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First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Viking
This edition published in 2017 by Transworld Digital
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Lissa Evans 2002
Cover image © Shutterstock
Cover design by Beci Kelly/TW
Lissa Evans has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473543454
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For Keith
With thanks to Gerard Reissmann, who kept me right on the medical bits, to family and friends, for putting up with my regular defeatist moans during the writing, to Georgia Garrett, for her unparalleled guidance, both on and off the page, to Juliet Annan, whose enthusiasm and encouragement is unflagging, to Clare Parkinson, so meticulous and thoughtful, and to David Hastings, for coming up with ‘Hung and Heavy’.
The estate agent’s letter was one of a handful that dropped onto the mat on a mild September morning. Fran, still in her socks, passed the bathroom where her brother was clearing his nasal passages with a series of avian honks, and padded down the stairs to the hall. She sifted through the post on her way to the kitchen, binning the junk, dropping Peter’s copies of Home Plumber and Journal of Health and Safety onto the table and hesitating over a fat airmail letter postmarked Denmark. She pinched the edge to confirm that it held more than the usual sheaf of folded paper and, swayed by curiosity, opened it and teased out a small photograph. It was a close-up of a cornflower growing beside a dusty footpath and the scrawl on the back read: Fran, this speedwell is as blue – but no bluer – than your eyes. She looked at the photo again and frowned slightly. It was quite definitely a cornflower; she could even see the characteristic pseudo-radiate capitula.
She tucked the unread pages into her bag for later and, switching on the kettle, stood for a while with the other letter unopened in her hand. It was in a nasty, flimsy Lion Brand envelope with a second-class stamp and a big smudge on the back, where someone had pressed on the flap to make the cheap glue hold. Eighteen months ago, when she and Peter had bought the house from Brown and Baddeley, all their correspondence from the firm had been typed on creamy, textured paper, almost as thick as cardboard, and the folder they kept it in had eventually split under the strain. This letter drooped limply in her grasp, and only the hand-stamped motto – Your Home is in our Hearts – was unchanged. She stuck a finger under the flap and felt the same queasy anticipation that had preceded opening her A Level results.
She hadn’t wanted a valuation; she knew it could only be dreadful, but Peter, with his usual formality, had insisted that they stuck to Paragraph 4 of their original agreement, the one stating that ‘eighteen months after purchase, the current value of 33 Stapleton Road should be ascertained and if either or both of the parties so wish the house re-introduced onto the market.’ The wording had been courtesy of a solicitor friend of Peter’s and the agreement amicably drawn up during the nine days that elapsed between exchanging contracts and watching the property market plummet into a death spiral.
The kettle clicked off while she was still hesitating, and with a surge of cowardice she decided to grant herself three minutes’ grace; she would read the letter once she had a mug of tea in her hand. She filled the pot and wiped a swathe of condensation from the kitchen window. Just a few yards away, on the other side of the garden wall, her neighbour was hanging out a row of huge shirts, doubling the sleeves over the line to prevent them dragging on the ground. As Fran watched idly it occurred to her that Iris had been living in that same downstairs flat for fifteen years. She looked at the envelope again; it was possible, she realized, it was really, horribly, possible that the contents might condemn her to a similar fate.
‘Fran!’
It was a muffled call. She looked up to see Iris waving and pointing.
‘What?’ she mouthed.
Iris pointed again, indicating something high on the wall of the house. Heart sinking, Fran chucked the envelope on the table and opened the back door.
‘Have you seen your roof?’ asked Iris, as soon as she was outside.
Face braced for the shock, Fran looked up.
During the night a length of guttering had come loose from the eaves and was hanging down in a giant diagonal, like a slide for sparrows, the lower end resting snugly on the bath overflow pipe. A sludge of ancient leaf mould had dripped from the broken section, forming a stinking blot on the wall, and beneath it on the concrete lay an old nest that had landed intact and upright. It contained the tail end of a mummified mouse.
‘Tremendous,’ said Fran, flatly. It was only a month since a chunk of her bedroom windowsill had fallen off, and not much more than that since her brother had put one of his size twelves through a bathroom floorboard. Like a very old lady who has never seen a doctor, their house was disintegrating piece by piece. All their DIY – all their hammering and gluing and slaving and fiddling and following the instructions over fifteen illustrated weekly parts – had merely constituted so much first aid; it could surely only be a matter of time before one of the major organs failed. Or possibly the whole building would suddenly implode like the house at the end of Poltergeist, leaving a pulsating black void strewn with corpses. At least it would be quick, she thought, at least it would spare them the current relentless decline.
‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,’ said Iris, resuming her shirt-hanging.
Fran shrugged, resignedly. ‘That’s next weekend sorted, anyway.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a pigeon flutter down to the blackcurrants and she smacked her hands sharply to frighten it. It clattered off, and the black cat from number 39 bolted out of the broccoli and leapt over the back wall.
‘Vermin,’ said Fran. ‘I should get one of those bird-scarer shotguns that automatically fires every ten minutes. I suppose the neighbours might complain though.’ Iris laughed through a mouthful of pegs. She was dressed for work, in a longish, darkish skirt teamed with a paleish, vaguely crumpled shirt that sported a brown smear on the collar. Fran pointed it out.
