The winter sun wakes Laura, and she opens her eyes to a dazzle of pink, glad for once of Inigo’s belief that curtains would cut off his creative dynamic with the world. Buoyed by the roseate joy of the morning, she rises, determined to be serene today, and performs what should be a short but satisfying sequence of yoga stretches on the floor at the end of the bed. In fact it is nothing of the sort. Collapsing with a groan from the agony of doggy position, she decides to look for an alternative exercise programme. Inigo sleeps on. All she can see of him is the black slash of his hair on the pillow. In all the years they have been together, he has never woken up before her; even if his alarm clock is set, Inigo is incapable of being first out of bed. He likes someone else to pave his way.
Outside, sunbeams stretch across the street and the cars parked on each side of the road glitter and sparkle, coated with frost like the crystallised fruits Laura’s mother always has in the house for Christmas. Slapping her feet up the rubber-floored staircase Laura realises with horror that no thank you letters have been written to her mother for the Christmas presents she sent the children, and now it is almost March. She wonders whether to try and get them to do it this morning, but decides it will be easier to forge their handwriting herself and fake the letters. That way at least they might appear to be a tiny bit grateful for Dolly’s flower press and Fred’s mouth organ.
She opens the door to Dolly’s room, but the bed is already empty, the curtains flung back to let in the light and a rap music station is pulsing from the radio next to the bed. Dolly is in the bathroom. The air is thick with her favourite ozone-killing body sprays and hair volumiser, and the floor is littered with towels, T-shirts and trainers. Clearly Dolly is choosing her outfit for the day. The scene in Fred’s room is somewhat different. A fug of dark, silent warmth greets Laura when she opens the door. She tries a schoolmistress approach first.
‘Good morning, Fred. It’s a lovely, lovely day – do look.’
Her son does not move or make a sound, despite the rude crack of his blinds pinging up and the searchlight of morning sun falling onto his pillow and his turned-away face. Laura tugs at the duvet, and the visible part of Fred vanishes under the covers accompanied by a low groaning sound.
‘Come on, I’m making breakfast.’ She turns to leave the room, trying not to look at the heaped clothes, the sliding piles of books and hurled odd socks. Picking her way out, Laura stands on something soft and yielding yet crunchy.
‘Urgh, gross. It’s something alive, I think!’ she shrieks.
Fred is out of bed in a flash. ‘Where? Let’s see.’ He kneels next to her, scrabbling on the rug, then sighs. ‘Mum, you’ve trodden on my owl pellet. That’s so annoying, I was going to dissect it.’
Laura shudders. ‘Why was it on the floor then? What’s in it anyway?’
Both of them crouch on the floor, examining the desiccated mess of mangled feather and bone. Fred picks up part of a tiny skull.
‘Look, this is a shrew, I think. I didn’t know London owls ate shrews.’
‘Where did you find the pellet?’
‘Under the oak trees on the Heath. I think the owl’s got a house in there. It’s right by a rubbish bin and that was where I thought he got his food.’ Fred is wide awake now, picking over the bits of reconstituted owl dinner. Laura glances at her watch.
‘Come on. You’ll have to leave it for now. Just hurry up and come down for breakfast.’
Fred scowls at her. ‘All right, all right, there’s no need to get in a psyche, is there?’
Laura doesn’t answer. She bangs on Dolly’s door as she passes and shouts, ‘Breakfast Doll, come on,’ with little hope of being heard above the whirr of the hairdryer and the thud of the radio. She runs downstairs and into the kitchen, imagining with savage pleasure the children’s horror if she were to revert to a version of their behaviour and lie in bed refusing to get up or brush her hair or eat what is provided – Laura pours tea and places packets of cereal on the table, lost in her reverie, imagining herself lolling in the back of the car while her children drive, picking her nose, dangling her shoes from her toes and sighing at the choice of radio channel. It would be so enjoyable, such fun. Laura has forgotten how to have fun. Somewhere on the way to becoming a thirty-eight-year-old mother of adolescents, a wife manquée for fourteen years, she has left having fun behind.
