by Judy Astley
‘Ah! So where are you going? And when?’ he asked. He seemed quite pleased about that too. She’d made his day.
Lottie laughed. ‘To the first question I’ll have to admit I don’t quite know. Everywhere and anywhere we fancy, I think. We thought we’d see what’s going on in the world. And to the second, I suppose we’ll go as soon as someone wants to buy the house.’
‘Hmm …’ The Major shuffled his feet and looked doubtful. ‘I hope you’ll be, you know, careful about … Well, I mean, I just hope the buyer …’
Lottie waited patiently for him to choose his words, wondering how he was going to get across what he actually meant (which was: make sure you sell it to the Right Sort) without actually being thoroughly offensive. Perhaps she’d suggest a high-profile footballer had shown an interest, just to stir up the village into collective excitement.
‘Of course … um … we’ll, er … you’ll be missed and all that,’ he mumbled. Lottie looked at him closely, wondering if she’d heard him right. He looked ancient suddenly, rheumy of eye and his face randomly sprouted with whiskers, a sign of failing eyesight and having no one to prompt his grooming efforts. He went on, gruffly, ‘I know we haven’t exactly seen eye to eye about everything. You young people—’
‘Not young any more,’ Lottie pointed out gently. ‘Not that young for a while now.’ She and Mac would go on their travels and when they came back the ancient Major might be back in the village, but this time alongside his wife under the yew in the churchyard.
‘I’ll miss you, Major,’ she suddenly said, giving him a swift kiss on the cheek. ‘You haven’t been such a bad neighbour. After all,’ she laughed, wondering what he’d make of her word choice, ‘your cock never woke me before dawn.’
‘Yo, Sorrel! I hear you’re flying off to Oz in September. Everything’s, like, soooo sweet for you li’l rich girls, innit? You don’t have to slave for months in some crap job saving up the air fare like the rest of us.’ Carly did a bit of her trademark queen-bee blonde hair-tossing as she looked round her circle of loyal allies and was rewarded with a collective snigger of support.
‘Some of us have to pay rent at home as well as save up for travelling.’ Carly’s second-in-command Rosie got in quick with her back-up contribution and Sorrel, who had been crossing the canteen with Millie on her way to the lunch counter, stopped to see if the rest of this alpha-girl group had anything to add. They were, as at every lunchtime, gathered like a leggy coven round their prime window-side table on which the only evidence of food was three low-fat yoghurt cartons and the arch-minger Stacey’s empty family-size Doritos bag (possibly not the easiest lunch choice for someone who’d deliberately sicked up every school meal since Year Eight. Perhaps she liked a challenge). Sorrel’s thinking was that she might as well get this bitching session over with in one go. These things dragged on otherwise and she could be fielding spiky little digs for the next few weeks till the A levels were over. Not what you needed a few minutes before you had to come up with your best-ever reasoning as to why, exactly, Othello thought it a great idea to murder his wife. Gaz must have been shooting his mouth off again, telling them about her plans to go away straight after the summer. If it was him, they’d know everything by now, from the universal sink plug on her packing list to all the stuff she’d bought in Top Shop, right down to colour and size.
‘I can’t go off travelling at all – I’ve got to bank what I earn to pay my own way through uni and get a job when I get there.’
Sorrel looked with derision at the girl who’d just spoken. ‘Polly, you need to take Kwells just to get the train from Guildford to Waterloo. No way would you choose to travel the world. Or have you got a new hobby, collecting sick-bags?’
‘Nice one, Sorrel.’ Millie laughed.
‘OK, anyone else got anything to say?’ Sorrel asked calmly. ‘Anyone with a terminally ill mother to support, a house they’ve got to rescue from repossession? Couple of orphan cousins to raise?’
‘We were only saying, like, you’re sooo lucky, Sorrel, that’s all.’ Carly put on her best hurt and misunderstood face, the one she’d perfected over the school years for the benefit of teachers who might dare to accuse her of talking too much in class, of putting less than her best effort in to homework, or of reeking of cigarettes after every break time. ‘So are you flying first class, then?’ Carly added.
