Blowing It

by Judy Astley

  The lights were all out in the Major’s house. Lottie had seen the removal van outside that morning. By lunchtime it had trundled away, presumably taking the Major’s possessions to Eastbourne. She hoped he’d be happy there. She could picture him out for tea at the Grand Hotel, sitting by a well-stoked fire and being offered crustless cucumber sandwiches by an elegant dowager in classic navy and white while the two of them reminisced about long-dead friends and confided that for each of them the war hadn’t been altogether a bad time.

  ‘He hasn’t sold it yet.’ Mac noticed as they passed the gate. ‘I’d have thought a pretty Georgian place like that would be snapped up in days.’

  ‘It needs work. Susie told me. Lots and lots of work. And planning permission for just about every roof tile and pane of window.’

  ‘Too much to take on then. You’d need a lot of time, somewhere else to live, all that,’ Lottie mused.

  ‘Right. Far too much to take on,’ Mac agreed.

  Clover felt as nervous as a first-date teenager but she wasn’t going to change her mind now. What’s sauce for the gander … she told herself as she drove defiantly out through the Holbrook House electronic gates. And it wasn’t as if she was going to do anything really extreme. She was only going for a quiet drink with Harry, not running away for a weekend of porn-passion in a Paris hotel. Whatever. The important thing was Sean would find out and be horribly, stupendously amazed that she could even contemplate going out with someone else. Tough, because it was what he deserved, the lying, cheating bastard. Now he’d know how it felt. She’d told Sorrel and Ilex what to say when he called, and he would call because he phoned the house every couple of hours, apologizing to whoever answered (because it sure wasn’t going to be her) that he had to keep trying, she was refusing to answer her mobile.

  It wasn’t far. Just a few miles back towards the M25, through pine woods and down a narrow lane to the sort of not-quite-country pub that people used to drive out of town to for some real ale and a stroll in the resinous air. How lovely this must look when it was covered in snow. That’s what pines needed, in her opinion. They somehow weren’t at their best in summer; too angular and gawky like a certain type of upright, elderly Englishman she’d see each year holidaying in Cornwall, the sort that walked the cliff-paths in ancient shorts together with long woolly socks and sturdy sandals, trekking dutifully behind determined map-toting wives. God, Cornwall. She hadn’t booked anything for the holidays yet. There’d be nothing decent left – and now she’d have to go there without Sean (limited help though he tended to be) and be stuck with the girls in some damp, miserable hovel miles from the sea. The way her luck was going, it would be sure to rain daily. Perhaps she could persuade Sorrel to come, pay her to help take care of her nieces. It would add to her funds for her Australia trip. Or perhaps she would forget about Cornwall, book a last-minute gite in France. But the last-minute ones, weren’t they the ones that everyone had tried and no one wanted to go back to, ever again? Where the loo was a hole in the ground at the back of a barn and the owners wouldn’t let you run a tap between 9 a.m. and late afternoon?

  Clover felt her stomach tighten as she drove into the pub’s car park. Harry’s car was already there and she parked alongside it. She could actually have done with a longer drive to calm herself; or to have arrived first. Instead, she sat still for a few moments till she could breathe evenly, checking her make-up in the mirror and re-applying some gloss to nerve-dried lips.

  She was as ready as she was going to be. It was only a friendly drink after all; nothing to make a song and dance about. All the same, as she climbed out of the car, her instant thought was, Here goes a really, really stupid idea.

  ‘Bloody nerve. They can’t change quiz night! It’s written in stone!’

  ‘Travesty!’

  Mac and Al were taking their outrage out on the bar staff, who carried on obliviously pulling pints and slopping beer across the many customers who jostled at the crowded bar.

  ‘Packed out,’ Mac muttered. ‘Might as well forget it and go home. Charity bloody Karaoke night! What are they thinking of?’

  ‘Well it says they’re thinking of the Shooting Star Hospice, so I’ll put some cash in the tin,’ Lottie told him. ‘Shame about the quiz though – I was looking forward to getting into it, take my mind off the fractured family for a few hours.’

