‘Is my smoothie plain?’
‘What do you mean?’ Mum said, sitting back down and smiling like a stoned madwoman.
Stoned!
‘Am I . . . am I stoned?’ I said, incredulous. I’d never been stoned.
Mum fell sideways on the sofa with the force of her laughter.
‘Annabelle?’ I turned to my sister whose eyes were still on Marcus.
‘Yes,’ she said frankly. ‘You are stoned.’
‘What?!’
‘You were getting hyper so we decided you needed sedating,’ Mum said from her sideways position.
‘Roofied by my own family!’ I was aghast. ‘I’m aghast!’ I said.
Mum laughed hysterically into a cushion.
Annabelle turned back to Marcus. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Did you come to give me another mission?’ Hunter said, hopping from foot to foot. ‘I figured the last one out easy!’
‘Not this time,’ he said, ruffling Hunter’s permanently ruffled hair. ‘I came because . . . I wanted to . . .’ He looked at Annabelle, who seemed to be flushing around the neck.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘What’s happening?’ I said, looking from Marcus with Katie in his arms to Annabelle on the sofa with her eyes wide and an unsightly heat creeping across her collarbones. ‘Mum, something’s happening,’ I said, tapping at her head but not taking my eyes off the confusing chemistry between Annabelle and Marcus.
Mum wiped her streaming eyes, muttered about being ‘high’ and convulsed into hiccuping giggles again. Marcus put Katie down then crouched at her level. He began signing and Katie’s already beaming grin grew wider. Her eyes sparkled and flicked between watching his hands and looking up into his smiling face.
‘How come Marcus knows sign language?’ I asked Annabelle, who ignored me and watched her daughter and Marcus interacting.
‘What’s he saying?’ Mum said, trying to right herself but getting caught in the cushions.
‘I can’t . . .’ I leant forward and tried to read their hands. ‘He says . . . he wants to play the harp . . . he says ‘horsey do, horsey see’ . . . he says . . . no, that can’t be . . . he says . . . Agh!’ I fell back against the cushions, angry and frustrated. ‘I can’t figure it out, I’m too stoned!’
Mum howled with laughter and fell to the other side. I turned to Annabelle, who looked like she was either very happy or very sad. Or about to sneeze. Man, being high was confusing.
‘He says . . .’ I focused on his hands. ‘He says . . .’ then I gasped and looked over at Annabelle, who was tearing up. ‘He says “ . . . tell Mummy I love her” . . .’
‘Ridiculous!’ Mum wheezed, trying to straighten her skew-whiff glasses. ‘You’re too high. Try again.’
‘He’s a divorcee,’ Annabelle said a few minutes later while Marcus was out of the room putting Hunter and Katie back to bed. Her cheeks were still flushed.
‘Divorced?!’ Mum said, appalled.
‘He’s not exactly getting a vestal virgin with me, Mum.’
‘But still . . . divorced,’ she tutted. ‘Why?’
‘His wife had an affair.’
Mum shook her head disapprovingly, still tut-tutting.
‘From where do you get your moral standing?’ I said to Mum, who pursed her lips in return.
‘He’s a property developer. He’s thirty-six, has no kids and we’ve been seeing each other for eight months.’
‘WHAT?!’ I said.
‘WIE BITTE?’ Mum said.
Annabelle, tiring of Mum’s incessant tut-tutting, looked her in the eye. ‘Fucking for six.’
Mum’s eyebrows shot up. ‘No need to use such language!’ she said primly.
Inexplicably, or perhaps explicably (on account of the weed), I began to get the giggles. Then Mum did too and we gripped each other’s arms and tried to supress hysterics until tears streamed down our cheeks while Annabelle looked on unamused.
Marcus arrived back and stopped in the doorway looking uncertain.
Annabelle walked across the room, stood next to him and waited for Mum and me to regain our composure. Once we were under control, she spoke. ‘We wanted to keep it quiet because we knew you’d both have your concerns.’
‘And we do,’ I said, getting righteous. ‘He could have sleazy objectives. He could have dodgy money practices. He could have syphilis.’ I turned to Marcus. ‘No offence.’
Marcus, standing nervously beside Annabelle, reddened and waved my apology away.
