by Anna Maxted
Nana Flo stares silently down at the coffin, shaking her head. I’m relieved that Nana’s sister has flown in from Canada although she’s having difficulty reaching her as every time she takes a step, a dragonish fire-breathing relative blocks her path crying, ‘Great Aunt Molly! When was the last time we saw you!’
I release my mother for one minute to comfort Nana Flo and the next thing I know is, my mother has bowled up to the minister, and declared, ‘We won’t be using you again! And don’t think you’re getting a tip!’ Even Luke is shocked. And, for one unholy second, the Molly botherers stop nattering.
The blessed Uriah swoops to the rescue. ‘Mrs Bradshaw,’ he croons, ‘you must be frozen, might I fetch you a blanket?’ Her attention-hungry head swivels and I am reminded of a cartoon hero bravely distracting Godzilla from crushing a child by waving and jiggling his juicy self as a decoy.
‘You may,’ she says graciously. The minister sneaks off. Uriah orders a minion to fetch a blanket. Luke, and a million others, spark up and start yapping. I could almost believe that we were burying a stranger and that my father decided to stay at home, like Homer Simpson shirking church.
Then I see Nana Flo. She is standing tensely over the grave staring blindly at the mud-splattered coffin. Uriah waits a decent while before slinking up to me and saying, ‘Whenever you’re ready we’ll take the cards off the flowers for you.’
‘One second’, I say. I run over to Nana Flo, touch her shoulder softly, and say, ‘The funeral director asked if you would like him to take the cards off the flowers yet.’
My grandmother seems to drag herself back from somewhere far away. Her head turns slowly like a tortoise. She says in a bright hard voice, ‘Yes thank you, that would be lovely.’ I nod, retreat, and tell Uriah to go ahead.
Uriah’s men go to work and I gaze unseeing into the middle distance. I stand as inanimate as a maypole, while a sweep of blurry faces whirl and dance and chatter around me. Eventually, a gentle hand on my arm forces me to snap into focus. ‘Helen,’ says Lizzy softly, ‘everyone’s going back to your mother’s house. Do you want me to stay here with you for a little longer?’
I blink, and see that most of our guests are revving up their cars, the cards are gone from the flowers, and the gravediggers are inching towards the abandoned grave. Uriah, in the distance, is helping Nana Flo into the black limousine. Another plane drones noisily overhead and I am furious at its blithe intrusion. ‘Let’s go,’ I say to Lizzy. She takes my arm and we walk in silence through the mass of past lives to the cemetery gates where Luke and Tina are waiting. My mother is snug in the plush car and content to meet me at the house. I squeeze into the back of Tina’s yellow Ford Escort – a secret obsessively kept from her fashiony friends – and we roar off. And that is the end of my father.
‘All this way for a sausage roll,’ is one indiscreet but apt verdict on the after-show party. Our Canadian relatives – having secured free bed, breakfast, lunch, dinner, entertainment, electricity, fluffy towels, and hot water from my mother – have repaid her by dragging their slothful selves to Asda and spending roughly three quid on a few loaves of white bread (economy), foul-tasting margarine (economy), potted shrimp paste (which until I tasted the disgusting evidence, I assumed was a spiteful myth devised by Enid Blyton to dissuade children from going on picnics), four packs of crisps (Asda own brand) and three packs of Jammie Dodgers – which I refused to eat even as a two-year-old because of the mingy squiddle of jam they contained compared to the mouth-parching excess of biscuit.
My mother narrowly saves the day by picking the lock on my father’s drinks cabinet. Everyone falls upon the alcohol like alcoholics. My mother – who has a history of embarrassing my father at cocktail parties by demanding a cup of tea – swallows four double Baileys in ten seconds then lurches up to me and sniggeringly confides, ‘Cousin Stephen is so tight that when he walks his arse squeaks!’
I am secretly impressed at this stunning transformation from grief-stricken widow to gobshite, but know if I reveal the smallest sign of amused acquiescence she’ll run around braying this pertinent witticism to everyone, including Cousin Stephen. So I prise her fifth pint of Baileys out of her vicelike grip, replace it with a chill glass of water, and say primly, ‘At this precise moment, Mummy, you are in no position to be calling other people tight.’
