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‘No bed!’ That was Charlie. ‘Auntie Lizzie say no bed.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Auntie Lizzie to me.’ Mona raised an eyebrow.
‘Did!’
‘It’s true.’ Lizzie waved an open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc at Mona.
‘Just a small one.’
Lizzie raised her eyebrows. ‘No small glasses in this house.’
‘As it comes then.’
‘We agreed, remember? It’s for them, after all. They should be there for the ceremonial opening of the wardrobe.’
‘Wardrobe!’ Harrie and Charlie shrieked, running around the kitchen again. ‘Wardrobe!’
‘Do you feel weird?’ Mona asked half an hour later when they had transferred to the large bedroom that took up the entire front half of the first floor, where Nicci had spent most of the last six months of her life, when she hadn’t been in hospital.
‘Not weird, exactly,’ Lizzie lowered her voice. ‘Just, you know, empty. Like a piece is missing.’
‘I do, really weird.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ Jo said, walking in with a bottle of pink Laurent Perrier and three fresh glasses. She set the glasses on the bedside table, slit the foil and began unfurling the wire.
‘Why me more than anyone else?’
Jo smiled grimly, although she didn’t feel much like laughing. If a year ago someone had told her they’d be standing here, the three of them . . . Three . . . She shook herself.
‘Pot-kettle,’ Mona said. ‘And anyway, isn’t it about time you mentioned your little bequest?’
‘Stop it, you two,’ Lizzie said. ‘Little ears.’
But the little ears were shut. Their owners fast asleep, curled up, their dark blond heads like inverted commas on the pillows of David’s bed. Thumbs firmly in place.
‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that,’ Mona replied, prowling the room, unable to settle. ‘I meant this whole scenario. Last time we were here . . .’
Nobody needed to say it. The last time was the night before Nicci was moved to the hospice. The night she said her real goodbyes.
Easing the cork from the champagne as silently as possible, Jo poured three glasses and handed one each to Mona and Lizzie. ‘I thought we should do this properly . . . for Nicci and for the girls,’ she said. ‘But I think we’ve already lost our audience. I’m sorry I missed them awake. How did they seem?’
‘OK. A bit hyper. But I guess that’s better than the alternative. Better than David, anyway.’ Lizzie stared pointedly at Mona, but her friend was making a show of rearranging the large cardboard boxes lined up along the bedroom wall. Each had a scribbled yellow Post-it note attached: the first ‘Chuck’, the second ‘Cherish’, the third ‘Charity’.
‘Do you want to do the honours?’ Lizzie pointed to the mirrored double doors that led to the walk-in wardrobe.
‘No, it’s OK,’ Jo said.
‘I’m not doing it,’ Mona put in, too hastily. ‘It’s all yours.’
Anyone would have thought they were opening a long-sealed family crypt, not the spot-lit inner sanctum that housed Nicci’s fashion collection, Lizzie thought.
She sighed, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to do it. Didn’t see why she should. It wasn’t as if she was Number One Friend, anyway. That was Jo’s domain. But Lizzie had always been the tidier-upper, the smoother-over, the peace-maker. Where Nicci had been the leader, forging ahead with plans and ideas, Lizzie had always trailed at the back, shutting doors behind them, unable to come up with a good reason not to be the one to clean up after the others. She even helped mop up the trail of emotional devastation a much younger Nicci had left in her wake.
‘Looks like it’s down to me then,’ Jo said. Positioning herself by the double doors, her right hand on the handle, she lifted her glass stiffly. ‘To Nicci,’ she said, raising it higher and pulling the door open.
‘To Nicci,’ Lizzie and Mona echoed.
Ceiling-set spots had come on automatically as the doors opened, lighting the eight-by-twelve room lined with rails, one row of full height on the right, two of half height on the left. A wall of drawers faced them, and a double row of shoe shelves skirted the room from floor level. More shelves piled high with bags and hatboxes lined the top. There, any suggestion of order stopped. The room was stuffed.
‘I had no idea it was such a mess!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘I was expecting, you know, neat colour-coded piles. The law of the wardrobe, copyright Nicci Morrison.’
‘Are you telling me,’ said Mona slowly, ‘that when it came to her own clothes the queen of clean was the world’s biggest hoarder?’
