The Women of Primrose Square Read online

  The last thing Frank wanted that night, of all nights, was to bump into a single soul. It was absolutely critical that he get home unnoticed and unobserved – any witnesses would be a potential disaster. So switching off the engine, he took a cautious peek all around before daring to get out of the car. It seemed that his luck was in – the coast was clear. There wasn’t a single soul around, just lights peeping out through the curtains from lots of neighbouring houses and a Deliveroo guy pedalling furiously down the square with the smell of Thai food wafting after his bike. It seemed everyone was having a cosy Friday night in with takeaways in front of the telly.

  Frank’s home was the only gloomy-looking one, with not a single light on. No one was home. Gracie was still at work, Amber had gone to her piano lesson, and Ben was hopefully not going too wild at his end-of-term party. The place looked utterly deserted.

  Perfect, thought Frank. So far, so good.

  Gingerly, he stepped out of the car, a bit wobbly on his feet, but still. Frank felt fantastic. He’d made up his mind to do what he was doing and it felt utterly sensational, he thought, enjoying a freedom he so rarely got to savour. He clipped up the three neatly scrubbed stone steps that led to his own front door, thanking his lucky stars his hands weren’t trembling as he put his key into the lock. Speed was of the essence here.

  One heart-stopping moment later and Frank was safely inside the privacy and comfort of his own hallway, which was in pitch darkness. With a sigh of relief, he fumbled about for the light switch, finally grasping it and switching it on.

  ‘SURPRISE!!!!’

  ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANK!!!!’

  Frank heard the cheers in deafening loudness, but somehow his brain couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. Now the house was bright – full-on fluorescent bright. There were people stuffed into his sitting room and hallway, and no matter where he looked, every single face was focused on one person and one person only – him.

  There was a giant banner over the fireplace that read: HAPPY 50TH FRANK! Helium balloons were floating all throughout the hall and up the staircase, and everywhere Frank looked, he recognised someone. Old school friends he hadn’t seen for years, almost every one of his Primrose Square neighbours, including Susan Hayes and her husband, the square’s other Frank, his parents-in-law, and his only brother who lived in London and who must have flown over specially. It was like Frank was standing before a parade of his entire life to date, past and present.

  But the cheering and clapping had died out now, and every eye seemed to be staring at him in mute, sickening horror.

  On the stairs was Gracie, looking breathtaking in a skinny cocktail dress that he’d never seen on her before. She must have gone and bought it new, Frank thought, from the tiny part of his mind that could still function. Just for me. Just for this.

  Behind Gracie, Ben stood with his two best friends from school, all three of them gaping at him dumbly, mouths hanging open like pictures in old comics, registering crude shock at what they were seeing. Images were beginning to waft past Frank now, as he began to feel almost suspended in time. He saw Jayne from number nineteen with her husband Eric, and the confused, mortified look on their faces. Old college pals who he hadn’t seen in decades, were now trying to suppress snorts of snide, vulgar laughter.

  Beside them in the living room, Frank could make out a few of his work colleagues, the very same team who’d lied through their teeth about their plans for the night. Joe from sales with a beer clamped to his hand, Florence holding what appeared to be a gift-wrapped set of golf clubs, Tracey from reception, even Margaret the office gossip – all of them in perfect freeze-frame, staring at him in open-mouthed disbelief.

  And one last, final image that would probably haunt Frank till the end of his days. Amber, his little princess, bursting out of the kitchen, in her good party dress, clutching bright blue helium balloons that read: 50 today!

  ‘Oh Dad!’ she exclaimed, weaving her way through the throng before she could get to him. ‘I’m so sorry about all the lies we’ve told you – as if I’d ever go to a boring piano lesson on your big day! Mum and Ben and me have been planning this for weeks and weeks and we wanted it to be a proper surprise for you . . .’

  But then Amber’s voice weakened and slowly trailed away as she looked at her father in utter confusion.

  ‘Dad . . . ? Dad, why are you dressed like that?’

  The penny slowly dropped as she took in what Frank was wearing. The tight satin dress, the high heels, the wig, the faceful of makeup that he’d applied as painstakingly as he always did, but which probably looked harsh and unforgiving in the glaring overhead lights.

