by Ali Ahearn
As usual, she noticed the paintings before the people, even though the art wasn’t to her taste. She was suddenly assaulted by the memory of lying on the sofa during her last life-modelling job, eating a Snickers and patting Mandela, the three-legged dachshund she’d found in the recycling bin outside her apartment.
Maybe if G comes through, I won’t have to do the life modelling any more …
She shook off the image and scanned the room, unable to register a single face until, like a heat-seeking missile, her eyes found their target.
Five-feet-eleven inches of style and sophistication.
Understated, in a soft teal crew-neck and a gorgeous grey pencil skirt, her sleek blonde bob held away from her face with a single mother-of-pearl clip that looked like it cost more than Joni’s whole outfit (and her car). Fitter and leaner than Joni remembered.
The woman once dubbed most likely to succeed by the Haversham faculty.
The same woman who’d taught Joni how to wax her woo-woo and told her never to kiss a boy on the first date. Which had always seemed strange to Joni.
If we weren’t even kissing, why were we waxing our woo-woos?
Joni caught those eyes for the briefest moment before Frankie glanced away. Her hand almost snaked up, but she remembered, just in time – she’d removed the locket for the day.
Frankie’s eyes. Clear, grey, serious. Maybe a little red around the edges, but who could blame her? The force of their sisterhood cut into Joni’s stomach like a knife. She felt like a spurned lover, hungry for the sight of her sister, but choking on things that lay huge and silent between them.
‘Wonderful, then.’
Joni’s eyes cut towards the voice, which belonged to a red-faced gnome who had positioned himself squarely in the centre of the action. She could almost smell the self-importance oozing from his pores as he adjusted his underpants and took a deep breath.
‘We’re all here. We can begin.’
The Gnome indicated a chair with one chubby finger and Joni plonked herself down with a ferocity that even the scrumptious leather could not prevent from resulting in a muffled farting sound. Frankie covered her face.
The Gnome was well dressed, but the devil was in the detail. Ten centimetres north of his fly, a small triangle of furry red belly peeped out where two buttons were just not up to their task. Then her eyes settled on Nigel the Shitkicker at his left. No resemblance. The Gnome was definitely a Schuster, she decided uncharitably.
Nigel pinked up satisfyingly as she took her seat, and wiggled his fingers at her in a most unmanly fashion. Joni closed her eyes and summoned all her willpower not to reminisce about his lovely lips, before moving on to survey the rest of the room.
There were six participants in all. Joni and Frankie, front and centre of the action. Joni had only just realised that the seat she had plonked into was directly in the Gnome’s right-hand line of sight, while Frankie’s was at almost exactly the same place on his left. Which meant they were facing each other across the square table. Like medieval gladiators. Or Cain and Abel.
Was there a word for murdering your sister?
The seat next to Frankie’s was empty. Typical. People always gave her a wide berth, like she was royalty. Like they might mess her up just by plonking their scruffy humanity next to her. Even on the Tube, breathing space would magically materialise around Frankie, like some kind of force-field, while Joni would spend the trip rammed into someone’s armpit.
The Gnome cleared his throat as Joni took in the occupants of the remaining side of the square table. Her mother and father. Like Carole King and Benito Mussolini. As Joni mouthed a tense ‘Hi’ at them, she was astonished afresh that two people so utterly different in every way could ever have come together to procreate. And, okay, it hadn’t lasted, but Joni thought the fact that they had stayed together long enough to have two children was some kind of miracle. Or maybe just a testimony to the terrifying power of sexual attraction.
Joni’s confusion at her father’s presence cleared as she saw her mother take his hand. It wasn’t a romantic thing, she knew. But at times of high drama, Lizzie pulled Carter off the benches, so to speak. And dragged him along wherever she needed to go.
Even though he could be a patronising arsehole.
For his part, Carter had never learned to say no to Lizzie. Right from the time he agreed to let the girls take their mother’s name instead of his. Even now, thirteen years after their divorce. Even though he had to know there was no way he was getting anything from G. Even though Lizzie drove him crazy.
