by Judy Astley
‘Why don’t you get Dad to take Lucy to the audition?’ she suggested. ‘Or I could take her, I suppose. Depending on where it actually is, and what time . . .’ she backtracked rapidly, as if making the suggestion was more than enough; thinking through to the actual undertaking would be too exhausting.
‘No, it’s OK, you’re right. I’ll ask Joe. At least it’s after school so he can’t complain it’s a waste of lesson time. If he’s not actually recording today he might be able to get there on time.’ He owes me one, she thought, then corrected herself mentally, for after all it wasn’t a question of who owed whom. Such brief, body if not heartfelt passion was hardly a matter of having time to trade. Only the week before Sally had shown her a magazine article called ‘Sex with the Ex: Women who can’t give it up!’ She hoped she wouldn’t turn into one of those.
‘Oh and Henry phoned while you were at the hospital last night,’ Emily recalled. ‘He said when do you want him to do the painting, cos he happens to be free at the moment, till the end of next week.’
‘Everything at once,’ Nina said, looking round the room and feeling immediately defeated by the amount of clearing out that still needed to be done before the painting could even start. All the shelves would have to be cleared, all the pictures taken down, and the paintwork hadn’t been washed and Henry would want the sofas and floor dustsheeted and the rugs rolled up. She took a deep, resolute breath and started some mental sorting.
‘Right. I’ll phone Joe and ask him about Lucy. Megan’s taking her to school and should be here any second, Henry I’ll call when I get to the gallery and you, Em, are responsible for organizing supper tonight.’ She thought for another few seconds, then added, ‘Make it supper for four, perhaps Joe would like to stay. I happen to know Catherine’s away and besides, we could talk to you about what you want to do next year, couldn’t we?’
‘I wondered when I was going to be consulted about that,’ Emily grumbled, putting her cereal bowl into the sink. She looked up, caught sight of her mother’s face and hurriedly rinsed the bowl and put it into the dishwasher. ‘Sorry. I will try. I’ve got a lot on as well, you know.’ Emily was doing her best to sound grand, like a stressed executive, and Nina laughed. ‘You wait, you just wait. One day you’ll know what having “a lot on” can really mean.’
Graham had already taken nightdresses, slippers and washing equipment into the hospital on his way to work. Nina doubted that Monica would be allowed home yet. She’d heard enough stories from Graham about the lengthiness of the Social Services’ assessment procedures. Nina had only to find some interesting and heartening accessory to take to her mother that morning. She wondered about flowers, but knew Monica would take that to mean she was in for a long stay that nobody was telling her about yet. A pot plant would be even worse: she’d assume she was a terminal case. Monica loved chocolates, so Nina called in at the small food market opposite the gallery and bought some that had soft centres of kiwi and melon cream and coffee truffle at a suitably exotic price, then dashed across to Art and Soul to get some gift-wrap from the cupboard under the counter.
‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ Sally grumbled cheerfully. ‘You’re supposed to be hand-holding and heart-to-hearting before it’s too late and you end up in therapy dealing with eternal guilt.’
‘Oh thanks a lot, Sal. Sorry to be so disappointing but she’s not dying, it was just a fall.’
‘Don’t you believe it. They’re all dying, old parents. They do it on the sly when you’ve just had a row and said something terrible. Or they do it while you’re stuck in a jam on the M25 half an hour late for lunch with them. You’re supposed to hold your tongue about anything that matters the minute they hit sixty-five. Earlier, if they’re smokers,’ she warned grimly.
Nina pulled out a selection of flowered paper and chose a sheet patterned with sweet peas and some lilac ribbon for the chocolates. Monica would tut about the waste but would carefully roll up the ribbon to keep for another day. She had had a dresser drawer full of such saved treasures in her kitchen ever since Nina was a child. It was probably all still there, all the neat bright rings of ribbon in the huge oak sideboard. They’d still be there after she died, Nina thought, ready for her to sort through. It wouldn’t be Graham’s job – he’d be too upset. Just as he was too upset at fourteen to bury his pet mouse (‘Nina, you’ll do it’) and too upset at seventeen to go to his father’s funeral (‘A funeral’s no place for a schoolboy, Nina’).
