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The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia: A Black-Hearted Soap Opera
SARAH MAY
The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia
A black-hearted soap opera
This book is dedicated to all parents who dream of bringing their children up in a better world, out of harm’s way … and to all children who dream of escaping and getting in harm’s way. Que Sera Sera.
My overwhelming thanks go to all the extraordinary women who made this book possible, in particular – Katie Espiner at HarperCollins, for her enthusiasm, commitment and understanding of the darker side of life; Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken Associates for her beyond-the-call-of-duty support, demonic tenacity and unflinching ability to respond to e-mails written in the early hours of the morning, and last but not least … Jennifer Hutchinson and Sarah Weedon, for providing the sort of childcare you can’t pay for.
I would also like to thank my husband for keeping our marriage going during Linda Palmer’s reign of terror … there were more dark days and long nights than I’d ever want to have to account for.
Contents
Title Page Dedication Prologue Electoral Roll Littlehaven District 9 December 1983 Eight Sixteen Eight Four Eight Four Eight 23 December 1983 Four Eight Fourteen Eight Four Eight Christmas Eve, 1983 Four Eight Fourteen Ten Four Eight Four Four Four Eight 28 February 1984 Eight Twelve Eight Four Eight Four Eight Four Eight Two Eight 1 March – 11 October 1984 Eight Four Eight Four Two Four Six Eight Ten Twelve Fourteen Sixteen About the Author By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher
ELECTORAL ROLL LITTLEHAVEN DISTRICT
POLLARDS CLOSE Cont RH12 9NA 1260 1261 YOUNG, SHEILA YOUNG, BRIAN 02 02 1262 1263 1264 SAUNDERS, MICK SAUNDERS, DOMINIQUE 25 Jan 84 SAUNDERS, DELTA 04 04 04 1265 1266 NASSAM, OSMAN NASSAM, SANDRA 06 06 1267 1268 PALMER, JOE PALMER, LINDA 08 08 1269 1270 1271 NAME REMOVED KLINE, VALERIE KLINE, BRENDAN 10 10 10 1272 1273 1274 NIEMAN, WINKE NIEMAN, DAPHNE NIEMAN, PAUL 12 12 12 1275 BROWNE, ANTHONY 14 1276 KLUSCZYNSKI, MARGO 168
It had been snowing in Littlehaven for what seemed like forty days and forty nights, and everyone over four feet tall was tired of having to keep Christmas tree lights on all day long so that flickering neon could counteract a numb and unanimous sense of foreboding. The real world and snow didn’t go.
Then on 9 December, which was a Friday, it stopped.
Inside No. 8 Pollards Close the heating was pumping and the blinds in the master bedroom were still on tilt. Linda Palmer was naked, bent over the open drawer of her vanity unit. When she straightened up, a pair of clean bikini briefs in her hand, she was able to see not only herself, but the reflection of the TV screen and Selina Scott’s face just left of her hips, at pussy-level.
She put the bikinis on and turned the TV off. Since the show’s first airing in January she had done Diana Moran’s workout faithfully every morning, but now they were nearly at the end of the calendar year, her body had clocked up over eighty hours of workout since then and the Green Goddess just didn’t do it for her any more. The Green Goddess was for people who wanted to be like Linda Palmer, so what did she want with the Green Goddess when she already was Linda Palmer.
She turned back to the vanity unit, changed the Barry Manilow cassette in the stereo for a Bruce Springsteen compilation, then climbed onto the mail-order exercise bike she’d had long enough for the rubber stoppers on the legs to leave imprints in the carpet. With the switch on dead flat she started to pedal. If she didn’t do twenty minutes before the aerobics class, sweat formed on the back of her pink and grey striped leotard, and at the end of class Dominique Saunders would ask her if she was okay; tell her she looked tired.
A slow track came on, something about Vietnam, and she switched to gradient. She was just getting into the uphill rhythm when the phoned started to ring. After counting six rings, she flicked the switch from gradient to dead flat to off, and dismounted.
‘Is that you, Joe? Joe?’
‘Hello? Mrs Palmer?’
‘Joe – is that you?’
‘Mrs Palmer?’
The voice sounded foreign, and she didn’t feel like being spoken to by a foreign-sounding voice right then. ‘Who is this?’
‘Mrs Palmer, it’s Mrs Klusczynski.’
‘Who?’
‘Jessica’s advanced physics teacher.’
Linda backed away from the vanity unit, put the phone on the floor and jammed the receiver between her right ear and shoulder. The only word she caught the foreign voice saying was ‘advanced’. ‘Listen, if you’re trying to sell me anything …’
‘It’s Mrs Klusczynski, from Jessica’s school.’
