I squeeze myself into the taxi while I’m still shouting at Ben. ‘No, Ben. I’m not shirking my responsibilities. I have returned home because my mother is DYING.’
The cab driver peers at me over half-moon spectacles. I swear I’ve not seen half-moon spectacles this side of a period drama.
‘Where to, love?’
‘Beaulieu village, please. Sparks Lane.’
He starts the car up and asks the inevitable question. ‘On your holidays?’
‘No, I’m from here.’
This is what happens when you come from a beautiful part of the country; everyone assumes you’re not from there but on holiday there. Actually, one of the downsides of coming from somewhere so picturesque is that you’re then spoilt when it comes to holidays. There doesn’t seem much point in heading anywhere pretty; you’ve had pretty on your doorstep all your life. It makes you set the bar higher, or go somewhere urban that can’t compete.
It’s then that I hear Ben’s voice and realize I’m still on the phone.
‘I’m just really worried about JuJu Quick.’
‘Yeah well, I’m really worried about my mum.’
‘When will you be filing your report on Marrakech?’ And then he quickly adds, ‘Your unfinished report. Your incomplete report. Oh, this just gets better.’
‘I don’t know, Ben. I tell you what, though. If she does die tonight I’ll lean on the coffin and get typing. How’s that?’
‘There’s no need to be like that, Rachel.’
‘Is there not? Apologies. I tell you what. If you’re so worried about Marrakech, why don’t you send JuJu to that place you know in Ibiza?’
‘That’s not funny.’
I think it is, actually. Last year I found out Ben had gone to Ibiza with other man behind his then-boyfriend’s back. I was sworn to secrecy about it and it’s a timely reminder to him to not mess me about too much because I have that threat hanging over him. Not that I’d ever really ring his ex-boyfriend up and tell him. But he doesn’t know that.
I hear him say quietly, ‘Take as long as you want off. I can go to Marrakech tonight.’
‘Finally,’ I say. I meant to say thank you but . . . oh well. I hang up.
God, this taxi’s uncomfortable. And the seat belt digs into my swollen belly. If there’s one type of person I now have empathy for it’s obese people.
All my life I have completely taken for granted the ability to run up a flight of stairs, run for a bus, and that while you do these simple activities you won’t get completely out of breath.
There have been times I have lain in bed at night and realized I’ve not cleaned my teeth. But the effort that would be involved in getting out of bed and heading to the bathroom. It’s too much. So I don’t do it. I just lie there, hoping to sleep.
And don’t get me started on sleep patterns.
Okay, well, do.
All my life I’ve loved lying in bed, face-down in the shape of a starfish. It’s my best position for getting to sleep. Well, just try doing that with six months of gestation in your belly. Although I’m not supposed to, I can only sleep on my back or, at a push, on my side. And if sleep comes it’s a blessing. The baby presses down on my bladder so I’m constantly in need of the loo. Oh, and never mind how windy I’ve become.
Let me think of nicer things.
Let me concentrate on something else.
I know. The view!
The view from the taxi really is beautiful. It’s probably part of the reason I work at the exclusive end of the travel industry, for a company that isn’t even listed in the phone book. If there still is such a thing as the phone book. I want to help other people see places as beautiful as this.
Pretentious? Moi?
I’m sure I’ll get over it.
Autumn is well and truly over and winter is on its way. The trees in the forest are so naked I almost blush. And I really notice a chill in the air. Dorothy, you’re not in Marrakech any more!
I see the taxi driver giving me a long hard look in his rearview mirror, working out why, if I’m from round here, he doesn’t recognize me. He catches me catching him.
‘Never seen you before,’ he covers.
‘I’m elusive,’ I say, as if reading his mind. But he looks confused.
‘You what?’
‘I said I’m elusive.’ And then I smile.
‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘I’m Tony.’
I decide it’s probably best for me to keep my trap shut the rest of the way.
I know every inch of this journey, every second of the time it takes. Nothing I see from the cab window is new. This is an old part of the country, steeped in its own traditions. Change rarely happens here, and certainly not on the route from the railway station to my mother’s house. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s not much to see, just acre upon acre, mile upon mile of scrubland and the odd clump of trees. In the distance the hills on the Isle of Wight. The occasional pony munching on grass. Even more occasionally a deer will dart out in front of the car, making the driver slow down, then bounce away to the trees on the other side of the road.
