by Kitty Wilson
Through some magical psychic luck, last night I had dreamt of a secret stash tin that I had lost as a teen. It is nothing short of a miracle that I found it upon waking today, exactly where my dream had said, in the plimsolls. I remember losing it fifteen years ago; many tears had fallen as I tore my room apart.
I stopped smoking forever ago, when Marsha was born, bar occasional but rare parties and moments of weak will, but with today being my mum’s birthday and our first family get-together since the tabloid stories exploded, I reckon today constitutes both.
Tin in hand, I tiptoe down the stairs, in the most exaggerated fashion with arms wide, hands splayed, down through the front door and into the garden. If I avoid the kitchen I should be safe. My parents won’t expect to see me until noon. One of the advantages of being subject to such low expectations.
I sit myself in the low-hanging curved bough of a favourite tree, an old pine that had proved my haven for years. Here I played Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows and Fairy Kingdom as a child, later becoming Ariel to the tree’s Prospero, Banquo to the tree’s Macbeth.
Currently though I am channelling my adolescence rather than my childhood and am wearing the most ridiculous short pyjama set that I had when I was sixteen. I’ve grown a little since then and my boobs are spilling over my top, and my shorts feel like they are extracting a kidney. I’m completing this high-fashion ensemble by being wrapped in an ancient, scratchy check blanket that I think has been around since my great-grandma’s time. It may still have smallpox.
I make and light the spliff and lean back against the trunk. Familiarity waves over me as I inhale.
My mind tracks back to yesterday. Any chance of paying back Chardonnay seems pretty weak right now. Am I going to panic? Thanks to my find – currently coursing in through my mouth and down into my lungs – probably not until tomorrow.
‘Still smoking?’ A deep male voice speaks behind me. The voice is vaguely familiar but out of place here. I spin around, my blanket slipping slightly with my movement, revealing a sliver of Snoopy chatting with Charlie Brown.
What the hell?
‘Rory?’
‘Hey, how you doing? I didn’t expect to see you today, but one sniff of that and I figured you must be home. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be Rose.’ He smiles and I remember the last time I saw him and my heart cracks a little.
‘Yep, back for the birthday.’ I wave the spliff at him.
‘Nah, you’re okay.’ He shakes his head, his dark red hair longer than I remember. He’s allowed his curls to develop instead of shearing them back and trying to pretend they didn’t exist as he had at eighteen. It suits him. He was always puckish but just a smidge. Willing to do as he was told, not go full carnival chaos. Mind you, Rory wasn’t all bad; from what I remember it was his girlfriend Jessica I had struggled with. She was one of those women that always seemed at ease with herself. A state of being I can only dream of. What must that feel like? To wake up every morning and not worry about whether you’re adequate.
‘Whose birthday? Not yours. Isn’t your birthday in spring? March?’ Rory’s question interrupts my reminiscing. How the hell does he remember that?
I remember the pitch of his keen. That will stay with me for ever.
‘Yeah, it’s Mum’s.’
‘Your dad said he’d be home with family, he didn’t say it was your mum’s birthday. How is she?’
‘Difficult. But still the better of the two.’
Rory smiles wryly. He saw them in action many moons ago. If he can remember my birthday then he can likely remember them shrieking in the driveway one afternoon as he dropped me back at the end of term, my mum throwing a tennis racquet at my dad’s head. A beautiful snapshot of middle-class dysfunction.
‘What you doing with my dad anyway?’
‘Work thing.’ He doesn’t make any move away so I push for more.
‘You’re a chef? Or in media?’ Both surprise me.
‘Neither, reputation management.’ He leans against the bough of the tree and smiles at me. Some men grow into their looks and Rory Walters definitely has, but if he’s working with Dad, that doesn’t speak well to his character.
‘Ah, The purest treasure mortal times afford / Is spotless reputation,’ I quote.
‘Eh?’
‘Never mind. Reputation management? I didn’t know that was a thing.’ I manage not to say it sounds a bit weaselly.
