News Where You Are

15

Andrea, Frank and Mo had driven out to the canal for a walk one afternoon the previous summer. They followed the canal out through the suburbs where Mo enjoyed giving a running commentary on every back garden they passed. She loved the ones with stone ornaments in the shapes of hedgehogs and badgers and waistcoat-wearing frogs carrying wheelbarrows. She also loved the gardens that had small wooden jetties at the end and row boats tied up. The idea of just getting up in the morning and going out in a dinghy seemed entirely magical to her. She disapproved fiercely, however, of those gardens with trampolines, believing their proximity to the canal was a terrible accident waiting to happen.

Frank had said: ‘What? Boing, boing, splosh?’ and Mo had nodded solemnly.

At some point the houses petered out and the canal continued its course through countryside, alongside empty fields and tangled hedgerows. They had walked for some miles through the filtered green light of overhanging leaves when the landscape on the opposite towpath abruptly changed. Modern apartment buildings in the style of old warehouses and wharves rose up from the towpath. An opening in the block revealed a colonnaded plaza built around a grand stepped waterfall, which led down to the canal. Enormity appeared to be the key design feature.

The three of them stood and stared for some time before crossing the bridge to explore. Mo ran up and down the steps at the side of the waterfall while Frank and Andrea looked around the shopfronts of the plaza. All were empty except for the office and estate agents of the development company itself, and a shop selling leather furniture. They laughed at a lime-green sofa that cost £6,000. They wandered on through the estate, which stretched far back from the canal. Signposts told them they were in a village and directed them to the centre. They passed through an empty zone called Waterside, through another called Gardenside and reached the apparent centre, which branded itself as Marketside. Here they found more empty shopfronts, two designer clothes shops, a Sainsbury’s Local and a bar yet to be opened. They saw no one apart from the shop workers that stared as they passed. Andrea said it was as if a neutron bomb had fallen. Mo liked it. She liked the neatness of the houses and shops and she liked the clock tower in the middle. She said she felt like a Playmobil figure and started speaking in a strange, presumably Playmobil, accent. Frank walked into a shop like someone fallen from the sky to ask where they were. The answer was Byron’s Common.

Now Frank was back again. The bar was open for business, serving food all day, and he sat waiting to meet Phil’s widow Michelle. Byron’s Common was a little busier now, though still had the feel of a stage set. Most of the shop units were still empty, but Frank could see a chemist and a Chinese takeaway had opened on the parade. There was a slow trickle of people passing by and a few other tables were occupied in the bar. For no reason that Frank could discern, the upholstery in the bar was covered with what appeared to be cow hide, and bleached cattle skulls hung on the bare brick walls. Their hollow sockets gazed out at the Sainsbury’s Local across the street. Frank wondered if it was a reference to the Old West, with Byron’s Common cast as a frontier town. Had he missed out on the gold rush? He couldn’t help but notice that the women in the bar all looked similar. Blonde hair, deep tans, jumbo handbags, tight dark jeans and heels. A few of them recognized him. They caught his eye, looked away then looked back. He pretended to read the menu.

It was twenty minutes past their arranged meeting time when he saw Michelle pull up in her convertible Audi and park illegally on the pavement outside. She created an enormous disturbance in the atmosphere as she entered the bar jangling with keys and earrings and beads. She bustled up to the table. ‘I’m sorry, Frank love, bloody workmen. Take my advice: you want a new kitchen? Fit it your bloody self. Couldn’t do a worse job! Oh God, I need a drink.’

Frank smiled and stood up to kiss her. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve been enjoying the ambience.’

‘Oh, I bet.’ Michelle sat with her back to the other tables and ordered a spritzer. She asked lots of questions about Frank and Andrea and Mo before Frank was able to speak.

‘What about you? How have you been?’

‘Fine, yeah fine.’

Frank frowned at her.

‘You don’t have to say that.’

Michelle smiled. ‘Okay.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Well, since the funeral, in chronological order, I’ve been bad, really bad, terrible, better and now okay, I think, or close to it.’

‘We tried calling, but it was always the answerphone. You should have called us when you were having a rough time.’

‘No offence, Frank, but what could you do? What could anyone do? I had to get through it. I went away. After the circus of the funeral I had to get out of the country. The scale of the reaction just freaked me out. I know it wasn’t that extreme — Phil wasn’t Princess Di — but even at his level of fame it felt so inappropriate, so invasive.’

‘Were people bothering you?’

