The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

by Sarah May

  Findlay looked up, saw his mother, then shot his left foot out, catching Arthur just below the knee. ‘Why didn’t Dad come?’ he asked. Then, before she had time to answer. ‘Where’s Flo?’

  ‘Flo? She’s here with me.’

  Findlay relaxed and gave Arthur another kick.

  Kate put the car seat down by the dining tablestill obscured by breakfast cereals and a copy of A Choice of Ethical Careers.

  Arthur dropped onto the floor, panting, staring with bloodshot chlorine eyes at the gas-effect fire, which was on.

  ‘Thinking of a change in career?’ Kate called out, wanting to smooth things over.

  Jessica reappeared in the kitchen doorway, the water from a pack of Hertz frankfurters she was holding leaking over her suit jacket.

  Kate held up A Choice of Ethical Careers, which Jessica peered at while sucking her fingers.

  ‘Oh, that’s Ellie’s,’ she said coldly.

  Kate was about to put the book back on the dining table when she saw the St Anthony’s letter, covered in a trail of milk. She scanned through it twice. ‘Oh, my GodJessica!’

  Getting her foot caught round one of the table legs, she tripped then made her way over to the kitchen. ‘Jessica…’

  Jessica, who was dropping frankfurters into a pan of water, didn’t turn round. ‘What?’

  ‘Arthur got in.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I saw the letter just now on the table. ARTHUR GOT IN.’

  ‘Ohyeah.’

  Jessica was staring strangely at her. Kate let out a solitary, hysterical laugh. ‘You must be so pleased.’

  ‘YeahI didn’t think he’d get in. At least him and Findlay will be together,’ Jessica said, smiling for the first time since Kate’s arrival.

  Kate continued to stare stupidly at her, trying to think of something to say.

  ‘This is fucking hopeless,’ Jessica muttered, trying to scoop the frankfurters out of the pan. ‘It was Peter who used to do all the cooking. God, I miss borscht,’ she sighed.

  Kate smiled awkwardly. She’d never heard Jessica refer to Peter before.

  ‘Does Findlay want one before he goes?’ Jessica said, dropping them into hot-dog rolls, which became immediately saturated with the boiling water still running off the frankfurters.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Kate said quickly. ‘We’ve got to get going.’

  The smell of burnt onions was rapidly filling not only the kitchen but the entire maisonette, and somewhere in the background a baby started crying just as the burnt onions finally got round to triggering the maisonette’s decades-old, fugged-up smoke alarm.

  ‘Fuck,’ Jessica said, taking the pan off the heat and opening the kitchen window.

  Findlay and Arthur appeared in the doorway, the skin around their eyes puffed up from overexposure to chlorineand excitement at the smoke alarm.

  Jessica took a swipe at the alarm with the tea towel until it stopped ringing and was left hanging from the ceiling by two wires.

  ‘Mum—’ Findlay started.

  Then Jessica cut in with, ‘D’you want me to get her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, Flo, she’s…’

  ‘Oh.’ Now the smoke alarm had stopped, Kate became aware that her daughter was cryingscreaming in fact.

  ‘I’ll get her,’ Jessica said when Kate showed no sign of movement.

  She reappeared a minute later holding Flo against her chest. ‘You’re sure you don’t want to stay for tea?’

  ‘Sorrywe’ve got to run.’

  ‘Maybe another time,’ Jessica said, suddenly desperate. Then, ‘She’s gorgeous, Kate,’ staring down at Flo and running her forefinger down the length of the tiny nose.

  Without responding to this, Kate yelled, ‘Findlaywe need to get home.’

  Findlay appeared in the doorway, pushing his damp fringe off his face as he started to slowly pull on his shoes.

  Flo immediately started to cry again as soon as Kate took her from Jessica, who followed them downstairs.

  Findlay was singing loudly, ‘Who let the dogs out? Whowhowho…?’

  Kate thought she was going to explode.

  At last, Findlay was buckled in and Flo was staring with fretful, wet-eyed wonder at the felt carousel dangling about twenty centimetres directly above her that Kate now activated to calm herself, before getting into the driver’s seat to the chiming melody of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’.

