Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (17 page)

The last thing Frieda wanted that evening,
after the funeral and her unsettling visit to Joanna, was to go out. She needed time
alone, in the cocoon of her house, where she could draw down the blinds, light a fire
and shut out the world. Yet after her chemistry lesson with a bad-tempered Chloë,
she stayed on. She had been invited – or, rather, ordered – to come for dinner. And not
just any dinner: this was a dinner to introduce her to Olivia’s new boyfriend,
Kieran. Chloë described him as her mum’s eBay find. A few days before, Olivia
had asked Frieda to bring someone else along too, so Frieda had asked Sasha if she was
free.

‘Not a
woman
! God, Frieda,
what planet are you living on? I meant, bring another man along or it might seem
odd.’

‘Odd in what way?’

‘I don’t know. Too intense –
kind of meet the family.’

‘The ex-sister-in-law.’

‘Whatever. You know what I mean. But
if you bring someone, it’ll seem more casual. Two couples.’

‘I’m not a couple.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘And isn’t Chloë going to
be there?’

‘Oh, God – probably. She’ll sit
there glaring at him all evening. You know the way she can glare. I’ve never seen
such a brow. It’s a Klein brow – she gets it from her father. I hope she goes
out.’

In the end, Frieda had reluctantly invited
Reuben to accompany her. He asked if he could bring Paz as well,
because she had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed cheering up. And then
they had to ask Josef too, didn’t they? Josef couldn’t be left alone at the
moment, not in his present state. Reuben was worried about him: he sang sad songs in the
shower and had grown a straggly moustache but still wouldn’t talk about what had
happened. And with three new guests, Olivia announced it didn’t make sense to
disinvite Sasha after all: she just had to be kept away from Kieran. So the simple
supper turned into an elaborate meal of overcooked salmon fillets rolled in pastry and a
pudding made from meringues that stuck to the teeth. Reuben arrived in his favourite
waistcoat that glistened like a jewelled breastplate. He drank water all evening (except
when he was taking sips from other people’s glasses) and glowed with his new
virtue. Josef came with him, wearing a strange jacket that looked as if it had been made
from a potato sack. He carried a large bunch of wilting flowers that Frieda was willing
to bet he had lifted from the house whose boiler he was mending. Sasha arrived straight
from work, dressed severely, no makeup on her beautiful face, and was placed at the far
end of the room, safely in the shadows. Olivia had put on a red gown and dangling gold
earrings. Her eyes were kohl-lined and her lips scarlet. She walked like a crane in her
high-heeled shoes and laughed in the wrong places. And then Chloë decided she
wouldn’t go out after all, but her Goth friend Sammy would be joining them and no
one was to stare at the way she had shaved one side of her head.

Chloë had told Frieda that
Olivia’s new friend Kieran was a creep. She rolled her eyes whenever she talked
about him. But Kieran turned out to be a shy, crumpled man, who stooped to hide his
height, blushed easily and seemed baffled but delighted by the lavish attentions of
Olivia. She popped olives into his mouth with her long, painted fingernails, ruffled his
hair and
called him ‘honey’, while he gazed at her with a
heartfelt gratitude that everyone found touching, except Chloë, who found it gross.
Frieda saw that Kieran was terrified of Chloë and she felt a lurch of pity for him.
Her niece was a formidable enemy: she had no sense of restraint and she wouldn’t
mind making a scene in public.

‘What do you do, Kieran?’ she
asked him, and Chloë gave a snort of derision.

‘Guess,’ she said. ‘Just
try and guess.’

‘I’d prefer to be
told.’

‘Twenty questions.’

‘I work for a firm of funeral
directors.’

‘See?’

‘That’s a good job,’ said
Frieda. ‘An important one.’

Kieran smiled warily at her to check she
wasn’t being ironic. ‘I work in the office,’ he added. ‘Doing
the accounts.’

‘He doesn’t carry a
coffin,’ said Olivia, ‘and pretend to be sad.’

