Playing with the Grown-ups (23 page)

'My insides are most certainly not bruise free,' Kitty said furiously, as she ran from the room.

Her mother came to her bedroom later.

'I'm sorry,' she said, sitting on the bed. 'It was a shitty thing to do. I should have given you twenty pounds like a normal
person. I think Marianne is a bad influence on me. Did you have a horrible time?'

'I had the most horrible time, and I'm the most horrible disgusting person in the world,' Kitty said, and she told her mother
everything.

'Oh sweetie pie, it's not the worst thing in the world. I understand your upset though. Just don't ever tell Rosaria. And
don't do it again. The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy,
yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be very careful of moments - they're very tricksy
things.'

'I wasn't a moment, was I?' Kitty asked after a while, as they lay in companionable silence.

'My darling, you were, and are, a lifetime. Nothing momentary about you, I promise,' her mother said.

'Look, it was nothing,' Kitty said. 'We were both pissed. I kissed him for two minutes at the most. It really isn't a big
deal. He didn't even like me, I could tell.'

'It is a big deal. It's a huge deal. My best friend and the boy I've been obsessed with for six years. He's my next-door neighbour!
Why did you do it?' Rosaria was crying.

'I don't know,' Kitty said slowly. 'I'm sorry.' She didn't know whether she was sorry, or sorry Rosaria had found out. She
decided both were true.

'I can't speak to you for a while. I'm too angry. My other friends think you're a terrible person, and I would feel too stupid
to speak to you. Do you understand?' Rosaria said.

'Yes,' Kitty said.

The barman presented her with another drink.

'I've still got one,' she said.

'Yeah, I know, but the bloke over there sent you one.'

Jake smiled at her from the end of the bar. He lifted his glass to her.

'Who are you here with?' he said, as Kitty rearranged herself next to him.

'Oh, my friends are late,' she said lamely. 'You?'

'I had to see a man about a dog.' He winked.

'Oh,' she said again, like she understood.

'You look pretty tonight,' he said. 'Really pretty.'

'Thank you,' Kitty said. Her hand trembled.

'Do you want to come out tonight with me?'

Trying to conceal her excitement, she reached into her bag and put on another coat of jarnmy lip gloss.

'Yes, I would,' she said.

'What about your "friends"?' he said mockingly.

Smoke machines, the tart taste of cranberry slicing against her teeth, her hands in the air,Jake's fingers finding the space
where her stockings ended and her thigh began, his sharp intake of breath, drum and bass at Subterania hitting her in the
groin, could this be love, everybody smiling, their teeth ivory white in the dark with the strobes, so the whole night is
like a living breathing Polaroid picture.

'I want to be an actor!'Jake shouted above the music.

'What?!' Kitty couldn't hear or wasn't sure she heard him properly. He handed her a key, and together they snorted coke off
it, right there in the club, right there in front of everyone.

'You're a good girl, do you know that? You're a good girl. I'm the same as you - I can see it in your eyes. We're not like
the rest of this scum. I think your mum and Con are wrong, but we're not going to talk about that because it makes me feel
strange, we're going to talk about what's real and now, what's important. I'm going to get the hell away from all these people
and I'm going to live on the beach in California, breathe the sea air, and make everything right. I've done some bad things,
that aren't really me, and I need to get away. Did I tell you I think you're a good girl?' He ruffled her hair.

'Yes,' Kitty said. 'I think you're good too.'

He introduced her to everyone he knew, all the fast, sharp-suited night people, and they seemed to think she was funny, and
they flirted with her, and Jake looked proud, with unfocused eyes, proud to be with her, and she spun with delirious happiness.

The Soho flat was cold and empty, but they were high on drugs and drink and each other so it didn't matter, nothing mattered.

She fell with him for what seemed like miles, cocooned in laughter, whispers and clumsy apology down on to the stained futon.

'I'm a virgin,' she said, but she wasn't frightened like she'd always thought she would be.

He reached over her, kissing her neck, and took a condom from a drawer. When he entered her it hurt, a searing pain right
through her, like she was breaking in half, but she did not tell him. She just said I love you, and when she looked at him
it was as if Kitty was seeing him for the first time.

'Where are Sam and Violet?' Kitty asked angrily. It was half term; Nora was visiting her family in Ireland. Her mother giggled
girlishly.

'They're outside playing cricket with Con's friends.'

'Have they had tea?' she said.