Fortunately the tourist season is over now, so the road is clear. In the summer this would be crammed with traffic, all driving at a snail’s pace, slowing down to show the kids a donkey, a horse, a tree. I know all these roads from riding them on my bike as a kid. It would be me, a rucksack of sandwiches and a bottle of pop, my bike, and that was it. I was a solitary child, not helped by my mother packing me off to a grammar school miles away. When I came home I didn’t mix with the other kids in the village. They either went to boarding schools or went to the local state school and therefore thought I was snobby because of my ‘nice’ accent, even though they had no idea that home life was very down at heel. Mum was a dinner lady at a local senior school and also did dressmaking to make extra cash. She was a good seamstress and could copy any frock, more or less, if you showed her a picture of it. This made her a popular choice for some local brides, though she didn’t always like the resulting attention her dresses brought. ‘Don’t put it in the paper you got your dress from me,’ she’d insist, if she knew a bride was having her picture in the local paper, though I never knew why.
It was only after I left the area for good and moved to London that I started to meet like-minded people. I had grown up believing that no-one else in the whole of the New Forest was like me and that I needed to get to the big bad city to find my soul mates, and then on one trip back I discovered a quirky cafe had been opened on the high street by a woman who’d moved from London, Cliona. It was best-buddy love at first sight. And then love at first bite when I tried her Rocky Road Pie. For me she was a sharp blast of fabulosity in a landscape of dreariness. She dyed her hair pillar-box red and wore it in a victory roll. She wore fishnet stockings and frocks that wouldn’t look out of place on Jessica Rabbit. Her heels were higher than the World Trade Center. And she had the filthiest laugh I’d ever heard. Irish by birth, she had lived for years in London before moving here with her trendy hubby Joth, another hipster type who seemed to dress like something out of Dexys Midnight Runners in their dungaree period, and would often be found in the local pub, strumming on a banjo for no apparent reason. And then a series of weird things happened. Someone stole Joth’s banjo and it was found burning on top of Cliona’s car. Then someone painted the word DIE on the window of the cafe. It was so hard to get off that in the end Cliona had to get a new window put in. And then someone cut the brakes on Cliona’s car. Fortunately she realized as soon as she got in the car and so avoided doing some big dramatic Help I can’t stop my car and I’m approaching an insanely busy junction and the lights are red type of scenario. Nobody knew who might have had it in for Cliona, till one day a woman walked into the cafe with a pair of espadrilles and asked Cliona if Joth worked there. Cliona answered that he did. The woman then asked if she could pass on the espadrilles to him as he had left them at her B&B when he was staying with his girlfriend last night. Now as far as Cliona was concerned, Joth had gone to visit family in Newquay. Cliona covered, though, and acted dumb, asking questions about Joth’s lovely girlfriend, and the woman from the B&B was remarkably loose lipped.
The B&B was only a few miles down the road. As Cliona eloquently put it later, ‘Talk about shitting on your own doorstep.’
By the time Joth arrived back later on his espadrilles, along with the rest of his belongings, were neatly packed in suitcases for him. And standing outside the cafe on the pavement.
Of course he did that male thing of bleating on about how he’d never wanted to hurt her and how he’d been manipulated into a relationship by this psycho woman. Cliona didn’t want to hear. But she did hear enough to report the new girlfriend to the police for cutting her brakes and defacing her property. She was now in prison for attempted murder, and Joth was single once more.
I’d only got to know Cliona properly because I’d been in the cafe when the B&B woman arrived with the Dexys Midnight Runners shoes. After she’d left Cliona had been so upset she’d poured a pot of tea directly into my lap instead of into the cup and when she’d taken me into her kitchen to wipe me down she’d burst out crying and told me her whole sorry tale.
And then when I’d found out what I’d found out about Jamie I’d gone to the cafe on my next visit home and cried on her shoulder. Our shoulders wet with each other’s secrets and sadness, we were now firm buddies, and what was nice about our relationship was that it didn’t matter how long we spent apart; once we were back in each other’s orbit we could pick up exactly where we had left off last time.
