The Sunshine Cruise Company (8 page)

Since the 1980s.

Betamax.

Bought for seven thousand pounds.

A lifetime of lies. Everything built on nothing.

She checked the front door was locked, turned the hall light off, slipped out of her shoes, picked them up and padded silently upstairs. The habits of a lifetime.

Coming along the hallway she noticed the light was still on in the spare bedroom down at the end – just a crack through the slightly open door. She could hear voices, voices that had the unmistakable tone of an argument being conducted at whispering level. She edged closer down the hall towards her own bedroom, then past it, closer to that crack of light.

Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, Susan …

Tom’s voice first, strained, an edge to it. ‘For God’s sake, Clare, I’m just saying, if the worst comes to the worst, if she has to sell the house and she’s got nowhere else to go …’

‘And all I said was surely she’d be eligible for some kind of council housing?’

‘I’m not packing my mum off to some grotty council estate!’

‘Jesus – don’t be such a bloody snob!’

‘That bastard. That dirty fucking bastard. I can’t believe he did this to her!’

‘All I’m saying is that I don’t know many women who’d be thrilled at the thought of living with their mother-in-law.’

‘It might not even come to that. Look, can we talk about this in the morning please?’

Susan tiptoed away, her shoes clutched to her chest. She closed her bedroom door very, very quietly.

THE WROXHAM HIGH
Street branch of the Lanchester Bank, on a suitably rainy Tuesday afternoon in late May. It was a warm day, twenty-one degrees (or the low seventies in the old money Susan tended to think in), and the rain was almost tropical – great fat drops.

Susan and Roger were sitting facing the manager, a Mr Alan Glass. The ‘Mr’ felt faintly ridiculous to Susan – he was just a freckled boy in a suit and tie – and she’d felt relieved when he said, ‘Please, call me Alan.’ He looked to be about Tom’s age and it occurred to her that he probably hadn’t even been born when she and Barry opened their account here. He had a stack of paperwork in front of him, as did Roger. Susan had her hands clasped in her lap as she listened.

‘I’m afraid, on that front,’ Alan was saying, ‘our hands are tied. HMRC have already frozen the account pending their investigation. It looks likely, if the figures you’ve given me are correct, that pretty much all of the money in there will go to them anyway.’

‘What about the flat?’ Roger asked.
The flat
, Susan thought.
The Sex Dungeon.

‘Already remortgaged to the hilt, I’m afraid. Twice in the last five years. There’s no equity.’

There was a knock at the door and a girl’s face appeared. ‘Alan? Sorry to interrupt, but Securicor are here. We need you to open the strongroom.’

Alan looked up. ‘Oh – is it, is this the last Tuesday of the month already?’ He looked at the clock on the wall: 2 p.m. exactly. ‘Sorry, will you excuse me for a moment?’ he said, turning back to Roger and Susan. He went out into the hallway. Susan overheard another girl saying, ‘Is that the supermarket takings? I’ll get Gerry to come and help.’ ‘Thanks, Katie.’

Susan and Roger sat there in silence for a moment. The framed photograph of Alan’s wife on the desk. The calendar. The clock ticking. Roger gave her a weak smile then the door was opening and he was coming back in, saying, ‘Sorry, where were we?’

‘If not the flat the main house then,’ Roger said, fishing through his pile, ‘the primary residence. There’s no mortgage on that. It must be worth six or seven hundred thousand easily. If we could remortgage for even half of that amount –’

‘Yes, well,’ Alan said. ‘How do you propose to meet the repayments?’

‘From the savings account.’

‘Which, as I explained, is frozen. And likely to all be due to creditors.’

Susan cleared her throat. They both turned to look at her. ‘I could get a job. I have some, um, secretarial experience.’ The two men stared at her like she was a child calling a telethon to offer the contents of her piggy bank to try and end African famine.

‘I’m afraid –’ Alan tapped at a calculator – ‘on a remortgage of, what, three hundred thousand? We’d need to have proof of an income of at least seventy thousand pounds a year. And, even then, at your a …’ He thought how best to phrase it. ‘At your time of … with the usual term being twenty-five years …’

Susan looked up. There was a poster on the wall behind the desk. It featured a happy, smiling, black version of Alan with his arm around a beaming young couple. The girl was holding the keys to a house, the pretty house in the background of the photograph. She was pregnant. In bright red type across the top was the slogan ‘YOUR FUTURE MATTERS … TO US’.

