‘Ho, ho! Yes. What a laugh. And what will you be offering our viewers over the next few weeks, Kath? More “lightbulb moments”?’
Kev had been quite derisive about her ‘light a bulb with a bicycle’ fundraising segment. She’d put her foot down though. Literally and figuratively. Viewers were viewers. They needed to see what was happening. They needed to know not only how much money was coming in, but what it was going to do. Plus, Halfords had taken out a string of advertisements to run through the latter half of the show. *Boom!*
‘Well, Kev. As you know, our crews will be decamping from the studio up to Hadrian’s Wall in just two months’ time. Before then, I’ll be meeting with a few of the lads and lasses from Team GB’s cycling teams—’
Kev’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. She’d seen his Commonwealth Games and raised him.
‘—Also, the team here at Brand New Day thought it would be fun to do a few features on some of the folk game enough to come along on the trip of a LifeTime as well as visit some of the people LifeTime helps. With any luck … we’ll reach that goal of one hundred thousand pounds in no time. A snip to Comic Relief’s millions, but as they say …’ she patted her non-existent back pocket, ‘… every little helps.’
Kev laughed. ‘Oh, Kath. I love your positivity.’
No he didn’t. He belittled it. Said she was naive and didn’t understand how the real world worked. She knew she lived a privileged life, but she was pretty sure that the fact that she still knew the price of a pint of milk kept her a splash more down to earth than a man who lavished gold flake face cream on his mug every night.
‘Thanks, love. It’s always so reassuring to know you have my back.’ She stiffened at his touch.
‘Forever and always.’
They each turned to separate cameras for the sign-off then went to their dressing rooms alone.
‘Sorry?’ Kath swept the towel Fola handed her across her face.
‘I have an idea for your show, Katherine.’
Sigh. How did he make her name sound like poetry?
Fola took her towel, then directed her to a mat he’d just laid out in front of the mirrors she’d grown to cherish instead of resent. He held up a finger, then unfurled a fresh towel on it.
‘Fola!’ She laughed. ‘You make me feel like the queen herself!’
‘But you are a queen,’ Fola said completely straight faced. ‘Just as I am a king.’
‘Does that make us a couple then?’ She met his eyes, felt a flash of something utterly primal, then instantly looked away. How foolish she was being. He was a vital, thirty-something man of the world. With a girlfriend. He had his whole life in front of him.
She was a middle-aged, married, Northern, lite morning television show host who agreed to let her husband throw cream pies at her.
Fola would never fall for a woman like her. He taught sport to inner-city children who might otherwise be chalked up to the ever-increasing knife crime statistics. She’d not noticed her brother was so mired in depression (and whiskey) his liver had stopped functioning.
He was humming with life.
She was a woman whose flirtation skills had rusted back in the early 1980s when Kev had taken her under his wing at the Starlight Dance and Cocktail Lounge just off the main drag of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach.
‘Did your mother not raise you to think of yourself as a queen, Katherine?’
She laughed. It didn’t tinkle with joy. ‘No, I’m afraid my mother raised me to get a job, pay for my own dance lessons and move out as soon as possible.’
Fola looked genuinely aggrieved by this, head shaking as he indicated she should lie down so he could help her stretch out. She dutifully lay down, knees up, one ankle crossed over a knee as he knelt before her. ‘My mother raised me to think of myself as king. Not because of wealth or power or arrogance. She had none of those. No. She raised me to think of myself as a king, because she believed everyone should think of themselves as master of their own destiny. In charge of their own life. Their own future.’
Having a man kneel in front of her, stretching out her glutes and hamstrings, as he told her why he thought of himself as a king was quickly becoming one of the most powerful moments Kath had ever experienced.
‘That sounds lik
e wise counsel.’
‘She is very wise, my mother. Strong enough to be kind. Strong enough to let go.’
‘Of what?’
‘Pride.’ He leant against her leg, his scent flooding round her like a soft breeze carrying wafts of warm bread in its wake. A personal trainer shouldn’t smell of carbs, but by god his aroma made her hungry.
He released the pressure then leant back on his heels while she switched her feet around.
Pride, eh?
Was it pride or love that was motivating her to do this ride?
