Nomance (9 page)

Tamsin whispered, ‘Oh,
Phoebe
!’

Hearing that, Carla
thought to herself:
this Phoebe makes the same mistake over and
over again
.

And indeed, Carla could
now enjoy the spectacle of Phoebe wither under the flames of
contrition. It seemed to have dawned on her she’d made a faux pas.
However, Carla’s pleasure soon dimmed when she noticed everyone in
the room was staring at her reproachfully. It seemed she was being
singled out for interrupting them in the middle of a crucial
sentence, and not Phoebe.

The jumpy geezer, that
drug-addict Carla had spoken to first and who knew Gwynne, stepped
forward out of the crowd and declaimed. ‘But that’s Gwynne’s
sister!’

There was a general
exhalation. Gwynne, must have been a tried and tested source of
needless alarm. And who was to say her sister would be any
different?

But then a tall,
lugubrious geezer wearing an old man’s coat piped up, ‘What are you
talking about? Gwynne hasn’t got a sister!’

There was a general
murmur of mystification.

‘It was only a joke,’
Phoebe said, appealing forlornly to Juliet. ‘Gwynne’s set us up.
You know what he’s like.’

‘I happen to know that
he’s dead.’ This declaration was intoned by a late middle-aged
woman in a grey suit who, going by her demeanor, appeared to be a
member of the Government. ‘It happened last night. Didn’t anyone
else know?’

‘Gwynne’s not dead. I
know he’s not,’ Carla snarled with contempt, ‘or I’d have heard off
the EasyHomes DIY Superstore by now, wouldn’t I?’

The woman from the
Government opened her mouth, but a reply did not come out of it.
Carla shouldered her aside and took a step towards Juliet.

‘It’s your baby that’s
in danger,’ she yipped, gripping her belly like a bomb. Then
glancing round to check no one else was listening, she added in
rasping whisper, just loud enough for next door to hear, ‘Gerald’s
feeding me drugs, you know. Trying to kill it so I don’t get your
five thousand pounds. He can use it for stem-cell research. It was
on the telly!’

Juliet shook her head
and squeaked. All at once, the woman from the Government was in
Carla’s way again.

‘Listen sweetheart, who
is this Gerald? Please tell me, so I know what to say when I call
the police.’

Before Carla could open
her mouth, Tamsin intervened on her behalf, ‘Gerald’s her doctor,
Helena, and her doctor appears to be mad.’

Carla heard the news
race round the party –
mad doctor!

Helena produced a
glacial smile. ‘Well, if you don’t want to go back to hospital
because your doctor is mad, you don’t have to. But dear, you can’t
stay here, now can you? So, tell me, what is it exactly that you
want to do?’

Carla clutched at her
stomach as the pain dazed her for a moment, then, collecting her
thoughts, she made a supreme effort to carry on like nothing was
wrong and to answer the question.

‘I want to supply all
the flowers for your funeral,’ she wailed. ‘So before you die,
could you please call Rupert Nodes. You can’t go wrong – he was
established in eighteen ninety-nine.’

And with that she sank
to the floor in agony.

Once down there, she
assumed the position – it always eased the pain to get her knees as
close as possible to her ears.

Apart from her grunts
and snorts, an utter and complete silence descended on the
room.

Till Tamsin spoke, that
is. Or rather, screeched, ‘My God, she’s gone into labour!’

Carla dropped her legs
in alarm and also screeched. ‘What?’

She gaped at the
towering figures around her. The guy with the bongos clutched them
to his chest in horror. Phoebe reached out to take the lugubrious
man’s arm, but the lugubrious man took a deft step out of reach and
she gripped the freestanding lamp instead. And Juliet – Juliet put
her hands to her sheet-white temples now and emitted a
spine-tingling shriek.

‘Dear God, not on my
floor!’

This banshee cry sent a
convulsion through the crowd. Many were galvanised into action.
Amongst cries for towels and boiling water and –
Call the fire
brigade
, the heftiest guests, not all guys, lurched forward in
order to lift Carla and carry her into the bedroom. Though some of
them tried to take her to the kitchen instead. As she receded into
the darkness of the bedroom, Carla saw Philip holding onto Juliet
while calling for an ambulance on his mobile. Several guests were
also calling for an ambulance on their mobiles. But then, she
reflected, you could never have enough ambulances, could you?

