No Place For a Man (13 page)

Jess turned the car round and headed out of the car park again. ‘I’ll go and see if Dad’s at the allotment,’ she said to herself. And then, she thought, she’d go and map out a few chapter headings on the computer. If she had only six months left of writing Nelson’s Column, perhaps there was scope for collecting together the work of the last couple of years and putting them out as a book. It had worked for Jilly Cooper.

‘I can’t believe Emily could be that stupid,’ Zoe said again. She was sitting cross-legged on Natasha’s desk in her bedroom, picking at some loose threads at the hem of the curtain.

‘I can. She was always a track short of the full CD,’ Natasha told her. ‘Don’t you remember that time when she came round and said that her rabbit was lying down and had gone all hard and she thought it was because it had stuffed itself with too much food and would get up again after a sleep?’

‘It probably
did
die of overeating. She was always giving it bunny-munch sugary snacks. Maybe if she’d given herself a few bunny-munches, then she wouldn’t be bloody anorexic. I can’t believe she thought she was pregnant. She probably hasn’t even
done it
. God it was so embarrassing!’ Zoe put her hands over her face as if she was still in danger of blushing scarlet. ‘When the woman came in and asked Emily, in that oh-so-gentle way, why she had thought she was pregnant! I could’ve killed her! The woman looked sort of
pitying
as if she’d never met anyone this ignorant.’

‘Probably hadn’t,’ Natasha agreed. ‘But Zo, didn’t you ask her if she’d done a pregnancy test? Hadn’t Giles asked her? Hadn’t anyone?’

‘No. I just assumed. I mean if someone says they’re pregnant and drags you with them to a clinic you imagine they know what they’re about. I don’t think Giles gives a toss either way.’

‘She’s still got a problem though,’ Natasha pointed out. ‘She’s got too thin for periods and that’s dangerous. The school must have noticed.’

Zoe shrugged. ‘All the girls there were thin, like
really
thin, the ones I saw anyway. They all wore really low beige trousers and you could see their hip bones, all jutting out and pointy. Funny, because all the boys I saw were really pudgy. Perhaps they grab all the food, like pigs at a trough.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘Hey look,’ she pointed to the end of the garden.
‘There’s Tom, down by the railway. Are you supposed to go out and meet him?’

Natasha hurtled across the room and peered out of the window. ‘Where is he? Oh yeah I can see. No we hadn’t fixed anything but I think I’ll go down anyway. Actually Zoe, there’s something I wanted to ask you …’

Matthew felt bad about Jess and about the garden. On his way back from the Leo that afternoon he thought, though not too deeply, about cutting the grass. He wouldn’t make a thing about it, none of that ‘OK, look at me, I’m doing this for you’ attitude. He’d just get on with it and be cheerful. He’d cut back the honeysuckle a bit and hack out the scraggy remains of last year’s perennials as well so the new stuff could get going properly. It wouldn’t take long and he could do with the exercise. As he walked down the road he patted his stomach. It wobbled alarmingly and felt like an unfamiliar thing, an addition like a small bag. He’d only had one pint, too, along with the baguette with Brie and salami and all those squishy semi-sun-dried tomatoes. He’d always been slim, slim but solid. He’d taken it for granted that the outside edges of his body would remain the same, holding everything inside together in the same shape for more or less ever. The front part had now broken away just a little to hang over his chinos in the style of a gossiping neighbour leaning forward slightly over a fence to pass on a discreet confidence.

He slowed as he approached Eddy’s house. There was a police car parked outside and he wondered if some miserable Grove-ite had noticed that Eddy’s sturdy pot-plants lined up on his kitchen window sill
were exactly that: pot. It would be a shame to see Eddy carted away to be done for possession, and tragic if it was ‘with intent to supply’; he’d got used to the reminiscences of his fame days and rather envied him his stock of tales of disgraceful behaviour. It must have been fun to have a working life that involved, and so very profitably, the kind of seriously bad conduct that would have got you expelled from even the worst sink school.

It wasn’t Eddy’s house that the police were visiting, Matthew realized as he slowed his pace even more out of sheer curiosity, but the one next to it. Matthew could see the front door standing open in the manner of all premises where there is disaster. Eddy was just inside the door, ushering out an infantile constable. Eddy’s arm, Matthew noticed as he grinned at him over the gate, was firmly round the slim shoulders of the householder, an attractive, divorced red-headed woman he’d spoken to only once, at the kind of Christmas drinks party where everyone’s apologetically brought along a lost-looking house-guest and no-one gets past the ‘Oh number 34! I’ve always admired your stained-glass porch’ stage.