‘Haven’t you got any customers you can harangue? Or what about calling up a few suppliers, give our contributing artists the benefit,’ Nina asked Sally.
‘No-one’s around yet – it’s only just gone ten.’ Sally lit a cigarette and opened the gallery door, blowing smoke out to join the passing exhaust fumes. ‘Isn’t it today you’re supposed to be taking Lucy back to that second audition for Barbados? You know you could close early and just go, though it is Friday, and . . .’ It was like hearing Emily backtracking in the kitchen again.
‘No it’s all right, Joe’s taking her. He seemed quite happy to, actually, really almost thrilled to have been asked.’
‘Aha!’ Sally exclaimed triumphantly. ‘He’s feeling left out! They do that.’
‘Like parents do die . . .’ Nina interrupted.
‘Yeah but men, once you’ve got rid of them, they go through a phase several months later, just like Joe. I mean, he did demand that extra lunch with you yesterday. They start taking every titchy opportunity to get back in, dipping in and out now and then just to make sure they’ve got the choice. You should make sure he knows he hasn’t. I know, I’ll fix up that night out I keep promising us. Then you’ll have something to torture him about.’ She gave a gleeful chuckle.
Nina smiled but didn’t say anything. The feeling had been creeping up on her that she almost wanted Joe to have that choice. At least, she wanted him to want to have it, which might, or might not, amount to the same thing. She couldn’t tell Sally what she and Joe had done on that frilly silly duvet: not unless she wanted a lecture on wimpy weakness anyway.
‘If he’s going to start having another family with someone else, he won’t have any choices about anything for long. He doesn’t even seem to have much of a choice about that either,’ she told Sally instead. Her fingers, awkwardly tying the ribbon on the chocolates, felt like sausages. Tying gift ribbon was one of those things you really need three hands for. In her head just then she was suddenly way back, years before, thinking about changing nappies, the tricky little plastic tapes that covered the sticky fasteners. She remembered the dexterity needed and quickly learned, of holding down a wriggling, giggling baby while she fastened a too-big Snuggler round its tiny bottom. Then there were all the poppers on the clothes to negotiate, the kicking little feet in a Babygro . . .
‘They were so sweet,’ she murmured, finally tying an acceptable bow.
‘What? Husbands?’ Sally looked horrified.
‘No, babies,’ Nina confessed.
‘Oh God, don’t say you’re getting broody now. It must be the spring weather.’
Nina pushed the parcel into her bag and made her way to the door. ‘Doesn’t matter how I feel,’ she said, smiling brightly. ‘I don’t have anybody to feel broody with. So it’s irrelevant, isn’t it?’
‘Not at all. You must simply make more effort to find someone. Have you looked in the back of the Sunday Times lately? There’s usually a rush of likely victims at this time of the year. Something goes to their heads in spring.’
‘Isn’t it dodgy though, meeting some stranger like that? I mean they could be axe murderers, standing there in some nice bar waiting for you with their neat pink carnation and just desperate to cut your throat.’
‘Don’t be daft! Look, leave it to me. I’ve got a brilliant idea – I promise I’ll fix you up, trust me.’
‘“Trust me”!’ groaned Nina. ‘Now why does that give me a terrible sinking feeling?’
Monica was sitting up in her bed, looking as if
she’d been in waiting position for some time. Nina’s heart sank. Her mother didn’t look any more settled in than she had the night before. Then, Nina had been happy enough to put her impatience down to unadmitted fear and shock, but now there was no mistaking cussedness.
‘They said I can’t go home, not until Social Services have been round to assess the house,’ she told Nina. ‘It’s outrageous. Aren’t we always being told they’re desperate for the beds? It’s going to be days. I’m not even allowed to decide for myself whether I’m capable of getting around or not.’
Nina sat on the orange plastic chair beside the bed. It was too low, and her mother was looking down at her in an imperiously enquiring way that Nina recognized from childhood. Any moment she would be saying something like ‘And what makes you so sure you’ve got all the answers, Miss?’
‘There’s no point letting you go home if you’re in danger of falling again or doing something even worse to yourself. That way you could be occupying the bed for months. Can you get around? Have they let you get up this morning?’
