Various Pets Alive and Dead (39 page)

She’s exhausted and hungry and she could just drive on by and leave them for the wind to blow around, or for someone else to clean up – but she’s not that sort of person. Slamming on the brakes, she reverses her car and goes over to investigate. And yes, sure enough, it’s the recycling bags from school, which Mr First Class Finance took away.

She opens her boot and rearranges various junk to make room. Behind another box of newspapers awaiting the recycling and tucked under the tyre tools, something green catches her eye. It’s her purse – the one she thought Jason had stolen. It must have fallen out of her bag. She checks: her credit cards, the three ten-pound notes, they’re all there.

She loads up as many of the bin bags as she can cram into the boot, the passenger seat and back-seat space, and drives back to Sheffield. The rest will have to wait for another day.

Serge couldn’t face work on Monday – in fact, he doubts that he will ever be able to face it again – but just to cover himself on Tuesday he signs on with a local GP, a Dr H. Dhaliwal, who turns out to be thin harassed young woman, barely older than him, who questions him in some detail about his accident.

Why didn’t he put out his arm to break his fall? Did he black out?

He doesn’t know.

She confirms that his nose is fractured and listens to his heart in a way he finds vaguely erotic. No one has shown such interest in his body since … since … Tears mist his eyes.

How did he get home, she asks?

He doesn’t want to go into all that, so he tells her he can’t remember.

‘So you’ve suffered loss of memory?’

‘Totally.’

She diagnoses a moderate concussion, sends him off to the hospital for a raft of tests, orders him to lay off alcohol and to take it easy for a week. She advises him to phone in sick.

‘Shall I come and see you again?’

‘Only if the symptoms return.’

I am a symptom! My whole life is a symptom! Help me, Dr Dhaliwal!

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

She smiles kindly. Actually, she has quite cute dimples.

He’s not sure about her concussion diagnosis but, amazingly, when he phones to extend his sick leave (‘I’m feeling sort of anxious. And a bit depressed’) she doesn’t quibble.

He spends the time on his own in his penthouse, watching autumn speed into winter from his window. Brisk clouds race across the sky, and brown leaves appear on his balcony out of nowhere. The evenings are cold. One night, it snows.

By the second week he’s beginning to get seriously bored, so he logs on and opens his accounts. In his absence, Dr Black has been doing very nicely. Not only is his cash reserve flush, but SYC has gone through the roof. Serge gasps when he totals up the numbers: he is worth £1.13 million. How did that happen? Pity he sold Edenthorpe Engineering too soon, else it would be even more. Really, this stock trading thing is quite a doddle once you get the hang of it. A peep at Kenporter1601’s transactions reveals that he’s been selling too. Weird. To look at the transactions, you’d think the two of them had mounted a concerted bear raid to drive the price of Edenthorpe down deliberately – though his role was purely accidental.

His personal finances also seem very healthy. Further investigation discloses a credit to his card account of £10,488.81 from the Poire d’Or restaurant. Nice one. Though a bit late.

The only irritation is a constant tirade of texts and missed calls from Doro, plus a few from Clara and some from an unknown number. He deletes them all. At a time like this, he has to focus his mind on positive thoughts.

He phones the HR department at FATCA to inform them of his progress and is surprised to receive by post, a few days later, a get-well-soon card from his colleagues. There are five signatures. The Hamburger is missing, but Maroushka is there – a curly Cyrillic scrawl in the top right-hand corner. This has the effect of considerably speeding up his recovery.

At half past three precisely on Wednesday, Clara zips out of the classroom, straight into her car, and off to Hardwick Avenue.

They’re having a family meeting to discuss Oolie’s future living arrangements. Mr Clements has called it, Marcus and Doro have reluctantly agreed, and Oolie has insisted that Clara be there.

She notes as she comes through the door that the house has been tidied up. An unfamiliar smell greets her that is floral and slightly sickly – Doro must have been spraying air freshener around.

Oolie greets her with a hug in the hall. ‘Hiya, Clarie. ’E’s not ’ere yet. Mum says we ent gotter give ’im no tea.’

‘No tea? Why?’

‘She says she don’t want ’im ’angin’ around.’

Clara shrugs. Doro seems to be getting more and more peculiar.

‘Well, I need a cuppa. I’ve had a hard day at school.’

She goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Oolie follows her.

‘Did it come back, that ’amster?’ An obscure emotion flits across her face.

This is the second time she’s mentioned it.

‘Oolie, are you sure it wasn’t you that let him out?’

Oolie shakes her head emphatically. ‘It worrent me. ’E done it ’imself. Cheeky bugger. ’E nicked the key. I seed ’im.’

‘Oolie, you’re fibbing! You’re winding me up!’

Oolie lowers her eyes sulkily. ‘No I in’t. Cross me ’eart. Let ’im die. Poker needle in ’is eye.’

Clara has always assumed that Oolie sometimes gets things muddled, but doesn’t have the ability to actually invent things. What else has she been inventing?

But before she can pursue this line of enquiry, the doorbell rings and her parents materialise in the hallway. Her mother is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘
Rectify the anomaly
’. Her father is wearing a tie.

Clara stares. This must be serious.

They seat themselves around the kitchen table.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Her mother fixes the social worker with a cold eye.

‘Mum says you ain’t gotter ’ave no tea,’ says Oolie.

‘No. I’m fine, thanks,’ he says.

‘Mum says she don’t want you ’angin’ around,’ says Oolie.

‘I’ll try to be brief, then.’ He blinks rapidly as he takes a folder out of his briefcase. ‘As you may know, there’s going to be a sheltered housing scheme as part of the Greenhill Lees redevelopment plan. There’s already a waiting list for places. Now, as you know, I’m very keen to get Oolie-Anna’s name down on that waiting list. But I’d like your agreement.’

‘And what if we don’t agree?’ says Doro.

‘I think you will,’ he says.

Wow! He’s quite brave, thinks Clara, to face Doro down like that.

‘Tell ’er, Clarie! Tell ’er I wanna have my own flat,’ says Oolie. ‘I’m fed up of living at home. Cos Dad farts all the time.’

Marcus laughs. ‘It’s a good enough reason.’

‘Who’s going to make sure she doesn’t eat rubbish?’ says Doro. ‘Who’s going to make sure she takes … her medication?’

‘What midi-cakes?’

‘It’s not the end of the world if she sometimes eats a bit of pizza,’ Clara chips in.

‘We’ll put support in,’ says Mr Clements. ‘We’ll monitor things carefully.’

‘And Megan’ll help,’ says Clara. ‘Like she said, Oolie’ll be more of a presence in her life now than she was in the past.’

‘That’s not difficult, is it?’ Doro retorts.

‘You can be involved just as much or as little as you want, Mrs Lerner. It’s better to start letting go now, in a planned way, when all the services are in place, than to wait for an emergency …’

‘He’s got a point, Mum,’ says Clara. ‘You and Marcus are getting elderly, if I may say so.’

She’s noticed how tired Marcus looks, and how distracted Doro seems.

‘No, we’re not!’

‘Yes, you are, Mum. It’s not going to get any better.’

Doro rolls her eyes. Mr Clements frowns at Clara.

‘See it in a positive light. Don’t think of it as an imposition. Think of it as a lovely gift to your daughter, Mrs Lerner. The gift of blossoming independence.’

He’s obviously been on one of those positive-thinking courses.

‘Giff! I wanna giff!’ cries Oolie.

‘And what if she gets P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T?’ Doro spells.

‘What’s ayan tea?’ asks Oolie.

‘She’s longing for a B-A-B-Y.’

‘Look, Mrs Lerner, I know what you’re worried about,’ says the social worker quietly. ‘I went through the case notes, right back to 1994. You know, in the nineties they were finding child abuse all over the place. Since then, we’ve come to accept more … er … unconventional living arrangements.’

‘That’s exactly what I said at the time,’ snaps Doro.

‘Mm. The other thing I discovered –’ he shuffles around in his chair and nods towards Doro almost apologetically ‘– is that you and Mr Lerner never actually completed the legal adoption process.’

‘Because we weren’t married! Because we lived in a commune! Because the social worker who interviewed us was a narrow-minded bigot with an obsession about nudity and paedophilia! Probably you are too! What? Don’t you shush me!’ Her mother turns furiously on poor Marcus, who’s had the temerity to raise a finger to his lips.

‘I think this is very helpful,’ says Mr Clements calmly. ‘You need to express your worries.’

