by Claire Sandy
‘What was it this time?’ Lynda, like Marie, had her favourites. ‘Was it You can’t fight this, sexy lady, or I’m Caesar to your Cleopatra, Richard to your Judy?’
‘Or,’ asked Marie, momentarily forgetting to be annoyed with Aileen, ‘was it Damn it, you owe me! That meal came to two hundred and forty-three pounds!’
‘We must be due a please please please please please please soon,’ said Lynda.
‘Remember the night it was just the extended version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”?’
‘For a change,’ said Aileen, replaiting one of her buns, ‘it was interesting. He reckons he—’
‘I know what you’re doing, and it won’t work. I don’t care what Klay said from the depths of his poor heartbroken soul. Get yourself round to Jonas. Now!’
Twenty minutes later Aileen returned, almost falling through the door.
‘Tatiana!’ said Lynda.
‘Is Jonas with you?’ asked Marie.
‘He’s not coming,’ said Aileen.
Sayings are passed down through families. One of Marie’s mum’s expressions that still got bandied about was Have the name of an early riser and you can sleep all day. The twins had puzzled over the meaning until Marie had explained: ‘Once you have a good name, you can do bad things and nobody will suspect you.’
Their grandmother’s opinion of human nature was borne out that morning by Mr Wilson’s immediate ‘yes’ to the twins’ request. He would never normally dream of allowing pupils to use the ICT suite unchaperoned during the lunch break, but those two had a stain-free record of high test-scores, perfect attendance, enthusiastic involvement in after-school clubs and general sucky-upness.
‘We need to practise a presentation for assembly,’ said Iris, as Mr Wilson, one of the last proponents of the Fair Isle and tweed tie as teacher-wear, flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights. The dead air of the blank white basement room began to hum.
‘Tidy up when you’re finished,’ he said, leaving them to it.
‘I’ll set up,’ said Rose. ‘You go get her.’
‘Roger,’ said Iris and laughed. Rose laughed too, and then they both stopped laughing, because they were secret agents on a mission and that sort of person wouldn’t laugh at the word ‘Roger’.
Out in the neither-here-nor-there sunshine of a watery May day, Iris dodged through the ‘big’ playground. The two halves of St Ethelred’s were segregated, but she’d gained admission to the more glamorous secondary-school stretch of tarmac by claiming to carry a message from the headmaster.
Spotting her target, Iris felt her first twinge of doubt about the plan. Those girls were scary. Short skirts. Bitchy faces. They’d probably kissed boys and everything. Swallowing hard, she went over to where Lauren’s coven huddled around her, a carefully cultivated air of bored languor hanging over them.
Lauren scowled. ‘Mr Cassidy wants me?’ She turned to her crew. ‘Being a governor’s niece sucks!’
This bon mot provoked a blizzard of laughter.
‘He’s waiting in the ICT suite,’ said Iris, and bolted. The scrupulous nonchalance of Lauren’s gait ensured that Iris got to the computer room minutes before her.
‘All set?’ she whispered.
‘Yes. Get down here.’ Rose yanked her sister down below one of the Formica desks that dotted the room. Down here, through the tangle of cables and chair legs, they could see the huge pull-down screen on the end wall, currently on standby. The lights were out and the anonymous room was lit only by the screen’s gentle fuzzy glow.
‘This,’ said Iris, ‘is like something they’d do at Mallory Towers, isn’t it?’
‘Shush!’
The door opened.
‘Mr Cassidy?’ Lauren’s default voice was a pissed-off whine. ‘Mr C?’
Iris and Rose watched her carefully from their knee-level vantage point. As they’d anticipated, Lauren groped for the light switch. And, as they’d anticipated, when she found it to be taped over, she just swore lightly and made no attempt to pick the tape off, preferring to ask the air, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’
A swear, mouthed the twins, wide-eyed with disapproval. Rose pressed a button on her control.
The screen jumped to life. Lauren twitched, looking around her, as WHO’S THAT GIRL? appeared in scarlet capitals and the Eurythmics track of the same name boomed from the speakers.
Huddled together and high on the drama they’d created, the twins could see Lauren’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the screen. She was stiff. They had her attention.