Joni shook her head. Talk about co-dependency.
It hadn’t always been like this.
Joni still vaguely remembered a time when her mother and father made an effort, when things were easier for all of them. Before Rwanda, when her father still knew how to loosen up, at least occasionally. She remembered the puppet show.
It had been Lizzie’s idea, but she had roped in Carter and G for the performance.
The girls had helped make puppets, and chosen a story. They had no doubts: G had taught them all well. The Sound of Music was the only show in town.
Lizzie had outdone herself as the baroness, and Carter, who had been ambushed walking in the door in his dress greens, had performed a passable rendition of ‘Edelweiss’, cheered on by an adoring Lizzie, who had looked at him like he was Frank Sinatra and GI Joe rolled into one. And G, of course, had excelled as the cast of bit characters – children, nuns and soldiers. Her ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ was so poignant, everyone had been in tears.
Joni shook her head. Was that the last time she could remember them all happy?
Lizzie Tripton waved frantically at Joni as she took her seat, blowing her a kiss with her pouty, pink mouth and crossing her black eyes under those, really quite remarkable, brows in the universal language of What manner of insanity is this?
Joni smiled with more warmth than she felt.
She hadn’t seen her mother for six months, even though she only lived at Enfield. G, on the other hand, she’d seen six times in the month before she’d died.
Since it happened, seven years ago, the anger and bitterness had reshaped their already screwy connections and turned them all into strangers. Before it, she had at least been close to her mother. Afterwards, the shaky dynamics of their little family were magnified a thousand-fold.
Joni glanced at her father, who frowned at her. So what’s new? She surreptitiously considered his still-dark handsomeness out of the corner of her eye.
She remembered vividly the day he’d collected her from Sister Mary Magdalene’s. She’d wriggled through long minutes while her sins had been catalogued. And Sister Albertine hadn’t even known the half of it. Carter Pike had retained his impressive poker face right up until the tale about the squirrel, the collection tray and the Easter Mass, at which point Joni had started to hear the unmistakable chords of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ strumming through her adolescent brain.
It had all been downhill from there.
The Gnome started speaking again. ‘My name is Axel Schuster.’
Joni almost choked on the lukewarm coffee Hairiet had slid discreetly under her nose before making her muffled exit.
Axel? As in, Axl Rose?
‘I would like to welcome each of you here today, to the reading of the last will and testament of one Margaret Agatha Tripton.’
Axel Gnome coughed with an embarrassed air.
‘And that, I’m afraid, is where my part of the formalities ends. From now on, we have been instructed to follow a strict script. I can assure you at the outset that it is entirely Ms Tripton’s text.’
He coughed again. ‘An unconventional departure for us.’ He paused as if to underline his next point. ‘For an unconventional woman.’
‘Amen to that,’ Lizzie Tripton barked in a voice that sounded like Lucky Strikes and Bruichladdich X4 whisky, and then emitted a stage whisper loud enough for the whole room to hear. ‘Any biscuits?’
Joni glanced automatically at her father, and then at Frankie. They had both automatically bowed their heads, horrified by Lizzie’s flippancy at this grave time.
Nigel scurried to his feet in a terrifying impression of a mobile epileptic fit, raced to the back of the room and retrieved a silver platter, which he dutifully carried back to Lizzie. Axel Gnome grinned like a man who has anticipated everything. ‘I believe HobNobs are your biscuit of choice, Ms Tripton?’
Lizzie chose three HobNobs from the silver tray and indelicately threw them into her plump, decadent mouth. Joni didn’t need to look at Frankie to know she would have recovered and raised neither of the gorgeous eyebrows that, Joni noticed, were still paying tribute to Brooke Shields.
Joni watched the two lawyers watching her mother like she was an interesting artefact in a Great Bimbos Through History exhibit, and smiled. How long would it take before these men realised exactly what they were dealing with?
‘May we continue?’ Axel Gnome was back in the game, clearing his throat and flapping his paper. Joni could have sworn he even affected a different voice, as if to accentuate that the script was not his.
