by Claire Sandy
When she’d produced two cold bottles of beer, saying ‘As you’re sixteen now! Just the one each!’, there had been a snigger she didn’t care to analyse. The boys’ body language was almost liquid, their limbs pooling over the sides of their chairs. Communication was by grunts and exhalations, a Neanderthal dialect that Marie couldn’t fathom.
Alone in the utility room with her Frankenstein’s rabbit, Marie saw it through Angus’s eyes and wished with all her heart that she’d made a fruitcake. She was infantilising her son, willing him back to an uncomplicated time when she could protect him.
Birthday parties used to mean a scrum of boys in her kitchen, all squirting each other with juice and rubbing banana sandwiches in their hair. Now there was just Joe, and a clearly marked no-man’s-land around the reason for the lack of personnel.
Marie’s hand hovered over the cake. Where to put the candles? It seemed disrespectful to put them anywhere near the rabbit’s bottom, and plain grotesque to have them poking out of his face. Plonking them on his buttercream chest would have to do.
‘Here it comes!’ She backed out of the utility room, awkwardly manoeuvring the outsize cake to the table.
There were whoops from the girls, and even Joe sat up, forgetting for a moment that he was a cool sixteen-year-old and looking like a little boy in the glow of the candles. Angus, however, stared past the cake and out through the kitchen window.
‘Who invited her?’ he demanded.
‘Happy birthday, darling!’ said Marie, rushing to the door to let in Chloe.
And Lucy.
‘Hello! Hello!’ Lucy was beaming, her sun-kissed cheeks taut like windfall apples. ‘You’re so kind to let us join in Angus’s birthday!’
There was no acceptable way to say ‘But I didn’t mean you!’ to a smiling woman holding a prettily wrapped present on your doorstep, so Marie answered her beam with a beam, and her nemesis was over her threshold.
As Lucy, an unexploded bomb in a pastel sundress, moved through the hall and into the kitchen, Marie saw – as if magnified and set to dramatic music – the damp patch on the ceiling, the cracked tiles behind the sink, the shape that her thighs made in her chinos. If she’d known Lucy was coming she’d have spring-cleaned, redecorated, cut Angus’s hair, vacuumed the dog, burned the whole house to the ground and started again.
‘Hi, guys!’ Lucy was a masterclass in understated elegance. Those flashes of brilliance at her ears were real diamonds; those buttery stripes in her hair were not the handiwork of Kool Kutz on the high street. Whatever Tod did when he roared off in that Merc every morning, he was a breadwinner on an impressive scale. ‘What a lovely kitchen!’ She looked around her. ‘So homely.’
Even a novice at suburban bitchery knew that was code for ‘messy’.
‘You’ve brought a cake,’ said Marie, proud of herself for not shouting this fact.
‘Yes. Nothing spesh. Just my weekly bake.’ Lucy plonked down a fruitcake. ‘Oh, look! A lovely bunny!’ She went into raptures about the cake – how delicious it looked, how adorable. Turning to Iris, she asked, ‘Did you make it, sweetheart?’
‘No, she didn’t.’ Marie’s high-pitched voice startled her children. ‘I made it.’
‘Oh . . .’ Lucy’s beam widened, stiffened. ‘May I have a slice?’
Marie had to admit that her wincing daughters had a point: it was macabre to slice up a bunny. Particularly when Iris asked for an eye on her portion. She appreciated Angus’s diplomacy in tasting a sliver of the rabbit cake first; later he’d devour that fruitcake, like Prinny with a torn bin-bag.
Her birdlike head to one side, Lucy asked Angus countless questions about his birthday, his summer, the coming term. Marie felt for her son, struggling to answer Lucy fully enough to qualify as polite, but vaguely enough to protect his privacy. Did Lucy subject Chloe to this kind of interrogation, she wondered? Poor girl. Beside Angus, Joe sank further into his seat, forking rabbit ear into his mouth, fearful that he’d be next for the middle-aged-woman inquisition.
‘We got you this.’ Chloe abruptly held out a package.
‘Right,’ said Angus, accepting it.
‘I think the expression you’re groping for is Thank you,’ said Marie tartly, willing her son not to show her up in front of this poor man’s Felicity Kendal.
