Walking on Air Page 6

  ‘One hundred and ten per cent wrong,’ Billie lied, hating herself.

  She would have loved to explain, but she’d left it far too late; and anyway, she’d always felt so protective of her mother. The more lurid storylines in EastEnders made Faith practically apoplectic about declining morals and hussies who stole other women’s husbands. The reality about her only daughter and Kieran Squires would probably finish her off.

  ‘And I’ve been happy driving a taxi. And now I’ll be happy doing – well – something else. And if the something else doesn’t involve bouncing down the aisle in a fondant fancy wedding dress, then I’ll still be happy.’ She had been about to add that no one should marry before they were thirty anyway, and look what had happened to Miranda, but remembered just in time that her parents had been married at eighteen. ‘Er – shall I mummify these salads with clingfilm?’

  ‘Yes, please. Oh, and while you’re putting those dishes in the fridge, get the other bottle of Baileys out, there’s a love.’

  Really, Billie thought hazily about two hours later, this was even more inebriated than one of her sessions with Miranda. She’d remained just sober enough to steer her mother away from any dangerous topics, and instead had concentrated on the local gossip. It was odd how all the girls in her sixth-form class were now married or partnered and had produced at least one child apiece. It occurred to her that she must be quite a let-down for her mother on the jumble-sale and coffee-morning chitchat circuit – no man, no baby, no career to brag about, and no prospects of any of the three in the foreseeable future.

  If she’d stayed on the Devon Argus, it would have been different. If she’d stayed on the Devon Argus and stuck with covering council meetings and court cases, and not pestered the editor to be sent to interview Kieran Squires about his plans to open a farmhouse restaurant near Bideford, then she’d have probably had her own column by now. It would have been called Billie’s Blabber or something similar, and she’d have been able to write it from home because, of course, she’d have married a neighbouring farmer’s son and produced the regulation baby every year.

  She pushed her chair away and stood up. The room swam slightly. God, she’d be comatose by midnight if she wasn’t careful. ‘I’ll go and have a bath and get glammed up if we’ve finished here. I’ll be out of the bathroom then in time for Dad to have a soak.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Faith stared at the Everest of cubed cheese on the table with apparent surprise. ‘Heavens. I hope everyone’s got a good appetite. I seem to have done a bit too much. Still, never mind. There’ll be dozens of the boys’ friends here tonight. You know, from the football club and what have you. They’re bound to be as hungry as hunters.’

  Billie groaned as she galloped upstairs. Unsubtle as ever! Her mother had probably been through the Torquay telephone book, surreptitiously inviting every lone bachelor under sixty.

  The night was sweet-scented and velvety warm, and the midsummer sky was diamond-dotted with constellations. Billie pressed her burning forehead against the leaded window and wished she had half as much energy as her parents.

  The party had been roaring for more than four hours – and there were still thirty minutes to go until midnight. Outside, the farmyard was thrown into elongated shapes of black and silver, with an occasional golden beam as people suffering from heat exhaustion piled out of the back door. Billie had danced and chatted, eaten enough fondue to sustain a calcium famine, and drunk at least eight of Faith’s killer-mix gin and tonics.

  The eating and the drinking had been relatively painless. The chatting and the dancing had both posed more of a problem. God, she was becoming so adept at inventing false lives. Of course, down here, Damon from Newton Abbot was a no-no, so she’d fended off any sort of chat-up lines by vague references to a man waiting patiently back in Amberley Hill. No, he hadn’t been able to make it down to Devon to meet everyone ... an ailing mother, you understand? Sadly, everyone seemed to, and said he sounded like a really decent bloke.

  The men her mother had invited – the football clubbers, the Young Farmers, the lifeguards, the fishermen – were mostly classmates from primary school, as homely to her as her brothers. They held no attraction for her whatsoever. But she, having been away and having resurrected Follicles and Cuticles knock-’em-dead party hairstyle, and wearing a dress from Joseph, which was the only other thing she’d spent her grandmother’s money on and which would have to see her through every festive occasion until the end of time, seemed to be able to pull them in like iron filings to a magnet. Miranda would have loved it.