Soon we’re in the village, the mill pond still as a mottled mirror and on the other side of it Palace House, the stately home, looking twice as big as usual since it’s reflected in the pond. We cross over it via the stone bridge and to my right I see a family picnicking on the banks of the pond, a donkey standing behind them, clearly wanting to be fed. They used to have rock, pop and jazz concerts at the Palace when I was growing up and, because I couldn’t afford the tickets, I would come to this bridge with my own picnic and sit and listen to the music floating across the water for free. We head up the high street. More donkeys, one eating something from the bin outside the village shop. The village shop that hasn’t really changed since I was a child – no barcode scanning here, they’re still on stickers and free paper bags. We pass the ice cream shop, the chocolatiers, the photography studio that still seems to be showing wedding photos from the eighties as their latest fare, the hairdresser’s and the teddy bear shop. What a high street! We pass the village school and the phone box, always so handy as the phone signal round here is pretty much non-existent. And every paving stone holds a story of my past. Falling over on a wonky kerbstone and grazing my knee, sheltering in the phone box because it was raining and I couldn’t find Mum. We head on past the garden centre that was boring as hell for a little girl but which I now find strangely enticing and gorgeous – but then it has had a makeover and does evening meals and cutesy breakfasts and you can buy all sorts there, not just boring old plants. In fact it’s the sort of place I could imagine working, were I to move back here.
‘Just at the top on the left, please. By the gate, thanks,’ I say to the driver.
These cabs don’t get any cheaper, I think to myself as I hand over a crisp twenty-pound note. It doesn’t pay to not have your own transport in the countryside. You can’t just nip on a bus here. I see him looking at me again as he takes the note off me, still wondering why, if I am so local, he hasn’t seen me before. Well, sadly that’s what happens when you’re the daughter of a recluse and your mother doesn’t let you have any friends round for their tea, or to play, or for a sleepover. I’m making the whole experience sound so gruesome. It wasn’t really, it was all I knew. It’s just I know different now.
I look up the street. There’s a light on in the cafe window at the corner that bends to the main road leading to Lymington. Dare I just nip in and see Cliona? Tell her I’m back? I can’t. I’ve come back to see my dying mum. I can’t go to the cafe, surely. It wouldn’t be right.
I could pop in for five minutes. See an old friend. No harm in that, is there?
I look at the gate that leads to the path that leads to Mum’s house and Pam’s house. The hinges are red with rust and the paint is falling away like it has alopecia. I drag my pull-along suitcase to the top of the high street and the quirkily named Hipster Teapot. But before I can even get there I hear someone calling.
‘Rachel? Rachel? Where you going?’
I turn and see Pam.
‘Oh, hi Pam. Yeah, I’m just coming.’
And I trudge back towards the gate.
Pam is dressed in Crocs, woolly socks, some kind of skirt that looks like the sort of thing a dog would lie on in the back of a Land Rover, and probably is, and a badly stained hoody that, when she turns round to lead the way, gives the impression that she studied at Yale. Where she got it from I have no idea, nor do I have the inclination to try to find out. She’s about Mum’s age, sixty-ish, but always looks older as her attitude to grooming is very much from the foreign-war correspondent’s school. I.e., you don’t bother because a bomb could go off any second.
She is clutching a box of ice lollies. ‘It’s all she wants to eat,’ she explains, and I assume she can only be talking about my mum.
‘How is she?’
‘Dying,’ she says abruptly. But then that’s always been Pam all over. She doesn’t call a spade a spade. She calls it a bloody shovel.
‘Well. I’m back now,’ I say, and it sounds pathetic. I can almost hear her thinking AND WHAT? But it feels hard to say anything at the moment and it not sound crass. She doesn’t reply so I try to explain.
‘So you’re not having to deal with everything on your own.’
‘Oh, I don’t care about that. She’s been good to me in the past, bless her. I’ll be all right.’
And I think it’s probably best to continue to the house without saying any more.
The only car that comes down this dirt track these days must be Pam’s. Even the postman parks on the high street and walks the rest of the way. As a result it’s all overgrown and weeds cover the odd pothole so you’ve no idea you’re going to trip into it until you’re actually doing it.
And then we come to a break in the road. The track leads left and right. If you turn right you go to Pam’s cottage. Left and you go to ours. I follow her down the left track and there it is. My childhood home, the place that more often than not felt like a prison. And now it looks so inoffensive and, of course, loaded with sadness.