‘Thank you,’ said Angus obediently, his cheeks pink. His mum knew it was shyness that chased his manners away, but his mum also knew that Lucy would revel in every slip and gaffe. The memory of the revolving-door pile-up of child-sluts, nemeses and headmasters was still fresh enough to induce a whole-body cringe. ‘Cool!’ Angus’s intonation had changed – brightened – as he examined the gift. ‘I really, really need an external mic. Thanks. Look, Joe!’
‘Cool,’ concurred Joe.
‘That’s so generous, Lucy,’ said Marie. ‘Thank you.’
‘I used my money,’ said Chloe suddenly, as if vomiting the words.
Angus’s face closed down again. A twin nudged another twin. Lucy changed the subject.
Teenagers, Marie concluded as she cleared up around them, freshened drinks and responded to Lucy’s genteel chit-chat, are a non-stop soap opera. Chloe watched Angus hungrily; Angus ignored her; Joe never took his eyes off Chloe. Why couldn’t people want the people who wanted them? She felt for all three of them, each one a brave little boat setting off into the choppy hormonal seas of young adulthood.
Iris had instigated her favourite game of asking, ‘What’s your favourite . . . ?’ She canvassed everybody’s favourite colour, smell, cow name, before asking Chloe, ‘Who’s your favourite boy?’
As Chloe pulled blue-black hair over her face, Marie waded in to save her. ‘I’ve got a better one.’ She nodded at Angus. ‘As the birthday boy is a film freak, let’s all choose our favourite scene from a film.’
‘That’s easy!’ said Lucy. ‘The end of Gone with the Wind.’
‘The end of what?’ asked Joe.
‘Is it about blowing off?’ asked Rose.
‘Shut up!’ said Angus. ‘It’s a brilliant old film about the civil war in America. It had Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in it.’
‘You really are a film buff.’ Lucy was impressed. Marie hoped her son’s film knowledge would go in the file, too. ‘It’s very romantic. The heroine is trying to convince the hero to stay, but he walks out and leaves her there, sobbing.’
‘That doesn’t sound romantic,’ said Rose.
‘Couldn’t he just buy her flowers or something?’ said Iris.
‘Love’s not always about flowers,’ said Lucy.
‘I like the bit in Toy Story,’ said Rose loudly (that she was a loud child was something the Dunwoodys had learned to live with, although sometimes it still surprised Marie that the child honking her order in Pizza Express was one of her own), ‘you know, the bit where thingy does that thing.’
‘Yes, that is a good scene.’ Marie shared an amused look with Angus, grateful that he was warming up a little.
‘My favourite scene from a film is when the wedding choir sings “Love Is All Around” in Love Actually.’ She stared into the middle distance, mourning for the briefest of moments that no man had ever bribed a choir to sing a love-song for her. ‘Chloe,’ she said, drawing the girl into the conversation, as her stepmother obviously had no intention of doing so, ‘what’s your absolute favouritest scene?’
‘Um . . .’ said Chloe. Then she said, ‘Er . . .’ and pulled her hair in front of her face again, like blackout curtains. ‘I can’t think,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Not when everybody’s looking at me.’
The boys exchanged a look best translated as Typical girl.
Lucy licked the fork she’d been using to sample Marie’s cake. Marie braced herself for unsolicited advice, but instead her guest winced and put her hand to her cheek.
Oh God! Marie’s stomach plummeted. I dropped something in the cake.
But no. ‘This damn tooth at the back,’ said Lucy prettily, ‘it twinges every now
and then. I really do need to get it seen to.’
‘Well, you know where to go.’ Iris looked up from the rug where she was kissing Prinny’s feet.
‘I certainly do,’ smiled Lucy. ‘That new dentist near the station looks amazing. Might get my teeth whitened while I’m there.’
A car horn beeped a three-note tune outside and Lucy jumped to her feet, hoicking her bag onto her shoulder. ‘Chloe! Up-up-up, darling!’
Chloe, as slothful as Lucy was urgent, unfolded her black-clad limbs. ‘Thanks,’ she said to the room in general.
‘See you at school,’ said Joe, trying to toss his hair, but forgetting that it was stiff with gel.
‘Thanks so much – been lovely, must-do-it-again, come on, Chloe.’ Lucy grabbed at the emptied cake tin held out by Marie.
Lingering at the front door, Marie watched Lucy scuttle across the road, scattering endearments and welcomes towards Tod’s car. She pulled the door open for him, gazing delightedly on him as he stepped out, kissing him as if he was back from war. ‘Darling!’ she breathed. ‘Welcome home!’
