No Place For a Man (20 page)

‘… looking for surf that has no bluebottles (Portuguese men-of-war). They are everywhere, even the little ones give a bad sting and a rash … Off for three-day surf camp in Straddie with Canadians & couple of English tomorrow. Must go, it’s sangria night at the hostel again and a didgeridoo lesson. Love (I suppose) to Girls, tell them to mail me with any goss. Ol.’

‘Well Oliver sounds like he’s still having a good time anyway,’ Jess commented as she printed out Oliver’s
latest missive. ‘No cares in the world. I feel quite envious.’

‘We haven’t got much in the way of cares either, not when you put it into a world-scale context,’ Matthew said from the sofa. He’d almost disappeared under the many sections of the paper. Only one, Appointments, as immaculately folded and untouched as it had arrived, lay on the floor beside him. It would look exactly the same when it went into the recycling bag. As she watched, he flung down the TV listings and stretched, yawning luxuriously. ‘What do you fancy doing today?’ he asked. ‘Shall we see a movie? I quite fancy that one about the woman growing dope in her greenhouse in Cornwall.’

Jess laughed. ‘You would! It sounds like some scheme you and the bunch up at the Leo would dream up over a few beers!’

Matt looked rather shifty at that and he had a strangely secretive smile as he over-scrupulously rearranged and refolded all the newspaper pages, confirming that this particular scam certainly had been discussed. ‘Well I suppose at least if you were in prison you’d have food and accommodation provided,’ she told him. ‘Anyway, I think I’ll go up and talk to Natasha, see if we can see a way of getting back towards normal.’

Natasha’s empty room was a shock. Somehow Jess had assumed the girl would be slumped on her bed either sullenly pecking out text messages to Claire on her mobile or pretending to sleep. The neatly made bed and the carefully reorganized desk looked like a statement about being adult, about Natasha refusing to be quashed. She would organize her own life, thank you, Jess interpreted from the doorway, praying Natasha
would somehow materialize magically from the wardrobe.

‘She’s gone!’ Jess hurtled down the stairs and back into the sitting room.

‘Oh, hi Jess! Who’s gone?’ Jess hadn’t heard Paula arrive. She was sitting on the sofa next to Matthew, looking as if she hadn’t had a lot of sleep. She was, Jess managed to note, still in last night’s clothes and had a look on her face as if she was trying hard not to keep breaking into a very broad pleased-with-life grin.

‘Natasha’s gone? Where?’ Matt asked.

‘God, Matt, how the hell am I supposed to know? She’s just not there. She must have gone off out straight after we told her she was grounded.’ Jess leaned across her desk and peered out of the window into the drizzle as if Natasha might still be waiting on the front doorstep, like a small child who runs away and daren’t go further than the garden shed. It even crossed her mind to check the shed: she’d noticed Natasha and Tom lurking close to it the night before.

Paula’s smile was a lazy, mildly curious one. ‘Oh dear! Have there been words? Your loyal readers will want to know all about it!’

‘I don’t think I’ll be writing about this one, Paula.’

‘Oh? I thought your column was all about sharing both the pleasures
and
the pains of family life. You always have before! Come on, tell me what your delicious daughter has done now? Is it a boy?’ Paula had scrabbled in her handbag and was brushing her hair now. Longish blond strands floated from her brush and landed on her leather trousers. Paula, with exaggerated delicacy, gathered up the stray bits between her lavender-painted thumb and index fingernails and dropped them over the side of the sofa onto the floor, assuming,
Jess thought, that a cleaning fairy would deal with them in due course.

‘It is a boy, but it’ll sort itself out.’ Jess didn’t want to be so disloyal to Tash as to start telling the world and its friends what she’d been up to. Stuff the column, she thought, this one’s private. She was worried too. If Natasha had flounced out in a teenage huff, she might decide it was too difficult to creep back in again and simply not come home.

‘Anyway, I was just telling Matt …’ Paula went on, eager to get back to the more enthralling subject of herself. ‘I’ve come for a character reference. Your friend Eddy is quite the sweetest man I’ve come across in ages – oh sorry that sounds so rude! – and I want you two to tell me all about him and what the score is. He says he’s single, but then he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘Oh he’s single. I think you could say he goes in for serial singleness.’ Matt laughed. ‘There’s three ex-wives, several children and a couple of grandchildren and I gather the old royalty cheques don’t go so far these days.’

