‘So, how is everything, babe?’
‘Oh you know, like genital warts,’ I said, picking my way along the busy wet footpath. ‘Absolutely ghastly, but I’ll survive.’
Priya, in full triclops make-up, laughed her loud, honking laugh. She’d FaceTimed me from her set between lighting changes. Behind her some cast members in their animal hybrid costumes or grey motion-capture leotards covered in sensor points sat in canvas chairs talking on phones, reading from scripts or staring off into the distance. One bald, muscled guy was having a set of giant elaborately feathered eagle wings attached to a heavy-looking harness on his back by three burly men in SPFX uniforms. Crew walked to and fro lugging various props, lights and cables. In contrast to her vibrant surroundings I was heading home from work along drizzly Charing Cross road trying to avoid being buffeted by Harry Potter-loving, umbrella-wielding tourists outside the Palace Theatre. It had taken a huge effort to get to the end of the week. Work had been horrible (zero ability to concentrate/worried looks from Lana/terrible coffee from Steve-o); home had been horrible (Mum forcing me to do cross stitch to work through my anger/Pete’s absence from the flat but his heavy presence on Giselle’s glossy Instagram feed/Dave’s dandruff on the back of the sofa), and the only time I felt even a seed of calm was when my mind wandered to Jimmy and Cape Town and Jimmy’s abs and Jimmy’s eyes and Jimmy’s grin.
‘Have you heard from Pete?’ Priya said, scratching one of the three fat dreads that ran along the top of her head.
‘No.’ I pulled my coat collar tight against the cold. ‘But he’s due back tomorro, so I guess I’ll see him when he comes to pick up his stuff.’
‘He’s a fucktard,’ Priya said. ‘I mean, I still think he’s ordinarily a great guy and he does make the best tamarind salmon salad, but his current behaviour can only be described as fucktardy.’
‘I concur,’ I said. ‘Fucktardy.’
‘There’s no chance you guys will work it out?’
I shook my head. ‘I think we drifted too far in different directions to go back. And anyway, I don’t think either of us wants to go back. We got together so young, we’re different people now, we grew apart, blah blah blah,’ I said, bored of the whole cliché Pete and I had become.
‘True,’ Priya said. ‘He didn’t need to cheat, though.’
‘No,’ I said, skirting round a throng of busy businessmen. ‘But he did.’
‘ ’Cause he’s a fucktard.’
I laughed. ‘He is.’
‘So how’s Annabelle coping?’
I stepped out of the stream of the busy pavement, stood under a shop awning next to the tube station and told Priya how, despite the fact that our world had imploded, my sister seemed to be doing better than she had in years. And seemed unusually, paradoxically content.
‘And your mum?’
‘I feel really sorry for her, actually. Dad is married to someone else. I just can’t believe it . . .’
Priya’s perfect eyebrows sloped with empathy. ‘What’s he going to do? Has he told his wife yet? Are your mum and him splitting up?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about my dad’s “real” life.’ I shook my head, still not believing that these words were coming out of my mouth. About my own parents. My own, boring, read-the-papers-on-Sunday-morning, put-the-bins-out-on-Thursdays, always-wash-your-jars-before-putting-them-in-the-recycling parents. ‘He arrives tomorrow morning. Mum and I are staying at Annabelle’s tonight and Dad will head straight there when he lands, so I guess I’ll find everything out then.’
‘What do you think he’s going to say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you want him to say?’
I thought about that for a second then launched into my hopes with Priya’s smile growing wider as I progressed. ‘I want him to say, “Wake up Jess, you’ve been having a nightmare. Would you like me to bring you breakfast in bed? There’s a box of orphaned baby raccoons downstairs and you need to nurse them to health. I’m pretty sure all of them are going to think of you as their mother so you may need to give up work to care for them. But don’t worry, a BBC documentary team is interested, so you’ll be fine for money and after that they’ll probably offer you a job where you get to play with baby animals all day. Do you want your eggs scrambled or poached, and shall I tell the reflexologist to come in now? Oh, and the news was just on and it turns out doughnuts have zero calories and cure cancer so we will all need to eat at least two a day. The ones with extra sugar glazing are the healthiest. Also Trump’s out, world peace is in, climate change has been reversed, snakes are severely endangered, scientists have eradicated all diseases and Jack Black is coming for dinner. By the way those new diamond earrings look fabulous on you”.’
