A Summer Fling

by Milly Johnson

  Chapter 21

  Ben had left a huge chocolate egg for Ray in the fireplace late Saturday night so she would find it on Easter Sunday morning. He’d had it iced at Thornton’s with her name on it and three kisses. He had made pink potato prints of bunny’s feet across the tiles the previous night whilst Ray was sleeping.

  ‘Hey Ben, look, the Easter Bunny left me an egg!’ said Ray, waking him up by jumping on him.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re going to share it with your husband,’ he smiled.

  ‘You might have your own,’ said Ray. ‘He might have left yours in the kitchen, for instance.’

  ‘Oh, might he?’ said Ben. He leaped out of bed and ran like a child to the kitchen where he found a big nest made out of brown cardboard. It was full of mini eggs and cream eggs and a big chocolate mama chicken sitting on them all.

  ‘You daft lass,’ he said affectionately, giving Ray a big kiss on her head. He loved her for these sweet, considerate things she did and was careful to make sure he afforded her the same courtesies. After all, they were in control now. Big and grown-up. They could make all the lovely things happen that never happened when they were kids.

  Dawn and Calum had made up, after she had apologized for nagging and watched him go out with his mates on both Friday and Saturday night without questioning him, and she buttoned her lip when she heard him come in at after two on Easter Sunday morning. He rewarded her with an early morning perfunctory bonk and an eventual ‘sorry that he had eaten the surprise egg’.

  Then they went over to Muriel and Ronnie’s for lunch. All the family were there, squeezed around a big table like the Waltons. Like the sort of family she had always dreamed of belonging to, and now she was about to – legally. She was squashed in between his younger sister, Demi, and his older sister, Denise. Denise, Demi and Dawn – even the alliteration of their names made her feel like one of theirs.

  ‘Got some good news for you two,’ announced Muriel. ‘Bette across the road is going to make the bridesmaids’ frocks. That’ll save you an arm and a leg.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Dawn, trying to muster up a diplomatic refusal. ‘Well, actually I’ve seen some lovely ones in Laura Ashley—’

  ‘Laura Ashley!’ scoffed Demi. ‘They’ll be poncey.’

  ‘No, not at all, they’re lovely and—’

  ‘Bette will make anything at a fraction of shop prices. You just tell her what you want and she’ll sort it. She’s a brilliant sewer.’

  ‘Oh well, thank you,’ gulped Dawn. Mu had already decided that Bette was doing the dresses and she felt ungrateful turning her down. And if Bette was so brilliant, she could make the same ones that she had seen in Laura Ashley.

  ‘Oh, and another bit of good news. Your Auntie Charlotte in the home is giving you a cheque for a thousand quid. You’ll have to go and see her to get it though.’

  There was a round of wolf-whistles from everyone except Calum who said, ‘Fucking hell.’

  Muriel gave him a crack with the spatula that she was using to apportion her meat and potato pie.

  ‘Who’s Auntie Charlotte?’ asked Dawn.

  ‘Well, it’s my auntie really,’ said Muriel. ‘Our Calum’s middle name is William; I named him that after her husband. He was very high up in the pit, Uncle William.’ She rubbed her finger and thumb together to indicate that Uncle William and Auntie Charlotte certainly weren’t without a bob or two. ‘Anyway, he’s dead and she’s got no kids. I tell you, it was a very good move calling him Calum William. I thought it might come in handy one day and seems I was right. Ever such a nice man he was, my Uncle William.’

  ‘You’re just like him then, aren’t you, Cal? Ever such a nice man?’ said Demi across the table to her brother. ‘I heard you thumped Dawn.’

  ‘Chuffing hell, you lot know more about my life than I do!’

  ‘You didn’t thump her, did you? What for, you rotten git?’ said Denise, screwing up her face with disgust.

  ‘Bloody nagging me, that’s what for,’ said Calum, taking a big slurp from his can of lager. ‘Anyway, it weren’t a thump. She were hysterical. I hit her for medical reasons!’ He smirked at his own wit.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dawn, don’t start going all bunny-boiler,’ said Denise, sympathetic to her brother now.

