The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe MBE by Claire Parkin

Author:Claire Parkin [Parkin, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2024-02-01T17:00:00+00:00

Preparing lunch in the kitchen

Moo has announced that she is ready to start the day and, having skipped breakfast, is demanding her lunch. So, I’m fishing out Mother’s medicine chest, and crushing two nitrazepam into Moo’s soup. I shouldn’t be doing this, I know that I shouldn’t, but I am so tired and anxious today, and desperately need a break from her capriciousness and irrational demands. Once I’ve knocked her out, I’ll go and find Puss, and smuggle him into my room. No matter if he has fleas. More than anything else right now, I want to fall asleep with a warm body and beating heart next to my own.

Moo loves Heinz tomato soup, as do I. It is comforting and familiar, even if it does feel a little silly sipping it on a warm, midsummer afternoon. Nevertheless, we’ll sit together, as we often do: me perched on the end of Moo’s bed, Moo propped up on her pillows, and drink our soup from matching mugs, just like we did when we were girls. I will open the windows to free the odour that has settled around Moo’s commode these last few days, allowing the scent of Joanna-Next-Door’s Trachelospermum jasminoides to drift around the room. Moo will probably joke – she often does at this time of year – that we’re stealing the fragrance from Joanna-Next-Door; that the pleasure the jasmine gives us is not ours to take. And I’ll go along with it, as I always do, all the while battling the urge to upend my mug over her silly blonde head and call her out as the filthy, thieving hypocrite she truly is.

Some people steal because they are hungry, others because they are greedy. Some steal because they are angry. My antics with Bear, I believe, put me in the third category – but at least I was able to put things right. The loss of Bear was not permanent for Moo; the damage I inflicted was nothing compared to the loss I endured when she took Mother and Harvey from me.

So many wrongs that were never put right.

Oh God. What have I done?

* * *

I started work at Venus Blue in mid-December. The delay was mainly due to the personnel department at Keen Erotica losing all my paperwork, but also down to me dragging my heels on finally accepting the job. And I had to be interviewed, of course. Frank Keen wanted to be seen as fair and impartial, even though those close to him knew he was anything but. At first, I really wasn’t sure about the team I would be working with. My fellow sub-editors were incredibly young and took themselves too seriously, especially the chief sub-editor – a bright young thing fresh from Oxbridge, untouched by failure, humiliation, and the general shit of life. The poor child simply oozed untried self-assurance.

‘Fiona Hart,’ she trilled, shaking my hand so enthusiastically that the pussycat bow on her blouse nodded in unison. She had evidently ingested Cosmopolitan

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