A Home in the Sun

by Sue Moorcroft

  ‘Fine. Smells don’t show up on images.’ He grabbed cases in either hand, balanced a tripod on his shoulder and took the path to the left front door.

  If Judith had been tired before the shoot, she soon realised she was going to be exhausted after. As Adam opened cases she buttonholed the two oldest-looking Lenckos available, one male, one female, both in the black studded clothes of goths. ‘You look like the guys with the authority. How do I go about organising the tinies so we can get this photoshoot underway?’

  The male sighed. ‘Yeah. Us as usual.’ But he set the older half of the family to subduing the younger half, combing hair, washing faces and doing up buttons or hair ribbons, snapping out instructions that ended the game of chase. The baby fed stolidly, throughout. Soon the twins returned sheepishly from their respective sulks and high jinks and disappeared upstairs to get ready. The baby burped without decorating his blue outfit or his mother’s black-and-violet dress. Jillie thrust her breasts away and Pete Lencko, the man of the house, emerged from the loo with the Daily Express.

  They were all set for a shoot in the vast sitting room that had been made from most of the ground floor of one of the original houses.

  Adam took Judith aside. ‘We normally do our best to co-ordinate everyone so that we don’t have horrible colour clashes on the page but we need to work fast while we have their attention. So do your best – and at least get that girl with the cochineal hair to stand away from the lad with the blue plume. Blast, that tall boy’s got a black eye, look. Turn him three-quarters on so it’s hidden. Pull the curtains and we’ll work entirely with flash because the bloody sun beams into this room from all angles.’ So the morning progressed, Adam reeling off what he wanted, what he envisaged and how he was going to get it, and Judith fielding toddlers as they made a break for freedom or getting teenaged girls to pause in their chewing and smile!

  While he worked, Judith noticed, Adam managed to forget about keeping his damaged hand out of sight. He used it as he needed it and adapted what he had to. With a mixture of Adam’s charm and Judith’s gentle bullying they managed the Herculean task of completing the shoot before anyone burst into tears or abandoned the shoot.

  ‘Thanks everyone. You were amazing,’ Adam told them when the last shot had been taken – generously, considering what a sustained effort it had taken to wrangle them. Then he and Judith had to get all the gear back in the car, trying to avoid too much ‘help’ from overenthusiastic and sticky young hands. Eventually, they were able to shut themselves back in the vehicle and drive away.

  ‘You did great,’ Adam congratulated her, visibly more relaxed now the shoot was over.

  ‘It was more fun than I thought it would be.’ Judith yawned as she used the map to guide Adam back to the motorway. Then the next thing she knew she was waking up outside the house in Lavender Row, the map still spread out over her lap.

  Groaning, she flexed her stiff neck. Her mouth was dry, her eyes were gritty and her hair was flattened over one eye. ‘Are we back? We’ve missed lunch.’

  ‘We can have some soup. Wake yourself up and I’ll show you how to download the pics onto my system and then run you through the paperwork.’ Adam threw the splint from his hand into the centre console, apparently as fresh as he had been at seven this morning.

  ‘Paperwork?’ She trailed indoors behind him. ‘What about the soup?’

  He pushed into the sitting room. ‘My assistant does most of my paperwork. And some phone calls. It’s in the day rate, OK? And I’ll need an invoice from you for your hours for the month, so you mark the days you work in that black diary, and at the end of the month type an invoice on the computer, print it out and put it on that pile for my assistant to pay.’ He grinned.

  She blinked at her temporary assistant status being so casually extended. ‘But you’ll be advertising, soon?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He waved the question away. ‘My assistant gets the soup, too. Is tomato OK? It’s all I’ve got. Now, downloading the images isn’t rocket science but it does have to be done correctly or you can lose the work or mess up the settings on the camera …’

  ‘Soup,’ she said firmly, heading for the kitchen.

  He sighed. ‘OK. Soup first.’

