by Lissa Evans
‘Sure. You mean dust them?’
‘No, they’re ivory so you need to wipe them very gently with lemon juice. It keeps them white, you see.’
‘Lemon juice.’
‘Just enough to moisten the cloth. I always do it once a week.’
‘Right.’
‘Thanks, Fran.’
Barry was still in bed, his bandaged foot protruding from beneath the duvet. He looked up hopefully as she came into the front room.
‘No, I haven’t made you any tea,’ she said. ‘We’re out of milk. Listen, Barry, I’m going over to my friend’s flat to tidy it up before he comes back from hospital.’
‘Oh. OK.’
‘And what are you going to do today? Any plans?’ She picked her way between the heaps of clothing to the window and opened the curtains. The light was flat and grey and the sash rattled in the wind.
‘It’s really cold in here,’ said Barry.
‘Do you need another quilt on top of that?’
‘No, I mean it’s cold when I get out of bed. I can practically see my breath – look.’ He attempted to demonstrate the fact.
‘Jumpers,’ said Fran. ‘Exercise. The heating engineer’s coming on Tuesday.’ She caught her foot on a discarded t-shirt and stumbled into Barry’s elbow crutches. They slithered down the wall, knocking over a pile of books and nudging his guitar to the floor with a hollow boom. ‘You could clear up in here, for a start.’ The mess was a daily reminder of the humiliation she had suffered on his behalf, scrabbling around on the pavement for his belongings, stuffing them into a waiting minicab while Janette screamed abuse at her from the window of the flat above.
‘I’ll try,’ said Barry. ‘But my back’s aching a bit from this bed. And you know, it’s quite tiring standing up on one leg.’
‘Listen, there was a bit in the paper last week about an amputee who went up Everest so I think you can probably manage to fold a couple of shirts. You’ve only got a sprained ankle.’ For a split-second she wondered if she could ask him to clean the piano but the potential for disaster seemed too great – she could almost see Sylvie’s expression as pips squirted from between the keys.
‘What time are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
He looked at her pathetically over the top of the duvet, and she sighed. ‘Look, I won’t be long. And I’ll get some milk and something for lunch on the way back, OK?’
‘Thanks, Fran,’ he said. ‘I really, really owe you.’
‘Too right,’ she muttered, closing the door and glancing up at the botch job she had done on the banisters.
The day after Barry’s fall she had inspected the damage and found the stair carpet littered with friable shards that turned to dust in her hands. The broken edges of the uprights were as soft as cork and when she had taken a torch into the cluttered cupboard under the stairs and played it on the ceiling, a myriad little holes stared back at her. Woodworm. It was like finding out that that zit under your arm was actually a symptom of the plague. ‘It’s lucky in a way,’ Barry had remarked later, watching her grimly lash together the uprights with Sellotape and a length of washing line. ‘Otherwise you mightn’t have found out until it was too late.’ She hadn’t deigned to reply.
The bottom deck of the bus was packed with extravagantly hatted black ladies on their way to church and the top deck was empty apart from a strong smell of marijuana, which someone had tried to disperse by opening all the windows. Fran slammed them shut, one by one, and then sat hunched and misanthropic in the front seat, left leg jammed against the heater, head stuffy with tiredness.
She had been kept awake the night before by the wind, which had teased up a corner of the corrugated-iron shed roof, and rattled it at irregular intervals throughout the small hours. In the past she might have put on her boots, taken a hammer and bashed it back into place, darkness notwithstanding, but last night a feeling of impotence had kept her under the eiderdown – a sense that it would take more than a couple of 3-inch wide-topped rust-proof carpentry nails to hold back the JCB of fate; with her current luck, if she repaired the roof then the shed would collapse.
Towards dawn the wind had dropped a bit and the roof had settled down to the odd clank but by that time she was wide awake, and had gone downstairs and made a cup of tea. Wrapped in a quilt and seated at the kitchen table, she had read through the house insurance policy from ‘A guide to peace of mind’ to ‘… ask a member of staff for a “Customer Complaints Form” ’ and confirmed her suspicion that woodworm was not covered under the terms of the policy. Indeed, the booklet gave the impression that the claims department would laugh derisively – possibly even jeer – if she phoned up with the news. She had put the policy back in the house folder (though in retrospect it would have been of far more use folded in four and wedged into the gap in the shed roof) and made a list of pest control firms from the phone book before trailing her quilt back to bed and dozing unsatisfactorily for a couple of hours.
