by Judy Astley
Ellie was in a rush to get out of school. It didn’t matter about upsetting Amanda, not today, not on a Friday because whatever it took, she just had to get out and away before Tasha caught up with her. Ellie didn’t want to be with Tasha today. Well, she didn’t and yet she did. Being out with her, even just walking down the street, had such a dangerous edge that she got all pent-up and nervy. Carly Andrews had told her she and Tash had just been walking along talking about school stuff and the next thing Tasha was running, racing off with some old woman’s handbag that she’d snatched off her as they passed. She hadn’t kept it or taken anything; a hundred metres further on she’d hurled it over a hedge and laughed. Just practising, she’d told Carly, as if it was an OK normal thing for anyone to do.
Tasha liked doing her weekend shoplifting on a Friday so she’d have something new to wear on Saturday night when, she claimed (who really knew what was true?) she went out clubbing all night and got ratted. She’d given Ellie a sly look, telling her this at lunchtime, as if wondering whether to trust her with some extra information. If it was anything to do with sex, Ellie really didn’t want to know. She felt quite squeamish about sex; it was all right to think about getting close to boys and snogging, but only with clothes on and with no big fumbly hands trying to get at her skin. So far she didn’t at all fancy the thought of any boy putting any naked bits of himself into or even close to any naked and very private bits of her. Picturing this made her squirm with horrified shyness, and the idea that one day not too far ahead she would actually want it to happen was almost beyond her wildest imagining. If Tasha started to tell her she’d been doing stuff like that, she would want to put her hands over her ears and sing loudly.
Tasha was older than the rest of them, very nearly fifteen. She’d been kept back a year at primary school after she’d missed two terms when her mum took her to Lanzarote in a converted ambulance to live with a man she’d met in Lineker’s Bar in Puerto del Carmen. Tasha made it all sound really glamorous and said that her mum and dad had fought it out in court and she’d been in the papers as a tug-of-love child ordered to be brought back home. It might be true, Ellie thought, but it might equally not be. She might have been kept back a year because she was thick, and been bigging herself up with this story as a cover. That was both the problem and the attraction with Tasha, she’d got a story full of drama for everything; true or not, you couldn’t tell but you wanted to hear it.
Ellie almost didn’t recognize Freddie; for one thing her cousin was about the last person she’d expect to see outside the school gate, and for another he’d abandoned his last year’s blond surfer look and got his hair all sticking up and with a dark red stripey bit down the middle, like someone she’d seen on telly playing cricket. He was leaning against the wall with Rory, smoking a skinny roll-up and eyeing the girls. The last time she’d seen him had been at his parents’ mad party up in Cheshire, when all the cousins had gone outside and made a snowman in the middle of a late night blizzard. Freddie and Juliet’s dad Oliver had lit a wood fire in the rusty barbecue and they’d topped off their snowman with a leather cowboy hat (Greg’s), then given him a champagne bottle and made him look as if he was swigging from it. In the morning his head had slumped down and he looked like a sleepy drunk with a horrible hangover. Greg had gone out and put his arm round the snowman and told him he knew just how he felt.
‘Hi Freddie, great to see you!’ Ellie dropped her school bag on his feet and Freddie grabbed her and gave her a big squeezy hug. She looked around sneakily to see if anyone she knew was watching. He was very good-looking, for a family member – girls in her year, and not just her year, would be highly impressed.
‘We thought we’d come down and meet you,’ Freddie told her as they set off towards the bus stop. ‘And Rory’s got a cunning plan.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ Rory said, pulling her with him across the road.
‘Hey, this is the wrong way, aren’t we going home?’ Ellie was hungry. She wanted to get home and make some cinnamon toast, her current favourite snack and one guaranteed to drive her truly annoying diet mother loopy with comfort-food craving. Serve her right, she thought, for the cruel absence of crisps and biscuits.
‘Not yet,’ Rory said. ‘First we’re going visiting. I’m going to show you this incredible place where old Aunt Delphine’s going to be living. I’ve got the keys.’ He threw them high in the air and caught them, one-handed.