‘Anyway, I’m afraid all of this is something of a moot point.’ Alan Glass patted another stack of papers. ‘With all the other debts we’re looking at here, the loans, the credit cards, the allegations of fraud, we’re almost certainly looking at a bankruptcy situation. In which case any kind of remortgage would be impossible. We’d love to help, we really would, but –’

Susan laughed, a short, bleak bark, and said, ‘I’ve been a customer here for over thirty years.’

‘I understand how difficult the situation is, Susan,’ Alan said.

‘Actually I’d much prefer it if you called me Mrs Frobisher if it’s all the same to you. You sit here, getting rich off people like me, and the minute we come to you for help, it’s –’

‘Susan,’ Roger said, touching her arm gently. She pulled it away angrily.

‘Look,’ Alan said, shooting his cuffs, sitting upright and suddenly becoming Mr Glass in the process, ‘Mrs Frobisher …’

Julie hurried towards the ringing doorbell, thinking
Keep your bloody hair on
. She’d been slicing a tomato for her late lunch of a tomato on toast. (Julie had to shop and budget very, very carefully these days.) When she made these humble meals she often found her interior monologue talking to her in the manner of a TV chef – Ramsay or Jamie Oliver – explaining what they were doing to the camera.
‘We’re going to make sure the toast is really hot, straight off the grill, and then some lovely thick slices of tomato, plenty of salt and pepper, and …
’ It made it seem more glamorous somehow.

She had to travel the entire length of her flat towards the front door, from the kitchenette, through the living room and down the hall. It took her just twelve paces and ten seconds to accomplish this. She opened the door to see Susan standing there in the pouring, pouring rain. She was trying to speak. ‘I … uh … uh …’ Christ, Julie thought. Has she been hit by a car or something? Susan was soaked through and her mascara had streaked all down her face. Panda eyes? Her eyes were those of a panda in August with very bad hay fever who has run out of antihistamines about an hour after they’ve been told their whole family has been killed. ‘Uh … they … I …’

‘Easy, easy, darling. What’s happened?’ She pulled her friend into the hallway, out of the rain. Susan was like a five-year-old in the middle of one of the biggest crying jags known to man: struggling to get the words out between racking sobs, almost like she was permanently riding the crest of a huge sneeze.

‘Th … they … THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE MY HOUSE!
’

She fell forward, collapsing weeping in Julie’s arms.

MUCH LATER, THE
windows were open to the humid night, the coffee table littered with dishes, glasses, bottles and an overflowing ashtray, Julie having broken her own rule about smoking in the flat. Even Susan had taken one! When had she last seen Susan with a cigarette in her mouth? Before decimalisation probably. They were slouched on the floor, out of the Smirnoff now and on to the Popol vodka: a cheeky little number Julie had picked up at a petrol station. A tenner for a litre. Mixed with orange juice it was fine, just about killed the tang of formaldehyde, Julie thought, and Julie knew a thing or two about cocktails. Also, Julie thought, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Susan Frobisher drink quite this much. She was
knocking
it back. ‘Tango in the Night’ by Fleetwood Mac played softly in the background on Julie’s little CD boom box. The CD. Another relic.

‘Little shit looked about fourteen,’ Susan said, hiccuping as she topped herself up. ‘Your future matters TO US!’

‘Bastards,’ Julie said. ‘They wreck the world, get bailed out by the taxpayer, and as soon as you’re in trouble it’s “Fuck you. Fuck you very much.”’

‘I’m not kidding. He was younger than my Tom.’

‘I’ve got one of them at work. Kendal. Administrator. Horrible cow. Straight out of college and given their own little fiefdoms to run.’

There was a pause as they both sipped their drinks. Susan sighed. ‘Homeless and penniless. I didn’t see this one coming, Jules.’

‘Join the club. It wasn’t exactly my master plan to wind up here …’ Julie gestured around her, at the tiny flat, four small rooms: bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. (At least, she’d thought, the Coalition’s new bedroom tax wouldn’t hit her.) ‘You work all your life and …’

‘Come on,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s be honest, I never really did a day’s work in my life.’

‘Well, there is that, yes.’

‘At least you did things, Julie. Got out there. Saw the world. Australia, America, London …’

‘Yeah, well, you can’t eat good times and all that. You had nearly forty decent years though.’ Julie shook a fresh cigarette from her pack of Ambassador: the cheapest brand available at the local shop. She’d have killed for a lovely Marlboro Light.

‘But it was all a lie. I was married to … to a sex addict.’

A pause. The two women looked at each and then, at exactly the same moment, both of them
buckled
with laughter. Very quickly they were rolling on the carpet, tears running down their faces. ‘Oh, oh, have you met my husband?’ Susan said, flattening a hand on her chest, feigning cocktail-party introduction. ‘He’s a sex addict!’

