by Anna Maxted
The problem was that she wasn’t scared of me. No one is scared of me. Not even . . . mice. In fact, a mouse would probably steal my cheese. That’s how non-scary I am. And I suspected that Cassie only respected people who she was a little bit scared of.
Perhaps I just had to be grateful that she and I were back on track, as much as we ever would be. I supposed I would always be the big ungainly sister to her, and I should accept that. Cassie would always want to be treated as the special, baby bijou sister. I’d never had a problem with that – why should it be a problem now? She was being more supportive than she’d ever been. She’d read my sex columns, and said she liked them, although I knew she was revolted. I didn’t tell her it was all made up. She was putting up a front, and it made me want to put up a front. I can only compare it to neighbours competing with extensions.
But, within those perimeters, our relationship was solid. Wait, isn’t that word pronounced ‘perameters’? I don’t get the English language. (Another thing, Cassie thinks I’m trivial. Although I’m not the one who owns three Hermès bags and has had her teeth whitened.) I do think Cassie had trouble with me changing. Cassie was sexy, whereas the boys always looked through me like I was plate glass. It was hard for her to adjust – I knew she’d criticise the Givenchy dress – but she was trying. I hoped she saw that I was the same in essence. I would still perform a shadow role to her shining star. Just not at cost to myself.
‘We might need a cushion, Dad!’ said George.
I saw Cassie shoot him a look of horror, and I couldn’t see why. It was so rare that George was diplomatic. (He was, after all, the man who had said to our father, ‘You work in a hotel. Do you often get asked for threesomes?’) Maybe she was merely surprised.
‘You want cushions?’ cried Mr Hershlag, excitedly. ‘Take!’
George cleared his throat.
‘This chicken is delicious, Sheila!’ cried Cassie. ‘Tell me, how do you get it so tender? I’ve tried to make this at home, and I just cannot get comparable results.’
I stared at her. Liar. I don’t believe my sister had ever touched raw poultry. She must want something. But for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything the Hershlags might have that Cassie might want. They weren’t wealthy people.
Sheila beamed in pleasure. She had a nice wide smile, and no malice. I caught myself. It is a sad day when you find yourself exhibiting Mother-in-Law Envy.
Tim’s mother wasn’t strictly an in-law, but was behaving like one. The previous weekend, they’d forced us round to their house. Tim’s mother had a face like a bloodhound. At lunch, she’d served me fewer roast potatoes than everyone else (which made me realise that I was bloody starving and wanted something proper to eat). Then, afterwards, we’d all sat in the lounge with our hands in our laps, and she’d nodded towards her garden. ‘See that wood pigeon. A fox got its partner. It was injured, and this one was trying to distract the fox. Flapping round. Making a noise. But it was no use. It’s lonely now. Just hangs around by itself.’
A tragic tale, but I was no longer fooled. Tim’s mother didn’t have a bleeding heart – she didn’t have a heart. I’d done away with her grandchild, and she thought I deserved to be miserable. We were in the lounge, still staring at the bereaved wood pigeon, when there was an almighty crash from the kitchen. We ran in, and saw that three framed photographs, balanced precariously on a shelf above the oven, had fallen to the floor, and one had smashed. A portrait of Tim and me.
‘I told him that shelf had slipped,’ sighed Tim’s mother. And then, ‘Funny how a lot of pictures fell down but that was the only one that broke.’ Pause. ‘They say bad things happen in threes.’
What did she mean? I was due another miscarriage?
To be honest, I thought I was doing fairly well with all that. There was the drink but maybe I’d drunk too little before. I was more lethargic than I had been. I scratched my ankle raw one night – itchy dry skin. Days later, I noticed that the scab wasn’t forming properly, and saw that it was septic. Once, I’d have sped to the medicine cabinet, and doused the wound in TCP. Instead, I thought, oh, let it sort itself out. Eventually it healed, but left a large brown and purple scar. I did wonder how far I would have let it go. Gangrene? Septicaemia? Amputation of the foot?
‘I’ll write down a recipe for you,’ said Mrs Hershlag.
‘You never ask me for recipes, Cassie,’ said Vivica. She said it as if she was joking.
