Same Time Next Week

Chapter 47

Mel had just finished giving young Jason Jepson an extra lesson on Saturday because he had an exam coming up. She had no worries about him passing, though. He didn’t want a cheese toastie because he was meeting a girl for a Nandos. Ah, she thought, young love. She remembered well that giddiness of someone being on your mind so much you should have charged them rent. She remembered it because it was recent history. Pat had been on her mind too much, and her thoughts kept returning to their evening together as if they were boomerangs. She was wise enough to realise that her ego was as damaged as her heart and she’d found a worthy bandage for it in his attentions. But was it just that? She’d enjoyed talking to him; she’d joined the still-nameless band because of his encouragement, they’d laughed together, he’d made her feel valued and listened to. Maybe in time she’d see it was merely gratitude she felt, but then gratitude didn’t tend to set off small bombs in one’s nether regions.

She’d stopped checking her phone to see if she’d missed any calls from Steve, she’d just got on with her days. There was more and more time between thoughts of him, and what he might be doing with Chloe who smelt of Chloe. If anything, her thoughts were too occupied with those five orgasms in one night; they’d taken top spot in her own personal Guinness book of records and she felt ever so smug about that.

She hadn’t changed her sheets since then, even though they were due a wash. She’d lain in bed where Pat’s scent was still present if she pressed her face hard into the pillow and inhaled and relived what they’d done. God, his tongue, no wonder she’d screamed. Steve was crap at oral. He couldn’t find the sweet spot with a satnav and a Sherpa. More often than not she’d had to commit the cardinal female sin and fake a climax when he was down there, under duress. So it was partly her fault when he repeated what he thought worked. She wouldn’t do it again – not after being with a man who made her feel as if it had been his pleasure to give her every one of those five orgasms. That’s one thing at least she’d take forward with her from all this,

‘An injection of joy’ had been an off-the-cuff remark to Amanda, but it summed it up completely. She’d be okay either way. If Steve didn’t come back, she’d work through it because she’d have to. But, if he did come back, as Pat thought he might, she had to make sure that she wasn’t so keen to forgive him that she ignored what her feelings were about it. He owed her whatever it took to get things straight in her head and that wouldn’t happen overnight. Either way, she had a journey ahead of her and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Today, though, she felt all right; in fact she was looking forward to bingeing on a new Netflix box set that the girls were talking about at work. It was a bit of a dark subject matter for an afternoon’s viewing, but who was here to tell her she should be watching it at night? Having the TV all to herself was great, no one to keep switching over mid-film to check how the cricket/snooker/football was doing.

She’d lost weight with all the trauma, and it felt good to be wearing a pair of chinos she hadn’t been able to fit into since Clinton was president. She fancied a bag of popcorn to go with her dark drama so she slipped on her Crocs and pootled down to the corner shop. When she returned, she put her key in the door to find it was already unlocked. She must have forgotten to lock it on her way out. That was the trouble with doing things on automatic pilot; more often, she fretted that she hadn’t done them, even if she always had – well, apart from this one rogue occasion. How many times had they gone out and she’d had to ask Steve to drive back to check that she’d turned her hot brush off. It used to drive him insane. Anyway, he wasn’t here to moan at her.

But when she walked into the lounge, she found that actually, he was.

Amanda took the milk, bread and Saturday newspaper out of her shopping bag. She felt numb, dry; there had been no great outpourings of grief since her mum died on Wednesday. She felt as if she were walking around, waiting for an avalanche rumbling far above her to descend. She’d heard that bereaved people entered a kind of limbo until the funeral, but there would be no funeral if Bradley had his way and so where would be the relief, the prick in the balloon that would release the tension and give her the starting point to heal?

She’d been to see Dolly Shepherd, her mum’s next-door neighbour, and the crew at the coffee shop that her mum used to frequent to deliver the news on Thursday morning. No one knew really what to say because the normal dictionary did not serve the bereaved; there were no words that brought comfort, only silly bloody platitudes about time being a great healer, except it wasn’t. There were welts inside her that had been there for decades that would never heal.

‘You’ll feel better after the funeral,’ said Dolly.

‘I don’t think there will be a funeral, Dolly. Apparently my mum’s wishes were that she didn’t have a service.’

And Dolly spoke for her too when she said, ‘Eh? That’s not right.’

Because it was wrong, so very wrong and there was nothing she could do about it since Bradley had sent her a photo of the part of the will that said Ingrid didn’t want a funeral. She’d even rung a solicitor to find out if she could contest this idiotic stipulation which she knew her mother must have been coerced into. He explained that the funeral wishes were not legally binding but the executor was in charge of the decision-making and Bradley was sole executor – because he’d photographed that part of the will for her too.

Amanda sent a text to Bradley, because if she rang she just might lose her temper and say something she shouldn’t. She volunteered to pay for the funeral herself. He replied not long after that he’d consider her request, as if she were a charity on the scrounge for a raffle prize.

She made herself a cup of tea and prepared to lose herself in the newspaper, divert her thoughts away from what was happening around her. Shit seemed to come in great big clods, it was never evenly spaced out to give one time to breathe between assaults. Luck never came like that: it came in a five-pound lottery win and then nothing for weeks, but crap… barrowfuls of it, this way please, just dump it right here on my head. Bradley was enjoying being in charge because he was an ineffectual little twerp who always lost whenever they confronted one another. Now, he held all the cards, all the power and he was loving lording it over her for a change. God knows where Kerry got her specs from to see him as Leonides, king of Sparta, over the breakfast table in their glossy white kitchen with his ridiculous racehorse teeth.

She read, but none of the news was uplifting: stabbings; peaceful protests that turned violent; some holier-than-thou MP caught on the fiddle; a scandal in the making of old people being ripped off by unscrupulous equity release and home reversion companies that seduced them into selling the houses they lived in but for way below the market value. They arranged the quickest of sales with misleading small print in the contracts. Some pensioners, led to believe they would be in situ for life, had been evicted and it was all legal and above board.

She turned the page, but there was something about the ripped-off pensioners that made the piece stick in her head long after she’d finished the whole paper, where it sat and fermented.