Looking For Lucy Read online

  We managed another fifteen minutes before Allegra’s wriggling and squirming had me at the edge of the bed and I gave up the idea of any further sleep, swivelled my bare feet onto the statically shiny nylon carpet and drew back the curtains onto a dank, miserable, early March morning. Someone, or something, had pulled over my overfull dustbin—the dustbin men, according to a letter I’d received from the council yesterday were refusing to come down our street because of some incident with next-door’s pit bull—and empty cans of beans, pasta packets and potato peelings were strategically strewn over my excuse for a garden. Oh shit. That was all I needed. Leaving Allegra still in her pyjamas and dressing gown in front of a DVD and the gas fire, I pulled my mac over my own pyjamas, grabbed my old boots and opened the back door.

  ‘Mummy, it’s cold,’ Allegra whimpered from the depths of her chair. ‘Close the door…’

  ‘Just a minute, Allegra, won’t be long.’ Armed with rubber gloves and a black bin liner, I spent the next five minutes freezing my tush off, picking up two weeks’ of uncollected rubbish while the pit bull hurled itself against the adjoining fence in fury at being unable to get at me. At least it was my rubbish: I wasn’t picking up what didn’t belong to me—although the slug that was hanging tenaciously to the soggy cereal packet, I hadn’t been acquainted with previously. I bent to pick up a twisted plastic bag but dropped it in revulsion when I realised it was a condom. Used. At the same time, the broken sash of an upstairs window was perilously shoved up and the woman next door shouted, ‘Shut the fuck up, you fucking animal,’ before banging it down once more. I looked at the used condom, at the mean little patch of gravel where a dandelion leaf was optimistically reaching for what passed as light in that dark corner of the garden, and burst into tears.

  2

  ‘Are you OK?’ Izzy stood back from the open front door as she ushered us in and gave Allegra a bear hug while simultaneously peering over her dark hair to look me in the face. ‘Have you been crying?’ she mouthed, when I shook my head but didn’t actually say anything. ‘Sid, Allegra’s here…’ she yelled over her shoulder …‘you wanted to show her your new Lego thingy, didn’t you? Take her down to the playroom and let her play with it with you.’

  A mop of black curly hair appeared round the kitchen door and then the owner of the hair itself. ‘Come on, Sid, frame yourself. Take Allegra with you and then Clem and I can have a coffee.’

  It always took a few minutes for our respective offspring to shake off their shyness with each other if they hadn’t seen each other for a week or two, and it had been a good three weeks since we’d been together.

  ‘Actually, skip the coffee. You look as if you could do with a drink. What’s up?’ Izzy reached for a bottle of white wine in her huge American fridge-freezer and opened a bag of crisps with her teeth. ‘Come on, Clem, knock that back and relax. You look as if you’ve got a bloody poker up your backside.’

  It always made me smile when Izzy, a beautifully spoken, public-school-educated doctor came out with things like that. ‘Do you talk to your patients like that when they come in to see you at the surgery?’

  ‘I have been known to in the past,’ she said, her face deadpan. ‘That’s the beauty of working for one’s husband—one can get away with murder. Although,’ she added, ‘the sexual harassment can be a problem. That’s better,’ she said, as I laughed at the idea of Declan slipping through their adjoining surgery doors for an opportunistic between-patient goosing. ‘Come on, what is it?’

  ‘Don’t be nice to me,’ I sniffed, ‘or I really will cry. I’m pre-menstrual, that’s all. Everything seems worse than it really is.’

  ‘What’s everything? What’s happened?’

  Tears threatened and I took a big glug of the wine. ‘It was the used condom that did it,’ I spluttered as the wine went down the wrong way.

  ‘Condom? And used?’ Izzy stopped wiping the kitchen table where she’d spilled wine in her overenthusiastic filling of my glass. Her eyes gleamed. ‘A man? At last? Four years since you had Allegra and no sex since then. And now a man? And you very sensibly used a condom?’

  I laughed at her hopefully raised eyebrows. ‘’Fraid not. The condom was in my back garden. I picked it up this morning by mistake just as next door’s pit bull nearly had me for breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, nice. Who left it there?’ Izzy visibly grimaced.

