The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

‘Pizza.’

He sighed. ‘You out tonight?’

‘Maybe. What about you?’

Richard nodded slowly. ‘There’ll probably be drinks after work.’

‘Who with?’

‘People.’

They stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Saskia said at last. ‘Just let me know.’

Richard sighed again.

‘Come on, you’ve got to get up—you’ve got a nine a.m. class.’

‘Not today.’

‘Yes—today; it’s the module on sitcoms and you’ve got notes for it already—those ones we worked on this time last year; I put the green folder by your bag next to the door. Come on—’ She lifted the duvet and tickled his feet.

‘Okay—I’m up.’

She leant over and gave him a kiss on the forehead before disappearing into the bathroom and putting on her make-up. After this she picked up another cardigan from the pile in the corner of her room, and a scarf that she wrapped round her neck at least four times before poking her head round his bedroom door once more and yelling, ‘UP!’

‘I’m up,’ he mumbled, sitting swaying on the side of the bed.

‘See you later.’

‘Yeah. Love you.’

‘Love you too.’

She went back downstairs, unlocked the front door and stepped out into the fog.

13

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Richard Greaves listened to his daughter leave the house, and waited. Sometimes she forgot stuff she had to come back for, but not this morning.

He exhaled loudly, unaware he’d even been holding his breath, and collapsed backwards onto the bed. This morning he was feeling the most unhappy he had felt since he’d first started waking up in the morning feeling unhappy, which was about five years ago. Something terrible had happened in his life; more terrible than discovering the love letters written by a man called Peter Jenkins to his then wife, Caro; more terrible than being laid off from Sky TV and having to pay most of his not generous redundancy package to Caro and her new partner, Peter Jenkins; more terrible than living in a two up two down overlooking the Unigate Dairy depot. What made it worse was that he couldn’t talk to anybody about it; not even his sister—the only member of his family he was still on speaking terms with—and definitely not Saskia.

He lay there staring up at the ceiling, which had been hastily wallpapered in order to hold it together—by the son of the woman who died here—before they put it on the market. The upstairs bedrooms had also been washed in a single coat of magnolia that the wallpaper underneath—a ghostly pattern of miniature posies—could still be seen through. The imprints of the elderly woman’s furniture could be traced as well, in the pile of the carpet from the decades it had stood there.

The lamp hanging from the ceiling was a deep, helpless burgundy, and had tassels. There were brown stains on the inside of the shade where water had, at some point in time, dripped through the ceiling. Sometimes he was so hung over when he woke in the morning that he thought he heard the lamp muttering at him in a language he couldn’t understand—a dead language like Aramaic. His sister phoned him while that was happening once and told him he sounded like crap and he’d asked her how a person who was getting taunted by a lampshade—in Aramaic—was meant to sound, and then she’d hung up.

This morning it wasn’t taunting him—in Aramaic or anything else.

Sighing, he rolled over and felt under the bed for the bag of cocaine he kept taped to the frame.

His dealer lived on a farm about three miles out of Burwood. He bred spaniels for gun dogs and Richard came across him because he had a lap top that was playing up—this was when he was writing his novel—and the spaniel breeder did a sideline in computer repairs. Richard left the farm with a fully functioning lap top and 4g of pure Bolivian—yet another of the breeder’s sidelines, it transpired.

Hauling himself once more into an upright position, he shook out a line onto the small metal tray with a picture of the Natural History Museum on it that he kept by the side of the bed specifically for this purpose.

He did the line, closed his eyes, and waited.

When he opened them again, the surfaces in the room had become sharper and brighter. By the time he got dressed in the suit Saskia had hung out for him, the interior of the house was virtually dazzling.

Downstairs, he felt that the kitchen could almost pass as the sort of kitchen other—ordinary—people had.

He poured himself a glass of milk and stood drinking it, staring at the two photographs Blu Tacked to the fridge door—the only two photographs in the entire house, in fact. One was of him and Saskia scuba diving in France, and the other was of him standing at the bottom of a trench in the Somme where a relative of his had died during the First World War.

You could tell a lot about a middle-class family from examining their fridge. A well-stocked interior indicated physical health, and a well-stocked exterior (fridge magnets) indicated an attempt, at least, in projecting emotional health. The Greaveses’ fridge was both empty, and unadorned—apart from the two photographs.

Richard picked up his bag and the green folder containing Saskia’s notes for that morning’s class on sitcoms and, feeling fretful—the only discernible trace of his earlier despair—but remarkably buoyant, pulled the front door loudly shut.

That was all he had to do.

As long as he left for work in the morning, kept the front garden clear of litter, and put the right recycling in the right bin, he was left alone.

