Laying the ghost, p.19
Laying the Ghost, page 19
‘No. I’m not the same,’ she said, sliding her hand into Tess’s and pulling her close.
‘Mimi!’ Tess glared at her. ‘We’re in the middle of the town? Like, anyone could be watching?’ She pulled her hand away from Mimi’s, eyes wide with shock.
‘I was only going to hold your hand, Tess. I wasn’t, like, going to snog you up against the shop window or anything!’ Mimi yelled. Now people were looking. A man cleaning the windows next door at Oasis yelled, ‘Go for it, girls, don’t mind me!’ Two old ladies with wheeled shopping bags turned and gave them the big glare.
‘Oh, weren’t you? Well that’s a big disappointment! Not!’ They looked at each other and started giggling, heading into the sort of hysteria that was going to make their insides ache. This was better, thought Mimi, trying to get her breath and stumbling around on the pavement with Tess while they shrieked and howled helplessly and got in the way of people trying to walk by. It meant they didn’t have to talk about this for a while. Perhaps they never would have to again.
‘Tess?’ Eventually Mimi needed to stop laughing long enough to get an essential question out.
‘Yeah, what?’ Tess spluttered. ‘I don’t even want to guess what you’re going to ask me …’ And she went off into a fit of giggles again.
‘No, really, Tess, listen … On Friday Joel wants me to go out somewhere after school. I don’t know where it is because he won’t tell me, so I don’t know what time I’ll be back and … can I, like, tell my mum I’ll be at yours?’
Tess stopped laughing and frowned. ‘Why can’t you just tell her you’re going out with Joel?’
Mimi looked across the road, focusing on the window display in Monsoon. ‘Um … I dunno. Sometimes you just want to be sort of … private. I don’t want her asking questions and she hates it when I say I don’t exactly know where I’ll be, even though I’ve got my mobile. It’d be easier if she thought I was with you. It’s just in case.’ Did it need spelling out?
‘I’m not stupid, Mimi.’ Tess glared at her. ‘It’s in case you do something you don’t want to have to tell her about when she does ask you questions. What kind of mother do you think you’ve got? Do you really think she’d want full details?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mimi muttered glumly. ‘I used to, but she’s weird and different now. I don’t know what she might say to me or want to know. Or what she might not want to know.’
‘OK then. I’ll cover for you this time.’ Tess hit Mimi hard on the arm and ran off, squealing, ‘But after you’ve done whatever you do with Joel, I’ll make you answer all my questions instead!’
‘You look different,’ Charles told Ed. ‘Older, younger, I don’t know. Different, anyway.’
‘Spring, that’s all,’ Ed replied. ‘Just warm air and longer days. Spring lifts the spirits. Or did you mean it in a negative way?’
‘Well, if I did I could hardly say so, now that you’ve obviously taken it as a compliment,’ Charles said, sniffily. Ed looked at him, wondering why he was being so waspish. Was this a sign of grumpy-old-man territory?
‘So it wasn’t, then?’ Ed teased.
‘It was just an observation,’ Charles told him. ‘It meant nothing either way, though you have obviously chosen your own interpretation.’
They were out on the terrace with an early lunch (Marks & Spencer chicken Caesar salad), watching the birds. A blackbird, fearing for its nest, was sitting on the fence making the kind of furious warning racket that told them Nell’s cat was somewhere around.
‘Bloody cats,’ Charles commented. ‘They all need shooting. Is it Korea where they eat them? Or China? Wherever it is, they’ve got the right idea.’
‘I don’t think anyone eats cats,’ Ed told him. ‘But I could be wrong. I know they get skinned, alive and horribly, somewhere. You wouldn’t wish that on any creature.’
‘I expect they taste like chicken, or maybe like lamb. No, not like lamb, because cats are meat-eaters. They’d be more gamey than chicken, wouldn’t you say? Possibly like pheasant, then. Well-hung pheasant. And stringy. There’s not usually a lot of fat on a cat. They’d be tough, I’d imagine, to eat. They’d need long, slow cooking. Casseroled for several hours with shallots and bacon and tomatoes could work, and plenty of thyme, a bay leaf and some decent claret in there too.’
