Cupcake Couture (26 page)

I slumped beside her on the sofa and rammed the corkscrew forcefully into the cork.

‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ I growled before filling my glass to the brim.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Leave to cool

What was I afraid of?

It was my first thought when I awoke, the question running through my head like a giant banner flapping behind a bi-plane.

My second thought was Hurley’s tragic story about not having had the courage to start his own business until his life was turned upside down. Literally and metaphorically.

My third thought was, why did I open that last bottle of Pinot Grigio?

Holding my head with one hand and the duvet with the other, I climbed out of bed, picked my clothes off the floor and padded out of the room without waking Heidi. She made a noise like a blocked drain when she slept and I had been woken several times by a sharp jab in the calf from her Wellies, which she had forgotten to remove in her euphoric, drunken state.

In my efforts to budget since my redundancy, I had cut back on heating so the bathroom felt like the ensuite in an ice hotel. I quickly pulled off my pyjamas and hopped into the shower and turned my skin red with the scalding water. Without bothering to dry and style my hair, I slapped on minimal make-up, pulled a thick woolly hat over my ears, shoved my feet into Ugg boots, scribbled Heidi a note, grabbed my keys and left the flat. I was on a mission and if I stopped to think about it too long, I would chicken out and change my mind.

I was going to visit my parents.

The drive to Embleton in Northumberland took the best part of an hour and a half. My ten year-old Golf did not get much exercise because of the good public transport system in Newcastle. I had always favoured reading a paper on the Metro on my way to and from work and letting the train driver do the work rather than sitting in a traffic jam. It was also rare that I ventured far enough at weekends to give the car a good run in. As a result, on this icy late November morning, it seemed to react to the drive like an old man with achy joints suddenly being asked to take part in the Great North Run, groaning and shuddering through the slush. The heater struggled to raise the temperature above zero and the radio seemed incapable of tuning itself, only crackling into life whenever a terrible song was playing.

I did remember to fill up with petrol at the supermarket before venturing north into the countryside, but I forgot to check the wipers before flicking them on to clean the dirty snow and grit from the windscreen. The right one had frozen to the base of the window so the rubber covering ripped off when I flicked the lever. For the rest of the journey, I played a game of either driving with zero visibility, or hearing a spine chilling sound like nails on a blackboard as the metal wiper scratched semi circles into the windscreen. Needless to say, by the time I drove past the spectacular ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle majestically guarding the coastline, which let me know I was five minutes from the parental home, my mood was too grey to appreciate its beauty. That mood turned to black when I pulled the car into the gravel drive of my parents’ home, turned off the engine and sat for a moment to prepare myself.

There was something difficult for many adults about coming home. Not that the increasingly ramshackle stone bungalow where Jango and Jemima lived had ever actually been my home, but the feeling was the same. I could walk up the driveway a confident, polite, relatively successful, fully functioning thirty-something but the
minute the door opened and I stepped into my mother and father’s domain, a chemical reaction would occur in my brain to turn me into a petulant, moody, argumentative teenager. I vowed to myself, as I stepped out of the car and came face to face with a ten-foot reconstruction of an Easter Island Tiki made out of fibreglass and mirrors, that today would be different. Today I was going to smile, to be friendly and accepting and enjoy my parents’ company.

‘What the fuck are you staring at?’ I hissed at the Tiki before tramping up the drive towards the mosaic front door.

Despite being located in a pretty rural village, my parents’ house was resolutely quirky and individual inside and out. A sculpture garden greeted visitors, as did a tribe of handmade creatures that lived in the trees lining the multi-coloured gravel driveway. The mosaic door matched the mosaic, brightly painted window frames and the porch, which was filled with a cacophony of wind chimes. I grimaced when I reached up for the doorknocker, which was fashioned into the all too distinguishable shape of a penis. I was sure it kept stuffy local busybodies and Jehovah’s witnesses at bay, but in my opinion it was free love taken a step too far when I had to greet my dad after just having held a giant, black penis in my hand.

‘Clover, to what do we owe the honour of your company?’