She hadn’t slept properly in days. For a start, she had spent five and a half hours in Casualty after Barry’s dive down the stairs, most of it spent sitting next to a man with a cold. ‘I think it might be flu,’ he’d explained to her, sneezing vastly, as though that were a reasonable explanation for his attendance. The only good moment of the night had been when some huge madwoman in a white coat had barrelled out of a side room and shouted at him that upper respiratory tract infections were a GP problem. Fran had almost applauded. The very next evening, just as she was going to bed, Iris had phoned to tell her about Spencer, and she had spent all night worrying. The next day she had visited him, and had come away from the hospital marginally happier but with definite symptoms of the man-in-Casualty’s cold, and after forty-eight hours of stertorous breathing and a set of sinuses apparently stuffed with concrete, she could have definitively reassured him that it wasn’t flu.
As the bus ground towards Islington, weaving between the Sunday pedestrians sleep-walking to the paper shop, the differential in temperature between her left leg and the rest of her body served to wake her up a little and she began looking forward to a cathartic session of scouring and polishing, an altruistic chance to vent a little frustration; it was disappointing, therefore, to walk into the flat and find it already tidy. Admittedly Spencer had been in hospital for only three days, but she had visualized a build-up of dust – a palpable air of neglect that she’d be able to dispel with a combination of vigour and furniture polish. As it was, there seemed little to do beyond cosmetic tweaks; even the sofa cushions had been plumped. It was far neater than Spencer normally kept it and she wondered if he’d taken on a cleaner.
She went over to inspect the animal tanks and found them looking like illustrations in a textbook, the interiors decorated as if for a photo shoot, the food trays heaving with life. The spider was mid-way through eating a caterpillar, the still-twitching corpse held between its pincers like a corn on the cob. In the tank next door, the chameleon kept both eyes closed as if revolted by its neighbour.
Mark’s instructions were still on the wall, but the ink had faded from black to a purplish-brown, and the corners were dog-eared. Spencer had crossed out the columns devoted to the lizard and the snails and had added the word ‘magazines’ to the bottom of Bill’s feeding list. Fran picked a hardened ball of blu-tack from one corner and rolled it between her fingers and thumb as she wandered between the other rooms. Aside from anything else, they were so beautifully warm; she’d almost forgotten what it was like to have central heating. The kitchen was pristine, the bathroom marred only by a couple of streaks of toothpaste on the tiles, and in the bedroom the duvet was plump and inviting. She sat on it for a moment, just so she could reach across and straighten the pillows.
She opened her eyes when she heard a key turn in the lock, and was shocked by the darkness of the room. Her body felt slack and satiated and she lifted her arm as if the watch were made of lead. It was half-past five. There was a jingle of keys and the front
door slammed, and then an Irish voice said, ‘Oh God, oh for fuck’s sake would you ever fucking believe it.’
‘Niall?’ she called.
‘Who’s that?’
She sat up and peeled a flattened piece of blu-tack from the corner of her mouth.
‘Jesus,’ said Niall, when she had lurched into the hall, ‘are you all right?’ He was holding a Tesco’s bag in one hand and a dripping carton of milk in the other.
‘I fell asleep.’
‘You’ve got a big crease down the side of your face,’ he said. ‘Hang on while I get this bastard decanted and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
She inspected herself in the bathroom mirror; a fold of duvet had impressed a red dent between eye and chin and her eyelids looked like uncooked pasties. She splashed some water on her face and shuffled into the kitchen.
‘So what are you doing here anyway?’ asked Niall, filling the kettle.
‘I came to clean up the flat but someone had already done it.’
He froze, his hand on the tap. ‘Did Nick not phone you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Oh Jesus, he’s such an amnesiac – I told him to ring you. We brought Nina round yesterday to feed the spider – God, she loves that spider – and Nick took one look at the flat and got the Mr Sheen out. Couldn’t resist it. You know the old joke, don’t you – how do you know if you’ve had gay burglars? The place has been hoovered and there’s a quiche in the oven.’
