by Lucy Lawrie
‘So, what was so bad about your day?’ I handed Murray his tea and sat down against the wall by the door, so I could see Pip playing with his trains in the hallway. Our conversations usually descended into work chat pretty quickly: his work, that is. His job as Managing Partner of McKeith’s solicitors involved high levels of intrigue and drama, which is more than could be said about my work proofreading legal textbooks, and working from home meant I didn’t even have colleagues to gossip about.
‘Oh, just the usual bollocks about bonus allocation. A couple of the associates are saying they’ll walk if they don’t get something substantial this year. Lemmings off a bloody cliff, as far as I’m concerned. But some of the partners are weighing in on it as well. It’s the same old story. They have no idea how tough it is to keep the business afloat in this climate.’
‘And how did the tender go for the new hospital project?’
‘Beatty let some junior associate loose on the pitch and he ballsed it up spectacularly. We didn’t have a chance anyway, Bodkins have undercut our rates by thirty per cent.’
‘Oh dear. And how’s Gretel?’
He shot me a sideways look. ‘She’s good. She’s off to Brussels next week to head up a taskforce. The Working Time Regulations, and the impact on small employers.’
‘God, that sounds even more boring than the last one. What was it, age discrimination and the opening hours of recycling centres?’ I blurted it out, so eager to sound animated, clutching at anything other than the polite ‘oh really?’ response.
Murray frowned. I’d ignored the unspoken Gretel Rule.
‘Sorry. I mean, it’s not boring. Just quite dry. Legal.’
He sighed, and sprawled backwards on the squashy sofa, his feet planted wide apart on the floor. He still had his brogues on. With their little pattern of dots, they looked faintly ridiculous, like the clumpy brown school shoes I’d had to wear in primary one. Or like Mr Men shoes.
He tugged his tie loose, craning his neck to one side as though it was sore.
For a moment, I almost slid onto the sofa beside him. I could have rubbed the knots out of his neck. He turned to me suddenly, as though he’d guessed my thoughts, and I dropped my gaze to the carpet, and its nubbly lines of oatmeal wool.
‘And what have you been up to this week?’ I loved the way his voice went quiet – almost tender – as he asked the question, the Managing Partner bluster melting away.
For a moment I wanted to tell him the truth, that I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Hattie, and had been trawling the internet for the merest glimpse of her. How I’d telephoned St Katherine’s, only to be told they couldn’t release any details of former pupils. And how I’d joined Facebook and friended a bunch of old classmates so that I could ask them if they’d heard from her. One of them still had an old class list from primary six, and bless her, she’d scanned it and sent me a copy. I’d phoned round all the telephone numbers on it, hoping I might be able to reach a few parents still living at the same addresses. This had yielded four further phone numbers. I’d followed up each of them, with a faux-friendly, ‘Hi! I’m Janey. We were at school together?’ But nobody had heard anything of Hattie since she’d left.
Most of all I wanted to tell him how those first few entries in her diary had made me feel – as though I was seeing my old self again through her eyes – bold, funny, merciless in my judgements, single-mindedly loyal. I’d never realised how much of me had disappeared along with Hattie, on that terrible December day when she’d failed to turn up for school.
‘Oh yes, my day was good, thanks. Pip almost ate a slice of cucumber with his fish fingers.’
Well, he’d stabbed it with his fork and thrown it on the floor, which I thought was progress.
‘That reminds me. I thought maybe Pip and I could do some baking. I cut out a recipe for gingerbread men.’ He drew a square of newsprint out of his jacket pocket and waved it around, looking slightly embarrassed.
He must have read one of the same articles I had, which recommended involving reluctant eaters in messy, fun food-making activities.
‘Pip?’ I called into the hallway. ‘Do you want to bake?’
Murray project-managed the production of the gingerbread men, or women, as it turned out, since Pip was determined to stick stodgy gingerbread skirts over their legs. He was always softer – almost reverential – with his son, but from time to time I could hear his boardroom voice ringing out from the kitchen.
