Meltdown (38 page)

One second later the screaming began.

It went on for ten minutes. Then twenty, then an hour. During this time both Jimmy and Monica suffered agonies. They loved their children, they loved them at least as much as they loved each other and certainly more than they loved themselves, and they could not bear to hear one of them in such distress. Screaming with longing and fear, choking with the terror of loneliness and separation. Drowning, it seemed, in tears and snot.

But they did not break. Jimmy probably would have done but Monica would not let him.

‘We have to get our lives back,’ she said, with tears in her eyes, ‘for their sake as much as ours.’

And so the long evening wore on. Another hour passed and then ten minutes more . . . and then, long, long after they’d both given up hope, Lillie stopped crying. She was simply too exhausted to continue.

For a moment the silence was too oppressive for them to speak.

‘She may be dead,’ said Jimmy. ‘We need to check.’

‘No!’ Monica insisted. ‘We might wake her up.’

She ran to the baby listener and turned it on. It had not been on before; the last thing they had wanted to do was amplify the nightmare, but now they needed to listen. She had placed the other radio unit on a shelf between Lillie’s cot and Cressida’s bed. She turned it up to full volume.

Sure enough, they could hear them, breathing, gurgling.
Sleeping
. They were both asleep. Lillie had fallen asleep in the absence of her parents.

And it had taken only two hours and ten minutes.

Jimmy and Monica embraced. The embrace turned into a passionate kiss and before they knew it they were making love.

Later that night the whole family slept through. Lillie, utterly exhausted by crying herself to sleep, did not wake up for her usual night feed. She closed the bar voluntarily.

All in all, it was a very good night.

Too sad to care

It was when Lizzie put her coffee mug down that Jimmy truly realized how fragile she’d become. Because she put it down directly on the polished surface of her beautiful dining table
without a coaster
. Jimmy had never, ever seen her do that in all the nearly twenty years he’d known her.

Lizzie hated rings.

She could spot potential mug or glass marks from across a crowded room. She could sense them. Her ears would prick up, her eyes widen in alarm and she would dash from one room to another, holding out an exquisite Chinese lacquered coaster in her hand, arriving miraculously at exactly the point when some thoughtless guest was about to place the wet bottom of their wine glass on to the gorgeous inlaid wooden lid of her eighteenth-century harpsichord. It was like a superpower. Like one of the X-Men. Lizzie was Coaster Girl, and there was no potential ring on furniture that she could not prevent.

Of course, Robbo himself had been the worst ringmaker of all. For a while Lizzie had called him Bilbo Baggins because wherever he went, a ring would be found. She used to follow him round at parties with a cloth and a stack of amusing little laminated squares depicting bloated British holidaymakers on Spanish beaches (from Lizzie’s Coaster Brava range) or lovely plastic discs with the face of a rock star on them (from her Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster range).

But that had been when Robbo was alive. Now he was dead and Lizzie, beautiful, full-lipped, full-figured, raven-haired goddess of all things lovely, was thin and drawn and grey-streaked and putting her mug down without a coaster.

Jimmy knew that if she didn’t care about leaving a ring any more, she didn’t care about anything any more.

‘Sometimes I’m just not sure I can face the day,’ she told him. ‘Honestly, I wish I’d been sitting beside him in the car when he . . . when he . . .’

Killed himself?

Was that what had happened? Lizzie had made it clear at the funeral that she did not believe it and would never believe it. Jimmy didn’t believe it either, although at the back of his mind he recognized that it was a possibility.

‘Wigan and Wigan are contesting my life-insurance claim,’ Lizzie said, as if reading Jimmy’s thoughts. ‘That awful man Andrew Tanner has written saying they’re withholding payment and are prepared to test the claim in court.’

Jimmy could believe it. He used Wigan and Wigan himself, having done so on Robbo and Lizzie’s recommendation. He was now behind on all his premiums and the firm had proved one of his more vociferous Webb Street creditors.

‘They don’t stand a chance, Liz,’ Jimmy said. ‘They’ll have to pay in the end and we’ll nail them for the interest too.’

But Jimmy was not entirely sure.

