Getting Over It (29 page)

Chapter 38

I
CLING TO MY MOTHER
like, I imagine, a rescued mountaineer clinging to a St. Bernard.
Oh god,
I wail inside,
why is it so bad, why? No one said it would be like this.
I am a hollow skin stuffed with razor blades that slash my body from the inside until I choke on my own blood. I cling to my mother so heavily that her knees buckle and we gently crumple to the floor, where she strokes my hair and makes soothing noises. “I don’t know what to do,” I sob. “I don’t know what to doo-hoo-hooo!” Even as I bleat the words, I feel horrified at this pitiful collapse in front of the one person who needs me to be invincible.

But my mother rocks me and says, “It’s so hard, darling. And I know I haven’t been much use. But you’ve been so brave,” and suddenly I am five years old again and being consoled after falling over and cutting my knee. I smile weakly and wipe my eyes. “Cry if you want to,” orders my mother briskly. “The children bawl constantly and I always say ‘better out than in!’ ” The tears fall hot and fast and I shake my head, wordlessly. This unexpected fortitude is like finding a shiny brown chestnut amid autumn’s decomposing mulch.

My mother smiles at my stupefaction and says softly, “Come on, darling. I’ll make you a hot drink.” I meekly allow her to drag me to my feet, and suddenly she bursts out angrily, “Stupid hot drinks! Your father’s dead and all we can do is have a bloody hot drink!”

I snivel-giggle and say, “It’s shit, isn’t it?”

My mother makes a face and fills the kettle. We sit in silence, drinking hot chocolate and contemplating the fact that death is a monstrous affront to the living and shouldn’t be allowed. After a long time my mother pats my hand and says softly, “Remember, darling. Daddy may be gone but he’ll always be with you.”

I look up, the corners of my mouth trembling, and see that she is crying, too. And I realize that even amid the rubble of our lives, we’ve salvaged something.

I think my mother realizes it, too, because in the weeks that follow my outburst, our relationship slips from fraught to placid like the stunned quiet after a flash thunderstorm. When she recounts a success she had at work and I tell her “well done,” I notice with surprise that she blushes. It’s as if we’re on honeymoon after a speedy romance—tipped into intimacy after the pink whirlwind of lust has settled—and she’s suddenly shy because what I think of her matters. I scramble upstairs, grinning to myself, and consider the inconceivable: that when I move into my flat tomorrow, I am going to miss her.

It’s strange. After I closed on the flat, I expected my mother to shun me for at least a fortnight, but instead she offered to help me interview builders for quotes. I assumed this was for bicep-ogling purposes, but she turned out to be a shrewd, efficient ally. Her enthusiasm didn’t fizzle like it usually does. She dismissed Lizzy’s recommendation (he wanted cash) and called the firm that Vivienne had employed to refurbish her kitchen and build a conservatory. “Vivvy couldn’t fault them!” explained my mother. Naturally I assumed they must be excellent—as most people employed by Vivienne are sued to within an inch of their livelihoods—and to my relief they
were
excellent.

Last year, Laetitia moved to Barnes and her builders dragged out a two-month job for five months, turned up when and if they felt like it, drank their weight in sweet tea (Laetitia had to purchase a bag of sugar especially), then peed it out over her turquoise mosaic toilet floor, cracked her extortionate new cast iron rolltop bath, chipped her antique gilt wall mirror, botched her Swedish style trompe l’oeil paneling, installed her boiler in such a way that it emitted poisonous gas into the kitchen, scratched her Provençal armoire, forgot to tighten the nuts connecting two water pipes, thus transforming the flat below into a large designer swamp, blocked off access to the gas mains, installed a dimmer switch in the bedroom that dimmed lights in the living room and study, too, and gave her an estimate of £3,500 but charged her £19,000. Laetitia marched into work most mornings shaking white dust out of her hair and muttering that it was “like being in a war.”

So I appreciate my beginner’s luck.

After six backbreaking weeks, my builders have replastered, replumbed, rewired, and resuscitated my little flat. They have been masterminded by Terry who, in his own words, “runs a tight ship.” Meanwhile, my mother and I have spent at least thirty hours trawling greater London in search of—as she puts it—“fitments.”

She has been astounding. She’s approached the flat refurbishment like a school project. She bought a pile of glossy interiors magazines, and ordered me to scour them and make notes. Every time I saw something I liked, she’d fill the Peuguot with petrol and force me to plan a route. Equipped with a tape measure and a sketch of the kitchen and bathroom dimensions, she’d then speed to the relevant store and barter with its sales staff.