  ‘Hey, you know we might as well stay for a bit and have a laugh,’ Al said. ‘Pick out the ones we’d go for if we were on the look-out for talent. Music talent I mean,’ he said, grinning at Lottie. He looked across to where the sound system was being given a last-minute tweak. Lottie saw a brief wistful look cross his face, as if he’d like to be involved as in his old Charisma roadie days, plugging up the leads and checking the microphones.

  ‘Not what we were expecting though,’ Mac said. ‘But that’s another sign of old age, isn’t it, getting set in your ways. You’ll stop me if I buy a pewter tankard to keep over the bar, won’t you, Al?

  ‘Just one drink then home?’ he asked Lottie. ‘Unless you want to stay and watch a bunch of golf-club accountants poncing about thinking they’re Jagger?’

  ‘No, it’s fine by me. Let’s just have a look at the song list though.’

  ‘Oh God, tell me you’re not joining in?’ Mac groaned. ‘Sorrel would never live it down.’

  ‘What do you mean? Sorrel’s not here to see what we get up to. After all this time are you saying my singing’s rubbish?’

  ‘Course I’m not. But you know what she’s like. She’d hear about it and she’d say we were making an exhibition of ourselves. Teenagers can’t think of anything worse. Look what she was like when the band was on Top of the Pops 2 last year. She had to run out of the room shrieking and with her hands over her eyes.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe she should remember that the stuff that makes her shriek and hide is what pays her way through life.’

  Lottie scanned through the catalogue of songs. ‘Look, there’s three of Charisma’s in here. Maybe we should give it a go. “Target Practice” is in: why don’t you do it, Mac? It might bring us luck, with the film and that.’

  ‘Not a chance.’ Mac was vehement. ‘Not a bloody chance.’

  And so it was a good four drinks later that Mac, appalled by an insultingly miserable rendition of his own ‘Welcome to the Circus’ by the searingly out-of-tune owner of the village Past It (Antiques and Ephemera) shop, found himself on a stage once more, wondering, this time, why he didn’t have as much breath as he used to in the days when he’d sung to much vaster audiences. Bloody age, he thought again rather dispiritedly, as he acknowledged polite, but hardly rapturous, applause.

  ‘Well, that went down very averagely,’ Mac commented to Al.

  ‘Mmm. Not bad. But a bloke behind me said you were supposed to give your own name, not the name of the original artist.’

  Lottie burst out laughing. ‘They didn’t believe it was you!’ she said.

  Mac was feeling all wrong. What Lottie had said hadn’t really gone in. He also felt as if not enough air had gone in either – he needed to get outside to breathe. And the room wasn’t as focused as it should be. He hadn’t had that much, enough but not enough to feel this unbalanced. He felt slightly queasy and didn’t want the last drops of beer. ‘Ready to go, Lottie? I think we’ve done our bit here. Shall we?’

  ‘Oh come on then, you miserable old git. You’re only pissed off because you’re not going to win.’

  The winner was going to be the man who thought he was Elvis. Al’s opinion was that any Karaoke was always going to be won by a person who thought they were Elvis, even when, in this case, they were short, tubby, bald and could make ‘Crying in the Chapel’ something to laugh long and loud at. Lottie said goodbye to Al and started to make her way to the door. Mac went to follow but his feet didn’t seem to want to move. Either he was lurching strangely or the room was tilting. The last thing he heard before his eyes closed against the greasy floral carpet was the voice of Mr Antiqu
es and Ephemera close by his ear saying, ‘Not just pissed, is he? What’s his name, for the ambulance?’

  Then Al: ‘Bernie MacIntyre.’

  ‘Yeah, right. I don’t think so, mate. Nothing like him. He was rubbish, singing, just now.’

  Then nothing.

  * * *

  She’d been right. It was a very, very stupid idea and it had got ludicrously out of hand. Clover now shifted slightly on the bed and wondered where her knickers were. This had been like too-fast teenage sex, though completely lacking the urgent, edgy thrill that she recalled from her own teen years. She was a tangle of clothes and limbs and embarrassment and feeling a deep, deep wish that she was pretty much anywhere else than here in this single man’s über-pad, on his low-lit, low-level suede-edged bed. Paddling among sharks would be preferable, or sky-diving into a thick fog. Anything, anywhere. So this was what it was like; this was a no-frills, one-off fling with no emotion and no commitment. Well, you could keep it. Give her Sean’s generous sexual warmth and cheerful cowboy whooping any day.