‘Hmm,’ Priya said with a thoughtful, three-eyed expression. ‘I think you’ve set your expectations too high. Maybe just hope for “I’m sorry, I love you, please forgive me?” and any box of baby raccoons is a bonus?’
‘Maybe . . .’
We smiled at each other, then Priya’s expression became serious.
‘I’m so sorry you’re going through this, babe,’ she said. ‘I wish I could be there with you.’
I bobbed my head. ‘Me too.’ I looked at my gorgeous, freakily made-up best friend. ‘I wish your disgusting third eye really could see the future.’
‘I don’t see the future.’ Priya sat up straight, shut her real eyes, slipped into her ethereal character voice and said, ‘I navigate tiiiiime and spaaaaace’, then spun her creepy forehead eye around and around which she could do via a little remote she kept in a pocket in her costume.
‘Gross!’ I giggled and Priya opened her real eyes and laughed her honky laugh.
Just then a girl with a headset approached Priya and said they needed her back in the chair to fix her loosened dread. We said our goodbyes and I joined the damp throng of commuters making slow progress into the bowels of Leicester Square tube station.
Twenty minutes later my phone rang as I turned the corner of Annabelle’s road. It was Pete. My spirits, after six years of practice, immediately lifted. But then I remembered he wasn’t my boyfriend any longer and therefore wasn’t ringing to ask me if I’d like chicken or salmon for dinner. With a heavy heart I answered.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi, how are you?’ he asked, his voice so familiar yet also strange, having not heard it for a whole week. The last time we’d spoken we’d been standing at the bottom of the apartment stairs saying an awkward goodbye with Trust standing next to the van looking uncomfortable and confused.
‘What do you want?’ I said, but not too harshly.
Mum had requested that should I talk to Pete, I not tell him anything about her and Dad as his parents were good family friends and we were all in a state of limbo as to how this whole thing would play out. So, Pete didn’t know that his call was coming at a difficult time. I’d like to think if he had he wouldn’t have said what he did.
‘Well, I’m coming home tomorrow and I just wanted to let you know Giselle is coming too.’
‘Right.’
‘She’s actually a Pilates instructor, so will get work easily.’
‘Great.’
‘We’re not coming back together,’ Pete said after a moment. ‘We’re just coming back together. At the same time together. Not as a couple together.’
‘Pete, shut up.’
‘Sorry,’ he said and then launched into the logistics of me being out of the flat the next morning so he could pick up his stuff. Which worked out fine because I would be with Dad, learning all about his duplicity. I hung up from Pete, let myself into my sister’s flat and flopped on the sofa in front of Annabelle, who was sitting on the floor rubbing some oily-looking cream from a recycled jar into Katie’s elbows.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘In the kitchen making dinner,’ Annabelle said. Katie was singing along to a song playing on the family iPad in front of her. ‘She’s been crying again.’
‘What about this time?’
Mum had been crying all week and Annabelle and I had started exchanging WhatsApp messages entitled ‘Reasons Why Greta Cries’. Yesterday’s list had read:
◾ ate the perfect peach
◾ saw a dog without a bone
◾ realised David Attenborough was in his nineties
◾ was sad the perfect peach moment was over
‘She’s brought round the family photo album.’ Annabelle placed the jar of cream on the coffee table and helped Katie into her pyjamas. ‘She keeps pointing at pictures and sobbing.’
‘Right,’ I said, not quite ready to head into the kitchen to comfort my mother. I picked up the open jar, sniffed and recoiled. ‘What is this?’
‘Mad Mandy made it. Marcus’s sister.’
‘She made it especially for Katie?’ I said, reading the handwritten label instructing the cream be rubbed ‘into Katie’s delicate skin after a neroli oil bath’.
‘Yes,’ Annabelle said. ‘And she sends home-made bath salts that help Katie’s skin condition and weekly numerology readings based on my birthdate. Which is a complete bunch of crap because this week I was supposed to have a windfall and find inner peace.’
I snorted my amusement and replaced the stinky jar on the coffee table. ‘How does she know your birthdate? And about Katie’s skin?’
‘I guess Marcus told her.’