‘Oh Lord. I bet it’s Marmite.’ She held out the collar and tried to focus on the stain, just below her chin. ‘And I ought to iron this top really. Does it look terrible?’ Fran hesitated. ‘I’ll iron it,’ said Iris. She yawned and ran a hand through her hair, and then patted it down as though she’d remembered she wasn’t supposed to.
‘Mu-um.’
‘What?’ asked Iris, over her shoulder. Fran saw the pale, sleep-creased face of one of the twins look round the back door.
‘We’re out of cereal.’
‘Look in the cupboard behind the pasta.’
‘It’s their eighteenth on Sunday, isn’t it?’ asked Fran, suddenly remembering.
‘Saturday.’ Iris hung up the last shirt, veiling herself from Fran’s sight.
‘Mu-um. There’s none there.’
‘I’ll get a card,’ said Fran. ‘Cards, rather.’
‘Mu-um? There’s none there.’
‘I’d better go,’ said Iris, lifting a shirt-sleeve and looking at Fran through the gap. ‘Your courgettes look lovely, incidentally.’ She let the sleeve drop again and a couple of moments later Fran heard her say ‘Look, just behind the spaghetti,’ with barely a trace of impatience.
The courgettes did look lovely, thought Fran, snapping off a strand of fennel to chew and taking a moment to admire her produce. Over the course of a year she had turned a sad little stretch of balding grass into a square of textbook fecundity, and it had been galling when the valuer’s sole comment on the garden had been ‘no lawn’. She winkled out a couple of snails that were hiding among the broccoli florets and threw them against the wall – a quick, organic death and a satisfying noise to boot – and then, unable to postpone it any longer, turned back to the house.
Probably the only advantage of 33 Stapleton Road, indeed probably the only selling point still remaining, was that a bus stop stood only twenty yards from the front gate. It was served by the 92A, which started in the City and ground uphill through Dalston and Tottenham to the green edge of London that still smudged the map between the North Circular and the M25.
For the first half of her journey, Fran sat staring out of the window, still trying to absorb the contents of the estate agent’s letter. The bus was full of schoolchildren, and beside her sagged a teenage boy whose lardy buttocks restricted her to a tiny section of the seat and whose enormous voice, raised in conversation with a friend three rows in front, seemed to fill the whole upper deck.
On the High Street the shops were just starting to open. There was a breakfast queue outside the twenty-four-hour fried-chicken takeaway cum minicab office, the Watchtower sellers had taken up position in the doorway of Iceland and the man with the orange lady’s coat and the airport trolley was already sitting outside the British Legion with a can of Strongbow.
‘Your face, right,’ shouted the boy next to her to his friend, ‘your face, MY ARSE.’
They crawled past the blackened shell of what had first been a Pound Store, then a charity shop and finally, briefly, Deelite Electrical Goods, where Fran had once bought a suspiciously cheap cassette player made by a company she’d never heard of. By the time the rewind button had jammed in the ‘on’ position – three days after purchase – the shop had already burned down. ‘Insurance company “has doubts” about origin of Deelite Fire’ as the local paper had put it. She’d binned the player.
At the Point Break snooker hall, the bus emptied, and a river of black blazers poured along the pavement towards the gates of Abalene Grove Comprehensive. The remaining passengers seemed to expand with a sigh, and Fran, unable to face brooding any longer about her future in Dalston, took Duncan’s letter from her bag and smoothed out the six closely written pages.
Dear Fran,
Low, dark hills – deep woods – shifting cloud-shapes in still pools – a white gate, painfully bright against the tangled undergrowth – can you see Jutland as I’m seeing it?
She had been to Denmark, once, on a field trip, and her chief memory was of how tidy the countryside had been, and how expensive the ice cream.
I’ve been camping at a dairy farm, rising at dawn to capture the first threads of the sun as they weave the day’s new light, and the cloud-puffs of the cattle’s breath as those gentle beasts watch me with unblinking eyes. My third eye – my camera – blinks only when I ask it to – a steady friend, who keeps watching even when the beauty makes me turn aside.
There was a lot more of this sort of stuff. Fran speed-read through to find something more concrete.
I miss you, Fran, I miss your body next to mine and your small, cold feet curled beneath you. I miss your stubborn face and your sun-scrubbed cheeks and the level blue of your gaze. I miss the curve of your back and the rough skin of your practical hands. I want to hold those hands and scour them across me, I want to
‘Scuse me.’ She budged up slightly to allow a cadaverous, rather trembly man to sit down. He spent some time shifting around in the seat, arranging himself, and then lifted an aged Boots bag onto his lap and started to look through it, emitting the while little plosive sounds between pursed lips, like a pan starting to boil.
She returned to the letter.
I want to hold those hands and scour them across me, I want to lick the salty sweat from your breasts and feel your nipples like raspberries against my tongue. I want to taste the
‘Prick.’ The man beside her was starting to form whole words. ‘Prick. Prick. I gotta prick.’ He said them briskly and without any particular emphasis, as if reciting a telephone number. ‘Prick, prick, that’s my prick.’ The bag rustled ominously.
I want to hold those hands and scour them
‘Prick, prick, balls, prick.’
