by Aoife Walsh
‘It is a sunny afternoon, Dad,’ Minny pointed out.
‘A sunny afternoon in a wild mossy garden. I think I hear a bird singing.’
‘Come on, Blarney Rubble,’ Harriet said, pulling the scarf off her head. ‘What have you got planned for us this afternoon?’
Minny had her homework so they set her up at the big wooden desk with the fancy white computer and all the stationery in the world, which was overkill since she only had a French comprehension and some reading for history. Her father pottered about in the background while Harriet slept on the sofa in the sun. Then in the evening they went out and roamed around Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill till they found a restaurant they liked the look of – it felt like being on holiday – and stuffed themselves again, with Indian food. It was easy. Going back to the flat afterwards was not unlike going home.
She left the next morning after giving the bedroom walls a second coat. She felt a little bit sad, but on the other hand eager for Raymond and a Sunday afternoon at home, homework done for once. ‘So what do you think?’ Des asked, as if he’d been nerving himself to it, while they were standing saying goodbye. ‘Would you be up for bringing your sisters here when your mum goes to Edinburgh?’
‘Sure,’ Minny said, shrugging. She didn’t want to dwell on the fuss she’d kicked up, or why she felt better about it now.
‘Great. That’s really great. Of course, I’m hoping I’ll get to see you again before then,’ he added. ‘That’s weeks away.’
‘See you later, Minny,’ Harriet said, hugging her again. ‘Thanks for all your help.’
She felt dozy and content on the Tube, but, after changing at Hammersmith, more and more impatient to be home too. She wondered for the first time what it would be like to have a new baby brother or sister. She wondered if he might look like her. Because she looked like her father.
It was especially nice to get home. Everyone seemed pleased to see her, even Selena, who was full of questions about what she’d done and what the new bedroom would be like and what she’d had to eat. ‘He took you to restaurants?’ she asked wistfully. ‘Were they fancy?’
‘Er – not especially.’
‘What makes a restaurant fancy, Sel?’ Nita asked.
‘Fans on the ceiling,’ Selena said with certainty. ‘And red velvet tablecloths.’
Aisling sat next to Minny on the sofa and kept asking her where she was going every time she left the room. When Raymond got up from his nap he was so delighted to see her she spent five minutes disentangling his fingers from her hair. ‘So you had a good time?’ her mother kept saying. Minny told her she had, and that it was OK for her to make her arrangements for Edinburgh. Selena got overexcited and went zooming around the house doing handstands in inappropriate places. Ash said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and ten minutes later went on the computer and started writing out a timeline of American presidents, which was one of the things she did when she was nervous. Babi said since everyone was going away she might go on holiday with Gil – not to Paris because it was overrated; perhaps to Seville, or Riga, somewhere where he wouldn’t be expecting too much. Then Nita reminded her that she still had to look after Raymond, and she looked relieved.
Gil turned up a bit later. Minny had been feeling all tolerant; not even Babi had tried to wind her up yet, but Gil managed it instantly by just looking so annoying. He had his hands behind him and leaned back and said, ‘So, Minny, how was your trip?’
‘Oh, fine,’ Minny said.
‘Not as bad as you thought then?’
‘No,’ she breathed, rictus-grinning.
‘So. He behaved himself then, your dad?’
It might have been just a throwaway remark if Gil hadn’t been part of the last row they’d all had. But he had. She said, ‘Mmmm,’ imbued with as much ‘and what possible business is that of yours; you are not a member of this family’ as she could manage. Then he suggested a walk by the river, and somehow almost everyone went: Ash and Selena, and they took the pushchair. Nita asked Minny if she’d help with dinner.
‘OK,’ Minny said, following her warily into the kitchen. She got handed a paring knife and a bag of potatoes, while her mother whipped up Yorkshire-pudding batter – Minny decided that Ash or Selena must have had a difficult weekend; they didn’t normally have roast dinners on a Sunday.