An image spiralled onto the screen and sat square in the middle for a few moments, before another twirled in to take its place.
‘Who’s that girl?’ Annie Lennox sang her soulful question over the pictures. A young child, about the twins’ age, was dressed as Minnie Mouse, a tearful third in a fancy-dress contest. The same girl, slightly older, walked hand-in-hand with two cheerful elderly people, her flowery dress unwittingly tucked into her knickers.
‘What’s going on!’ Lauren spun on her heel, but couldn’t keep her gaze from the pictures for more than a second or two.
Larger than life, the girl’s spotty face heralded puberty, her puppy fat spilling over a checkered bikini. Thrilled with her princess birthday cake, she showcased the braces on her teeth.
‘This is fucking crazy shit!’ shouted Lauren over the music.
Snap after snap filled the screen, documenting the mundane horrors of Lauren’s ‘difficult years’. Iris and Rose were not the sort of children to laugh at pimples or braces or double chins, but Lauren was that sort, and she nurtured it in her disciples. Bullying is so much easier when everybody agrees that the normal facts of life are humiliating. The twins were smart enough to know that where they saw a cute photo of a little girl hanging out with her beloved grandparents, Lauren would see an opportunity for the creatures she’d created to mock her.
‘Here comes the last one!’ whispered Iris.
‘The best one!’ said Rose.
A wedding party, lined up outside a country church, appeared.
Lauren let out a guttural sound.
No detail had been left out by the careful bride. She’d kitted out her young bridesmaid in floor-length satin the colour of egg yolk. She’d added a floppy hat. She’d added a crocheted bag. She’d added fingerless gloves. She’d added – and the twins would always be grateful to her for this – a cummerbund.
For Lauren, being outed as a psychopath would be preferable to being outed as a naff bridesmaid.
The credits rolled. This was the only part of the film the twins had made without Angus’s knowledge and they were proud of the ransom-note style, using letters and words painstakingly cut from newspapers and magazines.
Arms folded, foot tapping maniacally, Lauren took in the words that Iris and Rose had drafted and redrafted, before committing them to paper.
This short film was brought to you by the freinds of ANGUS DUNWOODY.
No more HORRID TEXTS.
No more MEAN PHONE CALLS.
No more EVIL NOTES in his locker.
Tell your stupid followers that Angus is a cool dude.
Stop the bullying right now or this film will go to every person on our list.
If you agree text YES to 07793438483
The email addresses of Lauren’s entire class scrolled past.
A petulant yowl from their audience, then a stamp of her foot. Lauren was an oversized toddler having a tantrum. She kicked a chair, slammed the Formica work surface with the flat of her hand. ‘You bastards!’ she spat, as her tormentors, slitty-eyed with mirth, put a hand over each other’s mouths as they crouched in the darkness.
Lauren bent over her phone and then the borrowed mobile tucked inside Rose’s blazer pocket flared in the darkness.
YES.
‘What’s Swiss,’ asked Marie, peering through the glass door of her oven, ‘about a Swiss roll?’
‘No idea.’ Lucy was dipping grapes in melted chocolate
at the kitchen table, then dropping them into her mouth. ‘Doesn’t the marvellous Mary explain in the recipe?’
‘She could if she wanted to.’ Marie reached over and popped a grape. Dipped in chocolate, the jade globule was a cunning synthesis of her five-a-day and a naughty treat. ‘She just doesn’t want to.’
‘Are you making a plain roll? Delia does a coffee version.’
‘Jonas would prefer plain,’ said Marie confidently. ‘I think he’d be old-fashioned about it, and see coffee Swiss roll as the work of the Devil.’
‘I look at elderly people in the street sometimes and wonder what they make of the world now. Everything changes so fast.’
‘God knows what sort of OAPs we’ll make. People used to just accept ageing. Sort of I am sixty, therefore it’s time to have a terrible haircut and wear elasticated slacks. Our generation won’t accept it. The drop-in centres will be full of old dears with tattoos and giant silicone breasts.’
‘Did he,’ asked Lucy, ‘die alone?’
