The Sunshine Cruise Company (3 page)

And it did cross Susan’s mind – was there vanity involved in the gift giving, the lunching, with Julie? Was there pride?
I can do this
,
see?
Was there even
cruelty
? Because there had been a time, and it wasn’t even so long ago, when it looked like Julie’s life was going to outstrip her own. She’d travelled a lot, Julie, in her twenties and thirties. London, Europe, America, Australia even. Then she’d come back home at the end of the eighties and there had been the salon, then the boutique, then the second boutique over in Axminster. Running about town in her little SLK. The string of boyfriends, some from London, some of them impossibly glamorous, older than her, younger than her, Julie didn’t care what people thought.

She’d finally settled on Thomas, a debonair colt ten years her junior, and it seemed, for a moment, caught there at the apex of her flight, that Julie ‘had it all’: her own business, handsome young lover, flash car. And there was Susan – still married to boring Barry whom she’d known since school. Pottering about with her roses and her bread-making and her am-dram.

And then it all came crashing down: the tax problem, the business slump, and, finally, young Thomas disappearing one night with the company chequebook, never to be seen again.

It would be unfair to say that Susan had taken comfort in Julie’s fall because it allowed her to be alpha female on deck. Grossly unfair. She
did
love Julie. But lifelong friendships are curious things – the yardsticks by which we often measure ourselves. They were deep pools where there were tensions, currents and strange eddies that it was best to steer clear of. But, at the end of the day and all that, here they were, both turning sixty this year. It looked like the results were in and Susan was the one with her nose across the finishing line.

And here was her yardstick coming through the door now, already mouthing ‘Sorry!’ Susan’s face broke into a smile as she rose to greet her.

‘Happy birthday, darling!’

The two women embraced, Julie hoping the last blast of Chanel she’d given herself had masked the lingering reek of ammonia and institution. (It had been almost the last of the Chanel too, the small bottle she’d nursed carefully since Susan gave it to her two Christmases ago.)

‘Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get parked anywhere. Where did you park?’

‘The little one, across from Debenhams?’

‘Oh, right.’
Good. Across from Debenhams. That’d be a left out of the restaurant then. Julie needed to know this.

Susan was signalling to the waitress now who, as arranged, was coming into view with an ice bucket containing a bottle of Moët & Chandon. She placed it on the table with a flourish.

‘Oh God, champagne! Susan!’

‘My treat.’

‘It’ll have to be, love.’

‘I mustn’t have more than two glasses though. I’ll be plastered. You’re still coming to the party tonight, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, of course. Ethel too.’

‘Oh God. Will she behave?’

‘You know Ethel …’

Susan
did
know Ethel.

Julie had brought her to their Christmas drinks party last year. She’d drunk six snowballs, lit a cigarette
in the kitchen
, then propositioned one of the boys working for the catering company in the downstairs bathroom before turning the music off and singing an – admittedly very tuneful – a cappella version of some rugby song, something called ‘Barnacle Bill the Sailor’ (Susan remembered a couplet that went
‘You can sleep upon the mat. Oh, bugger the mat you can’t f*** that.
’ She’d thought Jill Worth was going to faint) before Julie wheeled her into the conservatory where she passed out.

As the waitress cracked the cork and Julie settled herself, fussing with napkin, cutlery and menu, Susan decided she couldn’t wait any longer, certainly not until the end of the meal. ‘Oh bugger, look, here, darling. Happy birthday!’ She placed the box on the table.

‘Christ,’ Julie said.

‘Openitopenitopenit …’

‘God! OK! Hang on …’

Julie started fiddling with the bow as the waitress finished pouring the champagne. ‘I’ll give you ladies a few moments with the menus. And happy birthday by the way!’

‘Thank you!’ Julie said.

‘Come on!’ Susan squeaked, clapping her hands together.

With a riiiip Julie tore the paper off. She saw the hallowed words immediately, inscribed right there on the glossy box: CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN.

‘Oh, Susan.’

Another squeak from Susan.

Julie removed the top from the shoebox as carefully as an archaeologist might remove the lid from a sarcophagus. There they were – classic black, open-toed, the famous red soles seeming to almost glow.

‘Oh fuck,’ Julie said.