  Jessica tapped on the window. ‘Are you still on for the PRC tonight?’

  ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘Probably. I’ve spoken to Ellie.’

  ‘See you around eight.’

  Before Jessica had time to say anything else, Kate gave a wave and the car slid out from under the streetlight, executing a fraught U-turn before driving at high speed back down to the lower end of Prendergast Road.

  Chapter 16

  Jessica watched the Audi until it disappeared downhill by the Pentecostal church where some information about Christ’s Second Coming was written in black marker penin such large letters she could read it from where she was standing on the pavement. When Kate’s car had gone, she looked up at the windows of the maisonette she’d bought six months agothat she was going to have to put a lot of effort into calling homeand instinctively sniffed her hands, which smelt of Flo. Her insides lurched as they had done when she’d first picked up Flo. Up until then she had never thought of wanting more children.

  Ellie appeared like a ghost at an upstairs window.

  Jessica waved, but Ellie didn’t wave back.

  Ellie shut the curtains.

  Looking up the street in either direction as if waiting for somebody long overdue, Jessica sighed and went back indoors, walking over some stray rose stalks and chrysanthemum leaves that must have blown under the florist’s door into her hallway. After six months, she was almost impervious to the scent of the flowersall except the lilies, which gave off a carnivorously humid smell that unsettled her.

  The maisonette needed painting but paint charts didn’t feature large in the life of the Palmers. Paint chartslike a lot of thingswere for other people.

  Pushing hair that hadn’t been cut for over a year out of her eyesand catching the smell of Flo on her hands againJessica looked down the street one last time, watched two cars pass the junction with Harlow Road, then shut the door.

  Upstairs, Arthur was on the sofa watching TV, his hair damp with sweat.

  She gave him two wet hot dogs smeared in ketchup, which he accepted with the comment, ‘One in every four people on the planet’s Chinese.’

  ‘I’ll be back in five minutes,’ Jessica said to him in response to this. ‘I’m just going to check on Ellie.’

  Checking on Ellie was something Arthur was so used to her doing that he barely noticed as she left the room and headed towards Ellie’s bedroom with a second plate of wet hot dogs smeared in ketchup.

  Ellie was sitting at her desk and the computer was on. The only part of her daughter that Jessica could see from behind the huge Mastermind chair was her crepuscular left hand, moving the mouse backwards and forwards.

  Ellie’s room was immaculate, the tidiest in the houseas if she was biding her time until a better alternative came along and keeping the room tidy so as not to leave any traces behind when she’d gone.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jessica asked

  ‘What does it look like?’

  She walked over and stared at Ellie’s hair; so fine it was bristling in the screen light. She had to put a lot of energy into overcoming the urge to put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and say, ‘Ellie, you do love me, don’t you?’

  ‘Looks violent,’ she said, casually balancing the plate of hot dogs on the edge of the desk.

  Ellie looked sharply at them. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Tea,’ Jessica ventured. Then, to change the subject, nodded at the screen. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘That?’ Ellie turned back to the screen. ‘That’s Baghdad after t
he American ceasefire.’

  ‘But they’re still fighting,’ Jessica said, making a show of peering at the screen while trying not to actually look.

  Ellie groaned. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘There was no ceasefire. This is footage from unembedded Al-Jazeera reporters.’

  Jessica tried to think of something to say to this that wouldn’t irritate Ellie. ‘How was school today?’

  ‘Shit, actually. Apart from Mr Hunter. I thought he wasn’t in today because he wasn’t there at the beginning of the lesson and I hadn’t seen him around school. Then he did come in and everything…’ Ellie stopped, suddenly aware of Jessica standing there. ‘We learnt how to make a nuclear bomb in chemistry.’

  ‘You did?’ Jessica tried not to sound distractedsounding distracted when you talked to Ellie was something that triggered her anger.

