Skeletons (2 page)

Poppy unwound her scarf from her neck and then proceeded to wind it back round again more tightly. The day was sunny but deceptively cold. The leaves had already started to leave the trees behind, and they kicked them up underfoot as they walked.
Jason strode on ahead with Poppy’s four-year-old daughter, Maisie, pointing out the ducks and the boats, occasionally grabbing her hand or the hood of her jacket when she strayed too close to the edge of the riverbank.

‘Do you think I’m getting a moustache?’ Poppy said, out of nowhere.

‘Let me see.’

Poppy pushed her face close to Jen’s, and Jen screwed up her eyes and scrutinized her sister-in-law’s upper lip.

‘No. I mean, no more so than anyone else. There’s hair, but it’s blonde. I’d never have noticed, if you hadn’t pointed it out.’

‘Shit. I’ll have to add it to my list of things to get waxed.’

Jen laughed. ‘You can’t see it. I should never have said –’

‘No. You’re the only person I can trust to tell me how it is.’

‘OK, so how about me?’

Poppy peered at her. ‘I can’t tell. I need my glasses.’

They walked on in silence for a few moments.

‘So I’m guessing you were looking at Jason this morning and thinking, “What are we going to do with the rest of our lives now both girls have left home?”’

‘Witch.’

‘It’s a syndrome. I read about it.’

It might not seem ideal, having your sister-in-law for your best friend. There ought to have been whole areas that were taboo, subjects off the menu because they were just too revealing, but Jen and Poppy had a ‘no boundaries’ rule
that they had deemed essential if their friendship was going to trump their familial relationship. Luckily, Jen and Jason’s marriage was largely drama free so Poppy had never been called on to take sides. Not so far.

‘It’s just going to take a bit of adjusting to,’ Jen said now. ‘For both of us.’

‘I bet you end up having another baby.’ Poppy smirked.

Jen pulled a face that said ‘no way’. ‘We’re going to run around doing all the things we couldn’t do with kids in tow.’

‘Such as?’

‘I have no idea. Going dogging. Or taking drugs. What do unencumbered people do?’

‘I have a four-year-old, don’t ask me.’

‘Maybe we’ll go travelling, something like that.’

‘What? Backpacks and Birkenstocks? I can’t see it, somehow.’

‘I mean more like a long holiday. Nothing too intrepid. Nice hotels and scheduled flights.’

‘Can you afford to do that?’

‘No.’

‘If I were you, I’d just enjoy the peace and quiet. Lounge
around a bit without anyone asking you to make them a sandwich or give them a lift to a party.’

Jen sighed. ‘We can babysit Maisie whenever you like. Look at Jason,’ she said, pointing up ahead, where Jason was now carrying his niece on his shoulders and pretending theatrically to drop her every few steps. ‘He’s in
his element.’

Jason revelled in being a parent as much as Jen did. Adored family life. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him early on – his love of spending time with his family, his desire to be a father himself. Fatherhood, he had said to
her once after Simone was born, made him feel like a man. He had said it as if it was a joke, and she had laughed along with him, but she knew he’d really meant it underneath. And he’d been good at it too. Still was, she reminded herself. Or, at least, still would be whenever he
got the chance.

‘Great,’ Poppy smiled. ‘You can have her every weekend. Recapture your golden years of parenting while I run around and have fun. That way, everyone’s happy.’

‘OK, well. Maybe not whenever you like. But sometimes.’

‘You just need to give it a bit of time to work out who you are without the girls around. It’s not like you’re not parents any more. Just not full time. Or is that too many negatives? You know what I mean.’

Jen looked at her. ‘Have you been reading
Psychologies
magazine in the doctor’s waiting room again?’

