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

Jessica sat up on her elbow. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

He felt for her legs under the duvet and gave her ankle a squeeze.

‘This book’s really important, Dad. It talks about how not to die. How to survive.’

‘And what if this bomb of yours never goes off, Jess, and you have to do more than just survive?’

Jessica fell back onto the pillow. ‘You’re drunk.’

Joe stood up, trying to hide his disappointment. ‘Probably.’ He turned the desk light off and heard her turn over in bed. ‘How’s Ferdinand?’

She didn’t say anything.

‘We can take him to the vet tomorrow, if you like.’ What did he want? He wanted to tell her about meeting a hairdresser called Lenny today. What was wrong with him? Jessica was the one person he wanted to tell and he couldn’t, because she was his daughter. ‘Night, Jess.’ He stood there waiting for her to say something.

Then, at last, ‘Night, Dad.’

He left the room, shutting the door behind him, and crossed the hallway.

In the master bedroom, Linda was going full tilt up a virtual hill thinking about the muddy footprints Paul Nieman had left in the hallway when he came in with the beer, and how much she’d wanted to clean the carpet. Then she pictured the scene again with herself naked, scrubbing at the mud in a pair of black marigolds, and Paul standing over her, angry.

‘Shit, Joe,’ she said, catching sight of him in the vanity-unit mirror. ‘What are you creeping up on me for?’

He shrugged and watched as she flicked the dials on the handlebars until it looked like a cartoonist was running her in slow motion.

‘Jessica’s writing a book.’

‘Seven miles. I just did seven miles,’ she said, breathless and preoccupied.

‘On how not to die – with a Mr Browne – Jessica says he lives at the end of the Close, but I’ve never seen him. Who is he?’

‘I don’t know, Joe, and I didn’t know she was writing a book.’ Linda got off the bike and picked up the dressing gown from the bed. ‘Mr Browne?’

‘She said she met him at Youth CND.’

‘I think I met him once.’

‘He was giving a talk.’

‘He seemed okay.’ Linda paused. ‘And anyway, she needs to be around other people more.’

‘She’s fifteen years old, Linda!’

‘That’s what I’m talking about – she never goes out.’ Linda threw the dressing gown back down on the bed. ‘Did you see her tonight, Joe? She doesn’t speak – she doesn’t eat… the way she talked to me in front of everybody.’

Joe ignored this. ‘She’s got things she needs to work through.’

‘Like what – the end of the world?’

‘Well, that’s one of them.’

‘Jessica never leaves her room – she needs professional help, Joe.’

‘For what?’

‘For just about fucking everything.’

‘What – like the time she had to see that educational psychologist – what was her name?’

‘Penelope – but she told us to call her Penny.’

‘She spent eight sessions with Jessica – alone – filling her mind with fuck knows what, only to tell us Jessica had a fear of dolls.’

‘I don’t want to start talking about Penny again – you refused the further counselling she recommended.’ The nausea she’d experienced earlier while stood over the mandarin cheesecake rose up again.

‘For fuck’s sake, Linda, this is our daughter we’re talking about … where are you going?’ he said, watching her. The T-shirt she was wearing had dark sweat patches on it.

‘The bathroom.’

‘It’s nearly one thirty in the morning.’

The door slammed shut, and a minute later he heard retching sounds. ‘Linda?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘It’s the solids.’

‘The what?’

‘The solids – dinner tonight. I’m not used to it.’

He listened at the door, but didn’t hear any other sounds, and after a while he went back into the hallway towards the other bathroom, stopping by the window like he used to when they first moved in. That was two years ago, and everything had been so new then that the contractors hadn’t even got round to putting tarmac on the roads and pavements. It was a new world they hadn’t finished building yet, and he would stand at the hall window in the early hours of the morning, half expecting to see virgin forest carpeting the horizon.

Now all he could see was the glow of Gatwick and, in the distance, beyond the Surrey Hills, the monochrome aurora borealis that hung over London. How had he ever felt himself capable of imagining that the world – his world – was still unfinished?

He went into the bathroom, looked into the macramé basket hanging from the ceiling and failed to work out what he was doing there, then went back to the bedroom and undressed in the semi-dark because Linda was already in bed, and the light on her side was off.

