by Claire Sandy
‘Bastard!’ said Lucy. ‘Bugger!’ She thought hard. ‘Swine!’
‘Our very own Gordon Ramsay,’ said Marie.
‘She’s up.’ Lucy stiffened, and plumped cushions that didn’t need plumping. Above their heads they heard the creak of boards beneath Chloe’s feet. ‘She just disappeared yesterday when Tod started shouting. Melted away into her bedroom.’ Lucy stood up, her hands trembling so much that she clasped them together. The detail touched Marie’s heart – Lucy hadn’t trembled in front of Tod.
Utterly un-goth in a pink nightie, Chloe looked all of twelve without her face-paint. Without acknowledging Marie or Erika, she stood square in the middle of the cream rug, chin down, mouth set, holding up her phone like a warrant. ‘Dad says you threw him out!’
‘Darling . . .’ began Lucy.
‘This is his house!’ shouted Chloe. Her eyes were raw.
‘We—’
‘You told my dad to go!’
‘There was—’
‘Why can’t you go? He’s my daddy!’ The word surprised Chloe. She disowned it as it slipped out.
‘Chloe, you’re a big girl now.’ Lucy held her palms up, trying to clear a path through the girl’s noise and blather. ‘Your dad and I have some problems and . . .’
‘What problems? Does he buy you too much stuff?’
Lucy closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Chloe, I’ve tried to make my life with you and your dad work. But sometimes you have to walk away. And I know how much you love your dad, and how much he loves and adores you, but the truth is . . .’ She hesitated.
‘The truth is, Chloe,’ said Erika, crossing one leopard-skin leg over the other, ‘your lovely stepmum can’t bear to say it, but I can. Tod’s been having an affair with Hattie next door for six months. There!’ She responded to Lucy’s gasp with a firm: ‘The girl needs to hear the truth. She’s growing up. You can’t protect her from this.’
‘Bullshit!’ barked Chloe, taking advantage of the licence to swear granted her by this extraordinary day.
Marie watched Lucy put her hands to her face. She felt for both the women in Tod’s life, each in a personal hell, each straitjacketed by love for a man they had good reason to hate. She remained mute. Erika’s interjection notwithstanding, this was between Lucy and Chloe.
‘It’s true,’ said Lucy. ‘However much we wish it wasn’t, it’s true. And you have to try and be as grown-up as you can. The next few days will be hard, but if we look after each other we’ll get through it.’
‘I hate you!’
Stomping as much as is possible in bare feet on plush carpet, Chloe retreated up the stairs.
‘Should I . . . ?’ Marie motioned to the stairs.
‘I don’t think so. She’s very private.’ Lucy dropped to the sofa. ‘She’s made me think, though. This house is Tod’s. Maybe I should go to a hotel or something.’
‘Are you mad?’ Erika was shocked to anger. ‘Good God, woman! Where’s your backbone? Let Tod rough it. He’s been boffing the arse off that self-righteous little tofu-guzzler while you’ve been cleaning his house and bringing up his daughter! You’re staying put.’
Marie liked Erika more and more, and was glad that Lucy responded positively to her well-meant tyranny.
As Erika left in a cloud of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5, she said to Marie in an undertone, ‘Keep an eye on that kid.’
‘The custody battle,’ said Lucy, as Marie returned to the tasteful-beyond-words sitting room. ‘You know, Tod’s famous custody battle?’ She gave a sarcastic half-laugh, and Cookie looked up from sniffing her own unmentionables and whined. ‘Not what it seemed, you know.’ Lucy played with her wedding band, scooting it round and round her finger so that its diamonds flashed an SOS. ‘It wasn’t about . . .’ Lucy pointed up at the ceiling, to where loud music now crashed from Chloe’s room. ‘It was about spite. About getting one over on his wife. He told me his legal team battered her into the ground like a tent peg. That’s the expression he used. She’d tried to kill herself, you see, when she was younger, so it was easy for his highly paid lawyers to make out she was – that bloody awful phrase – an unfit mother. Had a history of depression. Addicted to medication. A very sad story. But only if you have a heart.’
‘Why didn’t you run a mile when he told you this?’ Marie couldn’t see the logic in making a life with somebody who’d abused his previous partner. ‘Didn’t it tell you something about him, that Tod could separate a child and her mother just because he wanted rid of his marriage?’
