You Don't Have to be Good (25 page)

Frank had nothing against getting the piece of paper, but the actual wedding – he looked down at his hands and realised he’d forgotten to clean his nails – the actual wedding was awkward in that way that weddings always are, especially as Bea insisted on that hat and six-inch heels and he refused to wear the ring she bought him.

When Frank got to the station it was nearly half past four and Margaret was nowhere to be found. He asked the driver to wait while he went to look for her. Before long he found her sitting on a bench on the London-bound platform, dressed from top to toe in powder blue. Even her hair was blue. She told him she’d got fed up waiting and she hadn’t wanted a party anyway, all this was Bea’s silliness, and anyhow, she needed to get back because she had a nasty feeling she’d left something on in the oven.

T
HEY PULLED
up outside the house and Adrian and Laura bounded out. Adrian wore a sweatshirt that said
Nobody Knows I’m a Leviathan
and Laura wore a pink dress and carried her violin. They danced round Margaret singing ‘Happy Birthday’ with Laura scraping out the occasional strangled note while Frank looked shyly around for signs of Bea. He tugged at his sleeves and followed the children indoors.

Inside he was astounded by the transformation. The floorboards had been hammered down, Bea’s plates, bowls and figurines shone from the walls and shelves, the table was laden with coloured bottles and candles, and in the garden Urban was putting the finishing touches to the patio. Richard was out there too, building a large bonfire, and Adrian had planted fireworks everywhere. Lance looked handsome in his suit and got shakily to his feet for Margaret, leading her to the chair next to him, where they had a good view of the garden and the drinks were in easy reach. Katharine flurried in and out, looking thin and yellow. Apart from some heavy blinking, which Frank noticed afflicted her from time to time, she appeared to be either drunk or very happy. Chairs were pulled out on to the patio and arranged round the fire basket, which glowed red hot. Lance kept saying, ‘I can’t believe the heat from that brassiere,’ and Margaret said she’d have an advocaat to start with because it settled her stomach and gave her a lift, which was what she needed, she’d been sitting that long on a bench at the blessed railway station.

At six o’clock, Frank put on an old Sinatra record and Adrian lit the garden candles. Laura looked out at the remains of Bea’s garden. She heard the man singing, ‘Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars’ and wanted to cry. She heard Lance say, ‘I lost mine, oh, years ago now.’ Margaret said, ‘I lost mine when they were still only girls.’ She noticed that the tips of their fingers were approximately three centimetres from touching.

When the doorbell rang, everyone froze and pretended not to. Then Laura put down her violin and pushed past Katharine to the hall.

Wanda stood on the doorstep with two plastic bags in her hands. She put her head on one side and said, ‘Hello.’

Laura said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She wanted to be sick from disappointment.

Wanda said, ‘Can I come in?’

Laura shrugged.

‘I forgot my key,’ said Wanda, holding the carrier bags up high. ‘I’ve brought the food and the birthday cake.’

Laura said, ‘In there,’ nodding in the direction of the kitchen and pressing herself against the coats so they wouldn’t touch, then she thundered up the stairs to the bathroom and locked the door.

If Bea was coming back, she’d be here by now. She knelt with her head over the toilet bowl and tried to vomit, put salty fingers down her throat and felt the animal heave in her. She moaned and retched. Nothing, just some spit.

She gave up trying to be sick and settled herself on the tufted mocha bath mat. The room still smelt of lavender and honey from the soap Bea used. It was small and cosy and cluttered with the shells and driftwood Bea brought back from holidays. They hung on strings from the ceiling and lay piled up around the edges of the bath. The walls were painted plum and fuchsia because she’d once seen a house like that in a magazine, and there were thick towels to match. Katharine thought the colour scheme hideous but Laura thought this was what a bathroom should look like, not hard and white like theirs. This bathroom was fruity and warm and a place to be held. Like Bea.

The floor was always warm by the cupboard. Laura opened it and looked inside. It smelt of camphor and eucalyptus. Cross-legged, and beginning at the top shelf, she began lifting out tubes and packets, opening, sniffing and putting them down again. She popped a Nurofen from its bubble and put it in her mouth. It was sweet and smooth like a Smartie. She snipped the top off a Karvol capsule and shook the drops on to her dress. She peeled the foil from an aspirin and let it fizz on her tongue. The Piriton was bitter and got stuck in her throat so that she had to wash it down with a glug of gorgeous sticky-sweet Calpol, and then she just had to lick the treacly cap as well. Being ill at Bea’s house had been the best thing. She smeared E45 cream on her cheeks and dabbed Preparation H behind each ear. From the garden she heard the bang and crackle of rockets. She struggled, anger rising, with the paracetamol bottle, heard the hiss and sputter of Roman candles, and still no Bea.

