by Anne Fine
Though, with someone so prickly, it was best to tread carefully . . .
‘So where’s this circus of yours now?’
Close to mind, that was quite obvious. ‘Bridlington this week. Then up towards Whitby.’
‘Not too far to go for a few days.’
She gave him a very sour look.
He panicked. ‘During the refurbishment.’
‘The what?’
Oh, why not? If it helped.
‘The refurbishment. Did you not get your letter? Some of these flats are being redecorated very soon.’ Oh, there’d be hell to pay with Hetherley and his workforce. And out-of-order billing going on for years. But it was worth it. Just the excitement of telling so many whoppers in a row made him feel a foot higher. ‘I’m afraid I was rather naughty when the order came round, and put you and Tammy right at the top of the list.’
‘I’m being painted? Soon? You mean, like next week or something?’
Next week? Christ! Forget Hetherley’s workmen. But he could chase up that little old fellow of Perdita’s. Pay him the earth to drop whatever he was doing, and smarten up the flat a bit. Maybe get in a cleaner. Anything to help the poor fettered creature through a few more grounded months.
‘It could well be as soon as that. And you should really think about getting away for a few days. It’s never wise to have a child around when there are workmen in a property. All those tools lying about. And nasty paint fumes.’
She didn’t look convinced.
‘He did invite you,’ he reminded her.
‘He didn’t mean for the weekend.’
God, she was touchy.
‘Maybe not. But you could see other friends. And I’m sure even Alexi can put up with seeing someone else’s child around for one or two days. She’s very winning, after all.’ He jerked a thumb towards Tam, who’d done his argument the good favour of falling angelically asleep on the sofa. ‘And she’d enjoy a circus. Look how she loves her poster. No, you’d be far better off away.’
Choosing the phrase ‘better off’ was a mistake. Mel asked him sourly, ‘Oh, yes? And how am I supposed to get Tam all the way to Bridlington? Carry her?’
‘No problem.’ He fished out phrases from a thousand mind-numbing council memoranda. ‘Your extra-domiciliary expense docket’ – that sounded good – ‘will have to be ratified anyway by our department. So if you planned to be away, I could give you the cash instead and deduct it at source. There’d be no problem.’
Diving into his wallet, he counted out notes on the table. ‘That’s thirty, forty—’
‘Bridlington . . .’
He raised his head. She was gazing across at Tammy, shifting in sleep. Between the chubby fingers, the magic flakes swirled. The pearly skater was defying gravity, still in her effortless pirouette, as the tiny world settled again sideways around her.
Then Mel, too, suddenly was in full spin. ‘I know. You take her.’
‘Me?’
‘Why not? She thinks you’re wonderful. And you are good with her.’
He shook his head. ‘Impossible.’
‘Please, Colin! Only for a night or two. It would make everything so much easier.’
She didn’t mean the travelling, he could tell.
‘No, really, Mel. I’m sorry.’
She was begging now. ‘She could still go to nursery. And, if you got stuck, your sister could help you. Didn’t she even share a house with some sort of nurse person?’
‘I’m afraid they’re not very friendly any more.’
She was already looking round, as if to decide what to take. ‘But you could still phone her for advice if anything went wrong. And nothing would.’
Dizzy with fright, he told her, ‘My mother’s not well. I have to go round every night, and stay quite late.’
Even to him, it sounded so lame and unconvincing that he was shocked, a moment after saying it, to realize that it was the truth.
‘Well, take her with you! You could both stay there, and I could—’
‘No!’
He felt as if he’d pushed her over.
The sullen mask of discontent dropped back on her face. ‘Oh, sorry I even asked.’
‘No, honestly. It’s me who’s sorry.’
‘Oh, please!’
Embarrassed, he made for the door. ‘In fact, I’d better be getting round to my mother’s now. Today happens to be her birthday as well.’
It was clear just how much credence Mel attached to this. ‘Of course it is. Goodbye. Thank you for coming.’
Her eyes fell on the money on the table, but, furious, she neither offered it back nor turned away, so he could easily step forward to fetch it.