‘It’s Chloe,’ I muttered, leaning in to kiss the air beside his greying ginger sideburns that stuck out from his cheeks like the brushes on a car wash, ‘and I was just passing so I thought I’d drop by.’

‘Just passing? Where are you headed, Scotland?’

He flapped his overgrown mono-brow and yanked open the door. The bottom caught the floorboard as it had since the day they moved in, necessitating a hefty
shove from my shoulder to give myself room to pass. I stepped inside and was hit by the familiar sickening aroma of joss sticks that most people grew out of after their gap year. Dad heaved the door shut but not before my personal Pootle cloud drifted over the threshold and settled above my head. I already felt like a surly teenager and I hadn’t even taken off my coat.

‘Jemima’s in the conservatory,’ said my dad, who had always insisted on using first names in our household.

He felt the titles ‘mother’ and ‘father’ aged people and stripped them of their true selves.

‘We’ve all been given a name for a reason, Clover,’ he used to say through a cloud of marijuana, ‘and why should our own fruit not be entitled to know us as the person we really are?’

‘My name’s Chloe and I’m not a fruit,’ was my usual answer.

To me, it was just another reason to feel different, not having people I could call mum and dad like the other kids at school. I didn’t want to be different; I just wanted to be normal.

The conservatory was at the end of a hallway painted dark red and filled with my father’s increasingly angry looking artwork. For a man who preached love and peace, his paintings screamed – ‘I may just kill someone one day!’ I led the way, my father (biological if not by name) padding along behind me in hand knitted slipper socks, not unlike the socks Heidi and Hurley had jointly purchased at the flea market. Despite the snow outside, he wore loose linen trousers, pulled tight into his still neat waist, into which was tucked a paint-splattered, faded blue T-shirt. A wool scarf accessorised the look.

I had a moment as we wandered silently towards the conservatory when I pictured my mother sitting in a chintz armchair with a cup of sweet tea by her side reading a Maeve Binchy novel. Of course, when we reached the now ramshackle conservatory, my mother was balanced on her head and one leg in the middle of a tatty yoga mat with her bum sticking up in the air to greet us. An overwhelming aroma of jasmine spiralled into the hazy air from a burning joss stick held by a stone Buddha and the sounds of whales mating emanated from an ancient cassette player. My mother wore red Lycra hotpants that left nothing to the imagination over a pink long sleeved Leotard. I took one look at her and regressed another five years or so.

‘Clover!’ she cooed from somewhere between her legs, ‘happy Thanksgiving for last Thursday’

‘It’s Chloe,’ I growled, ‘and I’m not American.’

I endured a painful twenty minutes of trying to focus on anything except the twisted bodies of a sixty-two and sixty-three year-old, while Jango and Jemima saluted to the sun, even though the sun’s rays were not strong enough to fight through the overgrown back garden to the conservatory’s dirty windows. Judging by the groans, sighs and creaks, it sounded like a painful twenty minutes for them, not to mention the poor bloody whales.

‘Great, any chance of a coffee?’ I mumbled when the yogarific experience thankfully came to an end.

‘Coffee, Clover? Not in this house,’ my mother laughed, wiping her sweaty brow on my father’s T-shirt and rubbing his bare stomach as she did so, ‘I’ll make you my homemade camomile tea. It has very relaxing properties. Chill you out.’

Chill me out?
What was she, nineteen?

‘And wheatgrass shots all round,’ my father whooped, leading the way to the kitchen.

‘Yay,’ I muttered, ‘add a soil shake and let’s get this party started.’

I would never forget the first time I saw our little house in Newcastle attached to the gallery that my father inherited from his artist friend. I always remembered the thrill of seeing my father unlock the door to our new home with a shiny key on a smart leather keyring handed to him by a lawyer with a bushy moustache. The keyring bore the name of the solicitors, which was etched in gold writing and matched the gold loop threaded through the key. I was a princess and this was the key to my castle. We’d never really had our own key before, having lived in squats and communes. Of course, my father ripped the keyring off and replaced it with a length of knotted rope with a bell on it but we had made a small step towards normality.