Loss had been the initial kernel of motivation. Then guilt. A need to make up for the fact she’d not noticed her brother’s increasingly rapid descent into alcoholism. They’d led separate lives. He was a late-night raconteur at whatever pub sold the cheapest booze. She was an early morning splash of sunshine for a predominantly female audience setting about their ‘ordinary lives’ in ‘ordinary Britain’. Would she have behaved differently if she’d been raised to think of herself as a benevolent queen of her own destiny?
She squelched the thoughts. What’s done was done. The only thing she had control of was her future. ‘So, what was this idea of yours?’
‘The visits to the riders.’ Fola leant in again, his chest against her calf.
She scrunched up her face and tried not to breathe in. ‘Sorry?’
‘In and out, Katherine,’ Fola laughed, drawing his hand up and down the line of his chest. ‘In and out.’
She blushed.
Good god. Perhaps she would’ve been wiser going with a female trainer.
He sat back on his heels again. ‘Left leg out, right knee across.’ He pressed down on her shin and thigh with his hands. ‘I think you should come to school with me.’
She gulped in a deep breath, trying to process what he was saying whilst ignoring the wild fireworks display going hell for leather in her more intimate regions as his hand swept from her buttock to her knee.
‘How do you mean? School?’ she asked in a high-pitched voice she’d not heard from herself before.
‘I thought it could be interesting if you did a segment on me and my kids …’ she smiled. He always called the boys he trained in football ‘his kids’. ‘… people might be more generous.’
‘Oh?’
‘Most of these boys could do with help from a charity like LifeTime.’ Fola released his hold and sat back so she could switch legs again.
He wasn’t wrong there. They were the sort of schools that totted up the type of statistics people liked to ignore until, of course, the problem had become ‘an epidemic’. Knife crime. Drugs. Poverty. Abuse.
She bit back the instinct to say it sounded a bit too ‘BBC’ for them. That was how the producers dismissed things as too boring, or too intellectual or too earnest for their target audience of ‘busy people wanting a bit of lift rather than a reminder of just how miserable real life actually was’. They didn’t need reminders. They lived it. Oh, that’s a tad BeeBeeCeeeee, don’t you think, Kath? Why don’t we drum up something a bit more fun for the viewer, yeah?
A fire that had nothing to do with how damn sexy Fola made her feel lit within her.
This ride was for her brother. Her sweet, funny, kid brother who died of alcoholism after serving his country as a soldier for ten years of his adult life, left to mire in the stew of his own, screwed up, PTSD-stricken psyche when they not so gently suggested he hang up his machine gun and find something else to do. He didn’t have anything else. Know anything else. He was a servant to crown and country and had been left to wander round the Midlands with no marketable skills beyond being a class-A sniper. There wasn’t much call for snipers in the Black Country. Not yet anyway.
She could already hear the ‘no, ta, loves’ ring out from round the pitch table at the studio.
She tried to picture herself in an ermine robe and a crown. Not a huge one, something modest. What would Queen Kath do if the chance came to her to do something real? Something that might be out of her comfort zone, but could, with a bit of grist, make a genuine difference in one solitary person’s life. She was too late to help her brother. But maybe, just maybe, if she put her pride to the side, humbled herself, she could help someone else’s.
‘Let’s do it.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘Such an unusual name. Raven.’ Sue’s mother finished off a bit of roast potato then asked, ‘Do they actually have ravens in Pakistan?’
It was all Sue could do not to crawl under Katie’s immaculately laid French Oak slab dining room table. What was her family doing? Acting like they’d never spoken to someone of colour before? Mortifying. And, frankly, surprising. Raven was every bit as English as Sue was. Apart from the grandparents who’d come from India, of course, but Raven was a walking, talking, English person. A very brave one, too. She didn’t know if she would’ve agreed to come along to a Sunday lunch at a house full of people she’d never met before. If the roles had been reversed, Sue probably would’ve hidden in her room and read magazines or snuck downstairs even though she’d been told she had free run of the place and watched a bit of Sunday afternoon telly only to sneak back up before anyone got home. Gary had always been the more social of the two of them.
Perhaps, she was missing her own family and thought being at Sunday lunch would be nice. Or, more likely, Raven didn’t like being in the house on her own. What with … things.
Either way, Sue was ever so pleased she’d agreed to come. This was her first proper Sunday lunch without Gary beside her to cushion the effects of two to three hours in close proximity with her family.
