Size Matters (15 page)

‘Why did he do it, do you think?' Freddie had moved on. ‘Kurt Cobain – why do you think he shot himself?'

Rory considered for a minute, listening to Kurt ranting some more before answering. He felt flattered to be asked for his opinion. There was a two-year difference between him and his cousin, one that seemed to be getting gratifyingly smaller as they got older. Another couple of years and it would be practically nothing. This year they'd both got exams coming up; OK, Freddie's were A levels compared with his own baby-level GCSEs, but they were both at life-changing stages.

‘I think . . .' he started, ‘I think he just wanted to know what it was like to be dead.'

‘Well he knows now,' Freddie said, chortling quietly.

‘Ah but
no
he
doesn't
.' Rory sat up, wincing as his stitches pulled. The curly chrome radiator on the wall in front of him seemed to shimmer like a heat haze and his head was spinning slightly, which he put down to getting up too quickly. Unless it wasn't just Golden Virginia Freddie had rolled into the Rizla. He'd like to have been told if there was anything else, so he could savour the moment and check out in a
proper aware state the things that spliff was doing to his head.

‘He doesn't know what it's like to be dead,' he said, ‘because when you're dead your knowing time is
over
. Kurt knows nothing. He did it for nothing.'

‘He'll be regretting it then,' Freddie said.

‘No, he won't be regretting it.' Rory was emphatic, excited at feeling sure he was close to some profound insight; sometimes you did that, got just the tiniest whisker's width away from what was the true meaning of the whole of life, the universe, everything – as the book went. ‘See, your regretting time is over too. Your everything time is. He's beyond aware.'

Freddie laughed and looked at him. He had eyes like Ellie's, blue and overknowing. ‘Beyond aware.
So
not imaginable. Waste of good time and a bullet then, right?'

Rory punched him on the shoulder. The insight moment whizzed on by, escaping his grasp yet again as he said, ‘Man, are you ripping the piss?'

‘When polishing the top of the dresser, please DO NOT place the goldfish bowl on the shelf unit in front of the mirror.'

Pretty decisive capitals, those. Anya was sitting next to Jay in the van and looking worried, waiting for an explanation. Jay read the note again, a note that Mrs Cooper had insisted Anya show to Jay ‘In Person' which meant that after a anxious phone call from Anya she had driven over to the Coopers' hacienda-style bungalow to meet her and see what the problem was, leaving April boiling up a test batch of the cabbage soup.

Obviously it was of enormous importance to Mrs Cooper, this thing with the fish, although when Jay had previously been to the house herself, the small, plastic tank had seemed no different from any other standard-issue
petshop number containing a pair of very ordinary goldfish shimmying around looking bored among pondweed, gravel and a miniature shipwreck. Hard as she tried, she could recall no outstanding features about them, and unless the underside of the tank was covered in razor wire, there was surely nothing that could do damage to a perfectly sturdy-looking beech-veneer Habitat unit. Perhaps Mrs Cooper didn't want the fish getting overexcited. Possibly she was a keen student of fish psychology and knew it would upset them deeply to see themselves reflected, only to be disappointed when returned to their usual spot to find their new ‘companions' had vanished.

‘Mrs Cooper says the fish is “fish ooey” and I am not understand,' Anya told her. ‘Is money, she says. A money fish? They's not gold, only fishgold.'

Light dawned and Jay laughed. ‘Fish ooey? Oh, I get it!
Feng shui
.'

‘Huh?' Anya was no closer to understanding and there seemed no point in going into deep, linguistically tricky explanations about the mystical science of placing household objects. This might, Jay realized, also explain the mysterious coins Mrs Cooper kept under her doormat which Anya carefully removed and piled up on the dresser each week, only to find they were back in place again next time she washed the floor. Jay had assumed it was a test of trust. She suspected several clients did that, sneakily leaving pound coins around or a crafty fiver to catch out a light-fingered employee.

‘It's OK Anya, I'll talk to her. Just put the fish on the floor while you wipe down the dresser and then put them back again. I'll talk to Mrs Cooper.'

