by Claire Sandy
Now. Now! Marie whipped out the coconut. It looked like a Lilliputian beach, bronze and beautiful. The next step was to cover her largest chopping board with foil, as a (frankly not very convincing) backdrop for her rabbit. Was it, Marie pondered, a space-rabbit? A rabbit from a hi-tech future? Briefly she regretted not buying green crepe paper to make a grassy background, but if foil was good enough for Mary Berry, then it was more than good enough for Marie Dunwoody.
The diagram was clear, but Marie was tired. She nudged her hacked-up sponges this way and that, wondering which were the feet and which the ears. Across the Close, Lucy’s kitchen was dark. Lucy never seemed to burn the midnight oil, despite her production line of mouth-watering goodies. For one moment Marie imagined a life married to Tod, with no need to work, no need to worry about the bills, spending every day conjuring up cakes and pastries and pies and . . . rabbits.
‘That’s an ear,’ she decided, plonking down a crescent of sponge. ‘Or is it?’ She snatched it up again. ‘Where’s his bum?’ she whispered desperately.
Time to go back to basics. Again! Marie took a deep breath, a glug of strong tea, shook herself vigorously and reapplied herself to the instructions. It all fell into place and soon the rabbit took shape on the foil. True, he was part Elephant Man, but he had a friendly look in his crooked eye and Marie felt confident he would taste great.
Slowly, methodically, she smeared yellow buttercream all over the rabbit, working carefully and refusing to panic when his tail fell on the floor and she only just beat Prinny to it.
Mary’s unchanging advice had worked again.
If only Mary could run the rest of Marie’s life. Mary would know how to react to news of a rival dentist on her turf; a rival with deep pockets and, according to Aileen, eight other ‘highly successful’ dental practices.
Mary wouldn’t have huddled with her team all afternoon, alternately bitching and panicking. She wouldn’t have broken out the Baileys after the last customer left. And she certainly wouldn’t have spent the evening predicting bushweeds drifting across reception, and a conga line of patients snaking out of Smile!’s door to the new dentist. The imagined highlights of Marie’s catastrophic future were: falling behind on the lease; sacking Lynda just before her wedding; and Aileen selling her body outside Waitrose.
The door from the garage opened and Robert emerged, wiping his hands with one of the many oily rags that lived in there. ‘You were wrong earlier,’ he said, one eyebrow cheekily raised. ‘My Paul would Chinese-burn your Mary into submission like that!’ He clicked his fingers. ‘She’d have no comeback. Nothing.’
‘Come now, Mr Dunwoody. She’d bring him to his knees with a karate-chop. Like so.’ Marie laid down her spatula and brought her hand down like a cleaver, stopping just short of Robert’s arm. She enjoyed his flinch, and did the same to his groin. ‘That’s what she does to your little chum just before they saunter in front of the cameras in The Great British Bake Off tent.’
‘He’d be back, quick as a flash, with his karate-kick.’ Robert demonstrated and toppled backwards over Prinny’s bowl.
‘Mind your back,’ said Marie, returning to the rabbit, as Robert fell through the utility room to sprawl on the tiles.
‘I meant to do that.’ Robert bounded up and converted his wince into a look of nonchalance.
‘Does this look like a rabbit to you?’ Marie swivelled the board and almost pitied her husband as he searched for an answer. Letting him off, she wondered how the Bake Off contestants managed to churn out such quality items with the rain lashing down on the canvas roof and Hollywood stalking the marquee like an irritable badger. Her crumb-structure would surely collapse under his stern eye. ‘It’ll be better when it’s covered in toasted coconut.’
‘That’s what they all say.’ Robert settled against the worktop, hands in tracksuit pockets, ready for a chat.
Marie hesitated to tell him about her new rival. Robert was already worried about his work; she didn’t want to burden him with her business woes just now. He would panic, and she needed him to be his usual steady, solid self while she digested the news. Even though he earned the lion’s share of their income, it was Marie who balanced the books. It was she who knew how much council tax they paid, the interest rate of their mortgage, how much violin lessons and trainers and rucksacks and school shoes cost. And besides, he was off on another topic, folding his arms and chuckling.
