Apocalypse Cow (21 page)

‘There was nothing we could do,’ Terry said, more to himself than David.

In the rear-view mirror, David’s cheeks were streaked with tears. He dug among the shopping bags and held a package aloft. ‘You don’t understand. I took Fanny’s trolley by mistake. All we got were lentils.’

A wave of disgust swept over Terry, and he swung the car out onto the road as sharply as he could. David went skidding across the seat and hit his head on the door.

‘Lentils,’ he moaned, and began to sob.

12

Cold turkey

Geldof was leaning against the window, watching a hawk circle in the distance, when the car turned into the street. His breath fogged up the pane as he puffed out in relief. They had made it. Now he could go back to being annoyed by Fanny’s existence, rather than wishing she was there so he could give her a hug.

David got out first, clutching two plastic bags, and made a beeline for the gate. Terry remained in the car, his head resting on the dashboard. It was only when David started shouting to be let in that Terry leapt out. He looked up at the house and met Geldof’s gaze. He quickly looked away. Geldof turned his attention back to the car and waited for his mother to emerge. The doors remained closed. A knot appeared in his stomach. Maybe the army had taken her to a camp, sending David and Terry back for the others. It was possible. As he turned to run downstairs, and Mary gasped in response to something Terry had said, the knot grew into a fist that pushed against his diaphragm. Geldof’s bare feet whispered
on
the carpet as he descended the last few steps. Terry was standing over his father, who had collapsed onto the sofa and was stroking its blue satin covering.

‘She loved this sofa,’ he murmured. ‘I made her come four times on it once. Eight hours of solid bliss. It was our personal record.’

James’s head lolled back.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Geldof asked.

‘The wheel has turned. Fanny has ascended, transcended, transmogrified.’

Geldof redirected his question to Terry. ‘Where is she?’

‘She’s dead,’ Terry stated, looking everywhere save at Geldof.

As far as bald statements went, that one was worthy of gracing Kojak’s head, but it did not immediately register.

‘She can’t be.’

‘There were some pigs—’ Terry broke off and, lifting his head for the first time, glanced at David. ‘There was nothing we could do.’

Mary came towards Geldof, wrapped her palms around the back of his head and guided it into her bosom.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

Two dreams come true at once
, Geldof thought vaguely, feeling an insane urge to giggle. The fist grabbed a hold of his guts, squeezing so hard he bent over and jammed his head hard against Mary’s chest. He stayed there awhile, numb save for his stomach, until he noticed Mary’s dress was wet. He turned his head away from the moist patch and then realized the source of the wetness.

I’m crying
, he thought. And then started to bawl.

‘Stupid woman!’

Geldof sat on the floor in his parents’ room, now just his father’s room, slamming his fist repeatedly against the side of the wardrobe. The medieval curses had been tossed aside for their more forceful descendants, but Geldof was not as well-practised in the art of profanity as David and was struggling to find the expletives to convey just how furious he was.

‘She never bloody listened to anyone, always had to do things her way. Now she’s fucking dead! Stupid crappy fucking sod.’

‘Don’t be angry,’ James, who was sprawled on the bed clutching Fanny’s pillow, said softly.

Geldof kicked the bed frame. ‘Why shouldn’t I be angry? She was an opinionated control freak who cared more about her principles than her own bloody son.’

‘I know Fanny said some things to you that seemed shitty, man, but—’

Geldof blazed across James’s attempt at mollification. ‘What, you mean like humanity is a plague and that she regretted adding to the problem by having me? Is that the kind of thing you mean?’

James waved his hand. ‘Yeah. But she never meant it, you know?’

‘So when she said I was a lead weight dragging her back down into the sea of consumerism – you know, that time I asked her to buy me a new school uniform because she had spilled paint intended for some rich woman’s fur coat on it – she was just having a laugh?’

‘You got to understand what she was. When I met her, she was just eighteen. She had a warrior’s soul. She just wanted to screw and fight.’

‘You’re a bigger idiot than she was. You’re talking to your fifteen-year-old son here, remember?’

James showed no sign of having heard. ‘You made it harder for her to be who she was.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did my existence get in the way of her plans?’

‘We wanted to get an abortion, but we were travelling through Africa, deep in the bush, when we found out.’

‘Are you supposed to be consoling me?’ Geldof asked. ‘I’m an aborted abortion, that’s what you’re saying?’

Still James kept going. ‘We kind of hoped she might miscarry. All those diseases in Africa, bumpy buses, bad hygiene, civil wars. But you clung on.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Geldof shouted at his impervious father. ‘You really are a halfwit, aren’t you?’

James finally lifted his head and met Geldof’s gaze. His eyes looked like they had been yanked out, dunked in a bowl of freshly chopped onions for an hour, then stuffed back into the sockets – a combination of crying and a four-hour marathon of back-to-back mega spliffs, the whole stash gone in one fell swoop.

‘Do you have a point, or are you just trying to make me feel worse?’ Geldof asked.

‘Point. Yeah. The point is, when you came out, she forgot all that and just loved you. She never stopped.’

‘Oh.’

The knot Geldof had been trying to cough up dissolved. He stopped punching the wardrobe and his eyes filled with tears again. Before he could wildly seesaw into a blubbering wreck, his father came to the rescue. ‘She could barely tear herself away from staring at you to eat the placenta. Fried it myself with some garlic.’

Geldof got up, rubbing blood from his skinned knuckles on his trousers, and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Didn’t that go against your vegan principles?’

James shrugged. ‘Nah, nothing died.’ He struggled to a seated position. ‘She was rough on you, I know, but she just wanted you to live right. That’s why she protected you from your granddad.’

‘What, Granddad Peters? Why did I need protecting from him?’

‘No. Granddad Carstairs.’

‘Eh? I thought he died before I was born.’