  When she finally left the house, after he’d taught her how to download, label and organise the images, explained his computer system, showed her how to raise invoices and post them to the appropriate spreadsheet – the paperwork was a doddle because Adam was organised and everything was up to date – it was turned six o’clock. She’d also somehow agreed to assist him on shoots on Tuesday (a donkey sanctuary), Friday (a girl who’d done well in Pop Idol revisiting her old school) and Thursday and Friday of next week (a couple who’d married each other three times and a windmill turned sumptuous dwelling).

  ‘Just until you advertise,’ she reminded him. ‘It ought to keep the wolf from the door while I look around for something else.’

  ‘What else?’ he queried genially.

  That gave her pause. ‘I don’t know.’ But working for her tenant was a bit odd.

  Weary from her busy day, she trudged home. And then, groan, groan, she discovered that Molly and Frankie were engaged in a teeth-clenched row, just when all she wanted to do was flop down somewhere and relax. Creeping upstairs, she showered, shut herself away in her room with her radio and a book and tried to ignore increasingly unignorable shouts and slams. Eventually, she put on her shoes, crept back downstairs and slipped back out of the front door.

  Not having an abundance of places to go, she opted for jumping in her car and visiting her mother. One of the carers in a lilac overall showed Judith to Wilma’s pink-and-white room, where she’d sought the comfort of Coronation Street on TV. ‘Hello, dear,’ said Wilma uncertainly when she caught sight of Judith, rocking her tubular aluminium walking stick on its three grey rubber feet. ‘I’d forgotten you were coming. I haven’t put my lipstick on.’

  Judith kissed her mother’s soft cheek. ‘You haven’t forgotten, Mum. There was nothing arranged. I just thought I’d like to see you. Is that OK? You said I could pop in any time, now I’m living in Brinham again.’ She sat down in an orange plastic chair, massaging an ache above her left eye. Sleep was beckoning madly, but an early night was off the cards chez O’Malley.

  ‘Of course! It’s lovely to see you.’ Wilma agitated her stick some more and sucked her teeth. ‘What shall we talk about? I haven’t really had a chance to think of anything to say.’

  How odd that her mother should need notice to gather together the ingredients of a conversation with her daughter. Had Judith been very self-absorbed not to notice how her mother’s world had shrunk? Now she was back in Brinham she must make more effort to become part of the fabric of Wilma’s life. Meanwhile, it would probably be easier for Wilma if Judith got the conversational ball rolling. ‘I’ve got a temporary job as a photographer’s assistant.’

  Wilma laughed. ‘A temporary assistant? You? Does your employer realise that you’ll be bossing everyone about in no time?’

  Settling in the chair, Judith got herself comfortable. ‘That doesn’t sound like me at all,’ she joked. ‘Anyway, it’s just one bloke. The one who rents my house, Adam Leblond – he was two years above me and Mel at school. It’s just till he gets someone more suitable and I look round for something else. What’s new with you?’

  Wilma gave the subject some thought. She wore no powder and her skin looked duller than usual. ‘Nice lunch, today,’ she offered. ‘Beans.’

  ‘Green beans?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t like baked beans. And a chop and new potatoes. Very fresh and tasty. They look after us lovely, here.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Late-lunch soup seemed a long way in the past. Stomach gurgling, Judith cast around for more material for discussion. ‘Have you read your newspaper today?’

  ‘Most of it. And done the crossword; the crossword’s my favourite, I always leave it till last. And the problem page. Me and my friends here all buy diff
erent newspapers and pass them around during the day. Florrie read out a problem from a magazine today, ever so racy, and only from a girl of seventeen. We all giggled but I was a bit embarrassed.’ She went on, outlining the way the papers and magazines circulated.

  Despite her good intentions, Judith’s mind began to wander over the recent disasters in her life … Giorgio in a stark white hospital room, his gaze not meeting hers … Sliema Z Bus Tours in liquidation. Judith’s money down the toilet.

  Wilma grasped Judith’s wrist gently, regaining her attention. ‘Today there was a letter from a woman who was awfully worried about her daughter.’

  Judith blinked. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A problem, m’duck, on the problem page.’

  Like many people, Judith only skimmed problem pages for the snigger-worthy and the salacious. ‘Oh?’

