‘Well, I’m not hungry any more,’ Marge says, a dig at the late mealtime. They’d all eat at six if Marge had her way. ‘I think I’ve gone past it, to be honest, so you can have mine.’
‘There’s plenty, Mum,’ Victoria says. ‘And you know what time we eat around here.’
‘Yes,’ Marge says, her downward-turned mouth momentarily balancing out the post-stroke lop-sidedness of her face. ‘Silly o’clock, that’s when you eat. It’s not good for the digestion.’
‘You’ve stained your shirt,’ Victoria says, mesmerised by a red dot on Martin’s double cuff as it moves up and down. His cufflinks are blue and pretty, but she can’t remember if she bought them for him or not. Is her failing memory yet another side effect of the menopause, or is it instead the result of all the Valium she’s been popping? She thinks she read something about Valium affecting your memory, though she can’t for the life of her remember where.
Martin follows her gaze to his cuff and says, ‘Oh. Yeah. That’ll come out, won’t it?’
Victoria takes her plate from his outstretched hand and uses the occasion to study the stain up close. ‘What is that, anyway?’ she asks, wondering if she has any Vanish left, and then wondering if one of those Stain Devil things mightn’t work better.
‘Dunno,’ Martin says. ‘Food?’
‘It’s very red for food,’ Victoria says.
‘It looks like lipstick,’ Marge offers.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Martin mugs. ‘That’ll be it. The female clients all insist on doing this kneeling cuff-kissing thing these days. Ever since Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s getting to be a real bore.’
‘Really?’ Victoria asks. There is humour in Martin’s voice, she can hear that. And there’s a wry smile on his lips, too. It’s just that time stretches strangely when dragged through Valium. It takes her longer to react to things, which is, after all, probably the point.
‘No, Mum,’ Bertie says. ‘Not really. Dad’s joking.’
‘It’s ketchup, dear,’ Martin says, finishing serving himself and sitting down. ‘Bon appétit! ’
‘It’s a bit dried out, I’m afraid,’ Victoria says, poking at her chicken with a fork.
‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’
‘So, did you talk to your sister about Christmas?’ Marge asks, her slurred voice making her sound slightly drunk. ‘I called her yesterday morning and she said she needed to speak to you first.’
‘I did. We spoke yesterday, too. But she hasn’t asked Sander about it yet.’
‘About what?’ Martin asks.
‘Whether we go there or they come here this year.’
‘It’s only October,’ Martin says, then, ‘Hmmm, this aubergine is lovely.’
‘You said we could go there,’ Bertie says, looking concernedly at his father.
‘I said, we’ll see.’
‘Oh, come on. It’s much better there. There’s nothing to do here.’
‘We’ll all be together, wherever it is,’ Martin tells his son. ‘So I can’t see that it matters much, does it?’
‘Except that they, like, live on a beach!’ Bertie says. ‘And they have a proper tree and they’ve got animals, and an XBox and a Wii, and that drone thing you can fly on the beach.’
‘I suppose it is more fun for the youngsters,’ Martin concedes.
‘Plus, other people always drop in there,’ Bertie adds. ‘Like those Polish people last year, and the mad gypsies the year before.’
‘Penny’s waifs and strays,’ Marge says. ‘You know what I think about that. Christmas should be for family.’
‘Do you think Will will be there?’ Bertie asks.
‘I expect Will has his own family to go to at Christmas,’ Martin says. ‘Why?’
Bertie looks down at his plate. ‘Dunno,’ he says, with a shrug. ‘He’s a laugh. That’s all.’
‘Anyway, I’ll talk to her next week when we get back,’ Victoria says. ‘And we’ll try to get a decision made.’
‘We could go down before Christmas,’ Bertie suggests hopefully. ‘We could have, like, a meeting to plan it properly and everything.’ He knows how his mother likes the idea of planning things properly.
‘Actually, that could be good,’ Victoria says. She hasn’t been seeing as much of Penny as she’d like.
‘I don’t have anything against a weekend at the seaside either,’ Martin says, picturing himself casting off from the jetty. He might even buy himself a new fishing rod.
