by Claire Sandy
‘Seriously.’
‘No way!’ Robert shook his head, eyes still on the page. ‘Do you think I landed yesterday from the Planet of No Women? I like my testicles exactly where they are, thanks very much.’
‘Go on. Be honest – I won’t get upset.’
Robert took a deep breath, laid his head back on the pillows and looked at his wife. ‘Marie,’ he began, ‘I don’t know what age you look. You look like you look, and you look lovely – like you’ve always looked.’
Marie was touched.
‘To me,’ he added, going back to the magazine.
Wishing her husband knew when to stop, Marie peered into the mirror propped on top of the chest of drawers. She leaned in, a fingertip to one eyelid, searching for new lines, but a sudden image stopped her mid-scrutiny.
Superimposed over Marie’s bare and shiny face was a much older visage, that of the lady she’d been watching for the past hour. Robert had come good and remembered to tape The Great British Bake Off, so Marie had spent a joyous sixty minutes watching her heroine pussy-whip Paul Hollywood and dispense her patented brand of genteel tough love to the stressed-out contestants.
Mary’s face, Marie recalled, was a map of the woman’s life. Lovely, proper wrinkles marched unashamedly across her brow and from the corners of those iridescent peepers, telling a tale of people loved and people lost, mountains climbed and hills hurtled down on a tea-tray.
There were no apologies in that face. No Whoops, how did that happen? I got old! Pass the Botox! And Marie loved that face.
Feeling better about her own countenance, she turned to the window and peeked out through the gap in the curtains. Across the Close a door opened, slapping a rectangle of light onto the Grays’ dark path. Tod was manhandling a large bin on wheels out into the street.
‘Oh God, it’s bin-day tomorrow. Did you . . . ?’
Robert groaned. ‘It’s always bloody bin-day.’
‘Go on,’ said Marie. ‘They’re full.’ Of half-baked sponge and misfired sausage roll, mainly.
‘Why are the bins my thing?’ He swung his legs angrily off the bed.
‘Because they are,’ said Marie. ‘Men do the bins. That’s how it is. Look at Tod.’ She peered closer. ‘My God, he’s even taking it to the end of the Close, by the looks of things. What a hero!’ She couldn’t resist adding, ‘And he’s wearing a proper dressing gown.’
‘Good for him,’ grumbled Robert, pulling on Marie’s pink towelling shortie number. A grumpy cross-dresser, he stomped out of the bedroom and down the stairs, shouting, ‘This sudden Tod-love would have nothing to do with the fact that he praised your sodding cake, I suppose?’
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
27.08.13
00.11
SUBJECT: OI!
Hi Soulmate
Email me!
Why are you all quiet tonight? I can sense you’re there. Have you given up on me because you got brilliant results and you can’t hang out with the asshat who got a D in eng lit?
Twins are pairing me up with this Goth Girl Across The Road. Some hope! They don’t know about YOU. And they don’t know I DO NOT WANT A GIRLFRIEND.
The Clones are quiet at the moment. Maybe they’ve gone abroad or something. Waiting for it to kick off again is almost as bad as when it’s full on. I feel like Sigourney Weaver in Alien being creeped out by all the dark corners on the space ship and wondering when the creature will jump out at her again.
Come on, Soulmate! Email me. Nobody else knows what’s going on. And I need to hear what you’re thinking and doing and what you hate today and what you love today.
laters
Angus
SEPTEMBER
Angus’s Birthday
Bunny-Rabbit Cake
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
01.09.13
12.09
SUBJECT: Quickie
Hi Huz
Just a quick one (while I await Mrs Donaldson and her broken front crown) to say GOOD LUCK!!!! with your speech to the department today. Slay ’em with your sausage roll, big boy. Oh I keep meaning to say – ask Magda for a new chair. I was shocked when I visited last week. That chair you sit on should be in a skip, not cradling the (rather nice) buttocks of the UK’s foremost cutlery personage.
Love you.
See you at home.
(You’re on putting-to-bed duty tonight because I’ll be busy making Angus’s birthday cake for tomorrow.)
Mxxxxxxxx
P.S. Mary Berry could soooo take Paul Hollywood in a fight.