  Wilma adjusted her glasses with their fancy designs up the side and flexed her fingers on the handle of her stick. ‘She’s in her forties, the daughter, and a very competent person – on the outside. But she’s thin as a rake and the mum suspects she’s awfully upset. Something horrible’s obviously happened but she hasn’t confided. It’s quite all right,’ she went on softly. ‘The daughter’s always bottled up her problems and solved them herself, right from when she was a tiny girl. But it doesn’t stop the mum worrying.’

  Hot tears pricked Judith’s eyes. She didn’t need to be told that Wilma was fabricating an entry on a problem page in order to tell Judith something.

  Wilma shuffled in her seat so that she could lean forward and take both of Judith’s hands in her cool fingers, leaving the stick standing alone on its three feet. The light overhead reflected on the lenses of her spectacles, making her expression particularly earnest. ‘But the daughter will feel better one day, duck, however horrible whatever it is that’s happened. It’s just that the road to recovery is uphill all the way.’

  Judith found herself unable to speak around the tears that had formed a lump in her throat so just stroked the old fingers that were holding hers, the hands that had cared for her when she was a child, and hoped her mum was right.

  Chapter Nine

  The next Sunday, Judith cried off Moll’s traditional Yorkshire pud meal (and the traditional washing up that followed). Things had calmed down in the O’Malley household in recent days but Judith still liked to be out as much as possible. Moll had refused point blank to talk things over with Judith or acknowledge that she and Frankie were having issues. Instead, she’d pasted on a smile and breezed, ‘We’re fine, don’t worry about us.’

  Judith sauntered through a sunny park, where she watched a football match between teams that evidently didn’t know that football was a winter sport, to Hannah’s Pantry where she drank a latte and talked to Hannah behind the counter. Her pleasure in a little aimless chatter made her decide to look up old friends and get back in the swim of her English life, soon. Sunday lunchtime probably wasn’t the moment for dropping in, when roasts would be out of the oven for carving and gravy thickening on the hob.

  Bruised clouds gathered as Judith left Hannah’s Pantry and the town centre to make her way to the riverbank thinking she might eventually have lunch at the coffee shop there and watch the narrowboats humming gently by. Fat raindrops splatting on the pavement made her doubt the wisdom of this plan, the more so as they became faster, heavier and were cheered on by growls of thunder. In seconds the rain had soaked her hair and was bouncing up from the pavement onto her bare ankles.

  Her jeans sticking clammily to her legs, she changed direction rapidly into her old neighbourhood, along Leicester Road, past the shop on the corner of Senwick Street where the May trees would have been decked with deep pink blossom a couple of months ago. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed and rain hissed from a smoke-grey sky, stinging her scalp and her face as she jogged breathlessly into Lavender Row. She knew Adam was away for the weekend but she hoped maybe Caleb would be home. If not, she had her key. She’d get out of the downpour then text Adam to say she’d cheekily taken shelter from a storm. He surely wouldn’t mind. They’d been getting on very well as they worked together and she’d enjoyed being driven around the Midlands this week, journeys filled with undemanding conversation about routes, coffee and photoshoots. She’d learned he had another son, Matthias, older than Caleb and his opposite – steady and conservative, working on a doctorate in marine biology in Plymouth. He was getting married next year. She’d talked about her mum and that her dad had died from complications after flu not long after she’d left school.

  From this direction, number 18 was out of sight around an elbow. As she neared, she frowned. From somewhere, a clamour of noise was overriding even the thunder and rain. It sounded almost like a fairground with pounding music, shrieks, bellows, howls of laughter and girlish cries. A woman under a golf umbrella coming the other way paused with an angry shake of her head. ‘It’s been going on all night. All night! My husband wanted to call the police but you don’t want any retribution, do you? It might be our windows, next.’ Pulling her thin blue mac more tightly around her, she scurried on her way.

  Judith listened. Thump-thump-thump-roar. Squeal.

  She rounded the bend.

  At 18 Lavender Row almost every sliding sash window was open and several had been smashed, allowing curtains to flutter out into the rain. Empty cans and bottles filled the tiny frontage and glass was scattered through the gravel.

