by Amanda Coe
With all this deranged family stuff in full flow, Patrick wasn’t quite as grateful to Mia as he had been. In fact, he could be intensely irritable and therefore irritating, riding her about everything from the colour of his toast to the accents of TV newsreaders. There was also the whole thing he’d started about her going out. Whenever she left the house, even just to wheel the rubbish out to the end of the drive on collection day, he always demanded to know where she was going. It wasn’t as if Patrick’s anxiety conferred even the implicit compliment of need for her company, since he still spent most of his day in his study. He just seemed to need the reassurance of her body around the place, like a dog. Or so she had thought, until the next time she had to ask him for unmentionables money.
‘Distasteful . . .’ Sliding notes across the kitchen table, Patrick’s fingers stayed, trapping the cash. His expression was agelessly reasonable, as though discussing a third party. ‘But you’re old and educated enough to know the meaning of quid pro quo, my love.’
Well, not the Latin exactly, but it meant someone wanting to shag you, didn’t it?
‘I mean company, not molestation. A bit of human warmth.’
Apparently he wanted her to share his bed, ‘no more’. Mia took the money and continued to sleep on the sofa in the den. She knew she would be able to fend him off. But the next day, she updated her CV and began to send off exploratory emails (language schools, a cooks’ agency, one hopeful application for a magazine subeditor’s job). While she waited for replies, she doggedly continued to put the house in order, entirely for her own satisfaction. The time had been passing, and she needed a plan. Particularly now it seemed that Patrick had had one all along.
One night, in sleepless panic about her future, Mia got up to make herself a herbal tea and was startled to discover Louise, crouched like a teenager with her back against the wall by the hall table, the elderly phone cradled down on her lap. As before, she appeared to be listening more than she was talking. As soon as she saw Mia, she lumbered to her feet, and in that moment, as Louise replaced the phone on the table and told her communicant that she would have to go, Mia’s skin goose-pimpled. She hurried by, fully expecting Louise to follow her into the kitchen with an explanation, but in the time it took her to boil the kettle, shivering, Louise had disappeared back to bed.
Frustratingly, the hall phone was so old it lacked a redial function. Carrying her tea, Mia crept into the nicotine chill of Patrick’s study, where the technology was marginally less antique. Safe within the searing little cone of light cast by Patrick’s Anglepoise, she lifted the receiver. Around her, the house made its noises. She looked away from Sara’s smile, its mystery held in the photo frame beside the lamp. Her teeth were chattering. Just who might answer if she revisited Louise’s call? She replaced the receiver, conscious of an attempt to be as quiet as possible.
In the morning, bathed and rational, Mia marched into the study and punched redial. The number was for a premium-rate line to a psychic, although it took some pound-squandering minutes for her to manoeuvre through enough option buttons for this to become intelligible. She saw no reason not to raise the matter with Louise. Since Holly’s accident, Louise had contributed nothing to the household, either financially or in terms of her labour. Mia didn’t miss the sloppy pasta bakes, but she felt there was a principle being abused, and Louise’s secrecy suggested she knew she was taking the piss. Really, Mia was protecting Patrick. He was an old man, after all.
She found Louise in the disused pantry that housed the washing machine, off the kitchen. Either too large or too inflexible to bend in the confined space, Louise sat on the floor, legs splayed ahead of her, posting clothes into the open drum like a scaled-up toddler with an educational toy.
‘Did you want some washing doing?’
Mia didn’t beat around the bush, as her own mother would say. She’d taken note of the premium-rate charges and recited them to Louise. Confronted with the evidence, Louise froze, holding a limp bundle of leggings in mid-air. Mia had noticed that she could only do one thing at a time.
‘I’ll reckon up with Patrick,’ Louise said. ‘It’ll all be on the bill. Of course I will.’
‘Well, that’s okay, if it happens.’ Mia found herself reluctant to forgo an argument.