It was Charles’s afternoon for his Classical Civilization class. Ed guessed he only went so that he could pounce on any mistakes the class tutor might make. Charles, all-round scholar and widely read bibliophile, could outwit any upstart teacher-type presumptuous enough to think they knew anything at all about the political intrigues of Ancient Rome. Ed wouldn’t have minded an excuse to be in the room, spotting the other class members exchanging glances as the know-all geek with the half-moon glasses chipped in yet again with an alternative opinion on the events leading up to the downfall of Nero.
‘What are you doing after this? Haven’t you got some kind of meeting?’ Charles asked.
‘Yep. About marking A-level papers. It’s just a refresher – I went to the one last year and it’ll be much the same, but they like you to make the effort. I’ll see you later – I’ll be back in time for supper. It won’t be cat, though.’
The District Line platforms at Richmond were deserted, which meant a train must have just gone and another one, even if it arrived in the next few minutes, wouldn’t leave for ages, this being a terminus. Nell muttered ‘Bugger’ to herself. She was supposed to be meeting her agent in Kensington and would now be late. She started to walk further down the platform to wait on a bench and her foot slipped on half a crust of soggy bread. She said ‘Bugger’ again, but not quite quietly enough, and earned a glare from the bird woman, who was throwing chunks of bread and handfuls of corn to the pigeons from a super-size bag on wheels.
Which was more anti-social, Nell wondered, glaring back, a murmured curse or the wilful fattening-up of a thousand feathered vermin? She’d seen the woman before. She was a well-known local character who seemed to be everywhere, trundling her sack of corn and loaves of stale bread and distributing them wherever pigeons gathered. They probably followed her like the Pied Piper’s rats by now, knowing a soft touch when they saw one.
‘At the risk of being karate-chopped to the floor, hello, Nell, and could the old bat get an ASBO for doing that?’ a voice whispered in her ear, startling her. For a moment she thought of Patrick and his legal-action threat, and imagined she was being followed by his lawyers. She hadn’t yet written her letter to him. The night-time events in her garden had lightened her mood to the point where the fury was now downgraded, in the manner of stormy weather on the Beaufort scale, from ‘anguished outrage’ to ‘disappointment’. Today, she hadn’t had time to think about it. Patrick could wait.
‘Ed! Oh, hi! An ASBO for feeding pigeons? I expect so – even if it’s only on grounds of littering. It would take a braver woman than me to challenge that woman, though,’ Nell told him, moving the two of them further along the platform, safely away from the swooping pigeon flock. ‘She’s half-barking and comes out with a tirade of abuse if you dare suggest maybe they’re undeserving, disease-ridden pests. In her opinion, it’s people who are.’
‘Well, in some cases, I suppose she’s not wrong. I expect she sees it as her mission in life; somewhere between the bird woman in Mary Poppins and St Francis. Where are you off to? Somewhere fun?’
‘Not really, I’ve got a meeting near Gloucester Road with my agent about some more work. I need to up the amount I do if I’m going to keep the house. The mortgage is all paid off but the bills don’t get any smaller. I sometimes think we should move, but I can’t face the hassle. I’d rather see if I can keep the place going – otherwise I’ll feel that Alex has kind of … well, won, I suppose. What about you? A fun date with a foxy sort?’
Nell and Ed sat on a graffiti-scribbled bench, well out of the way of the pigeon woman, facing a poster advertising free chlamydia tests for under-25s. ‘Not for you,’ the poster seemed to be telling her. ‘You’re way past having the kind of frenzied sex life where you might catch something. You’re way past having one at all.’ Great, she thought – remind me, why don’t you, that I’m heading fast for a celibate lifetime of sensible knickers and old cronedom.
‘Hardly! I’ve got a catch-up session on exam-marking techniques somewhere near Paddington. I don’t know why they bother. It’s the same old pep talk every year and soon they won’t need any more than a basic computer to sort out the grades. It’ll be nothing more demanding than some random multiple-choice stuff, like: Duncan was murdered because: a) he had it coming; b) Macbeth fancied himself in a big crown; c) Lady Macbeth was a bit pre-menstrual and told her old man to show her what he was made of.’
