Same Time Next Week

Chapter 9

Amanda had a good sleep for once, a full seven hours, apart from the wee break somewhere in the middle. Was that the HRT starting to work? Oh, she did hope so. She had a coffee and then rang Baker’s the estate agency, to make an initial enquiry. As soon as she said she might be interested in selling a house on Winter Place, she could tell they were keen. Great big fat commission on a house there, an easy sell.

The weather wasn’t conducive for a long walk, it was typical April, blinding sunlight one minute, heavens opening the next. She found herself ringing up her mum to ask if she would like to go out for lunch.

‘I could do, I suppose,’ said Ingrid in her all-too-familiar grudging tone and Amanda once again wished that they had the sort of mother/daughter relationship others had, where they were more like friends who enjoyed each other’s company, and who looked forward to sharing some quality time together. Just for a change it would have been nice to hear the words, ‘Ooh, that would be lovely’, instead of feeling that she was forcing her mother to put herself out. She wouldn’t have been like that if Bradley had suggested it; she’d have had her coat and shoes on and be waiting by the door as soon as the call had ended.

As she was pulling up outside her mum’s house, Dolly Shepherd from next door was just nudging her old Jaguar into her drive. They passed the time of day and Amanda told her that she’d been to check out Bettina Boot’s old place and it was wonderful, and that the new owner was giving pensioners discounts. She knew from learned experience that one should never underestimate the reach of a geriatric PR machine which was more powerful than something even Steve Jobs could design. Dolly Shepherd made the spreading abilities of wildfire look incompetent.

Amanda had bought another camera for her mum’s bedroom. She’d dispense with its services when she found out what Bradley was hunting around for in there. It was very unobtrusive and would sit happily with all the knick-knacks on the large antique whatnot. She should have been able to trust her brother but she didn’t wholly, and there was no point in being direct and asking him why he was poking around because he’d only deny it or lie, so it was best to do her investigations undercover. He’d always been fox-cunning and she could guarantee that whatever he was up to, it wasn’t for their mother’s benefit and that’s what was concerning her enough to turn into a temporary Sherlock Holmes.

She knocked on Ingrid’s front door to alert her before unlocking it and walking in.

‘Only me.’

Ingrid was in the lounge, patting some powder onto her cheeks.

‘You look nice, Mum.’ She was a smart woman, even if everything she owned was either black or navy.

‘I’ve not had this on for years. I’m surprised it fits.’

‘I don’t know why it shouldn’t, you’ve been the same size for as long as I can remember.’

‘I’ve always been lucky with my weight,’ said Ingrid, nodding agreement. ‘Have you put some on? You’re looking a bit fuller in the face.’

‘No, I’ve lost a bit recently actually,’ replied Amanda, thinking, great. She wondered if their mother ever said as much to Bradley, who had a pot belly the size of a kettledrum these days. It wasn’t healthy for him, not that he’d take advice from her on the subject.

‘I’m just going to the loo.’ Amanda nipped up the stairs and quickly into her mum’s bedroom. She positioned the camera in between her Staffordshire flatback pot dogs on the shelf, pulling away a skein of cobwebs that had settled on them. It looked as if they hadn’t been dusted behind in a while which was odd and sad, because it wasn’t like her mum to have dust anywhere around. She remembered as a child, moaning when she was all comfortable and her mum wanted to shift the sofa or chair she was sitting on to clean under it because her mum wasn’t one for missing out the unseen places. She’d obviously got to the stage where she needed a bit of help now, that was clear and the realisation brought some pain with it.

Ingrid was standing by the window and huffing at the weather when she went back down.

‘Don’t worry, you’ve no walking to do,’ Amanda assured her. ‘Just into the car and out of it at the other end.’

‘If you say so.’

Amanda noticed she’d put too much powder on and it was too dark a shade for her skin and looked like a mask.

‘Here, Mum, let me just adjust your make-up a bit.’ She smoothed a tissue over her skin, she had lovely skin her mum. Amanda was gentle but her mother twisted and turned her head like a toddler.

‘That’s better. Now, you’ll do.’

‘I’ve had to miss my morning coffee for this,’ said Ingrid, dragging her coat off the back of the chair.

