by Anna Maxted
‘So when’s Brian back from Hong Kong?’ I say to Lizzy who is desperate (I can tell by the look of ravaged purity) to absolve herself of last night’s sin by harassing Tom.
‘Soon,’ she replies miserably, and then ‘please let me explain to Tom!’
I clutch my forehead and say, ‘It doesn’t matter! Anyway, there’s no point. You saw he was with someone.’
Lizzy wails, ‘But she could have been a friend! Or his sister! You don’t know!’
I grimace and say – as if addressing a very stupid child – ‘Liz, he was holding her hand.’
Lizzy starts, ‘Yes but holding hands can mea—’, sees my thunderous face, and stops. She is, in her see-no-evil way, disappointed in me. She pouts and wrestles a small brown bottle from her bag. She twists it open, presses its pipette top, and squeezes two drops of liquid into her mouth.
‘What’s that?’ I say, sniffing.
‘Bach Rescue Remedy,’ she replies shortly.
‘It smells like whisky,’ I growl.
‘Well it’s herbal,’ she growls back.
‘Hair of the dog more like,’ I mutter.
‘What?’ says Lizzy.
‘Nothing,’ I say sweetly, ‘just remind me never to get you drunk again.’
‘You won’t have to remind me,’ she snaps.
I glance at her cross face. She’s wearing a red coat, brown suede gloves, and looks exactly like a sulky china doll. Only the ruffles are missing. ‘Aw!’ I say. ‘You know the best hangover cure?’
Lizzy regards me hopefully. ‘What?’ she breathes.
‘A fried breakfast,’ I say sweetly. She says nothing but gives me a small – but remarkably painful – pinch on the hand. ‘Geroff!’ I squeak, and we both giggle. We then lapse into weary silence until we reach the office.
I collapse at my desk and decide to call Tina tomorrow. I have far too much work to do today. I have estate agents, mothers, and vets to harangue. Laetitia is in a meeting so I spend thirty minutes scrounging broom cupboard details off young men with names like Richard and Costas who are insulted at the piddly sum I have to spend and reluctant to waste their sharking time on a minnow.
Then I call my mother. This time she’s awake. ‘Hello?’ she trills.
‘Mum,’ I say, ‘could you do me a favour?’
There’s an alarmed pause before she says unwillingly, ‘What is it?’
I scratch around for a trigger phrase and produce, ‘I need some support.’ I wait to see if a neurone picks it up. Silence. I continue, ‘I need you to take Fatboy to the vet.’
My mother replies, ‘Tim, the vet?’
I say, ‘Yes, Tom.’
She says, enthusiastically, ‘Such a charming boy! Clumsy but so charming!’ I wonder how to play it.
‘Mum,’ I say eventually, ‘Fatboy is unwell. He’s sleeping a lot and I’m concerned that he has, er, sleeping sickness. So he needs to see Tom, urgently, preferably today.’
My mother is unconvinced. She declares: ‘But cats sleep sixteen to eighteen hours a day! Sixty-six to seventy-five per cent of every twenty-four hours! They have light sleep periods lasting about thirty minutes, which is where we get the term “cat nap” from, and then, unless you pull their tail, a deeper sleep phase, which is an essential biological function! They—’
I cut this lecture short by shrieking, ‘Mother!’
She stops mid-sentence then says sulkily, ‘We did a project on it last term.’ Just my luck.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I say, trying to remain civil, ‘but I’d like Tom to check him over anyhow.’
My mother says quickly, ‘Why don’t you want to take him?’
I squeak, ‘What do you mean?’
She replies, ‘I’m not daft, Helen! I’ll be a go-between if you like, but I’m not daft!’ An unfair and highly inconvenient statement. The woman plays Clouseau for the whole of my life but picks now to play Sherlock! This trait – call it the IQ Swing – is just one of the many which make my mother so exquisitely annoying.
‘Alright,’ I say reluctantly, ‘but promise you won’t say anything to embarrass me?’
She booms, ‘Of course not! Tell me why you’re not taking him!’ I have no choice but to tell her.
‘Tom and I had a disagreement,’ I say carefully. ‘Tom made me feel bad when I’d done nothing wrong! Anyway, Lizzy and I went out last night and bumped into him, and er, well, Mum, please don’t repeat any of this, but Lizzy insulted him because he was with another woman.’
My mother gasps and I expect a long, ranting tirade about the loose morals of the younger generation but she exclaims: ‘So what’s wrong with that?’