She has the business scruples of a kidney broker and if a shop didn’t offer her a loss-making bargain, she’d walk out. (I’d already be out, having run into the street purple with mortification.) Personally, I wouldn’t query the price of beads in a Morrocan flea market and would have forked out a premium for granite floor tiles without a squeak. My mother, however, would shout down God over the cost of a halo and shame Him into a discount.

I won’t say it hasn’t been stressful. Especially as Lizzy had assumed that the role of Assistant Foreperson would fall to her. I pacified her with a paint-shopping trip and she accepted my mother’s superior involvement as widow’s compensation. This excuse to Lizzy was partially true.

Following her husband’s demise, my mother has a loose bunch of emotions rolling about that she needs to put somewhere. Until recently, she hasn’t been capable. But the key has been jiggling in the lock for the past month and it seems, finally, to have turned. The electronic transfer and its tumultuous aftermath has helped my mother realize—on some vague level—that if she keeps pushing me away I will eventually go. So yes, her interest in my flat is in her interest. But it would be more truthful to say that she understands I genuinely need her.

Consequently , for the first time in—at a rough estimate—twenty-six years, she has been humoring me. When I threw
Elle Decoration
on the floor and announced I was sick of stick women in Prada flouncing around their cool empty homes, smirking over their solid oak chairs which they’d “picked up for two pounds each from a thrift store,” my mother rose to the challenge. Three days and twenty quid later—she handed me the receipt—I was the proud owner of two solid oak chairs. (She hadn’t bought more as there wasn’t enough room in the flat: “Aren’t I clever!”)

When I decided that multi-million pound steel kitchen units were imperative or I’d be too embarrassed to invite people round, she consulted
Living Etc.
and suggested a visit to the London Metal Center. “Look, darling! They sell stainless steel sheeting from about five pounds per square foot! You stick it on top of that hardboard stuff and it looks exactly the same!” I caught Terry chortling to himself, but I think he was secretly impressed.

I’m just thankful that she’s fizzing with energy. I’m determined not to think about how long it may or may not last. Mostly, I’m succeeding. So maybe I have changed, too. I feel calmer. It’s as if I’ve had my nose pressed up against an abstract painting, fighting, panting, pushing for a brilliant view. But it’s only now when I step back that I can appreciate the picture. It’s an unexpected revelation, and when I recall the incongruous sight of my mother in animated chat with Terry over architectural suppliers, I feel an airy flutter of delight.

I expect moving in to feel ceremonial, but though I carry Fatboy over the threshold, it doesn’t. Possibly because I possess only seven large items: two chairs, a table, a television, a bed, a dartboard, and a clothes rail, so it takes Luke and myself about seven minutes to hoist stuff up the creaky stairs and arrange it. Now the builders have gone, the flat looks stark—in the same way that a pinhead looks stark. “Helen,” says Luke, “this is so tidy for you!”

After Luke leaves, I walk around from room to room (it takes me nine seconds) touching the yellow walls, sniffing the chalky newness, stroking my craftily crafted steel-covered kitchen units. Then I boil water in my shiny new kettle—courtesy of my mother, who badgered it out of Woolworths as compensation for a faulty plug—make myself a coffee, sit on a chair, and look at the polished wood floor. Silence.

Then, after three labour-intensive hours of arranging my duvet, moving four mugs and three plates from a high cupboard to a low cupboard, shoving forks into a drawer, lining up my murder collection in a row on the bedroom floor with piles of bricks as bookends, scrubbing the bath, bleaching the toilet, sweeping the floor, placing my blue toothbrush next to the sink, and making a list of items I need but can’t afford without a new credit card, I tire of homemaking and ring Lizzy.

I have pasted over my disappointment in Lizzy. She sensed my coolness and was palpably hurt. A week ago she said—in a stiff, rehearsed voice that made me suspect she’d been brooding—“Helen, I do hope you don’t think that you can’t ring me anymore just because I’m going out with Brian. We’re not one person. We don’t do everything together.”

I laughed guiltily and said, “Lizzy, of course I don’t think that. I’ve just been mad busy with the flat, that’s all.”

The pathos of this exchange stayed with me and I began to wonder if I’d been harsh. After all, I hadn’t presented Lizzy with the brutal facts, so maybe it wasn’t fair to condemn her. Of course, she would have wanted to help Tina if she’d known the truth. And—holier than thou considerations apart—I missed Lizzy. I missed her for the same reason I resented her. I wanted Miss Twinkletoes back in my life sprinkling fairydust.