‘Oh yes,’ Monica conceded grumpily. ‘They let me get up. One minute they won’t let you move, the next they’re saying ghastly things like “Upsa-daisy, we don’t want to go getting a nasty thrombosis now do we?” I’ve got these ghastly white stockings. They make my legs look dead already. I expect the rest of me will soon catch up.’
Nina laughed, and her mother’s face twitched at last with humour. ‘Everyone gets those in hospital now, even teenagers. It’s just a precaution. You can always come and stay with us for a while, we could all take care of you between us,’ Nina offered, handing her the chocolates.
Monica laughed loudly and the rest of the ward’s permed grey heads turned to listen. ‘Oh heavens, Nina that would be terrible, we’d never get on. And your girls are so noisy. No, I’ll get Graham to fix the stair carpet and then everything will be fine. I might even promise not to go up and down stairs while there’s no-one else in the house. Anything just to get out of here. I can feel myself ageing and decaying in this bed.’ She stared around the ward at the other patients, some of whom were several years younger than her, and then said in what might have been meant as a whisper, ‘I’m sure it’s catching, you know. I’ll be as dead as they are if I stay more than a couple of days.’
‘So, if you get this job, you and your mum get ten days lazing around in the Caribbean, is that right?’ Joe asked Lucy as they drove to Kensington.
Lucy was sitting in the back of Joe’s Audi surrounded by the essential trappings of her modelling career. Gas-fuelled curling tongs were heating and would soon be singeing the cream leather seat; her book of photos was on the floor beneath her favourite, shamingly clean trainers. Three sweatshirts were laid out beside her and the ever-present Sophie, who sat in the front next to Joe, had the responsibility of choosing which one went best with her black jeans. Sophie’s role was to be an admiring observer. She was quicker at running, climbing and squirming through nettles on her tummy, but this today was Lucy’s speciality and she was on the edge of being over-excited and showing off.
‘We don’t laze around,’ Lucy declared with exaggerated scorn. ‘We work. Really early in the mornings so that it isn’t too hot. And I expect,’ she added grandly, ‘there’ll be some evening shots too, because of the magnificent sunsets.’ She returned to brushing her hair and dividing it into strands for curling, not meeting Joe’s gaze in the mirror.
‘Magnificent sunsets! You’ve been watching too many holiday TV programmes. Can’t be bad though. Well lucky old you, isn’t she Sophie?’ Joe teased.
‘Not really,’ Sophie said sniffily. ‘My mum and dad, they said that children doing modelling is, er . . .’ she hesitated, either groping for the word they’d actually used, or suddenly deciding she needed to find a more polite one for the circumstances.
‘Common?’ Joe suggested, grinning at her.
‘Um, I think so. Something like that,’ she admitted.
‘What’s common mean, exactly?’ Lucy asked from the back seat. Joe looked at her in the mirror. Her eyes were wide with pretend wondering. A chunk of her long chestnut hair was wrapped round the curling tongs. The ends would get split and over-dry. The finished result could make her look like something from one of those all-American Junior Miss Peanut Princess pageants. All Lucy needed now was jailbait raspberry lipstick and some heavy-handed dollops of mascara. Even though she was required to turn up resembling a normal, natural child, she, as all the other hopefuls would be doing, was pulling out all the stops. There would be nine-year-olds who’d had French manicures, tiny blondes would be blindingly highlighted and every child would already own her own bulging make-up bag. Joe felt depressed and secretly thought Sophie’s parents probably had a point.
‘Common means vulgar, downmarket, naff, grotty,’ he informed Lucy, thinking with sad disloyalty, please God don’t let her get this job. As he pulled up outside the casting studio, he regretted his plea. Worse would be the rejection she’d feel if she didn’t get it. Either way, he thought as the three of them went inside to find Angela, Lucy’s agent from Little Cherubs, Lucy shouldn’t have to be going through it at her age, however much she claimed it was her choice.
