Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘But that’s just it. This wasn’t like that.’ I hear a thud above my head. ‘Look, I can’t really go into it now. Jake’s coming down the stairs. I just thought she might have called you, that’s all.’

  ‘Have you tried Celeste? Perhaps they’ve gone off on one of their outings or something.’

  ‘No. I don’t have her number.’

  ‘I’m sure I do. Damn. But not here. Tell you what. We’ll be finished up here in twenty minutes or so. I’ll try her as soon as I get home and call you back.’

  ‘Thanks. But now I think about it, I might just as well drive over there when I’ve dropped Jake at his drum lesson.’

  ‘And you’ll call me, yes?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘And if I hear, I’ll do likewise. Oh, bloody, bloody hell,’ she says. ‘This is all we need, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, God, Pru. I hope she hasn’t done something stupid.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ she says drily.

  Jake’s still quiet as I take him off to his lesson. Quiet yet not even plugged in. and I silently curse myself that I’ve been so busy worrying about me, that I’ve never found a second to discuss this with him.

  And that, now, clearly, is not the right time. Or so I think, anyway. Jake’s obviously got his own ideas about that.

  ‘Perhaps she’s run away,’ he suggests, his tone difficult to read. ‘You know. Like to pay you back for last night.’

  I wonder how much he’s heard. I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder at my imbecility in having got to this point in the first place. I attempt levity. ‘I was a bit of an old bag last night, wasn’t I?’

  Now he does turn. And he’s shaking his head. ‘No you weren’t, Mum,’ he says. ‘Nan was bang out of order. She shouldn’t take advantage of you like that. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Well, it’s all over now,’ I say, stunned by his frankness, and anxious to reassure him.

  ‘Good,’ he says firmly. ‘Because…well, I mean I know I love her and everything, but sometimes, Mum, you know…the way she treats you…’

  ‘Like a child.’ I pat his knee. ‘I know. And I shouldn’t let her, should I?’

  He turns towards me. ‘I was going to say like a servant. She does, Mum. You shouldn’t let her. You should tell her. It’s skank, Mum. You should make her do things for herself.’

  This from my son? My son who’s so young still?

  But he’s absolutely right. He’s heard that from me often enough. I should have sorted this stuff at least thirty years back. Oh, I could weep. I really could.

  But I don’t weep. I rally. I’m a mother. I must rally. With Jake’s sage words still making ripples in my head, I turn the car around and head off to Celeste’s. But my mission there proves equally fruitless, and without any sort of coherent plan in my head, I head back for home. Perhaps Pru’s had some luck.

  I’m just parking the car when Mr Davidson appears, and for a moment I think salvation’s at hand and that she’s been in there helping with his Triangle stand.

  But no, he hasn’t seen her. Has just come out to give me money. He presses a ten pound note into my hand.

  ‘What’s this?’ I ask, completely at a loss to understand it.

  He looks sheepish. ‘It’s to pay for some carpet shampoo. I’m most terribly sorry.’

  I try to give it back. ‘Mr Davidson, please don’t be. Mum managed to get most of it out already, last night.’

  He looks unconvinced, and he won’t take the tenner. ‘Then buy yourself some flowers,’ he says.

  Flowers. At a time like this. I don’t think so. Though I’m very touched by the gesture, I still can’t help but think that flowers are what you use to make wreaths.

  I’m still thinking that – well, thinking how utterly ridiculous it is to be thinking things like that – when my progress through my own front door is arrested mid door-swing. And by, it turns out as I ease myself around it, the two suitcases that are standing to attention in the hallway. My mother’s two suitcases, in fact. I walk around them and into the kitchen.

  Where my mother is sitting, at the table, with Wilfred, who is pouring from a pot of freshly-brewed tea.

  Not dead. Not departed. Sitting in the kitchen. As if absolutely nothing is wrong. ‘Hello, dear,’ she says brightly. ‘Can we pour you a cuppa? Did you have a good day at work?’

  I am so relieved to see her I do what almost everyone does when they have a bucketful of adrenalin coursing through their arteries and suddenly nowhere for it to go. I explode. ‘Mum, where the hellhave you been?’

