by Jessie Jones
He laughed. ‘Mitzy’s idea. I take it you two have done the introductions.’ He sat down on the sofa, putting his arm round fluffy blonde … Mitzy. Jesus.
‘What’s that short for?’ I asked.
‘Mitten,’ she laughed, ‘Suzie Mitten. And I’m very pleased to meet you.’
We sat for a moment, looking at each other awkwardly, as ugly thoughts about her silly name raced through my mind.
‘To what do we owe this honour, then?’ Dad said at last. He turned to Mitzy and added, ‘Dayna’s been too busy living the high life to look in on her old dad.’ He had a smile on his face as he said it, but I could see that it was just as false as mine.
‘Well, she’s been busy working, hasn’t she? And don’t forget college,’ Mitzy reminded him. ‘You’ve got your exams coming up, love, haven’t you?’
Was there anything she didn’t know about me? And what was her game, trying to ease the tension between Dad and me? She couldn’t just sweep into our lives with her silly name and her silly candles and make peace.
‘She’d better pass those bloody exams,’ Dad grouched. ‘That college has cost me a fortune.’
‘I’ll pass, don’t worry,’ I grouched back.
As we eyed each other, Mitzy broke the silence. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. Give you two a chance to catch up.’
‘So what’s new?’ Dad asked when she’d left the room.
I shrugged like a moody fourteen-year-old. ‘This and that,’ I mumbled. ‘You know, the usual stuff.’
‘No, I don’t know, Dayna. I never see you, do I? I mean, you couldn’t even pop into my party for ten minutes just to say congratulations.’
There, he’d said it. The thing that had obviously been bugging him for weeks was out in the open.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said, softening. ‘But I’d had a really bad day and –’
‘Do you know how hurt I was that my daughter – my only bloody family – wasn’t there to celebrate with me? Oh, but you’re happy taking my money though, aren’t you? Does Simon know how selfish you are?’
‘Simon and I are finished,’ I snapped. ‘That’s why I wasn’t at your party, OK?’
He looked at me, stunned. ‘Finished?’ he gasped. ‘What did you do?’
‘Thanks for that, Dad. Good to know you’re on my side.’
‘I am on your side. What are you talking about?’
‘Well, you just assume it was me. Couldn’t be that he did anything wrong.’
‘Like what? He’s a lovely bloke. He worshipped the ground you walked on.’
I snorted. Couldn’t help myself. ‘Look, I’m not going to talk about this now … Not while we’ve got company,’ I said.
Now it was his turn to soften. ‘Actually, I’ve been wanting you two to meet. She’s great, don’t you think?’
No, actually, I didn’t. Apart from anything else, how old was she? I put her ten years below my dad’s forty-eight. At least.
‘Bit young for you, isn’t she?’ I said, sounding horrible, but past caring. ‘How old is she?’
‘Don’t be so rude, Dayna. How would you like it if people asked you your age?’
‘I’m not even twenty! Why the fuck should I care if someone asks me –’
‘Hey, don’t you dare use language like that round here,’ he snapped.
‘Oh, fuck!’ came a shout from the kitchen. Then, ‘Sorry about that. Ignore me, just knocked the milk over.’
Dad looked at me. I was smiling. ‘What?’ he asked defensively.
‘Nothing,’ I replied, defensively.
‘Everything all right?’ Mitten the (sweary) Kitten mewed as she reappeared with a tray laden with cups, saucers (where were the mugs we always used? Dad was in the building trade and he therefore had an innate aversion to fancy cups and saucers) and a big plate of chocolate biscuits (biscuits? Dad never bought biscuits. Someone had definitely been marking out her territory here).
‘Here you go, Dayna,’ she said, pouring the tea. ‘White, one sugar, isn’t it?’
Bloody hell, she’d really done her homework. Dad had obviously run her through my profile, like the CIA does when they’re briefing agents on a target: ‘Name: Dayna Harris. Occupation: student beauty therapist. Specialist skills: massage, Swedish technique. Shares flat with friend. Prone to sudden mood swings. Tea: white with one.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the saucer from her and spilling half the tea into it.
