by Robert Webb
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
And then, because it was suddenly the obvious question, ‘How are you?’
‘How am I?’ Toby gave a toothy smile and looked out to the room for a moment. ‘I must say I’ve felt worse.’ He returned his gaze to her. ‘I’m a wee bit dizzy, to be honest.’
‘Oh, right. Is that what happens when you dance?’
‘No. Apparently it’s what happens when I stand quite close to you.’
Kate looked down at her boots and shuffled like a schoolgirl. There wasn’t much point trying to be cool about this. ‘That’s a nice thing to say.’
‘It’s a nice thing to feel, I don’t mind telling you.’
She reached up and kissed him again, more passionately this time. He placed a hand on the side of her face and she experienced a sudden drop in her pelvic region as if she’d just driven a car over a humpback bridge at high speed.
She broke off. ‘Ooh, right. Okay.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘My thoughts entirely.’
Kate took a woozy moment to reflect that the sudden change in her feelings for Toby were the exact opposite of sudden. It wasn’t that he was different – it was that she now saw what she had first missed. Of course! Of course Toby was an unassuming fuck-god. Of course he was self-sufficient and kind. And that kiss – of course it felt rich and tender. Why wouldn’t it? It had been cooking for twenty-eight years.
Still, the insight frightened her and she didn’t trust her feelings. She needed to take a moment. Luckily her bladder was giving her an insistent excuse. She was glad she wouldn’t have to lie to him. There had been quite enough of that. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said, ‘but I really do need that piss.’
His expression faltered. ‘Okay …’
‘Toby, seriously.’ She kissed him again. ‘I promise I’m not going to disappear.’
‘Go, then. I demand that you have this important piss.’
‘You’ll be here?’
‘I’ll be waiting.’
She laid a hand on his warm chest and then forced herself to turn towards the door.
The one-cubicle sensory provocation that called itself the ‘Ladies’ was back through the main door and past the stairs. Kate made her way round the edge of the room, grabbing a handful of complimentary prawn crackers from a shared bucket on the way. It was a muscle memory: you’re at Blossom – you pig-out on prawn crackers. Not just because you’re hungry but because you once heard that the fat content allowed you to drink for longer before keeling over. Moving through the crowded doorway, she contemplated the metaphysics of her attitude to the prawn crackers. Her older self – or rather, herself in her future life – would now take a dim view of exposing her immune system to the do-boys-really-wash-their-hands-after-having-a-wee? bacterial lottery of a communal snack bucket. There again, her older self didn’t seem to be entirely in charge of this body. This body seemed to have quite strong opinions of its own. For example, the lower-middle part of it was, she was the first to notice, currently having quite the party because of a kiss from Toby Harker.
She then wobbled round the corner to a sight that was equally unexpected and considerably less welcome.
Luke had just reached the top of the stairs and wore an expression of unhinged determination. He looked like a man who’d just discovered a neighbour had driven over his display of prize begonias and he was jolly well going to say something. Kate wanted to hide but Luke had already seen her and he stopped her by saying, weirdly, ‘Excuse me!’
She was still holding a prawn cracker and sensed that she probably had crumbs on her lips. It was as if she had just been caught red-handed doing something outrageous. She immediately resented a powerful feeling of guilt and tossed her hair, waiting for him to speak.
‘I came to ask you what the hell you think you’re playing at,’ he said.
‘I’ve said everything I had to say. The rest is up to you.’
‘And you expect me to believe you?’
Kate took a large and defiant bite of prawn cracker and said through it, ‘Yeah, I do actually.’
‘That I’ve got a brain tumour and you’re my time-travelling fucking … wife from the future?’
Kate glanced around, conscious that she didn’t want this conversation overheard. The merry patrons of Blossom were toing and froing around them obliviously. Luke registered her unease: ‘Oh, what? You don’t want other people to know? You think they might think you’re nuts?’
She dropped the rest of the cracker on the floor and wiped her hand on her jeans. ‘Luke, you’re making a dick of yourself. I understand that you’re having trouble accepting this, but—’
‘How could you possibly understand!?’ He was shouting now, an angry flush reddening his face and throat. ‘People I care about, a grandmother that I really loved, died of cancer and it’s not a funny subject!’
