Laying the ghost, p.14
Laying the Ghost, page 14
‘Well, they never are at the time,’ said Isabelle from no. 14, a woman who still put lipstick on every morning before breakfast so her husband (a golf-obsessed, dull specimen, by anyone’s standards) couldn’t accuse her of letting herself go. ‘It’s only later …’
‘No, really. I don’t at all regret Alex,’ Nell told them. The bright pink shoes were quite nice, too. In her head, though, she could hear her mother being sniffy. ‘Ankle straps. Tarty.’ She tried them on. Tarty was good – though she had also heard that straps like this made your feet look like trotters. ‘If I hadn’t married Alex, I wouldn’t have Mimi or Seb. I’d have missed out there.’
‘Yes, but you’d have had some with another one.’
‘No. No, I wouldn’t,’ Nell said, turning away from them, back to the rack of clothes. ‘Anyone going to try this Jigsaw dress on? I love this coral colour.’
‘Talking of which …’ Evie’s voice emerged from the depths of Isabelle’s never-worn emerald satin off-the-shoulder number, ‘Mimi looks OK. I heard she’d got some nasty tummy bug. Was it only the one day off school that she had? Polly said something about lucky her – missing a maths test!’
Nell stopped fiddling with the coral dress’s zip. ‘When? Last week? She’s been fine! She hasn’t been off school …’
Even as she said it she wished she hadn’t. Because, for some reason, Mimi obviously had taken time off. Why? The faces that were staring at her now, with questioning little smiles, were also dying to know. Whatever the reason was, she didn’t want the entire neighbourhood wondering about it, discussing how it was all starting to fall to bits at no. 19, now Alex had buggered off.
10
Manic Monday
(The Bangles)
‘SO. LAST WEDNESDAY – where were you, Mimi? Why weren’t you in school?’
Eight in the morning probably wasn’t the most sensible time to try and get this sorted, but Nell’s theory was that if you pounced on Mimi with a really tricky question while she was still warm from sleep, she was likely to come up with the truth, entirely because she was still too dozy to think of an instant convincing lie. The evening before, Mimi had stayed on at Polly’s, ganging up in Don and Evie’s faux-Gothic conservatory to swop embarrassing-mother experiences, so there was no opportunity to confront her. Nell’s evening had turned into a sudden write-off. Apart from loyal Kate’s, each of the faces that turned to her after she’d been unexpectedly caught in possession of a lying, wayward daughter, expressed the same gleeful anticipation of trouble ahead. Sweet, clever, pretty Mimi: the one who’d got it all in looks and brains and a potential brilliant future to boot – she was showing early signs, after all, of being a holy teenage terror for her newly single mum. What a result. Every woman’s face said one thing: thank you, God! This is happening to someone else, not me! I am a top mother: you are a parental-disaster reality show!
Nell felt, though she knew it was an exaggeration, that the baton of thoroughly bad behaviour had been passed from Polly Mitchell to Mimi. Evie was that close to shrieking ‘YESSS!’ and punching the air. Nell had gone off the coral dress, suddenly hated the pig-feet shoes, and had gone home soon after, gloomy and empty-handed, to get into bed with the cat and curse Alex for leaving her to deal with everything. How could he just walk away? How could he think that leaving her the house and everything in it was going to be complete compensation for opting out on all teen management? And why did he no longer want anything from this home that they’d made together – did he value so little every item that they’d chosen? He hadn’t shipped out to New York so much as a single painting (not even the Patrick Proctor lithos that he’d always loved – or claimed he did), not a book, not a photograph, nothing. She’d lain there sleepless and seething and getting hotter and more furious, calling curses from the most venomous gods down on Alex and all errant men.
‘Bath,’ Mimi mumbled from the depths of the fridge. She emerged with the milk, took the cap off and sniffed warily at the contents.
‘You were in the bath? All day?’ Oh God, Nell couldn’t help thinking, was she with a boy? While she had been … ooh yes, sneakily checking out the whereabouts of her own old lost lover?
‘Are you mad? Of course I wasn’t in the bath!’ Mimi sloshed milk clumsily on to her Alpen. It spilt over the sides on to the table. Pablo the cat, waiting on the floor, licked his lips.
