Jack reappears at the table, brushing a casual hand across the light down on his head then leaning over to kiss the crown of Laura’s.
‘I’ve got a taxi waiting outside. I’ll take Manfred back to his hotel and we’ll talk in the morning,’ he says, folding the receipt ostentatiously into smaller and smaller rectangles, just in case anyone missed the fact that he has paid the bill.
Manfred rises and reluctantly bids Laura farewell. He would like to stay drinking coffee and schnapps and preening his intellect; he thinks it is a bit much of Jack to drag him away as if he is a schoolboy, but it is difficult to argue with someone who presents his own suggestions as a fait accompli.
Laura and Inigo, left alone at the table, are suddenly and simultaneously overwhelmed with a desire for sleep. He smiles and holds out a hand to her.
‘Come on, let’s go home, it’s late.’
Chapter 2
The winter sun wakes Laura, and she opens her eyes to a dazzle of pink, glad for once of Inigo’s belief that curtains would cut off his creative dynamic with the world. Buoyed by the roseate joy of the morning, she rises, determined to be serene today, and performs what should be a short but satisfying sequence of yoga stretches on the floor at the end of the bed. In fact it is nothing of the sort. Collapsing with a groan from the agony of doggy position, she decides to look for an alternative exercise programme. Inigo sleeps on. All she can see of him is the black slash of his hair on the pillow. In all the years they have been together, he has never woken up before her; even if his alarm clock is set, Inigo is incapable of being first out of bed. He likes someone else to pave his way.
Outside, sunbeams stretch across the street and the cars parked on each side of the road glitter and sparkle, coated with frost like the crystallised fruits Laura’s mother always has in the house for Christmas. Slapping her feet up the rubber-floored staircase Laura realises with horror that no thank you letters have been written to her mother for the Christmas presents she sent the children, and now it is almost March. She wonders whether to try and get them to do it this morning, but decides it will be easier to forge their handwriting herself and fake the letters. That way at least they might appear to be a tiny bit grateful for Dolly’s flower press and Fred’s mouth organ.
She opens the door to Dolly’s room, but the bed is already empty, the curtains flung back to let in the light and a rap music station is pulsing from the radio next to the bed. Dolly is in the bathroom. The air is thick with her favourite ozone-killing body sprays and hair volumiser, and the floor is littered with towels, T-shirts and trainers. Clearly Dolly is choosing her outfit for the day. The scene in Fred’s room is somewhat different. A fug of dark, silent warmth greets Laura when she opens the door. She tries a schoolmistress approach first.
‘Good morning, Fred. It’s a lovely, lovely day – do look.’
Her son does not move or make a sound, despite the rude crack of his blinds pinging up and the searchlight of morning sun falling onto his pillow and his turned-away face. Laura tugs at the duvet, and the visible part of Fred vanishes under the covers accompanied by a low groaning sound.
‘Come on, I’m making breakfast.’ She turns to leave the room, trying not to look at the heaped clothes, the sliding piles of books and hurled odd socks. Picking her way out, Laura stands on something soft and yielding yet crunchy.
‘Urgh, gross. It’s something alive, I think!’ she shrieks.
Fred is out of bed in a flash. ‘Where? Let’s see.’ He kneels next to her, scrabbling on the rug, then sighs. ‘Mum, you’ve trodden on my owl pellet. That’s so annoying, I was going to dissect it.’
Laura shudders. ‘Why was it on the floor then? What’s in it anyway?’
Both of them crouch on the floor, examining the desiccated mess of mangled feather and bone. Fred picks up part of a tiny skull.
‘Look, this is a shrew, I think. I didn’t know London owls ate shrews.’
‘Where did you find the pellet?’
‘Under the oak trees on the Heath. I think the owl’s got a house in there. It’s right by a rubbish bin and that was where I thought he got his food.’ Fred is wide awake now, picking over the bits of reconstituted owl dinner. Laura glances at her watch.
‘Come on. You’ll have to leave it for now. Just hurry up and come down for breakfast.’
Fred scowls at her. ‘All right, all right, there’s no need to get in a psyche, is there?’