Once through the hall door, the worst of Joe’s fears were confirmed. Inside the rather shabby building, the air was stifling with hair spray. Lucy’s loosely waved hair was of restrained subtlety compared with the flamboyant full-scale perms of some of the contenders. One poor girl with waist-length black ringlets, Joe calculated, must have spent several days having her hair ragged and curled. He was the only father, the only man apart from a couple of twittering young ones who he presumed were doing the model-selecting and who looked at the assembled dozen children as if they were loose tigers. The mothers, smartly supporting but cleverly not outshining their daughters, were mostly turned out in neat pastel sweaters or a forgettable background of navy blue. The hall, by contrast was almost dismally dingy, with peeling green paint like an early family planning clinic, and a dusty old grand piano half-covered by a crocheted blanket in a depressing shade of musty yellow. The high, paint-flaked windows were blurred with filth and there was a faint underlying smell of stale beer; Joe guessed the place was probably mostly used for theatrical rehearsals. So much for the glamour industries, he thought, looking round at the fussing mamas and their pretty poodle-daughters. ‘Christ, it’s like bloody Crufts in here,’ he said. When running music to film for ads that featured children, he’d never considered this meat market aspect to casting. Those bright confident little faces plugging the cereal or crisps gave no hint of the horrors of mass casting.
‘Lucy, darling. Over here and let me have a look at you. Got your book? Good. A touch of blusher here and here I think . . .’ Angela, a vast woman in billowing purple, bustled up and gave Lucy a fast and professional up-and-down appraisal, ignoring Joe completely. She glared suspiciously at Sophie, who was looking bored and chewing a grubby nail and said, ‘And who is this?’
‘Sophie, my friend. She’s only here because she’s coming home with me after,’ Lucy explained. With undisguised hostility, Angela stared at the child who, compared to the others present, looked as if she’d been sleeping rough and never seen a comb.
‘Yes well, little girl, you just sit here out of the way with Lucy’s daddy; and you’ll be nice and quiet, won’t you?’ Angela ordered. Joe grinned at her, feeling a comfortable conspiracy with the scruffy, unimpressed child. Sophie’s navy blue school sweatshirt had a big streak of misrouted lunch down the front of it and the knees of her corduroy trousers were baggy and ingrained with mud. Behind her was a girl in a pink and gold Versace T-shirt who would probably faint if she spilt so much as a drop of water down herself. Beside her, a curly redhead was idly picking at a leftover chickenpox scab on her bare midriff. Lucy was led away to line up next to a child in orange frilled socks, a pair of lime green cycling shorts and a yellow baseball cap. Her face, contrasting with her winter-pallid limbs, was coated with exuber
ant tan make-up.
‘Getting into character, I think that’s called,’ Joe said to Sophie as together they looked at the child in amazement. One by one the girls were called behind a vast white screen where test shots of them playing with a beach-ball were taken. Each of them stepped forward confidently as she heard her name, fixing a beaming, well-trained smile as she went. Joe and Sophie could see shadows of the children on the screen, see lightning flashes as the photos were done. Bored, Joe took out his paper and started doing the crossword. Sophie, disobeying Angela’s strict request, got up and wandered about. Joe glanced up but didn’t call her back; after all, there was no trouble to be got into there, the place was beyond damage . . .
‘I hate you, Sophie!’ Joe was jolted out of an elusive anagram by the sound of his daughter shrieking. ‘You’re not even supposed to be here!’ There followed the unmistakable sound of fist connecting with face, followed by a howl and a scuffle. On the big white screen, like a very early movie, shadow play of a pair of girls, one lashing out, one defending herself, could be clearly seen. ‘Oh God,’ Joe groaned, ‘A cat-fight.’
‘Out! Out at once!’ Angela came looming from behind the screen, hurling out a furious Lucy, her curled hair flying madly and her eyes full of jealous tears. Her face was red-streaked and ugly with anger. Aghast would-be models and their fond mothers stared. Smugly, the mothers claimed the hands of their well-behaved darlings and drew them protectively close, away from the tantrum.
‘I’ve never seen such behaviour!’ Angela began, taking in Joe with her accusation.
Joe looked at her in amused disbelief. ‘In this business? You must have!’ he said, ‘What’s up Lucy, broken a nail?’
‘Sophie! They’ve picked Sophie!’
Joe, fighting a disloyal is-that-all, felt sorrowful sympathy for the distraught Lucy. ‘After what her parents said about modelling?’ he said, then addressed Angela: ‘“Common, naff and vulgar”, weren’t they the words?’ Angela, hands on hips, looked outraged. ‘And Sophie doesn’t even have an agent to pay, does she?’ Joe couldn’t resist taunting her.