Crazy Paving (34 page)

‘Now don’t forget you’re miked up,’ the technician said as he fiddled with the lapel of Helly’s waistcoat. The microphone was attached to a small
black clip. Helly peered down at it, pulling a face. It was like having a cockroach perched on her chest. ‘At the end of the show,’ the technician continued, ‘don’t leap up
off your seat. Just stay put and we’ll come and dismantle you.’ He moved on to the person sitting next to her, a counsellor with expertise in dealing with the long-term effects of
traumatic injury. ‘Don’t forget you’re miked up,’ the technician began again.

‘Alright, alright,’ said Helly, ‘we get the point.’

The counsellor was called Cherry. She and Helly had got talking in the hospitality room. ‘What are you here as?’ Cherry had asked.

‘Bomb victim,’ Helly had replied. ‘How about you?’

They were both on the front row. All the front row contributors were miked. The rest of the studio audience sat on banked seats behind them. Along the row were ranged two other survivors of the
Victoria bomb, one who was facially disfigured. There was also a Unionist politician, a Catholic priest and a florid, middle-aged man from an organisation called Victims For Action Against
Terrorism. They had been given a rough running order. Helly would be the third or fourth to speak.

Opposite the banked seating were cameras, lights and more technicians, under a huge draughty roof not unlike an air-craft hangar. A producer stood with a clipboard and stopwatch.
‘Where’s Kilroy?’ Helly asked, leaning over towards Cherry.

‘There,’ said Cherry, pointing.

Kilroy stood amongst the technicians, watching his guests settle in and fiddling with his ear. Joanna had made Helly promise to take a good look – she had always had a thing about Kilroy,
she had said. Helly regarded him with distaste. His suit was sharp enough to chop the Sunday veg, in her opinion. His light grey hair was in lurid contrast to his hot orange tan, which looked as
though it could be peeled off like the mask of the Invisible Man. He glanced their way. Helly leant over to Cherry again and murmured, ‘What a ponce.’

‘Ssh! Don’t forget you’re miked up!’

Kilroy was fiddling with his ear and frowning at them.

‘Oops!’ said Helly.

‘That was just the start of it!’ Helly screeched with glee. She was sitting on the sofa in Rosewood Cottage. She was holding a can of beer and wiggling her legs to
and fro. ‘They cut what I did at the end, well not exactly cut it, you can tell some sort of commotion is going on.’

Bob was on his knees in front of the television, trying to rewind the video. Joanna sat on the sofa next to Helly. She was also holding a can of beer. ‘Another dream gone,’ she said,
shaking her head. ‘He’ll never marry me now.’

‘Ah shut up, I brought you a signed photo.’ There had been an elegant fan of black and white signed photographs on the table in the hospitality room. Helly had helped herself to one,
which Bob had framed. It now hung in Rosewood Cottage’s lavatory. ‘And they sent a car for me,’ Helly added to Joan and Annette, who sat in armchairs opposite. ‘And it
brought me back home again. The driver called me miss.’

‘You’ve never been a miss in your life,’ muttered Joanna. ‘Annette, another cup of tea?’

Annette shook her head. She would have loved a beer but she had only been out of hospital for two days and was still on strong painkillers.

‘Almost there,’ said Bob, still bent down with his nose to the video recorder.

‘Oh hurry up,’ said Joanna. ‘We’ve had enough of the sight of your arse.’

He sat back. As the music to the programme started, Helly and Joanna began to sing along. ‘Da! Daaa!’

Bob rolled his eyebrows and gave Joan and Annette a comradely glance. ‘Can you imagine what it’s like
living
with them two? They were doing that over breakfast this morning.
I’m ready to go after the bloke with a hammer.’

‘Good morning!’ said Kilroy from the television, with a beaming smile. Then his expression switched to tragic. ‘Bombs are exploding all over London again. Nobody knows whether
they are safe. In the wake of the latest outrage, I’ll be talking to survivors and the bereaved, and to some people who think they know the solution. This is not a political programme . .
.’

‘You can say that again,’ muttered Helly, caressing her beer.

‘Ssh!’ said Joan.

‘On this programme, we’ll be talking to people who have direct experience of what it’s like to be a victim of terrorism.’

Helly had taken exception to the word victim, and when her turn came to speak she told Kilroy so in no uncertain terms. During the rest of the programme, the screen switched to catch her facial
expressions even when she wasn’t talking. There were a lot of expressions to catch. She had dressed up for the occasion, in a velvet waistcoat and one of Bob’s floral ties, knotted
neatly. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she was wearing bright pink lipstick. The camera loved her.

