by Shari Low
‘Taylor, I’m Toni’s aunt. And I just wanted to have a chat about this situation.’
So far, so good. Cool. Calm. However, the shock in his face and the sneer of his lip sent me down a slightly different path. I think it was the same one as Liam Neeson in Taken.
‘Listen up, you little fucker, if you dare, just dare, to do one more thing to hurt my niece, I will hunt you down and I will remove your balls, layer by layer, with my cheese grater. It will be slow, it will be painful and you’ll never have sex again. Or cheese. Do we understand each other? Excellent. Now delete the photos or I’m coming for you and you really, really don’t want that, you insidious piece of crap.’
I hung up to a stunned silence, five women staring at me open-mouthed.
Jess eventually shrugged. ‘Well, that got the point across. Not exactly the adult, mature approach we’d discussed.’
Adrenalin was still causing havoc with my heartbeat. ‘I used the word “insidious”. That’s totally mature.’
Silence.
‘Any other thoughts?’ I asked, slowly coming down from white hot rage.
Carol slipped her phone into the pocket of her robe. ‘I… erm… think you were clear and well understood,’ she nodded, as if I’d just read the weather forecast.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Toni nodding, and I was scared to look. If she was rocking back and forward, distraught, I’d never forgive myself.
But no.
Her face had cracked into the first real, natural smile we’d seen for months.
‘Aunt Carly… thank you.’ Her shoulders had lifted, her eyes were brighter and, to my relief, I could see that she absolutely meant it. ‘But remind me never to piss you off.’
29
Los Angeles – Four Days Later
Hold My Hand – Brandy Clark
‘She’s like a different girl,’ Carol said, gesturing to Toni, who was attempting to surf across the pool on the swan in a race against Val on her inflatable Statue of Liberty.
We were just hours away from our flight home and we were at Sam’s poolside, taking advantage of our last few hours of California sun. We were also trying to sweat out the last of our overindulgence from the night before. Sam was still in Toronto on the World War Two set – apparently there was some issue with the director – and Estelle had gone to a residential boot camp in Montecito (a departure that had evoked not a single complaint from us), so Arnie had taken us all to a celebrity restaurant called Craig’s, in the hope of finally satisfying Val’s mission to track down Sylvester Stallone. He wasn’t there, but on the way to the toilet, she did introduce herself to a lovely bloke who said he was going to be in the next series of Grey’s Anatomy. He didn’t mention what his role was, so there was every chance he was corpse number three at a natural disaster, but he had a Patrick Dempsey jawline so we didn’t care. Val brought him back to the table and pointed out that Jess was single.
Actually, I wasn’t sure that was strictly the case. Every night since we’d got back from New York, I’d heard Jess creeping past my room on the way out in the middle of the night. And every morning, she’d creep back in then come down for breakfast looking like someone had attached her to a whirligig and spun her round for several minutes. Apparently, the Tinder action in LA was relentless, and she was making the most of it.
Maybe that’s why she was now lying next to us, looking like someone had rained on her casual sex parade.
Carol, meanwhile, was still beating herself up on the other side of me. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t realise what was happening. I feel like the worst mother ever.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Have you seen what I feed my kids? I’m definitely the worst mother ever.’
That at least made her smile. She was right about Toni though. The last four days had been an absolute joy and she was just like a normal eighteen-year-old again, one without the weight of the world on her shoulders. We had no way of knowing if Taylor had deleted the photos from his phone, but he’d taken them off the Whatsapp chat and he hadn’t published any more. I think what was making a huge difference with Toni, though, was that she now felt supported. Seeing the bond she’d developed with Val was wonderful too. The girls, like my boys, were missing someone in the grandmother role, due to the fact that my mother was resoundingly disinterested, and Val, well, no girl could ever replace her Dee, but she had plenty of love and hairspray for a whole squad of nieces.
