by Jenny Eclair
Dear Lance –
No, far too formal.
Hey Lance, just got home from the hairdresser’s (fighting the tide of grey, haha) where I spotted the article featuring you and Kittiwake, in amongst the celebrity-Botox-and-filler mags! I have to say, the photos are phenomenal. Freya is so talented, the place looks almost habitable, haha, can’t wait to see it in the bricks and mortar, so to speak. What a great idea to host your fiftieth down there, no doubt Natasha will be very excited at the prospect. As are we! Yup, that’s right, I wanted to confirm that we can all come and we simply can’t wait. Till August then.
All our love to all of you
Bel xxx
Three kisses looks as if she’s trying a bit too hard, Bel decides, and edits them down to one.
Feeling a little bit calmer for having finally RSVP’d, she digs the purloined copy of Better Homes out of her bag and leaves it on the kitchen table, so that she and Andrew can have a good laugh about it later, and comforts herself with the thought that Andrew probably won’t even notice her hair, never mind say anything mean about it. He’s not like the husbands of some of her friends who make nasty comments about their weight or wrinkles. Mind you, she acknowledges, it’s not like Andrew’s in any great shape either; his legs are spindly, his shoulders slope and his belly is as round as a football.
We’ve turned into each other’s matching slipper, Bel admits to herself. There’s precious little passion but we’d be lost without each other. Once again she feels a rush of gratitude towards her husband. If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t have everything she had craved since childhood, her own house and her own garden, complete with her own birdhouse hanging off her own apple tree, not to mention her own children – not that they are children any more. What has time done with those pink-cheeked boys, she wonders. Glancing at the school photograph on the kitchen windowsill featuring her sons in their regulation green sweaters, their hair slicked down by some unknown hand, it strikes her that if either of her sons had been abducted as children only to turn up some fifteen years later, she probably wouldn’t recognise them. She’d still be searching for the sweetness and freckled snub noses of their primary school years.
Placing a coffee pod into the espresso machine and trying to ignore the fact that someone has left several jars lidless on the counter, Bel digs around in the cupboards for some ibuprofen. Her head is killing her. She attempts a few neck and shoulder stretches; if she had any sense, she’d roll out her mat in the living room and pull up a nice relaxing restorative yoga session on YouTube, but she can’t be bothered, a handful of pills will have to suffice. Someone has put an empty blister pack of tablets back into the ibuprofen box and Bel feels her jaw clench in irritation. How can she keep track of things if people keep being so stupid and selfish? It happens all the time, millimetres of orange juice and single rashers of bacon are shoved back in the fridge, mere scrapings of Marmite returned to the cupboard. Why?
Hunger isn’t helping her foul mood. The hairdresser took so long she missed her lunch and now it’s gone three o’clock. Feverishly she pulls the lid off the cheese Tupperware and angrily eats the only remnant of cheese that has been left in the box, its rind mottled with green. Sod it, she refuses to go out again – restocking the cheese and the ibuprofen can wait. There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge and freezer for a simple stir-fry tonight, though she’ll have to do rice as there aren’t any noodles. Bel hates cooking rice. Midway through her fifties she still hasn’t mastered the art of making it light and fluffy. Last time she cooked rice, Jamie commented that it had the same consistency as a wet nappy.
Maybe he’d like to make it himself, thinks Bel, cramming a handful of crackers from the tin into her mouth and hauling herself upstairs. Her head throbs and the light is painful to her eyes. If she’s not careful, she’s going to develop a migraine. It crosses her mind that the worst things for a migraine are coffee and cheese, but it’s too late to worry about that now. Sleep is the answer, if she gets a good few hours in a darkened room, with any luck she’ll dodge a full-blown attack.
Closing the curtains against the spring sunshine, Bel slides into bed fully dressed. Some days really aren’t worth the effort, but before she can close her eyes there is a shout from downstairs. Ed or Jamie, she can’t tell, and she doesn’t care.
‘I’ve got a migraine,’ she shouts from under the duvet. There is no response, no ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ Only the distant flush of a toilet.