‘That’s quite all right,’ he burbled, shuffling backwards till he tripped on the box with the toaster. ‘I had to come by. We had a couple of reports about vandals taking pot shots at some of the hall sprinklers.’
It was another glib excuse that, once out, struck him as the truth.
‘I’ll take a look at them on my way out.’
‘Yes, you do that.’
And, inasmuch as it is possible to check a sprinkler as you hurry past, blind with embarrassment, that is what he did.
This time, he found his mother on the wicker seat beside the shower. Again he had the sense of confronting a stranger. ‘Hello,’ he said, frightened he’d startle her. Skipping the lecture on not leaving the doors unlocked so anyone who happened to be passing could step in and murder her, he held out his present. ‘Happy birthday.’
She took the fat wrapped lump. ‘It feels so heavy.’
The words might have been an echo, but whereas Mel’s were bubbling with excitement, his mother simply sounded critical. Giving him one of her tired, watery smiles, she peeled off one layer of rustling rainbow tissue, and then the next. Uncovering yet another, she rolled her eyes up in that gods-give-me-patience way she’d used to squeeze discomfort out of him all his life. He didn’t flicker, knowing from long experience how all these little drives to petty cruelty were nourished, rather than allayed, by any signs of his weakness. To his surprise, for once it proved no effort. Seeing her yet again so very differently, in this strange place, on this strange chair, he found himself, too, feeling oddly detached, capable of interpreting these almost involuntary flashes of contempt and disapproval as nothing personal, just her own greedy victim’s way of acting as if each chance she missed to make a meal of upset or of disappointment would, like a dropped stitch, mar the overall design of the long tapestry of her life.
‘By the time I get down to this present, I’m going to be far too exhausted to enjoy it.’
Strange thing to do, though, when you came to think. To poison everything. Force yourself, as Dante put it in that chunk of the Inferno that Mr Ashcroft made him learn when he got so mad at him for forever being bullied, to be ‘sullen in the sweet air’. Dante hurled those who wilfully lived in sadness into a mud pool. He, Colin, would be kinder. ‘Don’t you fret,’ he wanted to console his mother. ‘I understand at last. All these past years, you’ve never really been at war with me and Dilys. All these attacks on others have really been digs at yourself, and we’ve only been stand-ins.’ Could he explain to Dilys? Would she understand? For suddenly it seemed to Colin that, after a lifetime of guilt that stemmed from neither his sister nor himself having the faintest inkling of what it was their mother had been needing, at last they could change things. Surely there must be time. And the sooner the better, because bad character was its own worst punishment, and old age judgement on the life you’d lived.
So was it said as comfort or as warning? ‘I think you’re nearly at the end.’
The last few layers of tissue fluttered down. She blinked. ‘Oh, Colin!’ His heart swelled as her thin hands shook. He cupped his own strong palms beneath, for fear she’d drop the small glass world.
‘Is it Good King Whosit?’
‘Wenceslas.’
She shook the snowflakes into blizzard to watch them swirl. He wou
ld have given half a world to read her mind. Should he tell her that Dilys had chosen it? Better not take the risk. ‘I thought you’d like him.’
‘He’s a treat and a half. Look at him, striding along with his beard like a rhododendron!’
Taking advantage of her distraction, he took her gently by the elbows and prised her stiff bones up from the wicker seat. ‘Why are you sitting in here, anyway?’
‘I’m hiding from that doolally young pest who flings her mascara on with a tablespoon.’
‘Perdita? Has she been round again?’
‘Only crooning through my letter box! “Remember what I was saying, Mrs Riley? About selling the house? Well, we’re working a little differently now. So here’s my new number, if you’d like to call.”’ Scrabbling around in a pocket, she drew out a business card on which Tor Bank’s number had been blackened out, and another written over it. His mother’s venom lent her imitation a verisimilitude that poor Mel’s of Alexi had lacked. ‘“Oh, and if you’re there, Mrs Riley, happy birthday!”’ The pursed lips tightened. ‘I tell you, if that young lady comes battering on my door again, I won’t be leaving her hair with so much fight in it. How come the nosy baggage knows it’s my birthday anyway?’