The world didn’t care that a coke-addicted divorcee lived at number twenty-four Carlton Avenue with a daughter he was incapable of looking after—or that he’d slept with a minor in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Richard took the same amount of cocaine most mornings to help him out of bed, out of the house and into the dark green Skoda that had been designed with Saabs in mind. He used to make people laugh—his ex-wife, Caro, included—at his Skoda jokes, but that was when he drove a Saab. Now, as a Skoda driver, he wasn’t entirely sure of his footing when it came to telling Skoda jokes, and didn’t know any jokes about Saabs.

The fog was beginning to lift and the early morning world of Burwood shone through the diminishing grey as he drove the Skoda out of town towards the new bypass and Technical College.

Once there he made his way to the far end of the car park and parked beneath a bank of Scotch pines where traces of fog still hung. This was where he always parked because nobody else ever did.

He shunted his seat back, picked up the bag of cocaine he kept on the floor under the driver’s seat, and did another line from the Skoda’s dashboard. After this he got his phone out his bag and dialled the number he’d been thinking about dialling all morning. She didn’t pick up. He thought about leaving a message, but in the end decided not to.

Still clutching the phone, he got out the car and headed towards the glass and steel college building. It wasn’t until he got half way across the car park that he realised how cold his legs were.

Feeling suddenly sick with fear, he checked to see that he’d remembered to put on the suit trousers—he’d once got as far as the bypass before realising that he was only half dressed. Yes, he was wearing trousers; it was his socks that he’d forgotten to put on.

Reassured, he passed through the automatic doors into reception where he saw Polly—who taught textiles and made her own clothes—standing waiting for him.

‘Richard,’ she said, coming towards him in one of her own designs, her voice long and mellow from decades of breathing exercises. ‘I was hoping to catch you—’ She paused, hauling her hair slowly back over her shoulders and laying a hand on his arm. ‘Everything okay?’

He’d once made the mistake of crying in front of her when he gave her a lift home, and now she thought she had Fast Track Access to him.

He stared at her hand, but it didn’t leave his arm.

‘I really need you to confirm re. the Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

Lost, he probed his mind for references to a Transcendental Yoga Retreat. Was this something they’d actually discussed? Her tone seemed to suggest so—at a worryingly concrete level. Her tone seemed to suggest that she was going to carry on probing his Chakra points until he caved in—and said ‘yes’.

While waiting for a response, her hands started brushing at the shoulders of his jacket, dusted with fallout from his nostrils after the line he did on the Skoda’s dashboard.

Could he tell Polly about his problem?

‘Look at all this dandruff. You’re stressed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some wonderful oil for scalp conditions.’

Their eyes met. ‘I just don’t know if it’s my thing—a Transcendental Yoga Retreat.’

‘Did you go to the site?’

He shook his head.

‘Go to the site—have a look at it—then make your mind up.’ Her hand was still on his arm.

‘The thing is—I’ve got quite a lot of complicated personal stuff going on at the moment.’

Polly nodded, interested.

Richard looked around him.

The college building was optimistically open-planned so ironically reception—the main thoroughfare into the college and usually crowded—was often the best place to have a private conversation.

‘I’ve been involved with someone.’ He broke off when he saw the look on her face. ‘Not seriously,’ he said quickly. ‘I mean—for me.’

‘I didn’t realise,’ Polly mumbled, upset.

‘I should never have started it.’

‘So—you’re breaking it off?’

‘Trying to.’

‘Why trying to?’

‘She’s not getting the point.’

All this was good—what Polly wanted to hear—and she would have been reassured by it, exuberantly so, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Richard’s facial expressions were changing by the second and there were beads of sweat along his upper lip.

‘She doesn’t understand the…impossibility…I mean, it’s my fault for starting it in the first place, but the…impossibility…of it carrying on.’

‘So talk to her…tell her.’

Richard let out a strange, high-pitched giggle.

‘I keep trying to, but she’s obsessed. It’s her age—’

‘Her age?’

Richard nodded. ‘I mean, she’s quite young.’

‘How young?’

‘Young.’

‘How young?’

He scrunched up his face. ‘Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen!’

A group of students turned round and stared at them then swung away again, laughing.

‘For fuck’s sake, Richard.’

He winced. ‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t know.’ Polly paused. ‘She’s not a student here, is she? Please God, don’t tell me she’s a student here.’

He shook his head. ‘Look, I really need to talk -’

‘I’m no professional.’

‘I just need to talk—to somebody. Later? After school?’

The bell sounded and she started to move off through reception.

‘Please—’ he called after her.

She turned and looked at him before disappearing through the double doors leading to Art & Textiles.