Carla was laid groaning
on the bed. She closed her eyes to stop the room spinning, and then
she must have blacked out, because all at once she was being
grappled by two ambulance medics.

They made a right job
of getting her onto the stretcher, groaning louder than the
patient. After a moment to recover, they heaved her up, and stamped
out into the living room like they were carrying a piano
instead.

To get through to the
stairs they now had to pass through an awkward succession of
doorways. At their first attempt they got stuck and there was
nothing for it but to back out and try again. But then they found
the stretcher had lodged tight.

‘Nige!’

‘Vern!’

‘Back!’

‘Give us a chance
then!’

‘Just push!’

Vern pushed, Nige
pulled and with Carla shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing to
me?’ they lurched free and pitched back into the livingroom.

People leapt out of the
way, fearing for life and limb. Carla screamed, finding herself
hurtling towards the window. Unhindered, Nige and Vern stumbled
backwards right across the room, gaining momentum as they went.
They crashed, with tooth-jarring force, into the dining table.
Carla heard the thing squeal and scrape on its pointy legs and
turning, she saw Phoebe’s metal candelabra topple, bounce and roll
off. Tamsin, staring wide-eyed at the unfolding drama, was standing
in wrong place at the wrong time. The candelabra felled her in one
and pinioned her to the floor, where she lay, screaming and
bloodied.

Carla squeezed her eyes
shut tight as she heard Nige say, ‘Better bring her too.’

Merciful darkness swept
over her then like a wave of warm water. She seemed to swirl round
and round till a hand reached out and held her arm. All at once she
was back at the shop. The plants were grotesquely overgrown. She
could barely breathe in the fetid air. The hand gripped her arm
more tightly.

It was Juliet.

‘Carla dear, what an
absolutely divine little place you have here. It’s just so sweet
and lovely. Look at all these fabulous flowers. Why, this is just
heaven – you’re so lucky, you really are.’ Juliet was wearing that
little smile that all her snooty customers wore when they claimed
they envied her.

Carla couldn’t bear any
more.

‘Flowers! Flowers!
Flowers! I hate the bastards! This shop is the bane of my life and
I can’t wait to sell it. I tell you this, when I move to a new
place, I’m going to cover the front garden in concrete and park a
lorry on it!’

Juliet laughed
derisively. ‘But, darling, I wasn’t ever going to buy any flowers.
I’ve got what I want from you.’

Carla howled and tried
to wrestle free. ‘No!’

The grip tightened on
her arm. Juliet’s thin face was devilish. ‘Oh yes.’

‘God, help me,’ Carla
cried, and, in that instant, He did! A brilliant idea came to her –
the best idea she’d ever had, so it must have come from above – and
she commanded Juliet, her most nightmarish customer yet, to – ‘Go
to hell. I’m going to have an abortion, see, and I’m going to bill
you for the funeral!’

Juliet’s face twisted
demonically. Too late, Carla saw she was grasping a fork in her
hand – a garden fork. In the next instant, the evil creature thrust
it into her stomach.

There was no pain.

‘Carla?’

The smooth voice was
familiar. She tried to open her eyes but the light was blinding.
She shook her head and groaned. ‘Carla?’ The voice again. ‘How are
you doing?’ It was Gerald. Other voices were murmuring further
away. Some were laughing.

A gentle hand rested on
her forehead and in its shade she managed to focus a little. The
kind face of a middle-aged nurse was smiling down at her. ‘It’s a
lovely little boy,’ she said.

Ten
:
Taking Stock

It was about six months
later when Charmaine and Gwynne’s relationship fell apart.

Everyone was taken by
surprise. And that included Charmaine and Gwynne. They couldn’t
seem to see why they had to break up either. It just didn’t make
any sense. And yet . . . they did.

