Her stomach still tightened a little when she drove in through the office gates – news of the restraining order had circulated like wildfire – but she no longer cared if people whispered about her in the canteen or stared oddly at her in the corridors. And in recent days she’d managed to silence the people who greeted her with the curiosity that masqueraded as exaggerated concern by saying she didn’t think they were looking at all well, and asking if they were absolutely sure they were all right.
Her job in the accounts department required little conscious effort. While one part of her mind checked the columns of figures, the other dreamt of the holiday. She pictured Debbie and herself in different locations around the ship, parading along the deck, attending cocktail parties and black-tie dinners, Debbie at the centre of things of course, but Melanie close behind, champagne in hand, the sun on her back. Debbie said the holiday would bring closure to Melanie’s awful year, and for the first time Melanie was beginning to believe it might actually be possible.
At a quarter to eleven every morning Melanie went outside for a smoke. Ignoring the sniggers and glances of the office juniors in the next doorway, she got out her mobile and waited for Debbie’s call. If the salon was busy it wasn’t always possible for Debbie to call, of course, but then she’d phone after work, or at the latest the next day. But first one day went by without a call and then another. Always prone to anxiety, Melanie immediately began to worry that something had gone wrong. Debbie was going to cancel. With ten days to go, she had finally realised the holiday was a mistake. She had found something better to do, or someone better to do it with.
Melanie left a voice message on Debbie’s mobile, then a text message. She called the salon and asked to speak to her, but they said she was busy, and when Melanie said she’d hang on, they told her Debbie really couldn’t come to the phone but would call her straight back. When Debbie didn’t call back, the fear clutched at Melanie’s stomach, the figures on the printout she was meant to be checking became a blur, and, saying she had a headache, she left work early to drive to the salon.
Debbie wasn’t there. The stylists said they didn’t know where she was, but she wasn’t expected back that day.
Melanie went home but couldn’t settle. She left two more messages on Debbie’s mobile before getting back into her car and driving the twenty minutes to Debbie’s house. As she drew up outside, she saw Debbie’s car parked on the garage apron.
Debbie opened the door with, ‘Oh, hello, Mel.’
Her tone was subdued and Melanie had the sickening certainty that her worst fears were about to be confirmed.
‘I was worried,’ she said.
‘Sorry I didn’t call back.’ Debbie led the way into the lounge and stood by the fireplace. ‘But I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘My dad’s ill. They think he’ll have to have an operation. I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to come on holiday.’
Melanie stood staring at her.
Debbie added, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no way round it.’
Melanie’s mouth had gone dry, she couldn’t speak.
‘You can always go on your own, you know. There’s bound to be lots of other singles on a cruise like that. There always are. You’ll get to know them in no time flat. End up having a wonderful time.’
Go on my own? she wanted to scream. But I don’t want to go on my own!
Debbie went on calmly, ‘But if you decide you want to cancel, you can always claim on your insurance. Just like I’ll be claiming on mine.’
Melanie jerked her head from side to side in misery and disbelief.
‘I’m really sorry, but there it is.’
Melanie must have been holding her breath because the next moment she felt dizzy and the room began to sway. She thought Debbie would help her to a chair, but she didn’t move, she just stood there watching her.
When Melanie finally managed to speak, the words came out in a series of gasps. ‘What’s – wrong – with – your dad?’
‘They’re not sure. It’s going to be an exploratory operation.’
‘But … can’t it wait?’
‘No, it can’t wait,’ said Debbie sharply. ‘It might be serious.’
‘Can’t they do it before we go?’
‘They might. But I’m certainly not going to leave my dad just after a major operation. No way!’
Melanie groped her way towards a chair and sat down. The unhappiness surged up into her throat, her face crumpled and she began to sob wildly, like a child.
‘Please don’t,’ said Debbie, and her tone was very cool.
‘But I can’t go on my own!’ Melanie cried. ‘I can’t!’
‘Then cancel.’
‘I don’t want to cancel. I want to go with you – on – the cruise.’
‘Look, you’ve just got to face facts.’
Melanie wailed, ‘You never wanted to go with me! I knew you didn’t! Not really!’
‘That’s not true. Of course I wanted to go with you.’
‘You were just pretending!’
‘I don’t pretend.’
Melanie sobbed again, ‘But I don’t want to go on my own. I don’t!’
There was a clinking sound and after a moment Debbie pushed a glass into Melanie’s hand and encouraged her to drink. It was whisky and she took two gulps.
‘Now, you’ve really got to calm down. These things happen. It’s not the end of the world.’
But misery and dread pulled at Melanie’s stomach. It wasn’t just the holiday, it was the tone in Debbie’s voice. ‘You’re glad not to be going!’ she wept. ‘You’re glad!’
‘Look, just pull yourself together, and we’ll talk about it another time.’
Melanie cried bitterly, ‘So you are glad! I knew you were! I knew it!’
‘All right. If you really want to know, I am relieved. Because you’ve been keeping things from me that you shouldn’t have. You’ve not been telling me the truth. And after everything I’ve tried to do for you, I think the truth isn’t too much to ask.’