Towards the end she became engaged in a heated debate with the florid middle-aged man from Victims For Action Against Terrorism, who became more and more florid as the debate proceeded.
‘For your information young lady, I lost my daughter in the London Bridge bombing in March. I don’t intend to sit idly by and watch these murdering bastards – sorry about my
language but that’s what they are – I’m not going to sit by and just let them walk all over us. I want to see some of them behind bars or better still, strung up.’ There was
a smattering of applause from the rest of the audience.

‘This bit! This is it!’ cried Helly from the sofa. ‘You watch. It’s nearly the end.’ Kilroy was looking over to Helly for her response. ‘Well for your
information, matey,’ she was saying, ‘I was on London Bridge when that bomb went off too, so I’ve had my fair share. I’m sorry about your daughter but you’re an angry
old bigot and you’d be an angry old bigot whether you’d lost your daughter or not and if you think stringing up a few Irish people is going to help you’re bleeding mental. It
won’t stop someone else’s daughter getting blown up.’

The florid man was apopleptic with rage. ‘How dare you! How – how—’

Kilroy had sprinted across the studio to a white-haired woman sitting half-way up the seating who had her hand raised to comment. He thrust his handheld microphone into her face.

‘I would just like to say,’ she began in quavery tones but Helly and the florid man were still arguing. At that point, Kilroy turned to a camera and said, ‘Well, ladies and
gentlemen, it’s been a very passionate debate but I’m afraid that’s all we have time—’

In a corner of the screen, Helly could just be seen getting to her feet and beginning to unclip the mike. ‘Get this thing off me!’ she could be heard saying as Kilroy continued his
closing announcement. Her voice went muffled and then disappeared.

‘What did you say?’ shrieked Joan. She was on the edge of her seat.

Helly was grinning from ear to ear. ‘I said, and get me away from this orange ponce and that red-faced prat over there who both have blancmanges where their brains should be.’

‘You didn’t!’ said Annette.

‘She did,’ said Bob, philosophically.

Joanna shook her head. ‘Our Helly,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s the start and end of her career in television.’

Helly was beaming. ‘It was fucking great.’

‘Rewind it,’ said Joan. ‘I want to watch it again.’

Later, Helly gave Annette the guided tour. It was the first time she had been to the cottage. Joan had been several times already. In Helly’s bedroom, Annette sat on the
narrow single bed and looked at the walls. ‘Helly,’ she said gently, ‘all these paintings . . . I didn’t know you liked art.’

Helly sat cross-legged on the floor. ‘It’s still a bit of a mess, this room. I want to decorate – paint it white I think. This awful floral stuff is what they had for my
great-gran, the one who died. Doesn’t really go with Kandinsky.’

Annette rose and went over to the print. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘not really my kind of thing.’

‘No, you’re more . . . Corot, I think.’

‘I don’t really know much about paintings.’ Annette sat back down. ‘Haven’t you thought about going to art school or something?’

Helly pulled a face. ‘Nah. Not for me, that kind of place. Full of ponces. I’d be telling them all to piss off inside a fortnight.’

‘It’s nice,’ said Annette, looking around. ‘It’s a nice room.’

‘It isn’t,’ said Helly, ‘but it will be.’

As they came down the stairs Annette said, ‘Time for me to go.’

Joan was emerging from the sitting room. She looked up at them. ‘Are you off? Maybe I’ll come with you.’

‘Nonsense you two!’ Joanna appeared behind her, holding the tea-tray. ‘Stay the evening. We’ve got plenty else on video besides madam here. Bob’s going to do
lasagne.’

Joan looked from one to the other uncertainly.

Annette said, ‘I really wish I could. I’ve got my mother at home.’ Her mother had come to stay for a few days following Annette’s discharge from hospital and was sleeping
on the sofa-bed in her tiny house. She was determined to do housework of some sort or another, even when there was nothing to clean up, and followed Annette round like a small dog, waiting for her
to drop something.

‘You stay Joan,’ she said, automatically reaching for her coat with her right arm, remembering, then switching.

‘Oh, there’s Alun . . .’ grumbled Joan.

‘Stay. You can get a mini-cab later,’ said Joanna, in a tone of voice that suggested it was all settled.

‘I wouldn’t argue with Gran if I were you,’ Helly advised. ‘Not unless you have a saucepan handy.’ Joanna cuffed her granddaughter across the top of her head.

