by Anna Maxted
As I say the slimy word ‘Celine’ a toe-curling yet plausible theory forms in my head. It forms in Tom’s head too. ‘O-o-oh!’ he says acidly. ‘Celine told your mother that I was away with my girlfriend.’ He pauses for a second then bellows, ‘Why are you so selfish? Why don’t you give anyone a break? There’s no pleasing you is there! You can’t ask me to my face like an adult! Oh no! That’d be far too easy! You—’
I stamp my foot so hard I nearly break it. My voice is shaky with anger. ‘Don’t you shout at me, you pompous man, I won’t have it!’ Secretly I am mortified to the core about the girlfriend error, but I’ll be damned if Tom’s going to know about it. I screech, ‘I can’t believe I let you boss me about! You think you’re so superior!’
Tom splutters, ‘What are you on about?’
I stamp my foot again – less hard this time – and snap, ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! Preaching to me about what I should be doing, saying to my mum, feeling about my dad! Where I should be living! You—’
Now Tom slaps his hand down on the table and makes me jump. He yells, ‘I didn’t preach about anything, you little shit! I made a suggestion because you were never going to think of it yourself! I tried to help but you wouldn’t let me! You’re the one running away! I wasn’t going anywhere! So don’t blame it on me, sweetheart! You’re like a bloody yo-yo! And I’m guessing at what I’ve done wrong! When I’ve done nothing wrong! You wanna grow up, darling!’
I am so astounded at the intensity of his rage that I barely hear what he is saying. Not for the first time I feel an urge to slap him. So I pounce on ‘I tried to help you’ with a shrill squawk of ‘No you didn’t! You knew I needed somewhere to stay! You never offered! You didn’t care!’
Tom smacks himself on the forehead with the flat of his palm. This takes me by surprise and I bleat, ‘Wh, what did you do that for?’
He sighs and says, ‘Because you make me want to cry!’
I say sulkily, ‘Why?’
He says in a slow, tired, heavy voice, ‘I didn’t offer Helen, because I do care. Or did. I’m not a fucking emergency service. Now is there anything I can do for your irresponsibly overfed cat or did you cart him all the way here in a box as an excuse to yell at me?’
Like most petty criminals whose cover is blown, I am glaring and silent.
‘I thought so,’ says Tom, his blue eyes cold. He rips open the door. I snoot out. ‘Your ca-at!’ he shouts after me in a nasty singsong tone. I snoot back, snatch the Voyager, and snoot out again. I snoot around to say something horrid but Tom slams the door in my face. I look towards reception and see a Jack Russell and its owner staring at me in beetlebrowed fascination, so I lean my bottom against the front door and snoot into the street.
The poison cherry on the plastic icing on the rotting cake is a call from Tina on my mobile. Every time I’ve approached her at work she’s trilled ‘Not now, doll, I’m busy!’ and waved me away. All my carefully worded e-mails are ignored. But this evening she chooses to make contact. My callback tone rings as I heave Fatboy through the front door. I dial my message service and wince at Tina’s high-pitched merriment: ‘Hi, Helen! Just thought I’d let you know! Aide has made a big promise to change and it’s all sorted and okay! So you can stop fussing! No need to ring! Bye!’ I kick the door shut, release Fatboy from portable prison, and say bitterly, ‘Jesus, you’re even thicker than I am.’
I can’t even smile when my mother shouts from the kitchen, ‘Darling! Are you talking to me?’
Chapter 37
NANA SAYS THAT when something bad happens you know who your friends are. Lizzy says that when something good happens you know who your friends are. The upshot is I don’t have a clue who my friends are. Jasper is still chasing me like a fox after a chicken, Tina veers from reasonable to remote, and I can’t decide what has happened.
The only news is that after four knackering, nitpicking, hair-tearing weeks, my solicitor rings to say we’re ready to exchange contracts on Flat 55b. I tell Lizzy that in less than a month I’ll be a homeowner and collapse on my desk. She can’t understand it. ‘Aren’t you thrilled? What’s wrong? Oh my, it’s so exciting! We’ll have to go paint shopping!’
I’m not sure which is more upsetting – the fact I find paint shopping a happy prospect or that I am now committed to living alone by myself in a titchy derelict terraced box in a scruffy part of Kentish Town. At least the Toyota will feel at home. And the purgatory of argybargying with banks and brokers and wasting cash on surveys and searches and surveyors and getting gazumped by people richer than me and being patronised and bullied is nearly at an end.
