In-Laws and Outlaws

by Kate Fulford

  Before I could think how ironic it was that we had only just been talking about the possibility of Pixie drowning, Sophie had shot off towards where her daughter presumably was (I couldn’t see any part of Pixie above the water) and was on the verge of throwing herself into the Serpentine. I don’t think of myself as naturally heroic but I am pragmatic and I know, from visits we have made to the pool with Pixie, that Sophie is a very poor swimmer. I, on the other hand, am an extremely strong and proficient swimmer. I therefore ran after Sophie and grabbed her arm before she did something stupid.

  “Leave this to me Sophie,” I bellowed, stripping off my outer layer of clothes and my shoes with extraordinary speed. I did a quick assessment of where beneath the surface I thought Pixie was likely to be and waded in. The water was every bit as cold as I had feared it would be and my body attempted to defy my will and stop me going any deeper than up to my knees. But I knew Pixie was under there somewhere, and with Sophie’s animal howl still ringing in my ears I felt I had no choice but to disappear beneath the surface myself. As soon as my head was under the water I became disoriented. I couldn’t see a thing and all I could hear was the sound of the water rushing passed my ears. Nonetheless I waved my arms around in all directions hoping one of them would make contact with my niece. After what seemed an eternity I had to come up for air. I gulped a huge amount of the stuff into my lungs and headed down again. This time, miraculously, I felt a human seeming bundle below me. Using all my strength and determination I grabbed the bundle and pulled it to the surface. God Pixie was heavy. While she isn’t the slightest of children I really hadn’t expected her to weigh this much. It must be her sodden clothes I thought, that made her so difficult to manoeuvre. Luckily the Serpentine is quite shallow, at the edges at least, and I was, with a superhuman effort, able to heave the bundle to the surface and drag it to the water’s edge, where I threw it onto the path in front of Sophie and, as it turned out, Pixie.

  “You really shouldn’t have done that madam,” the paramedic said, as he handed me a cup of hot, sweet tea a few minutes later. Normally I might have been affronted to be referred to as ‘madam’, which is a word I associate with old ladies. Maybe when I’m ninety I’ll be happier about it. Right now though, my teeth were chattering so hard I couldn’t say anything, let alone ‘please don’t call me madam’.

  “The thing is madam,” give up with the madam already, “the thing is, we put more people in body bags that have gone in after someone, or something, usually a dog, than drown in the first place.” While I didn’t feel as if I could make any facial expressions, my face being so cold, I must have looked quizzical because the paramedic continued. “The person, or dog, that goes in first usually comes out of their own accord, you see. They’re not looking for anyone else so as soon as they surface they make for safety. Now your heroic types, like you madam, you keep bobbing up and down, going back to look again until you’re exhausted. And then you get too cold, or swallow too much water and then you die. Lucky you found that sandbag really, or it wouldn’t be tea I’d be giving you.”

  Sophie had not, it transpired, seen her daughter drowning. With thoughts of Pixie’s watery demise filling her head she had, instead, misinterpreted the sight of a black dog (Pixie has dark hair) thrashing around in search of a stick, for her daughter. For my part, and following Sophie’s lead, I had not taken the time to reflect on the fact that Pixie had actually headed in the opposite direction. It had also not occurred to me that Sophie wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a dog and her own child. The upshot was that I had, according to the paramedic, risked my own life to drag a sandbag from the Serpentine. Brilliant, bloody brilliant.

  “Brilliant, bloody brilliant.”

  “Well thank you Dominic, I was only doing what came naturally, I mean I didn’t really even stop to think.” I was unused to receiving so much praise for my bravery, never having done anything particularly brave before, but I was rather enjoying it. Gideon had been extraordinarily impressed and said that he was exceedingly proud of me, which was nice. Marjorie also seemed to think I deserved especial treatment. She and Malcolm had treated Gideon and me to a meal at a Michelin starred restaurant. We did go at lunchtime and have to choose from the set menu, but it was a generous thought.

  Sophie could hardly speak for gratitude, even though it was only some sand and a bag that had benefitted from my heroics. “But just think,” she kept saying, “what if it had been Pixie?”

  “I’m just glad,” I would reply, “that it wasn’t.” At this point I would cast my eyes down and look wistful. Little did I know that my brother, far from calling to heap yet more praise on my already swollen head, was about to bring me back down to earth with a bump. As soon as he heard about what had happened he was on the phone, and as soon as I had hung up he was at the front door. Dominic can move very quickly when the mood takes him, and the mood had most definitely taken him, but it was not somewhere I wanted to follow.

  “I can definitely use this,” he announced, clearly delighted by recent events.

  “Use it?” I enquired. “Use it for what?”

  “To help my custody case.” He sounded very glib considering what a momentous and life changing (and not just for himself) path he was heading down. We were seated at the kitchen table, two cups of coffee (one each) and a plate of homemade muffins, one of which Dominic was scoffing as we talked, between us. I had been practising my baking of late and it was coming on quite well. I didn’t eat very much of what I baked, not being a cake fan, but Gideon was lapping it up (not literally, my efforts were better than that).