‘But . . . you can’t just walk in! Suppose someone’s there!’ Ellie really didn’t want to do this. It would almost have been better to be with Tasha. At least with Tasha whatever they did would be just teen crime at worst and somehow she’d have a chance to persuade the police that it wasn’t her. If she and Rory got caught in Charles’s flat, it would all come down on her and Mum and the great business empire that was Dishing the Dirt.
‘Rory, no, please don’t let’s. Mum would kill us if she knew.’
‘She won’t find out and anyway the geezer’s away till tomorrow, flying his big jets. He’s expecting people to go in – well, Mum and Barbara.’
Freddie stopped walking and looked at her, smiling and kind. ‘You go home if you like, Ellie, honestly it’s fine. We’ll go on our own.’
That was even worse. She’d have to go with them, make sure they didn’t jump on the beds with their shoes on or leave a fridge door open or something stupid. Boys didn’t seem to have the thinking gene. She knew this from school, where it was always the boys who ‘accidentally’ smashed test tubes and mucked up the textbooks. They didn’t look ahead and imagine that their stupidity might have results beyond making a few sad fools laugh. Her mum had pointed this out too, though in her case she’d been talking about the making of accidental babies. Luckily she hadn’t been directing her comments at Tristan at the time. It would only have upset him when he and Imogen were so happy.
‘OK, I’ll come with you. But we’re just looking for a minute or two. And it’s no touching anything, no messing about, then straight home, all right?’
The two boys mumbled a promise and they took the next bus towards the riverside complex.
Ellie had great hopes of the security gates being locked and that they wouldn’t be able to get in. Either that, or there’d be a sentry guarding the place who would send them away for looking suspicious, but there was no-one around. The drive-in gates needed a special card but the walk-in one was open.
‘It’s not like we’re not just slightly entitled to be here,’ Freddie tried to reassure Ellie. ‘We’re just visiting our soon-to-be step-uncle.’
‘Who we know for sure happens to be on the other side of the world – unless he’s changed his plans. Have you thought of that?’ Ellie said, feeling that she was about to go into a deep sulk.
‘Chill, Ellie,’ Rory told her, swaggering into the lift and keeping his finger on the ‘doors open’ button for her.
Well it was worth a look, Ellie had to admit as she stepped cautiously across the hallway and into the sitting room. It was like something out of her dad’s design magazines. Aunt Delphine would tut about all the shiny surfaces and start putting crochet mats down.
‘Great place for a party,’ Freddie said, peering into the giant fridge and taking out a can of Stella.
‘Freddie! Don’t take his stuff!’ Ellie panicked, terrified he’d spill beer all over the sofa. Instead the two boys went into the bedroom and sat down on the silky blue throw that was folded over the end of the bed. She wished she hadn’t come. They’d had a look, they should go now, not hang about.
‘I was thinking that, about a party or something,’ Rory agreed. ‘Even Samantha Newton would turn up if she got asked here.’
Freddie opened the can and took a deep swig while Ellie held her breath, waiting for an explosion of froth on the silk.
‘She a bit special then?’
Rory glanced at Ellie, who was keeping terrified eyes on the main door. ‘S’pose so.’ he shrugged. ‘She’s in my year though.’
�
�Ah. Well that’s bad and good.’ Freddie nodded like a man of deep wisdom. ‘Bad because chicks generally prefer older men. It bigs them up with their mates. But it’s also good because she’s actually the right age for you. Unless you can get an old one who’s seen some action, someone really old like mid-twenties. All you need to do, old son,’ Freddie said, getting up and, to Ellie’s relief, pulling the cover straight. ‘All you’ve got to do is really, really impress her.’
The smell hit Jay as she walked through the door. It stank like the bin bag of leaves she’d kept from two autumns ago so that they could rot down for quick compost. Too much rain had got in – they’d gone slimy and stank of mould. What she’d been expecting was the shady scent of hot, late-August woodland – fresh, mysterious and musky. This hadn’t even been close. Even when she’d spread the leaves under the camellias the smell had lingered over the summer, and each time it rained the air was filled with a stench like a rotting pond. And now it was in her kitchen.
