Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Gabriel turns too, and lifts a hand in greeting.

  ‘Is that it, lads?’ he calls out to them. Jake lifts a thumb.

  ‘Well, goodbye, then,’ he says softly, closing the car door with a clunk. He leans forward, and brushes his lips against my cheek. ‘You have a nice life, Abbie, okay?’

  Our eyes meet momentarily, sealing his words. Then we go and join the others, job done.

  Chapter 25

  IT’S HARD WORK, refraining from crying. Hard on the throat, hard on the tear ducts, super hard on the nerves. And yet, somehow, by some miracle, I manage to do so. All the way back inside the club. All the way back outside again. Throughout the hearty farewells. The well dones, the see you laters, the mutual appreciation society back-slapping and the urging of the manager to come again, soon.

  Even when the last image that is burned on my retina is of the two of them, her stooping to climb into the back of a taxi, his hand gently guiding, on the small of her back.

  Once we get into the car, Jake, to my relief, is soon plugged once again into his iPod. Yet even that – grateful though I am for the absence of the need to make words – only adds further to my misery. It’s been thoroughly spoilt now, this precious red-letter evening. Invaded and soured by horrible emotions that, however intently I don’t want to be feeling them, I seem powerless to make go away.

  When we finally get back, I have to park the car six houses down, ironically just behind Hugo’s Nissan, which sits, stubbornly still refusing to attract any buyers, under the horse chestnut outside the Thomases’ house. Mr Thomas doesn’t mind us like Mr Davidson minds us, because he’s six houses down, and also deaf.

  I’m so preoccupied with my fragile state – my need for some sort of oblivion from my wretched post-morteming – that it’s only as I put my key in the lock that I realise something’s not right. Not because of anything immediately visible, but rather because the action’s accompanied by the sort of ear splitting squawk a cat tends to make when you inadvertently step on its tail.

  Except I don’t have a cat.

  Just a dog. I push the door open. There’s a thought, I think. Where is my dog? My dog who loves me. Who is always there to greet me. My mind moves seamlessly from thoughts of my heartache, to other, more insistent, less self-indulgent ones. Now I’m thinking Dee, who I left here three hours back, and, by logical extension, to Malcolm. To Malcolm, to Tim, to sharp kitchen implements, to cuckolded husbands and to murder most foul. Thus I step into the hall, expecting the worst. What I find, however, is no sign of either Dee or her belongings, but a woman of about sixty, in a peppermint-hued sweater and wearing glasses on a chain, emerging from my downstairs loo.

  I say see, but in fact that’s a loose-ish description. For the hall seems to be wreathed in a soft autumnal mist.

  A soft yet undeniably acrid autumnal mist. And there’s not been smog in Cardiff in decades. ‘Oh, hello!’ she says pleasantly, smoothing down her skirt front. ‘I’m Pamela. And you must be Abbie.’

  At least I assume that’s what she’s attempting to convey, because what she actually says is ‘air hell air! M Pamla. Anchew musby Ab-hic.’ I pull the key from the door and put the cymbal bag down on the hall floor.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I say back, because what else is there to say? ‘Hello.’ I put the bass pedal beside it.

  She sways minutely, then smiles, and then returns to the living room, shutting the door promptly behind her. Jake, by this time, is hard up behind me with his drum stands. I step aside to let him in.

  ‘Blimey, what a stink!’ is his considered opinion as he props the stands carefully up against the lower stairs. ‘Is someone having a party, or what?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I say. I am now, if belatedly, gathering momentum. ‘But I certainly intend to find out.’

  I am still, at this juncture, loosely working on the Malcolm/Dee/Tim bloody domestic conflict scenario and wondering where M Pamla slots into the equation. Is she Malcolm’s AA counsellor? Tim’s mother? What? My mother’s not in. My mother is at Wilfred’s. Because Brian’s had a flood. It’s all coming back. Wilfred was coming to pick her up. I remember.

  Another gale of laughter blasts through from the living room. Seems I’ve remembered all wrong about that. Seems someone is indeed having a party.