After I left home and moved in with Roxy and Heidi, my parents had moved to the bungalow, favouring the more rural location in Embleton rather than being close to the buzz of the city. They sold the house and the gallery, downsized and, as far as I could tell, lived off the profit because, to be frank, the day my father sold a painting would probably be the day the world imploded.

My parents had never been big on cooking. Even as a child, I had fended for myself rather than wait for them to get the munchies after smoking a spliff. In our new home, the kitchen became my domain, my sanctuary. While they created art (and a lot of mess) throughout the house, I kept the kitchen neat, clean and more like the kitchens of other girls my age who had mothers who baked brownies and flapjacks and fathers who carved a Sunday roast with an electric knife. The older I got, the more I protected my territory. My parents could turn the rest of the house and garden
into an ever-changing gallery space but the kitchen was my room to study in, to entertain my friends in and to bake cakes. My parents accepted this as my quirk. They prayed I would have more quirks but I didn’t. It surprised me, then, that when I followed them into the kitchen in the bungalow they had lived in for the past decade, it suddenly felt less like the lifeless room with an unused cooker in it and more like the hub of something much closer to a home.

‘What’s that smell?’

I sniffed the air and settled on a tall three-legged stool that had been painted white and fitted with the head and wings of a plastic swan.

‘Bread,’ said my mother nonchalantly.

She wrapped a tea-towel around her neck and skipped across to a shiny metal bread maker whirring on the work surface.

‘Bread? Since when did you start baking bread in a bread maker?’

‘Months ago,’ said my father who was pouring shots of wheatgrass juice, ‘This particular loaf’s got curried fruit. Jemima, let her try the nutty one on the chopping block there.’

‘Curried fruit? Well I might have known it wouldn’t be a Hovis loaf. Chopping blocks are for people who cook. You don’t cook.’

Jemima and Jango looked at each other and laughed as if sharing an hilarious private joke.

‘Clover, how do you think we eat if we don’t cook?’ said my mother.

‘You never cooked for me.’

‘You were independent. You hardly let us do anything for you.’

I blinked at my father who deposited a glass of wheatgrass juice in front of me.

‘Did I have a choice?’ I said, holding up the glass of green slime and grimacing.

‘There’s always a choice, Clo’,’ said my mother. ‘We let you make your own decisions and your own food.’

I put the glass to my lips.

‘Well sometimes kids want their decisions… and their food made for them.’

My father skipped over to my mother and wrapped his hands around her frustratingly tiny waist. By some miracle of science, when their skinny genes collided, they had created a child of average-to-above-average size. Bummer.

‘Oh you did alright, Clover. You didn’t starve and neither did we. Although you look like you haven’t had a good meal in months, Jem, you petite, horny woman.’

I choked on the green gunk.

Did my father really just say horny?

‘Nothing wrong with my appetite, Jango, you know that,’ my mother replied with a guttural laugh and a wink. ‘One slice of bread or two, Clover?’

‘It’s Chloe,’ I hissed before gulping my camomile tea and burning my tongue. So much for its relaxing properties.

The three of us sat around the kitchen table from our old house that had once been polished pine until my father had run out of canvases and had decided to paint a depiction of the 1980’s miners’ strike on the top. I had always found it rather distracting trying to eat while Arthur Scargill glared at me from the picket line. I looked on in bemusement as my mother sliced the homemade nutty bread into thick doorsteps and laid it on a wooden block along with softened butter, chunks of cheese and pots of what looked suspiciously like homemade chutneys.

My mother sat beside me on the wonky wooden bench and gazed at me for longer than was comfortable before speaking.

‘You look different, Clo, what is it?’

My father nodded from across the kitchen.

‘I thought that too.’

I pulled off my woolly hat and ruffled my hair.

‘I didn’t straighten my hair this morning. I figured with the snow and everything there wasn’t much point.’

My mother tilted her head as if noticing I had hair for the first time. She waved her hand dismissively.

‘That doesn’t even register with me, I’m afraid, I’ve never been one for pruning and preening, you know that.’

I glanced at her frizzy grey-blond hair that was pulled into a ponytail on top of her head and erupted like a firework from the frayed elastic hairband.