  ‘Anyone would think I’d turned into Peter Sutcliffe!’ said Calum. ‘It’s her fault. She nags and nags and nags.’

  ‘Aye, lad,’ said Ronnie, making a rare contribution to the conversation. ‘And now you’ve given her something else to nag you about.’

  They all laughed. Dawn felt herself dragged into their jollity and seeing herself through their eyes. So what if they were a bit rough? So what if they had a brown sauce bottle permanently on the table and drank whatever lager was on special offer by the crate load? They were an old-fashioned family who loved and laughed together and stood side-by-side with each other. Like the ones in Catherine Cookson’s books. Her heroines were always feisty and fighting and making up, weren’t they? She really did need to lighten up.

  Chapter 22

  Maltstone churchyard was a serene place for the dead to sleep, was Raychel’s first thought as they threaded through the bumpy grass and stone crosses and angels to a pretty corner, a mass of bright and faded colours, flowers, teddy bears and cards: the children’s graveyard.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Raychel.

  ‘I think it’s perfect,’ said Ben. ‘It’s a lovely spot. Aye, here, pet.’

  There was a tree at the edge of the grass border where a wood started. Raychel opened her handbag and took out a small cross and a tiny, fluffy toy rabbit. She parted the grass at the side of the tree. Bluebells were in flower and the air was full of their musty scent.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben.

  Raychel kissed the cross and lifted it to Ben’s face so he could do the same.

  ‘Happy Easter, my darling Angel,’ she said, kneeling to anchor it between the sweet blue flowers in the soil. ‘Dear God, please look after her for us. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Ben, helping Ray to her feet. He wrapped his arm around her as tears bubbled in his eyes and he sniffed them down hard.

  ‘I’m OK, really,’ she smiled. ‘I know she isn’t there. I know she’s up in heaven but I need somewhere to come that’s nearby and pretty like this.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain to me, darlin’,’ said Ben. ‘Come on, let’s go home. We’ll come again. She knows we will.’

  As they turned to go, Ben blew a kiss heavenward and hoped it would be delivered to her. The baby had died before she had been given a name, so they had picked ‘Angel’ for her. Ben and Raychel, her big brother and sister, were the only ones who would ever remember and grieve for little Angel.

  Chapter 23

  According to the Internet, Anna read, Vladimir Darq was forty-two years old and originated from Romania. He had enjoyed huge success as a designer of exclusive gothic gowns and wedding dresses for A-list clients before he disappeared from the face of the earth for a year, emerging recently in Milan with a breathtaking taster-display of sumptuous lingerie. According to an Observer article that she also found, he no longer wanted to design exclusively for the very wealthy, already-beautiful people. His new market was to be ‘the forgotten woman’, the one who thought herself ordinary and who had carved her niche in the background of life. The price points would match her purse too! Vladimir Darq maintained that it was possible to make any woman feel sexually powerful with the right underwear beneath her clothes – his underwear. He had designed a bodyshaper that no woman could afford to be without, he proclaimed confidently.

  There were quite a few sites featuring him, even an online fan club and forums trying to find out things about him, although no one seemed to have much information other than what was reported in the newspapers. He was, it seemed, a real international man of mystery. Or was he indeed a man? There was a weighty amount of speculation on a few gothic sites that he was, in fact, not marketing h
imself as a vampire, but was the real thing. It accompanied obviously Photoshopped pictures of him with pale golden eyes, bleached white skin and exaggerated fangs. Apparently, he preferred to do all his business in the evening because he hated the sun, which added fuel to the fire. All tabloid newspaper nonsense really.

  Unmarried, childless, he was pictured alongside a few beautiful models and with his arm around his ‘friend’, the photographer Leonid Szabo. Anna might have known Vladimir Darq would be gay. Let’s face it, any man who was interested in her couldn’t possibly be heterosexual.