Laura doesn’t answer. She bangs on Dolly’s door as she passes and shouts, ‘Breakfast Doll, come on,’ with little hope of being heard above the whirr of the hairdryer and the thud of the radio. She runs downstairs and into the kitchen, imagining with savage pleasure the children’s horror if she were to revert to a version of their behaviour and lie in bed refusing to get up or brush her hair or eat what is provided – Laura pours tea and places packets of cereal on the table, lost in her reverie, imagining herself lolling in the back of the car while her children drive, picking her nose, dangling her shoes from her toes and sighing at the choice of radio channel. It would be so enjoyable, such fun. Laura has forgotten how to have fun. Somewhere on the way to becoming a thirty-eight-year-old mother of adolescents, a wife manquée for fourteen years, she has left having fun behind.
Sighing, self-pity welling, Laura opens the fridge, reaching before she looks and thus dislodging a pyramid of eggs. One rolls out and breaks softly on her foot. ‘Sod it,’ she murmurs.
‘If we had a dog your foot would be licked clean in a nano-second,’ says Fred from the doorway where he has chosen to stand to eat his cereal. He prefers not to sit at the table, it makes the prospect of conversation with his sister more likely. He grins at Laura, and despite the small humiliations of the morning concerning owl spit and feet, Laura smiles back, love surging because he looks so scrubbed, his hair slicked back with a wet comb from his brow, freckles a splash across his nose, and the hollow at the back of his neck visible again now after a severe interlude at the barber’s shop, reminding her of long-ago life when he and Dolly were babies and she lay with them in bed feeding them for so long it seemed for ever.
‘Mum, why are you standing there with egg on your foot?’ Dolly is at the table, her hair a sliding copper curtain as she leans over her bowl, shovelling spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth fast, flipping the pages of an exercise book between gulps. ‘We’ve got a maths block test this morning. Do you know any algebra formulas?’
‘You mean formulae,’ Fred interrupts triumphantly.
‘Oh, shut up, you swot,’ growls Dolly, sticking out her foot to trip him up. Fred flounders but doesn’t fall, and Laura is wrenched back from the misty memories of their babydom by them hurling abuse and shreds of breakfast at one another.
Having just read a manual on how to raise happy children, Laura suppresses her maternal instinct, which is to scream, ‘Shut the hell up, you two, or I’ll bang you heads together,’ and opts for the psychologically correct response: ‘I see that you are both angry – shall we all sit down and talk it through?’
Inigo walks in as Laura is saying this and looks at her incredulously. ‘Get a grip, Laura. They’re never going to take that hippy crap seriously,’ he says to her, adding, ‘What is that disgusting slime on your foot?’ before clapping his hands like a tinpot dictator and yelling, ‘Dolly! Fred! Enough.’
Irritatingly for Laura, they both shut up for an instant, but then explode into giggles.
‘It’s egg, Dad. Mum’s covered in egg.’ Fred sighs a last snigger and gulps milk from the carton. Inigo deliberately averts his face and props three spoons together to form a wigwam on the kitchen table. Fred looks at him, measuring up his mood. He decides to risk it. ‘If we had a dog, it would have licked her foot clean by now,’ he says, edging away towards the hall and his coat and bag as he speaks.
Inigo doesn’t hear, he reaches into the fridge and emerges with three eggs. He rolls one out of his palm and on to the knuckles of his right hand while throwing another to Dolly. ‘What did y
ou say, Fred? Here, Doll, catch this. I liked your egg pyramid; shame Mum got to it.’ He shakes his head sorrowfully in the direction of Laura’s slime-smeared trainer and reaches out to pull her towards him by her waist. ‘I’m starving after eating that pile of organic horse shit last night. Who else wants scrambled egg?’
‘We’ve got to go.’ Laura glares at Fred over Inigo’s shoulder, not wanting the dog row to break out this morning. ‘We mustn’t be late, they’ve got a maths test.’
Fred assumes an innocent and angelic expression and waves to his father. ‘Bye, Dad, see you later.’
Inigo turns from the stove, a flowery apron tied neatly yet absurdly around his waist. ‘See you tonight, Fred. Hope the test is OK.’