Granny Fairbright. Lilian. Bowel cancer. When he was twelve.
Kate opened her mouth to speak but Luke couldn’t allow it. ‘And don’t say that you knew that! Don’t you dare say that you know! You don’t know these things about me. You don’t know things! I don’t believe you! You don’t know!’
He was hysterical. He’d obviously spent the last hour in his room knocking up a hot soup of fear and incomprehension. She moved closer and tried to calm him. ‘Luke …’ she said.
‘DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME!’ he yelled and lurched to take a step back.
But there was no step to take.
Instead, Luke’s hastily reversing foot found the thin air at the top of the stairs. Kate lunged forward to grab him. Already falling, Luke took the movement as some kind of attack and batted her hand away. He flailed wildly with his other arm at the slick wall of the staircase but there was nothing to save him. The momentum of his recoil from Kate carried his six-foot-two body down the stairs with the back of his head leading the way. It struck a middle step and the rest of him followed in a crumpled somersault. Over he went: once, twice.
Clattering down after him, Kate was at his side before he had stopped moving.
‘Luke! Luke!’
There was no response from his closed eyes. And Kate fought for breath as a pool of his blood began to form on the ground behind his broken head.
She screamed. ‘Help me! I need help!’
Chapter 17
‘I can’t say I’m surprised. Your aunt Vanessa only lasted one day at secretarial college.’
‘Mother, I already told you. I haven’t dropped out. I just came back to collect a few things.’
‘It was a blessing in disguise, of course,’ Madeleine went on. ‘She would never have made a typist, not with those nails. Or her attitude to men.’
They sat opposite each other in the small, tidy room that Bill called the living room and Madeleine called the parlour. A modest sunrise was breaking through the net curtains: a Sunday morning in Kate’s childhood home in Deptford. A very recent childhood as far as Madeleine was concerned. As for Kate, she had let herself in through the front door for the first time in many years. Since, in fact, her mother had sold the place after Bill’s death. Kate was tremulously aware that her father was asleep upstairs.
Kate sipped the Earl Grey her mother had made for them. She hadn’t slept. She had ridden with Luke in the ambulance, holding his hand and chanting to herself ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ as the paramedics improved on her work to stop the bleeding. Once he was stable in intensive care there was nothing to do except call his parents. Barbara had answered with impressive speed given that she must have been in bed. But then, Kate imagined, this is what parents do: the phone rings after midnight and they expect the worst. Poor Barbara! Kate had always loved her and had now admired the focused and unfussy way she had taken the details of the hospital from this strange young woman on the end of the phone. She had told Barbara the truth, from a certain point of view: she didn’t know Luke well but there had been an accident.
Kate looked at her w
atch. There were no trains that late and Luke’s dad, Richard, would have driven them from Salisbury to York through the night. Kate had felt – perhaps conveniently – that she would only get in the way if she hung around. The truth was she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear to see Luke’s parents in a hospital. Not again. She couldn’t begin to imagine the lies she would have to tell them while concealing the full impact of her own reanimated grief. What was she supposed to say? She was some girl who met him a few hours ago and that’s why she was at the hospital looking like the world had imploded? That Luke had somehow managed to give her his parents’ phone number before losing consciousness? She couldn’t do it. He was alive and there were doctors; when he came round he would see his mum and dad – not the witch who might as well have pushed him down the stairs with her broomstick. She had tried never to take the word ‘witch’ as an insult even when that was the intention. A witch was just an eccentric woman who tried to heal people in ways which too often provoked fear. Yup, she’d been a witch all right.
Above all, Kate needed to talk to her father. She had waited outside York station in the dark and fare-dodged the first train to London. God bless 1992: the ticket inspectors who couldn’t be arsed before rush hour and the automated barriers that didn’t exist.
Madeleine was a light sleeper and had appeared in her splendid black and gold oriental-style dressing gown before Kate had managed to fill the kettle.