  ‘One of the girls that makes her living round the back of my house, I guess. There’s a little gang of them who seem to prefer being outside rather than taking their punters back home with them. I suppose by the time they’ve actually taken someone back to the flats on Emerald Street where a lot of them live, they can service twice as many and save themselves the money for the gas meter.’

  ‘God, can you imagine anything more awful than having sex for money? Bad enough having sex with one’s husband when one’s not in the mood, but feigning passion on a cold, wet street with some sleazy punter with bad breath and week-old boxers must really be quite horrific.’

  I was torn between thinking there must surely never be a time when one wouldn’t want to have sex with the very gorgeous Declan, Izzy’s husband, and wondering where Izzy got her information about the girls from the Emerald House flats.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about the johns who pick up the girls,’ I said.

  Izzy laughed. ‘The johns? God, that’s a handle I’ve not heard for years. Do they still call their clients that? I only know as much as anyone assumes they know about the sex trade. And Emerald House is on my patch. Gosh—’ here she laughed ‘—that makes me sound like a copper doesn’t it—on my patch? Anyway, a couple of the girls come to see me when they need their methadone prescription or if they think they’ve picked up something a bit more worrying than Mr Smith from suburbia who’s told his wife he’s popping out for a quick one.’

  ‘A quick one being a hand job as opposed to half a pint of Taylor’s best?’

  It was Izzy’s turn to raise her eyebrows. ‘You seem to know a bit about it yourself.’

  ‘Only what I see from my backyard.’ I smiled.

  ‘Well, if it was up to me,’ Izzy said, ‘I would totally legalise prostitution. There’d be properly run brothels where the girls are warm, where they are helped with anything like drug addiction and where there are bouncers on the door and regular check-ups by in-house doctors.’

  ‘But the problem with that is that people don’t want brothels in their neighbourhood—the price of houses would plummet if an area was known for its great knocking-shop rather than the fabulous grammar school that everyone wants to get their kids into. I mean, look at you two, you moved here because of the schools. You wouldn’t have looked at this house twice if there was a busy brothel next door.’

  ‘Absolutely not, I agree. But brothels wouldn’t be in the suburbs; they’d be in town with the nightclubs and open-all-hours bars. Just get me into government and it’s one of the first things I’d do. In fact, it would form the basis of my maiden speech.’ Izzy’s eyes lit up with a crusader’s fervour as she threw back the contents of her glass of wine and poured herself another.

  ‘I actually think you’re missing the point about prostitution. The expensive call girls have never been on the streets and I’m sure they have regular medical check-ups. No, most of the girls haven’t the energy or inclination to organise themselves into a properly run whorehouse. What they want is a quick couple of quid to feed not only their drug habit but for a lot of them, their kids as well. And anyway, you organise legal brothels and I guarantee a lot of the punters will continue to cruise the streets looking to pick up girls. Organised sex in a warm room is too clinical for some men. They want the illegal thrill of picking up a dirty little whore, not the sanitised version in some warm room where a receptionist will charge them a fortune on their credit card.’ I paused for breath when I realised Izzy was looking at me curiously.

  ‘You do know a lot about it, don’t you? It really is time you got out of that hellhole you call home
and found somewhere decent. You need to think about Allegra.’

  I sighed. ‘Don’t start, Izzy. Don’t you think if I could afford more I’d be out of there?’

  ‘But why down in that part of town, so near the centre? Surely there are little cottages you could find at the same rent in a more salubrious area. Maybe out into the countryside a bit?’

  ‘It’s very near to college and now Allegra’s school. We can walk to both—saves bus fares.’

  Izzy looked at me curiously. ‘Are you that hard up? Really? Surely your mum and dad will help you out?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking,’ I said shortly. ‘You know what they’re like.’ Izzy had met my parents on only a couple of occasions and hadn’t warmed to them at all.

  Izzy frowned. ‘But why are they like this? I don’t mean their politics, although I don’t understand anyone voting how you’ve said they vote. I mean about helping you and Allegra when you so obviously need it. Surely they can’t be happy their only granddaughter is living down on Emerald Street?’

  I hesitated. ‘One day, Izzy, I’ll sit you down with a bottle of wine and tell you it all.’

  ‘Tell me now, Clem.’ Izzy poured us both more wine and leaned forward eagerly. ‘Come on, trust me, I’m a doctor. Ever since I met you, you’ve kept this part of yourself to yourself. I know everything about your life since meeting you at that playgroup, but very little before it.’