At least that’s something they all mastered eventually, she sighs, recalling the time when Ed developed a phobia about using the flush and she was forever encountering a toilet bowl of cheerful yellow urine, occasionally studded with little brown turds. Christ, her children have always been quite repulsive.
Bel finally closes her eyes, falls into a deep sleep and dreams of waking up in Kittiwake in a set of children’s bunk beds.
Three hours later she wakes in real life to the sound of the doorbell. It’s still light outside but it’s nearly 8 p.m., and the smell of an Indian takeaway wafts upstairs. Of course they haven’t cooked. Cooking an evening meal would involve making decisions, taking responsibility, finding pans, chopping boards and knives; it would require getting off arses to slice, dice and set the table.
If there were any biscuits left under the bed she would stage a protest and stay in her room, but hunger drives her downstairs. Hopefully they will have ordered her favourite chicken tikka masala, with pilau rice and a Peshwari naan. She hopes there is a jar of mango chutney in the cupboard, the stuff from the takeaway is thin and vinegary. All of a sudden she is ravenous – what a brilliant idea, a takeaway in front of the telly.
Andrew is at the door, handing over twenty-pound notes. As he turns around with a grease-spotted brown paper bag in each hand, guilt crosses his face at the sight of her.
‘What are you doing up? I thought you were asleep, we weren’t going to disturb you.’
She decides to be cheerful. ‘Looks like there’s plenty to go round,’ she replies, smiling as if to say, See how pleasant I can be, how accommodating I am?
No one has got plates or cutlery out and there is only a tiny teaspoon of the good mango chutney left. Bel immediately goes into domestic mode, counting plates, laying out serving spoons and unpacking the cartons. There is a tinfoil tray with a cardboard lid labelled ‘ch tikk mass’ in black marker pen. At least someone’s chosen her favourite.
Andrew calls the boys in and they pile through, immediately snatching at the food, karate-chopping poppadoms so that they splinter all over the work surface and clumsily spooning rice in the vague direction of a plate. Good job Constancia will be clearing up the mess tomorrow, thinks Bel. She waits until Ed and Jamie have taken what they want and disappeared back into the living room before helping herself, only to find the carton of chicken tikka masala has vanished. ‘That was Maisie’s choice,’ Andrew explains. ‘It was all she wanted.’
Bel can’t help herself. She marches into the sitting room and seizes the carton from Maisie’s hands before she can pile the whole lot into Ed’s Beatrix Potter christening dish, which she has taken to using ‘because it’s so cute’. Silly bitch.
‘I think there’s enough to share,’ she tells the girl, then marches back into the kitchen where Andrew is sitting nervously at the table. She pours half a bottle of white wine into a large brandy glass that she has snatched from the cupboard, and she’s still trembling with fury when Ed comes in to tell her that stealing food from his girlfriend is the behaviour of a ‘madwoman’. It’s all she can do not to pick up the Chardonnay bottle and swing it at his head.
‘Oh, fuck off, baldy,’ she says instead, and for a moment her eldest son looks a tiny bit hurt. Good.
30
Guilt
London, May 2018
Tikkagate was a week ago and Bel is still mortified by her behaviour, occasionally experiencing flashbacks of Maisie’s face as she swiped the chicken tikka carton from under her nose. The girl’s instant l
ook of confusion and hurt, the same face her sons pulled when they were little, followed by the endless fraternal round of accusations, ‘He’s being mean to me.’
I was mean to her, Bel confesses inwardly, forcing herself out of bed. I acted like a crackpot. Even Andrew had looked embarrassed on her behalf. Why do I keep behaving like this, she asks herself, immediately excusing herself with a list of reasons.
Because she swans about in my house, wiping her arse on my toilet paper, shagging my son and smirking at me because I don’t spend forty-five minutes a day shading in my cheekbones and pouting into the mirror.
Maisie pouts constantly; whenever she passes any remotely shiny surface, her face automatically turns into what looks like a sexed-up guppy, she lowers her lids and purses her lips, whatever time of day it is and whatever she’s meant to be doing.