‘Yep, I got in early but it has exploded as an industry now.’
‘You’re going to have your work cut out with my dad.’
‘Yeah, I know. But we can get his optics back on track if he does what he’s told to.’ A laugh escapes my lips. Standing, I drop the end of my smoke to the ground and wrap my blanket around me, aware that I am far from decent and for some reason, caring about it.
‘Come on then, I’ll walk you to the front door, but do you mind ringing the bell and pretending you haven’t seen me? It’ll give me a couple of hours more respite.’
He grins again and nods. I’d never noticed all those years ago how green his eyes are.
Rory.
I hadn’t expected to see Belle today. In fact, I haven’t seen her for years. She’d been a funny thing at university, somehow managing to combine wild with aloof, party girl with snippets of intellectual brilliance – on the rare occasions she turned up.
I had been fascinated by her back then – she was everything my life wasn’t. But for all of her privilege she had always reminded me of a world-worn baby fox on its guard.
I hadn’t been able to put her into any kind of box. I was fond of boxes, assessing people and who they were, where they sat. It had given order to life. She had something of the indefinable. I knew even if I squashed her into that poor little rich girl box she would fight her way out, battering the edges down, refusing to be contained, screaming that there was more.
We had done the same course, English Literature, and our paths had crossed many times. She had been in the same halls as Jessica, they had shared a kitchen, but very little else, and I had found myself driving her home more than once. It had become a habit; with her parents so close to Bristol and mine living there it became an end-of-term routine we fell into. I would drive and she would moan about spending time at her parents, rhapsodise or complain about her latest boyfriend, panic over essays and later her dissertation. For all of her doubt she had a mind that worked so quickly, fair racing past mine.
I have often wondered what happened to her, and when her father’s agent had reached out, curiosity had been awakened. What was she doing now? Who was she? Had she changed? Smoking a joint outside her parents’ house whilst wearing some ludicrous outfit that merged both aging granny and pre-pubescent teen was definitely the Belle I remembered.
I was pleased to see her, but it was bittersweet. I had imagined her trotting the globe, capturing hearts and minds, pushing boundaries and opening worlds in whichever field she had chosen rather than getting stoned in her parents’ garden. But then who am I to judge? And who am I to assume that because she’s home on her mum’s birthday she has not made something of her life, is not happy, successful? Judgement, that was the old me, putting-people-into-boxes me. The Rory that thought if you made the right choices, did the right thing, then you couldn’t go wrong.
I should have been more Belle.
Having given Belle a good five minutes to make her escape upstairs, I press the buzzer.
‘Hello, hello!’ Nick Wilde flings the door open and flourishes his arms, welcoming me into his home. His trademark blond hair is sticking out at all angles atop his ruddy face. A large glass of red in his hand.
It’s eleven in the morning.
Great.
I follow him through to a huge kitchen. The house itself is old and sprawling, a little neglected in places but squeaking with generational wealth, whilst the kitchen itself is new money, achingly modern. Sleek NASA-like appliances, razor-sharp lighting juxtaposes with a blazing fire encased by old stone, and a
huge, worn wooden table that could have easily seated the Last Supper and had room for some more.
Cyndi, Belle’s mother, is sat at the table, and her features fuse themselves into a generous welcome the minute she sees me. Performance art. Which, like the ridges, scrapings and stains on the kitchen table, I suspect has been perfected over the generations.
For two hours I sit there listening to why Nick isn’t to blame for his reputation being in tatters. A whole bottle is downed as he talks, chopping vegetables at speed, caressing meat with its fat in marbled thick lines. ‘Do stay for lunch.’
‘Yes, do,’ Cyndi echoes.
‘You know how some women are – flighty, hysterical, will say anything for attention and especially for a payout.’ He continues to prevaricate and my eyes flick to his wife, who is up and filling her mug from the boiling water tap. Her hand is tight on the mug handle, gripping it the same way she is holding her shoulders, taut, her rigidity at complete odds with the looseness of her husband. ‘I could be the Archbishop of bloody Canterbury and the newspapers, that scum, will still find lies to print, to spread on fucking Instagram,’ he adds.
