Crazy Paving (35 page)

Alison reached the deep end and paused to catch her breath. She breathed deeply, holding onto the side with her fingers and treading water. What about me? Am I supposed to be worried about my
husband or resent him? Am I supposed to be endlessly supportive – or rage against the way in which a moral victory has been snatched away from me? He had an affair. He was unfaithful. (With a
woman who is now an amputee. How can I compete with that?) He lied to me. But he has been injured and somehow in the great scheme of things that is supposed to make up for the wrong he has done.
But he didn’t get bombed because he lied to me. And the lie is still there; it’s just undergone a little plastic surgery, that’s all, and I am supposed to avert my gaze. More
lies, but this time of the moral kind. The worst kind of all.

She rested her chin lightly on her fingers and continued kicking her legs, gently.
Pain
, she thought, and it was the only clear thought that came to her. I am in pain.

They waited for her in the entrance hall, sitting on lurid green plastic seats which were so clean and shiny that Paul kept pretending to slip off. After he had picked him up
for the fourth time, William let him lie there on his back on the tiled floor, waving his arms and calling in mock distress, ‘Help! Help!’

William placed his foot gently on the boy’s stomach and wiggled him from side to side. ‘Help!’ called Paul, gurgling with laughter. Then he glanced over to the stairwell and
saw his mother.

William looked up. Alison was wearing her black tracksuit and had her sports bag slung over one arm. She was towelling her short hair. Paul pushed himself out from underneath his father’s
foot and charged over, hurling himself against his mother’s legs. Alison dropped her damp towel over his head and he squealed with glee. She picked him up and held him against her chest,
pretending to growl.

William watched them. My wife and son, he thought. The perfect couple.

In the car going home, they were silent. Paul had screamed for ice-cream for five minutes, then fallen asleep. I wonder what will happen to us, William thought as they drove
through Bromley’s quiet, midday streets. I wonder whether we will stay together and have another child and watch them both grow up. I wonder if we will ever sit next to each other in a school
staff room and talk to Paul’s geography teacher. I wonder if we will split up, separate, divorce; if Alison will re-marry and move to a different part of the country so we can argue about
visiting rights.

He didn’t know. He had no idea how his life would turn out. It all depended on Alison, really. And Alison was unfathomable.

Alun Hardy was sitting in his kitchen, eating the dinner that his wife had prepared. He was holding his fork in his right hand, as he always did, and scooping it at regular
intervals into the food that lay on the plate which was sitting directly beneath his nose. He always chopped up his food and ate using only the fork. He had done since he was a child. An open
newspaper lay in front of him. He read it as he ate.

His wife was upstairs. She’d eaten earlier, she had said.

Alun Hardy’s fork had just scooped a large piece of chicken when he heard his wife’s voice behind him. She was standing in the hall.

‘You know something Alun,’ Joan said. He continued to eat. She often chattered away when he was eating. It irritated him. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to
tell you ever since I got bombed. I should have explained before now but I wasn’t sure how to put it and anyway I don’t think I really worked it out until now.’ It was a Sunday,
around teatime. It had been a nice day. The sun had shone. ‘I’ve been making a list.’ The piece of chicken was in his mouth and he chewed slowly, his eyes passing over the TV
page. ‘It’s a list of the things I want to take with me when I leave you.’

Alun Hardy froze, the fork suspended in mid-air.

‘I’ve been making it for thirty-two years. It’s got quite long. It started after that row we had over the rabbit hutch the first year we were married. After you’d gone
round to Bill and Sally’s I sat down and wrote a list of what I wanted to take with me when I left. It was quite small then: clothes, the tea service, the woodland picture Gilda gave us. My
sewing machine.’

Alun slowly lowered his fork but did not turn round.

‘It’s grown over the years, of course. A list like that can get quite long in thirty-two years, as I’m sure you can imagine. Clothes, the tea service, the woodland picture,
sewing machine, knitting needles, silver teaspoons, the red saucepan, velvet curtains from the back room, cuckoo clock we bought in Amsterdam even though it’s plastic, vanity unit including
all the bits and bobs, wellies. I tried not to let it get out of hand. Only the things I cared about, not things that were valuable, like that three piece suite we bought from Dalton’s
Furniture in 1975. It was a lot of money for us then, as you well know but then I thought, I never really liked the blue stripe. It was you wanted the blue, not me. Funny thing is, however long the
list got, I never dropped anything off. It got so it was like that rhyme, you know, the old lady who swallowed a fly who swallowed a cat and so on. I never wrote it down. I never forgot a single
thing. It just got longer and longer.’

