Love, Lies and Lemon Cake

by Sue Watson

  My Living List

  Learn to Ice Skate

  Lose 10 lbs

  Make a wish at the Trevi Fountain in Rome (then ride a pistachio-green Vespa through the streets.)

  Swim naked in the ocean

  Drink champagne on a New York roof garden

  See a Santorini Sunset

  Eat macarons in a Parisian tea shop

  Be a bride

  Be a mum

  I closed the Filofax, my heart squashed somewhere inside the purple covers. These random desires had been jotted down years ago, between A-level revision, putting make-up on, making music tapes and drinking lager and lime in the pub with my friends, all long gone to other lives. Reading through the list again, I could see it wasn’t as random as it first appeared; these things had an order to them... ending in marriage and children. I liked things in their place and, subconsciously, even as a slightly chaotic, hormonal teenager, I’d planned my life in a certain way. Going through the list, I was hoping to tick off a few, but it was only when I came to the end I realised I could only tick the last two. I’d achieved only a fraction of the life I’d planned as a young woman. It was like I’d been waiting at the bus stop for my life to turn up but it had been cancelled. And no one had let me know.

  I looked through the postcards. Other people’s travels from places I’d never been, from half-remembered friends. A girl with a lisp called Melanie I’d known briefly at university had sent me a card from New York. Almost twenty years old, the colours were now washed out, the picture cracked from the many times I’d held it and looked into it. I turned it over and read the few scribbled words:

  ‘Dear Faye, I finally made it to NYC! Mel x’

  ‘Good for you, Mel,’ I thought, sitting on the bed and gazing into it again. I was years older and wiser, but the picture still had the same effect on me. A rooftop in New York on a dusty golden evening; the stars were emerging above, the city lights bright and blurry below. Two glasses and a bottle of champagne on a table for two—and if you kept on looking, in the distance a shadowy couple were dancing.

  When I’d first received the postcard, I had been both scared and exhilarated by it. Pregnant with Emma and still in a state of confusion that my life had changed radically within a few weeks. I was unsure about the decisions I’d made, worried about the pregnancy, the birth, my future, my baby’s future. Yet I found it a comfort to look into this postcard. I’d spent many hours longing for escape to a rooftop in New York at dusk.

  Once Emma was born, I’d packed my foolish dreams back into the rucksack, put it on top of the wardrobe and bought a nappy-changing bag instead. Once she’d arrived I couldn’t imagine a life without my perfect baby, the safety of my marriage and my neat little home. I was the lucky one I thought, and had no lust for Melanie with the lisp’s glamorous, childless existence in New York.

  I jammed everything back into the rucksack, a symbol of my failure to achieve anything. I didn’t put the postcard back with everything else, though; I kept looking at it, fascinated by the scene, imagining myself there, a saxophone playing in the distance, distant traffic sounds rising like smoke from the streets below. The picture filled me with the same fear and exhilaration it had when I’d first received it all those years ago, but now it gave me a twist of hope. Sitting on my bed wrapped in a towel on a wintery morning in the Midlands, I could hear that saxophone, remembering the life I’d once hoped for and how far from that I had landed.

  ‘Christ, are you out of that bathroom yet?’ Craig’s voice cut into the mists of time like a bloody sledgehammer. ‘I’ve got a crimp fitting system to put in today and you’ve made me late waiting for the bathroom... I’ve got a street load of frozen pipes to do this morning.’

  ‘Sorry, I was out of the bathroom ages ago—meant to tell you,’ I said, entering the kitchen and taking a slice of warped pleasure from his fury at the news he’d been waiting for nothing.

  His face was flushed with anger and I wanted to throw his mug of tea at him—resisting not because I didn’t want to hurt him but because I didn’t want to spend the morning in A and E with his scalded face. I ignored him and put some toast on. It was early February and Craig’s favourite time of year, when combi boiler problems blossomed everywhere needing his surgeon-like attention. Throughout the season, Craig’s skilled hands were paid handsomely to warm frozen pipes lovingly back to life. Shame he couldn’t do the same for me.

  ‘I won’t be home tonight; I’m spending an evening at my lover’s penthouse apartment,’ I said, spreading low-fat butter on my toast.