The police had established that although Robbo was certainly over the limit when he crashed he had not been spectacularly drunk, and the CCTV footage of the incident offered no clue as to why the car had swerved so violently. As far as it was possible to establish, it appeared that up until moments before the crash Robbo had been driving normally.

The coroner’s verdict remained open.

‘But Lizzie,’ Jim went on gently, ‘currently you’re broke, really, really broke, and you have a great many liabilities.’ He had come round to help Lizzie with her accounting. ‘We need to make a plan for you,’ he continued, knowing that it was his father’s wisdom he was imparting, not his own.

‘I don’t need a plan,’ Lizzie said in a voice as leaden as it had once been golden. ‘The kids are going to be OK. Amanda has managed to squeeze them on to her school bursaries programme, and that’s all that matters. It’s so kind of her because I know how oversubscribed it is.’

‘OK, Lizzie, so the kids have schools to go to. We have to start thinking about you.’

‘I don’t want to think about me,’ Lizzie said, her voice beginning to crack. ‘I don’t care about me. I deserve this.’

‘Why? Why?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Why do you deserve this?’

Now the tears came in earnest. She looked so washed out, Jimmy wondered where she was still finding them.

‘Oh Jimmy, supposing he
did
mean to do it? I mean just for a moment, for one insane, distraught moment, and then it was too late? Supposing I didn’t love him well enough for him to know that I wouldn’t have minded about him losing all the money. If in all those years I hadn’t shown him that he could trust me to support him through anything . . .’

‘No, Lizzie. That’s madness. Don’t go there,’ Jimmy said. ‘He was going to get some fags. He lost concentration.’

‘What if he left me, Jim?’ Lizzie said, openly weeping. ‘What if the insurance man is right and Robbo left me? If he cared more about his shame and his failure than he did about me? About living
for me
! Because if that were true then I don’t care enough about me either! I don’t care enough to bother about anything at all.’

‘Liz,’ Jim protested, ‘it was an accident and it’s time to pull yourself together. You’re not like me, busted flat with nothing to offer. You’re Lizzie of Lizzie Food, your name’s still good. You can get out there and make money. Just think of something beautiful and sell it.’

‘I don’t think I will find anything beautiful ever again,’ said Lizzie.

Art imitating life

In a blinding moment of inspiration, the solution to Jimmy and Monica’s mounting fiscal problems dawned upon them both.

They would become novelists.

The precedents were extremely encouraging.

‘Look at Jeffrey Archer,’ Jimmy said. ‘He was broke, wasn’t he? So he wrote
Kane and Abel
. Brilliant. Simple as that, he had a problem, he fixed it.’

‘And J. K. Rowling,’ Monica said.

‘Exactly. Another classic case. Broke. Single mum. Eking out coffees in an Edinburgh café. Writes
Harry Potter
. Problem solved. Bloody obvious when you think about it. That’s what we need to do.’

‘Of course it is. We’ll start tonight.’

And so after they’d put the children to bed they made a pot of coffee, allowed themselves a small plate of digestive biscuits and sat down to think.

Within an hour the ideas were taking shape.

Monica decided to write a children’s book that adults would enjoy. She wanted it to contain lots of adventure and magic and dragons and dark forces. But (and this was terribly important) it would be very different from
Harry Potter
. That was essential.

She planned to set her story in a pre-human world which was populated by trolls (although in her mind they looked more like pixies than trolls). It would be a sort of medieval society, but with trolls instead of people. The story would take place at the court of the great Troll King. Here, a lowly but feisty troll girl working in the scullery would suddenly discover that she had magic powers! She would be the unwitting inheritor of dark secrets and ancient sorcery.

‘There’ll be a wonderful scene when she first works it out,’ Monica explained. ‘She’ll spill all the food on the floor and be heading for a terrible beating when all of a sudden she’ll make it right again! Just by wishing it! The spilt jugs full, the ruined pies back in their dishes. She doesn’t know how it happens but it does happen. Anyway, the great Troll Wizard hears about it and, recognizing that the girl is special, takes her on as one of his apprentices, but the evil Wraith Goddess from the Dark Side also hears about the girl and vows to steal her power. What do you think?’ said Monica with great excitement.

‘It’s Harry Potter,’ said Jimmy.

