by Freya North
‘Morning, Mary, and don't you look divine for a Monday,’ Django says, entering the bookmakers.
‘And don't you look colourful for January,’ Mary says, wondering if he's warm enough in his paisley shirt and tapestry waistcoat.
‘From Peru,’ Django tells her, opening his waistcoat wide, like a flasher. ‘I had to trade with bandits on a mountain pass.’
‘And what did they get of you, duck?’
‘My passport,’ Django says and he roars with laughter. ‘A tenner on Cool Cat, if you please.’
‘Rank outsider,’ Mary warns him.
‘I know,’ Django shrugs, ‘but the odds were worse for Fenland Star yesterday and truly terrible for Pipistrelle last week and they both won.’ He hands over a ten-pound note. ‘She's flying home as we speak, you know. Cat. I have all three girls descending on me for the weekend.’
Mary knows Django's girls. They were at school with her daughters. ‘No doubt you'll be cooking up a treat for them, then?’
‘She's been in America for four years,’ he says, leaning on the counter and beckoning Mary closer. ‘That's an awful lot of McDonalds. Apparently her hair is now red.’
Mary can't see the connection between McDonalds and hair colour. If she remembers correctly, Cat is the sporty one who married the doctor of a professional cycling team.
‘So I am indeed preparing a Spread to welcome her home and put back some nutrients,’ Django is saying. ‘Oh, and let's have a tenner on Three's Company at Fakenham. Good little horse, that.’
Django McCabe hasn't had a beard for over twenty years, yet still, in moments of contemplation, he strokes his chin with fingertips light and methodical as if his goatee still sits proud on his face. The habit is one that he uses for all manner of pontification, from selecting horses according to their names or the form given them by the Racing Post, to his choice of the next domino at the Rag and Thistle. Currently, he is toying with his chin while wondering what to cook. Laid out before him are all the foodstuffs from the fridge, most of those from the larder, and a few from the capacious chest freezer too. He doesn't believe in shopping according to a recipe, he cooks to accommodate available ingredients; he invented food combining in its most oblique sense. He fingers his invisible beard and begins to make his considered selection, as an artist might choose pigment for the day's palette. Indeed, Django feels at his most creative when cooking – he sees blending, mixing, combining, concocting, as art, not science. Thus he never measures or weighs and he believes cookery books are to cooking what painting-by-numbers kits are to painting.
Whenever his nieces visit from London, it warrants a Spread. And as the forthcoming weekend is to be not just an ordinary visit, but a homecoming celebration, it has to be a Monumental Spread. Django hasn't seen Cat since the summer. None of them has. Christmas was peculiar for her absence. She'd turned thirty-two years old in the autumn and he hadn't been able to make her a birthday cake. On top of that, Pip implied recently that Fen has been a little down. He knows of no way better to warm the heart and feed the soul than to fill the stomach with all manner of home cooking first.
Django is at his happiest when cooking for his girls, even though they are all in their thirties, with homes of their own, and their health has never been of concern.
‘It's habit,’ he'll say when they say he needn't have, when they say a pub lunch or ready-meal supper would be fine by them, when they say they are too full for seconds let alone thirds. ‘I'm old and stuck in my ways,’ he'll declare. ‘Humour me.’ he'll say the same thing when presenting them with carrier bags bulging with Tupperware containers when they leave again for London.
Django McCabe is their family tree. The desertion of their mother, the death of their father gave him no choice – but ultimately gave him his greatest blessing. His arms, like great branches, have been the protective clasp, the loving embrace of mother, father, confidant and mentor to Cat, Fen and Pip. He provided the boughs in which their cradles were rocked. His are the roots which have always anchored them and kept them safe.
Tuesday
Fen McCabe used to enjoy looking in the mirror. Far from it being a vanity kick, She'd found it an affirming thing to do. In the scamper of a working day, to grasp a private moment to nod at her reflection was sustaining. Hullo you, She'd sometimes say, what a busy day. And in the heady period when Matt Holden had wined, dined, wooed and pursued her, She'd frequently nip to the loo in some restaurant or bar, for a little time out with herself. He likes me, She'd beam at her reflection, you go girl! She'd wink at herself, give herself the go-ahead to party and flirt and charm the man who, soon enough, wanted to be with her for life.
