The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia: A Black-Hearted Soap Opera

‘Skirton Street,’ Lenny said.

‘What?’ Joe couldn’t hear. The flat was suddenly made of chocolate and it was melting.

‘I grew up on Skirton Street. The one after Cassidy.’ She was smiling.

Lenny the hairdresser was smiling.

‘The thermostat, Joe. Just behind the microwave.’

‘Skirton Street. I know Skirton Street,’ he said to Lenny.

‘There you go then,’ she said, walking past him into the kitchenette and re-emerging with the carpet sweeper.

‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there,’ Belle said to Joe, ‘I can’t get to the thermostat.’

‘All right, Belle, I’ll sort it out.’

‘It’s just behind the microwave.’

He went into the kitchenette and found the thermostat, which was above the sink. When he went back into the living room, Lenny was gone. ‘Where did the hairdresser go?’

‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there.’ Belle shook her head. ‘Didn’t you get me any tissue, then? I’m covered in bloody chocolate.’

Joe went back into the kitchenette and pressed his knuckles into the sink rim, letting his head drop between his shoulders. After a few minutes he grabbed the kitchen roll off the windowsill and went back into the living room.

‘Pass me that.’ Belle flicked her eyes over him, her hands full of kitchen roll. ‘You should phone Linda or I’ll be getting into trouble for keeping you here.’

He stood there watching the kitchen roll moving in her hands, the rings and liver spots suddenly intensely familiar.

‘I’ll be getting into trouble,’ she said again.

He sat down in the armchair that matched the lamp-shades on the standard lamps and dialled home.

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 underneath the coffee table, caught between spasmodic festive light from the tree and the aura from the TV.

Ferdinand was panting expectantly.

Linda went over to the patio doors and slid them open.

‘FERDIE, OUT!’ She gave a nasal yelp, trying not to breathe the stench in.

The dachshund jumped off the sofa and went over to the vomit, nosing his way round it.

‘FERDIE, OUT!’ Linda grabbed hold of his blue-studded collar, dragging him through the carpet and the open patio doors. ‘OUT, YOU FUCK.’ She slammed them shut before he managed to get fully outside and his tail, which was trapped inside, went stiff. Ferdinand screamed.

She slid the door open then shut it on the dog’s tail again.

‘You fuck, Ferdie, you fucking, fucking dog.’

Ferdinand was trying to turn round and reach the part of him that hurt, but his head kept smashing into glass. Linda didn’t hear the front door open. ‘Those were centre-spread gateaux, you fucking, fucking fuck of a fucking –’

‘Mum!’

‘What?’

Jessica came running into the lounge, covered in snow, her school bag still over her shoulder and her keys in her hand.

‘Mum – what’s going on?’

Linda turned round, but could hardly make out her daughter standing there. ‘What?’

‘Let Ferdie go.’

‘Why should I?’

The dog started to howl.

‘Let him go,’ Jessica shouted, trying to pull Linda’s arm off the door. ‘Come on, Mum.’

Ferdinand pulled himself suddenly out from between door and doorframe and shot across the garden leaving a thin trail of blood specks across the snow.

‘He’s bleeding. You made Ferdie bleed.’

Linda slammed the door shut and tried to regulate her breathing just like she’d tried to regulate it on the bike that morning and then at class, but failed because she was so wound up about the Niemans coming.

‘He ate the gateaux. Both gateaux,’ she said.

‘What gateaux?’

‘The centre-spread gateaux. The gateaux for tonight.’

‘He wasn’t to know.’

Linda surfaced from her rage, gasping for air. ‘And Mrs Klushky rang me today,’ she said, trying not to let the fact that Jessica hadn’t taken her shoes off in the hallway bother her.

‘Klusczynski,’ Jessica corrected her.

‘Klushwhatever. She gave you a detention.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘She told me, and we need to talk about this.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, and anyway the teacher who was meant to be giving it never showed.’

‘But it’s five o’clock now – what have you been doing?’

Jessica was watching Ferdinand in the garden. ‘I was with Peter Klusczynski. He was in detention as well. He had a fit during period two and Miss Witt sent him to special needs.’

‘You were in special needs?’

‘It’s where detentions are held.’

‘With Peter Klush …?’ Linda didn’t want to think of her daughter holed up for an hour alone with Peter Klushky. It would be just like her to fall for an epileptic. ‘But what did you do?’

‘We talked,’ Jessica said, staring through the patio doors. ‘It doesn’t matter – I think Ferdie needs to see a vet.’

‘It does matter. I need to phone the school about this.’

‘Since when have you ever phoned the school?’ Jessica said, rounding on her.

‘Jessica …’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Mum.’

