The Sunshine Cruise Company (2 page)

‘Well, you know what I think.’

‘I know, but –’

‘One thing after another. That stupid hamburger van. That “boutique”. Woman couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.’

‘She’s been unlucky.’

‘You have to learn to budget, Susan.’

‘I do!’

‘Every other month it’s a couple of hundred for this, a hundred for that.’ He was getting up now. Placing his coffee cup in the sink, finishing the knot in his pink tie, a neat full Windsor.

‘Please, Barry. Don’t be mean.’

‘I’ll transfer the money, OK? But that’s it till next month.’
Another bank transfer to do today too, Barry boy, rather bigger, from the shell account in Holland …

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘I don’t bloody know …’

It had always worked this way, their finances. Barry took care of everything. (Susan had worked, briefly, back in the mid-1970s, in the art gallery in Poole, in the brief window between finishing her fine art degree and marrying Barry. When had she left the gallery? Yes, 1977. Julie had turned up unexpectedly, back from her travels, all her hair shorn off and rows of safety pins running up her lapels. The gallery owner had nearly thrown a fit – Barry too when he met them later that night. Later still they’d gone back to her and Barry’s flat where Julie had made fun of them for listening to Fleetwood Mac on Barry’s reel-to-reel tape machine. State of the art that was at the time. Whatever happened to it? The stuff you have over the years, where does it all go?) Susan only noticed money when her ‘allowance’ account ran low. Barry loved money. Moving it about. Doing this and that. ‘Restructuring’ their finances. Always on the lookout for a sweeter credit card deal, a better interest rate for their savings.

‘Right, I’m off,’ Barry was saying, pushing himself up from the kitchen table with a reluctant grunt.

‘OK, darling. There’s cottage pie in the fridge for your dinner. You can do yourself some peas, can’t you?’

‘I guess I’ll have to. I might work late though …’ He moved to kiss her cheek, then surveyed the mess and thought better of it. He blew one across the counter and Susan smacked her lips back.

‘Good luck, Susan,’ Susan said as he walked towards the door.

‘Eh?’ Barry said, turning back.

‘Good luck with your dress rehearsal tonight, Susan.’

‘Oh, right. Yes, yes, good luck.’

Well, thank you
, Susan thought as he left.

Barry, in his turn, thinking,
What a load of old bloody bollocks.

WHILE SUSAN WRESTLED
with the problems of blood, her oldest friend was dealing with bodily fluids of a different stripe. The thing about piss, Julie Wickham was increasingly coming to believe, was that it was like snowflakes or fingerprints; no two examples were exactly the same.

Take Mrs Meecham at the end of the hall. Hers was always extremely acrid. Sharp. Old Mr Bledlow, Alf here, not so much. Mild, almost scentless. Why? They both had much the same diet, the same three meals a day doled out by the home, tipped out of huge, ultra-cheap plastic catering bags and then boiled or baked or fried. Maybe it had something to do with the kidneys, with their varying degrees of decrepitude. Yet Mr Bledlow was nearly ninety, sitting quietly in the corner over there in the clean pyjamas the nurse had helped him into while Julie worked her mop all around and under his stripped bed, where the overspill had gone. By God it had been a fair old load. Julie dunked the mop into the bleach/water mixture, rinsed it out by pressing it into the colander bit of the metal bucket, and started swabbing again. She caught her face reflected in the shining linoleum, still pretty in the right light, her black hair hanging down, very little grey for her age, and thought to herself, as she had nearly every day in here for the past three months,
‘Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week – But it’s a paycheck, Jack.’

‘Piss Factory’ by Patti Smith. She’d been, what, twenty-one or twenty-two when she first heard that? Living up in London, in that tiny bedsit in Finsbury Park. Handy for the Rainbow it had been. She’d been going out with Terry who did the door at the Roxy at the time. He worked at the Vortex later.

Yep – a paycheck, Jack. She’d done things for money over the years, Julie. She’d stolen. She’d … well, anyway. But if you’d told her back then that she’d end up turning sixty and working in an old folks’ home mopp—

She became aware of a sound, a steady choking noise. She turned – Mr Bledlow, sobbing, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. She propped the mop against the bed and went over, leaning down by the vinyl-covered armchair. ‘Hey, hey, what’s this now?’

‘I’m sorry,’ the old fellow said, hands still covering his face. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘Come on, no need for all this, Alf. Just a little accident.’

