I explain about the downstairs loo being, let’s just say, out of action, like, forever.
‘And why did you not just ring Dyno-Rod?’
‘Story of my life: no money.’
‘Hmm,’ she sniffs, disapprovingly and for some reason I get the feeling that the story of my blocked, knackered loo is the one she’ll be retelling later on. ‘OK if I light up a fag to disguise the smell?’
I lead her through the dining room (‘A table that seats fourteen, Jessica? And where do you all sit when there’s something you want to watch on telly?’) and then on out to the massive conservatory. She wanders around, freely tipping cigarette ash everywhere, passing disparaging comments about how expensive every single thing must have been, all the while comparing and contrasting with the soft furnishings in her own house.
Anyway, I hasten to remind myself, the thing to remember is that she means well. She’s the one person who volunteered to give me a dig out and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m determined to build bridges with her. If nothing else, on the principle of divide and conquer; if I have Joan on my side, it should make life with Laurel and Hardy that bit more bearable. Shouldn’t it?
She plonks herself down on a wicker two-seater, wincing a bit at how uncomfortable it is, then asks me the one question calculated to reduce me to a blubbering wreck inside of four seconds. ‘So, what none of us can understand is…has that Sam Hughes really just broken up with you and disappeared off the face of the earth? Where, I’d like to know, is he in all of this?’
‘Dunno,’ I say weakly, slumping down beside her. Desperate to talk and yet knowing that it’ll only bring on yet another tsunami of tears.
My latest theory is actually way too painful for me to articulate out loud, but for the record, it’s this: you see, while Sam juggles so many balls in the air when it comes to his career, in his private life, he’s a pure minimalist. From 6 a.m. when he starts his day, he’s like a puppet master, buying this, selling that, hiring this person, letting that one go, taking this meeting, having a high-powered business lunch with some top executive then off again in a whirlwind of activity and money making and success and all the trappings. But when it comes to his private life, he doesn’t just crave, he demands peace, tranquillity and absolutely no hassles of any kind whatsoever. Ergo, the very second I became a problem, I was unceremoniously dumped so fast that my head is still reeling from it.
And the reason I landed on this particular theory? Because this is history repeating itself. It’s all happened before. Years ago, when I was still pointing to warm pressure areas on maps in the TV weather room and Sam was dating a high-profile politician who was never out of the papers. Anyway, big scandal at the time, but basically she lost her shirt on stocks that crashed, was forced to declare insolvency and ended up having to resign from her party on account of some mad rule that bars anyone bankrupt from sitting in government. Huge deal, headline news, the papers even called it ‘Stock-gate’. But I distinctly remember reading in the gossip columns not long afterwards that she and Sam had split up. Coincidence? I think not.
I say none of this to Joan, of course. In time, I’d like to think she would become a confidante, but right now, if I have to articulate these thoughts aloud, there’s a good chance I’ll have a full-blown breakdown. So I go for a gag instead, ‘Oh, you know Sam, out helicopter shopping, probably.’
‘Well, no Jessica, I don’t know him, do I? Only through what I read in the papers. We were never introduced. Or even invited here before you fell on hard times. Remember?’ There’s a hint of ice in her voice now, which wasn’t there before.
Shit. I was kind of hoping that wouldn’t come up. Right then. Nothing to do but deal with this head on. Build bridges, keep allies and at all costs, get her onside. ‘Joan, I know I haven’t exactly been a model stepdaughter in the past, but please know how much I appreciate you taking me in.’
‘Well I can’t say we’re exactly looking forward to it…’
‘I know, I know, we fight like Italians…’
‘Oh please don’t say that. It makes us sound so…garlicky.’
‘Come on, I know we’re family and everything, but let’s face it, Dad’s anniversary mass once a year on Christmas Eve is taxing.’
She just pulls on her cigarette and doesn’t answer, but I know she agrees with me.