‘That’s because I know your recipes,’ said Cassie. ‘Or should I say, recipe.’
I giggled. One fateful evening, our mother had watched a cooking programme (I think the remote was out of batteries) and garnered from it that alcohol, cream and butter added to the flavour of a dish. From that day forward, every meal she served was bitter with raw booze, and drowning in grease. All that varied, some weeks, was the bacteria (lamb, beef, chicken, fish).
‘Can I ask where you bought these beautiful Shabbat candlesticks?’ enquired Cassie, who had obviously taken some mind-altering drug.
‘They were a wedding present from my mother,’ said Mrs Hershlag, proudly. ‘They belonged to my grandmother. They’re at least sixty years old, but I polish them every week, and they look like new.’
‘Well,’ said Cassie, ‘it’s amazing that as well as having sentimental and religious significance, they are so stylish. They make a superb centrepiece. They fit so well with the décor.’
Décor? What décor?
My house was a design museum compared to this abomination, and she hated it. (‘Everything half works,’ she once told me. ‘You have to bang the microwave to get it open. You have to twist the handle of the toilet door right down, spraining your wrist. The hot tap at the sink is actually the cold tap. You have to whack the boiler with a spanner to get the heating to come on. The kitchen bin lid is broken, and you have to touch the bin to throw anything away. It’s like an assault course.’)
‘Dad,’ continued Cassie, without a pause, ‘how’s work? Any interesting stories?’
She hated our father wiffling on about the hotel. We knew there were juicy tales of sex, drugs and pilfered bathrobes, but we – ‘the children’ – never got to hear them. As Cassie once said, ‘We always get Aesop’s Fables, and we’ll be getting them when we’re fucking forty.’
‘As it happens, yes,’ said our father.
Cassie beamed. Did anyone else realise my sister had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a robot?
‘Today,’ said our father, ‘a gentleman checked in, a multimillionaire. He’s stayed with us for years. I took his Louis Vuitton luggage up from the valet. This gentleman always asks for four hundred Rothman cigarettes to be waiting in his room. I often organise him theatre tickets. He has Parkinson’s disease, and when I took his luggage up today, I said, “How are you feeling, sir?” He said, “I’m going to see a specialist in the US.” And then he said, “You are much wealthier than I am. If I gave you one million pounds, would you sell me ten years of your life?”’
There was an awkward silence.
Cassie opened her mouth to fill it, but George got there first. ‘Guess what, people. My wife is with child!’
Chapter 22
I stood up, and George’s words ran riot in my head, making me stagger. I felt as if I was trying to keep balance during an earthquake. As I stumbled towards the door, our mother cried, ‘Darling, that’s marvellous! Lizbet can give you her things!’
‘Vivica!’ said our father in a sharp voice.
She added, stuttering, ‘I mean, it’s bad luck to have them in the house.’
‘Yes,’ I heard myself say, ‘although I think that’s before the miscarriage.’
Mrs Hershlag had jumped up to kiss Cassie – and she caught my arm as I squeezed past her. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘Please God by you.’
It was an old-fashioned expression, wishing the same good fortune on another person. (Every time I attended a Jewish wedding, I heard it a million times, as it was customarily spoken by women olde
r than forty, to women older than fourteen.) I nodded, and tears filled my eyes. Why did she have to be kind? I could cope with Tim’s mother’s spite. It glanced off me, each little scar making me tougher. But compassion was a killer. It wormed its way into your heart, infecting it with sorrow, until you thought you might die of the agony.
The phrases appropriate to the occasion presented in my head – ‘Congratulations, Cassie and George, I am so pleased for you, what wonderful news’ – but my brain refused to grant clearance.
So when I heard those same words spoken aloud – ‘Congratulations, Cassie and George, I am so pleased for you, what wonderful news!’ – my head jerked in surprise and shock.
‘Cheers, Tim! Cheers, mate!’ said George.
Cassie managed a tight smile.
‘Lizbet,’ said Tim, ‘aren’t you going to say something?’