Sighing, self-pity welling, Laura opens the fridge, reaching before she looks and thus dislodging a pyramid of eggs. One rolls out and breaks softly on her foot. ‘Sod it,’ she murmurs.
‘If we had a dog your foot would be licked clean in a nano-second,’ says Fred from the doorway where he has chosen to stand to eat his cereal. He prefers not to sit at the table, it makes the prospect of conversation with his sister more likely. He grins at Laura, and despite the small humiliations of the morning concerning owl spit and feet, Laura smiles back, love surging because he looks so scrubbed, his hair slicked back with a wet comb from his brow, freckles a splash across his nose, and the hollow at the back of his neck visible again now after a severe interlude at the barber’s shop, reminding her of long-ago life when he and Dolly were babies and she lay with them in bed feeding them for so long it seemed for ever.
‘Mum, why are you standing there with egg on your foot?’ Dolly is at the table, her hair a sliding copper curtain as she leans over her bowl, shovelling spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth fast, flipping the pages of an exercise book between gulps. ‘We’ve got a maths block test this morning. Do you know any algebra formulas?’
‘You mean formulae,’ Fred interrupts triumphantly.
‘Oh, shut up, you swot,’ growls Dolly, sticking out her foot to trip him up. Fred flounders but doesn’t fall, and Laura is wrenched back from the misty memories of their babydom by them hurling abuse and shreds of breakfast at one another.
Having just read a manual on how to raise happy children, Laura suppresses her maternal instinct, which is to scream, ‘Shut the hell up, you two, or I’ll bang you heads together,’ and opts for the psychologically correct response: ‘I see that you are both angry – shall we all sit down and talk it through?’
Inigo walks in as Laura is saying this and looks at her incredulously. ‘Get a grip, Laura. They’re never going to take that hippy crap seriously,’ he says to her, adding, ‘What is that disgusting slime on your foot?’ before clapping his hands like a tinpot dictator and yelling, ‘Dolly! Fred! Enough.’
Irritatingly for Laura, they both shut up for an instant, but then explode into giggles.
‘It’s egg, Dad. Mum’s covered in egg.’ Fred sighs a last snigger and gulps milk from the carton. Inigo deliberately averts his face and props three spoons together to form a wigwam on the kitchen table. Fred looks at him, measuring up his mood. He decides to risk it. ‘If we had a dog, it would have licked her foot clean by now,’ he says, edging away towards the hall and his coat and bag as he speaks.
Inigo doesn’t hear, he reaches into the fridge and emerges with three eggs. He rolls one out of his palm and on to the knuckles of his right hand while throwing another to Dolly. ‘What did you say, Fred? Here, Doll, catch this. I liked your egg pyramid; shame Mum got to it.’ He shakes his head sorrowfully in the direction of Laura’s slime-smeared trainer and reaches out to pull her towards him by her waist. ‘I’m starving after eating that pile of organic horse shit last night. Who else wants scrambled egg?’
‘We’ve got to go.’ Laura glares at Fred over Inigo’s shoulder, not wanting the dog row to break out this morning. ‘We mustn’t be late, they’ve got a maths test.’
Fred assumes an innocent and angelic expression and waves to his father. ‘Bye, Dad, see you later.’
Inigo turns from the stove, a flowery apron tied neatly yet absurdly around his waist. ‘See you tonight, Fred. Hope the test is OK.’
Dolly, twirling her school coat like a matador with his cloak, wraps her arms around her father, her bright hair sweeping his black-clad shoulder, ignoring the wooden spoon dripping butter onto the floor. Inigo kisses the top of her head, gesturing to Laura to take the wooden spoon. She does so, but drops it as Dolly begins her own personal dog attack on her father.
‘Dad, come on, it’s time we talked about this. We all really want a dog and—’
‘Not now, Dolly, we’ve got to go,’ Laura cuts in, grabbing her daughter’s arm, trying to pull her out of the door.
Inigo narrows his eyes, crosses his arms and assumes an evil and inaccessible expression. ‘Well, I don’t want a sodding dog, so you can all go to hell.’
