of that scholarship to give a student a really good PhD experience because that’s what Esther would have wanted. I mean, didn’t her husband say . . .’
Ollie rolls his eyes. ‘It’s great being dead, isn’t it? I mean, dictating what everyone . . .’
Clem twists her hair around a finger. ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot.’
Again, the way she says it. With a little lazy smile so he can’t get pissed off. Like when a beautiful cat scratches you and you can’t really be cross. Although Clem is not cat-like. She’s a mermaid. A smiling, singing, beautiful and deadly thing from the sea, twisting her hair around her finger like . . . Like, who does that during what could become a really exciting argument, with crying and everything?
‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’ And because of her, he can’t even say this the way he wants to say it and has to make it sound like something from a meditation tape. Ollie takes off his shoes, which should have been taken off downstairs. He drops his socks on the wooden floor, and his boxers on the yellow chair. He sucks in his stomach as he unbuttons the yellow shirt that Clem bought him. This goes in the washing basket, although the wrong one (there is one washing basket for delicates, to be washed only by Clem, which this shirt, costing £189.99, definitely is; and another washing basket for things which are not delicate and can therefore be washed by Alison, who puts everything on the Easycare cycle regardless of what any of the labels say). Ollie folds his jeans over the back of the chair, but they look wrong there, so he hangs them up. Then he puts his socks and boxers in the non-delicate washing basket and moves his yellow shirt to the right basket. Why is life so fucking complicated?
‘Anyway, didn’t her husband say that the bequest was to make sure a student could do a PhD without having to work as a waitress on roller skates, or whatever bizarre thing Esther had to do?’
‘Topless on wheels, selling her body for . . .’
‘Oh, come on.’ She sighs. ‘Don’t be such a dick.’
‘Well, she . . .’
‘She’s been dead for less than a year. She was our friend. Why does everything have to end up being about . . .’
‘Oh, right. And now you’re going to pretend you were really close to Oleander too.’
‘Ollie . . .’
‘What?’
‘Why are you being such a dick today?’
Of course she calls him a dick, rather than a cunt, because her cunt works and his dick does not work. At least, his dick works, on the rare occasions when it is given the chance, but his balls are a tangled mess and because of that . . .
‘Why is it always me?’
‘I don’t know why it’s always you.’
‘Oh, so you won’t even admit . . .’
‘I think I’m going back to sleep now.’
‘I see, so you won’t even . . .’
‘Goodnight.’
And how does she do that? She just rolls over and goes to sleep. Just like that. Like a seal or something, rolling over in the water, or into the water from a grassy bank or wherever seals go when they’re not in the water. She doesn’t even moan about having to get up so early in the morning because she WORKS IN LONDON when they LIVE IN CANTERBURY. And it is quite late, after all. It’s 23.15 and she likes to be asleep by half past ten. Can you lose an argument on the basis of simply not scoring enough points? Or is going to sleep in the middle of it basically a KO against the person who is still awake?
Somewhere in the grounds of Namaste House, a pop star is loose. Not Paul McCartney, who evidently couldn’t make it. It’s only Skye Turner, nowhere near as famous as Paul McCartney of course but currently a respectable number 7 on the Top 40 compiled from iTunes and Spotify figures (but not YouTube, where she has yet to make her mark). She is not just loose but lost and alone in the white garden, which is not yet white. She has been to the house thousands of times but has never made it beyond the orangery and into the grounds. And now Oleander is gone. About half an hour ago Skye Turner saw a copper sculpture of a horse that she would like to buy. It was standing in the middle of something called the ‘wildflower meadow’, although there are no wildflowers yet. Would such a thing be for sale? You don’t know unless you ask. But now she can’t find it again. At first the sculpture horrified her: it was half horse, half skeleton. But now she would like to buy it. She would like to buy it, but she can’t find it. And now Oleander is gone.
Who was Skye Turner crying for, at the funeral this morning? Was she crying for Oleander, who was old and had not been in much pain and in any case not only believed in reincarnation but did not want to be reincarnated, which is a win-win, really? Or was she crying for herself, for what she had lost? There’s Fleur, of course, Fleur remains, but . . . Skye Turner sighs. Oleander was a mystical recording studio, and all the tapes that Skye Turner made there are now lost. Burned. Erased.
She walks through an old wooden door and finds herself in a small walled garden. In the centre of the garden is a stone plinth with another copper sculpture on it: a toad. Facing the sculpture is a moss-covered bench with a robin on it. The robin stops digging around in the moss and starts watching her. The dried remains of last year’s poppies – even Skye Turner can recognise a poppy – are scattered around like faded decorations from a long-ago party. And there are green shoots everywhere. Things are growing, despite the cold. There is a faint smell of chamomile. She turns again and is no longer lost: there is Fleur’s cottage, looking like something from a book, with its big, sleepy-eye windows and huge, sad door. Ivy beards it all over like a green man’s face. And there’s Charlie Gardener, the great-nephew, hovering. He is thin, angular, slightly wizard-like. A young, dark magician who might see her and chase her through the tangled forest where she would fall and . . . Skye Turner moves away, back towards the white garden, followed by the robin, who is singing something that sounds like, but can’t be . . .
How exactly does a pop star come to be in the garden of a house on the very edge of England, in a slow, small medieval town that, long ago, was a busy port before the sea curled up like an old woman with no lover and became a tiny, shallow river with little boats and moorhens and samphire growing on its banks? You can take a helicopter, which is what the Beatles did all those years ago. You can land at the small airport a couple of miles away. But the more normal route is two trains and a taxi. It takes forever. On a map Sandwich looks close to London. It is in Kent, for goodness sake, a county that bleeds into London, is right next to it. But it takes Skye almost as long to get here as it takes to get to her parents’ place in Devon, which is almost five counties from London, the way the train goes. From here to her parents’ place in Devon it’s roughly seven hours. And then there’s Greg somewhere in the middle.
And now Oleander is gone.
Skye Turner walks on, through the small forest and around to a larger path lined with trees. From here she can see Namaste House: big, red, old; perhaps slightly wiser than the sad cottage next door? The large white door with the crescent-moon steps leading up to it. The orangery to the right. All the flowerbeds and kitchen gardens and greenhouses and the old brass sundial. There are flowers everywhere in this part of the garden. Skye Turner can’t name most of them, but in the summer they are delicate purple things and fragile red things and trembling blue things and things that climb up without checking what the way down might be. Clinging to the
