The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  And I wait, breath held like a child who has been told to close their eyes and hold out their hands, not knowing if it is a sweet or a snake about to be placed on their palm. And it’s hard to believe, Edie, but I didn’t know what I wanted the answer to be, what would be more bearable. That he was happier than he had ever been, that he had found his true love’s kiss and it was only the quotidian, the drudge of adulthood that was causing this pause. Or that he was miserable but staying anyway, committed because of this boy – this beautiful boy – and another on its way.

  ‘Happy enough,’ he says eventually. ‘Which is all any of us can ask, isn’t it?’

  No, I think. No, that isn’t what the stories say. That’s not what I was told and believed. Still do. But, as I open my mouth to protest, Chuck places his hand on a missed thistle and his yell snatches Tom’s attention and sends his bare feet running to his son’s rescue.

  A good thing, I think later as I flick through the TV channels, having ignored Mark’s offer of dinner, or a drink down the Bells, because now I am safe and sound, back in the cynical shell I have built myself, and this version of me knows Tom to be right.

  I only see him once more that visit – a chance encounter, brief, outside the launderette.

  ‘No Mivvi?’ he asks, eyeing my Magnum – a grown-up ice, and one I have forced myself to choose over Cornettos and Feasts.

  I smile. ‘They stopped making them, I think.’

  Chuck’s fat face puckers and frowns. ‘What’s Mivvi?’ he asks.

  Tom laughs. ‘The best,’ he says. ‘Junk on a stick.’

  I can tell by Chuck’s confusion that he will not have a Mivvi childhood. No Fabs or cans of Fanta or fat wads of Bubblicious chewed bland and stiff on our backs on the lawn. ‘You’re not missing much,’ I assure him. ‘Honest, tofu is just as good.’

  Tom raises an eyebrow. So does Chuck.

  I smile, my lie outed.

  ‘Listen, we have to go. I’m on a mission to find effing soya milk. We’re running out.’

  ‘Effing milk,’ agrees Chuck.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I say.

  Tom laughs, looks at me, his face straightening now. Won’t stop looking at me, so that I wonder what he might say, begin to conjure possibilities. But Chuck whines and yanks on his hand.

  ‘Effing milk,’ he repeats.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he says, his patience slipping slightly. ‘Look, Di, if I don’t see you again, you . . . you look after yourself, OK? Be happy.’

  I feel a wash of disappointment, hear the fizz of a tinder stick being put out. ‘I’ll try,’ I promise.

  I don’t see him again. Despite a calculated visit to your house and a return to the launderette – a fool’s errand, you would say, have said.

  But then I am one, aren’t I? A fool.

  Two days later he is gone, back to New York and the picket-fenced, picture-perfect life he has fashioned for himself – or she has.

  Three weeks later, two more planes fly across that city, but never make it to the other side. And, though I know his house is across the bay and along a railroad, and his office uptown, not down, the cloud of fire and smoke sends my fingers to the phone dial – clattering it onto the ground, once, twice, before I can steady myself to punch in the numbers I quietly copied from Angela’s fridge – then, when all I get is an engaged tone, sends my feet slap-slapping up to the Lodge, my head racing with possibilities – that he might have had an appointment there this morning, an interview with someone. That he might have taken Chuck to see the Windows on the World. That he might just have been walking in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  ‘Tom’s fine,’ Angela tells me, before I even manage a hello. ‘David got through from work. I can give you his number but he says everyone’s ringing and he’s going to take it off the hook soon. Or I can tell him you called by.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry. I should . . . I have to . . .’ But I don’t finish the sentence. Just walk, dazed, into the afternoon, half relieved, half grieving for all those not-Toms, the men and women who weren’t so lucky to live suburban lives; half joyous, half guilty that I am happy, that I don’t live in London, that I am in a town too small and lead a life too ordinary to be a target, to become a true story.

  But you are not so self-deprecating.

  When I get home you are sitting on the step, your skin skimmed milk, your eyes and tongue whisky-wet.

  ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ I say, unlocking the door. Trite words, but all words are trite, too feeble, on a day as big as this.

  ‘Terrible,’ you agree, standing up, then pushing past me into the narrow hall. ‘You need to stock up. Get toilet rolls and tin cans and things. Wine. God, we’re going to need wine.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re under siege,’ I say, putting the kettle on defiantly. ‘There’ll be talks. The UN will do something.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ you say. ‘It’s war. It’s like . . .’ You trail off, change tack. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just now. Where were you?’

  ‘The Lodge,’ I say quickly. Too quickly. ‘I . . . I wanted to check on Tom. I was worried . . . well, you know . . .’

  Your face tautens, your skin translucent, tracing-paper thin, so that I can almost see the bones beneath. ‘But what about me?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Why weren’t you worried about me?’

  I’m confused, if unsurprised. ‘Edie, you live – we live in England. In Essex. Who’s going to blow us up?’

  ‘They might.’

  I am sucked back then, down the time tunnel to a Seventies sitting room, the floor full of squatting bodies, in turn full of cider, dope and nuclear war.

  ‘Will the Germans come?’ I hear myself whisper into your ear. ‘Will they shoot us?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ you tell me.

  But my head is full of horrible possibilities, and I need a concrete promise. ‘But if they do,’ I continue. ‘Will you rescue me?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ You flap your hand and turn back to Toni.

  ‘Even if they say they’ll make you do camping and have the gas and stuff?’

  You turn back then, startled by the breadth of my knowledge, confused though it is, or the depth of my fear. ‘Even if they say they’ll make me do camping. Even,’ you add, unbidden, ‘if they say they will make me listen to Barry Manilow until my eardrums burst.’

  I smile then, satisfied, knowing that this is true devotion, and return you to the top of my list after an earlier switch with Toni because you made me use newspaper instead of toilet roll (‘It’s still bloody paper, Di’). But it was thick and crackled and my bottom went black and so you lost points. But this restores you to prime position. Back where you belong.

  I click the kettle off. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I ask. ‘A proper one, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ you say. ‘I’m sure you’ve got more important people to worry about.’

  ‘Edie.’

  You hold up a hand as if stopping traffic, or the tide. ‘Just don’t,’ you snap. ‘I’ve got places to be, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I plead. Then, when my carrot fails, I pull out the stick. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh, I’m ridiculous?’ You pause, choosing your weapon. ‘He doesn’t love you, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘However much you troll around after him, he’s gone. He. Doesn’t. Love. You.’

  It pierces, straight and true. ‘I know,’ I say eventually.

  But you are already out of the door.

  That’s why I do it. That and what Tom said. ‘Happy enough,’ I say to myself. ‘I can be happy enough.’

  And so, when Mark knocks on my door at nine, red-eyed from work and worry, I let him in. I let him make pasta that neither of us will eat. I let him pour me wine that we barely taste as we swallow it down. I let him turn on the television, then turn it off an hour later, telling me we can’t watch the
same piece of footage any more. Then, when he says he should go, I shake my head, take his hand, and kiss the tips of his bitten fingers.

  Then the crease at the crook of his neck.

  Then his sad, claret-stained lips.

  And he lets me.

  And, though he will never be top of my list, I am happy enough.

  Snow White and Rose Red

  January 2003

  We all turn into our mothers in the end, or so we are told.

  I always thought, hoped, it was no more than a lazy cliché, or a flashed-up warning to strive for difference. I would sit at the mirror and try to see you in me, half desperate for your etiolated beauty, half scared that if I could match your high cheekbones, your rosebud lips, your baby-doll lashes, then I would be doomed to become you. But I was left both relieved and bereft; what little we shared no more than lipstick traces, forensic detail.

  Then I would look for him. I thought if I could subtract what little of you there was – the flesh of our earlobes, the arch of eyebrow, the smattering of freckles that fall like fairy dust on your nose and spattergun mine – then somehow an image of my father would appear, clear and unblinking, before me. But the little I managed to piece together was no more than a hazy photofit of washed-out eyes, a too-small nose, a too-big mouth, all set on a pasty, whey-faced canvas.