‘All the bills,’ said Louise, ‘the heating and that. I want to pay my way.’ She kneaded the leggings, now in her lap.
‘Those phone lines,’ said Mia. ‘You know they’re just a rip-off.’
‘Oh some of them are, of course,’ Louise agreed.
‘Why would you waste your money?’
‘I’ve found someone really good,’ Louise maintained. ‘Really proper. Not like some of them. Kamila’s definitely got the gift. She could even tell me stuff about Holly and that.’
‘But Holly’s alive.’
‘A good psychic, they’ll tell you all sorts. About the future. Stuff about you, even, she’s told me.’ Louise’s gaze slid up from the leggings to Mia. ‘She thinks you’re alike, you see.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Mum. She’s been communicating a lot about you. Nothing bad!’
From the floor, Louise stretched to pat Mia on the shin. Her eyes danced. Mia took an instinctive step back.
‘She’s given you her blessing. Because she was worried about Patrick being looked after, but now she knows he’s got you, so she can be at peace, like. She says, “She’s like me.”’
So that’s what it was. For a few months during her first year of university, Mia had worked for a sex chatline. A psychic’s punter might demand more freewheeling invention than the sad wankers Mia had been instructed to string along, but she felt sure the underlying ethos was identical.
‘These people will say anything to keep you talking. Trust me.’
‘Well, we’re all entitled to our beliefs.’
Louise resumed loading her washing, with the same unreachable aplomb she deployed when Patrick started shouting at her.
Sara speaking.
Instead of making soup for lunch, Mia picked up her bag and left the house without stopping to knock on Patrick’s study door and let him know. He’d live. Getting out was pure relief, into the bracing November cold. As Mia walked up to the main road, she half-expected a toot behind her from Louise’s rusty Nissan, making the daily trip to the hospital. Mia was prepared to reject the offer of a lift, but the car hadn’t appeared by the time she turned on to the verge of the dual carriageway. She headed off in the opposite direction.
There was an attenuated bus service to Newquay, but Mia walked the full seven miles, flayed increasingly by the wind. It was crazy, living somewhere so remote without a car. Patrick had never learned to drive, of course, and although, according to Nigel, Sara had always acted as chauffeur, she had stopped driving for the last years of her life, despite the viable-looking Peugeot still standing in the garage. Mia, having given it a cursory inspection, thought its trade-in value was probably nil.
With her circulation speeding and a massive appetite, Mia felt herself again. The walk had taken over two hours, making Holly’s feat on the night of her accident even more remarkable. Passing the second roundabout, Mia stared determinedly ahead, refusing to notice the patch of road where, during their terrible wait for help, Nigel had got down and cradled Holly’s still head, using his folded jumper as a cushion. Mia had kept talking to her, shocked words of meaningless consolation, unable to touch or look as she looped up to the junction and back on the pretext of checking for the ambulance. The one horror-film glimpse of Holly’s illogically splayed legs, the gloss of blood across her white face, had been unbearable. The paramedics had assumed that Mia would want to go with Holly in the ambulance, called her ‘your sister’, although Mia had quickly put them right. Given that unwelcome flashback to the moment of damage, it was incredible the doctors had been able to pin Holly back together so confidently. She was healing. No doubt Louise thought that this process had been abetted by Sara, who was apparently watching over
them all.
She thinks you’re alike, you see.
Mia marched into the first Costa she saw. Waiting for her molten panini to cool, she brushed aside inherited muffin crumbs to make a suitable space on the table and took out her leather-bound notebook. Also a good pen. A rollerball, which she preferred to a ballpoint. The trick with lists was to start with a couple of things already accomplished. Course, Mia wrote, then immediately ticked it off. Strictly speaking, although her dealings with Newcastle were squared away, there was the matter of her graduate loan, but she was hardly about to sully the immediate simplicity of her list. Mum, she proceeded. This also warranted an immediate tick, since she had sent her mother a card on her recent birthday, making an unspecified promise to visit.