Kate stretched out like a cat purring in the sun. ‘Sam’s going to have to replace all these loungers because they’re pretty much moulded into the shape of our bums,’ she said, laughing.
It was true. We’d barely been off them since we came back from New York. We’d spent lazy days at the pool, and cosy nights by the fire or – with the exception of last night – in Sam’s movie theatre watching films that weren’t even out in the cinema yet. Turns out he was on an awards panel and was sent copies of all the new releases. Val said she was bringing her Don here and they were just going to camp out in the movie room for a month.
Jess put her Sex On The Beach down on the table next to her lounger. ‘Have you heard from him?’ she asked me.
‘Who?’
‘Brad Pitt,’ she answered drily.
‘Nope, I think he’s trying to get back with Jennifer Aniston.’
Jess threw a flip-flop at me.
I sat up and pulled my psychedelic kaftan over my shoulders. The girls called me Joseph and started singing ‘Any Dream Will Do’ every time I wore it. ‘I refuse to answer questions about Sam Morton on the grounds that I’m a complete emotional screw-up, who always seems to say and do completely the wrong thing. And also, I’m still fairly sure Estelle is monitoring these conversations and one wrong word could get her so fired up her lip filler could explode.’
‘I close my eyes…’ That was Val, in the pool, singing her heart out.
How was I going to get through the rest of my life without seeing every one of these women every single day? In the last three weeks, despite all the emotional traumas, I’d never laughed more or ever felt so loved in my life and it was all thanks to these women. My soulmates. And in my heart, Sarah was included in that too.
I shoved my feet into my furry sliders, an impulse buy from Venice Beach. I think the fumes from all the hippies smoking pot had made me high. ‘I’m going to go and finish packing. What time are we leaving for the airport?’ Just saying that made my stomach lurch. I missed Sam. I missed Mark. I really, really missed my boys. So on the one hand I was desperate to get home, but on the other hand I was dreading leaving. I still hadn’t come to a decision about Mark, either. It was just all too complicated.
Jess checked her watch. ‘In about an hour.’ The time check made her get up too. ‘I think I’ll just go and see if Arnie has sorted out our lift to the airport.’
‘Hopefully Sam will be back by then,’ Kate said. ‘I’d hate to leave without saying goodbye.’
I tried not to let my feelings show on my face. Sam. I hadn’t heard from him since he dropped me off after bringing me home from the airport, and I hadn’t contacted him either – mainly because I didn’t want to disturb him, but also because, okay, I was annoyed. I felt judged, but I didn’t want to think about that right now because I was too freaked out by the thought of leaving without seeing him.
Taking my iced tea, I schlepped on up to my room to get myself organised. I jumped in the shower, then dried off and pulled on a pair of cropped jeans and a grey Clippers basketball T-shirt, then towel-dried my hair and left it to dry. When I came here, I was hoping to channel pixie cuteness. Now I was channelling Boris Johnson after taking a wrong turn and wandering through a car wash.
‘Hey, you.’
The surprise made me yelp. ‘You really need to stop that sneaking up on people stuff,’ I chided.
Sam leaned against the doorway, in jeans and a white T-shirt, surveying the scene of chaos in front of him. I may have slightly overdone the shopping for the kids. I had no idea how I was goin
g to get four boxes of trainers, eight T-shirts and three pairs of goggles into my case. ‘Good to see you’re organised as ever.’
‘Good to see you’re critical as ever,’ I shot back.
Shit. A bit too harsh.
He flinched, his eyebrows raising quizzically. ‘Something wrong, Cooper?’
My brain started throwing out orders to the rest of me. Say no. SAY NO. Just thank him for his wonderful hospitality, tell him how much his friendship means to you and then walk away quietly leaving no chaos in your wake.
‘No. Everything’s fine.’
Ah, crap. This man had lived with me. He knew that when I said ‘fine’, I actually meant irritated, pissed off and if you hang on five minutes, I’ll come up with everything you’ve ever done to annoy me.
