Getting Over It (28 page)

Tom grits his teeth and growls, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! What girlfriend?”

At this point I clutch my hair to stop myself from shaking him, and scream, “Don’t lie to me, I’m sick of being lied to! The girlfriend we saw you with in the pub, you moron!”

Tom’s mouth falls open.

“What?” I say angrily.

Tom glowers at me and shouts, “You stupid brat, that was my sister!”

This is absolutely impossible and I’m about to say so. But then I remember a wheedling comment Lizzy made soon after the pub incident, something like “she could have been his sister!” Then I also remember Tom telling me about his sister. And suddenly, the idea that the pub woman was Tom’s sister is less impossible than it first appeared. If this is true, my position is untenable. But I’m not going to give in without a brawl.

“My mother was told that you were on holiday with your girlfriend!” I snap.

Tom shakes his head in disbelief. “I don’t understand,” he says. “Why was your mother discussing my holiday arrangements?”

I say quickly, “Because I was busy at work, Fatboy was ill, so she brought him to the vet.”

Tom says coolly, “Really. So?”

I shrug. “So she knows you, so she asked where you were! I suppose… Celine told her.”

As I say the slimy word “Celine,” a toe-curling yet plausible theory forms in my head. It forms in Tom’s head, too. “
Oh
!” he says acidly. “Celine told your mother that I was away with my girlfriend.” He pauses for a second, then bellows, “Why are you so selfish! Why don’t you give anyone a break! There’s no pleasing you, is there! You can’t ask me to my face like an adult! Oh, no! That’d be far too easy! You—”

I stamp my foot so hard I nearly break it. My voice is shaky with anger. “Don’t you shout at me, you pompous man, I won’t have it!” Secretly I am mortified to the core about the girlfriend error, but I’ll be damned if Tom’s going to know about it. I screech, “I can’t believe I let you boss me about! You think you’re so superior!”

Tom splutters, “What are you on about!”

I stamp my foot again—less hard this time—and snap, “Don’t pretend you don’t know! Preaching to me about what I should be doing, saying to my mum, feeling about my dad! Where I should be living! You—”

Now Tom slaps his hand down on the table and makes me jump. He yells, “I didn’t preach about anything, you little shit! I made a suggestion because you were never going to think of it yourself! I tried to help, but you wouldn’t let me! You’re the one running away! I wasn’t going anywhere! So don’t blame it on me, sweetheart! You’re like a bloody yo-yo! And I’m guessing at what I’ve done wrong! When I’ve done nothing wrong! You wanna grow up, darling!”

I am so astounded at the intensity of his rage that I barely hear what he is saying. Not for the first time, I feel an urge to slap him. So I pounce on “I tried to help you” with a shrill squawk of, “No, you didn’t! You knew I needed somewhere to stay! You never offered! You didn’t care!”

Tom smacks himself on the forehead with the flat of his palm. This takes me by surprise and I bleat, “Wh-what did you do that for?”

He sighs and says, “Because you make me want to cry!”

I say sulkily, “Why?”

He says in a slow tired heavy voice, “I didn’t offer Helen, because I do care. Or did. I’m not a fucking emergency service. Now, is there anything I can do for your irresponsibly overfed cat, or did you cart him all the way here in a box as an excuse to yell at me?”

Like most petty criminals whose cover is blown, I am glaring and silent.

“I thought so,” says Tom, his blue eyes cold. He rips open the door. I snoot out. “Your ca-at!” he shouts after me in a nasty singsong tone. I snoot back, snatch the Voyager, and snoot out again. I snoot around to say something horrid, but Tom slams the door in my face. I look toward reception and see a Jack Russell and its owner staring at me in beetle-browed fascination, so I lean my bottom against the front door and snoot into the street.

The poison cherry on the plastic icing on the rotting cake is a call from Tina on my mobile. Every time I’ve approached her at work she’s trilled, “Not now doll, I’m busy!” and waved me away. All my carefully worded e-mails are ignored. But this evening she chooses to make contact. My callback tone rings as I heave Fatboy through the front door. I dial my message service and wince at Tina’s high-pitched merriment: “Hi, Helen! Just thought I’d let you know! Aide has made a big promise to change and it’s all sorted and okay! So you can stop fussing! No need to ring! ’Bye!” I kick the door shut, release Fatboy from portable prison, and say bitterly, “Jesus, you’re even thicker than I am.”

I can’t even smile when my mother shouts from the kitchen, “Darling! Are you talking to me?”

