Chapter 5
Lord’s Yard is the last thing before the speed limit sign at the east end of Menstrie. The second-last thing is Victoria Terrace, where the Croziers lived, so we’ve been friends since we were three. Kind of. Depending how you’re counting.
Back at the start, we played together whenever we could persuade one of our mums to take us along the side of the busy road, chubby hand held tight, chubby leg stung by nettles and scratched by brambles, but protected from the whizzing cars by that maternal bulk.
Then we met up in the reading corner on the first day of nursery school, charmed and thrilled to find out that we would see each other every day now, no pestering required.
We saw each other every day for the next thirteen years.
We saw each other through puberty, first loves, first heartbreaks, and her wedding.
She got me through my mum’s early, savage cancer and my tests for genetic markers, my dad’s heart attack and all the leftover trauma I felt when John went to have his arteries checked out.
She celebrated with me when it turned out we both got my mum’s healthy heart and my dad’s lack of cancer genes.
She never bugged me about celebrating in quiet settings, so I didn’t have to scream over the hubbub and end up wrecking my voice for work.
Then, somehow, we lost each other. I suppose it must have been my fault because I met Kai and moved, but I kept emailing, sending birthday cards and Christmas cards, inviting her over.
It was Chloe who vanished. John kept me up to date, telling me she’d left her restaurant job and started a cleaning business, she’d got divorced and was working her way round the county, rugby teams first. I wrote to her then but got no reply and didn’t push it.
So, it’s an understatement to say I was surprised to hear from her after Kai’s diagnosis. “John told me,” she said, on a phone call that showed she had no idea what time it was in Hawaii. “Is the invitation still open?”
It was, and it stayed open for the nineteen months Kai was dying.
She said, the day after his funeral when we went for one last walk up the canyon, that what I had lived through day by day, too close to focus on it, was five snapshots for her: both of us looking healthy but stunned right after the diagnosis; Kai stumbling over his words but still cheerful, after surgery, and me spending down my capital of hope; Kai bloated on steroids in his electric wheelchair and me thinner than I’d ever been, with my hair dry and breaking; Kai lying wordless in the hospital bed we drew up to the window so he could watch the birds while I watched him, marking every breath; finally, on the last trip, a box with the lid shut and me . . .
“What?” I said. “Me what?” We had stopped at the lookout on a ridgeline path, jungle laid out before us and ocean winking in the distance. I screeched the question from my ravaged throat, work the last thing on my mind now, my voice a broken croak. “Me what, Chloe?”
“You wrapped up in blankets and fed off a teaspoon,” she said, handing me a tissue.
She had bought the good ones, with the lotion, but still I could only dab at the raw skin under my nose where I’d blown it with the cheap ones before she arrived.
“You coddled and cared for. I’m scared when I look at you. ”
“Are you applying for the job?” I said, snorting instead of blowing my nose again, then turning away to spit. “Coddler, carer, blanket wrapper?”
“Of course,” she told me. “Who else?”
So it’s Chloe I phone, sitting parked on the road outside Saint Helen’s once Neighbourhood Watch Man has seen me off.
She doesn’t answer, because it’s a workday and she runs the cleaning business she owns like she ran the restaurant she managed.
She used to stalk around on those high heels she swore were comfy, head going side to side like a raptor, looking for empty glasses, dropped crumbs, customers trying to catch an eye.
These days she’s in trainers, and she’s looking for stray hairs on porcelain, watermarks on chrome, balls of dust. But she’s the same old Chloe.
It’s like those missing seven years of our friendship never happened.
“It’s Lindsay,” I say to her voicemail. “Look, I’ve had a bit of a shock.
That’s too extreme. I’ve had a bit of a disappointment.
And I’m having these—” Except, thinking I knew Farmer George in the property centre was nothing really.
And I’m mad to question whether Peggy was real.
It was only yesterday that I— Although I missed a day, didn’t I?
And the visual stuff? I’ve already decided that’s grief and jet lag.
“I’ve had a disappointment,” I say again.
“Any chance you’re up for a drink tonight? I need you.”
I really do hope she’s free, I think, about a minute after I get back to Lord’s Yard, because John and Shelley are at me again, tag-teaming, worse than this morning, and not even seeing my nephews again can make it bearable. I need a break.
