It was a smouldering volcano, volatile and fractured. The smallest shift could blow it sky high
When the food was served, Mitch took advantage of Tansy’s preoccupation with her little brother to sit next to Ellie. She gave him a pallid smile and picked listlessly at her food. Now he was next to her he couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. To ignore her distress by beginning a conversation about anything else would make him seem heartless, but to rake over the coals of her unhappiness would seem cruel. So he just smiled and passed her the butter and tried to exude manly sympathy and support.
‘How was your golf yesterday?’ she asked him presently.
He made a moue. ‘I don’t think your dad enjoyed it much.’
She gave a little laugh, then. ‘He wouldn’t have done if you beat him,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I did. Clearly a bad move on my part.’
‘Very bad,’ she frowned theatrically. ‘He’s a very poor loser.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mitch gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘And I so wanted to ingratiate myself.’
‘Did you? Why?’ There was the merest twinkle in her eye, the slightest hint of flirtation glimmering through her care-worn veil.
‘Well,’ he began, moving closer to her on the bench, ‘I was really hoping…’
‘Yes?’ she breathed, the beginnings of her dimple quivering in her cheek.
‘I was wondering if he might consider…’ recklessly, he lifted his hand and tucked a tress of her heavy, silky hair behind her ear. Her eyes opened in surprise but she made no move to restrain him. He flicked his eyes swiftly round the table. No one was paying any attention to them.
‘Consider?’ she prompted, mesmerized. He had dropped his hand to her shoulder. It slid under her hair, round her narrow back and rested against her neck.
‘Yes,’ Mitch swallowed. He had gone too far now to retreat. He felt giddy, breathless and a little sick with the riskiness of it. ‘To consider if I might make a suitable…’
‘A suitable?’ she prompted again, hoarsely. Her dimple, now, was fully realised. Humour and, more deeply, a budding sexual response, was quivering under the surface.
He moved his mouth close to her ear. She thought for a crazy moment, that he was going to kiss it.
‘Truck driver,’ he whispered.
She gasped, and then the peal of her laughter rang out down the table. She flung her head back and hooted. It was as merry, as exuberant, as water bursting from a spring. Rob, at the boisterous end of the table, looked up at the sound of it and his heavy load of guilt lightened a little. Belinda found reassurance in it. Mitch drank it in. He realised it was the first time he had really seen her laugh. He sat back to observe it, happy to have divined it. He poured her some wine and nudged her plate towards her.
‘Come on,’ he said blithely, ‘eat up, or no pancakes.’
Granddad Robert sat in his customary chair at the bottom of the table. The old man seemed frailer and more disorientated than usual, a dribble of spit gleamed on his chin; he was having difficulty eating. On either side of him Mary and Les were managing his cutlery and napkin with deft, discreet gestures, and chatting across him with determined brightness. James and Ruth made another moody pool in the central section of the table. After remarking, ‘Ah ha! Potato Jaquettes!’ in that whimsical way he had, James had fallen silent. At least Ruth had eschewed the wine which had been offered to her and was drinking water.
Presently she roused herself sufficiently to say, ‘I found Rachel, you see.’
Opposite them, Miriam and Muriel were making herculean efforts, Miriam paying fascinated attention to the unsuspected nobility of Roger’s character. The top end of the table was ribald with hilarity, as Simon and the boys bantered amongst themselves with only Tansy’s occasionally reproving, ‘Dad! Really!’ sounding a restraining note.
Rachel sat amongst them, and said nothing at all.
Ellie finished her food and gave a heavy, cathartic sigh. ‘You’ve made me laugh,’ she observed. ‘I was beginning to think I never would again.’
‘Things are never as bad as they seem.’
‘It’s hard to see it, though, from the inside. That’s where you’re lucky, being detached from it all.’
Mitch raised an ironical eyebrow. He had never felt so connected, so attached, helplessly pinioned by his irresistible attraction to the girl at his side and by the compelling lure of the interwoven mesh of personalities and relations around him.
‘It makes me feel trapped. They,’ she indicated her family, ‘make me feel suffocated. Sometimes I think I hate them.’ She drank some wine. Her hand shook a little.
In the past Mitch had thought he had hated people, but it had only been a reaction built of fear and disappointment and bitterness and wounded love. He suddenly remembered a conversation he had had with a cell-mate about hate; words spoken into the darkness after lights-out. His voice, when he began to speak, was low, and she leaned her silky head closer to him. ‘A bloke I knew called Billy thought he hated his son,’ he said. ‘By all accounts the lad was a complete loser; addict, dealer, thief, violent with it – off the rails...’
Ellie nodded, ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘He would smash the house up on a regular basis, kept his stash there, and people coming to the door at all hours to buy the stuff... Billy had tried and tried to keep him in check but the lad was on a self-destruct mission. Eventually he’d just had enough. Anyway, they had a big row and Billy chucked him out and took his key off him. Then Billy went on a bender; he’d been sober for years but the stress of the thing was just too much for him so he went on a binge that lasted days. He woke up in a police cell to find that he’d driven home while he was off his head and knocked his son down.’