Since having a baby six months ago, Fen has hated looking in the mirror. Not because she finds the sight depressing but because she finds the sight so strange. She doesn't so much wince away from the sight of a few extra pounds, the limp hair, the sallow skin, the dark and puffy eyes, as glance bewildered and wonder who is that? How can this be my reflection when I don't actually recognize the person staring back? And mirror mirror on the wall, wasn't I once a damn sight fairer than this? So it's something of a relief not to have the time during the day and to be too tired in the evening to face the facts staring back from the looking glass.
The phone is ringing, the baby is crying. Fen is nearer to the phone and Matt is nearer to the baby. Matt knows that Fen can find little wrong with the way he answers the phone so he's happy to swap places here in the kitchen.
‘Hullo?’ he answers. ‘Well hullo!’ He looks over to Fen. She's wearing truly awful pyjamas. Even if they'd been a matching set they'd have little to commend them. The bottoms have polka dots on a sickly lilac background. The top is littered with cutesy cartoon animals, a strange hybrid love child of a dog and a rabbit and even some teddy bear chromosomes somewhere along the line. ‘Hold on, I'll just pass you over.’ He holds out the receiver.
‘Who is it?’ Fen mouths but Matt will only cock his eyebrow and grin. As Fen shuffles over to the phone, the placated baby at home on her hip, Matt notes her slippers. The grey, felted monstrosities he once termed ‘eastern-bloc lesbian clogs’. He'd had her in stitches at the time, She'd done a bastardized folk dance in them and had him in hysterics, before She'd banished them under the bed. For good, so He'd thought, until just then.
‘Hullo?’ says Fen.
‘Boo!’ says the voice.
‘Cat?’
‘I'm back! we're in a cab, on the M4. Heading for Clapham.’
Matt watches the smile warm her face. He thinks how clichéd it sounds to say that the sun comes out when Fen smiles. But in his eyes, it does. And suddenly he forgives her the pyjamas and the clogs and he feels bad for having felt irritated with her and now he wants to go to her and put his arms around her and kiss the asymmetric dimples on her cheeks, brush her overlong fringe away from her forehead and kiss her there too, scoop her hair into a pony-tail and bury his nose in her neck. She's hanging up the phone and he thinks that, though he's now ready to leave for work perhaps there is time for a little spontaneity, for affection, for physical and emotional contact. The baby can stay on Fen's hip. They're a family after all. Group hug and all that. So he crosses the kitchen and he's about to reach for her when her nose wrinkles.
‘Gracious,’ she's saying to the baby, ‘how can someone so little and cute make such a revolting smell.’
‘I'll change her,’ Matt offers.
Fen falters. ‘It's OK,’ she says, ‘I'll do it. I want to check that her nappy rash has cleared.’
She may only be six months old but Cosima Holden-McCabe has decided, quite categorically, that she will not be eating anything unless it is orange in colour. Fen is fretting over whether puréed carrot and mashed sweet potato for the fourth day running – and currently for breakfast – might give her baby carotene poisoning. Or have caused the nappy rash. Or created the current extreme pungency of the nappies.
‘Wouldn't you rather have a nice squidgy banana? Are you OK, pumpkin?’
Keeping her eyes on her baby, waggling a spoon loaded with orange mush, Fen speaks to Matt. ‘Does she look orange to you?’
‘Pumpkins are orange – You're probably giving her this complex.’
Fen looks at him for a loaded moment.
‘Joke?’ Matt says with a sorry smile. ‘She looks bonny – she has a lovely glow to her fat little cheeks.’
‘She's not fat!’ Fen protests.
‘It was a compliment,’ Matt assures her. ‘I meant it affectionately.’
‘But do you think the glow to her cheeks is a bit orange?’
‘No, Fen, I don't.’ Matt peers in close to his baby and kisses her cheek. ‘She looks fine.’ He glances at his girlfriend. ‘I think Cosima is happy and healthy and that carrot-and-sweet-potato mush is her favourite food of the moment. I reckon it's because you look peaky in comparison, Fen.’
‘If I do look peaky,’ Fen says defensively, ‘it's because I'm so bloody tired.’
