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

When Joe thought about it later, it was what he remembered most about that afternoon in December: the sound of the scissors and Belle’s grey curls on Lenny’s boots.

‘Don’t mind, do you, Joe?’ Belle asked. ‘We was right in the middle.’

‘You go ahead. Wouldn’t want to get between a woman and her hair.’

He went over to the window, pulling the nets to one side. A seagull on the ledge eyed him and let out a shriek then flew away. In summertime you got a bird’s-eye view of the nudist beach from here.

‘Not such a good view in December, is it?’ Belle said, smiling.

He looked to see if Lenny was smiling as well, but she wasn’t.

The room was lit by the gas fire and a couple of heavily tasselled standard lamps with shawls draped over them. The lack of overhead light combined with net curtains, snow and twilight made it difficult to see anything but shadows in the room, and the flat suddenly felt as though it was waiting for somebody long overdue.

‘Your eyes all right?’ Joe asked Lenny.

She nodded, tucking the scissors into her belt as she started setting fat pink curlers in the old woman’s hair.

‘D’you want tea?’ Belle asked Lenny, her eyes closed. Then, without waiting for an answer, ‘Go and make us some tea, Joe, and don’t forget the biscuits.’ Her eyes opened and followed her son-in-law into the kitchenette in the corner. ‘And you can take your coat off – the flat’s got central heating.’

The light in the kitchenette was orange and unsteady, and speckled with the corpses of flies. It made his eyes hurt. Belle’s cupboards were full and it took him a while to find the tea caddy – the one with elephants on that he remembered from his courting days – behind the rows of sugar, flour and canned fruit and vegetables that she always had in, never having recovered from rationing and the urge to stockpile. The whistling kettle had been replaced by an electric one, and as he plugged it in he wondered when the overhaul had happened and why Lenny, the hairdresser, didn’t like him. Animals and children liked him, which meant that most men and women did as well. Why didn’t the hairdresser? He looked down at his black suit and dark purple tie and thought about her standing in the hallway with the scissors.

In the room next door the hairdryer went on, and when he took the tea in neither of the women looked up. Belle still had her eyes closed and he hoped she hadn’t fallen asleep. He put the Coronation tray on the coffee table and walked past the photographs on the sideboard, as alarmed as he always was at how prolific they made his life seem. They were nearly all of him, Linda and Jessica. The only one Belle had of herself was of her and her first husband, Linda’s father, who had drowned in the sea while home on leave at the end of the war. This was the first thing Belle ever told him. Then she said that Eric had never been able to make her laugh while he was alive, but talking about his death always set her off.

There were no photographs of her and Jim, her second husband, or even just of Jim. When he died all the money from the sale of the hotel went to Brighton Cricket Club, who got a new clubhouse and practice wickets built with it.

Joe looked at a photograph of himself as a grown man then looked away. The hairdryer cut out.

Belle’s hand went up to her hair and Lenny unhooked the mirror from the chimney breast.

‘Isn’t it nice? Won’t last, but isn’t it nice?’

‘Won’t last if you keep touching it and messing it up. Here.’ Lenny took a can of spray out of the case on the table and covered Belle’s head in it.

The spray hung heavily in the heated air.

‘You staying for tea?’ Belle asked her.

‘I should go. I’ve got Mrs Jenkins in Flat Four to do, and she’s going out tonight.’

‘Jenkins is always going out,’ Belle grumbled. ‘Probably goes out more than you do, and she’s not “Mrs”. Never got married – whatever she says. Pour her a cup, Joe.’

‘Milk? Sugar?’ he asked.

‘Both,’ Lenny said, packing away the hairdryer, scissors, spray and rollers into the case.

‘How many?’

‘How many what?’

‘Sugars.’

‘Three. Please.’

‘How many sugars’ll you have, Joe, now she’s not here to tell you off?’

He smiled, but didn’t put any in his cup.

‘Go on, just have one.’ Belle turned to Lenny. ‘He used to have sugar with some tea in it when I first knew him. Won’t let you have sugar no more, will she?’

‘Linda’s just looking after me.’

‘That’s what she calls it, is it?’

Joe paused then dropped a spoonful of sugar into his tea. ‘Look what you made me do, Belle.’

Belle smiled, pleased at her son-in-law’s dissent.

Lenny, moving about rhythmically in the corner of the room, didn’t look up.

‘Joe’s been at the Britannia Kitchens roadshow at the Brighton Centre. His company had a stand there.’

Lenny looked up, taking in the suit. ‘That’s what you do, then?’

‘Course it’s what he does, I told you.’

‘What?’ Joe said to Lenny, over Belle’s head.

‘Build kitchens?’

‘He doesn’t build kitchens, he sells them, but that isn’t what Joe does.’ Belle slurped her tea and started on the biscuits. A flake of chocolate melted in the corner of her mouth and ran in a rivulet down one of the wrinkles there. ‘Joe makes money.’

‘I’m a carpenter,’ he cut in. ‘By trade, I’m a carpenter.’ Why did he think this sounded better than making money?

‘Was a carpenter.’ Belle wasn’t having any of it. ‘Now you just make money. Got a whole office full of people working for you. Joe’s got his own company.’

‘I’m a carpenter by trade. My dad was a carpenter.’ If Lenny didn’t look up or say something soon, he thought he was going to explode. ‘I’m from Brighton,’ he yelled. ‘Brighton born and bred.’

Lenny turned her back on him and clicked the clasps on the case shut.

‘Cassidy Street. Right there on Cassidy Street.’ He gestured blindly at the net curtains as if his entire past lay just beyond them.

‘Calm down, Joe,’ Belle said, leaning forward to pour herself another cup of tea and farting. ‘You’ve earned the money. No need to be ashamed of it.’

Lenny drank her tea in one go and at last turned to look at him. ‘What makes you think I’m from Brighton?’

‘I don’t know, I …’

‘You think I’m from Brighton?’

Belle started rattling the biscuit tin. ‘These’ll melt if we don’t eat them. What’d you put them so near the fire for, Joe? Look at this!’ She held up her hands, covered in chocolate, for him to look at. ‘Look at this, Joe. Why’d you get the chocolate ones out? It’s a bloody sauna in here with the gas on and you know what I’m like with the chocolate ones.’ She let out another fart. ‘I’ll sit here and eat them all. Why’d you get these ones out?’

‘I don’t know.’

Belle was disappearing out of earshot.

‘Turn the heating down, Joe. Have a fiddle with the thermostat or something, there’s bloody chocolate everywhere.’

‘Skirton Street,’ Lenny said.

‘What?’ Joe couldn’t hear. The flat was suddenly made of chocolate and it was melting.

‘I grew up on Skirton Street. The one after Cassidy.’ She was smiling.

Lenny the hairdresser was smiling.

‘The thermostat, Joe. Just behind the microwave.’

‘Skirton Street. I know Skirton Street,’ he said to Lenny.

‘There you go then,’ she said, walking past him into the kitchenette and re-emerging with the carpet sweeper.

‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there,’ Belle said to Joe, ‘I can’t get to the thermostat.’