  ‘My house,’ she breathed as shock shimmered through her. ‘What’s happening to my house?’

  Dispensing with the formality of ringing the bell she flew through the front door, pulling up short at a pool of vomit. A plump girl was sprawled glassily at the bottom of the stairs and looked suspiciously as if the vomit might belong to her.

  Judith picked her way past and stamped upstairs where most of the noise was coming from. The house seemed to be shaking with the beat of the music and people bellowing to be heard over it. Cigarettes had been ground out on the carpet and the mixture of stenches made her want to gag.

  The bathroom door was locked. In the smallest bedroom, two young men smoked joints and examined one of Adam’s silver cases of camera equipment clumsily, cans of beer between their feet.

  For now, the equipment she usually cared for wasn’t her primary concern. She moved swiftly on to the second room, now Caleb’s, and decorated with posters and a litter of dropped clothes. There, a girl cried blue mascara noisily down her face while a lad had passed out crosswise on the bed. The room at the front that used to be hers – presumably now Adam’s – hosted at least three couples on the bed or the floor, one of whom was awake and naked. She backed out hastily with a hissed, ‘This is my bloody bedroom!’

  Then a shock of splintering glass. She whirled and sprinted back downstairs, hurdling the vomit to run down the hall.

  In the kitchen, eyes wide, hair tumbled around his face, Caleb stood. His lips were moving as he gazed from the broken glass in the back door to the broken glass in the door between kitchen and hall. Judith was almost upon him before she could distinguish the words over the music.

  Mantra-like, he was muttering, ‘My old man will go mental. My old man will go mental.’ Joint in one hand, vodka bottle in the other, he chanted the words, shock stretching his face. Behind him, a lad with a short, square haircut was knocking out the last of the glass with his fists, globs of blood flying from his lacerated arms.

  ‘Stop that!’ Judith bellowed, fury coursing hotter and hotter through her body. ‘That glass was original!’

  The youth with the square haircut shook her off with a snarl.

  Swaying, Caleb turned his gaze and frowned as if trying to place her.

  A new sound broke through the music from the sitting room, sharp, staccato, metallic. Judith turned and raced in to find a bare-chested youth hitting the cast-iron fire surround with a poker and giggling as the inset tiles shattered. A girl was retching into the seat of an armchair. Two young guys were having a beer-spitting competition, roaring wit
h laughter as they spattered the girl’s back and Adam’s computer. A further dozen or so people were comatose on the floor or furniture.

  It was such a contrast to the careful way she’d kept the house – and Adam after her – that Judith felt anger explode, as if someone had set off a bomb in her chest. Self-preservation stopped her attempting to disarm the poker-wielder so she tore the plug of the booming stereo out of its wall socket instead.

  Her ears rang in blessed relief at the reduction in noise.

  She stamped her way back to Caleb, who was still standing in the kitchen wearing an expression of comical dismay, his companion meticulously snapping off the final pieces of glass in the back door.

  ‘They’ve trashed Dad’s house,’ he told her sadly, his dark eyes desolate.

  ‘No, they’ve trashed my house. Wait till I see your father!’ she snapped. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  Caleb rocked on his heels. ‘Grandma’s ill. Dad’s gone to Bedford to see her.’ Shakily, he drew on the fat roach between his fingers, which had gone out anyway. ‘Back on Sunday.’

  Judith snatched the roach and threw it out through the broken glass of the back door. ‘Yes, I know where he’s gone. I’ve been working here this week, haven’t I? He’ll be back today.’

  ‘Sunday,’ Caleb corrected her gently.

  ‘Sunday’s today.’ She suppressed an urge to shake him, preferably by the throat.

  Caleb’s eyes grew round. ‘Holy crap. He’ll go mental.’

  ‘That’ll be two of us,’ she promised grimly. Should she call the police? It was the sensible option for several reasons. An aggressive party reveller fuelled by God-knows-what might turn on her as she tried to clear the house. Officialese, in the form of a crime report with statements, could very well prove to be necessary for an insurance claim and, on the off chance that some stupid young idiot needed medical help, the police could deal with it instead of her.