Laying the Ghost (8 page)

Hmm, confident to the point of cockiness, Nell decided, wondering what knack he had perfected that made him think he’d be able to put twenty new names to new faces in one hour.

‘First of all, before we do the boring form-filling and so on, I’m going to ask you which of the two doors I came in through. Those who think I came in through the left one, go to the left-side wall, those who think I came in the other door go to the right. Got it?’

Nell looked at Abi and shrugged. She hadn’t a clue, but there was a fifty–fifty chance of getting it right, so she chose the left wall with the gawky teenager and his mother, a yummy mummy wearing a bright slick of sparkly scarlet lipstick, and a giggling selection of the ponytails. Abi waved at her from the far end of the room.

‘Now you,’ Steve bounced down from the platform and addressed Nell’s group, ‘you, you got it wrong. Everyone in this room is an antelope and you lot have your heads down, grazing. But you,’ he sprinted down the studio, ‘you are aware. You watch, you see, you notice, see what’s where. In other words, you get to survive. Out there …’
He
pointed beyond the doors in vaguely the direction of the club’s restaurant, reception area and main doors. ‘Out there is the jungle and it’s full of lions waiting to pick you off. Life is divided like this: the antelope graze, keep their heads down and are vulnerable to the lions who prey on them. The antelopes that don’t learn to keep an ear and an eye open for the lions, they, folks, become lunch.’

Steve waved an arm towards Abi’s group. His gestures were exaggerated, like a dancer’s, Nell thought. He was whirling, pointing, gesticulating, making sure they got his message. He leapt back on to the platform, landing beside the flip chart, on which were pinned newspaper photos of various teen boys. Their faces were almost entirely hidden by hoods, shoulders huddled, the pictures obviously selected for the maximum brooding menace. It was funny about the hood thing, she’d always thought. Surely a fleecy-lined, hooded top was a sensible item for a young boy to wear? What mother wouldn’t want her son to keep his head and his ears warm on a chilly day? And yet such garments were considered something close to the clothing of Satan.

‘A
Daily Mail
reader, then,’ Abi muttered to Nell. Nell looked at the photos. They were ordinary enough young lads, every one – no different from Sebastian who could look as yobby as anyone when in a strop. What was this Steve on about? Maybe yoga would have been better. When the next robber attacked, she could slow him down
with
a calm invitation to chill and make peace with his chakras. She realized she’d lost concentration already, become a grazing piece of lion’s prey. She looked down the room and caught the eye of the Hell’s Angel, who smiled. Another dozy antelope then, not quite tuned in to Steve’s words of wisdom.

‘And these are some of your lions, your enemies,’ Steve told them, indicating the boy photos, his voice dropping towards an appropriately dramatic growl. ‘Keep your wits about you and your chances of being someone’s prey will be reduced to the absolute minimum. Right, before we go any further, can you all just take a minute or two to fill in these forms?’

He bounded down from the platform and handed round registration documents. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘The club insists. There’s a box to tick for no junk mail.’

Nell entered her name where required, and under ‘reasons for joining this class’ wrote ‘divorce’, which just about summed it up, but she hesitated after that and left the spaces for address, email details and phone number blank. She added her form to the pile on the edge of the platform and rejoined the group.

‘OK.’ Steve was pacing the floor now. ‘The next bit is why are you all here? Have any of you been victims of crime?’

A few hands went up, Nell’s included, though warily in case Steve planned a full-scale reconstruction of whatever assaults had taken place.

Wilma, mother of the teen boy, was prodding him encouragingly, but he sullenly folded his arms, blushing.

‘Jason had his phone nicked,’ she announced.

‘God, Mum,’ Jason seethed. ‘So
’barrassin
’.’

‘What were you doing at the time?’ Steve asked him.

‘Um. Well, I was tex’in’. Jus’ walking down the street, tex’in’.’

‘Walking down the street?’ Steve smiled. ‘Show me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Show me. Walk towards me with your phone, pretend you’re texting, just like you were that day.’

Jason blushed but shuffled forward, hand out, pretending to peck at his phone. Head down. And then, so swiftly that no one could swear they’d seen him move, Steve swooped on the boy, slipped the phone out of his hand and whirled past him. ‘See? Well no, you didn’t see, did you? This is the point.’

