Paradise City (15 page)

She undoes the chain and opens the door. Sunlight streams in and an unexpected warmth rises from the stones of the pavement. She hadn’t realised it was such a balmy day.

‘Alan,’ she says. She has to remind herself to smile. Her normal responses to social situations seem to have dulled over the last few months. A lot of it feels like too much effort. ‘Well this is nice.’

Alan grins, shifting from one foot to the other like a small boy about to ask for his ball back.

‘Nice to see you too, Mrs Hetherington.’ He glances at her dressing gown. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you—’

‘You’re not disturbing me, Alan. Why don’t you come on in off the street? I’ll put the kettle on.’ She pads back down the corridor, leading the way to the kitchen at the back. ‘I haven’t had a chance to get dressed yet. Such a busy morning, what with one thing and another.’

White lies. They come easily to her these days.

‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ Alan says, his voice monotone. Carol pulls out a seat from the kitchen table and motions for him to sit.

‘Yes,’ she agrees, even though she has always thought it a particularly stupid expression. Still, he’s just trying to make small talk. ‘Yes, it does.’ She fills the kettle from the cold tap, putting in too much water just because the sound of it soothes her. She does not sit, not straight away, but instead looks at Alan and takes him in, evaluating him for the first time as a potential suitor for her daughter.

He is wearing a crumpled blue flannel shirt, rolled up to the elbows, and faded blue jeans. His Timberland boots have a crust of mud around the soles. Through force of habit, she glances at the lino to see if he’s trailed any of that dirt into her house and sure enough, the white-grey checked pattern is speckled with dots of black like rabbit droppings. The kettle starts to boil, so noisily that any chatter proves impossible.

Alan’s face has an unhealthy sheen to it: he is pale and his cheeks look sallow. There are purplish smudges beneath his eyes and he seems uneasy, picking at his fingernails, one knee juddering up and down underneath the table. He is a large man and yet something about him remains unformed, almost wilfully youthful.

He looks too big, sitting there squeezed into her Ercol chair, his lumbering arms pressed against the spotless pine table like pieces of roasting meat. His neck is thick and brown and there is a suggestion of coiled muscle beneath his shirt, the tendons packed tightly into his torso. Not tall, Carol thinks, but imposing – yes, that’s the word she’d use to describe him. Vanessa normally goes for wiry, thin types whose complexion denotes a life of libraries and air-conditioned offices – like they’d not seen a day of sunshine in their lives. All of her previous boyfriends have been a bit wet, to be honest. A change might do her good.

‘What can I do for you, Alan?’ she says when the noise from the kettle finally subsides.

‘I was just wondering, Mrs Hetherington—’

‘Carol, please.’

He grins, showing the prominent gap between his two front teeth.

‘Carol.’ He draws out the two syllables, playing with the word in his mouth, tasting it. ‘Carol,’ he says again. ‘Could you do me a favour?’ There is a mild West Country tone to his voice that Carol finds appealing. It accentuates the childishness of him, makes it seem like he needs looking after.

‘That depends what it is!’ she replies cheerily but it comes out more accusingly than she’d intended. She can’t seem to strike the right conversational notes any more. Everything she says sounds off-key.

Alan’s knee jiggles. Biscuits, she thinks suddenly. They must have biscuits. She’s sure she’s got some somewhere, even though it was Derek who’d always been more partial to them. The older he got, the sweeter his tooth had become. He was quite capable of demolishing half a packet of chocolate digestives sitting in front of
Newsnight
of an evening. But then, with the chemotherapy, he’d lost his taste for sugar. Just like that. Overnight, he’d started craving pickled things: hard-boiled eggs preserved in gloopy jars of vinegar, capers, big tubs of sauerkraut that Carol had lugged home from the Polish shop in Southfields.

Funny what terminal illness did to you.

She catches herself. No, not funny. Not funny at all.

She turns her back to Alan, rummaging in the cupboard for the biscuit tin. Her fingers brush against its cool edges and she slides it out with a sense of triumph. It is the same tin she’s used for years: a commemoration piece from Charles and Diana’s wedding, their two young faces staring out at her in faded colour. Diana is smiling shyly, her eyes cast down over her pussy-bow blouse.

