I still remembered Cecily’s face as she handed over the cash. ‘It’s what we do, for family,’ she said. The implication was that she was doing it for Carson, not me.
And there was no doubt that she thought I owed her.
Because she told me.
‘You owe me, Miss High and Mighty Scarface,’ she’d whispered when Carson was out of earshot. ‘Don’t forget it.’
Given the circumstances, I didn’t bother telling my husband about how rotten his mother was to me.
All things considered, I suppose I figured I deserved it.
Carson turned to me. ‘Listen, are you okay waiting here for the rabid uncle? I have some work to do at school.’
‘He’s called Uncle Rabbit. And it’s a holiday, isn’t it? What are you doing going to work?’
‘There’s always marking, you know how it is?’
No, I didn’t.
Carson worked every hour as it was – last week he’d been home at 2 a.m. two nights in a row.
‘But this sort of stuff isn’t exactly my forte, is it?’
‘You think carpentry is mine?’
‘Ain’t mine, either,’ Hammertro offered. ‘But my uncle, he’s a genius with wood.’
Then he laughed at his own crude joke.
Jessie and J crept past.
‘And where are you two going?’ I said sternly.
‘Out of here,’ J murmured.
‘The café next to the park,’ Jessie said. A sweet kid; she knows I worry.
‘Be careful,’ I told them. Over by the bookcase, Carson was gathering his briefcase and some papers. He was still planning to leave me with the door issue – and I decided that I had put up with enough from the Teesons.
Thanksgiving indeed!
When did someone give thanks for the efforts I made?
Carson must be lying about why he was going to work – he could mark papers anywhere, couldn’t he.
He could do them at home – and guard our doorless flat at the same time.
‘Dad will be here if you need him,’ I told the kids, looking for my purse.
Carson sprang to attention. ‘Scarlet, I just said–‘
And grabbing my coat – leaving Carson gobsmacked in my wake – I followed the kids into the chilly autumn morning.
Outside, I saw another inmate of our building, elderly Mrs Carlisle, struggling with an absurdly large parcel.
Telling the kids to be careful and be back before dark, I raced over to ask if the seventy-something, former fellow employee of Flindes, needed help.
‘That’s would be lovely, dear. How’s work?’
‘Dan Phillit, the new manager, is vile. Other than that, it’s still the same.’
‘Oh, what a shame.’
I shrugged as I grabbed the heavy, odd-shaped item. ‘What are you doing with this, anyway?’
‘Oh, I offered to try and sell these for my husband – they’ve been up in the loft for ages and we could do with a cruise.’
‘What it is?’
She pulled the brown paper aside to reveal some glass eyes and a lot of fluffy white fur. ‘Sheep. Fiberglass. We have ten of them.’
‘Why?’
‘My Samuel can’t help himself when it comes to a bargain. Bought them at auction a few years ago, hoping he might offload them to an antipodean jumper joint on 6th across town, but after they said no, he dumped them up in my loft instead and that was that. I thought I might get a few dollars for them.’
‘Christmas is coming,’ I said. ‘Not much demand for sheep.’
‘I thought the church might want a couple, for a manger. But they’ve got their old wooden animals, haven’t they?’
Helping her into her apartment on the first floor, I snuck back down, walking quickly past my own apartment windows in case Carson saw me and tried a getaway of his own.
As I neared the subway, I wondered what to do.
It was a holiday.
I had no money.
I might as well go to Lolly’s. She might have time for a cuppa and a chat.
Or she might need some help if the place was busy.
As I walked away, I spied Carson looking forlornly out of the living room window.
Serves him right.
*
The LollyBliss store was packed with the liberal elite of NYC, indulging in childhood fantasies of hand knitted jumpers and floral prints. It took me a moment to narrow in on Lolly. Finally I spotted her, surrounded by great lengths of semi-opaque tulle near the store windows.
‘Lolly, there you are.’
‘Scarlet, what are you doing here?’
‘Escaping.’
