Guerillas In Our Midst Read online

  “No I am bad! I’m a really bad person.”

  “No honey you’re not!” I held her close.

  “I am! I’m so bad because I’m going to have a BABY Edda! I’m bloody well PREGNANT and I was DRUNK and I SMOKED and I was DRUNK…”

  I held her to me, stroking her hair and saying nothing because my throat was tight and my heart was pounding and my eyes were prickling with tears. In a single second my whole world had just fallen apart.

  Bethan was going to be a mum.

  And there was no one to stroke my hair and hold me.

  “Oh Edda!” An exhausted cried-out Beth stared at me across the kitchen table with swollen red eyes.

  I held her hands. “It will be OK you know…”

  “No it won’t!” She wailed.

  “Well, how were you to know—”

  “What kind of a mother am I going to be if I get pissed out of my head on cheap Cava and smoke a pack of fags a night?”

  “They were Lights you know.”

  “Edda, for God’s sake, this is serious!” she dropped my hands and started wailing again.

  Fine. Fine then. There was no arguing with her. Beth – as always – was the boss.

  After an hour of hand holding, hair stroking, hugging and generally hushing, Beth still hadn’t progressed from the crying. Jack had hovered nervously in the background: I’d only noticed him after fifteen minutes; he was pacing the kitchen looking worried, an unlit fag in his mouth. He’d left soon after I’d noticed him; escaping to Surrey to tell his parents the good news and leaving me to sort out his pregnant girlfriend.

  “Women do this, don’t they Edda?” He’d whispered at me, wide-eyed, ramming on his shoes in the hallway while Beth, still wailing, had disappeared into the kitchen to get more kitchen towel. “They get all hormonal, don’t they, when they’re up the duff. That’s right isn’t it Edda? This is normal yeah?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, wondering why just being a woman gave him the impression that I had insight into this kind of stuff. “Beth is acting completely normally and rationally for a pregnant woman.”

  Back with Beth, there was a glint of hope as she surfaced from her wailing and took a sip of water. “I could have caused my little baby permanent harm though, couldn’t I? That Cava was so bloody awful and I had so much of it! Do you think I’ve mutated my baby?”

  “I’m—”

  “Oh I would never have got so hammered on cheap alcohol and smoked if I’d have known!” she wailed. “When I think of the harm that I—”

  “IT. IS. FINE,” I shouted at her.

  And for the first time that morning she stopped giving it the full Lady Macbeth and looked up at me.

  I never shouted. Beth shouted. But I never did.

  “Look, Beth,” I filled the uncomfortable post-shout silence. “I don’t know much about babies, but right now I imagine that your baby is probably no more than some dividing cells. You will have just mellowed out the cell division: eight cells probably didn’t become sixteen cells quite as quickly as they might have done. That’s all. You haven’t given it a weird nose or anything…”

  “Given it a weird nose?”

  Damn. The second I’d said the bit about the weird nose Beth started up again, wailing about foetal alcohol syndrome and sobbing the word mutation over and over, so I sat in silence with my head resting on my hands and contemplated the lonely road ahead.

  Three

  The day after finding out about The Baby, and still in shock, I was on my way into work when I found myself standing beside a street light on Wickham Road, open mouthed and agog. More strange stuff. What was going on with my world? Wrapped around the base of the street light beside me, winding upwards, was a giant yellow and purple knitted snake. And there wasn’t just one of the things, there were lots of them, twirled around all the street lights that ran along the length of the road, their heads drooping and tiny black wool tongues poking out at the pedestrians beneath them.

  I hadn’t noticed them straightaway, I’d been in my usual head-down if-I-don’t-think-about-work-then-it-might-not-actually-happen mood, trudging down to the Council offices for another day filing paper in Beigedom. And then, for no real reason, I’d looked up and there was this giant woolly snake, looking down at me with white bobble eyes.

  And I’d yipped, actually yipped like a poodle.

  Fortunately there hadn’t been anyone around at the time. Just me and the woolly snakes.