‘Caroline put her foot right in it today,’ he said, gleefully. ‘As usual she was poking her nose in, reading over my shoulder, and she caught that line in your email where you said I should ask for a new chair.’
‘That’s private!’ Marie resolved to be careful about what she wrote in emails to Robert at work. If Caroline had read the one from last week . . . Oh dear God, nobody – nobody – must ever know their codeword for sex, or Marie would have to pluck out her own eyes and jump in the river.
‘She got her comeuppance because her little mind started working overtime, and of course she couldn’t let me get away with having something new, so she said, “Ooh, I need a new bin. Where do we keep the requisition forms?”’
Not riveted by this tale of bins, Marie said, ‘So you’re getting a new chair then? Good.’ She selected two small Liquorice Allsorts for the rabbit’s nose.
‘Of course I’m not!’ Robert was shocked. ‘Magda is obsessed with cutting waste. She expects us to use things until they fall apart. She fishes paper clips out of the rubbish and we reuse teabags until they beg for mercy.’ He chuckled, enjoying himself. ‘Caroline even pointed out in a catalogue the bin she wants. It’s state-of-the-bloody-art.’
Marie flinched: that was the second time today she’d heard that expression.
‘It’s ergodynamic. It’s chrome. It’s by a designer. It’s a designer bin.’ Robert was enjoying himself hugely. ‘Magda’s brain will come out of her ears when she sees that requisition form. And then in I come with my sausage roll. Bam!’
‘Yes, darling – bam indeed,’ said Marie, not listening any more and trying to correct the rabbit’s squint.
Peeking in at the sleeping twins later that night, Marie tucked the duvet around Iris, who was doubled up like a prawn, her bottom sticking out of the bedclothes. In the other bed, a foot or two away, Rose’s head was thrown back, eyelids moving as her avatar moved through some twinny dream.
Hopefully it was a good one. Marie wanted nothing but sunny dreams for these two. Her skin had thinned perceptibly when she became a parent; she felt their every slight and bruise.
Pausing at Angus’s door, she wavered and almost padded past, but instead knocked gently and poked her head around the door, knowing that even this would be an intrusion for the boy who used to leap into her arms the moment he saw her, squealing, ‘Mummy! My Mummee!’
‘All right, love?’ she whispered, as if in a library or an old folks’ home. The room was full of sharp shadows thrown by the angled desk lamp.
Long limbs drawn up like a spider, Angus leaned back on a chair, its two front legs off the floor. Marie assumed that a by-law had been passed stating that all teenage boys must use chairs in this fashion. Not looking up as he tapped on his laptop, cords trailing from his earphones, he took her question literally. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘No reason.’ Marie wavered again, but ploughed on. She hadn’t seen him all evening. ‘You typing something?’
A huge exhalation, and Angus swivelled to face her with exaggerated patience. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am.’
‘Did you invite Joe tomorrow?’
‘Yes!’ Angus responded as if Marie had asked him this question three times an hour for a year. ‘Well,’ he frowned. ‘I asked him round. I didn’t invite him. It’s not a party. It’s just us lot and a cake.’
‘You’ve just described a party.’
‘No, it’s just hanging.’
‘Or chilling,’ suggested Marie. ‘Could we even be chillaxing?’
She could tell he wanted to laugh, but all she got
was a stern ‘Mum? I’m emailing?’
‘Goodnight, love.’
This was not how Mary Berry would buy a birthday present. That coiffed, fragrant lady would never tear around the local shops on the day itself because she’d put so much thought and energy into the cake (a cake the birthday boy would barely notice) that she’d forgotten about the present.
Realising her mistake, as Angus withstood an off-key Dunwoody rendition of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ at the breakfast table, Marie had manhandled Robert to the utility room for a brief, frantic, whispered argument about who should rush out in their lunch hour.
‘Wall-to-wall meetings,’ claimed Robert, brazenly stuffing his squash racket into a bag.
‘But you’re surrounded by present possibilities! You work for a sodding department store!’ hissed Marie, glancing neurotically at the door.
‘In the buying department. Which is ten minutes from the nearest branch.’ Robert added an unconvincing: ‘I’d like to help, love, but I can’t.’
