Spencer's List Part 1

SPENCER'S LIST.

LISSA EVANS.

For Keith.

With thanks to Gerard Reissmann, who kept me right on the medical bits, to family and friends, for putting up with my regular defeatist moans during the writing, to Georgia Garrett, for her unparalleled guidance, both on and off the page, to Juliet Annan, whose enthusiasm and encouragement is unflagging, to Clare Parkinson, so meticulous and thoughtful, and to David Hastings, for coming up with 'Hung and Heavy'.

1.

The estate agent's letter was one of a handful that dropped onto the mat on a mild September morning. Fran, still in her socks, pa.s.sed the bathroom where her brother was clearing his nasal pa.s.sages with a series of avian honks, and padded down the stairs to the hall. She sifted through the post on her way to the kitchen, binning the junk, dropping Peter's copies of Home Plumber and Journal of Health and Safety onto the table and hesitating over a fat airmail letter postmarked Denmark. She pinched the edge to confirm that it held more than the usual sheaf of folded paper and, swayed by curiosity, opened it and teased out a small photograph. It was a close-up of a cornflower growing beside a dusty footpath and the scrawl on the back read: Fran, this speedwell is as blue but no bluer than your eyes. She looked at the photo again and frowned slightly. It was quite definitely a cornflower; she could even see the characteristic pseudo-radiate capitula.

She tucked the unread pages into her bag for later and, switching on the kettle, stood for a while with the other letter unopened in her hand. It was in a nasty, flimsy Lion Brand envelope with a second-cla.s.s stamp and a big smudge on the back, where someone had pressed on the flap to make the cheap glue hold. Eighteen months ago, when she and Peter had bought the house from Brown and Baddeley, all their correspondence from the firm had been typed on creamy, textured paper, almost as thick as cardboard, and the folder they kept it in had eventually split under the strain. This letter drooped limply in her grasp, and only the hand-stamped motto Your Home is in our Hearts was unchanged. She stuck a finger under the flap and felt the same queasy antic.i.p.ation that had preceded opening her A Level results.

She hadn't wanted a valuation; she knew it could only be dreadful, but Peter, with his usual formality, had insisted that they stuck to Paragraph 4 of their original agreement, the one stating that 'eighteen months after purchase, the current value of 33 Stapleton Road should be ascertained and if either or both of the parties so wish the house re-introduced onto the market.' The wording had been courtesy of a solicitor friend of Peter's and the agreement amicably drawn up during the nine days that elapsed between exchanging contracts and watching the property market plummet into a death spiral.

The kettle clicked off while she was still hesitating, and with a surge of cowardice she decided to grant herself three minutes' grace; she would read the letter once she had a mug of tea in her hand. She filled the pot and wiped a swathe of condensation from the kitchen window. Just a few yards away, on the other side of the garden wall, her neighbour was hanging out a row of huge shirts, doubling the sleeves over the line to prevent them dragging on the ground. As Fran watched idly it occurred to her that Iris had been living in that same downstairs flat for fifteen years. She looked at the envelope again; it was possible, she realized, it was really, horribly, possible that the contents might condemn her to a similar fate.

'Fran!'

It was a m.u.f.fled call. She looked up to see Iris waving and pointing.

'What?' she mouthed.

Iris pointed again, indicating something high on the wall of the house. Heart sinking, Fran chucked the envelope on the table and opened the back door.

'Have you seen your roof?' asked Iris, as soon as she was outside.

Face braced for the shock, Fran looked up.

During the night a length of guttering had come loose from the eaves and was hanging down in a giant diagonal, like a slide for sparrows, the lower end resting snugly on the bath overflow pipe. A sludge of ancient leaf mould had dripped from the broken section, forming a stinking blot on the wall, and beneath it on the concrete lay an old nest that had landed intact and upright. It contained the tail end of a mummified mouse.

'Tremendous,' said Fran, flatly. It was only a month since a chunk of her bedroom windowsill had fallen off, and not much more than that since her brother had put one of his size twelves through a bathroom floorboard. Like a very old lady who has never seen a doctor, their house was disintegrating piece by piece. All their DIY all their hammering and gluing and slaving and fiddling and following the instructions over fifteen ill.u.s.trated weekly parts had merely const.i.tuted so much first aid; it could surely only be a matter of time before one of the major organs failed. Or possibly the whole building would suddenly implode like the house at the end of Poltergeist, leaving a pulsating black void strewn with corpses. At least it would be quick, she thought, at least it would spare them the current relentless decline.

'Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,' said Iris, resuming her shirt-hanging.

Fran shrugged, resignedly. 'That's next weekend sorted, anyway.' Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a pigeon flutter down to the blackcurrants and she smacked her hands sharply to frighten it. It clattered off, and the black cat from number 39 bolted out of the broccoli and leapt over the back wall.