  Harry, though; Harry’s parentage was clear. At the roots of her bottle blonde lurked David’s nondescript mouse, while her daring, her hope, her brief flashes of empathy, all betrayed his part in her making. But really, she was – is – all Angela: the pursed lips that greet any argument or denial; the airbrushed perfection of her face, her wardrobe, her world; the panic that rises in her when it all threatens to tilt.

  I am Sunday-morning editing when she calls – my kind of church: a new author, a big debut; rearranging words, suggesting new ones to wring a few more possible drops of magic from painterly prose. This is an important job for me, and for the publisher – a risk for all of us, given the state of the industry, given the state of me a year or so ago. But Jude has kept her word, and while at first she passed me scraps – proofreading, the worst of series fiction that will be devoured under duvets by torchlight then dropped in the recycling with the cereal boxes it so resembles – now she feeds me the real stuff: fat scripts full of ripe imagery and words to be plucked like plums, stories she knows I will understand, that will strike enough of a chord that I am able to draw out what it is the author is trying so hard to say but has mired in the mud of a first draft. Right now I am toying with the weighting of a sentence, moving a word back and forth, back and forth to see which placing brings bigger impact, will elicit the greater gasp. So that when my calculations are interrupted by the tinny ring of my mobile, I curse at the audacity of cold callers and cut it off without even checking the ID. But within seconds the landline starts up, and so insistent is its shrill tone that I have no choice but to drop the word where it is and pick up the receiver instead.

  ‘Yes?’ I ask, my voice pointed, poised like a fly swat.

  But this is no accident claim, no bank or begging call; at the other end of the line is not the dull monotone of an automated message or the fake cheer of the call centre but a genuine question, and desperate hope embodied in a single word: ‘Di?’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Can you come over?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I look at the screen. ‘I’m . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘Or I could come to you?’

  I pause, confused. ‘That’s a long way.’

  I can almost hear her rolling her eyes. ‘Er, where do you think I am?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hampstead?’

  ‘I’ll be over in ten minutes.’

  True to herself, if not to her word, she shows up an hour later, all bed hair and fidget. And something else as well.

  ‘Fuck, Di,’ she says.

  ‘Fuck,’ I echo.

  ‘Yup,’ she affirms.

  ‘How?’ I ask, stupidly, pointlessly.

  ‘It’s called sex, Di.’ She takes another mouthful of wine I now realize she shouldn’t be drinking, swallows. I flinch. ‘You should try it sometime.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I oblige, not bothering to tell her I had lengthy, heartfelt, if mediocre, sex two nights ago. ‘I mean, aren’t you careful?’

  ‘Not enough, apparently.’ She pulls a face. ‘I missed a pill. Then I got a stomach thing from Max’s kid. Missed the bloody BAFTAs. He said it wasn’t the end of the world, and I told him bollocks, only now look.’

  ‘This is really not the end of the world,’ I say.

  ‘Are you mad? Yes, it fucking is. It’s the end of everything. My life is over and I’m only . . . what am I?’ She looks at me.

  ‘Thirty-three.’

  I wait a moment for the fatness and symmetry of this number to sink in.

  ‘Fuck. How old was Mum when she had me?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’ I don’t miss a beat, plucking the number from memory as easily as I do yours.

  ‘Edie?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Shit. I’m old, aren’t I?’

  I nod. ‘Old enough to have a baby.’

  She runs a manicured finger round the rim of her glass, smearing Ruby Woo red in its wake. ‘Shit,’ she repeats.

  ‘What does Max think?’ I ask.

  She smiles then, looks up at me. ‘He’s over the fucking moon.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nods. ‘Wants to ring round nurseries to check admission criteria. You have to meet criteria to get into a fucking play school, can you believe it?’

  It’s London. Of course I can believe it. And this is Max. Who despite all my misgivings, my but he’s married thoughts, has come good, adores her, would do anything – does do anything – for her.

