Christopher Brookmyre (8 page)

She finished with the mousse and returned the basin to the kitchen floor, then made for the hall cupboard and her trusty Dyson. Within a couple of minutes, most of the meter-reader's tracks had been erased, with only the damp patches near the door testifying to his having visited. She surveyed this with the satisfaction she always enjoyed when it had been freshly combed: no streaks, no imprints, just an unspoilt virgin purity. If only people didn't then have to go and walk on the damn thing.

Okay, all of this was daft, she knew. The guys who painted the Forth Bridge understood that there was no end; like the river below them, their work was a constant flow. She understood that too, most of the time. Today, for goodness'

sake, she was hoovering every speck, and rendering the place immaculate when she knew Michelle was bringing Rachel and Thomas over in the afternoon - the pair of them capable of turning the place upside down in minutes. But she needed, every so often, to restore a kind of equilibrium. It reassured her to achieve this - the untrammelled carpet, the sparkling kitchen tiles, the empty laundry basket, no clothes on the horse or in the pile - because if that equilibrium had been restored, even for a short while, it meant that no matter what the subsequent disruption, it could be restored again. And this also, she knew, was daft. Very daft. She had to take a step outside herself to see it, however, which was a rarely glimpsed perspective, and sadly not one revelatory enough to free her. It meant she was still obsessivecompulsive, but self-conscious and embarrassed about her lot into the bargain. Obsessing over carpets and laundry. How on earth had it come to this?

Tom said she was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis, though that was in response to her Private Hire work and her abortive mature student foray into academia. He didn't really mean it. It was merely his way of discounting what she was doing as a phase he was impatiently awaiting her to get past. Men were good at that; Tom was anyway: filing your activities and enthusiasms away under Silly Female Behaviour, transient notions of a feeble and ditzy mind. Bide your time and she'll be back to normal soon. But what if this 'normality'
was
her mid-life crisis? If so, she'd be extremely disappointed. She'd always imagined it would take a form considerably more dramatic than involuntary emotional investment in the condition of her floor coverings, and be precipitated by something significant, remarkable and halfway interesting. But maybe normality
was
what precipitated it. What bigger crisis was there at this late juncture in your life than finding yourself asking: Is this it?

The ironing, dusting, hoovering, mopping, sponging and re-hoovering complete, Jane moved on to cleaning the bathroom and the downstairs toilet -

temporarily gleaming china representing a few more brief licks on those riverspanning girders - before continuing her rich, full day with a jaunt to the shops.

Apart from the major milestones of marriage, parenthood and bereavement, other people marked the passing phases of their adult lives by the cities they had lived in, stages in their careers, lovers they'd been with, projects they'd worked on. 'Ah, yes, the Barcelona years. Those summers with Theo, before we grew apart. That controversial tenure with the Philosophy Department. My Impressionist period.' Jane could break hers down by supermarket. Early Eighties: Presto. Late Eighties to mid-Nineties: Tesco. Late Nineties: Safeway. Early Twenty-First Century: her J Sainsbury period. This last she considered something of a
belle epoque
, but strictly in terms of the shopping. Jane had never had a career. A succession of jobs, yes, interrupted by childrearing, but never a career. She'd known only one city, and having lived on its periphery in East Kilbride most of her adult life, she couldn't even claim to have known it that well. For more than twenty years she'd lived in the same house, and for longer than that had had the same lover. Well, the same man anyway. Projects? At least on that score she could say there'd been two. But they had both left home now, indeed one of them had left the country, and neither gave the impression they believed she'd done a bang-up job. On the plus side, one of them
was
still speaking to her. Being just up from Whirlies Roundabout, the Kingsgate retail park was yet another node in the EK traffic-generation-and-recycling system, but it was worth tolerating the congestion to shop in a comparatively calm and spacious environment, especially when you spent as much time in supermarkets as Jane did. Also, for Lanarkshire, they boasted more than the average number of aisles not selling oven chips and frozen pizzas.