Jo shrugged. ‘Looks that way.’
‘How the hell did she collect so many?’
‘It was her life’s work,’ Jo said, ‘her passion. You know that. Her job and her hobby. Some people collect books or works of art, Nicci collected clothes. This isn’t even the whole lot. David says there are about eight suitcases in the attic, maybe more. He reckons there’s nothing of value in them; Nicci was too worried about moths and damp for that. We should have a quick sort through just to be sure. But I reckon those can go straight to the charity shop.’
‘The question is,’ said Mona, putting her glass on Nicci’s dressing table and joining Lizzie in the doorway, ‘where the hell do we start?’
‘Knowing Nicci,’ Lizzie said, ‘there’s an arcane filing system. Nothing as straightforward as “what goes with what”.’
‘Alphabetical by designer?’ Mona suggested.
Jo scanned the wardrobe. The air was far cooler in here than in the bedroom. On the wall beside her, just inside the door, a thermostat was set at fifteen degrees Celsius. Typical.
‘Good guess,’ Jo said. ‘But I don’t think so. It’s too much of a mishmash. If all the McQueen, for instance, was in one place, the Prada in another, the rails would look more uniform.’
Mona frowned. ‘By style?’
‘I’ve got it!’ Lizzie announced loudly, glancing over her shoulder at the sleeping girls almost before the words were out of her mouth. ‘It’s autobiographical!’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Jo. ‘That would be chaos.’
‘And your point is?’ Mona laughed. ‘Lizzie’s right. Look.’
In the left-hand corner, tucked at the back, was a pair of beaten-up Doc Martens, the fluro-pink that graffitied them now almost invisible. Above them hung a familiar cracked and faded leather jacket.
Jo blinked and stared hard at the thick-pile carpet, determined not to let the others see her cry. Tears rolled down the side of her cheeks, dampening her neck.
‘I guess we start at the beginning then,’ Lizzie said, taking charge. Pulling a small wooden stepladder from its place at the back of the closet, she lifted a yellowing hatbox from the uppermost shelf, set it on the floor and removed the lid.
‘Omigod,’ she said, wrinkling her nose as she stepped back from the box. A piece of something unquestionably dead was suspended between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Gross. Can you believe she kept this?’
‘What is it?’ Mona asked.
‘Dead bunny,’ Lizzie said. ‘It was dead as a doornail then, and it’s even deader now. And it smells rank.’
‘Bin!’ Mona wretched. ‘Where it should have gone long ago. Why haven’t we got an option for bin? I’ll go and get a black bag.’
‘You can’t,’ Jo said. Taking the rabbit fur shrug from Lizzie’s hand, she laid it carefully on the bed and stood in front of it, as if guarding it from Mona’s malign intent. ‘It’s cherish, definitely cherish. Is there a peach satin slip in that box, too?’
Peering through folds of aged tissue paper, Lizzie nodded.
As soon as she saw the slip she remembered exactly what Jo had known the second she saw the shrug. Almost reverentially Lizzie handed the delicate fabric to Jo, who folded it neatly and put it on top of the shrug.
Mona watched, her expression one of revulsion. ‘If you apply the principle to everything,’ she said, ‘that if-Nicci-kept-it-it’s-significant, then the chuck-stroke-sell pile and the charity shop pile are going to be non-existent.’
‘It won’t apply to everything,’ Jo said. ‘But if it’s twenty years old and has no obvious value – like, it’s not the first piece of McQueen she saved up for, or those original Vivier shoes she bought in a junk shop on The Lanes in our second year, or her Helmut Lang suits – then it has a different value. A sentimental value. Like this.’
‘Why that particularly?’ Mona asked.
‘You must remember?’ Jo said.
She could still see Nicci in the living room of their rundown student house, drumming her newly graffitied docs impatiently while they waited for Lizzie to decide what to wear. ‘It’s what she was wearing the night we . . . The night she met David.’
Chapter Eight
The Rabbit Fur Shrug
Sussex University, Brighton, 1994
The evening hadn’t got off to the best of starts.
‘Lizzie, c’mon!’ Nicci bellowed up the stairs. ‘We’re gonna be late.’
Silence.
