Al said, “Wait. He just said something interesting.” She paused, her hand held above her abdomen, as if she were tuning him in. “All right,” she said, “if you’re going to be like that, you know what you can do. See if you can find a better home to go to. (Not you, Col, I’m talking to Morris.) What makes you think I want you moving in anyway? I don’t need you. I’ve had it up to here! Bugger off!” She shouted the last phrase, staring through the windscreen.
Colette said, “Shh! Keep it down!” She checked over her shoulder that no one was watching them.
Al smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Colette, I’ll tell you what we should do. Go back in there, and tell that woman to put us down for the biggest house she’s got.”
Colette placed a small holding deposit and they returned two days later. Suzi was on duty, but it was a weekday morning and the caravan was empty.
“Hello, again. So you’re not working ladies?” Suzi enquired. Her eyes skittered over them, sharp as scissors.
“Self-employed,” Colette said.
“Oh, I see. Both of you?”
“Yes, is that a problem?”
Suzi took a deep breath. Once again a smile spread over her face. “No problem at all? But you will be wanting our package of personally tailored mortgage advice and assistance?”
“No, thank you.”
Suzi spread out the site map. “The Collingwood,” she said, “is very unique, on this site we shall only be erecting three. Being exclusive, it is in a preferential situation, here on top of the hill? We don’t have a computer-generated image as of this moment, because we’re waiting for the computer to generate it. But if you can imagine the Rodney? With an extra bedroom en suite?”
“But what will it look like on the outside?”
“If you’ll excuse me?” Suzi got on the phone. “Those two ladies?” she said. “That I mentioned? Yes, those ones. Wanting to know about the Collingwood, the exterior elevations? Like the Rodney with different gob-ons? Yes. Mmm. Just ordinary, really … . No, not to look at them. By-eee.” She turned back to Colette. “Now, if you can imagine?” She passed her forefinger over the sales leaflet. “For the Rodney you have this band of decorative plasterwork with the nautical knots motif, but with the Collingwood you will get extra portholes?”
“Instead of windows?”
“Oh no, they will just be decorative.”
“They won’t open?”
“I’ll check that for you, shall I?” She picked up the phone again. “Hi, there! Yes, fine. My ladies—yes, those ones—want to know, do the portholes open? That’s on the Collingwood?”
The answer took some time to find. A voice in Al’s ear said, did you know Capstick was at sea? He was in the merchant navy before he got taken on as a bouncer.
“Colette,” she said. She put her hand on Colette’s hand. “I think Morris has met Keef Catsick.”
“No?” Suzi said. “No! Really? You too? In Dorking? … Well, there must be a plague of them. What can you do? Live and let live, that’s what I say … . Yes, will do. By-eee.”
She clicked the phone down and turned away politely, believing she was witnessing a moment of lesbian intimacy.
Colette said, “Keith who?”
Alison took her hand away. “No. It’s all right. It’s nothing.” Her knuckles looked skinned and darkly bruised. The lucky opals had congealed in their settings, dull and matt like healing scabs.
Al thought you couldn’t bargain with a house builder, but Colette showed her that you can. Even when they had agreed on a basic price, three thousand below Suzi’s target, she kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, until Suzi felt sick and hot and she began to capitulate to Colette’s demands; for Colette made it clear that until she was dealt with, and dealt with in a way satisfactory to herself, she would keep away any other potential customers—which she did, by darting her head at them as they climbed the steps and fixing them with her pale glare; by snapping, “Do you mind, Suzi is busy with me?” When Suzi’s phone rang, Colette picked it up and said, “Yes? No she can’t. Call back.” When Suzi yearned after lost prospects as they stumbled down the steps, following them with her eyes, Colette zipped her bag, stood up and said, “I could come back when you’re more fully staffed—say, next Saturday afternoon?”
Suzi grew frantic then, as she saw her commission seeping away. She became accommodating and flexible. When Suzi agreed to upgrade to a power shower en-suite to Bed Two, Colette signed up for fitted wardrobes. When Colette hesitated over a double oven, Suzi offered to make it a multifunction model including microwave. When Colette—after prolonged deliberation—gave the nod to brass switchplates throughout, Suzi was so relieved she threw in a carriage lamp free. And when Colette—after stabbing at her calculator buttons and gnawing her lip—opted for wood-style flooring to kitchen and utility, Suzi, sweating inside her orange skin, agreed to turf the back garden at Galleon’s expense.
