One Way Ticket (6 page)

“Yes, my brother moved out when he got
married a few years ago. It’s just me and Mamma now.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty seven. Twenty eight in April.”

I tried not to judge, I, after all, was
living with my great aunt. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I started
cautiously, “but have you ever thought of moving out of home? Moving away?”

“Moving out?” he repeated as if he’d never
heard the words before.

I was pushing our friendship here but it
was hard to stand by and watch a grown person being cowed by their mother (when
I do it, it’s different). “It might be good for you, give you a chance to live
your own life. Don’t you think?”

He did appear to think about this for a
second. What this thought was I will never know though, it was interrupted by a
uniformed policeman.

“Ad, chief wants you upstairs.”

He put his cup down and followed the
officer, appearing to slump in on himself as he walked away. As I watched him,
I was struck by the thought that prisoners on death row probably walk the same
way.

8 Driving Me To Drink

I told Aunt June about Addi’s
troubles that evening when I got home from work. “Poor bloke looks really stressed
out.”

Aunt June didn’t say much, just carried on
stirring a pan of stew. A sudden twinge of guilt struck me.

“I should be doing that.” I nodded at the
pan, “I’m meant to be helping here.”

“Nonsense, dear. This takes two hours to
cook anyway, we’d be eating at midnight if you were cooking it!”

That may have sounded like a slight slur but
it was just my aunt’s way. “I’ll cook tomorrow then.”

“If you like, dear.”

I started thinking about what I could cook
to demonstrate to my aunt we were now in the 21
^st
century. A Thai
green curry would probably be too much for her taste buds and I couldn’t
imagine being able to get sushi rice here. Perhaps something a little less
adventurous was in order - sliced bread?

“My tip didn’t work out?” Aunt June asked,
still stirring.

“What tip?”

“The one I rang you with earlier.
Honestly, I don’t know why I bother.”

“That was a tip? What you whispered down
the phone?”

“Of course. Do you think I go around
whispering people’s names down telephone lines?”

I had wondered. “You’d better tell me
again.”

“Beth Johnson. Didn’t you even pass it
on?”

“I didn’t know what it was. What’s she
meant to have done?”

Aunt June lowered her voice even though we
were the only ones in her villa. “I asked around, discreetly, about the thefts
at the CrossGlobal club. That’s the name I got back. You must be careful though,
I don’t want it to come back to me. Alright?”

“Alright!” I got up and ran to where I’d
dropped my bag earlier. “Thanks Aunt June, I’ll tell Addi now.” The poor little
soul was probably crying into a glass of beer, this would cheer him up.

I had a few numbers of people from the
office programmed into a new mobile phone. Sergeant H had insisted every staff
member provide a mobile phone number so we could be contacted at all times. It
was a bit rich as the department wasn’t prepared to pay for our phones themselves.
My cheap pay as you go phone lived, permanently switched off, at the bottom of
my bag.

Addi’s mobile phone number wasn’t in my
list but I had his landline so I gave that a ring.

“Yassas?” came the response in Greek.

The voice was female and sounded middle
aged. Was this Addi’s infamous mother?

I asked to speak to Addi in my best Greek.

“Who is this?” the woman replied in English.
That answered the question of whether I speak Greek with an English accent.

“Can you tell him it’s Jennifer? I’m a work
colleague.”

“Jennifer? You are not a police officer.”
It wasn’t a question. This was definitely Addi’s mother, I was getting a sense
of dragon from her imperious tone.

“No, that’s right. Is Addi there?”

“My son is busy with important things. You
should leave him alone, I think.”

That told me. Before I could say anymore,
she put the phone down. Poor Addi. I could understand now why he looked
depressed.

“Was he pleased?” Aunt June asked when I
got back to the kitchen.

“Didn’t get through. His mother doesn’t
want me talking to him.”

“Did she say why?” Aunt June asked,
getting two plates out of the cupboard.

“No, just put the phone down. Is dinner
ready?”

“Yes, sit down.”

She didn’t need to ask me twice.

“Perhaps she thinks you’re going to run
off with her son,” Aunt June added, putting a plate in front of me.

“What?”

“It’s a worry for some people, that their
child could marry a foreigner, someone not of their religion. You’re a xenos
here, you know.”

“I have no intention of marrying anybody.”

Aunt June began dishing up her stew.
“Thought we might eat a bit earlier tonight. Now it’s not hot in the day, there
doesn’t seem so much point in waiting.”