I pour the Baileys down the sink and wish that everyone would leave. I don’t want to talk. Not even to my friends. It’s effort. I don’t want to hear how much Great Aunt Molly enjoyed chatting to my father about the Canadian property market or how he and Cousin Stephen went camping together when they were boys. I don’t give a shit. Trying to appropriate the lion’s share of the grief and limelight when they’re barely related! I don’t want to be sociable. I want my father to walk into the kitchen and say, ‘Helen, make me a cup of coffee, will you.’
The doorbell rings, and I sag, dramatically, like a sullen teenager and plod grumpily towards it. As I approach I can make out a familiar figure through the frosted glass. Surely not. I ping out of my slouch and curse myself for not changing my student skirt the second I returned to the house. Marcus. As if on cue, Luke wanders out from the lounge. ‘Marcus said he might turn up later,’ he says brightly.
‘Thanks for warning me,’ I say as I smooth my hair and yank open the door.
‘Hell-ie,’ says Marcus in a soothing tone. ‘You poor love. I am so sorry I missed your old man’s send-off. I so wanted to be there but some doll from this new girl group Second Edition needed showing round the gym. I tried to get out of it but it was no go.’
I narrow my eyes disbelievingly and purse my lips in the beginnings of a pout. ‘I’m sure you were desperate to escape from the glamorous pop star,’ I say.
‘Oh Hellie, don’t be like that,’ he grins. ‘I’d prefer to spend time with you any day. To be honest, she was a dog. Legs like tree trunks.’ I do a token-feminist tut to disguise a large smirk. Incidentally, Marcus is the only person in the world I would ever allow to call me Hellie.
I have had an unrequited crush on Marcus for approximately nine years, ever since I spied him in the dinner queue at college. We had Luke’s friendship in common but as Marcus spent every waking hour at the gym I only got to know him at close range three years ago – when he bought his flat in Swiss Cottage and needed someone, preferably more reliable than Luke, to rent a room. (Fortunately there wasn’t anyone, so Luke suggested me.)
Marcus is undeniably vain and an unrepentant philanderer, but alluring even so. His job – assistant manager and personal trainer at an exclusive London health club, pardon me, health spa – suits him down to the ground and, not infrequently, into the bedroom. He knows that I fancy him, am humbly resigned to his romantic indifference, and that my lust is lying fallow. He therefore deduces – correctly – that I am delighted to be his friend and lodger even if he does charge slightly more than I can comfortably afford (there’s a surcharge for Fatboy.) And he is fun to be with. He’s a monster bitch who is acidly critical of everyone he meets yet superb at playing the sweetly caring friend. Marcus is adept at prising juicy chunks of gossip from his celebrity clients, and even adepter at blabbing them out to me and Luke. If I were ever to think about it – not that I do of course – I’d say that Marcus is fond of me. We enjoy a flirtatious relationship which peaks when I’m going out with someone. When he’s going out with someone it dips. When neither of us are going out with someone it drops into free fall.
But today Marcus is touchy-feely. He kisses me on both cheeks in a sincere manner, lightly resting a warm hand on the back of my neck. A zing! of lust shoots down my back, my sourness dissipates and my sunshiny temperament is magically restored. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I purr.
‘G & T would hit the spot, low-cal tonic if poss,’ he replies immediately. I nod, direct him to where Lizzy, Luke, and Tina are sitting, and obediently trot off. ‘Nice skirt, Alison,’ he calls.
‘Piss off,’ I shout, as I bump into Great Aunt Molly. She
looks straight at me and bursts into tears. I grit my teeth. ‘I didn’t mean you, Auntie Molly,’ I say in a saccharine voice.
‘Oh no dear, I know you didn’t. It’s all got on top of me – sob! – talking to Florence. Such a tragedy, losing her baby, her baby boy. And what a funeral! You young people have very strong ideas about how you like to do things. In my day, we had respect for religion! I know it’s hard for you too, dear, but losing a child, a child – no parent should ever have to bury a child—’ Great Aunt Molly is revving up for a big, bosomy, tear-stained rant, breezily innocent of the fact that I am fantastically insulted and itching to slap her.