And now, in her parlour, she was inspecting her daughter with a shrewd eye. The dawn had broken and Madeleine reached to turn off a side lamp without taking her eyes off Kate’s clothes. ‘Your father will be up shortly,’ she said. ‘You might want to visit the bathroom first and have a wash and a change.’
‘Do I smell, Mother?’
‘I’m sure it’s him you’ve come to see anyway. Lucky to catch him on a Sunday, but then of course you’ve thought of that.’
At forty-five, Kate’s mother was a state-of-the-art delivery system for laser-guided passive-aggression. In her head, Kate counted to twenty, slowly and in Russian. Madeleine had just entered her dyed blonde phase – a stylish bob, efficiently brushed in the dark while her husband slept. The lines at the downturn of her mouth were less pronounced than Kate was used to, the green eyes were agile and focused. This was vintage Mother – a woman of agency. Kate was on high alert.
‘Darling,’ Madeleine said suddenly enough to make Kate jump. ‘If it’s man-trouble, you know you can tell me about it.’
Kate made a rapid mental inventory of people she would discuss ‘man-trouble’ with before discussing it with her mother. The list started with Dr Susie Orbach and she got down to Anders Breivik before giving up. ‘There’s really no man-trouble, Mother.’
‘Well, then,’ Madeleine said, edging forward in her straight-backed chair, ‘woman-trouble, then. You can tell me, darling – I was around in the sixties. I’m quite unshockable.’
‘Oh God, here we go again.’ Kate was already annoyed with herself for taking the bait. ‘When are you going to accept that I’m not a lesbian?’
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Look at Gloria Hunniford.’
‘I understand it would … hang on, Gloria Hunniford isn’t gay either.’
‘Well … you say that.’
‘Yes, I do say that.’
‘Well …’
‘No, not “well”. Look, I understand it would give you great pleasure to tell Estelle and Sheila and all the other Ladies Who Lunch that your daughter is a massive homo and you’re bravely standing by her, but—’
‘There’s no need to mock my friends. They’ve already been very supportive.’
‘What do you mean “already”? Oh Christ, I knew it! You’ve been dining out on this for years!’
‘Is it any wonder? The martial arts! The way you dress! We worry about you, darling.’
‘Well, you can take your bullshit worry and shove it up your arse, darling.’
Madeleine’s eyes widened at the appropriation of the d-word. Eighteen-year-old Kate could be argumentative but this was considerably more push-back than she was used to. She loved it. This had the makings of a proper fight. ‘There’s really no need to be so hurtful, Katherine.’
But Kate had one or two things on her mind. ‘Martial arts, for crying out loud. Look at you. Going around in the nineteen-sixties with your Little Red Book, quoting tosspot aphorisms from a mass-murderer, and then the first sign that your daughter is into something girls aren’t supposed to be into – that’s it. She must be queer.’
‘I would never use such a prejudiced term.’
‘Fuck the terms. The terms change. They’re less important than the individuals.’
‘Individualism, is it? Spoken like a child of Thatcher!’
‘Who you voted for twice, you phoney old twat.’
‘Kate!’
‘What? I thought you were unshockable.’
‘There’s such a thing as civility. I thought you understood that.’
This was an instinctively smart move. Kate knew she had an appalling temper and it constantly undermined her arguments. She took a breath. ‘I’m sorry. That was rude.’
‘All these years …’ Madeleine shook her head in martyred regret.
Kate understood that she had raised the emotional temperature too high for Madeleine to listen to another word she said. But she finished her argument anyway – something which, ironically, her mother had always taught her to do.
‘I apologise again,’ she said. ‘But it’s not cool to tell girls who like karate that they’re lesbian. They might be, and that’s fine, but they might not be and that’s also fine. The point is, girls don’t get into boys’ stuff so our parents can find an excuse to feel good about themselves. We like it because we like it.’
Madeleine had her hands in front of her eyes and was beginning to vibrate. ‘I can’t believe a daughter of mine is such a homophobe.’
‘Mother, please don’t cry.’
Madeleine was crying. Or rather, as Kate wearily recognised, Madeleine had actively summoned the necessary feelings which would allow her to cry. The feelings were real but they had been accessed with precision: she was a consummate actor. Kate offered a silent prayer of thanks that her mother would never really get the hang of Twitter. This talent for willed grievance would have made her a star.