Kitchen came next. With an increasing sense of redundancy, Mia inked a dash and added a question mark. She knew that manoeuvring Patrick into agreeing to any kind of work, let alone the renovation she had extensively envisaged, would take serious and unavailing effort. He had even put a stop to her very basic decorating plans once he knew how much it would cost. It wasn’t just that Patrick couldn’t care less. She knew now that she had been bamboozled by the good furniture and the house around it, while failing to read the more accurate message of their neglect. She had simply assumed that Patrick was mean and his late wife chaotic, and that she’d be able to cajole him into spending in the same way that she’d finally got him to eat garlic. But his scrimping, own-brand ways weren’t just habits. He was, it turned out, as broke as she was.
Well, this wasn’t entirely true. Through the forensic ransacking of the paperwork she had cleared from every surface, Mia was stunned to discover that Patrick and Sara had never mitigated their hardships with even a normal level of debt.
‘Not even a credit card?’
‘Fetters of capitalism. Cut ’em up as soon as they sent ’em.’
It was beyond own-brand, or not taking holidays. Accordingly, Mia had applied for a couple of credit cards in Patrick’s name and was working up to getting him to sign them, for his own good.
Pen hovering over her list, she forbore to write Patrick’s name, even as a sub-category of kitchen, although she did finally scribble finance??, from which was born bank. To accomplish anything there would have to be a chunky loan. Given that all she needed was the first sniff of a job offer to send her on her way, even research at the level of price-comparison websites was pointless. Mia scored the entire entry through.
Mia nibbled her panini. Job, she wrote finally. No dash, no question mark, and definitely, despite all those emails, no tick. Looking up, she saw that the Costa employee who had served her, a post-adolescent boy with dark circles under his darker eyes and a misguided directional haircut that angled to conceal one ear and was shaved above the other, was lingering under the pretext of clearing the next table to watch her write. It was the post-lunch lull.
‘Busy.’
The word was bottom-heavy with an accent, possibly Polish. Mia flashed him a dismissive smile.
‘You need?’ He offered her the napkin dispenser he was lifting to wipe beneath. Politely, she hoisted the thin napkin on her panini plate. ‘No thank you.’
He mimicked writing. ‘Studying?’
Capping her pen, Mia shook her head, whisked the list into her bag and reached for her scarf. The boy hovered, possibly on the verge of telling her that he was a student himself, or wanted to be: psychology, perhaps, or business studies. Although if it was business, why was he working in a Costa?
With a smile full of aggravating irony, the boy tried to fix her gaze. ‘Something more interesting than studying, maybe.’
She had a vision of her own future, learning to flourish frothed milk into the calligraphic leaf on top of a flat white. Chocolate on that?
Mia shouldered her bag. ‘Everything about me is more interesting than you can possibly fucking imagine.’
She didn’t look back as she made for the door. She was so much better than all of it. She always had been.
After an undermotivated tour of the less tacky shops, the acquisition of some interiors magazines that would have earned her another tick on the kitchen portion of her list if she hadn’t scrubbed it out, and a maintenance trip to Tesco, Mia took a cab back to the house. It was still quite early, and she was relieved not to see Louise’s car parked outside. As she paid the cab driver, Patrick appeared from the back of the house. He was shouting.
‘Everything all right with the old boy?’ asked the driver, a middle-aged man who had spent the journey telling her about his cholesterol levels.
‘I think he was just wondering where I’d gone.’ Mia terminated their transaction with a couple of pound coins and straightened up from the car door to withstand Patrick. It would be the usual thing. Sure enough, he started before the minicab had even negotiated the turn in the drive.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’
She told him, briskly headed towards the back door, in no mood. Patrick hurried to keep astride with her, the slight swing of the Tesco bags batting him away as she manoeuvred them through the doorway. Backing round to accomplish this brought his face into proper view. Mia’s first thought was that his eyes were watering from the wind, then she realised that he was weeping.
‘Patrick.’
