Tuesday's Gone

Nineteen

The last thing Frieda wanted that evening, after the funeral and her unsettling visit to Joanna, was to go out. She needed time alone, in the cocoon of her house, where she could draw down the blinds, light a fire and shut out the world. Yet after her chemistry lesson with a bad-tempered Chloë, she stayed on. She had been invited – or, rather, ordered – to come for dinner. And not just any dinner: this was a dinner to introduce her to Olivia’s new boyfriend, Kieran. Chloë described him as her mum’s eBay find. A few days before, Olivia had asked Frieda to bring someone else along too, so Frieda had asked Sasha if she was free.

‘Not a woman! God, Frieda, what planet are you living on? I meant, bring another man along or it might seem odd.’

‘Odd in what way?’

‘I don’t know. Too intense – kind of meet the family.’

‘The ex-sister-in-law.’

‘Whatever. You know what I mean. But if you bring someone, it’ll seem more casual. Two couples.’

‘I’m not a couple.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘And isn’t Chloë going to be there?’

‘Oh, God – probably. She’ll sit there glaring at him all evening. You know the way she can glare. I’ve never seen such a brow. It’s a Klein brow – she gets it from her father. I hope she goes out.’

In the end, Frieda had reluctantly invited Reuben to accompany her. He asked if he could bring Paz as well, because she had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed cheering up. And then they had to ask Josef too, didn’t they? Josef couldn’t be left alone at the moment, not in his present state. Reuben was worried about him: he sang sad songs in the shower and had grown a straggly moustache but still wouldn’t talk about what had happened. And with three new guests, Olivia announced it didn’t make sense to disinvite Sasha after all: she just had to be kept away from Kieran. So the simple supper turned into an elaborate meal of overcooked salmon fillets rolled in pastry and a pudding made from meringues that stuck to the teeth. Reuben arrived in his favourite waistcoat that glistened like a jewelled breastplate. He drank water all evening (except when he was taking sips from other people’s glasses) and glowed with his new virtue. Josef came with him, wearing a strange jacket that looked as if it had been made from a potato sack. He carried a large bunch of wilting flowers that Frieda was willing to bet he had lifted from the house whose boiler he was mending. Sasha arrived straight from work, dressed severely, no makeup on her beautiful face, and was placed at the far end of the room, safely in the shadows. Olivia had put on a red gown and dangling gold earrings. Her eyes were kohl-lined and her lips scarlet. She walked like a crane in her high-heeled shoes and laughed in the wrong places. And then Chloë decided she wouldn’t go out after all, but her Goth friend Sammy would be joining them and no one was to stare at the way she had shaved one side of her head.

Chloë had told Frieda that Olivia’s new friend Kieran was a creep. She rolled her eyes whenever she talked about him. But Kieran turned out to be a shy, crumpled man, who stooped to hide his height, blushed easily and seemed baffled but delighted by the lavish attentions of Olivia. She popped olives into his mouth with her long, painted fingernails, ruffled his hair and called him ‘honey’, while he gazed at her with a heartfelt gratitude that everyone found touching, except Chloë, who found it gross. Frieda saw that Kieran was terrified of Chloë and she felt a lurch of pity for him. Her niece was a formidable enemy: she had no sense of restraint and she wouldn’t mind making a scene in public.

‘What do you do, Kieran?’ she asked him, and Chloë gave a snort of derision.

‘Guess,’ she said. ‘Just try and guess.’

‘I’d prefer to be told.’

‘Twenty questions.’

‘I work for a firm of funeral directors.’

‘See?’

‘That’s a good job,’ said Frieda. ‘An important one.’

Kieran smiled warily at her to check she wasn’t being ironic. ‘I work in the office,’ he added. ‘Doing the accounts.’

‘He doesn’t carry a coffin,’ said Olivia, ‘and pretend to be sad.’

The evening lurched by. Olivia got tipsy, took off her shoes and let down her hair, leaning her flushed face on Kieran’s bony shoulder. Reuben, absent-mindedly taking hold of Sasha’s wine glass, told Chloë and Sasha a long story involving snow geese. It sounded like a parable but without a final moral: the snow geese simply disappeared at the end of the winter. Josef taught Sammy and Paz a drinking song about wood alcohol and dubious country pleasures. Frieda stacked plates, filled glasses and passed cups of coffee round the table. She heard about Kieran’s two sons, now grown-up, one in the army and the other living in Australia, and about Sammy’s elder brother, who had joined a gang and had a knife that he hid in his shoe. She thought about Kathy Ripon, once more buried but this time with love, and about Joanna telling her story to the world, with all the uncomfortable bits rendered anodyne and harmless. She looked at Olivia’s smeared and happy face and thought that there were many worse ways to find men than on the Internet.