‘I’m so glad you had a good time,’ Nita said. ‘You see, being brave pays off. It’s a nice flat, is it?’
‘Yeah, it will be. They’re doing it up.’
‘Oh good. Right. Well, it’s nice to have you home.’
‘Mmm.’
‘There’s actually something I need to talk to you about. Don’t cut those too small, they’ll be mush.’
‘That’s when they’re nicest.’
‘The thing is, something rather … odd happened yesterday.’
‘What?’ Minny turned the hob on.
‘I got a call from Cora. Penny’s mum.’
Minny looked up and put the knife down.
‘Yes, I was surprised. I wondered for a second if she was going to start talking about how you two were rowing, but it wasn’t really that. Not exactly. She said that Penny was devastated and had been crying all day and finally it had come out that she was upset about you. Worried because, er, you’d changed so much lately and you’ve been taking lots of drugs and, er, hanging with a bad crowd. But, yes. Drugs.’
Minny actually shook her head, as if she was in a cartoon, though whether to check that her ears were not full of water or to help compose her ideas she couldn’t say.
‘Minny?’
‘She must have gone mental, Mum. It’s the only possible explanation.’
‘So, you haven’t been—’
‘No, of course not. Cross my heart, honestly.’
‘Oh good.’
‘I think this is all because of Franklin. Or – I don’t know.’
‘Yes, his name came up.’
‘He told her that he once got expelled for having … weed, but that was ages ago. I’ve never heard him even talk about it, much less do it.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I mean, she got a thing straight off about him smoking cigarettes, as if speaking to him was going to turn me into a nicotine addict. And then she did have a go at me last week in the park and accuse me of being stoned, but I thought she was just sort of making it up for the sake of having a go at me. I didn’t think she could really possibly believe it.’
‘Well, it seems she does.’
The thing was, even if she did, which Minny couldn’t get her head around because there was no evidence of Minny doing anything like that whatsoever – even if she did believe it, why on earth would she tell her mother about it, knowing full well that Cora would tell Nita?
‘It sounds as if she’s in a very strange place, poor kid,’ Nita said, when Minny put this to her. ‘Either she is really, genuinely worried about you, which would suggest she’s lost quite a lot of proportion—’
‘– or she just wants to get me into trouble and is making up lies about me,’ Minny finished. ‘What did you say to Cora?’
‘Well, I told her my instinct was that Penny was mistaken. Of course she thought I was kidding myself. She said she’d ring back this evening when I’d had a chance to talk to you, as if she needed to check that I was going to bother raising it with you at all.’
‘So what will you say to her?’
‘I’ll tell her that Penny is wrong, and perhaps gently suggest that she try to have a chat with her about what’s going on with her rather than with you. I don’t expect it to go well. I wouldn’t be pleased with that if I were her.’
‘Penny’s never going to talk to Cora about what’s going on with her and Jorge,’ Minny said. ‘Which makes it even weirder that she’d tell her something about me. Maybe she was just trying to distract her.’
‘Distract her from what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She fell silent, wondering.
Her mother looked at her. ‘You
wouldn’t consider maybe making up with her?’
‘No, Mum.’
‘OK.’
‘You want me to make up with her now, after this?’
‘It’s just, whatever’s behind it all, it sounds like she could do with a pal right now.’
‘Well, it’s not going to be me.’
‘OK. But try not to be too angry with her, all right? Don’t start any fights over it – that’s all I ask.’
She was a fine one to talk; her conversation with Cora that evening degenerated into an extremely frosty exchange of advice. Minny hadn’t been allowed to stay in the room, but they all heard Nita, just before ringing off, say rather loudly, ‘No, I don’t have my head in the sand. No, actually I don’t. Look, one of us has a daughter who’s trying to distract us from her own problems by pinning something on her friend, and let me ask you this, Cora – whose daughter has a history of fantasising?’
‘Who’s Mum talking to?’ Aisling whispered, coming out onto the landing where Minny was leaning over the banister – and from where she could see that Babi was standing just inside the kitchen door, also listening.
