The Last Word

by A. L. Michael

  Looking out from the upstairs bedroom window, she could see Seb talking with Jeff in the street, their shadows as they laughed. She leant forward, the palms of her hands on the cracked, flaking windowsill, and watched as Jeff waved, clambered into his van and cranked the engine and imagined him pootling off to the King’s Head pub, his pint in his own silver tankard waiting for him on the bar and a million eager ears ready for his lowdown.

  ‘So what do you think?’ A minute later she heard Seb walk across the creaking floorboards as he came to stand behind her, his hands snaking round her waist, the heat of him engulfing her like a duvet.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said, leaning her head back on his shoulder and feeling the rumble in his chest as he laughed.

  ‘Damned with faint praise.’

  ‘No, it’s really nice. Very cute.’ She turned and almost muffled it into his T-shirt so he might miss the lack of conviction.

  ‘Yeah, I think it’ll do. It could be much worse, Anna. I think we’ll be OK here. Get a dog, plant some vegetables.’

  She bit her lip as her cheek pressed into the cotton of his top, swallowed over the lump in her throat and nodded.

  He stroked her hair, ‘We’ll be OK, Anna. Change is never a bad thing. And you never know, you might love it.’

  The very thought led to a great wave of nauseous claustrophobia engulfing her and she had to pull away from him. Going over to the big seventies dressing table she unclipped her earrings and put them down on the veneer surface, the reflection in the big circular mirror showed Seb’s profile ‒ wide eyes gazing out across the fields of wheat that she knew from her quick glance earlier was accented with red as the moonlight picked out the poppies. She couldn’t miss the wistful look on his face, the softening of his lips.

  She wanted to say, ‘One year, Seb. Don’t get any dreamy ideas. It’s not going to happen.’ But she wasn’t in any position to lay down the rules. The fact that they currently had nothing was her fault. The dream she had been pushing had broken, now it was Seb’s turn to try his. And the feeling was like having her hands cuffed behind her back and her smile painted on her face like a clown.

  He turned to look at her. ‘Think of it like a holiday,’ he said with a half-smile.

  She thought of her vacations, two glorious weeks somewhere with an infinity pool, cocktails on the beach, restaurants overlooking the sea, basking in blazing sunshine. Or there was schlepping round Skegness with her dad in the rain as a teenager. At the moment, this was more the latter.

  ‘I’m going to have to shower, I’m too hot,’ she said, peeling off her silk tank-top, wondering whether if she just hung it by the window, the little dots of sweat would dry and not stain.

  The bathroom was tiny, the grouting brown, the ceiling cracked where the steam had bubbled the paint. She pulled back the mildewed shower curtain and found herself perplexed.

  ‘Seb!’ she called.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s no shower.’

  ‘No shower?’

  ‘No shower.’

  He stood in the doorway and laughed, ‘You’re going to have to learn to bathe.’

  ‘Who doesn’t have a shower?’ She whispered, biting the tip of her finger, feeling suddenly like a pebble rolling in a wake, her façade teetering.

  ‘Primrose Cottage, honeybun.’

  Oh she knew it was going to be called something dreadful like that.

  ‘Home sweet home.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘I lay awake most of the night.’ She said this without moving, as if her limbs were tied to the sheet. ‘And do you know what I could hear?’

  Seb was standing at the end of the bed in just his boxer shorts, drinking a glass of water.

  ‘No, honey, what could you hear?’ He raised a brow, waiting for it.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a sound. Just total and utter silence. And do you know what I could see?’

  ‘Let me guess…’ He smirked.

  ‘Nothing.’ She started to push herself up the bed. ‘I could see nothing. It was black. Pitch bloody black. I couldn’t even have made it to the bathroom if I’d needed to. I couldn’t see my fingers in front of my face.’

  ‘I think that’s nice. Cosy.’

  ‘It’s like being in a coffin buried underground. Where are the street lights? Where are the cars? What does everyone do after ten o’clock? Does no one go out?’ She was so tired she wanted to just bury her head under the pillows. The engulfing darkness of the night had made what was bad seem worse. ‘I thought the countryside was meant to be being ruined by motorways and lorries and flight paths.’ Seb gulped down the last of his water as she pulled the sheet up towards her chin. ‘I didn’t hear any bloody planes,’ she said. ‘At least an animal would have been good. A fox or an owl or something. Anything. A cow mooing would have sufficed.’

