Coming Up Next. Penny Smith
flat below Katie’s, accidentally pressing her buzzer at the same time. Katie let him in.
A few moments later, Dee appeared at her door with a beaming smile, a motorbike helmet in one hand and a delivery bag in the other. ‘Howzat?’ she asked.
‘Brilliant,’ said Katie, stuffing a few items into the delivery bag. Pyjama pizza and large tube of toothpaste to go …
Outside, the reporters and photographers were still keeping an eagle eye out for Katie Fisher. They had had information that she had definitely returned on a Virgin flight from Barbados. She might have gone elsewhere, knowing that there would be interest in the story of her demise as sofa queen. Phone calls to her parents and brother had turned up nothing, and they were now in limbo. Most were hoping to be allocated a different story. Even if she came home, she probably wouldn’t say anything, and they’d just get shots of her letting herself into the flat.
They had perked up as the delivery-boy had rung the buzzer – but the snappers with their long lenses had told them it was the flat below. They didn’t spot that the delivery-boy who had just left appeared to have grown about six inches.
Katie popped on to the scooter and let it roll down the hill without turning it on. That she had no idea how to ride it had almost scuppered her and Dee, until they had come up with the idea of getting it to the end of the road where a strategic corner meant she could hop off and wheel it to the pizza joint.
Within an hour of leaving her flat, she was on her way home to Yorkshire with her brother, and Dee had phoned gleefully to tell her that she had left the building to a cacophony of camera shutters and shouted questions, all of which she had ignored.
‘How long are you going to stay with your mum and dad?’ she asked.
‘Until I can keep a smile on my face without it falling into Dad’s soup. It’s chestnut and prune today, apparently. He’s being creative. I think I just need to shout a bit, and use my body as a repository for pies. Thanks for all your help.’
Ben had managed to swap his shift with a fellow doctor at the hospital, in response to her emergency call for help in getting home. She couldn’t face the train. And anyway, someone might alert the media.
He was looking rather handsome, she thought, like someone out of Young Doctors, wearing jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with a pink logo. ‘Is that some smutty reference?’ she had queried, looking at the logo, ‘“Potting the Pinks”.’
‘No idea. Is it? I thought it was about geraniums. I bought it at a gardening shop. Or was it a gay shop? Anyway, what could it possibly mean?’
She smirked at him.
‘I’m sure it’s pure filth. We’ll ask Mum. She’s bound to know.’
She had rarely been so happy to see him as she had when he pulled up beside her outside the pizza joint and drove her away from its cheesy wafts.
As they headed north on the A1, and London slipped away behind them, she noticed that the daffodils were out. Lambs were gambolling. Did they go to Gambollers Anonymous? Easy to get fleeced. Shorn of money.
Was that the sort of thing that got me sacked? She dozed off.
Ben looked over at his sister as she lolled beside him with her auburn hair tied scruffily back at the nape of her neck.
She looked drawn and a bit blotchy. And smelled very slightly of pizza.
Ben had phoned ahead to alert the parents to their imminent arrival. His father said he would immediately get on to it, which Ben took to mean that there would be more than just the aforementioned soup. His mother had merely said, rather vacantly, ‘Who?’
He skidded up the drive in a shower of gravel, undid both their seatbelts and went round to open the door for his sister, not from chivalry but for the joy of watching her fall out since she was still asleep.
‘Thanks very much,’ she mumbled, as she untangled herself from the seatbelt and put on her shoes.
‘No, no. Thank you,’ said Ben. ‘You were such an entertaining passenger to have on a long trip. The mistress of quick-fire wit and repartee.’
‘Well, sorry. I was a bit knackered.’
‘And it’ll take weeks to get rid of the smell of pizza.’
‘You were lucky it wasn’t extra anchovies.’
‘Oh. It smelled like it was.’
‘Beast.’ She laughed. ‘Wonder what’s for dinner, talking about delicious-smelling things.’
The house was grey stone with pillars at the front porch – a legacy from the mill owner who had felt they befitted his status. Their mother had wanted some sort of creeper growing up them, but their father had vetoed it, saying he would have to deal with the extra spiders and the work involved in pruning and general tidying.
It was their father, wearing the full chef’s outfit of checked trousers and a white jacket, who let them in. ‘Present from myself for my birthday,’ he said. ‘She’, he nodded in the general direction of the sitting room, ‘forgot. As usual. Now that she’s on her way to becoming the new Matisse, she’s far too busy to notice that that I’ve turned pensioner. I’ve started calling the paints cads. As in cadmium. The colour?’ he said to Katie, giving her a hug.
‘It’s OK, Dad. I got it. Utter cads. You know you never have to explain them to me. Maybe to your thicko son, though.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, brightening, ‘we’ve got the soup, followed by sea bream baked in coconut milk, yellow chillies, lemon grass and fresh lime leaves, then Moroccan rice pudding with pistachios and rose petals. Only I couldn’t find any pistachios, so I’ve had to use almonds instead. It was either that or peanuts. It almost wasn’t anything, mind you. Hercules had his nose inches from the bowl when I popped back into the kitchen to make sure everything was ready. Bloody dog.’ He looked at her questioningly. ‘You all right?’
‘I’ll tell you later, Dad. I’ll go and put the bag upstairs.’
Katie went up to her old bedroom – now a testament to her mother’s ex-loves. Full of abandoned items from spent passions. It was a beautiful big room with a large window that looked out on to the slightly distracted garden. It had felt spacious when she had lived in it. She had never been much of a collector and preferred being able to lie on the carpet with lots of space round her to make cardboard boxes into everything from spacecraft to ships. She had also liked to write fairy stories – endless fairy stories that had handsome princes, beautiful princesses, lots of danger and invariably death as she’d sought ways to bring them to a conclusion. So much easier to say, ‘And then the spectres ate them up and put their skeletons on display,’ than be bothered with more plot when it was time for dinner.
Now, though, the room was stuffed with bits of tapestry, a defunct potter’s wheel, a Workmate, half-made cushions and a badly stuffed badger.
In the kitchen, she challenged her mother about the badger. ‘You must have forgotten to tell me you were getting into animals,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’d have nipped to the Tower of London and brought you a flock of ravens.’
‘It’s an “unkindness” of ravens, I think you’ll find,’ replied her mother, wiping paint-stained hands on a cream smock. ‘And the badger was thumped into by your father two months ago. Made a very large dent in the car’s radiator. I thought it was a waste of an animal so I took it to the taxidermist. I told him not to bother too much – I just wanted to see how I felt with stuffed animals. And I’ve had second thoughts. I think your father would prefer to keep putting them in pies.’ She nodded sourly at her husband as he checked his soup.
‘And, Mum,’ said Katie, with a smirk, ‘that’s a nice top.’