I picked up my bag and charged out the building, lit up by a new sense of purpose.
I threaded my way through St James’s Park, across the Mall, and up the steps of the Queen Mother’s memorial. The streets around St James’s are lined with the sort of stately cream-colored buildings you could imagine filled with visiting dignitaries, all classical pillars and porticos. A string of trailers were lined up in front of Prince Philip House, and a group of people in black T-shirts and jeans gathered around an enormous camera while two actors in period dress rehearsed their lines.
I dug my phone out of my bag and dialed. My aunt picked up on the third ring.
‘Hey there, baby girl,’ she said in that gravelly voice of hers that was courtesy of a thirty-year Marlboro Reds habit. ‘How’re you holding up?’
‘Okay,’ I said. I ducked down a side street lined with parked cars and leaned up against the wall of one of the tall stuccoed buildings. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh, you know.’ I heard the flick of her lighter and then a long inhale. ‘Pretty much the same.’
‘Did the money get to your account okay?’
‘Of course it did, honey. Thank you.’ She took another drag. I could picture her standing on the screened-in porch, cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth, blondish-gray hair piled on top of her head, eyes a washed-out watery blue.
‘Does she need anything else? I could order some clothes …’
‘Don’t waste your money,’ she said. ‘She’s got plenty of clothes. If she needs anything, I’ll let you know.’
‘Okay.’ A car rolled by, a sleek Jag, the engine purring. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t called lately,’ I said. ‘It’s just, with the wedding and work and everything …’
‘Jenny, you don’t have to apologize. I know you have a life to lead – you can’t be expected to call every fifteen minutes. We’re doing fine here, I promise.’
‘Can I talk to her?’
There was a pause and the sound of the lighter sparking up again. ‘She’s not having a great day today, honey,’ she said gently.
I nodded. ‘Tell her I love her.’
‘Of course. But she knows you do without me saying so.’
‘I’ll make plans to come visit soon,’ I said, knowing this wasn’t true.
‘We’ll be here,’ she said. ‘There’s no rush. You just live your life, honey.’ There was a commotion in the background, the murmur of the television punctuated by someone shouting. My mother. ‘I’ve got to go,’ my aunt said. I could hear the tension in her voice. ‘Send our love to Christopher. Bye, baby girl.’
The line went dead.
I needed a drink, badly. The thought of going back to the flat seemed impossible now.
It was a clear, crisp evening, and the air was filled with the spring smell of mulch and grass. I headed up Lower Regent Street and turned onto Shaftesbury Avenue, the screens of Piccadilly Circus flashing ads for fizzy drinks and fast food above me. I spotted the enormous Waterstones and a plan started to form. I ducked inside, picked up a paperback I’d been wanting to read, and paid for it at the till. Tonight, I decided, I’d take myself out for dinner.
I know, this isn’t exactly revelatory. People go out to dinner on their own all the time. I’d see them sitting at a bar or in the window, one hand holding a book or a newspaper, the other a fork, and I’d feel the same way about them as I would someone who ran into a burning building to rescue a goldfish. Brave, sure, but was it strictly necessary?
But tonight, that brave idiot would be me.
There was a little Italian place on the corner that looked nice, so I screwed up my courage, pushed open the door, and asked the maître d’ for a table for one. He escorted me to the bar, handed me a menu, and disappeared without a word.
My eyes flicked across the page without taking much in. The bartender appeared and took my order – a glass of white wine and a plate of cacio e pepe – and then, just like that, I was on my own.
I tried, very hard, not to panic.
I dug the paperback out of my bag and cracked the spine. It was a literary affair – something about a middle-aged man having an amorphous life crisis – and the words swam in front of me. All I could hear was the clink and scrape of silverware on china, and the murmured rush of good conversation flowing around me.
Deep breaths, I chanted to myself. Deep breaths.