I shriek, ‘What’s wrong?! Mum! He gives me all this flack and then it turns out he’s cheating on me!’
She replies snappishly, ‘Is he sleeping with you?’
Her bluntness floors me and in a bid to protect her from the sordid truth, I bleat, ‘Er, no!’
My mother snorts loudly in my ear and barks, ‘No! Why not? What’s wrong with him? Is he gay?’
I nearly swallow my tongue (trait no. 2 – the Anomaly Opinion) and whimper, ‘No!’
My mother is confused. She says briskly, ‘So if he isn’t sleeping with you, what’s the problem? When I was your age I dated three men at a time and they liked it or lumped it! All’s fair in love and war until someone proposes!’
Interesting. I don’t argue. I merely say, ‘I just want you to get an idea of how Tom feels about me right now, and if possible, find out who the woman is.’ I add solemnly – wishing I had a gadget to press into her hand – ‘I’m depending on you.’
My mother gasps again and says proudly, ‘It all depends on me! Give me the address! I feel like a detective!’
I roll my eyes and say jokily, ‘Great, just don’t forget to take Fatboy.’
There is a pause and I brace myself for laughter. But she says, ‘Fatb—? Oh yes, of course!’
I put down the phone and wonder, what’s the worst that can happen?
I’m distracted for two minutes because Richard rings with a ‘fantastic bijou property’ he wants me to see. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ I say.
‘Nothing!’ he says in an injured tone.
‘Something must be,’ I say.
He confesses that it ‘needs a bit of work’. But it isn’t above a fish and chip shop so I agree to see it tonight. As I replace the receiver I hear him hiss ‘Yesss!’ Then I pick at the skin on my lip and pray that my mother doesn’t do anything foolish at the vet. I mean, did I just give a handgun to a chimp? I wait and wait, spend an hour trawling supermarkets in search of a vegetable called ‘purslane’ for Laetitia’s dinner party (when I return folorn and empty-handed she shouts, ‘Are you completely useless? It’s an ethnic vegetable!’), wait and wait, take a prank call from a pervert who wants me to read out Girltime’s coverlines to him (this month one of them contains the word ‘orgasmic’), wait and wait, type in a feature on celebrity cellulite (‘It contains tips you could make use of!’ sings Laetitia as she plonks the 3,000 word piece in front of me), wait and wait, and when I can wait no longer, ring my mother.
She picks up. ‘Mum!’ I squeal. ‘Why haven’t you rung?’
She says huffily, ‘I’ve only just stepped in the door. And I sat in that waiting room for hours! The inconvenience! It took me ages to find the cat! He was out hunting. I was on the doorstep calling him for twenty minutes! I got a funny look from the postman.’ I suspect this is because she refuses to call Fatboy by his name and insists on calling him ‘Pussy’. But I don’t say so because I’m desperate to hear about Tom.
‘So did you see Tom?’ I say.
‘Fuff!’ replies my mother – who savours power to the extent that she’d make a fabulous Bond villain – ‘That cat weighs a ton! Let me catch my breath! No, he wasn’t there. Someone else saw to the cat. He hasn’t got sleeping sickness but he has got fleas. And Tom’s on holiday with his girlfriend.’
Chapter 33
AS PE
OPLE WHO’VE never had anything bad happen to them always say, something good comes out of everything. So when I drive to the video shop on Saturday evening and see a young man crossing the road with a copy of the Sun and a four-pack of toilet rolls I grin because I’m reminded of Luke and how much closer we’ve become in the six days since Marcus evicted me. Six days since I saw Tom! It seems like an age. Anyhow, Luke is a lot more fun now we aren’t living together. For the first time in years, the two of us spent three hours together without scrapping.
Vivienne had invited my mother for Saturday tea – ‘A sympathy tea! To make up for not inviting me for Christmas. But it doesn’t make up for it at all!’ – so I called Luke and suggested he come round. My excuse was that Fatboy was demanding that Luke exercise his visiting rights (a lie as Fatboy’s affection for anyone evaporates the second he swallows the last lick of pâté).
The truth was that while I did want to see Luke, I was more impatient to know if Luke had seen Tom the night before, on his lads’ night out. Just to be sure. But Luke sounds so pleased to be invited – ‘should I bring a tin of tuna in brine or pilchards in tomato sauce?’ – I feel instantly ashamed of my duplicity. ‘Just bring yourself!’ I exclaim guiltily and rush out and buy two tubes of Cheese & Onion Pringles. (Luke’s motto: ‘Crisps, crisps! Food of the gods!’)