‘
What!
Don’t be ridiculous!’ Monica snapped. ‘It’s about trolls and the hero’s a girl.’

‘Yes. It’s about a troll girl Harry Potter who goes to magic school.’

‘She doesn’t go to magic school, she’s apprenticed to a wizard.’

‘Having previously been put upon and bullied.’

‘Of course.’

‘Will she make friends with some of the other apprentices?’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘A bookish one and a geek?’

‘No! Absolutely not,’ Monica replied angrily. ‘You’re being totally negative. I don’t think the two stories are remotely similar.’

‘They aren’t remotely similar, Mon,’ Jimmy said, smiling, ‘they’re very, very similar.’

‘But my story is about
trolls
.’

Jimmy shrugged and returned to his laptop. He had been typing furiously when Monica interrupted him with her troll idea.

‘All right then,’ Monica said huffily, ‘what have you got?’

‘Do you want to hear?’ Jimmy sounded rather smug.

‘Of course I want to hear.’

‘It’s going to blow you away.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘Us,’ Jimmy said happily.

‘What do you mean, “us”?’

‘I’m going to write a story about us,’ he said. ‘At least about us up to a point when it gets a bit dark.’

Monica looked suspicious.

‘How do you mean it gets dark?’ she said. ‘How dark? It’s not going to be all sex scenes, is it? Because that I would
not
be happy with.’

‘No. No sex . . . Well, actually I don’t know yet. But possibly a murder, certainly a suspicious death. It’s about this guy who does exactly what I did, right? Screws up, buys a street five minutes before the recession hits and ends up in the same shit as us, right?’

‘So far I think people would rather read about magical trolls,’ said Monica. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘Yeah, of course. That’s where the plot kicks in. This bloke decides the way out of all his troubles is to do a canoe thing!’

‘A canoe thing?’

‘You know, that bloke who went off in a canoe and faked his death for the insurance. People are always doing it. There was an MP, John Stonehouse, he left his clothes on a beach and then turned up years later in Australia. That’s what my man decides to do. Fake his own death.’

‘Maybe he should just try to write a novel like us.’

‘No, no. Honestly, Mon, this is great. I’ve got it all worked out. You remember Bob?’

‘Bob?’

‘The tramp at Webb Street who sleeps in one of the houses sometimes. He’s a total wreck. I told you about him, right?

Every time I go there I expect to find him dead.’

‘Oh yes, I remember.’

‘Well, get this. My man, in my story, has the same thing, a tramp hanging around his development site. And one day this bloke
does
find him dead.’

‘The tramp?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. My hero turns up and goes in one of the houses and finds the tramp dead . . . or,’ Jimmy’s eyes filled with gleeful enthusiasm, ‘perhaps my bloke kills him?’

‘Why would he want to kill a tramp? Is he a nutter who kills homeless people like in that horrible
American Psycho
book?’

‘No,’ said Jimmy, ‘he’s very sane. Very together. He has a plan and he needs a corpse.’

‘I thought he needed a canoe.’

‘I’m not
doing
the canoe story, Mon!’ Jimmy was becoming ever so slightly frustrated and suspicious that Monica was being deliberately obstructive because he’d poured cold water on her troll wizard idea. ‘That’s just an example of a famous insurance scam. My story’s totally different.’

‘Oh. Well, you didn’t say.’

‘I’m
trying
to say. This tramp’s got ID, see,’ Jimmy went on, ‘just like my bloke at Webb Street. It’s hanging round his neck, an old
Big Issue
seller’s badge and accreditation. Now it’s already occurred to the man in my story that with the way things are going in his life, what with the spiralling debt and fear of bankruptcy and all that, a false ID might not be such a bad thing to own.’

‘Is that what
you
’ve been thinking, Jimmy?’ Monica asked in sudden alarm, ‘or did you just make it up for your story?’

‘We-ell,’ Jimmy admitted, ‘it did sort of occur to me before, you know, just as a kind of fantasy thought. But the point is my man has been planning to go through with it.’

‘Stealing the tramp’s ID?’

‘Exactly. At first that’s all he has in mind. Pinch his badge while he’s unconscious from sniffing petrol and use it to open a bank account. That way if my guy ever gets his hands on a bit of money it won’t have to go straight to his creditors.’