He shuffled over to the reception desk, feeling cold inside, and slid his elbows across the glass surface. ‘I don’t suppose—’

The receptionist turned, in her headset, to look at him.

‘I don’t suppose you keep spare pairs of socks behind there, do you?’

She carried on looking at him, sighed, and turned back to her magazine and the article on celebrity house foreclosures she’d been reading.

14

On the Meadowfield Estate—Burwood’s only council housing—Grace Cummings was tying a French plait in her ten year old sister Dixie’s hair while Dixie, who was going through a major Sound of Music phase, tried to pick out the tune for ‘Edelweiss’ on a mouth organ she got in a Christmas cracker the year before.

Their mother—Nicole Cummings—had been working at Fleurs, the florist, for a year now. She used to have a job cleaning until Grace bullied her into applying for the one at Fleurs when it was advertised in The County Times. Despite the early start—which left Grace in charge of getting Dixie to school—working with flowers had changed Nicole in a way nothing or nobody else ever had. For the first time in her life, she had a career rather than a job, was sitting exams to get accredited and even—poised on patchy lino inhaling the green perfume of cut flowers on the threshold between life and death—nurturing a silent ambition to run a florist’s of her own one day.

When Grace had finished, Dixie shook her head smiling and ran a hand over her hair. ‘Emma’s going to be so jealous.’

‘Here, put this on,’ Grace said, handing her a duffel coat that used to belong to her.

‘Not that one—it’s scratchy.’

‘It’s the only one you’ve got and it’s cold so put it on.’

Dixie conceded. ‘D’you want to be a hairdresser when you grow up?’

‘Not really,’ Grace said, distracted.

‘So what d’you want to be?’

‘I want to go up in space.’

‘People still need their hair cut in space.’

They were running about five minutes late.

‘Who’s picking me up from tap tonight?’

‘Me.’

‘Can I wear my tap shoes to school?’

‘Where are your school shoes?’

‘I left them in the back of the car.’

‘You’re sure?’

Dixie nodded.

‘What about your trainers?’

‘Can’t find them.’

Before the job at Fleurs, Nicole had been seriously thinking about re-locating to Perranporth in Cornwall—to a council flat overlooking the beach and some municipal palms.

She didn’t sleep well, and didn’t read the Financial Times, so didn’t know about the reassuring statistics concerning crime, teenage pregnancy and male mortality—or that Burwood was a good place to live. Only last week she dreamt she woke at two a.m.—to the sound of the neighbour they backed onto beating his disabled wife with a shovel, out in the garden. When she looked out the bedroom window, however, there was nobody there—no grunting, enraged shovelwielding husband, and no terrified, disabled wife scrunched up on the lawn in threadbare moonlight. Unfortunately there was nobody lying beside Nicole in bed, and when she got up there was no article attached by magnets to her fridge door that she could read in order to dispel her fears. So the dream stayed with her, made worse by the fact that she was sure she’d heard an ambulance in a nearby street just before dawn, and hadn’t seen the disabled woman since.

Eventually they left the house, Grace pushing her bike and the metal plates on the bottom of Dixie’s tap shoes ringing out on the pavement, the echoes muffled by fog.

They cut down an alley where Grace remembered being pushed into a pile of nettles when she was about Dixie’s age. The attack was still vivid in her mind because she hadn’t seen it coming, and couldn’t understand it. Like the time that girl in the red anorak had put a stone inside a snowball and knocked out part of her tooth so that now she had a different coloured bit in one of her front teeth.

‘Emma says she can do the splits but I haven’t ever seen her do it and every time I ask her to show me she comes up with some excuse so now I don’t know whether to believe her or not.’ Dixie paused, waiting for Grace to comment, but Grace—who’d been even more distracted than usual this morning—didn’t have anything to say. ‘She says she can sit on her hair as well but I’ve actually seen her do that. So—’ Dixie swung her head, pleased at the slapping sound the French plait made against the back of her coat.

‘I hope Ms Jenkins isn’t sick today. She was sick last week and we had Ms Clarke whose hair’s pulled back so tight you can see all the veins on her forehead. She makes us put our heads on the table with our thumbs up and keeps on shouting “Silence” even when nobody’s talking. How can you talk less than silence? She made Emma and me sit apart and I had to share with Mandy who smells like going to the toilet and has to go to the hospital to have her bath ‘cause her mum’s in a wheelchair. That’s what Emma says.’

‘When am I going to meet Emma?’ Grace said at last, making an effort.

‘Emma’s mum says she’s not allowed to come to our house so I’ve got to stop asking her. It’s because of the dogs near us—the ones that don’t wear leads that might have rabies.’

‘She said that to you?’

