A Bicycle Built for Sue Read online

  No. Check that. She hadn’t done it yesterday. Not with Sue’s husband’s funeral to go to. That would’ve been tasteless and lacking in gratitude. So. Only three times this week. It was becoming quite the habit. Fake strangling her husband. Not that she wanted him dead dead. Quite the opposite in fact. What she wanted was to shake some get up and go into the man. Here he was, healthy, fit and not even a splash of Alzheimer’s on the horizon and Stuart’s favourite thing to do was sit. Sit and read the papers. Sit and do the puzzles. Sit and ignore the morning telly. At least it freed Flo to pick the channel. She always plumped for Brand New Day in the mornings. A garish, chirpy Mr and Mrs led-affair that felt interactive. Unlike her husband, who was busy sitting.

  Their Irish Wolfhound, Captain George, who was usually at Stu’s feet or hers (if she was sitting, which was rare), was wolfing down the remains of the white bread tuna sandwiches.

  She let her hands drop to Stu’s shoulders, tweaking his shirt collar out of his jumper and trying not to notice just how thin his hair was becoming as a new segment began on the telly across the kitchen.

  ‘Would you look at that!’ Flo said when the piece had ended. It had been about Africa and taking advantage of inexpensive flights. She gave her hands a squirt of moisturizer. All of that bright blue sky, combined with the high heating Stu insisted upon this time of year, made her hands feel dry. Stuart looked up from his paper, bemused. Flo tipped her head towards the telly. ‘Kev’s trying to convince Kath to go on a safari in South Africa. Last chance to see the white hippos.’ Or was it black? They hadn’t actually mentioned the hippos, but wildlife was always a good way to get her husband’s attention. David Attenborough boxsets were a Christmas staple in their home.

  Stuart’s forehead crinkled as his gaze returned to the paper. ‘Who’s doing what?’

  ‘Kev!’ Flo said as if she’d just been discussing one of their children and not a morning chat show host. ‘Off the telly. He wants his wife to go on safari with him. South Africa.’ She enunciated the name of the country sumptuously as if she were Marilyn Monroe saying di-a-monds.

  Stu nodded without looking up, but … ohhh … there it was. He cocked his head to the side and she could almost hear his pilot brain whir into action. Maybe this time …?

  ‘They’d be best avoiding Jo’burg. Cape Town is safer.’

  Flo bit back an irritated humph. Safe schmaif. Didn’t he yearn for an adrenaline rush? The thrill of wondering … will this be the time I tempt the fates?

  She gave him a meaningful stare.

  Nothing.

  Stu had really lost the knack for picking up her dropped hints these days. A safari would make such a nice change to their quarterly trips to the villa. It was spoiled to complain, but if they went back to Portugal one more time …

  So what if Jo’burg was a bit dangerous these days? They used to fly in all of the time, no problem. Go out on the town. Find some great little shebeen to enjoy music and shots of stomach-scalding hooch. She loved those little … what did they call them? Those spicy barbecued shrimp. They’d near enough set Stu’s mouth on fire the last time they’d been. She’d wept with laughter as he’d guzzled glass after glass of milk. Oh, those had been the days. Back when she’d wielded the power of persuasion.

  Stuart’s pencil hovered above his puzzle. Lowered. Lifted again. Taptaptap against the table before the process began again.

  It drove her mad. The pencil tapping. And why didn’t he man up and use a pen? Would it really be the end of the world if he couldn’t fix a mistake? Take a bit of a risk, man! Use ink! Fly into Jo’burg! There was no appreciating the ups without a few troughs on the old heart monitor, was there? Unlike most of the other flight attendants, she used to enjoy a bit of mid-flight turbulence. Great stories to recount at the bar later on with the rest of the crew. Toupees taking flight. Cocktails spilt in awkward locations. Hands grabbing things they shouldn’t. She was running rather short on them now. Hair-raising stories for Saturday afternoons when ‘The Golf Gang’ all sat down to order their grilled chicken or steamed fish at the club.

  She tuned back in as Kev finished a tedious bit on winter tyre safety. He turned to Kath and told her how lucky she was to be married to him, a man who could change a tyre without having to call the AA.

