Lemonade and Lies (14 page)

He saw it in my face, I think. The desperation.

“Where is it? What’d you do with it? You stupid bloody cow, you’ve never dumped it?”

And the thing was, I had. Not in the way he meant, but I’d given it away. I’d been angry with him when he’d taken off, leaving us to fend for ourselves. But if it was important to him and he thought I’d dumped it then I had a way to get my own back. And there was no way he could prove I was lying.

“You’ll never get it,” I said, a reserve of courage coming to my rescue. I took it to the tip along with all your other shit.”

He took another half hearted swipe at me. And when I ducked, he picked up my brandy tumbler, threw it at the wall, shattering the thing, sending the last of the sticky amber liquid running down the wallpaper and onto the worn Wilton. I laughed. A nervous tension-induced, pathetic sort of laugh. But a laugh’s a laugh. I was thinking about the poor, sad carpet and the fuss his mother had made over choosing it. Merlot, cheap brandy and a faded stain where Millie had dropped her toast and marmite had all taken their toll on the thing. Nothing less than miraculous-intervention would bring it back to its former glory now.

I don’t know how long I sat there on the floor, my back against the wall. I could hear him opening cupboards and trashing them, his anger mounting as the search proved useless. I should have run. Taken the chance to escape or call the police, but I was trapped in some sort of bubble that wouldn’t allow me to move. I didn’t even look at what the bastard was doing, but kept my eyes glued shut, hoping it would all be over soon.

“Which tip?”

I didn’t answer.

“Tell me! Or they’ll be carrying you out of here in a bucket.” He raised his hand again, but didn’t carry through.

I tried to think. Which council tip would I have taken it to? “Newquay,” I blurted.

“Newquay? You’re lying. Why the fuck would you take it to Newquay?”

I forced myself to concentrate. To remember. To be calm. In all the time we’d been here, had he ever taken any rubbish away? Had he even dropped a dust bin bag outside the front door? The thought was incredible. He didn’t do stuff like that. He was just testing me.

“I don’t care what you think. I dropped all your stuff in the council skip in Newquay. There’s no way you’ll get it back now. They’ll have ploughed it into some rancid landfill a long time ago,” I said defiantly.

“You stupid moo. D’you
know
what you’ve done?”

I thought he’d go for me again. But he didn’t. Instead he rushed from the room, viciously slamming the lounge door as he left. Maybe he was in a hurry to buy a pair of industrial strength rubber gloves and a long barge pole on his way to the nearest landfill site. I didn’t care. All I could think about were the kids. And my old life. And how I’d sometimes complained about it. But I wanted it back.

My head sank to my chest. Waves of depression and self pity rolled over me and icy shivers took hold until I was as cold as I’d been in the Oslo Fjord. I heard my name called and knew I must be in the grip of some kind of post-traumatic hysteria thing.

“Jilly, for God’s sake where are you?” The voice was urgent now, concerned. “Your front door’s wide open.”

Alice burst into the room, her eyes wide with fear. “God’s sake, girl what happened to you?”

David Ovenden crashed in behind her, ducking his head through the doorway. “Jesus! Your face.”

Alice spotted the brandy bottle, got one of my wine glasses and half filled it.

“Drink!” She ordered.

I felt sick, but swallowed a trickle of the fiery brandy. They seemed to think it would make me feel better. But nothing would make me feel better, not until I got to my kids. Saw they were okay.

“Why you here?” I asked.

“Thought a sister could use a hug.”

“Shit, Alice. I’m not stupid.”

“No, but you look like you’ve been mugged. And I suppose you didn’t recognise your mugger, eh?” She gave me a cynical look.

“Sure I recognised him. It was that bastard ex-husband of mine.”

“Bill?” She seemed surprised.

“Right. 999 - ambulance and police.” David headed for the phone. It wouldn’t help. I’d been cut off and hadn’t paid the reconnection fee yet.

“No!” The strength of my protest seemed to confuse them both.

“Look, old girl . . .” David Ovenden wasn’t good at this. But I guessed his heart was in the right place. “. . . We need to get you to a hospital.”

“Have you got your car?” I asked, and his face brightened.

“Sure. I can drive you there.”

“No. No hospitals. I’ll be fine. But I need to get somewhere else quickly.”

“Look, I’m getting the police. The man can’t get away with this.”

“And he won’t. But right now there’s something more urgent. Will you drive me to Scotland, David? There’s no time to lose.”

