Jubilee (13 page)

‘Hey, I know. How about one final treat? You want?’

‘Yeah. Yes, please.’

As her mum disappeared upstairs, Colette looked down at herself, a sweep of red polyester, white socks, the gloss of her Mary Janes. She leaned over experimentally, letting her skirt fall forward to obliterate her knees, then her buckles, then everything except the shiny curves of red at the very tips of her shoes. When her mum came back down, she was holding something behind her back.

‘Now, how about …’ – she pulled her hand round with a flourish – ‘… this?’

It was her clay sun pendant, Colette’s favourite. She’d never been allowed to wear it before. It wasn’t red, white or blue, like they were meant to wear that day, but Colette decided not to let that matter.

‘Wow! That’s great! Thanks, Mum. Can I wear it out?’

‘Yes you can. Special treat. Let’s pop it on.’

Colette dipped her head, reached towards the smiling sun as it bumped against her tummy, then watched as it rose higher. When it got to the V of her collar, it stopped.

‘I’ll just tie a little knot here; make it a bit shorter for you. There! Perfect!’ Her mum tucked the extra length of cord into the back of Colette’s blouse and the two stood silent for a moment.

‘You look lovely. Why don’t you pop over to Sarah’s? See how she’s getting on. Ask her mum if she needs any help, OK?’

‘OK.’

At Sarah’s, Colette was greeted by Mrs Miller, her apron clotted with patches of orange mush.

‘Come in, Colette. Quick!’ She held one arm away from her, sticky with the mess, and grasped the door latch delicately between the finger and thumb of her other hand. ‘The apricots came through the top of the blender. Now I’ve got to do it with tinned. Come inside.’

In the kitchen, a corner of tiling and the underside of a wall cupboard bore fruity witness to the accident. Mrs Miller busied herself with a cloth.

‘How’s your mum getting on? Not much for her to do now, I shouldn’t think?’

‘She’s fine. She said, could she help?’

‘That’s kind, but I’m OK. We’d just trip over each other. Tell her to enjoy the rest. Hey!’ She looked at Colette, surprised. ‘You’re really smart! Are those your special party clothes?’

‘Yes. Mum made them.’

‘She did a great job. Lovely red, white and blue. Wouldn’t the Queen be pleased? Do you want to look in on Sarah?’ Colette nodded. ‘Go on then! Tell her not to dawdle.’

Upstairs, Snoopy barred entry to Sarah’s room. Colette knocked with her fingertips.

‘Who is it?’

‘Colette. Your Mum said I could come up. I’ve got my new outfit on.’

There was a short pause, then Sarah opened the door, peering round from behind it.

‘Come in. I’m in the nuddie.’

Colette looked at her quickly, a narrow paleness, the bee-sting breasts, then looked away.

‘What are you wearing, then? Do you like my blouse?’

Sarah, pulling something from her wardrobe, glanced back. ‘Yeah, it’s nice. I thought I’d wear my jeans – blue – and this.’

It was her halter-neck top, the one she’d tried on before, when Colette had tied the bow.

‘It’s really nice. White and blue. I could tie it for you, if you like.’

‘OK.’

Sarah pulled on her pants, then her jeans. She turned her back to Colette, wriggled into the top and settled it across her chest. Patient as a horse being shod, she waited while Colette tied the bow.

‘How does it look?’ She turned for approval.

‘Great. No red, though.’

‘I’ve got red. Look at these. They’re new.’ She held up a pair of red wedgie sandals, with long straps that wrapped around her ankles. When she stood up in them, she wobbled slightly. Colette glowed with the luxury of it; Sarah was hers for a while. Had Mandy even seen these new shoes?

‘That looks great. Really good and … sexy.’ She stumbled on the words she’d heard them use. She looked into Sarah’s face for confirmation that it was the right one.

‘Thanks. And look: this is new. It’s from Mandy. Her mum gave it to her, but she didn’t want it. She said I could keep it.’

Sarah held up a necklace: an enamelled heart on a silver chain, its lobes fat and pillowy. More red.

‘That’s kind of her.’ Colette was quiet as Sarah turned towards the mirror to put it on. After a couple of slips she secured it, then started on her hair, brushing it into Farrah flicks, then soaking them with hairspray. She studied herself from the front, from one side, from the other. When she stepped back, she almost trod on Colette.

‘Oh! You’re still here. Thanks for helping, Colette. Doesn’t your mum need you?’

The moment was nearly gone. Soon, Sarah would be walking up the road to show Mandy her outfit, and sitting next to Mandy at the party, and – Colette could see her doing it right now – reaching up to touch her new necklace and thinking how generous Mandy was. Colette needed something special to stop those things happening, to stretch this moment a little longer, and in searching for this special thing she thought about her brother, Top Trumps and the Citroën GS.