‘Eh Matt, Clarissa here’s been burgled,’ Eddy called as the constable returned to his car. Eddy and Clarissa emerged from her house and she turned to double-lock the door with great care.

‘Burgled? Bloody hell,’ Matthew said as the two came down the path.

‘I’m just taking her into my place for a quick medicinal one.’ Eddy winked at Matthew. Clarissa seemed quite content to be snuggled into Eddy’s chest as if she still needed protection from the thief, either that, Matthew thought, or she was in such a state of shock
that she was oblivious to the tatty condition of his ancient Eric Clapton Live at the Budokan tee shirt.

‘Did they take much?’ Matthew asked.

‘Small things. The radio, CD player, the kids’ PlayStation, stuff like that.’ Clarissa’s voice was whispery. She looked up at Matthew and gave him a weak smile. She was terribly pale, more as if she’d discovered a body than a burglary. She’d clearly been crying – her fierce, angry green eyes were damp and her lightly freckled skin had livid pink patches on her cheekbones. Eddy was obviously looking forward to doing further comforting.

‘What did the police say? Are they likely to catch them?’ Matt asked. He was enjoying stalling Eddy, who was by now almost hauling Clarissa in the direction of his own front gate.

Clarissa shrugged. ‘They said there was a lot of it about and to call up my insurers.’

‘Did you see that young bloke they sent?’ Eddy commented as the police car drove away. ‘Practically a sodding teenager. Probably on work experience. Bloody burglars, they’re not big enough fish for them. But if I get my hands on whoever did it …’ He clenched his available fist and punched at the air, a disconcerting few inches from Matt’s nose.

‘Er right, I’ll leave you to it. See you tomorrow?’ he said to Eddy.

‘Yeah man, tomorrow, usual place.’ Over Clarissa’s bent head he turned and leered at Matthew before guiding his prey up his garden path. Matthew headed on towards home, looking forward to opening a beer and telling Jess the news. The garden could wait awhile.

*  *  *

The garlic was going to be ready early this year. The leaves were thick and strong and George was terribly tempted to pull up a bulb and see how it was coming along. When he’d been a child, he had found it impossible to resist, following his father round the garden and tweaking out a carrot here and there to see if it was ready. Then, and it must have been over sixty years back, he’d said the rabbits must have done it and his father had been kind and pretended he was right. Looking back all those years, George marvelled at the patience of the man: those had been years of hardship. Growing food then hadn’t been a hobby like it was now. Every wasted carrot would have meant just a few less mouthfuls of nourishment for someone who really needed it. The people who worked these allotments now mostly did it for exercise and to escape from the confines of home, not because of the sheer need for food. The woman a couple of plots down the row grew fancy lettuces, red ones and green ones all laid out like a chessboard, and then complained about spoiling the pattern when she picked a few leaves to eat. And Dave, who was easily ten years older than him and must remember the days when the difference between feeling full and going without was the number of potatoes you could scavenge from the earth, well he only grew competition stuff now. He had a weird thing about mammoth vegetables too, which George suspected were all but inedible. How much flavour could there be in a five-pound onion?

‘I’ve got the weeds out from the radishes. Anything else you want me to do?’ George grinned at the boy. He wasn’t a bad worker, this Tom, not considering how young he was.

‘No, you’re all right for now lad, thanks.’ George
fished about in his pocket for spare cash. ‘Here y’are. Don’t go spending it on those alcopops!’

Tom laughed. ‘No-one drinks those, well not blokes anyway.’

‘Girlie drinks, are they? They always like the sweet stuff, nothing’s changed there since I was a boy. Some things never do.’ He gave Tom a long hard look. ‘Kids have always run away from home. I bet one of Adam’s brothers did a runner from the Garden of Eden.’

Tom shrugged. ‘I haven’t run away from home.’

‘You’ve run away from something though, haven’t you?’

‘Dad! Hallo!’ Jess pushed open the main allotment gate and picked her way along the narrow grassy path towards her father’s scarlet shed. ‘Oh and hello Tom, what are you doing here?’

‘He’s been helping me. He’s not a bad worker, for a teenager.’

‘No school?’

‘Not everyone stays on to eighteen, you know Jessica, even in these days of NVQs and the like,’ George teased. ‘Some of them like to get on with the real doings of life.’