  I raised a cautious hand up to the snake and touched it. Yes, it was definitely knitted. I started walking again, slowly, looking up at each of the snakes as I passed them: green and yellow, black and white, orange and blue, round and round the street lights, some of them boss-eyed, some of them winking, some of them looking straight down at me…

  I turned the corner into Ashby Road with the same trepidation that a hunter might enter the jungle: what would be lurking here?

  Hearts! Hundreds and hundreds of knitted hearts, hanging on woollen threads from the branches of the trees along the road. Pink and red and scarlet and raspberry, and every shade in between. I found it beautiful but also unnerving at the same time: like Sushi.

  On Lewisham Way there were leg warmers on the parking meters and cutesy knitted animals, in fluffy pink and blue yarn, on the road signs. But by Lewisham it was all over – I found myself staring hard at the landscape around me, half expecting to see a giant tea-cosy over the entrance to the station. But no – the mass of knitted things appeared to be just limited to Brockley.

  I continued my journey, still spooked.

  The world was going mad.

  Because not only had Brockley been attacked by grannies – which was odd enough – but last week I had made it into the national newspapers. It turned out that in the Big Society ‘everyone doing their bit’ was hot news and gardening an abandoned skip was very now. The Telegraph had taken a photo of my skip and hailed the new generation of do-gooders. OK so I wasn’t mentioned per se (there was talk of residents seeing ‘two men in large straw hats, clearly inebriated’), but at least someone had noticed my efforts, and even better than that was the fact that Alan Titchmarsh had classed it, “a bold and imaginative use of colour and texture.”

  “Do you realise Edda,” Amanda jumped on to the edge of my desk and flashed her knickers at me, “that that’s like the fiftieth time, or something, you’ve sighed since you got into work this morning?”

  “Is it?” I said, weirdly drawn to gaze at her knickers, which were right there on display in front of me as they were most days. Today they were blue and had white hearts printed on them. They must have been her favourite pair: she wore them a lot.

  “And you’ve just done it again.” Amanda laughed.

  “Done what?”

  “Sigh.”

  “Oh.” I bit my lip and managed to turn my attention to her face. “Yes. Maybe you’re right…”

  “So, what’s up?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know … it’s … well …” I threw my hands up. “It’s because I’ve had my heart broken.”

  “Oh … no way! Boyfriend troubles?”

  “You know I haven’t got one.”

  “Girlfriend troubles?” her eyes widened with interest: Boring Old Colleague in Lesbian Shocker.

  “Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.”

  “Oh. Go on then…” She leant back and, faced with the blue with white hearts again, I struggled to regain my train of thought.

  “Is this the friend you’re like always going on about? The one called Bethan?”

  “Yes it is. But I don’t always go on about her.” I bristled.

  “Yes you do. Seriously, you like never talk about anyone else; it’s like oh my God she’s talking about that girl Bethan again already.”

  Amanda watched too much American TV. She spent hours in front of the TV dramas because it was her sole ambition in life to be an actress: she studied American soaps like she was cramming for an audition.

  “Well, I
go on about Bethan because she’s special to me,” I said.

  “But like not gay?” Amanda looked on unmoved.

  “No.” I said. And then because Amanda was completely impassive and, ridiculously, I wanted her to be moved by my tragic abandoned circumstances, I added, “Because when I was fourteen and I suddenly had no one, Beth and her family took me in and loved me, and she’s been like a sister to me.” Still nothing. “Beth is all the family I’ve got. We went to university together, we lived together in London, up until she moved in with her boyfriend…”

  “Oh, OK.” Happily, Amanda looked slightly more moved now she was beginning to understand the full extent of my relationship with Beth. “So, like, why have you two split up?” She winked and then added, “In like a totally non-gay way, of course.”

  “We haven’t ‘split up’. She’s far too lovely to split up from anyone. My friend’s having a baby. Her life is going in one direction—”

  “And yours is going in the other.”