Bel finds it incredibly off-putting, especially first thing in the morning, plus the girl needs to cover herself up a bit more. It’s bad enough having Jamie and Ed coming downstairs with what look like tent poles in their jogging bottoms; there’s no need for Maisie to go around exposing her genital shaving rash. A rash induced by using Bel’s leg-stubble razor, no doubt. Personally, she has never dared to wield anything that lethal near her own undercarriage, which is why Bel’s nether regions are as neglected as the failed vegetable patch in the back garden.
I might make it a rule that everyone needs to be fully dressed for breakfast, thinks Bel, soaping herself down in the en-suite shower and realising that the sag of her belly has finally formed an official saddle of flesh that hangs low over her pubic region.
Her mother will make some comment about this development at Lance’s party, no doubt. She will say something along the lines of ‘Well, a lot of women thicken around the waist in middle age, dear, which is unfortunate. I think the only solution is discipline.’
Natasha has always been stick thin, but then Bel has never seen the woman enjoy a meal in her entire life. She approaches every morsel as if the dish may have been contaminated. The thought prompts a flashback to making a lemon meringue pie in the school holidays and her mother struggling to swallow a couple of mouthfuls. ‘This pastry is very heavy.’
It’s been four years since she actually saw her mother in the diminutive flesh and the realisation that it was at Benedict’s funeral makes Bel feel weak. She allows herself to sit on the floor and let the hot water rain down on her head. The good thing about working part-time is that she doesn’t have to rush off anywhere; sometimes it’s good to just sit and think, even if the memories are too sad to bear.
Benedict died in Switzerland but he was cremated in London. He was only seventy-four – not old these days, but he had burnt himself out, the fags and the foie gras had finally done for him.
Lance had called her. She was furious that he knew before she did, but he explained that Natasha had been contacted first and she had called him – obviously, any excuse to speak to the prodigal son.
Bel hadn’t seen her uncle very regularly for a number of years, and she regrets that now. They emailed occasionally; Benedict had always kept abreast of technology, quite literally . . . she blushes at the memory of finding a selection of Polaroid photographs back in the eighties featuring his then girlfriend wearing nothing but a feather duster.
He’d hidden them in a vase. She was a redhead – natural, apparently.
At the funeral an elderly woman with grey roots and a face that looked as though all the skin had been pulled and tucked into a seam behind her ears approached Bel and whispered, ‘I loved your uncle very much. He was a generous lover and a purveyor of the fine art of cunnilingus, years before it was fashionable.’
It had taken Bel a couple of minutes to match her to the girl in the vase and as she looked around the congregation, she realised that it was full of weeping women of a certain age with elaborate hairdos wearing sheer black stockings. ‘Benedict’s harem,’ her mother had sniffed dismissively.
Without any warning, Bel’s shower begins to run cold – and no wonder, she’s been sitting here for nearly an hour, trapped in the past and using up all the hot water.
Wrapping herself in one of the few towels that is free from any form of Maisie grime – hair dye, fake tan, foundation, whatever – Bel wonders what Natasha would make of Maisie, should they ever meet. She doubts her mother has encountered anyone quite like her, a girl from a broken home on an actual South London estate, a girl who cannot pronounce her aitches and mispronounces ‘ask’ on purpose because she thinks it makes her sound more street, when in fact it makes her sound ridiculous.
On the other hand, Natasha might admire Maisie’s figure and the girl does have a certain way with clothes. The other day she walked out in a pair of red satin martial arts trousers, which Jamie had persuaded Bel to buy for him when he went through a teenage kick-boxing phase, yet another short-lived hobby paid for and abandoned.
Bel sighs and drapes the damp towel over the radiator, wishing for the millionth time they had a heated towel rail, and some new towels for that matter.
As she goes about the dreary daily faff of swallowing pills, applying deodorant and finding acceptable underwear, she wonders how much money she and Andrew would have saved if they’d ever said ‘No’ to their children.