‘Who’s logical when they’re in love?’ Lucy shrugged, absolving herself with the same good nature she’d shown Erika. ‘When Tod focuses on you, when he’s besotted with you . . .’ She struggled to find a way to describe it, flapping her hands pointlessly. ‘It’s like being in the middle of the sun. Everything’s bright and new, and you feel that life is opening out. I suppose I followed his lead and I blamed her, Chloe’s mum.’ Lucy looked hard at her hands, then said, each word bitten down on, ‘I’ve never been able to admit this, but I suspect . . .’ She faltered again. ‘No, damn it, I know there’ve been letters and cards that never got passed on to Chloe from her mum.’
Carefully preserving her expression, Marie said, ‘That’s unforgivable.’
‘You’re right. I accepted it when he said the envelopes with foreign stamps were from pen-friends he disapproved of. I stood and watched as he binned them. I chose to believe – the way a kid chooses to believe in Santa Claus – because not believing would put me out in the cold, just like his ex. She thinks her own daughter is ignoring her! Good God, Marie, that poor woman . . .’
They were quiet for a while. Marie asked herself a question as she regarded the battlefield of Lucy’s life, calm now, but scarred and treeless: What would Mary Berry do?
‘Come on.’ She slapped her knees and stood up. She held out her hands to Lucy, marooned on the over-large, over-priced, utterly-Tod sofa. ‘Time to bake.’
It helped.
With the radio oozing cheesy tracks, the two women weighed and sifted and stirred. The familiarity of it was soothing, the certainty of the outcome was comforting. If you mixed together eggs, flour and sugar, you got a cake.
As they put it in the oven, Chloe slammed the front door and took off on her bike. Families were a more complicated recipe.
Sent over with a message from Robert – ‘What cloth am I allowed to use to wipe the worktops?’ – Angus mumbled, ‘Is, you know, everything OK over here?’
‘Nah, love. Far from it.’ Marie put out her hand to ruffle his hair, then remembered she was forbidden to and dropped her hand. ‘But it’ll work out. Everything does in the end.’ Did she believe that? On balance she did, and felt comfortable encouraging her son to believe the same. ‘Oh!’ She looked beyond him, to the drive. ‘Hi, Chloe.’
Without answering, the girl walked her bike to a stop and stood, holding the handlebar. Her head hanging, black hair obscuring her face, Chloe stayed on the pavement, keeping her distance from the house. Her slender, colt-legged frame looked bone-weary, as if an old, old woman had somehow found herself in a sixteen-year-old’s body.
Angus, hands rammed into his pockets, stared at her. He seemed to vibrate, as if pulled by a powerful magnet and doing all he could to withstand it.
‘She looks,’ said Marie, ‘as if she could do with a friend.’
That was evidently the permission he needed. Angus darted out to Chloe, his mother watching as she half-closed the Gray front door. His father, Marie noted, was also watching from their kitchen window.
A brief conflab, presumably in muttered half-sentences, and then Chloe gestured helplessly to the flat tyre on her front wheel. In a move that reminded Marie poignantly of Robert, Angus squatted, concentrating on the tyre, clearly relieved that matters had taken a practical turn. A flat tyre, his body language said, was a problem he could solve.
A phrase floated over to the eavesdropper.
‘No worries!’ said Angus, his long finger
s tapping the tyre.
Above him, Chloe’s shoulders began to shake, and Marie saw Angus’s eyes turn to her and glaze with panic. The boy seemed frozen into his squat.
Chloe drooped under the weight of her misery, sobbing into her hands.
Angus stood, suddenly upright and a foot taller than her. He held out an awkward arm and Chloe clung to his middle like a koala, bawling.
Marie shut the door, intensely proud of her unpolished, unrefined, big-hearted boy.
It was late when Tod turned up.
Chloe was in bed, and Lucy was newly bathed, pink as a baby in a towelling dressing gown, about to embark on a medicinal Midsomer Murders and a large gin, both prescribed by Marie, who was finally going off-duty.
‘I should leave,’ said Marie as Tod let himself in and appeared in their midst, tie askew, by far the most dishevelled thing in the room.
‘I think you should,’ agreed Tod. ‘You’ve done more than enough.’