‘Tricky! If you got a chance for that good old word “discuss”, I’d go for a). I know I’d be wrong, but over six sides of lined A4 I could make it really, really convincing.’
Ed looked at her admiringly. ‘I don’t doubt it. But soon there won’t be any room for a well-argued case. Depressing, isn’t it? Everything’s got to be cut and dried and incontrovertible.’
‘Like biscuits,’ Nell said, vaguely.
‘Biscuits?’ Ed laughed. ‘What have biscuits got to do with it?’
‘Oh nothing, really. I was just thinking last week, when I was eating four in a row, the way you do when you need a sugar-fix cheer-up, how guilty you’re now supposed to feel about something that used to be just a harmless little snack, and I quite enjoyed that feeling. It was just a pleasant little dose of sin, innocent – if that’s not a contradiction. But then I read on the side of the pack that they were low in salt, full of fibre and only two per cent sugar, and I suddenly didn’t want them at all. Because if I’m going to have something that’s supposed to be bad for me, I don’t want the luscious guilty edge taken off it by the nutrition police.’ She glanced up the line to see if the signal had changed. ‘Where is this train? Shouldn’t there be one here by now?’
As if on cue, a muffled voice coughed down the PA system and, sounding barely awake through boredom, announced that the District Line would be suspended for several hours because of an ‘incident’ on the line at Turnham Green.
‘Ah! Result! That means I don’t have to go.’ Ed was gleeful. ‘Not that I don’t feel sorry for any poor desperate sod who’s fallen or jumped under a train.’
Nell sent up a quick prayer for any possible suicide’s soul. ‘Me too. But hey, let’s hope it was really only a bomb scare.’ The two of them got up and walked back towards the station steps. The pigeon woman glared at them and chucked a handful of bread in their direction.
‘No thanks, I prefer stoneground!’ Ed called to her, then said to Nell, ‘But definitely not a real bomb. No bomb, no one jumping.’
It wasn’t even half in the spirit of making an effort to get to where they were supposed to be going by alternative means that ten minutes later Ed and Nell were on the fast train to Waterloo, with both their meetings cancelled and without a plan as to how they were going to spend this unexpected free time. If Nell had had to analyse how they came to be on this train rather than on the way home, she would have found it hard to decide whether to blame a fifty-strong school party hurtling down the steps that led to their exit, or the fact that bus travel to their original destinations would have involved a long, complicated trip towards central London. Whichever it was, the Waterloo-bound train was just pulling into the station and they were close enough to catch it without making any effort.
‘This is fun,’ Nell said as they watched the allotments of North Sheen whiz by. ‘I don’t know where we’re going but I love this adventure feeling. It’s like when I was a teenager and I used to hitch to places. I knew it was dangerous but it was worth it, just for the feeling that nobody knew where I was. And it shouldn’t only be schoolkids who get to skive, should it? I know that being grown-ups we can more or less go where we want, when we want, but sometimes it feels great being not where you’re supposed to be.’
‘And we’ve each got an excuse, an alibi,’ Ed added. ‘In fact, two – one for the people we’re supposed to be seeing and one for those back home who might need to know where we are. It couldn’t be better. Where shall we go? Did you bring your passport?’
‘To go to Paris? Sadly I didn’t.’
‘Never mind, next time.’
‘Hmm. Sounds good, but will planning it kill the spontaneity?’
‘It depends – you could decide that bringing your passport along simply extends the range of possibilities rather than making Paris a foregone. And if you really want to keep guessing, there’s always Lille or Brussels for that last-minute decision.’
Nell smiled, thinking how lovely a slow, delicious lunch at the Café de Flore would be with Ed. They could play at being Simone and Jean-Paul.