‘Marcus is telling his sister all about you?’ I asked. ‘Why?’
Annabelle shrugged.
‘Well, I think he likes you.’
Annabelle dismissed my speculation with an eye-roll. She signed and told Katie that she was all done and to go play with Hunter. Katie gave her mama a kiss then toddled off with the iPad blaring an inspirational anthem about loving yourself and not needing anyone else, with Annabelle smiling after her.
‘That song,’ I said, getting off the sofa and heading towards the kitchen, ‘is about masturbation.’
It was nearly 7.30 p.m. and the kitchen was clean, quiet and held no evidence of dinner-making happenings.
‘Mum, have you started dinner?’ I asked, glancing over her shoulder at the photo album laid flat on the table. She was tracing a picture of Annabelle and me in summer dresses with a short-filed nail.
‘I got the meat out.’ She waved a thin hand in the direction of the kitchen, turned a page and uttered a little German moan.
I looked around the kitchen and saw a hunk of frozen beef sitting on a retro plate.
I knocked it with my knuckles. ‘It’s frozen solid.’
‘Yes, Plum,’ Mum said vaguely.
‘How’s dinner going?’ Annabelle walked into the kitchen holding Katie’s iPad. She sniffed the non-aromatic air. ‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘Mum, what have you been doing in here all afternoon?’ I said, opening the oven hoping to find a secret, fragrance-free, fully prepared dinner.
Mum looked up from the photo album with tears in her pale blue eyes. ‘What’s that, Plum?’
‘We’ll have to order in,’ I said, opening the cupboards and fridge and finding nothing but salad, grain-free crackers and smoothie ingredients.
Annabelle put the kids to bed while Mum sat at the table pointing at various family events in the photo album where Dad was absent, making comments like ‘we lied then’, ‘and then’, ‘and then too’. I ordered enough Indian food to feed Calcutta then thought my stomach would collapse in on itself when they told me they were very busy and it would take an hour to deliver. I hung up and joined Mum at the table with the photo album, only to find out that Dad had missed my science presentation when I was nine because he was at his other daughter’s graduation ceremony in Cape Town. Dad had had all these big events in his life, his other daughter getting married, his other grandchildren being born, birthday parties, buying houses, anniversaries, and I couldn’t get my head around the fact that there was such a huge part of his life he hadn’t shared with us. How would it have felt to be at his daughter’s wedding one weekend and the next be back with us, not mentioning anything about that wonderful day? It made my mind swim and caused constant nausea. I tried to stand, felt faint, wobbled on my feet and fell back down on my seat.
‘Stop!’ I said, wrestling with Mum who was trying to push my head between my knees. ‘I just need something to eat, I missed lunch today. Get off!’
‘I can make smoothies?’ Annabelle said, coming back in the room.
‘That’s a good idea,’ Mum said, still trying to push my head downwards. ‘Why don’t you put some ashwagandha in it? To calm us.’
I managed to fight off my tiny mother and sat up, my hair stuck to my sweating face. ‘How are you so strong?’ I puffed.
Half an hour later Mum, Annabelle and I lounged in the living room, the lights low and Annabelle’s record player emitting something soft and jazzy.
‘I’m feeling much calmer,’ I said from my prone position. ‘That ashwa-up-ya-gunga stuff really works.’
‘Ash-wa-gunga.’ Mum said, trying to enunciate but bursting into giggles.
‘Ashwagandha,’ Annabelle corrected with a smile.
‘I don’t think I’m even that worried about Pete bringing Giselle home tomorrow.’
‘He is?’ Annabelle said from her armchair.
‘Yep,’ I said, tucking a pillow behind my head. ‘Together six years and it’s all over, pfft, just like that.’
‘I guess the women in this family don’t have much luck with men,’ Mum said, sipping her smoothie.
‘Oh, I got lucky in South Africa,’ I said, thinking of Jimmy. ‘And it wasn’t cheating. No one can say it was cheating because Pete cheated first.’
‘Are you ever going to tell me what happened with Pete, Plum?’ Mum asked. ‘Or do I have to call his mother and find out from her?’
I gave her a very condensed version of what happened while Annabelle sipped her smoothie and listened, having heard it all already.