‘It’s India, actually. My ethnic heritage is Indian.’
‘Oh,’ her mother said as if she’d just been told there was an entirely new continent out there she hadn’t realised existed. ‘So do they have ravens? The Indians?’
Her mother really wasn’t letting this go.
‘Yes, just like England. But, it’s a nickname really. My given name is Sunita.’
Her mother chewed on that for a bit then gave the flat-lipped nod. ‘I can see why you went for something a bit more conventional in the end.’
What? Sue and Raven shot one another confused looks. How had Raven gone from being at the unusual end of the name spectrum to conventional? Sue lifted her cloth serviette to her mouth. Gaz would’ve had a field day with this.
‘The Yorkshire puds are first class today, Katie,’ Sue’s father said.
‘Oh, good!’ Katie enthused, clearly pleased to have the spotlight back on her. ‘I tried out a new recipe today. It called for an extra egg white and it seems to have done just the trick.’
They all nodded and mmm’d and moved their forks and knives along their plates to show their appreciation for all of Katie’s efforts. The children, who had been slightly less appreciative, had already disappeared into their rooms after Katie had deemed them impossible to contend with. Generation Alpha, she’d intoned as she’d watched them tear up the staircase. It needs a book writing. Zac had a ‘gaming date’ as play dates were apparently too babyish and Jayden said she had a book she wanted to finish but Sue knew she was watching Gilmore Girls under her duvet. (Katie didn’t ‘agree’ with Gilmore Girls. Something about false expectations and too much caffeine that seemed slightly at odds with her son’s freedom to destroy things at will in his video games, but Sue wasn’t a parent and, as such, her opinions were generally dismissed.)
After they’d all refused second helpings of Katie’s (Marks & Spencer’s) lemon tart and Dean had fussed about triple checking no one wanting a coffee or a brandy, Katie did a little dingdingding on her glass and said, ‘Announcement time!’ She rose and beamed at them all and then, quite specifically, at Sue.
‘Suey …’ she began. ‘Dear, sweet, kind, Suey who has been through soverymuch these past few weeks. We want you to know, Dean and I …’ she reached out and gave his shoulder a little fingertip squeeze, ‘… we want you to know that you have our support one hundred per cent.’
Sue’s chin quirked to the side like a curious puppy. Support? The last she’d checked they were looking for a peculiar variation on indentured servitude from her.
Katie gave a trill of a laugh. ‘Of course, when we – when I – took the step to make our offer to you to look after the children for pay, we hadn’t realised you’d already gone and got yourself a flatmate. Welcome, Raven.’ Katie pressed a flat hand to her equally flat bosom. ‘Welcome to our home. We have so enjoyed having you as our guest today, but I have to admit we were surprised to hear about you. Nothing to worry about. It only took a tiny bit of the helium out of our well-filled balloon.’ She pinched a soupçon of air between her fingers, then looked at Dean and shook her head with a frozen smile that said, this family of yours simply doesn’t know how to stick to a well-laid plan, does it?
‘Aaaaanyway …’ Katie once again fixed her glow of largesse back on Sue. ‘Enough wittering. What Dean and I were thinking, was that, with everything that must be going on with you and the stages of grief still very much in the early phases, we thought perhaps I was a bit quick off the mark to ask you about looking after the kids full-time. Well. Part-time, given that you’d still be at the call centre, but, whatever spin you put on it, you’ve been a bit hesitant in taking up our offer. I thought you’d pounce on it, but I guess it shows you there’s always room in a friendship for mystery. As such, we sat down with our business heads on … our recruitment heads …’ She gave a little helpless shrug as if she and Dean simply couldn’t help it, they were born to recruit! ‘After a serious round of brainstorming, we decided you might need a bit of a sweetener. Like your mum did.’
Sue threw her mother a confused look. What were they talking about? Katie’s mum had been paid to look after the children and Bev had only looked after Jayden and Zac for the Disneyworld trip. There had been quite a bit of mention of Duty Free gin in the lead up to that trip. Was that what they were suggesting? Giving her some gin to look after their children?? In fact, now that Sue thought of it, the last time the topic had come up, Bev had said she’d rather gnaw her arm off than revisit the ‘gory’ days of parenting.