‘Right then, here we go. Ahem. “I bring you all together today for the reading of my will. I know that each of you believes that I have no money, and you would have been right. Until, that is, about eighteen months ago. As much as it may astonish you to learn this, I once had a very rich lover.”’
There was no sound in the room. Axel Gnome had clearly been hoping for more, because his face became shinily disappointed before he continued.
‘Ahem. “No, not Randalph. Calling your grandpa a lover is like calling a brood mare a race horse. No, a real lover. An American. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since the war. But apparently he died and made me rich. I always knew I was a good lover, but it’s lovely to have it confirmed so clearly, so long after the fact.”’
Joni didn’t need to be told that this was verbatim G. Staccato. To the point. Full of her own wonder. Even read in Axel Gnome’s Oxbridge clip rather than in G’s outrageous East-End-ese, it sounded like her grandmother. Joni couldn’t resist looking at Frankie to check for signs of surprise.
Her sister’s face was a picture of calm, but, even after seven years, Joni knew her well enough to see she was shocked. Not at the lover but at the suggestion that G had come into money. The giveaway was the tiniest twitch in the corner of Frankie’s left eye. Controlled with extensive physical therapy since she was five years old, the twitch’s reappearance at moments of tension was only discernible to those in the know.
Joni’s right hand itched to take her sister’s. She dug her nails into it, hard.
‘Ahem.’ Axel was back in the game. ‘Ahem. Her script continues. “Lizzie, I’ll get your bit over with quickly. I know you’ll be in a hurry to get back to the peace camp, and the HobNobs will only keep you pleasant for so long.”’
Joni watched her mother closely. Lizzie’s eyes narrowed as she listened.
‘“Lizzie, to your baby, the Greenham Common Trust, I leave five hundred thousand pounds, to support the furtherance of peace and justice. To you, I leave an annual stipend of forty thousand pounds, to keep you in HobNobs and male escorts for the rest of your days. Go well, my darling.”’
Choking suddenly on her HobNob, Lizzie furiously scrabbled in a capacious handbag, before producing a very sophisticated-looking calculator. Muttering something about tax percentages and charitable rates, she did some quick calculations before returning to the remains of her HobNob with a quick nod and satisfied smile.
Holy fuck. Just how much money had this guy left G?
For the first time that month, Joni felt a thinning in the thick syrup of unease. Was she really going to get to twenty-eight with her kneecaps intact?
She gave Des an excited little stroke inside her pocket.
We’re all going to be okay, little fella, she telepathed to him. You, me, Mahatma, and the others. Maybe even the vinyl.
Axel Gnome scraped the saliva back from his jowly throat one last time.
‘“And now to my granddaughters. Hello, girls. I do so wish I could be there to see you in the room together. Both so beautiful, and so full of life. I remember the day you were born so well, Frankie. By the motorway. Your dad swearing so manfully at your mum for insisting on repacking her Gregorian chants. Your mum panting and chanting like a Masai woman on the floor of the minivan. And me. Trying to remember whether you cut or clamped the cord first. Oh dear, such a strange start. No wonder things were always a little confusing for you both …”’
Axel was really throwing himself into the part at this point. He sighed delicately and went on.
‘“Joni dear, I do so hope your hair is still Kermit the Frog green. My favourite shade on you. And, Frances, I know you’ll be wearing that mother-of-pearl clip. Gorgeous piece. And you always had a great sense of occasion. No doubt you’ll be on opposite sides of the room, my warring beauties. Well, hopefully, not for long. I have a proposition for you.”’
Ah, that phrase again. So Nigel had been in the know.
‘“I have a million pounds for each for you, and you only have to do the tiniest thing for me in return.”’ Axel paused.
Joni felt sick and hunted. The giddily optimistic part of her was trying to stay focused on the possibility that G’s will might be the key to escaping the dark forces that were threatening to rip apart her carefully reconstructed life. All over again. But the realist in her knew that things were never that easy, and suspected that the moment was coming when she was going to be told to kiss and make up.
Axel wasn’t going to leave them in suspense for long.