She paused but still he didn’t turn around.

‘Well yesterday I realised something Alun. I didn’t want it. Not any of it. The tea service has got those cups with the little spindly handles you can hardly hold and I never liked
that woodland picture. I had to say so to Gilda of course and somehow I got to believing it myself. All these years I’ve walked past it, thinking I liked it.’

Joan took two steps back down the hall to the cloak-room. She took her favourite coat, grey wool with gilt buttons, from its peg. She put it on. Then she picked up the suitcase she had packed
that afternoon and a plastic bag.

As she passed the kitchen on her way to the front door she stopped and said, ‘So it’s all yours Alun. Everything. I’m not taking any of it, except some clothes and toiletries
of course.’ She paused. ‘Oh, and the cuckoo clock.’

Then she left.

Helly stood in the ladies’ toilet and regarded herself in the full-length mirror. Around the mirror was the ornate gilt edging with which the hotel bar and lobby also
appeared to be covered. When she had first come in she had thought it was posh, but on closer inspection it looked rather tacky. Baroque on the cheap. Beside each of the sinks on her left were
little white china trays in which there were selections of coloured soaps. She had already slipped a set of those into her handbag.

She smoothed her short skirt over her slightly bulging abdomen. She had just eaten a three course lunch, with wine, and it showed. They can’t be after me as a nymphet-type, she reasoned.
It must be earthy authenticity they want. Well that’s no problem. She bent her head down and ruffled her hair which was freshly washed that morning, loose and chaotic. Then she flicked her
head back up and pouted into the mirror. ‘Well Ms Rawlins,’ she said to herself softly, ‘better not keep Rosylyn waiting.’

The call had been the first she had received after the telephone line was installed in Rosewood Cottage. (Helly had told Bob and Joanna that she would live with them on two conditions: one, a
washing machine; two, a phone.) Rosylyn – ‘That’s Rosylyn with two ys’ – James was a producer for an independent television production company called A-One-O-One.
Helly said she had never heard of them. Rosylyn laughed in a twinkly, that’s-alright kind of way and said, ‘We make children’s and youth programmes. We did that documentary on
teenage fathers last year, you know, the one where we reunited a teenage father with his own father who was in his thirties.’ Helly didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking
about. ‘Helen, it’s like this. I saw you on
Kilroy
the other week. Now, we’re about to start making a pilot for a new series where we get young people to interview other
young people about what they believe. We’re looking for a stable. Complete unknowns. That’s the whole point, you see.’

The upshot of the phone call was, she wanted to buy Helly lunch in a nice, expensive, central London hotel.

By the time Helly returned to their table, their dessert plates had been removed. Rosylyn had had cheese and biscuits. Helly had had three-layer orange cake with fresh cream. A
coffee sat at her place.

‘I went ahead and ordered coffee,’ Rosylyn said, apologetically. ‘I hope that’s okay.’

Helly picked up her napkin from the gilded, heavily padded chair and sat down. Rosylyn was smoking. An open packet of cigarettes sat on a silver tray on the table. She gave the tray a small push
in Helly’s direction.

Helly had not expected to like Rosylyn, who, over the phone, had sounded like a git. She had been pleasantly surprised. Rosylyn wore a fitted purple jacket over black leggings and a silver
bangle set with large bits of purple glass. The jacket was a mistake. It was slightly too tight across the chest and the buttons strained. Rosylyn was a bit of a fatty. Her nails were long but
unvarnished. She would start a sentence full of bullshit – ‘Helen, how nice to meet you I’m so glad you could find time to’ – but by the time she got to the end of it,
she would have lapsed into normal speech – ‘. . . anyway have a seat where’s our blasted waiter.’ Now that she had met Rosylyn, Helly could understand why she was so
interested in her.