The stubble, thought Marie, was a theatrical step too far. Nothing, but nothing, would keep Tod from his shaver. She moved towards the door, but Lucy said, ‘No. Marie’s my friend, and I want her to stay.’
‘She’s not your friend,’ said Tod. ‘She’s a witch, and she’s come between us.’
‘Hattie,’ said Lucy, ‘came between us, Tod. Please leave. Call next time, before you come, and I’ll have a suitcase packed for you.’ She returned her gaze to the television screen and pressed a button on the remote control.
Sitting beside Lucy, following her lead and feigning interest in the conversation between a policeman and an actress whose name she should know but didn’t, Marie marvelled at Lucy’s composure. Marie’s sarcasm knob turned up to eleven if Robert left the toilet seat up; if he’d shagged a neighbour, she’d cry, shout, throw things, chuck him out, then beg him to stay.
Competing with a fictional policeman checking out alibis, Tod addressed his wife’s dispassionate profile. ‘Hattie’s moving away. We can start again. It was a glitch, darling.’ He turned neurotically at a soft noise behind him. ‘Chloe!’
She ran to him and they swayed together, his arms about her.
‘Dad,’ she said, more a snuffle than a word.
‘All this,’ said Tod to Lucy, above Chloe’s untidy head. ‘You’re wrecking all this.’
She didn’t wreck it! Marie had to visualise screaming at Tod to stop herself doing it. You did!
‘And for what?’ He kept tight hold of Chloe. They looked like shipwreck survivors somehow transported to a domestic interior. ‘For one tiny slip-up!’
‘But not the first slip-up.’ Lucy turned off the television and looked up at him. ‘Now that my blindfold’s come off, I see things very clearly.’ She nodded at Chloe, whose face was screwed up, eyes tight closed, against her father’s chest. ‘No need to go into it here. I’m talking to my lawyer tomorrow.’
‘My lawyer, you mean.’ Tod peeled Chloe away from him, but kept a proprietary arm about her narrow shoulders. ‘You don’t have anything of your own. It’s all what I’ve given you. Even your so-called daughter is mine, you barren bitch.’
‘Hey!’ The word was jolted out of Marie.
‘It’s OK,’ said Lucy. ‘Tod’s just leaving. Seriously, Tod, we’re done here. All that’s left is to mop up the mess as best we can.’ Again, the merest inclination of her head towards Chloe: a typical co-parent secret message, which Robert would instantly have recognised as code for Not in front of the child.
‘I can practically see the pound signs in your eyes. Good luck with that! You’ll walk away barefoot, I promise you.’ Tod looked down at Chloe, his face animated, over-happy, the way childminders gee kiddies up for a visit to the swings. ‘Chop-chop, Chlo! Pack a bag!’
Chloe danced over to the door, then turned and leaned against the wall, surveying the adults. Marie stole a hand onto Lucy’s lap and took her trembling fingers, closing her own over them. Lucy was barely breathing, as if awaiting the lop of the executioner’s axe.
‘Where d’you want to go?’ asked Tod playfully. ‘The Ivy? Somewhere funkier? I think,’ he turned his gaze on Lucy, still talking to Chloe, ‘we should plan a trip somewhere hot.’ His face was supercilious, a sadistic mask that Marie berated herself for ever finding attractive. ‘Ibiza maybe. By the time we get back, your stepmother will have come to her senses.’
Nibbling her fingers, Chloe said, ‘Ibiza, Dad? Really?’
Lucy spoke, in a voice that teetered in tone between defiant, sensible and broken-hearted. ‘She has work experience at Robert’s office next week.’
‘All the more reason to go to Ibiza!’ Tod clapped his hands. ‘Hurry up, Chlo. Come on.’
Still nibbling, Chloe said quietly, ‘You need to start caring about the things that matter, Dad.’
‘I do, darling. I do. I care about you. Now move yourself, gorgeous.’
‘Dad, I don’t want to go to Ibiza.’ Her chin went up and a tear rolled off it. ‘I want to do my work experience.’ She looked straight at her stepmother. ‘Any cake left?’
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
22.04.14
06.03
SUBJECT: Wakey-wakey
Hi Soulmate
Wake up!
This is an early one.
I’ve been awake all night and I have to write this down. I can’t stop thinking. About you and about me which is about us I guess.
If there is an us?