Poppy laughed, pushed her dark (pink-streaked) hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. She and Jen were only a couple of years apart – forty-one and
forty-three – but Poppy was steadfastly
refusing to accept it gracefully. She somehow got away with it, too, managing to seem – to Jen, anyway – cool and carefree rather than deluded and tragic. Both of Jason’s sisters seemed younger than their years. Poppy because she cultivated a laid-back, youthful image, Jessie because
she acted up like the spoiled, indulged, youngest sibling that she was. As a counterbalance, Jason had assumed the responsible, reliable, elder brother mantle early on – another trait that Jen had found irresistible.

‘No. But I do watch
Loose Women
sometimes. Same thing.’

Jason turned round, Maisie swaying like the head of a sunflower on his shoulders.

‘Gaucho?’ he said, pointing to the restaurant up ahead.

‘Lovely!’ she called back.

By the time they got home, it was nearly dark and it was all they could do to summon up the energy to eat off their laps, flipping between
Strictly
and
The X Factor
. They had walked miles, trailed round the shops
half-heartedly, stopped for lunch and then coffee. By ten o’clock they were both dropping off, cuddled up on the sofa, and decided to call it a night. Jen nestled into Jason’s proffered arm, and was congratulating herself on a successful waste of a day when she fell asleep.

In her compact but perfectly formed flat on the top floor of a white stuccoed house, in a once run-down but now regenerated square off the seafront in Brighton, Cass Richards brooded about her own life while she studied herself in the mirror and
plucked at her stray eyebrow hairs. She screwed up her eyes, trying to get a good view through the detritus of necklaces and hairbands and scarves that hung over the sides of the glass. She really must declutter one of these days.

Her hair was freshly washed and wrapped in a towel. A choice of two outfits was laid out on her bed next door. It was Saturday night and, as on most Saturday nights, that meant going out. Usually to a party or a dinner. Tonight was a party. A
friend of a colleague was celebrating something or other, she forgot what. They all blurred into one endless event after a while. This one was being held in the colleague’s friend’s house in Rottingdean. She knew the one, a characterful flint-walled pile near the pond. She had
often driven past it. Admired it from a distance. It promised to be fun. If the friend owned the property, he – or it might have been a she, she couldn’t remember – must be doing OK, so hopefully there would be some interesting people there. By which she meant useful people. Good
contacts. She was always on the lookout for good contacts.

She treated these events like work. Dressed smartly. No more than one glass of wine. No shovelling in the canapés like it was your last meal. Network, network, network. You couldn’t overestimate the
importance of making new connections.

Her job was her success story. That was the one thing she had got right. So far, anyway. To be fair, it was all she had been concentrating on. She liked to see herself as a work in progress. Everything else – social life, family, relationships –
was a bit of a fuck up, admittedly. She had read a book once, one of those self-help manuals that were mostly bought by people who were probably beyond it, and it had suggested making a list of all the things in your life that needed attention. She had been exhausted just by the thought of
it, hadn’t been able to put pen to paper. Over the page, it had encouraged a second exercise entitled ‘All the things I like about me’. She had thrown the book in the bin.

The thing was, success at work was there if she wanted it. It was completely within her control. It was up to her to make something of her life. Everything else could wait.

Most of her friends were far less focused than she was. They fell into two camps: the ones who had simply taken jobs that paid the rent, that were a means to an end, and nothing else; and those who, like herself, were working at building a
career. She was the only one who rarely took a day off, though. Who had tunnel vision. For Cass it had always been about setting herself up for success. She had no interest in running around like the oldest adolescent in town, drinking and smoking and pretending that going to clubs until
four in the morning and waking up next to
some bloke whose name you couldn’t remember was what you really wanted to be doing. She wanted to make something of herself. Do well. Make her parents proud.

She wanted to stand out.

Actually, she usually found these events exhausting. Halfway through the evening, she would always think about making her excuses, ringing her friend Kara and heading to a bar for a few glasses of something fizzy. Letting her hair down a bit for
once. But she knew she had to seize every opportunity that was presented to her. If work was the only area of her life where she could call the shots, then work was going to come first.

She was a realist above all else. Circumstances had forced her to be. She was in an impossible situation; there could be no happy ending – at least, not as far as she could see. So she had learned just to accept things as they were. Not always
graciously, admittedly.