‘Shurrup,’ Julie gasped. ‘Stop it, please, I can’t breathe.’ She wiped a tear away and reached for the bottle. ‘Here.’ She poured them both another. ‘Shit, we’re out of OJ.’

‘Oh sod it,’ Susan said. She picked up her glass and pounded it back neat, grimacing, shuddering, shaking from side to side, falling over and kicking her feet in the air.

‘SUSAN!’ Julie said, amazed.

‘Ooh – that’ll put hairs on your chest,’ Susan said, sitting back up, blinking.

‘Christ, Barry,’ Julie said, lighting her Ambassador, leaning back against the sofa. ‘And here was me thinking I had the monopoly on all the worst men.’

‘Oh but you’ve had some
shockers
, haven’t you? Who was the alcoholic? Remember – the Scottish guy?’

‘Andy?’

‘That’s it! And the manic-depressive, wassisname? Tried to light himself on fire at New Year that time?’

Julie let out a squeal of laughter, remembering. ‘Michael!’

‘Michael. Christ. Oh no no. Wait. My favourite. The hard man. The gangster type you met when you were working in that club in Mayfair.’

‘Gangster?’

‘You know! He was older than us. Handsome. Looked a bit like thingummy … ooh, that actor. Terence Stamp.’

‘Terence Stamp?’ Julie saw that, fairly incredibly, Susan was pouring herself another vodka.

‘Come on, you know who I mean. Had a mad nickname and everything. Screws, or Rivets, or something.’

‘Oh – NAILS?’

‘NAILS!’

They both collapsed laughing.

‘You know what – I got a Christmas card from him a few years back. It’s in the sideboard somewhere, I think. He lives over in Tillington.’

‘He’s still alive? Christ, he must be getting on a bit now surely?’

‘God, yeah. He was in his forties back then.’

‘He was a gangster, wasn’t he?’

‘Kind of. You don’t remember what he did?’

‘No.’ Susan sipped her drink carefully this time.

‘He was a bank robber!’

Susan sprayed vodka across the room as they both collapsed in hysterics again. ‘A bank robber!’ she screamed.

‘I think … I think he wound up doing twenty years!’ Julie said, laughing so hard now her ribs were aching.

‘A bank robber,’ Susan repeated, flat on her back on the floor.

‘God, I could pick them, couldn’t I?’

‘A bank robber,’ Susan said again, in a very different tone of voice this time.

‘What?’

Susan sat up. She was breathing hard, but she wasn’t laughing any more. There was a strange look in her eyes, a faraway, thinking expression, something Julie had never seen before. Or hadn’t seen in a long time at any rate, not since way, way before Barry, back when Susan Frobisher was Susan Connors, the girl who put tacks on the teacher’s chair, who flashed her knickers at passing buses.

‘What is it?’ Julie asked.

‘A bank robber,’ Susan said for the fourth time, looking directly at Julie now.

‘YOU’RE OUT OF
your mind,’ Julie said.

‘Seriously, how hard can it be?’

‘Grief. That’s it. Delayed shock. You’re out of your teeny tiny mind with grief and shock.’

‘You get a gun from … wherever, and you walk in and you say, “Give me the bloody money.” It’s not rocket science.’ Susan was pacing the floor now. She was clearly insanely drunk, but she was speaking with conviction, with something passing for seriousness.

‘You’ve never been much of a drinker, have you? I’ll put some coffee on.’ Julie went to get up but Susan put her hands on her shoulders and forced her back down, kneeling to face her, the two of them eye to eye.

‘I mean it, Julie. Why not?
Why fucking not?
I … I mean, “You are overdrawn by five pounds. Oh, by the way, the letter we’ve sent to tell you this will cost you
thirty
pounds!” Or … or, “Oh, we’re sorry, that cheque you paid in weeks ago still hasn’t cleared so we can’t let you have your money yet because we need it to help us make another 500 billion pounds in profits.” Or – “Oh dear, we seem to have screwed up and lost everyone’s money, but that’s OK, because you guys can all just bail us all out, thanks. And, and, you know what? We understand your
husband just died
but unfortunately we will still be taking your home off you because, you know, your future matters to us!”’ Susan stopped and made a grinning thumbs up, like the poster. ‘“Your future matters”? Your
money
matters and you can go to hell! I mean it! I’ve had it! I’ve never done a single thing wrong or bad in my whole life and here I am – out on the bloody streets at sixty? FUCK THEM! FUCK THE FUCKING BANK, JULIE!’