‘Bath. Like, the place? Jane Austen and stuff? Romans?’ Full-scale sarcasm was an expected, challenging defence; Nell recognized it well. The wide-eyed, sneering derrr? expression matched it perfectly.
‘Bath-the-city. Right. OK, and what exactly were you doing there?’ With difficulty, Nell kept her tone calm and pushed a slice of bread into the toaster. Watching Mimi eat made her hungry. She’d thought she wasn’t – feeling too keyed up. Trying to sleep the night before, she’d pictured Mimi spending the skived schoolday in Soho, touring the clubs looking for work as a lap dancer (why? Why would Mimi want to do that?). Or having a secret meeting with a top model agency and planning on ditching the rest of her education (also unlikely – Mimi was a beautiful girl but would never grow to the required six-feet height). Or … the worst one: she could have been down at the travel agency in the high street, organizing a cheap open ticket to New York, so she could race off to join her father and … Cherisse … at the first sign of discord in the house. But then she wouldn’t do that either. She’d have looked on the Internet for it, surely. Please God, she hadn’t.
‘ ’S research. For a project,’ Mimi mumbled through a mouthful of muesli. ‘I’ve never been there and I needed to see it. I’m doing a talk for English – we all have to choose a historic person and give a five-minute talk on them. It’s practice for the GCSE stuff, right?’
‘All right …’ Nell recognized that this could be along the lines of truth, but still didn’t see where a day’s unofficial school absence came in. If all the pupils took off on such flimsy pretexts whenever they fancied, the school would be permanently half-empty. Half? No, completely empty. There would be stray teenagers mooching about everywhere you looked, shoving you off the pavements and lurking annoyingly in shop doorways.
‘So who are you doing? Is that the Jane Austen connection? Why didn’t you say? We could have gone down together one weekend, stayed over, done the whole place. The city has great shops. You didn’t need to skip school.’
‘I’m doing Brunel?’ Mimi was looking at Nell as if she was crazy, giving her that question intonation as if this was such an obvious fact that it was clearly beyond requiring discussion. Surely Jane Austen had been a perfectly reasonable assumption? Mimi had read all her books the year before. They’d talked about them, laughed about how Lydia Bennet was as wild and wayward as any twenty-first-century teenager, exactly the sort who’d constantly ‘wha’ever’ her long-suffering parents and have maximum skin on show in mid-January.
‘Brunel? What on earth do you know about him and what’s he got to do with Bath?’
Mimi gave her a glance that clearly pitied her ignorance. ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born in Portsmouth on 9th April 1806. His mother was Sophia Kingdom who was English and his father was Marc Brunel, a French engineer …’
‘OK, OK, I get the idea.’ Nell’s toast popped up, in a haze of blue smoke. It was overdone round the edges but just about the right side of thoroughly scorched. It would do. Nell spread honey over it and went to sit opposite Mimi.
‘And Bath?’ And how did you get there, how did you pay for it, who did you go with …? Nell squashed down her need to know all this and forced herself to be patient. It would all come out in time, of which there wasn’t, right now, anywhere near enough.
‘The railway. The Great Western Railway,’ Mimi said simply. ‘He built it, and designed the stations at Bath, Paddington, the old Bristol Temple Meads, but now that’s not used, ’cept as a museum, and he was a genius. The Box Tunnel was … um … a … pioneering feat of engineering.’
Nell gave her a sharp look but saw only wide-eyed innocence. Mimi sounded as if she was quoting someone; this was surely straight from a book. A book would have been the place to find out all she needed. That or by way of the sainted, all-knowing Google.
Mimi returned her stare. ‘What? That’s all. I needed to have a look. OK?’
Well no, it wasn’t. They’d have to talk later about the skipping-school thing. Time really had run out now. If Nell kept her any longer, Mimi would triumphantly accuse her of being the cause of more missed school. Three minutes, max, and Mimi would have to leave to catch her bus.
Now flouncing with a sense of moral high ground, Mimi stowed her bowl in the dishwasher and rinsed sugary milk off her fingers.
‘Gotta go … I’ll be late. I’ll just go and do my teeth.’ And she was gone in a whirl of wheatstraw hair and the scent of coconut shower gel, leaving Nell’s ‘And did you go there on your own?’ echoing unanswered down the hallway.
