The Sunday Lunch Club

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ He sat up, with a hurt look on his face. Luca was vulnerable, as if he’d opened up another layer of himself in the quiet room.

  ‘I want you to do what you want to do.’ This was double-talk. Anna carried on. She had a pin to prick her own bubble. ‘It was very emotional in there. I won’t hold you to anything you said.’ She controlled her voice. Sacrifice was nothing new. ‘It’s not just me now, Luca, it’s me and my baby. I can’t do casual. So thank you a million times over for getting me across the finishing line, but I don’t expect anything more from you.’

  ‘Phew,’ said Luca. He stood up, leaned over the bed, spoke slowly and clearly. ‘That, by the way, was sarcasm, mama bear. When have you ever heard me say anything I didn’t mean? I love you and how could I not love this little one?’ He sped up. ‘Annie, don’t answer now, it’s madness talking like this right after you’ve given birth, but why don’t we give it a try? You, me and what’s-her-name. I know I’m not her biological father, but who cares? Let’s write our own story. Let’s plonk a happy ending on it.’

  ‘You don’t like children,’ said Anna. She had more than one pin.

  ‘I know!’ Luca threw up his hands, giggling. ‘Except for this one. This one I love.’

  Anna gave herself permission to believe him. To lie back on the pillows his love provided. It was too much. She was crying again. ‘You came back,’ she said. And then she said it again, because she liked the sound of it so much. ‘You came back.’

  Sleep came. Softly, on tiptoes, it spirited Anna away. Time receded. Night and day didn’t matter, they were silly affectations. It was constant dusk in the room. She slept soundly, only beckoned out of her dreams by a peculiar noise.

  Was it a dog snuffling? Was it Yeti?

  It was her daughter, wriggling and rolling in her transparent plastic crib.

  Anna surfaced. The room took shape. Luca, looking decidedly second-hand, reached in and picked up the baby in its white waffled blanket.

  ‘Ouch.’ She sat up too quickly, forgetting the neat embroidery on her pubic line.

  ‘Careful,’ said a voice.

  Anna looked to the other side of the bed, as she stretched out her arms for the baby.

  ‘I had a caesarean and you have to take it easy for a while.’ Carly sat on another of those uncomfortable plastic chairs.

  Anna stared. She felt a weight in her hands and took the child to her. She looked at Luca, who beamed back.

  ‘I went to the house,’ said Carly. ‘They told me. Your sister, I think it was.’

  ‘Your aunt.’ Anna said it without thinking. ‘I mean, sorry.’

  ‘And this,’ said Carly, jiggling her knees so that the small sleepy girl on her lap laughed, ‘is Holly. She’s my daughter.’ Carly wavered. Then, as if stepping off a high ledge, she took a deep breath and said, ‘Your granddaughter.’

  It was a magical Christmas Day after all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lunch at Thea’s

  VOL-AU-VENTS

  COD BAKED IN FOIL

  STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING

  Everything – but everything – had changed.

  The cutlery Thea laid out was old and well handled. Mellowed by years of lunches and dinners, it enhanced the flat’s eccentric blend of old-fashioned cosiness and hipster style. She picked up a dessert spoon, felt its weight as it balanced on her finger, then set it down again, just so.

  The table looked perfect, even if she did say so herself. Not showy, not styled, yet welcoming and beautiful and thought about. She thought deeply about things, this slender woman with the carefully done nails and the well-cut dress in cornflower blue. She bent down to tweak the clean blanket she’d laid over the cat bed, amused at herself for such Mad Housewife attention to detail. This was not her usual style.

  The doorbell rang.

  Thea froze. Had she bitten off more than she could chew? Inside these walls she was safe. When that door opened, the world would flood in, dabbing its fingerprints all over her safe place.

  An old fear was exhumed; she could lose everything.

  Thea looked at the door to the garden. She could open it, race out, hurdle the low fence, leave the bell ringing and the cod in the fridge and the wine unopened. Each guest was a friend, but what would they make of her? Would they find her odd, exotic, alien? Or would they recognise her for what she was?

  A quote from a wise old woman popped into her head. ‘Your soul never changes,’ murmured Thea, taking one last appraising look around as the doorbell repeated itself, churlish this time.

