Blowing It (27 page)

‘Hmm … with an amazing Philip Treacy hat. Just please don’t ask me to try it all out while you’re still here. That would just be too … dangerous.’

‘OK I won’t. But anyway, more importantly what music did you decide on for my funeral? I was thinking Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” would be pretty good.’

Lottie laughed. ‘But you might
not
be comfortable. Or numb. There might be an afterlife of agonizing hellfire where you’re heading.’

‘OK then, you’d better go for “Eternal Flame” – The Bangles one, not the Atomic Kitten version. So what
did
you choose?’

‘Fairport Convention’s “Meet on the Ledge” and that amazing Saint Saëns organ thing, though I wouldn’t mind bagging that one for me,’ Lottie admitted.

Why are we talking about this? she wondered. Surely it was all wrong, this feeling safe to discuss it now the end wasn’t imminent, as far as they could be sure, for either of them? It seemed very much in the spirit of getting the demon out of the box to play with so the terrible mystery and fear went out of it, now that the immediate danger (for now) was past.

‘So, go on, what about the rest of it?’ Mac nudged her. ‘What about the talking bits?’

‘Oh, I didn’t get as far as any readings, poems and such,’ she added. ‘But I thought Ilex and Al could maybe say something. I know I just wouldn’t be able to, I’d choke; Clover would be a hopeless heap of
tears
and I couldn’t ask Sorrel; she’s too young, unless there was a poem she desperately wanted to read. Not something I could really ask her at this stage, is it?’

Definitely not. Lottie instinctively felt you kept that kind of spectral wondering to yourself and well away from the generation below, certainly from Sorrel’s age group. They were still at a lucky, almost-oblivious animal stage where the notion of death was mostly something theoretical, out-there, like the concept of light-years. It was something that would keep for an age they couldn’t yet imagine themselves being. Even Clover and Ilex had got by more or less unscathed by personal loss, having been merely peripheral congregation at the funerals of a couple of ancient uncles and one of Ilex’s work colleagues who had collapsed and died a week after retirement, possibly overwhelmed as to what else to do with too much spare time. No front-row grieving for them, so far.

Mac knew the workings of Lottie’s mind so well. He knew she’d try to offset the awfulness of his possible death by imagining her way through the worst of the immediate aftermath. Did everyone do that? Did everyone think, Right, I’ll picture the whole worst-case scenario, map out what I’d do, how I’d cope with it and be mentally prepared so the edge is taken off it, in the same way Susie had once said she only went for a bikini wax after the numbing effects of a couple of Nurofen Plus had
kicked
in? She’d love to ask someone who’d had to deal with the reality if the pre-thinking was any help. Probably not. She could phone Kate in Scotland and run it past her, she supposed, but it would hardly be sensitive, would it, to say, ‘So how are you? Oh, and by the way, did you, any time in the months before George dropped dead, think about how you’d feel if it actually happened, and decide which photo of him you’d have on the Order of Service cards, and whether to have flowers or donations to the Musicians’ Union Benevolent Fund?’

No of course she couldn’t ask her that. For one thing, poor Kate hadn’t had so much as an hour’s warning (unless you counted George’s many years of casual drug abuse). George had been alive and apparently as cheerfully well as a recreational cocaine user could be one minute, playing a sunny afternoon gig with a pick-up band at a festival near Stonehenge. Then, at the very moment Kate was wondering whether it would be a good idea to put a chicken in the oven for a late supper, there was George, stretched out on a trolley, being pronounced dead-on-arrival in a Salisbury hospital.

‘And what about hymns?’ Mac was, Lottie could see, quite on a roll with this. It was getting morbid and she wished he’d stop, now. But he was the ill one, she’d have to humour him.

‘Did you want hymns? I thought you probably wouldn’t, seeing as you don’t really do God. I was
thinking
along the lines of a woodland burial site. Do they cater for hymns?’

‘You don’t have to do God to like hymns. I want the one about the sea, definitely. And please don’t put me in a wicker coffin. Cardboard yes, but not wicker. It reminds me of laundry baskets or those Fortnum and Mason hampers that record companies used to send everyone at Christmas.’

‘Oh well, I thought I’d get an aluminium flight case made up complete with foam cutout for your body, like for a guitar.’

