Nomance (2 page)

The money had enabled
him to buy a guitar, and his buying a guitar had led to his joining
the band. And his being in the band had led to his getting booted
out of the band. But only after it had led to his meeting Elaine.
And his meeting Elaine, of course, had led to his getting turned
down by Elaine.

In this way his good
luck had contrived to do the precise opposite of what good luck was
supposed to do – twice over!

Now, that couldn’t be
mere coincidence, could it?

‘How come I get all the
shit and nobody else does?’ He asked himself, delving once more
into the mystery at the heart of all things. As mysteries go,
however, it was even tougher to swallow than the meat on Tony’s
sandwiches. For not only did other people not get the shit, what
they did get was the car
and
the girlfriend.

And in Tony’s case, the
biceps too.

Car, girlfriend and
biceps. They might be good for Tony, but they were like cactus
spines in Gwynne’s hide.

And living at Romance
he knew just how that felt.

He dumped his cereal
bowl into the sink.

‘Hey,’ Carla yelled
from behind him, reminding him with an unpleasant jolt of his
sister’s existence, ‘swill it out!’

‘I’m going to be late,’
Gwynne complained. He worked at the
EasyHomes DIY Superstore
in East Acton. He did the Sunday shift for the extra fifty pence
per hour.

Still, to keep the
semblance of peace, he swilled the dish out. This gave him time to
pose a pertinent question.

‘Why the fuck don’t we
get a dishwasher?’

‘I don’t know – let me
guess.’

‘They’re two hundred
quid or so at the warehouse.’ He put the bowl on the draining board
and turned to stare at her. ‘Only a hundred each from us, isn’t
it?’

‘Only a hundred?’ But
Carla seemed to like the idea of a dishwasher. ‘Can’t you get a
discount, from
EasyHomes
?’

‘That is with the
discount.’

‘What?’ Carla pulled
her face in disgust.

Gwynne shook his head.
‘You can’t even get hundred togther, can you? This fucking place.
Even I make more money than Romance, don’t I?’

‘You would if you were
a pop star instead of a fucking failure,’ Carla said, smiling for
the first time that day.

‘Don’t get too cocky.
I’m going to be in a new band soon.’

‘Yeah. Since when?’

‘We’ve been talking it
over, It’s with three guys I met at the warehouse.’

‘What, them
pensioners?’

‘No, these guys are
young.’

‘I thought they were
all pensioners who worked there,’ Carla said, making it sound like
he had let her down. ‘You said they all looked horrible and dried
up in the company uniform.’

‘Most of them do,
yeah,’ Gwynne assured her. ‘But these are young guys who started
there about a month ago. They’re on this Government scheme for
helping ex-offenders.’ He waved her down, as if she was about to
get anxious for his safety. ‘Don’t worry, they’re straight up. They
all want to kill the management, not me.’

Carla, who hadn’t been
worried, took a moment to digest this. ‘That’s something in their
favour,’ she allowed. ‘Like I keep telling you – places like
EasyHomes
are driving small traders like us out of the
market..’

‘Hm?’ Gwynne was
dwelling again on the wallet he’d found down the park. The whole
cycle of rumination was about to repeat itself.

‘I said, Romance can’t
hope to match their prices for pot-grown flowers. They’re killing
us.’

‘Who?’

‘
EasyHomes
!’

‘EasyHomes?’ He glanced
at his watch. ‘Shit, I’m going to be late.’

Two
:
Golden Aphrodite’s Nightmare

Gwynne loped out of the
back door, allowing it to slam behind him.

Carla bestowed a
rancourous glance on the dish he had left on the draining board
and, with a heavy sigh, turned her attention back to the account
books. Within microseconds she pinpointed another loss maker.

Her broad shoulders
sank a little lower. ‘Fucking lobelia,’ she muttered.

She hadn’t been able to
shift a single one and the whole lot had gone and wilted on her.
That bitch, Ms Stevens, had brought them every week without fail
for the past seven years and it made sense to assume her devoted
lobelia customer was merely ill when she didn’t turn up one week.
Discontinuing the line at that point would have been sheer madness.
However, the weeks passed and Ms Stevens still didn’t show. By the
end of the month, Carla had begun to wonder whether Ms Stevens
hadn’t in fact died of her illness. But if that were the case,
cancelling the order would still be premature. No doubt Ms Stevens
would want lots of lobelia at her funeral.

