The Last Laugh

by Tracy Bloom

  ‘Ooh no,’ says Maureen. ‘We’ll be fine, won’t we, George? In any case he’ll have much better ideas than you. Now go away, you’ve got bingo to set up.’

  ‘Well, if you’re all right…’ I start to ask George.

  ‘Of course he’s all right,’ dismisses Maureen. ‘After he’s taken his coat off. You must be sweating in that, lad.’

  I turn away as George begins to remove his coat ever so slowly as though if he does it slowly enough this ordeal won’t be happening to him. I take a breath. It’ll be okay, I tell myself. How much damage can an elderly lady do to a fifteen-year-old boy?

  * * *

  I peer through the window a few times but all I can see is the backs of their heads. Every time I look, their heads seem to have got closer, which I take as a good sign, but this time I can’t see George at all. It’s as though he’s disappeared – until I realise he’s bent down as if he has his head in his hands.

  After fifty-eight minutes I walk out the patio doors and cough loudly as I approach the bench. Both their heads turn instantly to face me. Maureen offers me a smile. George looks like I’ve caught him doing something he shouldn’t. His cheeks are rosy red – I’m not sure if it’s embarrassment or he’s caught the sun. I really should have made him put some sunscreen on.

  ‘So do you want to go and get that book from my room, George?’ says Maureen before I can ask how it’s gone. She reaches in her pocket for her key and waves it at him. He glances at me then grabs it and takes off at speed. I watch him head towards the patio doors, stumble slightly, struggle with the handle, then disappear.

  ‘Sit down, won’t you,’ says Maureen. ‘He’ll be a while. I’ve hidden the book I’ve sent him for right at the back of the shelf. And given he’s a bit drunk, it might take him some time to find it.’

  ‘What?’ I say, staring at her.

  ‘I’ve hidden the book. He won’t find it quickly.’

  ‘Did you say he was drunk?’

  ‘A bit, I think. Not legless or anything.’

  I’m speechless.

  ‘I couldn’t decide if ouzo was going to be appropriate to serve as an arrival drink so I asked around to see if anyone had any and sure enough, Mabel’s daughter brought her some back from Greece last year. Thought I’d try it with George to see if he thought it would go with his food. I had this brilliant idea that we would have a Greek theme, you see.’

  I’m still speechless.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t I tell you about the theme? Must have come to me after you left yesterday.’

  ‘He’s drunk!’

  ‘No, just a bit tipsy, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s fifteen!’

  ‘Is he? I thought he was the seventeen-year-old?’

  ‘No, that’s Ellie. Even if he was seventeen I wasn’t expecting to leave him with you so you could get him pissed!’

  ‘I keep telling you, he’s not drunk, just loosened up a bit.’

  I stand up. What am I to do with her? She’s out of control.

  ‘He’s got some great ideas for mini kebabs,’ says Maureen. ‘You know, fancy ones. Not with onion or anything. Heritage tomatoes, he mentioned at one point. Whatever they might be. But his idea is that we do fancy kebabs. All finger food, you see. Less washing-up. He’s a very clever lad, your boy.’

  ‘You got him drunk. What will Mark say?’ I’m pacing up and down now, trying to work out how we sober him up before Mark gets home.

  ‘Mark won’t notice,’ shrugs Maureen.

  ‘He will. He’s got a real thing about kids and alcohol.’

  ‘George says Mark never notices what he does. Apart from when he’s being rubbish at Maths. He said he could run around naked all day and his dad wouldn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘Maureen!’ I exclaim – about something, I’m not exactly sure what. So many options are available.

  ‘That’s what he said and before you ask, yes, he did use the word “fuck”.’

  ‘Please stop swearing,’ I beg.

  ‘Just trying to be accurate. Just trying to convey George’s depth of feeling. You really need to sort that out.’

  ‘His swearing?’

  ‘No! Mark ignoring him. I told you, didn’t I, that it was a problem? George confirmed it to me. He thinks his dad’s ashamed of him.’