A tragedy, what happened to her, Carol thinks. And those two lovely boys. A tragedy. Her eyes moisten and she busies herself arranging fig rolls on a patterned plate so that Alan won’t notice. When he takes one, the biscuit looks small as a postage stamp in his hand.

‘Thank you,’ he says. He chews on the fig roll and carries on speaking, so that a patch of table in front of him becomes covered in a light spray of crumbs. Carol tries to ignore this and then, when she can’t, finds herself making excuses for him. Perhaps he’s lived on his own too long, she thinks. Having a girlfriend would do him the world of good.

‘I’m going away for a few days and I wondered if you’d mind watering my plants,’ he says, the words coming out in a sudden, nervous rush.

She laughs.

‘Oh, I thought it was going to be something serious.’

‘It is.’ Alan meets her gaze, his face unsmiling. ‘I love my plants. I do.’

She chuckles. Alan doesn’t respond. She has offended him somehow. ‘Of course I will, dear.’ Carol takes the tea bags out and passes Alan a mug. Too late, she realises it has ‘World’s Best Dad’ emblazoned across the front in vivid blue lettering. It had been a Father’s Day present for Derek some years ago from Vanessa. Not that they had marked the occasion – the sentimentalisation of random days of the year for commercial profit had been one of Derek’s particular bugbears.

‘It all comes from America,’ he would say, any time he saw a padded Valentine’s heart or an inflatable Hallowe’en pumpkin. ‘Tat, the lot of it!’

But he’d loved the ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug in spite of himself. When Vanessa had handed it over, all wrapped up prettily with a spotted red fabric bow, his face had been a picture.

‘What’s this for then?’ he’d said.

‘Father’s Day, Dad,’ Vanessa answered, even though she’d never got Carol so much as a bunch of flowers for Mother’s Day. Not that she was going to say anything, mind. Not that she cared. Well, not much, anyhow Derek had always been her daughter’s favourite. Vanessa could wrap him round her little finger when she wanted to.

Derek had opened the box and eased out the mug with the tips of his fingers, holding it up to the light as if it were a precious antique. He was delighted with it and, as soon as he’d given Vanessa a hug, went to make himself a cup of tea. He insisted that the tea tasted better in that mug than any other. Over the years, the white china inside had browned with repeated use. Now, as she passed ‘World’s Best Dad’ over to Alan, Carol hoped he wouldn’t notice the rust-coloured ring-stain around the top.

‘I promise I’ll do my best to look after them, Alan,’ she says. He looks so disconsolate that she leans forward, about to pat the back of his hand, but she stops herself, just before making contact. She wonders why she does that.

‘Thanks, Mrs Heth – Carol.’ He grins shyly. ‘It’s my pride and joy, that garden. I’ve put a lot of work into it.’

‘I know you have. We always used to see you out there, planting things.’

Alan looks worried. ‘Did you? I hope I wasn’t making too much noise.’

‘No, love. Not at all. You’re a very considerate neighbour.’

He glances at her and she notices his eyes fall downwards towards the V-shaped cleft where her dressing gown is gaping open. She draws the neck of the gown closer to her and makes it obvious she has seen him looking but he doesn’t shift his gaze, does not, in fact, seem remotely embarrassed.

‘Anyway—’ she starts, feeling uncomfortable.

‘I’ve built a patio,’ Alan says, almost simultaneously. ‘I researched how to do it all online and it wasn’t much trouble. I got the paving stones from a reclamation yard. They were throwing them out. Got a good price.’

His dark brown eyes are gleaming. Before, she’d thought there was a kindness in his features but now, examining him more closely, Carol realises that it is more a sort of slowness, as though his thoughts take longer to come to the fore than other people’s. He seems to be several steps behind. In fact, she thinks uncharitably, he’s what her mum would have called ‘a bit simple’.

No, she realises with sudden clarity, he wouldn’t be right for Vanessa at all.

She’d never had much chance to speak to him before. After that first brief chat when he moved in, it had all been smiles over the garden fence, a shared nod of the head when the weather was nice, an exchange of chit-chat that skimmed the surface of civility, but nothing more. She begins to think she might have got him wrong.

