know I’m not the only one, that I’m not a freak like Donna says I am, that I’m not unnatural or pervy or weird or anything, but do you just feel sometimes, when it comes to other people, that you are just – just
CHAPTER TEN
Since the evening of the green-apple Martinis – not an evening to be remembered without wincing, on several fronts – Chrissie had been much on Sue’s mind. Chrissie had always been such a contrast to Sue, so organized in her life and her person, so apparently able to make decisions and steer her life and her family in a way that was invisible to them but satisfactory to her, so very much an example of that exasperating breed of women who, when interviewed in their flawless homes about their ability not to go mad running four or five people’s lives as wel as their own, plus a job, smiled serenely and said it was real y just a matter of making lists.
Sue had never made a list in her life. There was a large old blackboard nailed to the wal in her kitchen on which the members of the household –
Sue, her partner Kevin, Sue’s sister Fran, who was an intermittent lodger, and three children – were supposed to write food and domestic items that needed replacing. But nobody did. The blackboard was used for games of hangman, and writing rude poems, and drawing body parts as a chal enge to Sue to demand to know who drew them, and then forbid it. But Sue wasn’t interested in chal enges about which child was responsible for a row of caricature penises drawn in mauve chalk. Sue, just now, was interested in why her friend Chrissie seemed to have disintegrated since Richie’s death, and be unable to access any of the admirable managerial and practical qualities that she had manifested when he was alive. It shocked Sue that Richie’s clothes stil hung in the bedroom cupboards and that the only change to their bedroom had been the removal of two pil ows from the bed. It shocked her even more that his piano stil sat in the room where he had practised, hours every day, which now was in grave danger of becoming the most lifeless and pointless kind of shrine.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Sue said to Kevin, ‘if she wasn’t hunting for hairs in his comb.’
Kevin, who was twelve years younger than Sue, and worked for a high-class local plumber, was reading the evening paper.
He said, without looking up, ‘Wouldn’t you do that for me?’
Sue looked at him. Kevin had had a shaved head ever since she met him.
‘Very funny. But Chrissie isn’t funny. She might be griefstricken but I think she’s more loss-stricken. The structure of her life was founded on that bloody man, and that’s gone now he’s gone.’
Kevin said, staring at the sports page, ‘What a wanker.’
‘She loved him,’ Sue said.
Kevin shrugged.
‘Kev,’ Sue said, ‘Kev. Are you listening to me? You like Chrissie.’
Kevin shook the paper slightly.
‘Fit bird.’
‘You like her. When I suggest seeing her, you don’t behave like I’ve asked you to have tea with the Queen, like you do with Verna or Daniel e.’
Kevin made a face. Sue leaned across the table and twitched the paper out of his hands. He didn’t move, merely sat there with his hands out, as they had been while holding the paper.
‘Listen to me, tosser boy.’
‘On message,’ Kevin said.
‘Chrissie is stuck. Chrissie is lost. Chrissie is consumed by a sense of betrayal and a hopeless rage and jealousy about that lot up in Newcastle.
Chrissie needs to move forward because there’s no money coming in and those useless little madams, her daughters – sorry, I exclude Amy, on a good day – aren’t going to lift a spoiled finger to help her or change their ways. Chrissie is in some bad place with the door locked and what I would like to do, Kev, is find the key.’
Kevin gazed at her. Sue waited. Years ago, when they had first met, Kevin sitting gazing, apparently blankly, at her had driven her wild. She’d shrieked at him, certain his mind had slipped back to its comfort zones of footbal and sex and boiler systems. But over time she had learned that not only did Kevin not think like her, he also manifested his thinking quite differently. Quite often, when he was just sitting there, ostensibly gormlessly, his mind was like rats in a cage, zooming up and down and round and about, seeking an answer. If Sue waited long enough, she had discovered, Kevin would say something that not only astounded and delighted her with its astuteness but also proved that, while absorbed in the newspaper or the television, he had missed not a nuance or a syl able of what had been going on around him.
‘I learned deadpan as a kid,’ he once said to Sue. ‘It was best, real y. Saved getting clobbered al the time.’
Kevin leaned forward. Very gently, he took his newspaper back. Then he said, ‘Get that piano out of the house.’
* * *
The house was quiet. Amy was at school, Tamsin was at work and Chrissie, in a grey-flannel trouser suit, had gone into town, to an address off the Tottenham Court Road, for an interview.
‘I don’t hold out much hope,’ Chrissie said to Dil y before she left. She had her handbag on the kitchen table and was checking its contents. Dil y had her laptop open. She preferred working in the kitchen because that left her bedroom pristine and undisturbed. It also meant that, if there were any distractions going on, she wouldn’t miss them. Next to her laptop lay a manual on hair-removal techniques. The screen on her laptop showed her Facebook account.
‘Why’d you say that?’
‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ Chrissie said. ‘It doesn’t feel