Leaving dishes piled in the sink, and the kitchen coated in a fine icing-sugar dust, they emerged with the look of men who’d achieved something great, and flopped on the sofa to watch Grandpa in My Pocket. Pip copied Murray’s stance: arms crossed, chin pressed onto his chest. They were the picture of father–son bonding until Murray started glancing at his watch.
Please don’t go.
‘You could stay and help with his bath, if you like?’
A few times, when Gretel had been out socialising with clients, or ‘out with the girls’ on a Friday night, he’d stayed on after Pip’s bedtime and we’d talked over a glass of wine, or watched telly together. We could almost have been a couple, albeit an odd one, me in jeans, T-shirt and a Masterchef apron, him in his Savile Row suit and Cartier cufflinks, a full thirteen years older than me.
Not that I wanted to be in a couple: not with someone who’d once been my boss, and had knocked me up at a drunken client event at Gleneagles, before hooking up with a scary uber-lawyer called Gretel. But company . . . company was nice. I didn’t like sitting in the flat alone after Pip had gone to sleep. I didn’t like the feel of the minutes ticking away until it would be time to go to bed myself . . . time to fall asleep and give myself over to The Dream again.
‘Sorry. No can do. Gretel’s expecting me back tonight. She thinks I’m at the gym doing Body Combat for Men . . .’
He paused, watching me with a raised eyebrow, as though waiting for me to approve his choice of imaginary exercise class.
My cheeks felt hot. ‘D’you think maybe you should tell her? You know, that you come here on Friday afternoons?’
‘Yes, I should probably bring her up to speed. Leave it with me.’ He stood up, holding out the uneaten gingerbread person Pip had foisted upon him.
‘I’ll take it.’ His fingers brushed against mine as he handed it over.
Pip and I followed him into the hallway, where he shrugged on his overcoat and put on his scarf.
He hunched his shoulders. ‘Cold out tonight.’
He gave Pip a growly hug, nodded a goodbye to me, and turned to open the front door.
My left hand was tingling. The fingers tightening involuntarily.
What? No . . .
My left hand snatched the gingerbread person from my right, aimed and threw it, hard, at the back of Murray’s head.
‘Ow!’ He swung round, shooting an accusing glance at Pip, who was staring at me open-mouthed.
‘Oops! Off you go, then.’ I managed to keep my voice light, fighting down the surge of panic. I ushered him out into the cold night and shut the door after him.
4
Hattie’s Diary
Friday, October 20th
There’s something wrong with my music case. Mum said it was a bad dream, but it wasn’t that at all.
This happened last night. I’m writing this in the safety and comfort of school (wet break). Janey is collecting old tennis balls from the holly hedge because she forgot her PE kit again.
So basically, I’d done my homework (Spartans, and how they let their babies die on hillsides to see if they were strong enough, also how they played flutes) and gone to bed. I was just going to let myself have a little think about AR (see old diary: the ceilidh with St Simon’s on 17th June), and snuggled down under the covers.
But then I started thinking sad thoughts. About Dad and how he hasn’t been back from New York since Easter, even though he promised he’d come back every couple of months. He’s supposedly working on some amazing new idea h
e’s got for a musical, but I wonder if he and Mum have actually split up and just not told us. It was so lonely here over the summer. James was on summer camp for most of it, and Mum kept saying she was too tired to have my friends over, because they’d run riot over the house. We did a few nice things like baking madeleines, and putting new wallpaper up in my room, and once she put on some music and taught me how to waltz. But she had long naps in the afternoons, which didn’t leave much time for going out. I read a lot, curled up on the window seat in the kitchen.
So I was thinking about all this, and that’s when I heard it. A shuffling, bumping noise, coming from the cupboard by the door.
My first thought was that it could be mice again. I put on my slippers, because I didn’t want mice running over my bare feet, and put my ear to the cupboard door, listening until I felt brave enough to pull it open.
My music case – which I’d put at the back of the cupboard – flopped out and landed on the carpet. I put it back in, right at the back, underneath Cluedo and Risk.
