“Like Bet Lynch on the Street, for ever trying to get away, pinning her hopes on another man. Leaving and coming back with her wings broken. She ended up in Spain. You never found out if she was happy, did you? You just have to imagine. Why couldn’t these women be happy where they were? In their own programmes?”
Nesta draws breath. She is out of synch with Liz.
Something is happening.
Elsie shouts out, “Do something.”
“Fetch a nurse!” Tom yells.
Nesta blinks. None of them know what to do. Liz is hyperventilating. She starts to thrash about on the bed.
Tubes plop out of her nose. She is disconnecting herself. She shouts something about the motel being on fire.
“Yes! Yes!” Tom shouts at her, overcoming his panic. Now he’s fascinated and eager. “Tell us more, tell us about the fire...”
“I’m on the boat now,” Liz says, lying still again. “The fire has finished.”
“Where is the fire?” asks Tom, leaning close.
“They dragged me out of the fire. I’d left, but you never knew.”
“Where is the boat going to?” Tom asks.
“To the other land, the new place,” she says.
Tom nods smugly. “The next place!” he echoes.
“You all thought I’d perished. You couldn’t find my body. But I was on the QE2, ready for a long-earned rest.’
“Are you going to the next place now?” he asks, urgently.
“I am wearing a white headscarf and a white frock, and here I am, wishing to sail into the sunset.”
Elsie gasped. “She thinks she’s in Crossroads!”
Tom stared aghast at Nesta. “You’ve brought her back to life!”
Liz starts to cry. She cries lustily, with all of her might.
TWENTY-SIX
“To me,” Fran told her husband, “they looked shifty. I wouldn’t trust them an inch.”
“There you go,” he tutted. “I knew this would happen. All this hospital visiting.”
It was a gloomy night. Fran was glad to be indoors again, but she had brought the atmosphere in with her. She couldn’t shake the feeling off. She wanted to sit down, put her feet up. Frank had the house upside down, up to his eyeballs in mortar. He was building in the living room in a little vest top.
She stared at his freckles, just fading from the summer. He had them all over his shoulders, too. “I’m taking care of my mates,” she said distractedly. “Liz needs looking after.”
Frank grunted and went back to work. He buttered each of the breezeblocks carefully. He’d put plastic down so he’d get nothing on the carpet. At least he’d taken that precaution.
He was in a new, industrious phase, building an indoor fish pond for their living room. He’d drawn up all the plans. There was to be a fountain, plants, weed, fairy lights. These days he always had his little projects going. He’d moved on so much from his days of drinking lager and doing bugger all else. To that extent Fran was proud of him. She wasn’t keen on the fish-pond idea, but he was obsessed with fish. He’d put a tank in the bathroom. Watching fish, he said, made him drink less booze.
She wondered if Elsie was drinking less again, with her Tom back. She preferred Elsie pissed.
“The way they trooped into her room,” she said, more to herself. “Like they were going in to interrogate her.”
He commiserated. “Tom, Elsie and Nesta. What a bunch!” They weren’t his favourite people.
“I think I’ll pop out and see how Penny is getting on. I should tell her about this.”
He stood up and raised both eyebrows. “Don’t go stirring up trouble.”
She drew in an audible breath. “It’s never me that does the stirring! It’s always me that wants things to settle down!”
On her way to Penny’s she bumped into Mark.
“Have you seen Penny today?” she asked.
“Me? Should I?”
“Oh,” she faltered. “I thought...”
Mark smiled gruesomely. “You thought what, Fran?”
“Oh, you know.” She smirked, wanting the tarmac to open and swallow her up. “The usual idle gossip. The usual bloody rubbish.”
He snorted. “Ay, I know all right. You heard that Penny and I were an item. Well, we’re not. That’s Elsie, sticking her neb in and trying to cause bother.” He squinted at her in the gloom. They used to be close, him and Fran. As close as you could get watching sad TV movies together. “Hey. You don’t look right.”
“Frank’s right,” she said. “I do spend too much time running after people’s lives.”
He nodded. “Maybe you do, Fran.”
“Cheers!” She laughed, looked down and saw that she still had her slippers on. With her toes she could feel a worn hole the size of a ten-pence piece. Running out in her slippers. The pink fur was all wet. It was as if she thought all of Phoenix Court was indoors, her house.
“But,” he said, “if I needed a good mate on my side — I’d wish it was you.”
“Oh, get away!” she chuckled, and submitted to a quick, clumsy hug from the tattooed man.
“Penny?” Fran banged on her kitchen door. “Are you in?”
The kitchen was lit up inside and steamy with cooking. Penny’s blurry purple shape came to unlock the door.
“Is it Mam?”
“It’s something and nowt, pet.”
“Come on in, Fran.”
Penny had been doing herself a stir-fry. The kitchen was scented with ginger and soya sauce. Fran wasn’t sure, but as they passed through the kitchen into the living room, she thought she saw the water chestnuts tip themselves into the spitting wok. “Should you leave that cooking by itself?” she asked, following Penny. Penny said it was all right.
Fran started to take her coat off as Penny turned down the stereo. Carole King. The phone rang.
“It’s the hospital,” Penny said, before she even snatched up the receiver.
This is a fairly warm night for the time of year. The boxy houses are chocolate brown against the evening’s dusky pink. Mark thinks the estate looks like a chocolate box tied up with a ribbon — the triangles and oblongs of the rooftops.
When Mark returns home he has a sudden inspiration and changes