Bugger, Nell thought, crunching through the rigid, charred toast. That didn’t exactly go well.
Minutes later, the front door slammed and a casually unconcerned ‘Byeee!’ drifted back to her from halfway down the path. Nell stroked Pablo’s furry ears and cursed Alex again for his absence. He should be around – if he came back this minute, even for a flying visit, she would fling herself on him in delight. Another grown-up to share Mimi’s misdemeanours with would be very welcome right now. Instead, Nell was going to have to share her thoughts with only blighted tomatoes followed by lettuces that were, literally, heartless. Oh joy.
Mimi and Tess sat silently on the bus. Tess bit her thumbnail and stared at the graffiti (‘Nick’s a prick’: a direct but pathetically unimaginative observation, in her opinion) scrawled on the back of the seat in front while Mimi gazed out of the window.
‘I wouldn’t mind but … it’s not like she doesn’t have a secret life as well. I’m entitled. I don’t have to tell her everything I do,’ Mimi grumbled.
‘What secret life? She’s your mum. They don’t have secret lives! What secrets can they have? They take care of us and they go down Sainsbury’s. End of.’
Mimi sighed. ‘I think mine’s getting one. She’s got this man sniffing round: her self-defence teacher. She’s all sickly-smiley with him, like she’s grateful or something. It’s because Dad’s not there – she needs to get male attention to make herself feel better. I read about that in her friend Kate’s stupid divorce book. Do you think she’s doing payback? Is this what they do? God, I hope she doesn’t go like Carly Calder’s mum.’ Mimi put her hands over her face, recalling the horror of Carly’s mother turning up for parents’ night in a mid-thigh black leather skirt, her 38FF breasts crammed into a tight, low-cut scarlet top, the look completed with strappy silver stilettos that someone’s dad had sneeringly (and leeringly) described as ‘fuck-me’ shoes. He wasn’t wrong. Carly’s mum had practically oozed her whole body across the desk at Mr Merrick (maths). You didn’t normally feel sorry for teachers – the general opinion was that they mostly deserved all the grief that was coming to them – but in this case, well, if one of the girls got a bit close, he still sometimes had that scared-rabbit look, as if he’d never quite recovered from that terrible night.
Tess put an arm round Mimi. ‘Shit, babes, there’s no way! Your mum’s got a lot more class than that. Carly’s mum went all needy and weird when the dad went off. Dressing like a slut was just a symptom.’
‘Yeah,’ Mimi giggled, ‘of being a slut!’
‘In this case true. A slut. Seriously rough. Poor Carly.’
‘Can’t argue with that. And I suppose I should be glad my mum’s not lying on the sofa drinking gin and crying. They were quite OK about the break-up, like …’ Mimi sniffed. ‘Like it was something that was always going to happen; time’s-up kind of thing. I already think, God, if Joel ends it with me … what will I do?’
Tess pulled a pack of tissues from her bag and handed it to Mimi. ‘Mims, babe, you can’t be crying over a boyfriend you’ve had for only two weeks and who hasn’t even thought of dumping you yet! OK, he’s fit enough, but he’s lucky to have you. Get a grip, for fuck’s sake. What do you think you’d do? You’d be just the same as you were three weeks ago!’
Mimi tried not to think about when she and Tess had kissed. Something about that had sent a zing through her that didn’t quite happen when Joel kissed her. Maybe it had been the mood of the moment. Or perhaps it was the scent Tess wore, the feel of her long, soft hair or something. Maybe she and Joel needed a right-time, right-place thing to happen. She was meeting him after school, going to his house. Maybe, for once, they’d talk about something that wasn’t hard-core engineering or old-style rave music that he had a thing about too. She now knew more than anyone needed to about Brunel, Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Sir John Fowler, Sir Benjamin Baker, Stephenson, Watt and Trevithick, not to mention bands like Chicane and Leftfield. It was hard to convince Joel that there was more to life than steam turbines, the mechanics of viaduct structure and dance music that pumped at foetal heartbeat rate, but she was working on it.
