Sadie snorted. ‘Maud Ambrose is only a wall thickness away, but I was still banging half the night before she heard me.’
‘Right!’ snapped Angela. ‘How about teaching you and Mrs Ambrose Morse code, so you can tap out a message through the wall?’
Sadie sighed tragically. ‘You can’t help it, can you? At the first sign of someone besting you in an argument, you get sarcastic. I hope you haven’t let Conor see that side of you. Men find it very unfeminine.’
Angela wanted to scream. ‘The mobile phone,’ she repeated faintly. ‘Do you think it’s a goer as an idea ‒ yes or no?’
Sadie mushed her lips together. She was trying to purse them, Angela realised.
‘What if Maud was out when I needed her? And even with a phone, supposing I rang you in an emergency, and you were out gallivanting with Conor?’
‘Talk about a remote chance.’
‘With Rachel, then.’
‘Isn’t risking that remote chance better than feeling isolated?’
‘I’ll certainly consider it,’ decided Sadie, with an hauteur that covered her panic and ‒ to some degree ‒ her shame. She was behaving badly, but her fall had been a demeaning shock. As for that stuff about guilt trips ‒ what was Angela on about? After all she’d done for her. A spark of self-pity ignited briefly in Sadie, flaring under her breastbone like heartburn. Was it really too much to expect her daughter to at least offer to care for her in her dotage? Why couldn’t Angela throw self-interest to the winds and suggest they live together? The offer would suffice. She would, of course, refuse it grandly.
Her eyes met Angela’s. The plea was only a flicker, but nakedly obvious.
Angela cleared her throat and looked into the fire. ‘There’s another option. You could, of course, move in with me.’
‘Wouldn’t that cramp your style with Conor?’ asked Sadie quickly.
‘I have no style to cramp. We’re just good friends.’ And never likely to get beyond that stage if she became the carer of an aged, demanding mother, ever in need of clean sheets and soaked teeth. Horror loomed in Angela, followed by a wave of utter self-disgust. How could she be so selfish?
‘In that case,’ said Sadie, watching her daughter carefully, ‘no, no! I’m only joking! You don’t seriously think I’d give up my independence, do you? I wouldn’t want to move into your shoebox and you’d hate living back here. I’m not ready to be wheeled round in a bathchair just yet.’
‘As if,’ grinned Angela. ‘And we haven’t explored the third option, putting you in a home. The money from selling this place would keep you in rubber sheets for years to come.’
Sadie smiled thinly at the joke. Angela had grasped too quickly at a climb-down. It was proof positive that she did not want her mother living with her.
‘When are you seeing Conor again, lovey?’
‘He’s invited me to Shane’s sports day on Saturday. Now look, if we’re going to make you comfortable …’
‘Rachel said you saw a picture of the ex-wife.’
‘I glimpsed a photo in passing. She’s beautiful,’ admitted Angela, with a generosity that hurt her heart, ‘long white neck, longer red mane than My Friend Flicka.’
‘Who?’ asked Sadie, who obviously hadn’t read the book. ‘Where did you meet this Flicka?’
‘She’s a girl at work,’ muttered Angela, too irritated to explain that Flicka was a horse in a kids’ story. ‘But before you ask, no, I didn’t dig up the secret of their failed marriage. Does there have to be a secret? Couples grow apart and split up, end of story.’
‘It’s unusual to hop on a plane and leave your only child behind,’ mused Sadie. ‘She must’ve been desperate to get away. I wonder if she sued for custody and lost?’
‘I’ll have to ask,’ decided Angela, squaring her shoulders. Really, it was all very well for Conor to lay bare his sexual liaisons. But there were too many unanswered questions about his marriage. A sneaky idea crept into her mind. Maybe she could pump Shane, subtly, for info.
‘The lad’s obviously prickly because of his broken home,’ pondered Sadie. ‘I ask myself, how could any mother walk out on a twelve-year-old?’
‘You haven’t met him,’ said Angela uncharitably.
‘It must’ve been a wrench for her. I wonder if a third party was involved.’
Angela started. God, how stupid of her not to consider that! She’d just assumed that Rosie, the fling, was a direct consequence of the marriage break-up. Maybe she was also a cause.
‘Yes, she could’ve run off with another bloke and your Conor’s loath to admit it,’ said Sadie, who’d been thinking along different lines.
