by Judy Astley
But no. According to this article you definitely couldn’t detox on toast and marmalade and the kind of coffee that made you think of Mediterranean mornings. She returned to her chair and sipped miserably at the tepid herbal tea. She thought of the chocolate and strawberry cake from the day before, hoping to shame herself back into firm resolution. The thought only made her want to shove Imogen aside from the fridge and see if there was a sliver of the cake, a scraping of cream, left on a plate.
‘Found it!’ Imogen hauled a Marmite jar out from the back far reaches of the fridge, opened it quickly and plunged a knife into it.
‘Maybe you should look at the “best before” date,’ Jay warned.
Imogen paused in her toast-spreading and sniffed into the jar. ‘Smells all right. Smells delish,’ she shrugged, carrying on.
Jay munched dejectedly on the grapes, reading through the list of foods that were, for the next few days, utterly banned from her life. These included wheat, dairy products, eggs, fish, meat, coffee, tea, alcohol, sugar, cakes, biscuits. It didn’t leave much. It left, as far as she could work out, grapes and apples and lemons and brown rice. Oh joy. Food to commit suicide by. Still, it wasn’t for long. A limited amount of proper food (as she’d define it) could be introduced soon, gradually and with care. (Why? What digestive disaster would occur if she ate, say, a bacon sandwich, very fast and in quite reckless spirits?) Only six days in and for supper she could look forward to a small salad of citrus fruits with pumpkin seeds.
‘Got any more bread?’ Imogen clattered the top off the big old earthenware breadbin without waiting for an answer. ‘I just fancy one more slice . . .’ She turned to her mother, eyeing with pity the few remaining grapes and the sad tangle of scrappy stalks. ‘Shall I do one for you? And wouldn’t you rather have some proper coffee?’
Jay prodded her left thigh. The flesh gave beneath her finger, pleasingly soft and squishy beneath the denim of her favourite old jeans. Her resolve, as well as her plumpness, was dented.
‘OK then, just one. And marmalade.’
Well she needed it, Jay thought as she took a long, languorous bite and savoured the fleshy chunks of fragrant peel and the gorgeous gluey orange ooze. There was a hard day’s work ahead. Running a cleaning company wasn’t exactly a sit-down doddle. Every single client seemed to think Monday was the ideal day for getting the housework done and then complaining about whoever had done it. After delivering the girls to do Mrs Ryan’s Regular there was the Dachshund Man who wanted an Upstairs Blitz and two new clients who needed a go-see and a quote. Plenty to do. And anyway, Jay reassured herself, surely it was hardly worthwhile starting on a serious detox if you were already running on empty.
Rory was in trouble. He’d copied Hal Clegg’s French essay on ‘L’après-midi d’un chat’ pretty much full-on word for word. At the time he’d have said it was definitely Hal’s fault, the loser; he shouldn’t have left his bag on the bus. Rory had done him a favour really, picking it up off the seat, lugging it home, taking care of it overnight, phoning Hal to say he’d got it safe for him and then dragging the thing back into school (in his mum’s Dishing the Dirt van, embarrassing or what?) the next day. Hal couldn’t have expected there not to be some kind of reward in it. He couldn’t really be surprised that Rory had had a good scrabble through its contents and selected various items that could be of personal use. These had included a packet of Marlboro (only two gone), Samantha Newton’s new mobile number (result!) scrawled on a bit of paper and decorated with little hearts (you as well, Hal?) and the French essay.
Rory had had a quick look in his own homework diary. The essay title he’d written down was ‘L’aprèsmidi de Jacques’. He must have got it wrong. Rory wasn’t too keen on French (in fact what was French for understatement?) and would be the first to admit he probably hadn’t been paying attention. Hal was ploddy and studious and the kind of boff that got roped into those evenings for Prospective Parents, so they could admire this prime example of the best a state school could turn out. French Jacques, on the other hand, or perhaps not now Rory came to think of it, was the dreary spoon whose sad life they’d been reading about in Nos Amis Francais!. Jacques lived in une petite village up la montagne with his maman and papa and petite soeur Marie. He was keen on his pet chien, on le football and le skiing and on playing la trompette. Coming up with even fifty words’ worth of stuff of the remotest interest that Jacques could get up to in one afternoon was surely beyond anyone’s creative range.
