A Royal Mess (4 page)

‘Yes, well that was before I knew his creative endeavours were going to take so long. No, I discussed it with Bunny. And last week I made the decision I should have made years ago and put my plan to leave into action. I’ve come home to London to be with you!’

Okay, this was officially serious. Images of a frantic Bob pacing madly in search of his other half flashed through my mind. And who was Bunny? ‘Did you tell him you were leaving?’ I asked, my voice showing my panic. ‘He’s probably beside himself with worry!’

‘Huh!’ Sarah brushed this idea aside with a wave of her hand. I noticed she was still wearing her wedding ring at least. ‘He probably hasn’t even noticed I’ve gone. Last time I saw him he was head bent over his laptop waving away the dim sum I’d brought him for supper, you know the ones he loves with the …’ And that was when it got seriously scary. Her lower lip wobbled, she stretched out her arms for me to fall into and, reverting back to baby talk, added, ‘Bunny’s right. At least I’ll get to spend more quality time with my Boojie-woojems.’

‘Boojie-woojems,’ Honey mimicked. This time she
did
laugh, and her collagen-enhanced lips looked ready to explode with the mirth of it all.

See, this proves the absurdity of ’rentals. You love them, you put up with their unreasonable demands, you patiently endure their weird food fads and cultural oddities. For years, you even obey them slavishly and look up to them like they’re veritable gods, but ultimately you start seeing through the disguise, right into the insanity and hypocrisy of who they
really
are.

For starters, it was Sarah’s idea to pack me off to boarding school when I was eleven, promising me how it would be ‘super’ and how ‘you’ll make friends for life’ when for three and a half years it wasn’t a bit ‘super.’ It was a nightmare. And now that I actually
was
having a ‘super’ time and making friends for life, my mother pitches up and calls me a name she hasn’t called me since I was five and starts ranting about my father’s Big One. It’s perverse, that’s what it is. Even all this guff about Bob and his Big One, that was her idea too! She was the one who persuaded him to chuck his perfectly decent job at Warner and concentrate on his script. Okay, it was taking him a lot longer than she’d probably imagined, but still!

Portia was looking at me sympathetically, or perhaps it was a look of helpless pity, the sort of look you give to mad teachers.

‘But surely you and Bob will work this out? You love each other. Who’ll finish off Bob’s sentences if you’re not there?’ I reasoned, stroking her hair like she was the child and I was the grown-up. ‘And who is Bunny?’

‘Oh, Boojie …,’ she said in a slightly hysterical baby voice as she attempted to wrap me in a cuddle.

I wriggled away from her. ‘Can you stop calling me
that
!’ I snapped.

Sarah looked as if I’d struck her, and I immediately felt bad.

The room fell silent for a bit. I could hear the
tap, tap, tap
of our House Spinster Miss Bibsmore’s stick as she wandered down the corridor on her rounds, when suddenly Sarah began to sob, big heart-wrenching sobs. Portia gave her a tissue and I wrapped my mother in a big daughterly cuddle.

‘Bob’s Big One, what a joke!’ my mother remarked sarcastically.

‘Sarah, you’ve soooo got to stop saying that,’ I pleaded with her under my breath, handing her another tissue.

‘Saying what?’ she asked innocently as she dabbed at her mascara-daubed panda eyes.

‘Well … you know, Bob’s Big One. People might think, well they might get the wrong idea about what the Big One
is,
if you see what I mean.’

‘You mean the big earthquake? Well they’d be right, because this all feels pretty damn cataclysmic to me.’

I didn’t know what she was talking about for a minute, but then I remembered that Los Angeles is on a fault line.

‘I thought you left him because his penis is too small, darling,’ Honey said, fluttering her eyelashes, which were almost long enough to do herself an injury.

Sarah looked momentarily horrified by what Honey had just said, but then she started to cry again, not in a sobbing, wrenching way, though, but more in a crumpled little girl sort of way, which made me feel even more helpless. Honey started dialling someone on her phone. ‘Oh my gawd, darling, you have got to get down here and fast. The American Freak’s mother’s turned up. She’s a bigger freak than
her.
She’s clearly from a long line of ancestral freakage….’ This was rich coming from a girl who only two weeks ago was gadding about with an iron beak on her nose.