Rosylyn drew on her cigarette. ‘Anything else you want to ask me?’

Helly shook her head. ‘Maybe I should get this right, just so’s I can tell my gran and grandad later. I get bombed, am rude to people on
Kilroy
, and end up as a television
presenter.’

Rosylyn laughed. ‘Well, it’s not quite that straightforward. It’s only a pilot, after all. And there’s all sorts of meetings to do first and then there’s no
guarantee that the series will be bought. But I do want to get you in to meet some other people at A-One-O-One as soon as possible.’

Helly helped herself to a cigarette. ‘Well it looks like my side of the story is ending well enough. I’m happy.’

Rosylyn-with-two-ys leant forward and lit Helly’s cigarette. ‘This is not the end of the story, Helen, just the beginning.’

‘Actually,’ said Helly, ‘I call myself Helly. Is that alright?’

Rosylyn leant back in her seat and smiled. ‘Perfect.’

Annette knew that not all stories end happily.

It was the Sunday after she had been to Rosewood Cottage, the Sunday after her first trip to Julia the acupuncturist, early summer, midday, the first Sunday she had been for a walk since the
bombing.

Mountsfield Park was not a pleasant park. It only came to life once a year for Lewisham People’s Day, when local organisations set up stalls: the Catford Boy Scouts, the South London
Mental Health Survivors Group, the Liberal Democrats. Most days it was gloomy and windswept, even at weekends, with no more than a handful of visitors. It was the place to take your dog when it
needed to defecate or your child when it needed to scream; the park you went to when you couldn’t be bothered to go to a more interesting one.

It was a light afternoon, flickered with sun, with the merest hint of a chill in the air, to remind everyone that the winter was not far behind them and would one day come again. At the entrance
there was a single tennis court occupied by two muscular, middle-aged men in white shorts, taking themselves very seriously. As she approached the rise, there were two Alsatians who were sitting
gazing around, enjoying the view and panting at each other. A small group of young teenagers hung around the bandstand, smoking. Three drunks were sitting in a row on a nearby bench and another was
standing next to them, berating them loudly. ‘Youse wouldn’t know a good thought if youse fell over it!’ The sitting drunks seemed disinclined to argue. They were gazing at him,
nodding sagely.

Annette began a slow circuit around the perimeter. Towards the far side there were a few families, women pushing empty pushchairs while toddlers streaked ahead. Coming towards her along the path
was a woman of similar age, wearing a long cotton top like hers and no make-up, like her. Like her, she was staring straight ahead. As she passed, they exchanged glances.

Annette turned and went over to a bench. The view from this angle was uninspiring: the distant bandstand with the teenagers and drunks, a lone dog with the characteristic rolling gait of a pit
bull trotting along the path.

God, she thought, to think I used to do this regularly before the bombing; every Sunday almost. This is what I had become, a woman who believed in genteel suffering. I can remember myself,
casting brave, sly glances at passing groups or couples, walking with my collar turned up against the wind and gazing into the middle distance, imagining that passers-by thought me lovely and
wounded.
That woman, so sad. Not beautiful perhaps, but haunting. The eyes. I wonder what it is that makes her seem so wistful?
In fact, I was invisible.

She sighed. No more genteel suffering for her. Now she had the real thing.

She smiled to herself, thinking of the newspaper report of her release from St Thomas’. She hadn’t seen it at the time but her mother had shown her when she had come to stay:
‘
BOMB HEROINE LEAVES HOSPITAL
’. The photograph had been one she had allowed them to take the morning of her discharge, while she sat in a low-slung chair in the
ward’s television lounge.
Former secretary Annette is determined to smile through her tragedy
. Her mother was collecting her cuttings. It was a novel variation on china
butterflies.

Former secretary, bomb heroine; what neat phrases, how sharp and distinct these definitions were, and how insignificant they seemed to make her vague, shadowy adolescence. Her friends Sarah and
Jason were frightened of her disability but had made a point of asking her to a dinner party as soon as she came out of hospital. Once she had raised the topic round the table, the other guests had
given an almost audible sigh. As soon as she had signalled that it was alright to ask her questions, they had been unable to stop. In social terms, a missing hand was almost as good as a baby.