‘He sees the probation officer on Friday,’ Flora’s mother explained. ‘It always upsets him but they made it a condition of his parole.’ She slammed the larder door as the dog returned to eat. It was mostly a Border Collie. The wagging tail flicked their knees. ‘He loves that dog,’ Flora’s mother observed. ‘I suppose we’d better go into the lounge.’
‘Wormy! You’re here!’ enthused Baby Brother in the lounge, where he was kneeling beside a chunk of metal components on the floor. He got up to give her an oily embrace then returned to his work.
‘He’s going to sail around the world,’ her mother told Flora.
‘Good for him,’ said Flora. The sofa, covered with a rug that was matted with dog hair, was listing backwards into the wall. Or perhaps the wall was holding up the sofa. The prolapsed seats of the chairs were also hairy. Flora could remember when they had lived in a big house with a big garden, and the suite had been new, a mountain range of luxurious pink damask. Her father always sat in the corner of the sofa by the big window that overlooked the lawn. Then he had left, they had moved and her brothers had climbed over everything and broken it.
Flora pulled out a hard chair from the dining table and found a stack of Big Brother’s manuscripts. ‘Be careful!’ her mother yelped. ‘That’s his symphony.’
Baby Brother snorted and threw down a wrench. Putting the papers on a free corner of the table, Flora turned the chair around and sat down. Her mother stayed standing. Experience had shown her that there was no point in sitting down when you always had things to do.
‘I’ve got to work Sunday,’ Flora explained, ‘so I thought I’d pop over to see you this evening.’
Her mother’s face brightened briefly. ‘Have you got a new job?’
‘I meant my consultancy work. It’s going very well. I’ve got clients to see this weekend.’
‘I wish you had a new job,’ said her mother, slumping as her face fell back into shadow.
‘I have a job.’ Flora deployed what patience she had. ‘It’s going really well. I have to work this weekend.’
‘We’re having trouble with your father again.’ Her mother advanced this as if it were an argument in her favour. Baby Brother made a noise that was half a curse and half a grunt of effort as he loosened a stubborn nut.
‘What’s my father got to do with whether I have a new job or not?’ Flora demanded.
‘He’s trying to get out of paying for the boys,’ her mother complained. ‘We’re going back to court next week.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Flora immediately. ‘I need to be careful while I’m starting the business.’
From the master bedroom above came a glissando of electronic screeching. ‘That’s the third movement, he’s calling it Allegro Febrillato. He got this recording of parrots from Australia,’ said her mother with pride. Baby Brother threw a wrench across the room, just missing the dog as it jumped on the sofa. ‘I’m not looking at you,’ she told her daughter tartly. ‘I know you’ve never got enough to help us out.’
‘I don’t see why he should pay for the boys.’ Flora knew she was losing control but decided to go with it. She needed to externalise some of her feelings here. ‘They’re grown up, for heaven’s sake. They should be out working. I was at their age.’
‘They need to fulfil themselves,’ her mother argued, vague but immovable. ‘All the problems they’ve had, only because they’ve got all this potential that they’ve never been able to do anything with since their dad left. The school’s never helped. I’ve had to do everything.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ Flora suggested. ‘Not any more. It’s down to them. They’re adults.’
‘He’s only twenty.’ Her mother indicated Baby, now intent upon his socket set.
‘That’s old enough,’ Flora persisted.
‘You little cow.’ Baby got to his feet, towered over his mother and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘How can you take Dad’s side? What do you know? You left us the minute you could, you didn’t care. You haven’t hardly been home since.’
‘I went to university,’ Flora protested. ‘I paid my way, I never asked for anything.’
‘You went to university? Well, lucky old you. You only ever come home to make us feel stupid, don’t you?’
‘I do not! That’s not fair!’
‘You should think of their feelings,’ squealed her mother. ‘Boys are sensitive, you know.’
‘What do you want, anyway?’ honked Baby. ‘Coming home like this, not telling anybody?’