Angela brooded, reaching out to stroke Binky as he loped into the room. As her fingers stroked fluidly, she noticed Sadie’s, lying crabbed and still on the duvet. ‘Taken any painkillers, Mum?’
‘A couple. I think I’ll have a snooze now, Angela, if you wouldn’t mind buzzing off to wash the dishes or whatever. I wish you’d go back to work this afternoon. I don’t like you taking time off when you’re new in the job.’
‘Oh, they understand, Mum,’ sighed Angela, and squeezed the rough warmth of Binky’s fur in lieu of reaching across to gently squeeze Sadie’s gnarled hand. She was no good at that sort of thing.
Angela turned up the driveway of 23 Pacelli Road, mentally girding her loins for the afternoon ahead. A day out with Problem Child. A few hours with Conor to probe his past life without offending him. Extract the info, more like. And that was going to be fiddlier than a scientist extracting DNA from prehistoric bone marrow.
A stunning woman in tight jeans opened the front door.
‘H-hello,’ blinked Angela. ‘I’ve come ‒ I’m Angela.’
The woman didn’t shake hands. She jerked a richly coiffed head of peroxide curls over her shoulder and roared in purest Estuary, ‘Shane! Yer dad’s lady friend is here. Get your arse into gear.’
She held the door open for Angela to come in, then sashayed across the floor, a yellow duster fluttering out of a jeans back pocket. Angela blinked. Could this vision be Mrs Turner? Bloody hell, what sort of cleaning lady was this, for God’s sake? Where was the floral housecoat, the blue rinse, the endless complaints about bunions?
Angela shut the door too hard and sulked.
Mrs Turner turned round. ‘Stand on that rug, will ye?’ she barked. ‘I’ve just cleaned that floor with me own spit.’
‘Sorry!’ Angela jumped obediently onto a little island of pastel rug. Mrs Turner grunted and sashayed upstairs, passing Shane as he loped down.
Angela was too shaken by Mrs Turner to remember immediately that Shane was her mortal enemy.
‘That’s Mrs Turner?’ she hissed at him in a conspiratorial whisper.
He frowned at Mrs Turner’s receding, denim-puckered bum. ‘Was last time I checked.’
His tone reminded Angela where she was and who Shane was.
‘Er ‒ don’t you call her by her first name?’
‘Don’t think she’s got one,’ snorted Shane, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Reckon even her husband calls her Mrs Turner. When he’s home from prison, that is.’
‘Prison!’ goggled Angela. The bloody woman certainly looked more gangster’s moll than household treasure.
‘I s’pose you think Dad’s giving her one,’ blurted Shane, with a crude rudeness designed to shock. He watched Angela carefully for her reaction. But she was too cagey for him, weaned on Sadie’s wind-ups and follow-up looks.
‘It’s his business,’ she shrugged through gritted teeth. ‘Where is he, anyway?’
‘Gone out.’
‘Out! Where?’
‘Dunno. He didn’t say. International man of mystery, my dad.’
Angela held on to her temper by scrabbling fingertips. He couldn’t do this to her! Drag her over from Wilmesbury, then vanish before she arrived, leaving Problem Child and Gangster’s Moll as her welcoming committee.
‘He must’ve left a note or something,’ she murmured, aware she was
giving Shane the opportunity to deny any such meagre signs of consideration.
‘He left a message with me, didn’t he?’ muttered Shane. ‘That he’s had to go out, urgently and unexpectedly. And we should go on to the bleeding sports day, where he’ll try and turn up later. If you don’t want to come, you’ll just make the twelve-thirty train back to Wibblesbury.’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ snapped Angela tiredly. ‘I bet you’d give anything to skive off sports day.’
She paused to deliver her final salvo. ‘I know I did when I was at school.’
Shane looked at her quickly. His grey eyes gleamed briefly behind thick glasses. ‘Not sporty then, were you?’ he grunted.
‘I’m still infamous in school history as the girl who skipped the hundred metres,’ confessed Angela proudly.
‘You skipped it. Jesus!’ Shane exhaled flutily down his nose, whether with derision or admiration, she couldn’t tell.