I woke up later to the sound of more thumping. I put on my Walkman but the only tape I have is the one Mum gave me to go with it – a Haydn string quartet – and it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the noise. Something with a beat would’ve been much better, but my parents, like Miss F, think that pop music is ‘banal’. (Nobody is allowed to say that some of the songs in Dad’s musicals are basically like pop music, but with violins and stuff to disguise it.)
At ten past midnight there was another huge thump. I got the music case out and took it down to Mum. Her room was pitch dark, so I just hovered in the doorway and said ‘Mum’ a few times.
When she sat up and put on the bedside light I actually got a bit of a fright, because she was still wearing her eye mask, and it looked for a moment like a great black hole in her face.
She yanked it down and sank back down onto her pillows with a sigh. Then, tilting her head to one side then the other, she pulled out her earplugs. One of them pinged off the bedside table and landed on the carpet by my feet. I pretended not to notice: I didn’t want to touch the horrid, fleshy thing.
‘Hattie.’
She looked so pale without her make-up. Her eyelids drooped as I told her about the music case, and she said it was ‘jussabadream’.
She pulled on her mask and rolled over. I turned off the light for her, then very quietly put the music case down beside her bed before tiptoeing out.
There was no mention of it this morning at breakfast (Weetabix).
5
Janey
‘We have to wade through a sea of mud?’ Murray’s nose wrinkled as he surveyed the car park. With a sigh he opened the boot of his Lexus 4x4 and carefully changed out of his Mr Men shoes into a pair of pristine Hunter wellies.
‘No, Pip, wait!’ I shouted. He’d pulled his hand out of mine with a wild shriek of ‘Thomas Tanken!’ and was running towards the ticket office, taking the most direct route through a puddle that was more like a small pond. ‘Nope. Too late.’
Murray strode into the puddle, grabbed his son and flipped him sideways so his muddy shoes were held safely away from Murray’s checked Burberry raincoat (his Sherlock Holmes coat, as I privately thought of it).
‘Can’t keep Thomas waiting, can we?’
Pip practically expired with delight at the sight of the steam train with a big plastic Thomas the Tank Engine face stuck on the front.
‘Sit dere!’ he shouted in his most imperious voice, pointing at a table seat at the front of the carriage.
I hurried over to secure the seats, but when I looked back at Murray his face had gone rigid with shock. He bared his teeth and jabbed a finger towards the party sitting across the aisle: a woman and a young boy who were busy looking out of the window.
The woman turned. Murray raised his eyebrows and tried to twist his grimace into a smile.
‘Gretel!’
And oh God, she looked like she’d walked straight out of a film. She was Truly Scrumptious with her long blonde waves and lacy white blouse. She was Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa with those cheekbones and the wide chin. I blinked and looked again.
‘Hi, Murray.’ Her expression was bright, her tone even and unsurprised.
‘Gretel!’ he said again. ‘Hello. I thought you were taking Mutti out for lunch today?’ He turned to me and said, rather formally, ‘Gretel’s mother is sixty today.’
I smiled and nodded.
‘There was a change of plan,’ said Gretel. ‘I told you I was taking Gulliver out for his birthday tomorrow.’
Oh yes, this was Gretel’s fabled godson Gulliver, who’d known all his phonics from the age of two and who liked to snack on small bowls of olives.
‘Well, Jill was planning a day out with Gulliver today. But her mother was meant to be going to Bathgate with Aggie McCrae to look at mother-of-the-bride dresses because Aggie’s daughter Cat is getting married in September – they’ve had to bring the date forward – it was going to be a spring wedding but then Cat got pregnant and she wanted a proper white wedding dress, you know, not a pregnant meringue-style dress, so they’ve arranged things with the hotel – the Baldounie – you know that one where Richard and Jess got married? Apparently the hotel wouldn’t change the booking, and they’d paid a £5,000 deposit, which I thought seemed like a lot. Mind you, I’m sure Annette Quigley paid £7,450 as a deposit for her wedding, because remember that was around the time her credit card got stolen, and the bank queried it as a possible fraudulent transaction. But they agreed in the end, as long as the new date was a Tuesday, which she doesn’t mind because she’s feeling awfully sick. She thinks eighty to a hundred and ten guests is about the right number.’