‘My father was fifty-nine,’ I say coldly. ‘He was hardly a child.’ This, I know, is a truly evil statement but I have no room in my heart for other people’s whingeing grief. I can just about stomach my mother’s. I squeeze past her, snatch the gin bottle from a comotose Cousin Stephen, pour Marcus’s drink (full-fat tonic, I’m afraid), and speed back to him and the others.
Luke and Tina are deep in conversation about lord knows what, and Marcus is baiting sweet, courteous, well-mannered Lizzy about precisely why she ditched her last boyfriend. ‘Was he a marshmallow in bed?’ he demands.
‘No! no, I mean, I’d really rather not—’
Marcus rolls his eyes and nods knowingly: ‘He had a matchstick dick!’ Lizzy nearly spills her glass of Perrier. ‘Really! Really, I don’t think—’
But Marcus is relentless. ‘So what then? Was it big? Bite-size? Medium?’
Lizzy looks down at her lap and says in a small, reluctant voice, ‘Medium.’
I shove the G & T at Marcus without making eye contact, march out of the lounge, up the stairs and into the bathroom. I sit on the side of the avocado green bath, and laugh and laugh and laugh. I refuse to cry.
Chapter 6
ALMOST EVERY NIGHT, from ever since I can remember to the age of thirteen, I dreamed one of three dreams. Like most of the young female population I’d attend school wearing no knickers – an omission I’d discover as we queued for assembly. Or I’d fly around our house with Peter Pan, leaping carefree over the bannisters and floating upwards as weightless and airy as Tinkerbell. Most frequently, though, I’d walk alone into our local wood, in the terrible knowledge that a family of wolves lurked in the bushes. I’d start running, and they’d chase me. The dream never varied except on one memorable occasion, when I sped out of the wood and jumped over interminable lines of parked cars to escape them. Recently, however, my dreams have taken on a more urgent note. I dream I am hiding from a group of nameless baddies, in a huge empty house. I know they will hunt me down and the dream always ends as they yank me out of the attic cupboard. I try to relate it to Marcus but he yawns loudly, blips on the TV, and says, ‘There’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams.’
The bastard’s right so I ring Lizzy and tell her about it instead. Lizzy immediately consults a book she has entitled Definitive Meanings Of Dreams Dreamed By People We’ve Never Met But Whose Unconscious We’re Experts On. Or something like that. ‘Your ambition is pursuing you and pushing you towards success,’ she declares.
‘Are you sure?’ I say doubtfully. Lizzy recommends that tonight, before I go to sleep, I imagine confronting the baddies and demanding to know what they want from me. ‘Mm, okay,’ I say, knowing full well I will do nothing of the sort. Anyhow, I know what my dream signifies: that I am tired of being hassled by relatives who I wish to avoid but can’t escape.
Last night – after the hoi polloi finally left and the beneficiaries sobered up – our family solicitor, Mr Alex Simpkinson, read out my father’s will. Maybe I drank more than I thought because all I remember is my mother sobbing, Cousin Stephen whining, and Nana Flo shouting: ‘Silence!’ I’m sick of the lot of them. I have two more days of compassionate leave and my mother is badgering me to ‘pop round’. In other words, to share the burden of familial duty. Joyously, I have a valid excuse: my car is at the vet.
‘You mean the garage,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I reply, because I can’t be bothered to explain.
‘Get a taxi then,’ she says quickly.
I tell her I’m broke and furthermore, this week I’m on half pay. ‘I’ll pay,’ she growls. I tell her thank you, but I’m urgently busy. This isn’t, funnily enough, a lie. I have to locate my car insurance details and I haven’t the least idea where they are, who I’m insured with or, indeed, if I’m insured at all. My father was always instructing me to file important papers but how monstrously uncool is that? Far trendier to shove them in the nearest drawer. Only now, they seem to have vanished. Admittedly, my prowess with paperwork is mediocre. But today it is borderline chimp. A red wave of frustration floods me and before I know it I’ve snatched up my breakfast plate – a square of marmalade toast still on it – and hurled it at the wall. The plate (one of a garish set Marcus bought from the Habitat sale) smashes loudly into a thousand sharp pieces and leaves a dent. The marmaladen toast, of course, sticks messily to the wallpaper. Good.