That was too much to ask.

Jen and Jason were spending Sunday afternoon as they spent five out of six Sunday afternoons – or six out of seven, if Jen could get away with it – at Jason’s family’s rambling childhood home in Twickenham.

Despite the fact that his parents, Charles and Amelia Masterson, now lived there alone, and that it was really far too big for them – something everyone was studiously avoiding pointing out, so afraid were they that one day Riverdale might have
to be sold, and they wouldn’t just lose the bricks and mortar but also the fulcrum round which the whole family rotated – the house never seemed empty. Probably because it never got the chance to be. The Mastersons liked to congregate. And Riverdale was where they liked to do it
best.

Most Sundays, along with Jen and Jason, Simone and Emily, there would be Poppy and Maisie, as well as Jessie and her husband, Martin. They didn’t restrict themselves to weekends either. Didn’t need a birthday or an anniversary as an
excuse. The sun rising in the morning was enough of a reason for a Masterson get-together.

Admittedly, most women’s worst nightmare would be to marry a man whose idea of a good night out was dinner with his parents, or a drink with his sisters. For Jen
it was the culmination of everything
she had ever wished for.

Jen’s own family was called Elaine.

She was it. The sum total of Jen’s living relatives – well, with one exception, and he didn’t count. It was just her and Elaine, and it had been that way since her dad had walked out and left them when Jen was eight years old. She
loved her mum, of course she did, she just sometimes wished she could multiply her.

When she was seven, Jen had wanted two things: for her parents to start talking again; and for some brothers and sisters to come along to keep her company while she sat on the landing and listened to the silence. It wasn’t that her mum and
dad didn’t speak – it hadn’t got to the ‘Jenny, would you ask your father to pass the salt’ stage yet. They just didn’t speak unless they had to. There was no conversation. Nothing beyond the absolute essentials.

Most evenings, her dad would go out straight after tea and come home, three or four hours later, smelling like beer and kebabs from the nearby takeaway. Once, a local stray had followed him home, tail wagging, clearly convinced that Rory must
have been concealing some tasty meat about his person because of his habit of stuffing a doner into his pocket to keep it warm, and the resulting aroma that clung stubbornly to his clothes.

By the time she was nine, those seemed like the halcyon days. Her father had gone, and he didn’t seem to be coming back. Her desire for siblings had never abated.

Without her dad there, home had felt oppressive, the
long silences even more suffocating. Never mind that, in the last year or so, her father’s noise had mostly been the clatter he made when he fell
down the stairs, or his party trick of burping the national anthem when he’d had a few. A skill that had always made her mother seethe. At least there had been evidence of life.

She assumed that her mum and dad must have loved each other once. In fact, she knew they had, had a vague but compelling memory of fun family days out before it all went wrong. Rory had been a joker, always kidding around, doing impressions,
funny walks, pulling faces, anything to make her laugh. And she could remember Elaine joining in. With the laughing, that is, not the face pulling. She could remember a time when she didn’t have a knot of anxiety in her stomach, waiting for him to get home from work, for the heavy
atmosphere to descend, when he would pick her up and twirl her round until she begged him to stop. Actually, maybe he had already started drinking then because, looking back, he had had scant regard for her safety, flinging her up in the air and barely catching her, Jen gasping with laughter
and, probably, fear.

He was a man of big gestures, coming home on different occasions with a go-kart, a disgruntled-looking hamster in a cage, a Kenwood food mixer, and presenting them to Jen and Elaine with a flourish. She had wondered, later, whether he had won
them off his mates in a card game. Whether other wives and children had woken up bemused by one of their possessions having inexplicably disappeared. Some other little girl crying because Hammy seemed to have escaped and taken his cage with him. No one had ever seemed to ask.

