The A-Z of Everything

by Debbie Johnson

  A world without Andrea was, right then, too terrible to even imagine.

  Lewis had made a lot of friends during his long, rich life – but none of them had ever come close to Andrea. She was like a beacon of energy, a rainbow shining into a grey world, a blast of dazzling light scattering away the darkness. She was his soul mate, his true love without being his lover, his partner in crime.

  He’d first encountered her when he moved to the village years ago, and their eyes met over a crowded giant vegetable stand at the annual fete. They’d both been staring at the same collection of ridiculously large marrows, and they both had the same raised eyebrows and ‘oo-er missus’ expressions, straight from a Carry On movie.

  That had led to coffee. Coffee had led to a night in the pub. And a night in the pub had led to an unshakeable friendship, based on a rude sense of humour, a love of banter, and, if he was entirely honest, on mutual loneliness.

  And now she was gone, and he was sitting with a concrete bollard up his bum, and it was dark and cold and rainy. The height of the inglorious English summer. He’d left his mac on the back seat of his car, his tweed jacket was soaked through, and he knew his shirt would be plastered to his skin in ways that were far from flattering. She’d be thoroughly shocked at him showing off his man boobs in such an unbecoming way, he was sure.

  His fingers were shaking and his carefully combed hair was wet and flat to his skull, letting all the bald patches peek out.

  Somehow, though, he just didn’t seem able to care. All his life, he’d done the right thing – been properly turned out, played his part, done what was expected of him. Now, he wouldn’t be bothered if he was naked, covered in woad and speaking in tongues. Everything felt heavy, and useless, and empty. Especially him.

  None of it felt real yet. He’d done some paperwork, accepted sweet tea and sympathy from kind nurses who never really knew her, and been forced to eat some over-buttered toast. Eventually, after ‘giving him some time’, they gently suggested he needed to leave the room.

  It was only decades of training and conditioning and pure English politeness that stopped him from yelling at them. From kicking them out, and barricading the door with his recliner chair, and wailing like those Middle Eastern ladies you see on the news.

  He understood now, for the first time, how grief could make you wail like that. How pain could be so pure and so livid that it took on a life of its own, a small, furious animal that wanted to howl at the top of its lungs. To scream and scream and scream until the whole world shattered with the sheer force of its misery.

  His own parents had died after long, full lives, and they were never especially close anyway – they were merely the people who visited him at boarding school, and insisted he became a lawyer. It had hurt when they passed on, but nothing had prepared him for this.

  For the rawness. The agony. The inability to accept that she was really gone. That it wasn’t some silly trick of hers, that she hadn’t faked it all, and any minute would sit back up, tears of laughter in her magnificent eyes, proclaiming: ‘I well and truly got you that time, sweetie! I completely Reggie Perrin-ed you! Fancy a G&T on the way home?’

  But no matter how long he waited, it didn’t happen. She just refused to stop being dead, damn her. And now he is here, in the rain, fishing around in his jacket pocket for his phone and his cigar box. The cigar that she’d bought for him – a limited edition Montecristo that, under normal circumstances, he’d be looking forward to smoking.

  He’d enjoy it on the terrace of his small garden, along with a nice glass of ruby port, listening to the night-time sounds of nature all around him, bathing in the starlight.

  This, though, is slightly different. There are no sounds of nature, just sirens and screeching tyres and shell-shocked-looking people, standing in small, damp clusters as they wait for taxis. The starlight has been replaced by the flickering yellow signs of the hospital, and the glow of hundreds of tiny lights shining from hundreds of tiny windows. The car headlights are reflected in dark pools of oily rain on the pitted tarmac as they zoom past, and he can hear a horribly loud drunken argument going on somewhere nearby. It is far from idyllic.

  He waits until the downpour slows from its previous let’s-all-build-an-Ark levels to a mild drizzle, and pulls out his cigar box. He’s left his cutter at home, so he commits the blasphemous act of simply tearing off the end. He lights it, and takes that first, glorious puff, white smoke billowing out in front of his face in a fragrant cloud. He realises that he is sitting next to a ‘No Smoking’ sign, but nobody else seems to be taking any notice.