  I sit down. Months of therapy haven’t got us this far. Months of trying to wheedle out of him some inner feelings that might allow us to help him. It’s cost us a fortune. If only I’d known all I needed was a batty old lady and some alcohol.

  ‘Is that what he said?’ I ask. ‘He thinks his dad is ashamed of him?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But that’s what he’s trying to say. He said he feels like he is letting his dad down because he likes cooking rather than Maths.’

  ‘He actually told you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just asked him a few questions, you know, in between talking about kebabs and drinking ouzo.’

  I lean back on the bench. It’s going to take me a while to process all of this.

  ‘Oh, and he thinks you might be having an affair.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I told him that I definitely knew you weren’t. I mean, look at the state of you! Why are you wearing pastels again? I keep telling you they wash you out.’

  ‘But what on earth makes him think that I’m having an affair?’

  ‘The new look, the weight loss and the fact that you and his dad never talk to each other.’

  ‘Seriously? And his conclusion is that I’m the one having the affair? I’ve a good mind to just tell him. Tell him about his dad.’

  ‘Calm down,’ she says, laying a hand on my arm. ‘It’s probably not what George needs to hear right now, is it? And, anyway, that’s the least of your worries.’

  ‘What! Do you mean there’s more?’

  ‘Well, yes, there is actually.’

  ‘Who are you, Jeremy Kyle? What was going on out here?’

  ‘No, don’t worry, he hasn’t got anyone pregnant yet. Quite the opposite in fact.’

  ‘What!’ I leap up again. ‘What do you mean, he hasn’t got anyone pregnant yet. What are you talking about?’

  Maureen is smiling. Smirking, to be exact. I don’t see that there’s anything to smirk about. She starts giggling. Why is she giggling? How can she be giggling when she has just mentioned my teenage son and pregnancy in the same sentence?

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ I demand, bending forward so my face is close to hers.

  ‘Ooh, I couldn’t say,’ she says, laughing even harder.

  ‘Tell me,’ I demand. I’m getting cross now.

  She coughs and attempts to compose herself, then collapses in giggles once again. I grab her shoulders and shake her.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘He’s just, you know…’

  ‘No, I don’t know, so please tell me.’

  ‘He just thinks he’s wanking too much,’ she manages to spit out before she hides her face behind her hands, the colour having risen to her cheeks.

  I sit down again, staring at Maureen. Did she really just say what I thought she said? Her pink cheeks and near hysterics would suggest she did.

  A sense of relief floods over me. The relief of talking about my teenage son’s wanking habit rather than anything else.

  ‘Did… did he say how often?’ I find myself asking before I start to feel the giggles rising in my throat.

  ‘No,’ replies Maureen. ‘And I didn’t ask. That’s between him and his, you know, thingy.’

  She just said ‘wanking’ and now she’s too embarrassed to call a penis a penis.

  ‘So what did you say?’ I ask.

  ‘I said we have all been through it and it will pass,’ she replies.

  I look at her. What do you say to that?

  ‘Thank you,’ I say eventually.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  We sit in silence for a moment as I try to recall and
categorise the revelations that have passed between us over the last five minutes. I’d expected to leave here with George a gibbering wreck and the prospect of an evening on the phone to catering companies. Now I have no idea what I’m leaving with.

  ‘I was just telling your mum about the heritage tomato thingies,’ pipes up Maureen as George suddenly appears in front of us. ‘Can you explain them to her?’ she adds. ‘She’s never heard of them either.’ She turns to me – ‘They sound amazing.’

  ‘They’re just old breeds,’ says George, the very slightest of slurs perceptible. ‘From the old days. I thought the people who live here might enjoy them alongside the kebabs.’

  He sits down with a thump on the floor in front of us. As if he was worried that, if he didn’t, he might fall over.

  ‘You see,’ says Maureen. ‘Such a clever idea, such a clever boy. You should be very proud of him,’ she tells me.

  ‘I am,’ I say, smiling at George. ‘We both are.’

