Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls - Sarah May - Страница 19

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Richard Greaves listened to his daughter leave the house, and waited. Sometimes she forgot stuff she had to come back for, but not this morning.

He exhaled loudly, unaware he’d even been holding his breath, and collapsed backwards onto the bed. This morning he was feeling the most unhappy he had felt since he’d first started waking up in the morning feeling unhappy, which was about five years ago. Something terrible had happened in his life; more terrible than discovering the love letters written by a man called Peter Jenkins to his then wife, Caro; more terrible than being laid off from Sky TV and having to pay most of his not generous redundancy package to Caro and her new partner, Peter Jenkins; more terrible than living in a two up two down overlooking the Unigate Dairy depot. What made it worse was that he couldn’t talk to anybody about it; not even his sister—the only member of his family he was still on speaking terms with—and definitely not Saskia.

He lay there staring up at the ceiling, which had been hastily wallpapered in order to hold it together—by the son of the woman who died here—before they put it on the market. The upstairs bedrooms had also been washed in a single coat of magnolia that the wallpaper underneath—a ghostly pattern of miniature posies—could still be seen through. The imprints of the elderly woman’s furniture could be traced as well, in the pile of the carpet from the decades it had stood there.

The lamp hanging from the ceiling was a deep, helpless burgundy, and had tassels. There were brown stains on the inside of the shade where water had, at some point in time, dripped through the ceiling. Sometimes he was so hung over when he woke in the morning that he thought he heard the lamp muttering at him in a language he couldn’t understand—a dead language like Aramaic. His sister phoned him while that was happening once and told him he sounded like crap and he’d asked her how a person who was getting taunted by a lampshade—in Aramaic—was meant to sound, and then she’d hung up.

This morning it wasn’t taunting him—in Aramaic or anything else.

Sighing, he rolled over and felt under the bed for the bag of cocaine he kept taped to the frame.

His dealer lived on a farm about three miles out of Burwood. He bred spaniels for gun dogs and Richard came across him because he had a lap top that was playing up—this was when he was writing his novel—and the spaniel breeder did a sideline in computer repairs. Richard left the farm with a fully functioning lap top and 4g of pure Bolivian—yet another of the breeder’s sidelines, it transpired.

Hauling himself once more into an upright position, he shook out a line onto the small metal tray with a picture of the Natural History Museum on it that he kept by the side of the bed specifically for this purpose.

He did the line, closed his eyes, and waited.

When he opened them again, the surfaces in the room had become sharper and brighter. By the time he got dressed in the suit Saskia had hung out for him, the interior of the house was virtually dazzling.

Downstairs, he felt that the kitchen could almost pass as the sort of kitchen other—ordinary—people had.

He poured himself a glass of milk and stood drinking it, staring at the two photographs Blu Tacked to the fridge door—the only two photographs in the entire house, in fact. One was of him and Saskia scuba diving in France, and the other was of him standing at the bottom of a trench in the Somme where a relative of his had died during the First World War.

You could tell a lot about a middle-class family from examining their fridge. A well-stocked interior indicated physical health, and a well-stocked exterior (fridge magnets) indicated an attempt, at least, in projecting emotional health. The Greaveses’ fridge was both empty, and unadorned—apart from the two photographs.

Richard picked up his bag and the green folder containing Saskia’s notes for that morning’s class on sitcoms and, feeling fretful—the only discernible trace of his earlier despair—but remarkably buoyant, pulled the front door loudly shut.

That was all he had to do.

As long as he left for work in the morning, kept the front garden clear of litter, and put the right recycling in the right bin, he was left alone.

The world didn’t care that a coke-addicted divorcee lived at number twenty-four Carlton Avenue with a daughter he was incapable of looking after—or that he’d slept with a minor in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Richard took the same amount of cocaine most mornings to help him out of bed, out of the house and into the dark green Skoda that had been designed with Saabs in mind. He used to make people laugh—his ex-wife, Caro, included—at his Skoda jokes, but that was when he drove a Saab. Now, as a Skoda driver, he wasn’t entirely sure of his footing when it came to telling Skoda jokes, and didn’t know any jokes about Saabs.

The fog was beginning to lift and the early morning world of Burwood shone through the diminishing grey as he drove the Skoda out of town towards the new bypass and Technical College.

