The Prisoner of Meadow Bank Read online

  The Prisoner of Meadow Bank

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  –

  Copyright

  The Prisoner of Meadow Bank

  Miles Gibson

  A book for Nora

  ‘Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work!’

  Roy Lichtenstein

  –

  As soon as her husband leaves the house Holly Walker goes upstairs and shuts herself in the bedroom. She draws the curtains against the cruelty of sunlight and waits for the sound of his car to retreat along Red Beech Grove and turn into Hawthorn Avenue as he makes his way towards the traffic queues for the city. She sits on the edge of the unmade bed, waiting for the silence to settle, and looks around the room. She scowls at the little dressing table beneath the window, the wickerwork chair with its Chinese cushion, the lamp on the twisted bamboo table, the sheepskin rug on the floor.

  They came to this house three years ago, pulling up their roots to escape into the suburbs. The rambling apartment they had shared from a time before they were married was a draughty maze of rooms with elaborate mouldings on high, mottled ceilings and timber floors that cracked at night. The sash windows gazed into the corner of a stone courtyard where ferns grew in perpetual twilight. Their front door opened on to a massive oak staircase that led down to a marble entrance hall and the constant noise of the dirty streets.

  The houses here in Meadow Bank are new. Neat brick and plasterboard boxes on cold concrete foundations. The furniture had been too large for these small, square rooms with their narrow doors and low ceilings. The Edwardian sideboard with the copper hinges had been abandoned along with the tall bookcase and the big, polished refectory table. It had been difficult to adjust to the diminished proportions of this new home. Throughout the first winter they had felt squeezed and uncomfortable. Escaping from the city with its gloom of towers and buttresses, retreating into the green open suburbs, they had found themselves entangled like strangers from a tribe of giants in a shrinking world. The old apartment, they knew too late, was huge compared with the cramped quarters of the smug little town house with its shingled roof and stunted garden.

  Jack has gradually learned to adjust to the surroundings. He seems to thrive on challenges. He leaves for the office each morning and returns at dusk, bringing with him news of old friends, rumours, speculation and gossip. She remains trapped in the doll’s house. A large and clumsy child.

  A dog barks. A water pipe ticks behind a wall. Sunlight, splintering through the curtains, turns the floating dust into sparks. She shivers, stands up and abruptly removes her nightgown, bunching it against her breasts before letting it spill to her feet. She hesitates, turns slowly towards the pine wardrobe and stares at herself in the glass.

  * * *

  I’m fat. I’m thirty-five years old and I’m fat. I raise my eyes to the glass and a fat, hopeless woman stares back at me. She follows me everywhere, watches me from the mirrors, stalks my shadow on the street. She wears those stupid Mothercare frocks and big, shapeless sweaters. She doesn’t even fit her shoes – she wears an old pair of Reeboks to give her ankles some support. She looks ridiculous in her clothes but she’s most disgusting when naked. Look at her pinching those thighs. Look at the size of that stomach! Her legs are too short. Her knees are wrong. Her buttocks quiver when she walks. Disgusting. Grotesque.

  No one understands this misery. They tell you to be content with yourself. They tell you that natural beauty shines out from the soul and magically lights up your face. They tell you that beauty has many disguises. They’re wrong. Beauty is always size ten.

  My body has always been a problem. When I was a child my mother said that I had big bones. At school they called me Clumsy. Other women seek me out and preen themselves in my company. I make them look lean and graceful. I make them beautiful. They use me as a scapegoat and trust me with their secrets.

  Men have their own vocabulary, a secret language that masks disgust. They flirt with me but they sleep with skeletons, seeking the mortification of flesh. My excess excites them to loathing. At a party last Christmas one of Jack’s friends caught me in the kitchen with a bowl of Russian salad. He said something to me. He slapped my rump like a butcher smacking a side of beef. He expected me to laugh. He expected me to feel flattered by his attention. His wife is so thin that it hurts.

