Best of Friends (43 page)

“I know, but she was good and kind and still she died, while I’m screwing up everything I touch and I’m still here. It makes you feel there’s some truth in the cliché about only the good dying young.”

“Change the screwed-up bits of your life, then,” Mike said easily.

“It’s not that simple …” she began. Then stopped. Maybe he was right. Instead of moaning about the past, she should face up to the future and change it. Sally would have had the courage to do that. Abby gave Mike a faint smile. “That’s all very profound. To think that I put off having an agent for years because I thought they were all shallow and full of ‘You were
fabulous!’
bullshit.”

Mike’s tiny black eyes sparkled. “I can do shallow, believe me, I can do shallow. And people rave about my ‘You were
fabulous!
’ But premium clients get the full Horowitz package, which includes poignant insights, relationship advice and brandy. Just don’t tell anyone or my reputation would be shot to hell.”

Abby’s faint smile widened into a grin. She liked Mike Horowitz and she’d been so sure she wouldn’t …

“You couldn’t be more dangerous than Roxie,” Linzi said now with a shudder.

“Watch me,” said Abby, thinking of Mike, her new secret weapon. “Roxie’s going to find that two can play that game.”

It was ten in the morning and the three of them were in a taxi, being driven to work. There was only one more show to film, and as soon as they arrived at the house, a tired semi in a sprawling commuter town in the midlands, the three presenters heaved a sigh of despair.

Abby, Linzi and Mitzi stared in disbelief at the mess that was the Lockwood family’s house. They hadn’t stepped inside the door and already the three of them wanted to drive away. If there was that much junk
outside,
what would it be like inside?

Bits of old cars were piled up alongside some old tyres, packing crates and a kennel so ramshackle that no dog could surely be sleeping in it. Filthy net curtains flapped from the open windows, and it was clear that nobody had felt like painting the house for the last ten years. The whole effect was that the house wasn’t in need of dejunking so much as fumigating.

The Passion Wagon, AC and DC were already parked outside and when the women piled out of the taxi, they rushed into the Passion Wagon for coffee and reassurance that they weren’t overreacting.

“You aren’t,” sighed Julie, the assistant director, who was sitting on the red velvet couch comfort-eating her way through an enormous apple Danish. “I don’t know why this house wasn’t ruled out in the initial stages. It’s not just messy, it’s squalid.”

“So, we don’t have to touch it? We can find another location?” asked Linzi hopefully.

“It’s too late for that, isn’t it, Julie?” Abby said, selecting a Danish for herself from the box beside the coffee equipment. The high-speed filming of the end of the series meant that the system for weeding out hopeless cases from the hundreds of willing homeowners had gone by the wayside.

Julie nodded into her pastry. “You’re right on the money, Abby,” she mumbled through the crumbs. “I’ll kill someone when we get back to the office.”

“Don’t worry, girls.” Helen, the make-up artist, was cheerful. “I’ve got antiseptic wipes in my kit.”

Abby didn’t know whether it was because she had decided to throw herself into her work, but she’d never enjoyed filming more. Meeting Mike Horowitz had cheered her up no end, and she’d decided that he was right: she could sort out the future. OK, so it wouldn’t be the married-to-Tom future that she’d always seen for herself, but now that she’d faced up to that, she could mourn her marriage and move on. She wasn’t a bad person, she was just a flawed human being and she could try and improve on that. Mike believed in her, so she still had a career. All she needed to do was repair the damage the separation had wreaked on her relationship with Jess. And she could do that. She adored Jess. Love had to count for something, didn’t it?

So when she marched into the Lockwood family house, she felt invigorated and ready for action.

The twins, smirking like two naughty schoolgirls behind her, were doing their best not to giggle.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Lockwood,” said Abby politely as she met the untidy couple responsible for the smelly disaster. Their children, three equally untidy teenagers, lingered sullenly in the background. “Perhaps you’d show us the rooms we’re going to be working on?”

twenty-four

L
izzie’s “Things to Do Before You’re Thirty” list was getting a bit battered.

She kept it in a zipped section of her handbag and took it out occasionally to remind herself that most of the tasks were still firmly on her “to do” list. She had to stop wasting her life, she told herself.