She had seen the photos of her parents with their arms round each other, smiling broadly for the camera. Their wedding, with Rory’s Zapata moustache and Elaine’s heavy fringe and honey-blonde
bouffant locks. One and a half sets of grandparents still living, none of whom Jen could really remember ever meeting, dressed in their best. Everyone looking proud and happy and hopeful.

Not only was Jen an only child, but so were her parents. The only child of only children. Grandparents long gone by the time Jen was really aware they had ever existed. And once Rory had disappeared so completely from her life, Jen became the
only child of an only parent. It should have been the two of them against the world. Instead, Jen had decided to blame all Rory’s faults and shortcomings on her mum, Elaine. It was irrational, she had realized once she grew up a bit, but since when did rationality ever get in the way
of family resentments?

She had accepted every invitation that came her way, any excuse to get out of the house and away from her mother’s stubborn determination that everything was going to be absolutely fine with just the pair of them. She had sought out friends
who lived in noisy, crowded households, sitting quietly in the background, observing rather than taking part. Always the shy girl on the outskirts. And, as soon as she was old enough, she’d applied to go to college as far away from home as she could and still be in the same country.
Actually, she had tried to go to Scotland at first but, in the end, she had had to plump for her third choice, Newcastle, where she’d lived in twenty-four-hour-party halls and then a house shared
with five others. The noise never bothered her.
She had revelled in the chaos and the drama. Anything was preferable to silence.

The first time Jason had taken her to meet his own family, about six months after they had started dating – having met when Jen, fresh out of university, back living in a bed-sit down south and at a loss for what to do with her English degree,
had volunteered to help organize a production at the local council-run theatre where Jason was the stressed-out would-be director attempting to pull the whole show together – Jen had stared in open-mouthed amazement at the anarchy, the warmth and the bickering that had filled their kitchen.
Mostly the bickering. The Masterson girls could have won competitions in arguing. Synchronized squabbling. ‘55kg and under’ teasing. The contrast with her own teenage home couldn’t have been more extreme.

The house – a large but still somehow cosy-looking Arts and Crafts detached on a quiet residential road leading away from the centre of Twickenham – had smelled of fresh coffee and baking biscuits. Jen remembered thinking there were no hard
edges; everything was drowning in soft furnishings. It had reminded her of a padded cell – only, one made by Laura Ashley and featured on the pages of
Homes & Gardens
. The family was clearly as artsy and craftsy as their house, because there were pictures tacked up all over the
kitchen walls (some of which, she later discovered, dated back to when Jason was about three years old), and home-made-looking artefacts of varying degrees of ability everywhere she turned.

‘Jason made that in school,’ one of his sisters – Jen
hadn’t worked out who was who yet – had said as she’d pointed to a misshapen pottery thing that Jen had assumed was meant to
be a vase of some kind, but which now held pens in the middle of the kitchen table.

‘Good, huh?’ She had rolled her eyes as she said it, so luckily Jen had known she was meant to laugh. ‘Mum still has everything any of us has ever produced. It’s like the most pointless museum ever.’

Most of the family had been there. His mother, the two sisters, Poppy and Jessie. It had been Poppy, the middle of the three children, who had spoken to Jen she’d discovered when she was introduced. Jen had tried to hide in a corner,
overwhelmed by the two confident girls, an amorphous ever-moving cloud of long hair, perfume and sarcastic remarks. She had found them terrifying. Not because they were mean, but because they were so self-assured. They had been handed the world without even trying, why wouldn’t they be
confident in their own fabulousness? So she had given up making an effort to talk, and she’d sat in a large armchair that had almost swallowed her up, speaking only when spoken to.

‘What do you do?’ Jessie, the youngest at sixteen, had barked at her. Short, dark haired and ethereal-looking, she had draped her stick-thin frame in some kind of long wispy number. If Jen hadn’t known already, she would have
guessed that Jessie was headed for drama school. Jason had told her his sister was a natural actress, blessed with a talent for making up stories, self-obsession and histrionics.

‘Um …’ Jen had said. ‘Nothing really, at the moment. I’m looking.’

