Laying the Ghost (20 page)

‘Probably. If I got pulled up for it I could say I was a carpenter, or on my way to help a friend who had a couple of pictures to hang. What have you got?’

‘This.’ Nell showed her the two-foot-long Maglite torch she’d brought for Steve’s show and tell. ‘It weighs a ton and isn’t exactly handbag size. I keep it in the car, so I
suppose
if someone got in and tried to hijack me I’d be ready for them … except,’ she laughed, ‘I’d have to tell them to hang on a minute while I climb across to the back to get it off the floor behind my seat. That would work.’

‘Aha – the trusty Maglite!’ Steve said as he whizzed into the room alongside them. ‘I wondered how many of those would turn up tonight! A classic mistake – weapon too big for the user. OK, everyone …’ He leapt on to the stage. ‘Register first, then violence. Who’s here?’ He went down the list – there was a full class complement except for Patsy.

‘She’s got an aroma-stone massage with Leonie in the spa. She booked it ages ago,’ one of her friends told Steve.

‘A
massage
? She’s missing out on saving her own life for a
massage
?’ He put a cross by her name on the list and shrugged. ‘Oh well … if she wants to be murdered …’

‘Bit harsh, that,’ Abi whispered to Nell. Possibly it was, Nell was inclined to agree, but this time she’d put it down to his having an off-the-wall sense of humour.

‘… Being ready in case of trouble, getting the stance right …’ Steve was talking about body language and called Mike, the Hell’s Angel, out to the front to help demonstrate. Mike looked terrified, anticipating at any second to be hurled across the floor. Nell had noticed in the last class that he kept to the back of the room, trying not to be picked on. Being so easily flung around by a guy half his size couldn’t be doing his personal esteem as a
well-’ard
biker any good. He was leaving his huge shiny Harley very close to the gym doors too, she’d seen as she arrived, as if he was avoiding having to walk across the car park and risk being ambushed by Steve, whose idea of ‘just testing’ could be to wrestle him into a painful arm-lock over by the parent and child bays.

‘Why do you always pick on me?’ he asked now, with what Nell thought was quite reckless courage, given Steve’s speedy skill at the top end of assorted martial arts.

Steve gave him a cold stare. ‘I’m only … OK, you win this time. I’ll save you for later, wuss. Abi? You’ll do instead. Come up here for me, darling.’ Abi stepped on to the platform, giving an apprehensive glance back at Nell.

Steve smiled. ‘Don’t look so worried! All I want is for you to make like I’ve approached you in the street, as if to ask you a direction or something. OK, now just walk towards me.’

Abi did as she was told, then waited when Steve stopped her and politely asked her where the post office was.

‘Now don’t move, Abi, not an inch,’ he told her; Abi obediently froze, grinning at Nell and waiting to be thrown to the floor.

‘Mistake one,’ Steve said to the class. ‘Look: she’s face on to me, feet together, with maximum exposure of her softest and most vulnerable parts.’ He indicated her front. Abi stuck her tits out, page-three style, and pouted
provocatively.
Steve frowned at the resulting wave of laughter. ‘One push and she’d be over. Make your own jokes there, if you must, but this is serious stuff. You see it all the time, even police taking witness statements – they stand too close to the suspect, looking down and writing. Amateurs. No readiness for attack; like grazing antelopes again, you see. Any scumbag that’s been apprehended by that kind of idiot could give one hard shove and leg it, no problem, before the dumb plod has even noticed.’ He sighed. ‘Now, Abi, feet slightly apart, OK, stand a bit more sideways on … You’re only half the target that way, see? And you’re ready to fly if you need to. Simple, isn’t it? Just common sense.’

He sent Abi back to the floor. ‘Right – let’s see what toys you’ve all brought from home,’ he requested.

Out came an assortment of potential self-defence items: two baseball bats (Wilma and Jason), a piece of chain (Mike), several torches, an umbrella. Steve picked up Abi’s contribution and laughed. ‘What the …? Did you walk the streets with
this
?’

‘Yeah? And?’ Abi challenged. ‘It’s only a little bitty hammer. Every home’s got one.’

‘
Only?
’ Steve spluttered. ‘This, my love, is a full-scale lump-hammer. You could break up pavements with it. A light tap on a head with this and the road would be sticky with brains. Probably yours.’ He handed it back to her. ‘I’d get a cab home with it, if I were you, for your own safety!
Now
let’s look at these torches,’ he continued, taking hold of Nell’s Maglite.