ANGUS THIS IS MY FOURTH TEXT! R U STILL IN BED???? Get up NOW. Are girls up? Have u walked Prinny? Invite Joe over for tomorrow and we’ll make a party of it – you’ve hardly seen him this hols. GET UP NOW! Love you. Mum. x P.S. GET UP.
‘Aileen, don’t do that.’ Marie shuddered. ‘Not in reception.’
‘Don’t do what?’ Aileen turned from the mirror, a forefinger jammed on either side of a particularly magnificent traffic light of a pimple on the end of her nose. ‘Squeezing is necessary to maintain me complexion.’
Aileen’s complexion could double as a devilishly hard dot-to-dot puzzle; the squeezing wasn’t paying off.
‘You can . . . squeeze,’ said Marie squeamishly, ‘all you like – just not in front of patients. They expect high levels of hygiene from us.’
‘Fair enough.’ Marie lowered both hands with an elegant gesture, like a gymnast finishing a routine.
‘Seventeen weeks and three days to the wedding!’ According to the schedule on the whiteboard, Lynda should have been updating the clinic website, but she was mooching about on her wedding spreadsheet, a document that made The Da Vinci Code seem clipped and perfunctory. ‘The seating plan’s in its final stages.’
‘Who am I sitting next to?’ asked Aileen belligerently. She only knew how to put questions belligerently: if she asked a stranger the time, they assumed they were being mugged.
‘Let’s see.’ Lynda scanned the rows and columns earnestly. ‘Hmm. You’re between another bridesmaid and the best man.’
‘He’d better keep his hands to himself.’
‘He’s gay.’
‘I have a strange effect on men.’
‘Oh, I know you do,’ said Lynda.
Aileen tidied the plaque leaflets. ‘Is there room for a small canister of pepper spray in those little lacy handbags you’re forcing us to carry?’
Ignoring her, Lynda tapped the screen. ‘Ah, wedding cake.’ She looked over at her boss, who was scowling and ringing her home number. ‘Have you researched croquembouche yet?’
‘Yes!’ Marie nodded enthusiastically, phone to her ear, making a mental note to research croquembouche as soon as Lynda went to lunch.
‘Isn’t it fab-yoo-lus!’
‘Oh yes,’ said Marie, listening as the phone rang a mile away in Caraway Close.
‘D’you think you’ll need a ladder?’
Wondering why she’d need a ladder to make a cake, and now far too scared to research croquembouche, Marie was saved from answering by a childish squeak at the other end of the line.
‘Good morning. Dunwoody residence.’
‘Rose. Is your brother out of his pit yet?’
‘No. And his room smells like that circus you made us go to.’
‘Tell him I said to get up. It’s the second-last day of the holidays and he shouldn’t waste it in bed.’ Even as she said this, Marie wondered when she’d started quoting The Handbook of Dumb Things Mothers Say; she could think of nothing lovelier than a day-long lie-in. ‘Have you two had your cereal?’
‘No. We had eggs Benedict.’
Of course you did, thought Marie with a smile, wondering how their no doubt inventive version had tasted. Her resourceful daughters were a constant surprise to her. ‘Listen, any ideas for what sort of cake I should make for Angus’s birthday?’
‘Is this wh
ere you ask me a question, but you’ve already decided and you want me to agree with you?’
‘Not at all, darling!’
‘Fruitcake. That’s his favourite.’
‘How about a shaped cake?’
‘Fruitcake’s his favourite.’
‘But how about a cake in the shape of’ – Marie looked down at Mary’s book, open on Lynda’s desk, beside a brochure for bridal vajazzling – ‘a bunny rabbit.’ That, she thought, would stretch me.
‘Fruit cake’s his favourite,’ said Rose. ‘And we don’t say bunny rabbit any more. We say rabbit.’
‘OK.’ Marie gave up. ‘Well, don’t play with matches or stick your fingers in the light sockets, sweetie pie.’
‘You forgot about opening the door to murderers.’
‘You can do that, if you want.’
Rose’s giggle was like pretty china breaking. ‘See you later, Mum.’
The cheerful ding of the bell above the door signalled Mrs Donaldson’s arrival, her rueful smile and ‘Sorry I’m late!’ exposing the craggy stump of a front tooth.
‘You look like a tramp,’ said Aileen with a smile. ‘Or a Victorian prostitute.’