Jane enjoyed trailing along the shelves and counters, daydreaming about what she'd like to make if she wasn't going home to cook for Tom, who thought that alternating between Indian and Chinese for his Friday-night takeaway meant he had an adventurous appetite. Tom's favourite home-cooked dish was stovies, though ideally it would have been cooked in his previous home by his mother, whose culinary expertise had inexplicably failed to grant her international acclaim and whose secret recipe for her signature dish had gone with her to the grave, along with close to a hundredweight of rosary beads. It said a great deal about why Scotland was perennially referred to as the Sick Man of Europe that Tom considered home-made stovies a healthy and wholesome option, as opposed to, say, a deep-fried pizza supper or an intravenous injection of lukewarm, but rapidly congealing, pork-fat. Consisting of reheated Lorne sausage swimming in a watery stew of boiled carrots and disintegrating spuds, Tom's-Mammy-recipe stovies looked like what you might find swilling at the bottom if a butcher, a greengrocer and a pet-store shared the same wheelie bin. Jane was of the belief that Lorne sausage was something people would get into trouble for feeding to animals in ten years'

time, and was pretty sure that in other countries, they wouldn't even let you store stovies in the same wheelie bin as normal domestic waste. So, it being Thursday and her not having cooked it so far this week, guess what was on the menu tonight? A fillet of that tempting-looking sea bass on a bed of wasabi mash, with a spinach-and-coriander salsa? Some of that Gresham duck breast nestling on crisp salad leaves and drizzled with an orange-and-mango reduction? Or . . .

'Half a pound of square sausage, please.'

'Square? Right you are, missus.'

Jane's efforts at tempting Tom with more exotic fare had long since been abandoned. Minor variations on familiar dishes were met with queries as to whether she'd not been able to get the standard ingredients, and more ambitious undertakings had frequently been forsaken at the preparatory stage; Tom suspecting experimentation was afoot and venturing into the kitchen to inform her: 'I'll just have my steak/chicken/fish plain, with a few totties. Save you all that bother.'

She should have spotted it from the start, and looking back, the evidence was all there, but when you're young you sometimes project more than you actually see. The teen magazines of her youth should have offered less advice on make-up and period pain if it allowed space to pass on more useful wisdom, such as a warning that you were kidding yourself if you thought your young suitor's less desirable traits would fade with time, while allowing the fairer ones to bloom. An old-fashioned streak in an adolescent can seem endearing, single-mindedness a sign of character. Add twenty years and the effect is considerably less charming.

It wasn't that he was cantankerous or miserable with his stone-set ways: what truly alienated Jane was that he was so satisfied by them. 'Philistine'

was a term people used too freely to describe individuals they considered less cultured than themselves, even just people who didn't share their tastes. (The supreme irony of this, she had learned, was that the original Philistines were about five hundred years more culturally advanced than the Israelites.) If Tom preferred stovies to a Nick Nairn creation, that was his shout. It wasn't his taste that made him a Philistine. It was that he seemed, as one of her favourite books put it, content to live in a wholly unexplored world. The book,
The Lyre of Orpheus
, was about staging a new opera, from conception through to opening night. She'd read it no fewer than five times, savouring every word, its pleasures, like all of the best novels, bittersweet that it was a fiction. What wouldn't she give to be part of something like that?

Any part: a seamstress working on the costumes; a line-prompt; the librettist's assistant, transcribing his flights of idea. To be working in concert with committed, remarkable people, giving the best of themselves to create something of such excitement and beauty - a fluid, living testament to the peaks of human aspiration. Who wouldn't want to swap reality for the world between those pages?

Answer: someone who'd rather be further advancing his attempted symbiosis with a leather armchair while watching endless repeats of Celtic games on satellite pay-per-view.

She toured the store methodically, threading her trolley along every aisle apart from the pet-food section, briefly skirting the alcohol selection last, to pick up more cans of Export for Tom. The shelves of wine bottles glinted colourfully as she passed them, but, as ever, she wasn't tempted to lift any. She also felt a little intimidated by the vastness of the selection, reckoning you really needed to know what you were doing when it came to that sort of thing. She didn't drink wine. She'd had the odd glass of fizzy stuff, but it gave her a headache, and on the very rare occasion they'd been out for a meal, Tom just drank beer with his food. She remembered he had once or twice (more probably once) opted for sharing a jug of sangria with dinner when they were on holiday in Spain with the kids, but she wasn't sure whether that counted. It had tasted like medicine.

