Nomance (3 page)

Several seconds later
Carla said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Gerald jumped to his
feet, opened the built-in wardrobe, in which his jacket hung, and
pulled something from the breast pocket. He handed it to her.

Carla had been half
expecting medicine of some sort, but it was his business card.

‘If I understood you
correctly,’ Gerald went on, ‘your shop is on a knife edge and in
need of a cash injection.’ He sat down again. ‘You see, I’m always
on the lookout for a good birth surrogate and I’d like to invite
you for a preliminary examination. If you are interested, all you
have to do is give me a call. And remember what I told you.’

She searched his face
closely. ‘What was that?’

‘You get ten thousand
pounds, on average. And remember, there’s no tax.’ Gerald smiled.
‘On top of which, there is all the wonder and mystery of conceiving
a child. As a doctor I can assure you it’s an emotional and
educational experience rolled into one.’

Carla shook her head.
‘Am I dreaming?’

Gerald seemed to like
this idea. ‘Well, you are on Cyprus, the birthplace of Golden
Aphrodite.’

‘Who?’

‘The Goddess of
Love.’

Poetic allusion was
just the thing to give Carla the willies. ‘I think I’ll get back to
my room now.’

‘Feeling better?’

‘Better?’

‘Your stomach?’

She scowled. ‘Oh yes,
that’s better.’

‘It’s just the tax now,
eh?’ They stood up. ‘Well, like I say, just remember I’m a doctor
and I’m here to help.’

Eight months later,
sitting in her large, cold kitchen and staring at the shop’s
accounts, Carla heaved her heavy sigh once more. A remortgage was
out of the question and she was already paying off an extortionate
business loan (sodding banks!). If she wanted to keep
Romance
viable then artificial insemination seemed almost
inevitable. The notion appalled her – almost as much as it amazed
her.

But what else could she
do when lobelia, geraniums and lilies added up to such a heap of
heart ache?

Three
:
The Vultures of Romance

Monday morning.

Carla moved restlessly
behind the foliage of
Romance
. The waiting around was the
hardest. She longed to start opening at midday, but there was a
tiny contingent of mad bats who only dropped by at the crack of
dawn. In terms of profitability she could afford to lose them. The
trouble was, she sensed they exerted a hidden but powerful
influence throughout the affluent streets all around. If she
thwarted them, she might find her other customers slipping away
without apparent explanation.

And here was one of her
other customers, right now.

‘Oh Carla,
the
blossom
!’

It was Serena – the
princess of bitty shoppers and the human equivalent of a pointed
stick with which life poked at the ulcer of Carla’s resentment.

Every year, the same
exquisite torture!

By now Carla almost
admired Serena’s dogged persistence in believing that the seasonal
changes of the natural world held any interest for her, just
because she happened to run a florist’s shop. That said, the way in
which Serena used the same weary stock phrases, delivered in a
creaky pitch of delight (one which hadn’t altered a jot over the
past decade) suggested that Serena’s interest in the blossom was
even feebler than her own.

Unlike the blossom,
Serena’s true enthusiasms surrounded her at all times of the year –
outrageously expensive clothes.

Carla was very, very
careful to avoid the whole subject of clothing. She refrained from
openly noticing that Serena never seemed to wear the same garment
twice, and that what she did wear wasn’t on sale in any of the
shops she went to. But to give Serena her due, she didn’t need to
be told that fashion was a complete nonstarter for Carla, and she
was considerate enough to return the favour of not openly noticing
what her favourite florist wore.

It was supremely ironic
therefore, considering how much more she had to lose by breaking
their tacit agreement not to learn anything personal about each
other, that it was Carla and not Serena who went and spoiled it all
by opening her big fat mouth.

Thus one unforgettable
day, in a fit of temporary insanity, Carla had once casually
mentioned that she was going to the hair dressers.

Straight away this
throwaway little remark blew up in her face when Serena said she
wished she could go to a hair dressers just like that, but her hair
was so difficult that she was obliged to visit a special woman. In
fact, she had seen her just last week.

This information came
as a huge surprise to Carla, not least because Serena’s hair hadn’t
changed one iota in the last ten years – fringe at front, shoulder
length everywhere else.

