Same Time Next Week

Chapter 13

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Mel wished she could have caught them in the air and pushed them back down her throat. She’d had such a lovely, giddy lunch with Joss that it was spilling over, especially now her tongue was oiled with a second big glass of wine.

‘Who wants you to what?’ asked Steve, his loaded fork hanging by his lip, the peppercorn sauce dripping from it onto his plate.

Mel tried to underplay it then. ‘Just playing music together. Like we used to when we were kids.’

‘That’s not what you said, though, you said you were joining a band with a load of fifty-plus women,’ said Steve.

‘Well, it is, sort of, but we aren’t going to be doing gigs and things. Forget I said anything.’

Steve put the meat into his mouth and chewed and Mel knew that he had forgotten it already because she was not the type to go and seriously join a band. She worked in a bank, she was steady-away, not some mad impulsive creature. She wished they were both a bit more impulsive, but everything was so regimented. Like this meal: every Saturday night she made peppercorn steak – although occasionally she’d break ranks and do a Diane sauce. Upset of world order. Then they’d watch a film or a couple of episodes of a box set and go to bed for the Saturday night conjugals. Creatures of habit. Mel would have liked it if they were more adventurous under the sheets, but they’d fallen into complacency and maybe it was too late to do anything about it now. She knew she had her part to play, putting up with the status quo, being a husband-pleaser because if he was content, she was content. She hadn’t pushed to revolt against the monotony much because she knew he worked long hours and just wanted to relax at home rather than go and see a band or a film or a play. He would go if she was keen, but if his heart wasn’t in it like hers was, that would sour it.

‘A band, ha,’ said Steve, after clearing his mouth; he’d obviously not forgotten it after all. Then he added, ‘At your age.’

Mel’s eyebrows crunched. ‘What do you mean, “at your age”?’

‘Mel, love, come on, you’re fifty bloody three years old. Do you think I’d want you to make a fool of yourself?’

‘If you’d said to me that you’d been accepted on an astronaut’s programme, I’d have asked you all about it, and said go for it if that’s what you really wanted to do,’ said Mel, cutting into her steak with increased ferocity.

‘No, you wouldn’t, you’d have rung an ambulance and told them to bring a straitjacket because I’d gone bonkers. I’d certify myself!’

‘No, I really wouldn’t—’

‘Mel, I’m glad that you’ve met your friend and had a nice little trip down memory lane, but face it, love…’

He didn’t finish his sentence but he didn’t have to. He meant she’d never be the next Taylor Swift and she didn’t have the heart to argue with him, to tell him that’s not what she wanted to be. He was only being kind, she told herself; he didn’t want to see her set up for a fall.

‘I told her no anyway,’ said Mel.

‘Thank god for that.’

Mel felt stupidly tearful all of a sudden. It wouldn’t have hurt him to say, ‘You should join the band, you just never know where it might lead’, even if he was sure it would lead to nowhere. But he was hardly likely to do that at this age when he’d laughed about such a thing when they’d been in their early twenties.

She changed the subject. ‘So you’re working again tomorrow, you say?’

‘I have to if I want to get this job finished. It really needed two of us on it but… too late for that.’

‘Where is it again?’

‘Over Doncaster way.’ Steve flapped his hand in the vague direction of further south.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, trying to sound interested, as a spouse should do.

‘Taking off layers of old paper that’s fused to the wall. It’s a bugger to get off.’

‘Whereabouts in Doncaster?’

‘What is this, twenty questions?’ said Steve with a laugh, but also an underlying snap in his voice which brought her up sharp. He never usually minded her asking about his job and what he was doing. He usually liked to talk about the houses he visited and the quirky things he found in them – and the quirky people – and she liked to listen to him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, recognising how he’d just come across. ‘I’m tired. I shouldn’t have committed to working tomorrow.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ agreed Mel, her voice warm with sympathy. ‘You need some downtime after a hard week. I can’t remember the last time you worked on a Sunday.’

‘Needs must. I’m going to get a bath and go to bed early tonight.’

‘I’ll come up with you.’

‘No, stay down and watch a film or something,’ said Steve. ‘The dragon isn’t going to be tempted out of his cave tonight.’

‘I didn’t mean I was coming up for that ,’ Mel said, with some indignation. She wasn’t some sex maniac who’d pounce on him when he was tired; what did he take her for?

He gathered up the plates when they’d finished eating, put them in the dishwasher and planted a kiss on the top of her head.

‘That was lovely, that. See you when I get back tomorrow. I might be late, so don’t bother having any tea ready, I’ll pick something up on the road.’

He had disappeared into the hallway by the time she’d turned to reply to him. He never went to bed at this hour, even when he was working early. It all added to the weirdness of the day, because it had shifted too much silt from the seabed of her life and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad.

