by Jo Verity
The beach was stunning. They had seen it at its most benevolent today, in the gentlest weather, yet Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling that it might, at times, be a cruel place. Perhaps Diane’s sandmen were simply lying low, ready to leap up and chase invading mortals into the sea.
Ten fifty-five.
‘Have you spoken to Carl since we got here?’
‘He rang before we went to the pub. Checking up on me.’
‘That’s a bit harsh. He really cares for you, you know.’
‘Don’t.’ Diane flopped forward onto her bed. ‘Poor Carl.’
‘That sounds horribly terminal.’
‘I’m not suited to this fidelity lark, Lizzie. I’ve been trying so hard to convince myself that compromise is the way forward. I really have. But does that necessarily mean that I have to forsake passion for friendship? Why couldn’t it mean forsaking friendship for passion? That’d be much more my sort of compromise.’
Diane had rolled on her side and was facing Elizabeth, twiddling the zip on her sleeping bag. ‘We always end up talking about me, don’t we?’ She extended her arm, her hand clenched around an invisible microphone. ‘Tell me, Mrs Giles, now that you’re approaching your half century, how d’you see it going from here on? What do you want out of life?’
As schoolgirls, they’d sprawled on Elizabeth’s bedroom floor, hour after hour surveying the future, populating it with handsome princes and silken palaces. Now here they were, in this plain little house, together again, this time contemplating the ostensibly featureless plain of middle age.
‘What do I want?’
Such an innocent, terrifying question.
‘Oh. I don’t know. Lots of things. A bra that fits properly. The slugs to leave my hostas alone. People to stop telling me “cheer up, it’ll never happen”.’
‘Easy, peasy. Ditch the bra. Buy a bumper tub of slug pellets. And … I dunno … adopt the veil.’ Diane swung her legs around and sat up, looking intently at Elizabeth. ‘Obviously life’s a brutal joke, Lizzie, but there comes a time when we have to think really seriously, and – I know this will horrify you – selfishly about how we’re going to spend what’s left of it.’
Elizabeth’s phone chirruped and she snatched it up.
‘Jordan?’ Diane asked.
‘No. Laurence. He says, “Laid up with tummy bug prawns you ok looking forward to sunday × L.” She frowned. ‘No punctuation. He must be ill. He’s usually such a stickler.’
‘He would be,’ Diane said. ‘But I’m not going to let you off the hook. Let’s try another approach. Laurence says he’s looking forward to Sunday. How about you. Are you looking forward to Sunday?’
‘Yes…’ Elizbaeth closed her eyes and let her head fall back, ‘and no.’
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Diane’s tone was solemn and despairing. ‘You’ve got to stop censoring every word before it comes out of your mouth. You’ve developed this habit of deflecting questions. Those you can’t, you turn into a joke. It’s not good for you.’ She picked up her wash bag. ‘I’m going to see if Dafydd’s finished in the bathroom.’
Elizabeth heard voices followed, before long, by the murmur of water gurgling through pipes. Taking her novel out of her bag, she tried to pick up the threads of the story but within minutes she replaced her bookmark. Hearing an irregular ping, ping, ping, she glanced up to see a small moth throwing itself against the paper lampshade. This room, benign and welcoming only a matter of hours earlier, had become oppressive, the atmosphere laden not only with heat but with unanswered questions.
What had Diane demanded? The uncensored version?
No, oddly enough, she wasn’t much looking forward to Sunday. She wasn’t dreading Laurence’s return from France or anything like that. They enjoyed a lovely life and did lots of lovely things together – theatre, concerts, galleries. As a rule, after a few days with Diane, watching her friend ricocheting around in freeform chaos, she was delighted to get back home where everything ran like clockwork and where she knew precisely what was what. This visit had been threatening to follow that pattern but then Dafydd Jones had invited them to Llangennith. She’d been away without Laurence lots of times – well, quite a few – but she’d never before felt this slackening of ties with all that was familiar.