  Ellie nodded, not noting the distraction. ‘According to Mr Edmonds, it’s not nuclear bombs we should be worried about, it’s plutonium; plutonium in the hands of the wrong peoplesay an amateur terrorist. Getting your hands on Grade A plutonium is far easier than getting your hands on a nuclear bomb.’ Ellie paused.

  Nervous, Jessica picked up one of the china fairies from the collection on Ellie’s desk; she had had them since she was five years old.

  ‘He mentioned your bookHow To Survive A Nuclear War.’

  ‘He did? I thought it was out of print.’

  ‘God, you’re so negative. Anyway…he called it a post-Apocalyptic etiquette guide.’ Ellie chuckled. ‘I thought that was pretty good.’

  Unable to decide whether Ellie was being cruel or not, Jessica pulled Ellie’s copy of How To Survive A Nuclear War towards her. The copy was well read and had a stamp inside from London Borough of Hackney Libraries: withdrawn for sale.

  ‘Put it down,’ Ellie said, fractious.

  Ignoring her, Jessica flicked through the book until she got to the author’s photograph on the back flap. She’d forgotten about the photograph.

  There she wasthe same age as Ellie nowstanding beneath a cherry tree in a suburban back garden with coauthor, Lieutenant Browne and Peter’s mother, Mrs Kluszynski, flanking her on either side. ‘That’s me,’ she said, sounding shy and unsure, inadvertently holding it out to Ellie for verification.

  ‘You look happyin the picture,’ Ellie observed, hoping it sounded like an accusation rather than a compliment.

  ‘I do, don’t I?’

  ‘That’s Grandma…’

  ‘D’you remember her?’

  ‘Not really. I waswhatfour or something when she died?’ Ellie paused, looking more closely at the photograph. ‘I remember going to Poland to visit her that time, thoughjust before she died. There were all those ski lifts running up through the meadows past her house. They scared me for some reason. I don’t know why. I didn’t mind them in the daytime when they were working and people used them to take picnics and stuff up the mountain, but I hated it when they shut the machinery off at night and the lifts just used to hang there, swaying. They made this awful squealing noise.’ Ellie shuddered.

  ‘It was a big deal for Grandma, going back to Poland when the wall came down. She left there when she was only your age. The house she bought right on the edge of town belonged to a cousin she’d kept in touch with. I think she was happyin the end. Second time round she got to do Poland on her terms.’ Jessica paused. ‘It’s funny, that time you remember going over to visit her: we were half thinking of moving there ourselves.’

  ‘Whatyou and Dad? To Poland?’

  ‘All of usyes.’

  ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was just this idea we had at the timemoving to Poland.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I think we got overwhelmed by the idea of learning Polish.’

  ‘Didn’t Dad speak Polish?’

  ‘Some…badly.’

  Jessica put the book down, aware that Ellie was watching her hands as they attempted to restore it to its original position on the deskits exact original position. Ellie was very particular about things like that.

  In the silence that followed, Jessica heard herself saying, ‘Just imagine…if that had happened. If we’d all moved to Poland. Everything would have been different.’ She realised, too late, what she’d just said.

  ‘Yeah, we’d all be speaking Polish.’ Ellie paused. ‘And Dad would still be here.’

  Now Ellie was being cruel, and cruelty towards Jessicasince Peter’s deathwas something they had both subconsciously decided was permissible. But this was too much. She stared at her daughter, rendered suddenly helpless by a memory of Peter turning to look at her in the car as they were driving. ‘Ellie…’

  Ellie swung away from her, back to face the screen.

  ‘What you saidthat wasn’t fair,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Well, maybe if you’d loved him more, it would never have happened anyway.’

  ‘If I’d loved him more? I loved him—’

  ‘But not enough. If you’d loved him enough—’

  ‘Stop it! Stop it, Ellieyou don’t know what you’re saying.’

  Ellie spun round suddenly and they stared at each other. ‘I do know what I’m saying, and I know love.’

  ‘You don’t know love.’

  ‘I doI do know love.’

  Relieved, Jessica heard Arthur’s bare feet slapping at high speed up the stairs.