He took off everything apart from his vest, then got into bed and lay looking up at the ceiling where it had been pricked by Artex.

‘Your mum was having her hair cut today,’ he said, turning his head to face Linda, who had her eyes closed.

‘I don’t want to talk about my mother,’ she said, her breath smelling faintly of vomit. Then, after a while, ‘And I don’t know why she has that hairdresser – she can’t afford her.’

‘Well, it’s difficult for her to get out and about.’

The chains on the blinds started to rattle as the extractor fan in the en suite cut out, blowing a draught through the bedroom. Joe felt himself drifting off. ‘The soup you made tonight was good.’

‘Gazpacho, it was gazpacho,’ she said, ‘and before you say anything, it was meant to be cold.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

She didn’t answer, and Joe was almost asleep when Linda said, ‘She used to be in the army.’

‘You never said.’

‘Not my mother – the hairdresser. She was in the Falklands or something.’

He didn’t say anything, and after a while leant over to switch off the light on his side of the bed.

When he woke up it was still dark, and he didn’t know what time it was because the alarm clock was on the other side of the bed. Linda was lying on her back with her head turned away from him and her left hand curled into a fist.

He drifted off to sleep again.

23 DECEMBER 1983

4

The dark was still deep when Dominique left the house at five a.m. Mick’s flight from Florida – his last flight – was due to land in half an hour.

The road from Littlehaven to Gatwick was all new bypass, cutting across land with small strips of forest that deer used to graze in. She remembered pointing out the deer to Delta when she was small, but now there were no deer left to point out to Steph. They’d hit a deer once, in the red Renault, and Mick had wanted to stop and pull the animal off the road, but she hadn’t let him; she’d told him to keep driving. Then it started raining and they had to pull over anyway because the ton of running deer that had hit the windscreen had snapped both wipers clean off and they couldn’t see a thing. She’d tried to remind Mick about that deer a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t remember and this had shocked her. There was no way she could have forgotten a thing like that, but Mick told her, smiling, that he had no memory of it, no memory at all. As if he’d never been there in the car while they waited in the dark for the rain to stop, the dead deer and forest somewhere to their left, and Delta crying uncontrollably in the back. It was a shame the deer were gone, she thought, looking at the early-morning darkness and the way it hid the land’s details.

Leaving behind the patch of countryside the bypass intersected, she entered Gatwick’s network of roundabouts, Jacuzzi showrooms, electronics factories, out-of-town warehouses, hotels and – finally – the airport itself.

She had been a first-class air hostess working long-haul flights when she and Mick met. The first-class bit mattered, and ‘we got it together at fifty thousand feet’ was a conversation opener she still used. Most of the passengers in first class then were men, and she got on with men – even growing up without a father. It was women she didn’t like. Mick once called her a misogynist and it was true. She knew how to make men happy. How did you make a woman happy?

As soon as the plane wheels used to leave the tarmac – wherever she was in the world – she not only felt herself breathing again, but felt pleased to be breathing again. She never got claustrophobic in the pressurised cabin’s few cubic feet of reconditioned air and she never worried about dying. It was being on the ground she was afraid of: gravity. Anything that sucked you in or down or tried to anchor you in any way. She started taking as little time off between flights as regulation allowed and spending more and more time in hotel rooms in foreign cities with curtains shut and phials of sleeping pills, trying to defy gravity. As long as she had movement, as long as she had altitude, she was fine. It was her ground life that was going all autistic on her. Then Mick came along, and he changed all of that. Mick changed all of her.

When she told her mother, who was a scientist researching food dyes, that she was thinking of becoming an air hostess, Monica had just smiled at this new fatality in her life and said, ‘I suppose everybody’s got to do something.’

Then, two weeks later, Dominique got a phone call from her on a busy Friday night at the pub she was working in, and Monica told her she had an interview with someone running training sessions for Laker Air the next day. Which made Dominique feel, when she got accepted on the training programme, that the whole air-hostess thing had been her mother’s idea in the first place; that her whole life so far had been her mother’s idea. Even Mick; even Mick’s love for her; even her happiness – and Dominique being happy or not was the last thing on earth her mother cared about. It was just that happiness was part of the plan Monica had formulated for her daughter in the absence of academic success, because that’s what normal people were: happy. So she presumed.