‘I wish I could say he didn’t, but he did. Poor Jonas!’ Surreptitiously Marie took Lucy’s emotional temperature. Lucy repulsed anything that could be described as fussing, so direct enquiries were out, but her compassionate question was telling. ‘His neighbour noticed two newspapers sticking out of his letter box. The police broke down the door and Jonas was . . .’ She sidestepped dead, power-walking past the dreaded word. ‘He was lying in the hall. Heart attack, they think.’
‘I hope when I’m dead somebody bakes a cake for me, just like you’re doing for Jonas.’
No need for Marie to consult her amateur-psychology handbook to conclude that this was one of Lucy’s bad days. ‘How about I make you a cake while you’re still alive?’
‘Ha!’
The snorted laugh was welcome.
‘Whose idea was it to dip grapes in chocolate?’ Marie threw one in the air and caught it in her mouth, trying to hide how proud she was of this skill. ‘It’s so yummy. Not Delia, surely. It’s too decadent.’
Not rising to the bait, Lucy said, ‘Chloe suggested it.’
‘Our anti-chocolate, eternally dieting Chloe?’ Marie smiled. ‘How times change.’ She thought back to the Fireworks Night party; the night the cracks in the Gray family had first showed. ‘God, I feel so bad for suspecting you of being jealous when Chloe ate my bonfire cake.’
‘You weren’t to know.’ They’d long ago drawn a line beneath the past and declared an amnesty. ‘I so badly wanted to be your friend back then, but outside the house I was a paranoid mess, believing Tod’s commentary about how worthless I was. It was the same with poor Chloe. She’s so young and impressionable, and the man of the house – her hero – subjected her to a constant drip-drip-drip of snide remarks about fatties. She constantly denied her appetite, pushing away a half-emptied plate, as if she was a fairy who could survive on air. I tried to intervene, to balance out Tod’s influence with positive stuff, but . . .’ Here Lucy faltered. ‘Well, let’s say I haven’t been the best role-model . . . So I wasn’t jealous when she ate your cake. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe she’d actually gobbled up actual cake out in the open. I had to say something, but I was a nervous wreck and it came out wrong.’ She ended, more quietly, with: ‘It often did. Tod gave me hell about that little scene. Silent treatment for days, then counterfeit concern and the suggestion that I see a shrink.’
Chloe had been eating more. There was less talk of ‘bad’ food and ‘good’ food, more proper meals, no binges; she’d unselfconsciously wolfed down the endless bakes Robert had taken into Campbell & Carle during her work experience.
Her post-Tod appetite was only part of a wider-ranging rebellion. It was the mildest revolution in history. No gunshots, no bloodshed, just an un-hoovered rug here, a soapy footprint on the bathroom floor there. Mrs and Ms Gray watched their favourite rubbish on the television without being judged; had seconds at dinner if they fancied it; and dirtied mugs for the sheer joy of leaving them in the sink.
‘I left a Radio Times crosswise on the sofa today,’ said Lucy proudly.
‘Bet you’re itching to get home and put it away, though.’
‘I am a bit, yeah.’ Lucy licked her chocolatey fingers daintily as Cookie stared up at her, shaking with violent desire. ‘Chloe’s visiting Tod after school today.’
‘Really?’ Marie was taken aback. Tod had been calling his family incessantly – one call nice, the next nasty. He pitted them against each other (This is all your stepmother/your stepdaughter blowing things out of proportion) while showering them with gifts. As Lucy wryly told Marie, she had a blingy new iPad cover, but no cash to buy groceries; Tod had cut the purse-strings the moment he received the letter from Lucy’s divorce lawyer.
‘Yesterday Chloe deleted his number from her phone.’
The final straw had been Tod’s confession that yes, he and Hattie had been in the Maldives for a week.
‘When she did that, actually got rid of his number,’ said Lucy, ‘I felt it had all gone too damned far.’
‘But whose fault is that?’ A staunch defender of family solidarity, Marie still managed to sympathise with Chloe’s drastic step. Tod had threatened to ‘seize’ her, as if she was a household fixture and fitting. ‘She’s my daughter,’ he’d thundered. Lucy’s response – ‘And she’s sixteen, Tod, she can stay here, if that’s what she wants’ – had been more polite than he deserved.
