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For Gabriel
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Four Virgins Go Fruit Picking
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Suburban Satire
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The Poker Party
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Burwood Four
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Suburban Satyr
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Peace, Plenty and…Babies
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Sarah May’s novels:
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
four virgins go fruit picking
—summer—
1
Summer was shimmering and at its height as Tom Henderson drove his piebald red Volkswagen out of town with three seventeen-year-old virgins in the back. It was Ruth who—sitting in the middle between Vicky and Saskia—suggested fruit picking.
Tom said he’d drive them.
He had just about enough petrol to get there and back.
The windows were down and there was a Led Zeppelin CD playing that jumped when they went over potholes or when they braked suddenly like Tom was braking now, at a set of red lights. As soon as the car stopped, the 32ºC with humidity that had been forecast regained its full weight.
‘Jump them,’ Vicky Henderson ordered her brother. ‘It’s, like, B-Movie empty—there’s nobody around.’
‘The lights are red.’ Tom exhaled, uninterested.
‘This is fucking unbearable.’ Vicky groaned and turned irritably to Saskia, slumped against the opposite door, her face obscured by her hair, which had settled there when the car stopped. ‘Why are you wearing jeans? Aren’t you like melting?’
Saskia, high, was staring through the open doors of the Baptist Church they’d drawn level with—at an outsize flower display looming white in the shade of the vestibule. She looked down slowly at her denimclad legs and shrugged.
‘Yeah—’
The lights changed at last. They left the Baptist Church behind and a hot breeze started blowing through the car again.
There were a lot of churches in Burwood. In fact, they still built churches in Burwood. The newest was completed only six months ago—at around the same time as the North Heath housing estate, whose population it had been built to serve. There was a pub next to the church, clad in the same bright sandstone, serving western-style BBQ ribs to the hungry faithful.
‘And you’re tanned,’ Vicky carried on. She hadn’t finished with Saskia. ‘If I had your legs I wouldn’t be putting them in jeans.’
Saskia sighed and continued to stare out the open window, her hair blowing around her face. She was thinking about the south of France where she’d spent most of July; thinking in particular about her father lying drunk and untidy on a poolside sun lounger while she tried to drag a yellow and white striped umbrella over to him so he wouldn’t get burnt. That’s how she spent most of her time: stopping her father getting burnt—one way or another. At least in France she’d had Ruth for company when Richard Greaves lost consciousness, which he did most afternoons.
She turned her head to look at Ruth, who was sitting beside her, and her eyes caught Tom’s in the rear view mirror. Last summer Saskia had been in love with Tom. She kept a darkly detailed diary noting his every movement, gesture and look, and stole things from his bedroom that she never gave back—a ball of elastic bands, a pair of worn sports socks, a Smurf pencil sharpener, a Radio Mercury sticker, and a library copy of a D.H. Lawrence book he’d spilt aftershave over.
This summer she didn’t love him any more.
Catching her eye now, in the rear-view mirror, Tom felt bad about the hours his university girlfriend Ali and he spent talking and laughing about Saskia’s ‘hingeless passion’—a phrase coined by Ali—and the way he’d just handed Saskia up to Ali, who could be cruel.
‘How’s Ali?’ Saskia said suddenly.
‘She’s in India,’ Vicky put in. ‘Her parents think Tom and her are too close.’
‘And what does Tom think?’ Ruth asked suddenly—loudly, out of shyness.
‘Tom doesn’t think.’
‘Shut up, Vick—’
Ruth kept her eyes on Tom—taking in his thighs, throat and wrists—and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him as the red Volkswagen left behind the retail parks where the good people of Burwood bought pet food and hot tubs, hitting a leggy stretch of road lined by garages, off licences, discount bedding stores, pubs that welcomed families and sold salad in kegs, Indian restaurants—one called Curry Nights had been made infamous a couple of years ago when an Alsatian carcass was found in one of their bins.
‘I went to school there,’ Ruth said, as they passed the primary school where she’d had her hand driven onto a rusty nail by another girl and had to go to hospital to get a tetanus jab.
Nobody said anything.
It was too hot to worry about somebody else’s memories.
They passed the St Catherine’s Hospice and the flat above it rumoured to house Burwood’s only prostitute. Local press refused to comment on the prostitute or the Alsatian carcass in the bins at Curry Nights, and it was the News of the World, in the end, that covered both stories. Burwood also appeared—that same week—in the Financial Times, featuring as one of the ten towns in the UK where men lived longest.
Burwood ranked number four.
Burwood was a good place to live.