  Good grief. He was ever so fond of his own voice. Rattling on, never giving the poor woman a chance to reply, unless, of course, he was using her as the butt end of one of his ridiculous jokes.

  Flo was half tempted to tweet in with a Kath and Kev challenge. Get the pair of them to change a tyre right there in the studio. Or better yet, out in the rain. Flo would happily bet cold hard cash Kev was more vain than capable and that Kath would win hands down.

  She jabbed the remote at the telly and turned it off. ‘That poor woman,’ she clucked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one we’ve just been watching, Stu. Kath off the telly. Married to Kev?’ Nothing. She pointed to the wall mounted screen. ‘On Brand New Day.’

  A blank look met her expectant one.

  Astonishing. It was the exact same show she had on every weekday morning ever since she’d gone off that smug, baby-faced lad on the ITV. She liked that they recorded it up the road in Birmingham and the fact that it was on Channel 4 made her feel as if she was still tapping into the edgier realms of morning TV. The edgier realms of herself. ‘Anyway,’ she said, unable to resist pressing her point. ‘It’s a shame. The way he always has to get one over on her.’

  ‘Why watch it if it upsets you?’

  Oh, Stu.

  It didn’t upset her. It got her fired up. In a good way. The same way wearing short skirts and being called a slag had in the 70s. It made her want to do something. Change something.

  Besides, Brand New Day was bright. Fun. Downright silly at times which made sense for a couple who’d met doing freestyle disco dancing in Blackpool. Or was it ballroom? Either way, they didn’t put on airs and graces and watching it made her feel young. Apart from the little bits they did on old folk’s homes. She muted those bits or did the breakfast dishes. She’d send herself off to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel before her children booked her and Stu into some miserable ‘retirement community’.

  She sniffily continued her defence of the better ‘alf of Kath and Kev. ‘That husband of hers doesn’t know how lucky he is.’

  She stared at the top of her husband’s bent and balding head, pencil hard at work next to the newspaper. Taptaptap.

  She wondered if he considered himself lucky. Being married to a woman who not only knew how to change a spare tyre, but who also knew how to recharge dead batteries, unplug a blocked toilet and clear out the u-bend under the kitchen sink. Perhaps not, seeing as Stu had been the one to teach her ‘just in case’. If ever anyone deserved a motto it was her Stu. She could almost picture the head stone: Here lies Stu … just in case.

  And just like that she pictured that poor girl, Sue, looking utterly shell-shocked as her husband’s casket disappeared behind that scrappy old velvet curtain Flo had been seeing a bit too much of lately. Susan’s Derek had passed just before Christmas. Heart attack. Tom’s Deborah, just after. Cancer. Now this poor lad taking his own life. One worth saving if the brief eulogy was anything to go by. The pains she went through to find a reliable plumber.

  She moved on to another thought with another click of her tongue, pulled on the bright red puffer jacket her daughter had mocked for being ‘too young’ and shouldered her handbag. She and Stu weren’t anywhere near death. Not yet anyway.

  Chapter Three

  ‘It’s Sunita, isn’t it?’

  Raven looked across at the boy around her age who’d rushed in from the latest onslaught of sleet and perched next to her at the bus station.

  Weirdo.

  People didn’t just talk to people at the bus station. Particularly when one of them was exuding back off vibes.

  It was one of her finely honed crafts. Few, that they may be, but she could pull off ‘radiating wi
th leave me alone’ at the drop of a hat. She hoped it looked cool rather than what it actually was: standard practice for a five foot nine, overweight, Indian goth who was rapidly losing control of her whole entire life and was too shy/friendless/insecure to talk to anyone about it.

  She shot him a swift side eye.

  He had on a striped slouchy beanie. It was artfully tugged down to meet his patchwork stubble and the collar of his thick puffer jacket. Tufts of blonde hair stuck out the front of his hat. Trendy kicks and dark, mud-splattered trousers completed his outfit. He looked familiar, but this was one of those out of context meets she was never very good at, seeing as avoiding eye contact factored high on her day to day survival skills. Judging by his age and the fact he knew her given name, it had to be college. No one called her Sunita apart from her family and her teachers. Strangely, they hadn’t taken to her new goth name. (It wasn’t strange at all. Her name actually was Sunita. Raven was a fairly new development, but she lacked the sulky panache with which Telisa Wadhurst had swiftly managed to get the entire universe to call her Twist. Perhaps one day she’d be able to deliver dark, dryly ironic bon mots without sounding angry and, as a result, get people to do whatever she wanted. A girl could dream).