‘But, the thing is, Joan, I want you to know that I will try. To make an effort, I mean. If it’s one thing the last few awful weeks have taught me, it’s that I’ve been completely wrong about everyone who was closest to me up until now and I’m really hoping that…’ The actual end of that sentence is’…that I’ve been wrong about you, Sharon and Maggie and that somehow we’ll all miraculously morph into the Waltons over the next few weeks, right before I get offered a fabulous TV gig that puts me back on top of my game again. And gets me out of Whitehall and back to a life of luxury, with luck. And then Sam will realise what a moronic gobshite he’s been in letting me go and will come begging for me to take him back, with an engagement ring tucked under his armpit to woo me with.’ Not too much to ask, now is it? But of course I can’t manage to get a word of this out, so I settle for just sobbing my heart out instead. A real cri de coeur this time.
‘Oh Jessica, for God’s sake stop that right now, you’re getting carried away,’ snaps Joan, coughing on her fag now, but then this is a woman who hates all overt displays of emotion. Even at Dad’s funeral, the only way you’d have known she was having any kind of emotional experience was by the number of fags she chain smoked. ‘Do you know, driving here I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said “All men are bastards. Best you can hope for is to find a nice bastard.” Quite apt for you at the moment, I’d say.’
Through choked-up tears, I thank her for her pearls of wisdom courtesy of some bumper sticker, but as anyone on the verge of a breakdown will tell you, once the crying really starts, there’s just no stopping it. Next thing, Joan starts fishing around the bottom of her handbag, I’m presuming for a tissue, but no. She whips out a blister of tablets, pops out two, one for me and one for her and tells me to knock it back, that it’ll shut up my whinging. And that I can keep the rest of the pack.
‘Zanax,’ she explains. ‘Very mild sedative.’
‘Ah Joan, no,’ I sniffle, handing them right back to her. ‘The state I’m in, I doubt a sedative would know what to make of my central nervous system.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Jessica, these are no stronger than a glass of vino. That’s all. Gets you through the day. It mightn’t take away the pain but it’ll make you not give a shite about it any more.’
The funny thing is, she’s right. Because half an hour later, I’m loading all my boxes and bags into the boot of Joan’s little Toyota Yaris and for the first time in ages, I’m actually feeling…all right. OK, so I mightn’t exactly be dancing on the rooftops singing ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ but you get the picture. I’ve finally stopped whinging and from where I’m coming from, that’s a pretty big deal.
Joan’s defrosted a lot too; she even says that if I drop her off at the hairdressers where she works part-time as a receptionist, that I can have her car for the rest of the evening to keep moving the rest of my stuff into the house. ‘And don’t worry about where to put everything,’ she calls back to me as I drop her off at Curl Up and Die (the salon’s actual name; couldn’t make it up, could you?). ‘Plenty of room in the garage!’ Friendly as you like. Amazing.
Half eight that night
Right then. By now, the tiny garage in our little corpo house looks like Ellis Island at high tide, with the amount of suitcases and bin liners belonging to me. I’ve done three runs back and forth to my house and am almost finished moving. Best of all though, the Zanax haven’t even begun to wear off and I feel wonderful. Blissed out and totally relaxed. So chilled, in fact, that I’m seriously considering joining Maggie on the couch inside, where she’s fast asleep and snoring, sedated after two Chinese takeaways and four tins of Bulmers.
Sharon is working late tonight at Smiley Burger, so I know that for once, there might actually be room for me on the sofa too.
Next thing, the garage door trundles open and in thunders Joan demanding to know what the hell all my things are doing here and archly ordering me to get them out of her sight right now. You should see the vicious state of her; honest to God, it’s like she should be wearing a pointy Dracula cape with a dry ice machine behind her billowing smoke.
‘But…Joan…’ I stammer, momentarily taken aback at the severity of her mood swing. ‘You said this was OK, remember? You said I could store everything in the garage…’
‘Did I say garage!’ she snaps icily. ‘Silly me, I meant to say garbage. Now clear that crap out of here to make room for my car. If you think I’m leaving it parked out on the road at night with Psycho Brady out on the loose, then you’ve another thing coming, missy.’