  ‘Mum,’ he said from the bedroom doorway, breathless, his eyes wide open. ‘There’s some naked animals downstairs and they’re doing stuff to each other.’

  ‘Downstairs?’ Jessica looked quickly at Elliewho was looking at Arthur as if she was trying to weigh up the collateral damage her five-year-old brother was likely to cause with access to Grade A plutoniumthen back to Arthur.

  ‘On the TV,’ he added, worried that he was responsible for the weird looks on his mum and sister’s faces and the fact that they’d been shouting. He wasn’t allowed to do or say anything that made weird looks happen to his sister’s face.

  ‘OkayI’ll be down in a second,’ Jessica said.

  Arthur, reassured, went back downstairs.

  ‘I’ve got nothing more to say to you,’ Ellie announced.

  ‘But you can’t just say things like that. There isn’t the space in our life together for you to say those things.’

  ‘What life?’

  ‘It’s never going to workif you harbour those sorts of thoughts towards me.’

  ‘I’m not harbouring them, I’m saying them, and now I’ve got nothing more to say.’

  It’s true, Jessica thought, staring at her daughter in horror. The things we give birth to have the power to annihilate us. ‘Ellie—’

  ‘And you can take that with you,’ Ellie said, elbowing the plate with the hot dogs on it that Jessica had put down on the edge of the desk.

  ‘I’ll leave it up here in case you change your mind and want them later.’

  ‘I won’t want them later.’

  ‘You might.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Ellie snapped.

  ‘Okay…okay,’ Jessica heard herself saying, as if a long way away, helpless, suddenly exhausted and close to tears. ‘Okay,’ she said again, picking up the plate.

  She went downstairs and watched from the lounge doorway as two polar bears finished mating to David Attenborough’s voice-over. ‘Don’t worrythey’re just loving each other,’ she said to Arthur, who still had Ellie’s old science goggles on.

  Arthur stared blankly at her then back at the screen. ‘That’s love?’

  Chapter 17

  ‘I was about to send out a search party,’ Margery said as Kate walked through the front door. ‘I thought you were only going up the roadaren’t you meant to be going out at eight? It’s gone seven now.’

  Without responding to this, Kate said to Findlay, ‘Go upstairs and start running the bath.’ Then, turning to Margery. ‘Why are you whispering?’


  ‘Robert’s asleep.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The lounge.’

  As the sound of running water started coming from upstairs, Kate went through to the lounge where the curtains had been drawn, the gas fire put on and the lights dimmed.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ Margery hissed, following her in.

  The TV was onwith the sound offand Kate watched, distracted, as two polar bears finished matingdid animals orgasm?and started killing a seal instead. The huge white bears collaborated with far more grace and ease over death than they had just a second ago when copulating.

  Sighing, she turned the volume up and put the lights back on full.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Margery carried on hissingloudly now, to make herself heard above the TV. ‘He’s only just gone to sleep, bless him.’

  Ignoring this, Kate put Flo, in her car seat, on the floor by Robert’s feet and, sweeping past Margery, went to retrieve a bottle from the fridge.

  In the lounge, Margery grappled with the TV controls, finally managing to turn the volume down again. She was about to start tampering with the dimmer switches when Kate walked back into the lounge.

  Without commenting on the TV’s diminished volume, she knelt down and unstrapped Flo, depositing her viciously in Robert’s lap.

  Robert tried to pull himself up, knocking the bottle of milk off the arm of the sofa and onto the floor. ‘Shit, what was that?’ he said, blearily.

  ‘Here, give her to me,’ Margery said, nudging herself onto the sofa beside him and hauling Flo, who was frowning, out of his lap. ‘I told her you were asleep,’ she added.

  ‘I’m going upstairs to give Findlay his bath,’ Kate said, yelling, ‘Finn, you can turn that off now.’

  Robert sat up, still stunned with sleep, and watched her leave the room before getting slowly to his feet and stumbling after her. ‘Kate—’

  Margery listened to him walk unsteadily upstairs, slip on a tread, then carry on, calling out, ‘I’ll do Finn, you go and get yourself ready.’