‘We’ll soon have you back to normal,’ said Marie soothingly, as Mrs Donaldson’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘And then we’ll ask for a refund from Aileen’s Charm School.’
As Mrs Donaldson handed over her debit card, she flashed her pristine gnashers unnecessarily. ‘Did you notice they’re doing up the old snack bar across the road?’
All three Smile! folk peered like meerkats over the frosted bottom section of the window behind Lynda’s chair. The loss of Baguette Me Not had hit them hard; Aileen still mourned the snack bar’s baps.
‘Ooh, yes,’ said Marie, intrigued. ‘Wonder what it’s going to be?’
‘They’re spending a bit of money, whoever they are,’ smiled Mrs Donaldson. She would smile all day, now that she had her front tooth back, even if she had to deliver news of a death. ‘An army of workmen. Whole place is gutted. Saw lots of chrome and glass going in.’
‘Aileen,’ said Marie, knowing her assistant was one of the few people in the world who was nosier than her, ‘go and find out what’s going on.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lynda, as Aileen shot out of the door like a dog following a thrown ball. ‘Use your irresistible charm.’
‘Thanks again for fitting me in, Marie,’ said Mrs Donaldson, stuffing her purse into her bag. ‘I feel human again. You’ve done a brilliant job, as always.’
‘Aw, shucks, it was nothing,’ smiled Marie, her face ketchup-coloured. Not very expert at accepting compliments, she felt warmed when a patient thanked her like this. She knew she was good at dentistry and she knew that a healthy smile made a difference. When people made jokes at parties along the lines of How can you spend all day looking in mouths?, she wanted to tell them it was a vocation, a calling – a small way to add to the sum of happiness in the world. But that would sound pompous. And she was usually too tiddly to pronounce ‘vocation’.
The shrill scream of Aileen’s rape alarm brought them all back to the window. Across the road the builders seemed to have locked themselves inside the property, peeping out as Aileen stomped back to her colleagues.
‘They were un—’
‘We know.’ Lynda held up a hand. ‘Undressing you with their yada-yada-yada. What’s the shop going to be?’
‘It’s going to be . . .’ Aileen paused to maximise the drama. ‘It’s going to be a state-of-the-art, all bells and whistles, no expense spared . . . dental clinic.’
A happy side-effect of the Residents’ Association meeting was that Marie now felt better equipped to greet her neighbours. When she saw Hattie power-walking around the Close that evening she called out, ‘Evening!’
Hattie power-walked over, all elbows and knees, the sweatband around her head so Eighties that it could well be in fashion again. ‘Can I help you with those?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Marie heaved Sainsbury’s bag after Sainsbury’s bag out of the boot, wondering if they’d mated and reproduced on the short drive home. The welts that the vicious plastic handles left on her fingers were scars of motherhood – part of a matching set that included stretch marks, varicose veins and eye-bags, which, if examined, contained the words just let me sleep in microscopic letters.
‘Expecting visitors?’ Hattie, marching on the spot, eyed the massed bags.
‘No,’ laughed Marie. ‘But I’m baking tonight.’ Even with the comprehensive Mary-inspired makeover, Marie’s cupboards never held everything she needed for a new cake.
‘I bake when I’m out of sorts,’ said Hattie. ‘It makes me feel very close to the Earth Mother. It balances me.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Marie never considered her relationship with the Earth Mother, but she did feel a great deal more sane after a kitchen session with Mary, once she’d stopped banging cupboard doors and shouting Where’s the arrowroot – and WHAT is arrowroot?
‘Yoo-hoo!’ Erika was clambering out of a taxi, breasts first, on the other side of the Close. ‘Anyone fancy a swift G and T?’
Marie fancied one, but the bags cutting into her fingers reminded her she didn’t have time. ‘Another time!’ she shouted, wondering what her younger incarnation would make of this strange middle-aged woman turning down booze in favour of making a cake shaped like a rabbit.
‘You know I never touch the stuff!’ called Hattie, still marching, her expression a verbal tut-tut. For somebody who lived so healthily, Hattie was, thought Marie, rather well upholstered. Perhaps she strayed from the path of holistic righteousness now and again?
‘Just have to drink the whole bottle myself then!’ yelled Erika as she paid the taxi driver, bending over her handbag and offering him a ringside view of her D-cups.