  ‘Oh, so I have to make my own tea?’ Craig replied, his mind clearly on other things.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What time will you be home?’

  ‘How long’s a piece of string? We’re doing champagne and caviar on his yacht. Then straight after Coronation Street, he wants sex on deck, under the stars...’ I took a big bite of toast.

  ‘Take your house keys then,’ he grunted, getting up from the kitchen table and abandoning the internal organs of a dying dishwasher to head for the bathroom.

  I always tried to attract Craig’s attention before I left in the morning, as if I needed proof that after twenty-two years of marriage he wasn’t listening anymore. My after-work ‘plans’ had become more outrageous, expensive, sexually adventurous and generally more unlikely over time but still he didn’t hear me—or perhaps he just chose not to? I’d recently told him I was getting a tattoo of David Beckham on my left buttock after work so might be a bit late... and a bit sore. ‘Don’t make a noise when you come in because I’ll be asleep; I’ve got an early start in the morning,’ he’d said.

  Had he always been like that? Perhaps I just hadn’t noticed, but I was certainly way down the food chain when it came to fancy stopcocks. The way he handled a two-headed faucet was fascinating—I almost envied the inanimate object—and there was no doubting where his passions lay. He'd once told me he never remembered a customer’s face; he only knew them by their machines. When he opened up the back of a Hotpoint, he said he knew when he’d laid eyes on that circuit board before. I wondered, was there such a thing as plumber autism?

  Still chewing on toast, I took a last slurp of coffee, threw on Emma’s old parka, jammed on her woolly panda hat and set off for work as usual. I had decided, for health reasons, to try and walk into town at least three days a week, and though Emma’s old clothes did not epitomise worldly sophistication and glamour, they kept me warm.

  I had once cared about what I wore—never into high fashion, but always liked decent high street clothes, and wore a little light make-up. In the last few years, though, it had all seemed a bit pointless and it wasn’t like anyone looked at me. I was at an age where I was invisible to the naked eye and comfort was winning over appearance—hence the flat shoes and thick tights combo I was working that morning. It wasn’t flattering but at least I was warm and the tights covered up the newly discovered wrinkled knees. Good job I didn’t really have a lover and wasn’t really going for sex on his yacht after work because that day’s outfit would have been quite inappropriate. I pulled my hood up, thinking how it would be too cold for sex with anyone on the deck of a yacht this time of year, even a millionaire’s.

  We were going to be really busy that morning in the salon where I worked. Two weddings and a twenty-first birthday party would keep us on our toes and, with three foil highlights, seven cut and blows and a perm that afternoon, things weren’t going to slow down. I knew if I didn’t pick up something to eat on the way into work, I would pass out with starvation (well, as much as anyone around ten stone and five foot two can claim ‘starvation’). I felt like a change from my usual pasty from Greggs Bakery so popped into the new deli to buy a sandwich. Sue, my boss, was on a diet; Mandy, the beauty therapist, lived off bags of Monster Munch to work off her permanent hangover; and Camilla, our posh junior, lived on organic leaves—so it was just me looking for lunch. I scuttled down the road, head down, pushing myself against the icy blast of
wind rushing down the high street, and ran into the deli, almost blown in and having to force the door closed as I landed inside with a loud gasp.

  * * *

  The deli had only opened a couple of weeks before; it was my first visit, and once inside I was mesmerised. The shop was groaning with food, every corner utilised, every shelf stuffed—even the ceiling was filled with hanging meats and sausage. I wandered through, taking it all in. A savoury tang sliced through the air making my nostrils twitch, and with so much to look at I almost crashed into the glass counter right in front of me.