As Chloe caught Marie’s eye and mimed puking, Lucy took Tod’s briefcase from him, awkwardly cramming the cake tin under her arm, and preceded him into the house, looking behind her as if anxious that Tod might trip and stub a cherished tootsie.
‘OK, boys,’ Marie released her prisoners as she closed the front door. ‘Party’s over. You’re free to go.’
With insultingly obvious relief, Angus and Joe darted from the kitchen. The twins, too, dissolved into the ether, as people tend to do when there’s clearing up to be done. As the woman of the house, Marie couldn’t dodge that ball and began the tedious business of scraping plates and loading the dishwasher.
There wasn’t a speck of rabbit cake left. She felt a nuclear glow of satisfaction travel to the ends of her limbs. The squint in his liquorice eye hadn’t put them off. She’d baked, if not a show-stopper, then a crowd-pleaser.
And part of that crowd had been Lucy, baker par excellence, baker extraordinaire – and other French terms Marie couldn’t recall just now. She paused mid-scrape – Chloe had nibbled one tiny slice; Angus had dived straight into the fruitcake after one fragment; Joe had politely eaten one portion; and the twins had shared an ear.
Which meant that Lucy had demolished the rest of the rabbit. Scraping again, Marie assumed that, along with the pricey jewellery and haircare, her neighbour also had a top-of-the-range tapeworm. There was no other way to consume such quantities of cake and stay so slender.
The scraping took on a savage edge as Marie remembered Lucy’s remarks about the new dentist. All these years of living opposite each other and the woman hadn’t even bothered to find out that Marie was a dentist!
Comfortable on her high horse – the view was nice from up there – Marie didn’t linger on the fact she had no idea what Tod did for a living.
A car growled to a halt on the gravel outside. As an experiment, Marie trotted out, sweet expression on her face, to give her husband the Lucy treatment.
Seeing her smiling broadly, her head on one side, Robert backed away. When she held out her hand for his bag, he clutched it to his chest like a shield. ‘Stop it!’ he said, disturbed.
‘Have you had a wonderful day, darlingest darling?’ she simpered.
‘You’re scaring me: what have you done with my wife?’ Robert retreated with every step Marie took, until he was flattened against the car. They fought briefly, hand-to-hand, until Marie wrenched the bag away from him.
‘I’m being the perfect wife,’ she snapped.
‘You’re being bloody weird.’ Robert gave her a wide berth on his way into the house.
‘OK, no more geisha, I promise.’ She took pity on him, and then, after a second look at her husband’s expression as he tugged off his tie, took real pity on him. ‘Robert, what’s wrong?’
Robert stopped, mid-tug. ‘Caroline got her bin.’
The first morning of the new school year wasn’t the new leaf Marie had planned.
A Mary Berry breakfast would involve, she felt sure, granola, freshly squeezed juice, calmness. In the spirit of her mentor, she’d combed the Internet (i.e. checked out one BBC food website) to find a granola-bar recipe. The resulting bars did look a little grim, but they didn’t deserve to be described as ‘like something you’d get in a Middle Earth prison’. Once Robert had said that, Iris and Rose rebelled and bayed for Coco Pops. The juice she’d squeezed before going to bed had been glugged in one go by Robert, during a midnight swoop of the fridge.
‘Ang-us!’ Marie hollered up the stairs and stalked back to the kitchen. ‘If I had a pound for every time I have to shout that boy’s name . . .’
‘And if I had a pound,’ said Robert, rubbing at a yoghurt stain on a twin’s hairband, ‘for every time you say If I had a pound.’
‘Will you have PE today?’ Having cleared a space on the worktop among the slagheap of receipts, buttons, elastic bands, the nude cardboard middle of a kitchen roll, a glittery pen, an iPhone, a Hello Kitty hairclip and a half-eaten Crunchie, Marie wrote out name tags for the girls’ kit. How, she asked herself, could I misspell my own child’s name? Apparently the new trainers belonged to somebody called Irsi.
Even Mary Berry would be tempted to walk away and lob a grenade over her shoulder.
‘It’s rocket-shaped,’ said Robert sadly, turning from the twin/yoghurt situation to deal with the burning-toast-trapped-in-toaster situation.
‘Eh?’ Marie realised he was talking about Caroline’s bin. Still. After more than twelve hours he had not exhausted it as a topic. Bundling Aertex shirts into drawstring bags, she said, ‘I know, love. And it has a capacity of thirty-six litres. And a hand-operated stainless-steel lid. And if I’m not mistaken, the fire-resistant, galvanised-metal body has a powder-coated exterior.’
