You Don't Have to be Good (16 page)

‘And how was her state of mind, would you say?’

Frank said, ‘Well, you know . . .’ and stopped short of finishing the sentence, the rest of which had been ‘women’, because there was something about Jim’s calm face and gentle voice, something about the gold ring on his long-fingered hand that suggested he did indeed know women and in a way that Frank quite possibly did not.

Pete stepped out on to the patio, looked at the ground and pressed gently with his toe on a loose paving stone.

‘I think she said they’d got a new boss at work. You know, some young upstart. She went on about that.’

Outside, Pete was pulling something out of the water butt. Frank got to his feet and went to the door. ‘Ah. That is the work of a local handyman. Drifter type. Goes by the name of Urban, believe it or not. He just appeared yesterday in my garden and I have no idea how he got in. Claimed to be sorting out the squirrel problem at the request of my wife.’ Frank warmed to his theme. ‘I didn’t like the look of him. Something rather threatening about him, if you want my honest opinion.’

‘Urban?’ Jim made a note. ‘Urban what?’

‘No idea. He’s a friend of a friend.’ Frank paused. He would prefer to keep Wanda out of all this. ‘I mean, he does odd jobs about the place, you know, he’s . . .’ His voice died away as they watched Pete examine the squirrel trap, from which the dead squirrel dripped water. He put the trap on the ground and looked over at them.

‘I think you’ll be wanting to bury that,’ he called. ‘It’s not going to be smelling too sweet.’

Jim closed his pocket book and got to his feet. ‘We’d like to take a look around if that’s all right with you. Oh, there was one other thing. Do you have a toothbrush of your wife’s that we could take away?’

Frank was watching Pete, who had squatted down to stare at the garden spade standing in the flowerbed. Then he looked around at the lawn, turning his head slowly from left to right as if measuring up.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Frank.

‘Toothbrush, hairbrush, something of that sort?’

Frank blinked at him.

‘For DNA,’ said Jim.

‘Ah.’ Frank’s mouth was dry.

‘And we’ll need a recent photo.’

Recent? It was years since he had taken a photo of Bea, in fact he couldn’t remember the last time he had. He looked around him. On the mantelpiece were school photos of Adrian and Laura and an old one of himself on graduation day. Pete came in from the garden brushing dirt from his hands.

‘We’d like to conduct a preliminary search of the premises in order to secure and preserve appropriate evidence,’ said Jim. ‘Is that all right with you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Frank, feeling that it was very much not all right. He wasn’t even sure if it was entirely legal. His wife was missing. What was the point therefore of looking in her house? ‘How do you want to do this?’ he said. ‘One of you take the upstairs, the other downstairs?’

‘We stick together mainly,’ said Pete. ‘Why don’t you show us round?’

Frank watched while they did a cursory search of his workroom. They noted the duvet and the pillow on the couch, they gazed around at his vinyls stacked on shelves, the books and CDs and piles of reference books and papers. Scotch bottles and tumblers littered the wooden floor and a few tea mugs with mould in them stood on the coffee table. The place was really a bit of a tip. Perhaps he should relent and let Wanda clean it up. He never let her touch this with the hoover or the duster – it would be a disaster for his work. He led them upstairs into the bedroom, which smelt of Bea, some kind of flowery, sweet scent that she used. The room felt crowded with three men in it, and when they pulled the curtains open and let the light in, its shortcomings were glaringly obvious. They hesitated in front of the egg cups and Jim picked up a blue striped one from the Mull of Kintyre. Frank looked down at the floor and saw that the white carpet Bea had bought long before she met him was grubby and grimed with age. He watched Pete look up at where the faded curtains had come away from their tracks.

‘She was always on at me to do the bedroom,’ he said, and Jim gave the smallest of smiles. ‘Peppermint rarely works in my experience,’ he added, indicating the walls. ‘My father swears by wallpaper. Says it gives a room substance.’

Jim opened the wardrobe and surveyed the clothes on hangers. Pete opened the chest of drawers. They looked at each other and Frank explained that his clothes were in the spare room. Pete ran his hand across the hangers and asked whether these were all the clothes Bea had. Frank looked and said that he really had no idea. It seemed like plenty to him, but he wasn’t sure whether it was a lot or a little for a woman pushing fifty.