Jason grunted crossly, rubbing his hand. ‘No I didn’t bloody see,’ he muttered.

‘You see … a grazing antelope, folks. Wandering around with your head down and something valuable in your hand, you’re like horses with blinkers. You make it easy for the thieves. Too many do, just by not taking any notice of what’s around. You see it all the time, headphones on, phone in hand, bag held loosely – you might as well hand your valuables out to the first comer. OK – next. What happened to you?’ Steve pointed to Nell.

‘Oh, um … my bag was stolen in the Gatwick long-term car park.’

‘Some kid, was it?’

‘Well … yes.
Not
in a hoodie, though.’ Nell looked at the photos on Steve’s board. None of them remotely resembled the hopeless Callaghan.

‘And what were you doing?’

‘Trying to find my car in the half-dark, arguing with my teenage daughter, the usual.’ Nell shrugged. There was a ripple of sympathy from the older women.

‘You didn’t know where your car was?’ Steve looked puzzled, as if he didn’t quite understand.

‘Well, I’d been away. I hadn’t seen it for a week. And don’t tell me I should have written down the row number and the exact space. I know all that.’

‘Oh good. Then I won’t have much to teach you, will I? Right … next thing. Invasion of personal space …’

‘Here we go,’ Abi murmured to Nell. ‘Time to start beating the crap out of each other.’

‘I do hope so. I wouldn’t mind starting with Steve,’ Nell replied, though she didn’t fancy her chances with him on a dark night. Or on any night. He could swagger you into submission, she thought. Arrogant bugger – yet there hadn’t been a single thing he’d said that she could really disagree with. Some people, she thought, simply got your back up, day one. Oh well.

* * *

She’d done it again. Where had she parked? After the class, Nell said goodbye to Abi and the Angel (Mike) at the club door and went out to the car park. Now, where was the bloody thing? She flipped the button on her key and looked around. But this time, instead of wandering into the dark and ambling about hoping to stumble across the vehicle, she waited under the lights of the doorway and thought for a moment. She remembered driving in, turning left … or was that the last time she’d been …? No, definitely left. She stepped out of the light and towards the fence. There it was. She flipped the switch again and the lights winked back at her. Then, just as she was approaching the car, a man appeared beside it and opened the driver’s door.

‘What the hell are you …? Oh Steve, Jeez, what are you doing? You frightened me!’

‘You were too far away from it, you see. You should never unlock the car door till you’re right beside it. It was unlocked the whole time you were walking across the car park. Another time it could be some lowlife between you and safe, lockable space.’

So what was this, Nell wondered, personal tuition?

‘Yeah, OK, sorry. Put it down to an antelope moment,’ she agreed, smiling at him. Why was she apologizing? Shouldn’t he?

‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’ she offered, wishing she wasn’t so habitually polite. Telling him to naff off and
not
go round putting the frighteners on lone females might be more appropriate.

‘No – you’re all right, thanks. I just wanted a word, actually.’ Steve took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘You didn’t fill in any contact details on the registration form. I don’t have your address or any means of getting hold of you. Suppose I have to cancel the class for some reason? You wouldn’t want to waste your time coming all the way here.’

This was true. Nell wrote her mobile number on the form and handed it back. ‘There you go. Sorry.’

Steve smiled at her. ‘Is that it? No address? No home number?’

Nell climbed into the car, shut and locked the door, then whizzed the window down a grudging inch and grinned at him.

‘Well, no, Steve, I don’t think so. Because so far you’re still a stranger to me, aren’t you? I shouldn’t go casually handing out personal details to just anyone, should I? You can’t be too careful.’

‘Touché!’ he admitted. ‘See you next week. Goodnight.’

Nell drove out of the car park. Now who’s a grazing bloody antelope? she thought. Rooooaaaar.

5

Time Is Running Out

(Muse)

THERE SEEMED TO
be an awful lot that could go wrong with a cabbage. Nell found it hard to believe that a food crop could survive, reach the exacting standards that supermarkets demanded and be perfectly edible, with so much against it. From now on, she would regard the contents of the brassica section in Waitrose as a triumph of nurture over nature, organic or otherwise. If it wasn’t an onslaught of cabbage-white caterpillars that were going to do for your crop, according to the pages of guidelines and photographs that Sheila, editor of
Home Grown
, had sent, it would be whitefly, rootfly, wire stem or clubroot. There was also an entire minor league of more obscure ailments that were waiting to scupper your lunch, if it survived any invasion by rabbits, squirrels and pigeons, wasn’t dug up
by
dogs and foxes and if you weren’t also stupid enough to keep a pet tortoise roaming free in the vegetable patch. Being individually fitted with cardboard collars and swaddled beneath fine mesh seemed the only way these vegetables could be (almost) guaranteed to achieve harvest point.