But it was no use. The confidence that had buoyed me into the restaurant deserted me as quickly as it had arrived. It was as if I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, watching me, discussing me, pitying me. I half expected to turn around to find a gaggle of pitchfork-wielding townsfolk pointing at me and shouting SHAME! SHAME! The bartender delivered my wine with a small smile. He’s probably laughing at me, I thought. Probably off in the backroom now, laughing with the barback about the sad, wizened spinster out front.
I could feel myself spiraling, the black maw opening up inside me. And just like that, I was back in the day of the flying ants.
It was a normal Saturday in late August. My mother was in the kitchen, the papers spread out on the kitchen table, her half-drunk coffee cooling beside her elbow. I had come downstairs for a Diet Coke and a sleeve of Chips Ahoy! My mother raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I raised my hand to my cheek, felt the irritated constellation of pimples that had bloomed since my eleventh birthday, and quietly put the cookies back in the cupboard. Years later, I would read an article stating that there was no link between junk food and acne – it was mostly hormonal, apparently – but at that point, everyone thought you got pimples from eating chocolate. And I had a lot of pimples.
I was sloping my way back up the stairs, cursing my terrible skin and knobbly knees and flat chest and red hair and every other aspect of my general appearance, and, while I was at it, personality, when it happened. The phone rang.
I jumped. I remember that clearly: I nearly jumped out of my skin when it rang. To this day, I don’t know why. The phone rang all the time in my house, particularly that summer, when Isla was trapped at home with a broken leg, and phoned me constantly to discuss the latest episode of Dawson’s Creek. She had it for Pacey, bad, though I never understood the appeal.
Still, when the phone rang this time, and when I heard my mother get up out of her chair, pick up the phone, and say hello in that cool, slightly removed voice she used for the telephone, I was seized with fear.
‘Who is this?’ I heard her ask. There was a pause as she listened, and then she said, not in her normal telephone voice, but something sharper, shakier, ‘No, I’m not interested. I told you never to call here again.’ The phone slammed back down on the receiver, and then there were footsteps running towards the front door and my mother was screaming my dad’s name over and over. ‘Kevin! Kevin!’ I froze in the stairwell. My dad had been gone for three months.
I ran outside after her. She was standing on the lawn in her robe, screaming and crying and wrenching at her clothes. There were red marks on her arms from where she’d torn at the skin with her fingernails. She saw me coming out the front door and wheeled on me. ‘That woman keeps calling me!’ she was shouting. ‘Your father’s little whore!’
My father’s girlfriend never called the house. She wouldn’t have. She was too scared of my mom.
That’s when I noticed the flying ants.
They descended like a great black cloud, covering the grass and the pavement, zooming into our open eyes and getting stuck to our eyelashes. I swatted them away, but there were too many of them. All the while my mother was screaming, flying ants were swarming all around her as she stood on the front lawn, her mouth open, her eyes screwed shut, her face wet with tears.
I tried to get my mother to calm down, but I couldn’t. She kept screaming and crying, and then, finally, when I’d managed to coax her back into the house, she started destroying things. Everything, really. She threw pictures and vases and ornaments. A mirror smashed. She pulled apart pillows, feathers floating th
rough the air. She moved into the kitchen. I pulled on her arm, tried to block her way, but I wasn’t strong enough. She was filled with what seemed like a superhuman strength. And she was not going to stop.
Eventually, a neighbor called the police, and a cruiser and an ambulance pulled up to the house. I let them in and pointed up the stairs, and the EMTs trudged wordlessly through our living room and up to my parents’ bedroom, which, I realized, the thought hitting me like a bolt of lightning, was just my mother’s now. They wheeled her into the ambulance and took her away. One of the officers stayed behind until someone could come and look after me. I begged him to take me to the hospital so I could be with my mother, but he just shook his head and offered me another Mentos from the roll he kept in his pocket. Looking back on it, he was only a kid, too, really – no more than twenty-two, a rookie cop stuck with the job of babysitting the crazy lady’s kid. When I started to cry, he put the TV on to the Cartoon Network and poured me a glass of milk. It was sweet, really. But it didn’t help. I knew then that I was on my own.