‘Oh I’m not bothered about the money aspect,’ Paula said airily. ‘I just want to know if he’s a Nice Person, someone I could think of in terms of more than, well just, sort of sex. Grandchildren though,’ she frowned, ‘that must make him … how old? … too old?’

‘I expect he started young,’ Jess cut in. ‘Living the rock dream life, you know, married an early pregnant girlfriend, dumped her later for literally a younger model, that kind of thing. He’s OK these days, pretty settled. He was very kind to Clarissa when she was burgled.’ She smiled a warning at Matt not to elaborate on the nature of the ‘kindness’. It was actually quite cheering to see Paula looking so happy.

‘What, though, does he actually
do
?’ Paula went on. ‘I mean I asked him, of course, but he just said “this and that” and went on about expecting to make a million any day now, just like Del Boy used to in
Only Fools and Horses
, remember? I mean he must do
something
, he’s too young to live like an old retired bloke, pottering about all day, don’t you think Matt?’

Jess held her breath, wondering if Matt was actually going to slap Paula for her profound tactlessness or laugh at her for putting her foot so far into her mouth she’d practically digested it.

Matt stood up and headed for the door. ‘All I can say, Paula, is that Eddy is full of ideas,’ he said with mock solemnity. ‘As are all of us who are released early, and mercifully in my opinion, from the stifling grind of daily employment.’ He left the room and Jess heard him climbing the stairs. He didn’t sound unhappy or unduly insulted for he was leaping up them two at a time. She heard Oliver’s door open, then after a few seconds close again. Then there was the faint sound of slower steps heading for the attic.

‘Oh I’m so sorry. Me and my huge mouth.’ Paula put her fingers across the offending feature for a second and looked penitent.

‘Oh don’t worry about it,’ Jess reassured her. ‘He’s only gone up to watch the sport on telly in peace. Just because he’s out of work, he can’t expect the rest of us to pussyfoot round the issue. He doesn’t seem unhappy about it.’

‘No? Isn’t he desperate to find another job? I know I would be.’

Jess perched on the edge of her desk from where she could talk to Paula and also keep an eye on the Grove in case Natasha was on her way back. ‘He thinks of it
as a great opportunity,’ she said. ‘It’s like he’s finding himself, the way hippies used to.’

‘Some of them still are, you should see my aunt Eileen, still seeking personal space by way of bits of art therapy and rune reading and strictly middle-class university-level spiritual retreats where she gets her karma sorted. Never done a hand’s turn as my mother used to say.’

‘Yes well for that you need someone who’s prepared to keep you in meals and mortgage. I guess Matt thinks it’s my turn and he’s probably right.’

‘Aunt Eileen married a merchant banker and lives near Sissinghurst, so there you are. Are you jealous?’

‘What, of Matt? Of all that free time? No, it’s not that. It’s as if now he’s opted out of work, he’s sort of opted out of everything else in our lives as well. I feel very much on my own at the moment.’

Paula got up and gave her a quick hug. ‘Write it all down, sweetie. Your readers need to know you’re not perfect.’

‘I’m not sure I need them to know that though!’ Jess laughed.

Tom wasn’t in the Sierra. There was nothing in it at all, nothing to show he’d ever so much as opened its door. The steering column was smashed around the area where the ignition key should go, Natasha noticed as she peered in through the dirty window, so it must have been stolen at some time and dumped there. It couldn’t have been Tom though, she told herself, squashing her suspicions, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to sleep in a car he’d stolen. Someone else must have done it. The city was full of nicked cars.

‘Hello sweetheart, what are you doing up here?
Looking for that boyfriend of yours?’ George, with inevitable hoe in hand, was watching Natasha from his scarlet shed. She grinned at him. Her grandad was cool. How wonderfully mad did you have to be to stick so fervently to political beliefs that were on their way out half a century before? And how crazy to paint your shed bright red and declare it the People’s Palace of Mortlake Road?

‘Hi Grandad, how’s the carrots?’

‘Plagued with root fly but at least they grow straight and not twisted. If only people were like that.’

‘People? Why?’ For the first time she realized that George looked quite severely old. She’d always taken it for granted that he was an Old Person, that’s what grandparents were. But he’d always looked well, acted as if age wasn’t something that was a problem. Just now she realized that he wasn’t that far away from death. He even looked as if he’d been thinking about it.