I want to hold those
‘Prick, prick, prick, prick, prick, prickprickprickprick …’ The rustling started to speed up.
‘Excuse me,’ said Fran, loudly and coldly, pushing past him and trying not to look at what the bag might hold. He barely paused in his rhythm, and she turned her back on him and went downstairs with what she hoped was dignified haste.
There were no seats on the bottom deck, and she held on to a rail, stuffing Duncan’s letter back into her bag and bracing herself with one hand as the bus rounded the corner by Safeway’s. She glanced automatically over to the service alley between the supermarket and Billo Shoes, through which it was possible to glimpse her raspberry canes arrayed beyond the chain-link fence. They weren’t there. She strained towards the window, but could see only the side of the hen house, normally invisible from this angle. The bus lurched forward again, but just before the view disappeared she caught a glimpse of a large pig running across the gap.
She arrived at the gates of Hagwood Urban Farm at a run, her face red with a mixture of exertion and fury. Claud, the farm manager, had obviously been hovering by the car park in anticipation of her arrival, and he intercepted her, hands outstretched pacifically. ‘He’s in. Porky’s back in and it’s … it’s –’ he paused, clearly straining for a phrase that wasn’t a direct lie ‘– it’s not as bad as it looks. I think we’ll find that with a real group effort we can …’
Fran dodged round him and jogged past the classroom, the hen house and the compost heap before halting abruptly in front of her domain. The vegetable patch was smashed flat. Everything that had previously been vertical was now horizontal. Everything that was now horizontal had bits missing. A row of pumpkins looked like the aftermath of an alien road accident and the ground was sprinkled with a few tiny, saliva-flecked pieces of carrot. The lettuces had simply disappeared, as if sucked up by a giant hoover. There was a large, ragged gap in her newly planted hawthorn hedge and the wicker hurdle that had previously bordered the pond was now bent in half at the bottom of it. A long muddy smear ran the length of the wild-flower meadow, punctuated at one end by a flattened red bobble hat.
Claud appeared at her elbow and she threw him a pinched glance. ‘Which bit, precisely, isn’t as bad as it looks?’
He looked trapped, but smiled sweatily. ‘Well, obviously at first glance it’s pretty shocking but I think with a bit of work we can pull together and … and straighten a lot of it … straighten quite a bit of it …’ Fran picked up a snapped stem of Swiss chard and held it directly in front of him.
‘Well, er … obviously not, er, that er …’ his voice trailed away.
Fran chucked the stem to one side and stood with her arms folded, struggling to hold back tears of frustration. To visiting school parties, her end of the farm was known as ‘the boring bit’. On a sensation scale, with the size of Porky’s genitalia at the top, the baby ducks a close second, and the smell of the manure heap a hilarity-inducing third, the average ten-year-old could barely remain conscious when confronted with a bunch of plants. In her teaching sessions, she sometimes felt as if she were pitching the plot of a European art film to a group of Hollywood movie executives: they wanted sex, blood and car chases, and she was trying to sell them thought-provoking dialogue. The way to do it, she had discovered, was to wrongfoot them, to present botany and ecology with the degree of brio and the elastic range of imagery more often used by sports commentators. It was sometimes exhausting, but part of her reward was the wall of felt-tipped pictures in the staffroom that showed the sun issuing instructions to the vegetables through a megaphone almost as many times as they showed Porky weeing.
She could hear him now, above the roar of traffic on the North Circular, grunting with contentment as he scratched himself against the fence. At her elbow, Claud shifted anxiously as he waited for her reaction.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked.
He stalled for time. ‘You mean er …?’
‘I mean how – did – the – pig – get – out – of – the – pen?’ she enunciated, separating the words with great clarity.
Claud took his time replying. His managerial style, if he could be said to have one, was that he wanted everyone to be friends, all the time. He removed his glasses, cleaned them on the bottom of his t-shirt, replaced them and cleared his throat. Fran stood with arms folded.
‘There was a … a misunderstanding.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I thought that the weakened stretch of fencing had been mended, whereas, in fact, almost certainly due to some kind of mix-up, there was a –’
‘You mean that you’d told someone to mend it and they didn’t?’
‘Well, it all depends on whether you view the word “told” as an appropriate –’
‘Who?’
Claud shuffled miserably. ‘I don’t think we need a scapegoat for this particular –’
‘I’m not asking for a scapegoat, I’m asking who was told to mend it and didn’t.’
‘I’m really not sure we want to –’ A police car howled by, making speech impossible for some moments.
Fran changed tack. ‘OK. Was it Costas?’ she asked in a reasonable voice, naming the most reliable person on the farm.
Claud was startled into frankness. ‘Costas? No, of course it wasn’t.’
‘No, I didn’t think so. You’d have told me if it had been someone competent or useful, because they’d certainly have had some kind of excuse.’ She impaled Claud with a look. ‘So it must have been someone who’s a total waste of space.’
He opened and shut his lips a couple of times, but nothing came out.
‘I’ll kill him.’ She turned and marched towards the staffroom, Claud bleating ineffectually behind her.
Barry had the foresight to look slightly worried when Fran banged the door open. He was by the sink, wiping mud from his waterproof jacket with the washing-up sponge, his curly hair haloed by the morning sun.