‘I just hope she’s cleaned since the last time I was down,’ Marge says. ‘That bathroom was like one big mould factory. Honestly, the ceiling was green.’
Victoria imagines this and shudders. She decides she needs to remember to take her own bleach with her this time. She had been horrified to discover on her last visit that they ‘didn’t use bleach any more’. Something to do with it being bad for the environment. Personally, Victoria prefers that her environment smell of bleach rather than feet and mould and guinea-pig poo, but hey . . . Momentarily, she feels the tiniest flush of pride. At least she’s better at something than her sister is. But then Marge says, ‘Still, I suppose it is harder for her, being a working mother and all,’ and the feeling vanishes.
Once she has digested the comment, Victoria says, ‘It’s actually our turn to have them here.’ The mould is still in her mind’s eye. ‘We went to Penny’s last year, after all.’
‘Mum,’ Bertie pleads, dropping his fork and putting his hands together in prayer. ‘Please don’t do this to me.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Christmas here,’ Victoria says. ‘But I’ll talk to her. When we get back from Venice, I’ll talk to her and we can decide, OK?’
‘And you’ll see if we can go down before?’ Bertie asks.
‘Yes,’ Victoria says with a vague smile. She’s glad that Bertie likes his aunt and she’s glad he enjoys hanging out with his cousins. Their ability to spend time as a big, happy family is one of the rare areas of her life where reality just occasionally meets her expectations. ‘Yes, I’ll see if that’s possible.’
The sun is setting as Penny swings into Wave Crest, the sky lit up like one of Sander’s colour charts. She has rarely, if ever, seen such a spectacular eruption of colour and, once she has parked and turned the engine off, she sits and stares and allows herself a couple of minutes, a brief, magical pause in what has so far been a horrendous day.
When the rapidly falling temperature within the car makes her shiver, she reaches for her bag from the passenger seat and climbs out.
Indoors, the house is dark and unusually silent. Even the cat, who generally keeps watch, ever hopeful for extra food, is absent.
‘Hello?’ she calls out, wondering if a lack of reply would make her feel concern or joy. Her life these days provides so few opportunities (with the exception of driving) for actually being alone. So these moments are rare enough to be treasured, yet unusual enough to be unsettling, too.
As she hangs her coat in the hallway a door upstairs opens. ‘Hello?’ Sander calls. ‘Up here.’
Penny climbs the stairs and enters his studio. She finds him sitting facing the window. The room smells sweet with marijuana. ‘What are you doing in the dark?’ she asks, thinking, Like I don’t know.
‘Looking at that,’ Sander replies. ‘Have you seen the state of the sky out there?’
‘Hard to miss it,’ Penny replies, crossing to the window. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘So how was your day?’ Sander asks, reaching for an unfinished joint in the ashtray and then standing and moving to Penny’s side.
‘Don’t ask.’
‘That bad?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘D’you want to talk about it, or do you just want a puff of this to help you forget?’ Sander asks, proffering the joint.
Penny shrugs. She rarely smokes these days, but tonight she feels she needs something to help her through, otherwise she might just cry. ‘Go on, then,’ she says, taking the joint from Sander’s fingers and th
en leaning in towards the flame of his lighter.
She inhales, coughs, then takes another drag before saying, through smoke, ‘The rules are so stupid, that’s the thing. It’s like they’ve been designed to make the whole process fail.’
‘Asylum rules?’ Sander asks. He’s heard this rant before.
‘Right. So, I’m supposed to be counselling this woman for trauma, OK?’
Sander nods, almost imperceptibly.
‘They’re Syrians. Two daughters plus the parents. Dad got tortured by Assad. He’s missing three fingers, if that gives you some idea. And all three women got raped – the mother, who’s my client, in Syria, and the daughters during the trip to Greece.’
‘God, how old are they?’
‘Twelve and fourteen.’
‘Jesus.’