“It’s quite hot in here,” I pointed out,
taking off the thin cardigan I’d been wearing. The windows had steamed up and
were completely opaque.

“I put the heating on, it’s been such a
cold day.”

“Cold? This would be a summer’s day in Swindon!”

“I’m used to summers here.” As if to
demonstrate, Aunt June pulled the zip higher on her fleece. “Now the nights are
closing in, you’ll need something warmer on your bed. I’ll try to find my spare
hot water bottle too.”

“I’ll be alright for a while yet, it’s
still a lot warmer than home.”

“You had a bad winter last year, didn’t
you?”

Did she mean me personally or Swindon in general? The answer was yes to both.

“There was a lot of snow, wasn’t there?”
she added.

“Yes, it wasn’t very nice. Made it hard to
get around.”

“I miss the snow.”

I looked up from my plate. This was the
first time Aunt June had really mentioned Swindon or the past. “Yes?”

“We used to go up Cooper’s Hill with the
sled, me and your grandfather, when it snowed.” She had a faraway look on her
face.

“But you’ve never been back in all these
years?”

“Don’t hold with looking back. It doesn’t
do any good. Moving forward is the only way.”

Looking round the kitchen, it didn’t seem
that Aunt June had moved forward much since the 1970s, but I dismissed it from
my mind. I hadn’t thought before about why she’d come here, leaving everyone
behind in England. I’d just assumed she’d been attracted by the good climate
but perhaps she’d been running away from something like me?

I opened my mouth to ask her but it was
too late, the moment had passed and she’d already moved on.

“Kostas’ll be round in a bit.”

It was great that my aunt went out so
much, other women her age would be in bed by eight o’clock with their knitting,
instead she was in bed by eight o’clock with… yes, well, I didn’t need to go
there.

“We’re going over to Frank’s house. He’s
got satellite,” Aunt June continued.

No Greek blockbuster television for her,
then.

“You can come too,” my aunt said quickly
as if she felt a bit guilty, leaving me with the crap telly programmes.

What - miss an evening with ‘Eleni’ the
beautiful young leprosy sufferer? (Possibly that television masterpiece hasn’t
hit where you are yet.) “Okay, thanks,” I replied, surprising both of us.

“We’ll take your car,” my aunt told me, putting
her knife and fork down on her now empty plate.

Twenty minutes later, kitchen tidied, I
was in the hallway wearing a fresh t-shirt over my jeans, waiting for my aunt
to choose which scarf to wear with her outfit. She’d already given my clothes a
surreptitious glance and I had a feeling they had been found wanting, although
she was too polite to tell me so. By the time Kostas arrived, she had an
impressive pastoral scene tied around her neck. If we got bored with the telly,
we could always use it to spot local wildlife with.

Frank O’Neill and his wife Kate
were in their fifties and lived in a well kept house a mile away. I could
understand why my aunt always met them at their house when I saw the show home
standard of tidiness they maintained there. A visit to Aunt June’s villa would
probably send them into convulsions. Whilst my arrival had improved things at her
place, there was a limit on what I could do now I was working, which is what I
kept telling myself as I looked at their shiny surfaces.

“Jennifer! How lovely to see you,” Kate
welcomed me, coming out of the kitchen from which delicious smells were
emanating.

“I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all, Katie’s just arrived for a
visit. I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”

Katie, their imaginatively named daughter,
was a rather plump woman a few years younger than me who had squeezed herself
into an alarmingly yellow t-shirt. I asked her about news from England whilst desperately trying not to think of honeydew melons. My aunt and a few others
quickly fell to discussing Tina Lloyd’s murder. At least they didn’t try to
drag me into it.

“I come over a few times each year,” Katie
was telling me. “It’s so easy with mum and dad living here. It’s a really cheap
holiday.”

“And you can get time off work okay?”

“Yeah, I temp in offices so I can usually
just take whatever time I need.”

I’ve never had that knack of making my
life sound so completely wonderful that people like Katie have, but it doesn’t
stop me from trying.

“I’ve just moved here myself, thought it
would be great to live in the sun.” As I said this I could hear the rain, which
had been threatening all day, start lashing across the windows. “I got a job at
the police station, typing up stolen dog cases, things like that.”

Fortunately, Katie’s mother interrupted
everyone at this point, before I could make my life sound any worse.