‘… anything at all, I’m just not …’ she stopped herself. A long time ago, she had trained herself to keep the unfamiliar in the background, and this is what she did now. The foreign woman faded out and all she could hear was Bruce, still singing about Vietnam, and she couldn’t work out if he’d actually been or not or whether this even mattered. Maybe she was just missing the point. ‘It’s who?’
‘M-r-s K-l-u-s-c-z-y-n-s-k-i,’ the foreign woman yelled down the phone.
Linda held the receiver away for a moment as forty years of Poland in exile made its way through the barricade of redneck vocals on the stereo. She had a sudden image of a woman who wore cardigans and the sort of slip-on shoes that were more prescription than high-street, emerging from one of the two-bedroom terraces at the top of Pollards Close with her severely epileptic son. ‘Wait. Mrs Klusczynski, top-of-the-Close Mrs Klusczynski?’
‘That’s right. I’m also your daughter’s advanced physics teacher here at school.’
‘Her physics teacher. Right. I knew that. Sorry. I’m with you now.’
Looking at her alarm clock, she saw that there was less than an hour to go before class. The phone line fell in a coil between her breasts as she got back onto the bike. ‘I’m with you now,’ she said again, sideways through the receiver as she started to pedal.
‘Mrs Palmer, are you still there?’
‘I’m here.’ She flicked the switch to gradient, and breathed out hard.
‘I’m afraid there’s a problem with Jessica.’
‘A problem?’
‘It’s an interesting problem.’
Linda had never found problems interesting and didn’t like the fact that Mrs Klushwhatever was enjoying this conversation more than she was. ‘Yes?’ she said harshly, switching from gradient to gradient: steep.
‘She refuses to complete – no – even to look at the module on nuclear physics, which is a compulsory part of the A Level examination.’
‘What d’you mean “refuses”?’
‘I mean she walked out of my classroom just now on ethical grounds.’
Mrs Klusczynski paused. She sounded pleased and this confused Linda, who had begun to swing her head slightly in an attempt to regulate her breathing. ‘You’re sure?’ She couldn’t imagine Jessica walking out of class.
‘I’m sure. It’s never happened to me before.’
This was too intimate – more of a confession than a comment. Linda arched her back and tried to relax her shoulders.
‘But the school said to put her in for early-entry A Level Physics. They said she was a straight “A” – no doubt.’ Linda was having trouble finding enough oxygen to speak, think and cycle at the same time.
‘There is no doubt. All we have to do is get her to overcome her reaction to “nuclear” in the syllabus. I respect it. I respect Jessica and her decision,’ Mrs Klusczynski added, ‘but she doesn’t fully understand the physics of it. Once she understands the physics, or begins to understand, she will be able to see – or she will be a lot closer to seeing, anyway, that it’s not the physics that are corrupt.’
Linda became suddenly, acutely aware of her thigh muscles.
‘… She can’t study physics and turn a blind eye to the splitting of the atom. That’s not wanting to know the whole truth … that’s fanaticism –’ Mrs Klusczynski said, carried away, ‘– and ignorance.’ The art block was being refurbished and they were holding art classes in the science block this term. She reached out for the plastic cup full of mixing water that Miss West had been using during the last period and drank it like coffee. ‘I urge you and your husband to talk to her.’
‘We’ll talk,’ Linda said, with a hungry intake of breath.
‘Tell her – tell her not to throw her strength away on morality; that’s not the path for Jessica. Tell her –’
‘If she does the work she’s meant to do on this … this … module, she’ll still be in line for an ‘A’?’ Linda cut in, breathless, thinking about the number of times she’d told Dominique Saunders and others that Jessica was going to get an ‘A’ in A Level Physics – and Mathematics – at the age of fifteen. Trevor Jameson at the County Times was going to run a whole feature on her when she did – and here was some foreign woman whose garage wasn’t even an integral part of her house talking to her about nuclear bombs; about Jessica and nuclear bombs. Why was this all anyone ever talked about any more? She lunged forward as her lungs collapsed, her entire weight on the edge of the saddle … fuck the bomb.
‘Mrs Palmer? So … you’ll talk to Jessica, Mrs Palmer?’ Mrs Klusczynski no longer sounded convinced. ‘I had to give her a detention, I’m afraid. Whatever I think of what she did, I have to make it clear to the rest of the class that walking out in the middle of a lesson is unacceptable behaviour, and …’
‘You gave her a detention?’
‘Don’t worry, an hour’s supervision in the special needs room is all it really amounts to.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Tonight, yes, between four and five.’
