Chain Reaction (3 page)

‘There’s no view through there,’ Joy would like to remind the usurper, ‘unless you enjoy staring at long-nosed men with mean, bad-tempered eyes and thinning brown hair.’ That’s not fair. Joy knows she is being unfair, but these men are so ruthless with their little bit of power, like everyone else these days in the privileged position to buy. And why doesn’t Mrs Middleton tell him that he has a bad case of dandruff?

Joy can’t help being spiteful; she doesn’t want to sell her house.

The two Middleton teenagers fidget, obviously aware that this house is not to their parents’ taste and unprepared to play Let’s Pretend like them, nor brave it out. The graceless girl, the older one, dressed from head to toe in black plastic, sits on the edge of the bed as if to test the springs, as if the bed is for sale as well, but Joy will not rise to the bait. Their attitude is a mixture of laughter and scorn. Well, what does anyone expect for the money? This is a perfectly respectable house on a perfectly respectable estate. Some might call it a square box but it’s been a good home to Joy and Vernon. These kids have probably been dragged around hundreds of unsuitable houses, poor things, and are bored to death by now. Huh. The Middletons probably haven’t even sold theirs yet, it’s probably not even on the market. They just enjoy spending their days disturbing other people and conspiring to drive them mad, viewing houses as some folks take to the roads at weekends in order to go deliberately slowly and block everyone else.

Perhaps the Middletons are impostors and don’t even have a house to sell.

The agents swore that they vetted their viewers, made sure they were serious contenders before they allowed them loose in their clients’ homes. Well, the agents swore many things when first the Marshes went on the market. They promised they would show people round for a start, and that they would advertise widely… but so far they haven’t turned up once, and there’s been no sign of an ad in any of the local papers.

Ah well…

‘We’d have done better to try and sell it ourselves,’ Vernon said morosely after four weeks went by with no response whatsoever. Poor, dear Vernon. Running that shop never worked out; it swallowed all that precious redundancy money for which they’d had such high hopes. Joy is forced to close her eyes against that mocking memory. You would think an electrical engineer would be able to sell electrical appliances, knowing all about them and backing up every sale with a customer-friendly repair deal. Marsh Electronics Ltd, not the most imaginative title, not the most imaginative man. But Vernon was so brave. He is
still
brave. It is she who is the snivelling coward. It’s true, heroes are men like Vernon who get up and go to work every single wet morning for the trivial trappings of this world, blind to the views of the universe. Heroes are the lonely people who get through Sundays all alone, not the reckless men who go barging into battle, adrenalin flowing like flags in the wind. It is Vernon and men like him who should be given the medals.

Unfortunately, it had been the wrong time for Marsh Electronics, as well as the wrong place. There’re hardly any shops surviving in that arcade now, not since they built the new one beside the harbour. And they can’t even fill those—they are still three-quarters empty, and no wonder with the rents they charge! And now he is stuck with the lease to pay and a Sale that goes on endlessly, and unless they can sell the house… But that’s all water under the bridge. Now Joy must be positive.

‘And next there’s the roof extension.’

Up they spiral, this forced little party, one by one to the loft conversion Vernon built himself and was once so proud of—the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, this room at the top of the house. When the children left home they had to have somewhere to store the clutter, so of course it was piled up here. In those days they never imagined they would have to sell so soon. Walls of stripped and shiny pine, a window in the roof which floods the little room with light, ‘an airy office space,’ Vernon called it, ‘a quiet room where we can keep the computer or come and read or write letters or even put people up if the spare room is already taken.’

‘Isn’t this lovely?’

The floorboards are bare but for colourful rugs.

Joy turns to face the Middletons, determined to wrest some positive energy out of these uninspired people. They will not go away disparaging Vernon’s important work. ‘You can see for miles from here,’ she says, standing on tiptoe and gesturing out over the cul-de-sac, seeing a little V of birds fly over. Her washing hangs helplessly out on the line, left in the garden from last night. Rain streaks and tickles down the glass. She sees her own desperate face reflected in the window and it mocks her. Messy wet hair from showing the Middletons round outside. They looked but they
did not see.
And she was the same before she knew she was leaving; she too walked across the cool, green grass, past the cobwebs, the soft mauve flowers, the wonderful wet Michaelmas daisies, the black twigs of the thorn hedge and the dangling swing, abandoned now. All so precious, so familiar, all so taken for granted before.