‘I know you are,’ Matt says and it irritates him that Fen heard an insult instead of the concern intended. He wants to say, I'm tired too, you know; but he hasn't time for a petty dispute over who is the more exhausted. ‘Why don't you ask your sister if she's around today? You can have a little time to yourself?’
‘She's only just got off the plane!’
‘I meant Pip.’
Somewhere, Fen knows Matt's intention is sweet. But lately, unbridled sensitivity has lain far closer to her surface than sense. ‘You don't think I'm coping, do you?’ she says.
‘You're doing brilliantly,’ Matt says, because the books and the magazines have instilled the sentence in him and advised him to ignore the ironing mountain, piles of toys and general debris. ‘I'm late. What are you doing today? Is it Musical Minis?’
‘No, that's Thursday.’
‘TinyTumbles?’
‘No, that's tomorrow. I may meet up with the baby-mums this afternoon.’
‘That'll be nice.’
Fen shrugs. ‘I always come away feeling a bit insecure,’ she confides. ‘Their babies apparently sleep through the night and most have at least one tooth. And I'm not really sure about the women – I can't find a connection apart from the babies being the same age. They're forever trying to outpurée each other with increasingly exotic organic recipes. But all my baby wants is orange stuff.’
‘You're being unnecessarily hard on yourself,’ Matt says, ‘and on Cosima. And possibly on that bunch too. Stop being silly. You're wondermum and we love you.’
Fen can't hear the last sentence. Her ears are ringing with the fact that Matt says she's silly. She wants to say, Well fuck you. But they've made a pact not to swear in front of their child.
‘I'm late.’ He gulps his coffee. ‘Work is mental at the moment – I'll try and leave early, cook us something nice.’ He kisses the top of Fen's head and brushes his lips over the peach fuzz adorning Cosima's. ‘Bye, girls. Have fun.’
Tom Holmes likes Tuesdays very much. He doesn't like the fact that at school Tuesdays mean dictation followed by football. Tom finds it difficult to coordinate hearing a word, then assessing its meaning in context and having to write it down, all in the space of about two seconds. It thus seems entirely logical that instructions for rigging a yacht could well be ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’. It frustrates him that he never does well in dictation and that there's no opportunity in dictation to saliently reason that ‘Pacific’, taken contextually, is just as appropriate as ‘specific’. He's slightly taken aback that Miss Balcombe won't at least acknowledge that ‘Pacific instructions for rigging’ sounds fairly logical. He doesn't like it that there's no room for manoeuvre with meaning where dictation is concerned.
Football makes Tom miserable, more so because He's acutely aware that a nine-year-old should never admit to being miserable in the context of football. He supports Arsenal, which has won him friends at his North London prep school, but he hates playing the game. He hates playing because his limbs are often sore from eczema. Mud can actually sting but tracksuit trousers can catch and snag on chapped skin. Though his teammates are pals enough not to comment, Tom still catches them glancing at his body, unintentionally repelled. However, what makes dictation and football bearable is that, on Tuesdays, he stays with his dad and stepmum at their cool place in Hampstead.
They actually only live a mile or so from his home in Swiss Cottage and, though Tom spends every Tuesday, Wednesday and every other weekend with them, and any time in between that he fancies, the novelty value is still high. His dad's place is closer to school than his other home so instead of his mum slaloming her Renault through the school run (which has its plus points because she appears unaware how much she swears) Tom strolls down Hampstead High Street with his stepmum. And, without actually holding hands (He's nine now, someone might see), Tom can still subliminally tug her into a detour to Starbucks for hot chocolate.
Tom's had Pip for nearly four years. Her presence at the school gates continues to provide much intrigue. Being a clown by trade, Pip is well known to many of Tom's classmates from the birthday-party circuit of their younger years. She's also been to assembly to talk about the other work she does, as a clown at children's hospitals. She did the splits and a flikflak on the stage, bonked the headmaster on the head with a squeaky plastic hammer, made a motorbike from balloons in four seconds flat and Tom was the centre of attention all that day. His friends still make a point of saying hullo to her when she collects him. Invariably, she has rushed to school from the hospital, with her hair still in skew-whiff pigtails and traces of make-up on her face. Far more exotic than the widespread Whistles and ubiquitous Nicole Farhi worn by the other mums.