Cai was completely mad about Top Trumps. He’d never sit still to do his homework, was always fiddling and wriggling and wandering away from the dining room table, but he’d spend hours in his room with his cards.

‘You know my secret weapon?’ he told her one morning. ‘It’s the Citroën GS. Everyone always thinks it’s a really bad card. It almost never wins. But when you look at the whole pack, it has the highest revs! Of any car!’ That was what she needed. A Citroën GS. Then, suddenly, she had it.

‘I saw something funny this morning, when me and Dad were putting up the decorations.’

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s something about Mandy.’

Sarah paused, lipgloss in hand, and looked at Colette, who continued slowly. ‘It’s something she did … with Satish.’

‘What did she do?’

Colette paused, enjoying it. She had Sarah to herself, for a little time. ‘She kissed him. On the lips.’

Sarah angled one hip out, jutted her jaw. ‘I don’t believe you! She fancies your brother.’

This was news. Colette faltered. Had she really seen it? Yes, definitely. And her dad … She tried again.

‘I was with Dad. We both saw it. Dad was cross. They kissed in Satish’s room. He kissed her first, on the cheek. But she kissed him too, on the lips, for a long time.’ There was something about the grown-up way Mandy had done it – all of it, not just the kissing. The grown-upness made Colette feel funny, sort of left out.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Sarah was saying. ‘How do you know, if it was in Satish’s room?’

‘We saw through the window. Honest.’

‘She fancies Cai,’ Sarah repeated. ‘And Satish is a Paki, anyway. She can’t fancy Satish.’ She gazed out of the window for a moment. ‘Anyway, your mum will be wanting you. We’ll go out together.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Mandy’s. Come on. You’re not to tell anyone about this, Colette. I’ll be really cross if you do.’

‘Am I coming to Mandy’s too?’

Sarah laughed. ‘No. You’re going home. This is for us big girls.’ Forestalling argument, Sarah held the door open and gestured for Colette to leave.

Maya has spent the afternoon making lists, and now Satish is getting the fall-out. It’s the end of the day, but she’s not winding down. She’s putting the children’s packed lunches together and running through the things he needs to get done. He won’t remember half of it.

‘It’s really time to redecorate our bedroom and your study. I’ll get a couple of quotes but I need you to sit down with me and talk about colours.’

‘Colours?’

‘Yes. Don’t complain. I’ll do everything else. The water softener needs more salt, and your car is due for a service. Asha’s dance thing is after school next week and I know you can’t come, but have a word with her about it so she knows you wanted to.’

‘Salt, car, dance,’ he says, but he’s thinking about the sweet viscosity of his dose, about the curve of the upside-down spoon against his tongue.

‘She’s a mermaid.’

‘A mermaid?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll jot it all down for you.’ She zips up the lunch bags and dispatches the countertop mess with centrifugal speed: knives and chopping board to the sink, cheese and red pepper to the fridge, crusts to the green bin. She pushes the lunches across to Satish: ‘Will you?’

‘Of course.’

Satish has a minute or so in the garage, and then it will start to look suspicious. He stacks the kids’ lunch bags on the bottom shelf of the fridge, fumbling in his hurry. Maya doesn’t go upstairs immediately; he can hear her bustling about in the hall and it makes him twitchy. They are separated by the width of the door, no more. He hears her muttering: ‘Shoes, shoes, shoes.’ If he gets out the diazepam and she comes in and catches him … If he delays and she starts to wonder what’s keeping him …

Doing without is not an option; he’ll have to get it over with. He gets his briefcase down, snaps it open, and is about to pull the zip on the inner pocket when he stops. There’s an envelope in the back compartment. He didn’t put it there. Satish draws his hand out and yanks the case open further, tilting it so he can get a better look. There’s a word on the envelope, mismatched letters cut out from a newspaper. It says,
read this
.

He stares for a moment, not touching it, getting used to the fact of it. This could still be innocent, he tells himself. It could be – he searches for innocuous things this could be. There are none. He knows what this is: it’s the heavy hand on his shoulder, the one he knew was coming, right here, in the same place where he keeps his … medicine! In a sudden panic, he jerks open the zip and feels inside: a bottle, a plastic bag. It’s still there.

‘Satish?’ Maya’s right outside. The handle starts to turn.

‘No! I mean, don’t! I’m … lifting something … heavy.’ (But he wants to shout at her, dreadful things. He can feel them waiting in his throat.)

‘What? Do you need a hand?’

