The Piano Man Project (33 page)

And kick ass? Hell, yeah. She didn’t think so herself, but that girl could rule the world if she wanted to. It’d teeter on the edge of disaster the whole time, but she’d somehow keep it balanced and make every one of her subjects adore her without even trying. Personally Hal could live without the yellow tracksuit, but as summaries went, Skinny Steve had pretty much hit the nail on the head.

‘Pass the carrots, Steve.’

‘Jesus, Honey, there’s more than two hundred people here. We’re going to need a police marshal at this rate,’ Tash said. ‘We ran out of handcuffs ages ago, people are using anything they’ve got. I’ve just chained four men up by the belts from their trousers. The women next to them were cheering, they thought they were going to get a performance of
The Full Monty
!’

Honey shook her head, overwhelmed with pretty much everything about the day. The protesters lined the street along the railings, snaked around the corner, and then doubled back on themselves along the other side of the railings. They were almost back at the beginning again, a complete loop of residents, friends, family, and locals who’d heard about the protest and come to show their support. Banners waved, t-shirts were emblazoned, and the gathered press pack had expanded in numbers almost as quickly as the protest.

‘Are the residents all okay?’ Honey asked as Nell came to join them on the pavement.

‘Absolutely. They’ve all got a chair and a blanket each now, and we made sure they all had lunch. We had help, too. They’ve all had their medication,’ she said, nodding towards Nikki, the care home worker, who was kneeling beside Old Don laughing at something he’d said. Looking around, Honey noticed other staff from inside too, some chained up, others milling amongst the residents. There was something about the whole event that had her permanently on the edge of tears, which was handy really, given that she felt like an emotional wreck. She was determined to keep her mind focused one hundred per cent on being out here doing her best, and not on the man inside providing sustenance for everyone. Making a success of this campaign had become crucial, because it was a battle she had at least some control over. Hal was his own man and needed to make his own decisions, but in her heart Honey already knew which way he was going to jump. He just needed to get there in his own time.

‘Honey my darling, over here!’ Billy called out, waving her over to the railings. Throwing his free arm around her shoulders, he turned her to face the flashes of what felt like dozens of cameras.

‘Smile for the cameras, darling,’ he said in her ear, and she bared her teeth in a rough approximation that probably looked more like a snarl than a smile but was the best she was capable of right now. Her tearstained cheeks would just add drama. Who knew heartbreak could be so helpful? She stilled, feeling a million miles away from the flashing bulbs. Was she heartbroken? To be heartbroken you needed to be in love, and she didn’t love Hal, not precisely. Did she? Just because she wanted to be with him whenever she wasn’t, and dreamed of him, and craved his touch, and loved the rare sound of his laughter, and held his happiness as more important than her own, and couldn’t stand the thought of him walking out of her life, it didn’t mean she loved him, did it? She’d felt all of those things for … thinking about it, she’d felt those things for no one else, ever.

‘Could you unfasten my cuffs for a few minutes, dear heart?’ Billy said close to her ear. ‘There’s a loudhailer in my room; I think we’re going to need it.’

Honey nodded, opening his cuffs with shaky fingers, turned mute and stupid by her private epiphany. She didn’t want to love Hal. He was the most difficult, recalcitrant of men, and he didn’t love her back. How damn inconvenient to love someone who was marrying someone else next summer.

Billy detoured to the kitchen, loudhailer in his hand, and found Skinny Steve and Hal building sandwich mountains.

‘I’ll take the first lot out,’ Steve said, walking cautiously and peering over the top of one of the huge platters. ‘Billy, have you met Hal? He’s our new chef, and he’s brilliant. Hal, this is Billy.’

And with that, Steve stepped out of the back door and left them to it.

‘Billy,’ Hal said, aware of the older man’s presence before Steve had made formal introductions. ‘Honey’s told me a lot about you.’

‘She hasn’t told me an awful lot about you, old bean, aside from the fact that you can’t see,’ Billy said. ‘Rotten luck, by the sounds of it.’

Hal swallowed, taken aback by Billy’s frankness. ‘That’s one way to put it,’ he said, dryly.

‘Happened to my brother,’ Billy went on.

‘It did?’

