David Mitchell: The Book of Other People

‘Nobody else managed to get muddled, Judith.’

If June Nolan weren’t such a Lady Muck – Terry’s a big nob at the cider factory in Hereford better known for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease than for cider – I’d never have let it slip. ‘Well, I am a tad distracted. My lover has died. It’s rather thrown me for a loop, I confess.’

‘Oh.’ That made Lady Muck change her tune. ‘How… did it happen, Judith? Were you very close?’

‘A hit-and-run. The police are still hunting the killer. Oh, I’m not sure if anyone could understand how close Olly and I were. It was beyond closeness. We were one, June. One. I shall never be whole again.’

When June Nolan finally let me go, Muggins here cleaned up the needlessly made tray of coffees, locked up my theatre and headed back towards the clinic car-park. That car alarm was still blaring. Outside the clinic stood a young family, which sounds sweet, but this one made my heart sink. She was about sixteen, fat, dressed like a sporty tramp, and holding a newborn baby in one hand and a giant sausage roll in the other. He looked about eleven, had a lip stud, a rice-pudding complexion, and that hairstyle where strands drip over the criminal forehead. He was a two-thirds scale model of one of those English yobs you see littering European street cafés since budget air-travel came to the masses. Right outside the clinic, right next to his own baby, this boy-father was smoking . Had it been any other morning I might have passed by, but the universe, via Leo, had just sent me a message about the fragility of life.

‘How dare you smoke near that baby!’

The boy-father looked at me with dead eyes.

‘Haven’t you heard of lung cancer?’

Instead of yelling abuse, he inhaled, bent over his baby and blew out cigarette smoke straight into the poor moppet’s face.

Is that family the future of Great Britain?

Yes? Then perhaps eugenics is due a rethink.

A care home spies on the clinic car-park. Yvonne, an aromatherapist I was briefly friendly with, told me that on average its inmates last only eighteen months. The elderly wilt when transplanted. Queen Elizabeth opened this very building a few years ago. I made sure I got to shake the royal hand. She’s smiling at me, in our photograph. Thankful for my assurance that not all her loyal subjects think she organized poor Diana’s assassination. Mind you, I’d put nothing past that Duke of Edinburgh. Told her that, too. A subject has a duty to tell her monarch what’s what.

A janitor-type was peering into my Saab with a knotted-up face.

I realized the offending alarm was, in fact, mine.

With a crisp ‘Excuse me’, I nudged him to one side.

The janitor reared his bulk at me. ‘Is this your car?’

Without responding, I unlocked my car and disabled the alarm.

‘Is this’ – in the sudden silence he was shouting – ‘is this your car?’

‘Do I look like a joy-rider?’

‘ Thirty minutes , this sodding alarm’s been going. Nobody over there’ – he gestured at the care home’s windows, each framing a pale wispy face with less than eighteen months to live – ‘could hear themselves think !’

‘I doubt much thinking goes on there. Shouldn’t you be more concerned about thieves tampering with vehicles under your very nose?’

‘Oh, I very much doubt there was ever any thief!’

Water off a duck’s back. ‘Oh, so we live in a yob-free oasis, do we? See that midget thug over by the clinic? How do you know it wasn’t him? You’ll excuse me. I’m in rather a hurry.’

Thankfully, my Saab started first time.

I reversed out of the tight spot.

I found myself heading not homewards, but on the road to Black Swan Green. I very nearly turned around: Daddy and Marion weren’t expecting me until Sunday. But the universe had told me to cherish my loved ones, so onwards I journeyed, onwards, until the steeple of Saint Gabriel’s and its two giant redwoods sailed closer, closer, over the orchards. Philip and I would explore that graveyard, while our parents chatted after church. How long ago? When Mummy could still go outside, so the late 1970s. Philip found a crack at the base of the steeple. A crack of black. A door to the land of the dead, Philip told me. Left ajar. Philip heard voices, he swore, crying lonely, lonely, lonely .

And it occurred to me that Olly wasn’t the only victim of that hit-and-run murderer, because the Mrs Judith Dunbar-Castle whom I would have become had also been slain.

No, ‘Dunbar-Castle’ sounds like a National Trust property.

Judith Castle-Dunbar was a woman in her fifties, though she could pass for her forties. She was content, and contentment is the best beautician, as Maeve, the owner of an organic shop who pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes, not just mine, used to say. Olly and I would have pooled our funds and bought a spacious house near Charmouth. The Dunbar family would have embraced me. Unlike that gold-digging Patricia creature, who bled him white. Leo would have been Olly’s best man, and Camilla my bridesmaid. Olly’s grown-up son would have wept for joy into his champagne. I don’t think of you as a stepmother – you’re the big sister I never had. A chamber orchestra would have performed Jesus Christ Superstar for us as, one by one, Olly’s friends would have let slip that my husband was on the ropes before he met little old moi .

Magpies loitered with intent on Saint Gabriel’s lychgate.

Once, I was taller than the beech hedge around Daddy’s house. Now it’s as high as the car port. When one returns to childhood haunts, one is supposed to find how much smaller everything has become. But in Black Swan Green, I always feel that I ’m the shrinking one.

‘Daddy! So here’s where you’re hiding!’

‘Why would I “hide” in my own greenhouse?’ Daddy was bent over a cactus, stroking it with a special brush. He switched off the radio cricket. ‘You aren’t due until Sunday.’

‘I was just passing. Don’t switch the radio off on my account.’

‘I switched it off because the agony’s too much. We’re 139 for 8 against Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka .’

‘That’s a gorgeous bloom, Daddy.’

‘This, you mean? Mexicans call it the Phoenix Tree. The Yanks call it the Blue Moon. I call it a waste of bloody time. Six years of fussing and fretting, all you get is this mouldy mauve flower and the aroma of cat litter.’

‘Oh, Daddy!’

‘You can cut me eighteen inches of that twine.’

‘Sure. Is Marion not around, Daddy?’

‘She’s at her book group. You’re too old to say “sure”.’

‘Her book group? Jilly Cooper’s got a new one out?’

‘They’re reading an Icelander. Halldor Laxless, I believe.’

‘ “Halldor Laxless”. My.’

‘The only writer I can stomach is Wilbur Smith. All the rest are bloody Nancy boys. Eighteen inches, I said. That’s more like two feet.’

‘I put a punnet of strawberries on the kitchen sill.’

‘They bring me out in a rash. You’re staying for lunch, I suppose.’

Mummy used to complain that Daddy loved his greenhouse more than his real house. Neighbours’ children’s frisbees and shuttlecocks would get confiscated for landing too near it, never mind that they ganged up on me to vent their displeasure. And no silky mistress was ever cared for as much as the green velvet lawn upon which Daddy lavished vitamins and weedkiller. I remember the day Philip was shown how to mow it. It’s a man’s job, Judith. Women are congenitally incapable of straight lines. End of story . A lesser woman would still be bitter.