Seeing my mum so tiny and frail isn’t a shock. She’s tinier and frailer than the last time I saw her but Pam has kindly, or unkindly, depending on how you view it, been sending me regular photographs of her, tracking her progress, usually accompanied with texts reading Doesn’t she look awful, Rach? Really thin now. Cancer porn, I decided it was, like she was getting off on it. I’m sure she’d say she was preparing me so that seeing her wouldn’t be a shock, but there also seemed to be something of the illicit excitement about the texts. Still, at least she was too old and fuddy duddy to be on social media and broadcasting the spectacle to all and sundry.
Mum is in residence in the living room. Fast asleep on the sofa bed.
‘Jane? Rachel’s here.’
Mum doesn’t stir.
‘She’s not . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Dead?!’
‘It’s just . . .’
‘No, you daft brush. She’s sleeping.’
But then Pam leaned over as if checking for signs of life, suddenly alarmed. And then nodded her head as she heard something that put her mind at rest.
‘Put the fear of God in me then, you did.’
‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear anything. And she looks so still.’
‘SSH!’
‘What?’
‘She can bloody hear you.’
And then she turns to Mum again and practically shouts at her, ‘JANE. RACHEL’S HERE. SHE’S COME ALL THE WAY FROM MONGOLIA.’
‘Morocco.’
‘Morocco. Isn’t that nice?’
And then she looks at me.
‘Is it full of Muslims?’
‘It’s a Muslim country, yes.’
‘Then you’re lucky you didn’t get raped. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She heads into the kitchen. I’m too shocked to respond. But then she calls through.
‘Mind you! You are pregnant!’
‘Yes, I’m fully aware of that, thank you Pam.’
I let it lie for a minute but then can’t help myself. I call out, ‘Actually, it’s not that rapey a country, Pam!’ and then add as an afterthought, just to hammer it home, ‘Morocco!’
Suddenly she is in the doorway, an ice lolly still with the wrapper on in her hand. ‘It is,’ she says firmly. ‘I’ve looked into it.’
And then she returns to the kitchen.
Already Pam is making my blood boil.
She always does this. Makes some outrageous claim and then argues that it has to be true as ‘she’s looked into it’. Like the time she insisted that the actress Michelle Collins was from the New Forest. I had Googled her instantly to read, just as I’d thought, that she hailed from the London Borough of Hackney, but no. Pam insisted that she was New Forest born and bred and that her father Colin Collins had run the Fleur De Lys pub in Pilley. When I suggested that maybe, if this story had come from Colin, he might have been lying, she shut me down with, ‘Nobody’s lying, it’s true. I’ve looked into it.’
I follow her into the kitchen to find her sucking hard on the ice lolly. She looks embarrassed to be caught.
‘I’d opened it for your mum,’ she says between sucky slurps. ‘Seemed a shame to waste it.’
I shake my head like it doesn’t matter.
‘Why not take your things to your room?’ she says, like this is her B&B and I am her guest, as if I’ve never been here before. But I can’t be bothered to argue with her, and do what she says.
The cottage has been stuck in the sixties, style-wise, since the seventies, when Mum redecorated and made everything look ten years out of date. Bar the odd bit of carpet replacement since, very little has changed. Outside it might look like something from the cover of a box of candied fruits, but inside you feel like you’re stuck in an episode of Heartbeat.
My bedroom is something of an exception. My bedroom is stuck in the eighties. A pink wrought-iron single bed and a black, white and red striped carpet. It’s like a headache come to life, but when I was younger I thought it was so sophisticated. My teenage posters still adorn the walls; I’ve never been that bothered about taking them down. I honestly thought I was going to marry H from Steps back then, judging by the number of posters I have up of him and the group. Little did I know he’d turn out to be gay too. God, I can’t half pick ’em! I dump my case on the bed, unzip it and quickly rip out a cardy from inside. Sometimes I forget how cold this house can get. Mother has never been a big fan of central heating.
I go into her bedroom and open her left-hand wardrobe, where I know the boiler lives. Of course the heating is off. I flick it across to ON and the house feels like it rattles into action. It does actually vibrate as pipes that haven’t seen any action in months suddenly flood with hot water, excited to finally be put to some use.
When I return downstairs Pam is reading something on her phone. She is sitting at the kitchen table and speaks without looking at me.
‘Have you put the heating on?’
‘Yes. I was cold.’
‘Put a pully on.’
‘I’ve put a cardy on.’
Pam looks up and inspects me, then looks away.
‘The heat doesn’t agree with her.’
‘I won’t have her freeze to death.’
‘She loathes the expense.’