So Rory had copied the cat essay, because Hal was a swotty div and must have listened right. Hal had written some quite funny stuff about a cat called Celine who chased a mouse into a bar and drove the customers nuts by leaping at the TV screen when they were trying to watch a World Cup final. Hal’s French vocab was quite impressive. Rory had to look up lots of the words and because of the differences in their basic language skills had changed the story a little bit, obviously, simplifying it down to somewhere closer to his own level. He wasn’t completely stupid. He’d sent his personal cat (Fleur – neat touch that, even Hal hadn’t come up with a pukka French name) chasing its mouse into a shop where David Beckham was trying on shoes (and did his dad – Rory’s, not D. Beckham’s – have to find it so hilarious when he’d asked what was the French for Prada? Like were you supposed to know everything at sixteen?). He’d thought he’d done OK and forgotten about it till the work had been handed back oh-so-publicly that morning. What a sodding way to start a week. Hal Clegg had got away with it, no question. Course he had, the blue-eyed boy who could do no wrong. ‘Sorry, I must have misheard,’ he’d said, all big smarmy grin, not that it mattered. ‘Not a problem, Hallam; a highly inventive and entertaining effort,’ Ms Lofthouse had cooed at her number one A-star dead cert. ‘But as for you, Rory Callendar, what was your excuse?’
Detention. Two lunch hours. He’d looked at Samantha Newton, hoping for a glimmer of sympathy to raise more than his spirits, but she was doing nail comparison with Shelley Caine. Worse, during the detention he’d still got to come up with three hundred words on what Jacques did with his après-midi. So unfair. What, he wondered, was French for wank?
Katinka hadn’t turned up again. When Jay picked Anya up at the station she had tapped her nose and sniffed hard, by which Jay gathered Katinka had caught a cold. It was her third in a month and somehow each time she’d managed not to let Jay know by the more usual means of phoning rather than by just not being there. OK, granted there was a language problem here (rustic Polish v English), but surely she had just one friend who spoke a tiny bit of English? This meant Jay now had to join in with the cleaning rather than getting on with some admin. Otherwise Anya would be at Mrs Ryan’s for twice as long as she should be and they wouldn’t get to the Dachshund Man before twelve.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Jay thought as she lugged the vacuum cleaner up Mrs Ryan’s plush-carpeted stairs. She was supposed to be the boss. She was supposed to sit in her little home office next to Ellie’s bedroom, to feel important and businesslike and Do the Accounts. She was supposed to take the bookings, hire and fire the staff, advertise, promote and generally motivate and organize. She was not supposed to be feeling hot, fat and sweaty, clad in itchy rubber gloves and shoving Harpic down the clients’ skiddy lavatories. When Jay and Barbara-with-the-cats had set up Dishing the Dirt, investing serious money in their four little vans, the logos, the advertising, insurance and materials, the idea had been that their personal involvement should entail as little that was hands-on as possible.
Obviously they trained their staff on site, demonstrating the domestic arts and adapting them to any picky personal preferences of the clients. They made a point of settling in all their cleaners – working alongside even the most reliable, experienced ones – at any new bookings, partly to reassure clients that they took their requirements seriously but mostly so they were familiar with the premises and could fend off any unjustified complaints (such as the very many who assumed that by booking a Regular they
’d be somehow getting a Blitz, including all books off shelves and all overcrammed kitchen cupboards emptied, scrubbed out and restocked tidily). But essentially Jay and Barbara would administrate.
Barbara didn’t really have time for much more than that. She had her breeding queens (Burmese, the source of Jay’s crazed cat Daffodil) to deal with, her cat-show schedule and her kitten list to organize. Jay had her chaotic home life, Moggie and Tristan making babies in the basement flat and two moody teenagers whose activities required a constant stand-by taxi service. Yet here she was at Mrs Ryan’s, hauling a dangerously overfull bag of fish-stink garbage out of the swingbin. And Barbara was almost certainly, right now, up on Putney Hill, showing the two newly recruited Brazilian language students how to differentiate between Lemon Flash and Beeswax Pledge (quite important that, when faced with a cherrywood dining table), and making sure they understood that Fairy Liquid wasn’t what you used to clean the inside of Mrs Latimer-Jones’s fat-splattered oven.