Meanwhile, Alison had plummeted down on the click ’n’ fix korner group seating. I can afford it, she thought, I can probably afford it. Business was booming, thanks in part to Colette’s efficiency and bright ideas. There was no shortage of clients; and it was just as Colette said, one must invest, one must invest against leaner times. Morris sat in the corner, picking at the carpet tiles, trying to lift one. He looked like a toddler, absorbed, his short legs and potbelly thrust out, his tongue between his teeth.
She watched Colette negotiating, small rigid hand chopping the air. At last she got the nod and limped out to the car after her. Colette jumped into the driving seat, whipped out her calculator again, and held it up so that Al could see the display.
Al turned away. “Tell me in words,” she said. Morris leaned forward and poked her in the shoulder. Here’s the lads coming, he shouted. Here’s the cheeky chappies. Knew you’d find me, knew you would, that’s the spirit.
“You could take more of an interest,” Colette snapped. “I’ve probably saved us ten K.”
“I know. I just can’t read the panel. The light’s in my eyes.”
“Plain ceilings or Artex?” Colette said. Her voice rose to a squeak, imitating Suzi. “They think you’ll give them money to stop them making plaster swirls.”
“I expect it’s harder to make plaster smooth.”
“That’s what she said! I said, smooth should be standard! Silly bitch. I wouldn’t pay her in washers.”
Aitkenside said, we can’t live here. There’s no bleeding accommodation.
Dean said, Morris, are we going camping? I went camping once.
Morris said, how was it, mate?
Dean said, it were crap.
Aitkenside said, call it a porthole and it don’t bleeding open? Won’t do for Keef, you know, it won’t do for Keef.
“Brilliant,” Al said. “Couldn’t be better. What won’t do for Keith will do just fine for me.” She put out her hand and squeezed Colette’s cold bony fingers.
That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.
The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.
“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”
She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement wi
ll be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter, Not that sort of partner!!! It was just for her own satisfaction that she wrote it; it was no business of Gavin’s, she thought, what kind of partnership she was in now.
On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”
As the Collingwood was Galleon’s top-of-the-range model, it had more gob-ons than any other house type in the development, more twiddles and teases, more gables and spindles; but most of them, Colette predicted, would fall off within the first six months. Down the hill they were still building, and yellow machines picked and pecked at the soil, their stiff bending necks strangely articulated, like the necks of prototype dinosaurs. Trucks jolted up with glue-on timbers of plastic oak, bound together in bundles like kindling. Swearing men in woolly hats unloaded paper-thin panels of false brickwork, which they pinned to the raw building blocks; they disembarked stick-on anchor motifs, and panels of faux pargetting with dolphin and mermaid designs. The beeping, roaring, and drilling began promptly at seven, each morning. Inside the house there were a few mistakes, like a couple of the internal doors being hung the wrong way around, and the Adam-style fireplace being off-centre. Nothing, Al said, that really affected your quality of life. Colette wanted to keep arguing with the builders till she got compensation, but Al said, let it go, what does it matter, just close the door on it. Colette said, I would but the frame’s warped.
The day their kitchen ceiling fell in, she strode off to the sales caravan, where Suzi was still selling off the last remaining units. She made a scene; punters fled back to their cars, thinking they’d had a lucky escape. But when she left Suzi and began splashing uphill, picking her way between stacked paving slabs and lengths of piping, she found that she was shaking.
The Collingwood stood at the top of a rise; its portholes stared out over the neighbours like blind eyes. Is this my life now? she thought. How will I ever meet a man? At Wexham there were one or two young bachelors she used to glimpse down by the bins. One had never met her eye and only grunted when she greeted him. The other was Gavin to the life and went about swinging his car keys around his forefinger; the sight of him had almost made her nostalgic. But the men who had moved into Admiral Drive were married with two kids. They were computer programmers, systems analysts. They drove minivans like square little houses on wheels. They wore jackets with flaps and zips that their wives chose for them from mail order catalogues. Already the postman could be seen, ploughing across the furrows carrying flat boxes containing these jackets, and splattered white vans bounced over the ruts, delivering gob-ons for their home computers. At weekend they were outside, wearing their jackets, constructing playhouses and climbing frames of primary-coloured plastic. They were hardly men at all, not men as Colette knew them; they were dutiful emasculates, squat and waddling under their burden of mortgage debt, and she despised them with an impartial, all-embracing spite. Sometimes she stood at her bedroom window, as the men drove away in the mornings, each edging his square-nosed vehicle cautiously into the muddy track; she watched them and hoped they got into a pileup on the M3, each folding neatly, fatally, into the back of the vehicle in front. She wanted to see their widows sitting in the road, daubing themselves with mud, wailing.