‘Hiya,’ he said, cautiously. ‘I was just going to make you a mug of tea. I thought you might need one,’ he added, with a humorous little lift of the eyebrows.
Fran pushed the door shut behind her, blocking Claud’s worried face from view. ‘I’d like a word with you.’
‘Sure.’ He smiled, exuding his usual sleepy charm – the sleepy charm that Fran had stupidly assumed was jet lag when he’d been interviewed for the post of Agricultural Education Assistant Grade 5. He’d just come back from a holiday in Australia, and it had seemed a reasonable explanation for his excessively relaxed approach to the panel’s questions. Unfortunately it had turned out that he was always like that.
She sat down, and gestured brusquely towards another chair.
‘Sure you wouldn’t like a cuppa first?’ He waggled a mug at her.
‘No.’
‘Right.’ He seemed to sense the seriousness of the impending conversation and, sitting down, clasped his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward with an earnest expression, as if auditioning for the role of a social worker.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ said Fran.
‘It’s about Porky, isn’t it?’ He looked at her sympathetically. ‘Yeah, I’m afraid he made a bit of a mess of your veg. We just couldn’t get a grip on him, you see. I must have fallen over about fifteen times, that coat’s never going to be the same again.’ He tried a smile, and then put it away again.
‘And why was Porky out in the first place?’
‘Oh right, right. I see.’ He nodded, as if everything had come clear. ‘Yeah, I just hadn’t had time to get round to that fence, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, Fran. Claud asked me to do a poster for the autumn open day and then there was that kid yesterday I had to take for a tetanus jab and then I had to get off early for my girlfriend’s birthday so …’ He shrugged ruefully. ‘You know how it is when things get in the way.’ He looked at her, apparently waiting for an understanding laugh of assent.
Fran felt a neurone snap somewhere deep within her brain. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Barry,’ she said, with a vehemence that made him jump, ‘don’t be so ridiculous. An enormous great pig has completely wrecked my section of the farm and it’s all your fault because you’re a stupid, lazy, spaced-out berk.’ The last word was a shout and as she motored on she felt a certain pleasure at the shock on his face. ‘You know, when I think of all the students we interviewed for your job I could bloody well weep. We could have thrown a stone in a –’ she cast around bullishly and spotted a poster above the sink ‘– donkey sanctuary and hit something with more ability and common sense than you.’
Barry recoiled slightly, as if he’d been punched.
‘You’ve been given chance after chance but you think just because you’ve got a nice smile you don’t have to do any bloody work. Everything you touch is botched. You can’t lift a potato without needing a fifteen-minute tea break. The least you could be doing now is trying to restore some of the damage instead of sitting here cleaning your bloody coat like a member of the landed gentry. God, the work I put into that garden …’ She gulped for breath and tried to restore her breathing to a normal rhythm. Barry sat as if stuffed. ‘So why aren’t you out there? Go on, get out there.’
Like a very old man, Barry got to his feet. Under the remains of the tan his face was pale, and his eyes flinched away from Fran’s as he passed her. Following him to the door, she watched him tramp down the long, sloping parallelogram of the farm, past the hen house where Spike was collecting eggs, under the flyover, whizzing with cars like a vast abacus, and towards the dented patch of green where Porky had frolicked.
Fran glanced at Claud, hovering beside the boot scraper, and then looked away. Down by the pond she could see Barry starting to fish for the hurdle.
Claud eased himself towards her. ‘I’m not sure …’ he began.
‘I know,’ said Fran, tiredly, leaning against the doorpost. ‘I’d had a bad morning, even before I got here.’
‘He looked a bit upset.’
‘I’m a bit upset.’
‘Even so, I think that maybe …’
A passing juggernaut gave a great blast of its air horn. Claud tried again.
‘I think that maybe you should have a … a calmer chat with him. After all, it wasn’t as if he … he deliberately allowed Porky to …’
Fran nodded, slowly.
‘Perhaps you could make him some tea. Bring it down to the pond and –’
‘Yeah, OK.’
‘Peace offering.’
‘OK.’
‘I think we’ve got some biscuits.’
‘OK, Claud.’
‘Good. Good.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Right … well, all hands on deck for the great restoration. I think first of all I should … er, perhaps call some kind of informal meeting to, er, discuss …’
It was a thin afternoon for tourists in Trafalgar Square, and the birdseed man, who was wearing thermal gloves and a baseball cap with ‘I Love New York’ on it, sold Spencer two bags of yellow grit for the price of one. He said, ‘It’s your lucky day,’ as he handed them over, and Spencer asked, ‘Starting from when?’ but received no reply. The Square looked rather fine in the low sunlight that streamed along Pall Mall, turning the windows of South Africa House crimson and jewelling the KFC boxes that blew between the fountains.
Spencer positioned himself just under Nelson’s Column, filled both hands with birdseed and held them out at arm’s length, feeling like a combination of the crucified Christ and the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz.