The five of us have sat down for early tea because the boys have got football.
I don’t know how they can run about for ninety minutes after one of Shelley’s dinners, but they’re shovelling down rice and some kind of ham-and-pineapple concoction she tells me is curry.
I’ve taken a spoonful of rice and a spoonful of salad.
I don’t want to let on that Hawaiian food has ruined me but the sweet-and-sour sauce coating the lumps of meat makes me think of orange toffee.
John starts. “You can’t be on your own yet, Lindsay.”
“You’re the boss,” I tell him.
The boys snigger.
“He’s right for once,” Shelley says. “You’re not okay.”
“Of course I’m not okay!”
“Yeah, but we don’t mean that,” says Shelley. “We both noticed—”
“It’s probably jet lag,” John says, making my heart thump in my chest. Noticed what? All of a sudden, a sob escapes me, like a bubble that’s got no choice but to rise and burst. Tears roll down my face and tremble on the edge of my jaw.
“Mu-um!” Zak says, like a flare of danger. Poor kid.
“Mu-um!” says Nicky, mocking him.
“Behave!” John snaps.
“John, for God’s sake don’t take it out on them,” I say, wiping my face and sniffing. “I’m sorry, you two.”
“Tell Auntie Lindsay you’re fine sharing a room while she’s here,” Shelley says.
Zak and Nicky look warily at me, at their mum, then their dad, nod once and go back to eating.
I think they were primed, and they just failed.
Certainly, John’s looking daggers at the tops of their heads and Shelley’s smirking, like she always does when the boys are typical.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to love someone so much you love them even more when they’re annoying.
“Just don’t make any rash decisions,” John says.
“Like what?”
“You’re so subtle,” Shelley says, and he glares at her, but he looks uncomfortable too.
Then we hear a car, and we all turn our eyes to the door, grateful for the distraction.
“Here comes the casting vote,” I say, hoping I’m right. “Here comes the real boss.”
Right enough Chloe appears after tapping on the window with her nails.
She dumps her bag down, gives me a bone-cracking hug and a smacker of a kiss on the top of my head, then and goes to the kitchen tap to get a drink of water, her uniform hugging her figure in a way that makes Zak glue his eyes to her back.
She always wears the same uniform as her cleaners: a navy blue tunic—big white logo on the back, a smaller version of it on the breast pocket—and a pair of navy yoga pants.
For all the bending and kneeling, she said when I saw her in them for the first time.
Her white socks and trainers are scuff-free and blinding, and her hair is pulled up in a high knot, showing a face free of make-up.
She wears no jewellery at all and, although she says she can’t ask her staff to take their wedding rings off, she usually gets them stud- and chain-free in a couple of weeks.
“I needed that,” she says when she’s gulped down half a glassful.
She knew where to reach for the glasses, and I wonder if Shelley minds my friend acting as if this house is still the place she used to come to play after school, where she would ask my mum what we were having before she decided whether to accept an invitation to stay and eat.
She’s eying up the ham-and-pineapple gloop as if she could be persuaded now. That’s one of the things I love about Chloe. She’s very successful. She might even be rich these days. But she has no airs about her. Tap water and tinned ham get the same response as Veuve Clicquot and Wagyu beef.
“Welcome home, Lindsay,” she says. “And don’t argue, because I have made an executive decision for you, like we agreed.”
“Eh?” I say. “When did we agree that?”
Kai said, one time about a year ago, that I let Chloe boss me around too much and asked me how come she was the leader in all our exploits with me just following along uncomplaining.
I said nothing, only smiled. “What?” he asked me.
We were having this conversation in the house that he’d grown up in, on the island where he was native, before I went to work in the bespoke dead room that he preferred to either a sound pod or a rented studio.
I was his perfect wife because I was Chloe’s perfect friend.
Equally happy to be both. Still, I’d like to know what she’s on about.
John and Shelley are nodding in approval, even though they can’t have any more of a clue than me.
“You need a place to stay,” she goes on, steamrollering me as usual.
“She’s staying here,” says John.
Chloe waves a hand at him. “And you’re in no position to be making tough choices, so I’m going to make them for you.”
“Now hang on—” John says.
“I’m going to find you a house,” Chloe says.
“I can find myself a—”
“She’s not moving,” John says.