‘There is also,’ said Robert wistfully, ‘a plastic bottom ring.’
‘Furthermore,’ said Marie, keen to get this over with, ‘it’s the first time in four years Magda has OK-ed a requisition form for office equipment.’ As long as he didn’t start banging on about the guarantee, she could hold it together, she thought, writing Iris Wundoody on a label.
‘And then of course you’ve got a five-year guaran—’
‘ANGUS!’
Marie moved to the bottom of the stairs. Dunwoody tradition decreed that she drove her children to school on the first day of every term: at this rate they’d all be late.
‘AN-GUS!’
She’d tried calling her son all ways. Cajoling: Please come down. Concerned: Are you all right up there? Cheerful: Come on down! Thanks to Robert’s bin-monologue, she’d reached furious faster than usual.
‘Time for the stomp, d’you think?’ whispered Robert to Iris and Rose, who both nodded.
‘Right!’ yelled Marie, stomping up the stairs. ‘That’s it!’ What it was, she was unsure; it was probably illegal to shoot your own child for ignoring you, even if, m’lud, there were sixteen years’ worth of similar offences to take into account.
‘I’m coming in,’ said Marie pompously, well aware that she looked and sounded silly. She hesitated. Storming into boys’ bedrooms could be unrewarding for both mother and son alike. She rattled the door knob. ‘This is me,’ she said, ‘very much coming in!’
The room was dark and muggy, a sampler of all the smells you don’t want to smell ever again. Tearing open the curtains, her fury redoubled. ‘You’re not even out of bed!’
Wound up in his duvet, Angus burrowed further down into it. ‘I’m not well,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Marie delved in, located his forehead and felt it. ‘You’re fine,’ she said, not needing her medical degree to diagnose School-itis when she saw it. ‘Please get up, love. I’ll be black-balled out of the Mothers’ Union if you lot are late on your first day back, and I have an incredibly hard day ahead of me.’
No movement from the larva.
‘Angus Dunwoody, if you’re not o
ut of that bed in one minute flat I’ll—’
‘All right! God-uh!’ Angus, fit as a flea, was on his feet.
‘Good. At last.’ Marie was relieved she hadn’t had to finish her ultimatum.
Downstairs, eyeing their son as he pushed away a granola bar and reached for a cereal bowl, Marie said to Robert, ‘He’s never done that before. I suspect Joe pretends to be ill to get out of school, but not Angus.’
‘Hmm?’ Robert came out of a reverie, plonked down his mug and kissed her. ‘Even geeks have their off-days. If only he knew,’ he said, holding Marie close to him, his voice in her ear, ‘how much we’d give to change places with him.’
It was nice, this clinch. Robert smelled good close up, of soap and bristles and him.
‘Urrgh, get a room, you two!’ Since Rose had heard the phrase, she used it at every opportunity.
Pulling away, Robert said, ‘Did I tell you how much the bin cost?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Robert!’ Marie banged the dishwasher shut, as if everything was its fault. ‘You told me how much delivery cost.’
With mere seconds to go before the neurotic twitter of the bell, Marie had dropped her children off at St Ethelred’s gates. Despite the un-Berry nature of the morning, they were all in clean underwear, with full tummies and new pencil cases.
‘First round of the day to me!’ Marie raised her arms in triumph after slowing at the lights.
A massive poster loomed on the side of a building to her right.
‘Everybody deserves a Hollywood smile!’ it shouted, above a bewilderingly long list of the wonders on offer at the new practice.
‘Ding-ding. Round two,’ whispered Marie.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
02.09.13
19.14
SUBJECT: INGRID BERGMAN
Soulmate
Sometimes you – yes you! Shock horror! – are wrong about things. e.g. my so called party. It didn’t turn out fine like you said. It turned out KERAP.
Aren’t mums supposed to know their kids inside out? How come mine doesn’t know I’d rather set fire to my arse than have a party? She even invited The Goth Girl Across The Road. Mum is soooo lame. She’s determined to set us up and she thinks she’s being dead sly. She’s not as lame as the Goth Girl tho. She couldn’t even come up with a favourite film scene. Bet if I asked you you’d have like a million. She even said she couldn’t think if we all looked at her?!! WTF?