The Girls (10 page)

‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘Grace, that’s an awful lot of make-up.’

Grace shrugged.

‘No, seriously, Grace. You’re not even thirteen yet.’

‘I’ll be thirteen next month.’

‘But that’s not the point. Even thirteen is too young for that amount of make-up.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says every mother of a twelve-year-old girl!’

‘That’s not true. How do you even know that’s true?’

‘More to the point, Grace, we’re only going across the garden for supper with another family. I could maybe understand if I was taking us out to the Savoy. Who are you making yourself up for?’

‘Nobody,’ she snapped. ‘For myself.’

‘But there won’t even be any boys there.’

‘What has this got to do with boys? I don’t dress for boys, Mum. I dress for me. And given that this is the first time in, like,
six months
that we’ve been invited anywhere – you know, like even
left the house
, can you blame me for wanting to look nice?’

Clare breathed in. She had barely seen Grace this week. Every day after school she would change out of her uniform and head straight out into the garden. She didn’t even come in for tea half the time. Clare would have to keep things warm for her under tea towels and tin foil or occasionally just admit defeat (‘I am not eating cold risotto!) and give her a bowl of cereal. Most of the time she was on the benches at the top of the garden. Other times she’d disappear entirely and Clare would text her, plaintively:
Where are you
?
At girls’ house
, would come the reply. And finally she would appear in the back doorway at seven, eight o’clock, smelling of fresh air and indifference.

‘Fine,’ said Clare, ‘but you do not need make-up. And frankly, you look ten times better without it.’

She stepped into the black playsuit that belonged to her eleven-year-old daughter. It fell off her. She took it off, looped it back on to its hanger and handed it to Pip. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll just put my jeans on, I think.’

At the door she turned to look again at Grace. She was angrily applying a second coat of mascara. She looked brittle and bizarre. Behind her, Pip shrugged, an adult gesture as if to say:
What can you do?
Clare shrugged back and headed to her bedroom where she sat down heavily on the edge of her bed and let her head drop on to her hands. There was something wrong with the shape and texture of her world. While her children grew bigger and stronger, outgrowing clothes and shoes, outgrowing their own mother, she was shrinking to the size of a doll. While they spread their wings, found new friends, new places to spend their time, new ways to look, she was turning into a recluse.

She pulled on her too-big jeans and a black lacy tunic top. She fluffed up her white blond hair and put on a coat of red lipstick. She faced herself in the mirror: Clare Wild. What would Leo and Adele make of her? A young mum. A single mum. A thin mum. Would they find her engaging? Peculiar? Hard work? Would they like her?

‘Girls!’ she called into the hallway. ‘Are you ready? Time to go!’

She almost didn’t recognise her own daughter as Grace appeared before her. She was thrown momentarily, unnerved by the presence of what appeared to be a second grown-up. Her brown curls were plaited tightly away from her temples, bursting out into a voluminous cloud behind. She wore skintight jeans and a fitted grey T-shirt showcasing her small high breasts and her flat stomach. When had she lost that roll of puppy fat? Clare wondered. Her liner-winged, almond-shaped eyes appraised her coolly as if to say:
Don’t dare say a word.

Clare didn’t. Instead she smiled and picked up the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier and a small potted orchid and said, ‘OK, girls. Let’s go.’

Adele greeted them at the kitchen door in a patterned chiffony thing over a black vest and leggings. Her dark hair was twisted into a big bun on top of her head with a pair of black-framed reading glasses nestled into it. ‘Hello! You came!’

She leaned in and kissed Clare on both cheeks. Then she grasped the girls’ hands and told them to ‘go straight through, the girls are waiting for you!’

Pip followed Grace into the living room where they found Catkin and Willow behind a drinks trolley, mixing up cocktails.

‘No,’ Catkin was saying, pulling at the neck of a bottle of vodka in Willow’s hands, ‘that’s way too much.
No! Stop!
’ She snatched the bottle fully from Willow and said, ‘Now pass the vermouth. No, not that one,
that
one.’

Pip watched curiously. Were they going to be drinking cocktails tonight? Nothing much would surprise her about this family. Then Adele walked in and said, ‘How are those vodka martinis coming along?’

Catkin pushed a lid on to a metal flask and began shaking it up and down. ‘Nearly done,’ she said, ‘but they might be a bit strong.’ She threw Willow a withering look.