Three more weeks passed
before a postcard arrived, and this, in essence, announced that Ms
Stevens wasn’t dead at all. Instead she was basking in the Maldives
for a three-month winter warmer.

What a slap in the
face! Nothing rubs it in like somebody else’s holiday. And the one
thing Carla hated more than somebody else’s holiday was . . . one
of her own holidays.

Her last holiday (and
Carla had vowed it would be the last) was with Sharon. Sharon had
been her friend from school and, just as they both always knew,
Sharon was the one who broke free from the chains of her past. She
left Richmond-Upon-Thames and carved out a career at the Inland
Revenue Tax Office in Wolverhampton. To crown it all, she met the
love of her life – in the same office by a remarkable coincidence –
and married him. The lucky guy was Billy in VAT – a Civil Service
high flyer whose spectacular rise through the ranks hit the oak
ceiling when he died seven years later.

After a mourning period
of three months, and just in time for the med holiday season,
Sharon called Carla and told her she wanted to start living again.
She suggested they went away together.

How did two, lovely
sun-filled weeks in glorious Cyprus sound?

Against her instinct,
to be honest, Carla said they sounded pretty fantastic.

‘Great! In that case,
Carla, I’ll make the arrangements. Leave everything to me.’

Carla was surprised
when they got out there to find that Sharon had booked separate
rooms. But two days later she was thanking her lucky stars about
that. Sharon had met a Cypriot man and they were spending an awful
lot of time in her room together. Carla was only glad she could
maintain her privacy.

On the other hand,
Carla did begin to feel she was having a holiday on her own.

For this reason, Carla
couldn’t help resenting Yogi – as Sharon’s new man friend seemed to
be called. So when Sharon invited her out to a restaurant with
Yogi, Carla took the opportunity, during the meal, to fire off some
petty sarcasms at him. Sad to say, she found her ammunition was
wasted. Her petty sarcasms got lost in translation, even when she
underlined each riposte with a stab at her calamari like it was
still alive. She saw then that trying to understand English was a
dreadful strain for Yogi. And he looked dreadfully tired anyway.
Carla had to wonder why he didn’t just run his bar himself. Why
wear himself to the bone trying to get a foreign woman to marry him
and run it instead? She even began to feel a little sorry for him
by the time they said goodnight and he went arm-in-arm with Sharon
into her room.

By his grim expression,
you could see his work had yet to begin.

But when Carla went to
her own room and lay down to sleep, little did she realise that for
once she was not quite alone. In the early hours, the calamari she
had stabbed to underline her sarcastic remarks to Yogi woke her up
with its own sarcastic reply – the fun-filled med-holiday
tummy-bug.

Now, if she had learned
anything on her previous fun-filled med holidays, it was that
prompt treatment was essential. And so, she left her room and
padded down to the reception desk.

Here, an unblemished
young man, fashioned according to the dictates of Golden Apollo,
sat watching basketball on satellite television. He looked at her
from across the faux mahogany counter and smiled with the
unthinking affability of youth. The stare which Carla returned had
nothing affable about it. Med men – even the deluxe versions – had
become objects of keen resentment. She described her symptoms like
they were the boy’s fault. In return, he paid close attention to
every word, and then, knotting his brows, he performed what seemed
to be a long-division sum in his head.

He was translating.

All of a sudden, he sat
bolt upright in his chair.

‘Are you bad?’

But this was not so
much a question as an exclamation of blind panic. A stomach upset
is as economically damaging for the med hotelier as foot-and-mouth
disease is for the Brit farmer. The damage is caused not so much by
the human suffering itself – people die all the time – rather it
was the sound of suffering. The hoteliers didn’t need the wisdom of
Socrates to understand that if their guests heard someone wringing
their guts out in the next room then they wouldn’t be back next
year. And this Carla here, she was big and strong and would make
one hell of a racket before she died.

With that alacrity of
mind which distinguished the population of the area – three
thousand years ago, the lad figured out a way to get the woman off
his back and ring-fence the plague all at a single stroke.

He explained to Carla
now, in cursive English, that a Brit doctor was also a guest at the
hotel and he might be able to help.

