In-Laws and Outlaws

by Kate Fulford

  “Is what comfortable?” she asked in return, the chocolate still in her hand.

  “Your bed, Marjorie.” I said.

  “Yes, it is. It is a very expensive mattress.” Even with her nemesis jangling her own house keys at her from the end of the bed, Marjorie still had the energy to brag. “The Queen sleeps on one of these,” she added.

  “I’m sure she does. So, here’s a question,” I replied. “Do you think the Queen would notice if something were to be slipped under her mattress? Or,” I paused for dramatic effect, “something were to be taken from under it that she had been keeping there? Although I don’t suppose the Queen keeps secrets under her mattress, do you, Marjorie?”

  For a supposedly sick woman Marjorie leapt from the bed with lightning speed and, throwing the now slightly melted chocolate back into the box, began rummaging around under the much discussed mattress. Having flailed her arms around under it for a few moments in a fruitless search, she realised that her precious folder was no longer there.

  “What do you want?” Marjorie hissed. She had recovered herself enough to try to quell me with an intimidating look. Unfortunately her look, intimidating though it was, was undercut by her attire. It’s hard to quell someone with an intimidating look while dressed in a pair of pyjamas covered in little love hearts and a pale pink bed jacket.

  “What I want is for you to back off,” I hissed back. “That, Marjorie, is what I want.” I might, I’m afraid, have let my amusement at her discombobulation show. It’s not often, after all, that anyone gets to see their sworn enemy under quite such undignified circumstances.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Marjorie attempted to look down her nose at me imperiously. As she was considerably shorter than me she had to tilt her head back quite a long way and so only succeeded in giving me a good view of the underside of her chin and the inside of her nostrils.

  “I think you know very well what I mean, Marjorie.” I replied. “Since I met your son or, to be more precise, since I met you, you have done everything in your power to destroy my relationship with Gideon. I want you to leave me alone. I have something of yours,” I continued. “I think you know what it is, and what it would mean if I were to share it with Gideon.” I felt about ten feet tall at this point, such was my advantage over Marjorie. How, I thought, could this go wrong?

  “You wouldn’t dare!” She all but screamed. “You can’t possibly believe he would side with you against me. Me!” she cried thumping her chest in a ‘Me Tarzan’ like way. She was trying her best but we both knew the game was going very much my way. “And if he knew what I know about you . . .” she continued.

  “We’d neither of us come out of it very well, would we Marjorie?” I replied, satisfyingly calmly. My heart was going like the clappers and I felt a hot flush travelling over my entire body, but I was holding it together pretty well despite these physical symptoms of stress. “I might well lose him,” I continued, “but you’d have a lot of explaining to do yourself, wouldn’t you? It’s called . . .” What was it called?

  “Mutually Assured Destruction,” Marjorie almost spat at me. “That’s what you’re suggesting isn’t it? If I tell Gideon what I know about your . . . your past, you will reveal things that you believe you know about me.”

  “I don’t believe that I know them, I do know them, and I have evidence, while you only have speculation. But,” I went on, “if you were to stop interfering in my life, there would be no reason for me to interfere in yours, would there?” Had I been holding a long haired white cat I’m pretty sure I would have stroked it menacingly at this point.

  “You can’t believe for a moment that my son would ever turn against me, not after all I’ve done for him.” Marjorie wasn’t going to take this lying down.

  “Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.” I mused. “Does what you’ve done for him cancel out all that you’ve done to others? The question you have to ask yourself is ‘do I feel lucky?’ Well do you, punk, I mean, Marjorie? Do you feel lucky?”

  “You really are a piece of work,” Marjorie hissed.

  “Well thank you Marjorie. I’m glad that you . . .” I have no idea where I was going with this but luckily Marjorie interrupted me before I had to work it out.

  “I don’t have much choice do I?” she hissed. “I will give into your blackmail, and make no mistake, that’s what it is.”