‘“No, no, don’t get excited. No-one can force anyone else to mend fences, or to care for each other. But if eighty years have taught me anything, it’s this. One can compel action, which is sometimes all that’s required. So, here it is. Endurance Island. You need to go. As a team.”’
Joni was gratified that the first sign of true distress came not from her, but from Frankie, who choked loudly at the word team. Her sister rose to her feet, before quickly sitting back down again. No farting noise, of course.
‘This is ludicrous.’ Frankie’s voice was clear and sharp, and posh as hell. ‘I’ll contest. G was obviously unwell when she wrote it.’
Axel Gnome shook his head in faux regret at Frankie. ‘I’m sorry, Frances,’ he said, although Joni could tell he was not. ‘Ms Tripton anticipated this.’ He produced a sheaf of papers. ‘She got herself certified by every quack on Harley Street. It’s watertight.’
For Joni’s part, she was unable to comprehend what had just been said.
Endurance Island? That hideous reality TV show like Big Brother meets Survivor? In which people were forced to live like wild animals and do things that seemed physically impossible? And the female contestants were all Amazonian and wore bikinis? And the men were all fighter pilots and Vietnam veterans, with muscles in places that seemed indecent? Wasn’t that thing filmed on an island near Australia?
Not an umbrella-in-your-drink kind of island, either.
Lizzie looked over at Joni and, in a stunning display of lack of insight, shot her a thumbs-up. Like Joni had just won the lottery instead of being compelled to walk the plank. The sight brought a memory scudding across the canvas of Joni’s mind.
Her mother and father, united for once, coming for tea just after The Incident between Joni and Frankie … Joni, scary high, hallucinating for a single surreal moment that she was stirring her stash of cocaine into their Earl Grey. Shivering at the momentary horror that her stash could be exposed then, realising, recovering.
Trying to listen as her father explained how, although he and her mother were divorced, they wanted to help Joni and Frances through this ‘rough patch’. Lizzie laughingly talking about sisters’ tiffs and the stronger pull of the sisterly bond.
Lizzie didn’t have a clue.
How could she fix Frankie and Joni when she couldn’t see what was right in front o
f her? She could change the world but she couldn’t fix Joni. Carter had looked like he wanted to slip into his seal gear and slide into the Earl Grey, far away from the tiny flat that smelled of ferret wee and misery.
And that had been the last time Joni had seen them together.
Until now.
Even with her cluelessness on full display, something about the angle of Lizzie’s face as she grinned at Joni showed her remarkable likeness to her own mother. Joni took it as a message from G. Keep listening, Joni.
Only then did she realise Axel/G was speaking again.
‘“You don’t need to win, but you do need to make it through to the finals. I’ve hammered out the rules with the good Mr Schuster, so he’ll give you the nitty-gritty. Try to listen, won’t you? He’s no Julius Caesar in the oratory stakes and I know you bore easily, Joni, but do try to listen because he’s terribly good at thinking of everything. And his firm will be checking up on you girls along the way to make sure you’re safe, and you’re following the rules.”’
Joni looked over at Frankie, who was openly staring at her for the first time.
‘“Anyway”,’ Axel continued, ‘“I know you’ll be fabulous. Of course I’ll be voting for you from the grave. Good luck, girls. Joni – please try not to sleep with anyone on national TV. And Frances – please feel free to. I never did like that Edward. I love you both. Goodbye.”’
A million pounds. A million pounds.
All she had to do was survive on a lethal island, with a sister who’d happily feed her to the crocodiles. And somehow not get eaten, otherwise killed, driven to a nervous breakdown or voted off before the final episode.
Easy. Except for one thing.
She’d rather smash her own kneecaps than have to spend a minute with her sister.
Let alone four weeks.
‘I’m not doing it,’ Joni enunciated slowly, washing her hands more meticulously than usual and studying her face in the carefully lit bathroom mirror.
‘Yes, you are,’ Frankie, inside the cubicle, enunciated even more slowly in her imperious alto. She sounded very calm. It made Joni wonder.