‘Not much more than a kid at the time. It didn’t stop him of course, still grew up to be the bane of my mother’s life. More trouble afterwards, if anything,’ Billy grinned at the memories. ‘Sink or swim. He was a swimmer.’

Hal sat down hard on the stool at the bench, wondering if he was a swimmer. He didn’t feel like one most days. He felt like a child in armbands frightened to loose hold of the side. He was surprised to feel Billy’s hand on his shoulder.

‘You’ll get there, son. Early days yet.’

Outside, a police cruiser had indeed turned up, alerted to the size of protest by the almost non-stop coverage on the local radio.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ the officer asked Tash, who’d just appeared from the shop with the staff radio in her hands and set it up on the ground so they could all listen to the coverage.

Tash led him over to Honey, who’d flopped into Billy’s empty chair beside Mimi and Lucille to catch her breath.

‘Are you in charge of this event?’ the officer asked, pulling a pad from his pocket and looking over it at Honey. She stood up and wiped her hands down her jeans and then held one out in an attempt at professionalism. Her tearstained face and messed-up hair did little to back her up, but thankfully she didn’t realise that she looked every inch a woman who’d found and lost the love of her life in the space of five minutes.

She nodded. ‘I am.’

‘And I assume you have the necessary permits, and you applied to the council to have this road closed?’

Honey opened her mouth and closed it again. There were no permits, or closed road applications. They’d hoped the event would attract a crowd of course, but by crowd she’d envisaged forty or fifty, rather than hundreds. It was peaceful, but it was undeniably huge, and traffic had ground to a halt when drivers stopped to see what was going on and left their cars to join the protest. Horns honked, and Nell had eventually made a sign and put it up at the end of the road to politely advise people to come and join the protest or go round a different way.

‘Are you an officer of the law?’ a voice bellowed from down the pavement, and they all peered down to see Christopher hanging as far out from the railings as he could manage and waving his free arm to attract attention. ‘I’m the manager of this home and I demand …’

His demands, however, went unheard, drowned out in a flash by the sound of Robin clapping his hands and yelling ‘Five, six, seven, eight!’ in a theatrical singsong voice and swinging an invisible lasso above his head before performing a tight grapevine along the pavement. Beside him, all nine of his parole boys fell perfectly into step, completely obliterating Christopher from view aside from the occasional flash of his hand wildly poking out. The crowd went wild for them, joining in the boot-scooting chorus and doing their best to pick up the steps until a good half of the gathering were line dancing in the street, and the residents clapped along and cheered from their seats.

Honey clapped her hands to her face, tears coursing down her cheeks as she watched Robin’s diminutive frame and huge hair bounce around, his pied piper status forever cemented, along with their friendship.

The police officer cleared his throat. ‘Those permits we talked about?’

Honey opened her mouth to confess all, and at the same time Billy’s voice boomed through the air as he strutted down the path with a loudhailer against his lips.

‘Officer Nigel Thomson, as I live and breathe. I knew you when you were knee high to a grasshopper and your mother kept The Cock!’

Honey watched as the middle-aged police officer narrowed his eyes at Billy as he drew near, then broke into a huge smile and pushed his notebook back into his pocket, permits forgotten.

‘Uncle Bill!’ The officer put his hand out and pumped Billy’s arm, and then pulled him into a stiff bear hug.

‘I wasn’t actually his uncle,’ Billy mouthed at Honey over his shoulder with an arch wink. Watching Billy walk Officer Thomson back to his car a little while later, she let out a small sigh of relief at another near-disaster averted. When today was over, she needed to take a long holiday in a quiet place, preferably alone on a desert island with a fridge full of chocolate and wine.

‘Umm, Honeysuckle, dear,’ Lucille piped up, craning her neck towards the end of the road. ‘Is that a TV van?’

Hold that thought. It looked as if that one-way ticket to paradise would have to go on hold for a while longer yet.

‘Troy Masters can put his boom mike down my pants any time he wants,’ Tash murmured as they stood watching the TV cameraman get himself set up while Troy Masters, a well-known face from the BBC twenty-four-hour rolling news channel, chatted easily to the crowds.

‘You’ve been watching too many American TV shows, Tash,’ Nell said. ‘We still say trousers here, remember?’

‘Oh, I know the difference perfectly well, Nellie,’ Tash’s laugh was pure filth.

