by Judy Astley
Barbara shuddered, laughing. ‘Everything I achieved,’ Jay told her, ‘Delphine sort of managed to outdo, everything I had, she had a better version. If you were looking at it from a ten-year-old’s point of view, Delphine was someone’s life-work; she simply had it all, in spades. Everything from high-heeled silver ballroom-dancing shoes to a fluffy white fun-fur coat and her own pony down at the riding school. Sorry Barbara,’ she laughed, ‘I know this all sounds pathetically juvenile. It was really left behind years ago, finally taken away when Delphine went to Oz about twelve years back and she wasn’t there any more to tell me I should have got proper carpets instead of wood floors and rugs that slip.’
‘So do you think she’ll bring it all back again? Like luggage?’
‘Just like luggage – I hope not but it’s possible. You assume you change with the years but I know I’ll have to work at not falling into the old patterns. We should be past all that. The grown-up thing would be to be delighted to see her. I will be.’
Barbara didn’t look convinced. ‘This is like sneaking into someone else’s therapy session. What else bugged you?’
Jay eyed the Hobnobs then continued, ‘Well, she was what Auntie Win called “perfectly formed”. I, believe it or not, was an undersized, puny little thing, all bones and flatness. You can’t believe how toe-curlingly embarrassing it was, having your aunt look you up and down and say something like, “Not developing yet then?” when you’re pancake flat and nearly a year older than your curvy cousin in her first rosebud-patterned bra. I suppose I would’ve appreciated it if Mum had been a bit more in my corner, so to speak, but she wasn’t at all bothered about my fragile little ego.’
‘Yes but you’re all grown-up now aren’t you?’ Barbara pointed out crisply, topping up Jay’s wine glass. Jay mentally added another hundred calories to the day’s intake. So much for detox. That must have been the shortest attempted pre-diet in history. How long had it lasted? Five minutes that morning? Seven at a push?
‘Sure, I’m all grown-up. But these things linger, or their effects do.’
‘And don’t tell me you ever went in for competitive swanking about your own children’s attributes!’
Jay laughed. ‘Not at championship level, no, not like Win, but I’d have stuck up for them if anyone else had pitched their daughter against mine so they were in no doubt they were gorgeous – or at least I would have when they were that small. They deserve the odd boost to their confidence. Though just lately Ellie is so grumpy and foul-tempered that if anyone compared her unfavourably with their own thirteen-year-old I’d probably agree wholeheartedly and offer to swap.’
‘So you’ll be pleased to see her then, this Delphine. Personally I can’t wait.’ Barbara laughed. ‘I want to meet this woman who can still get you so rattled.’
‘Gee thanks! Yes, I’ll be pleased to see her, of course I will. Though only when I’ve had my roots done, lost a stone and we’ve got some more reliable staff so it won’t be a complete lie about you and me running the business rather than it running us.’ Jay looked down at her middle and poked it hard. ‘You know there must have been a time, maybe only a day or a week or two sometime, when this body was just perfect, size-wise, not shamingly skinny any more and not wodgy like this either. I wish I’d appreciated it at the time and taken more trouble with it.’
‘What you need is grapefruit,’ Barbara said, tumbling another heap of Hobnobs onto the plate. Jay, with great difficulty, managed to resist helping herself to yet another one. Barbara, who was blessed with the shape and height of Joanna Lumley, took two, one in each hand.
‘Grapefruit? Why?’ Somehow, Jay was still thinking of her first 30 AAA trainer bra and imagined shoving fruit down her front, padding out her teen flatness just as she had with tissues, in the days when she’d raced into the changing rooms after school games to get safely back into her uniform shirt before anyone could catch her in her underwear.
‘You eat half a grapefruit before every meal. I was reading about it,’ Barbara told her. ‘It’s full of fat-burning enzymes.’
‘Hmm. Are you sure? I mean they said that about cabbage soup. It’s not true. And pineapple too, and they’re full of sugar.’
‘Well anyway, it’s got to be worth a shot. You just have the grapefruit three times a day, oh and cut back on the carbs and the alcohol and drink lots of water. At least it’s not antisocial like the cabbage soup.’
‘Right – I’ll get some on the way home. Before I go though, can I just have a peek at the kittens?’