So far, she’d gone on holiday on her own (Joe’s in London
did
count), and she’d done one thing that wasn’t on the list but was still pretty brave—welcoming Sabine to Debra’s wedding had to merit some marks for courage. But that was it.

One evening in July, soon after the wedding, she sat in the living room with a glass of wine, unfolded the crumpled paper and looked at the list again. She didn’t fancy getting checked for chlamydia—that would imply that she had a sex life in the first place. Learning about investments and setting up her own stock portfolio would be useless when she only had a tenner left at the end of each week. Surely investment broker people liked a bit more disposable cash than that.

She skipped hurriedly over the one about not drinking her entire week’s alcohol allowance in one night. Not that she ever did that, but it wasn’t wise to dwell on alcohol consumption when you were nearly at the bottom of a glass of wine and it was only ten to seven on a Tuesday.

Sighing, Lizzie looked to see if there was anything on the list she
could
do that would cheer her up and make her feel as if she wasn’t ready for the scrap heap just yet.

The words “adventure sport” leaped out at her. Adventure sport. Rock climbing wasn’t her thing and she never liked getting her head wet, so scuba diving wasn’t an option. Besides, that was how Sabine and Myles had met, so she’d look like she was copying them if she tried that. Hmm.

In the background, the TV flickered. There was nothing on worth watching. There was never anything on. Lizzie decided that she’d go for a walk and burn some calories instead of sitting there all evening feeling sorry for herself. Reaching for the remote, she was about to click the “off” button when she stopped. Another tampon advert was on. This time, the girl wearing white trousers was jumping out of a plane.

“Look at me—nothing is going to stop me doing things,” her lovely face said.

That was it, Lizzie decided. A parachute jump. She’d always wanted to do one and, years ago, she remembered some of Joe’s pals doing one for charity. Joe, who didn’t like heights, had said no thanks, but Lizzie had been wistfully jealous. She loved flying and the idea of leaping bravely from a plane somehow appealed to her. Of course, she hadn’t actually done anything about the desire at the time. It wasn’t the sort of thing she did. She was Joe’s mum and that meant washing his horrible sports kit—not going skydiving with his friends. But why hadn’t she? What had stopped her?

Her own vision of what a woman of her age did, that’s what. Now, years later, she found that her own life vision was smothering her. It was time to change.

Skydiving—that would be her adventure sport. Yah boo sucks, she said to the “to do” list. She’d get through it yet.

Enlivened by this new plan, Lizzie switched off the TV, pulled on her trainers, and went for a brisk walk. She knew that lots of charities linked up with parachute jump centres to raise money. The charity stipulated that a certain amount would have to be raised before the jump could take place, and the fee for the jump came out of that. Lizzie knew so many worthy charities from her work in the surgery, but suddenly one came to mind: a national cancer charity. Wouldn’t it be great if she could jump for, say, Life Beats Cancer and make her donation in Sally’s name? What a lovely tribute to Sally to do this life-affirming thing. Lizzie could imagine what Sally would say if she’d been alive and if Lizzie had asked her advice about doing a parachute jump. Sally wouldn’t think she was too old or losing her marbles, she would say: “Do it!”

Lizzie’s previous experience of raising money for charity made her think that this would be the hardest part of her jump experience. She’d discovered that, yes, the LBC charity did organise charity jumps and she could jump at a local airfield. In fact, getting the promise of money turned out to be remarkably easy. The sponsorship cards she’d received from Life Beats Cancer said that Lizzie Shanahan was jumping for the charity “in honour of Sally Richardson.” Lizzie had wanted that put in especially. This was her tribute to her friend.

The words “Life Beats Cancer” and “sponsored parachute jump” made most of the people of Dunmore who opened their front doors smile at Lizzie approvingly; the mention of Sally made them invite her in and offer her tea.

“Well done,” “Aren’t you brave! I’m far too scared of heights to do that!” and “Fair play to you for doing something to raise money,” were the most common comments, followed by sad conversations about Sally and how the person had known her. It moved Lizzie to find that her friend’s untimely death had affected other people deeply too. And had saddened the most unlikely of Dunmore residents.

