The Last Minute

  The gas foreman has landed awkwardly on a pipe in the trench. He rubs his ankle, hoping that it’s just a twist, but the electric charge of pain that shoots up his leg tells him that it’s probably more serious.

  Lucy, just about to stride off in the direction of her mother-in-law’s house, notices that Chloe’s other glove is missing, too.

  TOCK

  54 seconds to go . . .

  THE SCHOOL COACH lets out another acrid hiss, and inches forward before pulling up again, to an ironic cheer from the boys in the back seat.

  Two large women step over Matey’s feet to get to the newsagent’s. The white van is in their way, and the pavement around it is crowded, with Lucy and her buggy, Bernie and his dog, the florist with her wreath, and Anthony Dougall, who has reached the white van, ready to let rip at the driver and force him to move. But the cab is empty. Anthony kicks a tyre in frustration, hurting his toe. He’s got to get moving. The van blocking his path is not the first delay. After spending the night in Sharon’s flat, he’d banked on an early getaway, before there were too many people about. He’d thought that choosing his birthday to tell Sharon that they’d have to cool things for a while would catch her at her most understanding, but there had been tears, and shouting, and he’d stayed in the hope of quietening her before the neighbours heard too much. Now he’ll have to step on it to get out to the airport in time to buy some foreign newspapers and a present for his wife that will be at once convincingly ‘foreign’ (an oversized box of those chocolates they call Mozart’s balls or a blingy bracelet) and yet typically ‘him’ (something obviously picked up in a hurry while in transit between a host of commitments more important to him than she is). He’d had everything worked out, right down to leaving the airport car park receipt (casually torn so the time won’t show) lying in the foot well of the car, to bolster the deceit. And it can still work. He can still sweep into his driveway from the right direction. It’s just that he left Sharon weeping in her kitchen, and he fears that if he doesn’t get away soon, she might run out to catch him, and make a scene.

  Matey is still talking. ‘You’ll like this, in . . .’

  With Ritzi still pulling on the lead, Bernie is struggling to tie a knot in the top of his bag of poo, wondering whether to risk being seen dropping it into the gas men’s trench, or to hang onto it until he reaches the special waste bin in the park at the bottom of the hill. Is it worth trying to retrieve the letter? It’s got a cheque inside (the late payment of an overdue bill, carefully timed to arrive at the last possible moment before legal action might be set in train). He has to catch today’s post with it, and he doesn’t fancy going through all the rigmarole of cancelling the cheque and writing out a new one. So he stays where he is, trying to work out how to get the envelope back without straining his aching knees or losing hold of Ritzi, the boisterous puppy.

  Lucy can’t turn her pushchair round because the roadworks have narrowed the pavement. She starts lugging it backwards towards the paper shop so she can look for the missing mitten. ‘Silly old Chloe,’ she says to her daughter, covering up her annoyance with a sing-song voice.

  Mrs Wilkins is wearing the wrong glasses to be able to read the leaflet the charity worker is holding out to her, but he is the only person who has spoken to her today, so she stops and leans on her stick, pretending to listen, though she’s left her expensive hearing aid at home, for fear of losing it in the street. Nick feels a flicker of embarrassment (almost, but not quite, a pang of shame). The chances are that the old lady can barely afford to look after herself, let alone give to others; and on another week, carrying a different clipboard, he might well find himself raising money for a charity from which she could benefit. But today it’s his job to persuade her to donate, so he’ll give it a try.

  Over in the coffee shop, where the conversation in the queue is about education and catchment areas, Sam wishes he had the nerve to chip in with his own experiences of the school the women are discussing. He doubts whether they are picturing their beloved children wiping tables after thirteen years of lessons and homework. One little boy, unstrapped from his buggy, has escaped from his mother. He’s a chubby chap, with black curly hair and a smear of chocolate around his mouth. He’s wearing round, wire-rimmed spectacles, with one lens obscured to force his other ‘lazy’ eye to get to work. Sam knows the child’s name is Max because his mother keeps breaking off from her chat to call out to him, without really taking any notice of where he is or what he’s doing.