Barbara laughed. ‘Weakening now?’ she teased. ‘I did say when you got Daffodil that you should have got two of them. Burmese need company. Come on, they’re in here. It’s time for them to come through to the house anyway, for a bit of socializing playtime when the boys get home from school.’ She opened the kitchen door and Jay followed her through to the old garage which Barbara had converted into palatial safe accommodation for her champion cats and their broods.
‘Their colours are really showing now. Two lilacs, three blues and one chocolate.’ Barbara picked up a kitten that was scrambling up the ragged back of a discarded velvet armchair. The nut-brown mother cat looked up from dozing on her cushion, blinked at Barbara and settled back down again, sure of her babies’ safety.
‘This one’s almost pink!’ Jay said, stroking the tiny creature’s leathery nose.
‘Potential champion, I’d say. A lilac. I’m thinking of keeping her, letting Bluebell retire from breeding. I’ve taken to calling her Lupin.’
Jay picked up another kitten, rolled it onto its back and tickled its broad plump tummy. The rattling purr sounded far too big and raucous for such a small animal.
‘They’re gorgeous. I don’t know how you can bear to part with them.’
‘I try to think of the money, what little there is of it after registration, stud fees, food and vaccinations. Really, you have to put it down to being a labour of love,’ Barbara told her with a smile as she rounded up the rest of the kittens, gathering them up into her arms like a bundle of wriggly laundry and heading back to the kitchen. The mother cat trotted after her, mewing reassurance at her babies.
‘Come on you fluffies, time for you to run round the house and learn about joining in. Just think, Jay, this time next year it’ll be just like this for you but with Imogen’s baby.’
‘Hmm. Another long stint of house-training and mopping. Lovely,’ Jay said.
Ellie followed Tasha round the shop. It wasn’t easy to keep up – Tasha moved through the display racks fast and carelessly like a woodland creature through brambles. Tash looked this way and that, her streaky blonde ponytail swishing as she took in the stock and sorted it in her head into Wanted and Not Wanted. Ellie, following, picked her way more carefully, mostly looking at the floor and trying very very hard not to look up into the far left corner where she knew there was a security camera. She was, she knew, the idiot sort who’d go and smile up at it politely and probably end up on Crimewatch or in the ‘Familiar Face’ column that the local paper had been running to try and shame local shoplifting kids.
Tasha didn’t care where she looked. ‘Brazen Personified’, that was what Mrs Billington, head of their year, called her. It had been meant as a huge telling-off but had somehow only added to Tasha’s glory. Nothing fazed Tasha. She’d blag her way daily through lost-homework excuses, through being caught most mornings with a fag at the bus stop, for wearing four-inch pink platform slingbacks, and never ever having the kit for netball. You wanted to be like Tasha, for the sheer nerve of her, for the fat-lipped, sexy, big-toothed smile that everyone fell for (even Mr Redmond, who blushed raspberry pink every time he told her off for not handing in the maths homework and she just grinned and flicked her bum at him like one of Barbara’s cats on heat). But then you so didn’t want to be like her because of the things she did. She lied. She picked on people. She changed favoured friends like other people change their tights and she stole. She’d get A grade A-level thieving, no questi
on. That’s what they were out doing now, after school, still in uniform. Shoplifting. Tasha was after a new top, a restock on the Glamma Nails and some purple bangles to go with a dress she’d had (or said she’d ‘had’, who could tell? Her mum might have bought it for her) out of Topshop the week before. She was on a mission and Ellie happened to be the person picked to tag along, just because she’d lent Tasha some lipgloss in the cloakroom at going-home time.
There wasn’t anything in this bright brash shop that Ellie actually wanted, not really. Everything, the jewellery, the make-up, the nail stuff, the thongy underwear that looked harsh and scratchy, it was all cheap and glitzy and just not worth the terrifying hassle. It looked like the kind of kit that nine-year-olds wanted, as if it would turn them into a fantasy play-Barbie overnight. Even if she’d got the money she wouldn’t be spending it on this. If she had a wish list, say if it was coming up to Christmas or a birthday, she’d have written down something shamingly secret like soft cuddly pyjamas that made you want to get into bed with a good book (like The Woodlanders)and completely shut out school and the Tash-girls and all the fighting hard-boys and the being careful not to be the nerd-in-the-corner stuff. Every school day she felt as if she was pretending to be someone else. You had to, if you were a bit different. The bit that was different wasn’t always easy to know till someone picked on you and made it clear.