But I think of the hovel that is Flat number 55b and my stomach flips like a pancake. When my mother saw it she nearly burst into tears. ‘Why can’t you stay with me?’ she exclaimed. ‘This is disgusting! It’s like a disused squat.’ I was tempted to reply, ‘Funny you should say that,’ then thought better of it. Adam went white and tried to suggest it had a storming aspect, but hushed up when my mother screeched ‘What!’ For once I feel as if my mother’s talking sense. What on earth am I’m doing? ‘Yes, fine,’ I hear myself bleat to the solicitor, ‘Eleven a.m., tomorrow, in your office, alright, see you then, bye.’
For the last month I’ve been working as hard as an Egypian slave to take my mind off Tom and the cruel things he said, so Laetitia is gracious in granting me the morning off. Her only comment is ‘Kentish Town? Wasn’t someone stabbed to death there recently?’ I laugh nervously.
Meanwhile Lizzy is being as sweet as the sugar plum fairy – she has already given me the number of her ‘sensational’ builders and ‘superb’ electrician and ‘angel of a’ plumber – and it’s easy to forget that I’m annoyed with her. I can’t help it. I feel sullen because Lizzy is too confident – for her own good and for everyone else’s. Her way is the only way. She may be kind but she is also alarmingly shortsighted. Lizzy is right about ginger being good for circulation and she is possibly right about peppermint being great for ringworm, but she is horribly wrong about Adrian and her teacher’s pet complacency is pissing me off.
So I sneak out of work without saying goodbye, and when she calls me at home in the evening I whisper to my mother to say I’m out. ‘She says she’s out,’ says my mother, forcing me to rip the phone out of her hand and be civil after all.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say with fake cheeriness. ‘She’s spent all day screaming at her kids. She’s gone deaf.’ Lizzy isn’t so sure. ‘Is anything the matter?’ she says cautiously. ‘You sound different.’
As I’d rather face a speeding truck than Lizzy’s aggrieved piety, I say breezily, ‘Nothing at all. I’m a little concerned about tomorrow, you know, big commitment and all that.’
As I expect, Lizzy poohpoohs this and sings, ‘Don’t worry! It’s so straightforward! You’ll be fine!’ As it happens, she’s wrong. Again.
The day of contract exchange starts badly when my mother storms off to work without saying goodbye. I try not to be annoyed and fail. I know it’s only because she wants us to live together for ever as a weird double act – the princess and the bloody pea. ‘The madam,’ I mutter. ‘She wants to stop behaving like a brat and grow up.’ As soon as I say this I realise it sounds familiar, and that Tom said it to me. ‘Hur!’ I say, switching on the TV and falling backwards on to the sofa. ‘He can sod off. Sod off! Shouting at me like that!’ I say this aloud in an attempt to make his loss less aching but it doesn’t work. My masochistic mind keeps turfing up cute memories. Hey Helen! Check out that wolf teeth smile! The emergency bunch of blue marigolds! Dissecting Stephen King while eating pizza! The elephant joke! Babysitting on tequila night! Fluffing up Fatboy’s fur to make him look like a punk! Kissing off that crumb of cream cheese at the corner of your mouth! Adorable, no?
But it’s not so much the little things as the sum of the parts. I can’t deny it. I try to work myself up into a rancour against Tom but I can’t. I want to despise him for liking me but can’t. I want to maintain th
e things he said to me were said out of malice but I can no longer pretend. You don’t spent ages peeling an orange unless you want to eat it. I recall his despair on our last meeting and it pains me. I’ve hurt him. Which proves me right. To care is to lose. And I’m a bad loser. It’s as if I’ve ripped out my own heart and stamped on it. As punishment I watch the Shopping Channel for ninety minutes to remind myself that there are people out there far worse off than I am. Then I jump in the Toyota and drive to my solicitor.
The solicitor’s office is in darkest north London and its frontage is made of glass. This sends me into a panic. Arctic explorers and people who live in Colorado get snow blindness. I get glass door blindness. There are six to choose from and as I ascend the steps I start sweating because I know the one I try will be locked and I’ll have to scuttle along the steps like a crab pushing and heaving all of the doors in turn while the doorman and the postboy lean on the reception desk and laugh and laugh and think I’m thick.