“Jeez, Jill. I know you miss the kids. But we need to get this sorted.”

“It’s not about the kids.” And it wasn’t. Well, not totally. I had to see my parents before Bill got there. He wasn’t slow. He’d work it out.

I hadn’t thrown his bloody carving in the dumpster. In a moment of inspiration I’d sent the Norwegian Mangle Board to my stepfather. Something about passing on the present given to me by one douchebag to another douchebag seemed like a poetic kind of justice in my head at the time. A sort of symmetry. Now I wasn’t so sure. He was my kids’ grandfather, and he was teaching them to fish. Maybe Alice was right. Maybe there was more to the man than I would allow myself to see. But the fact remained – that he’d never taught
me
to fish.

My mother’s natural optimism had taken a beating and who could blame her? She’d had a shock. Her default mechanism of making tea in a crisis had gone out of kilter and I sat watching my stepfather take on the job.

“One lump or two?” he asked, his face like an ancient stone block, unreadable. But was that humour? They didn’t use lump sugar, only granulated. Anything else was frivolous.

“I don’t take sugar.”
He didn’t even know
.

“Well maybe you should. Bit of extra weight wouldn’t hurt.”

I looked over at Alice, figured she got my ‘I told you so’ expression. But she remained annoyingly impassive. I guess she was tired. It had been a long journey and she and David had taken turns with the driving. I had been allowed to stretch out on the back seat and fallen asleep lulled by the warmth of the heater, the comforting hum of the engine.

Although I was no oil painting (swollen nose, and interesting purple bruises blooming across one side of my face) I figured I looked at least as good as Alice. She had bags as large as her favourite Suzi Tamarez under both eyes, and was every bit as thin as I was. He didn’t mention her weight. But if you were looking for fairness in life you’d landed on the wrong planet. This was the Webster household.

Ungrateful bitch, I told myself.
The man is making tea for you.
Yeah, well. It would take more than a cup of tea to even out our balance sheet.

“Hope David sleeps all right in that bed. The old mattress is a bit lumpy. I’ve been meaning to get a new one.” My mother was back in the reins. Running the domestics as she liked to call them. You can’t keep a good hostess down.

David was still in bed, even though it was the middle of the day, something my ‘father’ had always discouraged, but strangely now had nothing to say about.

“It’ll be fine, Mum.” I gave her a reassuring smile. My teeth hurt as well as my face, but I figured it was worth the effort. Our dramatic arrival must have scared the shit out of her.

“The children will be pleased to see you,” she said. “But what will you tell them about your face?” She’d caught up now and moved onto the next phase. My mother had never been one to let life get her down. Even when her grown up daughter arrived out of nowhere looking like she’d been in the ring with Mike Tyson.

My stepfather put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, dear. We’ll think of something.”

Dear? Had I walked into the wrong house? Alice threw me a look that reeked of the supercilious. The sort of thing she resorted to when she’d been proved right - and I mentally threw in the towel, at least for the time being. For Alice was right. The man seemed different, more humane than I remembered him. Or maybe that was the influence of Millie and Tom. Perhaps, instead of ignoring them, he’d begun to act like a real grandfather.

He set the tea down in front of me. Cup and saucer. No mug. Mugs were modern fixtures that had no place in the traditional Webster kitchen. And all of a sudden I wondered if that had as much to do with my mother and her foibles as him. She was strong, but around him I’d always thought of her as the little woman, happy to tug her forelock. But now I wasn’t sure if that was a figure of my own invention.

*

“Cool!”

What was it about the male of the species? Anything vaguely gruesome or violent they seemed perfectly at home with. My son had swallowed the lie about me trying to stop a mugger who had gone for an old lady’s handbag, and was impressed by the different palate of colours now making their way across my left cheek.

“Maybe the police will give you a medal,” said Millie.

It could have been sarcastic, and I searched her face for a clue. She was older than Tom and beginning to realize that adults didn’t always tell the truth. But there was no tell tale sign that she was being smart-arsed. Nothing to say she didn’t believe me. I could now add
fooling small children
to my C.V. Not an accomplishment I was proud of. But sometimes life calls for the odd, white lie and I told myself it was to save my children from something worse. That it was for their own good. So how come it made me feel bad?

“We don’t have to go home now, do we?” asked Tom, making it obvious that this would be like having his finger nails pulled out.

“Tom! That’s not nice.”

