Dear Beneficiary Read online

  Dear Beneficiary

  Janet Kelly

  Best Exotic Marigold Hotel meets Last Tango in Halifax in this hilarious debut novel by Janet Kelly.

  Life begins in her fifties for Cynthia when, released from a dull and dutiful marriage by her husband’s demise, she embarks on a passionate affair with a thirty-eight-year-old Nigerian man called Darius. The passionate romance is suddenly truncated when he has to return to his homeland to help his sick parents. Cynthia’s grandson helps her get on the internet in a bid to speak to her former lover via email, but when she receives a spam message requesting bank details for a friend who needs medical help, she assumes Darius has been in contact to ask for her support. Hilarity ensues when Cynthia finds herself travelling to Nigeria to try and trace the scammers and her life savings.

  Join Cynthia on her laugh-out-loud adventure as she proves that women of a certain age can live and love like never before!

  CONTENTS

  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

  Other Titles by Accent Press

  CHAPTER ONE

  There’s definitely something to be said for having a thirty-eight-year-old black lover. Particularly when you’ve recently turned sixty.

  Although no one, particularly me, could have imagined the impact such a relationship would have on my otherwise ordered outlook. Meeting him took me to places otherwise unconsidered, on more than one occasion.

  ‘Not there, Darius,’ I once told him, during a physically experimental moment, and thankfully he renegotiated his entry point. As it was eleven-thirty in the morning, I thought I was being adventurous enough.

  After our relationship ended I busied myself with new opportunities in a life I was finding increasingly challenging. Not so much because of its solitude, but by the way it seemed to be changing on every level. I took up knitting and found it pointless. I reorganised my books into alphabetical order according to their authors and planted an azalea bush, which subsequently died a quick death. It didn’t help.

  I’d spent a long time being diligently married to Colin. There was no doubt he was highly respectable and always, always dutiful – but somewhat dull. It’s difficult to admit but I don’t miss him much, a fact that’s highlighted even more now I have someone to compare him with. I suppose I loved my husband in the way you might love anything you’ve been stuck with for forty years, a bit like an old sideboard, but not in any great soulmate type of way. Ever since I’ve been on my own, which I have for more than three years, I’ve come to realise that my active life does not have to be over just because I’m widowed.

  I often thought about Darius but recognised, in my most stoic moments, that our relationship had to end. Apart from the fact he needed to return to Nigeria for family reasons, we couldn’t be seen together (the neighbours would start their own Surrey Defence League in protest!) and him being the same age as my children would create endless arguments about age-appropriate behaviour; all rather silly, really.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if I might ever see him again, if fate would ever allow me such a luxury. As it was unlikely, I figured I would have to look for something else to do. I searched around for a ‘hobby or interest’, as women’s magazines advise, to occupy my mind – and was thrown into despair at the opportunities for women of a certain age. If you don’t like making cupcakes and have an aversion to anyone who discusses the merits of being post-menopausal, there is little on offer. I did notice, however, that the world opens up if you have a computer.

  So when my grandson, Tom – at eighteen, the eldest of my daughter Bobbie’s three boys – arrived one soggy Saturday afternoon in the persistent hope of stodgy food and a financial hand-out, I decided to ask him if he could help me get to grips with technology.

  Tom is something of a geek; a large but obliging lad, clearly not used to exercise or nutritional considerations. Bobbie tried feeding the family with vegetables, fish and fruit but being surrounded by testosterone-fuelled males with a constant and unholy desire for white fats and carbohydrates she knew she was on a hiding to nothing. Rather than fight for a sensible diet she filled the freezer with pizzas and left them to their own devices. Despite the lack of tone and muscle, Tom made up for any physical shortcomings with great quantities of intelligence and logic. He was also a very kind boy, caring to his grandmother and fond of small furry animals.

  ‘Tom,’ I asked as he sat in my kitchen over a Diet Coke and slice of home-made banana cake. ‘You understand the interweb, don’t you?’

  He smoothed his hand over his mop of black, curly and slightly grubby looking hair, looking quizzically at me as if he’d never really understood who I was.

  ‘Do you mean the internet, Nan?’

  I sighed in exasperation. He was being obtuse and slightly pedantic. He knew what I meant but liked to haul me up on semantics. He was like his grandfather in that way.

  ‘Yes, of course, that internet thing. I want to go on it so can you help me?’

  Tom wasn’t one to miss an opportunity. He spoke with his mouth full of cake, excited by the prospect of his certainly solvent, if not well-off, relative being encouraged to buy the latest technology on a whim. He was no doubt hoping I’d go off it a few months later, to his benefit. I could see him making a mental note to seek out the most advanced, and expensive, computer he could find.

  ‘What do you want it for? Poker or porn?’ he chuckled, without any concept of how close his suggestions might be to my recent activities with the shiny Darius or the fact I was secretly hoping it might give me a lead to his whereabouts.