‘Well of course I am. And there’ll be a guard of honour and a limo waiting for me at Sydney airport. What d’you think?’ Sorrel snapped.
Why did they do this? Why hadn’t they grown out of it after seven bloody years in this place? It had always been that same little cluster of stupid, bitching girls. Sorrel wasn’t the only one they picked on – though it had reached a peak after Christmas when she’d passed her driving test and got her car. Maybe she should have held out for an old-style rusty Mini but that was devoted dads for you, they just wanted you to be the safest, even if it meant she got crap from the school divas for driving something so offensively new. You also got it from this lot if you were too poor, too fat, too clever, too blonde, too sexy. Obviously not if you were too dumb though, or they would have to start on each other. How had they scraped together enough GCSEs to get on to the A-level courses when they clearly had IQs smaller than their bra sizes in inches?
‘C’mon, Sorrel, I’m starving. They’ll run out of chips if we’re not quick.’
Millie pulled on her friend’s arm and Carly grinned, triumphant. ‘Yeah, go on, Sorrel, go and stuff your face. Charge it to your platinum Amex.’ Carly’s entourage laughed long and loud with their pout-painted mouths wide open showing flawless teeth and greying knots of half-chewed gum.
‘Bunch of slags,’ Millie muttered as the two girls walked away. ‘They’re so not funny. They’re just jealous – no change there.’
‘I know,’ Sorrel said, feeling miserable. ‘But why are they so pathetic? Why do they think I’m loaded? My family just so isn’t. They should see our house – it’s falling to bits around us.’ She felt in need of comfort and chose both pasta and chips to go with a token bit of salad and sod Jamie Oliver.
‘Yeah, but to be fair, it is mega-big and kind of historic and grand. Plus you’re one of those girls who looks annoyingly fantastic without making any real effort and you drive that black Mini and you’re going out with Gaz. Carly wanted Gaz. Still does – you saw her at Tasha’s eighteenth, practically oozing herself over him.’
Sorrel giggled. ‘I think I’ll tell her she can have him, and then, when she has – because he’s not going to say no to her, is he, not when it’s on a plate and she’s in that denim micro-skirt? – I’ll get her on her own and come over all girl-to-girl and tell her he’s left us both with a nasty little infectious problem that needs clearing up.’
‘Excellent! I’ve still got some of those flyers they gave us after that sexual health reminder-lecture last year. You can give her the phone number.’
‘Better yet, I’ll make an appointment for her and offer to drive her there – make sure she goes!’
Millie thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, but then you won’t have Gaz any more. Wouldn’t you miss him? And who’ll you go travelling with? I can’t go – I don’t want a gap year. Med school is long enough as it is without taking time out as well.’
Sorrel sighed. ‘I’m not that sure if he’s really serious about going. He likes the idea but he’s not what you’d call organized. And he’s broke – everything he gets he spends on computer games and stupid pimping-up toys for his car. But anyway,’ and she laughed, ‘I could always tag along with my folks. They’re selling the house and spending the dosh going round the world. And, hey, Carly would love this – they really are talking about going first class!’
‘Mad! Mad but brilliant! Are they serious? Where will you all live after the trips are done?’
‘Who knows? Up a tree or something.’ Sorrel arranged her chips in sunflower petal formation round the edge of her plate. ‘They’re always serious – at first. The
y were serious about the restaurant; then Mum was serious about the gallery in the village – the one she sold to Susie Granger – and serious when she gave up on that and did painting for a couple of years till the house filled up with horrible sticky canvases that we’ve mostly still got because nobody wanted to buy them. Now they’re both serious about their herbs and their vegetables and being self-sufficient if you don’t count having to buy in the meat and the fish. Plus stuff in tins and pasta.’
‘And loo rolls and washing powder and tea-bags and wine and just about everything else?’
