Getting Home (35 page)

‘Topaz!' Gemma freed an arm to make suppressing gestures at her daughter. ‘That's enough! You've no business …' But WPC Clegg had jumped to her heavily-shod feet and she was pink with what seemed to be outrage.

‘Since you – ah – you – you're already in communication …' She was having difficulty mastering some inappropriate emotion. ‘I don't think there's anything more to be done here at this point in our investigation and I'll … I'll be in touch as soon as … ah … as soon as we have the medical reports. From our point of view, you understand, if you were able to come to an arrangement between yourselves we would not pursue any charges and they would not remain on our files. And if … if, Miss Lieberman,' – this was condescendingly to Flora – ‘if in the meantime you feel in need of counselling at all, I am authorised to give you this number, which is the rape crisis and victim support helpline here in Helford.' She put a card on the table and sidled rapidly to the door. Rod threw down the tea towel and showed her out with excessively courtly politeness.

There was a moment of silence. Gemma picked up the telephone. ‘Just fuck off,' she said, cut the line and handed the receiver to Topaz who replaced it quietly.

‘Hey, Flora.' Had Topaz been a physical person she might at this point have given her sister a hug. As it was she reached out one hand in Flora's direction as if to impart approval by stirring the air. ‘You knocked his teeth out. Good going.'

‘Yeah,' ventured Rod, tortured because he had arrived the scene too late to do the job himself. ‘Good going.'

The victim seemed restored by this praise, while Gemma was annoyed. She was also annoyed with herself for having told Ted to fuck off when she had heard enough talk from him to know that he was only concerned about them. There was something truly manly in trying to make contact through such a firestorm of female emotion. And hanging in to take care of Damon, as much as he could, when many men just abandoned a child who turned out less than perfect. Pitiable as he was, Ted had that kind of benighted decency reminded her of his own dog. She ruffled Flora's hair, then got up from the sofa and made for the stove, ignoring her eldest child.

‘She
was
going to fix the pay-off,' Topaz insisted mulishly.

‘I know. Topaz, you were right – OK? Happy now? I do know. I just don't want to believe it.' She took possession of her saucepans again, taking the cloth from Rod to lift lids and peer at the contents. ‘What is it with trouble, it always comes at dinner time? You know my father used to say that? “Why can't we ever sit down to a meal in peace?” he used to say.'

‘Why don't you want to believe it?' Topaz was implacable. ‘You hate Allie Parsons. You said she was the worst mother since Medea.'

‘For Christ's sake, first-born child, you were supposed to fulfil my dreams, not run over them with a tank. Look, it's not about Allie Parsons. Like I care about some plastic dolly on the TV. It's this, it's – the Westwick thing. That dream. Nice people, nice neighbourhood, trees on the streets, where you girls were going to grow up with good schools and straight teeth, all healthy and strong and beautiful. That's why we came here. I don't want it to be crap, but it is crap, isn't it?‘

‘You know it's crap,' Rod felt able to come out from behind the kitchen table. ‘Anybody gets trouble in a nice neighbourhood, the nice neighbours just ignore them until they go away – aren't we all the living proof of that? When have any of those nice people ever supported you or me, or Steph or any of us?'

Stephanie had judged her moment. ‘Speaking of trouble …'

Now Gemma was crashing pans in her cupboards, those already in use having been judged inadequate. ‘Oh God. Not you too. I'm gonna haveta smash that mirror, I know it. C'mon Steph, spill – what happened to you today?' Shoving back her hair, she dragged out a cast-iron casserole and threw it on to the stove, followed by its clanging lid.

‘I decided I couldn't stand it any more, I decided my mother was right, I decided I'd rent out the house and move in with her until Stewart's home, so I went down to Greenwoods on the Broadway and discovered I couldn't rent the house because there's a road going to be built to the Oak Hill Business Park right through our house, and any day now the Transport Department are going to drop me a line to let me know before they knock it down.'

There was a silence. Flora twisted her hair into knots, looking encouraged that she was not the only sufferer in the room. ‘They can't do that,' Topaz spoke first.

‘My poor baby.' Gemma froze in the act of decanting arrabiata sauce. ‘My poor baby. That is unbelievable.'

Stephanie, still standing next to Rod, sensed a movement, turned towards him and found herself embraced. His arms were warm and hard, his shirt smelt faintly of mildew, as clothes kept on boats often do. She had not had a man's arms around her since the day Stewart left, nearly six months ago. He had not put his arms round a woman since he held Mairi-Sui's limp form for the last time. It was a shockingly good feeling, so they pulled apart fractionally to avoid full body contact, telling themselves they were still lightheaded from trauma.