Dolly huffs and glares, tossing her hair crossly. ‘You don’t have to be quite so rude, Dad,’ she says icily, and inwardly Laura applauds, although, with the childcare manual foremost in her mind, she knows better than to side with her daughter against her co-parent. Dolly flaps her coat insouciantly and turns on her heel, shouting back, ‘Me and Fred think you only mind because you don’t want to share Mum,’ and Fred cannot resist calling from the doorway as he passes through it, adding his mite, ‘You’re daft to think you and a dog could compete, Dad. The dog would win hands down. I mean paws …’
Laura closes the front door behind them, hastily escaping the tirade she knows will follow, and herds the twins towards the car, pausing to check for forgotten bags and books, inspecting Dolly from a safe distance for signs of anti-father tantrum, smiling at Fred in case he is nervous about the maths test, chivvying and worrying like a veteran sheep dog.
In the car Laura turns the music up very loudly; it is the only way she can be sure that the children will not speak to her and that she will therefore have peace, if not quiet, in which to think for a moment. The tape is a compilation of her favourite Country and Western songs. John Prine’s inimitable croak cuts into her thoughts, soothing immediately. ‘There’s flies in the kitchen …’
‘Oh no, it’s slit your wrist time,’ groans Dolly in the back. ‘Mum, can we listen to our music instead?’
‘Yes, in a minute, just be patient.’
Manoeuvring out of the quiet side street where they live and into the blaring, shunting London rush-hour traffic, Laura begins to relax. Time spent in the car is time off. Of course, it is better time off if the children are not in the car too, but even when they are, Laura is soothed by the fact that there is nothing they can do about forgotten homework, and even better, there is no need for her to nag them. She joins in with gusto, ‘Make me an angel to fly from Montgomery, Make me a picture of an old Rodeo,’ and flushed with pleasure at the music, and with her own faultless rendition, she glances in the rearview mirror to smile at her darling children, noticing as she does that there is a bus close behind, filling the back window of the car with its mud-stained redness.
The darlings loll vacantly, listless now the dog row has passed. Dolly is fiddling with her hair and gazing out of the window, Fred mouths the words of the song, not because he likes it, but because he knows it so well that he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. They are side by side, their school bags bundled between them, but each twin inhabits a separate world.
‘You’ve got twins. How lovely, they must be so close,’ people say to her when they meet her, avidly watching Dolly and Fred for signs of twinnishness. What these signs might be is not clear. They don’t even look alike. Fred’s freckles, his pale blue eyes, his determined chin and his hair the colour of wet sand come from Laura’s mother’s family, while Dolly has Inigo’s narrow face and long elegant fingers, his curving mouth and dark grey eyes. Only her copper bright hair, and her skin as smooth and pale as cream are like Laura’s. Or rather like they used to be, Laura thinks wryly.
Dolly catches her mother’s eye in the mirror and scowls for no reason except she finds it quicker and easier than smiling. Laura sighs, trying to remember when life with Dolly was not like living with a temperamental opera diva. Fred has always been easy, but not Dolly. Dolly is difficult, and Laura finds Dolly especially hard work. With Inigo she is usually a more persuadable child, and has been since the moment she was placed in his arms, a crumpled infant bellowing her first breaths with flailing fists and a cross little face beneath a shock of hair. On that day, in the delivery room of the vast, dying West London Hospital, Inigo looked at his newborn daughter and began to laugh, wrapping her closer in her blanket, surprised by the rush of love this tiny creature prompted in him, amazed by her instant vigour and energy.
‘She looks like a troll,’ he said, and kissed her forehead. Fortunately, no one heard this pronouncement, as the twin about to be known as Fred was proving difficult to lure from the warmth of his mother’s womb into this world, and every nurse in the room was occupied with watching the doctor as he snapped his forceps together and strode towards Laura on the bed. The sight of the masked doctor poised with his giant tongs was the catalyst needed, and Fred earned his mother’s lifelong gratitude by appearing just in time, a calm baby with surprisingly elegant eyebrows.
Laura cranes round to see if Fred’s eyebrows are still notable; he peers back at her crossly. ‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just looking.’ The thought of these thirteen-year-olds ever being tiny babies seems impossible; it was long ago, it feels almost as if it were in another life.