‘Glad to hear it.’
And I’d lived with him. I knew that he wouldn’t push me to tell him the problem because he thought that my reluctance to be open and truthful was incredibly immature. He might have a point, but that didn’t matter. My brain was still shouting out orders like a shop steward who was worried about workers getting out of line. Keep it civil. Stay friendly. You’re only here for another forty-five minutes.
‘I didn’t make a mistake going back to Mark last time!’ I blurted furiously. My brain clapped a hand to my forehead and slunk away to have a lie-down in a dark room. ‘I know that’s what you think, but you’re wrong and it really pisses me off that you’re judging me. I know it hasn’t worked out now, but we had another ten years of a good marriage after I went back to him. And what matters most is that the boys have had great lives, and haven’t had to deal with parents on different continents, going back and forward always missing one of them.’ My voice was getting higher by the second. There was a real possibility cracks would begin to appear in the French doors to the balcony. ‘And I know my career might not exactly have hit the giddy high spots of… of… some high-flying Hollywood producer or his Emmy-winning, yoga-bendy girlfriend, but I’m okay with that. So, if you don’t mind, keep your opinions to yourself and stop making me feel like you’re some wise oracle of knowledge and I’ve disappointed you.’
For a moment, I thought he was just going to turn and walk away. Confrontation wasn’t his thing. He was way too zen. I’d only seen him lose his temper once and that was twenty-five years ago, in Hong Kong, when I told him I was leaving.
‘Really? Is that where we’re going with this?’ Oh, bollocks. He was seething. The little muscle at the side of his jaw was bulging like a plum. It always did that right before he wiped out the bad guys with a rocket launcher in his action-movie days. ‘Disappointed? Of course I’m fucking disappointed! You’ve wasted half your life on a guy who didn’t love you enough, didn’t go out of his way to make you happy.’
‘Mark does love me!’ I shot back. ‘We don’t all have bloody…’ I gestured to the ceiling – no idea why. ‘… Chandeliers! And people to run around after us. And more money than we know what to do with. My life might have been lacking some things that I’d have liked, Sam, but at least there were people in it, at least I’m not fifty years old and shagging someone half my age who couldn’t make you laugh if she was… was… wearing a fucking clown suit and riding a unicycle!’
Aaargh, what was I saying? A clown suit? My brain was now rocking back and forward, weeping.
‘Things you’d have liked?’ he yelled back. Okay, maybe he hadn’t heard the bit about the unicycle. ‘Carly, from the minute I met you I knew you wanted to have this big crazy life. Look at all the things you did! You were the most driven, most adventurous person I’d ever met. You had all these huge dreams and you could have done anything—’
‘I did do something! I raised a family.’
‘At the expense of your dreams! I know Mark loved you, but it was all on his terms. What about your terms? Why didn’t your dreams matter?’
‘Because… because… life just doesn’t work like that!’
It was lame, but it was the best I could do.
It was twenty-five years since we last had a fight like this, but we were making up for it now.
His eyes were blazing. ‘It should have. You should have been with someone who made you count.’
It was out of my mouth before I even registered that I was going to say it.
‘You mean like you?’
He reeled back as if he’d been slapped, then stopped. Stared.
‘Yeah,’ he said, all volume gone. When he spoke again, it was softer, quieter, but I could still hear the anger. ‘You should have stayed with me.’
I brought it down a few notches too, but inside I was still blazing. ‘But who knows if things would have been different if I’d stayed here with you? There would still have been kids to raise, jobs to do, and someone always has to make sacrifices for that. We all have big dreams, Sam, but sometimes real life happens, and someone needs to do the school runs and take out the bins.’
He stepped backwards out of the door, turned, then stopped, turned back.
‘Have it your way, Cooper. Believe whatever you want to. And by the way,’ his voice was even lower now, ‘no matter what you think about Estelle, she’s not going to rip out my heart and destroy it. If she said goodbye, it wouldn’t hurt. I’ll take that any day over the kind of pain you left me with last time you walked away.’