  Coming face to face with a counter top of plump green olives in terracotta bowls with various sample dips and chunks of nutty, seeded bread was making me hungry. I’d only just had breakfast but was salivating at the sight of rich, garlicky hummus and sun-dried tomatoes, scarlet and glossy in olive oil. I had to stop myself reaching out and plucking one from the bowl while no one was looking. I was imagining the illicit tart sweetness of a sticky stolen tomato when the guy behind the counter asked if he could help me. I looked up from under fur-trimmed parka hood at the source of this lovely voice. It was a happy yellow accent full of laid-back Aussie sunshine, and... oh, yes, it matched the owner. He was a blond, tanned Australian with a killer smile. ‘Can I help?’ he asked again. Yes, indeed, I thought, you can certainly help me—you don’t get this in Greggs. I smiled shyly, gesturing blindly towards the cabinet—this bronzed god was as exotic to me as every other tasty morsel in the new emporium of continental delights. He looked like he’d just stepped off a surfboard I thought, dragging my eyes away from his boyish tanned face back to the tomatoes, then the olives. I asked for a slice of quiche and, as he wrapped it carefully, my gaze rested on his arms—brown, covered in wiry blonde hairs, slightly muscular and weathered, like they’d been left out in the sun... on a hot, hot beach. Our eyes met and we smiled and the woman in me wanted to rub olive oil into those arms, while the mother in me wanted to wrap a cardigan around him. It was February after all.

  I left the deli planning to call Emma that night and tell her all about it. She’d been to Italy with the school so would probably be very interested. Wouldn’t she? Or was I just using it as an excuse to call her? I’d always dreamed of going to Italy—it was on my list. But then so were many other things I hadn’t done. Trudging to work down the windy high street with its charity shops and sun-faded windows of baby linens and pound emporiums couldn’t be further away from a pistachio-green Vespa whizzing through the streets of Rome. The deli was a start though, and opened up a whole new world of continental culinary opportunities for me on a daily basis. It was a shame the guy behind the counter wasn’t a dark-haired, brown-eyed Italian to go with all the Italian produce. As eye candy went, the blond Aussie was quite cute, but God only knew what he made of the locals, especially me dressed in a panda hat. I smiled to myself; the one silver lining in the cloud of Emma being miles away in Manchester was that she couldn’t see me rocking her old parka and panda hat. As I opened the door to the salon, I realised that, as much as I missed her terribly, in Emma’s absence I could wear what I liked—and enjoy a taste of personal freedom as much as she could at uni in Manchester.

  ‘It’s cold out there,’ I announced, walking into the warm, hair-spray-scented cocoon and taking off my coat. This place of chatter and changing hair was my life, my sanctuary. Here in ‘Curl Up and Dye,’ everyone knew my name and my story, not that it was a particularly exciting one, but I was accepted for just being me.

  That morning, Sue, the owner and my closest friend, was in full flow brandishing a colour chart and telling Mrs Harvey how scarlet hair dye would match her skin tones and yelling over the noise of the dryers. ‘It will bring you alive, love.’ Spotting Mrs Harvey like a recumbent corpse in front of the mirror, I wasn’t convinced.

  But Mrs Harvey had been there before with Sue and her Technicolor dye jobs and wanted reassurance it wouldn’t turn her hair green as it had last time.

  ‘No. It’s opposite green on the Technicolor wheel, love,’ Sue said confidently, trying to blind her with science while not actually understanding it herself. ‘It’s a very hot shade; it’ll take years off you. It’s... what I’d call a... Sarcastic Scarlet,’ she added screwing up her eyes like this was a mysterious but good thing. She smiled at me while pressing a hair swatch against Mrs Harvey’s greying skin and grimacing; ‘Ooh, look, Faye... is Mrs Harvey going to look the spitting image of Cheryl Cole or what?’

  I marched over to gaze in the mirror at the marriage of ‘Sarcastic Scarlet’ and the fat fifty-something face. Cheryl Cole would have sued.

  ‘It’s stunning,’ I declared (which wasn’t a lie), nodding slowly with what I hoped was a look of awe and admiration. ‘You go for it, Mrs Harvey! If you’re that shade when hubby gets in from work tonight, he’ll think Cheryl Cole has broken in and she’s cooking his tea.’

  Mrs Harvey pursed her lips and Sue caught my eye in the mirror with a grateful look. It seemed I had pitched it just right. It was the push Mrs Harvey needed—but who could blame her for being reluctant, having once endured green hair for several weeks? I went to collect my next client from reception, wondering just how sarcastic that scarlet would be on those greying curls.