Boots crashed down the staircase and Big Brother loomed in the doorway. He had his headphones over his ears and was holding their jack plug in one hand. ‘Will you all just shut up!’ he yelled. ‘How can I get any work done with this bloody row going on?’
‘It’s her, it’s your sister.’ Her mother stabbed the air under the tip of Flora’s nose with her finger.
‘What the fuck does she want?’ Big Brother demanded.
At this, point, Flora lost it completely. As she always did. ‘I don’t want anything! I never want anything! I just came home to tell you—’
‘Well, we don’t want to know. You can just fuck off!’ Big Brother yelled, crashing back up the stairs.
‘You’re upsetting them,’ her mother accused her. ‘You mustn’t stay.’
‘Yeah, fuck off, Wormy,’ echoed Baby.
‘My pleasure,’ Flora assured them. As she wrenched the front door open, she heard the noise of the dog being sick.
On Friday morning, Flora reached Dillon on his mobile at around eleven. ‘Where were you?’ she asked him. ‘I called earlier. Haven’t you picked up your messages?’
‘I was with the boss. It’s always target review on Friday morning.’
‘Look, I’m going out with Georgie tonight. We can catch up tomorrow sometime.’
‘Yeah. Sure. Of course.’ Dillon was alarmed. Friday? The day that led to Saturday, which led to the weekend, which a woman might be expected to spend with her fiancé doing those thrillingly pointless things that people did when they were in love, like going out for lunch or wandering round Spitalfields market buying little presents or having sex all day. She was going out with another man on Friday. There must be an explanation. He would discover it. ‘And George is …’
‘Georgie. That friend who’s just come back from Chicago.’
‘Oh, her. Yes, I remember.’ A quick rush of relief, followed by a new order of unease. Dillon didn’t like the sound of this friend from Chicago. In the transmissions from his beloved so far, she sounded like one of those thrusting power-women who didn’t frighten him, exactly; they concerned him. He worried about them. OK, he was frightened. Power-women had big metallic fingernails and they stared.
Flora never stared. When she talked to him, sometimes, she looked down at her plain cropped fingertips in a way that turned his heart to slush. Sweet, creamy melted ice-cream slush. And her hair rippled with beautiful silvery lights when she threw it behind her dear sharp little shoulders in the way she did without any idea how much he loved it.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes, of course I’m still here. Look – um – so when …’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow morning. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ he said. She rang off so quickly. It was quite unearthly how fast she could do things. She was a sprite, a nymph, a dragonfly. And she was going to marry him. She would always be there, a hovering, darting presence, like a sunbeam dancing around their home. But his flat! So small, so cold, every lonely hour he’d spent there oozing a sour memory from the walls! The putrid carpet in the bathroom, that hole in the kitchen roof – he didn’t want to think about how it had got there. Nor did he want to think about how he came to be living in a sort of tenement by a railway line on Madagascar Basin. When he had bought the place Madagascar Basin was going to be the next Jamaica Wharf, the railway was going to be scrapped and the building was going to be refurbished. None of these things had happened. He could aff
ord better but he had never found the motivation to move. Until Flora refused to go into his kitchen because of the mice. Call the estate agent, put the place on the market!
Where would she like to live? By the water, hadn’t she said something about loving the river? A brand new place with a balcony over the water! They would sit out in the sun on Sunday! The scent of the coffee he would make, the little waves lapping below them, her white, white teeth biting into a croissant! They would laze in French café chairs – no, too uncomfortable, something else, she would know what to buy – they would laze, on their balcony in the sun every Sunday, amusing themselves with shiny newspaper supplements with pictures of girls not half as beautiful as Flora …
‘Dillon, what are you looking at?’
Shit, the boss. Usually she was safely locked up with the head of sales for twenty minutes after target review. ‘Looking at?’ Automatically, guiltily, his hand reached out for his mouse.
‘You’ve been looking at the wall for five minutes. The wall you’re looking at is just a plain white wall, Dillon. Unless there’s writing on the wall that I can’t see. Is there writing on the wall, Dillon?’