‘OK, you talk.' Anya smiled, relieved though none the wiser, and twiddled her finger beside her temple. ‘Mrs Cooper has loose head,' she said.

Jay laughed guiltily, feeling she should not really be conspiring with her staff in questioning the clients' sanity. Anya was right though, it was a fine line, the one between having high domestic standards and being obsessive. This wasn't Mrs Cooper's first complaint regarding Anya. Only a fortnight before there had been a stormy phone call demanding that Anya return
at once
because she'd left the dining chairs pulled out a little way from the table instead of pushed in underneath as far as they could go, in Mrs Cooper's preferred way. Of course she'd made the girl do no such ridiculous thing and got out of the situation slyly by offering to send someone else the next week instead. That had Mrs C. backtracking – Anya was a top-rate cleaner, fast and thorough, and Jay would have been thrilled if all her staff were like her. The placing here or there of the set of heavy ladder-back chairs suddenly became less important than hanging onto a highly valued and sought-after worker.

On her way back, Jay drove past the Swannery and glanced up at Charles Walton's apartment. He'd be home the next day so there wasn't really time to sneak April in for a quick look round, much as she'd like to. They'd have to wait till Delphine was in residence and hope she didn't swap the fabulous grey suede sofas for gentleman's-club earth-brown chesterfields with matching pouffes. April would love the Picasso (if it actually was one) and she'd giggle about the en suite wet-room with the TV built into the glass wall. A natty addition would be one of those Philippe Starck perspex Ghost chairs, then you could sit and watch
EastEnders
in comfort while you rinsed conditioner out of your hair.

Jay had still got the Swannery keys in her bag, which wasn't very efficient of her. They should really be tagged with a code number and hung on the rack in the
cupboard in her office. None of the keys had their relevant addresses on them – if they did, and there was a burglary in her or Barbara's office, the theft of the keys could result in dozens of households having to get the locksmiths in.

At the traffic lights, Jay had a quick look in her bag for Charles's keys. She intended to put them on the dashboard to remind herself to take them straight up to the office when she got in. It didn't bother her that she couldn't immediately find them; the bag was dark and deep and full of the usual clutter that most women, except the obsessively tidy, accumulate. She pictured her shamefaced horror if snoopers such as airport security staff asked to peer into it. The lights changed to green and she had to stop the search as a Range Rover behind beeped peevishly at her. She would wait till she got home. The keys were either somewhere in the cavernous bag or already up on her desk.

Ellie was in a rush to get out of school. It didn't matter about upsetting Amanda, not today, not on a Friday because whatever it took, she just had to get out and away before Tasha caught up with her. Ellie didn't want to be with Tasha today. Well, she didn't and yet she
did
. Being out with her, even just walking down the street, had such a dangerous edge that she got all pent-up and nervy. Carly Andrews had told her she and Tash had just been walking along talking about school stuff and the next thing Tasha was running, racing off with some old woman's handbag that she'd snatched off her as they passed. She hadn't kept it or taken anything; a hundred metres further on she'd hurled it over a hedge and laughed. Just practising, she'd told Carly, as if it was an OK normal thing for anyone to do.

Tasha liked doing her weekend shoplifting on a
Friday so she'd have something new to wear on Saturday night when, she claimed (who really knew what was true?) she went out clubbing all night and got ratted. She'd given Ellie a sly look, telling her this at lunchtime, as if wondering whether to trust her with some extra information. If it was anything to do with sex, Ellie really didn't want to know. She felt quite squeamish about sex; it was all right to think about getting close to boys and snogging, but only with clothes on and with no big fumbly hands trying to get at her skin. So far she didn't at all fancy the thought of any boy putting any naked bits of himself into or even close to any naked and very private bits of
her
. Picturing this made her squirm with horrified shyness, and the idea that one day not too far ahead she would actually
want
it to happen was almost beyond her wildest imagining. If Tasha started to tell her she'd been doing stuff like that, she would want to put her hands over her ears and sing loudly.

