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.

‘You’re not on a diet, are you?’ Kate was now saying, opening a cupboard and pulling out a pack of dark Ryvitas. ‘No biscuits? Is this all you’ve got? You’re usually a reliably well-stocked house, especially in times of stress.’

‘It is, sorry. I really need to go and shop properly sometime. Mimi and I are living like students here at the moment, just grabbing food on the run. We tend to dig out whatever’s in the fridge, cook it up with onions and a load of tomatoes and sling it over some pasta.’ And such a lot of pasta, Nell thought guiltily. Pasta, porridge, roast chicken, anything with mashed potatoes – all you needed for inner comfort. She must come out of this zone, if only in the interests of maintaining her dress size. It was just that eating salad or broccoli or a slab of virtuous salmon – whatever you put with it – didn’t make you feel you’d been cuddled.

‘You’ve got to get past that one. She’ll get lardy and she’ll only blame you,’ Kate warned, patting her own very substantial hips. She pulled a Ryvita out of its pack and studied it closely, in case it had mould. ‘I could eat one with some jam on it …’ Kate was back in the cupboard, moving jars. ‘I’m always hungry – it’s that post-baby thing.’

‘Post-baby? Alvin’s nearly three!’

‘OK, I know, but if you consider how time goes faster when you’re older, then you have to think that three is the equivalent of six months to the average teenage mother. What’s this?’ Kate asked, pulling out a pile of envelopes.

‘Where? Oh … Those are some of Patrick’s letters. Shouldn’t be in there. I’m sure that isn’t where I left them.’

They were the ones he’d written when he was away with his family on a ski trip. No emails back then, no mobiles. He’d been bored in the evenings and had written to Nell every night, telling her how many infant-age French children had run over his skis, how much vin chaud he’d got through at lunchtime while listening to his parents bickering about whether they should risk going down the most dangerous black run.

‘They should be in here with the others,’ Nell said, opening a drawer and moving napkins and tea towels around. ‘I’ve got a box of them – I was looking at them the other day and was sure I’d put them back. I must have left these out on the table by the computer and Andréa moved them when she was cleaning.’

‘Just suppose,’ Kate said warily, ‘suppose he never does get in touch with you. Suppose he just ignores you because for him it’s all long, long over and not worth rehashing. What will you do then?’

Nell thought for a moment. ‘Well … seeing as according to my mother it was Patrick who was asking about me only a few years ago, I assumed he’d be OK about hearing from me. But … If he isn’t, well, then I’ll deal with that one when it happens. Or doesn’t happen.’

‘Oh good. And don’t give it too long. If he hasn’t got back to you by this time next week, just give up and forget it,’ Kate said. ‘But I hope you do get to meet up with him and he’s gone old and fat and bald and unattractive. Then you’ll feel like you’ve been set free to find a nice fresh new one, won’t you? You need a man without a whole trolley-load of ancient baggage. And look …’ She pointed at the side window where Ed was passing, on his way to Nell’s back door. ‘There’s one approaching now. What with this tasty neighbour and your safety-class man, you can’t say you aren’t spoiled for choice, can you? They’re like buses, men,’ she said, swiftly grabbing her bag and heading, with helpful tact, for the front door. ‘None around for years but when they do turn up they come along in convoy.’

* * *

‘I shouldn’t really be here,’ Nell told Ed as they went back into the Bull’s Head bar to get a drink at the interval. The John Horrocks Blues Band had played a vibrant first set and her ears were ringing. ‘Mimi is in disgrace and I should be at home glaring at her and making sure she remembers she’s in big trouble.’

‘If you’ve got a troublesome teen at home, the least you should do is make sure they see you going out to have some fun. When they’re grounded it really rubs it in! What do you fancy? Beer, wine? A vat of medicinal gin and easy on the tonic?’

‘Oh … definitely not gin; for me, that stuff is even worse than champagne for gloom and misery. Dry white would be good, thanks.’

The barman opened a bottle of Sauvignon and poured out two glasses. The place was busy – John Horrocks pulled a fair-sized, though not particularly young crowd. Nell was glad about this – she hadn’t made a huge effort with how she looked (plain black wrapover skirt, flat boots, deep rust cashmere and a selection of chunky necklaces), and was grateful not to be surrounded by hordes of sleek, skinny girls in baby-smock mini-dresses and with their endless legs on view. Luckily Ed wasn’t the sort who’d expect her to be in full-scale dress-up. As ever he looked comfortably dishevelled, very much in the style (or unconscious lack of it) of the laconic James May on Top Gear. She thought of Steve and the contrast with Ed: Action Man versus a well-scuffed teddy bear.

‘I haven’t actually grounded her,’ Nell admitted as they went to sit on a sofa on the far side of the bar. ‘I thought of keeping her in over next weekend, but that would definitely be one for the old ‘this hurts me more than it hurts you’ category. Going out tonight for a bit is one thing, but I wouldn’t be able to escape that whole forty-eight hours of watching her pull the moody from hell! And besides, I think she got the gist of the message: skiving school is a capital offence.’