  I know Jack loves me. But I don’t let him look at me in the bath. We undress in the dark. I’ve tried to protect him from the truth. Since he brought me to live in this house I’ve gained more than thirty pounds. Sometimes I can sense the house mocking me with its prim little rooms and staircase. These windows magnify the sunlight. The walls shudder against my weight. It’s a size-ten house.

  I’ve tried to lose weight but I get so hungry. Sometimes I think I’m addicted to food. And when I eat I can feel it poison me. I crave chilli con carne, butter chicken with peanut sauce, hamburgers, meat loaf, spare ribs and cheese toast. I gorge on chocolate puddings, biscuits, meringues, ice creams, syllabubs and custards.

  I’ve tried everything. The liquid protein diet. The Pritikin diet. The high-fibre diet. The Englebardt diet. The Beverly Hills pineapple diet. The Think Yourself Skinny diet. Exercise. Meditation. Hypnotherapy. Hydrotherapy. What’s wrong with me? Nothing satisfies my hunger. Nothing stifles the desire. Successful women make living seem so effortless. They fit their bodies. They have perfect teeth. This is it. This time it has to work. Your last chance to change your life.

  * * *

  The kitchen, equipped with fitted cupboards, is five paces long and two paces wide. A set of tube lights, concealed beneath the cabinets, casts a yellow glow on a counter filled with bottles and jars, an earthenware jug holding wooden spoons, a toaster, radio, chopping board, electric kettle and pile of tattered recipe books. The window above the steel sink provides a view of the garden, with its shaved lawns and tall, featherboard fences. An empty bird feeder on a metal pole stands in the centre of the lawn, throwing a shadow towards the house.

  Holly, wrapped in Jack’s dressing gown, stands at the counter to measure her breakfast. She takes her box of Original Bran Flakes from one of the cupboards and shakes the cereal into a cup. It looks like fried potato peelings. She turns the cup into a blue-and-white bowl and lifts the bowl to her face, hoping to catch a faint biscuit smell escaping from the brittle flakes. They smell of nothing. She steals one of the flakes and chews it while she scoops raisins from a pot-bellied Kilner jar and turns them into the bowl. The bran flake softens against her teeth, disintegrates into chopped straw. When she tries to swallow it down the fibres catch in her throat.

  She opens the fridge and, closing her eyes against temptation, plucks at a carton of skimmed milk. She measures half a cup of thin, blue milk into the cereal bowl and, before she can eat, makes a careful record of this meagre breakfast in a child’s red exercise book, stubbornly scratching on the hairy paper with a dry ballpoint pen.

  That’s two hundred calories taken from her daily allowance. She counts them again and sets them against her thousand-calorie ration. If she can manage on a thousand calories a day she’ll lose a couple of pounds in a week. That’s how it works. When you don’t eat you starve. When you starve you lose weight. Your body begins to eat itself.

  She returns to her bran flakes and already she regrets her decision. She could have chosen a small boiled egg and a slice of plain toast. She could have made the dieters’ fruit bowl with an orange and some grapefruit segments.

  Her favourite breakfast – a luxu
ry she enjoys on Saturday mornings when they have time to spare and Jack, still exhausted from the office, wraps himself in newspaper and falls asleep on the living room sofa – is a thick slice of ham with fried eggs and lots of those little potato-and-cheese cakes still sizzling from the frying pan, with the cheese just starting to leak through the crust of breadcrumbs, and a glass of chilled orange juice followed by strong, sweet coffee and hot muffins drenched with butter and glazed with honey. The perfect breakfast. A breakfast to comfort and cradle the senses.

  Her stomach growls with hunger and her mouth tastes sour. Resentment pinches her face and in a sudden rush of anger she wants to throw the cereal bowl into the sink and search the fridge for eggs and potatoes, mushrooms and bacon. She moves from the counter and hesitates, catching sight of the mad woman’s reflection watching her through the window.

  She picks up her spoon and starts to eat.