Once there he made his way to the far end of the car park and parked beneath a bank of Scotch pines where traces of fog still hung. This was where he always parked because nobody else ever did.

He shunted his seat back, picked up the bag of cocaine he kept on the floor under the driver’s seat, and did another line from the Skoda’s dashboard. After this he got his phone out his bag and dialled the number he’d been thinking about dialling all morning. She didn’t pick up. He thought about leaving a message, but in the end decided not to.

Still clutching the phone, he got out the car and headed towards the glass and steel college building. It wasn’t until he got half way across the car park that he realised how cold his legs were.

Feeling suddenly sick with fear, he checked to see that he’d remembered to put on the suit trousers—he’d once got as far as the bypass before realising that he was only half dressed. Yes, he was wearing trousers; it was his socks that he’d forgotten to put on.

Reassured, he passed through the automatic doors into reception where he saw Polly—who taught textiles and made her own clothes—standing waiting for him.

‘Richard,’ she said, coming towards him in one of her own designs, her voice long and mellow from decades of breathing exercises. ‘I was hoping to catch you—’ She paused, hauling her hair slowly back over her shoulders and laying a hand on his arm. ‘Everything okay?’

He’d once made the mistake of crying in front of her when he gave her a lift home, and now she thought she had Fast Track Access to him.

He stared at her hand, but it didn’t leave his arm.

‘I really need you to confirm re. the Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

Lost, he probed his mind for references to a Transcendental Yoga Retreat. Was this something they’d actually discussed? Her tone seemed to suggest so—at a worryingly concrete level. Her tone seemed to suggest that she was going to carry on probing his Chakra points until he caved in—and said ‘yes’.

While waiting for a response, her hands started brushing at the shoulders of his jacket, dusted with fallout from his nostrils after the line he did on the Skoda’s dashboard.

Could he tell Polly about his problem?

‘Look at all this dandruff. You’re stressed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some wonderful oil for scalp conditions.’

Their eyes met. ‘I just don’t know if it’s my thing—a Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

‘Did you go to the site?’

He shook his head.

‘Go to the site—have a look at it—then make your mind up.’ Her hand was still on his arm.

‘The thing is—I’ve got quite a lot of complicated personal stuff going on at the moment.’

Polly nodded, interested.

Richard looked around him.

The college building was optimistically open-planned so ironically reception—the main thoroughfare into the college and usually crowded—was often the best place to have a private conversation.

‘I’ve been involved with someone.’ He broke off when he saw the look on her face. ‘Not seriously,’ he said quickly. ‘I mean—for me.’

‘I didn’t realise,’ Polly mumbled, upset.

‘I should never have started it.’

‘So—you’re breaking it off?’

‘Trying to.’

‘Why trying to?’

‘She’s not getting the point.’

All this was good—what Polly wanted to hear—and she would have been reassured by it, exuberantly so, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Richard’s facial expressions were changing by the second and there were beads of sweat along his upper lip.

‘She doesn’t understand the…impossibility…I mean, it’s my fault for starting it in the first place, but the…impossibility…of it carrying on.’

‘So talk to her…tell her.’

Richard let out a strange, high-pitched giggle.

‘I keep trying to, but she’s obsessed. It’s her age—’

‘Her age?’

Richard nodded. ‘I mean, she’s quite young.’

‘How young?’

‘Young.’

‘How young?’

He scrunched up his face. ‘Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen!’

A group of students turned round and stared at them then swung away again, laughing.

‘For fuck’s sake, Richard.’

He winced. ‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t know.’ Polly paused. ‘She’s not a student here, is she? Please God, don’t tell me she’s a student here.’

He shook his head. ‘Look, I really need to talk -’

‘I’m no professional.’

‘I just need to talk—to somebody. Later? After school?’

The bell sounded and she started to move off through reception.

‘Please—’ he called after her.

She turned and looked at him before disappearing through the double doors leading to Art & Textiles.

He shuffled over to the reception desk, feeling cold inside, and slid his elbows across the glass surface. ‘I don’t suppose—’

The receptionist turned, in her headset, to look at him.

‘I don’t suppose you keep spare pairs of socks behind there, do you?’

She carried on looking at him, sighed, and turned back to her magazine and the article on celebrity house foreclosures she’d been reading.