Heathers Busy Week Pt 04

CHAPTER SEVEN

(Sunday, 21st April 2002)

'Guess what?' said Rita as she came back into the waiting room. 'Alex won't leave his sister's side. You'll have to go one at a time.'

'I'd better go last.' Mother smiled. 'I might have to drag him out by the ear.'

The nurse had a put-upon air about her now, doubtless thanks to Alex. Heather followed her through a maze of corridors and into a small room. Or maybe it seemed small because it was packed with machinery.

'I'll knock after five minutes,' the nurse said, pulling the door to.

There was a hospital bed in the middle of the room. Alex was kneeling beside it on the only free patch of floor, holding Carrie's hand. He didn't look up when Heather arrived and she had no idea what to say. Instead of babbling something inane she stood in the wings, taking in the scene.

Machines everywhere. And brand-spanking-new machines at that. God only knew what they were all for, but they had to be minutely monitoring every bodily function known to man- and womankind. She switched her attention to the figure in the bed. Carrie's mouth was covered by an oxygen mask. There was a spaghetti junction of tubes and wires around her, a few of them attached to visible parts, others sprouting from under the bedsheets. The only piece of kit Heather recognized for certain was a good, old-fashioned drip.

Carrie was, as the doctor had warned, sedated. Her chest was moving steadily and, as far as Heather could tell, all about her was stable. She tried to recall anything Dr Strickland had said about treatment, but couldn't. He had said everything had been going in the wrong direction at first, though. So surely the treatment would be to stop the trends and then reverse them until they went back to normal? She edged closer and peered at the machine displays. It was hard to tell, not knowing what the machines were or what was "normal", but at least all the readings were steady.

Only then, having exhausted the room's supply of mysteries and possibilities, did reality sink in.

Good grief, I'm going to shag the twins' mother!

The thought of backing out never occurred. She didn't do backing out. And besides, she was wetting herself already. As per always. Talk about excited.

The rap on the door couldn't have come soon enough. Muttering, 'I'll see you back there,' to Alex, she again followed the nurse and effectively swapped places with Mother, who set off with purpose in her stride.

'Well?' said Rita.

'Well what? How do I think she's doing? It's hard to say, but she looks okay. And I didn't get a word out of Alex. He's either praying or communicating with her by ESP.'

'I don't mean Carrie, I mean her mother. And don't try to hand me off. She started drooling the moment she clapped eyes on you.'

'Did she?' said Heather, innocently.

'Hev . . . this is me, Rita. I know a hot and horny dyke when I see one. And that dyke is more than ready to self-combust.'

'Rita, she's at her daughter's bedside. Her very seriously ill daughter's bedside. I doubt she's thinking about anything else right now. And she's probably not a dyke, anyway.'

'I was watching her face. When Doctor Sexy-Arse said Carrie had pulled through, unscathed, she crossed herself. Then she devoured you with those wicked eyes of hers. Like it or lump it, babe, you are her preferred option for celebrating good news.'

'Sorry Rita, but you're imagining this.'

'So she didn't get you alone in here to make propositions?'

'No.'

'You'll be sleeping with me and Alex tonight, then?'

'I can't, I need an early night.'

'Bollocks!'

Heather had to laugh.

And Rita couldn't keep up the confrontational front. 'I'm not saying I wouldn't go for it myself,' she said, 'I wouldn't rule it out altogether. But isn't she a bit old?'

'I'll answer that tomorrow. Here's the cover story for Alex. His mother has booked into a hotel but doesn't know where it is. She doesn't trust local taxi drivers, either. Armed with multiple black belts, I see it as my duty to escort her. You meanwhile, need a hot curry as a matter of urgency . . .'

'This is going to cost you, Heather Hunter. Whatever happens with you and Alex next Friday, I want at least five more dates.'

'Five! On top of Wednesday?'

'Yes, and not months apart.'

'Have you missed me that much?'

'Frankly, yes. I want at least six nights of passion. So do you. I've seen the look on your face, never mind the light in your eyes.'

Six nights! Heather though. Then, returning Rita's smile: Well, why not? She hasn't got a willy, has she? I won't be breaking any rules.

'Oh all right then,' she said aloud. 'I'll try to fit 'em all into a fortnight. Somehow.'

'Promise?'

'Promise.'

Rita held out her fist and Heather bumped knuckles, sealing the deal once and forever.