The Collingwood still smelled of paint. As she let herself in at the front door, kicking off her shoes, it caught in her throat and mingled with the taste of salt and phlegm. She went upstairs to her own room—Bed Two, 15 by 14 feet with en-suite shower—and slammed the door, and sat down on the bed. Her little shoulders shook, she pressed her knees together; she clenched her fists and pressed them into her skull. She cried quite loudly, thinking Al might hear. If Al opened the bedroom door she would throw something at her, she decided—not anything like a bottle, something like a cushion—but there wasn’t a cushion. I could throw a pillow, she thought, but you can’t throw a pillow hard. I could throw a book, but there isn’t a book. She looked around her, dazed, frustrated, eyes filmed and brimming, looking for something to throw.
But it was a useless effort. Al wasn’t coming, not to comfort her: nor for any other purpose. She was, Colette knew, selectively deaf. She listened into spirits and to the voice of her own self-pity, carrying messages to her from her childhood. She listened to her clients, as much as was needful to get money out of them. But she didn’t listen to her closest associate and personal assistant, the one who got up with her when she had nightmares, the friend who boiled the kettle in the wan dawn: oh no. She had no time for the person who had taken her at her word and given up her career in event management, no time for the one who drove her up and down the country without a word of complaint and carried her heavy suitcase when the bloody wheels fell off. Oh no. Who carried her case full of her huge fat clothes—even though she had a bad back.
Colette cried until two red tracks were scored into her cheeks, and she got hiccoughs. She began to feel ashamed. Every lurch of her diaphragm added to her indignity. She was afraid that Alison, after her deafness, might now choose to hear.
Downstairs, Al had her tarot pack fanned out before her. The cards were face down, and when Colette appeared in the doorway she was idly sliding them in a rightward direction, over the pristine surface of their new dining table.
“What are you doing? You’re cheating.”
“Mm? It’s not a game.”
“But you’re fixing it, you’re shoving them back into the pack! With your finger! You are!”
“It’s called Washing the Cards,” Al said. “Have you been crying?”
Colette sat down in front of her. “Do me a reading.”
“Oh, you have been crying. You have so.”
Colette said nothing.
“What can I do to help?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“So I should make general conversation?”
“If you like.”
“I can’t. You start.”
“Did you have any more thoughts about the garden?”
“Yes. I like it as it is.”
“What, just turf?”
“For the moment.”
“I thought we could have a pond.”
“No, the children. The neighbours’ children.”
“What about them?”
“Cut the pack.”
Colette did it.
“Children can drown in two inches of water.”
“Aren’t they ingenious?”
“Cut again. Left hand.”
“I could get some quotes for landscaping.”
“Don’t you like grass?”
“It needs cutting.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“Not with my back.”
“Your back? You never mentioned it.”
“You never gave me the chance.”
“Cut again. Left hand, Colette, left hand. Well, I can’t do it. I’ve got a bad back too.”
“Really? Where did that originate?”
“When I was a child.” I was dragged, Alison thought, over the rough ground.
“I’d have thought it would have been better.”
“Why?”
“I thought time was a great healer.”
“Not of backs.”
Colette’s hand hovered.
“Choose one,” Al said. “One hand of seven. Seven cards. Hand t
hem to me.” She laid down the cards. “And your back, Colette?”
“What?”
“The problem. Where it began?”
“Brussels.”
“Really?”
“I was carrying fold-up tables.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Why?”
“You’ve spoiled my mental picture. I thought that perhaps Gavin had put you in some unorthodox sexual position.”
“How could you have a picture? You don’t know Gavin.”
“I wasn’t picturing his face.” Alison began to turn the cards. The lucky opals were flashing their green glints. Alison said, “The Chariot, reversed.”
“So what do you want me to do? About the garden?”
“Nine of swords. Oh dear.”
“We could take it in turns to mow it.”
“I’ve never worked a mower.”
“Anyway, with your weight. You might have a stroke.”
“Wheel of Fortune, reversed.”
“When you first met me, in Windsor, you said I was going to meet a man. Through work, you said.”
“I don’t think I committed to a time scheme, did I?”
“But how can I meet a man through work? I don’t have any work except yours. I’m not going out with Raven, or one of those freaks.”
Al fluttered her hand over the cards. “This is heavy on the major Arcana, as you see. The Chariot, reversed. I’m not sure I like to think of wheels turning backward … . Did you send Gavin a change-of-address card?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“As a precaution.”
“Sorry?”
“Something might come for me. For forwarding. A letter. A package.”
“A package? What would be in it?”
Al heard tapping, tapping, at the sliding glass doors of the patio. Fear jolted through her; she thought, Bob Fox. But it was only Morris, trapped in the garden; beyond the glass, she could see his mouth moving.
She lowered her eyes, turned a card. “The Hermit reversed.”