From the air, the town looked like an untidy circle surrounded by a band of green separating it from London to the north and Brighton to the south. In other words, it had a lot more going for it than most places viewed via satellite.
Burwood long pre-dated its Domesday Book entry, and was now flourishing and thriving its way into the twenty-first century with an all-pervasive aura of stability and permanence that breathed promise to the world-weary. So saying, Burwood had its fair share of anarchists—the most notable being a poet who, two hundred years ago, published political tracts and distributed them from a hot-air balloon, unsettling everyone before eloping with an underage girl called Harriet. In cases such as this, however, it was town council policy to disinherit—no matter how famous their anarchic sons and daughters later became.
The Hendersons, hugely influenced by the Financial Times article—and the fact that the town’s historic centre already felt familiar, having been used by the BBC on a regular basis to film Jane Austen adaptations—were by no means the first immigrés, and wouldn’t be the last.
Burwood ended now abruptly on its eastern side, which was also its most picturesque. They’d driven through all the rings of the town’s life from its premedieval centre to the helplessly conservative, sprawling suburban villas built with optimism after the Second World War, and with disproportionately small windows behind which a whole generation came to terms with the horrors of war and the legacy of those horrors…perennial-filled borders, trimmed lawns and terrifying stretches of leisure time spent struggling to define the word ‘peace’. They’d passed through the industrial estates and were, finally, beyond the reaches of the executive satellite estates—by products of the post-1986 housing boom. Burwood’s last house was an old brick cottage shared by two octogenarian brothers who had been Conscientious Objectors in the last world war.
The red Volkswagen turned off the main road into open country, following a lane that sank beneath banks of hedge and forest where there was sudden shade and the sound of water before rising again in order to cross fading green and yellow fields. The forest was beech and ash and had once stretched from coast to coast, covering the land Burwood now stood on. Deepest darkest forest had been replaced by deepest darkest suburbia, where modern man and woman sought refuge, as their forest-dwelling ancestors had sought it in the forest. Like them, they mistook the shade-dappled depths for a place of innocence where a simple life could be led.
‘I hope they have raspberries,’ Ruth said, to nobody in particular. ‘I told mum I’d get raspberries.’
Vicky stared at her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a conversation about anything —let alone raspberries—with her mother, Sylvia Henderson.
‘Isn’t Grace working at Martha’s Farm?’ Saskia said after a while, trying to pin her hair back with her arm.
Ruth watched Tom suck in his left cheek and move his hands on the steering wheel.
‘I thought she already had a job?’ Vicky said, irritated that she didn’t already know this.
‘Yeah, but this is like a holiday job.’ Saskia let go of her hair again.
‘Why didn’t she say?’
‘Probably thought you already knew.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’ Vicky turned to Ruth. ‘Did you know?’
Ruth shrugged. ‘I kind of lose count of the number of jobs Grace does.’
‘Yeah, well, some people’s parents can’t actually afford to send their children to university so they have to pay for it themselves,’ Tom said from the front.
Ruth, upset, looked away.
‘There are loads of grants and stuff for people like Grace,’ Vicky said, defensive. Upsetting Ruth was her territory.
‘People like Grace?’ Tom cut in, angry.
Ignoring this, Vicky carried on, ‘In fact, she’ll probably be better off by the time she finishes—not like the rest of us, up to our eyes in student-loan debt. Cambridge are offering her a scholarship anyway, so what’s the big deal.’
Saskia said slowly, ‘I thought she was going for that NASA one at Yale?’
Vicky, no longer interested, didn’t respond.
Grace was one of their group, and Vicky was tyrannical about having up-to-date information on all members. She considered the group—her group—a profound social achievement given that she’d only started at Burwood Girls’ in Year 11. First she successfully penetrated an already-established group, then she amputated the excess, re-forming a splinter cell comprising core members only: Grace Cummings, Saskia Greaves and Ruth Dent. She put her rapid rise down to not only getting them into Tom’s university parties but even some London ones as well. Who else on all Satan’s earth could have got them into Lilly Allen’s brother’s eighteenth for fuck’s sake?
They turned right off the lane into Martha’s Fruit Farm and tried looking for a space in the field full of cars. In the end they parked at the top near a ridge of trees where there was a sandpit.
Ruth, worried, said, ‘D’you think they’ll have raspberries?’
‘Will you shut up about raspberries.’ Vicky pulled her skirt off the back of her legs, which were covered in an imprint of the car’s upholstery.
‘I only mentioned them once.’
‘You mentioned them like about a hundred times,’ Vicky said, moving off between the rows of parked cars, the air heavy with the scent of fruit on the turn.