She decided to go for broke. ‘The PE teacher was a Nazi. The only reason she entered me in the hundred metres was to humiliate me. Why else would you enter a kid who ran about as fast as a tortoise with lumbago? I’d crossed her once too often with passive resistance, refusing to leap-frog over the pommel horse, slither up ropes, whack ankles with hockey sticks. Only it wasn’t resistance at all. I was too scared to do any of those things, so I just froze and refused, reckoning the fall-out couldn’t be any worse than breaking my neck in the attempt. But PE teachers are pea-brained, you see.’ Angela tapped her head passionately. ‘If they had any grey matter, they’d be teaching from proper books in proper classrooms.’
Shane’s head bobbled slightly. Almost a nod of agreement, thought Angela, careful not to snatch too quickly at wimps’ solidarity.
True, Shane had a physique that cried out for musclemen to kick sand in his face. On the other hand, he could be fast and wiry, ideally suited to track and field. Something in his reference to ‘bleeding sports day’ hinted otherwise, however.
‘You two still here?’ squawked the dulcet tones of Mrs Turner, reappearing at the top of the stairs. ‘Can’t you just bugger off and let me hoover? Honestly, what’s the point, with whole bleeding armies traipsing across the floor? Fucking middle-classes with their fucking dado rails and distressed fucking wood.’ She vanished again, muttering.
Now that was more like a cleaning lady, Angela reckoned, albeit a cleaning lady out of a De Niro/Scorsese film.
‘Charming woman,’ she remarked to Shane as he got his coat.
‘Yeah, thank God she’s only filling in until the real Mrs Turner gets over flu.’
‘The real Mrs Turner?’
Shane stared at Angela as if she was retarded. ‘You know, her mother-in-law.’
‘You have got to be flaming joking!’ Angela ranted at Shane. They eyeballed each other in the khaki-coloured school corridor. Shane stood defiantly in front of a noticeboard listing events for sports day. One list contained Angela’s name. She’d been entered in the mothers’ charity egg-and-spoon race.
‘I mean, are you sick in the head or something?’ she yelled at Shane, prodding his folded arms. Parents and teachers trickled past, frowning at her.
‘Careful now, you’ll never get on the PTA with that attitude. More like the at-risk register.’
‘I am not your flaming, frigging mother!’
‘Language.’
‘Well, I’m not doing it, so there!’
‘Ooh, the spirit of passive resistance lives. I knew you wouldn’t do it, so it’s no skin off my nose, like. I filled in a form for you, though, and got loads of sponsors. I’ll just pay back the sponsorship money. I entered Rosie last year, and she thought it was a right laugh. Even won it. It is for charity.’
‘Rosie?’ Angela blinked. She gazed down at Shane, a pigeon-chested weakling in a singlet and shorts, his glasses Band-Aided to each ear to minimise nose-bruising during the long jump. Like Angela in the past, he’d whittled down the day’s ordeal to one event, invariably the event reserved for the lazy, the lame and the uncoordinated who couldn’t hack running in a straight line. In Shane’s school, this was the long jump, a Cinderella spectacle relegated to a wind-blown sandpit in a far-flung field. Under other circumstances, Angela would’ve recognised a kindred spirit. Under these circumstances, she was hostile, browbeaten and spitting with rage.
‘Your dad said you couldn’t stand Rosie.’
‘I couldn’t, but she was a good sport, like.’
‘Huh, falling over herself to get in Master McGinlay’s good books, more like. That’s not my way.’
‘What was the tenner for, then?’
Angela hesitated, wrong-footed. ‘Actually, that was my mother’s idea. The foolish woman thought you might be grateful and even send me a thank-you note.’
‘How is your ma? Didn’t she fall under a bus or something last week?’
‘She fell on the floor and twisted her hip. It’s no laughing matter!’
‘Who’s laughing?’
‘You were smirking.’
‘Wasn’t!’
‘You really are a little shit.’
She turned on her heel and stormed towards the playing field, followed by the shocked expressions of a few parents she hadn’t spotted, lurking within earshot behind cloakroom pegs. Fuck the lot of them! It was a long time since she’d felt such anger, a violent mish-mash of resentments directed at Sadie, Robert, Rachel, the bloke who’d tried (deliberately!) to wrong-change her in the sweet shop that morning, and bloody, frigging, flaming Conor McGinlay, who’d rudely buggered off on the very day she’d psyched herself up to ask about Kate.