Up in Mrs Ryan’s chilly spare bedroom Jay sank her behind down on the silky sky blue bedspread and attached a soft brush to the end of the vacuum-cleaner hose. The room was kept polished, dusted and as sprucely ready as a Hilton suite for visitors who had never, as far as Jay could tell, turned up. The room reminded her of cousin Delphine’s teenage bedroom years ago, all co-ordinated fabrics – swagged Austrian blinds, fringed scatter cushions and quilted button bedhead – in blue and pink rose prints. Delphine had kept her room as immaculately tidy as this one now was, all her clothes were hung in colour order in a massive mirrored wardrobe that spanned an entire wall and had a light that came on when you opened the door. Her shoes had been perched inside on sloping racks, as if they were pertly tripping down a slope towards the thick cream carpet. Belts and scarves hung on a battery-powered gadget that turned like a tiny carousel.
‘Lovely isn’t it?’ Auntie Win had sighed to her sister Audrey, Jay’s mother, the day after the decorators had left and Delphine had at last arranged her silver-backed hairbrushes and combs on the glass dressing-table top.
Audrey had had a quick glance round and said, ‘Yes dear, but where does she keep her books?’
‘Books?’ Win had looked at her, puzzled, then pointed to a white wicker contraption by the bed. ‘Oh, over there!’ she said triumphantly. ‘The magazine rack. There’s room for at least a years’ worth of Vogue.’
Jay, now whooshing the brush round the unchipped white skirting, thought of her own teen bedroom. She’d shared it with her older sister April. Their mother had made a point of being uninvolved with nagging about cleanliness, on grounds of respecting their privacy, and their inadequate wardrobe space and overflowing drawers made the room resemble a serious burglary aftermath. Little scraps of fabric – fluorescent nets and vivid satins and sequinned taffeta – found their way all over the house, escaping from Audrey’s sewing room where she put together elaborate costumes for the area’s ballet schools, assorted competitive ice skaters and ballroom dancers. Jay and April’s bedroom walls were carelessly Blu-tacked with posters of angel-faced rock musicians. Homework and paperbacks and socks and abandoned crumb-strewn plates obscured the floor. Surfaces were obscured by make-up, magazines, records, jewellery. Jay, faced with a tangle of wire hangers on which her clothes were hung three items at a time, longed and longed for Delphine’s immaculate expanse of pristine cream carpet, the line-up of satin padded coat hangers, each one with a little lacy dangling bag of lavender, and the drawer dividers separating row after row of immaculate white pants.
She sat on the bed again to swap the vacuum-cleaner heads back and took her phone out of her pocket. Perhaps there’d been messages. Perhaps the office phone had almost rung itself off the desk with people clamouring for a few months’ casual cleaning work. It was coming up to spring – you often got students getting in quick for a way of making summer cash, or affluent sporty boys back from the ski season ready to save up for the next big trip.
‘Mog? Anything I should know? Any calls?’ It was no surprise that Imogen was up in her mother’s kitchen instead of downstairs in the basement flat. The heating there was free for one thing, so was use of the washing machine and the contents of the food cupboards. Jay could picture her daughter, sitting on the kitchen worktop reading her horoscope in a month-old Marie Claire and sipping at her fourth cup of coffee, very, very slowly getting herself in the mood for writing an onerous line or two of her final year university dissertation on drugs education for the under elevens.
‘Hmm,’ Imogen murmured. ‘Yeah there were one or two work ones. I’ve written them down. They’re on your desk.’
‘Thanks. And Imogen?’ A thought crossed her mind suddenly. The news of the pregnancy was coming up for twenty-four hours old for the immediate family, but there were others who should know. That was Imogen’s job.
‘Have you phoned Gran?’
‘No? Why?’
‘Well don’t you think you’d better tell her? About the baby?’
‘Oh. Right. Well I thought you could . . .’
‘Oh no, Moggy, that’s your job. She was bad enough when I got pregnant with you. It’s your turn now for the “throwing away your education” lecture!’
‘But you didn’t throw it away. You got your degree. I’m going to as well. Uni is cool about it, I told you.’