In fact, she had always
assumed it was a wig.

‘Well, I never.’

Carla was confident
that this note of mild wonder would be enough to draw a line under
the whole topic. But wait! Serena hadn’t finished the story of her
hair. Having agreed with whatever it was Carla was talking about,
she went on to add how lucky she was to have her special woman,
because not only did her special woman understand her hair as no
one else ever would, but she also did it on the cheap. To wit –
fifty quid per trim.

Fifty quid!

Carla reeled. She
always felt ripped off paying a tenner. And that was for a perm
that took ages and really hurt. Carla’s hairdresser didn’t ponce
about like Serena’s. She made damn sure that Carla, and everybody
else too, knew that her hair had been done, and done proper
too.

The blossom, the
clothes, and now the hair, the more Carla knew about Serena the
more she ached afterwards.

Not that Serena stopped
at making Carla ache at what she knew. She also made her ache at
what she didn’t. For there was a niggling riddle about Serena. An
enigma born of a contradiction. First up, the facts were these:

One
, Serena was
a freelance designer.

Two
, her clothes
were from Paris.

Three
, she spent
fifty nicker on her hair.

Now, could they come
more rarefied than that? No, of course not. Everything about Serena
screamed posy.

So then, the big
question was, Why the
hell
didn’t she buy more flowers?

By rights she should
have been ordering them in by the cartload. Well okay . . . it was
just possible she was too rarefied even for flowers. However, Carla
could not bring herself to believe such a level of snobbery was
possible, not even in Kew. And in any case, this mystery ran far
deeper than a poseur not buying flowers. Oh no, there was so much
more to Serena than a designer lifestyle, clothes from Paris and an
eternal fringe. Even if between them they did absorb more money
than Carla saw in a month of Sundays.

Oh no, above and beyond
all these ingredients there was . . . the nose.

Serena had this giant
hooter. A whopping monster of gristle and bone with well buttressed
and capacious nostrils that looked like they could suspend a
bowling ball by vacuum suction alone. Carla had almost dropped to
her knees in gratitude the first time Serena had stepped into
Romance, a decade or so ago.

But it was a joy all
too soon to be supplanted by bitter disappointment.

Her new customer had
quickly failed to realise any of her vast potential. Serena might
run her eyes appreciatively over the wide selection of blooms for
sale at Romance, but her purchases never went further than a packet
of slug pellets and a can of fly spray. Furthermore, not once had
she ever referred to the fragrances that filled the shop. She was
even reluctant to keep up her end of the conversation when Carla
apologised for the reek of the new fertiliser. In her darker
moments, Carla sometimes believed the solution to the mystery was
the precise one which offered Romance least hope for the future –
that the biggest nose on the block was a dud.

‘Oh Carla,
the
blossom
!’

In reply, Carla smiled
ever so faintly. It was best to humour them. Like any other
customer, Serena could get right under your skin if you let her and
Carla had learned the lesson of the fifty-pound-fringe-trim well.
It stood to reason she was never going to actually ask Serena why
she didn’t buy any flowers. Carla would just as rather assume the
nose was stuffed on a permanent basis. Anything was better than
hearing that the nose wasn’t a dud after all, and that in fact
Serena spent thousands of pounds a week at a florist’s on the
Champs Elysees.

Yes by God, Carla was
certainly grateful to Serena for never volunteering information
like that. Other customers who, like Serena, floated more often
than they walked, were far too free and easy with the sparkling
details of their scintillating lives. Indeed, they were so expert
at making Carla feel dowdy and dull that even the reverses and
disappointments they complained about were more textured and
vibrant than all of Carla’s birthdays and Christmases rolled into
one. What had never occurred to Carla, as yet, was that if these
uppity women had to make some pathetic little florist feel bad in
order to make themselves feel better, then they must hate their own
lives even more than Carla hated hers . . .

. . . Serena was
gone.

She had bought a can of
flyspray. Apart from the rare pack of slug pellets, she only ever
bought flyspray – the cheap
Pine Fresh
variety.

Oh, if it were up to
Serena and her likes, Carla would be dead on her feet here.