For a moment nothing happened, and then there was a mild commotion in his immediate vicinity and two smartish buff-coloured pigeons landed on his right hand and started devouring the seeds with cartoon-like velocity. Next a hideously diseased, possibly leprous, one-legged grey pigeon landed on his left hand, balanced precariously on its warty remaining foot and quite deliberately pecked Spencer on the wrist. He shook his hand violently to dislodge it, dropping most of the seed as he did so, and suddenly every pigeon in Greater London was in the air, heading towards him like a bomber squadron, wheels down, flaps set, tails flattened for landing. The sky was black with bodies, and the world only fitfully visible behind a screen of wings. He cringed as pigeons banked and swooped and landed and took off again; the ground was hidden beneath a shifting carpet of feathery backs and the air vibrated with the throaty calls that he had always found pleasantly soothing, and which now sounded like the rallying cries of an army crazed with bloodlust.
Covering his head with his arms, he ducked and ran. The carpet exploded into a wall of wings and then he was through, and safe, and all at once aware that he was being videoed by a party of Japanese pensioners. He counterfeited a casual wave and walked away, trying to look like someone who was really enjoying himself.
His other assignment was within easy reach. The London Pride (‘Sixty Sights in Sixty Minutes’) was a double-decker bus painted in an ill-advised combination of yellow and purple. It departed at twenty-minute intervals from just outside the National Gallery, employing a very old man in a fake Beefeater costume to stand on the pavement shouting, ‘London Pride, HAWL the Sights,’ at passers-by.
Spencer hesitated for a while, overwhelmed by inertia at the prospect. There were only three passengers on the lower deck, and two of them had their eyes closed. The third, a small child, stared fixedly through the window at Spencer, her finger up her nose to the second joint.
On some invisible signal the Beefeater changed his shout to ‘London Pride, departing in FUHIVE minutes’ and the engine started. Spencer climbed on board very slowly.
‘How much is it, please?’
‘Three pounds downstairs five pounds upper deck,’ said the driver in a monotone, his eyes fixed on a far and invisible horizon.
‘Five pounds, please.’ He placed a note on the change tray.
‘No drinks or ice creams, no standing up while the bus is in motion, no getting off except at designated stops.’
‘Right.’
‘Commentary is in English.’
‘Fine.’
‘In the event of traffic problems the company reserves the right to alter the route.’
‘OK.’ A green ticket whirred from the machine by the cash tray. ‘Anything else I should know?’ asked Spencer. ‘Any hints or tips?’
The driver swung his head round with the weighty slowness of a JCB and looked at him through half-closed eyes.
‘Just checking,’ said Spencer. ‘Thanks.’
His favourite seats – or rather Mark’s favourite seats – the ones right at the front that gave the illusion of driving the bus, were already occupied by a group of Americans – west coast queens by the look of them, tanned, fit, gorgeous and dressed in the kind of subtly expensive colours that people who regularly sit on London bus upholstery know not to wear. One of them was in the middle of an anecdote, and Spencer was given only the swiftest of inspections, five pairs of eyes registering cursory approval, before he sat down a few rows back and the storyteller picked up the thread.
Spencer hoped they appreciated their privileged position. He had once witnessed Mark paying two small boys a pound each to move, just so he could sit there and enjoy his usual thrill of going round comers six feet ahead of the front wheels, the nose of the bus apparently veering psychotically into the opposite lane before swinging round in a majestic curve.
‘London Pride departing in THUREE minutes.’
There was a five-pence coin under the seat in front. Spencer picked it up and used the milled edge to scratch at a crusty stain on his left shoe. Earlier in the afternoon he’d been stitching up a cut on a drunk’s hand when the man had flopped his head over the side of the couch and been copiously sick all over the floor, the wheels of the dressings trolley, and Spencer’s Birkenstocks. He’d run them under the tap but had obviously missed a few spots. In fact now he looked at them closely, he realized that the laces would have to go through the washing machine before they were presentable. As would his trousers, which had a pink stain just below the left knee, incurred when he’d accidentally knelt in a puddle of Hibiscrub, the lurid antiseptic soap of which they used gallons in Casualty. He’d been in the process of scrabbling around on the floor helping to pick up a pile of X-rays which had fallen off the reception desk and slid in all directions.
‘Better get them in order, or we’ll be ripping the spleen out of someone with a sprained ankle,’ as his consultant, Mrs Spelko, had remarked jovially. Since she had a voice that could vibrate lamps in the next room, there had been a volley of worried looks between the waiting patients.
It was the kind of remark that meant that Spencer, now into the second month of his contract, was learning more about damage limitation than emergency treatment. Mrs Spelko was tiring to work with; she was wide and vigorous and brought extra noise and panic to a department that was already lacking in neither. There was an easy brutality about her, as of someone who’d learned their bedside manner on the battlefield, dipping bleeding stumps into hot tar, and when she surged through the waiting room, patients leaned away as if avoiding the scythes on her chariot wheels. It was her voice, though, that caused most of the trouble; she seemed to lack an internal volume control, so that all statements, however mild in intent, emerged with booming clarity. Thus ‘Dr Carroll, you smell of vomit’ and ‘Can someone get rid of that idiot in cubicle seven’ could both be heard within a ten-metre radius. The man in cubicle seven – a fretter, rather than an idiot, who had unshiftably decided that a pulled muscle was a heart attack – had turned out to be a solicitor’s clerk, and Spencer was unsure whether the apology he’d managed to wring from Mrs Spelko (‘if I had to apologize to every stupid patient I’d be here all day’) would be sufficient to prevent litigation.