Outside, the cold air slapped her with a brisk plea to cool it. She slowed down by the main playing field, staked out with ribbons to create the lanes for a four by four relay, currently in shrieking progress.
Angela skirted the excited knot of parents and siblings, her anger gradually receding. Strangely enough, she wasn’t angry at Shane at all. In fact, she felt a little weepy. His horridness surely put the kibosh on any future with Conor, whatever she learnt about Kate.
Dabbing her eyes, she looked around and spotted the stony face of Shane, watching the race from the opposite side of the field. He hadn’t seen her.
He stood a little apart from a group of sniggering boys, singlets clinging to their over-developed chests. They were clearly casting aspersions on Shane’s athletic prowess, gawky mien and bottle-thick specs. Angela compressed her lips. The locker-room jocks! How well she remembered their female counterparts from her own days at school.
Her first instinct was to wade across the field and drag Shane to safety. But her common sense won out. He’d be appalled and he’d never live it down.
Might as well go with her second idea, which was certainly not instinctive.
Sighing deeply, Angela obeyed the crackly Tannoy summons and tip-toed towards the starting line for the charity egg-and-spoon race.
Her rivals had come prepared in sensibly tailored trousers ‒ and even shorts, despite a cutting March wind. Equipped with a soup spoon and an egg that refused to sit on it, Angela thanked God she wore low heels, left her raincoat with an obliging teacher, and shivered on the starting line, her ankle-length green shift dress flattened against her thighs by a strong head-wind.
She glanced down the line, proffering a comradely smile. Steely eyes glanced back, then looked ahead with a take-no-prisoners determination. God, thought Angela. So much for ‘It’s the taking part that matters.’
As the whistle went and her legs turned helpfully to jelly, she was catapulted back to the hundred metres at school where Mrs Jeffers, a Rottweiler in a shell-suit, had stood on the touchline, yelling encouragingly, ‘Where’s your competitive spirit, you stupid, spineless girl?’
Her egg wobbled off the spoon before she’d moved. She caught it with her other hand and spent valuable seconds nesting it down again, while maternal bottoms galloped past her.
‘Hey, lady, your dress!’ hollered a squeaky, sexle
ss voice from the sidelines. ‘Stuff it in your knickers to run faster!’
There was method in this mad suggestion. She didn’t stuff it in her knickers ‒ too many sniggering kids around and smalls too baggy and grey ‒ but she gathered up the front of her dress and twisted it into a knot away from her knees, giving them room to propel unimpeded.
She lost the egg four more times, but romped home a far-from-disgraced third last, nose-diving towards the finishing line with as much grace as she could muster, bearing in mind that Shane was watching.
Only he wasn’t. As Angela got to her feet and wiped grass off her knees, she realised that actually, few people had been watching her finest sporting hour.
The crowd had drifted away to other pockets of activity. In the distance, a shower of sand grains rose into the air. The long jump!
Reclaiming her raincoat and relinquishing the spoon, Angela hurried towards the sand-pit. Drawing closer, she saw it was an informal warm-up event for the actual long jump.
A group of boys were standing on the edge of the pit. In the centre, another boy sat astride a prone figure, making him eat dirt ‒ or, literally, sand. Just in front of the supine victim lay a pair of glasses, half-buried in sand like the last remains of a Foreign Legionnaire.
Angela’s breath shortened and her chest tightened. The bullying bastards! She tried to yell, but her indignation trapped her voice in a bubble of wheezy air. She curled her fist, which tightened on a smooth, warm surface.
She looked down, surprised to find the egg still in her hand. She’d never been any cop at the shot-putt either, but here went nothing.
Drawing back her arm, Angela flung the egg with all her might, aiming for the bully astride Shane. It hit the back of his bulldog head with a satisfying thunk, exploding on impact into a runny mess.
‘What the ‒ !’ The bully looked up. His cronies ran in all directions, without even bothering to see who’d chucked the egg.
‘Cowardly scum!’ hissed Angela, advancing on Torquemada, the ring-leader.
The boy jumped off Shane, who glanced fleetingly up at Angela, then plonked his face straight back in the sand. Angela didn’t care if she was embarrassing him or not. She’d never been so grateful to be a tall woman, with hair askew, raincoat flapping wildly, dander up.
Hush Hush Page 11