  She’d spent the evening slipping from one to the other, interspersing the escapes with brief gossips with childhood neighbours, and reminiscences with old girlfriends. The house buzzed with happiness and every face was dearly familiar. This was her security; her rock. She could come back here, and just pick up the threads, and it would be like the last two years had never existed.

  ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’ Stan Pascoe’s voice cut through the musing. I thought some young man had whisked you off into the night.’

  Billie swung round and grinned at her father. ‘No such luck. I’m just having a breather. I’m not used to all this. Can’t take the pace. I’d forgotten how manic your parties are.’

  Stan, big, burly, and comfortable, with a glass of whisky in one hand and a cigar in the other, nodded ruefully. ‘I blame your mother’s HRT. She gets worse.’ He lodged himself on the edge of the windowseat. ‘You’ll be back in the fray for the midnight conga, though, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Billie sat beside her father and linked her arm through his. ‘I want to do the whole traditional Pascoe party bit. Singing the silly songs out in the yard, like we always do so that the animals can join in, and all the dancing, and making the wedding wishes . . .’

  She trailed away. What would she be wishing for? What did she really want? Her own successful business on the perimeter of Whiteacres? Was that it? Was that the extent of her ambition? Not perpetual happiness? Or untold wealth? Or even a home of her own? Or, how about a man? Someone to share the rest of her life with? Wouldn’t that be the most sensible thing to be wishing for?

  ‘Dad, what did you really think when I told you that I’d spent Granny Pascoe’s inheritance on a monstrous breeze-block shed?’

  Stan swigged his whisky and tapped the ash from his cigar into a rather shrivelled geranium. ‘My first thought was that Granny Pascoe would come and rattle her chains at you for the rest of your life’. He took another mouthful of whisky. ‘To be honest, love, my main concern was the situation, on the edge of an airfield. You know what you’re like about flying . . .’

  Billie smiled. ‘It was one of Miranda’s main concerns too. But it won’t be a problem – I won’t be involved with the airfield at all. The industrial estate is quite separate.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’ Stan flicked more ash into the geranium pot.

  Billie, imagining Faith’s wrath in the morning, leaned across and poked the ash deep into the soil. ‘You don’t think I should have used the money for the deposit on a house, then? I know Mum does.’

  ‘Your mother would like to see you married and settled in cosy suburbia, whatever she may say to the contrary, but it’s your money – and it’s not a fortune, just a few thousand, love, and if the warehouse is what you want, then I’m certainly not going to chuck in any objections.’

  Billie hugged him. ‘And when I get into a right muddle over invoicing and tax and VAT, I’ll be able to ring you in a blind panic, won’t I?’

  ‘Course you will, love. Whether I’ll be able to help or not is another matter, but I’ll give it my best shot, you know that.’ Stan glanced at his watch. ‘Hey it’s nearly midnight. Time we were getting outside to dance with the happy couple. Look, when we’ve all recovered from our hangovers tomorrow, we’ll talk about it some more, OK?’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Dad. Billie stood up and hugged her father again. She knew what she wanted. The house, the wealth, even the m
an would have to wait. Tonight her wedding wish was going to be for the success of the Whiteacres warehouse.

  Chapter Six

  Miranda and Reuben were of the same opinion: that Billie had lost not only her marbles, but also the bag she kept them in.

  ‘It’s a dump,’ Miranda said cheerfully, the day Billie officially started her own business. ‘A condemned shit tip. And how much did you pay for it?’

  ‘More than I’d expected to,’ Billie admitted, not wanting to be barracked this early in the morning. ‘There were all sorts of things on top of the lease: insurances and deposits and stuff . . . Anyway don’t criticise it yet. You haven’t even seen it.’

  ‘I don’t have to. I can smell it on you when you come in. It’s all cold and cabbagey.’