‘London Pride departing in WUHUN minute.’
The front row of the bus began a noisy count-down.
‘British seconds,’ shouted one of them, ‘remember they’re much slower than US seconds.’
Spencer dropped the coin on the floor again and looked out of the window at the weaving lights of the rush-hour traffic circling Trafalgar Square. It counted as the first sight of the promised sixty, he supposed, a tiny tick on the list.
‘Fifteen … fourteen … thirteen …’
Spencer heard the slap of the doors closing downstairs and the bus eased forward into the stream of traffic. There was a cheer from the front row, and then ironic boos as it stopped immediately at a red light. ‘England’s full of goddam reds,’ one of them shouted in a John Wayne voice.
The pedestrians streamed across, the amber light began flashing, and then the roar of a motorbike tore past the bus, changing almost at once to a scream of rubber followed by the horrible, distinctive crump of metal and glass colliding. The bus, which had just started forward, stopped with a jerk, and Spencer glimpsed the riderless bike scraping an arc on the tarmac just in front of them.
There was a collective, horrified ‘Whoah’ from the front seat, and then Spencer, mentally gritting his teeth, was hurrying down the stairs. As he flipped the emergency exit lever on the bus door, the driver shouted ‘Oi’ and for a moment he heard a stampede of feet above him.
A crowd had already assembled, and he pushed himself to the front with a series of ‘excuse me’s. There was a lot of shouting going on, but in clearly defined strands, like the layers of a soundtrack. The ground was strewn with plastic shards and the bike lay with its front wheel tucked under the stove-in boot of a black cab; beside it knelt the cabbie, swearing monotonously. In the centre of the road stood a tiny elderly nun, leaning on two sticks and repeating the word ‘Maniac’ over and over again in a clear but tinny voice, like a stuck record. The biker lay prone with his head almost under one of the wheels of the bus, but he was clutching one of his knees with both hands and a reassuring stream of muffled obscenities was audible from beneath the helmet. A woman squatted by him, fiddling with the visor.
‘I’m a doctor,’ said Spencer, kneeling beside her.
‘So am I,’ she said, and lifted the plastic shield.
‘My fucking knee,’ said the biker, clearly.
‘Hi there.’ It was four of the Americans from the bus, arriving in a pale flurry of cashmere and leather.
‘Hello,’ said Spencer, confused.
‘We’re doctors,’ said the one with the floor-length camel coat, ‘can we help?’
‘I know it’s fucking broken. I don’t need six fucking doctors to tell me.’
‘I think we’ve got it covered, thanks,’ said Spencer.
‘Oh, OK.’ The spokesman straightened up amiably.
‘Need a hand?’ A plethoric man in a double-breasted suit was waving from the second row of spectators. ‘I’m a GP.’
‘Just fuck off.’
‘We’re fine thanks,’ said Spencer.
‘No skin off my nose,’ said the man, disappearing into the crowd again.
‘Is it hurting anywhere else or is it just the knee?’
‘Maniac.’
‘Fucking leave me alone,’ shouted the biker, desperately, at the little nun. She had shuffled over and was poking one of her sticks at his midriff. Spencer caught the rubber ferrule before it could do any damage, but with surprising energy she pulled it out of his grasp. He caught it again. She used the other stick to hit him on the knuckles. He grabbed the other stick as well. There was an impasse.
‘Tenner on the nun,’ shouted someone in the crowd.
‘Excuse me, sister.’ The fifth American had emerged from behind the bus and was extending a hand pacifically towards her. ‘Do you think you ought to come and sit down? You’ve had a very nasty shock.’ She turned a whiskery face towards him.
‘What?’
‘You’ve had a shock,’ he repeated, more loudly, and in what Spencer realized was an English accent. ‘You should come and sit down.’ She looked at him, doubtfully, her jaw trembling, and he placed a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he said.
The crowd stayed on, but there was no blood and, apart from the appearance of a troop of Danish Venture Scouts with first-aid experience, little drama, until the ambulance emerged unexpectedly along the wide pavement beside St Martin-in-the-Fields, the siren eerily amplified by the high wall, and the blue light beating off the pillars. Spencer stood to one side as the crew scooped the biker onto a stretcher with breezy skill.
‘Busted patella?’ said one, after the woman doctor had spoken to him. ‘You’ll be playing football in a couple of months.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered the biker, subdued. The police had just been over to take his details, and were now huddled with the Americans, one of whom was drawing a diagram.
As the ambulance drew away, Spencer could see the fifth member of their party, the English one, sitting on the steps of St Martin’s beside the nun. Taken in isolation he was clearly not as glossy as the others, and sported a bristly black crew-cut and a Nivenesque moustache. He caught Spencer’s eye and waved, then was obscured for a moment as a yellow-and-purple bus drove between them, venting a huge cloud of exhaust from its rear end. It took Spencer a second or two to realize it was the London Pride.
‘Hey!’ he said, feebly, but the bus had already swung round the corner and headed off towards Pall Mall, the lit upper deck completely empty.