Annabelle rolled her eyes and turned to Mum. ‘The kids adore him. He and Hunter have this little challenge game,’ she said with a fond twinkle. ‘He gives Hunter sentences in comic-book speak and Hunter has to decipher them. The last one was “Go to the centre of trade and retrieve the sunset orbs”, Annabelle said in an Ironman-type voice, her eyes shining with playfulness.
Mum and I frowned back.
‘It means “go to the market and get oranges”, she said with an expectant grin.
‘Hunter can’t go to the market by himself,’ Mum pooh-poohed. ‘That’s an irresponsible request. Marcus clearly isn’t suited to childcare.’ She turned to Marcus. ‘No offence.’
Marcus again gave a feeble wave of dismissal. Annabelle’s grin dropped. Just then the curry turned up and Annabelle and Marcus moved to the kitchen. Mum and I turned on the TV and with me on the floor eating my curry at the coffee table and her on the sofa munching her mono-meal of avocado, we tried to follow a documentary about stingrays while bitching about this newcomer.
‘He doesn’t look like the type to “shag and pack a bag”, to “doggy-style then run a mile”, to put “cock in hole then rock ’n’ roll”, but those are the ones you have to keep an especially close eye on.’
‘What are you talking about, Plum?’ Mum said. ‘And don’t use such language. Disgusting talk! You should be ashamed of yourself.’
I looked up at her. ‘I’m not.’
Mum pursed her lips. ‘I just worry,’ she said, pushing her avocado aside and eyeing my plate. ‘Annabelle doesn’t have room in her life for a man.’
‘Well,’ I said, biting a folded chunk of naan bread and talking through the mouthful. ‘Maybe she does if she doesn’t need us so much any more?’
‘Doesn’t need us?’ Mum looked unbearably hurt.
I felt the burn too. I turned back to the TV. Mum was already hurting; there was no need to say that I’d started to think that Annabelle might want some independence. From us.
‘I used to be scared of stingrays until I watched Finding Nemo,’ I said, and Mum nodded like I’d said something insightful.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ Mum asked, looking at my plate with its smudges of orange, two torn pieces of naan and a discarded onion bhaji.
‘No, I’m done.’
Mum slid off the sofa, hustled me out of the way and began shovelling the food in her face.
‘I feel like crisps,’ she said, after swiping the last bit of naan across the last smear of curry and shoving it in her mouth.
‘You’ve got the munchies!’ I laughed.
Mum crept out of the front door and was back ten minutes later with her arms and coat pockets full of the kind of crinkly wrapped foods I’d never seen in her possession before.
‘The nice man said I would like the pringle so I got three.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
‘Oh . . .’ Mum groaned. ‘Oh, it’s awful. Oooh nooo. Oh dear.’
‘Mum, shush, you’re hurting my brain innards,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, oh, oooooooh . . .’
‘Stop. Please stop,’ I croaked. ‘I have a hangover.’
‘Cannabis doesn’t give you a hangover,’ she rasped. ‘Oh, but I have one. Oh what is it? It’s terrible.’
I tried to sit up. Mum and I had slept on Annabelle’s pullout sofa bed and as I moved I found Wotsits in my armpit.
‘Well, what does it give you then?’ I said, tossing the limp Wotsits onto the coffee table, which
had been shoved to the side of the room.
‘A low, dear. You’ve been high so now you have a low.’
I stopped moving, having made it only halfway to sitting. ‘A low? Well, that’s not great,’ I said, feeling resigned to my fate. I located and flicked away another couple of Wotsits. ‘I was already pretty low . . .’
‘Oh, oh no, I can’t sit up. Help me, please Plum?’
I tried to pull her up to the half-sitting pose I was in but only succeeded in shunting myself back down. We grappled with the blankets and pillows and each other and finally, amid groans, grunts and Wotsits, achieved sitting status.
‘Oh, I really feel awful,’ Mum said, touching a feeble hand to her forehead. ‘It must be the E-numbers.’
‘Now I know what it’s like to be a drug addict.’
‘Oh, the rubbish people eat! How do they hold down jobs feeling like this?’
‘I need the next high to stop me feeling like this.’
‘I wonder if there’s a way to purge it all from my system . . .’
‘But actually, because I know the low comes after the high, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just ride out the current low and get back to normal, humdrum, everyday, middle-of-the-road averageness so you never have to feel this low again.’