‘I know it’s a bit OTT but it
is
your sixtieth and they were on sale and you are the only woman our age I know who still has the legs to carry them off and –’

Susan stopped jabbering. Because she saw that, across the table from her, Julie’s eyes were beginning to brim. And these did not look like the expected joyous tears of gratitude either. They looked like something else entirely. And Julie was
not
a crier. ‘Julie, are you –’

‘No. Please. Just give me a minute. I don’t want my mascara to run.’ Julie fanned at her face with one hand while taking fast, shallow breaths, her eyes craning upwards, as though trying not to look at the tears forming in the ducts below.

Susan glanced nervously around the restaurant. This wasn’t going at all as she’d imagined it would. After a moment it looked like Julie had it under control. She took a long draught of champagne and gazed at the shoes sadly.

‘What’s the matter? I thought you’d love –’

‘I
do
love them, Susan. They’re gorgeous. It’s just … where am I going to wear these? Now. At my age. Mopping up at the home?’

‘Come on, love. It’s only temporary. It was all you could get.’

‘Or running for the bus? Sitting in that bloody flat on a Friday night?’ Julie sighed. The shoes said impossible glamour. Infinite promise. All the things Julie was flat out of.

Susan said, ‘Bus?’

Julie sighed. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you. That’s why I asked where you’d parked. I was going to pretend I had to go the other way. I wasn’t late because of parking. I was late because the bloody bus was late. The car broke down three weeks ago. Some bloody manifold arse or other. Five hundred-odd quid they want to fix it.’
About exactly what the shoes cost
, Susan had time to reflect while she tried to picture Julie on a bus. That SLK didn’t seem so long ago. ‘It might as well be a million.’

‘Julie.’ Susan leaned across the table, taking her friend’s hand. ‘I’ve told you before, if you want to borrow –’

‘No.’ Julie shook her head. ‘We’re not starting down that road.’

‘But you
need
your car.’

‘I can barely afford to run it anyway. Have you seen the price of petrol now?’

‘I know.’ Susan couldn’t have told you the price of a litre of petrol with a gun at her head. It just went on the card. Barry dealt with it all. They sat in silence for a moment. The shoes and champagne unregarded on the table between them. The waitress approached the table, notepad at the ready. Susan smiled softly and shook her head and the girl retreated. ‘Well,’ Susan said, ‘some birthday celebration this turned out to be. Nice going, Susan.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s all lovely of you, it’s just …
sixty.
I mean, you can’t go on fooling yourself at this age, can you? I’m not going through some kind of slump or whatever. This is it. This is how my life turned out, Susan. On my own in a rented flat, working in a care home.’

‘You’re a bit down. Birthdays can be hard.’

‘I just …’

Julie looked out across the restaurant, through the windows, down towards the pub-encrusted town centre where the two of them had run gleefully in their late teens and early twenties, their lives a blur of fun and possibility stretching ahead of them. Julie seemed to see everything that had happened between then and now, all the wrong turns and bad decisions and half-baked schemes appearing to her as a mad parade. ‘I got a gas bill the other day for January to April. Two hundred and fifty quid. For a one-bedroom flat. I just … we’re old, Susan, aren’t we? I can remember bloody
Wilson
getting elected and I can’t remember life ever being as hard as this. It’s just so fucking
hard.
’

‘You know what we’re going to?’ Susan said. ‘We’re going to eat something and drink this champagne and then we’re going to go and return these stupid bloody shoes and we’ll use the money to get your car fixed and pay your gas bill. That’s what we’re going to do.’

Julie smiled for the first time in a while and said, ‘Never speak ill of the shoes, Susan.’

DESPITE HER EXCITEMENT
Jill Worth took the time to fully engage the handbrake before she got out of her ageing Polo and hurried round to the boot. Using all her strength she lifted the big jar out. It was the kind of jar used to store boiled sweets in old confectionery shops. A hole had been cut in the metal lid and the jar had been filled nearly to the brim with money: silver and bronze coins mainly, but there were a good few crumpled five-pound notes threaded through there as well. ‘Nearly six hundred quid I reckon, Mrs Worth,’ the barman at the Black Swan had told her, proudly slapping the lid. And that was just since Christmas! Less than five months!