  When I didn’t say anything, she patted my hand encouragingly. ‘Don’t you trust me, Clem?’

  I laughed. ‘Oh, stop doing your doctor act on me. There’s nothing to tell. I’m just a disappointment to my mum and dad. Haven’t really turned out as they wanted me to. But then how many kids do?’

  ‘Well, I did,’ Izzy said, surprised. ‘Went to gym club and pony club, was prefect at school, got all A’s at GCSE and A level. Went up to Cambridge. Became a GP like my dad. Married Declan…’

  ‘Are you boasting?’

  ‘No, no not at all,’ Izzy said seriously. ‘Just trying to get over that I’ve been very lucky. But maybe that’s why I want to get into politics. Maybe I’m filled with zeal to make life better for others.’

  ‘You’re too good to be true, you are. I’m not sure how you can side with the unemployed, the families with no money, the down-and-outs when you have no experience whatsoever outside your white, middle-class, educated, Telegraph-reading cocoon.’

  ‘That’s a bit unfair,’ Izzy protested. ‘And I read The Guardian.’ She hesitated as if racking her brain to come up with something that might dispel the myth that she had it all and then went on, ‘And I’ve been in trouble this week because of what Sid took to Show and Tell… my life isn’t all a bowl of cherries, you know.’

  I laughed at Izzy’s expression. ‘Go on, what did he take that was so awful?’

  Declan, coming in from where he’d been doing something gardener-ish with a hosepipe and overhearing the dreaded words ‘Show and Tell’, sniggered and grinned lasciviously at both of us before reaching for a bottled beer from the fridge.

  ‘Well,’ said Izzy, ‘as you know, all schools have this dreadful weekly Show and Tell session, a mind-numbingly boring thirty-minute parade of—well, God, anything. I’ve got to the stage, having had three kids demanding something different to take every Friday morning, of dreading the very words “Show and Tell”. Over the years they must have taken everything conceivable from the usual array of birthday presents to free plastic rubbish from McDonald’s Happy Meals to plasticine models, lovingly constructed, but often resembling an oversized phallus rather than the intended space rocket.’ Izzy paused for breath, caught Declan’s eye and giggled. ‘Anyway, we’d all overslept, I knew I had the usual huge Friday list of patients waiting for me—everyone trying to get their bunions and bad backs sorted for the weekend; it’s always the same—and Sid was wittering on about Show and sodding Tell. I told him to take the McDonald’s plastic yo-yo he’d got the week before—and that was what I assumed he’d taken.’

  ‘And wasn’t it?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Izzy grimaced, remembering. ‘When I went to pick him up from school, Miss Walters, who must be as old as God—you know one of those infant school teachers who’ve done nothing but terrorise five-year-olds for the last forty years—handed me Sid’s Show and Tell offering neatly wrapped in heavy duty brown paper and string. “I think this must be yours, Mrs Stanford,” she said, without a hint of humour in her little shark eyes.’ Izzy was in her stride now, enjoying my attention. ‘I had no idea what it was until she handed it over and it began, all by itself, in its brown paper covering to vibrate… “Why didn’t she like it, Mummy?”’ Izzy mimicked a tearful Sid. ‘“It was all pink and rubbery and tickled my hand and looked like a rabbit”.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I laughed. ‘How embarrassing.’

  ‘I know, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I get men to slap their willies on my examining table, peer at people’s piles and women’s bits and pieces on a daily basis without hesitation, but, faced with Miss Walters looking at me as if I was some sort of sexual deviant, I was a red-faced gibbering wreck. Anyway, enough about me, Clem. I reckon it’s time you went out on a date. You know, get back on your horse as it were.’

  ‘Get back on my horse? You know I’m allergic to horses as well as being terrified of the damned great brutes.’

  Izzy got up from the kitchen table and started assembling ingredients for Yorkshire pudding batter. ‘Exactly,’ she said, warming to her theme as she searched for a cookery book on her shelf. ‘You’re becoming allergic to men and frightened of them to boot. Oh shit, Clem, how do you make sodding Yorkshire puds?’

  Izzy, a notoriously bad cook, was the first to admit to the handle. ‘Come here, let me do it,’ I said, pushing her out of the way.