  And in my living room, too. ‘Ah,’ I say, opening the door again. ‘Hello.’ Heads turn. Hands flap. Greetings various are proffered. Cigars are wafted. Glasses are raised.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ says my mother, sitting regally at the head of what I suddenly realise is my kitchen table, clutching a small fan of playing cards in one hand and a half-finished sherry in the other. ‘I’ve had a few friends round. I do hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Er, right,’ I say, through the noisome, head-level fug. ‘Fine. Um – right. Okay, then.’ I don’t know what else to say, to be honest. I look around. Still no dog. ‘Mum, where’s Spike?’

  ‘Oh, we had to pop him into the dining room, darling. Poor Brian’s allergic, you see.’

  ‘Just as well,’ I tell Spike, once I’ve released him from purdah. ‘You’d probably asphyxiate with that lot.’ They haven’t even bothered to take his bed in there for him. Just marooned him on the laminate. How cruel. I press my nose into his fur and let him rootle in my ear. ‘C’mon, honey. Let’s get you to bed.’

  By the time I get back into the kitchen my mother is in there. With the person called Brian, and an empty glass bowl. Which she is currently filling with crisps.

  ‘Ah, Mum,’ I say as lightly as I can. ‘What’s going on?’

  She shrugs. ‘I told you. I’ve had a few friends round.’

  No. Wrong answer. Not had. Have. I look at my watch. ‘Well, fine,’ I say, continuing, as I must, in the polite and measured tones of a person for whom, irritatingly, there is a stray Brian present in the equation, denying me the opportunity to rant in my own kitchen. As they’re denying me the opportunity to sit in my own kitchen. ‘But it’s almost eleven-thirty and it’s Sunday night. I have work in the morning, Jake has school in the morning. So do you think you could start to wrap things up reasonably soon?’

  Which I think, even as I’m saying it, is pretty damned reasonable of me. In fact, were my arms long enough I’d be patting myself on the back.

  Just as Brian is patting my mother on the back now. I wonder if Brian is shaping up to become the next Hugo. But then I recall that he’s already married to someone. Isn’t everyone always already married to someone? Or, and how it’s hurting now, if not, then about to be. Which is almost just as bad.

  No. It’s worse. In any case, the substance of her answering ‘Oh, don’t worry about us. You get off to bed and leave us to it. We won’t disturb you,’ is somewhat diluted by another bone-shaking shriek from the living room, and I wonder if Macbeth’s going to join us as well. I feel suddenly angry. Proper throwing things angry. The sort of angry that cannot be easily discharged. The sort of angry my mother used to be with me on the rare – oh so rare – occasions when I got home late.

  ‘Well, I’d be grateful if you’d try to keep it down, please,’ I say levelly, gathering mugs from the drainer. ‘Jake’s got school, as I said. And please, Mum, would you at least open a window or two?’

  They leave the kitchen with their crisps just as Jake himself enters. His reflection’s in the window. His tall shaggy silhouette approaching my smaller one. And I feel myself welling up all over again. ‘All inside,’ he says. ‘Give us the keys and I’ll lock the car up.’

  ‘Thanks, darling,’ I say, ferreting in my bag for them and wiping my eyes on the back of my hand. ‘You know, you guys were brilliant tonight. Absolutely brilliant. I’m so proud of you, you know that?’

  He takes the keys from me, grinning sheepishly. ‘Yeah, whatever, Mum,’ he says. Then he looks at me harder. ‘Mum, what are you like ? You’re not supposed to cry when you’re happy !’

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me. You know what I’m like. I’m j
ust…oh, Come over here and let me give you a hug.’

  Which he submits to. His hair smells all sweaty and boyish.

  ‘Tea and toast?’ I say.

  ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘You’re alright, Mum.’ Then he grins. ‘I’m going to go to bed, if that’s okay with you. Way too many wrinklies down here.’

  I kiss him a reluctant goodnight, and am just thinking I ought to call Dee and see how she is, when Mr Davidson appears in the doorway. A wrinkly in waiting. He’s making good progress.

  ‘Er,’ he says. ‘Hello. Um… d’you have a cloth?’

  *

  ‘Ah, Abbie, dear!’ booms Celeste as I follow him back into the living room. ‘Are you going to come and join us? I think there’s some champagne left. Can I pour you a glass?’

