Freya North - Chances

‘Candy?’ Vita gestured that she’d be ransoming nibbles for information.

‘I had lunch at the Nags Head the other day,’ Candy said. ‘I hadn’t been in there for ages – anyway, the landlady greeted me like a long-lost friend. She asked after all of us – you especially. Well, you know how she likes a gossip.’

‘And she said –?’ Vita was fixing her best carefree smile to her face.

‘Oh, she just said that Tim often goes in there. Gets plastered.’

‘That’s nothing new.’

Candy was in her stride. ‘Yes, but here’s the funny part. He tends to go in there with this girl and invariably they get drunk, have flaming rows and one or other storms off.’ *

Who is she? Who is she?

‘Anyway, last week they go in there, the pair of them,’ Candy continued, ‘they drink, they row – she flounces out the back door, he storms out the front then half an hour later, he reappears with a totally different girl ! The sleaze! A couple of hours pass – then he’s suddenly ushering her out of the front door before Suzie comes in again through the back door and—’

‘Suzie?’

Candy stared aghast at her burnt spring roll as if looking directly at her faux pas. Michelle glanced at Vita, noted the goosebumps on her arms.

‘ Suzie ?’ Vita said again.

Candy shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

Vita gave herself a moment. ‘No,’ she said brightly, ‘not a bit. You’re right. He’s a sleaze. It’s just hard hearing she’s still on the scene. I wish he was with someone completely different.’

‘It hardly sounds like he’s gone on to forge a good relationship though, does it?’ Michelle said in a tone of voice Vita had heard her use to great effect with her children – when downplaying a fall or a bump, so they wouldn’t be alarmed. So they would feel better.

‘I’d pity her , if I was you,’ Candy said. ‘She’s now lumbered with all that you shifted.’ She touched Vita’s knee. ‘Promise you’ll think of Tim even less now – and think even less of him because of what I’ve told you?’ Candy said. ‘Me and my stupid big gob?’

‘Don’t call yourself Big Gob,’ Vita said softly. It’s what the bullies had called Candy at school. A beautiful Ugandan refugee who’d arrived in their small Hertfordshire town twenty years ago.

Vita didn’t want more details. She didn’t want to be reminded of her past or how different her present was from the future she’d taken for granted. So she encouraged Candy to run off on tangents about films she’d never get to see and frocks she still couldn’t fit into. And she gave Michelle a nod every now and then to say, I’m fine, stop worrying about me.

Vita Whitbury, way past midnight, all on her own. Not that it seems that way, with the riot of Tim thoughts filling her head. Infidelity, lies, deceit. She tried to rationalize that Tim’s life was the same but the cast around him had changed. And though his life sounded lairy, uncouth, unsavoury and diametrically opposed to all Vita hoped for in her own, a niggle remained to taunt her. Suzie was still on the scene. Of all the people – why had it to be her?

Vita wonders, Why do I still feel I could have done more to inspire him not to stray? Why do I still feel it’s a failing, an inadequacy, on my part?

And she wonders, How does his happiness graph look these days?

And she wonders, Where has my self-esteem gone?

And how am I to get it back?

She reaches to the bedside table and takes her pad of Post-its and a pen.

Phone Tim

She reads what she’s written. Then she adds DON’T at the start, scratching the letters down hard. She switches off the light and tucks down. She can see the pear tree, the blossom ethereal in the moonlight. It’s one of the things she really likes about her house – she doesn’t need to close the curtains and be surrounded by darkness at the end of the day.

Tinker, Spike and Boz

‘Can I get a lift to school?’

Oliver raised his eyebrow at his son. ‘Again, please?’

Jonty groaned and thought, Yeah, yeah, I know, Mum would make me ask again – at much the same time as his father was saying precisely that. Jonty thought, Give us a break, Dad. But he knew his father was right because his mother had been right too. He cleared his throat and gave a quick toss of his head to flick his long fringe away from his face. ‘ May I have a lift to school, please?’