I grabbed her phone and threw it across the room. ‘Get out,’ I told her with an authority I barely knew I had off the fencing piste.

‘You
can’t talk to
me
like that!’ she shrieked, flicking her long, blonde expensively streaked and straightened hair over her skinny tanned shoulders.

‘Just leave now,’ Portia added in her grandly aloof way, and Honey, seeing herself outnumbered, retrieved her phone and sauntered into the corridor, checking her reflection in her Chanel compact as if it had been her own idea to ban herself from her own dorm room. For those of you who’ve not met Honey, she’s not the sort of girl to miss a scandal – she’s the sort of girl to start one.

‘Look, I’m sure it’s just a bit of a tiff,’ I soothed, rubbing her back, unsure of what to do or say. I gave her a cuddle, and as I wrapped my arms around her I noticed some strands of grey hair mixed in with her lovely natural fair hair.

She struggled free. ‘A tiff? A tiff? Is that what you think this is? Do you think I’m so shallow that I’d walk out on the man I love over a tiff?’

Stupid, stupid, stupid Calypso! Why did I blurt that stupid word ‘tiff? It sounded like a cleaning product. I slapped my forehead. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. But if you love him, why –’

But Sarah was on a roll. ‘You try living with a man who’s self-absorbed in an ever-growing mountain of script. I hardly ever see him. And he’s making
no
money, as I was just explaining to Portia earlier.
I’m
holding everything together.’

Well, you can’t hold things together if you’re here, though, can you?’ I reasoned.

‘Yes, I can. Remember I am still a British citizen,’ she said, holding herself upright in an imperious sort of way. For a moment I feared she was about to burst into a chorus of ‘God Save the Queen.’ ‘I’ve got a job on
Gladesdale
in fact.’

‘Gladesdale?’ Gladesdale
was probably the chaviest program on television, a sort of bad soap opera for teens.

‘And taken a house in Clapham.’

‘Clapham!’ I yelped. Clapham, was
not
the place girls from Saint Augustine’s spoke of. Clapham was where people who couldn’t afford a big house in Chelsea lived in delusional gentrification and, more important, it was south of the river, and south of the river soooo wasn’t part of my friends’ world. Between
Gladesdale
and Clapham, I was going to be massacred.

I could hear Honey giggling in the corridor. She shrieked out the words ‘Clapham’ and
‘Gladesdale’
with the relish of a hound dog baying for blood. The writing was already on the wall for me now. From this moment forth I would be known as the Girl from Clapham, or probably the Clap, for short. And just when things were going so well.

Sarah hugged me to her tiny bosom. Won’t it be lovely to see more of one another, darling? You can have sleep-over parties with your friends. I can buy marshmallows and fish and chips.’

I tried to smile back. ‘Sarah, I’m not five anymore, and the next six weeks are really, really busy for me. I’ve got the Nationals and before that the Regionals and as well as that I’ve got three other tournaments. And GCSEs to study for.’

Miss Bibsmore’s
tap, tap, tap
ping was drawing closer.

‘Oh, I see. So what you’re saying is, you’d rather I go back to Bob and his Big One and live in a perpetual twilight of unhappiness?’ my mother asked as a solitary tear ran down her mascara-stained cheek.

‘Yes,’ I blurted before I had time to shove my pillow in my mouth. ‘No, of course not. I meant no. No, that is, I don’t want you to live in a perpetual twilight of unhappiness, but, well, I don’t want you and Bob to break up, do I? You guys love each other. You said so yourself.’

‘Ha!’ my mother scoffed. ‘Callow youth. What do you know about love?’

I managed to stop myself from saying, Well, quite a lot, actually.’

But I did say, ‘Sarah, for the last time, will you stop calling his script the Big One! Just call it his, erm, Opus or something.’

‘Oh, an’ wot ‘ave we got ‘ere then, eh?’ Miss Bibsmore asked, her odd little form leaning on the doorframe, looking none too pleased at the sight of my mother sprawled on the bed.