No, you can’t have an electric guitar; no, you don’t have to go to Reading Festival; no, you can’t have another pair of designer trainers to replace the ones you may have left on a park bench; no, you can’t have a lift to Alfie’s house; no, you can’t have ten boys sleeping over and smearing pizza all over the walls and filling the house with noxious fumes just because it’s your birthday. No, no, no, no, your girlfriend can’t move in and start causing havoc with the plumbing thanks to an overabundance of non-biodegradable face-wipes being flushed down the lavatory.
Bel had had a word with her about this issue only a couple of weeks ago, citing the environment and the damage carelessly discarded face-wipes can do and how eventually they could end up twisted around the guts of sea creatures.
The girl had looked at her blankly. ‘But we’re nowhere near the sea.’
Bel’s conscience pricks, she knows she is conjuring up horrible bitchy thoughts about Maisie to justify her appalling behaviour last week. She needs to watch herself, she is starting to look unhinged.
Fifteen minutes later, Bel is down in the kitchen, infuriated to find the glossy magazine featuring Kittiwake has disappeared She was sure it was in one of the piles of paper that migrates regularly from the kitchen table to the dresser and back again.
She hasn’t even shown it to Andrew yet.
Not that he’d pay much attention. Andrew doesn’t do jealousy, decides Bel, and it strikes her now that his vague contentment annoys her. Andrew has never been particularly dissatisfied with his lot. For example, unlike many of their friends, he has never wanted a second home. He once told Bel that he couldn’t see the point of spending all weekend on the motorway only to bleed another set of radiators.
‘Andrew doesn’t have much drive,’ her mother once said of Bel’s husband, and Bel bites her lip at the memory. She’d said it right after Benedict’s funeral, when she came to stay for a couple of nights. Bel had made so much effort to make her comfortable. She’d put a scented candle in Jamie’s bedroom and made sure the bed linen was fresh and properly ironed. She’d even bought croissants from Marks and a selection of expensive conserves, but the only comment her mother had made before they left for the service was to object to Bel’s handbag. ‘Brown with a black coat, dear?’ The criticism of Andrew came late that night, when Bel had taken her mother some hot milk up to help her sleep. She was sitting up in bed wearing a white cotton long-sleeved nightgown and as Bel sat down on the edge of the duvet, her mother casually came out with it and in the split second after the words left her mouth, it was all Bel could do not to throw the scalding drink in her face. Instead, she had put the mug down on the bedside table that she’d cleared especially, made her excuses and left. The tears she�
��d wept in the days that followed weren’t only for the loss of Benedict, they were also for the loss of any chance of making things better between herself and Natasha.
A couple of years ago, Andrew had paid for Bel to attend a two-day residential creative writing course in Holt where she had written a poem about this tricky relationship.
It was called ‘Jam’, and the gist of it was that to maintain a pleasant taste and consistency, any communication with her mother had to be kept entirely sterile, otherwise the resulting ‘jam’ of their relationship became wasp-infested and mouldy.
When she read it out to the group, she had cried and everyone had hugged her, which was both lovely and appalling at the same time.
One woman with long unwashed grey hair and a jumper made from string had hugged her that bit too long and in the end she was glad to get back to Clapham, where she hid her poem at the bottom of her underwear drawer.
‘My creative streak has never been properly fulfilled,’ she mutters to herself, digging around for the magazine and getting increasingly furious about it.
Eventually, after a good half-hour of fruitless searching, she finds the magazine under an egg-and-bean-stained frying pan in Ed’s room. There are no plates visible, just two dirty forks. They must have eaten their meal direct from the pan then, the savages.
Bel jumps as Maisie pushes the door open. She has a towel wrapped around her body and another on her head. She has been in the family bathroom, doubtless leaving the usual great scuzzy tidemark around Constancia’s freshly scrubbed tub.
Bel feels caught out and guilty. She shouldn’t be sitting here on Ed’s bed, it’s an intrusion. Maisie looks horrified to see her. Bel quickly reaches for the moral high ground.