  ‘Er…no, thanks,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to have a bath and get to bed. Busy day. Busy night.’

  ‘Of course! How’d it go, lovely?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Just fine.’

  Till right about now, that is. There’s a stain the size of a dinner plate beside the leg of the table. Red wine, by the look of it. Fabulous. On my white wine-coloured carpet. A stupid choice in the first place, all things considered. But it was on special offer. I liked it. I thought it would look chic.

  Mr Davidson’s knees click as he gropes down to try and mop it. The Pamla woman proffers a handful of pink tissues. Okay, I tell myself. Nothing to stress about. It’s just a carpet. An old carpet. An inexpensive carpet. A stain on a ropey old inexpensive carpet is no way – no way, Abbie – the end of the world.

  It’s just that everything feels like the end of the world right now. ‘Salt,’ someone’s saying. ‘You need salt to soak it up. Leave it a while and it’ll hoover up a dream. Kitchen, Di? Shall I go? What cupboard is it in?’

  Then the someone, who could possibly be Wilfred – how would I know? – pushes his own chair back to go run his errand. And in doing so, manages to knock over the dish of nibbles at his elbow, sending peanuts and cashews and silverskin onions to go forth and populate the further reaches of the room.

  I decide that in the interests of the NHS budget (it’s not cheap, calling doctors out to section people on a Sunday), that I will – that I must – simply take myself upstairs. If I stay down here a moment more I might feel the need to kill someone. Ms Garland in the Kitchen with the Kenwood Chef most probably. Wouldn’t want to add to the stain count in the lounge.

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ I entreat them, as nicely as I can. ‘I can sort things in the morning. Good night all,’ with which I exit the room.

  I hover a few seconds in front of the hall mirror, seeing terrifying traces of the woman I’m becoming. Which is the kind of woman that old ladies would cross the street to avoid. My hair, which up to now, I haven’t given much thought to, has danced its merry rain dance and now looks like linguini. I have gobs of mascara in twin stripes across my eyelids, and a cherry tomato for a nose. I have the face of a woman whose heart has been broken and who finds herself all out of plasters.

  My ears are still intact, though, about which I have mixed feelings. Because just as I stand and address the sorry state of my visage, Celeste’s words come floating forth to greet me from the lounge. That’s the thing with being merry. No volume control.

  ‘She okay, Di? Your Abbie? She seems a bit raddled. D’you think we ought to call it a night?’

  There’s a pause and a grunt – Mr Davidson rising? – then my own dear mother’s voice wafts out, load and oh-so very clear.

  I can’t see her roll her eyes, but I know that’s what she’s doing.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I hear her say. ‘Ongoing mid-life crisis situation, that’s all.’ She’s lowered her voice now, but not quite sufficiently. Not if I edge a bit closer to the door. ‘Man problems,’ she adds. ‘Take no notice.’

  Take no notice. Yup, she’s right. That’s me, that is. The sort of person whose occasional vagaries of temperament are of so little importance, of so little note that, just like warts and growing pains, they are best dealt with by taking no notice.

  I remain in the hallway for a further half minute. Fashioning a scene in which I burst into the living room, brandishing something – the bread knife? The kettle? A brace of Jake’s cymbals? – with which I hysterically commence the dispatching of her houseguests, like a serial killer on speed.

  Except I’m not the serial-killing type. I’m the go off and absolutely seethe instead type. So, seethe duly building, I trudge up the stairs. I shall call Dee, whose safety is still a cause for some concern, and then, assuming she’s okay, I shall seethe in the bath.

  And she is, as it turns out. Tucked up in bed with Tim. And going to worry about tomorrow, tomorrow, she tells me, before instructing me to get to bed myself. Which takes a bit of the edge off my fury. How ridiculous to get in such a state about my mother when real problems, bad ones, feel so very close to home.

  And, of course, there’s nothing like a long hot bath to soothe away your cares. Or so the ads would imply. Or so my own bloody mother would imply, as it happens. Nineteen seventy-six, or thereabouts. An ad for some bath foam or other that smelt of eggs.

