No Place For a Man (23 page)

‘Poor Micky’s in a bit of a state,’ Wandering Wilf told her. She was quite startled, hardly able to recall that Wilf had ever been known to talk to anyone before.

‘Oh, why’s that?’ she enquired.

‘Dead cousin,’ Wilf explained. ‘Can’t find a funeral place that he’d be seen dead in, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

Matt returned to the table carrying plates with their lunch, baguettes with lavish supplies of chicken and salad and garlic mayonnaise. ‘Why? What’s the problem?’

Micky, overhearing himself being discussed, took a break from cleaning the glasses and came to sit with them.

‘He was an old hippy, Geoff was. He wouldn’t want
to be stuck in some twiddly little oakette box lined with ruched polyester. You go in those places, and it’s, like, somewhere for seriously old people. All anaglypta magnolia walls and dried flower arrangements in horrible little fluted vases. And filing cabinets with fake wood fronts and horrible,
horrible
net curtains.’

‘Ugh, curtains.’ Eddy shuddered.

‘I mean, where,
where
is the Richard Branson of the undertaking business?’ Micky was on a roll now. ‘Where is Terence Conran when you need him, a bloke with design sense who can sharpen the trade up a bit? Get up to speed with the kind of people who buy their sofas at Heal’s and their fabrics from Designers Guild? There’s a lot of us about and our mates die too, not just ancient grannies. Geoff would be spinning in his shroud if he’d seen the Georgian-style brass-effect handles on offer for his coffin.’ He leaned forward, looking intense. ‘I said, “Haven’t you got a tasty straight-edged chrome? Something a bit more Philippe Starck?” Bloke in black thought I was crazy.’

For once, Jess could see that they had a point. She couldn’t think of any undertaker’s shopfront that didn’t look like a relic from a Dickensian novel. It was the one high-street business that didn’t seem to have moved on, certainly in her lifetime; some of them still referred to themselves as ‘funeral parlours’. The word ‘parlour’ should have gone the way of ‘scullery’ and ‘wash-house’ by now. She remembered when her mother had died, going into the hushed front office of Shearing Brothers, Undertakers and Monumental Masons and having to ask if the clerk would mind turning off the sombre taped music that seemed to make the whole proceedings even more depressing
than they already were. The carpet had been a dingy grey and black check, and although she was only the thickness of the dusty window away from a lively spring day out on the road beyond, it had felt as if time had stopped, and the air was barely breathable. The hush and gloom that were perhaps supposed to pacify fragile emotions seemed something of an insult, as if the atmosphere of supreme respect for the dead (or ‘loved one’ as the woman taking down the details had called her, reminding Jess of Evelyn Waugh and making her want to giggle) was entirely false.

‘We should take it on,’ Matt suggested. ‘Smarten up the death trade a bit. Bring in something like the Ikea factor, some smart paint along with the cardboard-box and wicker-casket options. After all, you’re never going to run out of clients …’

‘Hang on a bit, in theory you’ve got a point but …’ Jess could see him starting to get the kind of excitement going that he’d had over the ludicrous Cat Sat idea. It would lead to hours on the Internet and a week of one-subject supper conversations.

‘But what?’ Ben joined in. ‘It wouldn’t be a joke thing you know, there’s serious mileage in this, I’ve been talking to Micky about it.’

‘We’d have an empire in no time.’ Matt was getting excited. Bits of chicken and mayonnaise were dropping all over the table as he talked and waved his baguette about. ‘It’s just a matter of getting the right name.’

‘Dead Reckoning,’ Micky suggested.

Eddy giggled into his beer. ‘Nah, that would be what you call the bill, put it on the invoice heading. I think it should be something musical, like, let me think: what about Knocking on Heaven’s Door?’

‘It’s good, but then you wouldn’t get any atheists.’ Jess, rather amazed, found herself joining in.

‘Paint it Black?’ the architect, his face still suitably gloomy, said.

Matt laughed loudly. ‘How about Going Underground?’

‘They’d think we don’t do cremations,’ Ben said.

‘Final Countdown?’ Eddy suggested.

‘Oh I like that one,’ Matt agreed.

‘I’d better get back to work. Keep thinking about it though.’ Micky stood up and walked over to the bar. ‘Because I’m serious. I want something else to do. Can’t run a back-street bistro all my grown-up life.’

