Hush Hush (6 page)

When the in-flight meal arrived,
steamed up redly under its plastic cover, Angela discovered that she
could be hungry if she put her mind to it. She peeled back the cover,
prodded and sniffed.

‘Breast of chicken in
tarragon sauce with pasta underneath,’ said the man next to
her, reporting expertly on his first mouthful. ’Not bad, if
you’ve had nothing to eat in the last ten hours but a Rich Tea
biscuit.’

‘Would you like mine then?’
asked Angela timidly.
‘
I
don’t care for meat much.’

‘You could eat the pasta
underneath,’ said the man, his soft burr obscured by chicken.
Was he Cornish? Scottish?

‘The pasta will taste of
chicken,’ sniffed Angela.

‘My, my, aren’t we
fussy?’ snorted her companion.
‘
Don’t mind if I do.’ He pounced on
her meal.

Angela turned to glare at him.
What a Neanderthal! He was a scruffy brute of a man, unshaven, and
shovelling in pasta like a mechanical digger. He also whiffed of
something indefinable, but definitely not aftershave.

He saw her wrinkling nose.
‘
My
jumper smells of fish,’ he said with his mouth full.
‘
Spent
the last twelve hours on a smack so I could get to Agadir airport in
time for this flight. It won’t be putting you off, as you’re
not eating.’

‘You’re Irish,’
she realised.

‘Guilty as charged. Irish,
ugly and smelling of fish.’ He grinned and pasta-smeared white
teeth glimmered out of his nut-brown face.
‘
Not
exactly holiday romance material. Do you want that unidentifiable
dessert? I think custard may be a key component.’

‘Be my guest.’ He
wasn’t ugly, actually. Just blunt and covered in travel-dust.
And very hungry.

Pain lanced through Angela’s
head.
‘
Jesus,’
she whispered and slumped forward over Fish-Jumper’s second
meal.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’
he expanded.
‘
You
OK? You having a turn or something? Shall I call a stewardess?’

‘My lens!’ Angela
tipped her head back and blinked. She blinked again at Fish-Jumper
and shook her head. He was still a complete blur.
‘
I’ve
lost a contact lens!’ she panicked.
‘
I
think just now, when I leant over the tray. It’s in your food!’

Fish-Jumper picked up a plastic
fork and began trawling through soggy pasta.
‘
Not
like that! You’ll shred it!’ wailed Angela.

‘Very bloody sorry,
missus.’ He put down the fork and glowered.

‘Oh my God, I’m not
insured and they were one of my new batch for the month. Why did it
have to happen to me?’

‘The great philosophical
question of our times,’ observed Fish-Jumper, folding his arms.
‘
Got
a pair of glasses to put on?’

‘Don’t be stupid!’
snapped Angela.
‘
You
can’t see through glasses when you’ve still got a contact
lens in.’

‘I stand corrected. Why
bother, anyway? They’re so fiddly. They fall down the U-bend,
get hoovered up, slip round the back of the eye and rot there. What’s
the point?’

‘To look good!’
goggled Angela, looking anything but good (she knew) as her lensless
eye wavered and wept.
A highly
expensive sliver
of wafer-thin silicone was currently basting
in tarragon sauce that no amount of fizzy build-up tablets would
remove.
‘
And
they can’t go round the back of your eye. Especially not mine,
because they’re soft, and when you bung them in, they just
float around until they find where they’re meant to be and
settle there.’

‘And take out a mortgage, I
suppose.’

‘You’re no help!’
snarled Angela, wincing as she touched her forehead.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’
acknowledged Fish-Jumper after a pause.
‘
If
you need help at the other end, I can put you on a bus or call a taxi
for you or whatever.’

‘Mind your own business!’

‘OK, OK, keep your hair
on,’ he retorted, in a much milder tone.
‘
I
can see you’re tired and emotional. Look, I’ll go through
this tray very carefully. I’ve already found a rogue hair.’
He lapsed into a concentrating silence. She was vaguely aware of his
index finger excavating the chicken and pasta with patient
thoroughness.