‘There were a lot of women,’ I say. He arches his brow at my tone and I can almost hear his claws unsheathe. The lion disturbed in his den.
‘A lot of women have problems. You’re not naive. You’ve been around, you know that.’
I hold his stare.
I have worked with people I have disliked before, when their reparation serves the common good. Companies that need to suddenly greenwash and pour millions into environmental projects to make up for their previous misdemeanours, celebrities who I have believed were truly apologetic. But I have also walked away from people who were clearly manipulating optics with no intention of changing any of their underlying behaviour.
Nick is the latter. The only thing this man serves are his own appetites. On the phone he said that he is repentant, that booze had played a part. He told me he was knocking the drinking on the head, that his family were supporting him. So far, he has prepped salads, marinated meat, drunk nearly a bottle of wine and blamed womankind.
I do not need to stay for lunch.
I start to phrase my polite withdrawals when Belle pops into my head. The amber of her eyes. This man is no more an island than any of us and she is part of his archipelago. When the waters rise to flood him, push him down beneath the waves, then she will go too. I do not want to lie awake at night picturing her as the waves wash over.
It is the most uncomfortable lunch I have ever been to. Belle shrinks in front of me, a hermit crab hiding out in someone else’s shell. Her parents are relentless in their put-downs. They do not allow her to finish a single sentence, not one.
To make it even worse, Rose is here and the sycophancy is off the scale. Any question of who is the favourite child is dispelled five seconds after she breezes in, with a huge bouquet of winter roses in one hand.
‘Rose is married to Jack Sharp, you know, in the cabinet and only twenty-seven. So clever, the both of them. She was approached by GCHQ in school and again at university. Such a sharp mind and she’s putting it to good use. The golden couple of politics. Perfect politician’s wife, aren’t you, darling?’ Nick’s pride in his youngest daughter spills over.
‘Madly dyslexic though, Rory. Would have sold my soul to Santa if it hadn’t been for Belle. Couldn’t have got through school without her help, it was painful.’ Rose smiles at me and I don’t trust it for a second.
‘You would have been fine. Belle barely bothered going to school so I don’t know why you think she helped you. She’s not the one rising high with a powerful husband.’
Both sisters cannot get away from the table fast enough.
Rose is practically in her car before the table has been cleared. I’m not going to be far behind. I’m just coming out of the loo when I pause, hearing Belle shout hello.
I push the door beside me open to see if she is looking for me. And realise it’s merely wishful thinking. Belle is sat with her back to me, her legs crossed on a large leather chair, her laptop angled towards her, cutting out the edge of the door frame where I stand. On the screen I can see a familiar face waving back at her. Is that Luisa Fischer? It is. I want to wave and shout hello myself.
‘How are you doing? Are they being hellish?’ The German accent is still there. I wonder if she went back to Berlin after university.
‘We had an extra for lunch so they reined it in a bit.’
Reined it in? That was them behaving? And I’m condensed to an extra. Belle Wilde, ever dismissive.
‘But listen, I need to cut to the chase, um, I hate having to ask this and I know I told myself I never ever would again but um, oh God … um…’ Belle brings her hand to her eyes, her middle fingers rubbing her brow, her elbow jutting at a right angle and I am shot with a memory of her doing the same during her dissertation stress.
‘Do you need some money for Christmas?’
‘Yes, no. Yes. I need some money. But it’s not for Christmas. This year, like everyone else, you’ll be getting a salt-dough snowman. I wish it was for Christmas. But I owe Chardonnay and I still haven’t paid her and…’ Her voice dries to a whisper and I find myself craning in. ‘I’m … um … work laid us all off. They were hoping to get us to Christmas but…’
I know I should leave, I should have left about three seconds after I had opened the door, but I am stuck there. My legs have taken root.
‘Oh shit, Belle. I’m sorry. On the upside at least, you were blameless this time.’
‘Really…’
‘Okay, tactless. But you have form.’