  Billie was beginning to feel the first stirrings of doubt. Not to mention anticlimax. The previous day had been her last as a taxi-driver. She’d walked into the office prepared to do battle with Reuben – but he hadn’t been there. The hayfever had worsened and had laid him very low. Bronchitis now, Veronica had said, with a hint of malicious pleasure. He’d phoned in early and said he still wasn’t well enough to come into the office. Her fellow cabbies had said it was more like he couldn’t admit when he was beaten, and that he didn’t want to be there to see her go.

  Billie doubted this. She had an unpleasant feeling that Reuben was planning something nasty.

  ‘You should take Reuben a bottle of whisky as a gesture of goodwill and offer to rub his chest,’ Miranda said, still sitting on Billie’s bed. ‘I know I would.’

  ‘Well, go on, then. But don’t blame me if he bites you. Oh – pul-lease! Take that look off your face! You’re so disgusting! Reuben Wainwrright is the pits.’

  In Reuben’s absence, Billie s leaving party had been pretty tame. Veronica had made a cake in the shape of a taxi with only three wheels because she’d run out of sponge mix, and the other drivers had clubbed together to buy her an electronic organiser, and then they’d all gone to Mulligan’s and got fairly drunk and sang ‘The Rose of Tralee with the bar staff on the karaoke.

  And now it was the first day of her self-employment and she had the premises, the keys, less than two thousand pounds of her capital left, and still, despite racking her brains until the small hours, absolutely no idea what she was going to do. So far, her venture into big business had been completely unedifying. Miranda had said she’d be welcome to shampoo the blue-rinse brigade and sweep up at Follicles and Cuticles in lieu of rent if things got desperate. Billie had a feeling it might just come to that.

  ‘Shift.’ She kicked away the duvet. ‘I’ve got an empire to create, and I’m sure you should have been tarting up the population of Amberley Hill hours ago.’

  Miranda reluctantly got to her feet and slouched towards the doorway. ‘You’re a whizz on understatement, aren’t you? Tell you what then, when you’ve created your empire and I’ve beautified the masses, I’ll see you in Mulligan’s. We’ll have a beer or ten to celebrate, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ Billie nodded. ‘Anita Roddick probably only took a morning to create the Body Shop. It should give me the whole afternoon free.’

  ‘Being sarky is no defence over stupidity. Miranda twirled a plait which had now faded to a dull mauve. ‘Oh – and did I tell you that the salon’s going unisex? Starting next week. I mean we’ve always done haircuts for men, of course, but we thought we’d start offering facials and massages and manicures – and well, hey! Whatever they want. . .’

  Billie paused in searching for a matching sock. ‘And would this have more to do with you trawling through the population for the ideal husband, than dragging the men of the area into the twenty-first century?’

  ‘As if! How could you even think such a thing?’ Miranda giggled. ‘But I’ve told Kim to give me first refusal on all the muscular six-footers who want body oiling . . .’

  Billie gazed around the warehouse with mounting despair. Even allowing for the input of proper lighting, and electric heaters to dry out the damp, and every spare minute she’d had in the past week being spent hefting and sweeping and washing and cleaning, it still looked appalling. If only it weren’t so empty. If only it was filled with something. Anything. But what?

  Wandering around the vastness, her canvas boots echoing on the cold concrete, she took stock. Granny Pascoe appeared to have funded a few hundred million square feet of nothing which soared to cobwebby heights of improbable proportions. Simon Maynard’s kitchenette and lavatorial areas, despite having been bleached and scoured, still reeked; and the office must have been constructed from ice blocks.

  Billie had written a scarily huge cheque at a second-hand office furniture warehouse, and now had a desk, two chairs, and one lop-sided filing cabinet. Her hardware, to which Simon Maynard had referred in such an off-hand manner, so far consisted of a portable radio, her mobile phone, the new personal organiser – which would no doubt be a real boon as soon as she had something to organise – a very basic mail-order computer, a printer and an optimistically huge box of paper. Billie reckoned the computer would probably be repossessed long before she got the hang of using it.

