The Last Minute Read online

  She’d gone into floristry to try to get away from the pressures of her office job, and in the hope of having more time to look after her son, Calum, and her demented elderly mother. But it’s just as bad – no, worse – working with perishable goods and still up against deadlines like this funeral. In the flat above the shop, her mother, Margaret Sharp, was awake till the small hours, rattling the front door, and crying out about some imagined danger she couldn’t explain. Janine had locked her mother in her bedroom for her own safety when she went to the early-morning market to buy today’s stock. Then Calum had left it till after breakfast to mention that he needed a packed lunch for the school trip. In the end, Janine hadn’t had time to brush her own hair, let alone wash her mother’s, before opening the shop for the day.

  Now she’s hurrying to get the wreath to the funeral parlour before the hearse sets off for the church. She doesn’t even look at the beggar as she steps over his feet. The scruffy man is such a feature of the place that she has stopped wondering who he is, or how he came to be there. Everyone refers to him as Matey – no doubt because he calls everybody ‘Mate’. He must have a real name, but she has no idea what it is, or any urge to find out. When she’d first moved in, she would sometimes exchange a smile or a quick word about the weather, but she soon learned not to get trapped listening to his painfully unfunny jokes, which usually take the form of rambling stories, often with a forgotten punch line. If asked, she’d probably put the beggar’s age at about fifty, though it’s hard to tell: he’s always swathed in an assortment of oversized clothes, with a cap pulled down over his eyes. He looks too hot in summer, and too cold in winter. With no man in the house, Janine has no cast-offs to pass on to him now. Her husband died five years ago, taking with him all the laughter in their lives.

  Janine’s son, Calum, is on the coach of course, though in her panic his mother is unaware that she is just a few metres away from him. He’s sitting next to his best friend, Rahil Nandi, who fills the fun gap with his effortless clowning. Even Miss Hunter has been known to be won over by his mischievous smile (once or twice). Now she stands up to check that all the children are still strapped in.

  TICK

  57 seconds to go . . .

  TWO GIRLS ON the coach, Charmaine and Chenelle, who sit together in class, eat together at break, and whisper together in assembly, have stopped plaiting each other’s hair and are looking through the dance-class window, pointing at people they know, and half laughing, half singing ‘Hey, fatty . . .’ On the other side of the aisle, a boy has spotted Bernie bending to pick up the poo. ‘Gross!’ he cries, making a retching noise at the back of his throat. Sitting on her own, Kayleigh Palmer, always keen to keep in with the teachers, and universally despised as a sneak, sees Lenny Gibbon outside the shoe shop, puts up her hand, and calls out Miss Hunter’s name.

  Lucy leans awkwardly over her eight-month bump to put the mitten back on Chloe’s hand. The nearest drill falls silent, but Matey the beggar is still shouting. ‘Stop a minute,’ he yells, and Bernie does stay put, but only because – with creaking knees – he’s struggling to find a way of grasping the dog mess without letting the hem of his fawn coat trail in the stinking residue on the pavement. He’s as keen as his dog to go to the park. He wants to get the morning walk done in time to prepare the pub for the gathering after the funeral. But he wishes Ritzi would stop tugging on the lead and pulling him off balance.

  The foreman of the gas workers jumps down into the trench. He’s seen something he doesn’t like the look of, and wants to examine it more closely. His team won’t thank him if he has to stop them working to make a safety check. They want to get the job done as fast as they can, and not just so that the traffic can move smoothly again. Two of them have children at the local primary school, and if they finish early, they’ll make it to the nativity play.