  I was embarrassed, which was unusual for me. I pushed away a strand of wiry grey hair, prodding it back into the neat bun that had reappeared since the disappearance of my lover. It had been my trademark feature for more years than a donkey would be able to give time to, so people had become suspicious of the new look I’d adopted for Darius’s benefit.

  ‘Thomas Butcher, you are being inappropriate.’ I told him. ‘I want to get modern and that seems to be the way I have to go. Like it or not.’

  I paused and went to refill the kettle at the Butler sink. It was in place not for its fashionable status but because I’d liked its practicality. It was robust, solid and could hold far more than its stainless steel counterparts. In many ways it reminded me of Darius and his sturdy countenance. If I compared my men to sinks, Colin was more like the one in the cloakroom: small, white and not entirely essential.

  ‘Plus the bridge club have started sending emails instead of letters, so I’ve missed a number of meetings from not having an email address,’ I told him, in a bid to banish the reverie of my memories. Tom looked fondly at me.

&
nbsp; ‘Do they know you aren’t online?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve told them,’ I replied, and Tom gave me a look. I hoped it wasn’t suggesting what I thought it might be; that they hadn’t wanted me to get the information they were sending out to all their members. ‘But they won’t have any excuse if I get an email number, will they?’

  I’d never contemplated entering a world that involved communicating via a screen. It all seemed too arbitrary and cold. But my life was chilly and more complicated than I’d hoped it might be at sixty. Something was lacking, and on occasions I even wondered if I should have joined the Church – if only for somewhere to go on a Sunday, the bleakest day of the week to be alone.

  I thought of the future and realised I could have another thirty years of dealing with a changing world. A computer was something I had to have, if only to broaden my shrinking horizons and keep a possible connection to Darius. When he’d left, he’d given me his business card with all his contact details. A phone call seemed too direct, whereas one of those email things might be a polite way of getting in touch, a bit like sending a Christmas card with the annual ‘we must get together’ message that no one acts on.

  Mind you, I do so hate those types of round-robin reports of family achievement. One of my school friends had children of such literary and musical genius they apparently outwitted all their teachers at the local primary school within a week of starting. I couldn’t help but smirk when I heard that Jocelyn, the boy, had been expelled from his very expensive public school for cheating in his Religious Studies exam. He was caught when he removed his trousers halfway through, to refer to notes he’d written all over his thighs in ball-point pen. His mother had annually promised that we would all know of her son in time, and that prediction was certainly achieved. He received a conditional discharge for the offence of gross indecency (teenagers being prone to inadvertent erections) and could never get the faint remnants of the quote ‘You shall not live, because you have spoken a lie in the name of the Lord’ to entirely wash away.

  ‘Just tell me what I need to buy,’ I said to Tom, who was visibly flushed – no doubt thinking of the access I’d have to technology that was currently out of his budgetary reach.

  I read his thoughts and told him money was no object, knowing that would give him freedom to buy the best email system available. That’ll teach the bridge club!

  When Tom arrived with my new equipment I was impatient to get going with it all. He was thrilled to inform me the package came with something called a Blueberry. Or was it Blackberry? Either way it would take phone calls, emails, text messages, and by all accounts run my life if I let it.

  I’d like to say I was impressed but I hadn’t a notion of what my grandson was telling me as he took it out of the box and showed me all the functions. I was more interested in the computer, as it looked large enough to be able to do what I needed and offered a promise of connection to Darius. My dreams had been filled with his presence, and on many occasions I would wake up expecting to see him next to me. The disappointment was like winning the lottery and finding out you’d lost the ticket.

  ‘So how do I get online then, Tom?’ I asked as I squashed myself next to my grandson, while he peered intently at the screen of the new desktop PC. ‘Can I write an email to the bridge club yet?’

  ‘Just be patient, Nan,’ muttered Tom. ‘I’m setting you up now.’

  Tom bought the sparkling new computer, now the subject of his unswerving attention, from a specialist store in Tottenham Court Road. The addition to my household was funded entirely from Colin’s legacy of a healthy government-funded pension, enforced parsimony and sensible saving. He probably would have preferred to spend his hard-earned cash on golf club membership, an unsuitably fast car and possibly women slightly looser than myself (he would’ve died of shock at my antics with Darius, but being dead already he was thankfully spared the level of looseness I was prepared to go to, given the right encouragement). I suspect the constant need or expectation of sensible behaviour left us both always slightly wanting on the level of spontaneity, but certainly very safe in terms of his economic viability. The latter being a non-negotiable characteristic in a husband, as far as I’m concerned.

  Once the PC was strategically placed on the spare room table, next to the electronic piano and below a dusty looking shelf full of folders marked ‘justice’s manuals’ – a legacy from my days on the magistrates’ bench – it was all I could do to contain my excitement.