  * * *

  Jack usually picks up breakfast on his way into the office. He parks the car beneath the Prancer Johnson building and returns briefly to the street, where he slips into a sandwich bar for something to take to his desk. He likes to stop at the Five Star for a Belly Buster doughnut or the Hungry Dog Ham and Egg sandwich special. He loves the atmosphere of the Five Star – the clatter of cutlery, the smells of grilled bacon and boiled soup, the exploding steam from the giant espresso machines, the spatter and smoke from the broiler plates, the glimmer of brightly coloured pastries, sulphur-yellow sponge cake and scarlet fruit tarts, seen through the sweating glass of the chill cabinets. He loves the chattering secretaries and impatient young businessmen who crowd the counter. He loves the energy of the city. It was Holly who wanted to get away and make a new life in the suburbs. The travel doesn’t bother him. He can reach the office in an hour and he appreciates the long summer evenings when he can get home and catch the last few hours of sunlight in the little garden, standing in his shirtsleeves with a glass of wine in hand and the warm turf beneath his feet.

  This morning he buys an apple doughnut and walks briskly back to Prancer Johnson. Holly scolds him for eating junk but he never seems to gain weight. He’s forty-three years old and as trim as he was at twenty. He enters the building through the etched-glass doors, waves to the security guard, takes the lift to the fourth floor and walks the length of a corridor until he reaches a small, neat office with his name on the door.

  The room is furnished with a glass-topped desk and a pair of chrome-and-leather chairs. A framed photograph of Holly stands on the desk, competing for attention with a telephone, a bundle of trade journals, an ashtray filled with paperclips, a black plastic pen-and-pencil tray and a small silver calendar in the shape of an open book. Glass shelves on the opposite wall display the premium range of Prancer Johnson home enhancement products: Whoops! Stubborn Stain Remover, Swirl! Toilet Deodorant, the new improved Dust Buster, and Mr Perfect Instant Shine. Jack has special responsibilities for Whoops! The new, foam-action pump-gun has done better than anyone expected against the original aerosol can with its old-fashioned ozone stripper. The surfactant is less destructive than many of its rivals and Jack will tell you that Whoops! has a deeply deodorizing effect on carpets and fabrics. It’s a good product and he’s proud to be part of the team.

  He settles down at his desk, checks his diary, tears open the paper bag and starts to savage the doughnut as Felicity brings him a cup of hot coffee. They’ve worked together for five years and in all that time he’s never asked her to make him coffee, but she makes it for him anyway and now he depends upon it. She’s a good secretary and knows more about his strengths and weaknesses than he cares to admit. She’s twenty-six years old, tall and elegant, with a confidence he has grown to admire. Last year, when they had been under all that pressure about the child-proof locking caps, she had rescued him from a team of crusading journalists and even written the press release. It took sharp wits and cold nerves. He’d been impressed. Since that time he’s trusted her with more of the work and kept her involved in any new developments.

  Felicity places the cup on his desk and looks at his diary, leaning forward, hooking her dark hair behind her ears. She’s wearing a white silk blouse beneath her jacket. A steel tiepin at her throat.

  ‘The ten-fifteen on flexible time management has been cancelled again. The two-thirty has been moved to three-thirty and your lunch with Media Monitor has been carried to Friday.’

  ‘Friday is lunch with the people from Elliott-Shiner,’ he says, swallowing doughnut and quickly wiping his chin.

  ‘They’ve been moved to Tuesday next week,’ she says, flicking the page and tapping the entry with a fingernail. Her perfume is caught in the draught and lifted gently into his face. He likes that. The intimate spicy warmth that evaporates from this well-dressed woman.

  ‘That’s good,’ he says, smiling, instinctively casting a glance at her legs as she walks to the door, retreating to her own small office along the corridor. ‘Thanks.’

  He drinks his coffee while he checks through the bundle of trade journals and then spends the rest of the morning preparing his report on market share predictions for the second generation of advanced stain removers already taking shape on the drawing board. It’s fascinating work. The time passes quickly.

