What time is it in London? Michelle counted forward. Ten at night. Too late?
She craned her head towards the bedrooms. Harry and Rosie had both gone down for a nap, and, unusually, both seemed to be asleep. Benedict had gone to Aishe’s to tutor Gulliver. Aishe herself, Michelle knew, would have left to go to the animal shelter. She wondered what they had said to each other as they passed in the doorway.
Michelle leant against the kitchen bench until the pressure of the quiet house and her need to unburden became too much to bear. She grabbed the phone and dialled.
‘Hello?’ It was Anselo, sounding both breathless and hopeful.
‘Hi.’ Michelle felt as if she should apologise. It seemed that whoever Anselo wanted to be on the line right now, it almost certainly wasn’t her.
Sure enough.
‘Michelle,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Hi.’
‘Let me take a wild guess,’ said Michelle. ‘Not all is well?’
‘Fuck …’ Anselo breathed the word out. ‘Can’t get any worse, I suppose.’
Michelle felt a clutch of panic. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Darrell hasn’t—?’
‘Hasn’t what?’
Crap, thought Michelle. Oh well, in for a penny …
‘Hasn’t done the deed.’
‘Who the fuck knows?’ Anselo sounded less resigned now and more angry. ‘I don’t even know where the fuck she is!’
‘You’re kidding me! Darrell’s run away? That’s so—’ Michelle struggled for words. ‘So un-Darrell-like.’
‘Is it?’
Bitter as well as angry, thought Michelle. And fair enough, too.
‘Are you sure you have no idea where she’s gone?’
‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘I think she’s gone home. To New Zealand. To her parents.’
‘Have you phoned them?’ said Michelle.
Anselo made an exasperated sound. ‘What the hell would I say? Hi, I’m your daughter’s new Gypsy boyfriend. If she’s there, could you ask her if she’s planning to abort our illegitimate child?’
‘Fair point,’ said Michelle. ‘And to be honest, I think they’d be the last people she’d go to at a time like this.’
Michelle knew that Darrell’s parents and her own mother were cut from similar cloth —– the kind of synthetic, flocked upholstery fabric that felt like hell against your skin but which would wear until the crack of doom. And which matched the curtains.
‘Yeah? Why the hell would she go all that way then?’ But then he realised. ‘Right. Fuck. She’s gone to visit his grave. She’s gone to commune with his fucking ghost and ask what he thinks she should do.’ Anselo’s voice rose. ‘If the spirit of the dead husband tells her to do it, she will, won’t she? She’ll have it done there. She’ll bloody well have to. If she waits much longer, she’ll be too far gone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Michelle. ‘You poor sod.’
She felt a dull ache in her gut, a mix of sadness and frustration and fury at her friend’s selfishness and, in Michelle’s firm opinion, sheer idiocy. If I didn’t have the children, she thought, I’d bloody well get on a plane right now. Screw Chad and his make-believe problems. This is a man in real need.
‘Have you got anyone else you can talk to?’ she asked. ‘Family?’
‘If Darrell didn’t want to tell me,’ said Anselo, ‘then I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want every man and his dog to know. Which is what will happen within nanoseconds in my family. We leave Twitter for dead.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, Darrell lost all her rights when she fucked off without a backwards glance! Tell someone,’ Michelle insisted. ‘You’ll go mad if you don’t.’
‘That point was passed a while back,’ said Anselo. ‘But — I’ll think about it. Thanks.’
Michelle ended the call and immediately dialled another number.
‘Connie? You’re coming round for dinner. Too bad — Phil can have pizza and beer. Well, he can Zumba it off tomorrow. Do him good! Seven o’clock. Be here.’
And she hung up feeling marginally better.
‘He’s hoarding — beans?’
‘Yes, Connie. The musical fruit that makes you toot. Dried ones. Sacks of them. My father-in-law, Lowell Lawrence — seventy years old, former president of some whacking great bank, lifelong Republican and stalwart of the country club — has turned his study into the proverbial hill of beans.’
Michelle took a swig from her wine glass. ‘The study in which he is now also sleeping. And taking his meals. And from which, in fact, he is refusing to emerge.’