The door opened without a knock this time. Mother led a reluctant-looking Alex inside. 'We can't stay here all night, but there's one last thing I need to clear up before we go,' she said. 'I'm sorry to ask, Rita, but is Alex telling the truth when he swears he doesn't do drugs?'

'Hand on heart, Mrs H, I've never seen any sign of anything like that. He hardly even drinks beer.'

'And is he on track to graduate?'

'That's even easier to answer. We're on the same course and he's the class swot. I'm hoping to get a good 2.1. He's nailed on for first-class honours.'

'Thank you for that. I'll be able to sleep now.'

To her credit Rita didn't bite at that little opportunity. Or even flinch. 'Ring us a taxi,' she said to Alex. 'I desperately need a Taj curry.'

'I'm sure we could stay here overnight,' Alex objected. 'If we asked nicely . . .'

'Alex,' his mother said, all steel in a silk glove, 'the doctor told me she has one-on-one care. She's wired up to enough technology to run an aircraft carrier. And you, my young man, are exhausted. Go have your curry and then get yourself to bed. That is an order.'

He smiled wanly. 'The Taj is the best curry house in town. Are you coming with us?'

'No. Heather's very kindly going to show me to my hotel and I'm going to crash out. I'll see you back here in the morning. No earlier than nine o'clock, mind.'

Alex didn't seem to think twice about Heather's act of kindness. He rang a cab as they tried to find their way back to the main entrance. 'It'll be here in ten minutes,' he said, ringing off.

'Ours is coming in fifteen,' Heather said, stashing her mobile.

They made it outside just in time for the first taxi.

'Have a nice vindaloo,' Heather said as Rita climbed in the back.

'Sleep well,' Rita said in reply.

*****

Following Heather's directions their cabbie took them to a restaurant that was indeed small, intimate and off the beaten track. As they pulled up outside the owner waved at her. Heather waved back and raised two fingers the well-mannered way. He nodded and gestured for them to come in. Satisfied their table had been secured, she paid the cabbie and led Mother inside.

'Mario,' she said in greeting.

'Miss Hunter,' he said in reply.

'How many times, Mario? I'm Heather to you.'

'Yes, Miss Hunter. Anything you say.' Grinning broadly, he ushered them to a place in the farthest corner of the room. 'Shiraz to help you with your selection?'

Heather glanced at her companion who smiled assent. While Mario went to organize menus Heather leant across the table. 'What should I call you? Mrs Hart sounds . . .'

'I'm Eleanor,' Mother said, smiling. 'Although I have been known romantically as Ellie.'

'I think Eleanor's a great name. It's very sexy. And I bet it is sexier still in romantic situations.'

The wine waiter arrived with a litre carafe of red. When he poured a mouthful into Heather's glass she passed it across. 'You try it. It's the house staple, but I think it's great.'

Eleanor gave her approval and, as the waiter left, Mario hand-delivered the menus.

'Excuse my rudeness before,' Heather said. 'Eleanor, this is Mario. Depending on his mood he's either the manager or the owner. Mario, this is my friend Eleanor. I'm not telling you her surname because you'd only start calling her "Miss".'

'Pleased to meet you, Miss Eleanor,' Mario said, grinning again and oozing charm.

They all laughed and he left them to select. 'It's basic Italian,' Heather said, 'but that's not to say the food isn't excellent.'

'I take it you come here a lot.'

'At least once a week.'

'Is that why you get in dressed like a student while everyone else is up to the nines?'

'The other diners aren't usually as smart as this.' Heather tried not to feel conspicuous. 'Must be because it's Sunday. Anyway, don't worry about it. We're in, aren't we?'

'Okay. The rest of today is officially worry-free. What would you recommend?'

Heather studied the menu, as if she really needed absorb the finest details. 'I'm predictable when I order here, but the minestrone is to die for. So is the bread that comes with it. And as for the parmesan . . .'

'I'll have the same then. What about mains?'

'Fillet steak with pepper sauce.'

Eleanor raised her eyebrows. 'That sounds more French than Italian.'

'The sauce is a special Italian version. So is the way they cook the steak.'

'You've sold me. Sweets?'

'I always try to pretend I won't want one, so I look at the sweet trolley later.'

Order placed, they clinked already half-empty glasses.

'I hope you don't think I'm hard-hearted about Carrie,' Eleanor began. 'I know I haven't given her much sympathy.'

'The way I see it you broke records getting here. It takes me longer to get home to Kettlewell.'

'To the farm, you mean?'

'No, dad sold the farm eight years ago.'