Oliver smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘What use is textbook grammar when we communicate more by text messages anyway?’ Jonty murmured, shuffling into his blazer and hoicking his schoolbag over one shoulder.

‘It’s not about the grammar, per se,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s about laziness, it’s about apathy. That’s why I hate all this texting business – not bothering with vowels because consonants will do because y’know wha’ I mean .’

‘ Innit ,’ Jonty said and they laughed together. ‘Language evolves, Dad. “Chav” is in the dictionary. L8R looks good – it’s clever.’

‘It’s a fad.’

‘You sound like an old fart.’

‘I am an old fart. Believe me – you’d rather have an old fart for a dad than some divvy trying to be cool. Far more embarrassing.’

‘Who the heck says “divvy”!’

‘I do.’

‘Don’t say it again.’

‘Pillock.’

‘That’s worse, Dad.’

‘I know. It’s my job to annoy you like it’s your job to wind me up.’

Jonty thought, Actually, my dad is cool and he doesn’t wind me up all that much.

‘Come on, kiddo, let’s go. Have you got money for lunch?’

‘Father!’ Jonty remonstrated. ‘Again, please!’

Oliver coshed him softly. ‘ Do you have money for lunch?’

Watching Jonty lope off towards school with his mates, all of them in skinny trousers slung low, schoolbags as beat up as possible, hair lank and long and dyed darker than necessary, Oliver thought to himself how, had DeeDee still been here, he would probably be the one coping with their son’s teenagerisms the better, and it might well have caused a degree of antagonism between them. She’d have been much more You can’t go out looking like that at Jonty. She’d have said, Oliver! You speak to him! Oliver might have been caught in the crossfire. It gave him a lift to know he was doing all right as a dad to a teenage son. He liked to sense DeeDee’s approval. It was very odd to feel that these days Dead DeeDee possibly liked him more than DeeDee Living might have done.

Oh, but what I’d give for a little healthy real-life snippiness, Oliver thought as he headed off for his yard. What I’d give to hear her mutter, For God’s sake, Ols.

How he longed to argue over the finer points of managing a teenager, instead of muddling through it all on his own, albeit now doing things his way all the time without prior discussion. So, though he wasn’t the stickler for homework she had been, and although bed-time had become a movable feast and supper was now very movable indeed – usually in foil trays eaten off laps and sometimes left on the coffee table overnight – keeping up DeeDee’s obsession with grammar was a baton he’d gladly taken from her. He knew he and Jonty would run with it their whole lives.

At the yard, Boz and Spike, the two Aussies working for him, were loading the truck.

‘Tinker?’ Oliver asked.

‘Making a brew,’ said Spike. Oliver often reflected how he only seemed to employ youngsters from the Commonwealth – but there again, home-grown interest in arboriculture appeared to be sparse. And he did wonder why he gravitated towards those with names like Tinker and Boz and Spike – but he had to concede there were few applications arriving on his desk from Tom, Dick or Harry. He had a great team though – hardworking and sweet-natured. He enjoyed having them under his wing and his clients responded well. He felt paternal towards them – their own fathers being back home, time zones away. He also felt a keen duty to his trade – to hone their technical abilities as well as to train their eyes to feel a tree. Having a licence to use a chainsaw up a tree was one thing, but to sense innately how each individual tree ought to look was another. Two to four places on every branch where cuts could be made while balancing the resultant shape for the good of the tree – that was where art met science and technical ability met intuition. That’s where Oliver felt an aboriculturalist’s true skill lay. To make a tree look more like a tree, to return some hacked-about old giant, or some mangy neglected specimen, to the sculptural beauty that was its birthright. Every tree he’d ever worked on, Oliver aimed to leave as an archetype, as if Gainsborough or Poussin or Constable, Cézanne even, might have chosen it as the prime example of its genus to grace their art.