Erin finished the last of her tea and put the mug into the dishwasher, aware that her feet were dragging across the kitchen floor. She was in conflict, half of her wanting to get on with the thing to be done, the other half of her dreading it but she had to because she had taken time away from her job in order to force her hand. It was her firm, a graphic design company; she didn’t need to ask permission, but she rarely took days off because she would rather have been in her office than in this space.

Most of the furniture had been sold or donated to charity months ago, the things Carona had brought with her to the apartment, the things they had bought together: all too painful to keep. The bed they shared, large and ridiculously expensive, had been the first thing to go. What was left now were Carona’s clothes, her books, the minutiae of her life. Erin had put them all in the spare room out of sight, where they sat absorbing her energy through the walls.

She’d given Carona’s sister – her only attending relative – her jewellery at the funeral. She’d taken it reluctantly and said, ‘I hope she treated you better than she treated us.’ It was a small service, no wake. Carona had always said that if anything happened to her she didn’t want people gathering afterwards and talking about her when they hardly knew her. Maybe, though, she was frightened no one would turn up.

It had been a full six months now since Carona had died and Erin still thought of her every day. The two and a half years they were together had felt like much longer, maybe because of the roller-coaster ride, those initial highs promising much more than the lows that followed. She didn’t know if what she was going through was grief, because that road had a beginning and an eventual end. Whatever this was, she was stuck on it, great mounds of complications hindering any potential forward movement. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, feeling the press of their weight on her chest like boulders.

Erin steeled herself and opened up the door, ripping off the first of the black bags on the roll. She loaded the first with Carona’s underwear for the clothes bank at the dump, even though some of it still had the tags on. The books filled two huge boxes: Kafka, Nin, Pasternak, Proust, books meant to sit on shelves and impress, not to be read, and yet she’d pooh-pooh Erin’s book choices, the contemporary romances she’d lose herself in to grab at some respite and comfort. Reading was a waste of time when they could be doing something together, she’d say. As if she was jealous even of the books in Erin’s hands, their presence in her consciousness.

She bagged up Carona’s clothes next; she had always been so beautifully dressed. Erin could have sold these: the Vivienne Westwood skirt, the Jimmy Choo sandals, the Ralph Lauren blazer, but there was a local animal charity that had a shop where the choice stuff went. She didn’t break for lunch, she powered through and when it was done she rang them to arrange a pick-up time. They said they’d take the books too. Would tomorrow afternoon be okay? The sooner the better, she’d answered.

Tomorrow morning she had an estate agent booked to photograph the rooms and tell her what price she needed to pitch it at for a quick sale. The apartment was all hers. They’d written mirror wills and had life insurance on the mortgage that paid out extra in case of an accident. That’s what Carona’s death had been declared, but Erin knew different.

There were no photos in Carona’s ‘treasure box’ of her past: she’d burned them all; no family, no past loves, they were dead to her. There were only ones of her and Erin, the cards Erin had sent her, pressed flowers from bunches Erin had bought her, serviettes from places they’d eaten at, tickets from places they’d been to. And diaries, filled with her long, looping handwriting eating up all the white spaces.

Erin picked up the first her fingers fell on, opened up a random page, saw the childish doodles of hearts and flowers and the shouty capitals. She could hear the accompanying audio in Carona’s voice, reading the entries out with all the accompanying histrionic emotions and so she closed it and put it, with the others, in the bag destined for the incinerator in the garden.

‘Yes, you can take those away,’ said Ingrid to the waitress, flicking her finger at the plates.

‘Was everything all right for you?’

Ingrid squeezed her lips together. ‘I’ve had better. Much better.’

‘It was great,’ Amanda said to counterbalance the criticism, because the poor waitress didn’t know whether this was a complaint that needed to go to the kitchen with the plates, which were clear of everything but a couple of shreds of lettuce. ‘Thank you. We enjoyed it.’

Of course it was adjudged to be substandard because Ingrid always enjoyed a meal more when she had something to moan about. Only Marks and Spencer’s scampi would have scored the full ten marks. Or anything that Bradley cooked, the Marco Pierre White of the microwave.

‘Would you like to see the dessert menu?’ asked the waitress, returning with them.

‘We can have a look, I suppose,’ said Ingrid, holding out her hand for one.