‘Never mind all that,’ Honey said. ‘They want to interview me on screen in half an hour, and we all know that I’m going to be rubbish!’

Nell and Tash exchanged a worried look over her head.

‘Do you happen to have your make-up bag with you?’ Tash said, way too casually.

Honey shook her head. It had been the last thing on her mind that morning.

‘Hairspray? A comb?’ Nell said, tucking Honey’s wild hair behind her ear optimistically.

‘Nothing. I’ve got nothing, and no clue what to say.’

After a moment, Nell took charge.

‘Where’s the key to the shop?’

Five minutes later, the contents of Tash’s make-up bag were spread across the counter in the shop and Honey perched on a stool next to it. Tash walked around her, one way and then the other, casting a critical eye as she went.

‘Let’s just not bother,’ Honey said, suddenly feeling as if she were in the middle of a department store about to be given a drastic makeover by a perma-tanned assistant who hadn’t had enough training.

‘Are you kidding?’ Tash said, frank as always. ‘You look like the bride of Dracula. Did you just wipe mascara down your cheeks for a laugh this morning?’

Nell rooted in her bag and produced a packet of baby wipes. ‘I dread the day I have to stop buying these. I used them to polish the TV in a panic last week when Simon’s mother turned up unannounced.’

Swiping one lightly over Honey’s cheeks, she sucked in her lips. ‘I see what you mean, Tash. Bloody hell, Hon, have you really cried this much today?’ She rubbed harder at the streaks, making Honey screw her face up and take the wipe from Nell’s fingers to do it herself. Nell picked up a gilt, long-tailed hand mirror they used to show customers how necklaces looked on them and held it up for Honey.

The face looking back at her wasn’t the one she’d seen when she’d applied the ill-advised mascara that morning. It was similar, certainly; the same features, the same apple cheeks, cheeks that were now glowing like airplane landing lights thanks to Nell’s ministrations. But her eyes weren’t the same. These were the eyes of a woman, not a girl. Hal hadn’t just made a woman of her last night on her sofa; he’d been making a woman of her from the very first moment she’d met him.

As a child, her mother had gone through a stage of taking them to church every Sunday, and scraps of an oft-repeated reading drifted back.

When I was a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things
.

Today, Honeysuckle Jones had finally put away her childish things.

She took the mirror from Nell and laid it face down on the counter, and then put her hand over Tash’s to still it as she rooted through the cosmetics she’d laid out.

‘Forget the make-up, Tash,’ Honey said softly. ‘And the wipes,’ she half laughed, holding on to Nell’s hand too. ‘I don’t care what I look like on telly. What matters is what I say out there.’ An unexpected wash of absolute calm settled over her bones. ‘If I can find the right words, this is a real chance to actually save the home. That’s pretty bloody amazing, isn’t it?’

Nell nodded and squeezed her fingers in support, and Tash rolled her eyes.

‘Troy Masters might be a grade eight pianist in his spare time. That’s all I’m saying.’

Nerves rattled through Honey’s body as she stood on her mark beside Troy Masters and the cameraman ran through his lighting and sound checks. Lined up beside her were Lucille and Mimi, Billy, and on the end, Old Don in his wheelchair with his war medals pinned proudly to his t-shirt.

‘We’ll be on air in five minutes, guys,’ Troy said, smiling to put her at ease, his rich voice as familiar as an old friend’s from years on the TV.

Honey nodded, and tried to swallow with difficulty. The inside of her mouth seemed to have turned to sandpaper. The cameraman had chosen to set up the interview site close to the shop with the protesters in the background, which hopefully meant that viewers would be able to hear her clearly as well as get a good idea of the ever-growing scale of the protest. Even as she watched, newcomers arrived, by now bringing their own shackling methods having been advised to do so by the radio. Neck ties had proved to be popular, as had yards and yards of silver tinsel one of the staff from the home had found in the storeroom. In reality, tinsel wasn’t going to effectively restrain anyone, not even the many children who were happily playing on the grass, tied loosely to their parents’ wrists. The method of restraint wasn’t the point – it could have been a single strand of cotton and it would have had just the same visual impact. We all stand together, it said, every last one of us, from the ribbons fastening the pram of a six-month-old baby to Old Don tied by his vintage tie collection.