She had looked into his study, she lied, but he had been asleep. She should have left him a note. Or perhaps, to prevent this happening again, he might finally learn how to dial her mobile, which had been switched on all afternoon?
‘I don’t want to learn how to use your bloody mobile, just don’t do it again, you stupid little bitch!’
The margins of Mia’s tenderness contracted. Silently, she triaged groceries from their bags on to the table, before putting them away in cupboards and fridge, showing him her back.
‘I will not live like this!’ Patrick roared.
Continuing to ignore him, Mia stacked cans of tuna, taking the time to align them exactly. Behind her, she sensed movement as Patrick took a peevish swipe at a box of eggs. She wheeled into a stretch that caught them as they left the tabletop, surprising herself with her agility. Patrick scrabbled to pull the box from her, his massive hands crushing the cardboard as they tussled, her gasping and him grunting with animal effort until, at the sound of cracking shells Mia gave way, leaving Patrick to hoist the egg box one-handed above his head in a pose that was equal parts childish triumph and melodramatic threat. As he held this ridiculous position, a clear, spunky gout of egg white gathered from the lowest corner of the box and glopped down on to the shoulder of his jumper.
Mia laughed. Not as a weapon, but in rare true amusement, as happened to her sometimes, the way it had with Nigel when he gulped Nurofen on the night of Holly’s accident. Patrick touched his shoulder, exclaimed, ‘Shit!’ and momentarily panicked her by also bursting into laughter. Laughing, seeing him laugh, Mia felt something like joy. No future, no past, just this.
‘Oh Christ.’ Patrick steadied himself against the table for a few breaths, knuckles down on the scarred wood. ‘Forgive me, darling girl. Jesus.’
And he gathered her into his stinking old jumper, but she liked the smell, of whisky and fags and him, and even though the wool was full of holes it was actually cashmere. She avoided the egg white. He moved her back, looking for something in her face. Finding it, he kissed her, properly.
That night, having troubled to change the sheets, she followed him up to bed.
June 11th 1982
Dear Tony,
Good to see you and Penny yesterday, and thanks for the lunch. I hope your hangover isn’t as wretched as mine. Your theory about the better vintages doesn’t seem to obtain, but there was a glory in the experiment.
Forgive the arse-aching. It’s not just stubbornness. I may not subscribe to the idea of an immortal soul, but I do have an artistic conscience. Indeed, it’s the only conscience I do have. A small thing, but mine own . . .
To reiterate: Bloody Empire isn’t, never has been, and never will b
e a play about the Falklands. Although I can accept an element of serendipity in the timing of the production, I am very much inclined to look the gift horse, as you put it, in the mouth. A transfer to the West End may be lucrative, but really what could it profit beyond our bank accounts? Dancing cats are one thing, gilding our reputations with the blood of the fallen, another.
And yet, and yet. There can be no doubt but, like everything in this fallen world, conscience has its price. God help me, I may have discovered exactly what it is. Man the telephone, Mephistopheles.
Yours aye,
Patrick
PS. Apologies from Sara. She’s been rather tired lately.
Then
1983
SINCE OXFORD in summer term—Trinity term—was so obviously close to heaven, with the green college gardens, and drinks parties, and Shakespeare productions and drinks parties in college gardens, and punting, and Pimm’s, and rowing tournaments, and balls, and long, starlit nights out on the window ledges of rooms or in obscure meadows at parties, so many parties, Nigel’s exclusion from all these forms of paradise was particularly tormenting. It was like one endless production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which he had recently seen at Wadham, staged in the gloaming at the edge of the lake), in which he, an anti-Titania, had been forcibly unenchanted and left alone to see flaccid strings of mint in the warm, weak Pimm’s, wheeze asthmatically in the gardens however much he deployed his inhaler, and everywhere hear the confident, opinionated braying of his snogging, rutting cohort, their wholehearted hedonism failing to conceal from him its underpinning of untransformed self-advancement.