‘From what?’
‘A carpenter called Uncle Rabbit and my prat of a husband.’
The girl who was helping Lolly fix the tulle to the window display stared as if I had just teleported in from the unexplored depths of the galaxy.
By the looks of her, she was one hundred percent Upper East Side, so perhaps Brooklyn was like coming from outer space? The hair was brown, glossy and dead straight. As she moved, it swung from side to side in a thick sheet. She was dressed as if aping one of the Brady Bunch girls – a tiny woolen LollyBliss dress showed off her reed thin figure to perfection; and she was tall enough to get away with flat, red, patent Mary Janes.
‘Lucinda, this is Scarlet,’ Lolly said, handing me a length of the paper-thin fabric. ‘Here, you two put this up while I go and sort out that crowd at the till.’
I suppose it wasn’t surprising that Lolly was busy – Christmas was coming and the store had been featured in one of the inserts of a national newspaper as a ‘cool place to source nouveau-retro gifts in NYC’.
‘I don’t even know what nouveau-retro means,’ Lolly had said, ‘but I don’t care.’
Looking about now, as Lucinda struggled with a staple gun, I figured it meant money.
‘Can you hold it up a little higher?’ Lucinda accent was more British than mine. ‘Are you from the old Country?’ I asked.
‘New Hampshire, you mean?’
‘No, old Hampshire, or elsewhere in the United Kingdom?’
Lucinda appeared baffled. ‘No, of course not. Horrible weather. People with grim teeth.’ She gave a little shake of her head at the horror of it.
I looked pointedly at the rain bucketing down. ‘Good reason,’ I said, sarcastically.
‘Obviously,’ Lucinda replied, reaching for the furthest corner of the window with the staple gun. The micro-mini was raised to such an extent that it was clear she spent a fortune on salon treatments for hair removal. A group of lads outside began whistling.
‘Cretins,’ Lucinda mumbled, oblivious of her own contribution to the event.
Lolly reappeared. ‘Not sure about that tulle now. What do you think?’ she asked me.
I stood back. The tulle was see-through and revealed far too much of the wooden backdrop Lolly had recently installed. I could see she was going to put up some sort of clothesline and simply hang clothes onto it.
The effect would be, for want of a kinder description, amateurish at best.
Despite her skill in amassing trendy retro clothing, my dear friend clearly hadn’t grasped window displays.
And everyone knew that in New York City, window displays mattered.
I didn’t realize how much they mattered until Lolly began weeping quietly.
‘What on earth is wrong? The tulle isn’t that bad, is it?’
It was that bad, but still.
‘Don’t cry, Lol.’ I put an arm around her. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’
‘It is. NYC Shopping Weekly is coming to do a feature,’ Lucinda revealed.
Lolly confirmed it. ‘How on earth can I impress them with this?’ She punched at the tulle.
Honestly, the world was full of problems lately.
‘When are they coming?’ I asked.
‘Tonight. Just before we close.’
I checked my watch. That was in six hours.
‘Lo
lly, didn’t you think of this before?’
‘I did a drawing with the tulle – see.’ There was a tiny sketch of a pink fairy wonderland tacked to the side of the window.
‘Can you get more tulle?’ I asked, seeing the problem at once. It was clear that she’d need about forty miles of tulle to achieve the effect she’d drawn.
‘No,’ Lucinda said. ‘No without waiting weeks.’
‘So, you need a new idea.’
‘It took me a month to come up with the tulle. We’ve been so busy and . . .’
Suddenly, I remembered Mrs Carlisle and her sheep.
It might just work, LollyBliss was quirky, wasn’t it? If those sheep weren’t nouveau-retro, nothing was.
‘How about you do Christmas jumpers on suspended sheep? We could bunch the tulle up and make it look thicker by putting white paper balls behind it. I reckon I could help you make that window look funky in six hours.’
‘Is funky good?’ Lucinda scrunched up her perfect nose.