‘You two been catching up then, Michael?’ Mitzy asked.
‘Michael?’ I said. That had been bugging me since I’d arrived.
‘Mitzy hates Mike. It’s official: I’m Michael now,’ he explained while smiling at his girlfriend like a love-struck teenager. ‘By the way, angel, my daughter wants to know how old you are.’
She burst out laughing. ‘Way too old!’ she said, obviously not thinking that at all. ‘If you must know, I’m forty-seven. Forty-eight next month, actually.’
It might not have been the first shock of the afternoon, but it did knock me sideways. I had to give it to her, she looked good. I checked her out again with a professional eye, looking for any signs of scarring round the ears. She didn’t notice my scrutiny. She was too busy staring at my dad … lingeringly. And he was staring back … longingly.
I felt ill. I definitely had to get them to stop doing that. I slurped my tea noisily, just to remind them they weren’t in the back row at the Odeon. It did the trick, jolting them out of their loved-up eye-lock.
‘Actually, Dayna, it’s good that you’re here,’ Dad said. ‘There’s something we’ve got to tell you. Mitzy’s birthday is next month …’ he said, managing to sound awkward and nervous and excited all in the same breath. ‘We’re having a little do … Only it’s not just a birthday celebration … It’s going to be an engagement party too.’
They were clasping each other’s hands now, looking as if they were about to explode with the thrill of it all. I stared back at them, my mouth hanging open in an extended O shape.
‘We hope you’re as happy about that as we are,’ Mitzy gushed.
Never, I thought, never in a gazillion years.
We’ll never be flatmates again. We’ll never have another Saturday morning fry-up in the caff. We’ll never discuss infected hair follicles or left-in-right-out. Or slag off all the spoilt Jewish princesses while wishing we were them.
It’s all over.
Those were the things I was telling myself as I watched Emily and Max check in at Heathrow. (It didn’t take them long – they were first class, weren’t they?)
OK, she was only going away for six months, but I knew it would never be the same again. What? You think she was going to fly halfway round the world, live the life of a pampered expat with her true love, then move back in with me so we could pick up where we’d left off? Hardly.
But I was pleased for her. Only an idiot couldn’t have seen how happy and excited she was. And only a total bitch wouldn’t have been thrilled for her. And however badly I’d behaved at my dad’s, I wasn’t a total bitch.
My tears as we hugged at the departures gate were tears of happiness. OK, and maybe a bit of self-pity too.
‘If you crash and die on the way there, I’ll make sure your memory lives on,’ I said mid-hug.
‘How are you going to do that?’ she asked. She sounded genuinely curious.
I didn’t know; I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’d just wanted to get in a gag about her crashing and dying on the way there. Not that I was trying to make her have last-minute doubts or anything juvenile like that, just that I didn’t want her to go.
‘I’ll plant a tree in our garden,’ I said solemnly.
‘We haven’t got a garden.’
‘I’ll have one when I’m a spoilt Jewish princess.’
Max, who was Jewish by the way, didn’t laugh. ‘Come on, Emily, we’re going to miss the plane. Bye, Dayna. Come and visit us, yeah? You know where Rio is, right?’
‘Get lost, Max,�
� I said. ‘Call me the second you get there … But work out the time difference first and wait till I’m awake before you do.’
Emily peeled herself off me and set off with Max towards the departures gate.
But at the last moment – just before it was too late – she turned and ran back to me. My heart leapt. Yesss! She’d changed her mind! She was going to stay!
‘Something I want to say before I go,’ she said breathlessly.
Oh.
‘I know we haven’t talked about it much – I mean, sensitive subject and all that – but I think you should give this Mitzy a chance.’
‘Why?’ I said, my stomach tightening at the mere mention of her name.
‘For your dad’s sake. It must be tough to see him getting serious about someone, but … Don’t push him away. And you never know, she might be quite nice.’