Chapter 37

N
ANA SAYS THAT WHEN
something bad happens, you know who your friends are. Lizzy says that when something good happens, you know who your friends are. The upshot is, I don’t have a clue who my friends are. Jasper is still chasing me like a fox after a chicken, Tina veers from reasonable to remote, and I can’t decide what has happened.

The only news is that after four exhausting, nitpicking, hair-tearing weeks, my solicitor rings to say we’re ready to exchange contracts on flat 55B. I tell Lizzy that in less than a month I’ll be a homeowner and collapse on my desk. She can’t understand it. “Aren’t you thrilled! What’s wrong? Oh my, it’s so exciting! We’ll have to go paint shopping!”

I’m not sure which is more upsetting—the fact I find paint shopping a happy prospect or that I am now committed to living alone by myself in a titchy, derelict, terraced box in a scruffy part of Kentish Town. At least the Toyota will feel at home. And the purgatory of negotiating with banks and brokers, and wasting cash on surveys and searches and surveyors, and getting guzumped by people richer than me and being patronized and bullied is nearly at an end.

But I think of the hovel that is flat 55B and my stomach flips like a pancake. When my mother saw it she nearly burst into tears. “Why can’t you stay with me!” she exclaimed. “This is disgusting! It’s like a disused squat.”

I was tempted to reply, “Funny you should say that,” then thought better of it. Adam went white and tried to suggest it had a storming aspect, but hushed up when my mother screeched “What!” For once I feel as if my mother’s talking sense. What on earth am I’m doing? “Yes, fine,” I hear myself bleat to the solicitor. “Eleven
A.M.
tomorrow, in your office, all right, see you then, ’bye.”

For the last month I’ve been working as hard as an Egyptian slave to take my mind off Tom and the cruel things he said, so Laetitia is gracious in granting me the morning off. Her only comment is, “Kentish Town? Wasn’t someone stabbed to death there recently?” I laugh nervously.

Meanwhile, Lizzy is being as sweet as the sugarplum fairy—she has already given me the number of her “sensational” builders and “superb” electrician and “angel of a” plumber—and it’s easy to forget that I’m annoyed with her. I can’t help it. I feel sullen because Lizzy is too confident—for her own good and for everyone else’s. Her way is the only way. She may be kind, but she is alarmingly shortsighted. Lizzy is right about ginger being good for circulation and she is possibly right about peppermint being great for ringworm, but she is horribly wrong about Adrian and her teacher’s pet complacency is pissing me off.

So I sneak out of work without saying goodbye, and when she calls me at home in the evening, I whisper to my mother to say I’m out.

“She says she’s out,” says my mother, forcing me to rip the phone out of her hand and be civil after all.

“Sorry about that,” I say with fake cheeriness. “She’s spent all day screaming at her kids. She’s gone deaf.”

Lizzy isn’t so sure. “Is anything the matter?” she says cautiously. “You sound different.”

As I’d rather face a speeding truck than Lizzy’s aggrieved piety, I say breezily, “Nothing at all. I’m a little concerned about tomorrow, you know, big commitment and all that.”

As I expect, Lizzy poohpoohs this and sings, “Don’t worry! It’s so straightforward! You’ll be fine!” As it happens, she’s wrong. Again.

The day of contract exchange starts badly when my mother storms off to work without saying goodbye. I try not to be annoyed and fail. I know it’s only because she wants us to live together forever as a weird double act—the princess and the bloody pea. “The madam,” I mutter. “She wants to stop behaving like a brat and grow up.” As soon as I say this, I realize it sounds familiar, and that Tom said it to me. “Hur!” I say, switching on the TV and falling backward onto the sofa. “He can sod off. Sod off! Shouting at me like that!” I say this aloud in an attempt to make his loss less aching, but it doesn’t work. My masochistic mind keeps turfing up cute memories. Hey, Helen! Check out that wolf-teeth smile! The emergency bunch of blue marigolds! Dissecting Stephen King while eating pizza! The elephant joke! Babysitting on tequila night! Fluffing up Fatboy’s fur to make him look like a punk! Kissing off that crumb of cream cheese at the corner of your mouth! Adorable, no?

But it’s not so much the little things as the sum of the parts. I can’t deny it. I try to work myself up into a rancor against Tom, but I can’t. I want to despise him for liking me, but can’t. I want to maintain the things he said to me were said out of malice, but I can no longer pretend. You don’t spend ages peeling an orange unless you want to eat it. I recall his despair on our last meeting and it pains me. I’ve hurt him. Which proves me right. To care is to lose. And I’m a bad loser. As punishment, I watch the Shopping Channel for ninety minutes to remind myself that there are people out there far worse off than I am. Then I jump in the Toyota and drive to my solicitor.

