The Last Laugh

by Tracy Bloom

  The timer goes off and Betsy, our loveable mongrel, jumps out of her basket and stuffs her nose under my arm. She can already smell the leftovers. I shoo her away and in a zombie-like fashion I take out the pizzas and put them on chopping boards. Then I walk to the bottom of the stairs and shout, ‘Pizza!’ at the top of my voice. I wander back into the kitchen. I can’t face eating. I’m not sure whether it’s the illness or the stomach-churning emotion. Either way, looking at the array of pepperoni, margherita and Hawaiian (why?) makes me want to gag.

  I’ll tell them I’ve already eaten if they ask. This fleeting thought makes me laugh. As if they would question why I’m not eating. My eating habits are not on their radar.

  I’ve already decided today will not be the day that I announce to the family that I have cancer. The minute I tell them I figure a chunk of me is already dead. I will become someone else. The mother with a terminal illness rather than the pain-in-the-arse mum who just doesn’t understand me and is out to make my life as miserable as possible. I want to be her for just a bit longer.

  After a couple of minutes sitting at the pizza graveyard I get up again and walk to the bottom of the stairs and shout, ‘Pizza!’ even louder. I listen for sounds of movement. Nothing. I go back to the kitchen and pick up my phone to text my kids to call them for food downstairs. Within seconds there is a thumping on the stairs and George appears, swiftly followed by Ellie.

  ‘You’ve not cut the margherita with the same knife as the other two, have you?’ asks Ellie, sitting down and reaching over to help herself to three slices.

  ‘No,’ I lie.

  She’s eating it before I have answered. She claims to be vegetarian but seems very willing to accept all my deceptions over what has gone into various dishes, when normally she sniffs out my lies like a hound dog. It seems to be an unwritten rule that should her dalliances with meat ever be discovered then she can put all the blame on me. This means she is free to enjoy the odd pork sausage I occasionally tell her are Linda McCartney with a knowing look.

  George and Ellie sit and munch in silence. George is trying to hide the fact he’s feeding his crusts to a grateful Betsy, who’s sitting by his side looking up at him adoringly. I’m happy to watch, conversation beyond me; today the mere presence of my two children feels more meaningful and enjoyable than any of the other million times they have sat next to me and ignored me.

  There are maybe half a dozen slices left when Mark arrives home. I’m surprised – I just assumed that he’d be shagging late again and so I wasn’t prepared to see him.

  ‘God, I’m famished,’ he says, reaching over and picking up a slice and stuffing it in his mouth.

  I look for signs of his betrayal. Maybe an untucked shirt or a sheepish look. But he looks exactly the same as he did last week. Impeccably neat and tidy in a navy suit with white shirt and a striped tie. The sight of the corporate him used to get me very overexcited when we first started living together. I’d never had a boyfriend who wore a suit – it seemed so grown-up and mature and so damn sexy. I could hardly keep my hands off him. Clearly someone else now agrees with me.

  ‘I tell you what, the investors wanted their pound of flesh today,’ announces Mark. ‘I have been through every single page of our five-year strategy. Every page. Still, they seemed impressed, which is the main thing.’

  I don’t respond. Which is pretty normal actually when Mark starts talking about work. Either I don’t understand what he is saying or, to be honest, it’s just too damn dull.

  He puts his briefcase in the corner and sits down, grabbing a second slice of pizza. I can see George getting agitated at the arrival of his dad as it will mean less pepperoni pizza for him because they both like it best. I watch him eye Mark munching away, oblivious that he is stealing his own children’s dinner. I will George to say something but of course he doesn’t. He just bends his head low over his plate, observing Mark reach for yet another slice. Betsy jumps up at him in anticipation.

  ‘Get down,’ says Mark, roughly pushing her away. I watch as Betsy retreats to the protection of George’s side.

  ‘So how did your session with the tutor go today?’ Mark asks his son.

  George’s shoulders shrug in response. ‘Fine,’ he mutters.