  The cigar tastes and smells divine. A rare treat. She’d made him promise that he’d do this – that he’d do lots of things, in fact, but especially this. A quiet cigar, all alone, just for her. After a few tipples, she’d often filch one from him, and chug away on it while wiggling her eyebrows at his scandalised expression. Andrea often tried to shock him by doing un-ladylike things, and still somehow managed to remain the classiest woman he’d ever known.

  After a few moments of enjoying the aroma and the sweet, woodsy taste in his mouth, Lewis looks up to see a man in a wheelchair parked in front of him. He looks about ninety years old, and only has one leg.

  His wizened face is wrapped up in the hood of a fur-lined parka, and closer inspection shows that he isn’t anywhere near ninety – he’s much younger, but prematurely aged by some addiction or another.

  Lewis has spent enough time in courts to know that the missing limb is likely to be a related condition, and even in their relatively quiet patch of the country, drugs have ravaged the lives of many. He’d usually make his excuses and leave, overwhelmed by that peculiar mix of sympathy and disgust that men of his age and background tend to feel for the heroin-afflicted.

  Andrea, of course, was never overwhelmed by any such thing. She gave money to everyone who asked for it, had enough back copies of the Big Issue to wallpaper her whole cottage, and was ever empathetic with the lost souls of the world.

  ‘We all have our demons, darling,’ she’d say, passing a fiver to a shabby bloke with a dog on a string, ‘it’s just that some people’s are more obvious than others’.’

  He decides he’s not going to budge, not tonight. Not while he’s smoking his magical Montecristo, and still debating whether he should run back into the hospital and take Andrea back home with him. Perhaps he could mummify her and prop her up on the sofa, so he still has someone to talk to. He’s convinced that Andrea mummified would still be better company than most people alive.

  ‘Smells good,’ says the man, sniffing the air appreciatively. ‘Have you got a spare, mate?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ replies Lewis, shuffling slightly to try and relieve the numbness in his nether regions. ‘This was a gift from a friend.’

  ‘You must have some good friends,’ his visitor replies, tapping dirt-encrusted fingertips on the arms of his wheelchair. ‘I don’t have any left.’

  I wonder why, thinks Lewis, uncharitably, before reminding himself that Andrea could be watching right now. Hovering over his shoulder, a shimmering diamanté wraith telling him that he could afford to be ‘just a tiny bit less of a snob, don’t you think, my love?’

  ‘I’m not sure I do either,’ Lewis eventually answers. ‘The best one I ever had just died, in there.’

  Actual tears well up in the man’s eyes, and Lewis immediately feels like a shit for silently despising him. He has no idea what his story is, or how he ended up here, or what his demons are. He knows nothing about him, and has no right to judge.

  ‘That’s rubbish, mate. I’m so sorry for you. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. They say that time heals and all … but I’m not so sure. Sometimes time seems to stand still, as far as I can make out. Anyway, good luck to you. I’ll say a little prayer for your friend.’

  He gives Lewis an abrupt nod, and starts to wheel himself away, his hands slipping on the wet frames as he turns, the wind blowing his parka off his shaven head.
<
br />   ‘Hang on!’ says Lewis, standing up, and immediately feeling a shooting pain fly right up his spine. Ouch. He recovers, and follows the man in the chair, handing him the cigar. He’s lost his appetite for it now, anyway.

  ‘Her name was Andrea,’ he adds, as he backs away towards the car park. ‘And I appreciate your prayers. I’m sure she would too.’

  The man mutters his thanks and waves at him as he leaves, watching Lewis head towards his car, an old Jag he’s had for donkey’s years. He glances back, and all he can see of his new friend is the orange glow of the cigar tip moving around in the black night, like some kind of aromatic firefly.

  He opens the car door, and sinks into the passenger seat in a soggy, crumpled heap.

  He’s smoked his cigar. He’s increased his karmic brownie-point count. And now he has to do what he’s been dreading for the last hour. He has to do what Andrea asked him to do. What he promised her he would.