  Anna spent the rest of Easter Sunday watching a Jesus film and getting tipsy on too much wine. She cried a lot as Jesus went up on the cross and, once the floodgates were open, she cried about Tony and the big, painful hole he had left inside her heart. She cried about her cat abandoning her for another woman, seduced away by Edna the widow who served him smoked salmon. She cried hard and unashamedly that no one in the world loved her at all and at the thought that when her own death day came, no one would turn up at her funeral. There would be no headstone, and the grass and big, ugly weeds would grow rampant over her plot and dogs would crap on it. She would be even more forgotten in death than she ever was in life.

  She caught sight of her face in the mirror as she staggered to the sink after throwing up in the toilet. A moment of clarity in her alcohol-clouded brain told her that this was no way to carry on. She looked like she had died, been buried, dug back up and hit with the gravedigger’s shovel. There had to be something more than this for her. She truly was the forgotten woman that Vladimir Darq was talking about. She fell asleep with his business card clasped in her hand.

  Chapter 24

  ‘Hello, everyone,’ said Christie, breezing in. ‘Had a nice long Easter weekend?’

  ‘Lovely, thank you,’ came a ripple of consensus.

  Anna hoped she wouldn’t have to elaborate. What could she have said? Cried a lot, got totally pissed with Jesus – oh, and fainted in the train station and was asked to dress up in underwear by a gay vampire. Easter just didn’t get better than that. And to top it off, she’d seen that scrubber Lynette Bottom and Tony pass her in the car that morning. And she had a belting headache from crying herself to sleep. Well ‘sleep’ was pushing it a bit. She couldn’t remember when she’d last managed to have a full night’s kip. Last night, she’d had an hour, if that, before sinking into a dream about Tony and a very heavily pregnant Lynette getting married in front of Sailor Sid’s sweet stall on Barnsley market. She woke up with a start. Ache roared inside her body and she sobbed hard into her pillow, hoping sleep would come and be kind to her, but it didn’t. In the end she conceded defeat and got up to make herself some hot milk, but that only served to make her feel sick. She slumped on the sofa and clawed the time into morning, watching rubbish cable comedies that didn’t raise a single smile. Two large coffees and ibuprofen for breakfast had done bugger all to shift the pain in her temple that was making it difficult for her eyes to keep functioning. It felt as if someone was stabbing her brain with a screwdriver.

  Malcolm’s nose was once again sniffing in the direction of the department. As Anna went to the loo, she noticed him watching to see what the boxes were that Maintenance had just brought up to Christie. If he paid as much attention to his own department as to theirs, he might have ended up actually giving Cheese a chance to survive independently. It was looking more and more likely that it would be merged with Deli within the year.

  Anna went into the deserted toilet and sat on the closed seat, resting her head against the coolness of the partition wall. The pain went much further than her temple. It reached down into her guts, squeezed tightly and kept the pressure on until she felt she could bear it no more. Not content with haunting her dreams, she had opened a second-hand Barnsley Chronicle on the train to see that Tony had won an award for his barbering. He was there on the front page ‘pictured with his partner, Lynette Bottom’. Tony’s arm was around her back, a peep of his fingers at her waist.

  Partner! She wanted to ring up the Chron and say, ‘It’s not his partner, it’s his slaggy tart! I’m his partner!’ Partner. That one word, applied to Lynette Bottom, hurt – so much. And just to pile on the insult to the injury, they were smiling like love’s young dream. Her own life was in bits and she had apparently been whitewashed out of Tony’s. Everywhere she looked, he was there – in her vista, her nightmares, even her bloody newspaper.