The evening lurched by. Olivia got tipsy,
took off her shoes and let down her hair, leaning her flushed face on Kieran’s
bony shoulder. Reuben, absent-mindedly taking hold of Sasha’s wine glass, told
Chloë and Sasha a long story involving snow geese. It sounded like a parable but
without a final moral: the snow geese simply disappeared at the end of the winter. Josef
taught Sammy and Paz a drinking song about wood alcohol and dubious country pleasures.
Frieda stacked plates, filled glasses and passed cups of coffee round the table. She
heard about Kieran’s two sons, now grown-up, one in the army and the other living
in Australia, and about Sammy’s elder brother, who had joined a gang and had a
knife that he hid in his shoe. She thought about Kathy Ripon, once more buried but this
time with love, and about Joanna telling her story to the world, with all the
uncomfortable bits rendered
anodyne and harmless. She looked at
Olivia’s smeared and happy face and thought that there were many worse ways to
find men than on the Internet.

That evening, Karlsson bought a packet of
ten Silk Cut and a small box of matches on his way home. He used to smoke Marlboro,
twenty a day and more on bad days, but when his wife had got pregnant he had given up
and never smoked since. Even when she’d left him and taken the kids to Brighton,
he’d resisted. He didn’t want Mikey and Bella coming to a flat that smelt of
tobacco.

Now he went straight out into his small
garden at the back of his ground-floor flat, put a cigarette into his mouth, lit a match
and cupped his hand around it. The first drag made him feel dizzy and slightly sick. The
tip glowed in the darkness, brightening, then fading. In the garden next door, a woman
was calling her cat and banging a fork against the side of its bowl. ‘Here, Skit,
Skit, Skit. Here, Skit, Skit, Skit.’ On and on. She didn’t see him over the
fence, hunched inside his coat. It wasn’t snowing as it had been in Gloucester,
but there was a stillness to the air, as if it might at any moment.

He smoked two cigarettes in a row, then went
inside. He brushed his teeth as if she might be able to smell him over the phone and use
his weakness against him, then made the call.

‘It’s me, Mal.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what
you said.’

‘About Madrid?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Of course I can’t stop Mikey
and Bella going, you all going, if that’s what you want and feel is best for
them.’

‘Oh, Mal, if you
only knew how –’

‘But I want to see more of them before
you go. Mid-April, you say?’

‘Yes. And of course you can see as
much of them as you want.’

‘And I want to see them regularly when
they’re away. We’ll have to work something out. Have a system, a
structure.’

Even as he spoke, he felt the hopelessness
of it. They would get swept up into their new life and he would be just a memory, a
figure from the past, receding from them. Loneliness washed over him, a wave that almost
took his breath away.

‘I appreciate this.’

‘OK.’

‘I know this isn’t easy for
you.’

‘No.’

‘But you won’t regret
it.’

After he had put the phone back into its
holster, he went and poured himself a stiff whisky. It was a drink he associated with
Frieda. He pictured her watching eyes and the way she held her chin high, as if she was
waiting for battle. He pressed the tumbler against his forehead. If he’d been a
weeping man, he would have wept.

Soon he would come. He had said he would
come and she had to believe him. Unless something had happened. But, no, he would come.
She would hear him rap out their code on the hatch and she would lift it up and see him
silently swing his way down into the boat. He would hold her by the shoulders and look
into her eyes and she wouldn’t even have to tell him – he would know she had done
well, that she had kept faith, that she had never wavered. He called her his soldier,
his loyal one. She wouldn’t let him down.

She was running out of
basic things. Not water, which was the most important, because there was a tap down the
path near the rowing club and she could go there at night with her two plastic
containers. She had a bucket that she filled from the river, as well, when she wanted to
scrub the decks or flush the toilet. But her food supplies were almost gone, and
candles, toilet rolls, soap. She had no deodorant left, and she didn’t like that,
and her razor was blunt now. She should make a list to give him when he came. Nothing
expensive: matches, washing-up liquid, more milk powder, toothpaste, and plasters
because there were cuts that kept opening up on her legs. And perhaps some cordial.

Elderflower cordial. She got so thirsty;
her mouth was dry and it had a nasty taste in it that she couldn’t get rid of.
Water on its own doesn’t really quench your thirst. She allowed herself to think
about freshly squeezed orange juice, in a tall tumbler; sitting on a lawn with bare feet
and the sun on the back of her neck.