More like a box room now. Up here the air is acrid from disuse, it smells like skin and the stale warmth of the room is unpleasant. ‘On a clear day you can even see the moors.’

‘It’s not very big,’ sniffs the Middletons’ oldest child with disappointed eyes.

‘No, well it’s shrunk since we were forced into using it as a store room,’ says Joy with a chilly smile but still determined. ‘It is really quite spacious without all these boxes of books.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ says Mrs Middleton, fiddling with her handbag strap and keen to renegotiate the spindly stairway, down onto safer ground again. The woman is a bag of nerves, depressed, too, worse than I am, thinks Joy. And she pities her, and wonders what is the matter.

‘Look,’ she says more cheerfully, ‘my husband built a bar behind there. You can just see it if you bend—’

‘Very useful,’ says Mrs Middleton, looking away. Her little head jerks on a neck like a stem. ‘Always nice to have a bar.’

‘But you and Dad don’t drink,’ says the oldest Middleton child.

Cauliflower cheese.

Again. They eat quietly at the kitchen table but it all feels like an illusion. This house is for sale, this house is not their home any more, no matter how much she has cared for it and looked after it, and after her latest ordeal Joy isn’t hungry, she is quivering and tense. For so long she has seen Vernon as grown up and wise; he is the one who let her feel safe and she experiences a momentary chill, a rebellion against him—for his hurt and his disappointment are also his betrayal.

Its awful, it’s mean and unfair to think this way but Vernon has let her down. She has heard of couples married for over thirty years and the man goes off just like that, leaving the woman to wonder whether any of their life was honest. Well, Joy has been married for just twenty-three, and she will never let Vernon know it, but this situation feels rather like that to her…

‘There’s no point in us looking at properties yet, Joy, not until we get an offer which is acceptable. If we did, we would be as bad as them.’ And his worried eyes flicker off her.

Cautious and sensible as usual. Chew chew chew. Mastication. She watched a television programme last night which showed you where the food went, the whole digestive process. Liquids and solids. Sensible, solid Vernon like his sensible, solid father before him. Indistinct families moving behind net curtains and voting Tory to maintain the status quo.
Status quo?
She will never vote Tory again. Joy wonders if he can honestly contemplate the mess they are in. Nothing in his life has ever prepared him for this—and how long did he fend off the truth so even she didn’t know the true extent of their difficulties? To Vernon, bankruptcy is a crime.

If they sell the house now they will be just in time to prevent it.

Joy argues; she needs to know where they’re going. Her home is important to her image. ‘But we must get some idea, Vernon. Some idea of size if nothing else so I can sort out the furniture.’

‘We can do that by looking in the paper. Simple enough.’

But that’s not the same. She has looked in the papers, she is looking all the time, and this is all part of Joy’s inner turmoil. She saw a flat this morning, for £45,000. Surely they won’t end up living in a grotty flat like a couple of students starting out? She doesn’t like to pressurise Vernon any more than he is already. His blood pressure is high. He is on pills from the doctor and he should not eat so much salt. At least they are not caught in this negative equity trap like some; they bought Joyvern too long ago for that. Fifteen years is a long time to live in a house and have to leave it. Still, Joy would quite like to look round other properties all the same. After the debts have been paid they should have enough for somewhere half decent.

What will Vernon do with himself all day?

Tired, sick and fat.

A qualified electrical engineer, fifty-two years old and on the scrapheap. Despite what this government would have us believe, retraining programmes for men of Vernon’s age are ridiculous. Who’s going to employ a fifty-two-year-old retrained man with no experience when there’s kids around in the self-same boat with all their working lives ahead of them? I ask you.

Perhaps he could do some gardening, £3.50 an hour on the side for some cantankerous old woman?

And he’d once been so proud of himself.

They’d even dreamed of a world cruise.

The leaflet said—
Redundancy? Opportunity!

All is gloom and doom.