  ‘But . . . this is good,’ I tell her. ‘You and Max are good. It’s all worked out.’

  ‘Right. It worked out so fucking well that I’ve got an inbox full of hate mail from his ex, a stepson who treats me like I’m the cleaner, and now I’m bloody pregnant, and I’ll get fat and ugly, and Max will leave me for some fucking studio runner in a Wonderbra while I watch Jeremy Kyle with my tits out and slowly turn into my mother.’

  You already have, I think. But I don’t say it, for insults have moved on from the playground you smell and lezzer so that now there is no worse suggestion. ‘Your mother would never watch Jeremy Kyle,’ I say instead.

  Harry smiles, takes another illicit swig. ‘Not with her tits out, anyway,’ she adds.

  ‘Mine, on the other hand . . .’

  ‘At least she has the tits to go with it.’ Harry sighs and peers down her dress at her own: once braless, bee-stung, now swelling gently. ‘God, once I have a kid no one will want to fuck me again.’

  She leans into me then, and as I put my arm around her I am painfully aware of her fragility, of the thin skin and bones and delicate mind that have to house, to protect – no, are already protecting – another being. ‘Max will,’ I say. ‘Max will always want to fuck you.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Since he got the blue pills it’s like being attacked by a hammer drill. I’m downing so much cranberry juice I’ve given myself fucking thrush.’

  ‘Good to know.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  And then I ask it. The only question that really matters. ‘But do you love him?’

  At that, I feel her nod, hear her murmur a yeah.

  So I take the glass of wine and tip it down the sink; make her a cup of tea and a sandwich instead.

  ‘I’m not eating for two, if that’s what you think,’ she insists. ‘Wait, no pickle! Jesus, Di, do you want me to throw up on the rug?’

  ‘What does Angela think?’ I ask as she manages a bird-sized bite.

  ‘Are you insane? I haven’t told her. Not yet. That’s a three-vodka job, which kind of limits my chances right now.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ I wonder a
loud, confused, as her visits home are a rarely elicited event, duty not desire, as she had always promised.

  ‘Oh.’ Harry frowns. ‘Mum insisted. She rang and said she was doing family lunch and I had to be here. She said you were coming – clearly not. When I showed up she was still in her bloody dressing gown cleaning the microwave.’

  ‘Sounds par for the course,’ I say.

  Harry shrugs. ‘Anyway, she had a total spaz-out and sent Dad to Waitrose. They’re doing duck at six. Will you come?’

  I nod. ‘Duck?’

  Harry rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t even ask.’

  ‘Sounds divine, darling.’

  ‘Sounds bearable. Or at least it would if I could bloody drink. Though I suppose if I’m sober I won’t have to stay the sodding night.’

  ‘Every cloud.’

  But we are wrong. So very wrong.

  Dinner is a strange and strained affair from the moment I arrive. Angela is distracted by celeriac, which she insists is the new potato.

  ‘You’ll be telling us cucumber is the new KitKat next,’ David tries to joke.

  Harry and I roll our eyes, but Angela snaps.

  ‘Oh, do stop being so obtuse and do something useful like lay the bloody table.’

  I start, haven’t heard her swear since that night. David reddens, though, embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

  I look at Harry, who shrugs and shakes her head.

  ‘What?’ Angela demands. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ David smiles tightly.

  ‘Good. Then go on, shoo.’ She flaps us out of the kitchen with a tea towel. ‘It’ll be another ten minutes. Have a drink or something.’

  Obligingly we troop to the dining room, where David cack-handedly uncorks a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. ‘Oh bugger,’ he says, as he drips claret onto cream carpet.

  ‘It’s only a drop,’ Harry says.

  But practised, prepared, he finds the soda siphon and sprays away the evidence.

  ‘What’s up with her anyway?’ Harry asks. ‘She’s especially . . . Mum tonight.’

  David goes to pour Harry a glass but she covers it swiftly. ‘What’s up with you?’ he asks. ‘That’s more the question.’