  George says nothing.

  ‘Oh, I did have one idea,’ I tell him as I suddenly remember something I’d seen in a photo in one of my old albums. ‘Something we had a lot of in the nineties.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Vodka melon. Do you think you could have a go at that?’

  He smiles back and nods before he falls over.

  Thirty-Four

  ‘I really don’t have time for this,’ says Mark as we pull up outside a row of terraced houses. ‘I thought you said it was an emergency. Why are we here?’

  ‘Look,’ I say, pointing upwards. ‘It’s for sale.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Our old house, our first house.’

  ‘I know what it is, I just don’t know why we’re here.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh look, that must be the estate agent coming.’

  I get out of the car before Mark can make any other comment and walk quickly towards a shifty-looking man in his twenties wearing a suit that doesn’t fit. Without a shadow of a doubt the man I booked the appointment with on the phone this afternoon.

  ‘Mrs Sutton?’ he says in a way that makes me feel a hundred and seven. ‘And you must be Mr Sutton,’ he says, diving forward to shake Mark’s hand whilst failing to even offer to shake mine. A black mark, I think. Good job we aren’t actually interested in buying the property or else I’d have some serious issues with dealing with this young man.

  ‘We’ll get you inside, shall we?’ he says, fishing keys out of his pocket. ‘You’re actually the first ones to view the property,’ he adds over his shoulder as he struggles with the sticky lock. ‘It only went on the market yesterday.’

  Mark flashes me angry glances behind his back. He’s no idea what he’s doing here. Neither have I really but when the alert came through I couldn’t resist. I knew I couldn’t not go and see the house I moved into with Mark in 1996. It was fate, surely.

  I follow the estate agent boy down the hall and turn right into the open-plan downstairs space. Except it isn’t. Someone in the last fifteen years has put a wall up to cordon off the living room. Who does that? Who puts up walls when everyone else is knocking them down? I cast my eyes around the very small-looking dark room. What have they done to our house? Our 1996? Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. It looks weird with other people’s stuff in it and a bloody great big wall.

  Estate agent boy leads us through a newly created doorway into what is now a kitchen dining space. I heave a sigh of relief. It’s much more like I remember. The kitchen that Mark and I put in – in 1999 – is still there, complete with its black and white tiled floor and exposed floorboards in the dining area. The memories come flooding back. The noisy, drunken dinner parties, the dancing round the table to Kylie and the Spice Girls and Oasis. The early-morning clearing-up, gagging as beer and wine dregs were cast down the plughole and glass after glass lined up on the counter ready to be washed and dried by whoever had ended up kipping overnight on the sofa or in the spare room. The smell of bacon and sausages as Mark presided over a massive fry-up to set people on their way out into Sunday, to the next sofa they could find to sleep off their hangovers. The early-morning dashes to get out of the house to work and the late-night suppers in front of the telly when Big Brother actually had nice people on it and the Cold Feet crew were just extra members of our gang.

  This is why I wanted to come. This is why I wanted Mark to come. To feel it again; feel what it was like in the early days.

  Estate agent boy is droning on about something to do with energy efficiency and power-saving light bulbs but I haven’t really been listening to him since we walked through the door.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I say, talking over estate agent boy and grabbing Mark’s hand. I lead him up the open staircase.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he hisses in my ear.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ I say sharply.

  ‘The master bedroom is right at the top of the stairs,’ says estate agent boy, after I have already taken the turn.

  ‘They’ve varnished the floor,’ I say as we walk in. I’d spent a whole weekend sanding down the floor but had never quite got round to varnishing it. I wish I had – it looked gorgeous.

  ‘Do you want to wait downstairs?’ I turn round and say to estate agent boy.

  ‘Would you like me to show you the other bedrooms first?’

  ‘No need,’ I chant back.

  ‘Erm, okay then,’ he says. ‘I’ll be just downstairs.’

  He glances at Mark as though expecting him to explain this odd behaviour, then turns and leaves the room. I wait until I can hear the plod of his footsteps going down the stairs.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what on earth is going on now?’ hisses Mark.