‘I’m probably overreacting, but I never really got it. I never got who those people were who used to write to Phil when he was alive — his agent got letters every week from fans. Who writes to TV celebrities? Maybe if you’re a kid and you have a crush — but to Phil? I can’t see him being a teen pin-up. So it was just more of that, much more. Death seems to bring them all out of the woodwork. I had letters from people saying they’d cried more than when their own fathers had died. Can you believe that? Maybe I should have been touched, but I just thought they were tapped.’

Frank thought of the kinds of letters and emails he received each day, the endless ways in which people construed and interpreted you once your face was on television. The baffling array of purposes they thought you served. He had letters asking him for directions and for recommendations of dry cleaners, letters telling him about Jesus, letters telling him he was a wanker, letters telling him he brightened up their mother’s day, letters asking for photographs and letters containing photos of their own. He knew the number he received each week would be nothing to the volume that Phil had got. Phil hadn’t looked and certainly hadn’t acted like a man in his early sixties when he made his transition to national TV. In just fifteen years he’d become an institution. The nation’s favourite older man, twinkly yet suave.

Michelle shrugged. ‘I suppose people can’t deal with the shock of death. Even at seventy-eight. It’s something that we never really absorb. He was on telly every Saturday night; he couldn’t just suddenly die.’ She fell quiet for a moment. ‘I felt the same way.’ Tears started to leak.

Frank gave her a tissue.

‘I still can’t believe it. It’s so stupid. Of course I knew the age difference when I met Phil. Nearly forty years — you can’t overlook that — but I always just thought of that in terms of him being elderly before me. I never thought of him dead. I thought I’d have to look after him in his old age and that was fine. I know it’s corny, but I believed in the wedding vows. It never occurred to me that he’d go so suddenly, before I even had a chance to take care of him properly, when he needed it.’

Frank shook his head. ‘You were together twenty years. You took care of him.’

Michelle smiled, but she looked unconvinced. ‘So, anyway, I went abroad — Spain, Portugal, Italy. I don’t know what the hell I was doing. Running away, I suppose. Lying on beaches, eating too much, drinking too much, feeling lonely and a mess. I came home, spent time with friends, got my head straight, sold the house and then this whole TV thing came along.’

The TV thing was a new career for Michelle as the host of a makeover programme called Tough Love. During her marriage to Phil she had become a regular guest on chat shows and celebrity quiz shows. She was pretty, laughed in the right places and was married to a famous man; no other reason was needed. Since Phil’s death, though, her career had taken off with Tough Love. Andrea loathed it; Mo loved it.

‘Now I get the bloody letters. Only mine are more extreme. I’m their inspiration or they want to kill me. Women are so vicious. Anyway, I’ve got a place here that’s handy for the studio, a place down in London and a villa in Almeria. I’m busy working and sorting the houses and busy is good.’

Frank smiled. ‘How do you like life in Byron’s Common?’

‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Toytown. My sister visited and said she thought a big white ball would chase us if we tried to leave. I like it, though. It’s wipe-clean.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Mo liked it for the same reasons.’

‘You know, on the programme, it’s all before and after. And the before is always rubbish and ugly and sad. I like it here because there’s no before, only after.’

Frank thought that with him it was always before. It was after he had a problem with. He remembered Michael Church. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you something. Will you look at a photo for me and tell me if you recognize a face?’ He pulled the photo out and placed it on the table in front of Michelle.

She looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled. ‘Oh my God, it’s Phil. Wasn’t he handsome when he was young? I mean he was handsome when he was old, but just look at him. Those eyes. I’ve never seen one of him this young before. His old photos got lost along the way somewhere. What a charmer. Who’s the other boy?’

‘That’s what I was hoping you might tell me. His name is Michael Church. Do you recognize him at all? Can you remember Phil ever mentioning him?’

Michelle peered at the photo for some time. ‘No, sorry. I don’t recognize him.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Maybe the name … I don’t know. “Michael” is ringing a vague bell, but I can’t think from where. It’s not an uncommon name, though, so it’s probably the wrong one.’

Frank shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I was just trying to figure out who he was. It’s not important.’

Michelle looked at her watch and swore. ‘Shit, I’ve got to go. My whole day is half an hour out of whack. There was something else I wanted to talk to you about, but it will have to wait. I’ll call you, okay?’

He stood up to kiss her goodbye. As she left, all the women in the bar turned and watched her go, their faces as unreadable as the skulls on the walls.