Crazy Paving (26 page)

The boss looked at Annette as if it was she who had asked the question. Then he said solemnly, ‘It’s your dad.’

Within hours, the house was invaded. It stayed that way for days. Then there came the unequivocal glamour of the funeral. Annette’s Aunt Alice took her out and bought her a new dress, soft
navy blue wool with a tea-coloured lace edging around the cuffs and collar. It was from a boutique in East Grinstead called
Young Lady
, which was full of middle-aged assistants with
gravity-defying hairdos who followed Annette around the shop twisting their hands together and saying, ‘Oh that looks lovely on.’ Annette had never had anything so old fashioned. She
was enchanted. She was less enchanted when, the following day, she found her mother in the sitting room with the dress clasped on her lap. She was unpicking the lace with the end of a fruit knife.
Annette sat down on the sofa and watched her in silence. Eventually, the lace lay curled next to her mother’s feet, like crumbled biscuit. Her mother held the dress up, proudly. ‘There,
now you’re decent.’

At the graveside they stood close together. Annette in her new dress with the tiny pin-prick holes around the cuffs and collar, her mother in an old brown coat, her face red from weeping. Their
next door neighbours, Mr and Mrs Dobson, stood either side of them and held umbrellas over their heads. Mrs Dobson was on one side, with her arm around Annette’s mother. Mr Dobson was on the
other, next to Annette. Once in a while, he squeezed her shoulder protectively. She liked the feel of the Dobsons either side of them. It was like having bodyguards. She stared at the coffin and
thought, Mum and me, we are the stars. For days now, people had been coming round to the house and telling her how wonderfully well she was coping; complete strangers, some of them.

The following week, all the people disappeared. Her father had been buried. The house was silent. It became apparent that he was gone.

The only person who hung around was Mr Dobson. He was an electrician, self-employed. He started fixing things for them. ‘Might as well,’ he would murmur from underneath the sink, his
voice echoing. Annette understood that this was because her father was no longer around, although she couldn’t remember him ever having fixed anything even when he was. A week after the
funeral Mr Dobson came with a bunch of carnations for Annette’s mother and a book for Annette. ‘Just to cheer you up a bit,’ he said, a little bashfully, looking at
Annette’s mother. After he had gone, she swayed softly from side to side in the kitchen, and said to Annette, ‘He’s such a thoughtful man, and that wife of his leads him a merry
dance. She doesn’t deserve him. What’s in your book?’

‘Poetry.’

Upstairs, later, Annette opened it:
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
. Inside Mr Dobson had written,
To a brave and lovely girlie
, and signed it,
Keith
.

Her mother did not find out about Keith for eighteen months. By then, he had left his wife and moved into a flat in a new development on the edge of Uckfield. Mrs Dobson had
come round and wept in their kitchen. ‘I don’t know why . . .’ she had sobbed. ‘He won’t talk to me even . . .’

Later Annette’s mother said, ‘That put me in a rather difficult position you know.’ Then she added with a secretive little smile, ‘Not that you’d
understand.’

The first time Annette removed her clothes for Keith, she was standing in the bedroom of his new flat. Except for the bed and a wardrobe, it was completely bare. The walls were covered with
woodchip wallpaper, painted beige. She stood in front of him. He sat on the bed and stared. She was wearing the knickers that her mother regularly bought for her, cream-coloured ones which came
right up to her waist. Keith was staring at the knickers. Oh God, she thought. How awful. I must look about twelve years old. I’ve got to chuck these out and get some new ones. How
embarrassing. Keith took her wrists and drew her towards him. He gazed up at her. Then he buried his face in the palms of her hands.

Eventually, Annette plucked up the courage to tell her mother she was moving out. She was going to live with Mr Dobson. He wanted them to get married. Her mother looked up at her,
disbelievingly, from where she sat on a wooden kitchen chair. It was a Sunday. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

Annette went upstairs and began to sort through her things. Later, her mother came and stood in the doorway and began to shout. ‘That man is married! He’s the same age as your poor
father! They were almost best friends! He may have left her but he’s still married! What about your A levels? Think of his poor wife!’

