The Year of Taking Chances (2 page)

‘Gems?
Where are you?’
she heard Spencer shout as the front door banged behind him.

‘Up here, stark naked and awaiting your pleasure, sire,’ she yelled back, even though she was still in her old jeans, hair scraped back in a scrunchie, with an unattractive onion
aroma lingering on her fingers.
‘Come and get me!’
She swished her hand through the water, making the bubbles froth.
That should get him pelting him up the stairs, she thought.
Spencer
took the slightest raising of an eyebrow as an invitation that she was desperate for his bod.

She and Spencer had been together for fifteen years now.
They had met one sunny Saturday when she’d gone to visit her dad in Stowmarket and accidentally crashed into Spencer’s van.
Whatever he might say, Gemma was sticking to her guns: the prang was totally his fault.
If he hadn’t distracted her by walking along the street with no shirt on, his chest tanned and
muscular, his sloe-dark eyes so soulful and his black curly hair so gorgeously tousled, there was no way her foot would have slipped on the accelerator.
As it was, she’d been halfway through
a parallel-parking attempt, and had reversed into the vehicle behind her with a horribly loud bang.

‘Oi!’
he’d cried, breaking into a jog.
‘That’s my van, that is.
Look what you’ve done!’

Pink in the cheeks, Gemma clambered out of her car, mortified at what had just happened.
She was also kind of breathless at being so close to this handsome stranger, even if he was in a
blistering rage.
‘I am so sorry,’ she gulped.
‘Shit, this isn’t even my car – it’s my flatmate’s.
She’s going to kill me.’

His eyes softened, perhaps because she was wearing a turquoise minidress with a huge zip that went all the way down the front.
She had been small and slinky back then, a size eight and two stone
lighter than she was now.
With her long conker-coloured hair, heart-shaped face and large brown eyes, she was the kind of person that you couldn’t stay mad with for long.
‘Don’t
worry,’ he said gruffly after a moment, inspecting the mercifully intact bumper.
‘No harm done.
Are you all right?’

Her insides went swimmy as his gaze fastened on her, and her pulse quickened.
I am now
, she thought.

Gemma was living in London at the time, working as a designer for Pop, a cheap-and-cheerful fashion range, but it took just three months before she and Spencer were happily shacked up in a
rented red-brick terraced house in Larkmead, the small Suffolk village where he’d grown up.
A year later they were married and then, just as she was starting to tire of the London commute (as
much as two hours, door-to-door, on a bad day) she fell pregnant with Will and took an early maternity leave.
Sometimes she wondered how her life would have turned out if Spencer hadn’t been
in Stowmarket that day, or if she’d chosen a different place to park.
Funny how everything could change course so dramatically in one fateful moment.

‘Hell-o!’
he called now, bursting into the bathroom.
‘Hey,’ he added, seeing her still in her full scruffbag get-up.
‘I was promised nudity and sex.
Where’s
my nudity and sex?’

She laughed at the indignant look on his face, then her breath caught in her throat as he pulled his shirt over his head and approached her with a wanton gleam in his eye.
She might have let
herself go over the years, but he certainly hadn’t.
He was as beefy and muscular as he’d ever been.

‘Now then, Mrs Bailey,’ he said, sliding his arms around her and tugging at her top.
‘Let me help you take off these clothes .
.
.
’

On the other side of Larkmead, past the village green where the summer cricket matches were held, and over the curving brick bridge that crossed the mill-stream, the houses
were a mix of narrow Victorian terraces and smaller cottages, some with their original thatched roofs.
Up on Butler Row, two streets back from the greengrocer’s and post office, was White
Gables Cottage, the house where Caitlin Fraser had grown up, and where she’d come back to in recent weeks, after her life had fallen in like a toppled house of cards.

Slumped on the sofa now, she was sorely tempted to blow out the whole New Year thing and go to bed early with a hot-water bottle and a pint of wine.
Don’t be such a wet lettuce!
she
heard her mum exclaim in her head.
Go to bed early when it’s Hogmanay?
I don’t think so, lassie.

Caitlin rolled her eyes at herself.
Jane Fraser had become more Scottish than ever, now that she was dead and existed only in Caitlin’s memories and imagination.
Mind you, her mum had
always loved New Year, making a whole raft of resolutions every year, only for them to peter out and be forgotten before it was February.
‘It’s like a promise to yourself to do better
this year,’ she’d explained to Caitlin, the first time she’d let her stay up till midnight and see in the New Year.
‘So, for instance, I’ve made a promise that
I’ll help Maud Simmonds with her allotment, whereas your daddy’s promised to stop smoking those stinking cigarettes.
Haven’t you, Steve?’