‘It ain’t right you having to do this.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s my job.’ She slid an arm around his shoulder. His hair was like powder, frizzy and silver. You felt like if you breathed on it too hard it’d blow off his head, exploding into the pale, antiseptic air like the stems from a dandelion. ‘Shhh, come on now. Everything’s OK.’ She soothed the old boy, waiting for him to calm down, and looked around the room. The framed photographs of the children and grandchildren who visited once in a blue moon. The jug of weak orange squash. The tobacco tin he kept his loose change in. The grim view of the facing Victorian brickwork from the window. Julie was almost thankful she had no children. There’d be no one to not come and visit her when the time came. No one to not remember her birthday. No one to not spend the requisite minimum time on Christmas Day. No one to … no. Stop it. Best not to think about all that again. She’d been thinking about it too much lately, back at the flat, at night, with the off-brand vodka and her music playing.

She felt him regain his natural breathing tempo as the sobs subsided. ‘That’s better,’ Julie said.

He looked up at her through watery rheumy eyes – eyes that had seen nine decades come and go – and said, with simple, perfect clarity, ‘I don’t like it here.’

Julie felt a spasm in her throat as she stared into the force field of his sorrow: ending your days in a decrepit shithouse run by the lowest bidder, surrounded by strangers. She wanted to say, ‘None of us do, Alf. None of us do.’ But she swallowed her tears, her fear, and said the only thing she could: ‘Cheer up, love. They’ll be along with the tea in a minute.’

The English way – milk and two sugars into the abyss.

Alf managed a smile at that as, behind her, Julie heard an electrical whirr, the bang of the door being shunted open and then the bellowed greeting: ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU FUCKING OLD SHAGGER!’

She turned round. ‘Morning, Ethel.’

Ethel Merriman, eighty-seven, sat beaming in her electric wheelchair, her ‘grabbing stick’ – a telescopic device with a mechanical claw on the end that enabled Ethel to get hold of things that were out of her reach – tucked in behind her the way a coachman’s musket would once have been carried. Pushing twenty stone now, her hair a mad shock of reddish blonde framing a face that was somehow still pretty, a face that was right now set in its default expression, one best characterised as a merciless leer. Julie noticed Ethel had lipstick on her teeth. On the front of her wheelchair was a ‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’ bumper sticker. On the back another proclaimed ‘I BRAKE FOR NO ONE’. Ethel took in Mr Bledlow, the bucket, the mop and soiled sheets wrapped in a ball. ‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘Shat the bed, is it?’

‘Ethel!’ Julie snapped.

‘Hey, no bother,’ Ethel said. ‘Like my Oscar used to say – you’ve not been properly drunk till you’ve shat yourself. Here, Alf.’ Ethel reached under herself and tossed a bag of barley sugars into Alf’s lap. ‘Get stuck into that lot. Nicked them from that old cow Allenby down in 4C.’

‘Ethel!’ Julie said again.

‘You, birthday girl, shut it. Come on – fag break.’ Ethel pulled up the top of her leisure suit – a spectacular powder-blue velour number today – to reveal the pewter hip flask stuck in her waistband. ‘I’m holding.’

‘Jesus Christ …’ Julie sighed as two nurses came back into the room carrying fresh bedding for Alf, pushing their way around Ethel, ignoring her. They had previous.
Everyone
had previous with Ethel.

‘Morning, Nurse Bull, Nurse Diesel,’ Ethel said cheerfully to no response.

‘Right, five minutes,’ Julie said. ‘You be OK, Alf?’

Alf nodded, gratefully crunching a barley sugar.

‘SIXTY. YOU OLD
bastard. You fucking
ruin.
’

They were out in the sunshine of the fire escape. ‘I know, Ethel. Christ, how did that happen, eh?’ Julie dragged deeply and passed the cigarette back to Ethel, glancing towards the door.

With a grunt Ethel levered herself up out of the wheelchair, trotted the few steps over, and pushed the fire door securely shut. Julie knew that the degree of Ethel’s immobility, like the degree of her deafness, was selective. She could get out of that wheelchair and move a few steps when it suited her all right, like when another resident had left a bag of boiled sweets temptingly unguarded and just out of arm’s reach.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Ethel said, taking the fag with one hand, the other clamped around her hip flask, glittering in the morning sun out here. ‘I’m just taking the piss. Sixty’s nothing. Fuck, when I was your age I was ruling. I had it all, bitch, let me tell you. So much cock …’ She took a pull on whatever was in the flask and let out a long, satisfied ‘ahhhh’ before adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘Fanny too.’ Julie laughed as Ethel offered her the flask. She shook her head. ‘Man up,’ Ethel said, still proffering the booze.

