Virtual Strangers (2 page)

Which sounded dreadful but was entirely reasonable, I felt. My father had only been living with us for a month, but I was already having to learn coping strategies; given his long and illustrious history of embarrassing me, it made sense to forestall him by getting completely sloshed and embarrassing myself instead.

‘What’s this?’ Rose asked as he held out a tin to her. She was wearing her hair up, like a glossy black meringue, her glasses slung at her chest on a glittery chain. She scooped them up now and peered hopefully through them, squinting at the Tesco’s festive selection triptych on the lid. When she’d asked for donations of puddings and drink, I wasn’t sure this was quite what she had in mind.

‘A Victoria sponge,’ I offered apologetically.

‘With a stencilled dusting,’ my father added proudly.

‘Well, that’s just lovely, Mr -’

‘Tsk!’ my father trumpeted. ‘Call me Leonard! And filled with my prize-winning greengage and Tia-Maria jam.’

Not an auspicious start.

While Rose bundled my father off to acquaint himself with the facilities, I grabbed a drink and headed out into the garden. Where a cheerful voice reached me almost instantly.

‘On your own, then? No Phil?’

As was often the case, given the curious twilight world Great Western Trains rostering people seemed to inhabit, I didn’t expect my boyfriend to arrive for a while. In the months I’d been seeing him we rarely arrived anywhere together; we generally turned up at most places in stages, like catalogue deliveries. I shook my head, as Sheila Rawlins, Rose’s next door neighbour, moved purposefully forwards. I was invariably cornered by Sheila at parties, because, like me, she was divorced with two teenage children. And there our situational kinship ended. Nevertheless, Sheila’s main role in my life seemed to be to do everything I did just a little bit earlier than me, mainly, it sometimes felt, so that she could ease my own passage with her wisdom and spirituality. She separated from her husband just before me, had a resident (incontinent) mother, and her eldest daughter went off to Cambridge last year. I suspected she would have words of encouragement and guidance to impart. And she did.

‘Feeling a bit upsy downsy right now, Charlie?’

Why fight it? She meant well. ‘So-so,’ I told her. ‘More downsy, I guess.’

‘Of
course
you are. Tearful? I wept buckets and buckets.’

I nodded. She smiled. We both sipped at our drinks. ‘I’m okay. It’s just bad timing, losing Rose and Matt at the same time. But I’ll adjust.’

‘As you will, given time. And diversions, of course.’

‘Which I have, now Dad’s with us. Diversions aplenty.’

‘Mmmm! Offspring out, elderly relative in. Modern life, eh! In good health?’

Dad’s health was the least of my worries. Most were more fixed on his culinary foibles. I could even now make out his form in the distance, unmistakably miming a full rolling boil.

‘Excellent,’ I said.

‘But a strain on the family dynamic no less. And a symbol, of course, of a new life-stage beckoning. And one for which most of us are
so
ill-prepared.’ She shook her head slowly then rolled her eyes. ‘Tsh! Mid-life crisis city, eh?’

I spotted Phil arriving, and waved a hand in greeting, but he’d already been scooped up by Matt for a drink. Why didn’t Matt come and scoop me up too? Much as I liked Sheila, I really didn’t want to talk about me any more. I finished my drink.

‘Well,’ I said, swilling my ice cube around a bit. ‘Depends if I’m going to die at seventy eight, I suppose. I hope not. How are
you
, anyway?’

Sheila, who’s wide experience clearly failed to encompass understanding when someone wanted to change the conversational direction and tone, continued.

‘Oh, middling. Over the worst now, of course. As
you
will be, before you can say Gordon Bennett. You do know that, don’t you, Charlie?’

‘Oh, of
course
I do, Sheila,’ I enthused, changing tack. ‘I know I’m just a product of my age, time and conditioning. I’ve just discovered that the whole justification for my existence is bound up in my role as mother, nurturer, Piagetian facilitator and so on and that having been denied that role - well, fifty percent of it, anyway - I am bound to be floundering in the morass of my latent insecurities and will most probably be forced to sign on for a course in early Renaissance influences on the twentieth century biscuit wrapper or something similarly diverting in order to prove to myself that I still exist as a functioning human being. For the moment, at least. Do you know what I mean?’

Sheila blinked and then drained her own glass. Then, like a thwacked daddy long legs, soldiered gamely on.

‘Mmm-
mmm
,’ she said, nodding. ‘And you’re right to be so positive. I find my floristry classes an enormous help. Plus I can do something useful for the community. For the church, at any rate. They’ve been through a terrible time, what with the silk flowers and so on....’