'That sounds rather drastic. Had he had it long?'

'All his life. He was the sixth generation of Hunters to farm that land. I'm the entire seventh generation, but I retired from farming when I was thirteen.'

Eleanor's eyes widened at that. Maybe in surprise. 'It must have been a wrench for your dad,' she said.

'He had no choice. Well, he insisted I had a say, seeing as everything was meant to come to me. But although it was supposed to be boom time, debts were piling up. Supermarkets were slashing prices . . . to suppliers, that is, not consumers. Dad was on his uppers. Then, out of nowhere, a major house builder made an offer for the land. It was too good to refuse. The silly old bugger shouldn't have worked again. He should have just sat back watching the interest as it piled up. He tried that for about a fortnight. Then he got a labouring job on another farm. Before we knew it, he was working sixty hours a week.'

Eleanor's smile was bewitching. 'So you are now a rich man's daughter.'

'I suppose I am. He hardly ever spends anything, though, unless it's on me. He always says I have to inherit more than he made from the sale.'

'Don't tell me, he's paying your way through university.'

'He's helped a lot. That's been a lot cheaper than the private school, come to think of it.'

'All girls?'

'But of course. You too?'

'No such luck,' said Eleanor. 'I went through a three-tier state system. Village primary first. Then off to the nearby town for middle and final.' Her eyes twinkled yet again as her hand moved under the table, landing on Heather's knee. 'I found out a lot about myself at middle school.'

Heather was afraid her thong was reaching saturation point. Already! 'Please tell me more,' she said. 'I'm very intrigued.'

'Bear in mind we were children of the 1960s, even those of us born in the late 1950s. We had grown up with The Beatles storming the world. Flower Power was everywhere you looked. So was that horrible war in Vietnam. I started middle school in 1970 and my overriding memory is of the smell of joss sticks in the air. The schoolyards were full of would-be hippies, although I doubt any of them ever actually smoked a joint.' Eleanor hesitated. 'Have you ever smoked a joint, Heather?'

'Once or twice at school.' Heather admitted, conscious of Eleanor's hand moving up from her knee to her thigh. 'At the private school, I mean,' she added. 'One of the other girls insisted we all shared whenever she had pot. That wasn't often, though. I've significantly cut down since I've been at uni.'

She crossed her fingers behind her back as she said that. True, she had cut down at uni, but Mary Rose had always had pot. They could have been crawling through the Sahara, camels dead miles behind them, water supplies long gone, and Mary Rose would have produced a spliff from somewhere.

If not two or three.

'I used to walk round the biggest yard with friends,' Eleanor resumed. 'We liked to look at the third years in their colourful Afghans, trying to tell the boys from the girls. Then one day I saw her. She was sitting cross-legged on the asphalt with a circle of mates. I can still see her now, clear as day. Well, I can see her face; the rest of her was hidden under typical hippy clothes. She was a dead-ringer for Ursula Andress and I didn't know what was happening to me. I'd never felt any attraction to girls before.'

Their soups arrived and they divvied up the bread and made big inroads into the parmesan. Then, after agreeing everything was as fantastic as advertised, Eleanor proved she could talk politely as she ate.

'My friends soon realized why I wanted to hang around the same bit of yard, but most of them thought I fancied one of the boys. I let them keep thinking that, but Kimberly was quicker than the rest. She collared me and said I was wasting my time. "Ursula" was fourteen, she told me. I wasn't even twelve yet. And "Ursula" was going out with one of the boys in her little gang of hippies. She wouldn't be interested in me even if I was older. So I pulled myself together. Told myself it was just a bit of an aberration. Avoided that particular yard altogether.

'Then suddenly Christmas was coming and there was a disco for first years only. I don't think many of us had been to a disco before. The DJ probably hadn't, either. To start with he played whatever he was asked to play, so we got the Jackson 5 time after time, interspersed with Spirit in the Sky and Band of Gold. And the dancing wasn't particularly mixed. The boys only danced to their requests and scarpered when the likes of ABC came on. I'd like to say the girls were more daring, but we were all dancing in our own groups, too. And then, out of thin air, the DJ went for it and played slower numbers. Amazingly, seeing as we were only eleven or twelve, a few boy/girl couples started smooching That encouraged more and more girls to pair off and join in. In girl/girl pairs, I mean. Most of the boys didn't want to know.'

'Typical enough,' Heather observed. 'At that age, I mean.'