Ellie gasped and covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes wide with the horror of it, ‘Oh no!’
‘It seems the son had been out looking for him, trying to make things right, spotted the car and stepped into the road trying to flag him down. Billy had been too drunk to see him and just mowed him over. Killed him outright.’
‘Oh God!’
‘Now Billy told me that the hate he thought he’d felt for his son had been love all along. He said hate and love run down opposite sides of the same street and sometimes the street’s a very narrow one... Oh. I’m sorry...’ He realised that Ellie had begun to cry; silent tears slid down her cheeks. He put his hand on hers. It was a tiny hand, almost child-like, and very soft. He was glad now that he hadn’t intervened between her and her brother; that his attempt at it had foundered. He understood now, at last, the nature of it.
‘What a sad story,’ she whispered. She did not move her hand away.
‘If you wanted a bolt-hole,’ he ventured, ‘there’s always my room.’ She raised her eyes slowly to his.
✽✽✽
Ben had eaten too many pancakes. They sat in his tummy like stones and the nervous fluttering felt like the wings of birds trapped underneath them. He and Jude sat together on the piano stool as the family gathered in the games room to hear their song. Granny McKay, Grandma and Granddad sat together on the sofa. Granddad was quiet again, he looked dazed, his eyes glassy and remote, as though focused on something a long way away. It was like the ugly scene only an hour or so ago had never happened. But Todd’s bruise, and the way that he insisted on sitting on Uncle Simon’s knee showed that it had happened and could never be undone. Some things were like that; once they had happened you could never un-happen them. This moment felt the same to Ben. Once he had sung this song with Jude it would be out, escaped from the captivity of their private, shared composing, released into the wild to fend for itself. It would no longer belong exclusively to them. And he would never be the same either; he would have started on his path into the unknown. But he wasn’t afraid. Uncle Jude would tread the path before him, making the footsteps, like Good King Wenceslas for the page. Uncle Jude had told him if the song got released there would be Ben’s name there on the CD for all to see, and, less
exciting but still pretty cool, that every time someone bought it there would be a bit of money going into a bank account with Ben’s name on it.
He looked across at his parents. His mum, perched on the arm of the settee, looked pale and distant, hardly present in the room at all, unnervingly like Granddad, and Ben knew that it would not be too long before she went away from them for a few weeks. His dad stood behind her, but his size and strength could not save her.
The rest of the family had arranged itself around the room. Nearest to them, at the end of the piano, Heather with Starlight on her hip, the two of them smiling at Jude. On the small settee June and Muriel with Les between, looking uncomfortable. Simon, in the armchair, had Todd on his knee and Tansy perched on the arm of the chair, leaning against him. Miriam, away from them and alone, leant on the snooker table, tapping one of the red balls restlessly from one hand to another. Ellie and Mitch slouched on adjacent beanbags, talking quietly, their heads close together; she seemed to have cheered up. Aunty Belinda hovered behind his dad and away from them all, barely in the room at all, just in the doorway, there was Rachel smiling at him, except that her swollen face could not quite manage a full smile. Rob and Toby came in last of all. There were no seats left so they perched ridiculously on two of Starlight’s little sit and ride vehicles, their eyes unnaturally bright.
Jude gave him a nudge and an encouraging wink, and for a second or two Ben looked into his grey, smoky eyes, and then they placed their hands on the keyboard, and began to play.
✽✽✽
As soon as it was politely possible, after the applause had died down, Les switched the TV on to the football and tried to interest Robert in the game. Mary took advantage of a few distracted moments to lead her four children into the small lounge and close the door. James suggested Ben and Todd play a game in their room for half an hour before bed. Surprisingly, they needed no second bidding. It had been a long day and they were tired. Muriel went off to tackle the ironing while June put Granny to bed. She was unusually compliant, allowing herself to be guided briskly through the bathroom and into her nightclothes and swallowing her two pills which took quick effect. Starlight was far more spirited in her efforts to avoid being put, for the second time, to bed; wriggling about on the changing mat, making a nappyless dash for the stairs and yelling remonstrance throughout. It took Jude ages to get her into her travel cot where she stood defiantly and screamed at the top of her voice. Her piercing shrieks melded into the soundtrack of the boys’ computer game; the roar of engines and screech of tyres issued from the study and permeated through the house. Finally Starlight made herself sick, a gush of half-digested grapes and vivid orange spaghetti. She observed it rather proudly while Jude changed her sheets and pyjamas and the whole process had to be started again.
The match was a disappointment; it was well into the second half by the time they got the set switched on and City were being trounced by Spurs, 5 – 2 down and playing abysmally. Robert’s blue pill was beginning to take effect. Les took advantage of a commercial break to switch off the set and help Robert to his feet. ‘Come on, mate,’ he said, mildly, ‘time for bed, I think.’