‘I know, I know. But Gran doesn’t. Just give her a call, there’s a love, get it over with. And tell Tristan to tell his parents. They won’t want to be the last to know.’ Why was she having to say this, she thought, why was it all so uphill all the time?
‘Reminds me,’ Imogen said, ‘Auntie Win phoned and said you’d want to be first to know about this. She said Delphine is coming home. From Australia. To live.’ It crossed Jay’s mind that this must be a prime example of ‘think of the devil’.
Jay looked down at her hand, flabby and oversoft from being encased in its stifling rubber glove. Delphine would look and tut and advise cotton liners inside the Marigolds. She’d be right, as ever.
‘Mum? Did you hear me? Delphine’s getting married again. God, at her age! She’s leaving Australia and she’s going to live near here. Win said you’d be really, really pleased.’
THREE
Chocolate Hobnobs
‘This cousin. You two must be really close or . . .’
Jay watched as Barbara paused to adjust the wriggling cat she was grooming so that its fang teeth didn’t succeed in chewing holes in the brush handle. The lithe little pinky-grey animal squirmed on its back under Barbara’s big broad-fingered hand and gave a long disgruntled miaow of protest. Barbara cooed kindly and brushed away expertly at its short silky fur, smoothing out the cat’s lean body across her lap.
‘. . . you must be really close or it wouldn’t be important, would it? She’d just be a distant family member back from foreign parts. You’d get together for a reunion tea with the rellies, she’d get stuck into living back here again and then everything would carry on as per normal.’
Jay sighed into her spritzer – it was a bit early for a drink, barely past four thirty, but Barbara considered Monday to be the longest, hardest day that needed to have its working end rewarded with alcohol as soon as was decently negotiable. While Jay had been standing in for the cold-stricken Katinka, sweeping spider nests from the back of the Dachshund Man’s wardrobe, Barbara had been giving her overstressed employees a much-needed extra hand clearing the debris from a client’s weekend-long eighteenth birthday party that no-one had thought to warn them about. ‘It’s quite staggering,’ she’d told Jay, ‘that anyone can imagine that cleaning up after eighty teenagers – and it looked like a bloody good time had been had – could just pass as “regular cleaning” and can be whizzed through by two students in their usual couple of hours.’
‘The thing about Delphine isn’t really about closeness. She was always a lot more than just a cousin,’ Jay said, wondering how to explain. ‘She was always there for a start, like a sort of shadow. Auntie Win had this idea t
hat as Delphine was an only child, and I was the closest of my lot in age to her, that I’d have to play the sister part for her. “Your best friends are your family” she used to say to Mum, who didn’t actually agree but there was no telling Win – whatever you said she didn’t listen.’
‘All families are like that,’ Barbara said gloomily. ‘My kids don’t listen to anyone either. They’re convinced they know it all.’
‘Mine too.’ What was it she’d said to Imogen about being on the pill? Something about it being a good idea so long as you were the sort of person who remembered to take it, every single day? And there was lovely Moggie, the sort of dreamy, scatty person who barely remembered that breathing out came after breathing in . . .
‘Anyway, Delphine, well she defined my childhood. She was . . . how can I put it . . . she was what I failed to be, with the emphasis on the “failed”.’
Barbara let the cat jump down to the floor and went to wash her hands at the kitchen sink.
‘Oh come on now, who said you failed? Not your mum, surely. I can’t imagine that. She’s too laid-back. When she looks at you it’s in an approving sort of way, like she’s standing back and thinking she’s pretty pleased with how you turned out. Don’t tell me I’m wrong?’
Jay leant across the table to the plate of chocolate Hobnobs that earlier she’d pushed out of her own weak-willed reach. The outstretched hand looked pallid and bloated and rough-skinned and still smelled faintly of Mr Muscle (bathroom), in spite of a thorough washing and a rub-over with La Remedie hand lotion.
‘Heavens no, Mum was fine, very hands-off but generally OK. She thought her sister Win and the pampered infant Delphine were a hugely amusing source of entertainment. She, well all of us, we used to giggle like anything over Win indulging her little princess. There were lots of things that used to have her in stitches, like Win telling us she hung Delph’s school skirt inside a stocking every night to keep the pleats in place, and that she anointed Delphine’s eyelashes with Vaseline every night to strengthen them.’