‘Ah – I was thinking,’ he was blathering – he knew he was blathering but he couldn’t stop – ‘about what you said. About the pet market. The small-pet market. Conceptualising the small-pet owner and her or his needs. Asking myself whether …’
But she had moved on, with one of her acid whinnying noises which people were inclined to mimic, so the whole of the design desk fell into furtive snickering whenever she appeared.
Dillon conceptualised the small-pet owner. He saw himself aged eight, his hands drowning in his father’s rose-cutting gloves, clutching Archibald by the scruff of the neck. Archibald was not a rabbit, he was the spawn of the devil. The idea of designing an insurance policy to cover veterinary bills for the Archibalds of the world was morally offensive to him.
Archibald used to stink if he wasn’t cleaned out but he would bite any hand that entered his cage. Eventually he had settled his own fate by savaging the cat from next door, thus proving to the young Dillon that there was a God because his mother said that Archibald might have rabies and had to be put down. Archibald had always been on borrowed time with her. His mother was right about everything, he hated that about her. Flora, with her oils and crystals and New Age moonshine, was adorably wrong, always. And she was going to marry him.
‘It’s so-o-o-o nice.’ Georgie stirred the red scummy surface of her Seabreeze with the tip of the straw. ‘All these things I didn’t expect. Thinking of all this getting married stuff. Nice but weird. Weird but nice. Waking up with Felix and knowing you’re going to wake up with him every morning always.’ She lolled happily against the banquette, groping for the words to tell Flora about the altered state she had been experiencing ever since Felix’s proposal, but it was Friday, she was still jet-lagged, she had been at work since 5.30 a.m. and vodka never helped her think.
‘Always,’ said Flora. ‘Always and forever. That’s the plan, isn’t it?’
‘And thinking about his parents, and your parents, and wondering how they’ll get on and realising that you’re really making a whole new layer of family here, you’re like extending the dynasty or joining the clan or keeping the race going. I bet your mother was happy.’ Georgie had never met Flora’s mother. She had a vague idea of a wispy mum in a neat sweater with pearls in a small half-timbered mansion in the Home Counties. She was not far off; if she had been able to retain her husband, Flora’s mother would have been just like that.
‘Ecstatic.’ Flora pasted on a fond smile. ‘Now she’s hassling us for a church wedding. And Dillon’s got this mad idea about us writing our own ceremony and running away to get married on a wild heathery moorland or something.’
Georgie assessed the sense she had of this Dillon person. Flora preferred men who did what she told them, and her mother had always loomed large in her life. ‘Eight to one on your mother?’ she offered.
‘Against my darling boy? Are you crazy?’
‘Seven to one, then.’
‘OK, you’re on. What are we betting?’
‘Champagne would be appropriate, wouldn’t it? The pink stuff again.’
‘Right.’ Flora dipped into her bag for her Psion and made a note of the bet and so they caught up another thread of their friendship. Georgie seemed to revive; the warmth came back to her smile and the sparkle to her eyes.
Betting on life was something Georgie had learned from her uncle, her father’s brother, a priest who had made a lifetime study of innocent pleasures. He gave things nicknames. When he wanted to be emphatic, he said, ‘For the love of Mike,’ and explained that this was still technically swearing because Mike was the Archangel Michael. Her uncle also explained that betting was not gambling if no money was involved and you bet on things that were not officially sport. When he was posted to Ireland the whole family went to visit and he made bets on the weather with jelly babies. Ever afterwards a bet held out to Georgie the guaranteed happiness of summer holidays in childhood.
‘So,’ Flora ventured, encouraged to see her friend more cheerful, ‘how does it feel, to be a wife-to-be?’
Georgie considered. Bliss? Too pink. Peace? Too political. Safe? Too feeble. Calm? Was that it? Too boring.
‘It feels like calm but not boring. And bright like light. And colours, lots of colours. And warm. Calm in neon, maybe. And scary because it’s time to grow up now.’
‘You were born grown up,’ Flora told her, then added, ‘so was Dillon. He’ll be a great dad. I’m going to leave all that to him.’