  Raven didn’t have the slightest clue what the boy’s name was.

  If she was being brutally honest – something she generally avoided in life but not at the call centre because, hello, no one could actually see her – she tactically forgot people’s names in the hopes that it made her appear aloof rather than at risk of being ignored if she were to bounce up to someone she might actually want to talk to. Hey Twist. How’s tricks? Bleurgh. As if. Not popular by choice was always a better option than the achingly painful gratitude some of the other girls glowed with when popular looking boys like him deigned to speak to them. Which was why this was totes awkward. Sporty, popular looking boys like him did not talk to fat Indian goth girls like her.

  Particularly if they were glowering.

  She was proactively glowering.

  It was what happened when one’s life was backed into a very small corner.

  She shook her head. Her parents …

  Her parents were crafty.

  Of all the attributes she would’ve credited them with – punctiliousness, predictability, pernicketiness – crafty definitely wasn’t one of them.

  ‘Sunita, right?’ He tried again.

  Not really good at reading invisible auras, this one.

  ‘Umm … It’s Raven, actually.’

  He did the chin lift thing guys always did instead of answering back then pulled out his phone. Good. That was that done, then.

  She’d started calling herself Raven at college some eight or nine months back to just about no effect. Not really having any friends had a way of making a name change less effective. The new name had more sticking power once she began her first gap year job at a now-defunct taco bar. It wasn’t her fault really. The name change. She’d been forced to reinvent herself. Take herself out of what had become an utterly toxic morass of teenaged hell and start afresh. With darkness.

  Goth darkness, so there was some light (they could be funny, and not just Noel Fielding funny. So Goth I was born black? Brilliant. Discovering the goths of colour was like finding a promised land of dark humour and above par personal aesthetics). To be fair, it had been the dark clothes and back right the fuck off auras that had first drawn her to the gothic side. She’d needed it after that horrible, soul-destroying, nerve-wracking last year of college. Half of her peers had become the most vile versions of themselves (bullies, really) and the other half had realised their worst fears (anorexia, anxiety, depression, and in one particularly awful case that Raven was still struggling to absorb, a complete and utter reliance on self-harming). In the end it had been easier to keep herself to herself. Less shy, more … proactively wary of anyone with a pulse.

  What better moniker, then, than the poor, misunderstood Raven. Most people saw the bird as a portent of doom, but if anyone ever bothered to read anything properly, which they didn’t, they would actually know that the raven represented prophecy and insight. Security. Wisdom. And, if anyone cared, which she was sure they didn’t, the raven was the Royal Bird of Bhutan.

  One of the few plus sides of working at the call centre meant that she could be or say or appear whatever way she wanted because the turnover was so rapid, no one ever noticed to comment. 111 was a weigh station for most people. A halfway house between working for 999 (which people thought sounded cooler but was actually freakier) or getting ‘a proper job.’ Staying longer than six months was unheard of. For most people anyway. Raven needed to stick it out for nine thanks to Parent-gate this morning.

  She dabbed at her eyes, praying her eyeliner wasn’t running. It had taken about a hundred years on Brown Goth pinterest sites to get that right and sad clown goth was definitely not the look she’d been going for when she’d done her make-up at the Costa just down from the bus stop. Her mother’s lecture had been so long-winded she’d had to leave bare faced. Crazy-eyed more like.

  She still hadn’t entirely registered her parent’s ultimatum. Intern at her uncle’s law firm in Birmingham or pay for her own university fees? They had a desk all ready and waiting for her. And a room she could share with her cousin Aneesha.

  Intern for ambulance chaser Uncle Ravi? Nine months of sleepovers with Awfully Affected Aneesha?