‘But I’m having a dinner party tonight. The Niemans are coming to dinner, and … Jesus, that’s enough.’ She flicked the switch down and changed gear, at last finding some sort of karma between the balls of her feet and the pedals. ‘Jessica was meant to be helping with the canapés …’
16
Mrs Klusczynski put the phone down, pulling a tissue out of her cardigan sleeve and wiping her mouth, which was tingling. She had phoned Mrs Palmer to talk to her about her daughter, and Mrs Palmer was having sex. She was sure of it. She looked at her watch – it was ten a.m. – and carried on dabbing at her mouth. There had been music in the background as well. Mrs Palmer had taken a phone call concerning her only child while having sex to music. She stared at the tissue, which was stained black – why was that? – then through the windows in their chipped, cream-painted metal frames. Standing up on the rungs of the stool, she could see the entire school playing field. It had stopped snowing.
8
Linda pressed the phone against her chest and rested her chin on it as she recalled what it was she had been trying to remember about Mrs Klusczynski, who lived at No. 16. It had happened the summer they moved in. Mrs Klusczynski had been to meet the local-authority bus that used to drop off her son, who was prone to, on average, seven fits an hour, and Linda was watching mother and son walk back up the street, when it happened: Peter had one of his fits and collapsed onto tarmac that was melting in the heat. She remembered Joe, who was coming home early from work, leaving the car in the middle of the road and breaking into a run – she’d never seen Joe run before. He took off his suit jacket and put it under Peter Klusczynski’s head, and she watched from behind the blinds in the lounge as he carried the boy indoors, into their kitchen, sat him at the old dining-room table – the one they used to have before the glass-topped one – and gave him water to drink. Mrs Klusczynski hovered at the front door in a canary yellow sundress and Linda stayed in the lounge because she didn’t know what to say to her. At that moment she didn’t understand Joe bringing the boy into their house like that.
‘You all right?’ she heard Joe say.
‘Peter?’ Mrs Klusczynski’s voice came through the front door.
Afterwards Joe walked mother and son up the street. Linda saw him and the Polish woman talking together and the car still parked in the middle of the road with the door open. For a moment, the world felt as if it had suddenly emptied and she was the only one standing there, watching, only there was nothing left to watch, and someone somewhere was laughing at her.
4
By the end of the aerobics class, Dominique Saunders’ leotard was wet and the ‘D’ pendant on her necklace was stuck to her collarbone. She crouched down at the side of the hall where some orange plastic chairs were stacked, rocking back on the heels of her Reeboks while trying to regulate her breathing and not worry about the fact that Linda Palmer still wasn’t sweating.
Mrs Kline from No. 10 sat slumped beneath the Union Jack the Guides used for church parade, in a well-worn peach and turquoise tracksuit. The sort of tracksuit you put on, Dominique thought, to gorge and cry in. The sort of tracksuit she didn’t possess; not even as a secret. Mrs Kline was sitting with her legs stretched out across the brown carpet tiles that covered the floor of the Methodist Church hall, wiping sweat off her forehead and studying the palm of her hand.
Dominique wondered what had made Mrs Kline, who weighed sixteen stone and who had done the class barefoot, decide to take up aerobics. She didn’t strike her as the sort of woman losing weight meant anything to.
Linda knelt down next to her, her blonde perm letting off hairdresser-fresh aromas, and they watched as Mrs Kline put a pair of summer sandals on over some socks. It took her a while to get to her feet and when she did she walked unevenly towards where Dominique and Linda were sitting. Dominique realised, too late, that she was coming to speak to them, and that she should have said something before now anyway, given that they were all neighbours.
‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ Dominique said.
‘No. Well.’ Mrs Kline smiled shyly.
‘Thought you’d come along and give us a try-out?’
‘Well. Yes.’
‘Well. Great.’ Dominique hung back on her heels.
‘Well,’ Mrs Kline said, clutching the empty carrier-bag her sandals had been in. ‘Bye.’
‘What was she thinking of coming here?’ Linda said, realising that the story of Mrs Kline at Izzy’s aerobics class – that she could try out first on Joe when he got home – would go well with the gazpacho tonight. ‘Does somebody who’s murdered her husband and buried him at the end of the garden have the right to come to an aerobics class?’
‘That’s only rumour,’ Dominique said.
‘Well, I thought we were going to have to resuscitate her after the high kicks and that’s not fair on Izzy – having someone in the class she might have to administer first aid to.’
They watched the Reverend Macaulay talking to Izzy as she stacked the blue aerobics mats away.
‘What’s he doing?’ Linda said.
‘Telling her about the design for the new stained-glass window behind the altar.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘There was something in the local paper about it.’
‘But how d’you know that’s what they’re talking about?’
‘That piece of paper he’s showing her.’ Dominique watched Izzy in her rainbow-coloured head and wrist bands, smiling at the Reverend Macaulay.
‘Is stained glass something she’s into?’ Linda asked.