Bugger it anyway. I completely forgot that she could be like this. Mercurial. Lovely to you one minute, then would clip the side of your face off the next. Her moods are like the moon; they come in phases and are ever bloody changing. Right now though, I don’t particularly care. Because I’m on Zanax.
Chapter Eight
Having lived here in humanity’s petri dish of hatred for almost three long weeks now, I feel somewhat qualified to set the following down in stone: The Heaven of my old life versus the Hell I’m sentenced to live in now.
It’s true what they say, you really haven’t a clue what you’ve got till it’s gone. For starters, in my old life, I never slept. Hardly at all. Dunno how I managed it, but I just seemed to whiz through the day, buzzing on the sheer adrenaline high of having a job I adored, a social life that wouldn’t quit and a boyfriend that even Angelina Jolie might gratefully consider trading up to. Now, I sleep all the time. Ten, sometimes eleven, hours at a stretch. And when I actually am up and about, I’m staggering around the place in a living coma, full of tears that I won’t let fall. Then there’s the small matter of where I’m sleeping. In my old life, I’d crash out in a four-poster bed, on two-hundred-thread Egyptian cotton sheets, wearing sexy nighties straight out of the La Perla catalogue, with my sex god of a boyfriend by my side, more often than not. Now I sleep under a duvet on a three-seater sofa with bum imprints embedded deep into it from my stepsisters. And as for nightwear, these days, I just sleep in the comfiest fleecy pair of pyjamas I can find. Sleep in them, eat in them, go round the house in them, do all my chores in them, you name it. One outfit only. No need for anything else. No one sees me and no one cares. Least of all me.
In my old life, back in those long-forgotten days when I used to have energy, I’d bounce out of bed, zip into the TV studio and then spend most of my day having high-powered pre-production meetings about that week’s episode of Jessie Would, followed by a fabulous, expensive lunch in whatever restaurant happened to be hot at the moment. And lunch, by the way, would usually involve myself and Eva spending a minimum of two hours lingering over three courses, discussing men, clothes and beauty treatments, in that order. Taking the world apart, then putting it all back to rights again. Now, I think, Lunch? Are you kidding me? Between the marathon sleeps and the long To Do housework lists I get flung at me every day, I’m doing well if I can manage to grab a Pot Noodle and a Jaffa Cake in between unclogging plugholes or, I’m not making this up, hand washing the heavy-duty, double-gusseted tights that Maggie wears to work. You should have seen the state of them, honest to God, I picked them up off the floor and wondered where the hell she even goes to buy tights in that size. Harland and Wolff? That, by the way, was item number one on Jessie’s To Do list, which I think the bad bitch wrote purely on purpose to humiliate me. Yeah right, Maggie. Like I could possibly be humiliated any more?
Messing aside though, the housework list that she and Sharon handed me on my first morning here led to one of out bloodiest rows to date, and God knows that’s really saying something. And, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m a person who comes with no boundaries, but what they expected me to do really was pushing things to the giddy limit. It would have taken three highly trained maids working round the clock to get through what they expected me to do in a single day. Gak jobs too, that you’d blush to ask a paid professional to get stuck into. Like clearing out all the drains on the outside of the house. Yes, all of them. Including one that would have involved me climbing up a ladder to the outside of the bathroom window, then trying to simultaneously pour bleach down a gulley with one hand, while clinging on for dear life with the other.
‘Are you kidding me with this?’ I confronted the pair of them as soon as I read the list. Or should I say, page one of the list, given that it ran to well over seven pages long. Double sided. ‘Trained circus performers would demand danger money for doing that.’
‘Think of it like just doing a dare on your TV show, except this time there’s no cameras pointed at you,’ Maggie coolly puffed back at me, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Remember when you used to have a TV show? It was back around the same time you used to have a boyfriend. Oops, sorry, how tactless of me.’