‘Well, we are going to talk about it. Maybe not tonight, but we are going to talk, and now I need you to clear that up,’ she said, pointing to the vomit underneath the coffee table. ‘There’s a blue jug under the sink, and some carpet shampoo. Use the floral bouquet room spray when you’ve finished. Leave no trace.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jessica asked.

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’

‘To find dessert. We have no dessert. I need to find dessert.’

Jessica let her miner’s bag, which had badges pinned all over it, slip off her shoulder onto the carpet. ‘But what about Ferdie? Ferdie’s bleeding, Mum.’

Linda ignored her. ‘When I get back we need to sort out the canapés. And,’ she stared past her daughter, suddenly realising that the blinds at the front window were still open, ‘shut those bloody blinds.’

She put the fake fur coat back on over her sweatshirt and jogged through the blizzard across the road to the Saunders’. Stephanie, who was six, answered the door dressed in a fluorescent emergency services outfit. Her feet, in rollerboots, were moving backwards and forwards across the parquet in the Saunders’ hallway.

‘Hi.’

Stephanie took an orange ice-pop out of her mouth and stared at Linda’s Wellingtons. ‘Hi.’ She put the ice-pop back in.

‘Is your mum in?’

Stephanie shook her head then took the ice-pop out of her mouth again. ‘My sister’s been crimping my hair. She’s going to do my whole head.’

‘Who’s there, Steph?’

‘Delta? Are you in there?’ Linda called out.

‘Who is that?’

Stephanie skated off down the hallway.

Linda hadn’t slept for a week when Dominique told her she was having her fitted carpets ripped up and parquet flooring laid down. Then Dominique told her how much it was costing – and she let Stephanie skate indoors? On the parquet flooring? She’d tried telling Joe at the time that Dominique would never get the asking price if they sold the house without fitted carpets, and Joe had said, ‘not these days’. ‘Not these days’? Joe wasn’t a cryptic man – she was used to understanding him. So what did he mean by that? She felt she was missing something that Joe was on to – that everybody but her was on to.

Delta appeared in a kimono that belonged to Dominique. Linda recognised it immediately. It was the one Mick had brought back with him from a trip to Kyoto, and she was struck – as she always was – by how much more attractive Delta was than her own daughter. Especially in Dominique’s kimono. She couldn’t imagine Jessica wearing any of her clothes.

‘How are you, Linda?’

Delta always called her Linda – never Mrs Palmer – and even though the smile was frank, for the second time that day Linda got the feeling she was being laughed at. ‘I don’t suppose your mum’s in, is she?’

‘Nope.’ Delta shook her head, then trod in the puddle of melted orange pop. ‘Shit – what’s this?’

‘I think it might be Stephanie’s ice-pop.’

Delta looked down. ‘Shit.’ She hooked her feet up one after the other and wiped them on the end of the kimono.

‘So – your mum’s not in?’

‘Sandra dropped Steph off after school – Mum and Dad were having lunch or something.’

‘Lunch? It’s nearly five p.m.’

‘Shit,’ Delta said again, still trying to wipe her feet.

A bedroom window opened and Stephanie hung her head out. ‘Delta, you promised you’d do my whole head.’

‘Just coming, Steph. Don’t touch the machine, it’s hot.’

‘You promised.’

‘And I’m coming.’

Linda caught Delta looking at her fur coat and her Wellingtons. She forgot she still had Wellingtons on. She straightened up.

‘Did your mum get her Ice Man delivery this week?’

‘What – the freezer stuff? I guess she did.’

‘And do you know if she got the triple chocolate mousse cake and Black Forest gateau? They’re difficult to describe – there was a centre spread in –’

‘I don’t do catalogues,’ Delta said.

‘No, of course not. Neither do I, really, but the Ice Man one …’

‘Have you got your mother-in-law to dinner tonight or something?’

‘My mother-in-law?’

Didn’t everybody know they had the Niemans coming tonight? And didn’t Delta know that mother-in-law jokes were for women who had them?

‘I mean,’ Delta said, dragging the words out, impatient at Linda for not getting it, ‘that freezer stuff isn’t something you give to people – it’s something you inflict on them. Have you read the back of the packet? Have you read what’s in that stuff?’

Linda read the front of the box where it gave you the maximum freezer storage time and – if it was microwaveable – how many minutes it took to defrost. ‘But does your mother still get the Ice Man?’ she said, coming back to her original point.

‘I guess it’s what Steph’s been eating all week. I mean, it’s Friday and she’s climbing the walls. She’s toxic. I’m probably toxic as well, but it’s too late, and Mum can cook, that’s what really pisses me off.’

