Nothing but Trouble

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

A RAINBOW OF colour filled the church at Edith’s funeral. Red hats, blue skirts, yellow jumpers—I’d requested nobody wore black, and everyone enthusiastically heeded the brief. Edith wouldn’t have wanted it to be a sombre affair. The coffin I’d chosen may have been slightly unorthodox, but hot pink had been her favourite colour, and she’d have appreciated the floral tour of the world decorating the lid.

We started off with her favourite hymn, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” then moved onto the readings. Tears ran down my cheeks as I spoke, and by the time I got to the final line of my eulogy, half the church was sniffing. We finished up by singing “Get the Party Started” by Pink, which was the song Edith lived by.

I couldn’t believe that this would be the last knees-up she’d ever attend.

The wake started off a bit quiet, but once the band struck up, people began to smile a little. The four-piece came from the old folks’ home down the road. Not one of them was under seventy, but they put groups half their age to shame.

I tried to get into the party spirit, but I couldn’t manage it. In the end, I hid away in the kitchen of the church hall to block out the celebration of Edith’s life coming from the other side of the wall. Things were starting to wind down when one of Edith’s bridge buddies, Albert, found me sitting there, staring into a cup of tea as if it held all the answers to life.

“Not coming out to join in the party?” he asked. Albert reminded me of a Bassett hound—he had the same droopy face and always managed to look doleful.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand how people can celebrate. I know it’s what Edith would have wanted, but I’m not in the mood for fun.”

He dragged a chair up beside me and propped an arm on his walking stick as he lowered his behind to the seat. “At our age, we need to take advantage of these opportunities while we can. Nobody’s quite sure which one of us will be next.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

He stared into space for a few seconds while he sucked on his dentures. “I’ve been meaning to come and find you. Do you have time to pop round later for a chat?”

“What about?”

I didn’t know Albert very well. We’d bumped into each other over the years, usually when Edith had drunk one too many glasses of sherry and I’d had to give her a hand to get home, but we’d never had more than a casual conversation. I couldn’t imagine what he might want to talk to me about.

“It's something Edith asked me to do, if she left this earth before she planned to.”

Curiosity nibbled at me, but I could also picture Barry tapping his foot as he watched the second hand sweep around the clock above his desk.

“Okay, but it’ll have to be this evening. My boss isn’t very understanding about people having a personal life.”

“Not planning to go anywhere.” He wheezed a little and covered his mouth as he coughed. “I tend to be in bed by nine, though.”

“I’ll be there before six.”

Barry gave me a dirty look when I walked in just after one. I could tell from his glare he was itching to say something, but as he got halfway out of his chair his mother came in with his lunch, and she’d clip him round the ear if she heard him being so insensitive. Thank goodness for small mercies.

Jaz gave me a tight smile as she tried and failed to get a word in edgeways with her caller, and slid a cupcake over as I sat down. She had a habit of turning to food for comfort so it was her way of trying to cheer me up. She knew how much burying Edith would have upset me.

“Thanks,” I mouthed, even if I didn’t feel like eating.

Hollow inside, I drifted through the afternoon on autopilot. If someone asked me to recall a single conversation I’d had, I would have failed miserably, and I doubted the notes I jotted in the comment boxes on the screen made much sense either.

Tick, tick, tick—as five thirty approached, I was clock-watching more obsessively than Barry. The instant I finished my final call, I was out of the door before he could mention the word “overtime.” Jaz hurried along beside me with her heels clicking on the pavement. She hated flats and proudly boasted that even her trainers had platform soles.

“When you’re five feet tall, you need all the help you can get,” she’d once said.

My wardrobe contained a single pair of stilettos. I’d worn them precisely once. On that occasion, I’d nearly broken my ankle trying to climb a set of stairs, and as I’d flung out my arms in a desperate attempt to save myself, I’d accidentally groped the crotch of a man on his way down. Mortified didn’t begin to cover it. Now Satan’s favourite footwear languished at the back of my closet, never to see the light of day. I was more of a ballet pump type of girl.

“Are you going to be okay on your own this evening?” Jaz asked.

“Yes.” No. “I’ll manage.”

She laid a hand on my arm. “I can stay with you if you want. Amir can deal with Stevie for a night.”

“I’m going to visit a friend of Edith’s, then I just want to crawl into bed.”

“Have you got wine?”

I nodded. Edith had always kept an emergency supply in the cupboard under the stairs, and I’d say this qualified as an emergency.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be Barry’s evening to get hit by a bus.”

She said that every night. I lived in hope.

Albert lived in a big, old detached house two streets away. It was far too big for one person, but according to Edith, he couldn’t bear to part with the place where he’d brought up his family. He simply shut off half the rooms so it was cheaper to heat and enjoyed the home he’d lived in for more than half a century.

I rang the bell, an old-fashioned one hanging from a long chain, and waited for him to answer. And waited. And waited. Eventually, I heard the shuffle shuffle tap, shuffle shuffle tap of him coming along the hallway. The door creaked as it swung open, and Albert ushered me into the dimly lit vestibule.

“Cup of tea, or something stronger?”

“Do I need something stronger?” I still couldn’t fathom what he wanted to talk to me about.