Dixie nodded. ‘Maybe her mum’ll let her come now you’re Head Girl.’

Grace ran her hand protectively over Dixie’s hair.

‘Ms Jenkins said microwave food isn’t good for you—is that true?’

‘Probably.’ Grace felt exhausted and the day hadn’t even begun.

They were almost at the school crossing where she’d recently agreed to leave Dixie and let her go through the school gates on her own.

‘I told Ms Jenkins you were Head Girl, but she already knew. She said one day they were going to have to put a blue plaque up on the school to say you’d been a pupil there.’

Grace smiled.

‘What’s a blue plaque?’ Dixie asked.

‘It’s like a sign—they put them on buildings when a famous person’s lived or worked there.’

Dixie stopped. ‘Are you going to be famous?’

‘Who knows?’

Grace watched her younger sister cross the road with the Lollipop Lady, who gave her some sweets. When Dixie got to the other side she waved the sweets triumphantly in the air.

She gave a final wave before disappearing through the gates into the crowd of children and parents.

Grace could still hear the tap shoes. She waited until she couldn’t hear them any more before getting on her bike, preoccupied, thinking about what Ms Jenkins had said about the blue plaque, and feeling suddenly tearful.

As she stopped at the next set of lights, she heard somebody call out her name. ‘Grace! Grace!’ It was her Physics teacher and Form Tutor, Ms Webster, in the car that had pulled up beside her.

‘I didn’t see you at netball practice yesterday,’ Ms Webster shouted through the open window.

Grace played Wing Defence on the B team. She should have been on the A Team, but her commitments at home prevented her from going on any of the tours.

‘Sorry about that,’ she shouted back.

Ms Webster nodded, looking at her. ‘Anything wrong?’

Grace shook her head, her mind still on blue plaques.

The lights changed to green and she waved, moving instinctively forwards.

A few seconds later, Ms Webster overtook, calling out, ‘I’ll see you at school.’ She wiped at her face where something wet had fallen then accelerated past Grace, who kept her head down because she’d started—inexplicably—to cry.

15

Down in the basement gym at number two Park Avenue, Sylvia Henderson was listening to The World’s Greatest Arias and focussing on the weights because she’d noticed movement in her underarms recently—a lack of solidity that bothered her. She was used to working out with Rachel—who was still trying to get pregnant at the age of forty-four—in between Rachel’s miscarriages.

As she gasped and a whole host of sopranos sang, her eyes flickered over the garden, on eye level and bleak at this time of year in its early winter wash of browns. The garden was one of the few things in her Brave New Suburban World that frightened Sylvia. Even more so when she’d realised that in Burwood you weren’t only expected to spend time in your garden but with your garden.

At the Park Avenue Residents Association Summer Barbecue there was a large-scale trade in cuttings, which had alarmed Sylvia into drinking herself way above her limit and spending far too much time with a man with halitosis who kept chewing at his nails.

Despite having walls still papered in Laura Ashley and floors carpeted in dog hairs, Dr Fulton’s wife, Jill, had a social standing on the Avenue it was difficult to de-stabilise due to her horticultural reputation.

Sylvia enjoyed eating in the garden; she enjoyed getting Tom to light the fire pit when he was home—Bill was too depressed to be trusted with this task—and enjoyed sunbathing on her Plantation recliner. She didn’t enjoy anything that required her to kneel or wear old clothing, and anyway—lost interest once the summer was over.

She’d gone to a nursery just outside Burwood that was often on TV and spent vast amounts of money on plants guaranteed to give architectural effect, but still couldn’t make the garden come together. It overwhelmed her—and it knew it.

She could feel it now, in its winter nudity, taunting her—and wished the fog hadn’t lifted.

Shifting her eyes away from the garden, she continued pulling weights until the phone started to ring.

She answered it, panting.

‘Mum? Are you okay?’

‘Tom—’

‘You sound weird.’

‘I’m down in the gym.’

‘Is now a good time to talk?’

‘About what?’

‘The weekend.’

Tom sounded tense; stressed. His usual lightness—that herself and others found so endearing—wasn’t there.

‘Listen, mum—I don’t think I’m going to make it.’

‘Tom—’

‘I know.’

‘My poker party.’

‘I know—’

‘I’ve told everyone you’re coming.’ She indulged rapidly in the image of Tom in his Dinner Jacket moving through her guests. ‘What am I going to say to people? My God—’

In her distress, she’d inadvertently turned back to face the garden and was now staring at the randomly planted oleanders, olives, Dicksonia antarctica and eucalyptus trees looking like a band of horticultural misfits that had broken rank for the final time, never to re-group again under her command. She knew she’d seen Day of the Triffids

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