Page 48 of Love in Tune

‘Jesus, Honey, there’s more than two hundred people here.

We’re going to need a police marshal at this rate,’ Tash said.

‘We ran out of handcuffs ages ago, people are using anything they’ve got.

I’ve just chained four men up by the belts from their trousers.

The women next to them were cheering, they thought they were going to get a performance of The Full Monty ! ’

Honey shook her head, overwhelmed with pretty much everything about the day.

The protesters lined the street along the railings, snaked around the corner, and then doubled back on themselves along the other side of the railings.

They were almost back at the beginning again, a complete loop of residents, friends, family, and locals who’d heard about the protest and come to show their support.

Banners waved, t-shirts were emblazoned, and the gathered press pack had expanded in numbers almost as quickly as the protest.

‘Are the residents all okay?’ Honey asked as Nell came to join them on the pavement.

‘Absolutely. They’ve all got a chair and a blanket each now, and we made sure they all had lunch.

We had help, too. They’ve all had their medication,’ she said, nodding towards Nikki, the care home worker, who was kneeling beside Old Don laughing at something he’d said.

Looking around, Honey noticed other staff from inside too, some chained up, others milling amongst the residents.

There was something about the whole event that had her permanently on the edge of tears, which was handy really, given that she felt like an emotional wreck.

She was determined to keep her mind focused one hundred per cent on being out here doing her best, and not on the man inside providing sustenance for everyone.

Making a success of this campaign had become crucial, because it was a battle she had at least some control over.

Hal was his own man and needed to make his own decisions, but in her heart Honey already knew which way he was going to jump.

He just needed to get there in his own time.

‘Honey my darling, over here!’ Billy called out, waving her over to the railings. Throwing his free arm around her shoulders, he turned her to face the flashes of what felt like dozens of cameras.

‘Smile for the cameras, darling,’ he said in her ear, and she bared her teeth in a rough approximation that probably looked more like a snarl than a smile but was the best she was capable of right now.

Her tearstained cheeks would just add drama.

Who knew heartbreak could be so helpful?

She stilled, feeling a million miles away from the flashing bulbs.

Was she heartbroken? To be heartbroken you needed to be in love, and she didn’t love Hal, not precisely.

Did she? Just because she wanted to be with him whenever she wasn’t, and dreamed of him, and craved his touch, and loved the rare sound of his laughter, and held his happiness as more important than her own, and couldn’t stand the thought of him walking out of her life, it didn’t mean she loved him, did it?

She’d felt all of those things for … thinking about it, she’d felt those things for no one else, ever.

‘Could you unfasten my cuffs for a few minutes, dear heart?’ Billy said close to her ear. ‘There’s a loudhailer in my room; I think we’re going to need it.’

Honey nodded, opening his cuffs with shaky fingers, turned mute and stupid by her private epiphany. She didn’t want to love Hal. He was the most difficult, recalcitrant of men, and he didn’t love her back. How damn inconvenient to love someone who was marrying someone else next summer.

Billy detoured to the kitchen, loudhailer in his hand, and found Skinny Steve and Hal building sandwich mountains.

‘I’ll take the first lot out,’ Steve said, walking cautiously and peering over the top of one of the huge platters. ‘Billy, have you met Hal? He’s our new chef, and he’s brilliant. Hal, this is Billy.’

And with that, Steve stepped out of the back door and left them to it.

‘Billy,’ Hal said, aware of the older man’s presence before Steve had made formal introductions. ‘Honey’s told me a lot about you.’

‘She hasn’t told me an awful lot about you, old bean, aside from the fact that you can’t see,’ Billy said. ‘Rotten luck, by the sounds of it.’

Hal swallowed, taken aback by Billy’s frankness. ‘That’s one way to put it,’ he said, dryly.

‘Happened to my brother,’ Billy went on.

‘It did?’

‘Not much more than a kid at the time. It didn’t stop him of course, still grew up to be the bane of my mother’s life. More trouble afterwards, if anything,’ Billy grinned at the memories. ‘Sink or swim. He was a swimmer.’

Hal sat down hard on the stool at the bench, wondering if he was a swimmer. He didn’t feel like one most days. He felt like a child in armbands frightened to loose hold of the side. He was surprised to feel Billy’s hand on his shoulder.

‘You’ll get there, son. Early days yet.’