Late wasn’t Nicci’s thing. She affected casual insouciance but she was scrupulously punctual. Lizzie was always late, a reaction to her mum, who would always rather arrive two hours early than be two minutes late. And this involved clothes. Clothes and Lizzie just didn’t go together.
‘Just wear the bloody 501s!’ Nicci yelled.
More silence.
‘I don’t know why you’re bothering.’ Mona stuck her wet head, her arm and a single shoulder around the bathroom door. ‘You know how she gets.’
Nicci did. They all did. Lizzie was at war with her wardrobe.
‘Why don’t you just go and style her?’ Jo suggested.
Jo sat in the doorway between the hall and living room, a plastic cup of cheap white wine between her knees. She was wearing jeans. Mona and Jo both were. All three of them did, usually. Only Nicci refused, claiming they made her look even more like a boy. They didn’t, but who were Jo, Lizzie and Mona to argue? Nicci understood clothes in a way no one else did. Jo liked them – sometimes – more than clothes liked her, but she didn’t know how to play them. How to make them do her bidding.
Nicci was wearing her beaten-up DMs, with torn fishnets and one of the many vintage underslips she’d bought from a local flea market, topped off with a rabbit fur shrug she’d brought home earlier that day. The row about how disrespectful Nicci’s dead jacket was to Mona’s vegetarian sensibilities had just finished, only to segue into this.
If I didn’t love Nicci so much I’d be eaten up with jealousy, Jo thought. But she did. Nicci was Nicci. Whatever ‘it’ was, she had it. She could pull it off, black bra showing beneath the slip and all. That was just how life was.
‘Finally!’
Jo looked up at the sound of Nicci’s voice. Lizzie was hurrying down the stairs in her usual uniform of 501s and outsized man’s shirt.
‘You look great,’ Nicci said.
But Lizzie obviously didn’t feel great. She looked defeated. In the battle of Lizzie vs. her wardrobe, Lizzie had lost. Again.
They were so late they decided to skip the pub altogether. They’d drunk a bottle of the cheapest white table wine Tesco had to offer before they left the house, and had another two bottles in their bags so they went straight to the house party. The thud of the bass met them before they could turn the corner into the right street, and pissed students were already spilling onto the pavement.
The girls were so far behind everyone else on the alcohol-and-illegal-substance front that they almost kept walking.
It was Lizzie who saw him first. Not that his old-school purple Mohican was easy to miss. But in the dark, with the fug of B&H and dope smoke clouding the ceiling, and the pulsing beat of The Prodigy destroying the bits of her concentration alcohol hadn’t already wasted, it was a miracle she noticed anything at all.
Lizzie found him in the kitchen, beside a keg of Dutch cooking lager, set up on the draining board.
If she was honest his look intimidated her, but between the fierce hair and torn leather jacket were kind brown eyes.
‘Want some?’
After glancing over her shoulder to make sure he really was talking to her, Lizzie nodded. ‘Four cups, please.’
‘The party that bad?
She grinned. ‘I’ve been to worse.’
He grinned back. ‘Me too.’
When Lizzie fought her way back to Nicci’s corner, plastic cups of something warm and flat balanced between her hands, she looked different, somehow. Glowy.
‘You look different. Have you been smoking?’ Nicci asked, extracting one of the cups from Lizzie’s hands.
‘No!’ Lizzie yelped. ‘You know I don’t.’
But Nicci was right. She felt different too.
‘What is it then?’ Jo said. ‘You met someone? Fast work, O’Hara. You’ve only been gone ten minutes.’
‘Maybe,’ Lizzie said, but even in the dark they could see her blush.
‘You left one behind.’ The voice behind them made Lizzie start. She jumped, knocking Nicci’s hand and sending warm lager sloshing across her peach satin slip. ‘Bollocks,’ everyone said in unison.
‘Shit,’ said the guy with the purple Mohican. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I was just trying . . .’
‘Yeah,’ Nicci said.
‘I’m David,’ he added helplessly.
His face was in direct contrast to his hair. If his hair was all aggression and sharp edges, his face was round and friendly, his eyes soft and brown. He looked genuinely mortified. ‘Whose is this?’ He held up the final plastic cup and Jo claimed it.
‘I’m Lizzie,’ Lizzie said. ‘And these are my housemates, Jo, Mona and Nicci.’