‘The son’s missing, presumed dead, but possibly just rotting in a jail somewhere.’ Penny clears her throat before continuing. ‘So that’s what I’m supposed to be helping her with, right? All of that. But we couldn’t even get near the subject because what they need is someone to help them now. They’re living in a single room, a horrible bedsit. “Unhygienic” doesn’t even begin to cover it, believe me. Four people in two beds in a single room with one of those twenties Belling cookers in the corner. They’re officially not allowed to work, which is absurd, but they have to because no one can possibly live on £5 a day asylum seeker’s allowance. And if the father gets caught – so this is an ex-college professor painting people’s bloody ceilings for £3 an hour, yeah? – and if he gets caught, they get thrown out.’
‘Wow.’
‘I mean . . . ugh . . .’ Penny shakes her head. ‘How can I possibly be expected to help her with her trauma when it’s ongoing? When we – the social services, the government, the system – are still causing it? And then, on the way home, this ugly bloody skinhead – who I’m betting never worked a day in his life – gave me this.’ Penny pulls an English Defence League leaflet from her pocket, unfolds it and hands it to Sander.
Sander scans the bright red headlines of the various sections of text. ‘English Benefits for English People’, ‘Time the Muslins Went Back Home’, ‘English Pensioners MUST Come First’.
‘Muslins,’ Sander says. ‘Are they people who wear muslin?’
‘I know. It’s full of spelling mistakes. And it’s horrible. And there are way more of these hateful skinhead types scrounging benefits than there are immigrants, I’m telling you. I mean, if you met these Syrians – who just happen to be Christian, by the way – you’d swap them for baldy skinhead man in an instant. And all they really want to do, unlike Mr EDL, is get a bloody job.’
‘Sure,’ Sander says.
‘And they’re banging on about wanting to quit the EU, but they wouldn’t have the foggiest what to do if we did leave.’
‘Right. It’s stupid.’
Penny can tell from his tone of voice that he has reached the limits of his capacity to listen to her. It’s tough living with a partner who complains almost every day about her job – Penny gets that. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘Rant over.’
‘You do a tough job, Pen,’ Sander says, sliding one arm around her waist. ‘Some days it’s going to get to you.’
‘Thanks.’
Downstairs, the landline rings and then a few seconds later the mobile handset perched on Sander’s easel starts to chirrup. ‘Don’t, babe,’ Sander says, as Penny breaks free and picks it up. ‘It’ll only be your mother.’
Penny casts him a dirty look. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘And?’ She clicks on the answer button and then raises it to her ear. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she says. ‘How are you?’
‘D’you want tea?’ Sander asks as he leaves the room.
Penny nods at him and says, ‘Uh-uh,’ perhaps to him or perhaps to her mother, he’s not sure.
By the time Sander returns, the conversation is over and Penny is seated in his armchair watching as the last of the redness fades from the sky. ‘They all want to come down for the weekend,’ she announces.
‘I thought they were in Venice.’
Penny nods. ‘After Venice. Maybe the last week in October or perhaps for bonfire night? It’s a Saturday, apparently.’
‘Why?’
‘Officially, to plan Christmas,’ Penny says. ‘But Mum reckons they just fancy a trip to the seaside. And a bonfire on the beach, no doubt.’
‘It’s nice to feel useful,’ Sander says sarcastically.
‘I know. Do you think that’s true? I mean, I was happy at first – I haven’t seen Vicky for weeks – but when Mum said that . . . Well, I’m not so sure now.’
‘Who knows? And Christmas. Is that gonna be here then?’
‘Still to be decided. But I was thinking, we’ll need to sort the spare room out. All those boxes need to come back into our room, too. They’ve been there since the roof leak.’
‘I’ll handle that during the week.’
‘Right, well, in that case, I might try to get a lick of paint on that back bedroom. You know what Vicky’s like about stains and stuff.’
‘You’re tired,’ Sander says. ‘You don’t want to spend your weekend painting walls.’
‘Do we have any white paint left?’ Penny asks, ignoring the comment, because if she engages that train of thought they will inevitably end up discussing why she has to paint the room, why Sander doesn’t do it. He doesn’t seem to paint anything else these days, after all.
‘There’s some in the basement. If it hasn’t dried out. But I really don’t . . .’
‘And we need to do something about the mould in the bathroom. Mum asked if we’d dealt with it and I said yes.’