She’d glance at it, then sigh and say she didn’t fancy anything really but might have a little ice cream. It happened every time.

‘While Bradley’s in Turkey he’s having his teeth out and a new kitchen put in,’ said Ingrid as she scanned the menu.

‘Blimey, how big’s his mouth,’ replied Amanda, although it was a rhetorical question because she knew the answer to that one: not as big as his ego. The joke flew over her mother’s head, though.

‘He’s having white gloss.’

‘Are we talking teeth or kitchen?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Amanda. Kitchen, of course.’

Amanda’s brain rewound a few frames. ‘What did you say he was having done with his teeth?’

‘He’s having venereals. In Turkey. Him and Kerry.’

The corner of Amanda’s lip twitched. ‘Veneers’, presumably. That wouldn’t be cheap and Bradley wasn’t one for splashing the cash. ‘Has he come up on the lottery?’

‘Arnold died.’

She was not expecting that nugget of information.

‘Arnold? His dad? That Arnold?’

‘Well, of course I mean that Arnold. What other Arnold would I mean?’

Amanda was genuinely gobsmacked. ‘When?’

‘Last month.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I just have.’

‘I mean sooner, when it happened.’

‘Because it’s not really any of your business, is it? What was he to you?’

‘Mum, stop snapping at me,’ said Amanda; her patience would only stretch so far. They couldn’t have a conversation like normal mothers and daughters. Eighty per cent of everything Ingrid said to her was barked. She didn’t talk that way to Bradley; her voice softened, her words travelled to his ears like warm syrup, not barbed wire.

Duly reprimanded, Ingrid huffed and rolled her eyes.

‘Arnold left him a few bob. He was still working in that ironmonger’s because he was too tight to employ someone. And he never lived with anyone else after me so Bradley’ll cop for the lot.’

Amanda shuddered at the thought of Arnold Worsnip. She hadn’t seen him since she was a little girl but still his image, his voice, his dyed black block of hair, his stinging slap on her buttocks were all branded indelibly on her brain.

‘You should never have let him smack me,’ she said, many many years too late but the words had been sitting inside her to say and she never had before, so lord knows why they picked that moment to come out.

‘It’s a father’s job to do the disciplining.’

‘He wasn’t my father, he was a dirty old man.’ Words ground out between her teeth.

Ingrid jiggled her head as if she wanted to disagree but couldn’t be bothered.

‘Anyway, Bradley’s got a good job so he’s plenty of his own money. That’s why he’s getting his whole house done up.’

‘Yeah, it’s so good he’s still sat in the same chair he was in at eighteen.’

‘He’s an accountant.’

‘He’s an accounts clerk,’ said Amanda, putting her right because she felt like it. ‘He failed his maths GCSE twice. It was me that got him through it the third time.’

It had been the one spot in their relationship where they got on all right, but later on she’d worked out it was only because Bradley needed her help. He could be awfully charming, even as a teenager, when he was on the scrounge.

‘Anyway, Kerry’s given up her chef job and she’s going to stay at home and be a housewife.’

It was darkly funny how she elevated Bradley to being an accountant and Kerry, who worked in Ketherwood Fried Chicken, to having fourteen Michelin stars to her name, and yet she’d downgrade Amanda with a dismissive ‘she sells prams’ if anyone asked about them.

‘She burnt herself on the frier and is getting some compensation,’ Ingrid went on.

‘Money’s just flying at them then, isn’t it?’ Amanda replied. She had to say what else was on her mind because it had been festering there for decades.

‘Mum, you used my dad’s money to help buy Arnold that ironmonger’s, didn’t you?’

Ingrid didn’t directly answer the question. From the look in her eyes she had drifted off somewhere, to an old memory. ‘Fred always told me to buy gold. “Gold is worth more than gold” he used to say and he was right. He used to buy it cheap off people and watch the price, sell some when it went high and then keep hold of it when it dipped. Lord, he was canny. He stored it like a squirrel for a rainy day. I’ve still got it in that same tin but I can’t remember—’

She snapped out of the reverie. ‘I’m sure I’m going funny. I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

She put the menu down on the table.

‘I don’t fancy anything. I might just have an ice cream if they’ve got a plain one.’