Everyone’s gaze focused on me. I stared back at everyone. Mr Hershlag was wiping away tears with a handkerchief. Vivica looked like the class swot who knew the answer and was trying hard not to jump up and down and say, ‘Me!’ Our father was polishing his glasses with a corner of the embroidered Sabbath tablecloth. George stared at me, proud and defiant. Tim’s face was carefully blank. Cassie was cracking a piece of shiny chollah crust into crumbs with her fingernail.
I said, ‘I’m going to celebrate with a drink!’
I bought a bottle of Stone’s ginger wine – our father used to drink it and I liked the taste – and slumped in the car, taking dainty sips from the green bottle top. I noted that only Cassie and our father had tried to stop me from leaving. That cow. I slumped lower in my seat, spotted an empty Coke can on the floor, decanted the wine into it. Then I sat up, and drank in gulps. Ah, permission to relax! But I couldn’t. My whole body trembled in rage, and my heart pounded.
Two-faced . . . crap about George . . . knew there was something . . . unless . . . other man’s . . . brazen liar . . . unbelievable . . . must have known . . . how dare she . . . not fair . . . always gets . . . me never . . . so superior . . . disapproves . . . no one cares about me . . . mortgage people . . . unfriendly . . . M&S . . . avocadoes . . . brown . . . Sky . . . didn’t record . . . olive oil . . . best trousers . . . cat sick . . . teak table . . . discoloured . . . so unfair . . . tired . . . home . . . seatbelt . . . slowly . . . careful . . . here we are . . . brilliant driver . . . booze . . . helps concentration . . . mind . . . wall . . . pull into garage – CRASH!
‘Shit!’ I said, just as the airbag punched me hard in the face. ‘Jesus!’
I screamed, trying to shout away the pain. I thought airbags were supposed to protect you from injury. I’d also wrenched my neck. I sat there, dazed and trembling. I fumbled the car door open and was sick out of it. I could feel my nose swelling. Then I breathed deep, kicked the bottle under the seat, and scanned windows to see if any neighbours were looking.
Tabitha and Jeremy were peering from the front bedroom window. Tabitha had Celestia in a pink Babygro curled over her shoulder and looked annoyed. What? I wanted to shout. You’ve got your baby, warm and wriggly. You haven’t smashed your boyfriend’s car into a garage door. I could see Tabitha’s mouth moving really fast. Jeremy vanished from the window. Seconds later, there he was.
‘You alright, Elizabeth? You took that corner a bit fast.’
Jeremy wasn’t a favourite. No T-shirt was complete without a slogan, and the previous week I’d heard him in the garden with Tomas. ‘Tomas! Tomas! We’re going out to lunch . . . to Wagamama’s.’ Presumably, he thought the day would come when his three-year-old would respond, ‘Wagamama’s? But that’s not specifically a child-friendly dining experience. Oh, Daddy, you’re not like all the other conformist parents, you’re so rad!’ I couldn’t for the life of me work out what he and Tabitha had in common.
‘Migraine,’ I whispered. ‘I think I might have passed out for a second.’ I paused. ‘You don’t think anyone will call the . . . authorities?’
Jeremy saw himself as a rebel. ‘Authorities!’ he said. ‘Yeah, right!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘when Evelyn Toberman put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and backed her car into a tree, Letty Jackson pressed the panic button in her bedroom and six squad cars turned up.’
(Usually, said our mother, Letty Jackson pressed the panic button if Mr Jackson entered the bedroom.)
‘Huh,’ said Jeremy. ‘The pigs! We don’t have a panic button. I’m a brown belt in judo.’ He nodded towards Tim’s slightly crumpled car. ‘So did you have a few jars then?’
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘A few bevvies! A few drinks!’
‘No! Certainly not! I don’t—’
‘I was out on the lash with the boys last week – Christ Almighty, we were in a state. Went out with some of the crew from the old job, just the professionals, if you know what I mean, wwoooh, it was serious, had a beer at lunchtime, couple of white wines at five, back on the beers at seven, cor, I tell you, it was nasty, oof—’
‘Jeremy.’
‘. . . coupla shorts, few cocktails—’
‘Jeremy!’
