Beneath the Skin(83)
He ambles down the road in the evenings, strolls along the wet pavements lit by pretty street lamps and shops, looks into the windows of the bustling restaurants and cafe bars and sees people he recognises, but doesn’t really know. Ends up nursing a pint alone in the front bar of a pub, listening to the highs and the lows of the football fans watching the match on a large screen in the back.
Sami has as much space as he could ever want. He has the whole of Didsbury village and Fletcher Moss park beyond. He has a tidy house, a high-definition television, boxes of bottled beer, his car magazines and Sky. But Sami is struggling, especially in the mornings when he first awakes. Even now, the realisation that Sophie isn’t there feels like a punch to his stomach. Freedom aplenty, but aching emptiness everywhere.
Norma sits in the garden on a rusted metal chair, wrapped in her padded coat. She’s drinking coffee and smoking her first cigarette of the day. Her eyes focus on the iron table top. It’s rusty too, but nothing that a lick of enamel paint won’t cure. The boys used to paint it, a different colour each summer, eager to have tea outside as soon as the weather permitted. ‘Please, Mum. Can we have burgers on the barbecue? We’ll clean it, we promise!’
Of course the boys never cleaned the barbecue. She loved her boys and still does. She misses having them around the house with their affectionate jibes, even if they leave the bathroom grimy, their bedrooms bedraggled and eat unbelievable quantities of food. But what do they say about sons? They’re yours until they find a wife. Neither son has married, as it happens, but both live with their girlfriends, who seem pleasant enough.
Norma takes a drag of her cigarette and sighs; she gave them up for years. But she’s put on weight that no diet will shift and so she’s gone back on the fags in secret, berating herself each time she lights up.
A daughter’s a daughter for all your life, she muses. It’s lovely to have Sophie home. They’ve been talking, really talking. Probably for the first time ever.
My thirty-year-old baby, she thinks, feeling that she can, perhaps, forgive herself a little for somehow failing Sophie for all those years. Maybe she was just better with boys. Or perhaps she was envious, jealous of Sophie’s devotion to Barry right from the start. ‘Darling little Sophie, Daddy’s princess.’ She felt excluded, she supposes, and withdrew her demonstrative love to protect herself from that awful feeling of rejection. ‘But you’re the adult.’ Barry’s words. Her own words too, internally.
Norma stubs out the cigarette and stands up. OK, enough psycho-babble for one day, she thinks. Time for action.
She looks up at Sophie’s bedroom window and sighs. The curtains are still closed. Sophie has slept most of the week or so she’s been there. The initial camaraderie has faltered slightly into occasional bickering, mostly as a result of her attempts to chivvy Sophie along. To get up and get dressed. To brush her hair and her teeth. Even to eat.
Norma walks slowly up the stairs, a feeling of gloom making her legs seem heavy. She doesn’t want to be the baddie, yet again, but someone has to do it. She opens the bedroom door, yanks back the curtains, expecting the inevitable, ‘Mum! That hurts my eyes. Go away.’
‘Come on, Sophie,’ she says, trying for her nurse’s best brisk voice. ‘Time to get up. You’ve felt sorry for yourself long enough. I’ve made an appointment. We’re off to the doctor’s at ten.’
Three laps of the garden in the drizzle, three more to go. Charlie is dismayed at how shaky he is on his legs. Still, it’s only day two, it’s a very large garden and the walking gives him thinking time away from Barbara, the cook slash cleaner. Of her own volition she’s taken on the additional chore of loitering. Wherever Charlie is, she is too. He suspects Barbara has orders from ‘on high’ to keep an eye on him. But if anyone’s going to drop dead on the spot it’s the octogenarian Barbara and certainly not him.
‘Who were you talking to in the garden?’ Rupert asked yesterday.
‘Uncle David,’ Charlie replied.
Rupert nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
It does help, the talking out loud. It helps Charlie to cope with the intermittent spasms of intense grief and of guilt. Of culpability too. For not noticing David’s overspending on White Gables. For not intuitively knowing that David was in trouble, for not seeing his dear friend had been brought so low.
‘David, oh, David. Did we push you too hard?’
But Charlie is putting things right for David. For his reputation, his good name.
‘Got that insurance business sorted, David, so no need to worry about that. Straightened it with the client on the QT, so there won’t be any comeback. Money back with enhanced interest and a promise not to look too closely at the Money Laundering Regulations. An offer he couldn’t refuse.’
Charlie chuckles as he strolls. He’s said it aloud in his best Godfather imitation, which isn’t terribly good, but David always appreciated it. He’d laugh and slap Charlie on the back. ‘Not bad, Charlie,’ he’d smile. ‘But don’t give up the day job.’
David loved that film. He liked to quote from it frequently. He was good at remembering lines from films and a talented impressionist too. Don Corleone, Dirty Harry, Indiana Jones and of course Sean Connery’s Bond. Then the Jason Bourne films more recently. Not that Charlie has seen them himself. ‘Shall we go to the cinema to see what this Bourne malarkey is all about?’ he asked Helen a couple of years back. ‘Good God, no,’ she replied.