The Sunshine Cruise Company Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Niven

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Epilogue: Three Years Later

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning sixty. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all – a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people’s home.

  Then Susan’s world is ripped apart when Barry is found dead in a secret flat – or rather, a sex dungeon. It turns out Barry has been leading a double life as a swinger. He’s run up a fortune in debts and now the bank is going to take Susan’s home.

  Until, under the influence of an octogenarian gangster named Nails, the women decide that, rather than let the bank take everything Susan has, they’re going to take the bank. With the help of Nails and the thrill-crazy, wheelchair-bound Ethel they pull off the daring robbery, but soon find that getting away with it is not so easy.

  The Sunshine Cruise Company is a sharp satire on friendship, ageing, the English middle classes and the housing bubble from one of Britain’s sharpest and funniest writers.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He is the author of the novella Music from Big Pink and the novels Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The Second Coming, Cold Hands and Straight White Male.

  ALSO BY JOHN NIVEN

  Music from Big Pink

  Kill Your Friends

  The Amateurs

  The Second Coming

  Cold Hands

  Straight White Male

  The Sunshine

  Cruise Company

  John Niven

  To Sheila Sheerin

  ONE

  SO MUCH BLOOD, Susan Frobisher thought. So much blood.

  She was at the kitchen counter, absolutely covered in the stuff. It was spattered all over the worktops, her apron and her face. A huge bowlful of it stood in front of her. The horror-show aspect of the scene was hugely magnified by her kitchen’s whiteness. Traditional Shaker. They’d only had it done last year. All the gadgets: sliding chiller drawer at knee height, waste-disposal unit, one of those bendy taps like you saw on the cooking shows and even a built-in wine cooler. Not that she and Barry drank very much these days, but still, it looked nice, all those frosted bottles lined up like missiles in the bomb bay. (Emperor Kitchens on the Havering Road had done it. Barry had negotiated a very good deal, as always. He loved doing it. Negotiating.) Susan checked her reflection in the smoked-glass door of the cooler and, blood aside, was pleased with what she found as she approached her sixtieth year: her complexion was still youthful, her eyes clear and her figure trim. Her hair had been grey for nearly a decade now, however, and Julie was always on at her to have it done, although the days when it would have been Julie’s ‘treat’ were now long past …

  Outside, through the double glazing, the dew was already lifting from the half of the garden the sun was hitting. The first week of May and, finally, spring had properly arrived down here in Dorset. Susan stuck her pinkie into the bowl of blood and put it in her mouth. Mmmm. Not quite sure about the texture. It had to be just right.

  If you get it just right, as her great hero the special-effects wizard Tom Savini said, ‘You can create illusions of reality – make people think they’ve seen things they really haven’t seen.’ Horror movies were Susan’s private little vice. (Barry couldn’t stand them, couldn’t stand movies of any kind in fact. ‘Load of rubbish,’ he’d sneer. ‘Somebody just made it all up!’ He liked documentaries. War stuff.) She’d seen everything Savini had ever done – Friday the 13th, The Burning, Dawn of the Dead. She’d watch them curled up with her tea when Barry was working late.

  As if on cue Barry Frobisher walked into the kitchen, knotting his tie. He surveyed the scene and said: ‘What the bloody hell …’

  ‘Not quite the right consistency,’ Susan said. ‘Too thin.’

  ‘Look at the mess!’

  ‘I’ve got to get it done now. I’ve the shopping to do and then Julie’s birthday lunch this afternoon, then dress rehearsals tonight.’

  ‘Christ. Can’t you just … buy this bloody stuff, Susan?’

  ‘No budget, darling.’

  Barry sighed as he moved towards the coffee pot, his partially tied tie still loose around his neck, picking up a cup from the kitchen table as he went. (They always laid the kitchen table for breakfast the night before, before they went to bed.) ‘I don’t know what you get out of this, Susan, I really don’t.’

  He took a slice of cold toast from the rack and started buttering it thickly. He’d have been better off with some cereal, Susan thought, that waistline of his, really starting to crawl over the band of his trousers. A 42-inch waist she’d had to buy him,
the last time they went clothes shopping in M&S. Not to mention what it was probably doing to his arteries. Susan heard him wheezing a bit in the mornings these days, just with the effort of levering himself out of bed. (His bed. They’d finally gone down that road a few years back: his and hers single beds on either side of the room. They both liked different mattresses anyway. Better to get a good night’s sleep. And, as Barry pointed out, his back was bad and it’s not like they were newly-weds. That side of things happened only very occasionally these days. In fact, when was the last time? Susan strained to remember. Around Christmas? Maybe before.)

