Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls

In fact, even when he was it was sometimes difficult.

Tomorrow night, Sylvia was having a poker party.

Nobody in Burwood had ever had a poker party before.

If only Bill would stop creeping and shuffling about, and start acting like the sort of man who was married to the sort of woman who held poker parties for forty people.

The Hendersons had been to hell and back, which wasn’t to say they’d been to the Congo, but was to say that Bill Henderson had lost his job—unexpectedly—and had a breakdown. Leaving Sylvia to conceal this fact from just about everybody they knew (including themselves) while simultaneously attempting to sell the 1.2 million London home in order to get rid of the 600k mortgage, pay Vicky and Tom’s final terms’ school fees (£8,500), and put together the Henderson re-location package.

She’d been looking for somewhere they could shine—after The Crash, the Hendersons needed to shine—and chosen Burwood after seeing an article in the Financial Times ranking it as fourth highest in the country for male life expectancy, and eighth lowest for teenage pregnancy. These figures spoke affluence, and with the proceeds from the sale of their London Life, the Hendersons bought number two Park Avenue—the largest house on the street—and set about making arrangements for their own Second Coming.

The house had been undervalued for a quick sale—messy divorce, the estate agent who showed her round explained, with as much polite regret as he could muster.

Bill got the job she persuaded him to apply for at Pinnacle Insurance after pumping him with Prozac until he was well over the limit, and in spite of the fact that he was holding out for a job teaching maths at a school in Malawi, which she knew he wouldn’t get because she’d shredded his completed application after promising to send it recorded delivery.

Sylvia’s rise to top of the pile here on Park Avenue had been—much like her daughter Vicky’s at Burwood Girls’—astronomical. Most of their neighbours had been easily won over by her Phoney Femme Fatale persona —everybody, that is, apart from the doctor’s wife at number five, who had an unsettling sense of humour, and the two retired diplomats who lived with their Down’s Syndrome daughter at number seventeen.

Both the doctor’s wife, however, and the two diplomats, had accepted invitations to her poker party.

Sylvia was going to win.

While Sylvia lay in bed not thinking about Bill, Bill moved slowly through the fog on Hurst Road in the same direction and with the same frantic plod as the other commuters—towards the station that connected them with the country’s capital: London.

The behaviour of the human traffic on the pavement was the same as the traffic on the roads, despite the fact that they didn’t have a vehicle. Bill had been classifying them over a long series of Fridays. There were the tailgaters who stayed on your heel and refused to pass even when you slowed down virtually to a stop; the centre crawlers who seemed to take up the entire pavement and refused to move over; the obsessive overtakers who insisted on accelerating past you only to immediately slow down so that you were forced to overtake in turn only to find them once more accelerating on your right in a repetitive pattern that could cover the entire Hurst Road stretch to the station itself.

He never spoke to his fellow commuters—nothing more than shifting shapes in this morning’s fog—and yet over the past two years their faces had become more familiar to Bill than his own family’s: to the extent of noting absences on the platform, and wondering why. He’d filled in the hundreds of hours spent toeing the line along the front of Platform 2 while waiting for delayed trains spuriously christening his fellow commuters. There were Zombie Extra, Sid Steroid, The Obliterator, Super Slut, Hobo Becoming, War Criminal, and Dartford Tunnel (so-called for obvious reasons involving over-use by members of the opposite sex), who would have got the title of Super Slut if Super Slut hadn’t already been taken. For some reason they rarely showed together for the 6:08 train. Something that had initially led Bill to the conclusion that Dartford Tunnel was Super Slut on a bad day, which she in fact wasn’t.

Super Slut always got a seat on the train, and Sid Steroid always stood as close to her as he could; close enough to share both his inherent and artificial body odours. If Bill ever stopped to think about it—which he didn’t—he’d realise that he spent a disproportionate quota of the day’s emotions on these commuter fictions: from wondering whether the festive season would bring about some sort of consummation for Sid Steroid and Super Slut to wondering how it was that Zombie Extra and The Obliterator always managed to get through the train doors first even when they’d been standing at the back of a platform cluster.

He’d served up a few of his better stories to Sylvia—such as the time Zombie Extra took a seat vacated by a generous gentleman for Super Slut and how it had come to blows between Zombie Extra and Sid Steroid—but Sylvia wasn’t interested. Sylvia was only interested in the names of people at Pinnacle Insurance who held more senior positions than him.

In fact, she hadn’t only been uninterested in his Zombie Extra versus Sid Steroid story, she’d looked worried and initiated one of her off-the-wall discussions on how St John’s Wort was a genuinely effective herbal alternative to Prozac for the treatment of depression, and how it had changed Barbara Phelps’s husband’s life. When he’d asked who the fuck Barbara Phelps was (let alone Mr Phelps who had a Life), she’d looked at him and said, ‘Precisely.’

He continued to stalk through the fog towards the station.

Sylvia had revisited the St John’s Wort conversation again last night and this had somehow run into a criticism of his lack of initiative when it came to Tom and spending time with Tom. Despite speaking to Tom on the phone and seeing him when he came home to visit and get his laundry done, Bill hadn’t yet chartered a yacht for the weekend and learnt to sail it across the Channel like Mr Phelps, who had a Life, had with his son—cross-Channel sailing being, apparently, the Litmus test for those who were, and those who weren’t paternally engaged. So their relationship was completely dysfunctional.

He was still thinking about last night as he reached the traffic lights just outside the station and drew level with Zombie Extra. Poised on the edge of the kerb and ready with the rest of them to make a road-dash across now heavy traffic, he remembered what it was Sylvia asked him to do last night.

‘I forgot to empty the dishwasher.’

It wasn’t until Zombie Extra turned to stare at him that he realised he’d said it out loud.

In the darkness, Sylvia’s ears clearly picked out a tapping, scuffling sound and for a moment she thought it was Bill—maybe he hadn’t left for work yet after all. She lay still and concentrated. There it was again. It wasn’t Bill.

She’d been hearing it for about a week now and told herself they probably had mice. Whatever it was, it sounded like there was more than one of them, which meant they were breeding.

Not wanting to spend any more time alone in the dark, she hit the light switch she’d had installed—one on her side of the bed, one on Bill’s—and the bedroom was instantly illuminated with just the right wattage: low because her eyes had become increasingly light-sensitive recently. Rachel Dent, the Hendersons’ neighbour to the right and Sylvia’s best friend of two years, said it was a side-effect from the Botox, but Dr Forbes said this was unlikely, and Rachel was only saying that because she had a needle phobia and couldn’t do Botox herself. Sylvia had a top-up done earlier in the week ready for tomorrow night’s poker party, and was eager to see if the Botox magic she’d got so addicted to had taken place—it usually took about three days for her face to process the agedefying contents of the injection.