Poisoned Cherries (3 page)

“You cut it bloody fine!”
 
she exclaimed as she opened the door that fair Saturday morning, but she was smiling, big white teeth, tan and freckles, all framed by lustrous red hair.

She was right too.
 
Although we’d spoken about business a couple of times .. . I’m a non-executive director of her company... and exchanged a few text messages I hadn’t seen Susie since January, eight months before.
 
She’d been in fine shape then; she still was, only that shape was different.
 
For all she was wearing a big white housecoat, you could tell she’d filled out a bit.

“So it seems,” I agreed as I stepped inside.
 
“Have you been hanging on for me?”

“Not quite,” she answered, ‘but if you hadn’t turned up this weekend I was going to get in touch with you.
 
Officially, I’m due a week on Wednesday, but when I saw my consultant last Tuesday, he was talking about inducing her a few days early.”

“Her?”

“That’s right, Pops.
 
The heir to the Gantry empire’s going to be an heiress.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about Susie G. When I’d first met her she’d been going out with my copper pal Mike Dylan, and her old man had been in his pomp as Lord Provost of Glasgow.
 
Neither of them were around any more; Mike had succumbed to a terminal case of greed, and a policeman’s bullet, while Jack Gantry had succumbed to several men in white coats, who’d taken him away to a place in the country, with a very high fence topped off with razor wire.

After those misfortunes, Susie was left to rescue the family construction group from potential disaster, which she did with a skill that made a nonsense of Darwin and his theories.
 
Not many people knew that Jack wasn’t her real father, and many of those who didn’t insisted that his business skills were in her blood.
 
(The same sycophants passed over the fact that he was barking mad, and that by their logic Susie might have been too.)

The business was all she had, though; that apart, she had been a lonely wee lass when she’d turned up on my doorstep in Spain, on the very day that Prim had gone off to be with her sick mother.
 
She didn’t stay lonely for long, mind you.

I learned a lot in those few days, most of it about myself; I won’t say that Susie made me a better person, but she sure as hell made me more honest with myself.
 
Until then, I’d gone through life subconsciously pretending to be like my father, who is unquestionably the nicest man I’ve ever known.
 
Macintosh Blackstone does not have an enemy in the world, and that’s the truth .. . made all the more amazing by the fact that he’s a dentist.

The thing was that, as his son, I just assumed that everyone thought that the sun shone out of my arse as well.
 
Everyone at school was my pal... it didn’t occur to me for years that in a small town no one in their right mind would have wanted to fall out with the local dentist’s lad ... and afterwards I was everyone else’s.
 
I was good old Oz, short for Osbert... a laugh in itself... the finest lad you’d meet in a day’s march.
 
Okay, so my police career was so brief that afterwards I didn’t even talk about it... well, we’re not all cut out for a disciplined service.
 
Okay, so I was a bit of a one for the ladies .. . well, we all sow our wild oats, don’t we.
 
Okay, so I was laid back to the point of indolence .. . well, we don’t want to work any harder than we have to, do we?

Then I met Primavera Phillips; my luck changed, my life changed, and somewhere along the line, Oz Blackstone emerged from the chrysalis as the man who had been evolving, someone who wasn’t nice all the time, but who stopped making excuses for his ruthlessness and his nastiness and who even enjoyed it on occasion.

I still think my Dad is the greatest man in the world; but I know now that he’s too hard an act for me to follow.
 
(Actually I think the same thing may have dawned on my sister Ellie.
 
Since she dumped her apathetic husband, she’s turned into a mid-thirties raver and she loves every minute of it.)

In time, I would probably have worked all that stuff out without Susie Gantry’s intervention, but I thank her for it nonetheless.
 
She opened my eyes to me, and she opened them to Prim as well, to what she was really like, and what we were like as a couple.

As for what she taught me about herself... let’s just say that if the Glimmer Twins had met her, they’d never have written “You can’t always get what you want’.
 
On the other hand, when Steve Winwood wrote “While you see a chance, take it..
 
.”

Susie saw me there, on my own in Spain, and she knew me.
 
She was needing, she saw her chance, and she took it.
 
Love had nothing to do with it.
 
As she said often enough, “Susie doesn’t love.”
 
Just as well, I told myself; neither does Oz.

I liked her, though.
 
I liked her frankness, and I liked her honesty..

. plus, she was tremendous under the duvet.

She didn’t turn up in Spain with a game plan ... not one that involved banging me, anyway.
 
If she had, the baby probably wouldn’t have been part of it.
 
But when she happened, it just seemed right, somehow.
 
It didn’t alarm either of us, and it didn’t add to our expectations of each other; we had sorted out our relationship by that time.

“What are you going to call her?”
 
I asked, as I followed her into the big living space that I knew all too well.

“What are we going to call her, you mean.
 
She’s your daughter as well.

Or do you want to keep that a secret, for Prim’s sake?”

“There’s no need for that.
 
We’re finished.”

“You haven’t left her, have you?”
 
she gasped.
 
I thought I caught an edge of concern in her voice, one that had little to do with Prim, and more with the prospect of me as a single man.
 
“You said you were going to try to make it work.”

“No I didn’t; I said I was going to go along with it at least until I’d

finished the new movie with Miles.
 
And no, I haven’t left her.”
 
I

told her about Nicky Johnson and the Mexican love nest

“Serves you right, I suppose,” she said when I was finished, but with a smile.

“No; it serves him right.”

“That’s not fair; Prim’s not a bad girl.
 
You treated her like shit on your shoe; that’s the truth of it.”

“So did you.
 
Fucking someone’s husband on his honeymoon is not the act of a friend.”

“Ah, but I never said I liked her.”

I laughed.
 
“So you’ll not be calling the baby Primavera, then.”