‘Like Great Aunt Ada,’ said Connie.
Michelle blinked. ‘In Cold Comfort Farm?’
‘A definitive comic classic.’
‘You scare me sometimes,’ said Michelle. ‘The difference between Lowell and Great Aunt Ada is that the latter was a manipulative old bitch, who knew exactly what she was doing. Whereas Lowell, Lord love him — yes, all right, he may have always been slightly odd about oils and exercise, but with this, he’s left odd and bought a one-way ticket on the fast train to Loontown. No wonder Virginia has been beside herself.’
Connie broke a tiny piece off her bread roll. ‘What do you think is behind it?’
‘I’ve ceased to wonder about what drives the men of the Lawrence family,’ said Michelle. ‘Whatever it is, it obviously lies dormant, and only emerges when it is least convenient for everyone around them.’
‘Are you going to tell Chad?’
‘He said no contact unless it was a matter of life or death.’
‘But his poor father,’ said Connie. ‘And his poor mother. Would he not want to know that they’re suffering?’
‘No!’ said Michelle. ‘Fuck him! If he thinks he can check out of his life and then slot back in without consequence, then he deserves to have reality kick him in the teeth.’
Connie was breaking the tiny piece of bread roll into even tinier pieces. ‘Is that really fair?’
‘Fair?’ Michelle practically levitated off her chair. ‘Fair? Was dragging me the entire breadth of the country without consulting me fair? Was working all the hours God gave and leaving me all alone in a strange place fair? Was abandoning his wife and two small children for a month to find himself fair? And that’s only what he’s done to us. He’s consistently ignored his parents’ phone calls. He wouldn’t even go home for his father’s seventieth birthday party. Where in that picture do you see him being anything that even vaguely resembles fair?’
‘He wouldn’t go to his father’s birthday party?’
Michelle drew herself up. ‘Why did you choose to mention that and ignore the myriad injustices I have suffered?’
‘Because you can take care of yourself,’ said Connie. ‘It’s very interesting, don’t you think? From what you’re saying, Chad has been devoted to his father. Why on earth would he choose to not be with him on his birthday?’
‘Are you going to eat that bread? No? Then stop manhandling it.’ Michelle sat back and let out a put-upon sigh. ‘I don’t know. Should I care?’
‘Did anything — happen?’ Connie frowned. ‘Before Chad decided to switch jobs?’
‘Don’t you start!’ Michelle glared across the table. ‘My ex-best friend, Darrell, has already insinuated that Chad ran like a hare because his father became ill. He had a mild stroke, that’s all. He was sixty-nine. At that age, it’s not exactly a shock, is it? I mean, it was hardly like Darrell’s poor husband, who dropped stone dead of heart failure at thirty-two.’
‘Good gosh! Really?’
‘Why are everyone else’s misfortunes so much more compelling than my own?’
‘Thirty-two?’ said Connie. ‘How awful for her. I can see why she might be nervous about having a baby.’
‘Can you now?’
‘You know,’ said Connie, ‘if you tried, just once, to look at things from other people’s points of view instead of your own, you might find they seem very different.’
‘Well, thank you, Miss Dalai Lama
.’
Connie let her sulk for a while, then said, ‘Have you ever lost anyone?’
‘I lost my mother in Kirkcaldie and Staines department store once,’ said Michelle. ‘To be fair, though, I was trying quite hard to do it.’
‘Has anyone you cared for been close to death?’
‘There was that time when Chad taped over the final episode of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’
Connie stared in silence until Michelle scowled.
‘So what? Are you saying this is some kind of rite of passage in the psychological development of a mature human being? That I’m lacking something vital because no one close to me has bitten the big kumara?’
‘I’m sorry — bit the what?’
‘Carked it. Snuffed it. Shuffled off.’
‘Oh. No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that death is the thing that we fear most. More than pain, more than failure, more than loneliness. It is such a terrible thing because it is absolute and final. Once you are gone, you are gone forever.’
‘Connie, I know that.’