Sure enough, my prediction comes true and after a flurry of baffling gestures from Mr Jobsworth – who watches my struggle with small-eyed interest but won’t leave his seat to assist – I open the fourth door and stamp in, red-faced and fretful. Then I wait on the black leather sofa for seventeen minutes and listen to him sniff. After the twenty-ninth sniff I want to scream ‘Blow your nose!’ but am summoned to my appointment on the second floor just in time.
Lizzy’s solicitor is called Dorothy Spence and Lizzy is forever praising Dorothy as ‘thorough’. And thorough she is. Easily an hour thorough, reading through this clause and that clause and do I understand what this liability means and the import of this restrictive covenance and she’s queried that and she’s queried this but all her queries have now been satisfied and do I have any questions and if not she requires a deposit of nine thousand pounds.
I nearly fall off my swingaround chair. ‘What, now?’ I stammer.
‘Yes please,’ says Dorothy briskly.
‘But I, I didn’t realise.’ I bleat, ‘I, I thought that was . . . just before completion . . . I misunderstood, I haven’t done this before, so I thought . . .’ Dorothy shoots me a look – the same kind of look the doorman gave me earlier today – and I falter to a halt. There are times when I have so little faith in my own abilities that I ordain myself to failure.
And this is one of those times. I have made a foolish error. In my tizzy ignorance I assumed the ten per cent deposit was payable on completion. Admittedly, Dorothy sent me a letter a week ago detailing what would be required of me but – as I now recall – I glanced at it, stuffed it in my bag to read later, and forgot about it. (I regularly ignore scary letters, but credit card companies encourage me to confront my fears by ringing sly and early on Saturday mornings.) Dorothy didn’t even send me a red reminder. As a result, the cash is breeding in a high interest account and I can’t withdraw a penny without giving notice. I am a clueless fraud aping a dependable adult and the worst has happened.
I’ve been exposed for what I am.
‘Can I make a call?’ I ask Dorothy in a small voice. She glances at her chrome clock, nods sharply and reclines in her plump leather chair. I call my mother’s mobile and pray she answers. She doesn’t. So I call the school and ask to be put through to the staffroom. ‘Is Cecelia Bradshaw there?’ I say breathlessly. ‘It’s her daughter.’
A distant voice replies, ‘One moment.’ Forty moments later, I’m still waiting and Dorothy Spence is tapping her foot.
Then the line goes dead. I bite my lip, smile weakly at Dorothy, and redial. ‘I rang a minute ago and got cut off,’ I say, keeping my voice hard and loud so it doesn’t break. ‘I need to speak to Cecelia Bradshaw. It’s urgent.’ Thirty seconds later, my mother is on the line. I feel weak with relief. I pinch my nose to stop myself crying and explain. The humiliation throbs through me in shockwaves. When I finish declaiming my mother is silent.
Then she says in a wonder-of-you voice, ‘It’s not a problem, darling. I’ll call the bank right now and get an electronic transfer to the relevent account. Let me speak to the lawyer woman.’ I sink into a grateful trance and hand the receiver to Dorothy.
Fifteen torturous minutes later I am driving home in the Toyota. As any form of reflection is painful I spend the entire journey saying ‘La la la’ in a loud monotone to ward off thought. I slink into the office at 2.30 p.m. and start typing Laetitia’s rejection letters to all feature ideas sent in on spec without faffing needlessly for two hours first. To my relief Lizzy isn’t in the office – and as Laetitia wouldn’t dream of asking how my morning went any more than she’d dream of buying shoes from C&A, I work undisturbed until 6.36.
Then I leave without speaking to anyone. As I sit on the tube I feel naked. I am convinced everyone is peering at me, talking about me, jeering at me. I feel claustrophobic and I want to scream.
By the time I’m home I am a gibbery quivery wreck. I intend to curl up in bed and sleep but as I tiptoe upstairs my mother appears like a shimmering genie in the hallway and exclaims, ‘Helen! Come down here and talk to me!’ Wordlessly, I swivel and descend. I feel as hunchy and evil as a tarantula. My mother, meanwhile, is as glowy and zingy and zesty as a teenage beauty queen. The only difference is she’s not wearing a sash. She beams and pats her hair and lifts her hands and says in a joyous voice ‘So?’
I stand before her and my lower lip starts to tremble. I scowl at the patterned carpet and clutch my arms behind my back. And I say fiercely, ‘If Dad was here he’d have known what to do.’
I dig my nails into my palms and wait. I don’t know what I expect. Huffing. Tutting. Not laughter. But my mother tee hee hees and says, ‘Yes, but I managed okay didn’t I?’