They straggled slowly down the field whose early summer ruts had now been baked hard by the sun. By the time they got to the weighing-in hut at the bottom, all three girls had linked arms, their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.
2
Tom stayed in the car with the door open and lit another joint, sucking on it slowly while watching a black Labrador play in the sandpit just beyond the bonnet of the car. Through the windscreen he could see Burwood in the distance, but there was no resonance for him in the view. The Hendersons moved down from London two years ago and he’d only lived there a couple of months before leaving for university. He’d felt more at home in Bolivia than he ever had in Burwood.
An elderly couple—fruit picking veterans—returned to their car, a purple Nissan parked next to Tom’s. Their determined faces were sweating under matching white sun hats with ‘Crete’ embroidered above the visors, and as they lined up their baskets of fruit on the roof of the car, he saw that they were still wearing the surgical gloves they’d bought with them to pick fruit in, now stained purple.
He finished the joint then got out of the car and, without bothering to lock it, followed the others down the field.
There was a crowd of people round the weighing-in shed and a woman inside was barking at them to get into a queue, but people were too hot and laden with fruit to comply.
As the crowd shuffled forward, broke up then reformed, Tom caught sight, briefly, of his old black and silver racing bike leaning against the side of the shed; the one he told his mum he’d sold to Grace last summer—only he never sold it to her, he gave it to her.
He remembered clearly riding it round to Grace’s house and Grace answering the door in a dressing gown, holding one of her sister Dixie’s dolls. Up until then he’d never realised Burwood even had a council estate. He’d rung the doorbell and while he waited, staring at a patch of wall next to the drainpipe where a lump of pebble-dash had fallen off, he’d decided that he was going to give Grace the bike.
Grace, in her dressing gown, stared at him.
He prompted her. ‘The bike?’
She carried on staring at him before switching her gaze to the bike. ‘The bike—shit. Sorry. Just a minute.’ She disappeared back indoors.
Too late, Tom realised that she was getting the forty pounds they’d talked about on the phone the day before.
‘Wait—’ he called out, wanting to follow her, but just then there was the slap of wet feet on pavement and Grace’s nine-year-old sister, Dixie, appeared round the side of the house leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her. She stood on the corner in a pink polka dot bikini with bows at the side, water glistening on her legs, watching him through a pair of goggles and wearing a smile that was missing two bottom teeth.
They took to each other immediately.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Tom.’ He held out his hand and Dixie shook it wetly in hers.
‘Yeah, but who are you?’
‘A friend of your sister’s.’
‘Like a boyfriend?’
‘No, just a friend.’
Dixie contemplated him. ‘I never saw you before.’ She paused. ‘I’m having a sleepover tonight.’
Before Tom had time to respond to this, Grace reappeared at the front door and Dixie ran off up the side passage and into the back garden again.
‘Forty pounds, right?’ Grace handed him an envelope.
‘Leave it,’ Tom said, embarrassed.
‘You said forty pounds—on the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘What?’
Grace looked angry.
‘It doesn’t matter—about the money. I mean, just take the bike. I changed my mind about the money.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said forty pounds. On the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
This had gone on and the sun had moved round the side of the house until it was filling the front garden.
Now Tom saw her, standing over by the ice cream van with her back to him. While he was watching, she stood up straight, laughing. She looked like she was having a good day. He should go before she saw him.
‘Hey, Tom.’ She’d seen him—was smiling straight at him.
‘Hey.’
She came across the grass in her flip-flops and a bottle-green T-shirt that said ‘Martha’s Crew’. Grace didn’t look like she belonged to anyone’s crew—let alone Martha’s. Tom watched the boy in the ice cream van watching Grace.
‘What brings you out here?’
He hadn’t seen her for a year, and this wasn’t the kind of thing—a year ago—she would have said.
‘I’m my sister’s chauffeur.’
‘She’s here?’
‘Somewhere.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Saskia—Ruth.’
‘I didn’t know they were back from France.’
Tom didn’t say anything.
She squinted across at the fields laid out below the weighing-in hut, trying to pick out her friends.
He saw that her fingertips were stained purple.
‘You’re not picking anything?’ she said.
‘No—’
For some reason this made her smile.
‘How’s the bike doing?’ he asked
‘The bike’s doing fine. Only one puncture so far.’
‘You should change the tyres to Kevlar—they won’t ever puncture.’
‘Okay—’
Was she laughing at him?
‘They sound expensive though—and I still owe you for the bike.’
‘Fuck that,’ he said, genuinely angry.