  This was much to Tom’s irritation, as he really wanted me to leave him with the kit for a few hours so he could test out the graphics card and speed of connection to his game challengers, one of whom he was sure he could beat into oblivion with the assistance of the state-of-the-art connectivity this system was capable of offering.

  ‘What’s my email address?’ I pushed. ‘Can I email Marjory?’

  Marjory is my sister and she lives in Manchester. We haven’t spoken or written in years, after an unsavoury incident involving a used condom. Jonjo, Bobbie and Titch had been staying with their cousins, and none of them would admit to anything. I knew it would be nothing to do with my children as they would know better and I told Marjory so. She was quite rude, actually, and wouldn’t accept that her kids don’t know how to behave. Anyway, there’s no loss there but possibly the remote nature of an email might offer the chance to circumnavigate stubborn pride and years of embittered family feuding.

  ‘Do you know her email address, then?’ asked Tom.

  Not to be thrown by tricky technological questions I took a wild guess. Spinning around from the PC, I said that of course I did.

  ‘It’s Marjory Fuller, at something.’ I felt a bit silly at that point, as it dawned on me there was probably more to this internet lark than I’d first thought, but I wasn’t going to be deterred. I’d every intention of mastering new methods of communication. However, a few diversionary tactics don’t go amiss when caught out not knowing one’s stuff. I also recalled Darius’s business card and the various contact details but didn’t think it wise to present it at this point.

  ‘Right. Time for a cup of tea and one of my best cakes,’ I said, making a hasty exit on a mission to the kitchen. On the way down the stairs I stopped to look at my reflection in the mirror on the landing and thought I could see some distinct ageing.

  I wondered what Darius would see. A slight sagginess to the otherwise rounded and highly placed cheekbones, a few extra lines around the mouth and crow’s feet? Or laughter lines, as my mother would call them; even though laughing wasn’t a natural activity for anyone in our family.

  No I thought. The light isn’t good and you had a bracing but windy walk to the library which is enough to make anyone look a little haggard.

  I hoped Marjory hadn’t fared any better on the physical front, particularly as she always had a tendency for overindulgence and laziness. She wouldn’t bother with the ‘cleanse, tone and moisturise’ routine like I have, and has always had little resistance to pies, chocolate and second helpings.

  I heard Tom hitting the keys on the computer keyboard with a dexterity known only to the latest generation. Not touch-typing, just a complete knowledge of where to go and what to do. I turned back to look at him and wondered how he could have such certainty about something at such a young age. It seemed like only a few weeks ago I was teaching him how to spell his own name, and that took some time.

  He plodded down the stairs after a few minutes, his jeans far too long and stained at the bottom where he had trodden them into a variety of puddles and pavements over the last winter. He was no slave to fashion. Even his hoodies came from British Home Stores.

  He gave me a hug before he walked into the kitchen. My gaze followed him, stopping momentarily to note the hall which, I thought, was looking a little austere with its lime green walls and wooden floor. From the back Tom looked like one of those stuffed bears you see in the fairground; all snuggly and round, with hunched shoulders and a general slackness, which in Tom’s
case was developed from spending his formative years hunched over computers.

  I’d never had any problem developing a relationship with Tom. Where others in the family would see me as some silly old woman, he was always affectionate and warm. He says he finds me funny, and when describing me to his friend at school called me ‘cool’, which wasn’t a word I expected to be assigned to me. I smiled, thinking what his description would be for an old lady lost in romantic notions about a man who couldn’t possibly be mistaken for her son on account of his colour.

  ‘You be careful now you’re online,’ he said, warning me of the possible dangers of what he referred to as ‘surfing’.

  I made him laugh by not knowing what he was talking about and he suggested it was quite understandable I was a bit out of touch at my age, a comment I thought to be a little unnecessary.

  ‘How much trouble can I get into from my own spare bedroom?’ I said, as I closed the front door behind him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It didn’t matter how long I stared at the computer screen, it didn’t feel familiar. I’d been trying to work it all out for three days, one of which was mainly spent finding the ‘on’ button.

  There seemed to be some emails, little headings in a list promising intrigue and communication, but even though I’d managed it the day before, I couldn’t remember how to open them. I couldn’t quite master the art of mouse control either. Even when I could get the pointer anywhere near a message the little arrow would move tantalisingly close to where I needed it to be and then run away to hide in the corner of my screen, shaking like a frightened mouse might.

  After prodding at the keyboard a few times I decided I needed help, although it galled me to admit it. I looked on the wall for the Post-it note with Tom’s mobile phone number scrawled in his spidery writing and found it stuck behind the desk. I couldn’t reach it with my fingers, a ruler or the metal bit from underneath my bra. I tried to move the desk but Colin had thoughtfully screwed it to the wall after it had collapsed under the weight of his briefcase.