Luke discovers me, thirty minutes later, hyperventilating on the bed. I whine out the tale of the horrid, spiteful car insurance papers and he gives a cursory glance around my bombsite bedroom, pokes aside a rogue pair of greying knickers with his toe, picks up a few sheets of paper festering underneath them, and says, ‘Isn’t this it?’ I am too relieved to be embarrassed. Anyway, it’s only Luke.
‘Thank you,’ I say stiffly.
‘No problem,’ he replies. ‘What are you going to do now?’
I’m not sure but I think he’s asking me less out of interest than to ensure I’m not about to smash any more of Marcus’s precious plates. ‘I’m going to put on a ton of mascara then call a cab and get my car back.’
Luke nods approvingly. ‘Say hi to Tom,’ he says.
Tom, it turns out, used to play football against Luke when Luke – fighting fit on a mere twenty a day – was a goalie in the Sunday league. I know this because as we motor home from the funeral Luke demands, ‘How do you know Tom?’ Not, you’ll note, ‘Why did you arrive at your dad’s funeral in a vet’s van?’ But then, that’s Luke. I assume Tina didn’t notice and Lizzy was too polite to ask.
An hour later I am standing in the clinical-reeky reception of Megavet, attempting to be civil to Celine. Who is, pleasingly, on her hands and knees wiping up a yellow puddle of Labrador wee. But it’s impossible. I apologise, again, for denting the car – I refuse to refer to it by name. Her rude response: ‘Your negligence has caused me a great deal of inconvenience.’
My rude response to her rude response: ‘What long words! Do you know what they mean?’
We exchange details in the same manner as, I imagine, Batman and the Joker after a prang in the Batmobile. I employ my sneeriest, snootiest, shop assistantest expression throughout then realise I need to ask her a favour. I decide to be brazen. ‘Is Tom around?’ I say in a bored tone.
She looks down her ski-jump nose and drawls, in an equally bored tone, ‘He’s busy.’
I am on the verge of leaping over the reception desk and throttling her when the surgery door clicks open, a large dough-faced woman carrying a tiny Yorkshire terrier waddles out, and Tom appears – a happy medium – behind her. I rearrange my expression to saintly.
‘Hello,’ he says, when he sees me. He jerks his head towards the surgery door. ‘Come in – I’ll be one second.’ Tom then turns his attention to totting up the bill, so I cross my eyes at Celine, smile nastily, and sashay in to the surgery. I sit down, and am suddenly overcome with the irrational fear that I have spinach in my teeth (unlikely as I don’t eat spinach) so I dig through my bag, extract a make-up mirror, bare my teeth and peer into it. So when Tom walks in I am making a face like an aggressive baboon. I shut my mouth and the mirror about as fast as the speed of light. I think he didn’t notice.
‘How was it?’ says Tom, ‘if that’s not a stupid question.’
I look at him blankly. ‘How was what?’
‘The f
uneral,’ he says.
‘Ohhhh! Oh, that. Terrible, actually.’
He wants to know why so I tell him, at length. Then I wonder if he really wanted to know or if he was just being polite. In the past, I’ve been reprimanded by Jasper for engaging his boss in a long discussion about my recurring headaches and whether they might indicate a brain tumour, after she answered his phone and asked how I was. ‘Even if you’re in intensive care on a life support machine, you don’t tell people!’ he’d squawked. “You say ‘I’m fine thank you very much, and you?”’
I remember this gem of advice after regaling Tom with tales from the crypt for a full eight minutes. ‘Anyway,’ I say quickly, ‘it’s over now. I just really came by to get my car and say thanks again for the lift.’
Tom’s face breaks into a smile and he says, ‘Any time,’ like he means it. He is fiddling with a pen. There is a short silence then we both speak at once.
‘I think you know my flatma—’ I say.
‘I wondered if you—’ he says. He stops, quickly.
‘You say,’ he says.
I giggle nervously, and say, ‘I was only going to say, I think you know my flatmate Luke Randall. Or at least, he knows you.’
Tom wrinkles his nose. ‘Luke, tactless Luke?’ he says.
‘Yeeees!’ I say, in a disproportionate squeal of pleasure.
Tom laughs. He then tells me about the time a bunch of them went on a boys’ night out to a rough East End nightclub and the screw on Luke’s glasses came loose. ‘So he goes up to the barman and says, “Have you got a knife?”!’