'Yes, Kitty, they've had tea.' Her mother rolled her eyes at Con.

'Jake said to say hi.'

Con laughed, and her mother followed. They were spectacularly annoying. Kitty hated them.

'Con is going to take a photograph of all of you for my birthday,' her mother said, as though this were reason for great celebration.
'He's a very talented photographer, you know.'

'Well, I'm not going to be in it,' Kitty said. 'You can put a blank space where I'm meant to be. Can I talk to you in private,
Marina?'

'Oh OK,' her mother said. 'Though I don't see why we can't share things out in the open.' She followed Kitty into the hall.

'I don't think you should let Violet and Sam be around these people, I don't think it's good. Please make them go home,' Kitty
said.

'Darling, I think you're overreacting. They're having a lovely time with Con's friends in the garden. We're all just having
a relaxed Saturday afternoon. Stop being such a control freak. Come and sit with us - I feel like I haven't seen you for ages.
Come and tell us what you've been up to.' Her mother took her hand. Kitty snatched it away.

'Since when have you and Con Brown become an us? I don't want to sit with you and Con Brown and tell you what I've been up
to. I hate Con Brown. He's using you -can't you see that? He's got no money, and he'll use you until he gets bored. Even Tommy
hates him; he won't come over any more because of him.'

'They're your friends,' her mother said.

'What?' Kitty took a step back.

'You brought them into my life. I would never have come across them if it wasn't for you. They're your friends. Maybe you're
a bit jealous.'

'I hate you,' Kitty said.

Shrugging, her mother walked back into the sitting room.

'It's me,' she says.

'Hey, you. How's it going?'

'All right. We haven't seen her yet; we're going in a minute. Tell me something funny.'

He proceeds to tell her about a conversation he's had with a Romanian poker-playing, carp-fishing, ex-lawyer taxi driver on
the way to work.

'His name's Eugene. He's invited me to be his first mate in the Massachusetts shark tournament. I've got his email; I think
we should fix him up with my cousin. Great guy. . .'

'Mark, I'm frightened,' she says.

'I know, honey. I can tell. You have your wobbly voice.'

'I don't know how to be. I know how to be for Sam and Violet, I know how to be for everyone else, because I can be myself;
I don't need amour. But I don't know how to be for her. It's like I've built a wall and I'm numb, and I can't remember any
more.'

'Kitty, I will never know entirely what this is like for you, because it hasn't happened to me. I know an inch of it from
loving you, and understanding through that. The only thing I can say is just try to remember that above all your mother is
sick, she has an illness. You've done your best, you need to know that. It's like that poem, shit, how does it go? What will
abide with us is . . . Fuck, what is it . . . ?'

' "What will survive of us is love?" '

'That's the one.'

'Thank you,' she says.

Kitty looks at Sam and Violet. She takes a deep breath.

'Ready?' she says.

Downstairs they were playing spin the bottle, and Kitty sat to the side, smoking, one cigarette after another. Con had many
people with him, boys that she didn't recognise, men really, with expressionless faces, and coats that they kept on. The girls
were dressed in black, had tiny skirts and tiny handbags. They kept passing round a tray of coke; it was one of her mother's
painted trays from the kitchen, one that Kitty remembered her painting in the studio at Hay long ago, when life was not so
complicated. She wanted to scream at the intruders to stop it, and explain who her family was, not this, and what that tray
meant, but her voice had gone away.

'Kitty, truth or dare?' Con was looking at her and smiling.

'I'm not playing,' she said.

'You have to, you're in the room.'

'Come on, Kitty,' her mother said. 'Everyone else is playing. It's fun.'

'Truth,' she said.

'Did you or did you not screw my cousin?' Con asked in a silly falsetto voice.

Everyone laughed, the faceless men boys too. She looked at her mother in appeal, and she wanted to lie, but Con's smile froze
her like a deer in headlights.

'Did you, Magpie?' he repeated.

Kitty moved away from her nickname sliding with ease from his lips.

'Did you?' her mother asked, and she sounded surprised, and a look went over her face that was something like hurt.

Kitty looked down at the floor. It needed to be cleaned. Precious could have used her magic orange polish on it, she thought.

'I think we can take that as a yes.' Con leaned back, satisfied, his hand on her mother's thigh.

'That is so sweet,' her mother said. 'Darling, we should open some champagne.'

Kitty shut her eyes.