She was about to say something when a voice started yelling, ‘Grace—Grace,’ from inside the hut.
‘Shit—I better get back.’ She disappeared into the crowd round the weighing-in hut and didn’t look back.
Tom and the boy in the ice cream van were left staring at each other. The afternoon felt suddenly pointless—as though it had been going on for too long.
3
Vicky followed Ruth to the far end of the raspberry field, whose boundary was marked by a narrow strip of woodland unable to cast any shade because the sun was too high in the sky and falling on it at the wrong angle. The earth was hard and tufted and, with a serious headache beginning due to the day’s dope diet, Vicky kept losing her footing. She picked the biggest raspberry she could find, put it in her mouth then spat it out again.
Ruth stopped picking. ‘You okay?’
‘Tastes funny.’ Vicky wiped her mouth. ‘Do they taste funny to you?’
Ruth took one of the raspberries out of her punnet. ‘Tastes fine. Maybe you just got a bad one.’
They carried on picking, the heat close around them.
‘Where did Sas go?’
‘Redcurrants.’
Vicky, bored, had stopped picking and was now just trailing after Ruth. ‘Redcurrants?’
‘Said she’d never picked redcurrants before.’
‘What d’you do with redcurrants?’
Ruth continued to make her way up the row, too intent on picking to respond to this.
Behind her, Vicky said, ‘Matt was meant to phone at twelve today. He’s been on holiday and he said he’d phone when his plane landed, but he never did. No message—nothing. I’m meant to be going to a party with him this weekend.’
She looked up instinctively as a plane went overhead, nosing down towards Gatwick. ‘I can’t believe you and Sas didn’t meet anybody in France—like, anybody at all.’
Ruth had stopped picking and was staring at something in the distance, her shoulders so taut with concentration that Vicky had one of her brief, habitual anxiety attacks that their GP at Park Surgery refused to prescribe her Diazepam for.
It was the plane—the plane that flew over just then; it had crashed. She just knew it. Any minute now there’d be smoke and debris and the field would be full of soft, torn, bloodied body parts. Any minute now the silence would end and she’d see freshly twisted wreckage and freshly dead people. What if Matt’s flight had been delayed? What if Matt was on that plane?
The two blues she took out of her pocket now and put into her mouth had, until recently, belonged to her mother, Sylvia, whose anxiety attacks their GP at Park Surgery had been happy to prescribe Diazepam for.
She’d been taking Sylvia’s prescription Diazepam since she was fifteen—when the burglary nightmares first started. It was the same every night—she’d wake up around two, convinced she heard someone crossing the gravel drive, walking up the side of the house and letting themselves in through the patio doors. She’d lie in bed flushed with fear and barely breathing, listening to the intruder’s footsteps on the stairs, and waiting for her bedroom door handle to start turning. That’s when she’d take the Valium, put on her i-pod, and curl up under the duvet—whatever the weather.
‘What is it?’ she tried not to scream.
Ruth, distracted, said, ‘Does that look like Mr Sutton to you?’
‘Mr Sutton?’ Vicky’s eyes grazed the fields spread out around them, still looking for smoke, still sniffing the air for blood.
‘Over there.’ Ruth pointed.
Vicky felt herself start to calm down. The sky was clear—no smoke. The plane that had gone overhead had landed safely.
‘I’m sure that’s him.’
Vicky looked. Ruth was right. In the next field was their Art teacher, Mr Sutton—whose home address they’d taken from confidential staff files so they could send an anonymous Valentine’s card.
Mr Sutton was the youngest male member of staff at Burwood Girls’, and taught art under an overwhelming barrage of oestrogen that manifested itself in the various totemic gifts he was recipient of—from an envelope full of pubic hair to a photograph of a pair of bare breasts.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Picking fruit—like everybody else.’
‘Shit—look at me.’
‘He’s two fields away, Vick.’
‘Yeah, but we can see him. So are we going over—saying hello?’
Ruth was blushing. Confident—and often caustically funny—with family and close friends, she was pathologically shy with most other people.
‘Come on—you know you’ve got a thing about him.’
‘I know, but—’
‘And we haven’t seen him for ages.’
Ruth shrugged and turned away. ‘Wait—he’s with someone.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s talking to someone.’
As Vicky continued to stare, the gradient of the field, which sloped gently downwards, seemed suddenly much steeper. The next minute she grabbed hold instinctively of one of the raspberry canes as the entire field lurched out from under her feet.
She’d never had such an intense or sudden attack of vertigo before.
‘Vick?’ Ruth said, turning to her, worried. ‘What happened? You looked like you were about to black out.’