Free Jubilee by Shelley Harris Page B

followed him.
    ‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do, Colette,’ he says, returning to the lounge. ‘And presumptuous.’
    ‘Don’t! We need to talk.’
    ‘About what? We’ve talked. Go home.’
    ‘Satish …’ She looks up at him. ‘You have never, ever turned me away. Don’t send me home.’
    He falters. It’s the most presumptuous thing of all, to remind him of that. The bare-faced cheek. He starts sorting through the discs again.
    ‘We’ve got through worse than this, haven’t we, Satish? Way worse.’
    He’s not so sure. Back then, she was the only one suffering. It was the mid-Nineties, and she’d come to him out of the blue, nearly twenty years after the Brecons had left Cherry Gardens. Skinny with addiction, a cautionary tale, she had turned up on his doorstep. He and Maya had only been married a short while and Maya hadn’t even heard her name mentioned before. ‘You were the only one I could think of,’ Colette had told Satish. Maya had reached past him and pulled her inside.
    ‘You took me in,’ she reminds him now. ‘You helped me get clean. And that’s the thing. That’s why I need to talk to you.’
    This, then. Suddenly, he has to sit down. He lowers himself onto the sofa, takes one breath, two, then squares his shoulders and looks at her. ‘Go on. Say it.’
    ‘OK.’ She sits next to him. ‘To understand all is to forgive all, yeah?’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘OK. It’s about my dad.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The Andrew Ford thing. It’s about my dad. You need to know.’
    He has to break apart what she’s saying, quickly, and put it back into this new order, an order in which he isn’t about to be found out, to be disgraced. He wants to grin at her, but remembers he’s angry.
    ‘What about your dad?’ he asks.
    ‘Well …’ Colette twitches her head sideways. ‘It’s awful. Things are crap for him right now.’
    So things are crap for Peter. Satish finds he’s not uncomfortable with this notion.
    ‘Do you know where he’s living?’ Colette adds.
    ‘I know he’s in London. Catford, is it? What does that have to do with the photo?’
    ‘He’s living in this shitty hostel. I saw him two weeks ago and he wouldn’t even let me come in and see it. Shitty. You could tell. And he hates his job. Do you know how I know everything’s crap?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Because the whole time I was with him, the whole time, all he could talk about was how great it was. You know, it’s a positive advantage that he and Mum are living so far apart, because it means he can put in a few more night shifts.’ Her fingers stab the air, placing ironic quotation marks around the words. ‘It’s great that he’s working long hours because he says he can just pay off the debt quicker .’
    ‘Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe he just needs to do that for a while, put up with it.’
    Her glance is a rebuke. ‘He’s rubbish without Mum. He’s lonely, I think. I know he took that money. He was a bloody fool. She makes him say it, makes him call it … fraud … embezzlement. It’s like part of his punishment.’
    ‘Colette, it was fraud. He did those things. He was lucky, too. The bank could have prosecuted him.’
    ‘Well, I wish they had!’ Her voice disrupts the air between them. ‘I absolutely and bloody wish they had, because then he would still be in South Africa, with Mum, and he’d probably have had this tiny prison sentence which would be much, much more bearable than all these months of pain. Do you know how much he took?’
    ‘Roughly …’
    ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand rand. Do you know how much that is? It’s barely sixteen grand. Bloody fool! I wish they had prosecuted. They only reason they didn’t was because of the publicity. And she – Mum – makes him come over here because she says it’s easier to get work, but it’s hard, you know …’
    ‘Colette …’
    ‘We had lunch. I paid the bill and he was crushed.’ The last word is stretched as her mouth distorts.