‘And no, I don’t see us getting back together,’ I said as Mum opened her mouth to add some off-the-wall insight. ‘He’s made it very clear that he doesn’t see a future with me. And after that holiday I don’t see myself with him either.’
‘But you’re nearly thirty, dear,’ she said with concern. ‘What about children? You know your prime fertility years are already behind you.’
‘Oh I’ve never been worried about that,’ I said, airily. ‘If I don’t meet the right man my plan was always to just get some sperm from a bank.’
‘A bank?’ Mum frowned.
Annabelle sniggered.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think HSBC has the best sperm.’
Mum scowled.
‘Either that or I’ll find some cool, good-looking guy, have an unprotected one-night stand and not tell him when I get pregnant. Although it might not work the first time. I’ll probably have to have quite a few unprotected one-night stands.’ I grinned at Annabelle, who smirked and shook her head. ‘Actually, it sounds a fabulously fun way to have a baby. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.’ I looked over at Mum for a satisfying reaction but she was fiddling with a Rubik’s cube. After a moment she looked up.
‘I stopped listening to you after HSBC, Plum,’ she said, and went back to the cube.
We sipped our smoothies, listened to the jazz and talked in a meandering way about various topics.
‘I’ve had successful relationships,’ Annabelle mused. ‘Before they became unsuccessful.’
‘Your father wanted to be a pilot,’ Mum said, clicking one side of the Rubik’s cube fully to white. ‘None of this would ever have happened if he’d been a pilot.’
‘It would have been way worse if Pete and I had moved to freaking Egham and then broken up.’
‘I think success in a relationship isn’t longevity,’ Annabelle said. ‘It’s the intensity.’
‘Although pilots travel to South Africa . . .’
‘Imagine if we’d gotten married?!’ I took a gulp of my smoothie. ‘I’m better off like this with you guys.’
‘And the cabin pressure isn’t good for digestion. No, that wouldn’t have been good at all.’
‘I don’t even know why I haven’t called Jimmy back. I should. But I don’t want to talk to him while I’ve got the wrath.’ I giggled at the thought of me being wrathful when I felt so, so calm.
‘Anyway,’ Mum said, putting the completed cube on the coffee table. ‘Annabelle hasn’t had a man for such a long time.’
‘And she hasn’t had an illegitimate child in such a long time either. Well done,’ I said, raising my smoothie glass in a toast fashion. ‘We’re so proud of you.’
Annabelle tittered and curled her delicate legs under her.
Mum turned to me in a confessional manner. ‘She has low self-esteem, so pushes them away before they can reject her.’
‘Mum, I’m in the room,’ Annabelle said.
‘Yes, of course you are, dear.’ Mum gave me a look that said, ‘What’s she on?’
After an hour and a half I went into the kitchen to get away from Mum, who’d turned up the jazz and was showing me where I got my shocking moves from, and to ring the curry house.
‘The curry’s already been delivered,’ I said, arriving back in the living room.
‘I don’t remember that,’ Mum said, swaying in the middle of the room with all the fluidity of a rusted windscreen wiper.
‘Because they had the address completely wrong! Some fuckers have our food!’
‘They stole it,’ Mum tutted and swayed. ‘Terrible.’
‘No, apparently they paid. They are paying stealers! Is that even illegal? Can you call the police?’ I thought about how that 999 call would go and sniggered to myself at the idea of a serious police officer saying, ‘Can you please describe the stolen gobi, ma’am?’ ‘I’ve ordered it all again which they say could take another bloody hour. I’m starving, and you only have rabbit food here!’
‘More smoothie?’ Mum said.
‘I guess so,’ I said, falling back onto the sofa.
Annabelle collected the empties and left the room to make more while Mum and I sat listening to the jazz.
‘Your grandmother knew how to treat a man,’ Mum said after a while, seemingly continuing a conversation she’d been having in her head. ‘Her boyfriend didn’t write to her during the war so she sent him a saucy photograph. He came home and married her instantly.’
‘If only a saucy picture carried the impact it once did. I’m afraid free internet porn and the Kardashians have ruined it.’
‘Kardashians?’ Mum said, taking a seat on the sofa. ‘Are they the family who drove you to the beach for the day and forgot to bring you home?’
A gentle knock at the door stopped me from having to explain the pointless yet ever-present phenomenon that was the Kardashians to my mother.