The shouting continued for several months, whenever Annette or her mother met, which was not often and usually accidental. Once, they bumped into each other in Gateways. Her mother had shrieked,
from one end of the aisle to the other, ‘Your father is turning in his grave!’

It was Sunday afternoon. Soon, Annette would leave to catch her train back to London. She and her mother sat in the kitchen. They had eaten lunch. They were drinking tea.
Alternately, one of them would lift their cup to their lips, as if they were figures on a rain or sunshine weathervane. In the back garden, cloud and sun were also alternating. Shadows moved
about.

There was a pile of brochures and leaflets on the kitchen counter. Annette saw them as she rose from the table and went to refill the pot. She picked one up while the kettle boiled and began to
flick through it.

‘You can put crazy paving wherever you like these days you know,’ her mother said. She was sitting with her back to Annette. She didn’t turn around. ‘Not just paths. In
the front, down the back, up the walls. Except if you put it up the walls it’s called something else.’

Annette read:
It is important that crazy paving is laid level. Pegs should be placed every nine feet, alternately on each side of the path. Stones should be placed adjacent to the
pegs
. . . Opposite the instructions was a glossy colour picture of a man in early middle age wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, grinningly handsome. He was standing in a front garden
and holding a broken concrete slab. Behind him was his house. Standing in the window of his house, was his wife. His wife was holding their baby. She was also grinning. They were both looking
towards the camera and the wife had her hand raised, as if she wanted to comment on proceedings in some way.
The joints between stones must be between one quarter and one half of an inch and
should be filled with mortar
. ‘I had no idea it was so complicated . . .’ Annette murmured.

‘You have to do it right,’ said her mother. ‘You can’t just do it anyhow.’

Annette looked out of the window.
You know what your problem is
. . . Helly had said. Perhaps Annette did not know what sort of woman she was, but she knew what sort of woman she was
not. She was not the woman in the crazy paving picture. She was not her mother. She was not Mrs Dobson – or William’s wife. Perhaps, she thought, as I get older and older, all the other
women I might be will get eliminated, one by one. Perhaps, eventually, there will be one final option. Then I shall know. ‘Funny thing is,’ her mother was saying, ‘the man said if
there’s any pattern, then it isn’t crazy paving. Which strikes me as a bit illogical, if you think about it.’ Annette was thinking of all the different types of women she might or
might not be. She thought about her childhood and words ran round her head. In particular, one word – abuse.

She read the papers. She knew the meaning of the word. She knew about two-year-olds being felt up by their uncles, adolescent girls made pregnant by their fathers, children of all ages beaten,
buggered. Throughout her childhood, all her awakened years, her father had never once touched her improperly.

It was simply that, throughout those years, she had felt that at any moment without warning, he might.

The weather was not kind. Alun said they were unlucky. April was often fine this far south, he said. That’s what it said in the brochure. Joan knew that they were not
unlucky, they were average. They were mean, that’s what they were. If they had come a month later they would have had sunny afternoons, all the shops open, warmth. Instead, they got the
special offer with twenty per cent off, a brisk breeze and plenty of cloud.

Torrievieja was perched on the coast a few kilometres south of Alicante. Their apartment block was outside the village, a custard-coloured edifice built around a central courtyard with a
restaurant and kidney-shaped swimming pool. It was built to house a couple of thousand, by the size of it, but the only guests at that time were their tour group and three teenage girls in the room
below Alun and Joan who played pop music in the middle of the night and did their make-up on the balcony.

Most of the other travellers in the group were women. On the bus from Alicante, Joan had allowed herself a glance round and a moment of perverse satisfaction that she was one of the few people
on the bus whose husband had not yet dropped dead.

Once they were settled in they kept themselves to themselves. Joan tried to feel pleased. She had prepared herself for mucking in, exchanging life stories, the spirit of the blitz. She had come
ready to tolerate people she did not really like. Instead, the group seemed to keep in its pre-arranged order, mixed and single sex couples and the odd lone female. Joan and Alun were among the
youngest. The exception was a group of four women who were sharing an apartment on the same floor. They knocked on Joan and Alun’s door the first morning and said they were going on an
adventure down to the beach and did they want to come?

‘Oh,’ said Joan. ‘It is rather windy . . .’

After they had gone, Alun said, ‘What did they want?’