  B&Q’s sale had provided several industrial-sized tins of remaindered paint. This was today’s task: to decorate anything that didn’t fall apart at the flick of a roller. The shade strips on the paint tins would have had Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen capering with glee. No two colours were the same.

  By lunch time she’d got a rather splodgy red, white, and blue kitchen, and a candyfloss-pink lavatory. The rest of the paint would probably stretch to covering the office walls in various shades of sludge and daffodil. The grey breeze blocks of the shed itself would have to stay in their native plumage – well, at least until she had some more money. Paint-streaked and exhausted, Billie picked up a can of Diet Coke and wandered to the doorway.

  She hadn’t seen Zia and Isla or Sylvia again. Zi-Zi’s, she guessed, were out on a clothes-buying mission, and possibly Sylvia had taken some time off – either that or the unpleasant Douglas had got his way and forced her to abandon her project. Billie hoped fervently that it was the former.

  Despite the heat, every one of the double doors was closed, and although there were cars parked on the weedy concrete at the back when she arrived, so far this morning she had seen no one. Fred ’n’ Dick at number one, she knew, did replacement doors and windows, because she’d read the sign; two belonged to Sylvia; three was hers; and four was leased by Zia and Isla. Unit six, on the far end, was still empty. And likely to stay that way, according to Simon Maynard. It wasn’t, he’d said with understandable embarrassment, quite up to standard. So, that still left number five to be investigated.

  Anything, absolutely anything, could be going on behind those shuttered doors. And presumably as long as it didn’t involve fumes or high-frequency radio, and Maynard and Pollock got their money, no one really cared.

  Sheltering beneath the porch from the scorching sun, Billie surveyed her surroundings as she finished her Coke. The airstrip looked even more unprepossessing from behind the perimeter fence; like a war-torn no-go zone on the news. In the glaring heat, the colourless stubby grass merged into the dazzling sky, the wind sock hung listlessly like wet washing, and the radio control tower had all the charm of an offshore oil refinery. Sporadic small planes dithered along the runway and eventually coughed their way into the ether.

  There were several medium-sized planes sort of parked at haphazard angles, and a clutch of smaller ones sheltering from the glare of the sun with tarpaulins pulled over them. A couple of trucks meandered across the tarmac square in no apparent hurry, and the occasional figure in neon safety clothing dashed between the planes, only to duck out of sight beneath the wings.

  As she couldn’t see the departures and arrivals area from the perimeter fence, there wasn’t even the joy of people- watching to pass the time. Not that she’d envy them their journeys anyway: they’d probably be businessmen going somewhere boring, or cut-pricers taking a chance on a
cheap trip across the Channel.

  ‘Jesus!’

  The overhead roar made her duck her head. She dropped the Coke can. The plane was merely feet above her; the pulse of its engines punching into her stomach. Her heart beating a tattoo of terror, her mouth dry, Billie watched as it turned sharply towards the runway. The propellers were whirling twin circles of transparency. The fat black wheels appeared to be stretching themselves towards the ground and the scream of the brakes made her clench her teeth. Hitting the runway at what seemed a ludicrous speed, the plane bounced and twitched, then subsided into an elegant break-neck glide. Just as it appeared destined to plough off into the grass, it turned sharply, and, with the propellers slowing, almost jauntily cruised towards the glass-plated buildings.

  Billie realised she’d stopped breathing. It had never been like this at Gatwick.

  The plane was silver, purple and emerald-green, and could probably seat about thirty people as long as they were on good terms. The Sullivanair logo brashly inscribed across the side seemed vaguely familiar. Oh, yes, of course . . . the name splashed vibrantly across the hangars in the distance . . . Obviously Whiteacres was Sullivanair’s home base.

  Billie gave herself a good mental talking-to. She really was going to have to get used to the comings and goings if she was to stay here for five years. She simply couldn’t jump into catatonic shock every time anything larger than a hang glider appeared in the sky.

  The trucks and neon-jacketed men were all hurrying towards the new arrival, but anything interesting was happening behind the buildings, out of her line of vision. Wiping her damp hands on her jeans, she turned back into the shed.