I nod and whisper, ‘I miss my dad.’
My mother is quiet and I feel like a fart at a wedding. Then she looks at my face as if for the first time, and says softly, ‘I know you do, darling, and I’m sure he misses you too.’
And suddenly, she takes a step forward and hugs me tightly and I am lost and found in a waft of Chanel. The range of sound effects available to me as a human seem inadequate and I wish I were a wolf so I could tilt my head and howl, owwooww owwwwwww, surrender my body and soul to the resonance of grief.
Instead I close my eyes and wail silently, absorb the warmth of my mother’s purple jumper and feel her thin arms firm around me.
Chapter 38
I CLING TO my mother like, I imagine, a rescued mountaineer clinging to a St Bernard. Oh God, I wail inside, why is it so bad, why? No one said it would be like this. I am a hollow skin stuffed with razor blades that slash my body from the inside until I choke on my own blood. I cling to my mother so heavily that her knees buckle and we gently crumple to the floor, where she strokes my hair and makes soothing noises. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I sob. ‘I don’t know what to doo-hoo hooo!’ Even as I bleat the words I feel horrified at this pitiful collapse in front of the one person who needs me to be invincible.
But my mother rocks me and says, ‘It’s so hard, darling. And I know I haven’t been much use. But you’ve been so brave,’ and suddenly I am five years old again and being consoled after falling over and cutting my knee. I smile weakly and wipe my eyes. ‘Cry if you want to,’ orders my mother briskly. ‘The children bawl constantly and I always say, better out than in!’ The tears fall hot and fast and I shake my head, wordlessly. This unexpected fortitude is like finding a shiny brown chestnut amid autumn’s decomposing mulch.
My mother smiles at my stupefaction and says softly, ‘Come on, darling. I’ll make you a hot drink.’ I meekly allow her to drag me to my feet, and suddenly she bursts out angrily, ‘Stupid hot drinks! Your father’s dead and all we can do is have a bloody hot drink!’
I snivel-giggle and say, ‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’
My mother makes a face and fills the kettle. We sit in silence, drinking hot chocolate and contemplating the fact that death is a monstrous affront to the living and shouldn’t be allowed. After a long time my mothe
r pats my hand and says softly, ‘Remember, darling. Daddy may be gone but he’ll always be with you.’
I look up, the corners of my mouth trembling, and see that she is crying too. And I realise that even amid the rubble, we’ve salvaged something.
I think my mother realises it too, because in the weeks that follow my outburst, our relationship slips from fraught to placid like the stunned quiet after a flash thunderstorm. When she recounts a success she had at work and I tell her ‘well done’, I notice with surprise that she blushes. It’s as if we’re on honeymoon after a speedy romance – tipped into intimacy after the pink whirlwind of lust has settled – and she’s suddenly shy because what I think of her matters. I scramble upstairs, grinning to myself, and consider the inconceivable: that when I move into my flat tomorrow, I am going to miss her.
It’s strange. After I completed on the flat, I expected my mother to shun me for at least a fortnight but instead she offered to help me interview builders for quotes. I assumed this was for bicep ogling purposes but she turned out to be a shrewd, efficient ally. Her enthusiasm didn’t fizzle out like it usually does. She dismissed Lizzy’s recommendation (he wanted cash) and called the firm that Vivienne had employed to refurbish her kitchen and build a conservatory. ‘Vivvy couldn’t fault them!’ explained my mother. Naturally I assumed they must be excellent – as most people employed by Vivienne are sued to within an inch of their livelihoods – and to my relief they were excellent.
Last year Laetitia moved to Barnes and her builders dragged out a two-month job for five months, turned up when and if they felt like it, drank their weight in sweet tea (Laetitia had to purchase a bag of sugar especially) then peed it out over her turquoise mosaic toilet floor, cracked her extortionate new cast-iron roll-top bath, chipped her antique gilt wall mirror, botched her Swedish style trompe l’oeil panelling, installed her boiler in such a way that it emitted poisonous gas into the kitchen, dented her Aga, scratched her Provençal armoire, spilt paint on her Aubusson carpet, forgot to tighten the nuts connecting two water pipes thus transforming the flat below into a large designer swamp, drilled through the electrics, blocked off access to the gas mains, installed a dimmer switch in the bedroom that dimmed lights in the lounge and study too, and gave her an estimate of £3,500 but charged her £19,000. Laetitia marched into work most mornings shaking white dust out of her hair and muttering that it was ‘like being in a war’.