Mum looked at me with bleary eyes.
‘I’ve just talked myself out of normal averageness. I can totally see the benefits of being high now.’
‘Are you quite finished?’ Mum said.
I nodded.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now, do you think if I made myself vomit I’d feel better?’
Hunter and Katie hurtled into the living room, dressed, fresh-faced and bouncy, with the health and vitality of those who have not been up all night getting stoned and rolling in Wotsits.
‘I taught Katie a song!’ Hunter said, helping his grinning little sister up on the sofa bed. ‘Katie?’ he said. ‘Let’s show Grandma and Aunty Jess, OK?!’
Katie clapped her hands and together they sang and signed ‘The Rainbow Connection’. Katie’s words were slightly garbled but the tune and her sign language were spot on. She watched her older brother with adoration. Annabelle walked in, also dressed and fresh, and stood at the end of the sofa bed mouthing the words. Mum, her huge-framed glasses on wonky, signed along with them, her eyes moist with pride. As they sang and signed the last words Mum gave Katie a huge squeezy hug, I got a kiss sandwich, Hunter started leaping across the sofa bed pretending to be Hulk and my thoughts went to Jimmy singing that same song on Oscar the Couch, the rain battering the sand below. Oh to be back in that simpler time when my only worry was Pete cheating on me with Giselle, and whether or not Jimmy had condoms.
‘It’s nearly time to go,’ Annabelle said to the kids, signing for Katie’s benefit. ‘Get your bags, OK?’
Hunter and Katie leapt off the bed and ran out of the room squealing.
‘Where are they going?’ Mum asked.
Before Annabelle could answer, Marcus walked into the room looking formal in his woollen vest, slacks, his blondish hair combed and his face newly shaved.
‘Did you stay the night?’ I said, pulling the covers up to my unsupported chest and trying to hide my horrified judgement.
Marcus went to answer but Mum, also tugging at the jumbled covers, interrupted.
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s appropriate. It’s too soon for Annabelle.’ She pursed her parched lips, the bunched-up covers pulled tight under her chin and her wrinkled feet sticking out the other end.
‘Marcus has been staying over for the past six months,’ Annabelle said airily, while handing Marcus Katie’s portable respirator and a spare pair of bendy glasses. ‘I’m thirty-three and allowed to have sex without getting your approval first.’
Mum’s mouth dropped open and she looked awkwardly from Marcus, bristling with discomfort, to Annabelle, serene and resolute. ‘Well, I . . .’
‘But no, he didn’t stay the night, seeing as you asked. He came over early because he’s taking Hunter and Katie out for breakfast.’
‘But he doesn’t know about Katie’s allergies!’ Mum said.
‘He does,’ Annabelle said.
‘I do,’ Marcus said comfortingly.
‘But what if Hunter runs away?’
‘You won’t, will you?’ Marcus said, giving Hunter, who’d arrived back in the room with his backpack on, an ‘all right champ’ chuck under the chin.
‘Nah-uh!’ Hunter said, standing to attention, keen to have Marcus’s approval.
Annabelle saw the kids and Marcus off with Mum chipping in instructions and ultimatums should anything happen to them, then Mum showered while Annabelle pottered about and I stayed on the sofa bed googling the effect of an influx of E-numbers on a mono-mealing, recently cleansed, my-body-is-a-temple system. Once dressed (Mum), with the flat tidied (Annabelle), and with 86 per cent of the Wotsits removed from the sofa bed and a fear that Mum might collapse at any moment from toxin-related epilepsy (me), we sat in the living room in silence. I was sick to my stomach about the imminent family meeting.
Just before ten a car pulled up outside and moments later Dad came into the living room walking with the weight of his past decisions.
He stood in the doorway, his bags in his hands, looking like he hadn’t slept in days. Where usually we would have been rushing to exchanges hugs and kisses and stories, there was nothing except uncertainty. Nobody moved because we didn’t know how to be with each other.
Eventually, after what felt like an age, Annabelle got up, crossed the room and gave Dad a peck on the cheek. He looked at her with astonished gratitude.
‘Coffee?’ she said.
‘That would be lovely, Belle-belle,’ he said, touching her arm affectionately.