Although she’d only been here for a few hours, she was beginning to acquire a taste for this new world, where boundaries were loosely drawn, decisions made lightly and things not entirely as they seemed. As it was so agreeable, there was no reason why she couldn’t open herself up to more of this sort of thing when she returned to her ‘normal’ life. Become more impulsive, more laissez-faire. Say ‘yes’ more often as Diane suggested. (After all, it wasn’t as if she were a downtrodden little wife.) Yet she had the suspicion that her new-found appreciation of spontaneity was contingent on a very particular set of circumstances. A man. And a place. And a moment.
Now she supposed she must address her friend’s first and scarier question: ‘What do you want out of life?’
She lay on the bed, her face buried in the pillow, easing the censorship stopper off her bottled-up wishes.
I want Ben to come back from America. Not necessarily to live in London but in some place like York, or Lancaster, or Bristol, where I stand a chance of seeing him more than once a year. Ben – my firstborn who was once the sun in my solar system.
I want Alex – the little boy who used to creep into my bed and ask if we could get married one day – to split up with Vashti (amicably, so that he won’t mope about for months) then fall in love with a bright, straightforward girl who adores him, and has the minimum number of body piercings and a proper job. A girl who can persuade him that folk-music is a wonderful hobby but not a viable career, who wants to become part of the family, who wants to share him with me.
I want Laurence to stop all this cooking foolishness. I wish he would read fiction. Occasionally I want him to forget to put the bins out and to lose the car keys. To laugh at mistakes – both his and mine – not subject them to forensic scrutiny. And, once in a while, it might be interesting if he were less … courteous … in bed.
There. It hadn’t been so very difficult.
She went to the window and drew back the curtain. A faint breeze stirred, carrying distant voices and cooling her sweat-damp neck. The full moon cast its silvery trail across the sea and dappled the land with moon shadows. Down the hill, towards the beach, lights from campsite and caravan park stippled the blue-blackness.
Gazing at the moon, she reviewed her wish list. What was the matter with her? Had she lost all sense of self? Diane certainly wouldn’t stand for such passive desires predicated, as they were, on the whims of others. Panic, seasoned with disappointment, swamped her.
She had watched her parents, still hale and hearty, limit their lives with timidity and apathy. She’d listened to lame reasons why they shouldn’t do … whatever they might have done. Inertia was a chronic malady infecting willpower and purpose. Well, sooner or later, they wouldn’t need to concoct excuses. Their options would be reduced by infirmity and perhaps, like Dafydd’s mother-in-law, they would lose the plot – slight though their plot was.
Her own life had turned into a sort of well-run bank account, credits and debits coming in and going out on fixed dates. She knew that Laurence would ‘surprise’ her with a fiftieth birthday trip to Paris. That she would still be living in Cornwall Gardens when she finished work. That she would do a couple of mornings at the Oxfam bookshop and attend yoga classes for ‘sprightly seniors’. And then she would die.
If she wanted to escape this balance sheet, she would have to become a born-again Elizabeth Giles. If.
Diane, wrapped in a towel which barely covered her torso and revealed the scorpion tattooed high up on her thigh, was in the kitchen talking to Dafydd.
‘Anything from Jordan?’ he asked when he saw her.
‘No.’
He checked his watch. ‘I might as well go now. It’ll be eleven-thirty by the time
I get to the car park.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Diane said. ‘It won’t take me a second to slip my clothes on.’
‘Okay.’
Diane disappeared to get dressed.
‘We should exchange numbers,’ Dafydd said, taking out his phone.
‘Is there any point in my coming too?’
‘We really need someone to stay here.’
‘Yes. I suppose we do.’
After they’d gone, Elizabeth wandered through the house, phone in hand. Dafydd’s room – presumably the one vacated by ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ – was larger than theirs. The contents of his bags were strewn across the bed and hung over a chair. It was furnished with matching double bed, wardrobe and dressing table, much like the set – Stag? G-Plan? – that her parents owned thirty years ago before fitted units and king-sized divans became the norm. The standby light glowed on the compact music system next to the bed. She checked the stack of disks. Vaughan Williams. Willie Nelson. Michael Nyman. The Proclaimers.