There was something old-fashioned about her voice, with its received pronunciation but with slight German stresses on certain words . . . It made me want to lay my head back on the red velour headrest and close my eyes. I had a sudden, sharp memory of one rainy Boxing Day afternoon, curled up on the sofa with Grandpa watching The Sound of Music on the new colour telly . . . Even Granny had tapped her foot along to the music as she’d darned socks.
But now Gretel was looking at me, evidently expecting a response.
‘Oh, yes.’ I said quickly. ‘Eighty sounds about right.’
‘They’ve had to take the pâté off the menu too. But Jill’s mum has sprained her wrist and can’t drive to Bathgate. She slipped on some fox mess in the garden. Anyway, Aggie had this mother-of-the-bride appointment and Jill is very kindly driving her to it, and is going to advise her on the outfits too, which, let’s face it, is a better outcome than Jill’s mum doing it.’ Gretel winced at the idea. ‘So she asked if I could look after Gulliver today instead. I thought he might like to see Thomas the Tank Engine. Thanks for giving me the idea, Murray.’
‘Er . . .’
Gretel flashed him a bright smile. ‘I saw the tickets in the drawer of your dresser. Three tickets for the Thomas train. Unusual choice of activity for a client away day – that’s what you said you were doing today, wasn’t it, Murray? But hey, I thought, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. So here we are. And these are your clients, are they?’
‘Gretel, er, meet my son, Pip.’
‘Hi Pip,’ said Gretel. ‘Oh look, that man’s got a hat on like the Fat Controller! See, Gulliver?’
‘And I don’t think you’ve met Janey either. She’s . . . um. Well, she used to work at the firm.’
She’s the one I shagged at that completion dinner just before we started going out together? That awkward situation with the pregnancy and everything? Remember, darling?
‘The famous Janey. So we finally meet.’ She exhaled loudly and looked at her watch. ‘When do you think the train actually starts moving? We’ve been sitting here for ages. Just as well Gulliver had his sudoku sticker book in his rucksack. He’s very easily bored. He goes to a forest nursery.’
‘Oh?’ I said politely. ‘What’s a forest nursery?’
‘They don’t have any inside prem
ises. Just an awning, if the rain becomes torrential. But they’re worried about him making the transition to primary one, in a non-forest school.’
‘Ah . . .’
‘They were going to ask whether he could have a vegetable corner in the classroom. Space might be an issue, though.’
‘Or those . . . erm . . .’ I actually wagged a finger, in my eagerness to contribute. ‘Erm, growbags. You know, the ones you can grow strawberries in . . . and things.’
Why was I trying to please her? It wasn’t that I’d warmed to her, exactly: with her perkiness and the little ‘ta-da’ movements of her hands when she was speaking, she exuded a sort of spoilt girlishness. But perhaps it was that: the air of brightness and total certainty about her that made you feel nothing could go wrong when she was at the centre of it. Maybe that was why she was such a successful lawyer.
What would she be like as a friend?
A silly thought, given the circumstances. It was Hattie’s diary that was making me think like this, as though there was suddenly a friend-shaped hole in my life that needed filling.
And of course Hattie had had that too . . . a knack of making you think everything would be okay. It had almost pulled me in when reading those first few diary entries: I’d been lulled into believing that the phantom piano playing would turn out to be mice after all, or that Miss Fortune, the evil villainess, would receive her comeuppance in a breathless, Secret Seven-style denouement. Hattie and Janey, brave storybook heroines, would be best friends forever, skiving cross-country and passing notes in biology.
I put a hand to my mouth, caught by a stab of pain at the thought of it.
Gretel frowned, and shot a look down to my feet and up again.
‘Fat ’toller!’ Pip lifted a wavering fist in the direction of the window and beamed his wide-open ‘love me’ smile at Gulliver.
‘The Fat Controller,’ corrected Gulliver, blinking slowly. ‘Gretel, can we move over there?’
*
‘Is she always like that?’ I asked Murray on the way home.
He sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry she was there. I screwed up, leaving the tickets in the dresser. Leave it with me, okay? I’ll sort it.’