  “Yes. Sort of. Actually, mine’s staying the same. Mine has no other direction to go in.”

  “But she’s, like, old, right?”

  “She’s twenty-eight. The same as me.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. So you must have seen it coming, yeah? I mean if someone’s going to start a family they ought to do it before thirty, right?”

  I winced. The single biggest mistake I have probably ever made was to tell nineteen–year-old Amanda that I was twenty-eight. To Amanda, someone ‘staring thirty in the arse’ (her words) had enjoyed a good innings. To Amanda I was ancient and wizened, I had lived out a distant childhood in sepia and had experienced the Industrial Revolution first hand. Last week she’d asked me if I had all my own teeth.

  “Anyway, that explains the sighing,” I said, hoping she’d push off and take her blue knickers with her. Because I realised that I didn’t want to talk to her about it. Apart from feeling sad and abandoned I didn’t really have any other coherent thoughts to discuss or plans to move on.

  “I read about this.” Amanda was wagging her adolescent finger at me. “And do you know why you’re so destroyed?”

  “I am not destroyed.”

  “Well, whatever, but you’re so cut up about this because you’re, like, getting ‘platonically divorced’ from your friend.”

  “I am?”

  “Totally. I read it in a magazine. Like, I so did,” she added, seeing my scepticism, “You guys have been like a husband and wife…”

  “I’m still not gay.”

  “No. So … you and Beth have been living so close for all those years and, like, your lives have been so bound up together – that’s what the magazine said – and now she’s cheated on you.”

  “With her boyfriend?”

  “With her baby! So now there’s going to be no room for you in her life. You’re cast aside like an empty vessel.”

  I sat back and contemplated what Amanda had said. “You really think I’m an empty vessel?”

  “Do you think you are?”

  “Nooo…?”

  “Good for you!” Amanda enthused. “Because it’s still not too late for you, you know that. Even, like, near thirty. You have to treat it like a proper divorce, you know? Move on and everything. Go out with someone else, see your other friends when you would have seen her. You can come out with me and my friends if you want,” she said. “There’s older people in our group. My mate Rebecca is twenty-three. So you’d be OK, you’d have someone to talk to and everything.”

  I couldn’t have been more tight-lipped if I’d caught my mouth in a vice. “Mmm. Great. Thanks.”

  “But the article said, in situations like this it’s, like, absolutely over between the two of you. You aren’t going back. You can’t go back to how you were because she’s having a baby and doesn’t want you any more. So you have to start afresh. It’s the start of a whole new you,” she enthused.

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” I said with a lump in my throat at the thought that Beth didn’t want me any more. “We can pick up with something new. Just because she’s having a baby doesn’t mean it’s the end. We can adapt: we’ve been friends for fourteen years.” And then mentally added, since you were five. OK. Sometimes maybe I did seem quite old.

  But the blue-knickered harbinger of doom was shaking her head. “It’s, like, so over Edda. Accept it. You should like totally go wild and stuff, let your hair down. Hey – do you share a mortgage or something? Because that’s, like, really bad if you do.”

  “No. I live on my own.”

  “You have your own flat?”

  “House.”

  “You have your own house?” Amanda squeaked.

  “It’s an inheritance.” I said lightly. And then stopped there. I was absolutely not going to get caught up in a conversation with Amanda about my dead parents. God knows what improving magazine article she would thrust at me.

  “Well you could get a lodger, couldn’t you? Like, a really hot guy…”

  I considered it for a moment. “Ye-es. Or a nice girl, for company and not in a gay way...”

  “Or a really hot guy.” Amanda corrected me.

  “I don’t know. I’m really out of practice with socialising. It’s been me and Beth practically forever and I think I must have lost the knack of meeting new people.”

  “So you’ve, like, put all your social eggs in one friend’s basket?” Amanda said.

  “Erm. What?”