One burly neighbour who’d opened his front door with a wary eye that said he was fed up with charity collections had invited Lizzie in and spent ages talking about how kind Sally had been to him when his wife had died, baking big apple pies and phoning him at weekends to say hello.

“It made a difference,” the man said sorrowfully. “I didn’t feel so alone.”

Meeting the many and varied people who mourned Sally made Lizzie feel her loss even more acutely. Sally had been such a special person—not goody-goody or preachy, but genuinely kind, wanting to envelop everyone in her warmth. In her five or six years in the town, she’d become a part of it. Lizzie, who’d lived there for most of her married life and knew perhaps a quarter of the people Sally had, felt humbled by her dead friend’s compassion and verve for life.

In the end, she raised the promise of almost twice the money that she’d aimed for, thanks to some last-minute support from some of the town’s big businesses.

All she had to do next was actually jump from a perfectly safe plane and fall two thousand feet through the air with nothing but a parachute between her and sudden death. Easy, she joked to herself.

But skydiving was more complicated than Lizzie had imagined. She’d had a vague notion that somebody strapped you into a parachute, sent you up in a plane, and then shoved you into clean air, whereupon the chute opened instantly and you felt thrilled to be a part of the sky like a big, jumpsuited bird. According to the brochure she received from the training school, the reality seemed to be more complicated. First-time jumpers had to complete a day and a half’s training course before they got to jump. Even then, the decision as to whether the novice parachutists could jump lay with the course instructors. “We will have the final say as to whether a trainee is ready,” was the grim message.

Lizzie vowed that she’d be one of those jumping. She was doing this for Sally as well as herself, and it would be letting her friend down if she flunked at the first fence.

Her course started at nine on a cool Saturday morning in early August with clouds on the horizon and a nip in the air that was distinctly autumnal.

Undaunted, Lizzie arrived at the small airfield where the Santa Monica Flying and Parachute Training School was situated. It was a bare, flat place with several big plane hangars, a smaller breeze-block building and two runways stretching out behind the buildings.

There were several cars in the car park, and Lizzie climbed out of hers at the same time as two twenty-something women arrived in a funky little purple 4 x 4. She’d dressed in comfortable old jeans and a faded grey sweatshirt with runners on her feet, and her unruly hair corralled into a ponytail. The two girls, while also in jeans, wore the tight, butt-displaying variety, and showed off enviable figures in clingy little T-shirts and just as clingy zippy tops.

“Hi,” they said to Lizzie.

“Are you here for the course?” asked the girl with glossy short dark hair.

“Yes, for my sins,” said Lizzie.

“Us too. Isn’t it an adventure?” The other girl, with silvery blonde hair worn loose over her shoulders, grinned. “I’m Casey and that’s Dolores.” The brunette smiled a dazzling, lipsticked smile, and Lizzie was sort of glad she hadn’t bothered to do much more than slick on mascara and lip salve. In the glamour stakes, she wouldn’t have stood a chance beside Casey and Dolores.

“Lizzie,” she said, holding out her hand.

The three of them walked across an expanse of cracking tarmac to the grey building where a sign read “reception.” The two girls seemed very excited, and Dolores took out a compact as they walked and patted a bit of concealer on some non-existent spot.

“Want to look?” she asked Casey, who looked, squinted, then handed the compact back, secure in the knowledge that she looked stunning.

“We’re doing this to meet men,” Casey revealed by way of explanation for all the primping.

“Isn’t jumping out of a plane a bit drastic?” Lizzie asked. “I thought nowadays people tried Internet dating?”

“That’s just blind dating by another name,” Casey said dismissively. “No matter how you hook up with the guy, Internet or whatever, you still have to arrange to meet him in a restaurant and hope he’s not a serial rapist who’s covered his tracks and has picked you as his next victim.”

“She’s jaundiced about the Internet. She recently had a really bad blind date,” disclosed Dolores.

“Bad doesn’t describe it,” sighed Casey. “I sat there for two hours waiting for him and the waitresses had bets on when I’d give up and go home.”

“How terrible!” Lizzie could imagine the embarrassment of sitting there, watching every newcomer and feeling hope die as the time passed and nobody turned up.