My mother was hospitalized. I went to stay with my aunt while she was away. My father called every day but I wouldn’t speak to him. He had left us, and now my mother was broken, and it was his fault. At least that’s what I believed for the first few years, when it was just her and me on our own. He even turned up on my aunt’s doorstep, clutching some stupid teddy bear like he’d already forgotten that I was almost twelve and not some little girl that could be placated with a stuffed animal. My aunt chased him out of her driveway and then came back in and handed me a whole package of Chips Ahoy! I ate the lot.
After three weeks, my mom came home, and I moved back in with her. She tried hard to make it seem like everything was back to normal, but it wasn’t. She would hug me and smile and laugh at my jokes like she always did, but there was something missing from her after the day of the flying ants. She looked like someone who’d had the blankets permanently ripped away from her on a cold morning. Haunted.
I took a sip of wine. The taste of it on my tongue – cold and crisp and delicious – was enough to shake me out of the moment. My shoulders dropped half an inch, and I heard myself let out a tiny little sigh. The bartender appeared again with my plate of pasta, and set it down in front of me. Steam curled up towards me.
‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ I placed the napkin in my lap, took another sip of wine, and stole a quick glance around the room. There was a group of professionally dressed thirty-somethings in the corner, one of them raising his glass in a toast. An elderly couple held hands across their table. Two middle-aged women, both dolled up to the nines and with bulging shopping bags resting at their feet, were in peals of laughter. And not a single one of them was looking my way.
I twirled a few strands of pasta onto my fork and popped it into my mouth. The spaghetti was al dente, the sauce creamy and cheesy and peppery. Perfection. I washed it down with another swig of wine and signaled to the bartender for a refill. My shoulders dropped another half an inch.
I stuffed the book back into my bag. I didn’t need a shield, or a distraction. I was here on my own, and that was okay. No one had turned up with a pitchfork and judged me. In fact, no one gave a single flying fuck what I was doing at that particular moment. I’d pushed myself to do something outside of my comfort zone, and I’d survived. In fact, I’d enjoyed it, the same as I’d enjoyed the spicy food at that restaurant the other night, and climbing up that wall, and singing to a full room. I’d taken a step out into the unknown, and I hadn’t lost myself in the process.
I finished the pasta and the second glass of wine, and asked for the bill. The bartender presented it to me alongside a tiny glass of limoncello and a plate of chocolate truffles, and I sank the drink and ate all the truffles, and left with a smile on my face. And then I went to the movies on my own, and saw a film that I actually wanted to see rather than one that I thought Christopher would at least tolerate, and I was so caught up in this incredible rush of sistas-are-doing-it-for-themselves freedom that it was only when I was walking to the Tube that I realized I still hadn’t heard from Jackson. It really must be over. The twin feelings of relief and sadness accompanied me all the way back to my still-empty flat.
13
I was asleep by the time Christopher came in, and in the morning he still had the red-eyed, rumpled look of a man who’d had a dinner of six pints and two packets of cheese and onion crisps. ‘Plus some peanuts,’ he added when I handed him a glass of water.
‘Good,’ I said, dropping two ibuprofen capsules in his upturned palm. ‘I was worried about your protein levels.’
He smiled. ‘That’s funny,’ he said, but he didn’t laugh. For once, I wished he’d laugh at something I said. Him telling me he thought it was funny didn’t have quite the same effect.
‘How was everyone?’ I asked, pushing my irritation aside.
‘You know,’ he said, swallowing down the tablets. ‘The usual. Jonno’s panicking about the baby, Crispin’s boss is riding him like a Shetland pony—’
‘I thought Shetlands were more decorative than functional.’
He waved me away. ‘Figuratively speaking, then. Steve’s got a new girl on the go – blonde, apparently, and quite young.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Says he’s found the one, but I think we both know how that’s going to go.’
‘I won’t buy a fascinator just yet.’ I plucked the damp towel off the bedroom floor and hung it across the bedframe to dry.
‘And then Spanner brought out his bloody deck of cards and started doing his whole “pick a card, any card” shtick at the poor group of lasses next to us, and he ended up chucking the whole deck at the window.’
