Alas, whilst she was fretting over the disappointing pudding with its lacklustre commercial custard, Kay’s motions became so jagged that she knocked over her port glass, splashing fortified wine onto the printouts and using up three or four minutes of the twenty-eight that apparently remained of her entire life on mopping up the spill. Port had also splattered her lovely white dress. Although she didn’t want to waste even more time changing clothes, being found covered in ruby stains seemed déclassé.
Cyril fetched her a refill, but when he returned with a tray it also held a pitcher of water and two tumblers. He set the tray in the middle of the coffee table with the stern priestly air of serving communion.
“It’s taken me ages to realize that I still don’t understand what this is,” Kay blithered. “I mean, it’s difficult to quit something when you’ve no idea what you’re quitting. I may be eighty, and perhaps that really is as much time as I deserve, but I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive in the first place, much less what it means to die. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it was we were supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there was something I was supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in”—she checked her watch again—“fourteen minutes!”
Cyril had just launched into some Jonathan Livingston Seagull-style pap about only being able truly to understand what you have once you’re in the process of losing it when the front door banged open and slammed. Hayley burst into the sitting room. Kay couldn’t stop herself thinking what a pity it was that at only forty-eight their daughter had grown awfully dumpy. She’d been just a slip of a thing at university.
“Mum!” Hayley knelt and took her mother’s face in both hands. She was wearing a kooky homemade mask whose fabric was incongruously covered in smiley faces. “Look at me! Have you taken anything? Tell me, quick, whilst you still can, if you’ve taken something, what is it?”
In their daughter’s clutch, Kay could just catch Cyril’s face in the corner of her eye. His expression communicated in an instant that he could indeed distinguish between a mere difference of opinion on a political matter and full-on personal betrayal. He had never in their marriage shot her a look that cutting. “You told her.”
“Sweetheart, please stop slapping my cheeks like that,” Kay implored over sirens wah-oo-wha-oo-wha-ooing terribly close to this house. “I’m quite awake, we’re both fine, and no one has consumed anything untoward, unless you count an underwhelming crumble.” Just then she wished that she had indeed popped upstairs to change, because the splattered white dress conveyed the very derangement that Cyril’s scheme was designed to avoid.
Impatient pounding sounded on the front door.
“Whoever’s that?” Kay said.
“Who do you think, Mum?” Hayley said. “I obviously rang nine-nine-nine!”
“Emergency services!” More pounding. “Open up!”
Kay realized that she was still foolishly clutching the stem of her port glass, which with all Hayley’s patting and shaking had spilled yet more fortified wine on her dress. When she reached to put it on the coffee table, a sharp, excruciating pain in her right shoulder was another reminder of the corruption that Cyril would have spared her. As she attempted to scurry to the door, just rising from the sofa was slow going, and one didn’t “scurry” with arthritic toes. Hayley hurried ahead to let in the ambulance crew.
“We got a call-in about an attempted suicide?” a male voice boomed.
“My mum claims she hasn’t taken anything,” Hayley said, “but I’m not sure I believe her.”
When Kay arrived in the foyer covered in port, which they might have mistaken for blood, she didn’t make for a very credible witness when she protested again that neither she nor her spouse had imbibed anything more poisonous than watery Sainsbury’s custard. There was a hullabaloo about pumping her stomach anyway or at least taking her to hospital for observation.
“Hayley, it’s true I was having second thoughts, and on balance I’m glad to see you,” Kay said. “But we needn’t trouble these fine paramedics, who must have far more urgent situations to attend to during a national emergency. I don’t want all this fuss!”
“Madam,” one of the medics said through his mask and from behind a Perspex facial shield, in a tone that denoted anything but respect. They were both wearing not only blue surgical gloves, but full-body protective suits, as if en route to outer space. “Can you please inform us if the household contains any firearms?”
“Of course we weren’t planning to use a gun,” Kay dismissed. “What a messy business that would be.”
“Mum, if you’re telling the truth about not having taken anything yet, then where’s the bottle? Where are the tablets?”
“I’m not sure I prefer to tell you,” Kay said stiffly. “I might care to stick around a bit longer, but it’s our business if we—”
“Mum!” Hayley violently shook her mother’s shoulders; this scene would surely satisfy the girl’s keen appetite for high drama for weeks. “Where are the tablets?”
That right shoulder was now screaming in such pain that it might have been dislocated; if only to make her daughter stop, Kay capitulated. “In the fridge. A black box, top shelf, back left.”
Hayley returned from the kitchen glaring and empty-handed. “It’s not there.”
“Then ask Cyril. He’s the master of ceremonies.”
“You mean Dad is the homicidal maniac, from the sound of it!” Hayley exclaimed. “Another Dr Kevorkian! Or Harold Shipman!