He was relieved when they went into the spare room, which Bea had decorated for the children. Apart from his clothes in the small wardrobe there, she had made it entirely theirs and spent quite a bit of money on it. There was an orange sofabed and new curtains, a little desk and lamp for homework, funky wallpaper that made him feel seasick, pink furry cushions, a television and music centre and an electric guitar and amp – old ones of Frank’s that he had given to Adrian. Frank explained about the children and Jim nodded, seeming to know all about it.

Back downstairs Jim said, ‘Is it all right if we take this?’ He had their wedding photograph in his hand. Frank couldn’t think where they’d found it. It must have been when he left them to it upstairs and came back down to the kitchen to wait. He stared at the photo. It was years since he had seen it. Bea was smiling, one hand up, holding on to the ridiculous hat she had insisted on wearing. It was a small black fez with spotted net that reached to just below her eyes. It was understood that the hat was her way of making a joke of it. He stood beside her, eyes almost closed so that he looked like a halfwit; Lance stood at the edge in his funeral suit next to Margaret while the children grinned from either side. It was an absolute pig’s ear of a wedding photo, but that was what happened when you left it to an amateur. Richard had taken it. ‘Smile!’

‘
Y
OU DIDN’T
tell me I was gonna be the only black person here.’

Chanel had both hands pushed deep into her coat pockets, her hood was up and she had her face turned towards the Slots of Fun amusement arcade. No one in there was smiling.

‘I wish we’d stayed at school now.’

‘Don’t be stupid, it’s Friday.’

‘I like Double Art.’

‘Shut up, will yer?’ said Laura, giving Chanel a push. ‘You’re prac’ly the only black person in Cambridge too so get over yourself.’

But Chanel wasn’t going another step.

‘I wanna go back,’ she said and plugged in her earphones. ‘Anyway, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’

Laura looked about her and ran her tongue across the metal in her mouth. The wind hurt her teeth. Behind them was Hastings’s derelict pier and up ahead was the Old Town. Chanel was right, they hadn’t seen another black face since the train left Orpington, and as the journey took them further south she had become more and more subdued. The only fun they’d had so far was hiding from the conductor. It was rubbish being here with Chanel if she wasn’t going to be a laugh. The inside of Laura’s mouth felt alien and metallic. For some reason she wanted to cry.

Up ahead on the corner she could see the Italian Way ice cream parlour, where they had red check cloths and vases of carnations on each table. ‘This is the way that ice cream should be eaten,’ Bea always said each time she took them there. Laura pulled at Chanel. They pressed their faces to the window and peered inside. The tables were just as she remembered, but it was empty apart from an elderly couple eating knickerbocker glories. They blinked at Chanel and Laura, glanced at each other and looked back down at their ice creams. Each lifted a spoonful to their mouth.

‘I’m starving,’ said Chanel, misting up the glass with her breath.

The sun came out sudden and bright, illuminating the beach like a stage.

‘Come on,’ said Laura, dragging Chanel across the road. ‘Last one to the sea’s an A star.’

‘Yeah, like Delilah.’

Delilah got A star for everything, even maths.

They climbed the barriers at the side of the dual carriageway and squealed and darted their way between honking cars and vans. As they crunched along the shingle Chanel’s mood lifted. There was no one there apart from a young Chinese man sitting facing the sea, hunched over a textbook. When they staggered past he looked up and gave them a melancholy smile. Laura shoved Chanel towards him. Chanel thumped her hard and said, ‘What’s your problem, bitch?’

The water rolled and rippled as far as the eye could see. A racing sky and bright sun kept the light shifting from sullen to dazzling then back again. Gulls wheeled and cried around them. One hovered low, directly above their heads.

‘What’s it want?’ whimpered Chanel, ducking and swerving towards the water’s edge.

Laura waved her school bag at it and shouted. The gull drifted off and landed on stones up ahead of them.

‘It’s freakin’ me out, all that sky,’ said Chanel.