  ‘Dad?’ his daughter’s voice rang out, clear as a bell, through the pin-drop silence. ‘Why are you dressed as a woman?’

  Emily

  ‘Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life!’

  ‘And remember what Abraham Lincoln said: “Determine that the thing can and shall be done, then find the way”!’

  Emily was standing on the steps outside St Michael’s Wellness Centre, on the happy, glorious day when she’d finally been discharged and let loose into the world again. The other patients only meant well, she knew, as they clustered around her taxi, to wish her a fond farewell. Emily had really got to know them all over the past few months and they certainty weren’t the worst bunch. Still, she thought, forcing a tight grin through clenched teeth, she could gladly have dispensed with ninety-nine per cent of the happy-clappy, vomitty shite they were all coming out with now.

  Emily had clambered into the back seat and was dying to put as much distance between her and the nuthouse as possible when Chloe, one of the newer inmates, almost threw herself over the bonnet of the cab. An annoyingly thin woman in her early twenties, Chloe had pretty much driven everyone mad since she first checked in with all the patronising drivel she was constantly coming out with.

  ‘I’m only really here because of my stress levels, you know,’ she was forever reminding her fellow patients in a whiny voice that almost made Emily want to smack her. ‘It’s not like I’m . . . some kind of sad-case addict . . . I’m just here to rest, really.’

  ‘Where do you think you are, anyway?’ Emily would snap back. ‘A fucking health spa?’

  ‘Emily, wait!’ Chloe was squealing now, thumping on the car bonnet as the taxi driver tried his best to drive away. ‘I just have one last thing to say to you and it’s, like, SOOOO important.’

  ‘Do you have to?’ Emily sighed, sticking her head out the back window.

  ‘Well, you know I’m reading a lot of Paulo Coelho right now?’ Chloe said, ignoring the jibe. ‘He’s, like, this really famous author.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Emily said dryly, itching to be gone.

  ‘And he says: “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” Isn’t that so beautiful?’ Chloe sighed happily. ‘I just thought I’d share it with you before you go. To wish the new you well in your life of sobriety.’

  ‘Oh, would you ever fuck off with yourself,’ Emily said, rolling up the back window and getting the hell out of there as fast as was humanly possible.

  *

  Later that night, Emily lay fully clothed on the top bunk of her eight-year-old nephew’s bed. Lego Minecraft featured prominently in Jamie’s room; just about everything seemed to be covered in it, from the sheets she was lying on, to the posters on the wall.

  Meanwhile, Jamie lay on the bunk bed directly below her. The fecking monkey should have been long asleep by then, as it was well after his bedtime, but something about sharing the room with his wicked Auntie Emily had made him as high as if he’d eaten an entire bag of Haribos.

  ‘Auntie Emily?’ his little voice piped up for the nine hundredth time.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she barked, not meaning to sound grouchy, but not exactly bothering to check herself either.

  ‘Why are you here, Auntie Emily? I mean, like, in our house, sl
eeping in my room tonight?’

  ‘Because I’d nowhere else to go. It was a toss-up between this or sleeping on a park bench.’

  ‘Do you not have a house of your own?’

  ‘I had, but I drank it.’

  ‘That’s silly, Auntie Emily!’ He giggled. ‘How can you drink a house?’

  ‘It’s easy enough if you know how.’ Emily shrugged as she stared up at the ceiling, bored witless and wondering if Sadie, her younger sister, would have a complete meltdown if she lit up a fag.

  Jesus Christ, she thought. It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night and here I am, being quizzed by an eight-year-old I’m sharing a bedroom with. Could it possibly be any worse?

  ‘But . . . you could have stayed in a hotel,’ said Jamie, sounding puzzled.

  ‘Believe you me,’ said Emily flatly, ‘I’d kill to be in a hotel right now. I’d kill to be anywhere, except stuck in here.’

  Jamie thought about this for a second. ‘Then why don’t you just go?’ he asked, poking his head out from the bottom bunk. ‘You’re a grown-up. You can do whatever you want.’