  At the bottom of the hill, Lorraine Lee runs out of the park gates and turns towards the shops. She can feel her phone vibrating in her tracksuit pocket, but she ignores it. Can’t – stop – now. Her feet are hurting, and every breath burns and stretches the inside of her chest, but Lorraine is pleased with herself. She’s kept going from the moment she closed her front door, has circled the boating lake seven times, and now she’s ready for the challenge of the climb towards the hot drink she’s promised herself. In her mind’s eye she can see the whipped cream and flakes of chocolate on top of the mug that will warm her hands as she settles into the leather sofa at the back of the café. She’s conjuring up the sweet cocoa smell that in just a few minutes will be her reward. But that’s not the only reason she can’t afford to lose momentum. The marathon is only four months away, and she’s got to build up her stamina. Who would have thought she’d get this far? When she and her friends signed up for the race it was just a joke, really, and the others dropped out long ago, defeated by the winter chill. Lorraine had never expected to get addicted to training; to long to get out of bed in the morning and into the open air. Determined to maintain the speed and rhythm of her strides, she pushes hard against the upward slope.

  TOCK

  56 seconds to go . . .

  ELEVEN MILES AWAY to the east, and three thousand feet up in the air, the pilot of flight GX413 has told the cabin crew to take their seats for landing. One of the attendants is still on her feet. She’s trying to persuade the passenger in seat 42A that he must take out his earphones and fold away his tray-table, but the man either can’t or won’t understand her, and stays still, leaning his head against the glass of the window, and staring vacantly at the clouds. He’s young; probably still a teenager. The attendant knows it would be wrong to draw conclusions from the shade of his skin or his odd manner. Maybe this is his first flight and he doesn’t know the rules. Perhaps he doesn’t speak either of the languages in which the instructions were given. Or he might be nervous about the landing – secretly panicking, afraid to show his fear. Still, something about him is making her uneasy. She recalls that he turned down all offers of food and drink during the flight, and that on the one occasion he used the lavatory he was in there for a long time. Apologizing, she leans across the middle-aged woman on the aisle to click the man’s table securely away.

  On the ground, at the exit from the car park, the Audi driver, Anthony Dougall, clenches his fists as he lurches angrily towards the van that is causing the obstruction. He hears Matey shouting to Bernie: ‘I’ve got a . . .’ but takes no notice. He wants to get his car moving. Anthony is used to being in control, and until this jerk blocked the entrance to the car park with his stupid white van, he was. He had everything worked out to the split second. His wife – Gillie – thinks he’s in Salzburg. He phoned her only an hour ago and peppered his conversation with little details about the weather there, the shortcomings of his hotel, the tediousness of the (non-existent) conference, and the news (gathered from the Internet) that his flight is on schedule. He assured her he would be back in good time for the family photo-shoot his agent has set up to get pictures for his election literature. Gillie thinks he’s expecting a quiet birthday lunch after that, but Anthony knows (thanks to Sharon) that his wife has a ‘surprise’ party planned for him, with a marquee going up in the garden at this very moment. He certainly can’t risk being late for that.

  Bernie is prepared to tolerate Matey, since any money he collects is usually spent in the pub, and the man’s not smelly, violent, or obviously mad. In fact, if the beggar’s stories are to be believed, he’s had quite an interesting life: time in the army; a failed attempt at stand-up comedy; then bad luck, and stupid decisions about money and women that forced him onto the streets. Still fumbling with his messy task, Bernie opens his mouth (to warn Janine, the florist, to watch where she’s putting her feet) and drops the letter he was taking to the post box. It flutters down into the gas men’s trench. With Lucy and the baby so close by, Bernie hopes his single swear word can’t be heard above the noise of the traffic and the roadworks.

  Miss Hunter is on her feet now, and as
she turns, she sees that several children are standing, too. Some of them notice her, and sit down quickly.

  Over to their right, the dance instructor, Maggie Tate (who, though super-fit, also likes cakes) is wearing green striped leggings under a purple leotard, and has a shocking-pink headband tied round her mass of curly hair, which is dyed an unnatural shade of red. She claps her hands and, with her back to the window, bends to switch on her old-fashioned portable cassette player. It’s the size of a small suitcase, covered with unnecessary knobs and dials, and powered by a long extension lead that snakes across the floor.

  ‘ . . . bum bum,’ sing Charmaine and Chenelle.

