eight
As the millennium approached, their trade declined. It was nothing personal, no misstep in Colette’s business plan. All the psychics called up to grouch about it. It was as if their clients had put their personal curiosity on pause, as if they had been caught up in some general intake of breath. The new age was celebrated at Admiral Drive with fireworks, released by careful fathers from the raw back plots. The children’s play area, the natural site for the fiesta, had been fenced off and KEEP OUT notices erected.
The local free sheet said Japanese knotweed had been found. “Is that a good thing?” Michelle asked, over the back fence. “I mean, are they conserving it?”
“No, I think it’s noxious,” Al said. She went inside, worried. I hope it’s not my fault, she thought. Had Morris pissed on the plot, on his way out of her life?
Some people didn’t buy into the knotweed theory. They said the problem was an unexploded bomb, left over from the last war—whenever that was. Evan leaned over the fence and said, “Have you heard about that bloke over Reading way, Lower Earley? On a new estate like this? He kept noticing his paint was blistering. His drains filled up with black sludge. One day he was digging in his vegetable plot, and he saw something wriggling on his spade. He thought, hell, what’s this?”
“And what was it?” Colette asked. Sometimes she found Evan entrancing.
“It was a heap of white worms,” he said. “Where you’ve got white worms you’ve got radioactivity. That’s the only thing you need to know about white worms.”
“So what did he do?”
“Called in the council,” Evan said.
“If it were me I’d call in the army.”
“Of course it’s a cover-up. They denied everything. Poor beggar’s boarded the place up and cut his losses.”
“So what caused it?”
“Secret underground nuclear explosion,” Evan said. “Stands to reason.”
At Admiral Drive a few people phoned the local environmental health department, putting questions about the play area, but officials would only admit to some sort of blockage, some sort of seepage, some sort of contamination the nature of which they were unable as yet to confirm. They insisted that the white worm problem was confined to the Reading area and that none of them had made their way to Woking. Meanwhile the infants remained shut out of paradise. They roared with temper when they saw the swings and the slide, and rattled the railings. Their mothers dragged them uphill, towards their Frobishers and Mountbattens, out of harm’s way. Nobody wanted news of the problem to leak, in case it affected their house prices. The populace was restless and transient, and already the first FOR SALE signs were going up, as footloose young couples tried their luck in a rising market.
New Year’s Eve was cold at Admiral Drive, and the skies were bright. The planes didn’t fall out of them, and there was no flood or epidemic—none, anyway, affecting the southeast of England. The clients gave a listless, apathetic sigh and—just for a month or two—accepted their lives as they were. By spring, trade was creeping back.
“They’re coming to take samples from the drains,” Michelle told Alison.
“Who are?”
“Drain officials,” Michelle said fearfully.
After Morris left, their life was like a holiday. For the first time in years, Alison went to bed knowing she wouldn’t be tossed out of it in the small hours. She could have a leisurely late-night bath without a hairy hand pulling out the plug, or Morris’s snake tattoo rising beneath the rose-scented bubbles. She slept through the night and woke refreshed, ready for what the day might bring. She blossomed, her plumped-out skin refining itself, the violet shadows vanishing from beneath her eyes. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so well,” she said.
Colette slept through the nights too, but she looked just the same.
They began to talk about booking a last-minute holiday, a break in the sun. Morris on an aircraft had been impossible, Al said. When she was checking in, he would jump on her luggage, so that it weighed heavy and she was surcharged. He would flash his knuckle-dusters as they walked through the metal detector, causing the security staff to stop and search her. If they made it as far as the plane, he would lock himself in the lavatory or hide in some vulnerable person’s sick bag and come up—
“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Colette said. “Where would you like to go?”
“Dunno,” Al said. Then: “Somewhere with ruins. Or where they sing opera. It’s night, and you hold candles, and they sing in an arena, an amphitheatre. Or they perform plays wearing masks. If I were an opera singer I’d be quite alluring. Nobody would think I was overweight.”
Colette had been thinking in terms of sex with a Greek waiter. There was no reason, on the face of it, why Alison’s cultural yearnings and her sexual ones shouldn’t be fulfilled within five hundred yards of each other. But she pictured her hot-eyed beau circling their table on the terrace, his sighs, his raised pulse, his fiery breath, his thoughts running ahead: is it worth it, because I’ll have to pay a mate of mine to sleep with the fat girl?
“Besides,” Al said, “it would be nice to have somebody with me. I went to Cyprus with Mandy but I never saw her, she was in and out of bed with somebody new every night. I found it quite squalid. Oh, I love Mandy, don’t get me wrong. People should enjoy themselves, if they can.”
“It just happens you can’t,” Colette said.
It didn’t matter what she said to Al, she reasoned. Even if she didn’t speak out loud, Al would pull the thoughts out of her head; so she would know anyway.
Alison withdrew into a hurt silence; so they never got the holiday. A month on, she mentioned it again, timidly, but Colette snapped at her, “I don’t want to go anywhere with ruins. I want to drink too much and dance on the table. Why do you think this is all I want to do, live with you and drive you to sodding Oxted to a Celtic Mystery Convention? I spend my sodding life on the M25, with you throwing up in the passenger seat.”
Alison said timidly, “I’m not sick much, since Morris went.” She tried to imagine Colette dancing on a table. She could only conjure a harsh tango on the blond wood of the coffee table, Colette’s spine arched, her chicken-skin