  Emily stared across the room at a Minecraft poster and sighed. ‘In the first place,’ she said, ‘I’ve no money for hotels, and secondly, your delight of a mother is the only relation I have who’d take me in. So here I am.’

  ‘How long are you going to stay in our house for?’

  ‘Not long at all, I hope,’ Emily said, ‘but when you’re in recovery like I am, you’re supposed to stay with someone responsible. I don’t like it any more than you do, kiddo, but you might as well just get used to it.’

  Bit of a harsh way to talk to an eight-year-old, she thought, but what the hell. In St Michael’s, patients were constantly being bombarded with shite like: ‘tell the truth and it will set you free’.

  ‘What does “in recovery” mean?’ came Jamie’s annoyingly persistent voice through the darkness.

  Emily sighed. ‘It means when you’re not allowed to have fun anymore,’ she said.

  ‘Is that because you’re an alcoholic?’

  ‘Recovering alcoholic,’ she said. ‘Get your facts straight, kiddo.’

  ‘What’s an alcoholic, Auntie Emily?’

  ‘It’s when someone drinks a pint for breakfast and they think it’s normal.’

  ‘A pint?’ said Jamie innocently. ‘A pint of what?’

  ‘Vodka.’

  ‘What’s vodka?’

  ‘It’s something you shouldn’t touch till you’re at least eighteen. Jesus, are you ever going to go to sleep?’

  ‘Were you eighteen when you first had vodka?’

  ‘No, I was fourteen.’ She could have also told him that she regularly passed out in a pool of her own vomit at that age, but decided against it.

  ‘Mum says you’re trouble,’ said Jamie after a thoughtful pause. ‘Big, big trouble.’

  ‘Did she, now?’

  ‘She says you can only stay with us for a little while, till you’re all better, but then you have to go.’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  ‘I don’t think Dad likes you all that much either,’ Jamie said.

  ‘I’d say he doesn’t.’

  ‘He says once when you were drunk, you hit on him.’

  ‘I probably did.’ Emily shrugged.

  It certainly sounded like the kind of thing she would have done. God knows, she’d certainly done a lot worse than hit on Sadie’s pillock of a husband, Boring Brien, current holder of the grand title: Unsexiest Man on the Planet.

  ‘But Auntie Emily,’ came Jamie’s disembodied voice, ‘why would you hit my dad? Hitting people is wrong. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘I didn’t actually hit him the way you might think,’ Emily tried to explain, growing more and more desperate for a fag the more this inane conversation went on. ‘I didn’t punch him in the face or anything. I just . . . misread signals, that’s all. Booze makes you do crazy stuff like that.’

  ‘Dad says you made a show of yourself on the night of his fortieth birthday. He said you ruined all the fun for everyone.’

  ‘Believe me, I was the only bit of life in the place,’ Emily said, hauling herself up onto one elbow, so she could get at the emergency cigarette she kept rolled up at the back of the knapsack lying on the bed beside her. The one that was only to be used in the event of a crisis. ‘If memory serves, that party was complete shite.’

  ‘Auntie Emily! That’s a bold word! You’re not allowed to say bold words.’

  ‘Your dad just has a bit of a sense of humour bypass, that’s all,’ she said, feeling around the canvas lining for the cigarette and filching it out.

  Then she lay back on the bed, wondering if she dared light up in Sadie’s perfect two-bed dormer bungalow with its bang-on trend Farrow & Ball wall paint, underfloor heating and tastefully displayed artwork on the walls, in the heart of nameless, soulless commuter-land. This was a house where you were told to take off your stilettos before you were allowed to walk on Sadie’s beautifully waxed wooden floors. The rebel in Emily almost wanted to smoke purely to see Sadie’s shit fit of a reaction.

  ‘Don’t be mean about my dad,’ Jamie said stoutly, peeking out at her from the bottom bunk. ‘My dad is my bestest friend. He plays soccer with me every evening and he’s taking me to Tayto Park this weekend.’

  ‘I’m not being mean,’ said Emily through the darkness. ‘I’m just telling it like it is. Mark my words, kiddo, by the time you’re sixteen, your dad won’t be your best friend anymore. If you’re even halfway normal, you’ll want to get as far away from Stuck Up Sadie and Boring Brien as humanly possible. Then you’ll be delighted to have an auntie like me, because I’ve been there, seen it all, done it all and got the T-shirt. When your parents are driving you up the wall, you’ll be able to tell me anything. I’m unshockable.’