‘I believe the tour-bus driver can be dragged through the courts on a number of counts,’ said Greg conversationally, his personalized ballpoint poised above a notebook. The party was wedged in the corner of a smoky pub on the Strand, all swirly carpets and chipped glass ashtrays, a couple of hundred yards from the site of the accident. With much the same speed and efficiency as the ambulance men had displayed, Spencer had been scooped up by the American party, introduced to each of them, congratulated on his role as Good Samaritan and bought a double vodka.
‘Count one, failure to give a statement to the police after an accident. Count two, theft of property – that is, the burnt-orange scarf which my aged maternal grandmother knitted for me with her own, arthritic hands and which I left draped over the back of the seat. And count three, failure under the trades descriptions act – is that the correct name for it, Miles? –’ the Niven-moustache man nodded ‘– failure under the trades descriptions act to deliver the stated promise of sixty sights in sixty minutes.’
‘We saw one sight in one minute,’ said Miles, ‘so I suppose the ratio was correct.’ He had an occasional twitch, Spencer noticed, a tendency to screw up his eyes and then blink rapidly.
‘I always hated that scarf,’ said Greg’s partner Reuben, a spectacularly handsome blond. ‘I’d say it was worth paying five pounds never to see that scarf again. I might even have paid twenty.’
‘You never told me.’
‘I didn’t want to hurt you, Greg, because I know how sensitive you are about your grandmother’s presents. Besides, if you got rid of it she might have knitted you another one in an even uglier colour.’
‘Oh it all comes tumbling out now …’
Under the laughter, Miles leaned across to Spencer. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, quietly.
‘Yes, fine.’ He’d started to think about how long it was since he’d been in a pub, just sitting and chatting. Months, probably. Maybe as long ago as Easter. ‘Just drifting off a bit.’
‘Doing long hours at the moment?’ Seen in close-up, the moustache was more George Orwell than David Niven.
‘Peculiar hours, really.’ Miles raised his eyebrows interrogatively. ‘I’m working in Casualty, so it’s a shift system – we do a whole day, then a morning, then a whole night, then an afternoon. It’s a clever way of ensuring that we’re all tired, all the time.’
‘So you’re a surgeon?’
‘No, no, thank God,’ said Spencer, horrified at the suggestion. ‘A GP trainee – I start in General Practice in February. This’ll be my last hospital job ever, I hope.’
‘I heard that “thank God”,’ said Reuben accusingly. ‘You realize that if it wasn’t for surgery we wouldn’t be here? We actually met Miles at a surgical conference in Carmel. Admittedly he thought it was just a casual acquaintanceship and didn’t realize that three months later we’d arrive on his doorstep demanding entertainment.’
‘But he’s such a gentleman,’ said the one with the beard, whose name Spencer had forgotten. ‘Never a word of complaint. Not even when he realized we were staying the extra month. And bringing the maid.’
They all laughed and Miles twitched modestly.
‘What sort of surgeon are you?’ asked Spencer.
‘Eyes,’ said Miles. ‘I don’t know anything about legs, so I stayed clear of the accident.’
Spencer stared. Blinky Blaine. It had to be.
‘We’re walking in London at night,’ said Reuben excitedly, as they left the pub. ‘Everyone told us not to do it because it’s supposed to be too dangerous. But look, here we are!’ He waved his hands in mock terror.
‘You’re a bunch of fucking poofs,’ said a passing man.
‘Thanks for the info, Mr Ugly,’ replied Reuben.
‘If you’re going to Piccadilly then the theatre’s on your way, isn’t it?’ asked Miles. He and Spencer were slightly ahead of the others.
‘Mmm,’ said Spencer, distracted. He knew he had to do it. ‘Can I ask you something? You’re not … your surname’s not Blaine, is it?’
‘That’s right,’ said Miles, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because you used to treat a friend of mine.’ And he used to do impressions of you for days afterwards, he didn’t add. ‘I don’t know if you remember him – Mark Avery?’
‘Mark? Oh, of course I remember him.’ Miles blinked, and gave his moustache a stroke. ‘He wasn’t the forgettable sort.’
‘I know,’ said Spencer.
‘I heard he’d died. I was very sorry.’
Spencer felt his eyes begin to fill, as usual. ‘Yeah,’ he said lamely, ‘me too.’
‘How long ago was it?’
‘Four months.’
‘Not long.’
‘No.’
There was a pause, during which his nose began to run in sympathy. He searched ineffectually for a tissue, and was rescued by Miles, who wordlessly passed across a handkerchief. It was the ironed, monogrammed kind, on which it seems sacrilegious to wipe one’s snot, and Spencer dabbed tentatively rather than blew.
‘Thanks.’ He wondered what to do with it; he could hardly give it back.
‘You’re welcome. My mother gives me twelve every Christmas.’
‘Oh, OK. Thanks.’ He tucked it into his pocket and smiled awkwardly. ‘It was the double vodka, I think.’
‘Nothing wrong with a good weep.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I tell myself. About eight times a day.’
‘So how long had you known Mark?’