‘It’s just after nine, Ethel!’

‘Did I ask you the time?
Did I ask you the fucking time?
’

‘And I’ve got lunch with Susan later.’

‘Oof. Let the party begin.’

‘Oh, stop it. Susan’s all right once you get to know her.’

‘Boring,
’ Ethel trilled.

‘And then we’ve got this party thing tonight after her rehearsal. You’re still coming?’

‘A few hours out of here? Even the Wroxham Players are sufferable for that. But to return to the matter in hand.’ Ethel looked at the hip flask, as though it contained the key to all mythologies. ‘You seem to have misunderstood me. I did not ask for the time. Nor did I enquire as to your bastard schedule for the next twenty-four hours. I simply requested that you join me in
a drink on your birthday.
’

‘Oh God,’ Julie groaned, reaching for the thing. She glanced again towards the fire-escape door and took a quick swallow. She felt neat gin scorching her innards, torching through her like a house fire seeking oxygen.
‘Shiiitttt.
’

Ethel laughed. ‘Martini. My own recipe. Well, I say my own. I nicked it from an RAF boy, just after the war. What was the bugger’s name? Cecil? Cedric? Celly? Something wet. Flew Mosquitoes out of Duxford. Not much up top but fit as a Dobermann in the employ of a retailer of meats, if you catch my meaning.’

‘Yes, Ethel. It’s not that obscure, your meaning.’

‘Gin had to be near freezing, viscous, was his rule. And you just rubbed the Vermouth bottle against it.’

She passed the fag back. Julie took it and they looked over the rooftops of the home together: chimney pots, puddles on the flat asphalt, TV aerials, decaying brickwork. The sun was already warm though. It looked like it would be a fine day. Ethel watched Julie smoke, her cheeks flushed slightly from the gin and a faraway look in her eyes. ‘Right, out with it,’ Ethel said.

‘What?’

‘Don’t fucking what me.’

‘It’s just … sixty, Ethel. This isn’t where I thought I’d be.’

‘Where did you think you’d be?’

‘I dunno. Somewhere nicer than this. Not living in a rented flat. Mopping up piss.’

‘You think you’ve got problems? Here, give us a last drag on that. Look at me – star of stage and screen reduced to mixing my own cocktails in a locked bathroom and stealing barley sugars from sleeping pensioners.’

‘Were you really famous, Ethel?’

‘From Piccadilly to the Amalfi Coast, darling – if it had a bar and a stage chances are I’ve sung and danced in it.’

They both turned at the sound of someone trying to force the fire-escape door. It was only a second or two before the door scraped open, but that was enough time for Ethel to deftly peg the smouldering butt over the ledge with one hand while, with the other, she reholstered the hip flask like a gunslinger who’d just blown someone away. They found themselves facing the hulking form of Miss Kendal. Kendal was in her mid-thirties, florid of complexion, her hair hanging in a loose greasy fringe. She was crammed into a business suit slightly too small for her and carried her ever-present clipboard. She looked to Ethel like someone who consumed her meal-for-one alone every night and who masturbated joylessly twice a year. She looked like someone who crapped out in the early rounds of
The Apprentice
.

‘What’s going on out here?’ Kendal asked, already – always – suspicious.

‘Papers please!’ Ethel said in a heavily Germanic accent. Kendal ignored her.

‘Just took Ethel out for some fresh air, Miss Kendal.’

Kendal sniffed nicotine-tainted air, eyes narrowing.

‘Miss Wickham, as you’re leaving us early today, I’m sure there must be some duties you can be attending to?’

‘Yes, Miss Kendal.’

‘Right. Well then.’

The door banged behind her. Instantly Ethel had both sets of V-signs aloft and was blowing the world’s biggest raspberry.

‘Oh, grow up, Ethel,’ Julie said.

SUSAN SAT ALONE
at the table in La Taverna, the best Italian restaurant in Wroxham, and sipped her mineral water. She glanced at her watch again. Julie was a
little
late. (Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham – with the names they had Susan sometimes thought that the only place they could ever have existed was in some dreary soap opera about Middle England.) The gift-wrapped box nestled beside her and Susan felt the warm, anticipatory tingle of someone who knows they have bought the perfect gift. She’d lied to Barry that morning – she’d spent a
lot
more on Julie than she’d meant to.