Turning a grape between her fingers, Lucy said, ‘But whatever his faults, Tod’s still her dad. I sat Chloe down and we had a talk about it. Well, to be honest, I talked. She’s not exactly a chatterbox. I persuaded her to think hard, because Tod’s the only father she’ll ever have and he loves her. She is, let’s be honest, the only person he truly does love.’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Marie. ‘Maybe he loves you as much as a man like that is capable of loving a woman.’ Lucy was adamant about facing the ugly truths that Tod had left blinking in the light, but sometimes Marie tried to ease the sting a little. Without any further details, she knew that Lucy’s heart-to-heart with Chloe had been patient, gentle, respectful. None of these adjectives could be applied to what Tod might say about Lucy to Chloe.
Since his abdication, a truer view of life at Casa Gray had slowly emerged. Lucy was no tattletale, but sharing seemed to help her come to terms with her new reality. Marie had sat open-mouthed at tales of Tod shouting at Chloe for eating too much; shouting at Chloe for eating too little; raging about her school report, then sneering that she’d better find some sucker to pay her way for the rest of her life. A pointed look at his wife would ensure the parallel was neatly drawn.
The matching en suites that Marie so coveted had been installed because Tod ‘couldn’t bear’ to be in the same room as his wife as she brushed her teeth or used the toilet. A soiled cotton-wool ball left out in the open could trigger a day-long bad mood in her Lord and Master.
Those Fired Earth tiles and glass sinks weren’t so enviable now. Marie recalled how she’d weed on a stick in their own scrappy shower room, shrieking when the line appeared. Robert, covered in suds, had dragged her into the shower and kissed her and cried, and her hair had been ruined.
Taking pains to be fair, even while Tod enjoyed five-star tropical luxury with his mistress, Lucy emphasised how ‘good’ he’d been to them. ‘It wasn’t all moods and drama,’ she said. ‘We had lovely holidays and lots of treats, and on the whole we got on and life was calm.’
Tod’s brand of calm was laced with dread, like the sticky hours before a storm. The atmosphere would tighten and strain until kaboom! Then Tod would loudly speculate on whether Lucy had gained a pound or two, or snipe that Chloe had left a ring around the bath tub.
The poignant truth was obvious: Lucy’s apparent hauteur was only a symptom of the deep emotional distress that her husband carefully cultivated in her. She’d walked on eggshells twenty-four hours a day, and that can make a woman twitchy.
‘Chloe’s very lucky to have you, Lu
. Don’t pooh-pooh me – she is. And she obviously agrees with me, or she would have scarpered with Tod. She stayed put, and that speaks volumes.’ Marie admired the girl for emerging from her shipwreck of a childhood to recognise a good and wise woman when she saw one. The secret that Chloe had desperately hinted at during the bonfire party – the hidden unhappiness at the heart of the Gray marriage – had been outed. ‘You worry about what sort of a role-model you were during . . . let’s call them The Tod Years. But now you’re showing her how a strong and independent woman copes on her own.’ Lucy’s qualms about going back to work (Marie had been amazed to hear she’d once been a big noise in PR) were a frequent theme. Marie had resolved to cheerlead as Lucy retraced her steps to relocate her long-lost chutzpah. ‘Chloe and you are a team now.’
‘She doesn’t call me “Stepmother” any more.’ Lucy said it shyly, like a timid child daring to boast of some tiny triumph.
‘Yay! Does she call you—’ Marie stopped short. The word in her head felt too loaded.
‘No, not “Mum”. Which is fine,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m not her mum. She calls me “Lum”.’ She sighed/laughed, or maybe laughed/sighed. ‘I adore that girl’s mind. Half-Lucy, half-Mum. Lum!’
‘I love it.’
The two women shared the moment, acknowledging the progress the silly word represented.
Quickly, as if she wanted to force it out before changing her mind, Lucy said, ‘Do you remember you asked me once why I went ahead and married Tod after I found out how he treated his first wife?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Marie tugged on the novelty fish-shaped oven gloves that she hated and kept meaning to replace.
‘I think I said something like I was already in love and it was too late . . . Or something along those lines. Which was true. But not the whole truth.’
The large tin, liberated from the oven, sat on the rack between them and Marie pulled off the gloves. ‘Yeah?’
‘I was pregnant.’
Marie kept her gaze on the cake’s golden pockmarked surface.