‘Come on lady, get a move on.’ Laura is brought abruptly back to the present by a jeering voice.
The bus has edged next to her so the driver can shout at Laura; with a hiss of air brakes and automatic doors it revs away into the traffic, leaving Laura dawdling at a green light. It takes her a few moments to realise where she is and what she should do next. The school run is something she executes automatically; any attempt at concentrating on it results in bewilderment. In fact the whole school operation is frequently bewildering, and because of the children being twins, Laura never has a chance to get it right next time. On the other hand, as Inigo is quick to point out when attending plays or singing competitions, at least they only have to go through all of this stuff once. There is more beeping behind her. She kangaroo hops forwards in the wrong gear and Fred groans loudly.
‘Mum, please don’t drive like this when we get near school. And please can we turn your music off now and listen to something decent?’
‘Mum can’t help driving like this.’ Dolly has taken one shoe off and is sitting in full lotus position examining the sole of her foot. ‘Mum, can we stop and get some nail scissors? I think my toenail is growing into my foot, or maybe through it. It really hurts.’
‘Not if you want to get there on time. Put your shoe on, Doll, please – you’re taking up the whole seat sitting like that. Fred, find another tape, but please don’t let’s have Radio One, it makes me want to kill myself.’
School is reached with no further reference to dogs or pierced feet from Dolly, and just one hopeful request from Fred to stop for a gutting knife.
‘You can’t have a gutting knife. You’re a child, not a mass murderer. What do you want it for anyway?’ Laura parks on the zig zag of yellow lines outside his school gates, telling herself that it doesn’t matter as they are too late for any other children to be still arriving. She climbs out, chauffeur-style, to open the door for her offspring.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you later.’ Fred reaches up to kiss her then turns in through the gates and becomes the last of the seething horde of boys ebbing towards the school doors as the bell rings. Dolly is still in the car, scrabbling for her shoe.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to be late,’ Laura says, edging out into the traffic to drive the short distance to Dolly’s side of the school. They arrive, Dolly still half shoeless, searching beneath the back seat. Laura gets out of the car, bites her tongue hard to stop herself saying, ‘Why didn’t you keep your shoe on?’ and bends to retrieve the spilled papers and books which cascade from her daughter’s open school bag. A few girls run across the road and in through the gates. Dolly at last finds her shoe and shoves it on.
‘Bye, Mummy, see you later. Will you get my swimming hat today? And I need a new pen, I think.’
Laura simply nods, watching as Dolly, suddenly alert and smiling, runs off, returns to kiss her mother, then lopes across the empty tarmac to the school entrance.
As Dolly vanishes Laura turns to her car. She loves the moment of getting back into it after the children have gone; there is a luxurious quality to the silence, and the day stretches before her, lit with possibilities. Contemplating these possibilities today, however, sinks her spirits; she could go to the studio she works in with Inigo, where she will arrive in time to take a self-satisfied call from Jack about his session with Manfred and the television crew. Maybe she could nip out at lunchtime to buy some dye. Laura is determined to have glamour in her underwear drawer, and has decided that the most satisfactory way to do this is to dye all her knickers. Peacock blue is the colour she has chosen to kick off with, and today will be a perfect day to start. Following the vital shopping, there will be an hour to tear up small pieces of paper, an ongoing project as Inigo plans to amass five tons of tiny torn scraps of paper and tip them out in Hyde Park at dawn on the spring equinox. This installation is to be called Fall Back and was inspired by Laura’s inability to remember which way the clocks go when they change in autumn and spring.
‘It’s easy, Mum,’ Fred had told her patiently when the family were discussing it over supper. ‘You have to remember “spring forward and fall back”. I remember it because of leaves falling.’
This installation has caused consternation among the officers of the Royal Parks Committee, and Laura had to ask the Arts Council to use their influence in making sure the necessary permissions were granted in time. With less than a month to go until the equinox, she finally summoned the courage to ring them yesterday.