‘Oh – about ten years now.’ He found himself sighing involuntarily – a deep, almost theatrical exhalation – something he did so often lately that last week he’d spent a fruitless couple of hours rooting through the hospital library trying to find a physiological explanation for the habit.
‘And where did you meet?’
‘An ABBA concert. Such a cliché, I know. I was standing behind him in the choc-ice queue and he needed some change. He was wearing an Agnetha wig and a badge that played the first line of “Fernando”.’
Miles nodded in recognition. ‘I had one of those.’
‘And we were lovers for a while but that didn’t really work out. And then we were friends, and that … lasted.’ He nodded, too many times.
They walked in silence for a while, retracing their steps past Trafalgar Square. Behind them Greg and Reuben were struggling with the harmonization of ‘Feed the Birds’.
‘Mark wasn’t a doctor, was he?’ asked Miles, suddenly.
‘No, a civil servant. Why?’
‘I was just remembering – he always came to see me with a typed list of questions, with the medical terminology absolutely correct, all very well researched. Was that you?’
‘Well, I helped. But he was a great list man. Never happy without a ruled page in front of him. You know the type.’
Miles nodded.
‘In fact …’ Spencer hesitated. Mark was his specialist subject, his favourite topic; given the slightest encouragement, he could talk about him all day, every day, any aspect, any amount of detail. Yet sometimes, mid-monologue, he would detach himself, draw back and wonder whether the listener was actually listening, or whether they were simply indulging a grieving friend, letting him yammer on therapeutically.
‘What?’
He realized that Miles was still waiting for him to continue.
‘Oh, well … he’s the reason I was on that bus at all. He organized this year for me. He said he didn’t want me moping round, so he made out a list of all the things I’d never done in London. I promised to tick them off within twelve months.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, touristy things … Madame Tussaud’s … Harrods Food Hall … the Tower of London … Pie and Mash shop –’
‘You’re kidding!’ Laughter increased the twitch.
‘Oh, I’m barely scraping the surface here. It’s two pages long: Changing of the Guard … Billingsgate fish market … Lord Mayor’s Show … Cockney Pub –’
‘What’s that?’
‘Fake pearly kings playing the old Joanna.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘He said he wanted to break me of my middle-class gay cultural snobbery. And get me out of my flat.’
‘And how many have you done so far?’
‘About half a page.’
‘Any recommendations?’
‘Yes, don’t go and see The Mousetrap. It’s shit.’
Miles laughed and then stopped suddenly, as if bitten. ‘Oh. I just got it.’
‘What?’
‘Mark and Spencer.’ He caught Spencer’s eye. ‘Sorry.’
‘Good to meet you, and many thanks for the display of traditional nun-wrestling,’ said Greg, shaking his hand as they stood amidst the crowd outside Phantom of the Opera.
‘And are you two going to stay in touch?’ asked the bearded one, archly. Spencer glanced at Miles, a bit embarrassed, and then looked away.
‘Spencer knows where I work,’ said Miles, with dignity. ‘And if he wants company when he watches the Changing of the Guard, he can ring me there.’
‘Guards? Changing?’ said Reuben, looking round wildly. ‘Where? And why wasn’t I invited?’
Spencer could hear the phone ringing as he approached the outer door of the thirties mansion block in which he lived. His flat was on the ground floor but by the time he’d fiddled with two sets of keys, the answerphone had clicked on and he entered the living room to the sound of his god-daughter’s piercing voice: ‘Helloo! Spence-a!’ then, aside, ‘There’s no one there,’ and Niall’s voice hissing in the background, ‘Leave a message then.’
Spencer picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Nina, I’m here.’ There was breathing at the other end. ‘It’s really me,’ he said, ‘not the answerphone.’ There was a further pause, and then Niall took the phone.
‘Well you’ve really puzzled her now. Not there/there; she’s completely thrown. (Do you want to say hello to Spencer? No?) She’s off, I’m afraid, no stopping her, straight to the kitchen to see what Nick’s doing. Anyway –’ he took a pause for breath ‘– how are you?’
‘All right.’
‘Only all right?’
‘Well,’ said Spencer cautiously, ‘all right’s quite good on the scale of things, I think.’
‘How’s that list going?’
‘I’ve fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and … well, just the pigeons really, since I last saw you.’
‘Are you up for a bash on Saturday? We thought we’d go to a salsa club. The sitter’s booked. You could stay over, see Nina at breakfast.’
Spencer paused. ‘Can I think about it?’
‘Ah no, that means you won’t come, I know you. Go on, it’ll do you good. It’s only the Cally Road – two stops on the tube and you’re there. Bit of a dance, tip a few beers down you, see those Brazilian boys in their little shorts.’
‘Well I’m not –’
‘And Nina was only saying yesterday that she wanted to show you her new backpack with the teddies on that she currently only takes off to get into the bath, and to be honest the bloody thing’s going to disintegrate before too long so you should take your chance while you can.’
Niall was like a tidal wave, and Spencer gave up. ‘All right then.’
‘Yes! Result, Nick!’ He heard a distant cheer. ‘Right, well I’ll give you a ring on Saturday, make the arrangements.’
‘OK.’ He wondered if he’d be able to fake a last-minute cold. Or a bout of gastroenteritis.
‘See you then.’
‘Bye.’