Pip watched as Catkin carefully poured the cocktails into wide-topped glasses and arranged olives on the rims. Then Willow placed them on a tray with small plates of nuts and crisps and subserviently offered it around. Pip thought back to the old days when they still lived in Willoughby Road, before her father had got ill and gone mad, when their lives were relatively normal. She thought of nights when people had come round for dinner and she remembered how she and Grace would stay in their bedrooms for as long as possible or hide in the living room until it was all over. This was another world entirely.

‘What can we get you girls to drink?’ said Adele. ‘We’ve got the usual: cordials, water, smoothies.’

‘Have you got Coke?’ she asked.

Adele’s face folded with disappointment. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘no. We don’t.’

‘OK.’ Pip shrugged. ‘I’ll have a smoothie.’

Fern walked in then. She was wearing what looked like a man’s shirt unbuttoned over a black vest and low-crotched trousers with multi-coloured high-tops. Her hair was in a towelling turban and her face was streaked blue.

‘Fern,’ said Willow, ‘what the …?’

‘I’ve dyed it,’ she said offhandedly. ‘Just the ends.’

Pip waited for a reaction. She waited for Adele or Leo to say:
What do you mean you’ve dyed it? What the hell have you done?

But instead Adele smiled that contented smile of hers and said, ‘Oh how lovely, I can’t wait to see it.’

Then they all changed the subject.

‘How’s your father?’ Clare asked Leo.

‘Well, they finally operated yesterday,’ Leo replied, fixing Clare fully with his dark eyes.

‘So the foot’s gone?’

‘Yes, the foot is gone.’

Leo was looking very puffed-up, Pip thought, as though he was trying to be really cool. Pip looked at her mother. She looked quite pretty tonight, she thought. Not in the same way as Adele, with her piles of glossy hair and doe eyes and delicate bare feet with hot-pink toenails. But in a gentle way. She wondered if Leo was thinking that her mother was pretty and if that was why he was acting all puffed-up.

There was a kind of fuzzy, floaty, clubby music playing in the background and the room was all lit up with candles, little clusters of votives in interesting pots and bigger candles in glass jars. The French doors opened on to the patio where more candles flickered and danced. Voices came from outside then and Tyler appeared in the doorway with a woman who could only be Tyler’s mum because she was virtually identical to her.

Pip’s breath stopped. She sat up straighter. This was Cecelia. Sister of Phoebe – a character from a story come to life.

‘Hello! Hello!’ Tyler and her mum edged into the living room. Cecelia was holding a bottle of wine wrapped in white tissue.

Leo leaped to his feet. ‘Cece! You came!’ He kissed her firmly on both cheeks, her arms held tightly within his hands. ‘Adele said she’d asked you but I told her you wouldn’t come. I’m very pleased you proved me wrong!’

Cece was very tall with long, dead-straight, blond hair worn with a fringe. Her face was fine-boned and pointy with the same hard-edged planes as her daughter’s. She didn’t smile or reciprocate Leo’s effusive greeting in any way, just seemed to kind of tolerate it. ‘Hi, Leo,’ she drawled in a rough-edged London accent. ‘Long time no see.’

‘Well, you know where to find us, Cece.’

Cece rolled her eyes as though she’d heard it all before.

She didn’t look like Pip’s imaginings of a neglectful mother. She was graceful and nicely dressed in a dark blue Lycra dress to the knee and matching flip-flops, her blond hair in a tight ponytail, a small tattoo of a bluebird on a twig on her delicate forearm and another of a daisy chain around her ankle. Her face was tanned and scrubbed. She looked like the type of woman who went on holiday alone to dangerous places.

‘Martini?’ asked Catkin.

‘God yeah.’ Cece sighed and flopped down on the sofa next to Pip on the other side of the dog. She had that air about her of someone who was always at the tail end of a very bad day.

Cece turned and glanced at Pip. ‘And who are you? One of the new girls, yes?’

‘I’m Pip.’

‘And which one is Grace?’

Pip pointed in the direction of her sister.

‘Hi, Grace,’ she drawled. ‘Good to meet you.’

Grace nodded and said, ‘Nice to meet you too.’

Cece’s gaze lingered on Grace a little longer than was entirely normal and Pip wished she had a pair of magic glasses that would let her see beneath all the strange expressions and half-meaningless words.

‘Hi.’ Cece held out a long-boned hand to Clare. ‘I’m Cece. Tyler’s mum.’

Clare took the hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m Clare,’ she said. ‘Grace and Pip’s mum.’