  “Blackmail is an ugly word, Marjorie, but you of all people know that, don’t you?” I replied, which was probably over egging it but I blame the adrenalin rush I was now experiencing.

  “I will agree to your demands on one condition,” Marjorie continued, ignoring my comment.

  “Do you really think you’re in a position to make demands?” I countered.

  “Yes, I do.” Marjorie sounded very sure of herself. “I could have you sent to prison, and I don’t suppose you’d like that, would you?” She was clearly unaware this wouldn’t be a novel experience for me.

  “I don’t suppose I would.” I said nonchalantly. “But how would you achieve that?”

  “By reporting the theft of my ring. The ring that you stole.” Marjorie pointed an accusing finger at me. Bloody Meg, why’d she have to take the damned ring? “You have already proved that you’re a common thief,” she continued. “But don’t you think taking the ring was going a bit far, even for you?” As it happens, I did, but I couldn’t tell her that Meg had taken it without revealing my connection to Marjorie’s twin, and I didn’t feel that this was the right time for any more revelations.

  “I didn’t take it,” I said, “but if I can ensure that it’s returned to you, do we have a deal?”

  “You expect me to believe that you were not the thief, and yet you can ensure the return of the ring?” Marjorie sneered at me. I really didn’t like the inference, or rather the outright assertion that I was a common thief. I am many things, but I am not a thief.

  “I don’t care what you believe.” I said. I did, inasmuch as I didn’t want her to think that I was a thief, but overall I didn’t. “I repeat, do we have a deal?”

  “Yes, I suppose that we do.” Marjorie conceded ungraciously. “I have to say though,” she continued, a nasty little smirk on her face, “it’ll be a relief in some ways.”

  “Look,” I said, taking this as a conciliatory gesture despite the smirk, “all I want is for everyone to get on. I really do love your son, and I will do my best to make him happy. I don’t want us to be enemies.”

  “How very touching, although I’m not sure that you know what love is,” she replied. Perhaps I hadn’t until I met her son, but it wasn’t worth telling her that, she wouldn’t have believed me. Marjorie resumed speaking. “I was referring to the fact that I won’t have to spend any more time listening to your appalling brother moaning on about his dreadful life in order to find out a few snippets about you that might prove useful.”

  For a moment I was ready to spring to Dominic’s defence, it seemed a little harsh to call him appalling, but then I realised what it was that Marjorie had just said.

  “It was Dominic? Dominic was your source?” I let out a hoot of laughter. “Really, you must try harder, Marjorie. Dominic can barely see beyond the end of his nose. He’s certainly never taken much interest in my life. He would be the last person I would go to if I wanted to find out about me.” That didn’t really make any sense, but I’d said it now.

  “He knows enough,” Marjorie replied, clearly smarting from my comment, “and he certainly shares my feelings of distaste for you. What a lovely pair you make, and now I am to be forced to accept you into my family, god help me.”

  “Yes, god help you indeed. Now,” I said, “I think I’ll be on my way. I’m so pleased that you seem to have made such a miraculous recovery. I’m sure you’ll be back to your usual self by the time my wedding day finally comes around.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure I shall.” With that she turned away from me. The urge to make one last zinger was strong, but as she was as kee
n as me to get the last word the exchange might have gone on indefinitely and I had other fish to fry.

  CHAPTER 27

  “So I was right,” said Claire. “I did tell you, didn’t I?” she continued, only just stopping short of wagging her finger at me as if I were a naughty child. I adore Claire. She is my oldest and best friend and easily the cleverest person I know (not that I have mentioned this to Gideon) but she can be insufferably smug at times, and right now was one of those times.

  “Yes, you were, and you did,” I agreed, displaying none of the annoyance anyone might naturally have been expected to feel on being talked down to by Mrs Smug McSmugface. “I should have listened to you. Aren’t you pleased though, that it was all in my mind? I certainly am. Can you imagine what kind of monster Marjorie would have to be to behave as badly I imagined?”