‘No! I’m just …’ He puffs loudly, bangs his fist against the door. ‘… I’m right behind the door. A couple of suitcases slipped.’

‘Oh.’ She’s quiet for a beat, then: ‘I said you should have a tidy-up.’

‘Mm.’

‘I’m going to bed, OK?’

‘Yes. I’ll be there soon. I’ll just sort this out.’ He hears her go up, the familiar creaks and a muffled padding as she takes each stair. In her wake he has time to feel disgust at what he’s becoming, a latent emotion that dissipates quickly, like heat from the skin when you walk into cold air. He lies, he stumbles over his words; he is losing his dignity.

He reaches towards the bottle again, but then he diverts – a sleight of hand, tricking himself into it – and picks up the envelope instead. He tells himself: it’s not what you think, it’ll be fine, but even as he does so he feels the distance narrowing between himself and something terrible. He unseals the envelope, a forensic exactitude preventing him from ripping it indiscriminately. Inside, there’s a folded piece of A4 paper, the words in type.

Do the photograph or I’ll tell your secret

He feels his lower intestine liquefy. He needs to sit down, or lie down. He leans against the fridge and slides to the floor, puts his head between his knees. He finds he can’t think in any way that’s useful. It’s the betrayal, after everything, all these years and his own loyalty: Colette.

And then he goes over it again, the envelope, his name, the threat inside, re-reading it all in case it was quite different, and his panic had blinded him to what it was really saying. It’s such an extreme response, such a baffling thing to do. And if she was capable of writing this note, this terrible and unbalanced thing, then she might do everything else, too. She might tell them. He needs his dose.

There’s a quiet knock at the door and he springs up, shoving the letter into his back pocket. A dark head appears.

‘Papa?’

It’s Mehul.

‘What are you doing? Why are you still up?’

‘Not
still
. I woke up,’ he slurs. ‘I’m thirsty. Mummy said you’d give me some water.’

‘Oh, well …’ Satish lifts the briefcase onto its shelf and has a quick look round. ‘Well … all right. Come to the kitchen.’

Mehul walks beside him, slumped forward in tiredness. His hair lies every which way, his pyjama top skewed to one side. Satish hugs his son to him, a hand round his thin shoulder, then half-fills his Spiderman bottle with water.

‘Go to bed,’ he says and Mehul turns away, somnambulating, and retraces his steps.

Satish watches him go, impossibly fragile, right foot treading down the cuff of his pyjama trousers, left hand clutching the water. In his sleepiness, Mehul bumps up against the banister. He takes the stairs slowly, both feet on a step before he’ll rise to the next one. Satish waits it out, this slow ascent, and it’s like the countdown to his decision: what to do about the letter, the sleepy tread – bump-bump, bump-bump – a heartbeat, a ticking clock. When Mehul reaches the landing, Satish’s time is up.

He switches off the kitchen light and goes back to the garage for his dose.

Satish isn’t ready to deal with the note yet. He can’t find a way to think about what Colette has done. He approaches it from the margins, imagining the new photograph as a reality, imagining what the others would look like thirty years on. He tries to envisage them ageing, speeding them through the years like time-lapse photography. He knows a bit about Cai already. Colette has told him some things about her brother: he went bald early, she said. Other than that, he doesn’t look much different: a bit more solid round the waist. He has a long-term partner. They can’t have children. He’s a lion keeper in a zoo. Satish roared when he first heard this; it’s a child’s fantasy of a job, or else the first line of a joke. But no, Cai really is a lion keeper. Not too far away, either, just a journey round the M25. You should go, she’d told him mischievously. Take the kids. Satish doesn’t know what future he had envisaged for Cai. International spy, for a while. Rock star, politician, criminal. Cartographer, he might have said, remembering their early years of friendship.

It was Cai who’d mapped out the territory for him when he first arrived in the street, who had helped him achieve a kind of belonging. They didn’t play together at school; there, Satish was a lone explorer, and Cai was with his own tribe. Satish had had to learn for himself the subtleties that marked you out as a native: which bits of the school were no-go; you avoided the far end of the field because that was where the Years Fives always went, and you wouldn’t be caught dead on your own in the adventure playground, not at eight, it was for the littlest kids. But groups were different. He watched gangs of bigger boys storm the climbing net, hollering their way to the top, reminding the Infants who was boss. If you ever needed to hide at lunchtimes you could try the first aid room, a prefab near the swimming pool, which was left unlocked and unmonitored. It wasn’t meant to be empty, but the volunteer fifth-years who manned it nearly always deserted their post. You could usually stay for as long as you needed, breathing the comforting scent of TCP, smirking at the Kiss Of Life poster while you went undetected by your enemies.