  A man politely cleared his throat behind me. “Excuse me…”

  Amanda and I spun round and together we saw the Head of Planning looming up behind us. Just two steps down from the Chief Executive at Lewisham Council, Peter Shaw was definitely classed as a Person To Stop a Conversation For.

  “I am very sorry to interrupt you two young ladies but I wondered if I could have a word with Edda Mackenzie.”

  “I’ll be off, then,” Amanda jumped down in a flurry of pale blue pants.

  Peter Shaw politely looked away and, once she was gone, drew up a chair beside me.

  “I don’t think we’ve met.” He offered me his hand and I shook it. “I head up Planning at the Council.”

  “Hi.”

  I knew who he was. Everybody at Lewisham Council knew who he was. He wasn’t the God of Lewisham Council – that was the Chief Executive – but he was definitely around the Moses level. He certainly parted the queues at the on-site shop when he paid it a visit.

  “I’m here,” he dropped his voice and leant in towards me, all silver grey hair and affable M&S jumper stretched over a paunch, “in a non-work-related capacity.”

  I had no idea how to react to that. None. Was the Head of Planning going to ask me out on a date? Weirder things had happened: Beth was up the duff, I was in the papers (ish) and Brockley had been covered in knitting. Why shouldn’t he ask me out? I braced myself.

  “Edda, I have reason to believe,” he looked left and right like a spy in an old espionage film, “That you are responsible for planting up the infamous Brockley skip. Am I right?”

  “What?” I nearly jumped out of my seat. “How do you know?”

  “Ahh!” He leant back. “So you are! Well, let me tell you how I worked it out. I was intrigued by the story of the gardened skip in the papers, so I did some investigating. I wanted to track down the person who planted that garden, so I thought to myself that the person who took it upon themselves to deal with the skip of their own volition had probably complained about it beforehand. And lo – there were seven written complaints about the skip in the Environmental Office’s files. And all of them were from you.”

  “Oh.”

  “And one of the letters mentioned the fact that you worked for the Council.”

  “Did it? I—”

  Peter Shaw, Head of Planning, Moses, pulled out papers, which I instantly recognised as being my letters, from a maroon leather folder he’d been carrying under his arm. He sifted through them, cleared his throat and looking around in case anyone was listening
he read, “I work for the Council: can’t you pull your goddamn finger out for one of your own?”

  “Ah.” I said clammily, “Actually, I’m not really that rude. I sort of snapped. It had been months and the dumped rubbish smelled really, really bad.”

  “I quite understand. So, you see, it wasn’t very hard to locate you as you’d said yourself that you worked for the Council. When I looked your details up in the Payroll Department I found that your house just happens to be directly opposite said skip, would you believe? And so I assembled the facts and I worked out that you are in a particularly unique position to have benefited from such a philanthropic act.”

  I shivered. I had been investigated. I had been investigated by the Lewisham Moses and he had put together a file on me. Was this it? Was I going to get the sack because of my rude letters and my illegal gardening? As much as I hated my job – and I really did – I didn’t want to be sacked from it.

  “Don’t worry – in a way I’m just doing my job: we planners can be meticulous investigators. I wanted to find the skip-planter for a very particular reason, however...” He let the words hang in the air.

  He was going to serve an Order on me. He was going to prosecute me, caution me, repossess my house and throw me out onto the South London streets … the Planning team at the Council were notorious, power-crazed, workaholics who liked nothing better than breaking the spirits of residents who flouted their regulations by so much as a millimetre.

  Loft conversion too high? Five thousand pound fine!

  Garage extension too large? Go to jail for six months!

  “You don’t need to look quite so alarmed, Edda.” He laughed quietly.

  “I’m fine.” I laughed lightly, ungripping the table and dropping my shoulders by half a metre.

  “No, no, no, no.” He leant forward and placed a hand on my own. He was going to ask me out. Eugh. “I admire what you did. And so does my partner, Eustace Fox.” OK. He wasn’t going to ask me out. “And it’s on his behalf that I came round here to see you. Do you know Eustace? He owns Fox Estates … at the corner of your road.”