She climbed the stairs, the air growing hotter as she entered what had originally been the bungalow’s roof space, feeling that here, too, she had crossed a time zone into the era of exposed pine and cotton ‘throws’. Through an open door, she could see, the girls’ clothes littered across a twin-bedded room as if a whirlwind had swept through.
Hesitating before opening the second door, she half-wondered – ridiculous – whether she might find someone inside. Jordan, with his customary inconsistency, had stacked DVDs, books and iPod neatly on the bedside cabinet whilst his clothes lay in a snarled heap on the uncarpeted floorboards.
She was in the kitchen, washing up, when her phone rang.
It was Alex. ‘At last. I’ve been trying to get you for days. What’s going on, Mum?’
‘Don’t be silly. Nothing’s “going on”. And you’re pretty elusive yourself if we’re going to start into that. We’re staying with Diane’s friend for a couple of nights. Near Swansea. I assumed Jordan was keeping you up to date.’
‘I don’t really think that’s his responsibility, do you?’
‘Responsibility? You’re on very thin ice there, Alex.’
‘Yes. Well. So everything’s okay?’
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Good. Well … pretty good.’
She needed to end this call quickly, before she was forced to lie about Jordan’s whereabouts.
‘When will you get back to London?’ she asked.
‘Sunday. We’ve got a gig in Sheffield on Saturday night. You?’
‘Saturday, at the latest. Dad’s due back on Sunday.’
‘See you on Sunday, then. And Mum? Thanks.’
As soon as the call was finished, she composed a text to Jordan.
£25 if you get back before 12.30. E
To avoid risking any ‘misunderstandings’ she added That’s 12.30 AM then pressed ‘send’.
18
THURSDAY: 12.27AM
There was a gentle tat-tat on the front door and Elizabeth hurried to open it.
Jordan was standing on the doorstep. He was out of breath and perspiration had darkened the chest of his T-shirt.
‘I make it twelve twenty-seven.’ She glanced over his shoulder into the shadows.
‘Where are the girls?’
He stared at his feet.
‘What? You came back without them?’
‘You didn’t say we all had to come.’ He slid his phone from his jeans pocket and began to read her message aloud. ‘£25 if you get back—’
‘I’m fully aware of what I said.’
‘It says “you”.’ He held her gaze.
‘You know I meant all three of you.’
He shrugged as though she were unhinged.
‘It’s not funny, Jordan, and it’s not clever.’
She rang Dafydd to tell him that Jordan had turned up without his daughters. Then, handing her phone to Jordan she said, ‘Here. You explain.’
Jordan, evidently realising that there was no mileage in playing the innocent, described where he’d last seen the girls. ‘By the dunes? You go through a car park? There’s a grassy bit?’ The inflection made it sound as though he, not Dafydd, were the interrogator.
‘We’re heading over there now,’ Dafydd said when she took the phone back. He was panting with exertion. ‘I can hear music.’
Diane said something which she didn’t catch.
‘There’s a crowd of kids over there. It’s them, I think.’
‘Let me know what…’
But he was gone.
Jordan had sneaked off to his room and again she found herself killing time and wondering. Should she have anticipated Jordan’s misreading of her text? Maybe he’d tried to persuade the girls to come back and then, when he’d failed, switched his story in the hope of getting his money.
It rankled more than a little that Diane was with Dafydd on his mission. Di had no stake in the outcome. They were hunting for his daughters and her charge. She should be the one running through the sultry night alongside Dafydd Jones.
It was half an hour before Diane rang to let her know that they’d located Angel and Mimi.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
‘Not sure.’ Diane volunteered no details. ‘We shouldn’t be too long.’