  Mark has recently taken the step of hiring a maths tutor for George. Somehow George has failed to inherit his dad’s excellent maths genes. Mark waited patiently for numeric skills to emerge so that he could refer to George as a chip off the old block, but they never came. He doesn’t consider George’s considerable talents with food to be an adequate reflection and so is currently enforcing a strict regime of three sessions a week with a maths tutor. As far as I can tell, this is only having the effect of increasing George’s anxiety, making him less likely to pick up any valuable learning.

  ‘What did you do?’ Mark presses.

  ‘Simultaneous equations,’ says George, making no eye contact as he darts his hand out for the final piece of peperoni pizza.

  ‘Simultaneous equations!’ exclaims Ellie. ‘Seriously, George, we did those in, like, Year Seven. You’re so thick.’

  She reaches out and grabs the very last slice of pizza, which is Hawaiian (isn’t it always left till last?), and shoves it in her mouth, clearly forgetting there is ex-pig littered all over it.

  I’m staring at her with my mouth open, as is George. I squeeze George’s hand, allowing him a moment to gather his thoughts. He stands up. He’s going to run away, I think. Let her get away with it. I look up at him pleadingly, willing him to just let it out.

  ‘You’re eating dead pig, you hypocritical b-b-bitch,’ he stutters before he turns and flees the room, Betsy bounding after him. I want to applaud so badly but am stopped by Mark’s look of concern for his daughter.

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ he says to her.

  ‘No, he did,’ I say, interrupting this father–daughter bonding moment. They both whirl to look at me and I am in the spotlight. ‘That is Hawaiian you are eating.’

  Ellie looks down at the remnants of pizza in her hand and makes a show of dropping it on the plate like it’s burnt her.

  ‘I’ve eaten ham!’ she wails. ‘Did you hide it under the pineapple?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I couldn’t taste it, I swear I couldn’t taste it,’ she says, looking at her father desperately.

  ‘No harm done,’ I say, swiftly getting up and gathering up dirty plates.

  There is no response from behind me as I turn to put the dishes in the dishwasher.

  ‘There’s probably hardly any pig in the processed stuff they put on those pizzas anyway,’ I hear Mark tell Ellie.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she replies.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  ‘Will you take me and Phoebe to Nottingham on Saturday to go shopping?’ asks Ellie.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  ‘There’s a bikini I really like in Cruise.’

  ‘Fine,’ he mutters. I can tell he’s lost interest. He’s probably looking at his phone.

  ‘Can I have it?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Brilliant. I’ll let Phoebe know.’

  I return to the table to clear away half-empty glasses. Mark and Ellie are both staring at their phones. Ellie wanders out the room whilst Mark starts tapping at his screen. Is it a message from her, I wonder. Is she arranging their next session? Will he ever look up from his damn phone and see what’s happening right before his eyes?

  ‘I’ve got a few emails to sort out,’ he says, getting up and walking towards the door without even glancing at me, without offering to help clear away, without asking me how my cancer-ridden, affair-clouded day has been. ‘I’ll do them in my office,’ he adds, picking up his briefcase and wandering out.

  The rest of the plates get chucked in the dishwasher then I pour myself a large glass of wine. I hesitate over the expensive stuff that Mark buys to take to dinner parties, never to be enjoyed at home with me. But I pass. Recently wine and I have not
been the pals we used to be. Instead of the soothing calm before the shedding of inhibitions, I have experienced pain and cramps and general discomfort. The cancer again maybe. Ruining that little shred of joy as well.

  * * *

  I move to the lounge with an everyday glass of red. I sit in the dark until I can stand the gloom no longer. I put on a light and shut the curtains and sit down again.