‘Yeah – my parents’ idea of self-sufficiency is a bit lacking. Or was. I guess they’re over that phase now. Still, I’m just glad they didn’t decide that keeping a couple of pigs would be a great idea. They’d probably have let them into the house in winter and have them sleeping in front of the fire. You’re right about mad though. It’s highly possible that I’ll come back from travelling and not have anywhere to live. I just hope they leave their new address with Clover.’
‘Chips and pasta, Sorrel? Tut tut!’ Carly commented snidely as she swaggered past, leading her team out of the canteen.
‘Chips, chips, straight to your hips,’ two of Carly’s minions chorused as they passed.
‘God – who’d think they were eighteen and not eight?’ Millie said.
‘What, Carly and friends or my parents?’ Sorrel spluttered. ‘Because sometimes, Mills, when it comes to my family, I do wonder.’
* * *
Mac’s studio was the one bit of Holbrook House that was truly up to twenty-first-century standards. Separate from the house and alongside the back terrace, it had once been a barn then was later converted to a five-car garage until Mac had concluded that he wasn’t the type to collect cars, especially the kind that needed indoor pampering. What was the point of having a Cadillac under a tarpaulin? Or a Ferrari that simply begged some envious waster to run a key along its body-work every time you parked it in a street? Toys like that drew attention. Mac had had plenty of that onstage – you didn’t want people gawping at you twenty-four/seven. Even at Charisma’s peak, he preferred, when not actually performing, to be Joe Normal. The garage had been rebuilt and fitted out as every rock musician’s must-have accessory: a fully equipped recording studio. Most of his original kit had been sold off several years before. The days of needing a full-scale mixing desk and ninety-six track recorder together with a selection of wardrobe-sized synthesizers were long gone and he could produce all the sounds he wanted using a simple Macintosh computer, a Yamaha Clavinova, his beaten-up Steinway grand and a couple of old favourite guitars. All the same, the studio room still smelled authentically businesslike – a mixture of new wood, warmed-up electronics and the faint, ingrained scent of old coffee and cigarettes. If he closed his eyes he could easily conjure up a memory of studio two at Olympic and Eric Clapton playing table football in the studio kitchen. In here he kept the gold discs, the framed Billboard listing from the time the band topped both the US singles and album charts, his Ivor Novello songwriting awards and various other bits of Charisma memorabilia that Lottie considered far too naff to have in the house.
‘I’m not having that lot in the downstairs loo like some kind of shrine to the glory days,’ she’d declared when Mac had had the builders in to update the studio and he had jokingly suggested, after being impressed by a visit to the Long Room in the Lord’s pavilion, having a trophy cabinet built. And so Mac’s past successes were displayed on the studio shelves, reminding him uncomfortably that such a lot of time (and an awful lot of money) had vanished since he’d last achieved anything of note – either musical or otherwise. He was pretty glad now about Lottie’s loo-ban. He could quite easily face the evidence of how decidedly the best part of his career was over in the once or twice a week he ventured into the studio: being reminded every time he went for a pee would be just too much.
Mac would not, if he was honest, be able to claim these days that he could still put down ‘songwriter’ under the heading ‘Occupation’, even though his work still turned up on the world’s radio playlists often enough to provide a good (if alarmingly dwindling) income. He’d still have put it on his passport, if it had been required, for old times’ sake and for the small, rare ego-stroke of having immigration officials ask him if he’d written anything famous. He had never admitted to it for car insurance, as he knew from bitter experience that it would draw only a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the phone and either an eye-watering quote or a swift refusal on grounds of unacceptable risk. He’d always wondered exactly what it was about musicians that gave them such a reputation among insurers. It didn’t seem to matter whether you played a disciplined double bass in a symphony orchestra or were Keith Richards – apparently anyone who strung a few notes together for a living was tarred with the same wayward brush. Was it a simple matter of a collective reputation for drink, drugs and women? Did that mean that highest-level sportsmen could insure, say, a top-of-the-range Mercedes for about thirty quid simply because they tended to have early nights and a whole-food, temperate diet?