‘If you must use one this big, hold it like this.’ He held it by his shoulder, like a javelin. ‘Ready to swing it down on your target if you need to. But you’d do much better to invest in a police light.’ He showed them a small, ordinary-looking torch. ‘You see, it’s tiny; very portable, very innocent-looking. You can’t be arrested for carrying one of these little things. But look … it’s got this crenellated edge. On the blurb, they say it’s a “strike bezel, for enhanced personal protection” which just means it’s useful for jabbing hard into an attacker’s face if you have to. They’d feel it.’ He poked it towards Mike, who flinched and jumped a metre backwards. Steve smirked. ‘And don’t accidentally leave the light switched on in your handbag – it’s not only strong enough to blind temporarily and have a no-good bastard staggering around wondering where the hell he is, but it’d also burn a hole through your leather. It’s called a Surefire light, about ninety-five quid, give or take. Well worth the investment.’

‘Ninety-five pounds for a torch? What’s in my bag isn’t worth that!’ one of the ponytail girls said. ‘I’d rather just hand the whole thing over and buy shoes with the cash!’

‘It might not be your bag the scumbag is after,’ Steve told her, ominously. ‘We’ll be doing sexual assaults next week. After that you might just decide ninety-five isn’t bad – there are versions of this that go up to well over three
hundred
quid. It depends if you want to put a price on your life. Your choice.’

‘He’s very persuasive,’ Abi said to Nell as they left the class sometime later. ‘If he’d had some of those torches with him, I’d have been writing a cheque there and then.’

Nell rubbed her sore wrist – they’d spent a long time practising twist grips and moves for getting out of holds, and she’d pulled something. She’d been partnered with Jason, who’d turned out to be a hard little sod, well into the role play and making no allowances for her being either a woman or old enough to be his mother, but then she supposed he had a point: it wouldn’t be any kind of picnic if a vicious stranger pounced on her.

‘He
is
very persuasive. I feel like getting on the Internet right now and buying a top-of-the-range torch, then going out and daring someone to go for me. I can just see it, I’ll be in Richmond town centre, Saturday at midnight, shining this blazing beam around and shouting, “Bring it on; what are you waiting for?” to all the drunk hordes.’

Abi laughed. ‘Yeah, but you know what would really happen: you’d buy one of those little torches, right, and then you’d put it down somewhere in your kitchen and it would vanish. You’d be three hundred quid down and someone would have taken it up to the loft to look for something and dropped it in the water tank.’

‘Or I’d leave it switched on in a drawer and it would burn the house down.’

‘Either of you two fancy a drink?’ Steve caught up with them and got between the two women as they walked through the gym bar. Nell felt his hand lightly on her shoulder. She could, jokingly, consider this as molestation, grab, twist and bend his arm, trapping his elbow on the floor, show him she’d learnt a thing or two. But maybe he wasn’t the one to practise on. And possibly not here in the bar area, where he’d enjoy an audience as he flung her to the ground, half broke her thumb and put his foot on her neck like a hunter with a slaughtered leopard.

‘Can’t, ta, gotta dash, Olly’s outside, picking me and the lump-hammer up,’ Abi said, nudging Nell as she left her. ‘See you next week!’ and she was gone, leaving the two of them in the bar.

‘And I can’t either. Sorry,’ Nell told Steve, reluctantly. ‘Mimi’s on her own and I was out last night too.’

‘Oh? Where did you go?’

Nell hesitated: his tone was very inquisitive. It reminded her of her mother. Was he going to ask her who with and what time she got back and did she wear a skirt that was a sensible length?

‘To a pub, to see a band. Just with Ed from next door.’

‘Oh – yeah, that one I met. And …’ Oh here it comes, she thought, ready to be as defensive as she’d been in her teen years. When did you really grow up? she wondered; then considered, maybe she
was
being the grown-up here. It was none of his business.

‘I just wondered. Did you hear anything from that old flame of yours yet?’ he then asked, throwing her off track.

‘Um … no. Nothing. I don’t expect I will now – I mean, if you were pleased to hear from someone after so many years, you’d let them know pretty much immediately, wouldn’t you?’