  If she’d forgotten anything, it was too late to do a damn thing about it. Thea pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, cleared her throat, gave herself a last searching look in the hall mirror and opened the door.

  It was time.

  Anna brushed her teeth, her sleepy eyes still full of grit. Ivy disagreed with the whole notion of sleeping through the night.

  She forgave her. Readily. But she also looked forward, with an almost physical yearning, to the days when Ivy would get with the programme.

  Ivy had her father’s nose. Small, snub. Her mother’s eyes. Expressive, greenish. Yeti’s love of snacks.

  Yeti regarded Ivy as his. He sat with her. Occasionally on her. He licked her cheeks clean. He growled if a stranger dared to approach his ward. The size of a Shetland pony, Yeti was hard on Anna’s soft furnishings but gentle with the baby.

  A year of Sunday Lunch Clubs had passed since Ivy’s theatrical arrival. Anna heard her chuckling to herself in her cot. If anybody else had cut a crescent-shaped scar across my tummy, I’d hate them forever. Anna’s wound was a badge of love. It was still numb; feeling had never returned to that line on her body. The rest of her, however, was overloaded with feeling. Having a baby had turned her skin inside out. She cried at news bulletins. Felt for the whole world and wanted to heal it.

  A year of Sunday Lunch Clubs had meant a total of eighteen get-togethers. High points had included a renewal of Neil and Santi’s vows on a yacht in the South of France. The lowest of low points had been a ‘special’ meal for Anna’s parents in a local pub. Her mother had arrived alone, mouthing an excuse about ‘Dad’s ulcer flaring up again’. They all knew Dad didn’t have an ulcer.

  Today’s New Year’s Lunch Club was a fresh start. She thought of Josh, preparing for them all to arrive. She corrected herself. Thea. It would be her debut. Careful with my pronouns!

  The surgery had been harrowing. Thank God for Sheba, thought Anna for the hundredth time. She’d moved in temporarily with Josh— no! Thea and Dinkie, and had stayed. Her healing touch, her solidity, her high good humour once you got to know her, had made Sheba the essential third member of the trinity.

  ‘We’re going to be late.’ Anna whisked into her bedroom. ‘And it’s all your fault,’ she said to Ivy, who had, with the sarcastic timing of all babies, fallen fast asleep.

  A bird’s-eye view of the tree-lined roads around Dinkie’s new flat would show various cars trundling towards lunch.

  Neil and Santi were in their new minibus. Apparently, two-year-old Paloma merited a minibus. Listening to ‘The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round’ for the thirteenth time that morning, they were ready to let down their hair and hand their daughter over to other, less tired, arms.

  In the back of a cab, Maeve dabbed on lipstick. ‘Did you like him, Storm?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s all right.’ Storm, head shaved, had shot up in the past year. He looked like a man but spoke like the fourteen-year-old he was. The man Maeve had brought home the night before had not impressed him.

  ‘He’s a very very good kisser.’

  ‘Shut. Up. Mother.’

  Sam was still running-in the Saab Isabel had picked out for them. She rubbed at a smudge on the dashboard. She asked Sam to remind her to buy ‘two little mats to go under our feet’. Life with his new wife involved a lot more cleaning and tidying than Sam had expected. He said things like ‘She keeps me on my toes!’ and
‘No such thing as downtime in our house!’ all the while secretly wishing she’d relax and let him eat Pop-Tarts in his pyjamas.

  None of that really mattered. Sam loved Isabel’s face. He looked forward to watching it grow older. He realised she was talking, said, ‘Sorry, darling, what?’ and nodded, agreeing that, yes, he really must unblock the waste disposal as soon as they got home.

  The camper van had seen better days. It coughed, belching out sooty exhaust as Dylan peered out at the street names, directing his mate at the wheel. He knew it was somewhere around here. ‘Who,’ he murmured, ‘has a lunch party the day after New Year’s Eve?’ Possibly he was still drunk. Tequila tastes better drunk from the navel of an actress/model/whatever, but the hangover is the same. Ivy would cheer him up. Ivy always cheered him up. If the Australia idea came together, he’d miss the next few years of Ivy’s development, but she wouldn’t mind. He hoped.

  ‘Nearly there!’ sang Carly over her shoulder.

  Holly fidgeted in her car seat. ‘Said that afore.’

  Carly smiled to herself. ‘Yes, I did, but this time Mummy means it!’