Bea always said, ‘If you’re feeling down, get on a train and take yourself somewhere else. You’ll feel better when you get there.’ That was how Laura knew Bea had gone to Hastings. She wasn’t sure exactly where, but most likely they’d find her in one of their favourite places, like The Fish Hut or up on the cliffs. Of course Bea would probably pop in on her mum while she was here, but she wouldn’t stay long. Granny didn’t like long visits.

Chanel was holding her phone above her head and filming herself in catwalk poses against the backdrop of the sea.

‘Look at this,’ she screamed against the wind, holding her phone out for Laura and parading along the ridge at the water’s edge.

‘Chips?’ shrieked Laura, starting to run.

Chanel struggled after her, both of them moving in slow motion, heavy and clumsy through the shifting shingle.

Chanel caught up with Laura and stuck one foot out so that they both fell on to the stones. They were laughing and panting and struggling to get upright. Chanel held the phone above their heads and took a picture. They were silent when they viewed it. With their heads against the brown stones, the fur of their hoods framing their faces and the sun in their eyes, they looked strange, otherworldly.

Then Laura started to laugh. ‘We look like them igloo people.’

Chanel giggled, grabbing at the phone for a better look. She began to hoot. ‘What, them Innits?’

‘Innit though?’

‘No,
Innits
. That’s their proper name.’

Laura snorted. They kicked their legs in the air and screamed. An Old English Sheepdog bounded up to them, a flurry of white fur.

‘Oh my God, it’s a polar bear, man. I am not joking, it is . . .’

‘It’s a wolf thing, man, an Ark-tic fox!’

They scrabbled to their feet and crouched back to back, sobbing with laughter and holding their bags to their knees. The dog ran round them barking and jesting before dashing off up the beach.

‘Ooh . . .’

‘Oh . . .’

‘Oh my God . . .’

‘Oh my God, man . . .’

Drunkenly they helped each other up and pulled their clothes straight. They picked up their bags, spasms of laughter breaking out every time they caught each other’s eye.

‘Come on. The chip shop’s over there.’

With linked arms they staggered up the beach.

It was some time later, as they sat outside the chippy, fingers gritty with hot salty oil, that Laura remembered why they were there. They should get a move on. They had to be back in Cambridge by five at the latest.

‘You’re not looking!’ she said to Chanel. ‘We need to keep an eye open for my auntie.’ She swung round on the bench and squinted at the sea.

Chanel nodded and loaded more chips into her mouth. She looked around them. In the Dolphin pub just along the road, two big women sat drinking pints, a fighting dog on the ground between them. Behind Chanel, a few people queued at the jellied eel bar next door.

‘Where’s your granny live, then?’

Laura pointed with her bag of chips up the hill behind the shops. ‘That way. Not far.’

‘That’s what I’d do,’ said Chanel, nodding.

‘What?’

‘I’d go up me mum’s.’

Laura shrugged. She blinked at the horizon, suddenly unsure of her theory. After all, most people ran away
from
home, not to it. She looked at the boatyard, where small trawlers were festooned with tattered black flags. They leaned on the stones as if injured. Rope, chains and nets lay in chaotic piles between them. ‘Sweet disorder,’ Bea called it. She used to say it about her bedroom and her kitchen, that chaos was much underrated. ‘Careful chaos and sweet disorder.’

Laura pulled a postcard from her jacket pocket. It pictured the beach at Hastings, a brightly painted fishing boat pulled up on the shingle. She turned it over and addressed it to Bea in Cambridge. She wrote, ‘I came to find you. Miss you lots, love Laura,’ then stuffed it back in her pocket again. Her granny would have a stamp.

She looked up at the black net sheds that stood tall between them and the sea. The sun went in and she shivered.

‘Let’s go.’ Laura swung her legs off the bench seat and headed for the steps that led to her grandmother’s house.

M
ARGARET WOKE
with a start and looked about her. Her neck hurt and her glasses had gone awry. The record had stopped and the needle was lisping. There it was again. A rattle at the door. She sat up and patted her hair straight.

When she went out into the hall, she could see a shadow the other side of the frosted glass. A pair of eyes looked at her through the letter box.

A voice was saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Beatrice?’ said Margaret.

‘Let us in,’ said the voice.