On the second shelf there were shampoos and face creams, aftershave, razors, body oils and toners. She dabbed Elizabeth Arden Age Defying Night Cream on her forehead and tested the serum for limp, lifeless hair, rubbing it into a few strands of her fringe. On the bottom shelf was Bea’s make-up bag, black and sequinned with a broken zip. ‘Cashmere’ was written in gold on the base of a lipstick, which she opened just to hear the slide and pop of it when Bea said, ‘Hang on, just a bit of damage limitation,’ and did that thing with her mouth in the mirror. Laura made a moue of her own mouth and drew the worn, gleaming tip of the lipstick over her lips, then rolled them together like Precious did whether she had lipstick on or not. When she opened the gold compact it released the sugary scent that smelt of Bea’s neck. She lifted the sponge disc and pressed its damp felt to her face. Before they went anywhere, Bea always checked her pockets, said, ‘Keys, Looks, Personality. Let’s go.’ Laura unscrewed the mascara wand and touched it to her lashes, brushed and stroked with her mouth agape, the way Bea did. ‘Your aunt is sexy,’ Chanel always said. ‘You can tell from the way she walks.’ Laura thought of Bea’s walk through the grass by the river that day. She moved slowly; her bottom
rolled.

What if it was Laura’s fault Bea couldn’t come to the party? Perhaps she had tried to phone but couldn’t. Perhaps she had been kidnapped and thought she’d call the police but then found her phone was gone.

Someone was knocking on the door. Someone was rattling the door handle and calling her name. Laura reached up and turned on the taps, stretched across and flushed the toilet so that she couldn’t hear. She held her mouth sideways beneath the tap and let the water gush into her. The cold hurt her teeth and she wished she didn’t have tracks at all because she still couldn’t speak properly, she sounded like she was stupid, it felt like she had a scourer in her mouth and her lips were always dry. She tested each toothbrush against her cheek, rejecting damp ones because it would be gross to get Frank’s. She sucked the peppermint memory from the lime-green one then put it in her pocket. The knocking on the door was getting on her nerves, and downstairs the man was singing, ‘The lady is a tramp.’ She sat down at the cupboard again and opened a Boots bag on the bottom shelf. Sanitary towels – Ultra Plus, Ultra Normal, with wings, without, and Super Plus Tampax. In another bag there were tubes and strips for dealing with unwanted hair – bikini, facial, leg and armpit. God, it looked exhausting being a woman; she was surprised Bea ever got out of the house. Finally there was a small hand-woven basket of bottles and potions. She pulled out each one and read the label. Dong Quai, Black Cohosh, Red Clover, St John’s Wort, Zinc, Calcium, B Complex and Magnesium. She opened each, shook out a tablet and put it on the back of her tongue, washing it down with water from the tap.

The door burst open and the little bolt dropped on to the carpet. Adrian looked down at her. Laura looked up disparagingly, then burped.

‘We’ve been calling you. Mum says you’ve got to come downstairs.’

‘What for?’

‘We’re going to have the cake.’

‘What’s the point? Bea’s not coming.’

‘She says it will help Granny.’

Laura dispatched a pitying look in his direction and got to her feet. ‘What’s Frank doing? Why can’t he help with the cake?’

‘He can’t.’

‘Why not? He never does anything.’

‘He’s busy.’

‘Oh yeah? Out looking for Bea, is he?’

‘He’s in charge of the balloon firework. He has to stay near it till I get back. He’s in the lilac tree.’

Laura pushed past him sucking her teeth.

Adrian said, ‘Wigga.’ Leapt into the bathroom and shut the door, pressing the entire weight of his body against it.

Laura kicked the air where his backside had been and slapped the door hard so the flat of her hand burned. Tears stung her eyes. She took a quick look down the stairs and tiptoed into Bea’s bedroom. Quietly she opened Bea’s top drawer and slipped a mobile phone right in there at the back among the scarves and bras and knickers.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It wasn’t me.’