'I cannot but agree.' Eleanor's smile was wistful 'Anyway, the dance floor was as full as it had been all night when Kimberly grabbed me. She just had to dance to Stoned Love, she said. It was an unwritten law. And by that she meant dancing closer than close. I didn't mind at all. I liked the contact and, best of all, I liked the way our bodies moved together. Towards the end, when they lowered the lights, Kimberly whispered something into my ear. I couldn't hear for the music, so she said it again, much louder, and this time I did understand. She was saying she wasn't too old for me. And she wasn't interested in going out with boys.

'Then the lights went out altogether and the DJ was announcing the last record. We've Only Just Begun. Odd for a last record but perfect for a first kiss.'

Eleanor had removed her hand while she tackled her minestrone. It returned as soon as she put down her spoon, bypassing Heather's knee, settling high up on her leg. Very, very high up on her leg.

Good grief, thought Heather, I'm so excited!

'We had an awkward romance,' Eleanor continued. 'It might be awkward nowadays, but trust me, it was tricky back then. Just think about it. Women were second-class citizens. Pubs and clubs could refuse to serve a woman right up until 1982. As for homosexuality . . . Well, it was made legal for men over twenty-one in 1967. Nobody seemed to know if it was legal or not for girls.'

'Lesbian sex never has been illegal,' Heather said, hoping she didn't sound like a know-it-all. 'Parliament set the age of consent at sixteen somewhere in the 1920s. Before then age didn't matter. Not for us lezzies. Some say Queen Victoria didn't believe women could have sex together; that it was physically impossible. So in 1885, when they upped age of consent for straight people, lesbians got missed out. That's almost certainly a myth, by the way. Kings and queens haven't set laws for hundreds of years.'

'Well we didn't know that in the 1970s.' Eleanor smiled and inched her hand a teensy-weeny bit higher up Heather's suddenly sweaty thigh. 'And our schoolmates didn't make it easy for us. We got away with that first kiss but, because we started shadowing each other all over the place, we were soon being called "lesbos". We agreed we didn't care. But it went on and on until Kimberly couldn't hack it. After a month or two she found a reason to fall out with me and that was it. She didn't speak to me for over four years.'

'Sic transit gloria mundi.' Heather grinned. Dead languages had life in them yet.

'Not forever,' said Eleanor. We were thrown together again in the sixth form. By then I thought I was straight, and so did she. Apparently. When we found ourselves in the same classes . . . in the same very small classes. . . I was glad she seemed to have forgotten our falling out. We didn't spend much of our free time in each other's company, but we got on pretty well. Before we knew it the 1975 Christmas disco rolled around. Of course that was much more grownup than the one we'd had in our first year. The music was a lot better too, if you could blank out The Bay City Rollers. It helped that everyone had had a drink or two. There wasn't a bar, but it seemed like everyone went somewhere before, even if it was only the nearest offy.

'Anyway, I was enjoying it, listening to Slade and Wizzard. I remember asking myself if those two Christmas songs were going to get played every year forever.' Eleanor laughed. 'That was the third year in a row that they'd been played and played again. What's it been this time? Twenty-nine or thirty? That's forever, isn't it?'

'I think we're stuck with them,' Heather agreed.

'So there I was, humming along, and Kimberly grabbed me, just like before. She said I'm Not in Love was on next, and she just had to dance to it. It was another unwritten law. I asked her where her date was and she pointed out a drunk snoring in a remote corner. So we danced close and the lights were already as good as out. And once they started, the songs for close dancing kept on coming. I think we'd got to Three Steps to Heaven when she kissed me. Holy God only knows what was on when we finally stopped.'

The mains came and there was little talking while they tucked in. Heather waited until their plates had been taken away before asking: 'What happened next?'

'We started shadowing each other again. And this time there wasn't any falling out. By the 1976 disco we were both eighteen. My parents were away that night, so she slept over at mine. We became true, proper lovers with Hotel California playing in the background. And that's quite enough about me. Tell me about you.'

'Not now. Here comes the sweet trolley.'

'Oh my word,' said Eleanor. 'Tiramisu! Look no further, I'm already convinced. What are you having?'

'I'd best not. Not if we're going to be rolling around in bed all night.'

Eleanor's eyes became calculating. 'We'll have one Tiramisu and two spoons,' she said to the waiter. 'And two Italian Classicos, please.'

She handed Heather one of the spoons before sipping her fortified coffee. 'Half a portion's not too much,' she observed. 'Not to someone with a figure like yours.'