‘With respect, Pam, she’s not the one who’s going to have to pay the bill. I am.’
‘We’ll have no talk like that, thank you.’
I sigh and open the fridge door. There’s not much in there. A few tomatoes. Half a pint of milk. Some tinned meat that’s been upturned on a plate.
‘If you’re hungry there’s some spam there. Got it in for you. Make a lovely sandwich with those tomatoes.’
I can think of nothing less appetizing but as she’s clearly ‘gone to a lot of trouble’ – or at least her tone of voice tells me she has – I pull the plate of spam out and grab the bread from the bread bin.
‘Any news on whatsisname?’ she asks. And I know she means Jamie.
I haven’t told Mum or her what really went on between us. I just told them he’d left me for someone else, which was bad enough, but I was worried back then that if I told them the truth they’d think less of me. Probably daft, but there is an element of humiliation to discovering your man is gay. I worried that people would see me as a bad judge of character, gullible, easily hoodwinked. Or some humongous fag hag who was obsessed with the queens. I was neither, or at least I didn’t think I was. And I wanted to keep it that way.
‘Is he still with that tart?’
‘I don’t know, Pam. And I don’t care.’
‘Well you should do, he’s the father of your child.’
‘I’m going to be fine, Pam. Please. Don’t worry about me.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry. I’ve got bigger fish to fry, love. Like her in there. Dying.’
As I have my back to her, slicing the spam for the sandwich, I allow myself a little eye roll.
‘Does she sleep a lot, then?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.
‘She hasn’t really been awake since Thursday.’
Right. Well, I didn’t know that.
‘Floats in and out. You know. Probably the morphine.’
I concentrate on making the sandwich.
‘Look,’ says Pam. And there’s a sudden honesty in her voice I don’t recognize. ‘I know you and your mum have never been the closest mother and daughter on the planet but . . .’
I turn and look at her.
‘But it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t bond with you. She had . . . she had problems.’
I can’t quite believe I am hearing this. Frankness like this is a stranger to these four walls. I look at her, alarmed.
‘Just . . . I think it’s really good that you’re here now. I . . . I think it’s really decent of you, all things considered.’
And I’m not sure quite what to say to that. So I just say a quiet, ‘Thank you,’ and return to sandwich making.
I can’t be a normal person, can I? A normal person would now say, ‘What do you mean? It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t bond with me? What are you insinuating? What happened back then?’
But instead I make a sandwich in silence.
I then take the sandwich into the living room and eat it, again in silence, staring at my mum. She sleeps on. And though I fear at first that I might become upset, I don’t. The over-riding feeling I have is one of numbness. See? I am not a normal person.
Sometimes I think I want that on my tombstone. I was not a normal person. Or . . . Eeh she weren’t normal.
I wonder what will be on Mother’s. Didn’t have much to say, really. That would be a good one. Or. Silence then, silence now. Forever silence. There is, of course, something so apt about the silence in the room, not even the ticking of a clock, as this for me was always a house of silence. But the silences of my childhood were heavy silences, loaded ones, passive-aggressive ones. Cunning silences that actually spoke volumes, that told me for some reason this woman resented my mere presence. I put it down to me reminding her of my father. She never told me this was what was going on, but it was an easy enough assumption to make. I often thought she was dishonest. And so when she told me, and reiterated the fact, that she hadn’t known my father long and that she had tried to keep in touch with him but he had proved elusive (ah, that’s where I get it from!) I didn’t really believe her.
Of course, me being me, I never told her this, I never challenged her about it. I just went with the flow. And fortunately, after a fashion, I didn’t have to keep up the facade for long, as it was always soon time to be heading back to the railway station and the lucky escape of school.
She told me once that he was a travelling salesman who had been drinking one night in the Turfcutters Arms when she’d done a brief stint behind the bar. He was staying at the pub and one thing had led to another. She only recalled that his name was Ambrose and, she revealed one night after a bit too much gin, he had the biggest willy she’d ever seen. Just what you always wanted to know about your father.
The memory had always repulsed me, rather, but tonight it makes me smile. I pine for the ticking of a clock. I want to lean over the bed and put the television on. Any sort of noise, any sound will be welcome tonight. Anything to stop the loudness of my brain.
I have too many questions for her but I fear it’s too late. This is it. This is the end.