  All is quiet, all is calm, everything looks the same as it always has, and yet everything is different. Nothing looks the same from where I am sitting. Rather than reassuring me that our kids were young and cute once, the school photos lined up on the shelf make me want to howl and scream. The large black and white picture of trees lining a country road above the fireplace is a reminder that for maybe ten years we have been meaning to replace the cheap Ikea print with something more original but we’ve never got round to it and now probably never will. I casually stroke the corner sofa, which was bought after weeks of searching necessitated by the scale of the purchase and mine and Mark’s disagreement over brown or black leather. I’d won that one and he’d admitted that it looked right when it finally arrived. We’d happily thrown popcorn at each other from either end as we watched Gladiator on DVD for the millionth time. Mark’s favourite film. A happy memory with him. I grab hold of it and savour it.

  We used to be happy. Our happiness seems to have eroded too slowly to notice until I woke up one morning and that became the day I discovered I’d lost him to another. I blame myself. Of course I do, I’m a woman. Clearly I’ve done something wrong. I nagged too much. I didn’t sound interested enough when you droned on about tax-exemption clauses or year-end workload. I wasn’t ready with a hot meal and a glass of red when you returned from that horrendous business trip to Hamburg. I didn’t have enough sex with you. I put on weight after having the kids. I didn’t put a ribbon in my hair or even try to make myself attractive for you. I put the kids first. It’s all my fault, of course. I forced you to go elsewhere with my terrible behaviour. You complete and utter bastard.

  Twenty years, I remind myself. We will have been together twenty years this year. In fact, of course, it was twenty years to the day on my birthday. I get down on my knees in front of the built-in cupboard in the alcove and pull open the doors. A clutch of DVDs fall out, clearly having been crammed in there by one of the kids… or more likely me. I reach to the back of the top shelf and start pulling out photo albums, all in different shapes and sizes. All recording experiences pre-2000 at a guess, at which point photographic opportunities were confined to digital cameras, destined never to see the light of day. That is until Facebook and Instagram appeared, allowing us to expose our finest moments to a raft of strangers out of the home whilst never taking the time to print them out and enjoy them in the home.

  I love photo albums. Well, I used to when I had the time. I was the person who would keep tickets and invites and sweet wrappers, anything that recorded a significant event in my life. In that cupboard were albums from parties and holidays and Christmases gone by and of course endless photos of both Ellie and George’s early years.

  I seek out a slightly dog-eared black leather album and find my favourite photo of them. They are both grinning into the camera from a bubble bath with foam Mohicans on their heads. Ellie must have been about five and George three. Mark had taken the picture before George stood up and splatted a dollop of foam on his head. I styled it into two little horns, which George thought was the funniest thing ever. Mark sat on the bathroom floor in his suit with crackling bath foam in his hair, the kids laughing hysterically and pointing. What a moment. What a once-in-a-lifetime, bursting-with-joy moment.

  I tuck the photo away quickly. It’s too hard to see that this perfection once existed in our family. We got it so right. Where did it all go so wrong?

  I pull out another album. A big thick cream one that has yellowed slightly but is still proudly labelled ‘Summer 1996’.

  I can practically hear Baddiel & Skinner and The Lightning Seeds singing ‘Three Lions’ as I flick through the early pages and catch sight of our Euro 96 celebrations in the clubs and bars of Corfu. There’s a great picture of Karen and me somewhere, holding up an enormous England flag on the beach. A few pages later and I find it. I’ve always thought it was the best ever picture of me. I look frigging amazing! My hair is all blonde and halfway down my back. My legs, oh my legs, I would die for legs like that now. (Well, I don’t actually have to now, I guess.) All tanned and slim but shapely. I actually have ankles, look at that. And I’m wearing shorts. I haven’t worn shorts, since, well, probably 1996. Proper shorts, not mum shorts that finish barely above the knee. These were short shorts that you have to be brazen, an Olympian, unconscious or very young to wear. I look so happy. We’d just beat Holland 4–1, and I was totally in love with Teddy Sheringham who’d scored twice. I liked the small eyes with a side-parting look (which is slightly worrying as that is what my dad looks like in pictures of him in his twenties).

  They were the easiest three weeks of my tour rep career, I remember. All we had to do was find a bar playing the footie, herd our charges in that direction at the appropriate time, then lead the singing of ‘Three Lions’, and all would agree that they’d had the best night of their entire lives.