I looked up, aghast. ‘Why the hell did he do that?’
He shrugged. ‘Said he’d seen David Blaine do it once, and thought he knew the trick.’
‘But he didn’t know the trick?’
‘Does Spanner ever know the trick? Three years of magic classes, at vast expense, plus God knows how many hours watching instructional videos on YouTube, and the man still wouldn’t be able to pull off a trick if it was Halloween and he had a roll of toilet paper and a carton of eggs.’
I laughed. It was true, Spanner was hopeless at magic, despite his enduring belief that he was Houdini incarnate. He’d once tried to pull a pound coin out of my ear, and instead got tangled up with my earring. He nearly severed the lobe.
Christopher set his glass of water on the bedside table and pulled me towards him. ‘C’mere,’ he said, kissing me lightly. The sweetly stale smell of old booze still clung to him. ‘I missed you last night.’
‘Me too.’ It was nice being together like this, the old shorthand flowing between us, the sheets warm from the heat of his body. Even in his hungover state, he still looked adorable – like the dissolute-but-ultimately-charming-Englishman-who-turns-out-to-secretly-be-a-prince in a Lifetime Christmas movie.
‘What did you get up to? Just stayed in?’
I shook my head. ‘I went out to dinner,’ I said.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Not with bloody Ben again, I hope.’
I felt a swell of anger rise inside of me. What did it matter if I had gone out to dinner with Ben? I’d explained a hundred times that Ben was just a friend. I didn’t nag Christopher when he went out with his friends, even that girl Becky he’d gone to uni with who I knew still harbored a crush on him. She called him ‘Toph’ in a tittering voice and shot me murderous looks when his back was turned. I opened my mouth to say something when I remembered that I’d lied about seeing Ben, anyway, and that maybe right now wasn’t the time to go around righteously defending my right to interact with the opposite sex, seeing as the last time I’d done that I’d ended up married to one of them.
Instead, I smiled and said, ‘No, on my own, actually.’
He scrunched up his face. ‘You went out to dinner alone?’
‘And
to the movies.’
‘Oh God,’ he groaned, pulling me in closer. ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea you were so keen to go out last night. You should have told me!’
‘Why? Would you have canceled your plans?’
He pulled back, surprised. ‘We were wetting Jonno’s baby’s head – a bit of a tradition – so probably not, but I would have invited you to tag along. It was a bit of a lads’ night, so not sure how much you would have enjoyed it, but at least you wouldn’t have had to go sitting in a restaurant on your own like a saddo.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I actually had fun.’
‘You don’t need to say that just so I won’t feel guilty.’
‘I’m not.’ I saw the look of horror on his face and laughed. ‘Seriously, it was nice! I sat at the bar and had a drink and then I went and saw a movie that you would never in a hundred years have wanted to go to. It was actually kind of great. I might do it again soon.’
He still looked dubious, but managed to shrug his shoulders. ‘As long as you’re all right. Still, we should arrange something with the other couples soon. Once Jonno’s wife’s recovered from the birth, maybe. It would be good to give you an airing.’ I wondered briefly at the idea that I was a cupboard, or a wound. ‘Speaking of couple things, Crispin said he went to a cracking wedding the other week and thought the venue might be good for us. I thought we could go down this weekend, take a look?’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know – Somerset somewhere. Durleigh? Thurloxton?’
The words meant nothing to me, but I thought of uncrossed items on my to-do list and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Sounds great!’
‘Perfect. Maybe we could stay in a little B&B nearby, make a night of it.’
I nodded. ‘Sure!’
‘Great. Actually, I’m swamped today – would you mind having a look at places? I’ll send you a link to the venue when I get into work. Speaking of which …’ He hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. ‘I should get going. Do me a favor and put the kettle on? There’s no chance I’m getting through this morning without a brew in me. I’ve got Ken the Shredder at 9.30 wanting to go over the McMannon case.’
Jenny Sparrow Knows the Future Page 18