‘There was a fire! Somebody set the bloody house on fire! Isn’t that worry enough?’

‘Mum thinks it were me, but it worrent,’ Oolie confides to Mr Clements in a loud whisper. ‘It were some lads. I seed ’em.’

Doro’s cheeks have gone chalky, like an old woman’s. Clara feels quite sorry for her.

‘I think that’s enough,’ she intervenes. ‘Unless you’ve got something constructive to say?’

‘Why not try it for six months? If after that it isn’t working out, you can always go back …’

‘All right!’ Doro sighs, and throws up her hands. ‘You’ve bludgeoned me into submission.’ She gets up like a sleepwalker and blunders into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

‘Well done,’ whispers Clara to Mr Clements.

He shrugs, and smiles. ‘D’you think she’ll let me have that tea now?’

‘I expect so,’ says Marcus.

‘Dad, you’ve just farted again,’ says Oolie.

Pity about the beard, thinks Clara.

Despite the Christmas decorations already drooping between the lamp posts, or maybe because of them, Doncaster town centre looks particularly cheerless on the last Saturday of November, as Doro makes her way along almost empty pavements towards Woolworths, in search of Janey. There are things she needs to ask about the fire, things she needs to clarify. It was so long ago, everyone has forgotten, apart from her, and even her own recollection has become muddied between what she saw, what she inferred, and the things she said at the time, which have become fixed in her memory as a true record of events. Janey’s words last time they met are lodged in her mind. ‘Wasn’t it some lads?’

But Woolworths’ windows are plastered with giant ‘
CLOSING DOWN SALE!
’ posters, and Janey isn’t there. She wanders around the desolate store, between the picked-over counters and posters proclaiming ‘
BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST!
’, vaguely remembering having read something about Woolworths going into receivership. It seems incredible that something so apparently permanent, something which has been here since her own childhood, can suddenly disappear just like that.

When she was a little girl, her mother used to take her on Saturday to spend her pocket money on the Woolworths pick-and-mix counter in Norwich. Thirty years later, when they lived in Solidarity Hall, she did the same with Clara and Serge. Serge was one of those kids who always hoarded his sweets, and cried when the other kids tried to steal them. Doro smiles, remembering the tears and squabbles of long ago. Later, he gave up hoarding sweets, and started hoarding other things – snail shells, dried seed heads, pine cones.

Yes, she found the charred remnants of the pine cones in the grate after the fire. Serge must have gathered them in Campsall Woods – there weren’t any pine trees near the house. She remembers so vividly, even after fourteen years, driving back from work that day, late because of a hold-up in the town centre. A little girl knocked over by a speeding car. Someone else’s tragedy.

She remembers how her heart lurched when she turned into their lane and saw, through the swish of windscreen wipers, a tight little knot of people gawping at the fire engine in front of their house, the great arcs of water playing from the hoses. She remembers the smell of charred wood and scorched paint, the billowing plumes of smoke rising up through the thin useless rain. But why was Serge there? He should have been at school, at the four o’clock chess club. Yet there he was, tears running down his face with raindrops and grey rivulets of ash, jabbering about Oolie and how he’d seen smoke and run all the way to the red telephone box in the village. And she’d looked around for Oolie, thinking she should be back any minute now, and suddenly she’d realised and started to scream, ‘Oolie! Where’s Oolie?’

They’d broken down the door of the annexe, and pulled her out. She was unconscious, with horrific burns to her arms. Doro had forced herself to be calm, putting her arms around Serge, covering his eyes with her hands. Only when the ambulance arrived did she break down and shout at the idle onlookers blocking its way up the lane. Where had these people come from? She barely knew them. A woman put her arm around her. ‘She’ll be all right, duck. It’s just the smoke.’

Doro shrugged her off angrily. What did she know?

The others drifted back between four and six o’clock – Otto and Star first, then Toussaint and Kollontai, followed by Nick, Moira, Marcus and lastly Chris Howe, who finished work at five thirty. The police took statements from all of them. The absentees were Clara who was away at university, Chris Watt who’d gone to visit her sister in Skelmersdale, and Fred who was in London. The neighbours had melted away. Presumably the police interviewed them too.

They questioned Oolie while she was still in hospital.

‘Come on. You can do better than that, sweetheart. Who was there when you came home?’ the policewoman coaxed.