‘Look at the cabbie’s face,’ laughed Marie, awkwardly slamming the car boot with her elbow. ‘He’s in seventh heaven. Boobs and a tip!’
Robert, ambling down their path in the sort of super-scruffy trackie bottoms that shouldn’t be seen by anybody except immediate family, held out his hand to take a bag or two and asked, ‘Boobs? Where? What boobs?’ with exactly the same expression on his face as Prinny wore when he heard the fridge door opening. He spotted Erika, tottering on her platforms, and said, ‘Ah, those boobs.’
Marie dug him in the ribs. ‘Eyes front,’ she barked.
‘Isn’t she . . .’ began Hattie, forgetting to march for a moment ‘. . . a little old for those clothes she wears?’
So, wholesome Hattie had talons. Having developed a soft spot for their eccentric sexpot neighbour, Marie defended her. ‘If that’s what makes her happy,’ she said.
A car, sleek and low, nosed up, and Erika, with a flick of her bouffant hair, rushed over to greet Tod.
‘She’s not so old,’ said Robert, earning a soft mew of agreement from Marie, who was proud of her gallant husband. ‘About, what – ten years older than you, love?’
‘At least fifteen,’ said Marie, teeth so suddenly clenched they could have shattered. ‘At least,’ she repeated warningly, as he half-opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.
‘Oh God,’ said Hattie out of the side of her mouth, ‘she’s all over poor Tod now.’
Erika put her arm through Tod’s and leaned in to whisper in his ear.
‘And if I’m not mistaken,’ said Robert, ‘poor Tod’s loving it.’
‘Men are so obvious.’ Perhaps it was the obviousness of men that got Hattie marching on the spot again, as Tod threw back his head and laughed at some saucy comment of Erika’s.
‘Give us a break,’ said Robert genially. ‘Men are straightforward. If a woman hangs on every word we say and favours a low neckline, we’re happy.’
Erika shouted across. ‘A customer for my G and T at last!’
‘Tod’s just being polite,’ said Marie, as they watched Erika abduct him in broad daylight and waltz him to her front door.
‘No, he’s not. He’s e
njoying himself,’ insisted Robert. Marie saw Lucy’s face pop up at the small round window beside the Grays’ front door. A small, wan blob, Lucy strained to see where her husband had gone, before disappearing again. ‘Tod’s so handsome and suave and tasteful. He wouldn’t look twice at Erika.’
‘I agree,’ said Hattie vehemently, as if big-breasted wealthy women were the last thing any man would enjoy.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Marie, uneasy that they might be disparaging a perfectly nice woman. ‘Erika’s great, but she’s not Tod’s type.’
‘Who is?’ asked Robert. ‘You, I guess?’
‘He’s married!’ snorted Marie.
‘Yeah. And so are you. To me.’ Robert puffed out his chest, and the egg stain on his Everton shirt expanded.
‘It’s at times like this,’ laughed Hattie, powering off, ‘that I thank God I’m single.’
‘Should I have plumped for a koala?’ Marie looked from the rabbit on the page to the three circular sponges idling on racks. Her stomach lurched in a way that brought to mind art lessons at school. She could never wrestle washing-up-liquid bottles and toilet rolls into rockets; they remained, obstinately, washing-up-liquid bottles and toilet rolls.
‘I’ll just toast the coconut before I start assembling,’ she said airily, as if toasting coconut was a cinch, and assembling a mere bagatelle. After shovelling the third blackened heap of coconut into the bin, she began to appreciate the virtues of a standard fruitcake.
The glass doors to the garden were blank black rectangles, closed after weeks of standing wantonly ajar each warm dusk. September had started as it meant to go on, and the garden furniture huddled, chilly and shocked, out in the dark.
Eyeing the coconut through the oven’s glass door (she knew by now that the difference between ‘golden’ and ‘burned to buggery’ was but a moment), Marie savoured the peace of the kitchen.
All was calm in her queendom. In the sitting room the twins were welded to the sofa, determined to make the most of the last late night of the holidays. The soft thud of music through Angus’s bedroom door was the only evidence that he was in the house. Robert was in the garage and had been for some time, doing whatever it is that men do in garages. He was looking for batteries maybe, or cleaning a hammer. Possibly he was planning an elaborate murder – whatever it was, he was doing it quietly.