“It’s okay mum,” I said. “He’s been enjoying himself. That’s great.”

“Me too,” piped up Millie. “I’m in the Pony Club and there’s a gymkhana at the weekend. You never have time to take us to stuff like that.”

“Millie, your mother’s busy working. Making sure you’ve got food to eat and a house and clothes. That’s important.”

Thanks mum! But I don’t need you to stand up for me.
This wasn’t working out so great. Okay, the kids were safe and they were getting to know their grandparents better, but I could feel them drifting farther away from their real life. They might never want to come home again.

“It’s okay, you guys. I only came for a visit. Just to remind myself what you look like. To get a hug and see if you missed me.”

Millie looked distraught. “‘Course we miss you, mum.” She tugged at my hand. Tried to cover it protectively with her smaller one, and I felt a lump rise in my throat.

“Know what’d be great?” Tom looked up from brushing Rupert’s coat. My mother had previously warned that the dog would not be allowed in the house, but it looked like the slobbering beast had won the day.

“What?”

“If you could come and live here.”

I pulled in a sharp breath. And my son waited expectantly, smiling first at me, then his grandmother, until a puzzled frown took over his face, confusion at the silence that followed his suggestion. His was a world of black and white, where things were simple and straightforward. The real world was far more complicated.

“Let’s take Rupert out for his walk.” Saved by the bell. Good old Mum. Or maybe she just wanted to escape the air of tension that now hovered in the scullery waiting for someone brave enough to defuse it. (My parents had always called their kitchen the scullery).

The kids, the dog, my mother, in that order, all headed for the backdoor leaving me and Alice to make small talk with the old man. My underlying optimism - that had lately been struggling to find a decent foothold - had always wanted to believe in miracles, had HOPED they existed. If only in small, infrequent batches. But it would be a step too far to think that I could help one along. And that’s what it would take for me to sit in a room with Harry Webster and make small talk. I made some feeble excuse and headed for my bedroom.

It was cold in there, unlike the kitchen where the Aga pumped out a comforting warmth. And although the bedroom was a friendly enough space, it made no concession to the Scottish winter, like central heating. The Spartans would have felt right at home. I hadn’t expected to. But weirdly, a sort of peace crept up on me and the tension I’d been holding onto slowly released from all my limbs. I felt more at ease than I had for some time. The strange shift in my stepfather’s behaviour may have had something to do with it (I’d even caught him smiling at my mother) or the blow to the head from my ex might equally have catapulted me into a Zen-like state.

I thought about the man downstairs, making tea, taking the kids to gymkhanas. All I remember him doing for me was tearing the page from my homework book in frustration, and binning my efforts at cursive writing. I had struggled with joined-up writing. What I didn’t know at the time was that lots of children did. Did
he
know that? Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, for he strived for perfection.

Was it surprising then that I couldn’t bring myself to hurl my arms around Harry Webster, this man who had taken over the role of father from my real one, the one whose genes I had inherited. This curmudgeon of a stepfather could never replace the mystical superman in the back of my head. The man whose features I often elevated to Greek God status because my mother didn’t have a single photograph of him anywhere.

“Can I come in?”

I know thoughts can be powerful things, but surely mine hadn’t brought him to my bedroom door. Note to self: stop all this introspection stuff in future. It could complicate the hell out of life, when coming through a single day unscathed was already hard enough.

“Jilly? You okay?”

Jilly? What the hell was that? Only my friends called me that. And in small doses, for it wasn’t something I encouraged.

“Uh?”
Language specialist first-class strikes again.

“Look, do you mind if I come in?” he shouted through the door.

“It’s your house.” Shit, I’d done it again. What was it about the guy that brought out the savage in me?

“We need to talk. Don’t you think?”

And I suppose we did. There was the real reason I’d come here for a start. But he’d made me feel like a gawky teenager again, trying to get a toehold on a world that confused and overwhelmed me.

“Come in,” I said.

This is where you face yourself, I told the battered woman in the mirror. Peering out at me. Looking scared. This is where you stand toe to toe with your own fear. And I was shocked to realize that I would be less frightened of going one more physical round with my ex-husband than spending time alone in a room with the man on the other side of the door. No buffers. No one else filling in the awkward gaps. And for the first time since I’d become an adult, I admitted to myself that perhaps that was as much my fault as his. Sometimes reflection is good. But you know what? They don’t hand out any prizes for it.