Melanie gripped her glass and tried to control her ragged breathing.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the doctor? Why didn’t you tell me it was all in your mind? I mean, we all get the hots for blokes, we all get to fancy people, but a restraining order – well, you should have told me. I felt such a fool not knowing. I felt such a fool saying I was going on holiday with you and having this bloke give me a seriously strange look. Talk about the last to know!’
Melanie downed the rest of the whisky and got unsteadily to her feet.
‘I mean, you should have told me you had a problem, Mel, and then I could have helped you find the right help. Because that’s what you need, you know – proper help. I mean, your mum’s death was a shock, of course it was, but to go stalking this poor guy – well, you can’t do that to people, Mel, you really can’t. He still hasn’t got over it, you know. He’s still worried that you’re going to be hiding in the bushes—’
Melanie stumbled blindly towards the front door.
‘Mel, wait! Wait!’
Melanie wrenched at the latch and ran for her car. She drove in the direction of home, then away from it, and got lost in a strange area. All the time a voice was ringing in her head: There’s worse. There’s worse. Deep down she knew what this bad thing would be, but she didn’t want to think about it too much yet. First, she wanted to be sure. It was terribly important to be sure.
Eventually she found her way home and took a bath and had a couple of glasses of Chardonnay. Then she went to the top shelf of her wardrobe and drew out her black tracksuit and black hat, and put them on. Then, choosing a roundabout route, she drove to a road three away from the one where Geraint lived. She parked in the dark area between streetlamps and, taking the pencil-beam torch from the door pocket, walked to Geraint’s house, keeping close to the front hedges.
He was out, but it wasn’t too cold. She didn’t mind wai
ting. She had her favourite place, behind a laurel in the garden of the house next door. Normally she would dream while she waited, but no dreams came her way tonight, and she thought instead about the red dress she would never wear, and the oceans she would never see, and the warm sun she would never feel on her back.
It was midnight before Geraint got home. She heard his car and looking through the hedge saw that he was alone. He went quickly to bed.
She was in no hurry. She felt exceedingly calm. She returned the next evening, and this time there were lights on and voices. His and a woman’s. All the curtains were drawn and a new blind had been fixed up in the kitchen where there had been none before. But the blind hung a good inch clear of the window and barely reached the edge of the pane, so she could see a small area by the kitchen door. But by the time the woman wandered into view it hardly mattered because Melanie had already identified the woman’s voice. It was Debbie’s.
Melanie cancelled the holiday. Because of the short notice she didn’t qualify for a refund, and since she had no insurance, there was no way of reclaiming the money.
On the first night at sea the two of them had planned a quiet evening. But on the second, which was a Sunday, they had decided to go for a gala night: long dresses, best hair and make-up, the works. So it was on the Sunday that Melanie put on her red dress and stood in front of the bedroom mirror, drinking Chardonnay and swaying to the strains of Sinatra singing ‘Strangers in the Night’. Once the Chardonnay was finished, she drank a third of a bottle of gin and the dregs of some cooking wine. Finally, she took the rest of the sleeping tablets that Geraint had prescribed, along with all the Panadol she could find and a packet of Nurofen. The moment she lay down, the miracle happened. Her dream-world came back to her in all its glory, more vivid than ever. It took her higher and higher, until she was floating among the stars. As she drifted in and out of sleep she wept and cried out in ecstasy because her life was so perfect and so beautiful. She had loved and been loved. What more could she ever ask?
She didn’t want to wake; she fought it all the way. But they wouldn’t let her rest. Their voices kept breaking in, calling her name, cajoling her to wake up. When she did eventually wake up, she longed to sleep again if only to escape the noise and the bright lights and the things the nurses kept doing to her. She had tubes down her throat and tubes in her arm, a throbbing headache and a terrible thirst, and no idea of how she would ever cope.
They kept her in hospital for two weeks because they were worried about what the Panadol might have done to her liver. Then, having decided her liver was out of danger, they sent her to a psychiatric unit for observation. There, two doctors asked her a lot of questions, sometimes one at a time, sometimes together. Once, she made the mistake of trying to describe her dream-world, but seeing their intolerant young faces, she stopped and never mentioned it again.
When she got home, she had to report to a new doctor, a woman who kept telling her she must be sure to take her drugs. The drugs made her drowsy, though, and after a month she decided not to pick up another prescription. Instead, she took herself to the Lake District and stayed in a youth hostel and walked for miles and miles every day.
One morning, she got up while it was still dark and watched the soft, pink dawn break over the lake, and cried out with joy because she had never seen anything so beautiful, not even in her dreams.
She sold her mother’s house and gave up the flat in Albany Road, and bought a tiny cottage on the edge of a wood, where she put out large quantities of nuts for the wild birds. After much thought, she decided to stay in her old job because she felt at home there, and continued to shop at Sainsbury’s because she knew her way around the shelves. Later, when the time felt right, she began to go out a bit, to the bowling alley at first, then a couple of the quieter pubs, because she liked the people there.