There was a creak from the floorboards above them. ‘And now you’ve woken your father,’ she moaned. ‘Perfect.’
Kate was reminded that even Madeleine wasn’t going to live forever. Whatever victory this was, it was worthless. She tried a peace offering – at least a morsel of gossip which could be expanded at a future ‘luncheon’ with Estelle and Sheila. ‘All right, Mother. Look. There is a boy.’
Madeleine stopped crying and found a tissue. ‘There’s no need to humour me,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s perfectly clear the matter is beneath your dignity.’
‘Actually, two boys.’
Madeleine interrupted her nose-blow. ‘Oh … Kate!’
‘I know,’ said Kate flatly. ‘Outrageous.’
‘You’ve only been there twenty-four hours. Are you determined to die of AIDS?’
‘I haven’t shagged them, Mother. I’m just a bit confused. That’s all I have to say about it.’
The loo flushed upstairs. Kate said, ‘And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Dad. I don’t want either of you worried about me.’ Kate had never tried this before – bringing her mother into a conspiracy that excluded Bill. The woman opposite uttered a non-committal ‘Hmm …’ but she was clearly considering whether or not to feel flattered. Kate went on: ‘But like I say, I came back to collect some stuff. That I forgot to pack. There were some things that I missed.’
‘Hello, hello! I know that voice!’ Bill popped his head round the door, his thick, greying hair madly unbrushed; the collar of his pyjama top sticking up. He looked like an Elvis impersonator with twenty minutes to sober up before a show. Kate stood and approached him as calmly as p
ossible. Which was not very calmly. She hugged him close.
Warmth. Peppermint. Cigarettes. Yesterday’s after shave. A touch of BO. All present and correct.
‘Looks like somebody missed me, then!’ She released him and laughed, wiping her eyes. Bill turned to his wife. ‘I told you, Maddy. I said Kate can’t go two days without our scintillating company.’
Madeleine drained her teacup and stood. ‘You said no such thing, Bill. You and your stories.’
Kate sensed her dad’s surprise at the tightness of the hug but he stayed on the surface for now. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’
‘There’s one in the pot,’ said Madelaine, crossing to the door. ‘I’ll pour it.’
‘Oh yes please then, love.’
Kate had recently recovered the power of speech. She said weakly, ‘I came back to collect a few things.’
Madeleine had just gone through the door but now instantly reappeared. ‘That’s right. Kate came back to collect a few things. Also, she’s overwrought because she entangled herself in a ménage à trois. For all I know, she’s working as a prostitute and has got herself pregnant three times over. But it’s a women’s issue and it’s between ourselves. She’d prefer not to talk about it and I for one respect that.’
Bill turned his big face back to Kate. ‘Blimey.’
Kate looked from her dad to her mum with a resigned smile. ‘Thank you, Mother.’
‘Not at all. And you’re staying for lunch, I take it?’
‘I don’t want to intrude.’
Her parents were united in the same astonishment and the same word: ‘Intrude?’
‘Tell me how you met,’ Kate said as Bill handed her another saucepan to dry. They were side by side in the little kitchen, looking out onto the back yard.
Earlier, Kate had helped her mother chop vegetables, relieved that she didn’t have to conceal any new-found twenty-first-century skill in this area because she didn’t have any. The pair managed to restrict their conversation to literature and the weather. After lunch, Madeleine retired for her nap. Bill’s nap would be later, of course. It was a routine which Kate had to admire for its easy predictability. And although the division of domestic labour was largely traditional – which is to say Madeleine did basically everything – both parties seemed largely content with the arrangement. The husband went out to work; and if this particular wife felt she’d had a rough deal from the universe (or in her case – God) then she didn’t seem to locate her resentments in Bill. Madeleine Theroux was angry about a lot of things and with a lot of people. But not the handsome rocker she found in that dance hall in 1963. And presumably – and Kate still didn’t like to conjure these particular images, no matter how grown up she was supposed to be – well, they had separate naps but not separate beds.