‘Oh,’ said Fran, not quite awake enough to laugh. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway.’ She yawned hugely and then remembered something. ‘Wasn’t Spencer supposed to be getting out tonight – weren’t you supposed to be collecting him?’
‘It’s tomorrow morning now,’ said Niall, lining up groceries on the counter. ‘He was sick after lunch and they said he’d have to stay in another night. He claims it was the raspberry mousse and nothing to do with concussion but the sister on the ward is having none of it and when we left he was having a massive sulk.’ He took a rolled-up magazine from the bottom of the bag and waved it at Fran. ‘I said I’d stock up for him, and I’m going to put together a little – ’ his voice became arch and motherly ‘ – welcome-home tray.’
‘Oh nice.’
‘Fruit, chocolate, bottle of Bailey’s, video –’
‘Porn mag,’ said Fran, as he unfurled the front cover of Horn.
‘A fella’s gotta relax,’ said Niall unblushingly. He looked critically at the large man in small pants on the cover. ‘Mind you, he’s never really gone for blonds. Except Reinhardt, do you remember Reinhardt?’
‘He was before my time, I think.’
‘He was nice enough but Mark – aka he who must be obeyed – decided he was boring so that was it for the poor bastard, big elbow and first plane back to Dusseldorf. Jesus.’ He put a large spoonful of tea in the pot, looked at it critically and then added another two. ‘This’ll wake you up.’
‘Thanks.’ She yawned again and leaned against the washing machine to watch Niall put the groceries away. She had never spent time alone with him before, or even met him unaccompanied by Nick, and away from the restraining presence of partner and daughter she sensed that the leash was slipped and they might stray onto a topic that was normally avoided. ‘He was quite bossy sometimes, wasn’t he?’ she asked, dangling a little bait.
‘Mark?’ Niall’s expression was incredulous. ‘Bossy doesn’t cover it. He was a fucking tyrant.’ He shook his head at the photo of Mark on the kitchen cupboard. ‘And jealous – Jeeesus, was he jealous. You didn’t know him when he and Spencer were an item, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh God, well if Spencer so much as turned his head in the direction of someone who wasn’t actually first cousin to the Elephant Man, he’d go out of his fucking mind – there’d be tears, tantrums, he’d chuck plates about, kick holes in the sofa, you wouldn’t fucking believe it.’ He paused for breath and looked at her expression. ‘You didn’t know that?’
‘No.’ She felt slightly shell-shocked, as if the bait had been picked up by a fifty-stone marlin, ripping the rod from her hands and heading out to sea. Spencer had tended to keep his social life segmented – Fran in one section, work friends in another, gay friends in the third and largest – and the segments had mingled only at times of celebration and disaster. As a result she had only ever experienced small doses of Mark, although even those had been intense and memorable. Well or ill, he had been at the centre of all activity, conducting events with mouthy relish; all instructions had been issued by him, all movements checked with him and although she had never seen him crossed, there was an element of Niall’s description that did not surprise her.
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong,’ he added hastily, seeing her expression, ‘I loved the man, we all did, he was a massive laugh and there’s a big hole left in the world now he’s gone, but he was a… you know, a manipulator. He couldn’t leave other people’s lives alone, it was always fiddle fiddle fiddle. Especially with Spencer. You know me and Nick have lost a really good, close friend – the best, you know – but Spencer’s lost a fucking navigator as well. I’m not surprised he’s been wandering round all year like someone burned his A to Z. And this bloody list –’ he rapped his knuckles against the paper as if to admonish it ‘– it’s just so typical of Mark. Wouldn’t even let being dead get in the way of running other people’s lives.’ He clonked a couple of tins of beans into a cupboard and banged the door shut. ‘I’ve worked my bollocks to the bone this year trying to get Spencer out the house, but he won’t go anywhere unless it’s on the list. It haunts him, y’know, and he doesn’t enjoy it, it’s like some bloody penance. I’d think he was a Catholic if I didn’t know better.’
