Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

His suit collection pre-dated their post-divorce move to the two-bedroom terrace overlooking the Unigate milk float depot. It was the legacy of his producer at Sky TV days, and most of the collection still fitted him despite the weight he’d put on. The suits had lost a lot of their original impact because they no longer had any expectations of the man wearing them—but the cut couldn’t be denied.

Saskia had stored them in a box when he got fired and the box had been put in the van along with everything else when they left their old house on the north side of Burwood. They’d stayed in the box while he took a year off on his redundancy money and tried to write a book, and they’d come back out of the box a year ago when he’d taken the job as a Media Studies teacher at Burwood Technical College.

‘Dad—time to get up—come on.’ She stood at the foot of the bed and waited as the duvet shifted and Richard rolled onto his back.

She went over to the curtains and opened them. ‘There’s a thick fog out there today—look.’

But Richard didn’t look; he was too busy watching her—and had stopped being interested in fog a long time ago.

‘You okay?’ he said after a while.

Saskia smiled at him, but didn’t say anything.

‘What’s that you’re eating?’

‘Pizza.’

He sighed. ‘You out tonight?’

‘Maybe. What about you?’

Richard nodded slowly. ‘There’ll probably be drinks after work.’

‘Who with?’

‘People.’

They stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Saskia said at last. ‘Just let me know.’

Richard sighed again.

‘Come on, you’ve got to get up—you’ve got a nine a.m. class.’

‘Not today.’

‘Yes—today; it’s the module on sitcoms and you’ve got notes for it already—those ones we worked on this time last year; I put the green folder by your bag next to the door. Come on—’ She lifted the duvet and tickled his feet.

‘Okay—I’m up.’

She leant over and gave him a kiss on the forehead before disappearing into the bathroom and putting on her make-up. After this she picked up another cardigan from the pile in the corner of her room, and a scarf that she wrapped round her neck at least four times before poking her head round his bedroom door once more and yelling, ‘UP!’

‘I’m up,’ he mumbled, sitting swaying on the side of the bed.

‘See you later.’

‘Yeah. Love you.’

‘Love you too.’

She went back downstairs, unlocked the front door and stepped out into the fog.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Richard Greaves listened to his daughter leave the house, and waited. Sometimes she forgot stuff she had to come back for, but not this morning.

He exhaled loudly, unaware he’d even been holding his breath, and collapsed backwards onto the bed. This morning he was feeling the most unhappy he had felt since he’d first started waking up in the morning feeling unhappy, which was about five years ago. Something terrible had happened in his life; more terrible than discovering the love letters written by a man called Peter Jenkins to his then wife, Caro; more terrible than being laid off from Sky TV and having to pay most of his not generous redundancy package to Caro and her new partner, Peter Jenkins; more terrible than living in a two up two down overlooking the Unigate Dairy depot. What made it worse was that he couldn’t talk to anybody about it; not even his sister—the only member of his family he was still on speaking terms with—and definitely not Saskia.

He lay there staring up at the ceiling, which had been hastily wallpapered in order to hold it together—by the son of the woman who died here—before they put it on the market. The upstairs bedrooms had also been washed in a single coat of magnolia that the wallpaper underneath—a ghostly pattern of miniature posies—could still be seen through. The imprints of the elderly woman’s furniture could be traced as well, in the pile of the carpet from the decades it had stood there.

The lamp hanging from the ceiling was a deep, helpless burgundy, and had tassels. There were brown stains on the inside of the shade where water had, at some point in time, dripped through the ceiling. Sometimes he was so hung over when he woke in the morning that he thought he heard the lamp muttering at him in a language he couldn’t understand—a dead language like Aramaic. His sister phoned him while that was happening once and told him he sounded like crap and he’d asked her how a person who was getting taunted by a lampshade—in Aramaic—was meant to sound, and then she’d hung up.

This morning it wasn’t taunting him—in Aramaic or anything else.

Sighing, he rolled over and felt under the bed for the bag of cocaine he kept taped to the frame.

His dealer lived on a farm about three miles out of Burwood. He bred spaniels for gun dogs and Richard came across him because he had a lap top that was playing up—this was when he was writing his novel—and the spaniel breeder did a sideline in computer repairs. Richard left the farm with a fully functioning lap top and 4g of pure Bolivian—yet another of the breeder’s sidelines, it transpired.

Hauling himself once more into an upright position, he shook out a line onto the small metal tray with a picture of the Natural History Museum on it that he kept by the side of the bed specifically for this purpose.

He did the line, closed his eyes, and waited.

When he opened them again, the surfaces in the room had become sharper and brighter. By the time he got dressed in the suit Saskia had hung out for him, the interior of the house was virtually dazzling.

Downstairs, he felt that the kitchen could almost pass as the sort of kitchen other—ordinary—people had.

He poured himself a glass of milk and stood drinking it, staring at the two photographs Blu Tacked to the fridge door—the only two photographs in the entire house, in fact. One was of him and Saskia scuba diving in France, and the other was of him standing at the bottom of a trench in the Somme where a relative of his had died during the First World War.

You could tell a lot about a middle-class family from examining their fridge. A well-stocked interior indicated physical health, and a well-stocked exterior (fridge magnets) indicated an attempt, at least, in projecting emotional health. The Greaveses’ fridge was both empty, and unadorned—apart from the two photographs.

Richard picked up his bag and the green folder containing Saskia’s notes for that morning’s class on sitcoms and, feeling fretful—the only discernible trace of his earlier despair—but remarkably buoyant, pulled the front door loudly shut.

That was all he had to do.

As long as he left for work in the morning, kept the front garden clear of litter, and put the right recycling in the right bin, he was left alone.

The world didn’t care that a coke-addicted divorcee lived at number twenty-four Carlton Avenue with a daughter he was incapable of looking after—or that he’d slept with a minor in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Richard took the same amount of cocaine most mornings to help him out of bed, out of the house and into the dark green Skoda that had been designed with Saabs in mind. He used to make people laugh—his ex-wife, Caro, included—at his Skoda jokes, but that was when he drove a Saab. Now, as a Skoda driver, he wasn’t entirely sure of his footing when it came to telling Skoda jokes, and didn’t know any jokes about Saabs.

The fog was beginning to lift and the early morning world of Burwood shone through the diminishing grey as he drove the Skoda out of town towards the new bypass and Technical College.

Once there he made his way to the far end of the car park and parked beneath a bank of Scotch pines where traces of fog still hung. This was where he always parked because nobody else ever did.