‘Well? Anything?’ Kate was on the doorstep at only nine thirty, straight from dropping Alvin at his nursery. She was holding a heap of mail that she’d just grabbed from Nell’s postman at the gate. Nell took it from her before Kate took it on herself to rip open any promising-looking envelopes, and, hands trembling as they did at this moment every morning, she flicked through the Visa bill, gas bill, offers from Majestic Wine, a postcard for Mimi from Seb (surfers, Fistral beach) and a cheque from Top Dogs magazine for a story illustration. Nothing from Patrick.
It had only been a few days since she’d sent her letter, but Nell’s heart pounded uncomfortably each morning when the mail arrived. She’d really thought today might be it. She’d imagined him leaving it to the weekend to reply to her, waiting till he had the chance to think what to say in a relaxed setting, with time to get the words right. If he’d posted it on Sunday morning it should be in her hand now. She’d give it another day or two, allow for him choosing a mailbox with no Sunday collection, or for having posted it in the evening … or on the way out the following morning … or finding it after a hectic Monday and mailing it later that night. So that was the mail covered for most of the week.
On top of that, there was the more likely chance of a twenty-first-century response: every time she switched on her computer, there was yet another hurtling downslide of disappointment as the list of new emails came up in her inbox, showing her usual list of contacts and nothing from him. She checked the junk-mail folder, just in case, and trawled through the offers of penis enlargement, ultimate diets, Viagra, scam lottery wins and fake Rolexes, to make sure he wasn’t hidden away among that lot. Whenever the phone rang, she got a surge of adrenalin that scorched her kidneys. She hoped that when (if?) Patrick contacted her, it would be via email or letter. She wasn’t at all sure she’d be capable of assembling any words that made sense if she had to talk to him in person, straight off.
‘Sweet nothing. Same as every day. I mean, I know it hasn’t been long since I sent it, but if he was going to make contact, I’d have thought he’d do it pretty instantly. It’s not good if he’s having to hang about thinking whether to or not.’
‘He could just phone you. That would be the simplest. You did give him …?’
‘Yes, of course I did! Landline and mobile. And email address. I’m open to all communication, me,’ Nell told Kate. ‘But who knows? Maybe there’s a good explanation. Like he’d rather eat chicken feathers than talk to me ever again.’
She felt weary, leading Kate through to the kitchen. It was as if having got the mail and the computer-checking out of the way, the day offered nothing more till after school time, when she had the non-blissful prospect of finishing dealing with Mimi. She might as well go back to bed, pull the duvet over her head and sleep all the day’s hours away. If she hadn’t got a living to earn she’d be very tempted.
‘Come on now, be rational,’ Kate told her. ‘It’s hardly been any time at all. Perhaps he’s away somewhere. If he lives alone and works at something arty, he can please himself, can’t he? He might be up a mountain getting inspiration from cloud formations or he might be in Australia, staring into the Indian Ocean and wondering how to get the colour of it right.’
‘I know, I know. I just wish I hadn’t started this. I mean, what am I hoping to achieve here? I’m just using it as an excuse not to get on with the rest of my life. It’s like some kind of obstacle I’ve put up, something to be climbed over before I move on and sort myself out. I don’t need it and it won’t change anything!’
‘You should have done it years ago,’ Kate told her firmly. ‘It’s clearly been an issue.’
‘Funny you should mention Australia, though,’ Nell said, measuring out coffee. ‘Patrick’s sister went to live there, not long after her wedding.’
And what a strange wedding that had been. On the surface it was the full works, the church, the flowers, the meringue dress, the big white limos, the marquee, the mother of the bride in classic feathery hat and a pale turquoise silky outfit. But there were, quite pointedly, no bridesmaids, and at the reception there was the sad spare place at the top table for the absent sister who was never mentioned. Patrick, until the moment he’d suddenly blazed back into life and dragged Nell into the orchard, had been determinedly drunk and in the morose mood from hell. The bride hadn’t thrown her bouquet to a jostling bunch of shrieky friends, either. She had simply walked away by herself and left it, without comment or ceremony, and as soon as the photos outside the church were over, on the little grave in the churchyard where the missing bridesmaid was buried: Patrick and Susannah’s five-year-old sister Catherine. And after that, without any further word, Susannah and her new husband had resumed their wedding-day jaw-breaker smiles and got on with enjoying the party.