‘Silk flowers?’ I asked levelly. I really wanted to say sod the bloody silk flowers - I couldn’t imagine a single anecdote about flowers (silk, plastic, organic or venusian) that would be worth standing around holding an empty glass for, but then recognised in myself an unsettling new streak; I was, I realised, in danger of becoming a cynic. She forestalled me, in any case. With a whoop and a hand flap.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Enough!
Please
don’t start me on them.’

None the wiser, I nodded a relieved farewell greeting, as, duty done, she began making her excuses and heading off in pursuit of more sensible talk.

‘Oh, Sheila!’ I called. She turned.

‘Something, Charlie?’

‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly dismayed at my crabbiness. ‘Are you on-line round at your place? I thought I could give you my new email address.’

She stepped closer.

‘
What
mail?’

‘
E
mail. Computer?’

‘Not me,’ she said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘No truck with that sort of jiggery whatname. But remember, if you want to telephone any time -
any
time, Charlie, you know where I am.’

Rose had hung night lights in jam jars from the trees and the bushes. Even Matt’s runner bean canes were bathed in pale light. It seemed impossible that after next week I would probably never set foot in this garden again. All those school holiday paddling pool sessions with the children; all those wine-infused nights of debate on the lawn. I met Matt’s Aunty Jenny at the edge of the patio.

‘I can’t believe they’re going,’ I said.

She gave my arm a reassuring squeeze and shook her thin neck. Me neither,’ she agreed. ‘But we can visit. Though what a dreadful, bone rattling coach journey that’ll be! I shall probably have to travel without my dentures. Ah,’ she continued. ‘And this must be Leonard. What a joy to be able to meet you at last.’

My father smiled engagingly. Feeling suddenly sentimental, I told her he made the best jam in Britain.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘There’s a sweeping assertion if ever I heard one! But if you’re talking preserves, I’ve the very thing for you.
Jams, Jellies and Junkets
- just bought it. It’s in its seventh edition, you know.’ She gave him a wink. ‘Rose has just finished with it. Like a borrow?’ she asked.

‘Rather!’ said my Dad, allowing himself to be swept back inside.

Rather? Rath-
er
? What was the plot here?

Alone again, I slopped a gloopy slug of punch (plus brown apple slices, miscellaneous citrus membranes, bits of twig etc.) into my glass and knocked it back, cossack style, through a colander fashioned from loosely gritted teeth. When I had finished choking on the twig (rosemary/ rosebush?), I flipped my head back up to find Adam Jones beside me. Doctor bloody Adam bloody perfect bloody smoothie bloody Jones. A man so infuriatingly friendly and functional that there should have been a law against letting him out without a leash. A man also infuriatingly married to Davina Jones, my boss. So I had to be pleasant to him.

Not that you’d ever want to be less than pleasant to a guy so disarmingly good looking and decent and thoughtful, even if he did exhibit a rather shaky taste in wives. Davina was good looking too, certainly, and undeniably successful, but in her case, the words decent and thoughtful sprung rather less readily to mind. I had worked for her Estate Agency firm for several years now, and the only area so far where she’d gained my unqualified approval was in having had the good sense to marry such a man.

He looked down at me now with his brows slightly knitted.

‘You okay?’ he enquired. ‘Want a back slap or something?’

‘’s all right,’ I spluttered. ‘It was only a stalk.’

‘Hmm,’ he said, raising one eyebrow and smiling. ‘So. Daniel get off to Med school all right?’

Drat. The D word again. I waved an arm in an extravagant arc and to my astonishment, nearly over balanced. Adam Jones put out a warm downy forearm to steady me.

‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Flown the nest. Flown the coop. Flown the....um. Whatever. Anyway. Yes. Gone.’ I peered distractedly into the sediment at the bottom of my glass.

‘Uh huh. As they do,’ he said encouragingly, patting me. ‘ He’ll be fine.’

‘I know.’

‘Probably having a ball.’

‘I know.’

‘Best years of his life. Mine certainly were.’

‘I know. So they say.’

‘No,
really
.’ He spread his arms to illustrate the point. ‘One big round of parties and drinking and hah, hah..... and, er... Are you all right?’

No no no no no no. I’m not. Oh God. Here we go again. What’s happening to me? Why do I keep bursting into tears all the time?

‘Fine, fine..erm. Just got to. You know. Well.’ And I plunged off through the french doors and into the house.