She walked carefully up the short path, carrying the jar sideways, like a newborn, and rang the doorbell. She waited a few moments then rang again. Nothing. ‘Linda?’ she called through the door. Muffled noises from up the stairs. Then shouting.
‘Come in, Mum.’
Jill opened the door and walked into the hall grinning with her prize in her arms. When she saw her daughter sat halfway down the stairs, slumped against the wall, her grin crumbled. Linda was a mess – panda eyes, mascara blotched down her cheeks, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘Darling,’ Jill began, ‘what hap—’

‘Oh, Mum, we’ve had a hell of a night.’

Jill set the jar down and came up the stairs towards her. ‘What happened?’

‘Shhh. He’s sleeping now. I just finished getting him down.’

‘Come on,’ Jill said, threading an arm around Linda, helping her up. ‘Let’s go in the kitchen and I’ll put the kettle on.’

In the kitchen, as the kettle began to rumble while Jill busied herself with the cups, tea bags and milk, Linda sat at the small table and talked. ‘He wouldn’t eat, we’ve had to put him back on the drip, he just didn’t want to take his medicine, the new stuff, said his throat hurt, kept spitting it out, getting himself into a right state, till finally Ken and I were both holding him down and it got to a point where he couldn’t breathe, he just … couldn’t catch a breath. It was, Christ, it was horrible. Sorry.’ Her mum didn’t like swears.

‘That’s OK, darling. You’re upset.’

‘Then he couldn’t settle so we were both up and down half the night. God knows what Ken must be like at work today.’

‘Isn’t there some other way to give him the medicine? Tablets? Could you put it in his food?’

‘Apparently not. It’s a suspension. Something to do with the way it works on the lungs.’

Jill brought the tea over and sat down. Her poor daughter. Linda was thirty-five and looked fifty. These past three years, since Jamie was diagnosed, had been brutal. Jill, meanwhile, was wearing quite well at sixty-seven. Still drove herself everywhere. ‘The day you drive a car is the day they carry me out of here in a pine box,’ her Derek used to say. He was right in the end – Jill had started taking driving lessons right after he died. Twelve years ago now.

‘What’s that, Mum?’ Linda asked, nodding down the hall towards the jar sitting by the front door.

‘Oh! One of the collecting jars, from the Black Swan on the high street. Nearly six hundred pounds they think! Since Christmas! How about that?’

‘Oh, bless them,’ Linda said. Then she burst into tears.

‘Shhh, come on, darling.’ Jill pulled her daughter to her. ‘Inch by inch. We’ll get there.’

‘Oh, Mum, I don’t think we’re ever going to get there.’

‘Of course we will. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

‘If you’d seen him last night … he … he …’ the words coming between sobs, her face buried in Jill’s neck, ‘he looked like he was drowning, Mum. The fear in his eyes. He was
terrified
.’

‘Oh, darling.’

‘All this bloody
Rome wasn’t built in a day
and
we’ll get there
. Chicago, the whole thing, I sometimes think it’d be kinder if he just, if he just –’

Jill grabbed her daughter’s face and twisted it up to hers. ‘That’s enough, Linda. You hear me? Enough now. I won’t have that kind of talk. I simply will not have it. God has a plan for that boy and he is going to live.’ Linda collapsed sobbing in her mother’s arms. ‘There, dear. There, there,’ Jill said. ‘You’re just exhausted. You’re not thinking properly. We are going to fix this.’

‘Oh, Mum …’

Jill held her while she cried. After a while she said, ‘Go on now. I’ll go up and sit with him for a bit. You go through and lie down on the sofa and have a lovely nap. You’ll feel much better. I can stay tonight if you want.’

‘Haven’t you got your am-dram stuff?’

‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll manage without me.’

‘No, please, Mum, you go. Ken’s back at five. If I can just get forty winks …’

‘OK. Come on, let’s get you settled. I’ll come down in a bit and make us some lunch.’

After she’d laid a blanket over her daughter Jill crept quietly up the stairs and into her grandson’s room. The curtains were drawn, giving it the authentically sleepy tang of the sick ward. Jill sat down in the armchair next to the bed and looked at Jamie, sleeping. It was incredible, you’d never have thought it to look at him. Other than the canula going into the back of his left hand, leading to the bag of glucose on a stand, there was nothing to tell you how sick he was. A bit pale, yes, but basically a perfectly beautiful five-year-old boy. Nothing to suggest that, in the words of one of the doctors, he had the lungs ‘of a seventy-year-old miner’.