‘What’s got into him?’ Matt murmured to Ben as soon as Micky was occupied serving a customer.

‘Jaded. The cousin going has shaken him and he wants to travel and things. I don’t want him to go, I need a partner to run this place and I don’t want to take up with someone I don’t know. I need someone with a business brain like his – I can mostly take care of the food and the stock. Whatever. It’ll work itself out. Things do.’

Tom was back by the railway, looking up at Natasha’s window. She pulled the curtain back and waved down to him. Jess and Matt had gone out for lunch but she didn’t dare let Tom into the house again. This time her dad might just decide to murder him. She hoped he’d got the message to wait for her and ran off to get her coat. Since coming home the day before Natasha had spent most of the time in her room. Her parents would be amazed to see how much of her homework she’d got done. When it really came down to it, there wasn’t much else to do when you were in there all by
yourself. Jess was of the completely dated (in the view of all three of her children) opinion that it was bordering on a mortal sin for teenagers to have televisions in their rooms, considering that anyone bored and on their own should occupy themselves reading a book.

Leaving her books open and spread out on the desk in an impressive display of ongoing diligence, Natasha slipped down the stairs and out of the back door. At the end of the garden she twisted the rotting fence plank sideways and wriggled out through the gap to the long damp grass on the railway’s embankment. She felt quite scared to be there: from the time five years before when they’d first moved to this house they’d all been told Never Ever to go out to the railway line. She felt as if a train was going to veer off the track any second and rip her to shreds, just because she was doing the one big dangerous thing she’d always been warned about.

‘Hi.’ Tom had been waiting for her. She hadn’t been sure he would, he might have just been hanging about there waiting for Mel or someone else and hoping she wouldn’t be looking out of the window.

‘Hi,’ she said to him. Tom got hold of her arm and pulled her towards him, holding her tight against his chest. She relaxed and grinned to herself, breathing in the heady scent of the leather jacket again. It felt like the right place to be. She didn’t care what the parents said. If Tom asked her right now to run off to Paris or even Peckham with him, she knew she’d go.

Jess hadn’t stopped worrying about Natasha, though she knew deep down that worry in itself was a useless emotion that achieved nothing and changed nothing. It had been one of her mother’s brisk sayings: ‘You won’t get anything done if you wait for worry to do it for you.’

On the surface, between Natasha and herself, there was a truce, but still an uncomfortable sort of not-saying atmosphere lingered in the house. It reminded her of that faintest aroma of unfamiliar cat that she’d noticed the previous spring, every time the wind sent a breeze through the conservatory, when neighbouring felines were reassessing their territory and doing their encroaching through each other’s cat flaps in the night. In the circumstances it didn’t seem such an inapt analogy, she thought, trying not to picture Tom risking a plummetous death climbing, with less than a tabby’s agility, up the conservatory drainpipe and across the glass roof to Natasha’s window.

Jess, waiting out Natasha’s cool sad silence, had always assumed she was the kind of approachable mother that her children could talk to about absolutely anything. In the past she’d embarrassed them horribly, Oliver too (‘God,
Mum
’), by chatting away about contraception, drugs and the usual array of don’t-shove-it-under-the-carpet subjects that the average parent of the new millennium was supposed to be fully on-message about. But with this Tom thing, in all honesty she felt quite queasy at the idea of even his name being mentioned. The picture of the two pale figures rising up, Loch Ness monster-like, from the depths of Natasha’s bed had left too much of an imprint on her brain, like a half-remembered bad dream. One day, she thought, perhaps I’ll even find it funny. But not now.

There was no indication that Natasha was in any contact with Tom, and Jess hated herself for watching out, sneakily, for signs that she was. Her mobile phone was out of action through lack of funds and the house phone was something that Natasha and her friends hardly used these days, all of which added to the impression that she was deliberately isolating herself. The girl wasn’t sliding out of the house to use the pay-phone by the square, or running across the road to Angie’s on the pretence of finding out how Emily was doing. She was spending most of her time in her room and seemed to be occupying herself, with a diligence that bordered on the unnatural, with a maths investigation that was a pivotal part of her GCSE coursework. Jess couldn’t quite put her finger on it but, if pressed, would admit that Tash seemed a bit
too
quiet. She’d ventured to Matt that Natasha might be up to something, but he hadn’t wanted to know, saying that she shouldn’t go looking for trouble and coming close to
suggesting that if she didn’t stop being so suspicious, she would drive Natasha to do something unspecified but stupid.