Dolly, twirling her school coat like a matador with his cloak, wraps her arms around her father, her bright hair sweeping his black-clad shoulder, ignoring the wooden spoon dripping butter onto the floor. Inigo kisses the top of her head, gesturing to Laura to take the wooden spoon. She does so, but drops it as Dolly begins her own personal dog attack on her father.
‘Dad, come on, it’s time we talked about this. We all really want a dog and—’
‘Not now, Dolly, we’ve got to go,’ Laura cuts in, grabbing her daughter’s arm, trying to pull her out of the door.
Inigo narrows his eyes, crosses his arms and assumes an evil and inaccessible expression. ‘Well, I don’t want a sodding dog, so you can all go to hell.’
Dolly huffs and glares, tossing her hair crossly. ‘You don’t have to be quite so rude, Dad,’ she says icily, and inwardly Laura applauds, although, with the childcare manual foremost in her mind, she knows better than to side with her daughter against her co-parent. Dolly flaps her coat insouciantly and turns on her heel, shouting back, ‘Me and Fred think you only mind because you don’t want to share Mum,’ and Fred cannot resist calling from the doorway as he passes through it, adding his mite, ‘You’re daft to think you and a dog could compete, Dad. The dog would win hands down. I mean paws …’
Laura closes the front door behind them, hastily escaping the tirade she knows will follow, and herds the twins towards the car, pausing to check for forgotten bags and books, inspecting Dolly from a safe distance for signs of anti-father tantrum, smiling at Fred in case he is nervous about the maths test, chivvying and worrying like a veteran sheep dog.
In the car Laura turns the music up very loudly; it is the only way she can be sure that the children will not speak to her and that she will therefore have peace, if not quiet, in which to think for a moment. The tape is a compilation of her favourite Country and Western songs. John Prine’s inimitable croak cuts into her thoughts, soothing immediately. ‘There’s flies in the kitchen …’
‘Oh no, it’s slit your wrist time,’ groans Dolly in the back. ‘Mum, can we listen to our music instead?’
‘Yes, in a minute, just be patient.’
Manoeuvring out of the quiet side street where they live and into the blaring, shunting London rush-hour traffic, Laura begins to relax. Time spent in the car is time off. Of course, it is better time off if the children are not in the car too, but even when they are, Laura is soothed by the fact that there is nothing they can do about forgotten homework, and even better, there is no need for her to nag them. She joins in with gusto, ‘Make me an angel to fly from Montgomery, Make me a picture of an old Rodeo,’ and flushed with pleasure at the music, and with her own faultless rendition, she glances in the rearview mirror to smile at her darling children, noticing as she does that there is a bus close behind, filling the back window of the car with its mud-stained redness.
The darlings loll vacantly, listless now the dog row has passed. Dolly is fiddling with her hair and gazing out of the window, Fred mouths the words of the song, not because he likes it, but because he knows it so well that he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. They are side by side, their school bags bundled between them, but each twin inhabits a separate world.
‘You’ve got twins. How lovely, they must be so close,’ people say to her when they meet her, avidly watching Dolly and Fred for signs of twinnishness. What these signs might be is not clear. They don’t even look alike. Fred’s freckles, his pale blue eyes, his determined chin and his hair the colour of wet sand come from Laura’s mother’s family, while Dolly has Inigo’s narrow face and long elegant fingers, his curving mouth and dark grey eyes. Only her copper bright hair, and her skin as smooth and pale as cream are like Laura’s. Or rather like they used to be, Laura thinks wryly.
Dolly catches her mother’s eye in the mirror and scowls for no reason except she finds it quicker and easier than smiling. Laura sighs, trying to remember when life with Dolly was not like living with a temperamental opera diva. Fred has always been easy, but not Dolly. Dolly is difficult, and Laura finds Dolly especially hard work. With Inigo she is usually a more persuadable child, and has been since the moment she was placed in his arms, a crumpled infant bellowing her first breaths with flailing fists and a cross little face beneath a shock of hair. On that day, in the delivery room of the vast, dying West London Hospital, Inigo looked at his newborn daughter and began to laugh, wrapping her closer in her blanket, surprised by the rush of love this tiny creature prompted in him, amazed by her instant vigour and energy.