  ‘Ma-ax!’

  She’s at a table Sam is not looking forward to clearing. Her little group of friends come in regularly with toddlers who are too young for school. Today they’ve brought glitter, scissors and cardboard, to make Christmas decorations. He’s wondering whether he should ask them to leave – but he hasn’t the heart. The kids seem, if anything, quieter than usual, and it is nearly Christmas. The three little girls – two of them identical, and rather beautiful twins – are bent intently over their tasks, chattering away about what Santa is going to bring them. Sam just hopes that he’ll be able to get the glue off the tabletop when they eventually leave.

  Max ignores his mother’s call. He’s pressing himself against the shop window – transfixed by a digger as it scoops out earth from the trench. Sam gets ready with his cleaning spray and his cloth. Such small hands, and yet so many smears on the glass.

  Behind Max, the mourners’ conversation has turned from the virtues of the deceased to reflections on the suddenness of his death. ‘It makes you think . . .’ says the man with the loudest voice.

  In the plane, Dorothy Long – the passenger in seat 42C, two seats away from the man with the music player – rolls her eyes sympathetically at the flight attendant (who is miming the action of removing earphones, to no effect). Dorothy remembers how the young man in 42A plugged himself in early on in the flight, when she’d leaned across the empty seat between them to show off photos of the newborn grandson she’s on her way to visit. She feels slightly guilty. She knows she talks too much, and fears her neighbour has frozen himself off to avoid hearing more about her life.

  ‘ . . . two and . . .’ shouts Maggie, the dance instructor, getting into the rhythm of the day, and wiggling her bottom as she fiddles with the buttons on her tape player. Charmaine and Chenelle sing on, laughing. Mrs Palmer looks towards the shoe shop, and tries to catch Mrs Gibbon’s eye (to invite her to share her disapproval of the shameless women behind the glass) but notices that she’s got Lenny with her. Surely he should be at school? Why isn’t he on the theatre trip? The expression on Mrs Palmer’s face turns from indirect criticism to direct scorn. But it has no effect. Mrs Gibbon hasn’t registered that she’s there, and continues examining the discounted shoes.

  In the funeral parlour yard behind the shops, the carriage driver (dressed, like Frank, in grand old-fashioned mourning clothes, but finishing a last cigarette before he faces the public) is holding Dime and Dollar by their bridles, ready to lead them up the alley. The horses toss their thick black manes and snort. Frank has insisted on dropping one tradition. The horses’ heads are not forced back and up by painful straps, as they would have been in Victorian times. Frank is prepared to forgo a little authenticity for the sake of kindness.

  TICK

  53 seconds to go . . .

  MAGGIE, THE DANCE instructor, oblivious to the fact that she is being watched by Kayleigh’s mother and the girls on the coach, jiggles on: ‘ . . . three and . . .’

  Down the hill, Lorraine Lee isn’t counting. She’s chanting in her head, in time to the beat of her feet against the hard paving stones. Scan-ner, says her inner voice. It’s a trick she picked up from a running magazine. When you hit the wall – when the muscles in your legs are screaming that they’ve had enough – you can blot out their cries with an affirmation of your own. Don’t let yourself think of anything but the reason why you are training. For Lorraine, it’s to raise money for the cancer unit that saved, and changed, her life last year. When the doc
tor broke the news of her diagnosis, Lorraine had heard it as a death sentence. She’d never have imagined that the treatment, horrible though it was, would work, and leave her with a keener sense of future possibilities than she had ever felt before. Every day is precious now. For the first time ever, she has real plans – not just for the marathon, but for reunions, holidays, for making something really meaningful of her life, and for doing something for people less fortunate than herself. Scan-ner. It’s working. Never mind the pain, she’s lucky to be alive.

  Her phone has stopped vibrating, too.

  ‘Life is short,’ says the loud mourner in the café, a burly man for whom this funeral is a reminder of his own mortality. The lesson he takes from it is rather different from Lorraine’s. No point in going mad for fitness when death might be just round the corner anyway. Chasing the last few cake crumbs around his dentures with the tip of his tongue, he reaches into his pocket for the hip flask he put there to protect himself against the cold of the churchyard.