  She looks perfectly astonished. ‘To see Pride and Prejudice, since you ask.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At the pictures. Goodness me, Abigail. Calm down.’

  ‘Calm down? Calm down?’ I slump down, none the calmer, on one of the kitchen chairs. I can’t cope with this level of hormone production. Neither can I cope with this level of disingenuousness. I know her far too well to be fooled for an instant by her affectation of surprise at my tone. Amazing, I think, even in the midst of my ranting, how quickly we all revert to type. Behind our masks. ‘Typical,’ I say. ‘You can’t even do that, can you? You can’t even take yourself off in a huff without causing a bloody drama about it. Have you any idea what’s been going through my head? Have you?’

  Mother blinks and turns to Wilfred, who looks up at me with the expression of a man who’s been round the block in the woman department and who certainly knows a mid-life crisis when he sees one. Though his powers of observation are pretty academic, I remember. He’s already been told. By my mother.

  Which makes me even more furious. I pull my bag from my shoulder and dump my keys on the table. ‘Mum, I have spent the past hour and a half in a state of complete and utter panic, thanks to you.’

  ‘Why?’ she looks indignant.

  ‘Why? Think about it! I get home. There’s no sign of you. Jake doesn’t know where you are. No note. No message. No nothing. Your nightie’s gone missing. Your pills are all gone. Pru hasn’t seen you. Mr Davidson hasn’t seen you. And after last night and everything…’ I glare at her. ‘Think about it. What the hell do you think I’ve been thinking?’

  She looks at me as if I’ve gone quite, quite insane. And then, the penny dropping, a touch guilty.

  But only a touch. ‘Goodness,’ she says, with a reedy little laugh that I assume is entirely for Wilfred’s benefit. ‘You make all this fuss about me being under your feet and then the very moment I leave you in peace you’re flapping about like a headless chicken. Abigail, calm down. I’m here now, aren’t I?’

  I gesture towards the hallway. ‘And also packed, by the look of it.’

  ‘Well, yes, of courseI’m packed. That’s why Wilfred’s here. I was going to collect the rest of my belongings in the morning, but he’s kindly offered to bring them for me now.’ She sips her tea daintily. ‘Bar my cheval mirror, of course. It won’t fit in his Micra.’

  I look from one to the other. ‘To go whereexactly?’

  ‘To Celeste’s, of course.’

  ‘I’ve just come from Celeste’s. She’s not home.’

  ‘Yes, I know, dear. She’s at her salsa class till seven. Besides, we were waiting for you.’

  I get up and go across to open a window. I feel too strung-up to sit down. ‘But why didn’t you tell me earlier? Discuss it with me? Why didn’t you phone me at work? Or leave a note, even? Or tell Pru? Anything? We’ve been frantic!’

  She gets up as well and fetches me a mug. ‘Let me pour you a cup of tea,’ she says. I don’t want a cup of tea but I let her pour it anyway. ‘Abigail, I’m telling you now. I didn’t call you because there’s really nothing to discuss. And besides, I didn’t want to bother you at work. And why on earth would I leave a note? How was I to know you were going to finish work early?’

  Which is a fair point, I guess. I sit down at the table again. There’s a box of chocolates on it. Wilf
red shunts them towards me with a concerned air about him. ‘For you,’ he says, gently. As if talking through bars to a dangerous beast. ‘Just a little thank you for last night.’

  Chapter 27

  OH, BALM ON MY wounds. An email from my much-missed son.

  Ye mum!

  Yeah, I’m fine. And yes I did get the sweatshirt and I did get the CD and I did get the photos. J looks beast! All well this end. Am off to Cannes with Dad tomorrow to see a man about a marina. I tell you, mum. This is the life! xxx

  PS can you send my ski gear? Plz? xxx

  Memo to self: I don’t care who said it. I am going to have a nice life. I AM going to have a nice life. I am going to have a NICE LIFE.