Lizzy’s solicitor is called Dorothy Spence and Lizzy is forever praising Dorothy as “thorough.” And thorough she is. Easily an hour thorough, reading through this clause and that clause and do I understand what this liability means, and the import of this restrictive covenance, and she’s queried that and she’s queried this but all her queries have now been satisfied, and do I have any questions and if not, she requires a deposit of nine thousand pounds.

I nearly fall off my swingaround chair. “What, now?” I stammer.

“Yes, please,” says Dorothy briskly.

“But I, I didn’t realize,” I bleat. “I, I thought that was… just before completion… I misunderstood, I haven’t done this before, so I thought…”

Dorothy shoots me a look—and I falter to a halt. There are times when I have so little faith in my own abilities that I ordain myself to failure.

And this is one of those times. I have made a foolish error. In my tizzy ignorance, I assumed the ten percent deposit was payable on completion. Admittedly, Dorothy sent me a letter a week ago detailing what would be required of me but—as I now recall—I glanced at it, stuffed it in my bag to read later, and forgot about it. Dorothy didn’t even send me a red reminder. As a result, the cash is breeding in a high interest account and I can’t withdraw a penny without giving notice. I am a clueless fraud aping a dependable adult and the worst has happened.

I’ve been exposed for what I am.

“Can I make a call?” I ask Dorothy in a small voice. She glances at her chrome clock, nods sharply, and reclines in her plump leather chair. I call my mother’s mobile and pray she answers. She doesn’t. So I call the school and ask to be put through to the staff room.

“Is Cecelia Bradshaw there?” I say breathlessly. “It’s her daughter.”

A distant voice replies, “One moment.” Forty moments later, I’m still waiting and Dorothy Spence is tapping her foot.

Then the line goes dead. I bite my lip, smile weakly at Dorothy, and redial. “I rang a minute ago and got cut off,” I say, keeping my voice hard and loud so it doesn’t break. “I need to speak to Cecelia Bradshaw. It’s urgent.” Thirty seconds later, my mother is on the line. I feel weak with relief. I pinch my nose to stop myself crying and explain. The humiliation throbs through me in shockwaves. When I finish declaiming, my mother is silent.

Then she says in a wonder-of-you voice, “It’s not a problem, darling. I’ll call the bank right now and get an electronic transfer to the relevant account. Let me speak to the lawyer woman.” I sink into a grateful trance and hand the receiver to Dorothy.

Fifteen torturous minutes later, I am driving home in the Toyota. As any form of reflection is painful, I spend the entire journey saying “La la la” in a loud monotone to ward off thought. I slink into the office at 2:30
P.M.
and start typing Laetitia’s rejection letters to all feature ideas sent in on spec without screwing around for two hours first. To my relief, Lizzy isn’t in the office—and as Laetitia wouldn’t dream of asking how my morning went any more than she’d dream of buying shoes from C&A, I work undisturbed until 6:36.

Then I leave without speaking to anyone. As I sit on the tube, I feel naked. I am convinced everyone is peering at me, talking about me, jeering at me. I feel claustrophobic and I want to scream.

By the time I’m home, I am a gibbery, quivery wreck. I intend to curl up in bed and sleep, but as I tiptoe upstairs my mother appears like a shimmering genie in the hallway and exclaims, “Helen! Come down here and talk to me!” Wordlessly, I swivel and descend. I feel as hunchy and evil as a tarantula. My mother, meanwhile, is as glowy and zingy and zesty as a teenage beauty queen. The only difference is she’s not wearing a sash. She beams and pats her hair and lifts her hands and says in a joyous voice, “So?” I stand before her and my lower lip starts to tremble. I scowl at the patterned carpet and clutch my arms behind my back.

And I say fiercely, “If Dad was here, he’d have known what to do.” I dig my nails into my palms and wait. I don’t know what I expect. Huffing. Tutting. Not laughter.

But my mother tee-hee-hees and says, “Yes, but I managed okay, didn’t I?”

I nod and whisper, “I miss my dad.”

My mother is quiet and I feel like a fart at a wedding. Then she looks at my face as if for the first time, and says softly, “I know you do, darling, and I’m sure he misses you, too.”

And suddenly she takes a step forward and hugs me tightly, and I am lost and found in a waft of Chanel. The range of sound effects available to me as a human seem inadequate, and I wish I were a wolf so I could tilt my head and howl,
owwooww owwwwwww,
surrendering my body and soul to the resonance of grief.

Instead I close my eyes and wail silently, absorb the warmth of my mother’s purple sweater, and feel her thin arms firm around me.