Oh, he could guess. From one last peek at a policy she guessed was void last time she’d had to clear a desk? But this was no day to worry his mother with talk of a property vulture. He stood there, steeped in pity. All of his life he’d hated these frantic spasms of dislike for all things unexpected and unplanned. But now, still bathed in that peculiar sense of seeing his mother for the first time as someone utterly removed, almost a stranger, he saw her horror of spontaneity for what it always must have been: the terror of a damaged soul at even the slightest slippage in control.
Knowing her lifelong loathing of uninvited visitors would draw the fire from any limp response of his, he steered her away from the threat he saw looming. ‘I expect it was her mother who sent her round – maybe even with a present.’
‘I’ll send her back to Dolly with another – a necklace made from her own teeth.’
And might yet, Colin reckoned, unless he stepped in smartish. For that percentage-grubbing little witch was bound to be back. What had his sister said when she’d been prophesying Perdita’s banishment to one of the departments in Tor Bank where she’d be less likely to offend? ‘No fat commissions there!’ If Perdita would have felt hard done by in drab old Home Loans or Arrears, think how determined she’d be to cash in one last time on all that determined, sweet-talking, bouquet-thrusting groundwork, before sliding in a sulk into the depths of the Tor Pit.
But it was shameful. Shameful! And gave the lie to all that tosh about old people getting only what they deserved. Maybe, about emotional matters, that was true. Everyone said it, after all: ‘Be careful what you give a child, for, in the end, you’ll get it back.’ But that was feelings. This was different. This was behaviour. And how you treated people was a choice. It was outrageous to sneak up to try to take advantage of someone like Mother, whose powers were failing. It was like coshing someone in a wheelchair, or tripping the blind, or taking bets from the simple.
It was despicable. Despicable.
‘I’m going to get you a proper working answerphone. And fix you up with one of those outside mirrors, so you can see who’s coming up the path.’
‘You? Mr Ten Thumbs? No, thank you. I prefer my walls standing.’
Again he wondered at his own tranquillity. Instead of trawling round for some excuse to rush from the kitchen, hurry to the woodshed, take Flossie down the backs, he simply dug into his huge box of shopping to pull out supper.
‘Do you want fish or chicken? I bought both.’
‘The way I feel, I’d just as soon throw up as eat.’
Should he heat neither? Or both? Conundrums that would have put him in a tizzy yesterday left him unruffled. ‘I’ll do both.’
‘Oh, make yourself at home! Then I’ll come round to your house and mess your oven in return.’
‘You’d be most welcome.’
The red-rimmed eyes inspected him for signs of sarcasm. After all, how many years was it since curiosity about his life had last assailed her with sufficient force to cause her to visit? Was it to the flat before this one? Or the one before that? But suddenly what Dilys had maintained for years was simply another sign of her indifference now seemed an important, even, perhaps, a necessary bulwark against insecurity: the desperate need of someone fragile, someone vulnerable, to stay, poised for battle, on the ground she knew best.
And she was vulnerable indeed now. Perdita would soon be back, out to intimidate her into selling up with talk of hideous rebuilding or repair costs, and policies rendered instantly void by one small fraudulent response.
All stuff heard first at Dilys’s table.
And from his lips.
‘How about a little salad, then, Mother?’
‘No, not for me.’
‘Well, perhaps some soup . . .?’
He inched towards the larder. Yes, there on the shelf behind the jars of beetroot gathering dust lay the spare key he’d begged for a score of times on the grounds of his convenience and, more recently, her safety. He might have spread the chicken’s entrails on the table top, so strong his hunch the moment was auspicious, the time had come. With the sense of a Rubicon resolutely crossed – no fuss, no guilt, not even any doubt – he picked the old key off the sticky shelf and dropped it in his pocket, content to trust to luck that he could get a copy cut and sneak it back before she noticed. Safer than asking again, in case, sensing the way the seesaw of their lives had finally, irrecoverably, risen on his side, she petulantly shifted it to some other hiding place where he couldn’t even find it.