‘What?
Er .
.
.
yes,’ her dad said, although he didn’t look quite as zealous as Jane did at the prospect.

A promise to yourself to do better this year.
Put like that, it sounded pretty good, Caitlin thought, remembering how she and her mum had sat in their nighties and dressing gowns on this
very same sofa together, cheering as they watched the fireworks exploding over the Houses of Parliament on telly, while her dad snored like a hippo in the armchair.
If she leaned back and shut her
eyes, she could almost imagine she was there, slipping back twenty-five years in a single heartbeat.

Almost.
Except that her dad had died when she was twenty and wouldn’t be snoring in his favourite armchair again, and her mum wasn’t there this year either, to cheer at the fireworks
and splash them another tot of whisky each.

Caitlin’s eyes fell upon the Sympathy cards gathering dust on the mantelpiece (she must take them down soon; they depressed her every time she looked at them); the family photographs that
had an added texture of poignancy, now that the curly-haired lady smiling in a sundress was dead and gone; and the small urn of ashes still waiting to be scattered.
It had been over a month since
the funeral, but Caitlin was stuck in a half-lit limbo of grief and hadn’t yet been able to say that final goodbye.

‘She wouldn’t want you moping about,’ Gwen, the old lady next door, had said, whenever she popped round on her way to her book group or sewing bee.
(It was kind of dispiriting
when a pensioner was more outgoing socially than you, to be honest.)

‘Let me know if you want me to tidy up the garden for you,’ Jim over the road had offered when she bumped into him in the street.
‘I used to do some of the digging for Jane,
when she needed a hand.’
Even Spencer Bailey, whom she hadn’t seen since they were at school together, had accosted her outside the village shop one Sunday morning, saying he was sorry
to hear about Jane, and then rhapsodising that she’d made the best cakes he’d ever tasted.
He’d done her extension, he explained, when Caitlin looked puzzled.
He was a builder
now, still in Larkmead, married with a couple of kids, he went on.
(She remembered he’d always had that easy-going, friendly charm, even when everyone else was an awkward teenager.)
‘Hey,’ he said, just as she was about to make an excuse and end the conversation, ‘if you’re still here at New Year, we’re having a party, by the way.
Come along, if
you want.’

She had smiled politely, thanking him and saying she wasn’t sure of her plans yet, but then Gwen had knocked on the door that afternoon with a hopeful look in her eyes and asked if Caitlin
would accompany her to see a swing-band up at Radnor Hall for New Year.
‘Jane was going to come with me, you see, so I thought you might like her ticket.
Could be fun!’

Could be
fun
?
Could be a wake-up call that her social life was in danger of expiring, more like.
She had never been more glad to reply, quite truthfully, that she’d been invited to
a party – sorry, Gwen.
‘Thanks, though,’ she added, as her neighbour’s face fell.
Christ
, she thought to herself, closing the front door afterwards.
Things had got
pretty bad when someone seriously thought you might want to go to some geriatric swing-band evening because you had nothing better to do.
On New Year’s Eve!

Still, she realized soberly, it was only by chance that she
did
have something better on offer.
If ever anyone needed a resolution to sort their life out, it was definitely her.

Half an hour later Caitlin was leaning in towards the long gilt-edged mirror to inspect herself.
Even now it felt weird to be getting ready in her mum’s bedroom, as if
she’d be ticked off any minute for snooping around.
The light was best in there, though, plus there was that enormous mirror – the kind that only a glamorous woman with a love of
dressing up could hang on her wall.
Caitlin was not this type of woman, but Jane Fraser had always loved an excuse to ‘put a face on’ and doll up for a night out.
She must have racked
up hours standing right here, painting her eyelids and lips, sweeping blusher onto those high cheekbones and dithering over which of her many pairs of high heels to wear.

Even at the end of her life, when she’d been too weak to feed herself, dozing in and out of consciousness, Jane had begged Caitlin to put some mascara on her and brush her hair.
Imagine
that!
Mascara and hair-brushing wouldn’t get a look-in on Caitlin’s deathbed, that was for sure.
Coffee, perhaps.
A last bag of chips, with lashings of salt and vinegar.
Maybe a bloody
big whisky to finish her off.