  ‘Ma-ax!’

  Sam wonders whether he should pull Max’s messy hands off the window, but he doesn’t want to frighten the child, risk the wrath of the mother, or be thought of as some kind of pervert. Through the glass, he can see the crowd gathering around the white van on the other side of the road.

  There Matey is, still trying to capture Bernie’s full attention: ‘ . . . your line of work,’ he says, hoping that even if his joke doesn’t earn him a few coins, it might lead to a free drink later.

  But Bernie’s distracted by the sight of a policeman, breathless after climbing the hill, and now covering the last few metres towards them. He’s pulling the radio on his lapel close to his mouth and ear to overcome the noise of the snarled traffic and the roadworks. This is PC Nigel Lewis, fresh from training school, and finding it hard to believe that anyone will ever take him seriously as an enforcer of the law. He’s been dispatched from the police station to get the traffic moving again. He’s got no idea how he’s going to do it. It seems like no time since he would have been one of the boys on the school trip, pulling faces through the back window of the coach.

  From beside the white van, Anthony Dougall, the frustrated Audi driver, calls out, ‘Here! Officer!’ beckoning the young constable to sort out the mysteriously empty van. Anthony is torn between doing a ‘Do you know who I am?’ and keeping a low profile. He doesn’t want word getting back to Gillie that he’s been seen in Heathwick when he’s supposed to be somewhere else.

  As Anthony shouts to the policeman, the school coach makes another infinitesimal, but ear-splitting, lurch. But it still hasn’t passed the dance studio. The car behind moves forward and stops suddenly, too, closing the gap through which Janine, the florist, was hoping to cross the street. She can see the plumed horses at the far end of the alley opposite, and desperately wants to get the wreath to the funeral director and into position on top of the coffin before the hearse turns into the main road. She steps back, waiting for a chance to try again, feeling it would be disrespectful to try to catch the undertaker’s eye by waving.

  Someone else is waving. This is Deanna Fletcher. She’s on the other side of the road, outside the launderette. She’s rushing to meet her boyfriend, Paul Broadbrook, and she’s just seen him, coming in the other direction, weaving his way through the stationary traffic right up the other end of the High Street, by the church. He hasn’t spotted her yet, but she would recognize that jaunty walk anywhere. His hands are in his pockets as usual, and his long multi-coloured scarf is trailing behind him as he dodges between the cars. Paul and Deanna have been apart for six weeks. He’s been on a course in Scotland, and she wasn’t expecting him home till tomorrow. How like him to surprise her by getting an early plane down! He phoned her half an hour ago to tell her to drop everything and meet him in the coffee shop in Heathwick. And she’d done it. She’d muttered an excuse to her boss at the call centre outside town, and before he had time to react, she’d jumped into her car and driven away. When she hit the traffic jam, she pulled into a side street and set off on foot, her heart pounding like a teenager’s at the thought of seeing Paul again.

  Deanna knows why he’s chosen the café as their meeting place. It was where they first saw each other – when it was still the library, where she’d had a job she loved and he had come in to ask for a book she adored. Having Paul in her life was all that had got her through the shock of unemployment and then the dreariness of her new work. She’d never been impulsive. Running out of the office like that was totally out of character. But hearing Paul’s voice in her headset out of the blue, she couldn’t resist the drama of rushing to meet him, no matter what the consequences might be. And now he’s just metres away. In a few seconds they’ll be together again.

  TOCK

  52 seconds to go . . .

  ‘ . . . FOUR. AND . . .’

  ‘Have you heard . . .’ says Matey, apparently unconcerned by the lack of interest all around him.

  Maybe Sam should speak to Max’s mother, ask her to stop her son dirtying the window. But he can remember the joy of watching machinery when he was small. And anyway, the woman is busy cutting out cardboard snowflakes to keep the little girls entertained. One of them, kneeling on her chair to reach the blunt plastic scissors, has started singing: ‘Trinkle, trinkle . . .’ This is Polly. Those in the know can distinguish her from her twin sister Nell because she always has a red ribbon in her curly blonde hair, while Nell’s is always blue.