Dominique stood for a while at the Arrivals barrier watching passengers from the Florida flight, jetlagged, walk through the automatic doors, thinking she should have done what Mick wanted and taken the girls on this last flight with him. Why hadn’t she just gone? She was about to leave her post by the barrier and get a coffee when she saw Laura, whom she used to fly with on Laker Air in the late Sixties.

Laura had always had long hair, but now it was cut short, close to the scalp. Her legs looked long and brittle and her knees too pronounced, but Laura was still flying. Dominique felt herself pause, trying to decide whether she wanted to talk to Laura, who was still flying, or not. Whether she’d ever liked Laura, who was still flying, or not.

‘Dominique. My God. Dominique.’

‘Hey, Laura.’ Up close, Laura felt taller than her, slimmer, and better smelling. The short haircut pronounced her cheekbones and shoulders. Dominique wondered how she was looking under airport strip lighting. ‘Just landed?’

Laura sighed. ‘Just landed.’ She parked the small suitcase on wheels by her side and kept hold of the two duty-free bags.

‘They’ve changed the uniform,’ Dominique said.

‘The uniform?’

She nodded at Laura’s navy suit and Laura looked down. ‘Oh – I’m with BA now.’

‘Since when?’

‘This was my first flight with them. To Delhi.’ She looked down at her suit again. ‘You don’t think it’s too dowdy?’

‘Dowdy? No.’

The two women looked at each other, trying to simultaneously absorb and keep at arm’s length their different lives.

‘God – isn’t it awful what’s happening to Laker?’

‘Well – you got out in time.’

‘Just. It’s the people with families I feel sorry for. God,’ Laura said again, suddenly exhaling. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

‘It has – can’t remember how long exactly, but – yes.’

‘Yeah, ages. God. So. You’re here waiting for Mick?’

Dominique laughed without knowing why. ‘He should be around somewhere – the screen says his flight’s in Baggage Reclaim and people are already starting to come through.’ She wished she didn’t sound so vague. It made it seem like her and Mick didn’t really speak any more, like one didn’t really know where the other one was; like they often missed each other.

And sure enough there was Laura laughing and saying, ‘It sounds like you lose your husband a lot.’

‘Not too often.’ Vague.

Laura nodded with her lips partly open. ‘I was in Mick’s cabin crew on the Barbados flight a month ago. One of my last flights on Laker Air.’

Dominique didn’t know what to say to this. Why were they talking about Mick? Laura gave the sleeves of her sheepskin coat a couple of tugs. ‘Where were you?’

‘Where was I when?’

‘Barbados – you should have been in Barbados.’

‘Well, I wasn’t.’

Laura paused. ‘Have you ever been?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve never been?’

‘No.’

‘Well, the next time he flies to Barbados, you get him to book you a seat on the plane,’ Laura said sympathetically. ‘I know it’s difficult with the kids and everything … how many have you got?’

‘Two.’

‘… But you should go. You really should. Barbados is …’

‘Laura!’

They were standing in the shadow of a second air hostess, who Laura didn’t introduce.

‘This is Mick’s wife. Mick Saunders.’

The other girl nodded.

‘I used to fly too,’ Dominique put in, ‘a long time ago.’

The girl nodded again.

‘When did you give up?’ Laura asked.

‘Well – I didn’t really give up – I got married,’ Dominique said, looking for the first time at Laura’s left hand, which was ring-less. She held on to this, and the fact that up close there was a food stain on the lapel of Laura’s jacket.

‘So,’ Laura said heavily, ‘there you go.’

‘There you go.’

‘Well. I’ll probably see you again. Give my best to Mick.’

‘I will,’ Dominique said, hands in pockets. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye,’ Laura replied, steering her friend away.

Dominique was thinking of going to the Laker Air desk and getting them to phone through and find out where Mick was when Laura parked her case and came running back.

‘I meant to say – I saw Mick go up to the observation deck.’

‘The observation deck?’

‘About ten minutes ago.’ Laura shrugged. ‘And I heard about him being laid off – I’m sorry.’