  ‘The estate agent said they were in the same position as us when we left,’ I tell him. ‘They’ve got a second child on the way, they need more room.’

  I look around the bedroom and catch sight of the trademark technology owned by all young families: a baby monitor. It looks different to how I remember ours, more like a Star Wars robot. I look up at Mark. His hands are on his hips in frustration. I walk towards the big bay window overlooking the green. They’d play football there on a Sunday morning, loads of them. Their shouts and hollers and whistle-blowing were the soundtrack to our coffee-drinking, croissant-eating, newspaper-reading Sunday mornings.

  Utter bliss.

  ‘We made our babies here,’ I say, turning round. ‘In this room.’

  His face drops.

  ‘Do you remember?’

  He doesn’t say anything, he just shrugs. He has no idea what is going on.

  ‘Do you remember the night we made Ellie?’

  He still doesn’t know what to say; he looks more bewildered by the minute.

  ‘How on earth do you know exactly what night it was?’

  ‘We’d walked across the green into town,’ I say, pointing out of the window. ‘I bet we had a race down the track. Do you remember how we used to do that?’

  In the summer there would be an oval of faint white lines drawn on the grass, presumably for the nearby school. Often we would leave the house on a Friday night at the end of a hard week, hand in hand to head to the city’s pubs. As we approached the white lines there would be a pause in conversation until one of us wouldn’t be able to resist breaking free and making a sprint up one of the lanes. Mark would always win, mostly because he had more suitable footwear, and would shout over his shoulder just before the finish line, ‘Loser buys the first round.’

  ‘I always won,’ he conceded.

  ‘And I always bought the first round.’

  He shrugs again, as if to say it was my own fault for wearing high heels.

  ‘It was Tim's birthday that night,’ I say.

  Tim, aka Stubby, was the guy who had first come on to me when I had greeted Mark and his mates at Corfu airport all those years ago. Turned out he was actually Mark’s best mate and a really great blo
ke. He just got a bit leery when he was drunk, that’s all. He had been the one who had come round and put up some extra shelves when I moved in with Mark, as well as offering me a four-pack of Stella as a moving-in present. Like I said, he was a great guy.

  ‘We went to meet him and his new girlfriend in that tapas place, do you remember?’ I continue. ‘We were a bit naïve as to how to order tapas so we didn’t order enough. We weren’t naïve when it came to ordering carafes of the house red though, were we?’

  ‘Was that the night of the hangover from hell?’

  ‘Yeah. Julie threw up outside the restaurant, she was in such a state. She said it was the nerves caused by meeting Tim’s friends but I think it really was the entire carafe that she had to herself. Tim was legless too. They went home at nine, do you remember?’

  ‘Yeah, didn’t we carry on?’

  ‘We did, like a pair of idiots. Thought we were all right. We went for one in Soda Bar and that tipped us over the edge.’

  ‘Didn’t we go to McTurks for a kebab?’

  ‘We were starving. Turned out a couple of chorizo sausages and a cube of potato weren’t filling enough. We brought them back here. It was like there had been a kebab massacre in the kitchen the next day. There was cabbage, garlic mayonnaise and pitta bread everywhere. Still, the sex was good.’

  ‘We had sex?’

  ‘Yeah! The smell of chilli sauce turns me on to this day. You stank of it.’

  ‘I’m starting to get flashbacks. Was there cabbage in your bra?’

  ‘There was,’ I say excitedly. ‘You slipped your hand inside my bra and next minute you’re pulling half my kebab out.’

  He smiles. Thank God for that smile.

  ‘We were like animals that night. It was like the kebab had released something in us.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t the dodgy red wine?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I nod. ‘But I woke up the next morning feeling very content.’ I smile.

  ‘And with the hangover from hell.’

  ‘I have never known a headache like it. I think we lay in bed all day. I might have sent you for a reviving McDonald’s at some point but I think that was all we managed.’