‘I do. I did. I’m a good girl now, a stupid one though. I told Rose about losing the job before lunch; that’s going to come back and bite me on the arse. But listen, I hate to ask … you know how much I hate to ask … but the nub of it is that I no longer have a job and Chardonnay reminded me I owe her for that time she lent me money to buy that costume.’
‘Yeah, I still don’t know why you didn’t come to me for that.’
‘Because I didn’t want to ask you again. You’ve always been so generous and I would have rather gouged my eyes out with a spoon than asked you. Irony, huh?’
‘Lear.’
‘I taught you so well.’
‘On a serious note, you know I don’t mind. Plus, most people have parents who are willing to help out in a pinch. You don’t. How much do you need?’ My ears prick up. It had never occurred to me growing up that people born to families like Belle’s had to worry about money. But then I suppose after today’s display I shouldn’t be surprised; they seem to begrudge her breathing, there was no way they’d shower her with money. They probably wallpaper Rose’s house with fifties.
‘Um … I owe Chardonnay £250.’ It is a huge amount when you don’t have it – I remember those days – but to Nick Wilde it would be the equivalent of pennies. I need to leave. This is so wrong. I head down the corridor and pause in my tracks again.
‘You know what women are like.’ Cyndi’s voice mimics her husbands from earlier. ‘You are such a piece of shit.’ Her voice is raised, angry, I see her lash at him, her fist landing on his chest, the other following. He brushes them off and as she raises them again he grabs both wrists.
I step forward.
He drops them again and I pause. Neither have spotted me yet.
‘Let’s not forget you are not without blame,’ he spits. He turns on his heel and walks back to the kitchen as if such an outburst is everyday.
Cyndi bends over and breathes deep. After her bravura performance at lunch, it feels cruel revealing myself, a further stripping of her dignity. But it’s hard not to race over, comfort her, offer to get her out of this house. I take a step forward but as I do so she stands up tall, shakes herself out, fluffs her hair over her shoulder and heads back into the kitchen. I slide back along the narrow corridor, photos in frames of a happy-looking family on the walls. Nick and Cyndi besotted with each other, Rose being wh
irled above Nick’s head. I search the photos and it strikes me that Belle is always on the periphery or in the background untended, her smile forced.
I tiptoe back to hide in the loo, give everyone five minutes’ grace before I go in to say my goodbyes. Walking down the corridor again, I mark my way with a cough just in time to hear Luisa say, ‘There, it’s done. But it comes with conditions.’ My good intentions pause; I really want to hear the conditions.
‘Anything. I’m a whizz with nipple tassels, you know.’
‘Oh, trust me, I remember. But this is not about your twirltastic nipple skills. I want you to stop messing about. I’ve given you enough money for next month’s rent as well—’
‘Wait. That’s too much, I’ll get another job. I promise. I’ll keep trying for any seasonal work that’s left going.’ She lets out a hollow laugh. ‘I will get you this money back, I swear I will.’
‘Listen! I have had enough of seeing you live hand-to-mouth and work crazy hours to pay your rent and keep your head above water in these minimum-wage jobs.’
‘That’s how most people live. Those jobs, they give me time to work on my—’
‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake. Will you listen? I’d like you to work for me for the next month. I mean it. Remi and I are doing all right at the moment. We’ve just had a huge contract come in from a major supermarket so this is fine. Spend the next month looking at how to monetise your Shakespeare site. That is now your full-time job…’ Luisa carries on speaking but I have stopped listening. My ears had pinged up at the mention of a website. I’d forgotten that. Belle was obsessed by Shakespeare. Obsessed.
I remember a time, years ago, when we had sat up until four in the morning in Belle’s student kitchen drinking and talking about how I was wrong to find Hamlet dull and something about folios and quartos that I don’t quite remember. Is she still doing that? This makes me happy, I don’t know why but it does. I tune back in to Luisa. ‘You have created an amazing thing there, something that is going to help so many people. Get it out to the world, find a way to make money from your unique skill.’