  Luca, accepting the cup of excellent coffee his mother handed him, was nowhere near the flat. He was looking out at the river from the big wide window and wondering where Anna and Ivy were right now.

  They were on Thea’s doorstep. Anna was anxious. Of course she’d seen her brother – my sister, remember, my sister! – since the surgeries, but this first day of a new year was to be Thea’s real debut. No more androgynous clothes, hair. No more Josh.

  The door opened. ‘Hi,’ said Thea. ‘Happy new thingymabob.’

  ‘Oh dear God, you’re gorgeous!’ said Anna without thinking. She barged in, stood close to Thea, examining her so hard that Thea laughed. ‘Your make-up is . . .’ Anna was lost for words. ‘And your hair is . . .’

  ‘What were you expecting? Ringlets and clown lipstick?’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’ Anna, usually so careful to say the right, sensitive thing, was gabbling. ‘You look . . .’ She found the word. ‘You look right, Thea.’

  ‘I feel right.’ Her big brown doll’s eyes wet, Thea swallowed hard. ‘Thanks for sticking by me.’

  ‘Quite literally,’ said Anna, ‘the least I could do.’

  Dylan’s friend was called Rizzo, and he was staying for lunch. Ivy was kidnapped and cooed over. Dinkie was hugged. A glass of something. A soft seat. Anna breathed out.

  The garden flat was roomy, with good ‘flow’; a term Anna had learned from the afternoon TV property programmes she watched, Ivy at her breast. Like that day’s menu, the differing tastes of the flatmates met and mingled without ever clashing. Josh supplied the ironic twentieth-century furniture and Dinkie supplied the crocheted table mats.

  Anna let the spirited conversation splash all around her. She watched Josh. Thea. He, she, was elegant in the blue dress. Anna had dreaded high heels, or a décolletage. She saw that fear as silly now: Thea had dressed for her core values. They hadn’t changed. Whether male or female, Thea’s preference was for the stylish, the low-key.

  The atmosphere was heightened. Sharpened. Thea unsettled them all. Remembering that this was not simply Josh in a dress, that their brother was now their sister, had disrupted the status quo. Terrified of saying the wrong thing, they elected to say very little about Thea’s appearance. As if people changing gender was neither here nor there.

  There had been no deeply personal grilling, no questions about exactly what the operation entailed. Maeve had almost ‘gone there’, but the others held her back. Josh was a human being, they said, not public property.

  It was newbie Rizzo who broke the spell. ‘She’s a dude?’ he yelped to a whispered comment from Dylan.

  Conversation stopped abruptly.

  Thea, on the threshold of the room with a platter in her hands, stood stock-still. She looked lost, as if deciding whether to turn and run.

  ‘She was a dude,’ said Neil, stepping over to take a vol-au-vent from the platter. ‘Now she’s a dudess.’

  ‘No such word,’ said Anna, her tone playful.

  Rizzo looked at the floor.

  The conversation staggered back to its feet, and Thea made a round of the room with the hors d’oeuvres. ‘Dinkie made them,’ he said encouragingly.

  ‘You OK?’ whispered Anna as she bent down to let her take a vol-au-vent.

  Thea looked her straight in the eye. ‘I can handle it,’ she said.

  There had been a period of something close to mourning after Josh announced his plans to change gender. As if they all separately grieved for the loss of their brother. Neil had struggled with the concept, admitting his confusion to Anna in late-night calls.

  She’d advised and encouraged; that came easily to her. Taking her own advice had been harder. Particularly when Josh had dropped out of sight, avoiding family, ducking out of every Sunday Lunch Club.

  It had been Dinkie’s job to give them updates. She witnessed his anxiety before the operations, the long hours in the bathroom staring at his reflection. Dinkie had been brisk, reminding everybody that to make an omelette you needed to break eggs.

  That image – of Josh as a fragile, cracked egg – had almost undone Anna.

  She’d visited him as he recuperated in his new bedroom. Dinkie had warned that he was in almost constant pain as nerve endings reconnected. There were setbacks – an infection, exhaustion caused by the super-strong medication – but Thea had emerged, as if from a chrysalis.

  Watching her now, as she made the rounds of the room, Anna papered over memories of the melancholia that had swamped Thea as she recovered. The past was done with; there were new battles to fight. And today Thea was fighting them with humour and elegance and heart.