‘Well –’ The way Laura said it made Dominique want to defend, not Mick, but herself. ‘I think he’s pretty pleased about it. The package was good.’ She paused. ‘So good, in fact, that we’re thinking of emigrating to New Zealand and –’

‘New Zealand? When?’

‘I don’t know, I –’

Laura turned abruptly away, tripped over a suitcase somebody had parked in her path, then broke into a run.

Dominique watched her go, feeling unsettled. Something about the way Laura was running made her think she was crying at the same time. She rejoined her friend and the two women in uniform disappeared through the sliding doors that led to the car parks, the friend taking one last look at Dominique before the doors shut again. Dominique stood there wondering what either of them had to show for all those air miles they’d clocked up between them – after how many years of service? And even if there was anything to show – who was there to show it to? She started to make her way to the observation deck, thinking about the food stain on Laura’s lapel. Was Laura happy? Were women like Laura happy? ‘Women like’ – had she really thought that? There were no other women like Laura. There was only one Laura: Laura was unique. Just as she, Dominique, was unique.

She got into the lift, and a few seconds later the doors opened onto a lobby whose floor was covered in rubber matting. Through the lobby doors she saw Mick standing outside in the persistent dark in his overcoat and a pair of gloves. The gloves were thick woollen ones that made his hands look disproportionate to the rest of him, and his pilot’s cap was on the wall beside him.

When the automatic doors opened the wind nearly blew if off. A plane flew over and Mick turned his head to follow its undercarriage.

‘Your hat’ll blow off the wall,’ she said, stepping outside.

He turned round and smiled at her. ‘Hey, you.’

They stood looking at each other.

‘How’d you find me?’ he said at last.

‘Just did. Aren’t you cold?’

‘Maybe.’

They stayed where they were, not moving any closer.

‘Sad?’

‘Maybe.’

She wished she hadn’t said that. It sounded as though she was attacking him in some way. Her clearest, most instinctive thoughts always came across as aggressive when she articulated them.

‘I was waiting for you downstairs in Arrivals.’ She thought about mentioning Laura. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I was watching the planes.’ He broke off.

For some reason this seemed like a stupid thing for a pilot to say.

‘Was the flight okay?’

‘The flight was fine. How are the girls?’

‘The girls are fine. I left them both asleep. They missed you, but they’re fine.’

‘So everything’s fine.’ He reassured her with a smile, but it wasn’t enough to make her want to cross to him. ‘You know what I was thinking up there? I was thinking – I can’t remember the last time a child asked to come into the cockpit. We never get children up front any more and I was trying to work out why that was; why the fact that aeroplanes stay up in the sky at all doesn’t interest them any more. So I came up here.’

‘To watch the planes?’ she said.

He smiled at her. ‘To watch the planes.’

‘You look tired.’

‘Maybe I am.

‘You sure you’re okay? Nothing happened on the trip, did it?’

‘The trip happened. The flight happened, and the thing I’m still waiting to happen hasn’t yet – so I’m waiting.’

‘What’s meant to be happening?’

‘I’m meant to have some sort of feeling – definitive feeling – about the fact that I’ve just flown a plane for the last time. I don’t seem to be having that feeling.’ He paused. ‘I called you from …’ another plane went over ‘… Florida,’ he shouted. Adding, ‘Don’t worry – everything’s fine.’

‘It’s probably the jetlag.’

‘The jetlag. Probably. It always makes me maudlin.’

‘Well don’t be maudlin – when you’re maudlin you make other people sad,’ Dominique said.

‘So.’ Mick smiled then grabbed hold of her hand, pulling him towards her. ‘Come here.’

‘I am here.’

‘No. Come here.’ He kissed her. ‘I missed you.’

‘I missed you.’

‘I mean I really missed you.’

Dominique laughed. ‘There’s a lot of kissing going on here.’

‘I kissed you once.’ Mick put his arms round her, picking his cap up from the wall.

‘Why aren’t you wearing that?’ she asked.

‘No idea.’ He kissed her again, on the forehead this time. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

They left the observation deck and got into the lift, walking out a minute later into high-voltage airport lighting. They were holding hands and the world around them was moving rapidly.