Rather than answer, he headed for the lounge, where he paused in front of an old-fashioned drinks cabinet and poured me a whisky. Four fingers. Neat.

Uh oh.

“How about we talk in my study?”

How about I go home and hibernate for six months or so? “Sure, wherever you want.”

He settled himself behind a massive desk and straightened the row of pens sitting on the jotter in front of him. Come on, speak. I perched on the edge of the seat opposite him, waiting.

“I don’t know how much Edith told you about me?”

“Not a lot,” I admitted.

“Did you know I was her lawyer as well as her bridge partner?”

I shook my head, feeling a sudden dread. Was this about me living in her house?

“My son’s taken over the firm now, but it still says ‘Thomas and Thomas’ on the sign.” His eyes took on a wistful look as he stared at a spot above my head. “Those were the days. Standing up in front of the judge, picking apart the prosecution piece by piece. Closest I get to a courtroom nowadays is watching Judge Judy. Of course...”

Please, get to the point. My knuckles were already white from gripping the wooden arms of the chair.

“I had to defend some real pieces of scum,” he continued. “Always felt secretly pleased when one of them got sent down. As long as my fees got paid, of course.” He shook his head and re-focused on me. “So, where were we? Oh yes, Edith.”

I barely managed to nod my head in agreement.

“A couple of years ago, Edith asked me to draft her will for her. Did she ever mention it to you?”

“No.”

“I thought not.” He chuckled. “I’d better tell you what it says, then.”

He reached into his desk drawer and came out with a long, cream envelope. My heart beat a crazy tattoo as he slit the envelope open with a letter opener and took out a folded piece of paper and a smaller envelope.

“Edith thought of you as family, you know. She used to talk about you all the time.”

“She was family to me, too,” I choked out. “I was closer to her than anyone else in my life.”

“She said as much. She was so proud when you graduated from university.”

I knew that. She’d come to my graduation in a pink cocktail dress, clutching a jeroboam of champagne. It took a bit of convincing to stop her from spraying it everywhere.

“But she worried about you,” he continued. “She said you don’t get out enough. That you spend most of your spare time with your nose in a book. She wanted you to go places and experience things for yourself, not read about somebody else doing it. But more than anything, she wanted you to meet yourself a nice fellow and settle down.”

“She tried to help with that on several occasions.”

“I heard. She always said she hoped you’d meet your John. Your soulmate. We used to play badminton together, you know, John and I. Smart man. Made his money by inventing some widget that went in photocopiers. My firm helped with the patents.”

Edith had never mentioned photocopiers. She just said he was an engineer. “I think meeting the right person’s harder than she thought.”

“It is if you don’t get out there and try.” He unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out. “She said if anything ever happened to her, I was to give you a nudge in the right direction.”

What did he mean? I held my breath as his eyes scanned the document. Would Edith have left me a keepsake to remember her by?

“Edith left everything to you...” Albert said.

I could barely breathe. Everything? As in, her house? It was huge, five bedrooms, an acre of land, even a swimming pool, although that hadn’t been used in years. Surely there had to be a catch?

He continued, “On one condition.”

I was right.

“W-w-what’s the condition?”

He slid the smaller of the two envelopes over to me. “You have a list of tasks to complete. A bucket list, if you like, albeit one that Edith chose rather than you. You’ve got a year to finish. If you don’t manage it, all her assets get donated to the RSPCA.”

I had trouble processing his words. My mouth opened and shut several times, like a fish out of water, which in all honesty was exactly what I was. Far, far, far out of my depth. For years I’d lived in my little bubble, and now Edith was trying to force me out of it from beyond the grave.

Albert saw my discomfort and gave me an encouraging smile. “It’s quite a good list, if I may say so. I think you’ll have a lot of fun if you accept the challenge.”

I didn’t have a lot of choice, did I? Edith had made it that way. If I let the opportunity pass me by, I’d be homeless, but if I managed to complete the tasks, I’d get to take an escalator right to the top of the property ladder, something I couldn’t dream of on my salary otherwise. Trust Edith to do something like this. She always said she knew I’d get more adventurous, but I didn’t realise this was what she had in mind.

“Can I see the list?”

“Only if you accept.”

I took a deep breath as I made a life-changing decision. Edith wouldn’t have planned something horrible, would she? Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I feared. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said, so quietly I could hardly hear myself.

Albert grinned, which was a little disturbing as his teeth slipped forwards. “I thought you would. I’ll also mention that Edith’s been keeping the rent and grocery money you paid her over the years aside. You’re to use it to help in your quest.”

What, all of it? I did some mental calculations. I’d paid a hundred pounds a week, plus fifty pounds for food and bills, for the last three and a half years. When I first moved in, Edith said she didn’t want the money, but I’d insisted. If my rusty mental arithmetic was correct, there had to be over twenty-five thousand pounds.

“That’s crazy!”

“Not really. Edith needed your company, not your money. There was a fortune to be made in photocopiers, and John hit the market at just the right time. He left Edith very comfortable. You can keep living in the house for the next year, and her estate will settle the utility bills.”

I was in a daze as I left Albert’s house, clutching the envelope. I still hadn’t looked inside. I wanted to, but at the same time, I didn’t dare. At least not until I’d opened that bottle of wine...