When Luke arrives bearing pilchards and tuna, I hug him hard and feel chipper for the first time in days. I make coffee, present the crisps, and retrieve Fatboy from his new napping spot (the blue metallic bonnet of next door’s Volvo). I watch Luke watching Fatboy who bolts the pilchard juice, yawns pinkly, and stalks off to lie in a shaft of sunlight. Then I ask casually, ‘So how was last night?’
Luke scratches his ear deeply and wipes his finger on his crumpled blue shirt, leaving a waxy yellow smear. His face breaks into a wide smile. ‘Yeah! It was great. We had a great laugh.’ He embarks on a long story which begins with ten pints apiece in a functional no-frills pub and continues with a boisterous meal in an Indian restaurant where Luke’s mate Gobbo (who sounds like a sweetie although I’ve never had the pleasure) leans back in his chair and tells the bloke on the next table to ‘Shut your mouth you nobber or I’ll stick that table up your fucking pooh hole’ and continues further with Gobbo punching Luke in the kidneys and Luke about to leave it until Luke’s mate Parky says, ‘You’re not going to let him get away with that, are you?’ and Luke doing this move he learned from a Jackie Chan film and he flipping Gobbo over his head and Gobbo landing on his back like a turtle and Parky killing himself laughing and Gobbo all red in the face and saying it was a fluke and that Luke knows ‘SAS – Shit About Shit!’ and Parky laughing and Gobbo thinking Parky’s laughing because Gobbo just said something clever when in fact Parky’s laughing because Gobbo thinks he said something clever and—
‘Was Tom there?’ I say after twenty minutes’ yarn.
Luke stops mid-sentence. ‘No.’ He seems surprised at the question.
I try to act relaxed but my head jerks forward involuntarily and the words slide out in a sharp tumble, ‘But I thought you were going to ask him.’
Luke’s response is to wedge seven Pringles into his mouth and a short battle ensues between his jaw joints and the mass of crisp and until Luke gains control and his cheeks revert to their normal shape I am forced to wait. Luke swallows and replies, ‘I spoke to him but he was going away.’ He looks at me nervously.
‘Oh really?’ I say. ‘Did he mention when?’
Luke shakes his head. ‘Or with who?’ Luke shakes his head again and digs into the Pringle tube with such force his hand is, for a few tense moments, stuck. As he wrestles it out I abandon all semblance of dignity and ask, ‘So is Tom going out with someone? Apart from me,’ I add hurriedly, seeing his confused expression, ‘he’s not going out with me, remember?’
Luke blurts, ‘Doesn’t he fancy you any more?’
I say, with effort, ‘No.’
Luke crunches loudly, becomes aware of the deafening crunch-crunch sound echoing round the kitchen, and tries to crunch more quietly. He then coughs, spewing a fine Pringle spray over the table. ‘Can I have a water?’ he croaks. Luke downs the water in one, then says slowly, ‘He might be seeing someone, I don’t know.’ I squeak, ‘He might be! What does that mean?’ Luke pours a caterpillar of crisps on to the table and starts to devour it agitatedly, wodge by wodge. ‘Luke!’ I say awkwardly. ‘It’s just that I like him, I just wondered. I think I blew it.’ I tell him about Dog’s Bottom Night in the hope that the background information will spark a faint light in the dimness of his head.
Luke almost picks his nose, thinks better of it, and sits on his hands and says sadly, ‘He didn’t say. We talked about football.’
I feel like a sparrow pecking at concrete in the hope of it yielding a worm. I rub at an imaginary smudge on the table and say, ‘I don’t suppose he mentioned me, did he?’
Luke desperately wants to say yes, because his heart is as soft as a strawberry creme. So when he says ‘No’ he cushions the blow by offering me a Pringle as he says it.
I grin and say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I add jollily, ‘As someone else’s mother would say, Plenty more fish in the sea!’
Luke smiles and says, ‘Yeah, but who wants to shag a fish?’
After this philosophical exchange I decide not to mention Tom ever again ever and we sit on the lounge carpet and Luke plays ‘Snake Style v Cat’s Claw’ with Fatboy – who may look like a sumo wrestler but judging from Luke’s ravaged hand has an aptitude for kung fu. I make Luke wash his wounds under the tap, explain that Fatboy doesn’t mean to be spiteful, he’s just competitive – like a feline Gobbo, I add in a burst of inspiration – and after this Luke cheers up and we chat about Christmas.