  He has to start the process that she hoped would put all her daughters’ broken pieces back together again.

  He knows he needs to be strong. To help the girls and, in doing so, help Andrea. But he doesn’t feel capable of putting their pieces back together, when his are all scattered and shattered and shed.

  He feels like Humpty Dumpty, and has no idea how he is going to find the strength to do what he needs to do.

  Call Rosehip and Popcorn, and tell them that their mother is dead.

  Chapter 5

  It’s almost 11 p.m., and Joe is in bed. Rose is under no illusion that he’s actually asleep. He’ll be on Instagram, or playing Xbox Live, or doing whatever else it is that 16-year-old boys do when their mum isn’t around. She decides she’s probably better off not pondering that one, and walks into the kitchen.

  She sees a blurred reflection of herself in the stainless-steel fridge door, and hastily pulls it open. Nobody needs to see that, especially her. She’s wearing a baggy old dressing gown and stripy bed socks, and her hair desperately needs washing. Or possibly shaving off entirely so it can have a fresh start, and stop impersonating a neglected badger – her mass of curls is now pure frizz, the dark brown streaked with premature grey.

  She stares into the fridge, bathed in the yellow glow of its light. She inspects the shelves, already knowing what is there, and knowing that she wants to eat none of it.

  She went to Tesco on the way home from work, and there is practically a whole farm crammed on to the shelves. Fresh rocket and carrot batons and a cucumber big enough to qualify as a deadly weapon on an episode of CSI. Salmon fillets and a quinoa salad and green juices in trendy glass bottles. Her fridge is leaner than the entire British Olympic cycling team in pre-camp training. Surely some of that vitality will be absorbed into her just by looking at it, through some kind of environmental osmosis?

  She roots around, sighing. She’s bought all of this for her new health kick, walking round the supermarket full of hope and resolve as she packed the trolley with overpriced super-foods. She’d been shamed into it by Joe, who pointed out that him being forced to eat a broccoli stir-fry in one room while she stuffed her face with cream cakes in another wasn’t exactly setting a good example. Plus there were never any cream cakes left for him, which wasn’t fair.

  Rose didn’t really need him to point this out to her at all. She was already painfully aware of it, and he didn’t even know the full extent of the problem. At 16, he was out a lot. He had friends to see and parties to go to and parks to hang round in. And while he was out, she didn’t even need to hide – she could binge to her heart’s content.

  Except, of course, her heart probably wasn’t all that happy with it. Multipacks of Wotsits and microwave sticky-toffee pudding in pots are never, ever to be seen on those healthy food pyramid charts they have pinned up in the school where she works. They are the renegades, the outcasts, the bandits of the nutritional world.

  They are also, Rose thinks, shutting the fridge door a lot harder than she probably should, the only things that make her feel even marginally better about life.

  She walks over to the cupboard under the stairs. The one Joe never goes in because it is the place where she keeps a strange combination of the Hoover, printer cartridges, empty cardboard boxes that once contained long-gone appliances, and random presents for other people.

  It’s known as the Present Cupboard, a throwback to a time when Joe was much younger. When he was at primary school, and there seemed to be a party every weekend. When life was dominated by the local soft-play centre, and coming up with some £5 toy to stick in a gift bag. When teachers needed novelty mugs for Christmas, and toiletry sets for the end of term.

  It used to contain a cornucopia of delights. Cheap games and craft jars and wrapping paper and boxes full of cards with pictures of cuddly bears for the girls and pirate bears for the boys.

  All of that faded out as Joe got older, when the tenner-in-the-envelope replaced the tat on birthdays. Now, his mates don’t have the kinds of parties that involve climbing frames and ball pools – they have the kind that involve deliveries from Domino’s Pizza and illicit booze smuggled into the garden in Coke bottles and someone plugging their phone playlist into speakers.

  But for some reason, after all these years, they still both call it the Present Cupboard. And Rose does in fact still keep some presents in there – for colleagues, for neighbours, for those odd occasions when she just needs to say ‘thank you’ via the medium of chocolates or wine.