Sander laughs. ‘You liar! So you realise that preparing for the Christmas planning weekend is going to be exactly the same amount of work as preparing for Christmas itself, yeah?’
‘She’s my sister,’ Penny says. ‘I have to see my sister. Even if she does just want to visit the seaside. And even if she does require hospital cleanliness wherever she goes.’
‘You get that no matter how much you do, it won’t be enough,’ Sander says. ‘I mean, it’s fine. I’m totally happy for them to come. But as long as you’re ready for the fact that it won’t be enough.’
‘She’s a maniac and I’m a slattern. She’ll just have to put up or shut up. Or go home.’
‘Slattern?’
Penny laughs. Sander’s English is so perfect that most of the time she forgets it’s not his first language. But then he’ll say ‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’, or slap an ‘s’ on the end of ‘pasta’ or ‘accommodation’ to express the plural, and she’ll remember. ‘Slattern? It’s a dirty, untidy woman. It’s a pretty old-fashioned word.’
‘OK,’ Sander says. ‘Slattern, huh?’
‘You could bother to contradict me. You could say, “Oh no, Penny, you’re not a slattern.”’
Sander smiles. ‘I’m assuming you know the word better than I do. And yourself,’ he says. ‘Anyway, as far as Vicky is concerned, it sounds like you’re ready for an argument. And they haven’t even confirmed that they’re coming yet.’
‘Only if she starts complaining.’
‘Which, of course, she will.’
Penny wrinkles her nose and rolls her eyes. Her expression reminds Sander of their daughter, who generally considers anything anyone over twenty says to be automatically idiotic. ‘Relax,’ Penny says. ‘We won’t argue. I promise.’
Sander laughs again. ‘How come I know you so much better than you know yourself?’ he asks. ‘You’re the shri— . . . the psychologist. So, go on. Explain that to me.’
Inexplicably, from Penny’s point of view at least, it takes Sander a full eight days to move the twenty-two boxes of random junk and clothing back from the spare room to the walk-in wardrobe of their bedroom. Eight days, at – she works it out on her iPhone – two point seven five boxes per day.
Though the evidence – random items from the boxes appearing around the house – would appear to suggest that t
he principal reason is Sander’s capacity to become distracted by the contents of said boxes, he denies this. He has fixed the washing machine (again), he points out. He did the food shop (undeniable, but why does it take Penny thirty minutes and Sander seemingly a whole day?). Plus, his favourite excuse of the last fifteen years: he has, of course, been thinking about ideas for a painting.
Whatever the reasons, by the time the room has been emptied, only three days remain for Penny to paint it.
Max, bless him, offers to help, but Penny prefers that he work on his physics project. Thirteen-year-old Chloe could be pressed into service, it’s true, but Penny knows that sorting out the half-hearted adolescent mess she would leave behind would take longer than doing it herself. And as for Sander, well, three days has never been enough for him to do anything.
So, between working full-time and mopping up cat sick (and how can it be that no one else ever comes across the cat vom first?), between taking the car for its MOT and hunting for the lost guinea pig (Beethoven is found alive and well and living beneath the kitchen sink), and between braiding Chloe’s hair and then unbraiding it when she changes her mind, Penny somehow finds the time to paint the spare room.
Yes, it looks a little uneven in the daylight, but well, that’s just what happens when you finish up at midnight, and when ten litres of emulsion on special offer at Lidl cost £7.99. But Sander says he’ll put pictures up in carefully selected positions to hide the brushstrokes. And Penny just about believes that he might.
‘Can we turn the heating up?’ Chloe asks.
It’s a cold, windy night outside, and they are eating Lidl pizzas in front of a film that no one is really watching. Penny was too tired to cook tonight, plus, she’s saving herself for the hosting marathon, which begins tomorrow.
‘It’s on full blast, I’m afraid,’ she replies. ‘It’s because of the window upstairs. I’m trying to get rid of the smell of that paint.’
Chloe rolls her eyes. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have painted it the night before they arrive,’ she says – an indisputable truth.
The Bottle of Tears Page 3