The Hive (18 page)

A
nd a happy new year to you all.” The day was vague and sluggish; it was not yet quite light. Rachel’s breath turned to cloud as it hit the chilly gloom.

“Thanks but, you know what?” Heather was chewing her lip, shaking her head as they fell into step. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this one myself.”

“Jolly good. That’s the spirit. Have you ever thought of applying to be a ray of sunshine? You’d be a bloomin’ natural.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry. Happy new year.”

“More like it. Personally, I feel I’m owed one, as last year was so spectacularly crap.”

Poppy and Maisie were holding hands and skipping up ahead. How lucky they were, to be able to just bond together like that.

“OK.” Rachel linked her arm through Heather’s and softened her tone. “Take me through what’s bothering you and let’s see how much we can get sorted by the time we get to school.”

“Rachel, you are brilliant. Aren’t friends just the best? I missed you in the break. I feel better already.”

Of course, it went without thinking that Heather was wet. Sopping. Wringing. So Rachel was becoming increasingly alarmed by their mutual sympathies. But once again, she had found the school holidays almost purgatorial; at most a half-life. Her first post-Chris Christmas—a rushed lunch, a sticky pickup, then a joyless, toyless, endless afternoon with her mum on the sofa, the Queen on the telly and an increasingly hopeless struggle to tell them apart. Yes she had survived it, but only just. And those quiet dead days afterwards. Josh off on the school ski trip. Poppy with a horrid cold. It really was, honestly, good to be back.

“Right, here goes.” Heather took a deep breath. “Number one: Bea sent a text last night saying ‘Exercise tomoz. Gentle start. Walk the dogs’ and then an x and a puffed-out face.”

“O-K. Just for scale, is that the absolute worst of your problems, ’cause”—Rachel raised her arms to her face, a shield from the full horror, and started to tremble—“I’m not sure I can take any more…”

“BUT I HAVEN’T GOT A DOG!” Heather wailed. “I’ve always wanted one, always, but Guy’s allergic so we never got one and now look…”

“All right. Steady on. Well, what’s our schedule here? Nine? So buying one is out. We could nick that half-dead smelly one from The Old Stables, on the way up. Or, last-ditch but worth a thought: why not just go on the walk, without a dog, and see if anyone even gives a shit?”

Heather’s face cleared. “And you think they won’t mind?”

“Hey. Trust me. Next?”

“Oh dear.” Heather had that scrunched-up look again. “Well, the thing is, I happen to know, it’s Bea’s fortieth the Friday after next”

That’s right, thought Rachel. So it is. This time last year we went out for an Indian, just the four of us. Bea had said that was all she wanted.

“and of course we all ought to be doing something. But no one’s started organizing it yet”

Or they have and they’re not asking you. Or, obviously, me…

“so should I mention it to someone? Colette? Or even Tony? I’ve sort of met him. Ish. Or should I step in myself? Am I the person? Should I be The Organizer?”

Rachel doubted that very much, unless there had been a recent local nuclear wipeout and she’d missed it. But she was determined not to expend a kilocalorie of precious energy on Bea Stuart’s Happy Birthday.

“You must remember,” she said patiently, “things are different for Bea now. What with—”

“Of course!” Heather slapped her gloved hand over her mouth. “You’re so right. The Job!”

“Indeed. The job. And what else, the…?” Rachel hoisted Poppy’s games bag onto her shoulder and mimed the keeping of balls in the air, making the odd helpful
thwok
noise when pretend-catching one.

“The juggling!”

“Correct-a-mundo. The juggling. The likes of you and me, we just can’t begin to know what it’s like. So let’s just wait and see…” Hours of fun to be had with this one. Would a
HAPPY
40
TH, BEA
banner at the roundabout be pushing it? Rachel smiled. It would be nice…“Right. Next.”

They had now arrived at school. It had got as light as it was going to, and the sky was cold and flat, a uniform gray. Small children, big coats and huge bags were dragging towards the door, or being dragged there by pinched, exhausted parents. Milo Green was sobbing as Kazia coaxed him from the car. There was no trace of back-to-school excitement in the playground this term.

“This one isn’t so easy, I’m afraid.” Heather looked like she might cry. “It’s Jo.”

“Ah. Yeah. There’s some helpful perspective for us…” Rachel could cry herself.