  ‘Mum says you were born bad,’ said Jamie, ‘and that you were always trouble. She says you used to have loads of good things in your life, and you ruined every single one of them.’

  ‘Your mother only thinks that because she’s a sanctimonious prude.’

  ‘Auntie Emily! Talk in words that I understand; I don’t know any long words.’

  ‘Time you went to sleep, kid, OK?’ said Emily, breathing in the lovely, fresh tobacco smell of the cigarette in her hands. Sod this anyway, she thought. I’m exactly nine hours out of hospital and I deserve this. I’ve earned it.

  ‘Mum says you can share my room,’ Jamie said seriously, ‘but that I’m not allowed to hang out with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s because of what happened the time you took me to the panto when I was six. Do you remember, Aunt Emily? You promised to take me to Jack and the Beanstalk, but instead we went to that horrible, smelly dark place with the bar and the high stools, and you gave me Club Orange and you drank four drinks in the same time that it took me to drink only one. I was really bored, so I counted. We never got to the panto at all in the end, did we?’

  There was a long pause before Emily could answer.

  ‘No,’ she said, in a much, much smaller voice, mortified that he could still remember. ‘No, Jamie, we didn’t.’

  Weird, how the innocent questions of an eight-year-old had the power to sting her just as much as any full-on therapy session.

  ‘After that, Mum and Dad said you weren’t allowed to take me out ever again,’ he said sadly. ‘Mum said you broke Granny’s heart too, back when Grandad died and went to heaven.’

  Oh, fuck this, Emily thought. Enough is enough.

  She couldn’t take another word, so she leaped out of bed and scooped her jacket up off the floor, knowing there was a lighter buried deep in there somewhere. Then she threw open the bedroom window, stuck her head outside and lit up. Two puffs later and she felt a bit more relaxed.

  ‘Auntie Emily!’ Jamie said, totally shocked. ‘You’re smoking! Mum is going to kill you!’

  ‘Shut up and go to sleep.’

>   ‘I’m telling on you!’ he said, hopping out of bed and padding out the door in his bare feet.

  And that’s when Emily saw it. Half hidden on a bookcase behind a stack of Harry Potters, right beside the bedroom door.

  Her nephew’s piggybank. It had been his birthday just the previous week and there were lots of lovely, crisp, fresh notes sticking out of it, just waiting to be pocketed. Emily didn’t know what came over her and she didn’t particularly care. All she knew was that two minutes later she was pulling her coat on and tiptoeing down the hall in pitch darkness, banging the front door behind her.

  *

  Emily had had some pretty meteoric rows with Sadie in the past. But nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the one they had the following morning.

  Sadie purposely waited till Jamie was safely at school and Boring Brien had gone to work before launching into the mother of all rows. Up till then, she’d been frosty and cool, but the minute it was just her and Emily, boy, did she really let rip.

  ‘I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ Sadie began, abandoning the washing machine she’d been loading. ‘Because I’m only going to say this to you once.’

  ‘OK, OK, I get it, I fucked up last night,’ Emily said, putting her hands up in an ‘I surrender’ gesture, as she perched on a stool at the kitchen counter, drinking strong black coffee. ‘Calm down, dear. Won’t happen again.’

  ‘Too bloody right it won’t happen again!’ Sadie snapped. ‘Because as of today, you can pack up your bags and get the hell out of my house. Jesus Christ, Emily, have you any shame? You stole from an eight-year-old! I just drove Jamie to school and he was desperately upset—’

  ‘I didn’t steal,’ Emily interrupted. ‘I borrowed. Big difference. Besides, it was only a few quid. It’s not the end of the world. Jamie will get it back, won’t he? It’s not like he’s going to miss it or anything; it was just sitting there in a piggy bank.’

  ‘Not even a full day out of rehab,’ Sadie said, her voice choked with anger and frustration, ‘and you steal cash, then go straight to the nearest pub? Why, Emily? Why?’