To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ they didn’t spend any time alone. Never did anything together, just the four of them, as a family.

      ‘The house is always full of your friends!’ he’d snapped, more than once, when the twins had gone to bed, and Sunday was about to slip into Monday, when they’d both be back at work without a private word spoken. ‘Why can’t we be just us? If I’d known I was walking up the aisle with all four of you—’

      She’d put her hand in front of his mouth and he’d let her shush him.

      ‘They’re not just my friends. They’re my family,’ she said, as she always did. ‘You know that.’

      And she replaced her hand with her mouth.

      He missed her face and her smile. Her scent, the texture of her hair, the taste of her skin. She’d been what let him be him: David, the thoughtful one. He missed her body, and he missed feeling her naked skin as he fell asleep, and their hands clutching as they sometimes did when they both awoke.

      The woman was staring at him, looking anxious. The rain was heavier now, slicking dark curls to her forehead.

      He remembered her now. Well, he didn’t. But Nicci was always striking up conversations. Standing up to the rims of her Hunters in the freezing surf, chatting with strangers, as if it was July. You never knew who you might meet, she said. Better to waste ten minutes talking to a dull person than miss a chance of meeting an interesting one. To her, three huts down was almost family.

      Always open, always looking. His exact opposite.

      Nicci collected: people, things, clothes . . .

      ‘Oh!’ The woman’s face was ashen. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve said the wrong thing, haven’t I? You two haven’t . . . you haven’t split?’ Mortification crossed her face. ‘I can’t believe it. You always seemed so, happy . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

      David shook his head, finally glad of the rain blurring his vision and trickling down his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We haven’t split.’

      Oblivious to the rain, the girls sat at his feet petting the dog, content for the first time that day. ‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘I told everyone I could think of. Everyone in Nicci’s address book . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . She had cancer. It . . . the end . . . was quick.’

      Quick, but not painless.

      The expression that crossed the woman’s face was agonisingly familiar. He’d seen it before, many times, over the last two months. In the months before too, when the end became inevitable. But that didn’t make it any easier, for either of them. As the woman hastily made her excuses and strode off down the beach, dog in tow, head down, into the rain, David decided he could hardly blame her.

      Nicci’s Dead. It was a hell of a conversation stopper.

      They packed up soon after. There was no point staying. He’d come here looking for Nicci, but he hadn’t found her.

      She wasn’t here to be found.

      Chapter Eleven

      The only good thing about Croydon is leaving it, Lizzie thought, as she pulled her second-hand Renault out of The Cedars’ car park.

      It wasn’t Croydon’s fault. She didn’t have anything against the place. In fact, it wasn’t Croydon she hated at all. It was Sanderstead, and The Cedars in particular.

      The Cedars had been Lizzie’s mother’s home for two years now and Lizzie’s elder sister, Karen, had only managed to visit once. OK, so Lizzie lived an hour’s drive away, and Karen’s journey involved an eight-hour transatlantic flight, but even so, Lizzie thought, stomping her foot on the brake as a bus pulled out, would it kill her to visit her mother a couple of times a year?

      ‘I only get two weeks’ holiday,’ Karen reminded her when Lizzie called from the car park to give her an update. ‘And anyway, what would be the point of begging unpaid time off work? She wouldn’t recognise me anyway.’

      Lizzie’d had to resist the urge to hurl her mobile onto the gravel. She couldn’t afford to replace it. ‘You think she recognises me?’ she said instead.

      Before the home there had been the memory loss. The missing door keys, the lost handbags, the returning from school to twenty-five voicemail messages from her mother, all checking she hadn’t been killed in a car crash reported on the local news thirty miles away.

      Doctors’ appointments, specialists’ appointments, MRI scans and CAT scans, had swiftly followed those calls. Lizzie handled it largely on her own. Gerry was in meetings. Entertaining important clients. Away on business/at a training course/being fast-tracked. Gerry was off being Gerry.

      And then they had the care home row.

       I wouldn’t be any help, babe. What do I know about care homes?

      ‘The same as me,’ Lizzie had said. Fuck all.

      She didn’t add that bit. Just as she never gave her sister a piece of her mind. Just as she’d never properly quarrelled with her mother. The stand-up knock-down row she should have had at nineteen or twenty-one had somehow gone astray.

      Instead she visited countless care homes, each more depressing than the last, and then found an estate agent to sell the family home to pay for her mother’s care. Each step of the way she religiously called Karen in Brooklyn so she’d know exactly what was going on. And each time Karen had been too busy with work, with her husband and children, to come and help.

      Eventually, after Lizzie threatened to give every last stick of furniture to charity, Karen took unpaid leave from her job on Wall Street. The forty-eight hours she stayed at the Gatwick Hilton and systematically tried to ‘put right’ every decision Lizzie had made were topped off by their mother’s glazed lack of recognition. No, Lizzie was pretty sure Karen wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. And who could blame her? Lizzie only wished she had the same option.

      In a way, she was glad. Sometimes doing everything yourself was simply easier . . . As she pulled onto the M23 and put her foot down, she felt her spirits lift. It was done.

      The Stone Roses went on, the early album with all the good tracks. Not even her music really, but an old boyfriend at uni’s. Somehow she’d adopted his music taste as her own and had never really moved on.

      Mum had been even worse today.

      ‘Isn’t it nice of Kathleen to come and see me,’ she’d said, before lapsing into one of many long and intricate conversations with herself. It was ironic. Mum had never been chatty. Now you couldn’t shut her up.

      Janet, The Cedars’ manager, had shrugged apologetically. As if to say, What can you do? Lizzie had shrugged back. If Janet didn’t know, she certainly didn’t.

      Kathleen was her mother’s cousin, dead for ten years. Lizzie had been Kathleen for months now. At first she’d thought Mum did it on purpose, to punish Lizzie for not being Karen. Now she knew it was the illness at work.

      The next call to Karen was going to be grim. Lizzie needed to tell her The Cedars felt Mum needed specialist care. For which read expensive.

      ‘What’s wrong with the NHS?’ Karen СКАЧАТЬ