Outside, a police cruiser had indeed turned up, alerted to the size of protest by the almost non-stop coverage on the local radio.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ the officer asked Tash, who’d just appeared from the shop with the staff radio in her hands and set it up on the ground so they could all listen to the coverage.

Tash led him over to Honey, who’d flopped into Billy’s empty chair beside Mimi and Lucille to catch her breath.

‘Are you in charge of this event?’ the officer asked, pulling a pad from his pocket and looking over it at Honey.

She stood up and wiped her hands down her jeans and then held one out in an attempt at professionalism.

Her tearstained face and messed-up hair did little to back her up, but thankfully she didn’t realise that she looked every inch a woman who’d found and lost the love of her life in the space of five minutes.

She nodded. ‘I am.’

‘And I assume you have the necessary permits, and you applied to the council to have this road closed?’

Honey opened her mouth and closed it again.

There were no permits, or closed road applications.

They’d hoped the event would attract a crowd of course, but by crowd she’d envisaged forty or fifty, rather than hundreds.

It was peaceful, but it was undeniably huge, and traffic had ground to a halt when drivers stopped to see what was going on and left their cars to join the protest. Horns honked, and Nell had eventually made a sign and put it up at the end of the road to politely advise people to come and join the protest or go round a different way.

‘Are you an officer of the law?’ a voice bellowed from down the pavement, and they all peered down to see Christopher hanging as far out from the railings as he could manage and waving his free arm to attract attention. ‘I’m the manager of this home and I demand …’

His demands, however, went unheard, drowned out in a flash by the sound of Robin clapping his hands and yelling ‘Five, six, seven, eight!’ in a theatrical singsong voice and swinging an invisible lasso above his head before performing a tight grapevine along the pavement.

Beside him, all nine of his parole boys fell perfectly into step, completely obliterating Christopher from view aside from the occasional flash of his hand wildly poking out.

The crowd went wild for them, joining in the boot-scooting chorus and doing their best to pick up the steps until a good half of the gathering were line dancing in the street, and the residents clapped along and cheered from their seats.

Honey clapped her hands to her face, tears coursing down her cheeks as she watched Robin’s diminutive frame and huge hair bounce around, his pied piper status forever cemented, along with their friendship.

The police officer cleared his throat. ‘Those permits we talked about?’

Honey opened her mouth to confess all, and at the same time Billy’s voice boomed through the air as he strutted down the path with a loudhailer against his lips.

‘Officer Nigel Thomson, as I live and breathe. I knew you when you were knee high to a grasshopper and your mother kept The Cock!’

Honey watched as the middle-aged police officer narrowed his eyes at Billy as he drew near, then broke into a huge smile and pushed his notebook back into his pocket, permits forgotten.

‘Uncle Bill!’ The officer put his hand out and pumped Billy’s arm, and then pulled him into a stiff bear hug.

‘I wasn’t actually his uncle,’ Billy mouthed at Honey over his shoulder with an arch wink.

Watching Billy walk Officer Thomson back to his car a little while later, she let out a small sigh of relief at another near-disaster averted.

When today was over, she needed to take a long holiday in a quiet place, preferably alone on a desert island with a fridge full of chocolate and wine.

‘Umm, Honeysuckle, dear,’ Lucille piped up, craning her neck towards the end of the road. ‘Is that a TV van?’

Hold that thought. It looked as if that one-way ticket to paradise would have to go on hold for a while longer yet.

‘Troy Masters can put his boom mike down my pants any time he wants,’ Tash murmured as they stood watching the TV cameraman get himself set up while Troy Masters, a well-known face from the BBC twenty-four-hour rolling news channel, chatted easily to the crowds.

‘You’ve been watching too many American TV shows, Tash,’ Nell said. ‘We still say trousers here, remember?’

‘Oh, I know the difference perfectly well, Nellie,’ Tash’s laugh was pure filth.

‘Never mind all that,’ Honey said. ‘They want to interview me on screen in half an hour, and we all know that I’m going to be rubbish!’

Nell and Tash exchanged a worried look over her head.

‘Do you happen to have your make-up bag with you?’ Tash said, way too casually.

Honey shook her head. It had been the last thing on her mind that morning.

‘Hairspray? A comb?’ Nell said, tucking Honey’s wild hair behind her ear optimistically.