  That’s what she has in mind now, as she rummages through the empty backpacks and the battery tin and the cardboard box brimming with mysterious chargers for equally mysterious items.

  She eventually emerges victorious, brandishing one of those big, round, plastic tubs full of Cadbury’s Heroes. She bought it in the run-up to Christmas, along with about five others. This is the sole survivor. The rest have taken up permanent residence on her thighs.

  Rose checks the sell-by date, sees that all is good, and retreats back to the living room. She slumps down on the sofa, and sighs when she sees she’s left the remote control by the telly. Heaving her too-big body up again, she retrieves it, and flicks through the channels until she finds something bearable.

  This takes longer than it should considering the fact that they have about 8 million channels. She settles on a repeat of Poldark, which is pretty much the equivalent of a big box of chocolates in visual form, and leans back into the cushions.

  Just one episode, she tells herself. And just a few chocolates. It’s Friday, after all. She’s had a busy working week, and she deserves it. She’ll start her health kick tomorrow, and soon she’ll be all spry and limber, like Demelza, skinny enough to frolic through the waves on a Cornish beach in summer instead of hiding her despicable calves in leggings and encasing her bingo wings in cardigans.

  She hears a bumping sound from upstairs, and deduces that Joe is on his Xbox. His game chair is rocking around, and he’ll probably be getting over-excited as he shoots things. At least it’s the start of the school holidays, so it doesn’t matter how late he stays up. Or her, for that matter. Six weeks stretch ahead of them – six weeks of fun for him, and six weeks of boredom for her. School holidays feel different when you’re 42 than when you’re 16.

  At least she’ll be able to catch up on all those jobs she’s had piling up around her. Clean the car out. Unblock the drain in the shower. Many other exciting tasks.

  She makes a mental note to call her mum in the morning – that needs to be top of the list. Her mum sent Joe a gift voucher to celebrate the end of his GCSEs, which of course he’s already spent. It turned up weeks ago and they both keep forgetting to phone and thank her.

  Now she comes to think of it, she’s not spoken to her mum much recently at all. She usually called a lot – or at least what feels like a lot, when it’s your mum.

  She shrugs, deciding her mum must just be busy, and uses her untidy fingernails to tear off the tape around the lid of the box. Why do they always make these things so difficult to
get into? Why is it that the carrot batons are just there, all washed and ready to go and simple, and the good stuff like the chocolate takes an engineering degree and a blowtorch to break into? Life just isn’t fair sometimes.

  Rose shoves a handful of miniature Caramels into her mouth, and hides the wrappers in the tub. If they’re right at the bottom, it’s like they don’t count. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

  She looks on as Poldark takes his top off again – quality television – and wonders if this is all she has to look forward to now. Quiet nights in with a box of chocolate and Aidan Turner. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it was the actual Aidan Turner, here in person and scything her back garden for her, but it’s not. It’s a teeny-tiny-TV version, which is nowhere near as satisfying.

  She also wonders what Simon next door is up to. She saw him doing his own gardening earlier, also with his top off. Not quite Poldark, but enough to make her blush. He’s probably asleep, she thinks, or chatting to supermodels online. And I’m turning into a horny old woman who needs to get her own life, instead of living through other people’s.

  Joe is starting sixth-form college in September, doing his A-levels. He’s excited, and hopeful, and bright enough to do well. The world is at his size-10 feet, which is where it belongs – because he really is a great lad. He’s not had it especially easy, between his dad and his dad’s new family and what she suspects has been her increasingly morose presence, but he’s always stayed upbeat. Confident. Secure.

  She remembers those days when everything felt possible. The days back home, when mum was still acting and they all lived in the cottage, and She Who Shall Not Be Named was still in her life.

  It feels like a million years ago, she thinks, getting to work on the miniature Wispas.

  Chapter 6

  Forest Hills High School Christmas Disco, 1991

  Rose collapses down on to one of the benches, drenched in sweat. Poppy stays on her feet for a while longer, trying to tempt her back up to Chesney Hawkes singing ‘I Am the One and Only’.