Page 33 of Love in Tune

Honey didn’t have sweet dreams. Instead, she finished the wine and tossed and turned all night in a temper, while across the hallway Hal drank himself into a whisky-induced stupor on the sofa.

Headaches, lazy mornings and bad moods were the order of the weekend on both sides of the lobby, and Honey wasn’t impressed to find herself out of milk for a much-needed coffee.

‘I’m going to the shops,’ she yelled as she closed her door, her cross-body bag slung over her denim jacket, and her hair dragged back. ‘And I don’t care if you need anything, because I’m not your bloody servant!’

‘Try not to bring any random men home with you,’ he shouted back.

‘I will if I bloody well want to,’ she shouted back. ‘I’m sure they’d all be a damn sight more considerate than you are in bed.’

‘We haven’t been to bed, and we’re not going to,’ he said.

‘You’re not wrong there, buster,’ she yelled, opening the door. ‘You had your chance to spend the night with me and you blew it, big time.’

It wasn’t the best time to find herself eyeball to eyeball with the postman.

He lifted his eyebrows at her appraisingly, handed her the morning’s mail and walked away down the pavement sounding suspiciously as if he was laughing under his breath.

Honey glanced through the letters; bills, pizza menus and junk mail.

She threw them all on the table in the hall, including the brown envelope addressed in stark black handwriting to Mr Benedict Hallam.

Up to then he hadn’t received so much as one piece of mail, leading Honey to conclude that he’d redirected everything on purpose.

She cursed him loudly a few times for good measure and then slammed out of the house hard enough to rattle the windows.

Monday morning, and there had been no further communication, across the lobby or otherwise, between Honey and Hal.

Neither of them had enjoyed their weekends much.

Honey just didn’t get the man at all. Why had he agreed to sleep with her and then treated her the way he did on Friday night?

Was it just too good an opportunity to yank her chain?

Even after two days removed from the situation it was hard to see it as much else.

For his part, Hal brooded in silence, mad at himself for the way he’d made such a monumental botch of the situation.

He’d been so concentrated on not letting it cross the line into romance that he’d turned it into borderline assault.

Was this it for him now? A lifetime of misread situations and mistakes?

He knew exactly where he’d gone wrong – he should never have agreed to it in the first place.

‘Would you come outside and cuff me, dear?’ Mimi asked Honey an hour or so later.

It was her turn to be chained to the railings that day, and she was all decked out in her slogan t-shirt and hot pink leggings in readiness.

She’d tied a pink polka dot headscarf in a jaunty bow on top of her dark curls, and looked for all the world like the star of an OAP production of Grease .

Honey grinned at the thought. She’d pay good money to go and watch that on the stage.

Mimi would definitely be Frenchy to Lucille’s Sandy, and Billy’s snake hips would make him a shoe-in for one of the T-Birds.

Honey shot a look towards Lucille, stacking glasses over on the far side of the shop. Had she mentioned her visit to Ernie yet, she wondered? The cordial atmosphere suggested not.

‘Of course. You ready now?’ she said, picking up Mimi’s fluffy red cuffs from the counter.

Mimi nodded. ‘Although I’m starving. That chef the agency sent over is awful. He gave us biscuits for breakfast this morning,’ she grumbled. ‘We oldies need our All-Bran or there’s hell to pay.’

Honey grimaced. ‘How did he do over the weekend?’

‘Terrible. I can’t even talk about it,’ Mimi shuddered. ‘Even your cooking was better than his.’

Honey swung between being insulted and proud. She went with proud; there was little point in being insulted by the truth. She followed Mimi out, calling back to Lucille that she’d be five minutes.

Lucille looked up sharply. ‘Honey, dear,’ she called out as Mimi left the shop. Honey turned back, and Lucille zipped her lips together with her thumb and forefinger then shrugged apologetically.

Honey shook her head. ‘This can’t go on, Lucille,’ she hissed, as Lucille walked towards her and shooed her out the door.

Outside, Honey found not only Mimi but Billy too, along with two women in their forties who she didn’t recognise.

‘Honey, fetch some more of those frivolous little handcuffs, my darling,’ Billy called, slinging his arms around the shoulders of the two identical-looking women. ‘We’ve got company today. Michelle and Lisa here have come to help the cause.’

The women nodded in unison, and Honey found herself distracted by their uncanny likeness to both each other, and to Susan Boyle.

‘My auntie Titania lives here,’ one of them said.

‘She’s my auntie too,’ the other said, rather redundantly adding ‘we’re sisters,’ for clarification.

‘Twins,’ the other said, and they both nodded solemnly.