I don’t want to push you. I’m not that guy. I’m really not. But I have to ask.
Do we have a future?
I know you feel something. (This is really really hard to write down.) Don’t ask me how I know but I do. & listen I get it that it’s your ‘thing’ to be mysterious but right now I need some words from you. Just summat straight-forward like where you live e.g.??!!
There’s something else. Maybe you won’t even care. But listen I might (MIGHT JUST MIGHT YEAH?) have feelings for somebody else. Ive been trying not to, Ive done my best to ignore her but recently things have changed a bit.
I’m not trying to make you jealous, honest. (Altho that’d be nice.) I’m not forcing you into saying stuff you don’t feel. I’m telling you because I tell you everything like I used to tell my mum everything but I’m too old for that now. Parents live in another universe. She’d make all the crap at school worse. So it’s you I talk to. Lucky old you! Not.
I think the girl likes me too. A bit. Something could happen. Except I can’t stop thinking about YOU.
I need more from you. Just a bit more. To see if there’s a point to this hanging around.
I’m waving my heart at you Soulmate. Please wave back.
laters
Angus
MAY
Funeral Tea
Swiss Roll
FOR SALE
Ford Focus 2002 / Hatchback / 1.6L / 96,000 miles
Manual / Petrol
£750 ONO
07779 342401
(Please be kind to it)
‘You really don’t get this whole employer/employee thing, do you, Aileen?’ Marie loomed over her assistant, who was lounging across three seats in reception. ‘I tell you to do something, and you do it – that’s how it works.’
‘What if you asked me to set my knickers on fire?’ Aileen pulled a smug face, proud of her nuanced debating skills. ‘Or strangle the Queen?’
Marie gritted her teeth.
‘Heidi!’ shouted Lynda, setting down mugs on the coffee table.
‘Obviously I’d never ask you to do either of those things,’ said Marie. ‘A long-standing patient who lives three streets away is late for his appointment and he’s usually bang on time, so all I’m asking is that you pop round and make sure everything’s OK.’
‘When I finish me tea.’ Aileen held the mug in front of her like a shield. ‘You wouldn’t come between an Irish-woman and her tea, would you?’
Settling back behind her desk, with the limbo-style leaning
and groaning that her growing bump necessitated, Lynda said, ‘He’s at it again.’
In the window of Perfect You, Klay was waving and bouncing on the soles of his feet. Not so much hit by Cupid’s arrow as mown down by Cupid’s tank, he was infatuated with the ‘feisty goddess’ (his description) that he’d taken out on just one date.
Presents arrived daily. Little tributes in the shape of bonbon selections, and bigger ones of Swarovski jewellery. Marie had only ever seen giant heart-shaped boxes of chocolates in Doris Day movies before Klay had come a-wooing.
Aileen ate the chocolates, pawned the jewellery and necked the vintage champagne with her lunchtime burger. Klay assumed she was playing hard to get, unaware that Aileen never played and was impossible to get.
Aileen was rude to him. She cut him dead in the street. The less interest she showed, the keener Klay became. Eurostar tickets arrived and were torn up in the window as he watched forlornly from Perfect You, a dejected Romeo and his whatevs Juliet.
‘Where’s me sign?’ Aileen heaved herself up and crossed to the window, holding up a piece of white cardboard bearing a marker-pen message: YOU MEAN NOTHING TO ME.
Klay rolled his eyes indulgently.
Retrieving today’s roses from the bin, Marie said as firmly as she dared, ‘You’re not being fair to Klay.’
Lynda butted in. ‘He wasn’t fair to you.’
‘Not the point.’ Marie knew all about Klay’s sizeable dark side; his snide offer still rankled. Yet she couldn’t stand by and watch him being tortured any longer. ‘You have to put him out of his misery. Tell him how you feel, in person. Not exactly how you feel, mind you. No man needs to hear that sex with him doesn’t hold a candle to a tub of mint choc chip. But he should know where he stands, once and for all.’
‘All this stress,’ said Lynda, cradling the faint curve of her tum, ‘is bad for the baby.’
‘Do I have to?’ Aileen was surly.
‘Yes,’ said Marie.
‘I had another drunken phone message last night,’ she said, turning her back on Klay, who was now miming hearty laughter at his beloved’s cute little handwritten signs.