‘. . . a really big glass of Pimm’s, spat out the cucumber—’
‘JEREMY!’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you help me get this car into the garage, please? I don’t want Tim to see it . . . yet.’
‘Yeah, ok. What you going to tell him?’
‘The truth, of course! I had – I have a migraine, yes?’
‘Right. Or you could always say that Tomas ran out and you swerved to avoid him . . . into the garage door.’
I stared at him. His own child! ‘I don’t think I’d like to say that,’ I said, a little primly. ‘I might say . . . Sphinx ran out.’
Jeremy shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
Jeremy heaved open the garage door – which now had a big dent in it – and drove the car in for me.
‘There you goesy,’ he said. ‘Our secret, eh?’ He winked, and tossed me the keys.
I grabbed at air and they fell on the floor. I bent to retrieve them, and when I looked up, he was gone. Twit. I was glad that his wife made him eat the stale food in the fridge.
I fell into bed, without looking at myself, and drifted into a prickly sleep.
The next day, I sat at the breakfast table, pale-faced except for two black eyes. I had a fat lip, bruising around my nose, and my entire body ached. The vertebrae in my neck had been replaced by a hot poker. My head hurt. I thought of Cassie, soon to be wafting around her walled garden in white chiffon with a baby in a bonnet, and I felt myself twist with envy. Apart from that, I was just fabulous.
Tim marched into the kitchen, his gaze flickered over me, he didn’t comment. Ten minutes later, I heard our garage door open.
It reminded me that when we first moved in, it came to our attention that our other neighbours were not only slobs (big urine-stained mattress in front garden instead of rose bushes), they were forever opening and closing their garage. We couldn’t sit in our lounge in the evening without hearing at least one squeak and thud from their garage door. Once, we heard the familiar squeak-thud, and Tim said in a sneering tone, ‘Getting something from your garage?’
Not quite Oscar Wilde, but I couldn’t stop giggling.
Lately, there had been no giggling. It was so unlike us to be cold and silent, but though I wanted to, I couldn’t break the cycle. Even if my intentions were good, the tiniest wrong move from Tim made me blow up. I couldn’t stop myself. I’d lie in bed in the morning and think, why don’t you roll over and hug me? But there was no chance of that because I was non-stop horrible. He’d yawn too near to my face, and I’d snap, ‘Your breath stinks!’ I’d feel this heart-pounding rage, and I guessed it was because of the baby, but it seemed to have run like dye, into everything.
I heard a squeal of tyres, and Tim sped off in his damaged car. I wished he’d ring, tell me where he was going. Even if he’d screamed at me, it would be something. I did try to goad him out of his silence
with nasty remarks. He didn’t return the whole weekend, although on Sunday, Tim’s mother called and said, ‘I think you should know, Elizabeth, that Timothy is with us.’ She added, ‘I didn’t want you to think that he was lying dead in a hospital morgue, God forbid, puh-puh-puh.’
Tim’s mother had been socialising with elderly Jews, or Madonna. ‘Puh-puh-puh’ was a superstitious habit, the Kabbalistic equivalent of spitting at the Devil. If ever Aunt Edith made a smug observation, e.g., ‘Elizabeth, such a beautiful young lady!’ – she’d add, ‘Puh-puh-puh,’ in case God overheard, decided she was too cocky on my behalf, and had my fine features flattened by a truck the following day.
‘Puh-puh-puh’ could also be employed as insurance against an unpleasant occurrence – Tim lying dead in a hospital morgue, say – in case, having mentioned it, you put the idea in God’s head.
I didn’t step out of the house until Monday. Getting up seemed pointless, like wearing lipstick to the dentist. Cassie called my mobile, but I switched it off. She even came round, jamming her finger on the buzzer, but I didn’t answer. I lay in bed, letting all sound wash over me. The phone rang, and I let the answer machine pick up. When I played it back, Tabitha’s well-to-do voice rang through the empty house.
‘Lizbet. Timmy. Hello! It’s Next Door. Darlings, sorry to impose, I wondered if you might be able to do your godparental duty and take Tomas – for an hour, half an hour, half a minute – because if you don’t, I might just wring his neck. Aha-ha-ha! Only joking!’