  “Oh come on,” I said, “surely you can’t really want Pixie every other week. You can barely manage a weekend without calling me in to take her off your hands. Imagine, all those school holidays, you’d hate it.”

  “That is completely untrue!” It was, in actual fact, completely true. “And I have to, don’t you see?” All I could see was that Dominic was being a monumental arse.

  “Why? Why do you ‘have to’?” I asked, exasperated, and not for the first time, with my brother’s behaviour. “As far as I can see no one is making you do this.” The prospect of Sophie having to give Pixie up to Dominic’s care for so much of the time was too awful to contemplate. Poor kid, he’d have her believing the moon landings were faked before you knew it.

  “Sophie is making me do it,” Dominic said morosely before taking another huge bite of muffin.

  “How the hell do you figure that out?” I replied.

  “If I don’t stop her Sophie will take Pixie to Canada. How would you like that?” Dominic pointed his muffin at me, presumably for emphasis, before shoving all that remained of it into his mouth.

  “I wouldn’t,” I agreed, “but that would be up to Sophie.”

  “So you think she’s going to do it too!” he exclaimed, his mouth still full.

  “No I don’t.” I replied. “She’s never even hinted that she wants to do any such thing.”

  “Don’t you see? That just proves that she does. If she wasn’t then she wouldn’t be so secretive about her plans.” Dominic threw himself forward, his arms thumping on the table between us, causing some of my coffee to leap free of its cup.

  “So, the fact that Sophie has never said she wants to take Pixie to Canada is proof that she intends to take Pixie to Canada?” I tried, in vain, to point out the craziness of Dominic’s reasoning. This was the same logic, after all, that had led him to some of his most heartfelt beliefs. Being told that something is untrue is, for Dominic, virtually proof positive that it is true.

  “See, it makes perfect sense,” Dominic announced. Only to a conspiracy theorist who believes that the Queen (the Queen!) is an alien lizard intent on world domination. “But I’m going to make sure she doesn’t,” he continued. “And you’re going to help me.”

  “I am not!” I replied.

  “Yes you are. I’m going to prove Sophie’s an unfit mother who watched as her daughter fell into the Thames. If
she thinks that leaving a perfectly capable child in a bath is grounds to stop me seeing my own daughter, let’s see what she has to say when I can prove she let my daughter nearly drown.”

  “Firstly it was the Serpentine and secondly Pixie didn’t fall into it. And thirdly Sophie would have died herself to save Pixie.” I counted the reasons off on my fingers, but even this didn’t convince Dominic.

  “Yeah right, and what good would that have done?” he replied fiercely. “The fact Pixie’s not dead is no thanks to Sophie. If you, my sister, hadn’t been there god knows what might have happened.”

  “Nothing would have happened, except there’d be one more sandbag in the Serpentine.” I tried to tether Dominic to reality, but he wasn’t listening.

  “It’s like this,” said Dominic decisively, “either you help me, or that’s it.”

  “That’s what?” I asked. I knew perfectly well what he meant as we had played out this scenario any number of times before.

  “That’ll be it,” he replied

  “Say it Dominic. You’ll never speak to me again, is that it?” On one occasion Dominic stopped speaking to me for several months because I wouldn’t agree that it was at least possible that the Moon was an inter-dimensional portal controlled by aliens. Another time we had had a huge argument about whether or not Pixie should have the MMR jab (as it happened she’d already had it). Our most recent falling out had been about money. I had refused to lend Dominic a thousand pounds (which I didn’t have anyway) so that he could invest in a new and revolutionary energy source that was going to make everything else obsolete. So, dramatic though his threat might sound it didn’t impress me much. And, anyway, I wasn’t about to back down in the face of his emotional blackmail. If he seriously thought I would help him to take Pixie from Sophie for so much of the time because it served his ego and paranoia to do so he had another think coming.

  “Go on then Dominic,” I said, “off you go. I’m not about to help you to do something so despicable and downright spiteful just because . . .” And that was it. He leapt up from the chair in which he had been slouching (he doesn’t ever sit, only slouch) and stopping only to grab another muffin, he left.

  “You’ll be sorry,” he yelled as he headed out the door. “You have no idea, no idea at all, what you’ve just done!” Maybe I hadn’t, but I was sure I could live with the consequences, whatever they might be.

  CHAPTER 10

  “That would be the best thing ever!” I replied enthusiastically to Gideon’s suggestion. We had been discussing our forthcoming nuptials one morning over breakfast and getting nowhere. I was not very keen on any of the ideas put forward by Gideon. It all seemed so unnecessarily complicated and fraught with possible problems, not to mention the expense. As soon as you append the word ‘wedding’ to anything the price goes up – wedding dress, wedding reception, wedding cake, wedding favours (I don’t even know what these are). I also have a horror of being the centre of attention, which is where you tend to be if you’re the bride. I know some women begin planning their weddings at the age of four, but spending an entire day flouncing around in a big dress being gawped at was never one of my girlhood dreams. And even if it had been my dream I had already done it once already (not that I had mentioned this to Gideon, obviously). We had been going over our options for some time and whichever way we looked at it, it seemed impossible to have a small, inexpensive wedding that suited both of us. Until, that is, Gideon came up with the idea of, for want of a better word, eloping.