The next day, I approached her at work and asked if she’d like the New World Gas Range cooker because it was rusting to dust and about to be dumped on the skip. She flung her arms around me like I’d offered her eternal life, and collected it that same evening. Amen.

Lizzy is thrilled at my call and bounces round clutching a bunch of daffodils and a sleek glass vase. The vase is beautiful—a warm burnished orange, like captured sunshine. “It’s gorgeous,” I squeak. “It completes the room!”

Lizzy beams. “It’s my pleasure! Now show me round!” She exclaims, “I can hardly believe it’s the same flat. It’s so dinky!”

To my shame, we spend the next two hours earnestly discussing glitter paint and sugar soap and sanding machines. I find myself gabbling desperately, incessantly—as if building a wall of words could prevent her from leaving. But at 6
P.M.
Lizzy wrenches herself away (Brian’s aunt is throwing a houseboat party) and Fatboy and I are alone. The evening looms ahead like a dark tunnel.

I switch on the TV, am confronted by
Songs of Praise,
switch it off, wonder if the flat is bigger than a play house, flop on the bed, stare at the ceiling, spot a money spider in the corner, run into the kitchen to find a broom to poke it with, realize I don’t own a broom, run back, can’t see the spider, know it’s scuttling about the bedroom, suspect it’s pregnant and laying spider eggs, and start panicking. I am about to ring my mother when I remember that Vivienne has taken her to an organic health farm for the weekend. I slump back on the bed and feel miserable. When the phone rings, I almost swoon with gratitude. “Hello?” I whisper, hoping it isn’t a wrong number.

“Babe?” says a clipped voice.

“Jasper!” I squeal. “How are you!”

I am well aware that I sound inordinately keen. Unbeknown to Jasper, my delight is nothing personal, as I’d have greeted an AT&T salesperson with the same shrieky degree of elation. But Jasper being Jasper, he takes it personally.

“Hey, steady there, angelsweet!” he exclaims.

As I believe any man who says the words “Hey, steady there, angelsweet!” without irony should kill himself instantly to dispel the shame, I choke and pause before answering.

I say, “Hey yourself, Smug One! Do you want to come and see my new flat?”

There is a silence and I wonder if Jasper is going to cut me down—and it has been known—with a cry of, “I’m devastated, angelsweet! I’ve adore to, but alas I can’t! [ascending pitch as if asking a question] I’m escorting Monique the supermodel? The one with a Harvard doctorate? Who writes books on Jungian theory? To, hmm! Paris? [he’d pronounce it “Paree”] For a night of pash at the Georges Cinq? What crippling timing!”

Instead, he replies, “Absolutely, babe! Where are you? I’ll hop in a cab now.”

An hour later, Jasper and I are sitting at my table on my solid oak chairs, prodding at the remains of Chinese takeaway. Jasper is wearing a blue and white baseball cap, which I cannot see the point of. Even so, he looks ravishing. I am explaining how laying tiles at a diagonal will give a feeling of space when I notice Jasper stifle a yawn. “Sorry,” I say indignantly. “Am I boring you?”

Jasper’s eyes widen and he drawls, “Babe, I could listen to you forever.” I tell him he’s a liar. He sighs.

“What?” I say, surprised that I’ve made an impact.

“Oh nothing, babe,
rien
.” He shakes his head mournfully.

I snort. “If you’re resorting to French, something is definitely up. What is it?”

Jasper leans on his elbows and says slowly, “I’d rather not say.”

Naturally, I am agog. “Jasper,” I gasp. “You must tell me!” I wrack my brain to think of how to say this in French, but there’s a large vacant space where the knowledge should be.

Jasper shifts in his chair and mutters, “It’s not fair.”

I clutch the sides of the table to stop myself flying at him and prising the secret out of his mouth manually. “Is it your job?” I say.

“
No
!” says Jasper in a loud voice. “God, no! The job’s A-one!”

I try again. “Is it, uh, not being able to drive?”

Jasper looks piqued. He croaks, “Helen, you don’t think I’d care about a plebian thing like that, do you!”

As I know from rifling through his bedside drawer that he’s failed his driving test at least six times (it’s why he’s constantly broke), I decide not to answer. I say, “Hmm,” and then, “Is it… Louisa?”