‘She looks like a troll,’ he said, and kissed her forehead. Fortunately, no one heard this pronouncement, as the twin about to be known as Fred was proving difficult to lure from the warmth of his mother’s womb into this world, and every nurse in the room was occupied with watching the doctor as he snapped his forceps together and strode towards Laura on the bed. The sight of the masked doctor poised with his giant tongs was the catalyst needed, and Fred earned his mother’s lifelong gratitude by appearing just in time, a calm baby with surprisingly elegant eyebrows.
Laura cranes round to see if Fred’s eyebrows are still notable; he peers back at her crossly. ‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just looking.’ The thought of these thirteen-year-olds ever being tiny babies seems impossible; it was long ago, it feels almost as if it were in another life.
‘Come on lady, get a move on.’ Laura is brought abruptly back to the present by a jeering voice.
The bus has edged next to her so the driver can shout at Laura; with a hiss of air brakes and automatic doors it revs away into the traffic, leaving Laura dawdling at a green light. It takes her a few moments to realise where she is and what she should do next. The school run is something she executes automatically; any attempt at concentrating on it results in bewilderment. In fact the whole school operation is frequently bewildering, and because of the children being twins, Laura never has a chance to get it right next time. On the other hand, as Inigo is quick to point out when attending plays or singing competitions, at least they only have to go through all of this stuff once. There is more beeping behind her. She kangaroo hops forwards in the wrong gear and Fred groans loudly.
‘Mum, please don’t drive like this when we get near school. And please can we turn your music off now and listen to something decent?’
‘Mum can’t help driving like this.’ Dolly has taken one shoe off and is sitting in full lotus position examining the sole of her foot. ‘Mum, can we stop and get some nail scissors? I think my toenail is growing into my foot, or maybe through it. It really hurts.’
‘Not if you want to get there on time. Put your shoe on, Doll, please – you’re taking up the whole seat sitting like that. Fred, find another tape, but please don’t let’s have Radio One, it makes me want to kill myself.’
School is reached with no further reference to dogs or pierced feet from Dolly, and just one hopeful request from Fred to stop for a gutting knife.
‘You can’t have a gutting knife. You’re a child, not a mass murderer. What do you want it for anyway?’ Laura parks on the zig zag of yellow lines outside his school gates, telling herself that it doesn’t matter as they are too late for any other children to be still arriving. She climbs out, chauffeur-style, to open t
he door for her offspring.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you later.’ Fred reaches up to kiss her then turns in through the gates and becomes the last of the seething horde of boys ebbing towards the school doors as the bell rings. Dolly is still in the car, scrabbling for her shoe.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to be late,’ Laura says, edging out into the traffic to drive the short distance to Dolly’s side of the school. They arrive, Dolly still half shoeless, searching beneath the back seat. Laura gets out of the car, bites her tongue hard to stop herself saying, ‘Why didn’t you keep your shoe on?’ and bends to retrieve the spilled papers and books which cascade from her daughter’s open school bag. A few girls run across the road and in through the gates. Dolly at last finds her shoe and shoves it on.
‘Bye, Mummy, see you later. Will you get my swimming hat today? And I need a new pen, I think.’
Laura simply nods, watching as Dolly, suddenly alert and smiling, runs off, returns to kiss her mother, then lopes across the empty tarmac to the school entrance.
As Dolly vanishes Laura turns to her car. She loves the moment of getting back into it after the children have gone; there is a luxurious quality to the silence, and the day stretches before her, lit with possibilities. Contemplating these possibilities today, however, sinks her spirits; she could go to the studio she works in with Inigo, where she will arrive in time to take a self-satisfied call from Jack about his session with Manfred and the television crew. Maybe she could nip out at lunchtime to buy some dye. Laura is determined to have glamour in her underwear drawer, and has decided that the most satisfactory way to do this is to dye all her knickers. Peacock blue is the colour she has chosen to kick off with, and today will be a perfect day to start. Following the vital shopping, there will be an hour to tear up small pieces of paper, an ongoing project as Inigo plans to amass five tons of tiny torn scraps of paper and tip them out in Hyde Park at dawn on the spring equinox. This installation is to be called Fall Back and was inspired by Laura’s inability to remember which way the clocks go when they change in autumn and spring.
Green Grass Page 2