  I had just finished telling Claire, at whose kitchen table we were sitting having just finished lunch, about recent developments. A slab of Claire’s homemade bread sat reproachfully on my plate. It was the kind of bread that made you realise why we evolved wisdom teeth (all those hours reading that science book hadn’t been totally wasted), as too much of this stuff and even the strongest molars would undoubtedly be ground to dust and need replacing with shiny new ones. It looked like a buttered paving stone. I had managed one piece only because it had been served with soup which meant I could saturate it to the point where I felt my teeth would survive the encounter. I wasn’t about to risk another slab however, now that I was soupless.

  “Are you finished?” Claire looked reproachfully at the uneaten bread. I hate wasting food but I think Claire actually sees the face of a starving child imprinted into every uneaten morsel. She is a very, very much better person than I am.

  “Yup, that was delicious.” I was only half lying, the soup had been very nice.

  “So following the health scare she sought a rapprochement with you?” Claire asked as she cleared the table.

  “That sounds disgusting,” I replied, “but I don’t suppose it means what I think it does.”

  “It means that she wants to establish harmonious relations with you.” Claire attempted to clarify.

  “Like the von Trapps?” Why couldn’t Claire just speak English like a normal person?

  “What?” Claire said, rather sharply.

  “You know, the von Trapps.” I said. “The Sound of Music. Harmonious relations.”

  “Oh do shut up, you know very well what I meant.”

  I had been telling Claire how, having been given the all clear following a second opinion (funny that, how she went from deadly, unspecified cancer to the all-clear in just two appointments), Marjorie had invited me over for a little tête-à-tête. Once there, or so I told Claire, Marjorie apologised for all that she had said to Gideon regarding my lack of trustworthiness. She had, so she told me, (in my narrative to both Gideon and Claire at least) been on some very, very strong painkillers and they had interfered with her thinking, making her somewhat paranoid. She couldn’t express how sorry she was and asked, no begged, for my forgiveness (Gideon had particularly liked that bit) and we were now as thick, somewhat appropriately, as thieves.

  Claire is not easily fooled, or at least not as easily as most people, which is partly why I value her friendship so highly. She knows as much about me as anyone ever will, but there are limits, even with Claire. Fortunately even she is not immune to that most powerful of deception techniques, flattery. In many ways the enormous size of her brain is both her greatest asset and her greatest weakness. It can make her just a little too sure that she’s right because usually she is. She also has a very strong belief in the essential goodness of people. She was therefore more than happy to believe that Marjorie had shown herself to be a decent person after all. It fitted in much more neatly with her world view than the idea that Marjorie really was a conniving, vicious, unprincipled . . . person.

  I didn’t enjoy lying to Claire, but I felt that things had moved beyond the point when I could, any longer, involve her. I had no idea what might happen next but I was quite sure that, despite what Marjorie had said, she was not about to give up on her goal of getting me out of Gideon’s life. Having seen the evidence of what she was prepared to do to get her own way, the idea that she would meekly accept defeat was not realistic. What I needed to do, therefore, was to make it clear to Claire that there was nothing untoward going on in my life, and therefore no need for her to examine it any further.

  Gideon had been even more delighted than Claire with his mother’s volte face regarding me, and hadn’t expressed the slightest suspicion over her equally abrupt return to full health.

  “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Gideon had said, holding a bottle of champagne aloft as he came home the evening following Marjorie’s having risen, Lazarus like, from her bed. I could only wholeheartedly concur that it was, indeed, quite unbelievable.

  “I knew there must be something more to it, you know,” he had continued after I had explained the ‘very strong painkiller’ story. Yes, there must, I had again concurred. So, in Gideon and Claire’s world at least, everything was just peachy.

  “Hi Rich,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you, but I’m really glad you’re here.” Claire’s husband Richard came through the kitchen door just after Claire had poured us each a mug of mint tea.

  “Oh, are you? Why?” Richard looked at the ground about a foot in front of me. He never looks directly at me, or anyone else for that matter, but then he is a computer programmer.