However, as luck would
have it, Romance was just about kept afloat by customers who were
themselves pretty well dead on their feet. I.e. the really, really
old
ones.

There were about eight
or nine of them at any one time and, unlike Serena’s, their every
visit was a delight and a joy – in that they were always a little
bit more frail and decrepit than before. Carla was amazed at just
how frail and decrepit old people could get before they popped off.
They had her dangling on tenterhooks for months on end. After all,
a funeral for her and
Romance
could spell the difference
between survival and bankruptcy. That’s why Carla was forever on
the lookout for new ways to support the elderly. She did great
discounts for pensioners and always made sure they got the special
price list, the one with the fancy black border and the discreet
little advertisement for
Rupert Nodes: Undertakers since
1884
.

Carla had a lucrative
agreement with Rupert, and a good funeral jacked up the profits no
end. If this makes Carla seem insensitive then one must recall that
Romance
had only just about scraped through the last
financial year. That put death into some kind of perspective. She
wasn’t being morbid. She didn’t want them
all
to die. Just
two, or three every twelve months. Any more than that and she would
have to cough up more tax. Besides, she wasn’t 100 per cent immune
to grief. These bereavements took time to recover from. But recover
she did, because in time other customers became old and decrepit in
their turn, replacing those who had gone before. Why, one day even
Serena would be old enough to need a funeral.

So then, who said Carla
didn’t have anything nice to look forward to?

And Carla was such an
optimist in respect to death in all its many guises. Reading about
fatal car crashes, heart attacks and tragic suicides in the local
newspaper invariably provided her with a certain thrill of
anticipation.

And here was a
delicious daydream for you – a fatal car crash, a lethal heart
attack and a case of tragic suicide all within a fortnight
(assuming the relatives chose Rupert Nodes and his excellent
service) and she wouldn’t have to get pregnant!

The door banged open
and Kitty, the young assistant, clumped in.

Carla started from her
reverie and found herself back in the mundane, everyday world where
three Rupert Nodes funerals within a fortnight was just another
wild and crazy dream.

She eyed Kitty, a great
big tall, thickset girl of eighteen, and said, ‘Fill all the
buckets, like I showed you. I’m going to talk to Gwynne. He’s
stopped off work to help you out. Come through if you need me for
anything.’

Kitty leaned towards
Carla as she spoke and stared hard at her lips, as if she were
trying to read them. There was an interval before she nodded in
comprehension, or what passed for it.

Kitty was built on an
almost gross scale. One of the latest generations of kids, so
pumped up by the chemical nutriments in fast food that they were
almost deformed. There was no chance of Kitty getting lots of
flowers from lovesick gentlemen. A pound of beefsteak, possibly . .
. and no doubt she’d appreciate it more, too. The pity was, no
gentlemen were waiting in the wings. The girl could already lug
bags of peat around with ease, so who knew what she’d be capable of
on a diet of beefsteak?

Carla went out back
into the large and chilly livingroom where she found Gwynne playing
on his
Gameboy
. He had it up on full volume.

‘Don’t get playing that
thing in the shop,’ Carla yelled. ‘You’ll frighten the customers!’
Gwynne paused the programme, but continued to glare down at the
machine. She added, ‘Mrs Wanless hates loud noises. She almost died
when that shelf fell down.’

‘Yeah?’ Gwynne looked
up with interest.

‘Just help Kitty out,
will you? You know how she loses track.’

Carla’s voice lost all
its harshness when she recalled how stupid Kitty was. There was
something so comforting about it. Her own policy for hiring staff
was to avoid anyone with qualifications. The ones with certificates
could never do the job at all, which made them far worse than those
without any certificates, who were merely incompetent. And apart
from not being able to do the job, those with qualifications always
suckered some other employer into taking them on and left her in
the lurch. Carla could sleep at night knowing Kitty wasn’t going to
get another job in a million years. That made having to repeat the
same instructions every day, like it was for the very first time,
so much easier to bear. Then too, once she was set in motion, Kitty
was a methodical beast. Carla believed the shop could burn down
around her and she would carry on spraying the spider plants. Yes,
she would stick at it regardless till the firemen came to haul her
away. Two at each end.