‘Oh, Collette,’ says Vesta, ‘you’ve got to have a funeral.’
A flash of defiance. ‘I don’t, you know.’
Their driver is agog. She can feel him longing to turn the music down so he can hear properly. Collette’s head slumps back against the window, and she stares out once again, her lips pursed. They reach the three-way junction at the bottom of Northbourne Common, and the driver takes the right-hand branch.
Vesta leans forward. ‘No, sorry. We need the other road. The one that runs past the station.’
He puts his brakes on, pulls over to the side to prepare for a U-turn. The black Merc glides past them and turns in to a side road fifty yards up on the left. Suddenly, Collette is sitting up, alert, staring after it. Oh, God, it’s not, is it, thinks Vesta. I couldn’t have been that unobservant, could I?
The driver makes the turn in three moves and heads back towards Station Road. Collette cranes through the rear window. She’s grinding her teeth. If it comes out now, thinks Vesta, I don’t know what we’ll do. Go on to Gatwick?
They get caught at the traffic lights and have to wait a full minute. A small queue builds up behind them: a Fiesta, a Panda and what looks like the Poshes’ SUV, though it could be any SUV, really. Featureless, soulless guzzlers of petrol, a mystery in a world that claims to be worried about resources. No black bonnet emerges from the side road, no cashmere overcoats with the collars turned up against the rain.
Collette sits back as they turn the corner. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says. ‘Jumping at shadows. Hiding every time I see a tinted window.’
‘Yes,’ says Vesta.
‘It’s time I moved on,’ she says.
‘Hossein will be sad. I’ll be sad, too, come to that.’
Collette clamps her lips together and stares out of the window again.
‘He will, you know,’ says Vesta. ‘You’re the first… well, I’ve never seen him interested in anyone…’
Collette tries to ignore her. ‘I don’t suppose anybody much wants to stay in that house now,’ she says. ‘He’ll be gone the minute he gets the chance, trust me. But I’m not dragging him into all this. He doesn’t deserve that. I was only here because of…’ She has to wait a beat before she carries on. The crying’s going to start really soon, now, thinks Vesta. She thinks she’s hard as nails, but she’ll be in bits by tonight. ‘… because of her. I’m stupid. I shouldn’t have got mixed up with all of you. Christ, what a mess. He deserves better than that. He was fine here, your little cosy family and your cups of tea, before he knew I existed. He’ll be fine when I’m gone, too. We’re not some Romeo and Juliet. It just… is. What it is. You’ll all be fine. You’ll be better off, really. Give it a couple of weeks and you’ll all have forgotten I was ever here.’
Vesta raises her eyebrows. ‘You think I want to still be here? After… that?’
Collette shuts up.
‘Good God. I bloody hate the place. If that… bugger had just given me a bit of cash I’d have been out of there like a shot.’
This seems to come as news to Collette. ‘Really?’
Vesta pulls a face at her. This conversation is getting too personal for a public place. ‘Yes,’ she says.
Collette considers her. ‘It’s a crappy life, on the road. Really. You don’t want to do that.’
‘No. No, you’re right. I was thinking more about the seaside, myself. Open a café, feed the seagulls. But I’ve blown that now, haven’t I? I’m going to be stuck in that hole in the ground with the damp and the drains and the… ghosts for the rest of my life.’
Collette’s eyes fill with tears. ‘My God, Vesta. I’d do anything. I’m so tired. I’m so damn tired. Sometimes I think I’m so tired I just want to die.’
Chapter Forty-Seven
She will never be quite sure how it happened. Cats are like that. All love-love and climbing up for a cuddle, then one day they’re hanging off your face with their claws unsheathed. Maybe he has an infection somewhere that she’s not noticed, maybe it’s just a bad mood because his usual marauding had been curtailed by the rain, but Psycho, love of her life, suddenly goes from rolling over and showing her his tummy to slashing at her.
One of his claws catches in the skin on the bridge of her nose, half a centimetre from her eye, and suddenly the two of them are struggling, Cher shrieking in pain and rage and the cat, startled, digging the claw in further then thrashing about trying to extract himself. Then he’s free, and he’s flying across the room under the impetus of her throw and crashing against the wall. He lands on the carpet, stunned, and crouches there, glaring at her in reproach.
Cher slaps a hand up to the cut on her nose. Blood pours out of it, soaking into the corner of her eye, where it stings. ‘Fuck,’ she says to the cat, then, as the pain kicks in, yells ‘FUCK!’ Then white-hot rage fills her, and she runs at him, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and slaps his backside with furious passion. Psycho squirms in her grip, but he doesn’t fight back. Even as she’s beating him, she’s thinking oh, God, it was an accident, what am I doing? But the pain is ferocious and she’s in the full grip of her animal brain.
She carts him over to the door, opens it and hurls him on to the landing. Later, she will at least be able to comfort herself that she wasn’t so out of control that she threw him out of the window. Psycho somersaults through the air and lands on the carpet on all fours. His eyes are huge with hurt. People who don’t live with cats don’t know this: that if you know them well, their emotions are written large across their faces, if you only care to look. He hangs his head like a beaten dog, and bobs from foot to foot.
‘Yeah, fuck off!’ she bellows. ‘I don’t want to bloody see you, you bastard!’
She slams the door, shaking, and goes to examine her nose in the mirror. The cut is only a few millimetres long – nothing on the injuries from which she’s still recovering, but the fact that he’s missed her eye by a whisker makes her blood run cold. Imagination overtakes her, makes her jump outside her body and see herself, cat attached to her eyeball, membrane breaking and juicy jelly cascading over her cheek. She shudders and presses her hand to her eyes. Wets a bit of bog paper from the roll she half-inched from a pub a few weeks back, dabs at the cut.
The cat scratches at her door. He doesn’t like being excluded, is trying to apologise. ‘Piss off,’ she calls. God, it’s lucky they’re all still out at the hospital, she thinks. I’d have scared them half to death with my shouting.
Psycho yowls, and a piteous paw appears in the gap at the bottom of the door. She’s already over the anger, but she can’t resist punishing him a little more. He can stay out there till I’m ready. Little sod. She screws her eye shut and sprays a little perfume on the cut. A cut nose is one thing: a septic nose a whole other ballgame.
A few seconds of frantic scrabbling, then it stops. Cher can feel the rejection beaming through the wood. Oh, poor old sod, she thinks. He’s my best friend and he didn’t mean to do it. She chooses a little round plaster from the box Collette brought up when she was sick, and fixes it over the cut. It’s only oozing, now. It felt like it had gone all the way through to the bone at the time, but it’s clearly not that serious. She goes and opens the door.
Psycho is sulking. He has retreated to the corner by the Landlord’s cupboard, and has hunched himself into a tea cosy, his chin tucked in to his chest and his eyes wet with reproach. ‘Oh, sorry, lover,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. I’m not cross any more.’
She goes over to pick him up. He clocks her approach, and shoots off up the landing, towards the bathroom. Christ, cats. You can never snub them without getting snubbed right back. ‘Oh, come on, Psycho,’ she says, trying her reasonable tone, and follows. ‘You hurt me too, you know.’