Helly ducked, straightened, then said to Annette, ‘I’ll walk you to the main road.’

They reached the end of Sutton Street in silence. ‘This’ll do fine, I know my way from here.’ They stopped. ‘You were great,’ Annette said,
‘really good.’

‘It was a laugh. I wouldn’t have minded doing it again but I think I blew it.’

Annette looked at the ground and then up at the sky. ‘I hope we all get together again soon. I’d like to stay in touch.’

‘Yeh.’

They looked at each other and there was a moment of sad, swift collusion. They would not keep in touch, not long term. They both knew it and both regretted it, slightly. Put together, their
regret might be enough; singly, it wasn’t quite.

Helly laughed. ‘Well, we will if my gran has anything to do with it. She seems to be starting some kind of people-who-know-Helly society. She’s already got Joan to agree to come to
Windsor with us on Saturday. They’re going to be as thick as thieves, I can tell. Joan and Joanna, sounds like a television series, doesn’t it?’

Annette felt a twinge of jealousy that she had not been invited to Windsor, then thought how silly it was to feel jealous of two gossipy women in their late middle-age, then thought that
actually it wasn’t silly at all. ‘I’m going to see an acupuncturist tomorrow,’ she said, ‘in North London.’

Helly pulled a face. ‘Bleeding hell, they all want a piece of the action, don’t they. When will you get shot of this lot?’

Annette smiled. ‘Oh I rather like it, all this attention. Gives me something to do while I work out what comes next.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s what we’ve all got to work out now.’ Helly had started to walk backwards. She waved. ‘Are you sure you know the way?’

Annette raised her voice slightly. ‘Yes, thanks. And thanks to Joanna and Bob, and you were great, really. Really good.’

Helly waved again, turned, and began to trot back down Sutton Street towards the cottage. Annette watched her until she reached the door. She continued watching as her small figure opened it,
turned and waved for one last time, then disappeared inside.

While they had been talking someone had gone round the cottage turning on lights, although it was only early evening and there was no more than the merest hint of dusk. From where Annette was
standing, the windows’ pale golden rectangles lit up the cottage like a miniature, misshapen fairy castle, squatting solidly amidst the grey-brown patch of wasteground beneath a slightly
purple sky.

It was a Thursday and Alison had gone for her mid-morning swim at their local baths. With William at home now there was no need to leave Paul with the child-minder. Instead, he
minded his son and then drove over to the pool to pick her up. They were early, so he and Paul went up to the viewing gallery. They were the only people there among the rows of empty wooden
seating. On the ceiling above them the reflected waves from the pool made light, shifting patterns. There was the clean, heavy smell of chlorine.

Paul clambered onto William’s knee and William said, ‘See if you can see Mummy.’

Paul leant out to look and William held onto him. ‘There,’ said Paul, his tiny voice echoing and his hand shooting out to point.

William scanned the water. There she was, half-way down the pool, swimming the front crawl with slow, measured strokes, lifting her head to the side every third stroke, her mouth an open
‘O’, to take in air. William watched her – Alison his wife – so clean and careful and calm. She hardly made a splash. ‘That’s right,’ he said to Paul.
‘In the water, there, just about to pass that stepladder with the man sitting at the top.’

Paul turned to him and frowned. ‘That isn’t Mummy.’

‘Yes it is.’

‘No it isn’t. Mummy’s
there
.’ Paul pointed again, his face screwed up indignantly.

Standing on the edge of pool, at the deep end, was a woman in a red swimsuit with wet, slicked back hair. She paused, then lifted her arms, about to dive back in. It was Alison. I didn’t
know she had a red swimsuit, William thought.

In the water, Alison swam in slow sure laps, alternating one stroke after the other; front crawl, breaststroke, back-stroke. Every sixth length, she stopped at the deep end and
did leg exercises against the edge of the pool, then climbed out and dived back in again. She liked coming on a Thursday morning. It was the quietest time. It was the only time she was able to
think clearly.

Earlier that week, she had been to see William’s counsellor. He had asked to see her, William said, to get an idea of the family support he was receiving following his trauma. She had sat
in the counsellor’s room at the hospital and he had talked of his concern. Six weeks on from the incident, William was still suffering flashbacks and night sweats. The counsellor wanted to
refer him to a specialist who would take over his treatment long term. Alison had agreed readily, nodding, absorbing both what she was being told and what she was surmising on her own. Her husband
was permanently scarred in more ways than one. Towards the end of the session, the counsellor had paused, looked at her and said, ‘And what about you?’