‘Er, yeah. I’ve gotta go. Gotta see someone.’ Tom scurried away so fast that he left Jess with only the fleeting impression of his dazzling smile, fading slowly after him like the Cheshire cat’s.

‘He’s still seeing Natasha,’ she said. ‘But they keep to themselves. I just see them sliding in and out of the house now and then. All I’m getting is a back view. She sort of asked if he could move in, have Oliver’s room but I said no. Now she’s giving me the polite-but-non-communicative routine.’

‘Do you want her to tell you everything she’s up to?

You never did at her age, especially when there was a boy on the go.’

‘I suppose not. Though how are you supposed to know if there’s something to know if there’s nothing you are being told?’

George laughed. ‘Oh you know all right. With girls anyway. I thought you were the expert on all this stuff. You’re the one who’s always writing about the kids.’

‘Only in a superficial way. For the column I write about jolly things like the impossibility of agreeing on paint colours for their rooms or about how you never get four teenagers together who’ll agree to eat the same things. I’ve used little bits of them for entertainment, that’s all.’

‘You could call it exploitation.’

‘No you couldn’t. I’ve never written about anything that really matters.’

George gave her a long look. ‘Perhaps you should,’ he said.

‘What matters right now, and don’t ask me to write about it,’ she said, ‘is that Matt is the one who is behaving most like an adolescent pain in the neck. I feel, oh I don’t know, like I’m the only one in the house who can see further than the end of next week. It’s not a pretty view either.’

‘All you’re seeing is doom and despair, I suppose.’ George, annoyingly, chuckled.

‘What’s there to laugh at? You should see the collection of direct debits that goes out of our bank each month. I spent a ridiculous amount of money when Tash and I went out the other day, almost as if I was convincing myself it was still all OK. I’d have taken everything back to the shop but they’d only give me a credit note and that’s no use down at Sainsbury’s.
Since then I’ve seen nothing but hopelessness. Not far on from now I can see everything being cut off, bit by bit. Electricity, gas, prosecutions for non-payment of council tax …’

George cut in, teasing. ‘You blackballed from the gym, your
Vogue
sub cancelled, no more manicures …’

Jess laughed. ‘OK so we’ve got a few non-necessities, but not many. And I know there are millions worse off than us. It’s not just that. Matt just doesn’t take anything seriously any more, so I end up being the worry-villain all by myself. It’s turning me into a nagging dragon and I hate it.’

‘So don’t do it. Refuse to play.’

‘Easier said.’

‘No it isn’t. Hell, girl, don’t be so defeatist.’

‘I’ve been waiting for you! Guess what!’ Matt appeared from the kitchen as soon as Jess came through the front door.

Just in time, she managed to stop herself saying, ‘You’ve got a job.’ She hoped it would be that, but she could tell by the gleeful expression on his face that this wasn’t going to involve something as dull as the world of the Occupied Adult.

‘Go on then, surprise me.’

‘Eddy’s seducing his next-door neighbour. She’s been burgled and he’s taken her back to his for a spot of “comforting”.’ He came out with a thoroughly dirty snigger. ‘Nice going, Eddy,’ he chuckled. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘You remind me of a couple of fifth-formers discussing who they’ve pulled at the school disco!’ she laughed. ‘Anyway tell me about the burglary. I take it it was Clarissa. I can’t see Eddy snuggling up to the
VAT inspector from number 27.’

‘Probably some kids got in. I don’t think Clarissa’s up to speed with intruder alarms.’ Jess filled the kettle. Matt went silent for a moment and she could almost hear the cogs of thought clunking along in his brain. ‘There’s a lot of companies selling security systems. But I wonder if any of them do it on a purely advisory, just-between-friends basis, you know, without any hard sales pitch for one particular company. Of course, I’d have to know absolutely everything that’s available … must be on the Net somewhere …’

‘Surely if it was a just-friendly-advice thing, there wouldn’t be any money in it.’ She could have kicked herself for putting a downer on things, but somehow she was beginning to wonder if Matthew’s former career had involved any contact with the Planet Real at all.

‘Ah. Yes, you spotted the fatal catch. Back to the Cat Sat, I suppose. In the meantime my love, my breadwinner, I’m off to cut the grass.’ He gave her a hefty, beer-scented hug. ‘You see? I may be mostly useless but I’m not all bad. I’ll have a cup of tea when that kettle’s boiled.’