Her friend Catherine drank wine. She'd often have a glass or two, sometimes more, when they met up for lunch. Jane never quite caught what she was ordering, unless it was Chardonnay; she'd heard that mentioned enough to remember, and had even tried some once. It tasted worse than medicine. She knew you had to 'train your palate' to appreciate it, but couldn't imagine herself doing so. Catherine only ordered Chardonnay occasionally, so most of the time what she asked for sounded like some arcane code, worse than when Ross started to talk technical. Every so often she would urge Jane to have a glass, but as they usually met for lunch in Bothwell, where Catherine lived, Jane would have to drive afterwards. She liked the idea of drinking wine, but it was the same as she liked the idea of learning to play piano. She suspected it was a bit late to start, and besides, you'd need to go to night school or something to learn your way around all those bottles.

Jane headed for the checkouts, habitually scanning along the row. It wasn't busy, but she'd have to own up to queue length not being the only criterion for her choice of conveyor belt. Embarrassing as it was to admit, she preferred not to be served by a certain cheerful elderly lady, identified as 'Margaret' on her name badge. Margaret was pleasantly chatty and entirely efficient, and had done nothing to Jane that any rational person could complain about, but had nonetheless meted out the greatest offence in a passing remark, all the more wounding for it being an inescapable truth.

Jane had often been at the supermarket in charge of one or both of Michelle's kids, for whom Margaret always had a smile and a wave; and when Jane was there on her own, the sight of a few bags of chocolate buttons on the conveyor belt would prompt an affectionate enquiry after the wee ones. It was on one of the latter such occasions that Margaret committed her great oblivious sin, in response to Jane's relating her recent success in getting the weans to take a nap one afternoon while she got on with the ironing.

'Aye, us grannies ken the score,' she had said.

Jane could still feel that moment, the sensation of paralysis as disbelief and denial crumbled, leaving a shattering revelation amid the broken shards of the illusion with which she'd been deceiving herself. All right, maybe that was laying it on a bit, but she'd never experienced such a sense of life having ambushed her since the first time she found out she was pregnant. Us grannies. She and Margaret, this white-haired and birdlike woman with false teeth and wrinkled fingers, who was old enough to be Jane's mother. It was intended as a show of solidarity, even sorority, but in that moment Margaret had held up a mirror and let Jane see how the world saw her. In that mirror, she looked like Margaret.
Us grannies ken the score.
Jane had technically become a generation older the moment her first grandchild was born, three years ago, but Margaret's remark was the moment when she belatedly felt it. At the time of Rachel's birth it hadn't meant anything: she knew she hadn't got any older and it was still the same face in the mirror. Her thoughts had only been of joy at the sight of her granddaughter, tinged admittedly with a few concerns about Michelle, only twenty-two and following in the missteps of her mother, who'd found herself in the same position at nineteen.

She was forty-six now, forty-three when Rachel was born. There'd been lots of jokes about her being a granny and applying for her bus pass, but she'd happily laughed it all off because she still considered herself young. Being a grandmother at forty-three didn't change the fact that she
was
forty-three, any more than it had altered the status of her school friend Jennifer when she became an auntie at the age of nine. Forty-three was still young. Forty-six was still young. You're only as old as you feel, ran the cliche. She'd known people who'd been in their fifties since they were adolescents - she had in fact been foolish enough to marry one. Age was merely chronology. She knew what being young meant. It meant that life still had plenty in store for you; maybe even that it still had more in store for you than you'd already experienced. It meant there was still time to do all those things, whatever all those things might be.

Margaret's remark hit her so hard because it forced her to realise that by this, her own definition, she was no longer young, nor had she been for some time. She felt pulled forward in some temporal vortex, at the end of which she was sitting there, white-haired, bird-like, with false teeth and wrinkled fingers, never having done any of those things. There was no time, and life had little in store but more of the same. Suddenly she was in the third act, the beginning of the end. Us grannies ken the score: we've had our whack. This is it.