‘They wanted to know if we wanted to take a walk with them to look at the beach. They said nothing ventured nothing gained.’

Alun grunted and said, ‘Teapot.’

The restaurant was wood-panelled and served cheese and ham sandwiches at lunchtime and steak and chips in the evening. It was staffed by two young waiters in white shirts and black waistcoats.
They had brown eyes and heavily loaded accents which they practised on the teenagers. ‘Hallo,’ they would say, as the girls slid themselves up onto the tall thin bar stools.
‘Would you like somet’ing to eat or drink or shall we talk about t’ings?’

They ignored Alun and Joan, sitting at a table in an alcove. Alun was relatively patient to start off with, tapping the table with the end of a teaspoon and waiting for one of them to amble
over. Eventually, he went up to the bar and gave their order in a voice that boomed around the little restaurant and out into the courtyard.

‘I,’ (pointing at himself) ‘would like steak and chips. My wife,’ (pointing back at Joan) ‘would like egg and chips. We would like them pronto. Quickly.’

The waiters looked at each other and pulled faces. Then they shrugged and lifted their hands.

Alun sighed, picked up the plastic-covered menu and pointed at the pictures of what they wanted. ‘
I
. . .’ he began again, pointing at himself.

The young women watched, giggling.

Eventually, one of the waiters said, ‘
Aah
, Señor,’ as if Alun had explained the meaning of the universe, ‘I understand. Cheeps!’

At that, there was great rejoicing. The other waiter threw his hands up into the air and beamed with joy. ‘Yes! Cheeps!’ They both ran around behind the bar calling, ‘Cheeps!
Cheeps!’ Then one of them lifted the hatch behind him and shouted into the kitchen, ‘Luis! The Eenglish! He want cheeps!’

The girls nearly fell off their stools.

The four women were there. They clattered in together just after Joan and Alun, talking in high-pitched voices in a mixture of London accents. ‘Old hens,’ Alun muttered as they
nodded a greeting on their way past. They dined in the alcove next to them, talking loudly and playing cards. They started off with whist and rummy but by the time Alun and Joan had finished eating
they had degenerated to snap. Every now and then, one would bang the table and they would all scream ‘Snap!’ in unison. The level of hysteria rose gradually. One of them shrieked at the
waiters, ‘ ’Ere, Pedro, let’s have another bottle of vino!’ When he brought it over, the same voice cracked, ‘ ’Ow about a kiss?’ More shrieking. Alun
rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

Alun and Joan went back to their apartment, Joan dawdling to breathe in the cool, clean night air. Inside, Alun sat down to read the day-old paper they had bought in Torrievieja that afternoon.
Joan sat in the chair with a puzzle book on her lap and stared out of the sliding doors which led onto their balcony. Funny to think it’s a Monday evening, she thought, and that somewhere
else, my ordinary life is carrying on, as if there is another Joan who went into work today and talked to Helly and Annette and asked them if anything had happened with Richard and watered plants
and filed correspondence. I wonder how my impersonator is getting on. She tried to think of it the other way around, that her perspective of the world had merely shifted from London to Torrievieja,
but it was hard to grasp: the one thing we never manage to get hold of, she thought – a sense of our own absence.

Their curtains were open. She gazed through the patio doors out onto the balcony and beyond. That blackness out there, she thought, that is the sky, and the sea.

The days remained cloudy. Each morning Joan woke, left Alun’s silent bulk in bed and padded into the little kitchen to put the kettle on. This was the best bit, being
alone in the tiny room with nothing familiar around. All was new and white and clean, a fresh start. She went to the toilet while the kettle boiled, then tiptoed into the bedroom and pulled a
cardigan on over her nightie. She returned to the kitchen and filled the stainless steel teapot they had brought from home. While it was brewing, she went over to the patio doors, slid them quietly
back and stepped outside.

It was chilly. The sky was white, with clouds here and there which folded into grey. A light morning breeze whisked across the courtyard, ruffling the surface of the swimming pool. Sun-loungers
and plastic tables were piled high at the side, waiting for the peak-season hordes. She imagined how it must be in July and August: rows of girls in coloured bikinis, tanned boys diving into the
pool, hot blue sky, bottles of cold beer, radios blasting out.