‘She’s not doing the death rattle,’ Pam says suddenly. I didn’t even know she was still here. I look up and over to her. She’s in the kitchen doorway again. ‘Few more days in her, I reckon.’
Is this it? Is this how life ends? You lie on your couch with the television off and your daughter eats a spam sandwich and your friend stands in the doorway and we all just wait? There should be wailing, gnashing of teeth, histrionics, deathbed confessions, promises. Instead. A spam sandwich with a side order of ennui.
‘I might nip out for a couple of hours,’ I say to Pam.
She shrugs. ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere.’
I head to my room to change. As I do I call Cliona.
‘Rachel! I had no idea you were back! To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Oh, just a dying mum, you know.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry. Anything I can do, sweetheart?’
‘Well. Yes. I was just wondering if the ten o’clock club was on tonight?’
‘You fucking betcha. I’ll book us a cab.’
Margaret Mary Lavery lives in a big house at the top of a small hill on the other side of the Beaulieu River. In her youth she was a stunner. She still turns heads now at seventy-three. In her youth she was a glamorous actress on the telly. But those days are long gone and now she lives life to the full with a steady flow of cheap white wine and menthol cigarettes, the mainstay of her diet, topped up with the occasional chicken salad or boiled egg. Since her husband died she has been lonely, and every night at ten o’clock she hosts the ten o’clock club for any one of her friends who wishes to turn up and get drunk. Sometimes she celebrates alone. Sometimes with Cliona. Sometimes a few other people. But tonight it’s just the three of us.
I first met Margaret at the village fete. I found her rowing with the woman on the ‘guess the weight of the cake’ stall. She was full of expletives and passion, disagreeing with what she was hearing about the cake’s weight. I was instantly drawn to her, and a little bit obsessed. I’d then followed her round the fete, in the vain hope that we might fall into conversation. Eventually we did in the queue for the ladies’ loos. And when I dropped the C-word in front of her it had the desired effect. She grabbed my arm and told me we’d be friends for life.
The moon is high in the sky. The ultimate streetlamp that lights all around. The water in Margaret’s pool lies still, the moon reflected perfectly, unmoving in it. And sweeping down her lawn to the jetty the river lies still too, a glass shelf, the moon sailing on it.
‘Full moon,’ Margaret says with excitement, as she pops the cork on the champagne. The rivers of bubbles into our eager glasses are anything but still. Once they are full, a toast is raised.
‘To Rachel’s mum.’
‘TO RACHEL’S MUM!’
‘Even if she is a bit of a cold-hearted cow,’ Margaret adds, and there isn’t a trace of bitchiness in her tone, just sympathy. She’s always felt sorry for me; it’s just the way it is. I want so much for her to be proud of me, or happy for me, but the sympathy card always wins. She has so much joy and love in her heart, and offers it generously, that she can never understand people who aren’t like-minded.
‘And to trusty Pam,’ says Cliona.
‘Oh God, yeah. Trunchball,’ adds Margaret, though she doesn’t really know what this means. I think it is from a long-forgotten memory of Miss Trunchbull from the Roald Dahl book that she must have read to her nieces and nephews, but it has latterly been conflated with ‘Wrecking Ball’. Either way it feels apt. Pam can be a bit of a quiet monster who destroys everything in her wake.
‘And anyway,’ Margaret continues, ‘families are created not given. And here is our little ensemble. To real family!’
And again we toast. ‘To the ten o’clock club!’
Margaret then regales us with tales of her new cleaner, a Filipino woman who goes by the name of Baby and travels everywhere on a ‘ghastly’ moped at fifty miles an hour, honking at everything to get out of her way.
‘Are you sure you’re not making her up?’ Cliona gasps, between giggles.
‘No! I mean yes! Well, she’s real anyway. As is that God-awful scooter.’
‘But there aren’t any Filipinos in the New Forest.’
‘Well, there are now. And I’ll tell you something else.’
‘What?’
‘They’re facking good cleaners. Whenever she does my parquet I swear, it’s like a bally ice rink in there. Lucky I haven’t broken a hip. I could lie there for days in a puddle of my own incontinence. But hey. I’ll have gone down in a clean house. To cleaners!’
And this time we toast cleaners. Suddenly Margaret looks disorientated.
‘Music. Shit. I haven’t put any on.’