She wished he hadn’t asked. Now she’d put into words what she’d been trying not to believe, it seemed there was no chance of a response from Patrick. It wasn’t remotely fair to blame Steve, but she couldn’t help feeling that by asking, he’d jinxed any contact possibility.

Steve smiled at her. ‘Well, possibly. Don’t give up.’

‘Oh I won’t,’ she lied, to be polite. ‘I won’t.’

Was there no end to the troubles of vegetables?
Home Grown
’s editor was so far highly pleased with Nell’s depictions of diseased cabbage, tomatoes, lettuces, beans and potatoes. It was now the turn of onions and Nell intended to draw several of these, as there were far too many ailments to be able to cram them on to one. In the studio, she placed a row of onions on the window ledge in front of her, consulted Dr Hessayon’s trusty book and made a rough plan of a neatly planted row of afflicted bulbs all lined up like battle casualties, with the name of each one’s disease pencilled in beneath. Maybe she could give them tiny temperature charts as well, and a selection of nursing notes (‘Onion no. 3 had a comfortable night
but
an attack of Downy Mildew rendered him unfit for storage’). She’d be surprised, after a potential grower had seen the results of the many infestations and disfigurements, if any readers of
Home Grown
would be tempted to try to raise them. One look at this lot and they’d decide it was much safer to stick to nice healthy ones in a net bag from Sainsbury’s.

Nell finished the sketches and then painted for an hour with Fleetwood Mac playing in the background. She became completely absorbed in what she was doing, having mentally divided the onions into those that were simply unlucky (Saddleback, Bull Neck, Leaf Droop), and the wayward ones that should be attending the equivalent of a sexual-health clinic (Smut, Shanking, White Tip). The morning had flown past, and when the sun’s rays shone through on to her painting she realized this was the first day she hadn’t given any thought to Patrick and his lack of communication … except that, of course, she had now. But all the same, he hadn’t been her first thought when she’d checked her emails that morning and she hadn’t gone back into the house to see what the post had – or hadn’t – brought. This was good, she decided. If she wasn’t to get any response from him, she could live with it. She’d done what she could to make contact – she’d be able to move on.

Feeling hungry now, she stretched her cramped limbs, washed the brushes and headed for the kitchen. She
flicked
the kettle switch on and then Radio 4 to catch the grumble of the day on
You and Yours
(the price of cat litter) and glanced into the hallway. A heap of mail, mostly polythene-clad junk at first sight, was strewn around on the doormat and she went and gathered it all up, happy to see the spring Toast catalogue had arrived. She put a tea bag into a mug and poured boiling water in, then went through the post, weeding out items to be sent on to Alex along with offers of bargain-price insurance and a brochure for a swanky spa. Patrick’s letter was in a long white envelope, which was handwritten (though with a blue ballpoint pen, not with the deep purple ink he’d liked back in his youth), and simply addressed to her as Nell Hollis – neither Mrs nor Ms. She was slightly surprised: although Nell Hollis had been on her own letterhead, she’d signed off as Eleanor. Apart from her mother, Patrick was the only one who had habitually used her full name, and it had been a small intimacy between the two of them. At school, college and in her grown-up life, she’d always been Nell to everyone else. But it had been such a long time since the word ‘intimacy’ could have applied to her and Patrick, nor was the envelope the important thing.

Nell put the letter down on the table while she added milk to her tea, conscious that she seemed to be moving at half-speed, reluctant to let this moment of heart-thumping anticipation go. Contact – wow! She’d found
him,
he’d responded: it was hard not to think ahead to what that envelope contained – he might want to meet, might be on his way right now – no, that would be ridiculous! A case of imagination running riot. What was she thinking? That he’d know when it would be delivered, and that he was waiting round the corner, ready to whisk her away to the Soho Hotel for an afternoon of reunion passion? That couldn’t happen on the outside of rom-com movie-world, sadly. The postmark was north London, and she wondered where exactly he’d been at the time he’d dropped it into a mailbox. She pictured him wandering in the sunshine through Highgate Village, or maybe about to return to Chadstock after trailing through the Wembley Ikea. Perhaps he’d forgotten he’d got the letter with him, or had been carrying it around, agonizing about whether or not to send it. She thought of him finding it in his pocket as he walked through the lighting section. Would he regard the Knappa lightshade as a piece of cheap-and-nasty tat (Alex’s opinion), or as an iconic design classic (Nell’s)?