“I don’t know what to do. I think about them all the time, all the time. Christmas Day, and Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve and all the days in between I thought about her, and those kids and what they’re going through, and my heart aches, just aches for them. But I haven’t done anything. I tried to write a note but it was all wrong. So I’ve done a big shop to make a meal—you know, a family meal, something comforting, like we all did when Laura, the twins’ mum, you know, passed. But should I do that? I mean, what’s happening, do you think? What exactly are we all doing?”

Instinctively, reflexively, Rachel looked over to Bea. She was, of course, under the beech tree—looking neither pinched nor exhausted—swaddled in a cocoon of chocolate-colored nylon and fake fur, surrounded by women in tracksuits with dogs. But she was not holding her clipboard. Indeed, Rachel realized with a start, she did not even seem to have a pen.

“Well,” Rachel began uncertainly. She too had done nothing, and it weighed heavily. She had meant to do something, wanted so much to do something, knew she should do something. And yet hadn’t. She had just left Jo as another thing-to-do, in her emotional in-tray, for the whole of the holidays. “I know Georgie is round with her today. They’re finally able to organize the funeral, and Jo wanted some moral support when the vicar came round.”

“I think I will cook for them. Pop it over. I mean, we always do do something. It’s what St. Ambrose is famous for.” Heather, with her eyes on the women under the tree, and the pack of dogs, was chewing her lip again. “After all, we are one big happy family.”

Georgie sat on the hard, resistant sofa and looked around. The walls were bare. There were no pictures, no bookshelves, no printed matter to be seen—it was an entirely characterless space that took the war against pretentiousness to a whole new level. The only object adorning Jo’s sitting room was the enormous blank television screen, standing proud against the far wall like an altar. Nothing was quite as Georgie had anticipated, and right then, she was feeling slightly uncomfortable. Jo was just as pale and exhausted and unkempt as anyone would expect, but she was also, unexpectedly, aggressively bullish. And although Georgie was quite prepared to offer moral support—she was desperate to do anything to help—she wasn’t sure if it was Jo who needed it, or the poor vicar.

“Look, I’m sorry, no offense, Rev—”

“Please. Do call me Debbie.”

“—but we’re not having it in church, that’s that and stop wasting your breath. I’m not great at God at the best of times—and Steve could never stand the old sod—and right now I just don’t want to have anything to do with Him. Know what I mean? Look at us. We’re in a right bleeding mess now. Me, the boys, the money, the house…” She broke off, gulped, carried on. “Are you getting my drift? I’m like, yeah, cheers, God. Thanks for everything, God. Thanks a bloody bunch.”

The vicar put her mug of extra-strength PG Tips down on the patterned carpet and her hands on her knees. This, thought Georgie, should be interesting. After all, they did have to declare their Christian faith to get into St. Ambrose in the first place. School custom dictated that parents like Jo, whose homes clung to the margins of the catchment area, should observe a level of devotion that would have Thomas à Becket hanging up his hair shirt. The Reverend Debbie took all that very seriously indeed. In ordinary circumstances, no parent would ever dare to out their doubts in front of a school governor, of all people.

“It is always difficult to find the hand of God in the darkest moments of your grief…”

But these circumstances were, of course, extraordinary: when one parent comes home from a night shift to find the other parent hanging, cold, in the garage. Jo was currently struggling, thrashing, choking her way through something beyond our worst nightmares. Georgie bit her lip. She mustn’t cry here, now, with Jo beside her. But how, she wondered, will any of us ever be normal around her again?

She looked over at the sideboard, where Steve’s face was still grinning back from the happier times of his life, when he didn’t know what was coming down the pike to hit him: Steve with Ollie as a baby; Steve with Freddie in matching football strips; Steve, sunburned and pissed with his blokey mates, sharing a Liverpool scarf. Nothing of Steve with Jo, but that was family life for you: one parent vanished, invisible, behind the lens.

“So if we do opt for just the crematorium—” The vicar was trying again.

“We’ve opted.”

“—we can still include a religious element in the service. Favorite family hymns and so forth? Some people like to revisit hymns and prayers from their wedding?”

Steve and Jo did get married, quite recently—when he was made redundant the time before this one, and a financial adviser had told them to get on with it. But it had just been the two of them, down at the Town Hall, while the boys were at swimming. On the Monday morning at school, Jo had said with some satisfaction that they’d been done, dusted and home in time for
Football Focus.
So there weren’t even any old wedding photos, sadly. Georgie would love just a glimpse of them together, younger, happier, before family life snuck up on them like a mugger and robbed them of their individual identities.