‘I’ll help,’ I said, trying to get out of the bed, but feeling woozy and flopping back down.
‘It’s OK.’ Annabelle waved away my offer and padded into the hall.
I stared after her. I wanted to be with my sister. I didn’t want to be left in the room with Mum and Dad. But I also didn’t trust that my ‘coming down’ legs could hold me.
After a quick glance in my direction, Mum got up and greeted Dad too. I watched from the sofa bed with a strange mix of emotions as they murmured to each other. I could only see Dad’s face; Mum had her back to me, and his expression showed nothing but love for my mother. As usual. But sorrow was at the edges – and that was new. Mum led Dad to one of the armchairs and she sat in the one beside him. They were close enough to hold hands, and when in those chairs in happier, more innocent times, that was what they usually did. By the way they rested their hands in their laps, or stiffly on the arm of the chair, I could tell that to refrain felt unnatural for them.
Dad looked across at me. ‘Plum . . .?’ He was the same man with the same voice and the same clothes and the same aftershave. But he was also completely different.
I looked back at him, fighting the urge to burst into confused, angry tears and rush to him for comfort.
‘I’m . . .’ he began. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘About the lying, or for being found out about the lying?’ I said, shocking myself by how bitter I sounded.
‘Jess,’ Mum cautioned.
Dad patted her hand but kept his sad eyes with the crinkles round the edges that showed he smiled often on me. ‘It’s OK, Greta, love. She’s hurting.’ He focused on me. ‘I’m sorry about both. The lies I’ve told and the way you found out. I—’
‘Let’s just wait for Annabelle to come back,’ I said, not wanting to hear anything without her beside me.
Dad nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said and the room became still.
Mum played with her pendant, while Dad studied me with his kind hazel eyes. Annabelle came back in and handed out coffees for everyone except Mum, who wrapped her withered hands gratefully around a mug of pungent mushroom tea. Because the sofa bed was still out and my Wotsits and I were still in it, Annabelle had nowhere to sit but the floor or
in bed with me. She chose the bed, and with Dad and Mum on the other side in armchairs, we looked a weird little meeting indeed.
‘So, let’s have it then,’ I said once Annabelle had curled herself into a tiny spot beside me. ‘You met Mum in high school, you cheated on Mum in South Africa, you cheated on your wife with Mum, and then it’s been cheat, cheat, cheat ever since, with a handful of kids thrown in.’
Dad reddened.
‘Jess, what’s got into you?!’ Mum said. ‘He’s still your father and you will show some respect, my goodness!’
‘Cannabis, Mum,’ I said. ‘Cannabis has got into me.’ I gave her a hard stare. ‘Unsolicited cannabis.’
She muttered a few things in German, which I think translated to me being unstable. Dad appeared to be both confused and alarmed and Annabelle observed the banter impassively from behind her coffee cup.
Mum gave me a terse frown then patted Dad on the arm. ‘Dear, I think it’s best just to start.’
Dad sighed, rested his gaze on Annabelle then on me before turning to Mum, who nodded encouragement. ‘Let me paint you a picture—’
‘Will it be of vaginas?’ I said.
All three of them gave me a ‘you’re unhinged’ look.
‘Sorry. It’s the drugs,’ I said, shooting an accusatory look at Mum.
She let out a puff of frustrated air. ‘Oh Plum, will you rein in the crazy for just a couple of hours, please!’
Three sets of eyes waited for my response.
‘Go ahead,’ I said to my father without looking directly at him.
Dad, the pain of his forthcoming explanation weighty in the furrows of his face, began his tale.
It wasn’t too dissimilar from Mum’s, just from his point of view. They met in school, they made frequent trips to see each other while she attended university in Germany, they lived together in a flat in Angel and then Dad moved to South Africa and got busy with work. And marrying other women.
‘Your mother and I,’ Dad said with a look of desperation for us to understand. ‘We’d never fallen out of love. It was just distance. We didn’t have the ways to communicate like you do now. It made the world a huge place, and when I was in Africa there were only letters. Or a very expensive, poor-quality phone call with crossed lines and terrible delays. I don’t suppose it’s something you can imagine but it really was the dark continent back then. South Africa was my home. I got on with my life. I did what everybody does; I worked hard, I made friends. I fell in love.’
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