  ‘Anna, are you going to get up?’ Seb said, going over to a suitcase to pull out a shirt he’d ironed before they’d left the Bermondsey flat. Always prepared for every eventuality, she thought. Some Scout motto or something. She saw him look at his watch as she rolled herself in the sheet and turned away so she could stare at the crack in the wallpaper join. The little leaves didn’t match up. She thought about the clean white walls of their old place, the wooden floors she padded across to make a breakfast of yoghurt and plump, juicy blueberries.

  ‘You’ll be late for work,’ he said, looking down at his buttons as he did them up.

  While Seb had landed his dream job of teaching at Nettleton High, getting back to his roots as he put it, Anna was about to begin a new career working in a little antique shop that her dad had pulled in a favour for. If her memory served her correctly, it was a grubby hovel that she had had to sit in as a child while he haggled the price of his wares up before he took her to ballet lessons. It was going to pay her six pounds fifty an hour.

  ‘Come on, get up and we can have coffee in the village before I have to go to school.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a Starbucks?’ she asked, brow raised.

  ‘You know there isn’t a Starbucks.’ He rolled his eyes.

  ‘It was a joke!’ she said, heaving herself up. ‘You have to allow me a joke or two.’

  ‘You have to allow me some semblance of enjoying this.’

  ‘I am!’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying, I promise.’

  He didn’t look at her, just fumbled around in his suitcase trying to find his tie. She bent down and fished one out of the side pocket of a different bag and went over and hung it round his neck.

  She thought about the look on his face when she’d told him that The Waldegrave had gone into administration. That all their money was gone. Everything. That even just the loss of the fifty percent deposit was actually the whole shebang. That she hadn’t been exactly truthful about the extent of the cost.

  And he had turned to the side for just a fraction of a second, clenching his face up, all the muscles rigid, shut his eyes, taken a breath. Then he’d turned back, eyes open, squeezed her hand in his and said, ‘It’s OK. It’ll be OK.’

  She turned his collar up now and laced the tie underneath, knotting it over and looked up at him and said, ‘I will try harder.’

  He shook his head and laughed, ‘All I want to do is have coffee with you before my first day of school.’

  ‘And that, my darling,’ she said with a smile, hauling the sheet further round her like a toga, squashing the part of her that wanted to sneak back under the covers, and kissing him on the cheek, ‘Is all I want to do, too!’

  He raised a brow like he didn’t quite believe her but was happy to go with it.

  Driving to the village, Seb had trouble with the narrow lanes, bramble branches flicking into the window as he had to keep swerving into the bushes as Golf GTIs and mud-splattered Land Rovers hurtled past on the other side of the road, beeping his London driving.

  ‘It�
�s a fucking nightmare,’ he said, loosening his tie, knuckles gripping the steering wheel. ‘You just can’t see what’s coming.’

  ‘I thought you always said you knew these roads like the back of your hand.’ Anna straightened the sun-visor mirror to check her reflection. She’d been told by Mrs Beedle, the antiques shop owner, on the phone to wear something she didn’t mind getting mucky in. Anna didn’t own anything she minded getting mucky. Her wardrobe had predominantly consisted of Marc Jacob pantsuits, J Brand jeans and key Stella McCartney pieces. The only memory of them now were the piles of jiffy bags that she had stuffed them into and mailed out to the highest eBay bidder. For today’s outfit she had settled on a pair of khaki shorts that she had worn on safari three years ago and the most worn of her black tank-tops.

  ‘I did. I think they’ve planted new hedgerows since my day.’

  Anna snorted and pulled her sunglasses down from the top of her head, closing her eyes and trying to imagine herself on some Caribbean beach absorbing the wall of heat, about to dive into the ocean, or settled into the box at the Opera House to watch the dress rehearsal, sipping champagne or a double vodka martini.