“Or ‘Abide with Me,’ then? That can be a comfort.”

“Chrissakes, Debbie. It’s not the bloomin’ Cup Final.”

Georgie hadn’t known Jo for that long—just five years, since Ollie and Kate started Reception. But in many ways, she thought she knew her more intimately than closer friends she’d had for decades. She knew her favorite sweets (Gummy Bears, inexplicably—and a matter of furious debate) and the state of her sex life (nonexistent) and that of her pelvic floor (shot to pieces). They met every single day, generally twice, often more; plenty of time to pore over the fine print of each other’s lives, plus footnotes. And so much more than Georgie ever got to spend with even her dearest soul mates from college. That must be three times a year, if they were lucky, at meetings so rushed they had to shout the news from their lives in banner headlines: “PREGNANT!” “CHUCKED HIM!” “PREGNANT AGAIN!”

And yet, sitting here on Jo’s sofa this morning, she was struck by how much she did not, or had not, known. She had never been in this lounge before, for example. Georgie knew nothing about the rest of the house, had never penetrated beyond its kitchen door. She had only ever existed in her friend’s everyday. Her normal. Her humdrum. She couldn’t begin to imagine how Jo might cope with something as abnormal and monstrous as this. After all, though she had known that Steve was depressed, and that Jo was finding him difficult, Georgie had had no idea that things were so awful that they might even come to this. Because, most importantly, she realized, as she looked around his house, at his wife, at his things, she had not actually known Steve at all.

Heather stood in the kitchen, eyeing up two different lasagna dishes. One was too big, definitely—she didn’t want to burden Jo with leftovers or extra wet-food recycling. But the smaller one was a bit of a useful old favorite—she would definitely like it back at some stage and didn’t want to burden Jo with having the bother of returning that. How much did they eat, she wondered? There were two boys round there, sports-mad, and Jo did like her food; that was a well-known fact. But would they even have an appetite right now at this terrible time? It was all very tricky, and she did so want to get it right.

She felt a little unguided, to be honest. Without a proper rota, she was just sort of swirling around. Nobody was blaming Bea for not doing one, of course, after Georgie practically beat her up in the playground that horrible morning that Steve…she couldn’t even bear to think about it…But they did all feel the same. They’d talked it through on the walk earlier, and there had been general agreement: no blame, but lots of swirling.

On the other hand, Heather did have to admit that rotas did not always work to her own particular advantage. When nice Pat down the road got pancreatic cancer, she put herself down to do the drive in for the chemo, but that gang who lived in the turning circle had just gone and grabbed the first few weeks for themselves even though they didn’t know the poor old soul from a piece of cheese. And then Pat had gone and died, very sadly, before they had even got to Heather on the list. Which she still thought was a real shame, because they had both always really enjoyed their little chats. And that reminded her of something else: Laura’s twins and the Brownies drop-off. Heather still hadn’t had her turn with them yet, thank you very much, and she had been on the waiting list for months. It was always the same people that got picked, in her experience, and while it was nice that everyone wanted to do their bit—and that was what was so really lovely about St. Ambrose, after all—it was also nice for everybody who wanted one to get a go.

The smaller dish: that’s what she would go for. If a job’s worth doing…It was much nicer to look at, and there was plenty there for three hungry people. Ah—help!—not dishwasher-proof. Still, she’d stick a little Post-it on the foil on the top, with just the briefest of washing instructions, and saying that she’d come round and pick it up in a couple of days. That would be all right. She hoped it would be all right, anyway. She certainly didn’t want to do anything that might add to Jo’s grief…

I knew everything about him, Georgie was thinking, and yet I knew nothing at all: intimately familiar, and yet completely remote. Like a celeb, almost: she had the same relationship with Steve as she did with any member of the celebrity first division. She was kept constantly updated on where they were, what they were up to, their likes, their dislikes, in everything from the bedroom, via the wardrobe, to the kitchen. The private facts of their lives were all around her, in the ether, and she seemed to have to absorb them, breathe them in, whether she wanted to or not. But she did not actually know the people themselves. OK, she had seen a bit more of Jo’s Steve than she had of Becks or Clooney—if you were going to nitpick—but not enough to write home about.