  ‘Oh bay-beee,’ Harry groaned beside her, a voice that came straight from a cheap porn movie. God. Clover gritted her teeth and hoped he wasn’t going to close in for post-coital snuggling. If she could bring herself to speak, she’d love to tell him he could by-pass that pseudo-lovey aftermath bit and go straight to the scene where he went to make her a cup of coffee so she could grab her bag and vanish out of the front door, never to see him again. Whatever she’d hoped to prove, whichever stupid ‘what you can do, I can do’ trip she was hoping to compete on with Sean, it hadn’t worked. This was as dire as it got. Why she hadn’t stopped at the point where Harry (while doing the ‘how about a tour of the apartment?’ bit – to be expected, she supposed, from an estate agent) had first slid her onto the bed and started nuzzling at her neck like a foal after sugarlumps, she’d never know. Sometimes, good manners were such a curse. She would have to make sure her daughters learned there were limits to the concept of being polite.

  Clover moved slightly and rubbed the back of her neck. The clasp on her necklace had been digging in painfully, for Harry’s idea of a perfect grip was to shove his hands under the pillow and scoop it up around her ears so her head felt squashed to the point of near-suffocation. He’d probably put her wrigglings of protest down to writhings of passion. What had that been about? she wondered, speculating on how close she might have come to being totally smothered. Possibly it was lucky she hadn’t been far roused from inert passivity. Maybe distaste had saved her life. Harry, who had blithely floundered on, oblivious to her non-participation, quite possibly wouldn’t have noticed if he’d actually killed her; he had surely been absent from the school sex lesson where they did the bit about girls liking to join in too.

  ‘Coffee, sweetie?’ Harry murmured in Clover’s ear.

  ‘Mm. Please, that’d be great.’ Good. At last, a chance to get out.

  ‘Kitchen’s through there.’ He pointed through the darkness in the general direction of the hallway.

  Through there? Clover sat up abruptly and retrieved her watch from the table beside her. Then she scrambled off the bed and picked up her bag and jacket and quickly slid her feet into her shoes. How lucky, as it turned out, that in his school-boyish eagerness Harry hadn’t got round to removing more than the absolute minimum of her clothing.

  ‘You want me to make it?’ she asked.

  ‘Only fair, darling. I did all the work.’ Even in the half-dark, she could see the smirk.

  ‘True,’ she said, heading for the door, ‘all by yourself. But then I expect you’re used to that.’

  Slam. The front door made a good loud clunk and Clover raced down the stairs to her car.

  ‘Home, home,’ she murmured to herself as she leaped into the car, started the engine and hurtled down the road back towards the A3. What a waste of an evening, what a stupid experiment, she thought. And a waste of good knickers too, for they were still in Harry’s bedroom, kicked into the dust beneath his bed. No way would she ever want to see them, or him, again.

  FIFTEEN

  CONSIDERING HOW MUCH bad news and anxiety hospitals tend to hold, Lottie thought the decor in the waiting area was insultingly upbeat, as if it was trying to convey a jovial ‘Cheer up, it might never happen’.

  Surely, if you were on the premises either pacing about being a worried relative or flat-out in a cubicle, then ‘it’ patently already had. What were all these nerve-racked people, fidgeting on the edges of their seats, supposed to make of the candy-pink walls, the bright orange chairs and the floor that was a chequerboard of red (to hide blood-stains?) and sky blue? The place looked like a playgroup’s venue of choice and was surely far too hectic for keeping the customers calm and reassured. Were they supposed to think, Ooh that’s nice. I feel so relaxed and happy here? Not very likely, was it, if, like Lottie, you were quite possibly about to hear that the person you loved most in the world was ready to be wheeled to the mortuary?

  ‘They don’t tell you anything. Why won’t they tell me? I’d rather know.’ Lottie sat on the tatty orange chair beside Al and put the plastic cup of tea on the floor beside her. She couldn’t hold it – her hands were shaking too much.