A
FTER THE
fireworks had finished, Adrian went upstairs and climbed into Bea’s wardrobe. He pulled the door shut behind him and smelt the gunpowder and woodsmoke on his sleeve. He sat down among her shoes and put his face in her clothes. The floorboards creaked and he peered through the crack in the door panel. Katharine came in and stood by the egg cups, where she ran her fingers over their rims. He heard her sniff and sit down on the bed, her feet facing the wardrobe. He waited and listened to his breath for a long time, blinking in the semi-dark. When she bent to the floor, he just saw the top of her head as she reached for something under the bed. She pulled out a pale blue slipper, bent down again and pulled out the other one. Then she sat up and held them out of sight. The bed creaked as she kicked off her own shoes and bent forward to put Bea’s slippers on the floor. Adrian saw the grubby blue fluff of them, the sole coming away at the toe on one. Slowly and with great care, Katharine slid her feet into first one, then the other. She rested her feet on the floor for a long time. Laura’s voice shouted up from the kitchen but Katharine didn’t move.

Katharine took the slippers off and put them neatly beside the bed. She went to the door and returned with Bea’s dressing gown, which she laid carefully across the quilt.

Laura came up the stairs, still shouting her mother’s name. Adrian watched Katharine as she went to the bed and turned down a corner of duvet. She smoothed the bottom sheet and plumped up the pillows.

‘Mum?’ Laura was at the door.

‘Just coming down,’ she said and switched off the light as she left.

Adrian eased his hip off the hard edge of a pair of boots and relaxed. Above his head hung what must be a hundred garments. Buy less crap, he had told Bea once. It’s a website. You should look at it. Bea laughed at him and nodded. I know, she said, then shook her head and looked hopelessly at the clutter around them in the kitchen. It’s true, I should buy less crap. But I can’t seem to stop right now. And she rubbed her stomach and made a face. It’s like a hunger, she said. An addiction. I want to fill my life up with stuff. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, conjuring up Bea’s shape and form in his mind’s eye. He knew it was not possible for her to disappear unless she had been heated to a temperature of over one thousand degrees and vaporised, which was what happened to the people in the cellars and houses and streets of Dresden and Nagasaki. Then there was nothing left of them at all. No clothes, no bones, no
thing
. All the water in their bodies turned to steam: bones, teeth, flesh, organs made ash and dust in an instant. So unless Bea had walked into a firestorm, she would
be
somewhere. Whether she was alive or dead was another matter. She might be on the river bed with stones in her pockets, she might be asleep in the back of a container lorry in the Channel Tunnel, she might have gone to Hastings and be sitting in a rented room overlooking the sea. ‘I could stare at the sea for ever,’ she’d said.

‘Never?’
he had said. It was one of those times she had brought both children with her. They were on the shingle in the shelter of an upturned fishing boat.

‘No,
ever
.’ She didn’t look at him but she was smiling. A figure battled against the wind down near the water’s edge, a black dog loping by its side.

‘There’s no difference,’ he said.

She didn’t answer him. Perhaps she was thinking about it. Probably she was somewhere else. He threw stones, waiting for her response.

‘Between ever and never?’

She wasn’t even trying. That was probably the problem with two X chromosomes. Frank would put up a fight but Bea just gave in most of the time, although his mother never did and she had two Xs, so perhaps it was just habit or laziness.

‘Yes. They’re both expressions of time. Ever is the same as never. It’s why people say “never ever”. They’re just repeating themselves. For emphasis.’ He threw a stone, watched it fly in a low arc, enter the water and disappear.

‘Actually, they’re contradicting themselves,’ said Bea.

Adrian thought about this. ‘Are they?’

‘One is all the time in the world, for ever and ever, Amen. The other is the absence of time.’

She was right. He tried the word out loud. ‘Neverness. You probably get that in space.’

‘Probably.’ She got up. The pebbles clattered and rolled. ‘Come on, we’re late.’

Adrian ran his hand through her skirts, dresses and trousers, making the hangers click and knock. He was surprised by how cool the fabric felt, not low down near the wardrobe floor but high up towards the shoulders and lapels of them. Her clothes were mostly dark, although one or two patches of white shone through in the gloom. He rubbed jersey and rayon, wool and cotton between his fingertips, and took deep long breaths of Bea.