In her clapboard studio (which she loved – it reminded her of a village cricket pavilion) beneath the birch trees across the garden, Nell laid out her choice of watercolours in the shades she planned to use, opened the first of her selection of reference books and propped up a fat, healthy cabbage on the shelf in front of her.
Home Grown
’s brief was to paint twenty different vegetables. Each one had to be the entire plant, from tiniest roots to topmost leaf tip, incorporating all the diseases most likely to affect the crops of the keen amateur grower, all on one plant. A cabbage seemed like a good enough place to start. The cool, firm leaves and rich, deep greens suited her current rather uncertain mood, being somehow more soothing to work with than, say, the searing scarlets of tomatoes with their tight, tense skins. She would have to paint a bloody big one, she decided, committing a few pencil lines to a layout pad as a trial guide to the kind of shape she was going for. If it fell victim to even one of the troubles she had to inflict on it, it wouldn’t get even halfway to the size she was going to have to make it. Nor would it have any of the plump, veiny, full-size leaves she was going to have
to
give it, to show these optimistic amateurs what a perfect specimen should look like.

Nell was comfortably settled at her desk and had just sketched out the basic shape she intended to use for her fantasy cabbage when she caught sight of movement up by the house. The side gate was opening, very slowly. Whoever was behind it wasn’t yet showing their face. She tensed, nervous suddenly, wary of how vulnerable she really was. The studio door was open to let in the weak March sunshine (the cat was sprawled across the doormat, basking in a sunbeam), the house’s back door was unlocked and the keys for the car were lying on the kitchen table, along with her bag which contained credit cards, cheque book, a ninety pounds credit note from Joseph and two silver Tiffany bangles. She’d also left her computer on the worktop, after emailing Seb down in Falmouth to tell him that yes, it was all right, Alex was going to pay for another year of his car insurance.

It was, as Steve would have put it, a grazing-antelope moment. So, not as ready as she’d have liked to be to tackle a vicious burglar (the hands-on techniques came later in the Stay Safe course), she went outside and bravely, briskly, strode across the grass to confront the intruder, just as Steve himself suddenly emerged through the gate.

‘God, you scared me – again! What are you doing here?’ she demanded furiously, too outraged to care how rude she
sounded.
How rude was it, after all, to come creeping through people’s side gates when there was a perfectly good front doorbell he could have rung? It also rang in the studio – there was no way she could have missed hearing it.

‘Sorry, Nell – I didn’t mean to frighten you. I did press the bell but I couldn’t hear it ring in the house so I guessed it wasn’t working. Is it a battery one? It might need a replacement.’

‘It isn’t, actually. I’ll check it out and get it fixed. And I hope you’re not going to lecture me: I know I should keep that side gate locked. Anyway, come on in, I’ll make us some coffee.’

Steve followed Nell in through the back door. ‘Thanks, that would be great. You looked so fierce, I didn’t dare mention the lock! I’m going to cover home security in lesson two.’

‘So – what brings you here? And how did you find me? I didn’t give you my address.’ Had he followed her home after the class? she wondered. It seemed unlikely – after all, why would he? If he’d wanted to spend more time with her he could have accepted her offer of a lift.

Nell then wondered, as she made the coffee, if Steve supplemented his teaching with a spot of burgling. He’d know all the tricks: best method of house entry, whether a metal drainpipe had enough fixing points that hadn’t rusted through so that he could get safely up to a window that was open a mere careless centimetre. Perhaps that was
why
he was here now; he was casing the joint. Well, he wouldn’t find a lot; no more than the usual domestic haul of electrical gadgets and non-heirloom jewellery. She was not – unlike her mother – a collector of trophy gems. All the same, Nell, after putting two mugs of coffee on the table, moved her bag out of his way and shoved it to the back of the worktop, beside the bread bin.