  Times were hard and, as the hairdressing business had been hit big time by the recession, Sue had been forced to change our usual hair dye brand to a much cheaper one. Keeping the business going was paramount, and despite her accountant telling her to reduce staff costs, Sue had refused to do that, saying we were her family. So in order to save money, she had to economise elsewhere and had purchased a job lot of the cheapest hair dye on earth. The dye was from Lithuania, not the ‘go-to’ hair dye country for other hairdressing luminaries, but Sue Lloyd was a self-styled hairdressing pioneer. She was also great at PR and told clients it was ‘a radical new approach to celebrity hair colour.’

  Despite her sharp selling and shameful PR, Sue hadn’t considered the fact that none of us spoke Lithuanian. As the colour description and instructions were in that language, we were often as surprised as the client at the ‘celebrity’ results when the dreaded stuff was rinsed off.

  So in the absence of a definitive Lithuanian translation for each colour, Sue was forced to ‘invent’ descriptive shades, often on the spot. She couldn’t use the hair colours of reputable companies because ‘They might get me on the Trades Prescriptions.’ Who ‘they’ were and why it was prescriptive I didn’t ask—it would only add to the general confusion and chaos. In spite of her inability to understand Lithuanian, Sue’s confidence was never an issue and she felt qualified to translate Perlas šviesūs into ‘Wicked Cinnamon’, Imbieras into ‘Malevolent Blonde’, and Pilka into ‘Strident Peach’. Sue’s comprehension of English words was bad enough, but this was hair dye dyslexia.

  ‘Oh... I thought malevolent meant glamorous,’ she sighed when someone pointed out it didn’t really work as a hair colour. ‘Cruel Plum’ though was christened instinctively, born of desperation when Jayne from the chemist (two kids both C-section, husband in fitted carpets) emerged after her dye job and threatened to take us to court. I had to give it to Sue—‘Cruel Plum’ was spot on.

  Sue loved the glint of celebrity spotlight and, regardless of the fact we were a small salon on a small high street on the outskirts of Birmingham, she longed for a real celebrity client. In the unlikely event of a visit from Cheryl Cole or Nicole Kidman, two of Sue’s personal favourites, she made the best of what we had—and that was Gayle Jones. Gayle’s claim to fame was that she’d once had a spit-roast with two premier footballers, and what gave her even more celebrity credit was that this liaison was reported in a national Sunday paper. When Gayle first came in for extensions, Sue had been very excited. She'd wiped down the chairs and wiped down Mandy, our beauty therapist, and told her not to speak or go anywhere near Gayle. Mandy was loud, sometimes drunk, and when she wasn’t swearing and shouting was keeping the salon up to date on her latest trip to Kavos, which sounded less like a holid
ay and more like Dante’s Inferno.

  That morning, Mandy had apparently turned up late and in a bad mood. She was usually quite an upbeat girl and at only twenty-one had a full (if alcoholic and promiscuous) social life, long shiny hair and a body to die for. However, her looks and her lifestyle were at odds with each other. She looked like European royalty, but behaved like a sailor on leave. I knew we had a problem when I mentioned to her that her first bikini wax was waiting and she rushed into the stockroom in floods of tears.

  ‘All I said was bikini wax!’

  Sue shook her head. ‘It’s not you, Faye. Mandy’s a bit upset today,’ she sighed, tugging hard on Mrs Harvey's calf lick. I looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘Didn’t she tell you? Terrible news... Lady Ga Ga died this morning...’ Sue was nodding into the mirror at her client, pulling a sad face. The client let out a gasp and put her hand to her mouth.

  At the mention of Lady Ga Ga, Mandy emerged slowly from behind reception, tear stained and looking like a little girl.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mandy,’ I said, dabbing at Mrs Jackson’s grey roots with the foul-smelling ‘Cruel Plum’.

  ‘I was the one that found her, Faye. They’re saying... suicide... I’m literally gutted.’

  Not literally, I thought, but left it as Mandy was prone to arguments and, when upset, fights even. To be fair, her fly-kicking skills were only apparent after several vodkas, and I had never been on the receiving end, but in her current state I wasn’t taking any chances.