Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls - Sarah May - Страница 18

12

Saskia Greaves swung her legs out of bed and made her way over to the window where she opened the curtains—still just about hanging from the few remaining plastic hooks attached to the rail. Her bedroom window usually commanded a view over the strip of wasteland that was their back garden, the neighbour’s garden to the right—containing a miniature Swiss chalet housing two blood-hounds—and beyond this the Unigate milk float depot.

This morning the drone of the milk floats sounded distant and all she could see of them through the bank of fog was their headlights. There was another light hovering at eye level—one of the floodlights that went on at around 4:00 a.m. and was usually attached to an arching branch of steel—now suspended in fog.

She stood motionless, her mind moving rapidly.

Turning away from the window, she put the toadstool night light on that she’d had since childhood and picked up her mobile. She went back over to the window.

We need 2 talk. Tonite. S

Once the text had been sent, she remained by the window, tapping the mobile gently against her teeth.

At last, sighing, she moved over to the pile of clothes heaped against the chest of drawers. There was no wardrobe in the room. The chest of drawers were here when they moved in, only the bottoms had since fallen out of the drawers so she’d just started leaving the clothes in a pile by the side instead. This meant it was sometimes difficult to separate the washed from the unwashed clothes and after a while they all got the same smell—damp wallpaper, rotting carpet and other things the survey had failed to shed light on and that Richard Greaves hadn’t really been in a fit state to take on board at the time of purchase.

She found a couple of tops in monochrome shades and then put on the skirt she’d taken off the night before and thrown on the floor by the side of her bed, the legs of which had broken on one side so that it was propped up with National Geographics and manuals for computer software that no longer existed.

Then she went downstairs where there were no curtains at any of the windows—apart from a blind in the kitchen—so the morning’s low calibre lighting had already made its way in.

Picking up a slice of pizza from the box on the coffee table—last night’s? The night before that?—she wandered through to the kitchen, opened the fridge door, stared inside, shut it again then took a couple of bites from the slice of pizza and started to make coffee.

She checked her dad’s timetable, blue-tacked to the wall, and saw that he had morning classes starting at nine.

‘Dad!’ she yelled from the foot of the stairs, her mouth full of pizza. ‘You’ve got a nine a.m. start. Dad!’

She took a cup of coffee upstairs and went into the only other bedroom in the house, pulling the duvet back enough to reveal the small head and sleep-ruffled grey curls of Richard Greaves. Then she went over to the fitted wardrobe and selected one of the dark heavy suits—first checking for cigarette burns and other stains—and hung it on the sliding door, the one that was still in its runners, where he’d see it when he woke up. The other door was propped against the wall with a serious dent in it, Richard having recently crashed into it when drunk.

His suit collection pre-dated their post-divorce move to the two-bedroom terrace overlooking the Unigate milk float depot. It was the legacy of his producer at Sky TV days, and most of the collection still fitted him despite the weight he’d put on. The suits had lost a lot of their original impact because they no longer had any expectations of the man wearing them—but the cut couldn’t be denied.

Saskia had stored them in a box when he got fired and the box had been put in the van along with everything else when they left their old house on the north side of Burwood. They’d stayed in the box while he took a year off on his redundancy money and tried to write a book, and they’d come back out of the box a year ago when he’d taken the job as a Media Studies teacher at Burwood Technical College.

‘Dad—time to get up—come on.’ She stood at the foot of the bed and waited as the duvet shifted and Richard rolled onto his back.

She went over to the curtains and opened them. ‘There’s a thick fog out there today—look.’

But Richard didn’t look; he was too busy watching her—and had stopped being interested in fog a long time ago.

‘You okay?’ he said after a while.

Saskia smiled at him, but didn’t say anything.

‘What’s that you’re eating?’

‘Pizza.’

He sighed. ‘You out tonight?’

‘Maybe. What about you?’

Richard nodded slowly. ‘There’ll probably be drinks after work.’

‘Who with?’

‘People.’

They stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Saskia said at last. ‘Just let me know.’

Richard sighed again.

‘Come on, you’ve got to get up—you’ve got a nine a.m. class.’

‘Not today.’

‘Yes—today; it’s the module on sitcoms and you’ve got notes for it already—those ones we worked on this time last year; I put the green folder by your bag next to the door. Come on—’ She lifted the duvet and tickled his feet.

‘Okay—I’m up.’

She leant over and gave him a kiss on the forehead before disappearing into the bathroom and putting on her make-up. After this she picked up another cardigan from the pile in the corner of her room, and a scarf that she wrapped round her neck at least four times before poking her head round his bedroom door once more and yelling, ‘UP!’

‘I’m up,’ he mumbled, sitting swaying on the side of the bed.

‘See you later.’

‘Yeah. Love you.’

‘Love you too.’

She went back downstairs, unlocked the front door and stepped out into the fog.