That evening, Karlsson bought a packet of ten Silk Cut and a small box of matches on his way home. He used to smoke Marlboro, twenty a day and more on bad days, but when his wife had got pregnant he had given up and never smoked since. Even when she’d left him and taken the kids to Brighton, he’d resisted. He didn’t want Mikey and Bella coming to a flat that smelt of tobacco.

Now he went straight out into his small garden at the back of his ground-floor flat, put a cigarette into his mouth, lit a match and cupped his hand around it. The first drag made him feel dizzy and slightly sick. The tip glowed in the darkness, brightening, then fading. In the garden next door, a woman was calling her cat and banging a fork against the side of its bowl. ‘Here, Skit, Skit, Skit. Here, Skit, Skit, Skit.’ On and on. She didn’t see him over the fence, hunched inside his coat. It wasn’t snowing as it had been in Gloucester, but there was a stillness to the air, as if it might at any moment.

He smoked two cigarettes in a row, then went inside. He brushed his teeth as if she might be able to smell him over the phone and use his weakness against him, then made the call.

‘It’s me, Mal.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said.’

‘About Madrid?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Of course I can’t stop Mikey and Bella going, you all going, if that’s what you want and feel is best for them.’

‘Oh, Mal, if you only knew how –’

‘But I want to see more of them before you go. Mid-April, you say?’

‘Yes. And of course you can see as much of them as you want.’

‘And I want to see them regularly when they’re away. We’ll have to work something out. Have a system, a structure.’

Even as he spoke, he felt the hopelessness of it. They would get swept up into their new life and he would be just a memory, a figure from the past, receding from them. Loneliness washed over him, a wave that almost took his breath away.

‘I appreciate this.’

‘OK.’

‘I know this isn’t easy for you.’

‘No.’

‘But you won’t regret it.’

After he had put the phone back into its holster, he went and poured himself a stiff whisky. It was a drink he associated with Frieda. He pictured her watching eyes and the way she held her chin high, as if she was waiting for battle. He pressed the tumbler against his forehead. If he’d been a weeping man, he would have wept.

Soon he would come. He had said he would come and she had to believe him. Unless something had happened. But, no, he would come. She would hear him rap out their code on the hatch and she would lift it up and see him silently swing his way down into the boat. He would hold her by the shoulders and look into her eyes and she wouldn’t even have to tell him – he would know she had done well, that she had kept faith, that she had never wavered. He called her his soldier, his loyal one. She wouldn’t let him down.

She was running out of basic things. Not water, which was the most important, because there was a tap down the path near the rowing club and she could go there at night with her two plastic containers. She had a bucket that she filled from the river, as well, when she wanted to scrub the decks or flush the toilet. But her food supplies were almost gone, and candles, toilet rolls, soap. She had no deodorant left, and she didn’t like that, and her razor was blunt now. She should make a list to give him when he came. Nothing expensive: matches, washing-up liquid, more milk powder, toothpaste, and plasters because there were cuts that kept opening up on her legs. And perhaps some cordial.

Elderflower cordial. She got so thirsty; her mouth was dry and it had a nasty taste in it that she couldn’t get rid of. Water on its own doesn’t really quench your thirst. She allowed herself to think about freshly squeezed orange juice, in a tall tumbler; sitting on a lawn with bare feet and the sun on the back of her neck.

Because the gas was nearly gone, she decided to cook all the remaining potatoes. She could eat them cold over the next few days. There were tins of tuna and sardines she could add to them, and she had stock cubes as well. Sometimes she just poured boiling water over a cube for a meal. She put the potatoes in the sink, which had a crack running down one side so didn’t hold water, and found the knife. The potatoes were large, knobbly and grimy; some of them were beginning to sprout. When she was younger, she used to dislike potatoes but he had shown her you couldn’t be fussy. It was like being in a war, in the trenches or hiding behind enemy lines. You had to remember why you were there, your purpose and your solemn mission. He had held her very tightly when he’d said that and his eyes had shone.

She peeled the potatoes with slow precision and cut them into small chunks so that they would boil more quickly and use less gas. She put them in the pan and added salt. She must put salt on the list. There was so little left. Everything was running out. She thought of sand trickling through an hourglass, the way it seemed to speed up at the end. That was how it felt now. There were lights behind her eyes and her heart was beating like a drum; sometimes she couldn’t tell if it was inside her or out, like distant thunder gathering and coming nearer. Time running out.