  ‘At EXO’ I read carefully. ‘You, the customer, is paramount. Mind. Body. Spirit. The essential triumvirate of the human condition…’

  ‘The rule of three,’ says Dee, equally carefully. ‘The holy trinity…’

  Because much of what takes place at Exo involves the client in being either prostrate or supine, much of their philosophy of personal wellbeing is written on the ceiling and the floor. Written lavishly, with lots of curlicues and flourishes, in gentle earthy tones that match their gentle earthy sentiments about how best to achieve personal nirvana

  Not that it’s working. We have been here almost an hour, but I can still feel twangs and creaks of stress and irritation infiltrate my personally prescribed de-stressing mask. It is so thick and so hard now that my frown lines have been disabled. My lips are dry from breathing through the small fixed aperture that is my mouth. I cannot breath through my nose because a small gob of face mask hangs from my left nostril like a small avocado-scented bogie, and vibrates if I try to inhale through my nose, which tickles and makes me want to sneeze.

  I have the impression that I am neither in a place or a situation where the violent expulsion of the contents of my bronchii would be considered an appropriate happening. I am, I muse, with no small degree of bitter irony, engaged, as is my ambition, in the pursuit of a nice life. And everyone knows that people with nice lives only have them by virtue of a rigorous commitment to de-stress and de-tox.

  Even if it is all utter crap.

  ‘It is, you know,’ I tell Dee. ‘De-toxing. It’s all phoney pseudo-science. Assuming you have a functioning liver and a pair of kidneys, there is absolutely nothing you can buy in Boots or from Carol Vorderman that will do the job of de-toxing better than your own body will, left to its own devices.’ I point. ‘And what’s with ‘triumvirate’ when it’s at home? What a load of pretentious twaddle.’

  Dee has a different face mask on to me. Hers is the colour of a Chinese chicken curry and was specially mixed for her to address the unique skincare concerns that a woman must attend to when she’s ‘with child’. Or presumably face the consequences. Which have been spelled out in terrifying detail by Brandi, our nice Exo therapist-for-the-day. Dee moves her face carefully towards me.

  ‘Still. It’s nice this, isn’t it? You know. As a way to spend the day. A bit of quality time. We do deserve it.’

  ‘You do. I’m not sure that’s quite how I feel.’

  ‘Oh, piffle. My God, Abs, you’ve been through it too.’

  ‘Not like you have.’

  And I’ll brook no argument on that score. The fall-out after the fall out was short but fairly bloody. Having made such a public statement of intent via their bedroom window, Malcolm has since consolidated his position. By putting the house on the market, counter-petitioning for divorce – for adultery, naturally – and also by selling Dee’s car. Which wasn’t Dee’s car, as it turns out, but his. Though in practice she drove it (he had a company van), it was Malcolm that owned it. His name on the documents, his finance agreement, his right (till the divorce settlement’s sorted, at any rate) to dispose of it as he saw fit. Dee’s been staying with Carolyn and her three Persian cats and getting the bus into work.

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ she says. ‘But when they’re handing out the medals, they can certainly leave me out. If I’d a bit less time being such an utter wimp, we wouldn’t have come to this.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have met Tim either, don’t forget.’

  And thank God she has. Thank every deity in the firmament. And she does. Despite the mask, I can see it in her face. ‘And now we need to find you one.’

  ‘One of what?’

  ‘A Tim, stupid.’

  I grimace. With difficulty. ‘Blimey, give me a chance, Dee. I’ve only just uninstalled Mother, don’t forget. I think I could do with an emotional break. Besides, everyone knows that there’s nothing less sexy than a woman on a mission to find a man.’

  And I’m not on one anyway. Because I simply can’t imagine that there’s another man on the planet I’d so much as glance at right now. These things take time. Too much time, frankly. But then I suppose I’ve got plenty of that.

  ‘So she’s gone, then? Like, properly?’

  I nod carefully. ‘As of last Monday. She’s moved in with her friend. I’m popping over later to take her some things. Fingers crossed the two of them are still speaking.’

  She chuckles. ‘And this is permanent?’

  ‘I think so. I hope so. To be honest, with hindsight, I’m surprised this didn’t come up as an option months ago. I mean Celeste’s been on her own for quite a few years now. And she certainly has the space. And they’ve been friends for, like, decades.’