  At twelve-thirty Harry Ludlow wanders up from the third floor, grunts at Jack and sinks, sprawling, into a low leather chair. Harry has special responsibilities for Swirl! and before Prancer Johnson they both worked for Procter & Gamble. They’ve known each other a long time. He’s a couple of years younger than Jack but his wife, Katy, is the same age as Holly and the four of them like to spend time together at weekends whenever they can arrange it, which is less often since they made the move to the suburbs.

  ‘Can I take you to lunch?’ Harry asks, lurching forward to pull a magazine from the desk. He’s heavier than Jack and whenever he stretches an arm his shirt tightens against his paunch. He walks like a bulldog, his chest pushed out and his legs bending slightly beneath his weight. He gives an impression of strength and durability, a street fighter in a business suit.

  Jack glances up in surprise. ‘I thought you were supposed to be in a big meeting with the regional directors for the rest of the day.’

  ‘They couldn’t make it,’ says Harry, pulling open the magazine and smacking it shut again. He seems nervous, glancing towards the open door at every movement in the corridor. ‘Are you hungry?’ He flings the magazine into the lap of the opposite chair and straightens his spine, pumping out his chest, bracing his hands against his knees as if preparing to jump to his feet. ‘Let’s try that new Mexican place on the corner.’

  ‘Good idea,’ says Jack, pleased with the invitation. He told Holly about the Media Monitor lunch and unless he phones home to tell her it’s cancelled she won’t be planning to cook tonight.

  * * *

  The restaurant has been designed to look like a Mexican bar and canteen. The floor has been stripped to bare boards. The walls are rough plaster washed with sun-bleached shades of distemper. Candles flicker at varnished tables. They enter from the glare of the street and stand, frowning into the gloom, ceiling fans whisking above their heads. The place is busy but they find a table in a corner and a waiter takes their order for drinks. Harry wants a tequila. Jack settles for thin, yellow beer.

  ‘When are you coming to visit? Holly is always telling me to invite you down for the weekend,’ says Jack as they try to make sense of the big plastic menu cards.

  Popocatépetl Velvet: We take fat ripe avocados whip them into a frenzy with plenty of tomato garlic and chilli season with coriander and lime juice and leave it to chill out before we serve it up for your delite with a big pile of crunchy corn chips guaranteed to make you ride tall in the saddle.

  Thunder over the Alamo: We take the best cuts of tender prime lean beef carefully shredded and gently pan-fried with fat ol’ sun-kissed tomato and secret hot spices stirred into an authentic cauldron of chuck wagon beans and left to stew in their own juices until
they taste just-the-way-you-like-’em.

  ‘It’s a question of time,’ sighs Harry, gazing around the restaurant. He presses the menu against his chest like a shield. ‘Life. You know. It gets complicated.’ He swigs his tequila and grinds his teeth on the taste. ‘We’ll make it one of these days,’ he adds, forcing a smile.

  ‘You’re always welcome,’ says Jack gently.

  ‘I’ll get Katy to fix a date.’

  They order guacamole and bowls of chilli and Harry asks for another shot of tequila. When the food arrives they eat in silence. Jack watches his old friend scooping at the guacamole and flipping corn chips into his mouth. He can sense that something is wrong by the way Harry avoids his eye and concentrates on the food. Harry loves to talk. He’ll talk to anyone. But he’s just sitting here looking hunted, shoulders hunched and shadows like bruising under his eyes.

  ‘What is it, Harry? You look terrible.’

  Harry loads a corn chip with avocado glue and watches it fall apart in his hands. He stares mournfully at the mess on his fingers and pushes the fingers into his mouth. ‘I haven’t been sleeping,’ he says, at last, wiping his hands on a paper napkin printed with a cartoon Mexican bandit, gap-toothed and grinning under a large and wilted sombrero. The same bandit beams from the menu and the pockets of the waiters’ aprons.

  ‘Is that it?’

  Harry looks uncomfortable and spends a few moments picking at the broken corn chips on his plate. ‘Well, no, actually I wanted to bring you out to lunch, I suppose, so that we could have a talk …’

  The sound of Gene Autry comes rattling through a set of speakers suspended from the ceiling:

  I’m back in the saddle again

  Out where a friend is a friend