  But despite my hopeful mindset, some cares are too entrenched to be amenable to soothing, whatever the unguents and potions in which you’re sloshing around. Because though the protracted contemplation of one’s navel can often be relied upon to banish the day’s tensions, the contemplation of one’s previously unacknowledged status as someone who is apparently gripped in the charmless embrace of a middle years crisis situation is not. But perhaps there’s a kernel of truth in what she said. Am I having a mid-life crisis after all? Could that be it? After all, presumably one doesn’t know that one is having a mid-life crisis until such time as some well-meaning person points it out for you, does one? And unless you’ve had a mid-life crisis of your own, you’re probably not in the best position to recognise the symptoms, are you?

  I spend forty-five minutes in the bath, wallowing, a further two in Jake’s bedroom, stroking his sleeping cheek, and a good fifteen sitting on my dressing-table stool, frowning, and wondering quite how I have become the sort of woman who needs it pointing out – and by him,and in so breathtakingly patronising a way – that she should go off and Have A Nice Life.

  None of which, bar stroking my son’s cheek (without which morphia I would be catatonic by now), serves to make me feel any less incendiary about it. And specifically (and in tandem with feeling so bloody strung-out about Gabriel), incendiary about my Dear Mother. Thus when I do finally venture downstairs – a good fifteen minutes after the last shrieking harpy and phlegmatic old codger has departed (and yes, I do include Mr Davidson in that – though am obviously cheered by the new balance of relations as a consequence of the wine stain debacle) – and find the spiny anthill that is my mother’s bottom glaring defiantly up at me from the living room carpet, it is all I can do not to pull back my best foot and then propel her, with force, into the grate.

  But I don’t do that. Because that would be illegal. So I plant both feet on the living room threshold and consider her instead. I think, momentarily, that she is engaged in some sort of yoga posture; the Swan, perhaps, for it has that sort of look, or maybe the Recently Beached Sea Cow. But then I realise she is not in fact posturing but scrubbing. At the carpet. With the new Landmarks of Venice tea towel I bought at the Airport.

  ‘You shouldn’t be kneeling,’ I say, automatically. She ignores me. I try again. ‘Mum, you know you shouldn’t be kneeling. Will you please leave that?’

  She scrubs a bit harder. I walk around her and go and open all three of the top living room windows, causing billows of icy air to mushroom into the room. At which point she stops scrubbing and goes ‘tsk’ instead.

  My mother could ‘tsk’ for Britain. My mother being, lest we forget, a dancer and an actress, has a variety of ‘tsk’ available for almost any situation, much as Inuit peoples have lots of words for snow. Th
is ‘tsk’, this passive-aggressive little nugget, is a ‘tsk’ that means ‘bog off and leave me alone.’

  So that’s exactly what I do. I go into the kitchen instead, where the table has been returned to its rightful position in the corner of the kitchen and Spike, order having been restored and the roof returned to his sleepy hole, is flat out and dreaming about whatever it is he dreams about. Not rabbits, I fancy. Has he ever seen a rabbit, even? No, perhaps he dreams dreams in which he vanquishes Airedales. I really must get him a new rubber bone.

  And while I’m at it, a new rubber heart for myself. Something sturdy and unbreakable, ideally. I leave Spike to his slumbers and survey the chaos on the other side of the room. The worktop by the sink is now a sea of plates and glasses. Some of them empty, but some still playing host: to beer and whisky. Wine. Sandwich curls. Pringles. Cigarette ends. Cigar butts. Gherkins. Smears of pickle. I take it all in and I pull open the dishwasher. Which is still full from lunchtime. I click it back shut.

  At which point my mother enters. In her slippy-sloppy slippers. I turn around. ‘Quite a party,’ I say.

  She puts a foot on the pedal bin and empties the dustpan into it. It closes with a snap and Spike starts. ‘It wasn’t a party, Abigail. It was just a few friends round, for goodness’ sake!’

  She turns on the hot tap and fires a stream of water into the washing-up bowl. Except there’s a plate sitting in there and the water bounces back, showering her skirt front instead.

  ‘Mum, can you just leave that? Please? I’d really like to get to bed and I –’