  ‘And how’s Jake with it all? He okay?’

  ‘He’s just fine. Which is such a relief I can’t tell you. I was so sure he’d hate me.’

  She laughs again. ‘As if.’

  ‘No, I was. They’re so close. And I felt awful. We’d never even discussed it. Not properly.’

  ‘But he understood.’

  ‘He didn’t see there was much to understand. What he’d said, well that was just a spur of the moment thing really. He never actually assumed that was what was going to happen. Didn’t want it. He said we’d drive one another mad.’

  ‘There you are then. All that fretting for nothing. And now you can put it all behind you.’

  And have a nice life. And move on. And spend my days off coming to places like this where there is silence and serenity and Indian head massages on tap. All the better to concentrate the mind. But when your mind is so chock full of demons and goblins, is concentrating it in any sense helpful ? ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I say. ‘Trouble is, I still feel so awful about it.’

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t!’

  ‘I know. But I do, even so. You know, the thing that really gets to me is that I never really thought about it properly.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Mum. Why she’s the way she is. I’ve been pretty hard on her, Dee.’

  ‘No, you haven’t! You’ve been an angel!’

  ‘Only on the surface. Up here –’ I touch my finger to my temple. Carefully. ‘Up here I’ve been furious. Resentful and furious. But she’s right, you know. She never really did know how to be a mother. And how would she? She was only four when hers left her…’

  Dee touches her stomach. ‘God, so young.’

  ‘Which must leave some pretty big scars, don’t you think?’

  She mimes quote marks. ‘Issues.’

  ‘Exactly. Issues.’ I raise a hand. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not planning to write a dissertation about it. Just endeavour to think a little harder, that’s all.’

  ‘But you’ve got to quit the guilt trip.’

  ‘I shall try to quit the guilt trip. Anyway. Enough. How’s Carolyn?’

  ‘Oh, bearing up under the strain of living with a bag lady, I think. Still,’ she says. ‘Not for too much longer. I’m on the move too, as of next week.’

  ‘To where?’

  She looks surprised. ‘I’m going to move in with Tim, of course.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean I know things are great between you, but are you sure you don’t want to give yourself a bit of space b
efore making such a big commitment? It’s not as you’ve known each other that long.’

  Dee pats her stomach and snorts. ‘I think it’s a bit late for that, don’t you? Commitments don’t come much bigger, in my book. And you know what? I’m glad. Because if it wasn’t for this baby, who knows how long I’d still be limping along with Malcolm? Trying to do the right thing. Trying to make it work. You know, before I found out I was pregnant I was seriously – and I mean seriously – contemplating ending things with Tim. Can you believe that? You know, that thought scares me more than anything. That I might have done that. Despite everything I feel about him, I actually might have let him go.

  ‘So thank God for this baby, is what I say. Thank God that I didn’t have to make that decision.’ She turns and smiles. ‘You know, I don’t need space, Abs. Really I don’t. I’ve been living in a vacuum for so long. I’ve had enough space to last anyone’s lifetime. What I need is exactly what I’ve got. I know I haven’t known him long. I know it could all go wrong at any point –’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t.’

  ‘But it still might. I’m not so naïve I haven’t considered the possibility. But I’m going to go for it. I’m going to give it my best shot.’ She smiles. ‘Become a bit more like you, in fact. Stop being such a victim. I’ve spent way, way too long not daring to dream about having any sort of happy future; walking around with a cloud over my head, not expecting things to get any better. Well now I have to make them better, don’t I? Get back in the driving seat and run my own life.’

  Whereas conversely, I’m beginning to feel that, bar Charlie, of course, I’ve been travelling solo for way, way too long. Which reminds me of something. ‘By the way,’ I say. ‘I had a thought when I woke up this morning. How d’you feel about fostering a beige Nissan Sunny? Just the one careful owner, full service history, and only smells very slightly of mice.’

  Celeste lives in a house with a novelty doorbell, which played Tie a Yellow Ribbon when I called round last week, and is now playing Strangers in the Night.

  Which seems fitting. Because that’s what he was. What he is. Except the rest of the lyrics don’t fit.