‘That sounds lovely, Alan,’ she says.

He slurps the rest of his tea and takes another fig roll from the plate without asking.

‘You’ll have to come over when it’s built. Have a cup of tea, or—’ and here he breaks off, cocks his head and winks at her. Carol swallows drily. ‘A gin and tonic. A sundowner. That’s what they call them, isn’t it? In posh restaurants?’

She nods, in what she hopes is a motherly fashion: encouraging but not flirtatious. She doesn’t want Alan to get the wrong idea. Carol wishes she weren’t in her dressing gown. What had possessed her to open the door in this state of semi-undress? She feels vulnerable and exposed without her usual armour of clothes.

‘When are you off on holiday, Alan?’

‘Thursday, just for four days. There’s a tap in the back garden so you can fill the watering can out there. No hoses allowed, of course.’ He grins. ‘Wettest drought I’ve ever known,’ he says, but it sounds like a joke he has overheard and stolen from someone else. Besides, it’s still only May. There’s been no talk of a hosepipe ban as far as Carol knows. Not since last year, when the news headlines were full of talk about a drought because the reservoirs were so low. It was strange of him to mention it.

‘That’ll be no trouble, Alan.’ Carol picks up the empty mugs and stands up to put them in the sink, hoping he’ll get the message. Normally she’d ask where he was going but she is unwilling to prolong the conversation. She stays there, her hands pushed against the damp rim of the steel moulding.

Alan looks at her, silent, for a few seconds. Then his face cracks into a grin again and he pushes his chair back.

‘Right, I’ll be off then, Carol. Thanks very much for – you know—’ He gestures towards the table and the plate of biscuits. ‘My plants will be in good hands!’

She smiles, half-hearted. He walks down the hallway, his feet clomping against the carpet, his shoulders stooped as if afraid he might knock against the ceiling. At the door, he turns to her and rapidly, before she has a chance to move away, he bends down and kisses her on the cheek. His lips are warm against her face, his breathing close.

Carol is so startled she doesn’t have a chance to react until he’s out of the door, waving at her jauntily.

‘Bye then,’ he says, raising his voice a fraction too loudly.

She holds a hand up, speechless.

It is the first time a man has kissed her anywhere since Derek died. As soon as she closes the door, she rubs her cheek frantically, trying to rid herself and the house of Alan’s presence. But even as she goes upstairs to get dressed, she can feel the shadow of him: a darkness lingering like a cat in the corner, waiting to pounce.

Beatrice

It has been forty-eight hours and Beatrice still hasn’t heard back from Howard Pink. All she got was an automated response in her email inbox, thanking her for her correspondence to the Paradiso Group and reassuring her that the matter would be attended to ‘at the earliest opportunity’.

She hadn’t expected a swift and easy resolution, of course, but she is disappointed. She doesn’t especially want to make life difficult for Howard Pink or that tough-looking blonde woman in the gossip magazine photographs, she assumes is his wife. At the same time, she doesn’t want to let him get away with it. There is a fire in Beatrice that has yet to be quenched. The experience of her life so far has left her not jaded but hungry. She wants to prove herself, to show that she isn’t to be taken for granted, that all the humiliations and loss and pain and wrongness that have beaten down on her like sharp hailstones from the sky, that all of it is for a reason, a purpose.

She knows she is an oddity in this respect. Every week, she drops in to the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Support centre in London Bridge, and she sees other men and women arriving through the doors with hollow eyes and a glazed expression, sagging with a sense of defeat. When Beatrice first arrived, she was like this too: a mere outline of herself, as though all the scribbled colour of her had been rubbed out. She had barely been speaking, could not find the words to express herself, and was terrified, if she did, that the British authorities would be disgusted by her and would send her back home.

A volunteer had led Beatrice inside, seating her at a small kitchen table in the back office while she made her a cup of instant coffee. She had given Beatrice a coat. Beatrice put it on, sliding her arms through the sleeves and feeling the soft graze of material against a trail of goose-bumps. And then, instead of asking questions, this woman had waited for Beatrice to talk.