  ‘Eh voila,’ Seb said a minute later, cutting the engine and winding up his window.

  She opened her eyes slowly like a lizard in the desert.

  There it was.

  Nettleton village.

  The sight of it seemed to lodge her heart in her throat. Her brow suddenly speckled with sweat.

  ‘OK?’ Seb asked before he opened the door.

  Anna snorted, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’ She unclicked her door and let one tanned leg follow the other to the cobbles. Unfurling herself from their little hatchback, she stretched her back and shoulders and surveyed the scene as if looking back over old photographs. Through the hazy morning mist of heat, she could see all the little shops surrounding the village square, the avenue of lime trees that dripped sticky sap on the pavement and cars, the church at the far end by the pond and the playground, the benches dappled with the shade from the big, wide leaves of the overhanging trees. Across the square was the pharmacy, its green cross flashing and registering the temperature at twenty-seven degrees. She looked at her watch, it was only eight o’clock. The window still had those old bottles of liquid like an apothecary shop, one red one green, it could have been her imagination playing tricks on her but she thought she remembered them from when she was a kid. Next to that was the newsagent, Dowsetts. A bit of A4 paper stuck on the door saying only two school children at a time. Now that she did remember. Three of them would go in deliberately and cause Mrs Norris apoplexy as they huddled together picking the penny sweets out one at a time and pretending to put them in their pockets. Then, when her friend Hermione locked Mrs Norris in the store cupboard one lunchtime, it earned them a lifetime ban. Did that still stand, she wondered. Would she be turned away if she dared set foot inside? Or was it like prison? Twelve years or less for good behaviour?

  Nettleton, she thought, hands on her hips, there it was, all exactly as she remembered it.

  Seb came round and draped his arm over her shoulders, giving her an affectionate shake. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

  She forced a little grin.

  They strolled over towards a bakery coffee shop, its yellow-striped awning unwound over red cafe tables and chairs, a daisy in a jam jar on each.

  ‘Charming,’ Seb mused, pointing to the cakes in the window ‒ rows and rows of macaroons all the colour of summer and displayed to look like a sunrise, deep reds into lighter pinks and brilliant oranges fading into acid-lemon yellows, their cream bursting out the insides and their surfaces glistening in the shade. Like jewels jostling for space. Behind them were trays of summer fruit tarts, fresh gooseberries sinking into patisserie cream and stacks of Danish pastries with plump apricots drizzled with icing next to piles of freshly baked croissants, steaming from the oven. There was a small queue of people lined up in the cool, dark interior waiting to buy fresh baguettes and sandwiches. ‘Truly charming.’

  Anna thought back to when she’d picked the wedding cake in Patisserie Gerard. The slices the chef brought over on little frilled-edged plates and metal two-pronged forks, watching as she placed the delicate vanilla sponge or chocolate sachertorte into her mouth and sighed with the pleasure of it. How he had suggested that she had to have between four and six layers, less was unheard of for weddings at The Waldegrave; two chocolate with a black forest-style cherry that would ooze when cut and soaked through with booze, heavy and dense. Then a light, fluffy little sponge on the top, perhaps in an orange or, he suggested, a clementine. Just slightly sweeter. The guests would be able to tell the difference. They’d definitely be the type to appreciate such delicate flavours.

  Then, without warning, her mother’s voice popped into her head. We never had a wedding, Anna, and it was a sign. Anna didn’t see the cakes, just her own reflection as the words carried on. Pregnant with you, Anna, and standing in some crummy registry office with a couple of witnesses he’d dragged in from outside. I didn’t even get a new dress. And in those days you didn’t have pregnancy clothes, Anna, not the flashy things you have now. Oh no, I had a big hoop of corduroy pleated around my belly like a traffic cone. There were no photos. Thank god. But when I think about it now, I know it was definitely a sign. He wanted to gloss over it. A wedding is more than just a day, Anna. It’s a statement of intent.

  As Seb pulled out a chair and stretched his legs out in the morning sun, Anna perched on the edge of the one opposite and said, ‘My mum rang yesterday.’