I don’t know how long we stared at each other, speechless, before we heard the sound of a throat being cleared.
‘Erm, sorry to interrupt,’ Kate said. ‘But Leon is here to take us to the airport. He says traffic is heavy, so we need to go now. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. We’re done here,’ Sam said.
This time he was the one who walked away.
30
That Night and The Next Morning, Los Angeles and London
Proud – Heather Small
‘Jess, I beg you – instead of watching me drinking the gin, could you just hit me over the head with the bottle, so I can go straight to the blackout stage?’
Jess shook her head. ‘Nope, you deserve to suffer. That was brutal.’
‘Could you guys hear everything?’ I groaned.
‘Carly, the whole of Pacific Palisades heard you. I’m pretty sure Matthew McConaughey had to call a halt to his naked yoga because you were disturbing his peace.’
I let my head drop onto the table and I didn’t even care that it was sticky or that everyone else in the airport bar was probably wondering if I’d fainted.
As it turned out, the traffic hadn’t been too bad after all, so we’d got here three gins ago. Maybe four. I’m sure Val bought doubles.
‘I just lost it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I mumbled into the wood.
‘I blame the menopause,’ Val announced, making several people around us choke on their drinks. ‘When I was going through the change, I was forever just blurting out whatever was on my mind. Although, my Don says I’m still doing it, so this must be the longest menopause in history. I also took a liking to rhubarb, but we never got to the bottom of that. Anyway, love, he’ll forgive you,’ she went on, patting the bottom of her bob to make sure it was still a perfect dome. ‘Sometimes a good barney is what you need to reset a relationship. Gets rid of all that sexual tension.’
Carol nodded sagely. ‘Val’s right. It’s just water under the tunnel. He’ll get over it.’
‘I thought age was supposed to bring wisdom,’ Toni drawled, earning a loud cackle and an elbow in the ribs from her great-aunt.
Hearing Toni so upbeat and funny was the only thing that could have got my head off that table right at that moment, although there was a definite sticky residue and I really wished I’d cleaned the table before my dramatic gesture. Anyway, the return of her sparkle and her dry sense of humour was a joy to see, so it was worth it.
My phone buzzed.
Benny: Mum, we’re at the airport. Boarding soon. Mac says he’s handcuffing himself to a chair because he doesn’t want to come home.
* * *
/> Mum: Tell him to go marry someone with an American passport immediately. But only if I can come live with them too.
* * *
Mac: I’ll go off grid. You’ll never find me.
* * *
Me: I got you chipped when you were a baby. I’ll find you. PS: the vet that did it got struck off.
* * *
Mark: Is this the nonsense you lot always talk on here?
* * *
Benny: Yep. Welcome to paradise.
Wow. Mark Barwick had just joined one of our chats. Another first. Maybe he really was changing. Maybe…
I shut the thought down. I couldn’t go there right now, not when Sam’s bollocking was still reverberating in my brain.
‘Let’s do a video for Dad and Charlie,’ Carol suggested to Toni.
She held up her iPhone so they were both in the picture. ‘Right, you two, we’re on our way. Time to get rid of the twenty-one pizza boxes that are probably now stuffed under the sofa…’ She wasn’t kidding. It was a standing joke that my brother could eat his body weight in chips and still retain the body of an Adonis, while I gained two pounds just taking the Chinese takeaway menu out of the drawer. ‘Love you both and we can’t wait to see you!’
With that, she and Toni both blew kisses and giggled as they ended the clip.
My phone buzzed again.
‘Suffering mother, it’s like a shop for those sex aid things in here with all this buzzing,’ Val exclaimed, making Kate and Jess howl with laughter.
Mark: Carly, shouldn’t you be boarding by now too?
‘Oh my God, that man and his need to organise things!’ I exclaimed.