‘Miss Bibsmore, this is my mother. She’s, erm, she’s visiting from America.’

Miss Bibsmore took in the scene. The panda-eyed, tear-streaked face of my mother, the looks of worry and concern on the faces of Portia and myself, and the shadowy presence of Honey peering in from the corridor. Well, I’m pleased to meet you an’ all, I’m sure, Mrs Kelly. Miss Kelly ’ere is a good girl, no trouble from her. Not like some,’ she added darkly, turning to eye up Honey. ‘Always polite is Miss Kelly.’

‘How kind of you to say,’ my mother replied. ‘We tried to teach her manners and, well, I’m an old girl myself, actually.’

Miss Bibsmore put her hands on her hips. ‘I’m not old! What do mean coming in ’ere and calling me
old.
I’m in my prime I am, an’ all. “Old” indeed!’

‘No, no, no, you misunderstood me, Miss Bibsmore,’ Sarah said. ‘I was a Saint Augustine’s girl myself many years ago.’

Miss Bibsmore humphed. ‘All the same, be that as it may, it’s time for visitors to be off innit. Parents or no parents. Old girl or not. Rules is rules.’

My mother nodded obediently and gathered up her large handbag and a pale blue pashmina I’d never seen. As she kissed both cheeks she said, ‘I’ll call you on your cell, but if you need me, this is my number.’ She passed across a card with an address and phone number on it.

She already had a card? This was serious. Sarah really
had
left Bob!

She didn’t look at me as I took the card, and I felt that I’d failed her somehow. Maybe I should have joined her in attacking Bob and his Big One, but the truth was I just didn’t believe something like this could happen to my parents. I gave her a proper cuddle, and the familiar smell of her musky Keils perfume made me feel like crying myself. She seemed so small and I felt so strong and tall as I stroked her hair the way she used to stroke mine.

How could this be happening? How could my good, decent, liberal, loving parents have come to this? Bob and Sarah? Sarah and Bob? Even their names sounded right together. They thought with one mind, their hearts beat to the same political ideological pulse, and they backed one another’s madness to the hilt. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

But now here we were, Bob on one side of the world and Sarah, living in Clapham, of all places. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Bob was going through. I mean, he can
barely pour his own granola without Sarah. I imagined him lying in a heap of despair, living under piles of pizza boxes, too weak to work, too despondent to go on. Surely he’d be on a plane begging her forgiveness and tearing his script to shreds. Okay, so there’d be a back-up copy on his Zip drive, but at least it would be a gesture.

Sarah was the love of his life. He was always saying that (much to my embarrassment). He’d even told my headmistress, Sister Constance. Surely he’d be on the first plane over. But what if Sarah was right? Maybe he
hadn’t
noticed she’d even gone, buried as he was under his, erm, Opus.

Before Sarah left, I agreed to go and see the house in Clapham with her on Saturday. It was the least I could do. It was only after she had said her tearful good-bye that I remembered I’d agreed to see Freds on Saturday. And then I felt conflicted. Was it really shallow of me to put the joy of meeting my boyfriend above spending time with my mother in her time of need? I was pretty sure the answer was yes.

I would have to txt Fred, although maybe calling him would be better. I was sure he’d be sympathetic, or was it too early in our relationship for me to start burdening him with personal problems? Oh God, it was all so complicated.

Portia came over and sat on my bed with me. ‘I’m really sorry about your parents, Calypso. But I’ve seen Bob and Sarah together, when they came to the school after Honey sold those photographs of you and Freddie to the tabloids, and –’

‘I did
not
sell them,’ Honey snapped indignantly, stepping back into the room. ‘I just gave them to them. There is a difference you know, it’s not as if I needed the money –’

‘Oh shut up, Honey. No one was talking to you,’ Portia said calmly. ‘Seriously, Calypso I’m sure they’ll work it out….’

I nodded, because in the summer, Portia had watched her mother killed by a car on Sloane Street, and I knew she wasn’t just offering polite words of comfort.