  On the rug, Dylan squatted to say ‘All right?’ to Ivy. When she replied with ‘Dada?’ he sprang up as if scalded.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ laughed Anna. ‘She says that to all men. And even some inanimate objects.’

  ‘She’s a crazy one, isn’t she?’ Dylan seemed wary of touching his offspring. There’s time, thought Anna to herself. If Dylan ever came back from Australia, he had the rest of his life to bond with Ivy. ‘Come here, you,’ said Anna, as Holly dashed past.

  The little girl, a guarded child, stopped and stuck her thumb in her mouth. ‘Granna,’ she said. ‘You sewed Mummy’s handbag.’

  Carly, bringing up the rear, said, ‘Clever Granna made everybody’s handbag.’ There had been an Artem gift under the tree for everybody that year; Carly’s bold fuchsia bag was slung across her body. ‘Do you want me to bring you some nibbles, Anna?’

  ‘You’re an angel.’ Anna settled back. She wasn’t ‘Mum’. That title belonged to the mild, canny woman who had adopted Bonnie, renamed her Carly, and brought her up with scant money but great tenderness. A tentative friendship of sorts had been struck between Anna and Carly’s adoptive parents, but it was flimsy.

  ‘Uncle Thea,’ said Holly, eliciting a guffaw from Neil, and nervous laughter from the others. ‘What?’ demanded Holly, fuming. She was a precocious child; teasing her was dangerous.

  Santi swept her up, twirled her around until, annoyance forgotten, she began to cackle. Holly was still entranced with her new uncles and aunts and cousins.

  As Anna made room on the sofa for Carly to sit beside her – they tended to stick together at Sunday Lunch Clubs – she covertly watched ‘Uncle Thea’. She hadn’t quite got the hang of standing like a woman; there was something subtly male about her posture. It’ll come, thought Anna.

  Thea found her eye and made her way over. Perching on the arm of the sofa, she bent down to whisper, ‘Anna, tell me, do I pass?’

  ‘As a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do.’ Close up, Thea was beautiful in much the same way Josh had been handsome. Ethereal. Fine. ‘We’re all a bit stunned. It’s such a big change.’

  ‘I’m still me.’

  ‘And we’re still us. We’ll catch up with you.’
A few months ago, Anna had passed on an old swimsuit to Thea. She’d changed her mind a dozen times, then stuffed it into a carrier bag and handed it over. The tears in response had astounded her; it wasn’t just an M&S swimsuit – it was acceptance.

  Carly leaned over. ‘Love the dress. I couldn’t wear something like that. But you carry it off.’

  Thea stuttered her thanks. ‘Where’s your other half today?’

  ‘Manning the bar. He sends his best.’

  There had been relief when Carly’s husband didn’t arrive. He was a trifle Neanderthal about gender reassignment; Anna wondered if Carly had engineered his absence. She’s a sensitive soul, my daughter. Anna still felt a swell around her heart when she described Carly in that way. Pride. Poignancy. A deep gratitude for second chances.

  The pile of newspapers had been lugged over to The Intrepid Fox. As a form of proof. The front pages – all twenty-five of them – were framed and hung in formation in the main bar. It was a new tradition; Anna would continue to buy a newspaper on the eleventh of November every year. No more plodding up to the attic with them; she’d put them into Carly’s hands.

  Her older daughter was no longer a stranger, but there were aspects of Carly that felt foreign, other. They were building an emotional shorthand, the best ways to navigate around each other. Their relationship was like no other – it gave Anna intense joy to be near Carly, and disquiet when Carly said or did something that dismayed her. It was complicated. Disappointing. Joyful. It was beyond precious.

  ‘Do you think,’ whispered Carly, as Thea moved away, ‘that she’ll ever have, you know, a relationship?’

  ‘Not sure.’ Anna had given it a great deal of thought. ‘But she’s changed gender not personality, and Josh never talked about his sex life, so Thea probably won’t either.’

  ‘I’ll geddit!’ shouted Holly when the doorbell sounded.

  ‘No you don’t!’ Sam hoisted her into his arms as he opened the door. He didn’t look old enough to be the child’s grandfather; he grew younger as he grew happier. ‘Luca, in you come, mate,’ he said.