What decent landlord in his fifties thought that moving in with a twenty-six-year-old female tenant was acceptable, thought Sky as she passed by the lounge to go to her room. It looked as if Wilton would be stationed there for the night, which put it out of bounds for her. He’d been in residence just under twelve hours and the house felt totally different already. It smelt differently, too: fustier, and when she went into the kitchen it stunk of cigarettes and she didn’t want to sit in there and breathe it in, it wasn’t good for her. Ordinarily she’d have enjoyed Saturday in front of the TV with her housemates, or alone if they were out. She was fine with that, because her bedroom wasn’t really big enough to double up as a personal sitting room, and the sofa might have been old but it was huge and squashy and perfect for sprawling out on.

When she went up to the loo it was to find that Wilton hadn’t flushed it properly after he’d used it. That was the last straw. She picked up her coat and her car keys. Adam the electrician at the repair shop had been talking about the new diner place that had opened up on Spring Hill and there had been a really intriguing piece about it in the Yorkshire Standard . She always bought it on a Saturday because it had a section about all the big houses for sale in Yorkshire, the dream mansions with their acres of land and many bedrooms. Even a small home of her own seemed a dream too far away with no prospect of a change on the horizon. She’d eat out rather than spend her Saturday night confined to barracks stressing, because stressing wasn’t great for her health either.

She wasn’t shy about taking herself off out to the cinema or for a meal. She might never have gone out at all if she were. She’d lived by herself since she was twenty, when her dad died and the lease had expired on the house they shared and the owner wouldn’t renew it as he wanted to sell, so she’d had to leave it. She hadn’t had any real close friends in her life, she’d mostly kept herself to herself. Her dad always said that looking back, he’d probably made a mistake not moving to another town; but then, he didn’t want anyone thinking he was running away when he had nothing to run from. They’d carried on living in their little half-isolated cottage on the road out of Penistone, where, conveniently many said, no one could see any comings and goings. But there was not a scrap of evidence to support him being Wayne Craven’s accomplice, although people could always manufacture it if they were keen enough, and they had.

The criminal profiler had said that Craven’s accomplice was bound to be someone like him: bullied, indolent, glib, flitting from job to job with a wasteground of broken relationships behind him. That alone should have set her father completely out of the frame for no one could have been more solid in every way, loving and faithful to his family than big Eddie Urbaniak. He’d spent everything he had on consultations and treatments to make his wife well again, and when he couldn’t, his focus became on bettering the quality of her remaining life. Then he’d had to bring up his daughter single-handedly when his wife died way too young.

So what that he’d gone to school with Wayne Craven and stood up for him as a boy because he couldn’t stand up for himself and was kind to him as an adult? He had been kind to everyone. So what that when his name was mentioned to Wayne Craven on his deathbed, Craven had smiled? All that meant was that Craven remembered that Eddie had been consistently good to him, the only person who ever had. But every time the story was revived in the press, the whole flimsy rumour machine started up again. Some people, Sky knew, wanted the second man to be a big, gentle Polish-born bloke who made and mended teddy bears for a living, because that would make an entertaining story. And one of them, for sure, was Angel Sutton.

The diner looked inviting, and a really nice man, who introduced himself as Ray, showed her to one of the booths in a quiet corner. There were a couple of flyers tucked between the salt and pepper pots on the table. One said: LADIES OF ALL AGES: MAKE NEW FRIENDS. TUESDAY FRIENDSHIP CLUB 6 P.M. and she didn’t consciously commit that to memory, but it happened all the same.

She chose a burger and a moon-pie-flavoured milk shake and tried not to think about creepy Wilton Dearne who was waiting for her back home.

Mel clicked on her laptop. She was fed up and Saturday night TV was rubbish. She’d flicked through Netflix, Paramount Plus and Prime, and despite all the offerings, there was none that took her fancy.

She felt a bit sly really going onto Facebook, but she was just curious for a reason she couldn’t name. She found social media a bore at best, couldn’t see the point of taking a picture of your dinner and posting it online to entertain folk, but the devil made work for idle hands, as they said. She wanted to see if there were any photos of Steve’s school reunion. She wanted to see if there were any photos of Saran Sykes.

She was easy enough to find because, even though her status was married, she was still using her maiden name. Her profile picture showed her wearing a pink tunic in a beauty salon but the header was a group shot of what was obviously the party at the school. She was bang in the centre with Steve at one side of her, his arm draped around her shoulder. She looked glam, perfectly blonde, tanned, a cracking figure; great arms that she was happy to show off in a glittery top with no sleeves; boobs that worked against gravity; big snoggy lips. Her wall showed loads of photos of the night. There she was dancing, chinking glasses with other women, laughing, having a great time. On another, someone else was in main focus larking around, but she was in the background with Steve. Her back was to the wall and she was smiling up at him as if he’d said something amusing, or sweet. Steve looked good in the photos: handsome, happy. There he was again with her, and they were talking animatedly by the look of it, behind them was a row of three blokes doing the can-can. It was odd seeing him with another woman so close, looking like a couple. Mel felt the stirrings of something alien in her gut, a silly, acid jealousy that was pathetic, but she felt it all the same.