  ‘I suppose they’ll come and tell you when there’s something to tell.’ Al was looking pale and frightened. He kept gazing longingly at the exit doors, clearly desperate for Ilex or Clover to turn up and take over his stake-out duty. Lottie remembered that when they’d travelled with the band, Al had always been terrified of anything medical, was always the last of the crew to get vital vaccinations done, having to be coaxed to the surgery by the drummer and by George who would haul him, still struggling, into the building, one each side of him like club bouncers in reverse. She hoped he wouldn’t faint. He easily might if a patient staggered in, covered in blood. That would make one more to panic about, for would it be a faint or another … what? Heart attack? Stroke? What was it Mac had had? Either of those options seemed way too grown-up. Surely Mac was still a young, vital man, really? The many years they’d been together seemed compressed, somehow, as if only a few brief months had passed since that Roundhouse night when they’d first met. Vividly, she recalled asking him where he’d got his exquisite flowery shirt. (Granny Takes a Trip, King’s Road, hand-made.)

  She hoped they’d done the right thing. The barman at the Feathers had pushed through the crush and shoved a tiny aspirin under Mac’s tongue, claiming they were kept in the till for exactly this reason; they were probably past their best-before, he’d said, apologetically, but couldn’t do any harm and might save his life in the case of heart failure. Or, Lottie now wondered, it might be just one more complication, the one thing he absolutely shouldn’t have had. If it was a brain haemorrhage he’d had, wouldn’t thinning his blood still further be the worst thing they could have done? The paramedics in the ambulance hadn’t seemed too stressed, but as they saw this kind of collapse (presumably) on a daily basis, maybe that didn’t mean anything. The fact that Mac had collapsed in a pub though, that wasn’t great, Lottie thought. There seemed to be a general bias about that. A presumption that if you were on licensed premises and you fell over, then you must be completely rat-arsed. She hoped the medics (wherever they were) were checking Mac for more than just blood-alcohol levels. Mac hadn’t been completely unconscious, which was apparently a good thing, and didn’t seem to be in unbearable pain, apart from the terrifying shortness of breath; both he and Lottie becoming more fearful by the second that each of these shallow, painful breaths would be his last.

  The accident and emergency department was a busy one, considering it was only a Wednesday night. A girl in a nearby cubical was sobbing constantly, in spite of a kindly nurse’s attempts to reassure her. Lottie tried not to speculate that perhaps she’d lost a baby, or been told a lump really was something to worry about. A pair of Goth teenagers clung to each other on chairs beside the reception desk, the expressions of all-out terror on their pale faces contrasting bizarrely with their
black, spiked hair, purple lipstick and kohl-eyed make-up. A man with his arm in a sling was wincing every time someone walked past, possibly terrified of drunks carelessly meandering, falling on his shattered limb.

  ‘I couldn’t work here,’ Al murmured, his knee drumming up and down in agitation. ‘How do people stand it, dealing with all this pain every day?’

  ‘I don’t have a clue,’ Lottie told him. ‘But thank God they do.’

  At last. Clover. Where the hell had she been? When Lottie and Mac had left Holbrook House that evening it had been full of people. When she’d phoned home from the hospital, there seemed to be only Sorrel and Gaz on the premises, babysitting the two sleeping children and with no idea where either Ilex or Clover had vanished to. She’d always insisted to them, back in the days when they’d lived at home, how important it was to tell someone where they’d be. Just in case. It wasn’t enough to have mobile phones – what use was one of those if the battery was down or it had switched itself off in a bag, as Clover’s seemed to have done?

  Lottie watched her daughter hurtle nervously through the automatic doors as if expecting them to snap shut and cut her in half.

  ‘Mum! What’s happened? On my way home I phoned Sorrel to check on the girls and she said Dad was in here, all collapsed! Is he OK?’ Clover’s face was twisted with anguish, but even so, Lottie couldn’t help noticing she was wearing the kind of make-up that was for serious going out. And the shoes … weren’t they her precious last-birthday Jimmy Choos? Lottie pulled Clover down to the chair beside her and hugged her close. She felt shivery and could feel tears on their way.

  ‘I don’t know, Clover. He was in the pub, singing …’