Where a posse made up of Rose, Aunty Jenny, Phil and my father were waiting in ambush in the kitchen to bar my way to the toilet and to Express Grave Concern.

‘Ah! There you are! Oh! Charlotte! Are you all right?’ Etc.

‘Rath
er
, Dad!’ I twerbled. ‘Just a pip in my eye.’

‘A pip?’ Phil advanced on me. ‘How did a pip get into your eye?’

I rubbed, but fruitlessly. Piplessly. Everyone’s face (bar Phil’s, of course; his had gathered itself into a grimace of concentration) was taking on that tell-tale expression. That one which says, we know you haven’t
really
got anything in your eye and that you’re actually crying, but we’re far too polite to make reference to it and will simply await further cues.

‘A tomato pip,’ I expanded, furiously. ‘It must have been stuck on the back of my hand while I was trying to deal with the twig.’ I slapped Phil’s questing finger away. ‘There’s a lot of acid in tomatoes, you know.’

Silence fell around us like a batch of badly tossed drop scones, onto which, thankfully, Rose soon stepped. ‘They’re those vine-ripened ones,’ she said. ‘Sharp as a lemon. Matt makes a big hoo-hah about their superior flavour, but he really only buys them because they have a stalk on and he thinks he can fool people into thinking they’re his - come on,’ she pressed a warm hand into mine. ‘Let’s hit the bathroom and salvage your make-up.’

As we left the kitchen I could pick out my father’s voice. ‘It’s the change,’ he expounded. ‘Had the same with her mother. Thank goodness I’m around now to jolly her along.’

By midnight, the party had divided itself neatly into two. One half drinking coffee and being sensible in the house, and the other drinking everything else and being legless in the garden. Phil, typically, was doling out instant in the former while Rose and I, on the grass, were in very much the latter. Supine, in fact, on her picnic rug.

‘Look at that arse,’ she observed, sitting up.

I propped myself on my elbows and focussed. It was the property of a young guy in combats. I considered. ‘Nine point five. Whose is it?’

‘Keiran’s.’

‘Who’s Keiran?’

‘Oh, you don’t know him. New head of IT at school. Phew! How I shall miss that arse.’

‘There’ll be others, in Canterbury.’

She lay back on the blanket again and twiddled her glass stem.

‘Don’t get me wrong. This is a brilliant career move for Matt and everything, and I would hate to think he even had an inkling about it - he’s
so
excited about it being so rural and the size of the garden and growing bloody brassicas and potatoes and leeks...Oh, and chickens! Did he run
that
one by you yet? The kids will love it, of course, but, God, right now I really wish I wasn’t going.’

Rose and Matt’s two were both still in Primary School. Rose was right, they would love it. ‘You don’t mean it...’

‘Oh, yes I do, Charlie girl. Nothing like having all your best friends in a glut to remind you just how much you’ll miss them when you’re gone.’

‘It’s not so far.’

‘It is. It might as well have been Brussels.’

‘I know. But we can visit, and...’

She sat up and gestured. ‘Look at him, for instance.’

‘Who? David Harris-Harper?’ David Harris-Harper was new to the area, but had already established himself as Cefn Melin’s resident hunky conveyancer. And was managing to exude androgens even through cords.

She nodded. ‘How could there possibly be anyone in Canterbury as shaggable as that?’

‘I’m sure there must be.’

‘Yes, but
you
won’t have seen them, will you?’

‘So you’ll have to describe them for me, won’t you? We can exchange our shag lists via lurid letters - emails, even, come to that. You could take furtive photographs and send them down the computer to me.’

The idea of the shag lists - our secret top ten of local blokedom - being committed to print and zapped along land lines like an urgent DX bag, struck me as not only funny but strangley appealing. Rose laughed. ‘Excellent idea! Which reminds me...’

She disappeared inside.

She was back moments later, swaying slightly, with a present.

‘What’s this for?’

‘For you, silly.’ She proffered the slim package. She’d wrapped it, very beautifully, as always, in tissue.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have. What is it? Should I open it now?’

She nodded. ‘If you like. You might want to change it. When I bought it, I thought it was a book about Everest, but when I got it home I realised it was actually about a peak in the Andes. And then I thought, well, no matter. It’s still about mountains. I thought it might prove an inspiration while you’re planning your trip. But then I read it. Well, not read it, but read the captions with the photos. And read some of it, and then thought it wasn’t really what I’d wanted. It looks a bit harrowing.’