  “We could go to Gretna Green, or Vegas!” I suggested excitedly. “We could be married by Elvis in Vegas!” I’m not a particular fan of Elvis but fired up with enthusiasm for the idea I was, perhaps, getting a little carried away.

  “That isn’t exactly what I was thinking,” Gideon replied, “and going to Vegas wouldn’t help keep the costs down. What we could do is go to the local register office, get a couple of strangers to be witnesses, or at least a couple of people we know who will be discreet and not tell anyone . . .”

  “I could ask Claire,” I interrupted, “she is very discreet. She is, in fact, the queen, no, the empress of discreetness.”

  “Discretion,” said Gideon.

  “What?” I queried.

  “The word is discretion, not discreetness.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve always said discreetness.” Gideon often corrects what he perceives to be my linguistic errors and I am always eager to learn, so I don’t, as one might imagine, find it intensely irritating and want to hit him every time he does it. Or at least that is the impression I give. I am the very soul of discretion, or discreetness, which, personally, I prefer.

  “Then you’ve always been wrong,” he said. “And I’m not sure we need imperial levels of discretion, but Claire would be good, and Bob.” Bob is an old school friend of Gideon’s who, and I have to be honest here, I’m not very keen on. I find him a bit creepy.

  “Bob, really?” I asked. I was trying to sound neutral but clearly I wasn’t successful.

  “He’s my friend,” said Gideon, “and he’s every bit as discreet as Claire, more if anything.”

  “More? Are you mad? No one is more discreet than Claire, it’s not possible.” I wasn’t about to have Claire out-discreeted by Bob. “The only reason Bob is discreet is that he has no one to tell anything to.”

  “So we’re agreed then?” Gideon continued. “A purely functional wedding, with nothing but a marriage to show for the day.”

  It was hardly the most romantic of weddings, but it suited me so perfectly that (having decided not to pursue the argument about whose friend was most discreet) I could only nod my head vigorously in agreement. For one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about the fact that my side of the room would look a little sparse, guestwise. After his behaviour at Christmas I certainly didn’t want Dominic at any wedding of mine, even if he had been speaking to me, and although I do have some very good friends they tend to exist in separate compartments, which is where I would rather they stayed. When I had agreed to marry Gideon the wedding itself was the one element that troubled me. Now, in one fell swoop, all my wedding related concerns were at an end.

  “Won’t your mother mind though?” I asked. “Surely she’ll want to be at your wedding?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I’ll make sure everything is all right with Mum.” Gideon assured me.

  “Will you tell her when we’re getting married? If it’s a secret from everyone then . . .”

  “She knows we’re getting married . . .”he began.

  “I know that,” I reminded him. “I was there when you told her.”

  Gideon and I had told his parents about our forthcoming marriage at the Burns’ Night party, after everyone else had left. Marjorie’s response had been to say that she had been saying only that evening to Brenda (whoever she was) that she thought (hoped?) Gideon would never marry. I wasn’t really sure how to take that.

  “But will you tell her that we are getting married and she’s not invited?” I continued.

  “I said I’ll make sure everything is all right with Mum, and I will. You don’t need to worry about it. She’ll be amazing about it whatever we do.” Gideon really did overuse the word ‘amazing’ in relation to his mother. Nothing I had seen of Marjorie made me feel that ‘amazing’ could be applied to her in a positive way. She clearly cut a very different figure in Gideon’s mind than she did in mine, but I had no idea why, other than being his mother, he felt that way he did.

  “Just think,” I said as I sat in bed moisturising my elbows (I’m not normally a great one for such things, but this was a special occasion), “this time tomorrow we’ll be married.”

  “I know, good isn’t it? I’m glad you’re moisturising your elbows,” Gideon continued, “I wouldn’t want to marry a woman with dry elbows.”

  “Who would, really, if they had the choice?” I concurred.

  It’s astonishing how quickly and easily a wedding can come together once you drop all the
usual nonsense. Here we were, just two weeks after deciding on a no fuss wedding, and the whole thing was pretty much done and dusted. We had only had one disagreement during the whole process, which was about where we should eat afterwards (I don’t know why, but we both felt that a wedding should be followed by food, even an unconventional one like ours). Gideon wanted to go to Nando’s (because he loves peri peri chicken) while I favoured fish and chips (because I don’t) in the comfort of our own home. I had won mainly because Nando’s doesn’t serve champagne, which was non-negotiable for both of us.

  It was as I was moisturising my elbows and reflecting on how very happy I was that my reverie was interrupted by the phone. It was after ten, a time at which no one should call anyone unless they are bringing news of a life or death nature, and the only time I find it impossible to ignore an incoming call.

  “Go and answer it,” I said, giving Gideon a nudge.

  “I’m not getting out of bed to answer the phone at this time of night,” he replied, pulling a pillow over his head to block out the sound.

  “It might be an emergency.” I said.