  Kayleigh Palmer’s mother is watching the exercise class, too, but with a different kind of contempt. She was in the street when the coach came by, and now, though she’s got a lot to do, she doesn’t want to start her errands until it’s out of sight. She goes out of her way not to spoil Kayleigh, and bites her tongue if she’s ever tempted to praise her or betray embarrassing signs of love, but the child is all she has since her husband left her ten years ago, and there have been times when her duty to look after Kayleigh has been her only reason for carrying on in a world so full of disappointments and unfairness. Now she’s got one eye on the coach and the other on the dance studio. There’s no way you’d find her in there. She thinks that extension wire is a trip hazard, for a start, but she has no intention of pointing that out to the women inside. She sniffs. People who have no qualms about cavorting about half dressed in full view of the public deserve to find out about such dangers the hard way.

  ‘Doggie!’ says little Chloe, pulling her hand away from her mother and reaching towards Ritzi’s nose.

  Matthew Larkin wipes his brush against the rim of the tin to get rid of any excess paint. He can’t help being meticulous, even though no one else will ever see the precision with which the red line is painted. From down below, all people will get is a vague impression that the appeal fund is inching towards its target. He knows that the measurement is spot-on. He’s praying (he was actually on his knees in his beloved St Michael’s on Sunday) that the total will be reached in time for him to inspect the roof repairs from the top of a ladder, rather than a heavenly cloud.

  TICK

  55 seconds to go . . .

  ON FLIGHT GX413, the attendant presses the button that restores seat 41A to the upright position, ready for landing. The man still ignores her – staring through the window, clutching his MP3 player. The attendant knows it’s switched on. She can hear the tinny hiss of loud music leaking from the headphones, which (against the rules) are still in his ears.

  Outside the pub, where the pavement narrows opposite the church, Sarah Wilkins, aged eighty-three, is hobbling round the corner. She hasn’t any specific errands to do, but the doctor has told her she needs to get out of the house every day if she wants to stay mobile, so she’s on her way to the shops. Nick, the GIFTFORCE boy, seizes on her as his first challenge of the morning, stepping forward to block her path. ‘A moment for the poor?’ he asks, looking straight into her eyes and smiling, as he was taught on the training course. Nick had imagined that promoting good causes would make him feel good, but it’s become just a job like any other: slightly worse, in fact. It’s rare for shoppers to return his cheery greetings with anything other than evasiveness, and some are critical or downright rude. He used to think he liked people. Now he’s not so sure.

  Back down the street, Janine the florist is shifting from foot to foot, waiting to get across the road, and Matey is attempting to cheer Bernie up: ‘ . . . joke for you.’

  Janine is even more determined to get away. She doesn’t want to be rude, but she hasn’t time to get caught listening to one of the man’s stories.

  Maggie, the dance teacher, turns up the volume to compete with the din of the roadworks. With her bottom to the window as she tends the machine, she sways in time to the music, counting out the beats to get the class moving in time. ‘One and . . .’ Some of the women are still chatting as the others begin their routine. In the street outside, Mrs Palmer lets out a censorious sigh.

  There’s an alley at the side of the dance studio. It leads to the back of the funeral director’s shop (or ‘chapel of rest’, as he would call the building, not wanting to sound too commercial). The lane opens out into a private yard. There, out of public view, the hearse is being prepared. It’s an easy job today: at St Michael’s, just a short drive up the road. Nevertheless, the undertaker, Frank Pilbury, is worried about timing, because the roadworks have reduced the flow of traffic to a single line, controlled by slow temporary lights. The coffin’s loaded, and on a normal day the cortège wouldn’t need to set off for another fifteen minutes, but today they’re going to have to fight to nose their way into the solid stream of cars. There was a time when everyone would stop and make way for a funeral procession as a matter of course, but these days you can never be sure.