‘Tamsin used to do it all the time. When the school eventually wrote to ask if the glandular fever was getting any better – something she hadn’t actually had, of course – she told me she couldn’t give a flying one and said she preferred being educated in the real world. She spent all her time in libraries, devouring books by the dozen, so I suppose she had a point. Not …’ and he laughed, ‘not that she was reading Dostoevsky or Milton or anything so edifying, but the amount of crime fiction she got through …’

‘That’ll be the “real world” she was learning about then, will it?’ Nell laughed.

‘OK – fair point! All the same, it’s stood her in good stead. She got a Silver Dagger award at only twenty-two and she’s working on a TV script – a pilot from her first book. If that goes well … who knows? Move over Lynda La Plante.’

‘So, for her skipping school was a canny career move. For Mimi, well, I can’t really fathom her. She said she went off to Bath by herself and admitted that she travelled without a ticket, but I think there must be more to it than that. If she was with a boy, why not say so? I’m not exactly the heaviest parent.’

‘They like their secrets,’ Ed said, smiling. ‘Teenage girls like diaries, confidences, whispered things. I bet you remember that.’

‘Teenage girls and middle-aged men.’ Nell knew she sounded bitter, but the thought of Alex and his many years of secret liaisons had come sharply to mind. Maybe Mimi would be like him, having to keep something back, having to live in her own head.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Didn’t mean to say that – this is an escape night.’

‘That’s OK – it’s not been long since you and Alex split. He’s bound to be on your mind.’

Nell looked at him carefully, trying to fathom what he was thinking. Why had he asked her out? It had sounded neighbourly and casual (‘Just wondered … if you’ve got nothing better to do …’) and of absolutely no real consequence at the time. Now she wondered, was there more to it than that? Kate would say there definitely must be. She’d say, why didn’t he just go to see this band by himself, or drag some workmate along? But then Kate was eager to pair her up with a new partner, to keep her friend tidily organized with a love life. Just for once, though, Nell thought, wasn’t it lovely to be out with someone of the opposite sex, without the remotest possibility of sex being something you had to consider?

The bar was emptying as the room at the back filled up for the band’s second set.

‘We don’t have to go back in, if you’d rather get back to Mimi,’ Ed told her, finishing his drink.

Nell hesitated for a moment. ‘Well, actually … I probably should go home. But you don’t have to if you’d rather stay – I can go by myself, no problem.’ She was thinking ahead here. If she went home alone, that would solve any potentially tricky problem about how to say goodnight. This was like being a teenager – would he kiss her? He never had, not even in an air-kiss polite greeting sense, so no, he almost certainly wouldn’t. God, why would he even want to? She was surprised to find herself thinking it wouldn’t be too unwelcome if he did want to, but she wasn’t up on the finer points of dating etiquette. Not that this was a date, not really … So much for having no thoughts in that direction. But then he only lived next door. If she was going to practise amorous arts for future use, she’d do better to sign up to some kind of agency and get through a few casuals who wouldn’t really count and were safely more distant, geographically. What a ridiculous train of thought! She picked up her bag and started to make a move.

‘I’ll come with you – I’m ready to go,’ Ed said, heading for the door with Nell. ‘Ooh, watch out …’ Nell had opened the door and walked straight into a stick that an incoming woman was wielding. A ski pole, for heaven’s sake – there’d only been two days of snow this winter. What on earth was she doing with it? Ed caught Nell’s arm and stopped her from crashing hard into the door frame.

The woman, limping (OK, so she had an injured foot. She wouldn’t be the only one if she wielded sticks around like that), and using the pole for support, stomped crossly – if unevenly – past Nell into the bar, ignoring her apology, followed by an equally bad-tempered-looking man, bulked up in a North Face quilted jacket.

‘They were a cheery pair,’ Ed laughed as they went out into the chill air. ‘Do you think she really hurt herself skiing? I bet she didn’t.’

Nell looked back at the pub. Through the window the woman was glaring at her as she leaned the pole against the bar at an angle guaranteed to trip up the next unlucky punter.

‘She’d like us to think so,’ Nell said, feeling cheerily malicious. ‘But I think she just fell off her front doorstep or something. You know,’ she said as the two of them walked along the road towards where Ed’s car was parked, ‘it’s funny round here, isn’t it? It’s so typically south-west London that if you need a walking stick for a while, a person would immediately look around their house and pick out a ski pole. Not an umbrella or a golf club. And can you imagine they might, say,’ and she giggled, ‘unscrew the mop head from a Vileda and use the stick?’

Ed laughed. ‘Certainly not! That would be far too downmarket! Imagine passing up a chance to be a show-off! Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s a gap in the traffic – we can cross here.’ He grabbed Nell’s hand and they crossed the road, which didn’t, Nell decided, feel at all strange, or challenging or problematic, merely friendly and perfectly normal. Just so long as he didn’t kiss her and complicate things. She really wasn’t ready to deal with anything like that.