‘Cora Grey.’
‘Penny’s mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’ She went back into her room.
Nita came out of the back room, slamming the door, and walked past Babi into the kitchen.
‘Lesbians are neurotic,’ Babi remarked.
TEN
Minny found that week curiously intense. She really didn’t want to get into some kind of feud with Penny so she tried hard to avoid her, but they had all their science and maths lessons together so it was a question of not giving her dirty looks – which turned into trying not to look at her at all, which was ridiculous. Penny never said a word to her. She seemed to spend most of her lunchtimes snogging Jorge outside at the side of the football pitch, under a horse chestnut tree. On the other hand Minny found that a lot of people were suddenly talking to her who never had before, a few from her year but mostly from the year above. She put it down to being friends with Franklin, who seemed to have had less trouble than they’d all feared finding people to hang out with – and maybe they were feeling bad over Aisling too. Anyway, it was exhilarating but exhausting, trying to think of things to say to people like Veronica Sedgwick, who sometimes came to school dressed entirely in yellow right down to her home-decorated sandals, and Luis da Souza, who you occasionally saw around town in the evenings dressed as a girl.
Then at home her mother was hardly around, and when she was she’d be in a fret of organising her Edinburgh trip, on top of the usual end-of-term rush of events and reports – and making sure Aisling was all right. Nothing had been sorted out for her yet for next term; Nita barely had time to set her work to do. Ash was strange and silent, and kept following Minny around when she got in from school. Minny tried to put up with it, but it drove her mad. On Thursday evening Franklin rang up to ask if Minny wanted to go to the cinema after school the next day; there was a film on they’d been talking about seeing. ‘Can I come?’ Aisling asked.
‘You hate the cinema.’
‘Can I come anyway?’
‘No. You’ll just want to leave in the middle and make loads of noise moving about.’
Aisling didn’t say anything, she just went upstairs. Selena looked over from the corner where she was trying to build a Jenga tower before the baby could knock it down.
‘Well,’ Minny said. ‘She would. I’m not her babysitter. I can’t give up my social life entirely just because Aisling’s bored here all day.’
She did go to the cinema with Franklin, but she didn’t feel great about it, especially when he asked how Aisling was before the trailers had even started. ‘You’re always worrying about my family,’ she snapped, without meaning to. ‘I mean, I would have thought you’d have thought our problems were kind of small-scale.’
That sounded terrible, she realised. Franklin took a couple of Minstrels from the bag she was holding. ‘Not really, you know. You’re just all going through some … stuff, aren’t you?’
‘I suppose so. But I feel guilty,’ she admitted, suddenly putting a name to her irritation. ‘You have to live away from home and everything – and stuff has happened to you – you know what I mean? I mean, what makes you such a saint? Why are you worried about my sister, or my mother of all people?’
‘I like Ash. She used to be nice to me when we were kids, and everyone just ignored her all the time. Anyway –’ he took another Minstrel and looked at it as the lights went down – ‘I just always liked you. All of you. It was nice coming round your house, I looked forward to it. You always had music playing, and you weren’t stuck-up round me like everyone else, and your mum talked to me like I was real. Even your dad – he wasn’t there usually, but you all looked forward to him coming home. You just seemed like a … a really nice family.’
Minny didn’t move but the bag still crackled. ‘I can’t believe you remember so much. We were only little.’
‘I know, but …’
‘I don’t know if we are that nice a family.’
‘Yeah, but you’d all do anything for each other, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Course you would.’ He was staring at the screen. ‘The last thing I asked my mother to do was come to the hearing with the social worker. She didn’t make it.’
Minny passed him the Minstrels.
After the film – which was unimportant – she invited him to come back to their house because Ash would like the company. Only they walked into the beginning of a tremendous row. Her father was there, in the front room, shouting at her mother, who was holding Raymond while Selena stood beside him trying to interrupt and trying not to cry, and Aisling sat on the stairs.