As the minutes dragged by, she grew increasingly anxious. Dafydd was clearly livid with Angel and Mimi. And no doubt they would be mortified that their father had come to ‘rescue’ them. It was going to be awkward, especially as she had no idea what role Jordan had played in the drama or whether she would, by her text, be held responsible for his abandoning them.
She tiptoed upstairs, pausing on the landing outside Jordan’s room. Did he honestly think she was going to pay him for failing? Did he imagine that the issue would be decided in some quasi court of law, and that he might win on a pronoun technicality? He was ruthless where money was involved and there was little chance of his letting the matter drop, but she didn’t like the idea that her incompetent attempt at bribery might be revealed. That would be embarrassing.
Standing in the darkness her anger moderated. Jordan Fry was an exasperating boy, but, to be fair, it hadn’t been his idea to go to the party. He’d just tagged along. Perhaps, when they got there, the girls had ignored him. (He’d be no match for the surfers with their sun-bleached locks and clinging wetsuits.) He might be lying in bed now, fretting that Mimi and Angel would shun him for defecting. Or (she hated to concede this) there was the possibility that he had misconstrued her text. The male of the species seemed preprogrammed to misinterpret. She needed to talk to him and get the gist of what had gone on. Knowledge is power … and all that.
As she was about to knock on his door, car headlights raked the darkness and she hurried downstairs. She was filling the kettle when Diane entered the kitchen.
‘You’re still up, then.’ Diane’s voice was overly bright.
Elizabeth shot her a questioning glance, receiving a grimace in response.
Dafydd was in the unlit hall, talking quietly to Angel and Mimi in Welsh. She was unable to make out their faces but whatever he was saying was clearly heavy stuff.
‘Say goodnight,’ he instructed his daughters after several minutes.
‘Nos da, Elizabeth.’ ‘Goodnight.’ They spoke diffidently – two compliant daughters.
‘Night-night, girls.’ Sensing that a tender word wouldn’t go amiss, she added ‘Sweet dreams,’ as they hurried upstairs.
Dafydd had opened one of the cupboards and was rooting through the orderly ranks of tins and jars. ‘Ahhh. I thought there must be some somewhere.’ He plonked a half-bottle of brandy on the table, took three mugs from the draining board and poured a generous measure into each. ‘Medicinal,’ he muttered.
‘Thanks.’ Diane accepted the one he pushed towards her. ‘I’m off to bed. Goodnight you two.’
‘I won’t be long,’ Elizabeth called after her.
‘Is Jordan okay?’ he asked when they we
re alone. ‘I don’t know why he decided to come back but it shows great … perspicacity.’
Yes. Well.
He sipped his drink. ‘Perspicacity. I don’t think I’ve ever used it before.’
‘It’s a handy word,’ she said.
She sipped from her mug, the brandy pungent and fiery as it reached the back of her throat, not sure what ailment the four star ‘medicine’ had been prescribed to combat. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Not really. No.’
He closed his eyes, massaging his cheeks, the rasp of stubble against the flat of his hands audible in the silent kitchen. ‘One of them had Mimi on the ground. His hand was inside her top. And Angel’s got love bites all over her neck. They’ve been drinking. I could smell it on them when we got in the car.’
He took a sip from the mug then cleared his throat. ‘I thumped the puny little bastard. I only hope he didn’t recognise me or it’ll be all over the bloody papers. We’ll more than likely be getting a visit from the plod.’
‘The plod?’
‘I’ve never said that before either but it’s turning into that kind of night.’
She glanced at his hands but detected no sign of blood or skinned knuckles. ‘How hard did you hit him?’
‘I didn’t actually hit him. I shoved him. And he fell over. There was a lot of swearing.’ He frowned. ‘I was pathetic. I should have smashed his face in but I was scared of hurting my hand.’
‘Are the girls … okay?’
‘I think so.’ He drained his mug. ‘Perhaps this sort of thing goes on all the time when they’re in London. Gwen and I never discuss stuff like that. Maybe we’re going to have to from now on. I know I can’t wrap them in cotton wool but, quite frankly, the thought that some pumped up, randy lout …’