‘You mean he wants to be a house husband?’ She was so tired. Easier not to talk about herself, easier to talk to Flora about Flora. Satisfaction, that was what was coming off Flora. She looked very, very satisfied. And happy, of course. Astonishing she could drink so much and never seem drunk. There she was, still poised like a Japanese flower, while Georgie felt herself getting rumpled and blurry.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Dillon’s a real golden boy. He’s totally brilliant, even Donna says so. If he works like stink for ten years and gets all the bonuses, he’ll have made enough money so he never has to work again. Then we’re going off to … I don’t know, Bali or Fiji or somewhere. Somewhere we can have a life.’
‘Well, I don’t know about Felix. We haven’t gone that far yet.’ A frown seized her temples and squeezed. Extraordinary that Felix, a master of method, hadn’t told her about his plan for children. ‘I suppose we’ll wait until there’s enough in the bank so we can really afford to start a family. It’ll be a few years, anyway, until Felix has been published at least. Then when he’s off lecturing I’ll be able to stay home with the children. Yes. That’ll be the plan.’ The glass was empty now except for the ice, which Georgie swizzled wistfully with her straw.
‘You’d hate it,’ Flora predicted, ‘not working.’
‘And I’d get miserable if Felix was away a lot.’
Flora was smiling. ‘If Dillon has to be away a lot I’ll go with him because I want to know what happens with him, I don’t want him falling into another woman’s clutches. Like going off to Prague or somewhere with all those raving Natashas just waiting to pounce.’
‘Felix wouldn’t get into that kind, of trouble.’
‘Of course he would. Any man would. Look at the Scumbag.’ Georgie’s eyes became two wounds and Flora realised her friend was still not ready for the whole truth about that subject. She backtracked. ‘Look, fact of life. Men are all the same. If they’re offered pussy on a plate and they think they can get away with it, they’ll be in there, they’ll be on it. Whoever they are, they’re all the same. Doesn’t matter. Only thing to do is keep young and beautiful and never let’em out of your sight.’
‘Felix …’
‘If you think Felix is any different …’
Georgie tried to shake some of the vodka out of her brain and explain. ‘Felix knows he’s a man, that’s what I mean. He knows
he has this genetic programming but he believes that personal integrity is very important. And honesty. So he suggested we should be totally open, right from the beginning. We decided to build our relationship on total, complete honesty. Even with what we’re thinking.’
‘So you’re saying he’d do it and then tell you about it? Are you crazy?’
‘No, no. You’re not getting it. It’s about telling each other what’s going on with us. So if I fancy another man, I tell him. So it’s out in the open and we have complete trust and there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘What happens when you do that?’
Georgie had fallen into the habit of making false confessions of lust just to keep up with Felix and stop him feeling like some monster of raging testosterone. ‘Well, he’s hurt. But he’d be more hurt if I weren’t honest. That would be the real cheating.’
‘And if Felix fancies another woman, he tells you?’
‘Absolutely. I mean, he almost never does. It’s usually crap, he’s embarrassed to own up to it, being such a slave to his hormones. He admits he has these idiotic fantasies about a waitress in a restaurant or someone. Or a flight attendant. He has a thing about air hostess uniforms. It’s all about fear, really, isn’t it? The fear of flying is displaced and becomes arousal. Women are more highly evolved, that’s for sure.’
‘So it’s all fantasy? He never fancies another woman for real?’
‘He doesn’t seem to. I mean, we have sex a lot you know. He’s a very passionate man.’
Flora noticed that when Georgie confided this her top lip twitched and her eyes grew big and dark. Another problem with Georgie was that she hadn’t transcended her physical being. She still wasn’t in balance with her sensuality. That, in Flora’s opinion, had been what went wrong with the Scumbag. Someone who let herself be a slave of her hormones like that just didn’t give out the right energies.
Flora said, ‘Dillon is just brilliant at sex.’ That one landed. Georgie rallied out of her trance of exhaustion and said, ‘Really?’
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