Dominique shrugged. Mrs Kline was more of a problem for her. As much of a problem as the rapport between Izzy and the Reverend Macaulay and their mutual interest in stained glass was to Linda. Things that didn’t fit; things that broke up the rhythm they lived their lives to. ‘Right. That’s me. Everything.’
‘You off?’ Linda asked.
‘Mick’s taking me out to lunch.’
Linda didn’t want to think about lunch – she’d been on a liquid shake diet for the past fortnight. ‘Where’s he taking you?’
‘Gatwick Manor – and the snow’s stopped so we might actually make it.’
‘The snow’s stopped?’ Linda said, then called out, ‘See you tonight,’ as Dominique left the church hall in her new sheepskin hat. ‘Around seven thirty. Don’t forget.’
Through the windscreen of her two-seater green Triumph that was an anniversary gift from Mick, Dominique saw Mrs Kline, in sandals, waiting at the bus stop, which was banked in grey slush. She slowed down, trying to imagine Mrs Kline in the seat next to her with her empty carrier-bag and having to talk to her for the ten minutes it would take them to reach Pollards Close.
Mrs Kline watched the green Triumph pass, not bothering to back away from the kerb when the car’s acceleration sprayed the pavement with more slush as it sped up again.
Dominique told herself that Mrs Kline probably had shopping to do or friends to meet for lunch, but she knew this wasn’t true: Valerie Kline had an armchair lunch every day in front of Dr Kildare repeats. She’d seen her through the windows of No. 10 with her legs rolled up under her, a plate of food balanced on the arm of the chair and Richard Chamberlain on the screen.
She’d probably watched the series as a teenager when it first came out, Dominique thought, suddenly able to see – clearly – an immaculate room with antique rugs and cut flowers that somebody had been taught how to arrange, and an overweight girl sitting in it, alone with Dr Kildare. And into this room walked a young man … or rather arrangements had been made for a young man to walk into this room and turn the overweight, lonely young girl into Mrs Kline.
Five years into the marriage, Mr Kline had bought No. 10 Pollards Close, a four-bedroom executive house on Phase III of the Greenfields development, and moved Mrs Kline and their adopted son into it. Then he left for work one morning and never came back. He hadn’t been seen since, and nobody in Pollards Close really remembered him. Dominique had heard rumours during waxes at Sinead’s that Mrs Kline waited a fortnight before informing the police. Without really knowing why, she had a sense that the marriage had been brutal. She thought about Valerie Kline at aerobics that morning in her peach and turquoise tracksuit, and the way she looked standing at the bus stop in socks and sandals with an empty carrier-bag in her hands. Then she thought about the table in the bay window that Mick always booked when he took her to Gatwick Manor because it overlooked the gardens. She couldn’t have lived Valerie Kline’s life; she couldn’t have lived a single second of life as Valerie Kline.
8
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Linda was standing in the lounge of No. 8 Pollards Close tilting the blinds so that she could see out into the street. The blinds were part of an over-order for Quantum Kitchens that Joe had brought home and put up at the lounge windows and all the bedroom windows at the front of the house as well because Linda liked things to match. They were made of strips of stiffened fabric connected by chains that clattered when you tilted them. They were clattering now and it was making her nervous. The snow had eased off again and she’d just got in from the new Tesco superstore on the other side of Littlehaven that had launched an inflatable elephant for its opening week. She saw them launching it from the roof while she was there, and men in suits had been wrestling with guide ropes. When she got home she realised she could see it from the window in the spare room, but what had she been doing in the spare room anyway? She couldn’t remember. Now here she was looking out into the street from behind the same blinds Joe had in his office, chewing her nails and wondering why Dominique and Mick weren’t back from Gatwick Manor yet; eaten away by the fact that they were probably in one of the hotel’s rooms together right now having sex in the afternoon on linen sheets. A married couple having extra-marital sex with each other.
The only thing that managed to distract her was a purple Granada turning into the Close and parking outside her house. She watched as a man in a ski jacket with what looked like oil stains on it got out of the car and started to walk down her drive. She went outside.
‘Hello?’
‘Wayne Spalding,’ he said, flipping up the sunglasses lenses attached to his spectacles. ‘Local council.’ He paused. ‘Were you going out?’
‘No, I was –’ She looked down and realised that she still had her coat on – a grey fake fur one that an antivivisectionist once spat on. ‘Did you say local council?’
‘Environment department.’
‘The tree. Of course.’
‘We tried telephoning this morning, but there was no answer.’
‘I was at an aerobics class,’ she said automatically.
This seemed to please him, and the way he looked at her made her feel as though she had done something worthy; something moral even, and this confused her momentarily: a) because she didn’t like him very much, and b) she’d never really thought of aerobics as either moral or immoral. ‘D’you want to come through?’