‘Yay! Food!’ I leapt off the sofa, passed Annabelle carrying three smoothies into the living room and ran down the narrow hall. In two seconds I was back in the living room, grumpy and with a man in tow. He was wearing ironed jeans and had introduced himself as Marcus.
‘It wasn’t the food.’ I fell onto the sofa and picked up my refilled smoothie glass. I was going to eat the coasters if I didn’t get some naan bread into me soon.
‘What are you doing here?’ Annabelle said, straightening in her armchair.
‘Well, I just . . . I wanted to . . .’ Marcus looked nervously from Mum, to me, to Annabelle. ‘Hello,’ he said to Mum, who peered at him through her giant glasses as if he were some strange but fascinating creature.
Hunter suddenly hurled himself into the room and threw his arms around Marcus’s waist. ‘Marcus!’
‘Hunter, what are you doing up?’ Mum said, standing. She rocked on her feet. ‘Goodness, I feel a little dizzy. Must be the up-your-gunga.’ She looked over at me and tried to stifle a giggle, her eyes watering with the effort.
An excited WHEEEEEEE let us know Katie was also up and a moment later she ran heavy-footed and squealing into the room. She flew at Marcus, who bent down and picked her up.
‘Katie . . .?’ I said, confused. Why were the kids so affectionate towards quiet, wearing-a-nicely-pressed-navy-sweater Marcus with the mad sister? How come I wasn’t greeted with as much affection? I was more than a little miffed. ‘I’m more than a little miffed,’ I said, but as it was not in connection to anything I’d said out loud previously I looked crazy. I tried to stand up but also felt wobbly, so flumped back on the sofa. I looked at my smoothie.
‘Is my smoothie plain?’
‘What do you mean?’ Mum said, sitting back down and smiling like a stoned madwoman.
Stoned!
‘Am I . . . am I stoned?’ I said, incredulous. I’d never been stoned.
Mum fell sideways on the sofa with the force of her laughter.
‘Annabelle?’ I turned to my sister whose eyes were still on Marcus.
‘Yes,’ she said frankly. ‘You are stoned.’
‘What?!’
‘You were getting hyper so we decided you needed sedating,’ Mum said from her sideways position.
‘Roofied by my own family!’ I was aghast. ‘I’m aghast!’ I said.
Mum laughed hysterically into a cushion.
Annabelle turned back to Marcus. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Did you come to give me another mission?’ Hunter said, hopping from foot to foot. ‘I figured the last one out easy!’
‘Not this time,’ he said, ruffling Hunter’s permanently ruffled hair. ‘I came because . . . I wanted to . . .’ He looked at Annabelle, who seemed to be flushing around the neck.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘What’s happening?’ I said, looking from Marcus with Katie in his arms to Annabelle on the sofa with her eyes wide and an unsightly heat creeping across her collarbones. ‘Mum, something’s happening,’ I said, tapping at her head but not taking my eyes off the confusing chemistry between Annabelle and Marcus.
Mum wiped her streaming eyes, muttered about being ‘high’ and convulsed into hiccuping giggles again. Marcus put Katie down then crouched at her level. He began signing and Katie’s already beaming grin grew wider. Her eyes sparkled and flicked between watching his hands and looking up into his smiling face.
‘How come Marcus knows sign language?’ I asked Annabelle, who ignored me and watched her daughter and Marcus interacting.
‘What’s he saying?’ Mum said, trying to right herself but getting caught in the cushions.
‘I can’t . . .’ I leant forward and tried to read their hands. ‘He says . . . he wants to play the harp . . . he says ‘horsey do, horsey see’ . . . he says . . . no, that can’t be . . . he says . . . Agh!’ I fell back against the cushions, angry and frustrated. ‘I can’t figure it out, I’m too stoned!’
Mum howled with laughter and fell to the other side. I turned to Annabelle, who looked like she was either very happy or very sad. Or about to sneeze. Man, being high was confusing.
‘He says . . .’ I focused on his hands. ‘He says . . .’ then I gasped and looked over at Annabelle, who was tearing up. ‘He says “ . . . tell Mummy I love her” . . .’
‘Ridiculous!’ Mum wheezed, trying to straighten her skew-whiff glasses. ‘You’re too high. Try again.’