“Hell, no.
 
Actually, I was thinking about calling her Janet, maybe Jan for short.
 
I really did like her.
 
How would you feel about that?”

I wanted to pick her up and hug her, but I hung on to my cool.
 
One of my new life rules is “Never get emotional’.
 
It’s the same as being drunk; you tend to say things without a thought of the consequences.
 
Right then I might just have asked Susie to marry me, and I couldn’t have been certain she’d have turned me down.

“I’d feel fine,” I told her... a considerable understatement.

“I was hoping you’d say that.”
 
She smiled at me in a way she never had before.
 
I think I realised in that moment that what we had between us was the closest we were going to get to total happiness for the rest of our lives.

“So what do you want to do, now you’re here?”
 
she asked.

I scratched my chin.
 
“Well, looking at the size of you, I suppose a shag’ll be out of the question.”

“It’d be a bit crowded,” she agreed.

“In that case, you pack an overnight bag, I’ll have a shower, a shave and whatever else, then we’ll drive sedately up to Anstruther and see my Dad and my stepmother.”

“Sedately?
 
That’s not like you.”

“Girlie, I’ve just flown in from Los fuckin’ Angeles, so my body thinks it’s the middle of the night.
 
I can fool it for the rest of the day, but please, allow me just one piece of untypical behaviour.”

She stepped up to me, then stood on tiptoe and kissed me.
 
“Nothing you do is typical, my love.”

“What did you call me?”

“Oops,” she exclaimed.
 
“Sorry... slip of the tongue; won’t happen again, I promise.
 
Okay, we’ll do it your way.
 
But how much have you told your Dad?”

“I’ve told him the same as always; everything.
 
He’s up to date; he knows Prim’s gone.
 
He knows I was coming here, and he’s half-expecting us.”

“He knows I’m .. .?”

“That too; the day I keep secrets from him, I’m done.”

Susie grinned.
 
Sometimes, when she does that, she can light up a room.
 
“The day you keep secrets from me you might be done, too.
 
Listen,” she went on, “I’d offer to drive us, but I have this problem with my feet just now.
 
I have to put the seat so far back to get behind the wheel that they don’t reach the pedals.”

She wasn’t kidding either; since I’d seen her last, she had acquired a BMW sports coupe.
 
It was low slung, and there was no graceful way she could lower herself into the passenger seat.

“I’m not so sure about this,” she muttered as I drove carefully out of the parking area.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’d be nervous enough meeting your father, but looking like this .. .”

“Susie, you haven’t been nervous since you were about ten, and anyway, you’ve met my dad before.”

“Maybe, but going up to him and saying, “Hey Mac, I’ve got your granddaughter in here!”
 
.. . that’s different.
 
That’s a pretty fundamental statement, sunshine.”

“My Dad has two grandsons,” I reminded her.
 
“He’s bad enough with them, but a girl..
 
. He’ll think you’re offering him the crown jewels.”

I leaned on the accelerator as we turned on to the slip road to the M8 and had my first hint of the power under the bonnet.
 
“I’ll have your crown jewels if you scrape this thing,” Susie hissed.

I took her at her word and stuck to ‘sedate’ as we cruised out of the

city.
 
I played with the CD controls and found that Ophelia by Natalie

Merchant was lined up in the auto-changer.
 
I was touched; I’d bought

that album for her in January, but it’s late night music and wasn’t

best at that moment for my advancing jet-lag.
 
I moved on to the next

and found Bob Dylan.
 
“Lenny Bruce’ is one of his greatest and angriest

songs, but there’s a line in it that’s pretty gross and not suitable

for a lady in Susie’s condition, so I hit the button again,

quick, and settled for Blue Views by Paul Carrack .. . another of my January buys.

“No!”
 
said Susie, and moved back to where I’d begun.
 
“I like that!” Until that moment, I didn’t know she could sing; the mother of my child is full of surprises.
 
She leaned back in her seat and let it all out, word-perfect on each track, her full, rich contralto complementing rather than fighting with Natalie’s sharp soprano.

I didn’t say a word; I just drove and listened as we cruised..
 
.
 
sedately..
 
. out of Glasgow and along the motorway that cuts Lanarkshire in half.
 
(Smaller pieces would be even better, a native of that county once said to me.) I didn’t want her to stop, but eventually she did, during the long instrumental break on track four.

She smiled at me.
 
“Sorry,” she said, almost shyly.

“Don’t be.
 
Would you like to make a record?
 
I could fix it.”

“I know you could.
 
And if I wanted to be Sharleen Spitieri, that’s who I’d be ... but I don’t.”
 
She leaned back again and picked up on track five, with its simple piano backing, leaving Natalie in her wake as she embellished the song with some added twists that its writer never imagined.

She was into the last track, singing about golden bells, when she stopped, abruptly.
 
I glanced sideways at her, worried that maybe I’d looked as if I was nodding off.

She switched off the music.
 
“Do you think you’re up to driving a wee bit less sedately?”

“Probably, but why?”

She gasped, and winced.
 
“I could be wrong .. . I’ve never done this before ... but I don’t think I’m going to make it to your Dad’s.”

Four.

For a while after that, everything became a bit blurred.
 
I’ve been in a couple of dangerous situations in my time, and I’ve managed to stay reasonably cool, to keep thinking logically.

Looking back on that day, all I can remember saying is, “Let’s get you to the Simpson; it’s nearest.”
 
After that my brain went into meltdown;

I drove that M3 like David Coulthard with Schumie on his tail, while Susie did all the sensible stuff like getting the number of the maternity unit and calling ahead to warn them.

Words broke in.
 
Susie saying, calmly, “Yes, my waters have broken,” although that was not news to me by that time.
 
Then there was something about, “Less than a minute.”