  ‘It’s fun,’ Susan said, answering his question.

  Barry snorted.

  Wroxham Players – Susan’s ‘creative outlet’.

  She was no actor. (Not that many of them were.) She’d started out helping with wardrobe and had now been in charge of Costumes and Props for the past three years. Jesus, Barry thought, the first nights he’d been obliged to attend. Bunch of pensioners and starry-eyed teenagers stepping into the scenery and over each other’s lines. Still, it was harmless enough, he supposed. Kept her off the streets and all that. He poured himself some coffee while, in the background, Susan added more corn syrup to the fake-blood mixture. ‘What is it this year?’ Barry asked over his shoulder.

  ‘King Lear.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘That’s … Shakespeare?’

  ‘Yes,’ Susan said. Not a reader, her Barry. A good provider. An accountant. A chartered accountant, Susan used to hear herself saying proudly.

  ‘What’s it about then? That one,’ he asked, sipping his black coffee.

  ‘Oh, the indignity of old age you could say,’ Susan said, stirring the mixture, wondering if there would be enough of it. She feared Frank, the director, was intending to go a little Peckinpah in the eye-gouging scene. She wondered if the sensibilities of the average Wroxham audience could take it.

  ‘Sounds cheery,’ Barry said, opening the Daily Mail over at the table, already only half listening. Look at this – bloody East Europeans. All over the place.

  Old age.

  They’d both be sixty this year. Their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. What was that? Susan wondered. Jade? Topaz or something? And was it really ten years since their silver wedding? Such a lovely little party Tom and Clare had thrown for them, in the function suite down at the Watermill. Not that they saw much of Tom and Clare. Both caught up with their careers. At that age now, early 30s. Still, Susan did find it odd that their son and his wife had been together over a decade now and still hadn’t produced a grandchild. It seemed to be the way these days. She’d been nearly thirty when she had Tom, back in 1983. They’d classified her as an ‘old mum’. Special attention. Nowadays thirty seemed young to be having children. What was Clare now? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Anyway – they wanted to be getting a move on in Susan’s view.

  She gave the water/corn syrup/ketchup mixture a final stir, pleased with the consistency now, and started looking in the drawer beneath the sink for the plastic ziplock freezer bags.

  How best to ask him? Susan was wondering.

  Tricky ground. Julie and Barry had never enjoyed good terms. Julie, Susan suspected, thought Barry was boring. Barry, she very much knew, thought Julie was completely mental. A bad influence. True, Julie had always been wilder than Susan, way wilder back in the day, but she wasn’t crazy. Still, she’d had a hell of a life, Julie. Maybe play to Barry’s sense of superiority. ‘Oh, darling?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Eight hundred quid a week in benefits? Shiftless bastards.

  ‘Could you put an extra three hundred into my account please?’

  ‘Eh? What for?’

  ‘Well, I spent a little more than I meant to on Julie’s birthday present.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Susan –’

  ‘It’s her sixtieth, Barry! And she’s had a terrible time of it these last few years. Losing her business. That bugger running off with all her money. That flat she’s in. That awful job. I wanted to get her something nice.’

  ‘Well, you know what I think.’

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘One thing after another. That stupid hamburger van. That “boutique”. Woman couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.’

  ‘She’s been unlucky.’

  ‘You have to learn to budget, Susan.’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘Every other month it’s a couple of hundred for this, a hundred for that.’ He was getting up now. Placing his coffee cup in the sink, finishing the knot in his pink tie, a neat full Windsor.

  ‘Please, Barry. Don’t be mean.’

  ‘I’ll transfer the money, OK? But that’s it till next month.’ Another bank transfer to do today too, Barry boy, rather bigger, from the shell account in Holland …

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  ‘I don’t bloody know …’

  It had always worked this way, their finances. Barry took care of everything. (Susan had worked, briefly, back in the mid-1970s, in the art gallery in Poole, in the brief window between finishing her fine art degree and marrying Barry. When had she left the gallery? Yes, 1977. Julie had turned up unexpectedly, back from her travels, all her hair shorn off and rows of safety pins running up her lapels. The gallery owner had nearly thrown a fit – Barry too when he met them later that night. Later still they’d gone back to her and Barry’s flat where Julie had made fun of them for listening to Fleetwood Mac on Barry’s reel-to-reel tape machine. State of the art that was at the time. Whatever happened to it? The stuff you have over the years, where does it all go?) Susan only noticed money when her ‘allowance’ account ran low. Barry loved money. Moving it about. Doing this and that. ‘Restructuring’ their finances. Always on the lookout for a sweeter credit card deal, a better interest rate for their savings.

