The Sleeping and the Dead

Joe was continuing. ‘Her mum and dad say they’ll pay. We’re only going for a week. They think she could do with a holiday. It would do her good. A friend of theirs has a villa in Portugal.’

‘Very nice.’ This time Rosie managed to keep her voice noncommittal. She was thinking, It’s not Mel who wants to go away. It’s their idea. They’ve just had enough of her illness. They’re fed up with seeing her like that. They want the problem to disappear for a while.

They’d sent Mel away before and Rosie couldn’t blame them.

‘I’m not sure I can handle it,’ Joe was saying. ‘It’s the responsibility. What if something happens while we’re away?’ He paused. ‘They want her to think about going into hospital but she’s dead against it. They want me to persuade her.’

‘She doesn’t seem too bad to me,’ Rosie said. ‘No worse than usual.’

A punter came up to the bar. A salesman, she thought. Suit and a briefcase. He was sweating. It was very hot out now. From where she stood she could see the glare on the water as far as the horizon. Families walked past in shorts and skimpy tops and they seemed to turn pink as she watched them. Making the most of the summer. She expected the man to order a meal and a bottle of lager, but instead he barked, ‘Scotch. A large one.’ His voice was desperate. She watched him take it to a table in the shade, knew he’d be back in five minutes for another.

Joe slid back along the bar so he was facing her again.

‘You don’t have to go,’ she said reasonably. ‘Explain how you feel.’

‘I can’t let her down.’

They teased him sometimes because he’d been a choirboy as a kid. He said he’d been dragged along to church by his parents but she thought some of it had rubbed off. He had too many principles.

‘When do you leave?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘Mel didn’t say anything to me.’ Rosie convinced herself that was why she was so angry. She felt herself close to tears. They were supposed to be best friends.

‘She wanted to keep it a secret. I don’t know why.’

Because she likes secrets, Rosie thought. She likes keeping things to herself. She’s a hoarder. Perhaps that’s what the stuff with food is about.

‘What was all that with your mum last night?’ he asked with a complete change of tone. He pulled a prim, schoolmistress face. This was the Joe the others knew, the gossip and the clown.

Rosie was cross. Hannah was an easy target. ‘She’s had a bad time. All the talk. You know what it must be like, finding out that your husband’s a rat after twenty years. And she has it rough at work. It’s not a bunch of laughs in the prison.’

‘No,’ he said quickly, seeing that he had offended her. ‘It won’t be. I didn’t mean…’

The businessman came back to the bar. He held out his glass to her. She saw that his hand was shaking.

‘Your mum’s all right,’ Joe said. ‘We were being stupid.’

Rosie served the customer and let it go.

His burger came. He ate it quickly, holding it in his hand and tearing away at it as if he were ravenous. He stood still when he’d finished and she thought he was going to say something else about Mel. Perhaps he wanted to enlist Rosie’s support in finding out what lay behind the paranoia. But he just nodded.

‘See you in a week then. If I don’t catch up with you before we go.’

And he was gone.

That evening at a different pub, Rosie’s local, it was still warm enough to sit outside. She’d eaten the veggie lasagne her mother had cooked for dinner, had a shower and changed into a sleeveless frock. The beer garden was at the back, away from the road, though there was still a far-off hum of traffic. A row of conifers separated the pub from playing fields. There were tubs on the terrace and shrubs under the trees, a faint exotic smell of flowers and pine.

‘Melanie and Joseph are going away,’ Rosie said, using the full names as if it were a formal announcement. As in ‘I, Melanie, take you, Joseph’. That wouldn’t surprise her either. Joe was besotted enough to do it and he’d always been into crazy gestures. Melanie’s parents would be delighted. Melanie would have a full-time minder and they could go back to the real business of making money.

‘Isn’t Melanie’s name Gillespie?’ her mother asked.

Rosie hardly heard. She was imagining Mel’s dress, the church, the flowers. Her as chief bridesmaid. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Melanie Gillespie.’

‘And her dad’s the businessman?’

‘That’s right.’

When she’d first asked Melanie what her father did she’d said he ran a chip shop. Computer chips, it turned out. He’d set up a huge plant on the site of a derelict factory, was a major local hero because of all the jobs it provided.

‘He was on the television again tonight,’ Hannah said.

Mel’s dad was always on the television.

‘They’re going to the Algarve,’ Rosie said. ‘Mel and Joe.’

‘Will you be at a bit of a loose end then?’

‘I have got other friends!’