Her heart choked her at the
spectacle she’d reduced herself to.
‘
There’s
no need, really,’ she sighed, flaunting her desperately
recovered equilibrium.
‘
Look,
I’m sorry I was so rude and snappy. The lens is gone for good,
and I’m calling off the search. These things happen.’

‘Especially to you, right?’

She bridled. Was he goading her,
laughing at her or just sneering at her?

When the plane landed, he
grappled down her luggage from the overhead locker and deposited it
on her foot in the aisle.
‘
Can
you manage?’ he asked ungraciously.

She just growled, grabbed her
suitcase handle and trundled away.

At the carousel, they took up
positions at opposite ends. Typically, Angela found herself furthest
away from the point of luggage disgorgement.

She seized her navy holdall off
the belt and threw it on to a trolley with a casual toss that nearly
dislocated her arm. Then she made her exit towards the pick-up point
where Rachel was meeting her. Her dignified exit was spoilt a bit by
the trolley’s wonky wheel. She found the only way to reach
‘
nothing to declare’
was to point the trolley towards the gents’ toilet. And she
still had a headache.

‘But, the main thing is, you enjoyed
yourself,
’
said
Rachel.

Angela sighed.
‘
I’ve
been going on, haven’t I? You must be dying to get home to your
own bed.’

‘Not yet, Ange. I’m
intrigued by this bloke you met on the plane.’

‘Oh, Fish-Jumper. What’s
so intriguing about him?’

Rachel had come in after driving
Angela home. Now, as they lingered over late-night coffees laced with
brandy, Angela still chafed inwardly over her lost contact lens. The
lone survivor was safely potted in the bathroom.

‘Fish-Jumper,’ she
recalled,
‘
hoovered
up two in-flight meals like an industrial nozzle, and my lens with
them.’

‘Yes, but why was he on
holiday alone? Why did he need a lift to the airport on a fishing
smack?’

‘I dunno. Probably
smuggling hashish in his turn-ups and reckoned customs at Heathrow
would leave him alone if he whiffed of the EU mackerel quota.’

‘There’s got to be
more to it.’ Rachel’s gaze settled on the middle distance
with a matchmaking gleam that Angela knew and dreaded.

Rachel, currently between
admirers, sat with casual elegance on Angela’s unravelling
wicker chair, one golden leg folded beneath the other. Her body
boasted a pre-Christmas tan from Jamaica. Though it was winter and
Rachel
went without tights, she never sported plucked chicken
legs,
and wicker splinters knew better than to sink into that peach-glow
skin.

‘
Look,
Rache, I’m just like you,’ pretended Angela desperately.
‘
I
don’t need a man to look after me. I am coping. I start a new
job on Monday, remember.’

‘
I’m
sorry, Ange, but I’m with your ma on this one. You do need a
man’s protective custody. You’re not weak or anything,
you’re just
‒
a lot more yourself in a couple.’

‘
I
could be very insulted by that.’

‘
Don’t
be. You know something? I wish I wanted a soulmate. I get tired of
flitting from flame to flame, getting my wings singed.’

‘
At
least you’re an exotic sort of moth,’ grumbled Angela.
‘
Even
if I was a butterfly, I’d be a cabbage white.’

It was Sunday morning. Examining a shaving nick in
his bathroom mirror, Conor McGinlay thought about the daffy woman on
the plane.

Daffy
or not, he’d been rude and ungracious. He was out of practice,
talking to women socially.

‘
You
getting up?’ he yelled into the space behind him.
‘
I’m
only offering once! If you want a cooked breakfast, speak now or
forever hold your peace.’

He
cocked his ear for the usual assenting grunt. He heard nothing.

The
house wasn’t too much of a tip, considering his two-week
absence. Mrs Turner had polished his hardwood floors and maple doors
with zeal. The house was her pride and joy, too.

Blood
dripped into the sink. He blotted his chin roughly with toilet paper.
God, he wasn’t exactly an oil painting before adding
lacerations. His best feature,
according
to Kate, was his expression. A brooding animal
expression.
Big deal. An expression was hardly likely to see you into old age,
the way a mellowing, even sagging collection of half-decent features
would.