  ‘I can’t invite you to lunch and then expect you to make it,’ Izzy said, handing me the milk with obvious relief.

  ‘You normally do,’ I said, smiling and cracking eggs.

  ‘Do I? Well maybe I do. The kids always cheer when I tell them you’re coming over. I mean, you are such a brilliant cook.’ Izzy took a good slurp from her glass of wine and relaxed. ‘Why don’t you open your own restaurant? We’d all come and eat there every night.’

  ‘Hang on. I thought you wanted me to find a new man? Now you want me to open some restaurant into the bargain?’

  ‘Oh yes, we were talking men, weren’t we? Forget the restaurant, even though you are the most brilliant cook I know and people would flock to its doors. Let’s find you a husband.’

  ‘I thought you were an emancipated woman who reckons you don’t need a husband to get along in life?’ I said as Izzy started peeling carrots, taking off huge layers of skin with what appeared to be a blunt knife. ‘And use a peeler,’ I said, handing her one from the jar of utensils on the black granite, ‘you’re wasting half of them.’

  ‘I am a strong, independent woman,’ she said, ‘but I also like being married to Declan.’

  ‘Anyone would like being married to Declan,’ I said, reaching for the hand whisk hanging from the batterie de cuisine above my head.

  ‘Would they?’ Izzy asked vaguely. ‘Well yes, I suppose they would. Do you want the electric thingy for that?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, this is better, really.

  ‘So, where were we? Right, a man for you. I’m going to trawl through a list of all the single men that Declan and I know…’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, suddenly a bit cross that Izzy seemed to think I couldn’t sort out a man for myself, ‘I’ve got a date for next week.’

  ‘Have you? Who?’ Izzy stopped her massacring of a cauliflower and looked across the granite island at me.

  Had I? Until this moment I hadn’t given Peter Broadbent and his suggestion of a date for next Sunday another thought. ‘A very nice man called Peter Broadbent. He comes into the restaurant every week; asked me to go and assassinate King Charles with him.’

  ‘What?’ Izzy looked up from her cauliflow
er, knife in hand.

  ‘He’s into one of these reconstruction things. Civil War, I suppose it must be. There’s no way I’m going. I only said I had a date to shut you up.’

  ‘Oh, but you must, Clem. You must go.’ Izzy waved her knife in my direction, her greying dark hair bouncing as she enthused. ‘You must help Cromwell against those rich, vain Cavaliers. They were the forerunners of the Tories, you know.’

  ‘Right. Sorry, history’s not my thing. Anyway Sunday is my day for Allegra.’ I adjusted the temperature of Izzy’s oven as blue smoke began to build up alarmingly inside. ‘God, Izzy, are you trying to sacrifice this beef?’

  ‘Never mind the sodding beef. Listen, we’ll look after Allegra. We’d planned to go down to Alton Towers for Robbie’s eleventh birthday—Allegra can come with us and you can go off with this very nice man and have your first date in years and trounce a few Cavaliers into the bargain.’

  ‘I’d rather come to Alton Towers with you,’ I protested. ‘Anyway, there won’t be room in the car for Allegra.’

  ‘Oh yes there will. It’s Declan’s parents’ birthday treat. We’re taking two cars anyway, so just one more little one will fit in nicely. Sorry, no room for you, Clem. You’ll have to go off on your date.’

  Before I could protest further Emily, Izzy’s fifteen-year-old bounced in. ‘Thank goodness you’re here, Clementine. We might get some decent food for once.’ She poked suspiciously at the brownish contents of a Pyrex dish by the sink. ‘What in God’s name is this, Mum?’

  ‘Trifle,’ Izzy said dismissively. ‘Once it’s got some cream and cherries on it’ll be fine.’

  ‘You said that about that meringue thing you made last week. It wasn’t.’

  ‘Emily, I have far too much going on in my life to worry about puddings. We have more important things to think about at the moment. Clementine has a hot date next Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant.’ Emily grinned, helping herself to a handful of nuts as I insisted that I wasn’t going on any date, hot or otherwise. ‘What are you going to wear?’ She looked me up and down critically. ‘You can’t go out with some man in those cords. I’ve got a great pair of jeans I don’t wear anymore. You can borrow them if you like.’