‘Oh yes, Inigo Miller. I daresay we can persuade Royal Parks to relax restrictions for him – think of the publicity it will generate.’ Laura was secretly irritated that it should be so easy for Inigo. He is on a roll at the moment, and is hotly tipped to win the Artist of the Year award next month. This accolade takes the form of a large purple sash and a small cheque, and is only given very occasionally. The last time was seven years ago, when it was awarded to Glynn Flynn, the artist famous for growing grass seed and mould over everyday items.
Inigo has been a favourite of not only the Arts Council, but more unusually, the public, ever since his signature Möbius strip was used as the central motif in the Regent Street Christmas lights two years ago. The lights that year were turned on by a beautiful, aging opera diva who, holding hands with Inigo, sang ‘White Christmas’ over microphones placed all the way up Regent Street. Inigo, who adores opera, and also soppy musicals, wept with the emotion of it all, and Laura had to bite her cheek very hard not to get overpowering giggles. Anyway, the exercise ensured that he became a household name, and the art establishment, fearful that he might defect to America, are still anxious to please him. Laura can afford to skive for a bit longer.
A beam of sunlight dazzles through the windscreen, and instead of following the hill down through South End Green towards the studio and its array of possibilities for her day, Laura parks the car on a street of redbrick terraced houses, curved so they seem articulated like a child’s toy train, and walks between stout black bollards and on to Hampstead Heath. Another world. Here birds chirp as they flit from tree to shrub and the grass is vivid green and sparkling wet where the sun has transformed early morning frost crystals to winter dew. Laura closes her eyes and breathes in deeply. Increasingly and now without even trying to find an excuse, she is drawn to the Heath and the blast of outdoor life it offers. Today she strides towards the Men’s pond where even though it is February, the sound of jocose bathing is brash above the birdsong. She pauses when the pond comes into view, enjoying the spectacle of a young man with a soft white body, poised on the jetty, one toe in the shallows like a classical statue.
‘Come on in, Paul, you wimp,’ yells his heartier friend, crossing the water with a few flashy strokes of front crawl then emerging, streaked mud grey across pink red flesh. Watching from a distance great enough, she hopes, to escape classification as a filthy pervert, Laura cranes to hear the conversation, as the Greek statue and the hearty swimmer argue cheerfully.
‘I hate this,’ moans the statue.
‘It’s character building,’ urges the swimmer. ‘Come on, it’ll get rid of your hangover.’ He splashes back into the water, and a boxer dog who has been sniffing around the edge of the pond leaps in with him. They cavort noisily, sending silver spray feathering across the pond. The Greek statue teeters, his calves flexing to hold his balance, his back alabaster pale in the sunlight above incongruous glamour trunks decorated with pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Laura walks on, grinning broadly to herself, Inigo forgotten.
A Labrador bounces towards her, beaming goodwill and enthusiasm, its breath a vapour cloud in the cold air. It is one of a trio she sees most days on the Heath, pursued by the day-dreaming figure of their fair and ethereal walker. Laura bends to pat the dog. Given that Inigo shows no sign of relenting on the subject of dog acquisition, she wonders whether she should take up professional dog walking. An outdoor career with canines is appealing, particularly today when the Heath is alive with image and incident. If Laura became a dog walker, her walks would have a purpose to them, instead of being no more than time borrowed from her working day. Her walks would in fact be her working day.
Having always prized the cerebral above the physical, Laura is surprised to find such a strong instinct for fresh air within herself. She thinks of the teetering Greek statue, and the hearty swimmer playing with his dog in the ice-cold winter water, and finds herself longing to go back to the pond and push the statue into the water. The glamour trunks would be ruined, of course. A snort of laughter wells up and out, and Laura stops in her tracks, leaning on a tree to laugh. Wiping her eyes she begins to walk back across towards South End Green and her car, smiling and nodding when she passes the ethereal blonde, now throwing a pink ball to her three Labradors. Dog walkers are friendly, they appear to have untrammelled lives, and this attracts Laura. To find pleasure in the gloss on a dog’s coat, or to laugh as it rushes up to you with a stick to throw, are easy versions of happiness, and Laura responds gladly.
Back in the car, with five messages listed on her mobile phone, and all of them from Inigo, she stops smiling and punches in the studio number. Sometimes Inigo’s search for truth and purity is too much like hard work.