Hmm, I thought. ‘I’ll try,’ I said.
I glanced at Max, standing at the gate, jabbing at his watch – God, anyone would have thought he had a plane to catch. I gave Emily a final suffocating hug and shoved her off.
Then we were crying and waving and jumping around to keep sight of one another as she walked through the metal detector and the bag check and finally disappeared into the departures hall. That was it. Emily was gone.
I was still crying as I followed the signs to the car park. I tried to perk myself up by remembering my consolation prize. I had my car.
I’d bought it a few days before. Eight hundred and fifty pounds from The Wheel Thing, a scruffy little car lot in Archway. It was a Hyundai Elantra – light blue, not that the colour was important. OK, it wasn’t exactly a Mercedes, but I loved it and it got us to the airport just fine. Much to Max’s surprise. He’d wanted to take the free limo service that came with first class, but I’d insisted on driving Emily on her final journey on British soil.
As I walked out of Terminal Three I reached into my pocket for my car keys … then realised that the other set of keys that should have been in there weren’t. The keys to our flat. Now my flat. I flashed back to leaving a couple of hours before. I remembered struggling to squeeze the last of Emily’s coffin-sized LV cases into the boot and watching her waltz out of the front door with a pretty little LV clutch. ‘Did you double-lock?’ I asked. Why? We never double-locked the door to our flat. But I was going to be living alone now – time to be more security conscious. I sent her back inside with my keys …
And of course, the dizzy cow still had them. But I could hardly blame her. She’d only been following orders.
I stood outside the terminal and tried to think what to do. Dad might have been able to kick the door in for me, but we hadn’t spoken since I’d been round. I couldn’t ask him – way too soon to grovel. I’d just have to get myself home and worry about it when I got there, I decided.
A jet roared overhead, and because it might just have been Emily’s and she might just have happened to be looking out of the window using the super-powerful binoculars she might just have happened to buy in duty-free, I mouthed the words, ‘You’ve got my keys, you dizzy cow.’ Mind you, even if it had all come together like that, what did I expect her to do? Wind down the window and chuck them to me?
I reached my car, climbed in and turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing.
I turned it again.
Still nothing.
So I did it ten or twenty more times and I discovered that if you twist the key in the ignition really, really hard it doesn’t make the car start, but it does bend the key.
Then I banged my head on the steering wheel. Repeatedly. Which also didn’t make the car start.
My brand-new, less-than-forty-thousand-on-the-clock-love, just-the-one-careful-owner car was dead.
I had no way of getting home. And if I ever did get there, I had no way of getting in.
I was fucked.
And I was furious. Mostly with myself. Had I got the car checked out properly before I’d bought it? Had I hell. It had looked really clean and shiny on the fore-court, the engine had started first time when the salesman turned the key and thick black smoke had failed to gush from the exhaust, so I’d written the cheque. And as I drove away, I’d congratulated myself for having haggled fifty quid off the price.
Idiot, idiot, idiot! I yelled at myself. Then I told myself to calm down and think. But I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve crawling on my hands and knees to my dad.
So I thought some more and watched the shadows lengthen as the sun set.
You do know someone who could help, a little voice in my head whispered.
I told it to shut up and watched the car park grow darker and the ghosts appear. Real, invisible ghosts too, nothing like the ones you used to pretend to be when you were little by putting a sheet over your head and going ‘Whooooo!’
There is someone who could help you with the car and get you into the flat, the little voice nagged. This time I listened. It had a point. I did know someone with both mechanical skills and a set of flat keys because he’d never given them back to me when I’d chucked him. There was nothing else for it. I took a deep breath, swallowed my pride and pulled out my mobile.
* * *
‘It’s the alternator, isn’t it?’ I said to Simon’s arse. It’s not what you’re thinking. I couldn’t say it to his face because it was hidden under the bonnet of my car.
‘You what?’ he shouted.
‘The alt-er-nator. It’s always the alternator, isn’t it?’