'Oh my God!' Con guffawed. 'He really did, didn't he? I was guessing! He wouldn't tell - prides himself on some fucking old-fashioned
gentleman's code. My cousin popped your daughter's cherry! This is all just so fucking modem! Let's call Jakey. You can speak
to him. Pass me the phone.'

'Don't! Please don't!' It was the first time Kitty had spoken, and her voice sounded loud and thick.

'Come on, Con, don't tease Kitty.' Her mother spoke tenderly, as if they were siblings.

'I didn't answer your question. Give me a dare,' Kitty challenged him.

'Your non-answer was the answer, my dear,' Con said.

'I didn't say anything. Give me a dare.'

'Take your clothes off and run down the street naked.'

His brown eyes swept over her dismissively.

'Fine,' Kitty said.

She kicked off her jeans, and the pink cashmere jumper that she loved, the one that her mother had been given by Bestemama
when she was born. She shed them on the ground like skin that she had no use for.

She stood in her bra and knickers in the room full of strangers.

'I'll take the rest off by the front door,' she said to Con.

Kitty smiled at Con, at her mother, who was silent.

'I will,' Kitty said.

She welcomed the dark and the cool air, which slid against her nakedness like song.

The street compared to the house was blessedly quiet, and the lights were off in the tidy row of houses. Her skin shone bright
white, electric in the dark.

"'My mother said, I never should, play with the gypsies in the wood. If I did, she would say, naughty, naughty girl to disobey,"'
she sang quietly, liking the neatness of the rhyme as she ran to the sign that began the street, and touched it with her hand,
as if she were playing one of the nameless that children play, and she sailed to the other end, her bare feet slapping against
concrete, tapping the crumbling brick of the last house's garden wall, the place where the street officially ended.

She put her clothes back on. She walked into the sitting room, where they huddled, frozen in the same places, snorting and
talking over each other, as though time had simply stopped. The air had changed, thickened, and rounded with some dark intention.

'I'm going to bed,' Kitty said.

'Goodnight,' her mother said. She could not look Kitty in the eye.

She peered in to check on Sam and Violet, who both slept, arms open, as if to catch the snow. Their long eyelashes made shadows
on their heart-shaped faces. Their room seemed to belong to another house, in which a fire died softly in the grate as the
parents slept upstairs, warm from wine and conversation. The alarm set for 7 a.m. in time for breakfast-making, and the school
run.

Kitty lay on the floor and watched them for a while, and imagined an angel with a wing-span of twenty feet shielding them
with a great impenetrable wall of creamy feathers, which met in the middle as he spread his arms.

She got into bed, throwing the covers over her head, and curled up like a foetus.

Someone was sitting heavily on her bed, pulling her from sleep with an insistent voice.

'Kitty! There's something wrong with your mum. She's really fucked up.'

'What do you mean?' She sat up to see Con looking at her with wide and frightened eyes.

'She seemed to be having a really good time, and she asked me to call some chick at a hotel and get more stuff, but she's
lying in the bathroom and I can't wake her up. I think she may have taken some pills or something.'

Kitty leapt up, away from him.

'Have you called an ambulance?' she said, as she ran down the narrow hall.

'No. I didn't want to. The house is loaded with drugs.' He started crying.

The bathroom door was open. Her mother lay on the floor and her eyes were shut. Her legs were crumpled to the side of her,
carelessly, as if someone had thrown them away.

'Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!' Kitty shook her.

'Help me,' Kitty said to Con.

He dragged her mother's feet, and her legs splayed, showing her white knickers. She didn't want Con to see, so she pulled
her mother's skirt down and held it against her.

'Get the phone from next to the bed, the portable one. Bring it here.' Kitty cradled her mother's head in her lap.

'Mama, Mama, can you hear me?'

She called 999. The man on the phone spoke with a soft Scottish burr.

'What's your emergency?' he said in a voice trained with calm.

'It's my mother - I think she's taken an overdose, she's not moving, and we need an ambulance as soon as possible, please.'
She told him the address.

'All right, love, we'll send someone right now. What's your name?'

'Kitty,' she said.

'Is she breathing, Kitty? And do you know what she's taken?'

'I can't tell if she's breathing. I know she took some coke, some cocaine, and I think she's taken pills as well,' she said.

'All right, my love, someone will be there very soon. Do you need me to stay on the phone with you?'

'No, just please tell them to hurry up. Please make them hurry!'