  By the window, behind Max, the loud mourner pours a glug of brandy into the dregs of his coffee. One of his companions looks at his watch. Another stands and turns in the direction of the loo at the back of the café.

  Over the road, beyond the junction where Nick, the charity boy, has collared the old lady, the Reverend Jonathan Davis is standing in the churchyard, his cassock billowing in the wind, as he waves his arms in a half-hearted semaphore and shouts, with polite restraint, ‘I say!’

  He’s trying to attract Matthew Larkin’s attention without taking him by surprise and risking a fall from the ladder. He doesn’t want to sound ungrateful to the old man, who is, he knows, only trying to help; but he wishes Matthew would get a move on. The bell has started tolling for the funeral. The coffin is due to arrive soon. Some of the early mourners have already looked askance at such a mundane activity as sign painting taking place on their special, solemn day.

  But Matthew seems (and indeed may actually be) deaf to the vicar’s reedy pleas. He dips his brush into the paint again, thinking about his daughter – how much he’s looking forward to greeting her at the airport, and how long it’s been since he’s felt the squeeze of her hand, the warmth of her lips on his cheek.

  Janine, the florist, takes out her mobile phone to check the time, though she knows full well that she’s more than twenty minutes late with the wreath.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ says the flight attendant, still getting no response. She’s wondering whether to report the man to the captain, but that would lead to a trail of paperwork, and this is her last shift for a week. Once they’ve landed, she’ll want to get away as fast as she can. She’s tired. Her feet, which always swell up during long-haul flights, are aching in her high-heeled shoes. Her skin has dried out after weeks of relentless exposure to the dead atmosphere of cabins, airports and plastic hotels. Her lips are cracking at the edges of her weary smile. She’s longing to get into jeans, trainers and a sweat shirt and to slob around at her parents’ house for a few days. Why won’t this guy just do as he’s told?

  TICK

  51 seconds to go . . .

  ‘ . . . FIVE, AND . . .’

  ‘Likkle shtar . . .’

  At the newsagent’s, the man with the backpack, who has just asked for a nine-volt battery, has stepped away from the counter to hold the door open for the two fat ladies. The racket of the roadworks comes with them, laced with Matey’s throaty roar.

  ‘ . . . the one about . . .’ The beggar has raised his voice, hoping Anthony Dougall will join h
is audience, but he’s still trying to grab the policeman’s attention.

  Anthony’s mind is darting over alternative plans for getting on the move. There’s a bus at the bottom of the hill, by the park. He knows its route ends at the airport, and it’s moving so slowly that he could probably beat it to the stop halfway down the hill and have time to get on board. But his car would be left blocking the way out of the car park, and he’d only get into more trouble for that – and not just with the policeman. Gillie would be bound to hear about it.

  Lenny Gibbon’s mother has spotted a likely pair of shoes in a wire bin outside the shop and, as Miss Hunter expects, Lenny is dragged inside, mouthing an expletive Mrs Gibbon either misses or ignores.

  In his grubby flat above the shoe shop, fifty-one-year-old Noel Gilliard, author of one well-reviewed (but largely unread) novel and several that have failed to make it into print, absent-mindedly clicks the Internet icon on his computer. Although no publisher seems interested in his work these days, he’s determined to produce another book. Two days ago, he decided to implement his New Year resolution a little early (or perhaps very late indeed, since he had the same intention back in January). It’s a radical change of habits, which should increase his productivity. He’s promised himself that he’ll get straight down to his writing first thing every morning, and will never succumb to online distractions before lunch time. Simple. Shouldn’t take much willpower. And yet he’s only just had breakfast, he hasn’t even read through the two paragraphs he squeezed out yesterday, and he can’t stop himself.

  He starts typing in his Internet password: Tolstoy. He’ll just have a little look round some of his favourite sites before getting down to some serious work.