'Vermin,' said Fran. 'I should get one of those bird-scarer shotguns that automatically fires every ten minutes. I suppose the neighbours might complain though.' Iris laughed through a mouthful of pegs. She was dressed for work, in a longish, darkish skirt teamed with a paleish, vaguely crumpled shirt that sported a brown smear on the collar. Fran pointed it out.

'Oh Lord. I bet it's Marmite.' She held out the collar and tried to focus on the stain, just below her chin. 'And I ought to iron this top really. Does it look terrible?' Fran hesitated. 'I'll iron it,' said Iris. She yawned and ran a hand through her hair, and then patted it down as though she'd remembered she wasn't supposed to.

'Mu-um.'

'What?' asked Iris, over her shoulder. Fran saw the pale, sleep-creased face of one of the twins look round the back door.

'We're out of cereal.'

'Look in the cupboard behind the pasta.'

'It's their eighteenth on Sunday, isn't it?' asked Fran, suddenly remembering.

'Sat.u.r.day.' Iris hung up the last shirt, veiling herself from Fran's sight.

'Mu-um. There's none there.'

'I'll get a card,' said Fran. 'Cards, rather.'

'Mu-um? There's none there.'

'I'd better go,' said Iris, lifting a shirt-sleeve and looking at Fran through the gap. 'Your courgettes look lovely, incidentally.' She let the sleeve drop again and a couple of moments later Fran heard her say 'Look, just behind the spaghetti,' with barely a trace of impatience.

The courgettes did look lovely, thought Fran, snapping off a strand of fennel to chew and taking a moment to admire her produce. Over the course of a year she had turned a sad little stretch of balding gra.s.s into a square of textbook fecundity, and it had been galling when the valuer's sole comment on the garden had been 'no lawn.' She winkled out a couple of snails that were hiding among the broccoli florets and threw them against the wall a quick, organic death and a satisfying noise to boot and then, unable to postpone it any longer, turned back to the house.

Probably the only advantage of 33 Stapleton Road, indeed probably the only selling point still remaining, was that a bus stop stood only twenty yards from the front gate. It was served by the 92A, which started in the City and ground uphill through Dalston and Tottenham to the green edge of London that still smudged the map between the North Circular and the M25.

For the first half of her journey, Fran sat staring out of the window, still trying to absorb the contents of the estate agent's letter. The bus was full of schoolchildren, and beside her sagged a teenage boy whose lardy b.u.t.tocks restricted her to a tiny section of the seat and whose enormous voice, raised in conversation with a friend three rows in front, seemed to fill the whole upper deck.

On the High Street the shops were just starting to open. There was a breakfast queue outside the twenty-four-hour fried-chicken takeaway c.u.m minicab office, the Watchtower sellers had taken up position in the doorway of Iceland and the man with the orange lady's coat and the airport trolley was already sitting outside the British Legion with a can of Strongbow.

'Your face, right,' shouted the boy next to her to his friend, 'your face, MY a.r.s.e.'

They crawled past the blackened sh.e.l.l of what had first been a Pound Store, then a charity shop and finally, briefly, Deelite Electrical Goods, where Fran had once bought a suspiciously cheap ca.s.sette player made by a company she'd never heard of. By the time the rewind b.u.t.ton had jammed in the 'on' position three days after purchase the shop had already burned down. 'Insurance company "has doubts" about origin of Deelite Fire' as the local paper had put it. She'd binned the player.

At the Point Break snooker hall, the bus emptied, and a river of black blazers poured along the pavement towards the gates of Abalene Grove Comprehensive. The remaining pa.s.sengers seemed to expand with a sigh, and Fran, unable to face brooding any longer about her future in Dalston, took Duncan's letter from her bag and smoothed out the six closely written pages.

Dear Fran, Low, dark hills deep woods shifting cloud-shapes in still pools a white gate, painfully bright against the tangled undergrowth can you see Jutland as I'm seeing it?

She had been to Denmark, once, on a field trip, and her chief memory was of how tidy the countryside had been, and how expensive the ice cream.

I've been camping at a dairy farm, rising at dawn to capture the first threads of the sun as they weave the day's new light, and the cloud-puffs of the cattle's breath as those gentle beasts watch me with unblinking eyes. My third eye my camera blinks only when I ask it to a steady friend, who keeps watching even when the beauty makes me turn aside.

There was a lot more of this sort of stuff. Fran speed-read through to find something more concrete.

I miss you, Fran, I miss your body next to mine and your small, cold feet curled beneath you. I miss your stubborn face and your sun-scrubbed cheeks and the level blue of your gaze. I miss the curve of your back and the rough skin of your practical hands. I want to hold those hands and scour them across me, I want to 'Scuse me.' She budged up slightly to allow a cadaverous, rather trembly man to sit down. He spent some time shifting around in the seat, arranging himself, and then lifted an aged Boots bag onto his lap and started to look through it, emitting the while little plosive sounds between pursed lips, like a pan starting to boil.