Honey slipped back into the shop for more cuffs and then dutifully chained all four of the protesters to the railings.

Billy had opted for red skinny jeans and a t-shirt that declared ‘Old boys do it better!’ and when the twins removed their Pac-a-Macs they revealed matching white t-shirts handpainted with ‘We Love You Auntie Tit!’ across the front.

It was unfortunate – or fortunate, depending on how you wanted to look at it – that both women were extremely well endowed, because their ample cleavages had eaten several words from the slogan, leaving them proudly announcing ‘We Love Tit!’ across their busts.

They smiled serenely, and Billy nodded and threw a theatrical wink towards the press, who’d gathered as on most days in the hope of action.

‘Quite right too, ladies. Don’t we all!’

Light bulbs flashed, and Honey knew that thanks to the sisters’ t-shirts, the campaign would once again be flashed across the front of the papers.

It had made the local TV news for the first time last week too, which had sent Billy into a Brylcreemed spin of excitement.

Surely it must be having some effect up at head office by now?

They might say that no press is bad press, but surely being made to look heartless was bad PR for a company who made their money on retirement homes?

‘I think it’s amazing what they’re all doing here,’ a passer-by said, pausing next to her on the footpath while the press took their shots. Honey smiled at the woman with the buggy laden down with two young children and shopping.

‘Thank you. It means so much to everyone to stay here,’ Honey said. She was fast becoming accustomed to her role as public spokesperson. ‘I just can’t imagine what would happen to them all if the home closes.’

‘If I didn’t have these pair with me I’d have joined in.

’ The woman grinned and gestured to the kids, and then smiled and went on her way.

Honey stood and looked down the length of the railings, her mind whirring with ideas.

How many people could they fit along there, she wondered?

The railings wrapped around the street corner and carried on, so actually, quite a few.

Thirty? Forty? More? As she turned to head back to the shop she met an anxious-looking Skinny Steve coming in the other direction laden down with warm tea for the protesters.

‘You’re doing a great job, Steve,’ she said, patting his shoulder as she walked by.

‘Don’t go!’ he whispered loudly to her retreating back, and she stopped and turned slowly, unnerved by the desperate edge to his already thin voice.

‘You okay?’ she asked, carefully.

He shook his head, wide eyed. ‘The agency chef is going crazy in there, Honey. He won’t listen to a word I say.’

Honey frowned. ‘I heard there might be a few problems.’

Steve huffed and picked nervously at a spot on his chin.

‘Problems? Even I know better than to give this lot a prawn vindaloo.’ Steve spoke urgently, as if it were a relief to get it off his chest. ‘The staff have been going crazy because everyone wants the loo all the time. Old Don shat on Elsie’s slippers this morning because they couldn’t get him there quick enough.

’ He shook his head and pulled a face that indicated he’d probably witnessed the incident.

‘It’s bad, Honey. Really bad.’ He shook his head.

‘He’s in there right now making a chilli hot enough to take the skin off the roof of your mouth.

I know, because he made me try it.’ Steve swallowed painfully.

‘I don’t think he likes old people very much.

In fact …’ He looked at Honey fearfully, as if she were a police officer taking his statement.

‘I think he might be trying to kill them all with spicy food.’

Honey almost laughed, but held it in because actually, it wasn’t at all funny.

It was highly unlikely that the agency had sent them a chef who harboured homicidal tendencies towards the elderly, but this was clearly a problem that was too big for Skinny Steve’s skinny shoulders.

There was little to no point in suggesting he take the matter up with Christopher; in fact there was every chance Christopher had handpicked the worst chef he could find himself.

‘I’ll nip over there and have a word with him when I get a chance, Steve,’ she said, smiling encouragingly. ‘In the meantime, just try to steer lunch in the right direction, okay?’

Steve nodded, a vigorous duck of his head that almost spilt the tea on his tray.

Thirty thousand feet above ground level, Tash was also serving tea, and as the plane hit a pocket of turbulence it sloshed from the pot onto the lap of the passenger closest to her.

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ she said, putting the pot down quickly and grabbing a cloth. Dabbing at the guy’s paperwork, she noticed it was sheet music rather than the usual reports or graphs passengers studied in transatlantic business class.

He put out a hand and stopped her, and when she looked him in the eyes she found him smiling. ‘Hey, it’s fine,’ he said, his accent placing him as American. ‘It wasn’t very good anyway. You’ve just saved me a job.’

‘You write music?’ Tash asked, always ready to take the time to chat to passengers, especially ones with sexy blue eyes and an easy smile.

‘I try, anyhow,’ he nodded ruefully. ‘I’m a pianist.’