‘He’s a divorcee,’ Annabelle said a few minutes later while Marcus was out of the room putting Hunter and Katie back to bed. Her cheeks were still flushed.
‘Divorced?!’ Mum said, appalled.
‘He’s not exactly getting a vestal virgin with me, Mum.’
‘But still . . . divorced,’ she tutted. ‘Why?’
‘His wife had an affair.’
Mum shook her head disapprovingly, still tut-tutting.
‘From where do you get your moral standing?’ I said to Mum, who pursed her lips in return.
‘He’s a property developer. He’s thirty-six, has no kids and we’ve been seeing each other for eight months.’
‘WHAT?!’ I said.
‘WIE BITTE?’ Mum said.
Annabelle, tiring of Mum’s incessant tut-tutting, looked her in the eye. ‘Fucking for six.’
Mum’s eyebrows shot up. ‘No need to use such language!’ she said primly.
Inexplicably, or perhaps explicably (on account of the weed), I began to get the giggles. Then Mum did too and we gripped each other’s arms and tried to supress hysterics until tears streamed down our cheeks while Annabelle looked on unamused.
Marcus arrived back and stopped in the doorway looking uncertain.
Annabelle walked across the room, stood next to him and waited for Mum and me to regain our composure. Once we were under control, she spoke. ‘We wanted to keep it quiet because we knew you’d both have your concerns.’
‘And we do,’ I said, getting righteous. ‘He could have sleazy objectives. He could have dodgy money practices. He could have syphilis.’ I turned to Marcus. ‘No offence.’
Marcus, standing nervously beside Annabelle, reddened and waved my apology away.
Annabelle rolled her eyes and turned to Mum. ‘The kids adore him. He and Hunter have this little challenge game,’ she said with a fond twinkle. ‘He gives Hunter sentences in comic-book speak and Hunter has to decipher them. The last one was “Go to the centre of trade and retrieve the sunset orbs”, Annabelle said in an Ironman-type voice, her eyes shining with playfulness.
Mum and I frowned back.
‘It means “go to the market and get oranges”, she said with an expectant grin.
‘Hunter can’t go to the market by himself,’ Mum pooh-poohed. ‘That’s an irresponsible request. Marcus clearly isn’t suited to childcare.’ She turned to Marcus. ‘No offence.’
Marcus again gave a feeble wave of dismissal. Annabelle’s grin dropped. Just then the curry turned up and Annabelle and Marcus moved to the kitchen. Mum and I turned on the TV and with me on the floor eating my curry at the coffee table and her on the sofa munching her mono-meal of avocado, we tried to follow a documentary about stingrays while bitching about this newcomer.
‘He doesn’t look like the type to “shag and pack a bag”, to “doggy-style then run a mile”, to put “cock in hole then rock ’n’ roll”, but those are the ones you have to keep an especially close eye on.’
‘What are you talking about, Plum?’ Mum said. ‘And don’t use such language. Disgusting talk! You should be ashamed of yourself.’
I looked up at her. ‘I’m not.’
Mum pursed her lips. ‘I just worry,’ she said, pushing her avocado aside and eyeing my plate. ‘Annabelle doesn’t have room in her life for a man.’
‘Well,’ I said, biting a folded chunk of naan bread and talking through the mouthful. ‘Maybe she does if she doesn’t need us so much any more?’
‘Doesn’t need us?’ Mum looked unbearably hurt.
I felt the burn too. I turned back to the TV. Mum was already hurting; there was no need to say that I’d started to think that Annabelle might want some independence. From us.
‘I used to be scared of stingrays until I watched Finding Nemo,’ I said, and Mum nodded like I’d said something insightful.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ Mum asked, looking at my plate with its smudges of orange, two torn pieces of naan and a discarded onion bhaji.
‘No, I’m done.’
Mum slid off the sofa, hustled me out of the way and began shovelling the food in her face.
‘I feel like crisps,’ she said, after swiping the last bit of naan across the last smear of curry and shoving it in her mouth.
‘You’ve got the munchies!’ I laughed.
Mum crept out of the front door and was back ten minutes later with her arms and coat pockets full of the kind of crinkly wrapped foods I’d never seen in her possession before.
‘The nice man said I would like the pringle so I got three.’