‘No, the alternator’s fine. Great, in fact. Best I’ve seen in ages …’
‘That’s good,’ I said brightly.
He emerged from beneath the bonnet. ‘… It’s the rest of the car that’s fucked.’
‘Oh … Is there anything you can do?’
He shook his head. ‘Complete electrical failure. And the head gasket’s about to blow, the cylinder head looks shot, there’s next to nothing left on the brakes …’
I was glazing over.
‘… and there’s a massive kink in the front axle. Doesn’t the steering feel funny?’
‘I thought that was my driving. Please, Simon, there must be something you can do. I only bought it four days ago.’
‘Sorry, Dayna.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time of death: seven forty-five. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.’
And to his eternal credit he didn’t once laugh or say, ‘I told you so.’ Though he did glance at the bodywork and say, ‘Lovely colour … matches your shoes,’ with a nod at my pale blue trainers. But I couldn’t complain because I’d asked for that.
And I also couldn’t complain because when I’d phoned, he’d got himself to Heathrow in half an hour flat, proving, in my mind, that he was a true friend.
As we drove back into London I decided that I’d be mad to let that go. He obviously wanted us to stay mates and the only thing that was going to stop us was my baggage. I’d just have to do my best to lose it.
He pulled up outside my flat and gave me back my spare keys.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Seriously, thanks for everything today. I would have been totally screwed without you.’
He gave me a smile. ‘Forget it. You know I’ll always help you out.’
I looked at him and felt myself flood with total, utter indebtedness, and for some strange reason I found myself wondering what our children would have looked like if we’d ever got round to having any. I knew that for coming to my rescue, the least I could do was ask him in for a coffee or a cold drink or a shag.
‘So … you know … do you want to come up … for a coff––’
I stopped, not because I heard the ghostly voice of Emily screaming at me to, but because my phone rang. I pressed answer and listened for a moment. Then I put my hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Sorry, Simon, it’s my boyfriend.’
Still 4 cm
It’s brilliant, this giving birth thing. Pure bliss. I really am having the time of my life. The pain has gone, you see. I can�
��t feel a thing! Not from the waist down anyway. Half an hour ago a very nice man with floppy hair and a magic needle sent me to heaven and I’ve been there ever since. This is exactly what being in labour should be all about. No pain, everything to gain.
Hippie incense and singing whales? Yeah, right. Go tell it to the women with hairy armpits because I have been enlightened by a wonderful man with floppy hair and drugs. Being amazing, brilliant and clearly exceptional at his job, he managed to whiz through the seven women who’d booked their epidurals and had time to fit me in before his shift ended.
‘Emily, did you hear me?’ I give her a nudge. ‘I said it’s amazing.’
She sits up in the chair and forces her eyes open. ‘What’s amazing?’ she mutters.
‘This is! Not being able to feel anything any more.’
‘Yeah, great, I can’t feel anything any more,’ she intones.
‘Not you, you idiot. Me.’
I watch her eyelids droop southwards and I leave her to sleep. Well, it is three in the morning. It’s what everyone should be doing at this time of night. I’ve had months of rubbish sleep, so I’m used to it. I’ve heard that it’s nature’s way of preparing you for motherhood. Stupid nature. Emily – not having been forced to grow up by nine months of pregnancy – is still a teenager when it comes to sleep, rarely surfacing before ten most days, midday at the weekends.
I’m knackered, but obviously I can’t succumb. I have to keep an eye on the machine that’s wired up to my stomach. There’s a little screen on it and every few minutes the wavy line goes mental – the only sign that I’m having a contraction.
Teen midwife waltzes in. ‘Let’s have a look, see how you’re progressing,’ she says. She ducks down and I lose sight of her behind the Millennium Dome. God, what’s she doing down there? She could be up to anything, couldn’t she? Well, I can’t see her and I can’t feel a thing. But she resurfaces quickly enough and she has a big smile on her face. I must be nearly there!
‘Well done,’ she says triumphantly. ‘Another centimetre. You’re four now.’