She returned to the letter.

I want to hold those hands and scour them across me, I want to lick the salty sweat from your b.r.e.a.s.t.s and feel your nipples like raspberries against my tongue. I want to taste the 'p.r.i.c.k.' The man beside her was starting to form whole words. 'p.r.i.c.k. p.r.i.c.k. I gotta p.r.i.c.k.' He said them briskly and without any particular emphasis, as if reciting a telephone number. 'p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, that's my p.r.i.c.k.' The bag rustled ominously.

I want to hold those hands and scour them 'p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, b.a.l.l.s, p.r.i.c.k.'

I want to hold those 'p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.k, p.r.i.c.kp.r.i.c.kp.r.i.c.kp.r.i.c.k...' The rustling started to speed up.

'Excuse me,' said Fran, loudly and coldly, pushing past him and trying not to look at what the bag might hold. He barely paused in his rhythm, and she turned her back on him and went downstairs with what she hoped was dignified haste.

There were no seats on the bottom deck, and she held on to a rail, stuffing Duncan's letter back into her bag and bracing herself with one hand as the bus rounded the corner by Safeway's. She glanced automatically over to the service alley between the supermarket and Billo Shoes, through which it was possible to glimpse her raspberry canes arrayed beyond the chain-link fence. They weren't there. She strained towards the window, but could see only the side of the hen house, normally invisible from this angle. The bus lurched forward again, but just before the view disappeared she caught a glimpse of a large pig running across the gap.

She arrived at the gates of Hagwood Urban Farm at a run, her face red with a mixture of exertion and fury. Claud, the farm manager, had obviously been hovering by the car park in antic.i.p.ation of her arrival, and he intercepted her, hands outstretched pacifically. 'He's in. Porky's back in and it's... it's ' he paused, clearly straining for a phrase that wasn't a direct lie ' it's not as bad as it looks. I think we'll find that with a real group effort we can...'

Fran dodged round him and jogged past the cla.s.sroom, the hen house and the compost heap before halting abruptly in front of her domain. The vegetable patch was smashed flat. Everything that had previously been vertical was now horizontal. Everything that was now horizontal had bits missing. A row of pumpkins looked like the aftermath of an alien road accident and the ground was sprinkled with a few tiny, saliva-flecked pieces of carrot. The lettuces had simply disappeared, as if sucked up by a giant hoover. There was a large, ragged gap in her newly planted hawthorn hedge and the wicker hurdle that had previously bordered the pond was now bent in half at the bottom of it. A long muddy smear ran the length of the wild-flower meadow, punctuated at one end by a flattened red bobble hat.

Claud appeared at her elbow and she threw him a pinched glance. 'Which bit, precisely, isn't as bad as it looks?'

He looked trapped, but smiled sweatily. 'Well, obviously at first glance it's pretty shocking but I think with a bit of work we can pull together and... and straighten a lot of it... straighten quite a bit of it...' Fran picked up a snapped stem of Swiss chard and held it directly in front of him.

'Well, er... obviously not, er, that er...' his voice trailed away.

Fran chucked the stem to one side and stood with her arms folded, struggling to hold back tears of frustration. To visiting school parties, her end of the farm was known as 'the boring bit'. On a sensation scale, with the size of Porky's genitalia at the top, the baby ducks a close second, and the smell of the manure heap a hilarity-inducing third, the average ten-year-old could barely remain conscious when confronted with a bunch of plants. In her teaching sessions, she sometimes felt as if she were pitching the plot of a European art film to a group of Hollywood movie executives: they wanted s.e.x, blood and car chases, and she was trying to sell them thought-provoking dialogue. The way to do it, she had discovered, was to wrong-foot them, to present botany and ecology with the degree of brio and the elastic range of imagery more often used by sports commentators. It was sometimes exhausting, but part of her reward was the wall of felt-tipped pictures in the staffroom that showed the sun issuing instructions to the vegetables through a megaphone almost as many times as they showed Porky weeing.

She could hear him now, above the roar of traffic on the North Circular, grunting with contentment as he scratched himself against the fence. At her elbow, Claud shifted anxiously as he waited for her reaction.

'How did it happen?' she asked.

He stalled for time. 'You mean er...?'

'I mean how did the pig get out of the pen?' she enunciated, separating the words with great clarity.

Claud took his time replying. His managerial style, if he could be said to have one, was that he wanted everyone to be friends, all the time. He removed his gla.s.ses, cleaned them on the bottom of his t-shirt, replaced them and cleared his throat. Fran stood with arms folded.

'There was a... a misunderstanding.'

'Oh yes?'

'I thought that the weakened stretch of fencing had been mended, whereas, in fact, almost certainly due to some kind of mix-up, there was a '

'You mean that you'd told someone to mend it and they didn't?'