  Not ruddy likely! Why couldn’t they get it through their heads that she didn’t want to be a lawyer? That gazillions of teenagers had no idea what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives after they’d finished college. She was taking a GAP YEAR, not ‘destroying her future’ as her parents continually insisted upon calling the handful of months she’d asked for to sort herself out. Those last few months at college had been fraught with so much turmoil. Not so much in her life, but it was like the whole of sixth form had become a Netflix series intent on showing just how dark the teenaged heart could become. Hard to study and figure out the bright side of life with so much drama squeezing the joy out of everything. Not that she’d told her parents that. They’d been told she didn’t want to be a lawyer. Which she didn’t. Not the Uncle Ravi sort, anyway. Nor did she want to become a lawyer because it was mandated. As much as she loved her brother and sister, who became exactly what her parents had said they should (doctor, finance whizz), she did not want to grow up to be them. Or her parents. Or have another round of ‘We would’ve leapt at these opportunities if we’d had the chance. Didn’t Sunita know how difficult it was, working day and night, saving, moving a family halfway across the world, parenting, running a business, wanting more for your children?’

  It had been difficult not to remind her mother that both she and her father had been born in Leicester when that particular lecture reappeared, as it often did.

  ‘Raven. Hunh.’ The guy next to her popped his phone back into his pocket as if they’d carried on chatting and not been completely ignoring one another. ‘That’s cool.’ He looked confused for a second then did the chin lift thing again. ‘I’m Dylan. Dylan Riley. I was in your chem class with Mr Houlihan. I used to watch you draw those cool, um, you know those skulls with the—’ he pinned his fingers into bunches and put them in front of his eyes.

  ‘Roses,’ she filled in for him. She liked to do sort of a cross between Frida Kahlo and Goth art. Mostly because it was the only thing she could draw, but it was better than doodling swirls or squares like Sara Richardson who sat next to her had. Sara was at uni now. English or Media Studies. No doubt making someone else’s life miserable with that finely tuned look of contempt of hers. Raven dug her nails into her hands. She should’ve said something.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Dylan nodded as if she’d just told him she’d actually created the flower varietal herself. ‘Roses for eyes. That was some cool shit.’

  She looked down at her shoes, too embarrassed to accept the compliment and saw that they were, annoyingly, spattered with mud. Februar
y was a messy month. Mud puddles. Rain. Sleet. Slush. Parents wanting to micromanage the whole rest of your entire life making you choose between one suffocating roof over your head and another. And then, mercifully, right before she fell apart in front of Dylan The Almost Stranger and told him absolutely everything she was going through, the bus arrived.

  Chapter Four

  Kath moved her eyes towards the autocue. She’d fine-tuned it to a craft, having her make-up retouched, not moving a millimetre and absorbing whatever was on the Brand New Day prompter before the cameras were back on her.

  This was a new one, though. Touching her up as they played a ninety-second piece on a woman who knitted jumpers for her pets. Usually they waited until the commercial break. She couldn’t bear this new make-up girl. Bridget. Bridie. For some reason the younger they got, the more their adorably quirky/old-fashioned/whimsical nicknames annoyed her.

  ‘No lip pursing, chica,’ Bridie chided as she put another layer of powder on Kath’s upper lip. ‘Lines.’ Bridie’s eyes shifted to Kevin’s for just a moment and Kath knew in that instant that Kev had organised it. They must have some sort of signal. A ‘the wife’s looking a bit saggy’ finger flick.

  Kath’s eyes slid back to the autocue.

  K & K: AD LIB ON JUMPERS FOR PETS 30 SECONDS

  She smiled, shook Bridie away and began to laugh as studio camera two lit up. ‘That face! Precious. And what a lovely way to brighten up a grizzly February day, don’t you think, Kev? A chihuahua in a zebra jumper?’

  Kevin, who rarely looked at her off air anymore, looked her straight in the eye and laughed along, ‘How could I not?’

  Wanker.

  After twenty-five years of performing together she knew subtext when she heard it.

  Bloody ridiculous, he was saying. Only a simpleton would find that funny. If only their devoted fanbase knew the derision he had for them. The contempt. She’d read Wolf Hall, too. Didn’t mean she couldn’t find a gussied-up dolly dog adorable. In fact, of the pair of them, she was pretty sure she was the one with a handful more brain cells. Compassion anyway.