The irony was that her mum had been as fit as a fiddle almost until the end.
Lean and rangy, she had shimmied through Zumba in the village hall every Thursday evening apparently, and was always
out gardening or cycling around the village on her old upright bicycle.
Then, one Tuesday in October, she’d gone to the doctor complaining of stomach pains.
The doctor told her it was
probably gallstones and prescribed painkillers, but the next day Jane was vomiting and feverish, and ended up being rushed into hospital with acute pancreatitis.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she told Caitlin on the phone that night when she broke the news.
‘Lot of fuss about nothing.
I should be home in a few days, don’t
worry.’

‘Are you sure?
I’ll come and see you at the weekend.
Or sooner, if you want?’

‘What, and miss work?
Your boss would love me for that, wouldn’t he?
Don’t be daft, I’ll be home before you know it.’

Only it didn’t quite turn out like that.
Jane never went home again.
The doctors tried keyhole surgery to remove the dead tissue in her pancreas, but an infection occurred, which spread
into her blood.
Then a nurse telephoned Caitlin from the cottage hospital and said in that very British sort of way, ‘She’s extremely poorly.
You might want to be here.’
Caitlin
had left Cambridge that evening with a bag of clothes and a frightened heart, kissing Flynn goodbye with the promise that she’d be back as soon as she could.
But three days later, despite
everyone’s best attempts, Jane’s major organs failed, and then she was dead.
The whole thing, from stomach pains to death, had taken less than six weeks.

Tears swelled in Caitlin’s eyes as she remembered those nightmarish hours at her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, praying under her breath, trying to bargain with a god she
didn’t even believe in.
That was how desperate she felt.
That was how frightened.
But none of the antibiotics, drugs or prayers had had any effect.

Jane was rambling at the end.
‘I’m sorry, hen,’ she said a few times, gripping Caitlin’s hand.
‘I should have told you.
I never knew how to say it.’

‘Told me what?
What do you mean?’

‘We thought it was the right thing to do,’ Jane said, shutting her eyes.
Then her words became indistinct and mumbling, however close Caitlin leaned in to hear.

‘Don’t worry, Mum.
Whatever it was, it’s fine.’

Then Jane’s eyes shut and her face fell slack.
BEEEEEEEP
went the monitor, and it was all over.

Caitlin took a long, shuddering breath at the memory and raked a hand through her hair.
This wasn’t getting her ready.
She would be late, if she didn’t hurry up.
Taking a deep
breath, she peered into the mirror again and her reflection stared back warily.
Eyeshadow, mascara, lipstick: done.
It would take a scaffolder to prop up her eye-bags, and even Leonardo da Vinci
would struggle to brighten her sallow skin, but she’d tried her best.
She’d unearthed a clean pair of jeans and had Febrezed a sparkly top that had been at the bottom of her suitcase
for six weeks.
Hell, she’d even pushed the boat out and blow-dried her shoulder-length dark hair.
She actually looked halfway presentable.

You look a picture, lovey,
her mum said in her head.
A proper picture.
Now go out there and knock ’em dead!

‘Don’t get carried away, Mum,’ Caitlin muttered with a small smile.

An unwanted memory flashed into her mind.
This time last year she’d been getting ready for a night out in Cambridge with Flynn: dinner in town, then on to a house party off Mill Road.
She’d worn a scarlet dress and dangly earrings, her skin shimmering from the fancy scented body lotion she’d rubbed in.
As New Year struck, they found each other on the dance-floor and
kissed, really kissed, like two people who were madly in love.
They
had
been two people who were madly in love back then, she reminded herself grimly.

She sank onto her mum’s soft double bed, its floral duvet cover still in place, and wondered miserably what Flynn was doing tonight.
The last time they’d spoken – several weeks
ago now – he’d been curt with her, verging on aggressive, his sympathy and patience long since evaporated.
He wanted her to ‘snap out of it’, to ‘pull herself
together’, like it was that easy, like she could just click her fingers and return to normality.
Was she coming back or not?

Not
, she told him.
No way
.

She got up from the bed abruptly, not wanting to give in to despondency.
‘Come on, Eeyore,’ she said to herself.
‘You can do it.’

Grabbing a bottle of red wine, she pulled on her boots and coat and was out of the front door before she could change her mind.