“We thought we’d make a bit of a party of it
tonight because Katie’s here,” she announced, bringing a plate of something
pastry based from the kitchen. “Instead of just watching television, Frank’s
gotten out the karaoke machine!”

I slid my aunt a look of pure hatred as
Katie grabbed my arm and squealed.

“Oh, don’t you love karaoke?”

Was it possible to say no and still be a
good guest?

A sheet of song titles appeared and was
passed to my aunt and Kostas who didn’t even have the grace to look appalled.
Another couple arrived and seemed thrilled at the idea of an impromptu sing
song. I felt I was living in my own personal hell.

Later, I realised how silly I had been.
The evening didn’t become really hell-like until Kostas began singing ‘Sexual
Healing’, circling his septuagenarian hips along with the music. Everything
before had just been the warm up.

Thankfully, I found a bottle of gin at the
back of a display cabinet. After I’d poured a large amount of it into my glass
of orange squash (they knew how to live it up), I enjoyed the party much more
and, after more gin, even felt strangely compelled to sing myself.

The next thing I remembered was
a loud banging on the door. For a split second, I thought it was the police
come to haul me off to prison, how embarrassing would that be in front of my
aunt’s friends. Then I caught a glimpse of the clock and realised the police
would never be here at that time in the morning.

“Jennifer. You’re going to be late for
work.” My aunt’s voice sounded in the distance. “Are you awake?”

I opened my mouth to answer and found I
had swallowed an amount of sandpaper in the night. My head was not happy to
have been woken up and my stomach agreed with it.

It seemed easier to show her than try to
speak, so I staggered over to the door and threw it open.

“You look like the creature from the black
lagoon!” my aunt laughed. She was holding a glass of water though, so I forgave
her. “Do you want anything to eat?” she asked as I downed the water in one.

I shook my head at her and waved the glass
for some more.

“Don’t go back to bed,” she told me as I was
turning around, grabbing my arm to halt the overwhelming urge to crawl back
among the sheets. “You’re due at work in twenty minutes, just jump in the
shower.”

Leading me down the corridor, she ushered
me into the bathroom where I had to fight another urge to sit on the toilet for
the rest of the morning.

Aunt June was still hovering as I emerged
from the bathroom a little later, feeling slightly more human, but not much. “I
don’t know how you let yourself get into this mess,” she nagged. As she had now
produced a cup of coffee, I forgave her that as well.

“Are you sure you don’t want an egg or
something?” she asked, proving she did have an evil side in there somewhere.

“No, my stomach isn’t up to it. Must be
the quiche your friend served last night, it was probably off.”

“Yes, either that or the pint of gin you
drank.”

Ignoring her, I made it back to my bedroom
to dress. The clothes I’d worn to the office the day before were still lying on
a chair, so I crawled into them, not caring what state they were in. My head
and stomach told me drying my hair was a physical impossibility at the moment, so
I bypassed that by tying it back. The makeup was deposited in my bag until my
eyes had started focussing enough to be able to apply it.

I opened my door triumphant at my
herculean effort to be ready to face a day of work despite a raging hangover.

My aunt wouldn’t let me drive, convinced I
was still over the limit. I hadn’t drunk that much last night (had I?), but it
was better for my head just to get in the car than stand and argue with her.
Especially as one of our neighbours, Helena, was in her front garden to witness
it. We both gave her a polite wave as we got in the car.

“You certainly enjoyed yourself last
night. I’m not sure the rest of us can say the same,” my aunt started after
we’d pulled away and were safely out of Helena’s earshot.

“What d’you mean? You and Kostas were
having a right knees up.”

“That was before the drink got the better
of you.” She shot me a glance. “I suppose you don’t remember any of it, do
you?”

“Not much. What happened?” I wasn’t sure I
really wanted to know but I couldn’t help asking.

“You insisted on gathering everyone around
to tell them all about some bloke from back home.”

The headache was suddenly forgotten as I
gave my aunt a sharp look.

“Oh no.” I closed my eyes and wished it
wasn’t true. Had I really told everyone what had happened back home? It would
be all over town by now. My hand found the lever and I wound the window down
for some fresh air. “I told everyone everything?”

“No. You threw up in the ornamental pond
before you got the chance.”

“Thank goodness.”

“Jennifer! If you get time this morning,
you might want to ring Frank and Kate and apologise.”