Tasha was older than the rest of them, very nearly fifteen. She'd been kept back a year at primary school after she'd missed two terms when her mum took her to Lanzarote in a converted ambulance to live with a man she'd met in Lineker's Bar in Puerto del Carmen. Tasha made it all sound really glamorous and said that her mum and dad had fought it out in court and she'd been in the papers as a tug-of-love child ordered to be brought back home. It might be true, Ellie thought, but it might equally not be. She might have been kept back a year because she was thick, and been bigging herself up with this story as a cover. That was both the problem and the attraction with Tasha, she'd got a story full of drama for everything; true or not, you couldn't tell but you wanted to hear it.

Ellie almost didn't recognize Freddie; for one thing her cousin was about the last person she'd expect
to see outside the school gate, and for another he'd abandoned his last year's blond surfer look and got his hair all sticking up and with a dark red stripey bit down the middle, like someone she'd seen on telly playing cricket. He was leaning against the wall with Rory, smoking a skinny roll-up and eyeing the girls. The last time she'd seen him had been at his parents' mad party up in Cheshire, when all the cousins had gone outside and made a snowman in the middle of a late night blizzard. Freddie and Juliet's dad Oliver had lit a wood fire in the rusty barbecue and they'd topped off their snowman with a leather cowboy hat (Greg's), then given him a champagne bottle and made him look as if he was swigging from it. In the morning his head had slumped down and he looked like a sleepy drunk with a horrible hangover. Greg had gone out and put his arm round the snowman and told him he knew just how he felt.

‘Hi Freddie, great to see you!' Ellie dropped her school bag on his feet and Freddie grabbed her and gave her a big squeezy hug. She looked around sneakily to see if anyone she knew was watching. He was very good-looking, for a family member – girls in her year, and not
just
her year, would be highly impressed.

‘We thought we'd come down and meet you,' Freddie told her as they set off towards the bus stop. ‘And Rory's got a cunning plan.'

‘Well, not exactly,' Rory said, pulling her with him across the road.

‘Hey, this is the wrong way, aren't we going home?' Ellie was hungry. She wanted to get home and make some cinnamon toast, her current favourite snack and one guaranteed to drive her truly annoying diet mother loopy with comfort-food craving. Serve her right, she thought, for the cruel absence of crisps and biscuits.

‘Not yet,' Rory said. ‘First we're going visiting. I'm
going to show you this incredible place where old Aunt Delphine's going to be living. I've got the keys.' He threw them high in the air and caught them, one-handed.

‘But . . . you can't just walk in! Suppose someone's there!' Ellie really didn't want to do this. It would almost have been better to be with Tasha. At least with Tasha whatever they did would be just teen crime at worst and somehow she'd have a chance to persuade the police that it wasn't her. If she and Rory got caught in Charles's flat, it would all come down on her
and
Mum and the great business empire that was Dishing the Dirt.

‘Rory, no, please don't let's. Mum would kill us if she knew.'

‘She won't find out and anyway the geezer's away till tomorrow, flying his big jets. He's expecting people to go in – well, Mum and Barbara.'

Freddie stopped walking and looked at her, smiling and kind. ‘You go home if you like, Ellie, honestly it's fine. We'll go on our own.'

That was even worse. She'd have to go with them, make sure they didn't jump on the beds with their shoes on or leave a fridge door open or something stupid. Boys didn't seem to have the thinking gene. She knew this from school, where it was always the boys who ‘accidentally' smashed test tubes and mucked up the textbooks. They didn't look ahead and imagine that their stupidity might have results beyond making a few sad fools laugh. Her mum had pointed this out too, though in her case she'd been talking about the making of accidental babies. Luckily she hadn't been directing her comments at Tristan at the time. It would only have upset him when he and Imogen were so happy.

‘OK, I'll come with you. But we're just looking for a
minute or two. And it's no touching anything, no messing about, then straight home, all right?'

The two boys mumbled a promise and they took the next bus towards the riverside complex.

Ellie had great hopes of the security gates being locked and that they wouldn't be able to get in. Either that, or there'd be a sentry guarding the place who would send them away for looking suspicious, but there was no-one around. The drive-in gates needed a special card but the walk-in one was open.