Right now, his animal expression
was knackered bloodhound. He’d worked nights as well as days on
the logistics of the Hotel Paradise Beach. The contractor had a mass
market vision of paradise: five hundred and ten rooms, a vast
restaurant bisected by an artificial waterfall and a lobby bigger
than Agadir airport. The waterfall was the real nightmare. Still,
work kept his mind off other things.

He padded out of his en suite
bathroom and down the gleaming staircase, enjoying, as he did every
morning, the simple elegance and spacious modernity of his dream
home. His hand caressed the banister rail, as cool and silkily curved
as the hollow of a woman’s spine.
‘
Sausages,
fried bread and fried mushrooms coming up!’ he yelled in a town
crier voice.
‘
This
really is your last call, lazybones!’

At
the foot of the stairs, he frowned. His luggage lay piled untidily in
the hallway. On the top was a small case he didn’t recognise.

The phone eventually woke Angela. She opened one
eye, panicking. Was it Monday morning already? She squinted at the
clock radio, her other eye refusing to open. Her lids were gummed
together with weepy stuff. The phone went on ringing.

Angela half-tumbled down the
stairs, cursing her blurred vision and lack of a phone extension.
Wearily, she lifted the receiver.

‘You’re back then,’
accused Sadie.
‘
I
thought you’d ring last night when you got in.’

‘Wasn’t up to it,
Mum.’ She recounted the lens saga.
‘
And
the eye it fell out of is still giving me gyp like you wouldn’t
believe.’

‘You’d better see an
optician first thing in the morning.’

‘I can’t. I’ve
got
Goss!
tomorrow.’ She hardly wanted reminding first
thing on Sunday morning. She’d planned to start getting
depressed about four in the afternoon.

‘I’ll come round and
make you lunch,’ decided Sadie.
‘
See
you at oneish.’

‘That’s only an hour
from now! There’s no need.’ The line went dead.

Angela stared at the phone
furiously. She’d never got a chance to go to plan B
‒
pretending that she wanted her afternoon free to visit the cemetery,
alone.

Actually, she had to be in an
upbeat mood to go anywhere near the cemetery. If she went along
feeling the least bit cynical, all that dripping stone Victoriana and
the desolate cries of crows (buzzards?) wheeling overhead plunged her
into an ultimately fruitless search for reasons to believe in an
afterlife.

Catholics were buried at the far
end of Wilmesbury cemetery, a good half-mile walk through an avenue
of sombre yews. And when she reached the Catholic section, she was
forced to indulge two griefs for the price as one, as Robert was
buried only two rows behind her father.

She’d stand with head
bowed, her bitterness at their comparative ages wrestling the demon
guilt. A stranger wouldn’t have read Fenton’s headstone
(Fenton Feeney,
1935-2007
,
‘
Taken from us too
soon’) without remarking on his good innings compared to that
bloke two rows back (Robert Anthony Carbery,
1974-2012
,
‘
Dust has its
sweetness too,’ whatever the hell that meant. Pressed to supply
a headstone soliloquy at short notice, a shell-shocked Angela had
simply stuck a pin in the undertaker’s Patience Strong almanac.
In retrospect, she’d have preferred,
‘
Snuffed
out before his time. Thanks a lot, God.’)

Angela tottered back upstairs,
her gummed-up eye as stubborn as a clam.

She ran cold water into the
bathroom basin, and plunged downwards. When she came up for air,
gasping, her eye finally popped open. It stared back at her from the
mirror above the sink, threaded with veins, but mysteriously well in
focus. Then she realised why.

Beyond the blue rim of her iris
shone the silvery rim of her contact lens. It had been there all the
time; the cold water had floated it back into position! It had popped
off on a detour, despite all she’d said to Fish-Jumper.

Scrabbling it out and into her
lens bottle, she didn’t know whether to feel relief or anxiety
that she’d slept a good twelve hours with a foreign body
rattling round her orbital socket.