  “Because I have a favour to ask.” I continued. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? Doing you a . . . a . . . a favour?” Rich’s gaze shifted from the floor to the table a few feet to my right.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t mind, do you Rich? All you have to do Eve, is ask, isn’t that right Rich?” Claire was laughing as she spoke. Rich glared at her from under his brows. Goodness knows what was going on.

  “So you’ll do it? That’s great. So the thing is . . .” I left not long after, my favour secured and Claire’s concerns regarding Marjorie and me well and truly quelled, so that was two jobs, at least, done. And on to the next.

  “But you must give it back, you have to!” I implored Meg as we sat in the cold winter sun under the watchful eye of the Buddha of Battersea.

  “I damn well don’t have to. My sister has been making me do what she wants all our lives and this is where it ends. I won’t do it, and you can’t make me.” Meg was proving every bit as intransigent as I had feared she would be.

  “But if you don’t give the ring back, or at least give it to me to give back, she’s going to report me to the police.” I implored again.

  “They can’t prove anything can they?” Meg replied. “You don’t have the ring, you didn’t steal it. Why on earth would anyone believe that you had? It would make her look dotty.” What Meg said did have merit. I wasn’t very concerned about Marjorie’s threat to call the police. No one had broken into her house and the spare keys had been returned to their spot in the shed. How Marjorie intended to convince the police that a crime had been committed was beyond me. It was far more likely that Marjorie had simply lost the ring than that someone had taken it. What I couldn’t see, however, was what purpose was served by not returning it. It was the only loose thread in an otherwise fairly tightly wound conclusion to recent events and I was reluctant to leave it dangling. Loose threads can be pulled at, but I could only tie it up with Meg’s help, and she was utterly unmoved by my appeals. As there was nothing more I could do for the moment I left Meg on the park bench, hopefully contemplating how her intransigence would go down with the Buddha, and made my way to an altogether less salubrious part of town.

  Despite not having spoken for several months, it had been the work of a single phone call to arrange a meeting with my brother. Dominic is, he would be appalled to know, very easy to play. His Achilles heel is that he is totally unsuspicious of anyone’s motives. This might seem surprising given his penchant for c
onspiracy theories, but is actually a direct result of that mindset. He frequently refers to anyone that doesn’t believe the same things as him as ‘sheeple’ and thinks we are pretty much beneath contempt. That any of the ‘sheeple’ could fool him is therefore unthinkable, which means that we, the sheeple, can fool him pretty much any time we choose. And so here I was in his frankly disgusting flat in one of the grimmer parts of east London, planning on fooling him and pretty sure I would succeed.

  Looking around at the piles of magazines and newspapers, the plates of half eaten food, the mugs stained so brown you could have made a reasonably strong cup of tea simply by filling them with hot water, it occurred to me that he probably hadn’t invited Marjorie here.

  “You don’t know what this means to me Sis.” Dominic said, gesturing for me to take seat. He only calls me Sis when he wants something from me and I am complying. “I couldn’t imagine my life without Pixie in it,” he added.

  “And you’d bring her to live here?” I enquired, having perched myself on the very edge of the nearest chair while glancing as uncensoriously as I could around the room. No wonder it had needed fumigating last Christmas. Now, nearly a year on, it looked as if it was well past its due date for another going over.

  “I’ll move somewhere else, somewhere more ‘socially acceptable’,” he said, throwing himself into a dilapidated armchair. “I’m only here because it’s near to Pixie.” And it’s only a pigsty because . . . ?

  “Something has happened,” I had said when arranging this meeting, “and I think that you might need my help.” And now I was here, ready to help.

  “I knew you’d realise I was right, given enough time,” he now said. “I mean we should stick together shouldn’t we? I am all the family you have, after all.”

  “Yes, Dominic, you are.” I concurred. The concept of family is a very fluid one for Dominic. His idea of who comprises his, or my, family changes depending on what he wants at the time.