After more than two years at the school she’d worked out that there were things she had to act about, to make up for. These were: One – being small, which included looking way too young to be a credible thirteen, going on fourteen. Ellie, taking after her mother, was one of the littlest in her year and still child-shaped, though (thank goodness) acceptably pretty and with long glossy brown hair and a curvy mouth that went up at the corners, so people always thought she was smiling even when she was in a fury. To be a credible thirteen you actually had to look old enough to get served in a pub, to look as if you’d already had so much sex you were bored with it (even though hardly anyone had) and to have had periods since you were in primary school. Ellie’s hadn’t even started yet, which was why she kept Tampax loose in her bag and let them fall out on the classroom floor now and then.
Two, you had to have home problems that you could moan about. Top of that, best, you needed a struggling lone mum who scraped by on the social, with men who were a pain and maybe even smacked her about a bit. Ace would be a stepdad on remand for something dangerous. Ellie had two nice friendly parents who liked each other. On the plus side, her mum was often seen around driving her Dishing the Dirt van, so she’d told everyone she was a cleaner, not that she owned the company. But they were borderline posh, a bit suspect for living in a house that was practically mansion-size by her classmates’ standards. It didn’t have many rooms downstairs. There was just the sitting room (square-shaped and comfy) and the kitchen (huge, with space for a sofa and massive glass doors and roof) but that was because her dad had had most of the walls taken out. It was also arty and mad-looking, with weird glass bits designed by her dad tacked on all over the place. Imogen was going to be useful, now she was pregnant and only twenty and shacked up with a plumber. Ellie wouldn’t bother to mention that she lived with no real difficulties at all (apart from cool student poverty) in their basement flat, and that her bloke Tristan might be a plumber but he’d been to school at Eton and had got five A levels.
‘Whaddya think?’ Tasha stood in front of the mirror, holding up a scarlet bra that had silver lace and a vicious-looking underwire. Ellie smiled, loathing her own deep need to please. ‘It’s OK. Looks a bit . . .’
Tash narrowed her eyes, daring Ellie to come up with something that would prove first opinions right: that she was snobby, spoony, different.
‘It looks like it would show a lot through a top,’ Ellie said, rushing her words. ‘The lace, I mean, it’s very knobbly.’
‘Hmm. Yeah, I suppose.’ Tasha put the bra back on the rack and calmly flicked through a few more. ‘What about this one for you?’ She held up a pale lilac one, a rigid balcony effort that Ellie wouldn’t even half-fill. Ellie laughed, hoping she wasn’t going red. ‘Yeah right. And if anyone prodded me there’d be a dent!’ It was the only defence, putting yourself down before someone else did. You learned that fast enough.
‘OK, bored now, let’s go.’ Tasha crashed off again, out through the rails, diverting a bit to the right so they went out through the shop’s side door. Ellie raced after her, puzzled.
‘But what about . . . ? I thought you wanted . . .’ she hissed at Tasha as soon as they were a safe hundred yards round the corner away from the store. Tasha grinned at her, glancing back slyly to where they’d just come from, then hauled Ellie into Starbucks doorway and grabbed her school bag from her shoulder. Ellie watched open-mouthed as Tasha pulled the zip back. Inside her own bag was a messy jumble of jewellery, bangles and earrings all still attached to their display cards and price tags. The silver and scarlet bra glinted from behind her maths textbook and a nail varnish selection clinked together like her parents’ bottle bank donations after a typical boozy weekend. In spite of feeling a terrified nausea – God, if she’d been caught – Ellie was hugely impressed. Her eyes shone as she looked up at Tasha’s cunning face, the big luscious smile and the slanted cool grey eyes.
‘How did you do that? I didn’t see . . .’ Ellie managed to say at last as Tasha pulled out her haul and shoved it deep into her own bag.
‘I know you didn’t! That’s the point. You’re such an innocent, babes.’ Tasha patted the side of Ellie’s face, the way you would a cute toddler. ‘No-one would ever point the finger at you. If there was anyone looking down those cameras, their eyes would have been only on me.’ She grinned and handed Ellie a bottle of Hot Blush nail polish. ‘Here y’are, keep this. It’s more your colour than mine. See ya tomorrow!’