‘Yeah,’ said Fran. ‘He was fretting about it when I saw him yesterday – he’s worried that he’s missed a whole weekend, he thinks he’ll never catch up now.’
‘How many’s he got left?’ asked Niall. ‘He can’t be too far off.’
‘I dunno.’ They both peered at the heavily annotated columns.
‘What’s that scribble in front of Cockney pub?’
Fran looked closer. ‘I think he’s crossed out “the” and put an “a”.’
‘What’s that about?’
She shrugged. ‘God knows. He’s ticked it, anyway.’
‘There’s nothing next to the Tower of London,’ said Niall.
‘Or rowing on the Serpentine. Or Highgate Cemetery.’
‘Or the zoo.’
There was a pause as they scanned the items again.
‘I think that’s it,’ said Niall.
‘So it’s only four items altogether. He could get those done in a day, couldn’t he?’
‘Easy.’ He looked at her. ‘With a bit of help, maybe.’
‘You think we should give him a hand?’
‘Yeah. A little shove along the way.’ He said it with flippancy and then hesitated, thinking it through. ‘I do, you know. I think he needs to get them out the way, and once they’re done, we could start luring him into the world again, find a nice, boring boy for him to shag. He likes quiet lads, you know – it’s a bit fucking ironic, really.’ He poured the tea, a vicious dark-brown stream. ‘Here – get this down you.’
‘Ta.’ She sipped it and her stomach growled audibly and she felt a twang of guilt at the thought of Barry, waiting cold, hungry and clueless for her return; he would have expected her back hours ago. ‘I ought to get going really,’ she said. ‘I’ve got another invalid at home to cook tea for.’
‘I’ll give you a lift and we can er – what do those City bastards say? Crunch numbers?’
‘Huh?’
‘Make plans for Spencer. I’ve just got to check the menagerie first – you haven’t seen that tortoise have you?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me, and Nina scoured the place for him yesterday. Still,’ he added cheerfully, heading for the tanks, ‘they can go without food for years, can’t they? How do you think the other
s are looking?’
‘Fine,’ said Fran, running a professional eye over the inmates. ‘Though the chameleon doesn’t do much, does he?’
‘I haven’t seen it move once. Hardly worth having.’ They watched it in silence for a few moments. ‘Doesn’t even open his eyes,’ added Niall. A few more seconds of total stasis passed.
‘You don’t think –’ said Fran.
‘Don’t say it,’ interrupted Niall, sharply. ‘Don’t even think it. Clear your mind of all electrical activity. Walk away and don’t look back.’ He took the car keys out of his pocket. ‘Run.’
He dropped her at the all-night Turkish supermarket, and by the time Fran was fighting her way along the High Street, the two shopping bags acting as counterweights in the buffeting wind so that she swivelled with every gust, it was nearly half-past seven. She had bought a copy of Time Out in the supermarket, flicking through it first to glance at the accommodation adverts. There were pages and pages of them and she had been shocked by the size of the competition; there were so many others in exactly the same fix, desperate to pay the mortgage, wanting n.s. lodgers who would share bills and hswk, and who wouldn’t mind if there was no dbl glzg, shwr or easily accessible tube stn. Or cntl htng, she reminded herself as she passed the blur of the video shop’s spinning sign. Orbnstrs. Or the presence of a new, large and ominous crck in the dng rm clng. In fact, apart from the vegetable garden, she couldn’t think of a single asset that might be abbreviated into service and used to tempt a prospective tenant; it might even seem foolish to an outside eye that she had already given notice (2 weeks, crutches or no crutches) to the ready-made lodger who was already living there – after all, most landladies would be grateful to have someone who was, at least, reasonably polite, technically employed and moderately housetrained. She crushed the thought. It was too dreadful to contemplate being grateful to Barry for anything.
There were leaves all along the pavement in Stapleton Road, not the shrivelled singletons of autumn, but sappy bunches of five and six, torn from the trees by the wind and forming a sprung carpet of crossed stems. Fran picked her way carefully between them and then paused to blink away a speck of dirt that had blown into one eye. Another landed on her lashes and she picked it off. It smudged between finger and thumb, and as she wiped it off a third speck landed on her upper lip. She looked up to see where they were coming from and flinched from the shock.