‘And a lining of orange crushed velvet please. You’ll have to get Rock-It Cargo to provide a truck for the funeral, instead of a hearse. Pall-bearers could be roadies: all cigarettes, wife-beater vests and tool belts.’

‘And access-all-areas passes,’ she added, giggling. ‘That would scare them.’

No – this was joking too far now, pushing luck. ‘Mac, this is making me feel weird. Could we talk about something else? Tell me about the Burning Man thing. Tell me it’s not about setting fire to real people.’

‘Ah now … Burning Man.’ Mac’s face took on the happy far-away expression she’d come to recognize so well lately when he talked about their travel plans. ‘It all goes off at Black Rock City, which isn’t a city at all, just a vast space of desert out in the salt-lands of Nevada. It’s serious dressing up, the maddest entertainment, craziest art, and at the end
there’s
the burning of a huge effigy, stuffed with pyrotechnics and fireworks to die for.’

‘Not the “D” word, please, Mac.’ Lottie shuddered. ‘So when do they have this Burning Man festival?’

‘First week of September.’

‘Ah,’ Lottie said. ‘So not for us this year then.’

Mac hesitated for a moment. He looked, Lottie thought, not so much wistful as defeated.

‘No, not this year,’ he agreed.

An ASBO? Anti-social behaviour order? Oh great. What a deal to be threatened with. Surely it took more than one broken window (and Ilex’s own, at that) and a heartfelt, if chaotic, proposal of marriage to earn one of those? Wasn’t it usually people who bugged the neighbours by playing ‘ Show Me the Way to Amarillo’ at full volume thirty-six times in a row who tended to be given ASBOs? He could see that hooded teenagers who picked noisy fights in shopping malls at night and local paper front-page grannies who chucked bricks through the windows of the council tax office were two categories that might consider an ASBO a badge of honour, but for himself, an ambitious and hard-working, law-abiding (till now) property consultant … no, he couldn’t see it being an item that would do a lot to big up his CV. Let’s hope, he touched wood, that it wouldn’t come to that. And actually, it was only Wendy who’d told him it could. The rest of the police had seemed happy enough to let him go
with
a warning and far too much inappropriate hilarity. He seemed to have made their night. Wendy though, she still seemed to have her own axe to grind here.

‘And stalking’s an offence as well, of course,’ Wendy now told him in the pub, adding to the burden of his dread of criminal come-back. ‘And I’m only telling you for your own good,’ she added, ‘in case you were thinking of going back and having another bash at it.’ So that’s why she was here – for His Own Good; that’s why she was out, a mere week later, cavorting with a menace to society.

And why was
he
seeing
her
? he wondered. He must have some sort of mad death-wish. She’d phoned him, texted him, worn him down with a persistent show of sympathy. He only wanted to talk about Manda, to keep dropping her name into their conversation so that she still seemed to be real. Manda hadn’t vanished from the MacIntyre circle entirely. She was talking to Clover on a daily basis, no problem. She’d even been to visit Mac in the hospital but only when she was sure Ilex wouldn’t also be around. She’d checked on that one with Simon at the office and made sure she picked a time when Ilex was at yet another crucial Pilgrim Prospect meeting, making Simon swear not to say anything. Simon did tell him of course, but too late. She’d probably told Simon to do that, too, now he came to think of it, calculating exactly how to twist that knife.

Wendy sipped her drink tentatively, being so careful not to leave a trace of lipstick on the glass that Ilex could only conclude she was making sure the glossy pink pout stayed firmly in place for him to lust at. This was the first alcoholic drink Ilex had seen her with. A strange and oddly retro choice: Campari and lemonade, as if she’d heard it was a girlie equivalent of James Bond’s Martini. Today he felt neither shaken nor stirred by her. What was going on? Last time he’d gone out with her he’d seriously considered doing the dreaded deed at last, if only for the comfort of being wrapped in someone soothing and sympathetic. That time his dishonourable intentions had been scuppered by her unexpectedly coming across with the Just Good Friends card. Now she seemed to have changed her mind yet again. What did she want? And would the two of them ever want whatever it was at the same time? Somehow he doubted it.

‘Amazing you happened to be on duty that night,’ Ilex commented, seeing if he could dig out of her some big conspiracy, discover that she’d planned his arrest to the last detail, had even been following him to the flat and lying in wait, summoning the over-the-top back-up at the last minute.