  He twisted his head round to look at her. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That she’d give us the money to get married. All of it.’ Seb sat up straighter. Anna licked her lips and pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes. ‘As long as I don’t invite Dad.’

  Seb spluttered a cough. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. No way. What did you say?’

  She brushed some of the creases from her top. ‘I said I’d think about it.’

  ‘Anna, you can’t not invite your father.’

  ‘Why not? What difference would it make? At least it’d solve my problems.’ She paused. ‘Maybe then I wouldn’t have to invite yours either.’ She snorted at her own little joke, but Seb didn’t find it as funny as she’d hoped.

  ‘You can’t not invite him.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘I can’t start my married life on that kind of threat. She’s being a bitch.’

  Anna bristled. ‘She’s not, he just hurt her.’

  ‘It was a long time ago, Anna,’ he said.

  Anna glanced to the side, away from looking directly at Seb and, in doing so, caught a look at the girl behind the counter.

  ‘Oh god, it’s Rachel.’ Anna whipped round so fast her sunglasses fell off her head and landed with a clatter on the metal table.

  ‘What? Who?’ He stuck his nose right up against the glass. ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘It is. You’re so obvious.’ She pulled him back by the arm.

  ‘Well what’s wrong with it being Rachel. I liked Rachel.’

  ‘Urgh, that’s because you were a big old square at school just like her.’

  ‘I don’t think people say things like that any more. Not when they’re grown up.’ He raised a brow like she was one of his pupils.

  ‘God, I bet she’s loving this.’ Anna said, picking up her glasses and sliding them on to over her eyes. ‘Me back here with my tail between my legs. I bet that means Jackie’s somewhere about the place as well.’

  ‘Of course she is, Anna, she’s a teacher at the school, she helped me get the job.’ Seb shook his head at her like she was mad, as Anna started to breathe in too quickly.

  ‘Oh great, that’s all I need. Come on, we have to leave.’

  ‘Anna, stop it. This is ridiculous, you’re being ridiculous. You’re going to see people you used to know.’

  And they’ll think, stupid Anna, now it’s our turn to laugh at her, she thought. They’ll think, what’s Seb doing wit
h her? Have you heard, she lost all their cash? Spending outside her means. Running off to London, we all knew it was doomed. Never made it though, did she? Very few do, it’s a tough industry to break into. Did you hear she lost her job as well? Tough times though, isn’t it? Or the time to cut loose dead wood?

  ‘I can’t sit here.’ She started to push her chair away.

  ‘Anna!’ Seb raised his voice just a touch. ‘Anna, calm down. Sit down.’

  ‘No, I’ll see you later. Have a good first day,’ she said, grabbing her bag from where she’d slung it over the back of the chair and marching away in the direction of Vintage Treasure. She heard him sigh but couldn’t turn round. She caught sight of her reflection in the window of the old gift shop, Presents 4 You, and tried to regain some of her infamous poise. Her eye caught a T-shirt draped over a stack of gift boxes, on it read Paris, Milan, New York, Nettleton. In their dreams, she thought, in their dreams. Who would ever want to end up back here?

  ‘How do you like your tea?’ A woman’s voice called as soon as the bell over the door of Vintage Treasure chimed.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Anna said, her eyes pained by the catastrophe of objects piled around the place.

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  She heard a clinking of teaspoons and the air-tight pop of the lid coming off a tea caddy, and made a face to herself at the woman’s tone.

  Contemplating describing her love of Lapsang Souchong, her dislike of semi-skimmed milk and her tolerance for normal tea as long as it wasn’t too strong, she thought it easier to reply, ‘I just have it white.’

  There was no answer, so Anna carried on her journey into the dingy Aladdin’s Cave, just relieved to be out of the scorching heat and the gossiping voices that seemed to lace the air. Inside, dust swirled in the beams of sunlight that forced their way through the dirty windows and shone like spotlights on such delights as a taxidermy crow, its claw positioned on an egg, a crack across the left-hand corner of the glass box, a dark-green chaise lounge, the back studded with emerald buttons and a gold scroll along the black lacquered edges. A looming welsh dresser stacked full of plates and cups and a line of Toby jugs with ugly faces and massive noses.