  The undertaker’s wife (a genuinely kind face for the business, but a great saleswoman too) managed to persuade the bereaved family to pay for the most expensive (or, as Frank’s tasteful promotional literature puts it, ‘traditional’) package. It’s increasingly popular, and has become a sporadic treat for the people of Heathwick since the Pilburys reintroduced it five years ago. It had long been Frank’s ambition to get back to the old ways of his profession. Ever since he saw a video of Oliver! in the 1990s he’d dreamed of restoring the Victorian horse-drawn hearse that had long languished, dilapidated, in one of the garages at the back of the yard. When he was a child, he and his sister had used it as a den – an appropriately scary headquarters for the secret society they’d formed with their classmates from Heathwick School. In the dark, by candlelight, sitting on the spot where unnumbered corpses had rested on their final journeys, the exclusive group had played and plotted. Amidst the spiders and dust, they’d made notes, by torchlight, on the comings and goings of Mr Lorenzo, who ran (and still runs) the launderette next door. They’d been convinced (during the Falklands War of 1982) that he was an Argentinian spy.

  Frank still congratulated his twelve-year-old self for taking the blame when that surveillance project got out of hand. The parents of the rest of the group knew nothing of their involvement in the writing of an anonymous note to the police. When the constable came round to see Frank’s father, and Frank had been summoned into the sitting room (to discover that what, in the gloom of the hearse, Spikey Davenport had assumed to be a blank sheet of paper was in fact the reverse of a piece of headed notepaper bearing the funeral parlour’s address), Frank had kept quiet about the rest of the gang. He had even written, and delivered, an embarrassing letter of apology to Mr Lorenzo. His mother had stood over him, angrily correcting his spelling and criticizing his handwriting, as, with his tongue sticking out while he tried to concentrate, Frank laboriously scratched it out with his father’s fountain pen on a sheet of the very paper that had got him into trouble. It turned out that Mr Lorenzo was Italian, not Argentinian, with an unblemished record of loyalty to his adopted home in Britain. The episode had killed off the secret society, and had not been mentioned again until the best man’s speech at Charlie Morris’s wedding. Charlie Morris is now a policeman in Manchester. Spikey (or rather Cyril) Davenport is a Tory MP.

  In the years after the death of the secret society, the old hearse became the place where Frank experimented with smoking and drinking. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t much of a magnet for girls, and for the next twenty years or so it was almost unvisited, quietly decaying. Then, when his father (an enthusiastic modernizer) died, Frank set about the task of repairing, painting and polishing the carriage at evenings and weekends. He had carved a new filigree frieze to decorate the roof. He’d mended the spokes on the thin wheels – two huge ones at the back and two smaller at the front. He’d made a new velvet-covered plinth for the coffin, polished up the brass rails and the windows, sanded away the graffiti from the days of the den, and given the whole vehicle several coats of shiny black paint. He
found an expensive decorating site online that sold silky golden tassels, and he attached one to each corner of the roof. At first, the project had been just for his own amusement, though he toyed with the idea of putting the old hearse on display in the yard. Then, when Sidney Clark from the gang suddenly died, his widow asked if he could travel to his grave in it, and Frank had found stables where he could hire carriage-horses and a driver. After the pictures of that funeral had gone up on his website, there had been a stream of bookings for the expensive service, and Frank had grown increasingly fond of Dime and Dollar – the two jet-black stallions – who had been delivered to the yard in the early hours of this morning ready for another funeral.

  So now Frank is wearing his full formal costume, a splendid outfit inherited unworn from his father (though well used by his father before him). It’s a long frock coat, made from thick woollen fabric (that’s a curse in the summer but just right for today), worn over a high-collared shirt and a black cravat. With his top hat and ebony cane, Frank can’t help walking with a dignified swagger as he emerges from the alley on foot to look for a gap in the traffic and to guide the hearse forward.

  On the coach, several children fail to see that Miss Hunter is on her feet. She has to shout at them, for what she suspects is the first of many times that day. The noise she makes is so familiar to the class that almost no one will take any notice. It’s part gargle, part bellow, rising in volume like a vacuum cleaner that’s just been switched on. ‘Guuuurrrrrr 8C!’ she cries.