‘April? What’s that smell? It’s vile!’ The concertina doors were wide open and Imogen and April were in the kitchen, shrieking with hilarity and making dramatic, grand wafty movements with their arms to help clear the air. The extractor over the cooker was going at full blast.
‘It’s your soup!’ April laughed. ‘I started simmering it and I was just having five minutes on the sofa with Daffodil and this month’s World of Interiors and I sort of forgot about it! Sorry, Jay, but I think it might be fermenting.’
‘Have you chucked it out?’ Cathy next door would think there was a drain emergency.
‘It’s in the garden, still in its saucepan!’ April wiped away a laughter tear. ‘You could go outside and try it if you really want!’
‘Better do it quick, before it gets up and runs off, all by itself,’ Imogen squawked through her giggles.
‘It’s probably really nice, if you can get past the smell,’ April said. ‘I’m sorry about mucking it up.’
‘Hey it’s OK. I appreciate your efforts, but you know, tonight is sorted and it’s a diet-free time.’ She opened the fridge. ‘One I prepared earlier – proper, luscious, gorgeous lasagne. With a salade tricolore. Just got to find these keys . . . And where are the kids? They’re very late back.’
Imogen went out to pour the soup down the outside drain. It certainly wasn’t allowed back in the house, and Jay admired very much that a girl in the early months of pregnancy could both watch and smell the foul stuff being poured away without throwing up. Just as the last drop disappeared and Imogen turned on the hosepipe for a final rinse, Rory, Ellie and Freddie crashed in through the front door. Jay watched in her usual daily amazement as her children carelessly flung their school bags at the bottom of the stairs, and they all mooched into the kitchen leaving a trail of debris. Rory was carrying a bunch of keys.
‘Found these outside on the ground by your car, Mum. Getting careless in your old age.’ He patted her gently on the shoulder. ‘We’ll put it down to a granny moment, shall we?’
TEN
Nigella’s Strawberry Ice Cream (featuring ten egg yolks and a pint of double cream)
‘I hope you’re getting a good view of this,’ Jay muttered in the general direction of Planet Man and his telescope as she bent her body in half, put her hands flat on the floor and spread her legs apart. ‘I hope you’re copping my bottom in your sights from up there in your lair.’
This, she was certain, should put him off and have him turning his viewing attention to the other end of the road. Perhaps he’d discover the local house of ill repute and decide to focus on activities far more exotic than those to be seen in the glass bedroom. What was on offer for his viewing delight today surely couldn’t be a pretty sight for anyone: a plump (but working on it, working on it . . .) middle-aged woman in her bra and knickers puffing away at sun salutes on her bedroom rug at eight on a sunny Sunday morning. They were gorgeous knickers though – Elle MacPherson silky boy-briefs in mint and black. Planet Man would have got an excellent view of them (possibly even been able to read the label if his equipment was of outer-galaxy quality) as she went into Down Dog pose with her back to the window and warmed up with some hamstring stretches, bending one leg in first, straightening it, then flexing the other before sliding her body forward into Cobra.
It was harder work than it looked, this yoga. After Cathy’s class Jay had come home feeling exhilarated and a bit light-headed (which she’d put down to thirst and sorted out with a reviving glass of white wine) but not particularly overstretched or exhausted. For a while she’d felt quite proud of herself – all that hauling vacuum cleaners around and leaning down to clean scummy baths must have been more aerobically punishing than she’d imagined. A couple of days on and her muscles were now letting her know that they were rebelling in serious protest at the disciplined stretching and bending, and she’d completely changed her mind about yoga being a gentle, not particularly demanding, activity.
‘Mmm! Lovely! Your bum’s gone all sleek and solid.’ Greg, dripping and naked from the shower, came up behind her and clutched her flesh to check her workout results. It was pleasing to have your efforts admired but Jay was close to squealing with pain on behalf of her newly taut gluteus maximus.