One evening in late summer, sitting in a pub courtyard with some friends from work, she was distracted by a woman’s voice that she recognised, raised high in exasperation. It was joined by a man’s voice that she also knew, pitched low in anger. The two voices argued back and forth for some time, over what sounded like well-travelled ground, until the woman suddenly cried, ‘You know what? I really can’t be bothered any more. I just can’t be bothered!’ A chair scraped back, high heels clacked furiously away across the flagstones, then, after a pause, there was the sound of another chair and slower, heavier footsteps.
Melanie didn’t look round. She just looked at her friends and lifted the cool wine to her lips, and felt the warmth of the sun on her back.
FOOL OF MYSELF
Reginald Hill
‘And what will you tell him in this letter of yours?’ asked my mother as she lay dying.
‘Everything,’ I said.
‘Then, as usual, you will make a very great fool of yourself.’
Even in death she spoke with such certainty.
And she was nearly always right.
Not this time, Mother, I thought as I swung the wheel over. Not this time!
Then I saw the tractor coming round the bend.
And my last thought was, oh shit.
Perhaps Mother was going to be right after all!
Dear Detective Superintendent Dalziel,
You don’t know me, but I know enough about you to know you’re a man of independent mind, above fear or favour. That’s what I want, someone to understand, someone to be my voice.
So who am I?
My name is William Appleby. I am, and will now remain forever, nineteen. I’m an only child, my father dying when I was barely a year old. His car skidded off the Greendale Pass road and plunged into the gorge. It was recorded as an accident, but lately I have begun to wonder if it might not have been his last independent act, his bid for freedom.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I suppose that a son brought up by his mother alone must run the risk of being a ‘mummy’s boy’. It’s a title I didn’t mind. True, Mother was fearsomely protective, but at the same time she inspired a natural admiration and respect, not just from me but from everyone in our small town, and Yorkshire people aren’t easily fooled.
And yet, if you look closely, you could find she achieved her reputation at least in part by making unacceptable offers of help, such as proposing our pocket-handkerchief lawn as the site of the church fete or offering her wedding ring (which it would have taken amputation to remove from her finger) as prize in the restoration-appeal raffle. Instead of direct contributions to worthy causes, she would dangle before them the hope of generous legacies, though always with the rider, ‘Of course, my boy’s fragile health means I first have to make sure he is properly provided for.’
I reckon my ‘fragile health’ was a trump card that got her out of a lot of tight situations. In fact it didn’t consist of more than a slight tendency to get over-excited in certain situations, easily controlled by some mildly sedative capsules. Physically I usually felt on top of the world.
Another area where reality blurred a little was our finances. It was generally accepted that Mother, while not perhaps ‘stinking rich’, was certainly ‘not short of a bob or two’. If anyone was bold enough to make direct enquiry, she might reply, ‘Well, there’s the house …’ (worth over a quarter million in the current market) … ‘and I have a little invested in the funds,’ contriving to suggest by the archaism both sharp financial acumen and a broad portfolio. In one sense this was completely true. No one could live as comfortably as she did on a widow’s pension without knowing how to manage money. As for the portfolio, it was certainly broad. Susceptible visitors were permitted to glimpse a selection of annual reports from top companies scattered across the dining-room table before Mother with many apologies tidied them up, and the big calendar in the kitchen was always boldly annotated with mementoes of shareholders’ meetings.
These ‘susceptible visitors’ were invariably men. Mother was an attractive woman, and knew how to maximise her attractions by dress, make-up and d
emeanour. But, as I eventually realised, the prize she dangled before her admirers was not her person but her portfolio. Passionate romantics were of little interest to her. In fact, I believe my own devotion fed all her emotional needs. What she set out to attract was men with calculator hearts; men who would wine her and dine her and buy her reasonably expensive presents (exchangeable for cash refunds); men who would always err on the side of caution in their sexual demands for fear of scaring her off; above all, men who, if they became too demanding, could soon be sent running for cover by the simple disclosure of the real state of her finances.
Am I trying to paint her as a monster? Certainly not. She was a human being following the same imperative that drives us all – survival. We are not simply born into this world, we are shipwrecked on it. The survivors are those who make the right choices.
I think after Father’s death, Mother got all her choices right.
Except one.
A wise man, or woman, never comes between a dog and its bone, or a young man and his mate.
Adolescence arrived. I changed in all the ways that boys change. My devotion to Mother kept me from the extreme forms of teenage rebellion, but it could not damp down the fire in the blood.
You, Mr Dalziel, I guess are a man of the world and will know what I’m talking about.
I discovered girls. You might have thought that being such a mummy’s boy, I might have developed some kind of quasi-incestuous fixation on older women. Far from it. What I wanted were girls who were teenagers like me, girls who would laugh and drink and dance with me, and enjoy what naturally followed without regret or recrimination.
Perhaps my freedom from any Oedipal obsession was down to a growing intuition of what really made Mother tick, though it wasn’t till later when I went to university that I really began to look at her objectively.
The Detection Collection Page 17