  A fresh wave of pain engulfed her as she imagined Tony and her in bed, and she groaned aloud. Tony liked a lot of sex. He would do all the things with Lynette that he and Anna used to do together. Probably more, driven by her energetic teenage hormones. Anna burst into tears; the drops fell fat and warm down her cheeks and she didn’t care that they were cutting through her foundation, dragging her mascara with them. She couldn’t live with this tearing agony in her heart any longer; it was killing her. In fact, she wished it would kill her and there would be an end to it, because she knew she couldn’t recover from it. There was nothing to live for: she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t find any joy or hope in anything. And, if that wasn’t enough, in three days she would be forty – Mayday in every sense of the word. Fat, frumpy, forgotten-and-forty day. Life ends, not begins Day.

  The boxes contained lots of new and innovative gifts to reward those colleagues who sent in good suggestions to improve the business. Dawn volunteered to pack them all away in the store cupboard and Christie encouraged her to get on with it. The girl was in her element when she was organizing. It was only when the task was finished and Christie called a coffee break that they noticed Anna had been missing for a considerable time.

  ‘Where did she go?’ asked Christie.

  ‘I thought she’d gone to the toilet,’ said Raychel.

  ‘Not for all that time, surely?’

  ‘I’ll go and have a look, shall I?’ volunteered Dawn.

  She entered the loo which was deathly quiet, but the end cubicle door was locked.

  ‘Anna, is that you in there?’ She knocked quietly on it. There was no response.

  There was barely more than a slit between the door and the floor to look under and so Dawn went into the adjacent cubicle and climbed on top of the toilet seat to look over into the next. There she saw Anna, sitting on the loo lid, head against the partition wall, tears cascading down her face. The silent way in which they were doing so was the most disturbing thing about the scene.

  Dawn almost fell off the seat when the main toilet door opened, but thankfully it was only Christie.

  ‘We thought there was a Bermuda triangle in here and you’d disappeared as well. What’s going on?’

  Dawn opened her mouth to answer, then the thought hit her that, however nice Christie was, she was still their boss and Anna looked as pissed as a fart. Or, worse, drugged.

  ‘Is she all right?’ said Christie. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘She’s not really,’ Dawn hedged. If Anna was inebriated, she didn’t want to drop her in it.

  Christie rapped on the door.

  ‘Anna, love, open the door. Are you ill?’

  Anna leaned forward, her head dropping into her hands.

  ‘We need to get inside,’ said Christie. She whispered through the door, ‘Anna? Anna, can you open the door?’

  ‘No, please just leave me,’ said Anna.

  ‘I’m coming in,’ said Dawn, tucking her skirt up in her knickers, springing from the loo seat and hooking her long leg over the top of the cubicle. ‘Oops – bang go my tights!’

  Christie heard Dawn land and a second later the door was open. She came in and bent over Anna, who looked like a zombie.

  ‘Anna, Anna love, whatever is it? Have you taken anything?’

  ‘No, no. I am so sorry, Christie,’ Anna sobbed.

  ‘Why, love, what’s happened?’ Christie stroked Anna’s hair back from her face and that kind, gentle action smashed the last few bricks holding back the mother lode of Anna’s
grief. She fell forward into Christie’s arms and a confession poured out of her.

  ‘I lied to you all. I’m not happily living with Tony. He left me in February. There was a note saying there was no one else and there was. I’d just come home from hospital after a miscarriage. I needed him so much and he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ said Christie, squeezing Anna into her.

  ‘It was my fourth. I can’t seem to carry babies longer than six weeks.’

  ‘God,’ said Dawn, at a total loss for anything constructive to say but feeling the need to say something at least in a sympathetic tone.

  ‘I’m going to be sick, I’m sorry,’ said Anna, quickly pushing Christie away to a safe distance and throwing open the toilet lid. Yellow liquid poured violently out of her mouth. She looked like something out of The Exorcist.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Christie with a pitiful sigh.

  ‘I’m a wreck,’ said Anna, spent now and reaching weakly for the loo roll and finding none. Dawn pulled loads of toilet paper from the next cubicle and handed it to her.

  ‘Men can be such thoughtless bastards,’ Dawn said kindly. Her skirt was still tucked up in her drawers.

  ‘Oh God, look at your tights,’ said Anna. ‘I am so sorry.’