Linda tried to be offended that Delta was swearing in front of her, but she was too busy worrying about Dominique and the Ice Man, and the fact that Delta’s nipples were pushing their way through the branches printed on the kimono because of the cold.

‘We have people round and she’s doing soufflé.’

‘She does soufflé?’

‘That’s what I mean. She only cooks for dinner parties.’ Delta paused. ‘So … d’you want me to go and look in the freezer and see if she’s got a triple mousse … mousse … what was it?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What’s it for anyway?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’

‘You sure?’

‘Honestly.’ Linda turned and sniffed the air. ‘What’s that?’

Stephanie skated up the hallway, screaming.

‘Steph? Oh shit, Steph. I told you to wait.’

‘You told me it was hot,’ Stephanie cried, clumps of burnt hair falling onto the shoulders of her cardigan.

‘Where’s the crimper now? Is it still on?’

‘I dropped it on the carpet,’ Stephanie sniffed.

The girls disappeared indoors and, turning away from the smell of burnt hair, Linda crossed back over the road to No. 8, temporarily caught in the headlights of a car. She stopped at the top of the drive thinking it might be Joe, but it wasn’t. It looked like Dominique’s green Triumph. Without waiting to find out, she went back indoors, took the Wellingtons off then went into the kitchen to attack the collection of cookery books she and Joe had been given as newlyweds. She left the cordon bleu one where it was because it had never been opened, and grabbed Good Housekeeping’s Quick Guide to Dinner Parties that she often used the beef bourguignon recipe from. Turning to Contents, she saw that there was a whole chapter on soufflés. A whole chapter, and no pictures – apart from a series of diagrams showing you how to prepare the soufflé dish. A hot soufflé had to make an impressive entrance at the end of the meal and TIMING IS CRUCIAL.

After reading the page through three times she finally digested the fact that soufflés had to be prepared in advance but served immediately. ‘Finishing Touches’ had a section to themselves. And what was everybody else doing while she was standing there making her way through ‘Finishing Touches’? Who was preventing Joe from roaming freely through his repertoire of flatulence jokes, then his record collection, and putting Pink Floyd on? Who was taking care of all that? How did Dominique Saunders manage to serve immediately. Come to think of it – had they ever eaten soufflé at No. 4? Linda couldn’t remember. The times Dominique must have served soufflé were the times she and Joe weren’t there – the dinner parties she and Joe weren’t invited to – and how many of those had there been?

She slammed the book shut. Who were these people? TIMING IS CRUCIAL. What did they know about her life? SERVE IMMEDIATELY. They didn’t know anything about the early years of her marriage and the house on Whateley Road; or what she and Joe had been through.

Whimpering with the effort of trying not to cry, she pushed Good Housekeeping’s Quick Guide into the bin, then went into the garage, the cement floor freezing the soles of her feet in their thin socks.

She pulled up the freezer lid and saw the box with the picture of the mandarin cheesecake on it.

‘Jessica!’ she shouted up into the house when she was back in the kitchen.

A bedroom door opened and she heard music, then feet on the stairs.

‘What’s wrong with your face?’ she said as her daughter walked in.

‘Ferdie’s bleeding.’

‘You’ve been crying?’

‘Ferdie’s bleeding, Mum.’ Then Jessica saw the dog’s water bowl on the floor by Linda’s feet and started crying again.

Linda stared at her. She hardly ever cried herself and didn’t know what to do when other people did – especially when those other people were her own daughter. She’d never picked Jessica up when she was small and started crying – grief left its marks on the shoulders of jumpers and blouses, and some of them were dry clean only. So now they stood in the kitchen and did what they usually did: Jessica sobbed and Linda stood staring at her, and after a while she got the mandarin cheesecake out of its box and put it on the cake stand to defrost.

‘I told you to go and change,’ Linda said, her back turned.

Jessica sniffed.

‘Did you clean the lounge carpet?’

‘Yes.’ Jessica sniffed again.

‘There’s a pineapple over there in the fruit bowl – why don’t you cut it up and mix it with some cottage cheese?’

Linda watched her daughter move round the kitchen in silence and start to deftly slice up the pineapple, still sniffing.

‘Ferdie ate all the desserts I’d organised for tonight. All of them.’ Linda paused.

Jessica didn’t say anything. She put the mixing bowl with the cottage cheese and pineapple chunks in to one side.

‘Then he sicked them up.’ She stared at her daughter’s back in its school pullover.

‘D’you want me to make dessert for tonight?’ Jessica said, turning round at last.

‘I’ve got dessert for tonight. I sorted it.’

‘I could make something,’ Jessica said, looking at the mandarin cheesecake.

‘Like what?’

‘Like – syllabub.’

‘Syllabub?’