Oh, if only they hadn’t decided to start that business… but their hopes had been dazzling then. If only they had just given up trying and invested the money instead, sold the house around the end of the eighties and moved into a smaller one. Seven years ago, the investments would have doubled by now. Still, you just can’t stop and give up like that, somehow it’s not right. You have to go on. You
have to give it a whirl.
And it wasn’t as if they dived into it cold, either. Oh no, they went on the appropriate courses, did the necessary market research, sent flyers round, advertised in the local papers. And Joy gave up work in the dress shop to keep the books, man the telephone and do the secretarial work. She sent out the bills, too—bills that were seldom paid.

Oh, it’s all a great big con. Oh, truly the world is a cruel place and life is nothing but a treacherous bog.

Poor Joy. Waste not want not. Joy will finish the food on her plate. Cauliflower cheese,
such a tired idea,
sums up her present mood to perfection.

I
F ONLY THEY COULD
take time back she would deal with her children so differently. Ah, but it’s too late, far too late for that now. ‘You don’t think she recognised us, do you, Lenny?’

Anyone would think his beleaguered wife had a villainous look about her.

Lenny Middleton inwardly groans, concentrates on the road ahead. The traffic is heavy. It’s always heavy these days, too many cars, too many people. ‘Now why on earth would they recognise us? Come on now, Babs, get with it. We’re three hundred miles away from home, nobody’s heard of us round here, or of Jody. Come on, pet. This just won’t do!’

But Babs cannot relax, instead she plays nervously with her hands on her lap. A tiny, muscular woman with almost a twitch to her lips, she stares through the drizzle, wanting to believe him, wanting so badly to believe him, but her eyes are not focused on anything real; she stares out, but sees nothing. ‘I know, love,’ she mutters. ‘I know I’m daft. It’s just that these days I always feel people know who I am and despise me…’

‘You can never get your mind onto anything else, that’s your trouble.’ This time her husband is moved to take one hand from the wheel and try to pat her calm with it. ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. A fresh start, Babs, like we said. A fresh start for all of us. No looking back, pet, not now.’

Babs smiles, but faintly. ‘It was just the way that woman looked down her nose at us. As if we’re not good enough for her house.’

‘She was nothing but a jumped-up snob. What a lot of pretentious nonsense. Glossy white horses with flowing manes—the kind of pictures they hang on the wall in Boots. But the house was grand though. What did you think?’

‘I don’t really care where we live any more, Len, quite frankly.’

The two girls in the back of the car exchange tired glances before staring blandly out in silence once again. These are uneasy children. They have heard this discussion so many times of late they don’t bother to listen any more. This intense absorption of their parents for one another has turned them into virtual strangers to their kids. Cindy and Dawn Middleton don’t care what happens now as long as they escape from Preston, as long as there is a change in their world. Maybe then these endless traumas will cease, and people will stop talking about their brother Jody for once and for all.

I mean. These past few weeks they haven’t even been able to go to school. This trip has been a real relief, the chance to get away from it all viewing houses down south. Perhaps, when they get back, there’ll be some positive news about their own house. A couple are already interested even though it is only just on the market.

It’s not as though they want to move. The fact is, they’ve been driven out.

‘We must try and believe that this hell is nothing but a passage, a pathway we must travel along before we reach something better.’

High-minded, huh. It’s fine for Dad to talk like that, he doesn’t have to suffer the way they do, because he’s a man. And kids are so cruel. At least some adults pretend, the men more so than the women.

Some women seem to thrive on unkindness. Even neighbours, those they’d known since childhood, started shouting obscenities at them. Some shouted, some jeered and some stayed silent. These were the worst. Those silences grew into piercing hisses.

Since the rape they have watched their mother quietly disintegrate before their eyes. She hadn’t shouted and sworn like their father had at first, in angry denial. When Jody was arrested it seemed like a kind of death. The house went hushed and gloomy and full of whispers. Even the stairs, normally a space for cheerful communications, turned into the twisting stone steps of a castle, echoing to the whispers of sad ghosts. Nothing good meanders up them any more. It would have been easier for everyone if Jody had merely died, crashed his bike as everyone predicted he would.