‘Well, sweetheart, you’d better go. Lovely to speak to you.’
‘You too, Mum.’
‘Do you still have that emergency number I gave you?’
‘Yep. On the fridge and in my phone.’
‘Good boy. See you later.’
‘Bye.’
Jean puts the phone on Mary Jones’ gravestone and squeezes her eyes shut. She wonders if Mary minds being stuck with her husband for all eternity. What would she have done if she and Ricky had both died during those yearsthey were still married and some idiot had buried them next to each other, lying under the ground decomposing, their cells mingling again, the worms chomping and shitting through them both?I’d have haunted Sam mercilessly until he dug up my bones and threw them in the sea rather than stay next to Ricky, Jean thinks.
She remembers her father on her wedding day, just about to open the car door to drive her to the registry office. The bulk of Sam wriggling under her skin, kicking at the bouquet of daffodils she’d picked from the garden. He’d stopped, looked at her over the bonnet.Are you sure, darling? You know you don’t have to go through with it. It’s not too late to change your mind.
And she’d saidyes, Dad, of course I’m sure. And Sam had kicked and she’d huffed and puffed to get in and then out the car and of course Ricky was sleeping with at least three girls in the chorus by the time Sam was six months old, although she didn’t chuck him out until Sam was almost two.
Her nose starts to stream a little with cold. She tucks the notepad back in her bag and wipes her face with her sleeve. She shuts the lid of the oboe case, the damp air’s no good for the reed. She’s well and truly shafted without that thing: it’s her only way of keeping her menfolk alive. One more year and Sam will be leaving university and he can sort himself out, although he’s determined to be a musician so who knows when she’ll be able to retire and ask him for cash for a change.
She should have seen it coming but those years ofSam’s childhood were a fog of debt and exhaustion. She was working in the West End six nights a week and taking recording whenever it came up, and in the dressing room during intervals she would sit with a little book and write down everything she’d earned and everything she’d spent, watching the columns stubbornly refuse to balance. Her father had been Sam’s main carer since he was four, bedtime stories, bumps and bruises and bellyaches, he was the one who did all of it. By the time she broke through the surface of the mist and gasped for air, it was too late to save him.
On her thirty-seventh birthday – Sam was nine – her father made her sit on the sofa and listen to her son play Bach, and of all the curses of all the fairy godmothers, the boy was talented.
Then it wasplease Mum, I’d like to learn the sax like Dadand her father had said,go on Jeanie, it’s well and truly in the boy, his blood sings like yours and mine.Orchestra after school and jazz band on Saturday afternoons and her nothing more than a chauffeur and cook, never a chance to make up for those lost years. And still, only paying off interest on the credit cards and waiting for those royalty payments with her heart in her mouth and hoping the mortgage and her salary didn’t sail past each other at the door to her bank account.
Once he’d started to buy that horrendous aftershave and spend hours sitting alone in his room only to thunder down the stairs whenever the phone rang it wasMum, do you know anyone who can teach me the guitar, I’d like to get better.A growth spurt and a dusting of hair on his chin and he wasforever out, God knows where and who with but he’d smell like dirty clubs and weed on a Sunday morning, though he still sat down to play duets with his grandfather, the way she had every morning of her adolescence.
Then,Mum, can you help me write my personal statement, andMum, have you got a minute to listen to my audition pieces, and God love the boy he was planning to be a musician like the rest of them. She must have made it look easy, all those years of scrimping and all those grey hairs of worry. She must – and she regrets this bitterly – have made it look fun.
She should never have allowed it. She should never have let her father teach him the piano and said no to the sax. She should have locked her father’s LPs in the attic, got a job in a supermarket and signed him up for extra maths instead. Then he might be training to become an accountant now. Then he might stand a chance of making something of his life, building something solid that matters.
Not ending up somewhere like here, literally away with the fairies. Not ending up like her, broke and alone, and utterly dependent on a bit of cork and brass staying dry to keep body and soul together.
She shoves her laptop back in her bag and fastens one latch on the oboe case, but before she can swing her handbag over her shoulder her phone buzzes. A text. She opens the message with one swipe of her thumb.
We hope all aboard the Grub is going well and you have still not been taken to another realm!! xoxo
Toni. Jean’s vision swims, her heart starts to pound.Only the second time she’s heard from them in the almost two years since they’ve been gone. The first time, she messaged back that she missed them desperately and there has been silence ever since. Why have they got in touch now? Today, All Souls’, the day of dead things. And with such a nothing message too. No meat to it, nothing even to snack on. No acknowledgement of the long silence, nor the sweetness that filled their days before it.
On their first day the three of them had sat together in the wings on the chairs Mackie had set out for them, politely ignored by the dancers and crew. Beryl had leaned back, eyes closed, hands mimicking AJ’s as she picked out the intricacies of the score and Toni had watched the comings and goings of the dancers with delight. Jean watched the show and listened to the score with an eerie sense of déjà vu. Everything was familiar to her.
After the show the three of them stood in a jumble in the corridor outside Belinda’s office with their suitcases and instruments. Toni, her curly black hair tied up with a scarf and her cello-callused fingers nervously smoothing the hem of her jacket; Beryl with her long grey hair arranged in an elegant chignon.
They said the words, pricked their fingers and Belinda had got out her watch –sync to me, please, then I’ll show you to your cabins –and they were pledge-mates forever and ever.
Afterwards, they sat in the dining car and Jean asked them how they met. She read somewhere that people thought you were a good conversationalist if you askedthem questions about themselves. And she was trying to be a good conversationalist, belatedly. She was trying to see this job as an exciting new chapter, not a final failure in a long string of fuck-ups, trying not to think of herself as a drowning salmon, swimming upstream to where she had been spawned.
She had just turned forty-eight, Sam had started university and her father had moved into Hillview the week before. She had seventy-four pounds in her bank account, three maxed-out credit cards and a sheaf of bills in her suitcase.
It was in Prague, Toni had said.We were each covering for a friend at the symphony there…
…then she went off on a contract to Sydney for a year and I went back to London, recording and teaching…
…but we couldn’t do long distance, not at our age…
…so we asked a friend if they knew anywhere we could tour together…
…but no cruises because I get seasick…