Carla was not
impressed. She might be in keen physical pain and at the mercy of a
handsome cretin, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to sue
Cyprus for every last damned penny if she died out here.

Her voice was
rising.

The lad leapt to his
feet and made soothing sounds, or at least soothing in Demotic
Greek, and slipped from round the counter before disappearing down
a corridor.

Less than a minute
later he was back.

‘Doctor says great.
Just great! Follow me, please.’

Carla followed the boy
to another hotel room, where they found a man in his early
thirties, with a pleasant but inexpressive face, waiting for them
while slouched in a whicker chair. He wore a white tee shirt and
shorts, and held a glass of orange juice in one hand.

‘Good evening,’ he gave
them a smile and the boy smiled back before he waved and left.

‘Carla, isn’t it? I’m
Gerald. Take a seat.’ He motioned at the bed while he took a chair.
‘Now I expect George did not explain the situation in full, but the
Hotel nurse is not available this week, she’s off sick.’ The doctor
spoke in a smooth, supple voice that slithered through the air and
Carla’s brain, without leaving a trace behind. ‘However, I am a
doctor and although I’m on holiday I have a personal stock of
medicine for the usual ailments. If you tell me what the problem is
I’ll treat you, if I am able. Or at least I’ll try to make you more
comfortable.’

‘What?’ Carla asked, in
too much discomfort to concentrate.

Gerald took a measured
sip of orange juice. ‘Just tell me how it hurts.’

Carla did so and Gerald
listened with an eerie lack of expression. He continued to stare at
her for a moment after she had finished speaking. Then he roused
himself and went to the bathroom where he put a couple of tablets
in a tumbler and added some bottled water. He came back and handed
her the cloudy mixture.

‘Drink this, please.
And I’d like you to sit here awhile. You should remain upright for
at least fifteen minutes. A little chat will take your mind off
things. The upset may have been exacerbated by nervous
tension.’

Carla felt Gerald was
straying a bit far from her upset stomach by talking about her
nerves. But on second thoughts, if by nerves he meant the mental
distress caused to her by being abandoned on holiday, then that was
spot on, wasn’t it?

‘Thank you, I will
then.’

Gerald took another sip
of his juice and gave her a pleasant smile.

‘So, you’re a doctor?’
Carla asked. That she already knew the answer made asking the
question easier.

‘I’m a specialist. I
run a small private clinic.’

‘You’re on holiday?’
Another easy question.

‘Definitely. And truth
be told, I shouldn’t mind an extra fortnight off. I need it.’

‘Well, we could all say
that, couldn’t we?’

‘Oh, for sure. Except I
might lose some of my patients if I did.’

‘Me though,’ she
countered bitterly, ‘I couldn’t stay an extra fortnight without
going bankrupt. See, I run a florist shop and plants need constant
attention, or they die. Like your patients, I suppose . . . but
then, I bet you still get paid if your patients die, don’t you? Me,
I don’t get a penny. I’m on a knife’s edge. And do you know why I’m
on a knife’s edge?’

Gerald shook his
head.

‘Because the sodding
Inland Revenue taxes me up to the eyeballs, that’s why.’

He gave her a long,
thoughtful look. ‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘You should consider
the benefit of having a baby.’

The room went very
quiet. Even Carla’s intestines held their breath. Far off in the
night a med man honked his horn. ‘Eh?’

‘A baby,’ Gerald said
with an urbane smile. ‘Having a baby with me could solve all these
problems – ’

Carla’s head span.
Well, alright, she didn’t think much of his overture – gauche to
put it mildly – but on the other hand, he was a doctor, and that
made jigging with him a golden opportunity to get more even with
Sharon than she could have ever dared hope.

‘The woman in
question,’ Gerald was saying, Carla had missed a bit, ‘was paid ten
thousand pounds for bearing the couple’s child. You can believe me
when I say she didn’t pay a penny of tax on the amount. And what I
say is, why should she? To me, the services of a surrogate mother
can never be gauged merely in terms of a financial transaction.
That ten thousand pounds was less a payment, more a gift, given in
gratitude for something which will bring pleasure and happiness for
years and years to come. Like a tree or a hardy shrub from your
shop might.’