‘Gee, thanks so much for that, Maggie. One of your kinder and more sensitive comments, may I add,’ I muttered at her as I stomped back to the kitchen, mop and bucket in hand.
The only household job I’m exempted from is cooking, which goes back to my first night here, when I tried to make a chilli con carne that ended up tasting like a cross between paint stripper and dog diarrhoea. Put it this way: with me at the cooker, Nigella Lawson’s job is safe. Anyway, no one really cared, given that this is the house where evening meals invariably come courtesy of Domino’s Pizza or else the local Chinese takeaway down the road. (We’re far and away their best customers and even have the loyalty mugs to prove it.)
But to make up for that, they expected me to spring clean the garden shed, which still has stuff belonging to Dad inside and which I don’t actually think any of them have even set foot inside since he died. Well I took one look inside the cobweb-ridden door of it and could go no further. Because there, flung in a corner on top of a broken wheelbarrow was his favourite armchair, all saggy and torn, with bits of yellow foam and stuffing hanging off it. And beside that was his bookcase; I can still vividly remember him reaching down for my favourite book of fairy stories and reading them aloud to me when I was little. And over in a far corner was yet another container load of stuff belonging to him. Mum dying so young left Dad with a lifelong fear of losing things, with the result that he became a terrible hoarder. And here it all still was; except covered in dust and cobwebs with rain leaking down on top of everything that he’d treasured.
Funny, they say that grief takes two full years to heal but it’s not true. Because it never really does heal, just gets duller and more bearable, that’s all. Bad enough that every corner I turn in this house holds a ghost of his memory, but believe me, all the Zanax in the world couldn’t block out the searing pain of seeing all of his old things discarded into a manky, filthy shed and forgotten about. So I stand my ground and say no: the only job I’m prepared to do here is to bring all his things back inside the house again and restore them back to their rightful place. And that’s it. End of story.
So now, most of the time I settle for doing the bare minimum, which by the way isn’t laziness on my part; that still amounts to several hours’ worth of washing, scrubbing and polishing, then having a fight with them about it when they all come in from work and make me justify what I’ve been up to all day.
Sharon works shifts in Smiley Burger, so you never know when she’ll be around, whereas Joan seems to swan to and from her job at the salon whenever it suits her and unlike either of her daughters, actually has a social life and occasionally goes out the odd evening. Usually only as far as the Swiss Cottage pub down the road, but at least she’s out of the house.
‘If anyone rings looking for me, you’re not to say I’m in a bar, you’re to say I’m out at a wine tasting,’ is her invariable warning to me as she clatters out th
e door, looking like a perfume ad from the 1970s. Blue eye shadow, flicked hair, the works.
Maggie, on the other hand, is always home first. She finishes work at 5 p.m. and has her bum on the sofa by 5.30. Could set your watch by her. So generally, the first big humdinger row of the day will tend to be with her. Anyway, one particular howler went something along these lines:
Maggie (plonking onto her favourite armchair and cracking open her first tin of Bulmers of the night): ‘Why is my ironing only half done? What the feck have you been doing with yourself all day?’
Me (in the middle of hoovering): ‘Why Maggie, how lovely to see you too. How kind of you to inquire so politely about my day. I’ve been out riding unicorns in Never Never Land. Can’t you guess?’
Maggie (lighting a cigarette and sprawling herself out on said armchair, like an uncoordinated hippopotamus):
‘Listen, you. I work for the Inland Revenue. I’m in the suspicion business. And right now, I suspect that you spend the whole day sitting on your bony arse watching my DVD box set of Dancing on Ice.’
Me (knowing I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but not able to help myself): ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve actually spent most of today changing your bed sheets, washing your industrial strength tights, then picking up the empty tins and pizza boxes that you left strewn all over the floor last night. Now, I’m sure that you meant that last remark to be brimming over with gratitude and deep appreciation, so I’ll just assume that some of it got lost in translation.’
Personally, I Blame my Fairy Godmother Page 11