‘What sort of sheep?’ Lolly was puzzled. ‘I can’t really picture it.’
Strangely, I could. I imagined them flying about the small space, spotlights trained on them, squeezed into Lolly’s amazing knitwear.
‘Static, fluffy ones. Cute, and odd.’
‘Cute and odd, that’s you,’ Lucinda said to Lolly.
That’s no way to speak to your boss.
I waited for Lolly to tell Lucinda to shut up.
‘How much will it cost?’ Lolly asked me, instead.
‘What’s your window dressing budget?’
Lolly shrugged. ‘Well, I spent fifty dollars on that tulle, and it looks useless. I suppose I could go to two hundred, maybe a bit more.’
Asking if I could make a phone call, I found out Mrs Carlisle’s number from directory enquiries and called her. The elderly woman was thrilled at the opportunity to make a substantial amount selling all the sheep at once.
‘I can ask Hammertro to bring them, he is such a nice boy.’
‘Hammertro doesn’t have a car.’
‘Doesn’t he? I always see him in one.’
‘Are you sure that’s not a police car?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, possibly.’
I said to call a cab and put the sheep inside, and send it to LollyBliss. ‘We’ll pay the driver this end.’
‘Very good dear. And Scarlet?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
*
Lucinda and I put up a sheet so that the window display under construction was hidden from shoppers, and once the sheep arrived, we began our work.
It was pretty hilarious watching the girl from the Upper East trying to jam a jumper on a stout fiberglass sheep, and I had to admit that my mood improved immeasurably as the minutes raced away.
By the time we had sourced jumpers that would work together in the display, and then got them to fit the sheep without looking completely ridiculous, it was five fifteen. I hadn’t checked my mobile for hours, but intuition told me Carson was trying to call and force me to come home.
Why? So he could go out and enjoy his freedom?
Sod him.
‘Right,’ I said, my butt in the air as I pushed the last sheep into place, ‘what do we think?’
Lucinda frowned. ‘That you could stand to lose a few kilos?’
‘Not about me, Lucinda, about the window display?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. What do sheep have to do with Santa?’
‘It’s ironic.’
Lucinda’s dazzling eyes flickered, trying to compute the meaning of the word ironic.
Before she could offer a retort, Lolly appeared inside the curtained-off window. ‘Oh Scarlet, this is amazing.’
As we looked around, I had to admit it was pretty amazing.
We’d taken the tulle and sprayed it with opaque white from a nearby hardware store. Next, we’d arranged it in bunches in the window, pushing butcher’s paper behind the big tulle balls to bulge them out and give the impression of snowy fields. Then, after the sheep were dressed in the colorful jumpers – magenta, bright green, red, blue, orange and yellow – we suspended them at different levels as if frolicking in the window. We’d discovered that the sheep weren’t identical, which meant their legs all moved in different directions. The overall effect was slick, bright and humorous. The lads from Monty Python would be proud.
‘You like it?’ Lucinda asked, confusion evident on her beautiful face.
‘Lucinda, can’t you see that it’s just what I was trying to achieve?’ Lolly turned to me. ‘I know you wanted to design clothes, but this is much more your thing. I am paying you for this.’
‘Lolly, no, I didn’t do it for that. Plus you had to pay for the sheep and the cab.’
‘But Scar, you saved me. We’ll use the sheep again too. Maybe they can be our festive theme?’
‘Halloween sheep? That could work?’ Ideas were already racing about in my head.
‘Absolutely. And I am definitely paying you to do that. Now, I’d better get my face on, that reporter will be here soon.’
So as Lolly went to freshen up, Lucinda and I pulled the curtains off the windows and turned on the twinkling lights that Lolly had leftover from last Christmas.
People outside stopped and began pointing. On seeing them, other passersby did the same.
I only hoped that the magazine people thought the window was as wonderful as Lolly did.
It wouldn’t do if I ruined Lolly’s business, on top of everything else.