We know it’s dangerous for Margaret to play her music late at night. She doesn’t give two hoots about the neighbours. ‘Why should I? The nearest one’s half a bally mile away!’ But because she lives at the top of a hill, and the hill leads down to the river, any music she plays seem to hurtle down the water like a bouncing bomb, ricocheting into the houses lining the river. And in a posh enclave like this, people have no idea that neighbours can be anything other than silent. I sometimes wonder how they’d cope living in Brixton like I used to, the smell of ‘de ’erb’ permeating from next door’s yard, the low-level drum and bass accompanying everything I did. I got used to it after a while, but some of my neighbours here might never sleep again, were they confronted with it. Margaret disappears into the houses to meek bleats of ‘No, Margaret!’ and ‘Not too loud, Margaret!’ from me and Cliona. But true to form the next thing we hear is a VERY LOUD Frank Sinatra belting it out. It seems like the water in the pool and the river itself start to tremble like there’s a tsunami heading for the south coast; somewhere in the trees a flock of once-sleeping birds takes flight.
‘They don’t make them like this any more, darlings,’ Margaret says, eyes shut tight, leaning against the doorframe as if the beauty of his voice is too much to take, savouring every bar.
‘Well, they do,’ Cliona says, ‘it’s just you’re not familiar with them.’
‘Oh fuck off, you boring little popstrel,’ Margaret spits, heading back to join us. God knows why Cliona bothers to argue with her; it is a pointless battle she always undertakes. Margaret will soon annihilate her. No-one knows music like Margaret knows music. At least, that’s what Margaret thinks. ‘Amy Winehouse, I grant you. But where is she?’
Cliona goes to say ‘dead’ but Margaret pounces on her before she can open her mouth.
‘EXACTLY. And Adele, at a push. But what about Looby Lu?’
‘Who?’
‘Makes dresses.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Married to oojameflip.’
‘Who’s oojameflip?’
‘Got the kids. Never smiles.’
‘Victoria Beckham?’
‘Don’t you DARE sit there and tell me she can sing.’
‘Well, she can, actually. I think you’ll find she’s earned a considerably larger sum of money precisely from singing than anyone round this table.’
Margaret looks like she’s smelt blood and she’s going for it.
‘I’m not talking about earning money. I’m talking about singing. Do an impression of Victoria Beckham singing. SEE, YOU CAN’T. BECAUSE NO-ONE KNOWS WHAT SHE SOUNDS LIKE.’
‘With respect, Margaret. Victoria hasn’t been a professional singer for quite some time. Your argument is rather outmoded.’
‘Good. I like outmoded. Outmoded suits me. And careful what you say. You’re sitting on an outmoded chair on an outmoded terrace by an outmoded pool by an outmoded house. This place is the epitome of outmoded, so ya boo sucks to you, you little trend-setter.’
It’s got ugly. Cliona shouldn’t have challenged Margaret’s world view. I try to rescue the conversation.
‘I suppose I better start thinking of music for Mum’s funeral.’
‘Oh, don’t ask this one,’ Margaret says, jabbing her finger in Cliona’s arm. ‘It’ll be all Spice Girls and skinnymalinx.’
‘I’ve always thought Audrey Hepburn for a funeral. “Moon River”. You can’t beat that as the coffin rolls away.’
Margaret shuts one eye and uses the other to eye Cliona suspiciously. ‘Now that, my dear, might be the best idea you’ve had all night.’
And it seems relations are back on track.
We stay chatting till midnight, when Margaret announces that she is sleepy, and disappears inside. When we hear the door being bolted we realize she’s not coming out again and we’ll have to find our way home. I’ve only had one drink as I am with child, but Cliona is tipsy and leans into me as we walk all the way home. It’s a cool evening, the sky is clear, and the night feels eerily full of promise. Even though I have come home to witness my mother dying, I feel the buzz of potential in the air.
Cliona and I say goodbye on the high street and I watch as she staggers back to the cafe.
When I get to Mum’s cottage I’m as quiet as I can be as I let myself in.
I stand in the hallway and realize I can hear people talking in the living room. Soon I realize the voices are Pam’s and Mum’s. Oh good! Mum is awake!
I am about to open the door and burst in full of the joys when I hear Mum’s voice, weak but stern, saying, ‘No. Rachel must never know.’
I stop in my tracks. What on earth are they talking about?
‘So you’re not going to tell her?’ Pam asks.
‘No.’ Mum replies. ‘I’ll take that secret to my grave.’