‘So it’ll be all my fault then, will it, this unknown stupid thing?’ She’d felt outraged.

‘Not exactly,’ he’d sidestepped, which she took to be a ‘yes’.

The weird hush had infected Zoe too, and she and Natasha were speaking on only-when-necessary terms. She was spending the days either out with her friends or e-mailing them, hunched over her computer keyboard as she tapped away, leaning protectively close to the screen if she thought someone was about to catch sight of her hyper-secret missives. Occasionally she’d offer a crumb of information, such as telling them all over supper that Emily was doing OK and was desperate to come home from the hospital. She said it in a way that implied she should have been asked, using a ‘I don’t suppose you’re remotely interested but …’ voice.

It was hard to get it right, Jess thought, feeling exhausted by the effort to keep on the right side of them both and not provoke any outbursts. If she asked Zoe questions about anything, what she was up to, even how she was feeling, she risked a ‘What do you care? You’re only interested in Oliver and Tash’ response. Her younger daughter seemed to be relishing her new role of hard-done-by teenager. Oliver, meanwhile, was sending e-mails about the glories of carefree teenage travelling which seemed to include rainforest horseriding and bungee jumping.

‘He was never that active here,’ Matt commented as he read an account of a scuba-diving trip. ‘Perhaps he’ll start getting up in the mornings when he gets
back, taking up the odd sporty hobby and joining in with the human race a bit.’

‘Well, he did work for six months,’ Jess pointed out. ‘It didn’t leave much time for anything else.’

‘It left enough time for clubbing, drinking and sleeping,’ Matt said with a grin. ‘I used to be terribly envious. Now I’ve got time for all three and …’

‘And the one you don’t much fancy is clubbing?’ Jess finished for him.

‘Well … I dunno, should give it a try I suppose.’

‘We need to go out and do something, all together,’ Jess said to Matt one night while they were making coffee in the kitchen after another subdued, unnaturally polite supper.

‘We could visit Highgate Cemetery,’ he suggested. ‘Get a historical perspective. And then we could drop in at the Natural Death Society, the office is quite close by …’ His words trailed away. ‘Sorry, just thinking in terms of research,’ he said. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘So you’re still pursuing the undertaking idea?’ It had been over a week, she thought disloyally: given the usual pattern, he and the Leo crowd should have moved on to another million-making brainwave by now.

‘Course I am. We all are. But what’s all this about an outing?’

‘I’ve got to go and do that sport thing for the
Gazette
this week, and Paula’s secretary has booked me into a really smart golf club at a converted stately home in the middle of Surrey. We could all go, they’ve offered a free lunch.’

Matthew looked doubtful. ‘I thought there was no such thing. There definitely wasn’t when I was
working. I don’t think it’s got much teenage appeal either,’ he said. ‘It sounds like the “Sunday run out” our parents used to take us on when we were kids. About as much fun as typhoid.’

‘Mine didn’t. You know George never approved of cars.’ Jess laughed. ‘We used to go to museums in town by tube or out to the country by Green Line bus. That was exciting, Dad never used to check if there was a bus home again so it was always a bit of an adventure.’

‘Did you get marched round stately homes? We did – Blenheim and Hampton Court Palaces, Windsor, Arundel and Leeds Castles – they all blurred into one after a while. And they were all freezing.’

‘No we didn’t! Can you see Dad handing over money to prop up the aristocracy? He’d only have paid to see them guillotined!’

‘Perhaps we could bribe the girls with something?’ Matt suggested.

‘Well, I’ve thought of that. This place is also a hotel and health spa, so I thought while I’m doing the golf lesson and talking to the people who run it, the girls could go and have a treatment or two, a massage perhaps or a facial and a manicure, something like that.’

‘Mmm. And what kind of incentive can you offer me?’ He nudged her across the kitchen till he’d got her pressed up against the fridge. ‘If I forego the manicure do I get a massage with some seriously filthy extras?’

‘Certainly not!’ Jess laughed. ‘It’s a highly respectable establishment!’