  I flick to the end of the album and quickly find the entries recording my epic birthday. A photocopied invite is inserted behind sticky back plastic.

  COME TO JENNY’S

  HUSH HUSH

  DON’T TELL ANYONE

  SECRET BIRTHDAY PARTY

  1AM ON BATARIA BEACH, JUNE 26TH SEPTEMBER 1996

  Come dressed for anything!!!

  The invite preceded a plethora of out-of-focus, slightly faded photos that had been taken using a dozen or so disposable cameras.

  You don’t get photos like these any more. They’d be classed as rejects in this digital age. Drunkenly composed, a chaotic mix of arms and legs and squashed-up gurning faces. They capture a feeling of uninhibited joy where no one cared how the picture would turn out. Not like today’s self-conscious selfies where the pout, the angle of the eyebrow, the positioning of the cleavage are all carefully posed and predictable. Selfies are not about how the moment feels but a record of how good one looks in that moment.

  I reach for my phone and flick through the music until I find it. In my opinion one of the best songs ever written. It’s another Oasis one but, you know, it was the nineties. You couldn’t move for them. I listen to Liam Gallagher as he belts out the lyrics to ‘Champagne Supernova’. We danced on that beach and sang this song to the sunrise.

  There I am. I point at one of the last few shots as though I’m showing them to an imaginary friend. Riding high on the shoulders of my colleagues, arms raised high in the air, a glimpse of an early-morning sunrise on the horizon. It has the look of a festival, what with all the hands pumping the air, but it was my birthday. That was me in the middle of all that joy. That was me twenty years ago. What happened to that girl, I wonder. I’m not sure I’m recognisable from that girl who put all her efforts into having fun and enjoying life. Where did she go? I suspect she was slowly crushed out by responsibility and the slow creep of maturity. And now I am all that is left. I wish I had fought for her, stuck up for her, let her carry on her existence in this world. I think she may have lived this life so much better.

  Fifteen

  ‘How many do you reckon you’ll get?’ asks Maureen as soon as I enter her room the next day. I’ve arrived at work an hour early to see how my invalid friend is.

  ‘Get for what?’ I ask. ‘This afternoon’s armchair aerobics?’

  ‘Your funeral.’

  I gasp. I was all good with the practical, composed approach yesterday, but this?

  ‘Jesus, Maureen, really! I can’t worry about that.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ she replies. ‘In fact your situation has made me think about it a lot so I’ve been writing a list of who might come to my own.’

  ‘Really?’

  �
��Yes. It’s a good job I’m still writing to all the Pearson clan. They’ll boost the numbers,’ she says, looking thoughtfully at a piece of paper.

  ‘You’re only writing to them to make sure they come to your funeral?’

  She thinks for a moment then nods.

  ‘Pretty much,’ she admits. ‘Dorothy is a bit of a pain in the ass really but she still drives so I know she will be able to bring a few. And she’s a nosy old cow so she won’t be able to resist a good gawp at a funeral.’

  The wind is totally out of what shred of sails I had left. I plump myself down on the edge of her bed.

  ‘I reckon about fifty,’ she continues. ‘If Rod and Barbara don’t pop their clogs before I do. If they go that knocks out the whole Bertram side of the family, which could be a crucial half-dozen.’

  I really cannot think of any response to this.

  ‘Fifty would be about right. Faye Wilton only got about twenty-five, it was terribly embarrassing. I must be able to get more than that.’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to upset you. But these things do prey on your mind when…’

  She stops mid-sentence, presumably when she sees the look on my face. We study each other for a moment. Funerals hadn’t even entered my mind but they’re well and truly there now.

  Maureen puts down the piece of paper she has been staring at on the desk on wheels in front of her. ‘Shall we leave funerals for another day?’

  I nod.

  ‘But you will have to—’

  ‘Stop!’

  I wanted Maureen’s directness. I wanted her ability to help me pick my own path through this. It’s mostly why I chose to tell her. But funerals, really?