Such ramblings of thought occupied Mac as he strummed his old Martin guitar in the hanging egg-chair in the studio. It wasn’t a bad song, this new thing he was working on. He’d become very fond of it and out of the half dozen he’d demo’d in the past few months this was definitely the most promising. It was possibly heading towards being one of his best ever, or could be once it had had a bit more of a work-up. It was still at the early stage where it could go either way. He’d got the melody down with a basic backing track and had written some canny lyrics but it could all come to nothing if he couldn’t place it with someone capable of taking it to the dizzy heights.
Mac flicked a few switches and played back what he’d done so far, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. Not for Robbie at all now he listened again, but certainly one of those cute girl bands could do it justice, if he could find one with a bit of an edge.
Mac yawned and stretched and clicked the computer on to the Charisma website and the link to the guestbook and recent comments. He didn’t much want to read fans’ e-mails. Frankly, there shouldn’t be any – what sort of people clung to the memory of a long-past band? Sometimes you just didn’t want to know there were all these sorry loners out there thinking they might find the meaning of life or that the reason they couldn’t get a shag was there in your old lyrics. He imagined these not-so-young men (never the not-so-young women; it seemed they moved on far more successfully from their musical pasts and were out there having a real life), holed up in stuffy bedrooms that smelled of socks and french fries. He saw them Googling as if their lives depended on it, imagining a teeny fleck of stardust would descend on them if they got an e-mail through to their ageing hero who might, if their query had been entertainingly enough phrased, send a personal reply. Mac rarely did – it was a mistake he’d made in the eager early internet days when he’d felt bound by politeness not to ignore questions that seemed innocently enough asked. That way lay the stalkers and loons who questioned whether a comma accidentally inserted into a new print-out of lyrics was ‘significant’. These were the kind of crazies who’d come round and torch your car out of pique over an unanswered e-mail.
‘Is it true that “Target Practice” is being re-released?’ he read from Johnno – one of the regulars. That was the fourth time that question had come up recently. They seemed to think there might be some connection with a Keanu Reeves movie. He didn’t know where they’d got that one from. No one had told him, though he was due for a meeting with Doug, the band’s former manager, in a couple of weeks. Why didn’t these people have better things to do?
Feeling unaccountably grumpy, Mac closed down the computers, locked up the studio and went off towards the long border. There were tomatoes to feed, lettuces to thin out … a journey to plan. He looked back at the H-shaped house from the far side of the terrace. There were rooms on the top floor he hadn’t been in for at least a couple of years. Each wi
ng on its own could accommodate an entire family at a push. Part of the first-floor area was equipped with a perfect, barely used Smallbone kitchen circa 1987 from when Clover had gone through her late-teen phase of wanting a separate (though bills-paid) life. Sorrel hadn’t wanted it – she liked her snug, messy lair way up under the east gable. Whatever were he and Lottie doing now, rattling around in a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom house? When Sorrel had gone on her travels, and then presumably to university, the two of them might just as well move into the studio and let the rest of the place fall into the landscape. Or be a fabulous family home for someone else. It felt right, this idea of selling and moving on. Time to go, he thought, testing out whether this made him feel sorrowful. It didn’t. In fact, he could feel his spirits instantly lift at the very idea. Wonder if Lottie will think of phoning estate agents? he thought, tramping on towards the vegetables.
‘They’ll be biting your hand off. You’ll have agents queuing down past the primary school once they know your house is up for sale.’
It was reassuring to have friends like Susie, a person who always saw only the upside of life. Lottie, enjoying a lunchtime glass of white wine in the stockroom at the back of Susie’s gallery, was very much in need of this kind of reassurance.
‘It’s not the agents I want queuing – it’s buyers. I think they’ll take one look inside the front door and run a mile. I know I would. There’s so much stuff.’
‘Rubbish! It’s only a matter of …’
Susie hesitated and Lottie leaped in, laughing. ‘See – even you have your doubts! I know what it takes to get the punters interested; I’ve watched all those property programmes where some know-all breezes in and says, “Hey look, this place will be fine if you simply get absolutely every surplus item out and paint it all cream and caramel.” Holbrook just is not a cream-and-caramel kind of house. And what are they going to make of the black walls in the sitting room?’