‘Gosh,’ said Cece, ‘how did you get those two strapping girls out of that tiny little body? You’re mini!’

‘Ah, well, they were a lot smaller then.’ Clare laughed and Cece laughed and Leo laughed and Pip was really happy to see her mum being sharp and funny.

‘You all right over there?’ Leo called over to Grace, who was standing by the patio doors looking edgy. ‘Come and sit down.’ He patted the sofa next to him and Grace smiled and accepted the offer.

‘Here,’ said Leo, passing her a bowl of nuts, ‘have some nuts.’

Pip saw a bolt of colour pass through Grace’s cheeks as she pinched some nuts with her fingertips. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

Pip thought again of Tyler sitting on the bed in Willow’s room with her head on Leo’s shoulder. Now it seemed that Leo had cast some kind of spell over Grace too. She didn’t get it. Leo was an old man. He was nice but he was old. She thought of stories she’d read in the papers about men like Leo, nice men, trusted men, men with children of their own. Men who found vulnerable children and groomed them into submission. And Grace was vulnerable. Even Pip could see that.

Adele came in then, wafting patterned chiffon and spicy cooking smells behind her. ‘Cece! How wonderful! I didn’t think you’d come.’

‘Well, this one insisted.’ She gestured at her daughter. ‘Said she wanted me to meet her new friends.’

Pip felt surprised. She wasn’t aware of being Tyler’s friend. As far as she could tell, Tyler merely tolerated them.

‘Well,’ said Adele. ‘Dinner is served, when you’re all ready.’

They sat in the kitchen at a long wooden table, battered and worn, covered in graffiti. Leo spent some time selecting the right background music. The sisters laid extra places for Tyler and Cece and lit yet more candles. Adele hefted huge pans from the hob direct to the table and threw serving spoons on the table. A big wad of paper napkins was passed from person to person like notes at a meeting; Catkin filled glasses with wine; Leo dressed a salad in a bright red bamboo bowl. Beyond the kitchen windows the day was fading away; Pip saw a sky bruised violet and grey, the lights coming on in the distant windows of other houses. Her mum was laughing along with all the grown-ups at something funny Leo had just said; for the first time ever, Pip saw Fern laugh out loud and even Grace, sitting between Fern and Catkin, was starting to relax. Pip let her misgivings fade away. This was a happy house. These were happy people. Leo was a good man.

Adele stirred the biggest of the pans with a large spoon. ‘It’s chicken curry. No lentils. No beans. No coconut. Just chicken. Hope that’s OK, Pip?’ Adele winked at her and Pip smiled said, and said, ‘That’s good. Thank you.’

‘Lentil curry here.’ She pulled a lid off another pan. ‘And sag aloo in here. Get stuck in!’

After dinner Adele told the girls to ‘get your instruments and play us something’. Pip watched in amazement as all three girls filed from the living room and then filed back in again clutching various musical instruments: Catkin a flute, Fern an acoustic guitar, Willow a fiddle. Pip had never seen children playing instruments in their own actual homes before and was mesmerised by the spectacle. The three girls played an offbeat version of ‘Get Lucky’ by Daft Punk which made all the grown-ups laugh and then as an encore they played ‘Blurred Lines’ and Leo got up and did the ‘Blurred Lines’ dancing and then so did Adele, and Pip felt that excruciating stab of embarrassment and discomfort that she always felt when she saw adults behaving like that. She turned her head away slightly so that she wouldn’t have to look and sought out her sister to share the pain of the moment, but her sister did not look embarrassed. She looked enraptured, suspended in wonder and delight.

After the music, Pip touched her mum’s arm and whispered, ‘Can we go now?’

Five minutes later they were being hugged and squeezed at the kitchen door by Leo and Adele.
We must do this again. It’s been wonderful. Thank you. No. Thank YOU
.

Grace, as planned, stayed behind.
We’ll walk her back at eleven? Er, maybe ten? How about ten thirty? OK. Ten thirty. Are you sure you don’t want to stay, Pip? Sure? OK!

As they left via the patio, Pip turned, just once, and peered through the living-room window. She saw Grace, sitting between Leo and Fern on the sofa. She was holding Fern’s guitar and Leo was showing her how to place her fingers on the strings. She saw a look pass across her sister’s face as Leo leaned into her, unpicked her fingers from the strings and gently rearranged them. It was a look of what Pip could only describe as sheer bliss.