  ‘Right, I’m off,’ Barry was saying, pushing himself up from the kitchen table with a reluctant grunt.

  ‘OK, darling. There’s cottage pie in the fridge for your dinner. You can do yourself some peas, can’t you?’

  ‘I guess I’ll have to. I might work late though …’ He moved to kiss her cheek, then surveyed the mess and thought better of it. He blew one across the counter and Susan smacked her lips back.

  ‘Good luck, Susan,’ Susan said as he walked towards the door.

  ‘Eh?’ Barry said, turning back.

  ‘Good luck with your dress rehearsal tonight, Susan.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes, yes, good luck.’

  Well, thank you, Susan thought as he left.

  Barry, in his turn, thinking, What a load of old bloody bollocks.

  TWO

  WHILE SUSAN WRESTLED with the problems of blood, her oldest friend was dealing with bodily fluids of a different stripe. The thing about piss, Julie Wickham was increasingly coming to believe, was that it was like snowflakes or fingerprints; no two examples were exactly the same.

  Take Mrs Meecham at the end of the hall. Hers was always extremely acrid. Sharp. Old Mr Bledlow, Alf here, not so much. Mild, almost scentless. Why? They both had much the same diet, the same three meals a day doled out by the home, tipped out of huge, ultra-cheap plastic catering bags and then boiled or baked or fried. Maybe it had something to do with the kidneys, with their varying degrees of decrepitude. Yet Mr Bledlow was nearly ninety, sitting quietly in the corner over there in the clean pyjamas the nurse had helped him into while Julie worked her mop all around and under his stripped bed, where the overspill had gone. By God it had been a fair old load. Julie dunked the mop into the bleach/water mixture, rinsed it out by pressing it into the colander bit of the metal bucket, and started swabbing again. She caught her face reflected in the shining linoleum, still pretty in the right light, her black hair hanging down, very little grey for her age, and thought to herself, as she had nearly every day in here for the past three months, ‘Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week – But it’s a paycheck, Jack.’

  ‘Piss Factory’ by Patti Smith. She’d been, what, twenty-one o
r twenty-two when she first heard that? Living up in London, in that tiny bedsit in Finsbury Park. Handy for the Rainbow it had been. She’d been going out with Terry who did the door at the Roxy at the time. He worked at the Vortex later.

  Yep – a paycheck, Jack. She’d done things for money over the years, Julie. She’d stolen. She’d … well, anyway. But if you’d told her back then that she’d end up turning sixty and working in an old folks’ home mopp—

  She became aware of a sound, a steady choking noise. She turned – Mr Bledlow, sobbing, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. She propped the mop against the bed and went over, leaning down by the vinyl-covered armchair. ‘Hey, hey, what’s this now?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the old fellow said, hands still covering his face. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘Come on, no need for all this, Alf. Just a little accident.’

  ‘It ain’t right you having to do this.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s my job.’ She slid an arm around his shoulder. His hair was like powder, frizzy and silver. You felt like if you breathed on it too hard it’d blow off his head, exploding into the pale, antiseptic air like the stems from a dandelion. ‘Shhh, come on now. Everything’s OK.’ She soothed the old boy, waiting for him to calm down, and looked around the room. The framed photographs of the children and grandchildren who visited once in a blue moon. The jug of weak orange squash. The tobacco tin he kept his loose change in. The grim view of the facing Victorian brickwork from the window. Julie was almost thankful she had no children. There’d be no one to not come and visit her when the time came. No one to not remember her birthday. No one to not spend the requisite minimum time on Christmas Day. No one to … no. Stop it. Best not to think about all that again. She’d been thinking about it too much lately, back at the flat, at night, with the off-brand vodka and her music playing.

  She felt him regain his natural breathing tempo as the sobs subsided. ‘That’s better,’ Julie said.

  He looked up at her through watery rheumy eyes – eyes that had seen nine decades come and go – and said, with simple, perfect clarity, ‘I don’t like it here.’

  Julie felt a spasm in her throat as she stared into the force field of his sorrow: ending your days in a decrepit shithouse run by the lowest bidder, surrounded by strangers. She wanted to say, ‘None of us do, Alf. None of us do.’ But she swallowed her tears, her fear, and said the only thing she could: ‘Cheer up, love. They’ll be along with the tea in a minute.’