Still steeped in calm, he emerged from between the shelves holding a bag of ancient pasta. ‘Macaroni cheese?’
She didn’t even hear. Shaking the dome into another fierce storm, she’d jammed her sunken face as close to the glass as Tam had earlier. What could it be about these self-sufficient little blizzard worlds that they should have the power to send all who peered into them into a trance? Some, like Tam, simply dreaming; some, like his mother, seeing worlds they’d been denied from twists of temperament; and some, like Mel, gazing at dreams they’d worn as close as cotton to the skin, and only had to shelve because some precious little accident of fate had—
Mel!
He must get back to her as soon as possible! Tell her that he’d been wrong, and she must, after all, leave Tam with him to go and kick sense any way she could into this tiresome Alexi. Surely if she showed up, free of the sweet encumbrance whose birth had done so much to prick the man’s pride, he’d have to crack. Tam could be slid in later. What was important was getting Mel back to the circus. All very well to come to this new, charitable understanding of his own mother. But how could he live with himself, how could he watch his mother sink, still so unsatisfied, towards her death, if he could not forget that, through his craven shrinking from responsibility, he’d been a part of letting someone else fetch up on that sour path to pinched lips and a bitter life, where the sole pleasure came from taking revenge on yourself and everyone round you for what life had denied you.
Now it was his turn not to be even listening. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said, perhaps the tiniest sliver of chicken, then. I might just force it down. Since it’s my birthday.’ She sniffed. ‘So long as it’s not one of those nasty Fifine’s Fancy Truffle Maribou Whatsits.’
He’d learned that lesson. ‘No, no. It’s just plain frozen chicken from Betta-Shoppa.’
And if he hadn’t already moved on from worrying about her life to worrying about two others almost equally dear, he might have heard, over and above his own impatient assurances, a warning louder than the oven’s ping.
9
ALL THE CALLS came in at once: Arif from accounts, mystified at receiving a personal cheque from Colin for some two-year-old gas fire; Val, phoning from Priding General to say she’d just sp
otted his mother’s name on a list of Emergency Admissions; and Shirley, ringing up from Reception. ‘I have someone waiting for you here.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m afraid she’s refusing to give her name.’
That sounded ominous. Could it be the ubiquitous Mrs Moloney? ‘What does she look like?’
‘Striking. She has the most astonishing eyes – though I have to say her hair is a bit of a bird’s nest.’
Perdita!
But first things first. His heart already thumping, he phoned the hospital, only to find that, at the first mention of a ‘suspect chicken supper’, blood charged between his ears with such a surf-like roar that he took in little more than that food poisoning in someone his mother’s age was a serious matter, and in all likelihood she’d be in hospital for several days. Should he avenge himself on Betta-Shoppa by dropping the details of their freezer department’s malefactions straight in the tray marked ‘forced to decide to prosecute’? Or face his own guilt? How many unmarked boxes in the back of a van could one man muddle? Offered the quite unprecedented chance to do away with half of the villains round Chatterton Court without the trouble or expense of trial, he had instead managed to poison only his poor old mother – oh, and of course, if there’d been leftovers, poor Flossie as well. (He’d have to put that high up on his morning’s list – check Holly House for corpses.) Sweating, he dug in his pockets for a tissue, and ended up scattering a shower of paper scraps studded with Clarrie’s laborious handwriting on the floor round his desk.
He picked them up and inspected them one by one. ‘Phone Mr H.’ ‘That Mr H. rang.’ ‘Mr H. again.’
Taking it as a sign, he sat and stared.
Then, like a miner knocked half insensible as the supports around him began to topple, he found himself dragging his weakened, battered self towards the only chink of light that he could see by picking up the phone book and turning to the Hs.
Tammy was sitting on the desk, helping Shirley sort out the mess in her handbag.
‘I’m glad you’re here. I run a switchboard, not a crèche.’