‘Help?’ Marie spat out the word. This tactic annoyed her more than any other. ‘You’re not helping me. It’s a present for your own son – the product of your ejaculation sixteen years and nine months ago. You were happy to help that night!’
‘You could have used my staff discount, if you’d organised yourself earlier,’ said Robert. He was offensively cheerful, having spent the whole of breakfast rubbing his hands with glee at Caroline’s upcoming bin-based disappointment.
‘I know that, thanks very much,’ snarled Marie, looking wildly around her and wondering how to kill him using what came to hand. Fabric conditioner? Prinny’s towel?
So, as Robert held unimaginably important meetings about the future of . . . well, forks or something, Marie herded the twins through the revolving door of Belloc’s. They’d insisted on coming, to ‘help’.
Belloc’s was a local institution, having stood on the same spot (and, Marie suspected, having sold the same stock) since Edwardian days. It was stuffy and dated and naff, and it was all the tiny high street had to offer, apart from charity shops and gifty-wifty emporiums and a mobile-phone shop.
Tearing through the ground-floor departments at full tilt, picking up and putting down possible gifts like a chimp, Marie bombarded the girls with questions. ‘Does Angus want a ski mask? Would he like some shears? Has he ever mentioned a wild-bird seedball?’
‘Just buy him something you want,’ suggested Rose, striking a pose by a headless mannequin in a bikini. ‘Like you did with the cake.’
Channelling Mary Berry in the middle of Small Electricals, Marie heard her say Think like a sixteen-year-old, her voice eerily like a Home Counties Obi-Wan Kenobi. As the twins dragged her, one on each hand, towards Beauty and Toiletries, Marie imagined a life lived in a fog of Lynx, fighting a permanent erection.
‘We haven’t time, girls,’ she said tetchily, as Iris and Rose squealed with excitement at the rainbow rows of cosmetics.
As their faces fell, she heard the tone of her voice and didn’t like it one bit. It was too easy to fall into the Cruella de Vil style of mothering. ‘Tell you what: you two wait here and look at all the lovely colours, while I go to that counter over there.’ She pointed over to Leather Gifts. ‘Don’t move out of my sight, and don’t try on any make-up. Just look at it. OK?’
Marie eventually bought a wallet. She hated the wallet, and Angus would hate it even more. He wouldn’t, however, hate the thirty-pound credit note when they returned it to the store; she would take the credit note off his hands, leaving him with thirty pounds in cash and her with a credit note to blow the next time she needed a foot-spa or horrible shoes. Angus, like all teenagers, loved money with a fervour that amounted to lust.
‘Okey-dokey, ladies,’ she said brightly, returning to her girls. They’d been on the periphery of her vision throughout the transaction, giggling and jumping up and down. Marie wished she still giggled and jumped up and down when she was happy; maybe she’d try it the next time she finished a tricky pulpectomy.
‘Look, Mum!’
Iris and Rose turned together to face their mother, who gasped. And not with joy.
‘I said don’t put on the make-up!’ said Marie limply.
‘Did you?’ Iris bit her lip. Her cherry-red, glossy, outlined-in-purple lip.
‘Sorry.’ Rose fluttered her stiff, black, lumpy lashes and knotted her glittery brow.
‘You’re both orange,’ said Marie.
‘That’s the fashion.’ Iris turned her face to the left and to the right, so that her mother could admire the full easy-peeler effect.
‘I couldn’t make my mind up between the pink blusher stuff and the brown blusher glop, so I used them both.’ Rose seemed pleased with the results of her experimentation.
‘Let’s get you home.’ With a scant half-hour before her next patient, it would be a race to return the girls to Angus and make it back to Smile! in time. ‘And let’s just hope we don’t meet anybody we know.’ Marie flinched as they walked past mirrored pillars reflecting a dishevelled mother and two shrunken WAGs.
Head bent, burning with shame, Marie propelled her pungent charges (they’d gone bananas with the perfume testers) towards the exit. The brass revolving doors slowed as two adults stepped in on the other side. Lucy was chattering away happily to Mr Cassidy, the girls’ headmaster, as the door swept Marie and the twins into it. Trapped in the corresponding half, Marie met Lucy’s eye.