'Well, it all depends on whether you view the word "told" as an appropriate '

'Who?'

Claud shuffled miserably. 'I don't think we need a scapegoat for this particular '

'I'm not asking for a scapegoat, I'm asking who was told to mend it and didn't.'

'I'm really not sure we want to ' A police car howled by, making speech impossible for some moments.

Fran changed tack. 'OK. Was it Costas?' she asked in a reasonable voice, naming the most reliable person on the farm.

Claud was startled into frankness. 'Costas? No, of course it wasn't.'

'No, I didn't think so. You'd have told me if it had been someone competent or useful, because they'd certainly have had some kind of excuse.' She impaled Claud with a look. 'So it must have been someone who's a total waste of s.p.a.ce.'

He opened and shut his lips a couple of times, but nothing came out.

'I'll kill him.' She turned and marched towards the staffroom, Claud bleating ineffectually behind her.

Barry had the foresight to look slightly worried when Fran banged the door open. He was by the sink, wiping mud from his waterproof jacket with the washing-up sponge, his curly hair haloed by the morning sun.

'Hiya,' he said, cautiously. 'I was just going to make you a mug of tea. I thought you might need one,' he added, with a humorous little lift of the eyebrows.

Fran pushed the door shut behind her, blocking Claud's worried face from view. 'I'd like a word with you.'

'Sure.' He smiled, exuding his usual sleepy charm the sleepy charm that Fran had stupidly a.s.sumed was jet lag when he'd been interviewed for the post of Agricultural Education a.s.sistant Grade 5. He'd just come back from a holiday in Australia, and it had seemed a reasonable explanation for his excessively relaxed approach to the panel's questions. Unfortunately it had turned out that he was always like that.

She sat down, and gestured brusquely towards another chair.

'Sure you wouldn't like a cuppa first?' He waggled a mug at her.

'No.'

'Right.' He seemed to sense the seriousness of the impending conversation and, sitting down, clasped his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward with an earnest expression, as if auditioning for the role of a social worker.

'What's the problem?'

'I'll give you three guesses,' said Fran.

'It's about Porky, isn't it?' He looked at her sympathetically. 'Yeah, I'm afraid he made a bit of a mess of your veg. We just couldn't get a grip on him, you see. I must have fallen over about fifteen times, that coat's never going to be the same again.' He tried a smile, and then put it away again.

'And why was Porky out in the first place?'

'Oh right, right. I see.' He nodded, as if everything had come clear. 'Yeah, I just hadn't had time to get round to that fence, I'm afraid. Sorry about that, Fran. Claud asked me to do a poster for the autumn open day and then there was that kid yesterday I had to take for a teta.n.u.s jab and then I had to get off early for my girlfriend's birthday so...' He shrugged ruefully. 'You know how it is when things get in the way.' He looked at her, apparently waiting for an understanding laugh of a.s.sent.

Fran felt a neurone snap somewhere deep within her brain. 'Oh for f.u.c.k's sake, Barry,' she said, with a vehemence that made him jump, 'don't be so ridiculous. An enormous great pig has completely wrecked my section of the farm and it's all your fault because you're a stupid, lazy, s.p.a.ced-out berk.' The last word was a shout and as she motored on she felt a certain pleasure at the shock on his face. 'You know, when I think of all the students we interviewed for your job I could b.l.o.o.d.y well weep. We could have thrown a stone in a ' she cast around bullishly and spotted a poster above the sink ' donkey sanctuary and hit something with more ability and common sense than you.'

Barry recoiled slightly, as if he'd been punched.

'You've been given chance after chance but you think just because you've got a nice smile you don't have to do any b.l.o.o.d.y work. Everything you touch is botched. You can't lift a potato without needing a fifteen-minute tea break. The least you could be doing now is trying to restore some of the damage instead of sitting here cleaning your b.l.o.o.d.y coat like a member of the landed gentry. G.o.d, the work I put into that garden...' She gulped for breath and tried to restore her breathing to a normal rhythm. Barry sat as if stuffed. 'So why aren't you out there? Go on, get out there.'

Like a very old man, Barry got to his feet. Under the remains of the tan his face was pale, and his eyes flinched away from Fran's as he pa.s.sed her. Following him to the door, she watched him tramp down the long, sloping parallelogram of the farm, past the hen house where Spike was collecting eggs, under the flyover, whizzing with cars like a vast abacus, and towards the dented patch of green where Porky had frolicked.

Fran glanced at Claud, hovering beside the boot sc.r.a.per, and then looked away. Down by the pond she could see Barry starting to fish for the hurdle.

Claud eased himself towards her. 'I'm not sure...' he began.

'I know,' said Fran, tiredly, leaning against the doorpost. 'I'd had a bad morning, even before I got here.'

'He looked a bit upset.'

'I'm a bit upset.'