Luke hadn’t a clue what to get his parents so he rang his dad to ask if he knew what Mum wanted as a present and Dad revealed that Mum had been dropping hints about a pine bathroom and so he’d bought her a pine toilet seat and if Luke wanted to buy the matching doorknob he was welcome. Dad reckoned it ‘wood go down a treat!’
I snort and snicker until I notice Luke looks confused.
‘What?’ he says, half-smiling in an I-don’t-get-it way.
‘What do you mean, what?’ I squawk. ‘He’s joking, isn’t he?’
Luke shakes his head, panic-stuffs in four Pringles and lights a fag at the same time, and says (though the words are muffled), ‘Don’t you think she’ll be pleased?’ I slap the table-top and squeal, ‘Looooooke! I swear on my life she will not be pleased! My God now I know where you get it from!’ I am explaining to Luke the golden rules of female present-buying (quick guide: Cheap functional jokey token items = Go away you stingy bastard, Thoughtfully extortionate big frivolous items = Excellent you gorgeous man) when the phone rings.
It’s Lizzy. Can she pop by? ‘Of course!’ I boom. ‘Luke’s here too!’
Lizzy beams down the phone, ‘How lovely! I’ll see you in a tick!’
I replace the receiver smiling. ‘Lizzy bought all her presents months ago,’ I say to Luke – whose mind remains derailed by the pine toilet seat bombshell – ‘She’ll tell you how it’s done.’
As it happens, Lizzy doesn’t tell Luke how present-buying is done. She shows him. She is still doing self-imposed penance for DBN – even though I have waived the crime about thirty times – and is keen to ‘make amends’ as she puts it. ‘There are no amends to make, you idiot!’ I say, as she hands me a large parcel. ‘This is very unnecessary,’ I add – you have to say that if someone gives you a present and you’re over twenty-five – ‘but very sweet of you.’
Lizzy clasps her hands and whispers, ‘I do hope you’ll like it! I asked Brian to bring it back from Hong Kong! He found it in Staunton Street, the old part of Central.’ Lizzy and Luke watch, breathlessly, as I lift away the delicate wrapping and a heady waft of incense floats into the stale carroty smell of my mother’s kitchen.
Lizzy clutches my arm and says, ‘It’s, well, I – I th
ought it would be, well, it’s more a present for your father than for you! But I thought it would be nice for both of you.’ She shrugs.
I stop unwrapping. ‘What do you mean?’ I stammer.
Lizzy squeezes my arm even more tightly and says, ‘I hope I did the right thing! Open it and I’ll explain.’ I put the wrapping to one side and lift out the biggest item.
It is a cellophane-enclosed pack of confectionary – ‘Hichiload creamy milk choco bar with assorted flavour’ it reads on the side. The pack is as light as air and purports to contain small boxes of chewing gum and biscuits too. I smile weakly and don’t know what to say. Has Lizzy lost it? Her jokes are usually of the most impeccable taste. What does she expect me to do – sprinkle crumbs on the cold stone of my father’s grave?
Luke seizes a wad of what looks like toy money, also encased in cellophane. ‘One million dollar notes!’ he squeaks. ‘The Hell Bank Corporation promises to pay the bearer on demand at its Office here One Million Dollars!’ I look up and he flaps the money about and says defensively, ‘That’s what it says here!’
I turn to Lizzy who bursts out, ‘It’s a Chinese buddhist custom!’ She grabs at another plastic pack and thrusts it at me. It looks like a child’s toy set – a gold pair of glasses, a gold and silver watch with ‘Rolex’ printed on its face, a silver bracelet, a gold cigarette box, a pen, and a gold ring and a gold necklace, both with green bits stuck on them – all made of stiff paper and set against a bright red paper background.
‘You burn it!’ cries Lizzy. ‘It’s a man’s gift set! A jade ring! And the money, see! And look, a box of paper cigarettes with paper lighter, and look! a paper Mercedes! I didn’t know what car your dad drove so I told Brian to get a smart one! – you put it in a sack and address it to your father, see look, here’s the sack’ – she sifts through the pile and waves a grey paper bag printed with Chinese figures and burning joss sticks – ‘You put it all in the sack and you seal it with this yellow sash – it’s a heavenly post office stamp – the spirit will know it’s his parcel when he collects it and’ – at this point she glances at me and falters – ‘You can glue on the sash with Pritt Stick, it’s fine to do that, and you write the date you’re burning everything on a Post-it note which you stick on the sack and, well, I thought it would be a comforting thing to do. Especially at Christmas. You don’t mind, do you?’