Gwynne moved back to
Romance
, and was disconcerted to find the place seemed
different somehow. And after he was disconcerted, he was puzzled,
because the place looked the same. But more than that, he sensed
that he too had changed in some way, and this frightened him a
little. For a start, he found he could no longer take comfort with
“Beast Horde: The Ultimate Conflict” on his
GameBoy
. That
had never happened to him before. Still more disturbing was how he
had lost his urge to play in a band. It didn’t rankle with him in
the least that Pod, Ba’a and Rocco had kicked him out of
The
Dead Dianas
.

Now
that
was
odd.

In his experience,
getting kicked out of a band should have rankled – and kept
rankling for at least two whole years non stop.

Whatever the
explanation, not being rankled led to an unexpected consequence –
he stopped rankling other people.

And the first person he
stopped rankling was his sister. Of course, Carla had shouted and
balled when he first came back home, but Carla’s shouting and
balling was something he had heard countless times before. He
didn’t see the point in answering anymore. And because he wasn’t
answering, Carla appeared to lose the thread of her argument.

Which wasn’t to say he
had stopped communicating with her.

For instance, a week
after his return to
Romance
, and just as he was about to
finish his breakfast, he looked up from his cereal bowl and stared
long and hard at her.

After a full thirty
seconds, he asked, ‘Didn’t you used to be pregnant, or
something?’

Carla started, like she
hadn’t been aware he was there and answered
yes
, rather than
telling him to
mind your own fucking business
, which is what
he’d sort of expected to hear.

But even so, Gwynne was
a little too pushed for time right then to think of the next
question.

He would be merely on
time for work if he didn’t get going, rather than early.

That’s right, nowadays
he made a point of arriving at the
EasyHomes DIY Superstore
even
earlier
than he needed to.

You see, there had been
a change at work as well as at home, and he took his new
responsibilities at the
EasyHomes DIY Superstore
very
seriously indeed.

These responsibilities
had devolved upon him because his superiors had noted how quiet
Gwynne had become since he’d broken up with Charmaine. Interpreting
his lifeless expression as a mark of a sober young man, mature
beyond his years, they had offered him promotion.

Well, it was either him
or that complete drip, Ba’a, in
Tiles and Grouting
.

Gwynne jumped at the
offer. After all, even a complete drip knew promotion meant more
money. What did come as an unpleasant surprise was the hidden
catch. Promotion, as it turned out, involved stock taking.

Just his luck!

And Gwynne could tell
you a thing or two about his luck. Things to make your hair stand
on end. Except . . . wait about! After a few faltering first steps,
Gwynne found himself zipping through the new procedures with ease.
No, it was worse than that – he was soon taking an exotic pleasure
in learning them.

Now who the hell could
have predicted that?

Not Gwynne, for a
start. For although stock taking theory was devoted to material
objects it was, nevertheless, a form of abstract thought and till
that day Gwynne had been a stranger to abstract thought. An enemy,
even. Or at least he felt thinking rationally was something to be
treated as a hazard. Thus he had engaged with abstract thought as
tentatively as he would a tray of cacti back at
Romance
. To
his delight, however, the result was not the very familiar pain and
misery, but rather a revelation. Stock taking, unlike Charmaine,
car insurance, Elaine, the popular music industry, Carla, Kitty and
flowers made . . . perfect sense.

In fact, if it came to
that, what stock taking procedures actually made was . . . life
worth living again!

By sheer chance Gwynne
had stumbled upon what so many fail to attain in this restless and
corrupting world – self-realisation.

And to think that if
Charmaine and him hadn’t split he might never have got promoted and
learned stock taking. Just shows what a fine line runs between
tragedy and comedy.

And then, all his
friends had been wrong, hadn’t they? They thought they were fucking
him over by kicking him out of the Dead Dianas. But who was
laughing now? Him, with a career in stock taking? Or that load of,
plinky-plocky, warbling, guitar-twanging failed pop-star
wankers?

And he would be
laughing a lot, lot more when he found a way to frame Pod, Ba’a and
Rocco for all the stuff that was going missing from the
warehouse.

Stock taking –
geddit?

So, anyway, that was
the essence of Gwynne’s transmogrification, and a rundown of his
current intellectual obsessions, so it was not terribly surprising
that the next question that logically followed from –
Didn’t you
used to be pregnant?
had yet to occur to him.