The green Triumph made its way down the layers of multi-storey, through the barrier at the bottom and out into the morning.

Mick spoke to the woman in the car-park kiosk, calling her Barbara and asking her when her shift ended. Dominique knew that if she asked him in an hour or even three hours’ time when Barbara’s shift ended, he would be able to say three o’clock without any hesitation. Mick wasn’t just talk, he took people to heart. He listened to them, and they trusted him. Dominique didn’t ask – because the subject bored her – but she was pretty certain Mick had all the data on Barbara: husbands, lovers, children, other jobs. Mick would have the whole Barbara panorama at his fingertips because Mick understood that although Barbara’s life and death meant nothing to him personally, there were a lot of other people to whom it did. This was a leap of faith she herself had never been able to make. She didn’t give a shit about Barbara or how long her shift was, but Mick did.

For a while the road followed a metal fence with runway the other side, then turned off at right angles. She stared at the web of runway and lights and couldn’t ever imagine knowing what they meant.

‘I missed you,’ Mick said, turning to look at her.

‘You said. I missed you too. I think I already said that as well.’

‘One hundred and forty-four hours is a lot of hours to spend away from you.’

‘You were counting?’

‘I always count.’

She smiled and rested her head on the seatbelt. ‘You’ll never have to count again.’

By the time they parked the car outside No. 4, dawn was at last streaking highlights through the remains of night, diluting it with an early-morning grey. Stephanie answered the door in her gymnastics leotard, preoccupied.

‘Hi, Dad – can you make pancakes?’ she said to Mick. Then, turning to Dominique, ‘And can I take the mirror off the wall in the downstairs toilet?’

‘If you want –’

As they walked into the house the phone started to ring. ‘I’ll get that.’ Mick disappeared into the study and Dominique wandered into the kitchen where Delta was sitting drawing at the table.

‘Where’s Dad?’ she said.

‘On the phone.’

‘Somebody called for him a few minutes ago.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know – they wouldn’t leave their name. How is Dad?’

‘Jetlagged.’

‘No – I mean, how is he?’ Delta lowered her voice, anticipating a searing insight into the state of her father’s mind.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It must be weird,’ she persisted, ‘to suddenly stop doing something like that – after all these years – especially something like flying.’

She was floundering. They’d told her, but not Steph, that Mick had been made redundant. They’d told her that Florida would be his last flight, but they hadn’t told her what to think about this. Whether it was a good or a bad thing; whether it was something they were meant to be celebrating or not talking about. She’d been given facts without guidelines and wasn’t that interested anyway, so she was floundering.

‘Yes, it must be,’ Dominique trailed off.

She opened the fridge then shut it, staring at the magnetic letters on the door’s white surface for a while, trying to make out a pattern. Then, yawning, she went over to the kitchen table and sat down.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, watching her older daughter.

‘A sketch for a mural.’ Delta turned the sketch pad round and carried on adding details with a pencil.

‘What is it?’

‘A matador delivering the coup de grâce. I thought I could paint it on the wall opposite my bookshelves.’

‘Well, I don’t mind you painting there, but …’

Delta wasn’t listening. She turned the sketch pad back round to face her.

‘Won’t it give you nightmares?’

Dominique sat staring at the Great Wall of China, which was December’s picture on the calendar they got free every year from Mr Li’s Chinese takeaway. Then she went to find Mick in the study.

‘That was Station Pets,’ he said when she went in, signalling to her to shut the door. ‘They’ve got two hamsters left: a boy and a girl.’

‘Well, we only want one.’

‘Why don’t we just buy them both – she won’t be expecting two.’

‘But they’ll breed, Mick.’

‘So they’ll breed … we’ll buy a bigger cage or sell them or drown them or something.’

‘Don’t hamsters eat their young?’

‘Not these ones – they’re Russian hamsters. I told him we’d take them both.’

‘So why did you even ask me?’

He smiled at her. ‘He’s got a cage with a wheel, and because we’re taking two hamsters he recommended buying an extension with plastic tubing so they’ve got more to do … some kind of hamster gym. He’ll throw in the exercise ball for free.’

‘Hamsters need exercise?’

‘That’s what he said.’