Ellie stared after Tasha as she strode down the road towards the station. What she was feeling now wasn’t good. She wanted to feel used, to feel appalled, to feel hurt. Instead what she felt was exhilaration. Worse than that, she felt something even fiercer. Trying to work out what it was, she could only come up with ‘love’. All the same, as she walked to the bus stop she pushed her hand into her bag, pulled out the small shiny bottle and, looking round sharply, though not really seeing who was around, hurled it into the bin outside McDonald’s.
FOUR
Grapefruit
‘You should be doing this yourself. I shouldn’t have to drag you over to Gran’s,’ Jay told Imogen as the two of them drove to Thames Ditton to inform Audrey that she was to be a great-grandmother.
‘I’ve been busy. Stuff to do, college work. I’d have got round to it – you don’t have to take me there, I’m not a kid.’ Jay wasn’t so sure about that – Imogen had her feet up on the dashboard, making dusty scuff marks. Her trainers had no laces in them and she’d stuck Bob the Builder stickers – that had come free with pots of yogurt – all round the toe sections. Jay could just picture her, sitting there at the kitchen table, concentrating hard on tweaking the stickers into place. Still, at least today she wasn’t wearing her Plumber’s Mate T-shirt. Audrey would be sure to point out that Moggie might as well unpick the apostrophe, then she could go round as walking evidence that plumbers do exactly what it said on her front.
What kind of mother was Imogen going to make? Would she cope? She still slept like an adolescent herself, long into the mornings given the chance; how was she going to get up several times in the night to deal with feeds and nappies and the crying?
‘Moggie, at the rate you’re moving these days your gran would have found out about the baby by reading it in the Times births column. Tristan’s told his family, it’s only fair that you tell yours.’
‘You could’ve. She’s your mum,’ Imogen complained sulkily.
‘She’d be hurt if she didn’t hear it from you.’
‘But she’ll fuss.’
Imogen was right, Jay conceded privately. Audrey would fuss. She would ply her
beloved granddaughter with weak tea and leaden scones and, during the coming months, would collect every magazine on pregnancy and parentcraft she could find and hand them to Imogen in a couple of tatty Sainsbury’s bags, presenting them with as much flourish as if she’d given her something priceless and gift-wrapped. In spite of having been a breathtakingly hands-off parent herself, Audrey had taken on grandmotherhood with a rather haphazard fervour. Only the Christmas before, she’d made Ellie a white velvet hooded cloak, trimmed with Barbie-pink marabou and lined with scarlet sequinned lamé fabric. Luckily Ellie had had the good manners to pretend to be delighted. In fact she would have been if the cloak had been given to her six years sooner, when she’d have stood on the table and given them a chorus of ‘Winter Wonderland’.
‘She means well,’ Jay murmured, feebly. ‘She’ll be really thrilled.’ She crossed her fingers and hoped this would be true. Like most of her generation, Audrey did prefer the major events of life to occur in a comfortably settled, traditional order. When Jay had become pregnant with Imogen, while she too was at university, her mother had been hugely supportive but mostly as a reaction to Win’s gloating sympathy about her having a daughter ‘in trouble’. Behind closed doors she’d given her a good telling-off for carelessness before getting down to the fun stuff like searching out fabric for Jay’s wedding dress and doing her proud with eight subtle shades of blue chiffon in a design Stella McCartney would have cried with joy to have created.
Jay’s mother lived in a bungalow that adjoined her sister Win’s. This pair of widows had long ago accepted that their differing approaches to housekeeping made it impossible for them to share living accommodation, but they relished existing within such close grumbling distance. Living alone, Audrey saw no need to confine her sewing to its own specific room and so she lived happily among a shifting drift of fabric offcuts, shreds of flimsy paper patterns and trailing threads. Clumps of chiffon, satin, Lycra and net were heaped around the place, every fragment kept in case a tiny rose trim was needed to complete a costume, or to augment a hair decoration. Half-finished catsuits, leotards, fur-fabric animal outfits and voluminous classical tulle ballet dresses hung from every door frame. Stray threads of cotton wafted throughout the bungalow after her, ingraining themselves too deeply into carpets for the vacuum cleaner to reach.