After a struggle, Belle dragged the small leather pouf across the rug towards her. She heard ‘Brighton’, and ‘I called in to see your mum’, and ‘Just a cup of tea. I’m leaving now’, then settled her head back against the cover she’d crocheted for the wheelchair, put her feet up on the pouf and let out a small, silent fart. Joe was going to do something stupid, she was suddenly convinced of it – and Joe wasn ‘t the kind of man who could get away with doing stupid things and not suffer the consequences. What had she done?
Linda went into the shed to look for a bucket. She couldn’t remember whether they had a bucket or not, but she hadn’t been able to find one in the house or the garage so if they did turn out to have a bucket, this is where it would be. The torch-beam swung across the red-tiled roof and upper-storey windows of the doll’s house Joe built Jessica for her fourth birthday that was put into storage by the time she was six, after the incident with the Sindy dolls. Linda had been cleaning Jessica’s room one day and opened up the doll’s house to find a scene inside worthy of a Turkish prison. Jessica had a penchant, it turned out, not only for cutting off her dolls’ hair, but for holding bits of them – usually the forehead or breasts – against light bulbs until the plastic melted. There wasn’t a doll with nipples intact or a complete forehead left. The light hit a Classic Cars calendar for 1979, hung on a rusting nail, the page turned to May. The girl in the picture was wearing a white cowboy hat and looked happy. She didn’t know why Joe had put the calendar up. The off-cut from the lounge carpet at Whateley Road that he had put down on the shed floor was much more Joe than the Classic Cars calendar; much more the Joe she knew anyway. She looked down at the orange swirls, remembering Whateley Road as clearly as if it was a place she could walk into. They’d had a bucket at Whateley Road – Jessica’s old nappy bucket – that she used to mop the kitchen and bathroom floors with twice a week, and that Joe used to wash his car and the windows with. Whateley Road had been immaculate – bacteria free.
Then she moved to Pollards Close and met Dominique, who didn’t mop floors or put magazines at right angles on the coffee table, or iron the family’s underwear. Once a week an elderly woman with facial hair and arthritis came and cleaned No. 4 Pollards Close. She did the ironing as well, and in between her weekly visits Dominique just let the fallout gather. When they ran out of dishes she bought Findus ready meals and they ate them out of the cartons; clothes were worn un-ironed, and dirty underwear was left stranded on the bedroom floor. Linda remembered on only her second visit to No. 4 – while drinking coffee from a cup with rings of stains inside – the cleaner coming downstairs with a pair of lace knickers in her hand.
‘What d’you want me to do with these?’ She held them up in a crabbed hand to show where the lace panel at the front had been ripped.
The three women stared at the ripped knickers. Linda tried to take a sip of her coffee and burnt her mouth.
‘Bin them,’ Dominique said.
The cleaner nodded, her yellow eyes watering, and left the room.
‘No initiative,’ Dominique apologised.
Linda soon realised that Dominique and her cleaner were playing games with each other. War was going on; a war that had never been declared, which was what games were, she supposed: war without the declaration, and people played them whether they loved each other or hated each other. Not because life was too short, but because for most people life was too long. Even people like Dominique, who got their underwear ripped during marital sex. All Linda saw for months afterwards, every time she shut her eyes, was the pair of knickers held aloft in the cleaner’s arthritic hand. What kind of animal was Dominique married to? An animal who knew how to fly planes, and who looked like an anarchic version of Cliff Richard: Captain Saunders.
No. 4 was a pigsty whose pigs were having sex, and its slovenly glamour was something Linda spent a lot of her early months in Pollards Close trying to emulate, until Joe complained. Then, when she finally persuaded him to take on the Saunders’ arthritic cleaner themselves, she got embarrassed about the state of the house and ended up cleaning the day before the cleaner arrived. The thought of a stranger finding pubic hairs in her bath made her wince, and this was something she just couldn’t change about herself. After ten months the arthritic cleaner handed her notice in. She stood there in a badly felting jumper with a row of snowflakes knitted across it and told Linda that her conscience wouldn’t let her carry on taking money from her every Thursday. Linda handed her an envelope with her last week’s wages in and the yellow watering eyes nodded their thanks. No. 8 Pollards Close became immaculate once more, and that month Linda ordered over fifty pounds’ worth of home-improvement gadgets from the Bettaware catalogue, including a hands-free can opener, a vacuum packer for storing summer clothes under the bed during the winter and vice versa, and a stone frog with a hollow stomach to hide spare sets of keys in. She especially loved the frog that came lying on a lily pad – until Dominique pointed out that it looked like it was masturbating.
After a while she found a bucket shaped like a castle that they must have bought for Jessica on one of the Dorset holidays. Ever since the company had taken off she’d tried to persuade Joe to take them somewhere they’d need suntan lotion, but he didn’t like it abroad – wherever that was. The white plastic bucket handle had rust notched into it from where it had been hanging on a nail in the shed wall. Inside there was a web, but no spider. Linda went back into the garden. When did snow fall so hard and fast it technically became a blizzard? She swung round, the bucket in her hand, and tried to pick out the lights at the back of the house while wondering if anybody had ever died in a blizzard in their own back garden before, but was too preoccupied by the Niemans coming to dinner that night to imagine her funeral properly, and Joe’s grief over her tragic death.
Trying not to look at the tree, whose branches stood out clearly, she ploughed through the snow to where she’d seen the dog shit earlier. If this blizzard carried on the turds would be buried, but she needed to make sure because she wanted to put the garden floodlights on later, the ones Joe put in last weekend, and leave the curtains in the lounge open, and she didn’t want Mrs Nieman staring out through the patio doors at a trail of turds. She stumbled around for a while, her nose streaming and the bucket banging against her thighs, but the turds were buried without trace.
Just to make sure, she went back into the garage and flicked on the switch for the garden lights. Peering through the kitchen window, she could see floodlit snow and, if she concentrated, the pond Joe put in last summer for his fish. Joe loved fish; he loved sitting in his deckchair watching them, and he’d made a good job of the pond. She was proud of it as well because theirs was the only back garden in Pollards Close with a pond, but was it worth putting the lights on tonight if the guests had to concentrate in order to see it? Was concentrating something you should expect guests to do?
She carried on staring through the window, becoming slowly more aware of the kitchen behind her, reflected in the glass, than the floodlit garden on the other side of it. There were two empty plates on the breakfast bar where there had been a triple chocolate mousse cake and Black Forest gateau before she went into the shed. She turned slowly away from the reflection in the window to stare at the real plates on the real breakfast bar. For the next two minutes, she swung between reflection and reality, her life pivoting on the fact that the gateaux were no longer there. She’d been on the Slimshake diet for over a fortnight now. Was she so desperate for solids she’d eaten the gateaux herself – without even realising?
Still in Jessica’s old Wellingtons, she ran into the garage, yanked open the lid of the chest freezer and pushed her arms through a month’s worth of freezer food the Ice Man lorry had delivered only yesterday, but there were no more gateaux: cheesecakes, but no gateaux; ice cream, but no gateaux. She’d spent hours over the Ice Man catalogue preparing the order, and the gateaux had a whole centre spread to themselves. She could see that centre spread now as she walked in from the garage.
‘Ferdie! FERDIE!’ she yelled.
A dog’s collar bell tinkled in the living room.
She went through. The dachshund she’d asked Joe for last Christmas stood up on the sofa, but looked as though he was still sitting.
An oasis of brown and pink vomit lay