In the kitchen, Rachel stacked the dishwasher and filled the bowl with soapy water. It looked as though the boys had used almost every pan and dish and bowl in the entire kitchen; what her father called ‘man-cooking.’ The skillets and trays they had used for the burgers were greasy and crusted, the floor was slick with food debris. Roger has doing his best to clear it up - licking industriously at the floor. When they had left the kitchen the table had been sticky with honey and syrup and sugar and orange juice from the pancakes but it and all the crockery left on it were now suspiciously clean and Rachel suspected that Roger had been busy while everyone had been distracted.
Ellie, Rachel thought, had seemed much brighter at tea time and afterwards. Perhaps the more time that passed without Rob spilling the beans, the more convinced she would be that he would not in fact do so. Maybe seeing Rob in such high spirits had reassured her that in some way he now felt less need to betray her. Ellie’s feelings for Rachel were blindingly obvious; she hadn’t looked at her or spoken to her since the previous night, and it was clear to Rachel that she was to be cast out of the cousinly circle. Her betrayal would always be between them for as long as she lived, like a debilitating genetic defect - a birthmark, a harelip or prominent stammer - glaringly evident, politely unremarked.
Muriel pottered into the kitchen, her arms full of freshly ironed clothes.
‘Hello, dear, are you all by yourself?’ Muriel said, kindly. ‘Let me give you a hand. I’ll just put these...’
‘Oh don’t put them on the table, Auntie Muriel,’ Rachel raised a soapy arm. ‘I think...’ she glanced at Roger, ‘well, it might be sticky, I haven’t wiped it yet.’
‘Oh alright, dear. I’ll put them on the chair then,’ Muriel replied happily. ‘There we are. Now then, let me get a tea towel. My! You have been busy! What a lot of washing up those boys made. You’re like Cinderella here, all on your own, aren’t you? You ought to be off having fun with the others. I could be like your fairy God-mother, and make a spell so you can go to the ball, would you like that? And dance with the prince. Gosh! Wouldn’t that be lovely? Except I don’t think there are any pumpkins...’ Muriel wittered on in this vein for some time as they washed and dried the mountain of dishes. Rachel thought back to Saturday night, after the furore on the landing, when Rob had told them all the story of Muriel and June and Uncle Les, and how Muriel had not been able to bear the sight of Aunty June since then. Rob had said Muriel had cocked a snoot at the family. But the idea of this lady being so proud and bitter didn’t seem to fit. She’d done virtually nothing but wash and iron since she’d arrived, between helping with Granny and making tea. And it came to Rachel in a sort of a flash that the reason Muriel had withdrawn from the family was nothing to do with saving her own dignity; on the contrary, it had been to save the family so that she would not be a constant reminder of that terrible, shameful thing which June had done and with which they had all, by their silence, been complicit. It accorded with the family creed; that one family member should be sacrificed for the sake of the rest of them. They were in the same boat, except that Muriel was really a McKay while Rachel wasn’t, and Muriel hadn’t done anything wrong while Rachel had. Perhaps she, like Muriel, would spend the rest of her life on the edge of the family, a tolerated, distant, poor relation who had sometimes to be included but never made much of. She might be an embarrassing reminder of family indiscretion long after Ellie’s silly lie about the teacher had been forgotten.
Impulsively, Rachel turned to Muriel and said, ‘You’re far more like Cinderella than I am, really. You’re the one who deserves to go to the ball.’
✽✽✽
Ellie followed Mitch up the stairs and along a narrow landing she had not explored before. From somewhere nearby Starlight was crying, angrily.
‘You don’t have to go and help?’ she enquired.
‘He’ll let me know if he needs me,’ Mitch said.
He led her into a small, neat lounge. There was an old-fashioned, over-stuffed settee against one wall and a table with an ancient television set in front of the window. A dim lamp glowed over a desk. The curtains were open onto black, blank panes. A small collection of Starlight’s books and toys were assembled neatly on the seat of an upright, ladder-backed chair. Through a far door she could see his bedroom; an impeccably made single bed, clothes folded tidily on a chair.
Now they were here, alone together, Ellie felt shy. It was ridiculous, she told herself, she had only come to look at his room. He turned to her and held out his hands, palm up. ‘Not much to it,’ he said.
‘You’re very tidy,’ she laughed.
‘Yes,’ he said. He did not tell her it was a habit imposed in the young offenders’ institution. ‘It’s easy when you haven’t got much stuff. I only brought a few clothes.’
‘So did I,’ Ellie said. ‘But you sho
uld see my room. It’s a bombsite! Although actually,’ she hesitated, ‘Rachel tidied it up earlier.’ She had not said thank you, she realized.
‘I haven’t spent much time in here,’ he said, looking round as though seeing it for the first time. They both looked at the toys.
‘You’re very good with the baby,’ Ellie observed.
He shrugged. ‘I just seem to know what she wants.’
‘You seem to know what everyone wants.’
‘I know how to make myself useful,’ he acknowledged.
Relative Strangers Page 47