‘Short day,’ says Cher. ‘It’s so bloody hot it’s hard to concentrate.’
‘I bet. You got time for a cuppa?’
Cher mimes checking the watch she doesn’t wear. ‘Sure.’
‘Back door’s open. Come on down.’
She potters through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Pulls a face at the smell coming in through the open door. She’s got to catch the Landlord about those drains, again. Her kitchen sink is taking the best part of an hour to empty, cooling greasily an inch below the overflow. Five pounds a week she’s been spending on chemicals to keep the outlet moving, but the drains barely seem to work at all, now. That bottle of something he poured down the outside drain before she left has done no good at all. Probably just a gallon of bleach from Poundstretcher, anyway. He’ll never spend money if he has a choice about it.
The gate in the side-return creaks, and Cher appears at the top of the steps, picking her way delicately between the plant pots. Psycho the cat trots complaisantly in her wake. He must have been waiting somewhere in the shade for her to come home. He’s really attached himself to her, thinks Vesta. That’s nice. It’s nice to think he’s found himself a good friend. She would love to have him herself, but the Landlord would use it as an excuse to break her lease before he’d got through his first tin of Whiskas. Cher has shed her wig, and dangles it from one hand like a Regency lady holding a fan. Her hair is tied up on the back of her head, her neck exposed to let out the sweat.
‘It’s a stinker out there,’ she says, and starts down the chipped brick steps. Catches the whiff of the drains and pulls a face. ‘Feee-you,’ she says, and waves the wig in front of her face as though that will make the smell go away. She’s such a kid, thinks Vesta, again. It’s so bizarre, the way teenagers are: twenty-five one second and seven the next. ‘That’s a bit rank, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the drains,’ says Vesta. ‘They’re blocked again.’
‘He needs to call Dyno-Rod, that mean old bastard.’
‘I keep telling him. It’s all those kitchenettes. Emptying their bacon fat down their plugholes.’
Cher shakes her head. ‘Not me.’
‘Yes, well, that’s because you live on pizza and chocolate. These drains were built for a family house, not a block of flats, and he needs to deal with it. Someone’s going to go down with food poisoning, and it’ll probably be me. Milk and two, is it, love?’
Cher bounces down the last two steps, tittups over to her door. ‘Ta.’
‘Let’s have it in the garden,’ says Vesta. ‘Get away from the smell.’
She hands Cher her cup and follows her up into the sunshine, passing through her potted herb garden. Sweet aromas of sage and rosemary, basil and mint rise off the heated bushes as they brush past. Now, this is what a garden should smell like, she thinks. Feels a little swell of pleasure at the patch of civilisation she’s carved out of the dilapidation beyond.
It’s a big garden, bigger than normal for London, the railway tracks at its end having saved it from being carved up for development. Vesta has kept the front third tidied and cultivated all her life. It was her contribution to the family when she was a child, bringing flavour and colour to her mother’s sepia household, and the green-finger bug has stayed with her ever since. Narrow beds of bright annuals, fetched back, one by one, from the greengrocer’s discount shelf, surround a tablecloth of manicured lawn on which two old-fashioned deckchairs recline in the dazzle. Beyond the beds, a tangle of foot-long grass, run to seed so often it’s almost a hayfield, a blind rhododendron that contrives to look dank even in this weather, a couple of aged plum trees, stunted by some bug that’s way beyond Vesta’s knowledge, a mess of rubble and bonfire ash and goosegrass surrounding a tumbledown shed.
‘Looks lovely out here,’ says Cher.
‘Thanks,’ says Vesta, and they sit in the deckchairs with their back to the chaos. Each takes their first sip of tea and lets out the great British ‘ahhhh’ as they settle back. The generations may look completely different, thinks Vesta, but some things never change. The cat finds a patch of sun and rolls on to his back to show the handkerchief of white on his belly. She smiles.
‘You look more cheerful,’ says Cher. ‘You almost done in there?’
‘Not completely. But at least I can sit down, now.’
‘Christ. They really made a mess, didn’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ooh, that reminds me.’ Cher leans over her backpack and rummages inside. ‘I got you a present.’ She finds what she’s looking for, and holds it out, a small hard object wrapped in a T-shirt. She looks pleased with herself. ‘I hope you like it.’