‘No, that’s my point.’ Connie leaned forward and tapped the table for emphasis. ‘You don’t know that. You know it intellectually but you don’t know it. You don’t feel it. Death hasn’t touched you, hasn’t even brushed by you. Until it does, you will never truly understand that fear.’
This time, Michelle’s expression was not sulky but thoughtful.
‘Something nasty in the woodshed,’ she said. ‘Once we’ve seen it, our lives will never be the same.’
‘Yes!’ said Connie. ‘Exactly! We will never be free of that fear. And sometimes, if we’re not careful, we can let it shape and colour everything. It becomes so that we feel nothing is more important, that we have no other task but to elude it.’
‘Great Aunt Ada hid in her room for decades and forced everyone to wait on her hand and foot. While I admire her selfish bloody-mindedness, I’m not sure hiding would be my thing.’
Connie smiled. ‘Nor would running, I imagine.’
‘Is that what you think Chad’s doing? And Darrell?’
‘I can’t say.’ Connie shook her head. ‘I don’t know either of them.’
‘What are the other options? Give in, I suppose? Or fight?’
‘“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?’
Michelle reached over and topped up Connie’s wine glass, then refilled her own.
‘That would absolutely be me,’ she said. ‘I’d be like the Black Knight in The Holy Grail, lying there with every limb hacked off, yelling “I’m invincible!” with Death yelling back “You’re a loony!”’
Connie picked up her wine glass but didn’t drink.
‘I’ve been wondering what my life would have been like if I’d been braver,’ she said.
‘Connie.’
Michelle’s tone demanded that her friend look at her. When she did, Michelle smiled and raised her glass.
‘Our lives aren’t over yet!’
24
Aishe woke suddenly, her heart hammering. She’d had that dream again, the one with the wave. It always started out so benignly — she and Gulliver would be on a beach, somewhere wild and remote like England’s Dorset coast, in the shelter of a tall, rocky cliff. The weather would be fine and calm, and they would be the only two people there. They never spoke, but would stroll along in companionable silence.
Then — as if the dream was a movie that cut abruptly to another scene — Aishe would find herself at the top of the cliff, looking over the edge, down at the now tiny figure of Gulliver still on the beach. He was usually gathering stones or sticks, with his back, always, in every dream, to the sea. The sea, to Aishe’s horror, would slowly but inexorably begin to rise.
The Aishe in the dream knew that all Gulliver could hear were the small waves still spreading with a gentle hiss on the sand. He had no clue that coming up behind him was a wave so huge it would break right over him and sweep him away. The sea, which was swelling and growing like a monstrous living creature, would seize her boy and suck him under. He’d have no chance.
In the dream, she would try to call out to him, but found she could make no sound. Her mouth would be wide open, her throat straining, but she was mute. Behind Gulliver, the wave towered and she could not save him. Then, always, she woke up.
That was the worst part. In her head, she knew it had only been a dream. But at that moment of waking, every muscle was taut with fear, her heartbeat and breathing were so rapid, she had to fight to control them. Most terrible of all was a sense of loss so acute that she could feel her chest swell with the urge to scream, to lie down and pummel the ground and howl in grief and pain.
The first time she’d had the dream, Gulliver had been two years old. Frank had been asleep next to her and she’d thrown herself into his half-awake arms, sobbing and shaking. Now, even though she knew she was alone in her bed, she stretched out one hand and rested it in the space where another body could be. She ran her hand over the slight dip in the mattress where other shoulders had not so recently lain.
What’s the matter with me? she wondered. How come I can be so decisively intent on achieving one thing, then manage to sabotage it so royally? It’s like I start off an assassin, and end up a suicide bomber. All the territory I work so hard to secure gets blown to smithereens, leaving nothing but a smoking crater.
Seducing Benedict had been the right idea, she thought. There was no way I could risk him being the lever that prised Gulliver further away from me. I had immediate success there, which I managed to almost as quickly completely derail. And what’s worse, I knew I was doing it. I deliberately put the grenade between my teeth and pulled the pin. Even then, any sensible person would have thrown it away and dived for cover. But I just stood there and let my whole world go whoomph!