This Tuesday was no different. There was Pip, eye-catching in orange-and-purple stripy tights and clodhopping boots, chatting amiably with the other Hampstead mums.
‘Hi, I'm starving. It was shepherd's pie for lunch. Heinous,’ said Tom, keen to drag her away.
‘Dear oh dear,’ said Pip, ‘heinous shepherd's pie? I'd turn vegetarian, if I were you.’
‘No way, José,’ Tom retched. ‘The veggie option is always vomtastic.’
‘Vomtastic,’ Pip marvelled, planning to use the word in her clowning. ‘How was football?’
Tom gave a small shrug. ‘Cold.’
‘Are you angling for a brownie and hot choc?’ Pip nudged him.
‘If you say so,’ Tom said.
‘Well, your dad won't be home till sevenish,’ Pip reasoned with herself, as much as with Tom.
‘It would be very good for my energy,’ Tom said not entirely ingenuously. ‘Starbucks would really help my homework.’
Pip laughed. ‘Come on, tinker,’ she said. They walked towards the High Street. ‘I had a sad day at the hospital. It's lovely to see you.’
Tom slipped his hand into hers. Just for a few strides or so.
Pip looked at the kitchen table laden with the remains of supper later that evening, then she looked at her husband and his son embroiled in PlayStation. She put her hands on her hips and cleared her throat. They didn't look up.
‘Hullo?’ she called, as if testing whether anyone was there.
Zac glanced up briefly from the console, but not briefly enough to prevent Tom taking advantage.
‘Dad!’ Tom objected. ‘Concentrate!’
And then Pip decided She'd just smile and ask if anyone wanted a drink. She still found it difficult to gauge her boundaries as a stepmother. Her own standards, based on her childhood and her family's dynamic, said that a nine-year-old should help clear the table, or at least ask to be excused a chore. But she also acknowledged that this father and son hadn't seen each other for a week and Zac had been first down from the table challenging Tom to a PlayStation final-of-finals. So she tidied up and allowed them their quality time.
She glanced at the clock and felt relieved that it really was nearing Tom's bedtime. Zac had worked so late the last couple of nights she felt she hadn't seen him at all. ‘I'll run your bath, Tom,’ sh
e said.
‘One more game,’ Zac called to her.
‘I'll run it slowly,’ Pip said.
Despite actually trying his damndest to win, Zac lost at PlayStation. Far from being wounded, his pride soared at Tom's skill and after a noisy bathtime, he cuddled up with his son for a lengthy dip into James and the Giant Peach. Pip could hear the soft timbre of Zac's reading voice. She poured two glasses of wine and organized Tom's school bag for the morning.
Zac appeared and made the fast-asleep gesture with his hands. ‘He was tired,’ he said.
‘Well, It's late for him,’ said Pip, offering a glass of wine.
Zac looked at his watch. ‘I just have a little work to do,’ he told Pip who looked instantly deflated, ‘just an hour or so.’ He took the wine, kissed Pip on the lips, squeezed her bottom and disappeared with his laptop. He's happy, Pip told herself. She looked on the bright side, which was very much her wont. At least it gave her the opportunity to phone Cat, as long as her youngest sister had been able to resist the jet lag on her first day back in the country.
Many would say that being a high-flying accountant would have its ups and downs: financial remuneration in return for long hours and often relatively dull work; a bulging pay packet to compensate for a dry grey image. How else would accountants have become such a clichéd race? But the only things grey about Zac Holmes are his eyes which are dark slate to the point of being navy anyway, and the only dry thing about Zac is his sense of humour. If Zac's looks and his personality had dictated a career, it would have been something on the funky side of creative. But Zac's brain, with its amazing propensity for figures, decreed accountancy from the outset. Anything else just wouldn't be logical. Zac likes logic, he likes straightforward solutions and simple answers to even the most complex of problems. Consequently, he never judges anything to be a dilemma because he knows intrinsically that there is always a way to work it all out. Zac believes that problems are merely perceived as such. If you just sit down and think carefully, there's nothing that can't be solved. Problems don't really exist at all, it comes down to attitude. That goes for his personal life as much as his professional. So, when ten years ago, his on-off girlfriend announced she was pregnant a few weeks after a forgettable drunken friendship fuck, Zac welcomed the news with a shrug and easily devised a formula that would suit them all.