At Clapham, a group of Italian students got on the train. The three boys and two girls hung around by the doors, even though there were plenty of spare seats. Nell watched the smaller of the girls as she worked her charm on the boys, teasing them for her favours. Her skirt was tiny and she swung around the centre pole between the doors, never still, seemingly swaying about in time to her iPod but watching slyly as the boys jostled and joked and kept their eyes focused on her legs. Soon she had singled out the best-looking one, although the others were still hopefully including her in their banter. The chosen one responded to her as he was meant to, upgrading from the chat, grabbing playfully at her long hair as she twisted away from him around the pole. She kept her graceful balance easily as the train lurched, always just out of his reach. Then he was touching the skin on her neck, trying to still her, trapping her hand on the pole and leaving his there, over hers, claiming her. The other boys visibly backed away, defeated, sullen but not yet willing to start again on the taller girl, who now leaned silent against the doorside panel, waiting for the fallout. Oh, the awful competition of lust, Nell thought. Why would anyone who’d been bruised by it ever want to enter that fray again?
‘Kate gave me this book when Alex left, called After He’s Gone,’ she told Ed. ‘It’s about dealing with the aftermath of divorce.’
Ed laughed. ‘The title sounds more like it’s for after someone’s died, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘It’s probably not dissimilar – for some the misery must be even worse, really. If someone who loved you has died, it’s terrible, but at least they did love you. You’ve got that, even if it’s not a huge comfort till much later. With being left – well, you haven’t. As you know.’
‘When Alicia left me it was a relief all round, frankly,’ Ed told her. ‘She was a natural-born bolter, practically scratching her way out of the door from day one. She’s on her fifth now, Tamsin says. Tell me about this book.’
‘Well, one of its suggestions is that to lighten the general misery, you should do one thing every day that makes you feel specially good. It doesn’t have to be anything big; some women get a kick out of going to Tesco in their funkiest shoes that they’d usually only wear to a party. Or putting turquoise streaks in their hair, or eating doughnuts and sod the diet. Any small thing to get you through a day – like getting on a train on a whim, like we just have. What would you choose?’
Ed thought for a moment. ‘I quite like the odd sneaky cigarette in the garden,’ he said. ‘A crafty Gitane after a rubbish day can do it for me. Or reading one of the tabloids from cover to cover – one I’ve bought, not just found covered in someone else’s ketchup in the college canteen. It makes a jolly change from the Guardian.’ Ed glanced out of the window as the London Eye came into view. The train had slowed now, approaching Waterloo.
‘There goes our train,’ Nell commented, watching a Eurostar slowly pulling out from its platform.
‘Ah well … Paris another time.’ Ed smiled. ‘Never mind – for today I’ve had a better idea …’
This early in the season and on a weekday, there was hardly any queue for the London Eye. Nell and Ed bought their tickets, were patted and scanned for weapons and explosives and in no time were being ushered towards the constantly moving pods. They waited their turn to board for what was rather unnervingly described as a ‘flight’, and Nell looked down at the scarily insubstantial netting, there to prevent any accidental plunging into the Thames. A couple dithering with small children behind her and Ed meant that they were the only two in their capsule, and the door closed behind them.
‘Hey, that’s lucky – you have to pay a fortune to book this space to yourself!’ Ed said. ‘We should have brought champagne with us, made out it was an anniversary or something.’
‘Ah yes, but if we’d done that, it would have turned out differently. We’d be sharing it with six Japanese tourists and a drunken hen party from Newcastle.’
‘And two of those would feel sick with vertigo. You don’t get vertigo, do you? Have you been on this before?’ Ed looked nervous, possibly picturing her becoming faint and panic-stricken. He was eyeing the door as if to check it couldn’t be prised open by a hysterical screamer when they were two hundred feet up in the sky.
Nell laughed. ‘No and no!’ she told him, though as they were now on a level with the roof of the derelict Shell building, she wasn’t so sure about the first ‘no’. There was something mildly unnerving about the way the glass walls of the capsule curved at the bottom, as they became part of the floor.
The day was a clear, sunny one. They could easily see the arch of Wembley stadium, the slaty tower blocks of the Roehampton Estate, the radio mast at Crystal Palace, Hampstead Heath. St Paul’s, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf all looked squashed together as if there was no real distance between them, and on the other side of the river, quite close, there were intriguing glimpses of the hidden inner quadrangles of the Houses of Parliament and into the Treasury.