'Oh my God! Oh fuck, this is really heavy. I've got to get out of here.' Con Brown began to retch.

Then it was just the two of them, her mother and she, in the bathroom with the blue-and-white-striped wallpaper. There was
a poster on the wall of some happy children dressed in woollen clothes on ice skates, heading home for some Ovaltine. Things
she looked at every day, bath salts, her mother's skin cream, cold mundane everyday things.

'I love you, please don't die, Mummy.'

Kitty rocked her mother in her arms. Her skin was cold.

She wrapped her arms around her, putting her mother's hands in the sleeves of her nightdress. She looked at the almond-shaped
nails, the long painter's hands. There had been no paint on them recently, Kitty saw now. They were too white and clean. She
missed the hands that were flecked with paint, which smelled of turpentine when her mother stroked her face, and danced with
chips of colour when she told a story.

'You'll be all right,' Kitty said. 'I promise you. I'll make it all better, just please don't die. It will all be all right,
I know it. I don't hate you. I'm sorry I said that, I didn't mean it. I love you. We need you.'

They took her away down the narrow stairs. It wasn't like television or a film: they put her neatly on the stretcher, and
they spirited her away into the ambulance, the only sign of their visit the tube from the stomach pump, and the howling wail
of departure.

Sam and Violet did not wake.

Her mother's bed was unmade. Kitty crawled in, trying to fit into the grooves that her body had left in the sheets, placing
herself in them carefully like she was a piece from a jigsaw.

She buried her head in the pillows, the soft satin ones Ingrid and Elsie had sent from Frette in Paris, breathing in, holding
the ghost of her mother's scent in her lungs, until it stung, each count of her breath willing her mother's breath to correspond
from the hospital bed by osmosis, so they could take the rubbery oxygen mask away.

The number was tattooed in her brain. She waited as the phone rang. She knew they were asleep, his arm as always propped behind
the crook of her neck, his nose inches from the shoulder where her silver hair fell in a thick cloud. Outside their bedroom
birds would be just beginning to call each other to day, the window would be dulled by frost.

'Yes?' He sounded old, impatient. Kitty heard her grandmother murmur in the background, still dreaming maybe.

'Bestepapa?' she said.

'I remember it here, Bestemama!' he said, as the car turned into the lane. 'That's the train bridge, and Kitty used to tell
me a troll lived underneath there.'

'There isn't really a troll, Sambo,' Kitty said. 'I was making it up.'

'I know that,' Sam said. 'Obviously I was little when I believed that.'

Kitty smiled at Bestemama.

'It is sunnier here than where Mummy is working?'

Violet asked.

'Oh about the same, I should think, darling,' Bestema-ma said. 'Now what shall we have for supper?'

Sam and Violet looked at him with interest.

'Now who's this fellow?' Bestepapa said, pointing at Torty. 'He looks a very wise beast. Is it a bird?'

'No, silly. It's a tortoise,' Sam said.

'He doesn't like girls. He's an old man,' Violet said, laughing.

'Well, as a very old man, I can tell you, he might have the spirit in him yet. Come on, up we go, your sister can help your
Bestemama with supper.' He held out his hands.

'She's well. She's got a boyfriend called Constantine.'

'How exotic,' Bestemama said. 'I do like her.'

'Her uncle is the headmaster of a boarding school in America, in Connecticut. It's meant to be a really good school.'

Bestemama stared at Kitty.

'You have a school, darling. You've just come back from America.'

'I think it might be better for me to go far away. They're going to send a prospectus. I'd like to sort of start again, and
I know Connecticut isn't far away from New York, and I thought I could stay with Elsie some weekends if she doesn't mind,
and come to you and Mummy for the holidays. I couldn't live at Hay if Mummy lived in London; it would be too strange, and
I don't think I can live there with her.' She took a deep breath.

'You don't need to run away, Kitty,' Bestemama said fiercely. 'You haven't done anything wrong. I feel so angry with myself.
I felt in my bones that things weren't right from the moment all of this began with that bloody woman and her bloody tambourine.
I think Marina should move back here, to the cottage, with all of you. She was fine here. She wasn't doing any of this nonsense
when she lived with us. It breaks my heart . . . I'm just so sorry - oh my Lord - to think of it.' She placed her hand on
Kitty's cheek.

'I think . . .' Kitty said. 'I think it doesn't really make a difference where she is, because she always takes herself with
her.'