‘I don’t think Kylie should start worrying just yet,’ she told him as she stood up straight, turned herself sideways and took up a Warrior stance. ‘But give me a few more weeks and who knows . . .’
It would take a lot more than a few sessions of yoga. Jay had now lost five pounds (of an aimed-for fourteen) but at such a slow rate it felt as if every ounce of her spare flab was a tiny plump animal, each one clinging tight to her body as if its life depended on it. Even the smallest lapse in vigilance – such as that post-yoga wine – seemed to result in the return of the weight that must lurk somewhere close by, possibly under a convenient stone. You might as well, she thought, just keep it in your handbag and invite it back on board with every titchy biscuit.
Grapefruit was useless and Shape-Shakes unappetizing so she would have to take up a new regime; but which? The yoga class had been a fun and friendly experience and made her feel she might get better results if she was in the company of other like-minded people. She would have to join a slimming club. The discipline – and potential humiliation – of a weekly weigh-in would surely do more to focus her mind than had so far been achieved.
‘When people lose really serious amounts of weight, you know like almost half their body or something,’ Imogen had said the night before, ‘does that make the person, like, half-dead? Cos I mean, fifty per cent of them’s vanished, hasn’t it? So where’s it gone to, all that chunk of body? Heaven? The same special body-parts afterlife that amputated limbs go to?’
This was a modified version of the question all children get round to by about ten, the unanswerable, ‘Where do we go when we die?’
‘Fat’s gone down the bog, I suppose,’ Tristan said, condemning life’s greatest mystery to the council drainage system.
‘Yuck, mingin’.’ This idea had not appealed to Imogen.
‘Or into sweat or energy or whatever,’ He conceded. ‘It’s not like really dead is it, because your brain and all your organs and all the bits that make you work are still there and you’re still breathing. Same as if you have a bit cut off or out, like Rory’s appendix. Right, Jay?’
Did he think she had the last word because she was nearer to God, at least in the lifespan way, than he was? Cheery thought.
‘Hmm, that sounds about right. Nothing’s dead, as such, just sort of . . . melted.’
It reminded Jay of Hamlet, pleading for his ‘too solid’ flesh to melt. She sympathized with the poor man, even as she now realized that if she ever saw another production of the play she’d be hugely disappointed if he wasn’t played by a big lardy darts-champion type, rather than the usual skinny, angst-ridden sort. All the same it was a thoroughly horrible picture, this melting thing. She imagined oily, hot grease, a vast oozy lake bubbling with the offloaded blubber o
f an entire nation; or, still solid, heaped up in pound blocks, like Hamlet’s, a colossal bank of fat deposits. Which was, she concluded, pretty accurate, considering the way so many people regained the weight they’d taken trouble to lose, as if it was never really something you could disown permanently but merely stored in a current account, ready to be withdrawn and reattached as soon as anyone carelessly imagined it was safe to start wolfing down normal but unmoderated food again.
‘Remind me, what time’s he coming, this Charles?’ April rinsed her fingers under the tap and started hulling strawberries ready for Jay to turn them into ice cream.
‘I told him one thirty. But I told Mum and Win two o’clock. Oh and Cathy next door’s coming too. I thought we could give him a drink and get him settled before those two get hold of him and start in with their questions.’
April laughed. ‘And we can force him to answer all our own nosy-parker stuff first. Poor Charles. You could almost feel sorry for the man. By the time we’ve all finished with him he’ll wish he’d been born in the nice, gentle days of the Spanish Inquisition.’
Jay took the mixing bowl with the egg yolks in them out of the fridge. This was not going to be a mimsy-pimsy low-fat, healthy-option ice-cream mixture: Nigella’s sumptuous recipe required ten egg yolks and close to a pint of double cream. The whites had gone into making meringues which were lined up, ready to be sandwiched with the ice cream, raspberries and blueberries. And there was a hearty, traditional apple pie that April had made the night before. Audrey would comment on the pastry, having never knowingly consumed a piece of pie without saying something about flakiness, lightness of touch or crumbliness of texture. There seemed to be a whole specialized vocabulary that applied to pastry.