Really? Marie asked the universe, as she managed a lame hello. I mean, really? Lucy? And the headmaster?
Marie had never seen Lucy on the high street before. She’d never seen Mr Cassidy in any context except St Ethelred’s. Now here they were together, their wholesome smiles freezing as they took in the two tiny hookers holding onto Marie’s hands.
The door revolved twice with them all in it. All smiling. Especially the tiny hookers. Those tiny hookers thought it was truly hilarious.
With the phone shouldered against her ear, Marie made one last craven apology to the patient she was late for and stooped to pick up the package on her doorstep.
‘Is it for me?’ asked Iris hopefully.
‘Of course not,’ snapped Marie, adding with a tut: ‘It’s not even for me. It’s addressed to . . . one of the neighbours.’ As the girls lost interest, she followed them into the house, shouting, ‘Don’t disappear! I’m running a bath right now!’
Once all traces of make-up had been scrubbed away, Marie snatched up the package.
Pausing only to refresh her lipstick, curse her pot-belly and step into her best shoes, she trotted over the road with the parcel. Just as she was about to give up, after three rings at the doorbell brought no response, a shadow appeared beyond the glass door and Chloe, her head wrapped in a towel and her hands black to the wrists, opened the door.
‘Oh God!’ she said, flustered. ‘I’m dyeing my hair.’
‘Don’t panic.’ Marie held out the parcel. ‘It’s only this.’
Inky palms up, Chloe said, ‘Could you take it up for me? They like me to leave deliveries on their bed. But I’ll get murdered if I drip dye up there.’
‘Well . . .’ Marie gagged her conscience – good and tight. ‘Of course.’ This wasn’t poking around her nemesis’s home. Not at all. This was helping Chloe.
‘Ta!’ Chloe sped off into the house. ‘Up the stairs! On your left.’
Stealing across carpet so soft it felt like moss beneath her feet, Marie climbed the staircase, drinking in every detail. Every detail was beautiful. This was a glorious house, with the sunlight stealing along the painted panelling in the hall, and an open door hinting at a sitting room full of velvet. She saw an antique wing-chair in blood-red leather and knew that it must be Tod’s.
Hard to believe this house was the same basic design as the Dunwoody homestead opposite. It was exquisitely thought out and well finished, with none of the forgotten corners that she lived with, where skirting board suddenly ran out or a Hoover lurked forlorn and homeless.
Pushing open the door to Lucy and Tod’s bedroom, Marie trespassed further.
What is that colour? The walls and blinds weren’t pink, they were too pale to be pink; yet it was pinky, but not girly . . . Marie realised it was a fleshy, nude colour and thought how she would have shuddered if somebody had suggested it, and yet here it felt sumptuous and right.
A suede headboard in the same shade crawled halfway up the wall. Fitted wardrobes stood discreetly to attention, closed and correct. Marie thought of her own room – the mirror-image to this one. She visualised her discarded tights mating by the overflowing laundry basket, the jumble of toiletries on the chest of drawers, Robert’s Y-fronts draped like grimy bunting over the chair.
Nothing in this room was out of place. Marie – the bad part of her, the part that watched You’ve Been Framed and laughed without conscience at old women falling through garden chairs – wanted the room to be stiff and offputting and Lucy-like, but she was too honest to pretend it was anything but sensuous and inviting. She wanted to lie on that bed and nap forever.
She put down the package carefully and backed away, noting that the Grays had two en suites.
Two.
The party that wasn’t a party was going well, if you liked note-for-note reconstructions of the latest round of Britain’s Got Talent performed by identical nine-year-olds.
Marie did.
Angus didn’t.
The only one wearing a party hat, Marie had misjudged things badly and could see now that the catering teetered between kiddiewink and teen in a way that pleased nobody. Peanut-butter sandwiches had been a good idea; cutting them into flower shapes no Angus had asked for burgers, but he hadn’t asked for mini ones on pirate-themed paper plates. He and Joe had eaten nothing, muttering about going for a Maccy D later.