The evening at Gulliver’s rock school had been a kamikaze mission from start to finish. She had arrived there suspicious, angry and threatened, and that was the high point. She supposed she should be grateful that it wasn’t more catastrophic, but that didn’t make her feel any less stupid, or any less of a failure.
Aishe hadn’t worn her gold latex mini-dress. Although she knew she could still fit it, she’d suspected that comparisons with Katy Perry might be made, and ‘juvenile pop princess’ wasn’t really the look she was after. Smoking hot mama, yes. Candy girl, no. Instead, she’d walked down her stairs in skin-tight jeans, high-heeled cowboy boots and a pink t-shirt from the animal shelter that was purposely a size too small. Aishe knew her tits looked incredible in it, just as the vision of her arse in these jeans had been known to make respectable men moan low as she walked by.
Gulliver, waiting at the front door, bass in its black case slung around his shoulder, had reacted with a slightly pained expression. ‘Are you coming dressed like that?’
‘Why?’
‘Bit OTT, don’t you think?’
Her son, Aishe had observed, was wearing nothing that could possibly offend: a baggy blue t-shirt with some impenetrable logo on it and straight-legged jeans slung a little low on the hips, but not so far as to show actual underwear.
‘I’ll go change into a twinset and pearls then, shall I?’
‘Just don’t blame me if Eddie hits on you.’
Eddie is not the one I want to notice me, Aishe had thought. Then again, maybe a bit of rivalry wouldn’t be a bad thing.
For the length of the twenty-minute drive, Aishe had stewed about whether she had a rival, or if Izzy genuinely was that most suspicious of phrases — just a friend. She’d been dying to interrogate Gulliver, but knew he was smart enough to wonder why. That would never do. Gulliver could never know anything about her and Benedict.
The rock school practised together in a big open room above Eddie’s guitar shop. It was an excellent shop, Aishe had noted with approval, as she’d followed Gulliver through it to the stairs. Eddie was a man who was clearly head over heels in love with this instrument. There was nothing mass-produced here, only lovingly c
rafted guitars, each with its own personality and quirks. She’d stopped briefly to peer more closely at a red and white one that seemed unusually small.
‘It’s called a Ritchie Valens,’ a voice with a New York twang had said. ‘Know why?’
Aishe had turned. Eddie wasn’t wearing his usual pork pie hat, but instead had on a British bowler, pulled low on his head. He’d teamed this with a wide-cuffed white shirt, black jeans and a Fairisle vest, which made him look like a cross between Alex in A Clockwork Orange and Suggs from Madness. Not having previously given him more than a passing glance, Aishe had seen then that he was handsome. Dark hair streaked with grey, bright blue eyes, a strong chin and an infectious smile. Not young — early fifties, she guessed. But not bad. Not bad at all.
‘Because it’s good for playing Mexican music?’
‘Nope. Because it fits in an airplane locker. Tasteless but true.’ Eddie had stuck out his hand. ‘You’re Gulliver’s mother. He’s got a lot of talent.’
Aishe had returned the handshake. ‘I think he has, too. But then, as you say, I’m his mother.’
Eddie had gestured towards the stairs. ‘Come on up.’
He’d let her go first, and not, Aishe had been pretty sure, for reasons of old-fashioned courtesy. She’d made sure to swing her rear just a little more than usual.
The room was large and dimly lit. Aishe’s gaze had immediately zeroed in on Gulliver, standing in one corner unpacking his bass — and talking to Benedict. Beside Benedict, but obscured by Gulliver, Aishe had caught a glimpse of fair curly hair. Izzy. Had to be.
Aishe had found herself chanting under her breath: Don’t let her be pretty. Don’t let her be pretty.
Gulliver had moved to one side.
Shit. Izzy was gorgeous, and in that entirely natural, utterly infuriating way. No make-up, just good, high colour on flawless skin. Masses of blonde curls with caramel highlights. Terrific figure, tall with endless legs and a generous bust. And young. No more than twenty-five. Inside Aishe, a red mist had begun to rise.
The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence Page 20