‘Not really.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m a cop. It’s my job. I must admit though,’ and she gave him an under-the-lashes flash of steely eye, ‘when I heard the address they were off to I just had to tag along. It shouldn’t have really been my call.’

‘So you raced through the dark streets, lights and sirens going, just to watch me get dragged away in handcuffs? Thanks.’ He drained his drink. Another one? Better not. It was a long drive down to the dark depths of Surrey. If there was ever a time he was likely to lose his licence, this was surely it.

‘Of course I did.’ Wendy laughed. ‘It was irresistible, watching a grown man struggle like that. A real turn-on.’ She uncrossed her legs and he heard a slight swoosh of fabric as her silky skirt shifted across her thighs. It wasn’t doing anything for him though. Ilex stood up and took their empty glasses back to the bar. He hadn’t offered her another drink. Wendy didn’t look as if she minded and was busy rearranging her legs, crossing them higher this time, hiking her skirt up, smiling up at him with eyes full of glittery promise.

‘Look, I’d better get back,’ Ilex said, glancing at his watch. ‘I, er, um …’

‘Oh! Do you have to? But it’s still really early! Haven’t you got time to …?’ Her words faded to an awkward, questioning silence.

To what? She’d left it for Ilex to fill in the blank but she hadn’t given him the usual three choices for deletion, only the one. It came down to: hadn’t he got time to go back to hers and have a totally dispiriting shag that would leave him feeling wretched, guilt-stricken and worthless? He didn’t think so. Ilex looked at her, saw her standing now, too close to him. She was fidgeting nervously with her
necklace
, stroking it across the soft tender skin of her neck. It was no good. He just wasn’t cut out for anything but the real thing.

‘I’m sorry, Wendy,’ he said, kissing her gently on the corner of her shiny pink mouth. ‘You can do a lot better than me.’

‘Yes. I’m beginning to realize I can. At least, I bloody hope so,’ she said, swiftly grabbing her handbag from the table. He flinched slightly, for a second convinced she was going to hit him with it. She had that look on her face: fury and danger.

‘Go on then, Ilex. Piss off back to your girlfriend, you sad bastard.’ And suddenly Wendy was gone, the outside door of the bar swinging like a cowboy movie’s bar-room saloon exit. It was close to becoming a pattern, women storming out on him. Ilex trudged out of the door and looked down the street. He could hear the familiar chug-chug sound of the Beetle’s engine as it vanished round the corner and just for one frightening moment he felt very close to a flicker of sadness that he’d be seeing no more of that horrible pink and orange cat-daubed vehicle.

For goodness’ sake, Ilex, he told himself, get a bloody grip.

Guilt. Clover was so full of it that if she’d been brought up in the Catholic Church (or possibly in any church) she’d have had to go and offload her conscience in a confessional. Oh, did you ever have to be careful what you wished for. Right now, out in
the
Holbrook House garden picking pretty, stripy courgettes for Al to take to the Farmers’ Market, she started wishing again. This time it was that she’d never, in the first place, wished that Mac and Lottie wouldn’t sell the house. She’d got what she wanted there, hadn’t she? It looked like there was no chance of them doing anything so exhausting and traumatic as moving now. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be racing off round the world all carefree and crazy in a loved-up hippie haze now, would they? So that was a result then.
Not
– as Sorrel would say.

‘Clover?’

Oh God, Sean. He’d crept up on her at last. She knew he would, knew she couldn’t avoid him for ever, though heavens, she’d been trying to. She looked past him, up the garden to where Sophia and Elsa were chasing each other on the terrace. Was it after-school time already? It must be way past that, if Sean had collected them at the usual time then driven them all the way down here. Where did the day go when you worried yourself into the depths of gloom? She’d imagined this moment, the first time she’d face him since she’d … since that horrible night full of stupid … mistakes.
Mistakes?
Who was she kidding? What kind of a twee euphemism was that for full-on adultery? She should ask Sean maybe … he’d certainly be the one to know.

‘What do you want, Sean? There’s not really anything to say that can’t be written down and sent through lawyers.’

Clover put the box of courgettes down on the gravel path and rubbed her earth-smeared hands on a tissue.

‘Oh I think there is. I don’t know what’s the matter with you lot. None of you keep still for long enough to listen to anything or anyone.’