‘What about your dad? What does he do?’ Jessie had carried on.

Jen had imagined this was what it must have felt like to be interrogated by the Gestapo – except they might have been more interested in her responses. Jessie was painting her toenails while she talked, and only giving Jen half her attention.

Jen had absolutely no idea of the answer to that question. Drank? She hadn’t seen Rory for years at that point so, for all she knew, he could have been the man who had come to fix her boiler the week before.

‘I don’t know, really,’ she had answered, and Jessie had looked at her as if she thought Jason might have brought home the village idiot.

‘Have you never asked?’

Jen had ignored the question. She’d guessed that Jason hadn’t filled them in on her family history.

‘Jason says he met you at the theatre.’ Jessie pronounced each syllable separately, relishing them all: thee-ate-er.

‘Yes,’ Jen had said, looking to Jason to help her out, but he was playing with the family’s cat, and seemed oblivious to her plight.

She’d tried to conjure up some interesting anecdote or other, but everything she could think of seemed to have some kind of ‘R’ rated element: unsuitable for public consumption. ‘The first time we had sex was on the stage,
actually, after everyone had gone home,’ or, ‘Did he tell you about when we caught the leading man giving the boy who played his brother a blow job in the props cupboard?’ So she had just said nothing.

‘What were you doing?’

‘I was helping out.’ Oh, the sparkling wit. Move over, Oscar Wilde.

‘For God’s sake, Jess, leave the poor girl alone.’ This from Poppy, the other one, the middle sister, whose grungy get-up and unwashed hair couldn’t hide the fact that she had a face that probably made grown men weep.
Sloping hazel eyes had gazed at Jen sympathetically from under a spiky fringe. ‘It’s just that you’re the first girl Jason has ever brought home, so we’re naturally curious.’

Jason had looked up from his position on the carpet. ‘You are such a liar.’

Poppy had given Jen a big smile. ‘We were beginning to get worried … you know.’

Jason had thrown a cushion at his sister. It had actually missed Poppy completely and hit Jen in the eye, but she’d tried to ignore the fact she thought she might be going blind and she’d laughed along. It had seemed like the right
thing to do. And, if she hadn’t, she’d been afraid she might cry.

Jason’s mother, Amelia, had made tea. Home-baked scones, salmon-paste sandwiches and a Victoria sponge. The stuff of Enid Blyton families, not something Jen’s mum would ever have had the time – or even the inclination – to do. It had
struck Jen when Jason had first introduced her that if you ever had to explain to an alien what a mother was, you could just show them a picture of Amelia. She was so soft, so warm, so maternal-looking, covered in flour from baking treats for her children. Either that, or her cocaine habit
was out of control. Jen had nearly asked if she could sit on her lap.

Elaine was all angles. Elbows and knees sharp like compasses. Skin scratchy like sandpaper. On the rare occasions Jen condescended to give her a hug, she couldn’t help feeling there was a danger she
might snap her in half.

‘Do you take sugar, Jennifer?’

‘It’s Jen, Mum,’ Jason had cut in. He had heard Jen say the same thing many times, although she hadn’t been intending to insist on her preferred name here so soon.

‘My fault, Jason did tell me.’ Amelia had smiled, and the room had practically lit up. Jen had actually looked round to see if someone had turned a light on.

Jen hadn’t wanted to seem greedy by saying, ‘Yes, three please,’ so she had muttered a word that had come out a cross between ‘one’ and ‘two’, meaning Amelia had had to ask the same question again.

Jen had known that she wasn’t making a great impression. She wouldn’t have warmed to herself as a potential daughter-stroke-sister-in-law, in all honesty. She’d wished, and not for the first time in her life, that she was more
polished, more … accomplished. Or, at least, more socialized. She’d felt like one of those children found living in the woods who has been brought up by a wolf pack and has never had human contact before. All she could do was grunt. They were lucky she didn’t sit on the
floor, lift her leg and start grooming her bits noisily.