Because the gas was nearly gone, she decided
to cook all the remaining potatoes. She could eat them cold over the next few days.
There were tins of tuna and sardines she could add to them, and she had stock cubes as
well. Sometimes she just poured boiling water over a cube for a meal. She put the
potatoes in the sink, which had a crack running down one side so didn’t hold
water, and found the knife. The potatoes were large, knobbly and grimy; some of them
were beginning to sprout. When she was younger, she used to dislike potatoes but he had
shown her you couldn’t be fussy. It was like being in a war, in the trenches or
hiding behind enemy lines. You had to remember why you were there, your purpose and your
solemn mission. He had held her very tightly when he’d said that and his eyes had
shone.

She peeled the potatoes with slow precision
and cut them
into small chunks so that they would boil more quickly
and use less gas. She put them in the pan and added salt. She must put salt on the list.
There was so little left. Everything was running out. She thought of sand trickling
through an hourglass, the way it seemed to speed up at the end. That was how it felt
now. There were lights behind her eyes and her heart was beating like a drum; sometimes
she couldn’t tell if it was inside her or out, like distant thunder gathering and
coming nearer. Time running out.

Although she had gone to bed late, Frieda
got up early the next morning, vacuumed the house, washed the kitchen floor, laid a fire
in the living room for when she returned, showered and left the house shortly after
nine. She had been to River View Nursing Home twice before, but both times by car. This
time she took the overland train and got out at Gallions Reach, then walked past lines
of apartment blocks, light industrial units and a down-at-heel shopping mall until she
arrived at the nursing home, which was far from the river. Its windows were covered with
metal grilles. She pushed open the front door, went past the Zimmer frames and
wheelchairs that seemed as though they hadn’t been moved since her last visit, and
went to Reception, where a young woman in a uniform was thumbing through a magazine.

‘Is Daisy here?’ asked Frieda,
remembering the woman who had accompanied her last time.

‘Left.’

‘I wondered if I could see June
Reeve.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m a doctor,’ said
Frieda. ‘I visited her last year. I’d like to talk to her.’

The young woman looked up and Frieda saw a
flicker of interest animate her features. But she shook her head. ‘She’s on
a ventilator.’

‘What’s wrong with
her?’

‘Pneumonia.’

‘Will she recover?’

‘I’m not the
one to ask,’ said the young woman.

‘Could I talk to someone about her?
The manager, perhaps?’

‘Mrs Lowe’s around,’ said
the young woman. ‘You could talk to her.’

Mrs Lowe was about fifty and she had a
bright, high voice, a merry face, a brisk and bouncy style of walking. Everything about
her was designed to lift the spirits. Frieda found it difficult to stand close to her or
even to look at her. But, then, how else did you get through day after day, working
somewhere like this?

‘Do you want to pop your head round
her door?’ she asked. ‘Poor dear. Come along with me.’ She tucked a
friendly arm into Frieda’s. ‘It’s just down here.’

She led the way along the corridor that
Frieda remembered so well, past an old man in slipping-down pyjamas, and stopped at a
door.

‘She’s not her usual
self,’ announced Mrs Lowe, and pushed open the door on to a small, bare room: same
bars over the window, same picture of the Bridge of Sighs on the wall, same bookshelf
holding only a leather-bound Bible, same vase empty of flowers. Frieda looked for the
framed photograph of Dean and saw it had been removed. June Reeve was no longer sitting
in the armchair, but lying in bed with an oxygen mask over her mouth. Her skin had a
leathery look to it and was the colour of tobacco leaves. Her chest rose and fell
unevenly. Her eyes were closed.

‘Not long for this world,’ said
Mrs Lowe. She had white, strong teeth.

‘Does she ever speak?’

‘Not now.’

Frieda looked at Dean and Alan’s
mother, her small mean mouth and her folds of dying flesh. She had abandoned Alan
when he was a baby without caring whether he lived or died; she had
helped Dean snatch Joanna and turn her into Terry; and she had never exhibited anything
but self-righteousness and self-pity. But she was beyond any kind of reproach now, or
hatred. Frieda wondered what she was dreaming of behind her collapsed face.

‘Thank you.’ She turned from the
door and waited while Mrs Lowe pulled it shut. ‘Does she ever have
visitors?’