*
Lolly completed her own transformation, slipping into a red silk dress and shrugging on a woolly white jumper just as the reporter from NYC Shopping Weekly shoved against the glass and brass monogrammed door and stomped into LollyBliss, complaining about the weather.
Lucinda and I had run about tidying the store, but the window seemed to be enticing people in to browse, even though it was early evening and rain was pelting the sidewalks outside.
‘Horrible weather,’ Lolly said, hand outstretched.
‘Never mind that,’ said the haughty girl, who was almost a deadringer for Lucinda. She was dressed head to toe in camel colored Ralph Lauren and had straight light brown hair that came to her shoulders. ‘By the look of that window display, this is going to make a great feature.’ She spun around. ‘Huffie? Huffie?’
The accompanying photographer, an elderly man seemingly entering his tenth decade, was struggling with his equipment and the door that the reporter had shut in his face. Lolly ran to help him.
‘Huffie, there you are.’ The reporter walked over and indicated the street. ‘Get back outside and photograph this marvelously kitch window. I think we’ve got our Christmas cover.’
I don’t know who was more astonished: Lolly, me or posh Lucinda, who’d thought the sheep were barmy and me a mutant from somewhere designer brands didn’t dare to venture.
CHAPTER FOUR
Saturday, November 25
If you let small problems fester, they soon expand to the point
where going back is impossible.
Jocelyn Priestly.
MY HEAD FELT AS if a lorry had reversed over it in the night. Lolly had offered to take me out for a celebratory dinner, and after texting the kids with instructions of how they could heat up leftovers for dinner, I’d agreed.
She’d splashed out on Gramercy Park Tavern, and I had savored every mouthful, only feeling slightly guilty that Jessie and J were eating casserole from two days ago when the most spectacular chocolate dessert was served.
When I got home, Carson was asleep on the sofa, but at least the front door was back on its hinges.
I knew he was awake, because the rumbling snores he usually emitted were absent, but not a word was spoken.
Good.
Let him stew.
Looking at the calendar for that day, I silently told Jocelyn Priestly that letting small problems fester wasn’t always a matter of choice.
No
one would choose that kind of life, would they?
‘Mum,’ Jessie called, as I sidled past the mountainous basket of dirty washing outside her bedroom.
‘Hi darling, what is it?’ Looking at her sweet face, minus the glasses and the hint of mascara that she’d taken to wearing in the belief that I didn’t know she was doing it, Jessie reminded me of the toddler she once was.
‘Where did you go?’
‘Aunty Lolly’s.’
‘Was it fun?’
‘Busy. I helped with a window display. I suppose you’d call it fun.’
‘Mr Phillit from your work called. He didn’t sound happy.’
My stomach fell. ‘He never sounds happy, baby. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
‘But if you lose your job, I won’t be able to go on the excursion to Boston with school, will I? That’s what Dad says.’
Now the contents of my stomach began churning. I’d forgotten all about that class trip. And my job at Flindes. How could I have missed my shift?
‘Sweetie, trust me, you are going.’
Jessie considered this for a moment, wrapping one of her dark ringlets around her finger in contemplation.
‘Dad didn’t have dinner,’ she said.
‘What? Why not?’
Being angry with his wife was one thing, but taking it out on his kids was quite another.
‘Because he wasn’t home.’
My blood boiled. ‘So who was here while the door was being fixed?’
‘Don’t know. Not me or J. It was all done by the time we got home.’
Now I was fuming. Anyone could have been lying in wait inside the flat. ‘What time did he get home?’
‘About fifteen minutes ago.’
‘What!’
In the room next door, Carson stirred.
Eavesdropper!
I wanted to call out for him to get up and defend himself, but that would involve upsetting Jessie even more.
Small problems! Jocelyn Priestly didn’t know the half of it. What the hell had got into Carson?
Since when did he abandon his kids?
Then I remembered I’d turned my phone off, and booting it up again, I saw the ten or so messages from him, imploring me to go and watch the kids.
The Great Christmas Breakup Page 4