‘What’s going on?’ Minny asked her in dismay.
‘Des is angry about you,’ Aisling explained. ‘Hi, Franklin.’
He raised his hand in silent salute.
‘Oh, he’s here!’ Her father strode into the hall. ‘Oh great! You chose not to mention, Nita, that Minny was out with him. That’s just marvellous.’
‘Shut up, Des, and let me explain things to you before you make even more of a fool of yourself,’ Nita shouted. ‘And don’t pick on anyone in this house, this isn’t your house.’
‘What’s going on?’ Minny asked again.
‘What’s going on is that I received a phone call at lunchtime which necessitated my dropping everything including client meetings and panting across London because I thought I might get more sense out of your mother, and you, face to face.’
‘What was the phone call?’ Minny asked helplessly, looking at her mother, who tried to speak but was shouted down by Des.
‘The phone call was from Cora Grey, whom I had to rack my brains even to remember, yet who apparently has more interest in keeping me informed than anyone in my family when one of my daughters – at least – is going to rack and ruin.’
‘Now, stop it, Des.’ Nita stepped in front of him. ‘Minny has just got in the door of her own home. Even if there was something to worry about, this wouldn’t be the way to handle it and you don’t have the right.’
‘It’s not a right, it’s a responsibility …’
‘Long ago delegated by you, and you haven’t got it back yet,’ Nita said. ‘Which is why you didn’t know about this situation last week when it first came up.’
‘This situation?’
‘Yes. Minny and Penny have been arguing a fair amount lately, and for some reason Penny handed this tale to her mother.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ Minny whispered.
‘None of it is true – not what Penny says Minny has been doing, nor the kind of influence she says Franklin is exerting.’
Minny didn’t know where to look, even if she hadn’t been about to cry.
‘All right, let’s calm down,’ said Des. ‘Could we talk about this, just the three of us?’
‘No.’ Minny held ont
o the doorknob.
‘Well. Let’s look at this for a moment. Minny, your best friend, Penny—’
‘No, she isn’t.’
‘Your best friend has told her mother that you’ve been hanging around a good deal with … Franklin, and some other types at school that you’ve never been friends with before, who are into drugs –’
Minny sagged.
‘– and that you’ve been smoking a lot of pot, maybe trying out other kinds of drugs too, and acting very strangely altogether. This is very worrying for me, Minny. I would have thought it would be for your mother too.’
‘It would be,’ Nita said, ‘if I believed it for one second.’
‘Perhaps you’ve lost your sense of proportion. Minny?’
She couldn’t speak without wailing, which she would have done if Franklin hadn’t been there.
‘Perhaps Franklin should go home now,’ Nita suggested.
‘Oh, home? Or back to my mother’s house, where he’s exploiting another member of my family?’ Des shouted, losing it again.
‘Shut up, Des!’ Aisling screamed.
‘It’s OK, I’m off,’ Franklin said. ‘Minny hasn’t been taking any drugs though, you should know.’
‘And what about you?’ Des snapped. ‘I don’t trust you, son. I don’t know what you’re doing living with my mother.’ He strode right towards where they stood in the doorway, and Minny backed away in alarm, keeping Franklin behind her, but Des was headed for the train blackboard. He whacked it so that chalk showered lightly over him. ‘Life is like a bloody train!’ he yelled. ‘You don’t get to ride for free!’
‘Jesus God you’ve changed, Des,’ Nita said, holding the front door open for Franklin and patting him on the elbow as he slipped past.
‘I’ve just grown up, Nita. You could do with it yourself. This is just great.’ He paced up and down the hall.
Minny hadn’t been able to say goodbye. She could see Selena sitting in a frozen heap on the sofa in the front room, Raymond pulling at her knee. Aisling was crying.
‘Des, I think you should leave,’ Nita said calmly. She was still holding the door. ‘If you can’t be reasonable, then this is pointless.’