‘Bloody vandals and thieves, that’s what I’m talking about. Val’s shed was broken into a couple of nights back, all her tools stolen. She had good stuff too, not the cheap sort you get down the market that don’t last five minutes. Someone had a go at Dave’s as well but he’s got a lock on it that would do the job on Fort Knox so they didn’t get in. If people want to go nicking they should do it from those who’ve got it to spare, not from the likes of us. Anyway, enough gloom and doom. Come and have a cup of tea. Tell me what brings you down here. That lad hasn’t been around today, not that I’ve seen.’

Natasha was impatient to leave, there was still time to meet Claire and she needed somewhere to sleep for the night. The idea of camping out in the Sierra had seemed romantic, daring and exciting but only
combined with sharing it with Tom. Now her resolve faltered seriously at the idea of a chill and frightening night in it by herself. And whoever was doing the shed-burgling might come back. She caught herself thinking about how much her mother would worry and almost grinned at the thought that she was, deep down, feeling quite responsible, though her family wouldn’t see it that way.

She followed George into the shed, dumped her heavy bag on the floor and sat in one of his battered old floral picnic chairs.

‘You were lucky they didn’t get in here,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a lot of stuff and it’s all so clean and polished. The burglars wouldn’t even get earth all over them.’

Her grandfather gave her a long look as he stirred the two mugs of tea. ‘I hope it was just luck,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to think badly of people, not people I like. Car boot sales, I blame them.’

‘What do you mean?’ Natasha was mystified. Car boot sales were what her school PTA had every summer to raise funds for a new minibus or a new filter system for the swimming pool. Parents turned up in their Mercedes estates and set up clothes rails with last season’s Donna Karan skirts on them and boxes full of CDs that had barely been played. Clothes their smallest children had grown out of were eagerly snapped up, for the top-of-the-range quality guaranteed that wear and tear would be absolutely minimal. There were picnics during the day, too much wine was drunk and the takings were ludicrously vast compared with the Sunday morning boot sales in aid of the local hospice.

‘It’s where your local crook takes his swag and flogs
it to the unsuspecting punters. It’s all too easy. You don’t even need a car boot, just rent a table-top space and hope the cops aren’t on the lookout,’ George told her. ‘You can shift any amount of gear that way. You should ask your mate Tom.’

‘Tom? Why would Tom know?’

George laughed. ‘Hey lass, he may be straight, he may not. But he sure as hell knows people who aren’t.’

Later, as Natasha walked back towards the bus stop to go to Claire’s house, she thought about what George had said. Tom did know how to get into houses. But he didn’t take things, she was sure of it. She wasn’t sure, though, how he lived. He always had money for cigarettes, never seemed to be that hungry, and admitted he lived on junk takeaways, which were cheap enough but still didn’t come free, not like food at a parent’s house. She huddled against the bus stop, wishing she hadn’t bolted from home. It was a huge disappointment not finding Tom waiting for her. That was what was supposed to happen, surely? If he cared about her? She couldn’t recall that he’d said he did. Now she felt foolish that she’d assumed, because he was happy to kiss her, to touch her, that what he’d been feeling was real affection.

She could see the bus in the distance, waiting at traffic lights. She picked up the bag and stepped closer to the pavement, ready to put out her hand for it to stop. A VW Polo swooshed round the corner, too close to the kerb, and splashed water all over her feet and the bottoms of her trousers. Chill wet fabric clung against her already cold legs. The car window was open and she heard raucous laughter. Mel, her so very long-ago best friend, was in the car, dropping a cigarette end out of
the window. The driver, she could just make out, was Tom.

Matt sat on the old Lloyd Loom sofa in the bedroom and thought about Natasha. He needed to be by himself to do this, to let down the puppyish façade he’d been keeping going since Jess had shrieked at the girl in her room. There was no way he’d wanted to rush in and throttle Tom, that would have meant he’d have had to see them, get too accurate a picture that would stay with him, no matter what. He’d done very well so far, quite determinedly keeping the idea a bit hazy, not picturing Natasha wound around the boy, not tangled and tumbling on the bed with him. He didn’t have any of those rather dodgy ‘she’s my little girl and always will be’ feelings that he’d heard were harboured by some men, the type who shuddered at the thought of their daughters growing up. But still, he could have done with a bit more time, a few more leisurely years in which Natasha went through the usual dating process, dragged one or two home for inspection perhaps, before he had to come to terms with her as a grown-up sexual being. This way it was all too horribly sudden. He didn’t see any great value in virginity for its own sake, scorned the usual idea that it was something that was ‘lost’ as if it was a particular treasure. But
fifteen
, who on earth had a clue what they were doing at fifteen?