A light briefly came on in the depths of James’s bloodshot eyes. ‘Ah. I forgot. Sorry, Fanny.’

‘Forgot what?’

‘Don’t suppose it matters now.’

‘What doesn’t matter?’

‘He’s not dead. He still lives in London. We moved to Scotland to get away from him. Fanny used her trust fund to buy this house and the shop. He doesn’t know where we are.’

‘He’s not dead? Why did you lie, then? Was he a paedophile?’

James shook his head. ‘Worse. You know Carstairs Coffee?’

‘Of course. They sell it everywhere. What, he owns the company?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hell’s teeth!’ Geldof exclaimed, giving up on his experiment with real swear words. ‘He must be loaded.’

‘Filthy rich. And he wanted to leave it to you, his only male heir.’

‘Hold on. He wanted to give me his massive coffee empire?’

James nodded.

‘I’m struggling to see the problem here.’

‘His coffee wasn’t Fairtrade. We visited one of the plantations in Cameroon. They treated those workers like slaves.’

James sighed and flumped back down onto the bed, seemingly exhausted by what might well have been the longest conversation Geldof had ever had with him.

Geldof sat on the edge of the bed, stunned.

I should be angry again
, he thought.
She’s cheated me out of millions
.

But the whole situation was so ludicrous, and so typical of Fanny, that he had to suppress the urge to laugh. It struck him that, now she was gone, maybe he didn’t have to hate her. So often he had longed for his mother to disappear. He had never explicitly wished her dead: sure, he had occasionally imagined her developing a catastrophic nut allergy that ended with a fountain of Brazil nuts exploding out of her abdomen, or having her head kicked in by a police horse at a demo against the Iraq war, but those were just boyish fantasies.

Suddenly, fond memories flooded in. There was the trip to Glasgow Zoo when he was five, when she chained them both to the lion enclosure and demanded the beast be set free. Geldof had treated it as a fun game, even when the lion sauntered over to investigate the fresh meal someone had chained up for him. One zookeeper had had to keep it at bay with a pole so his colleague could put a tranquillizer dart in it as they waited for the fire brigade to arrive with cutting equipment.

Then there was the Arbroath Weekend Naturist Retreat, which she took Geldof to when he was seven. He was allowed to remain clothed since it was late autumn and he had the flu, and he passed a happy three days peering at jiggling breasts
(his
curious gaze allowed to roam freely by the shielding depths of his parka) with a fascination he didn’t quite fully understand.

And living in a tree-house in Pollok Park for three months as Fanny and her friends tried to stop a new motorway being built was a two-year-old boy’s dream. He still remembered raining conkers down on the hats of the police officers who were forced to keep a 24-hour watch on the protesters, egged on by his delighted mother.

Now he thought about it, their relationship only deteriorated when he hit puberty and developed, along with a raging brew of hormones, a finely honed sense of embarrassment. Now he was motherless. Effectively an orphan, since his father rarely put in an appearance on planet Earth other than to ask where the skins were. Geldof got up, crossed to his mother’s wardrobe and climbed inside. Her smell – earthy, sweaty and comforting – enveloped him. He pulled a dress off a hook and curled up around it. His eyelids started to droop and soon he nodded off.

When he awoke, his cheek was on fire. He burst from the wardrobe, rolled over and came to his feet like a marine. He fought the urge to claw at his face where the hemp dress had brought his skin up in massive hives.

Accursed hemp!
he thought.

That was when it hit him. He no longer needed to wear hemp. His father had never been bothered about that particular rule, or any rule for that matter, and Fanny was no longer around to enforce it. Thirty seconds later, Geldof was bollock naked. Aside from the normal relief of having the chafing items off his skin, his body tingled with the prospect of never having to don hemp again. In his elation, he forgot
the
house was full of guests and high-stepped into the hallway for a victory lap. Mary was before him, heading for the toilet. She shrieked, while Geldof cupped his balls and hopped sideways back into the room. He slammed the door shut and leaned against it, his heart thumping. Then he began to laugh. Finally, Fanny’d had her way. He had become a nudist.

That evening they gathered for what James said was a Buddhist ceremony to help Fanny’s spirit journey to its next receptacle. They gathered in a semicircle around the statue which was to represent her physical form: a two-foot-high, bright-red carving of a grumpy-looking god with droopy moobs and startlingly large male genitalia. It seemed particularly pertinent to Lesley that James had chosen an icon with huge balls to stand in for his wife, which was a comment on the nature of their relationship if ever there was one. Blue streams of smoke curled from incense sticks placed either side of the statue and circled James like the vapour trails of miniature fighter planes. The sandalwood scent was cloying, yet it still failed to quell the stale reek of nine humans who had run out of soap and toilet paper.

Only Constance was exempt from participating, which was fair enough considering she was still on the sofa looking like she was not only at death’s door, but had rung the bell and was listening for footsteps on the other side. James stood in the middle of the semicircle, swaying back and forth. Everybody else was in their own private little world. Mary was busy oozing motherly compassion towards Geldof, who still looked dazed; the twins were kicking each other’s shins; and David seemed to be licking his lips and gazing at the professor.

James stopped swaying and said, ‘Fanny is dead, but her spirit does not yet realize it. We must help her understand she has left this world and help her find her way to her next life.’ He bowed his head. ‘Please, hold hands.’

Terry’s warm palm enfolded Lesley’s instantly. Her hand tingled and she had to resist the impulse to squeeze. David grabbed her other hand roughly a few seconds later, smearing her palm with a slick of sweat. She grimaced.

‘Now, repeat after me,’ James intoned. ‘Anicca vata sankhara, uppadavayadhammino. Uppajjitva nirujjhanti tesam vupasamo sukho.’

Silence followed.

‘Could you say that again please?’ Lesley asked.