‘They can't do that,' Topaz said again. ‘There must be some kind of consultation procedure …'

‘Oh yeah. Like the one we just saw? Consultation on how good your case is to be considered a human being, how much you'll take for your innocence, exactly what it's worth to you to look in the mirror in the morning and like what you see. Topaz, you are so naive …' Gemma reached for her largest wooden spoon, the one as long as a forearm.

‘The plans for Oak Hill were all properly approved,' Stephanie sighed. Rod squeezed her shoulders and set her free. ‘We monitored the whole process at the Old Westwiek Society. I don't even remember a new road in the scheme. A road would be the Transport Department's show, it doesn't need the same kind of consent but they'll have to go through a consultation process on the route. You could be right, Topaz, if enough people protested it could be thrown out. But right now its all the same to us, because I can't in good faith sign any rental contracts when I know that up at the Transport Department there's a big black cross through the house. The guy at Greenwoods wouldn't wear it anyway. He said all I'd get was the nastiest kind of tenant offering me a rock-bottom rent and probably intending to squat the property anyway.'

‘This is supposed to be a democracy …' insisted Topaz.

‘Hah!' interjected her mother. ‘This is a
suburb
, my girl. No politics. No right or wrong, no ethics, no morality, nothing liable to cause thought, no, no, no, Mamma don't allow no thought-provokin'round here. This is a profit-making system, it's self-regulating. Whatever doesn't add value is out.' Animated with anger again, Gemma splashed her sauce into the pot and ripped open a packet of spaghetti which she dumped in the boiling water and stirred impatiently, her momentary tenderness for Ted vanishing in the steam. ‘And it was mostly created, I might point out, by that sleazebag who had the nerve to call up just now, who you, my darling daughter, have been trying to sell me as your ideal stepdaddy for the past six months. Ted fucking Parsons. I bet you've still got that stupid letter of his.'

‘It wasn't stupid, it was a beautiful letter. You can't blame him—'

‘Watch me. Listen, you like Ted so much, you shack up with him, give us all a break.' In accusation, Gemma pointed with the giant spoon. ‘Ted Parsons, director of the Oak Hill Development Trust, trasher of our friend's fortunes, whose idea of a neighbourhood is any place where you can jack the price of property up more than twice the national average. A family to him is just what you need to live in a neighbourhood, like your passport. If you said a neighbourhood was a place where people who shared the same values got together to raise families he'd ask you how much you were talking about.'

‘He's the only person who was ever decent to Damon,' Topaz protested weakly.

‘Yeah, well just at this moment I'd call that an error of judgment, Topaz.'

‘I'm going to change my clothes,' said Flora suddenly, heaving herself to her feet. ‘Shall I tell the little ones they can come down now?'

‘Yeah, we can eat in ten minutes.' Gemma stirred her brew, defiantly planted on sturdy legs, her free hand supporting her waist, her hair falling in her eyes. Topaz sulked, unmoving. Stephanie and Rod hunted for knives and forks. ‘Fucking Ted Parsons,' Gemma muttered again, banging a spoon on the edge of a saucepan, full of uncrystallised fury. Then she turned and advanced her silent daughter. ‘Who needs Jack Nicholson?' she demanded. ‘I don't need to call up the devil to get some respect around here. I can trash this fucking neighbourhood all by myself. So, Topaz, now you can go and get that beautiful letter which you so thoughtfully picked out of the garbage for me.'

The man of steel taught himself never to show emotion. As a prisoner in Siberia, when the man of steel was punished with ninety lashes he read a book all the time throughout the flogging. Topaz looked at her mother with a blank face. ‘All right,' she said.

It was past midnight. The children were asleep upstairs and Rod was opening another bottle of Chateau Mr Singh. ‘What we most hated about living in town was the car exhausts spewing out just at the height of a child's face in a buggy, so Sweetheart got gassed every time we crossed the road with her.'

‘What did it for us was when somebody stole Max's buggy right from outside our door, while I was getting out my front door key.' Stephanie still winced at the memory. ‘What kind of people would do something like that?'

‘The usual kind.' Gemma pushed her glass over for a refill. ‘The standard variety selfish ignorant murdering shithead. Common or garden
Homo sapiens.
Fools we were to think we could get away from them.'

Rod poured generously and fell back into his chair. ‘We never thought, Mairi and I. Never knew what we were getting into. We just wanted to live on a boat because we thought it'd be cool and there's no schools near the city marina.
Dawn Treader
was the first boat we found in a place a kid could have a life and we could still get to auditions. So we sold up and bought her. That was our dream.'

Gemma caught Stephanie's eye with the look which said: the man is talking, talking like expressing, we have to let this run. ‘Three months it lasted. We got Sweetheart into The Magpies, Mairi used to take her on bicycle up Riverview Drive. She loved it, you know, the little baby seat. And Mairi. Caring for the planet, all that shit. She wouldn't learn to drive even. Then this truck got her right on the Broadway, right outside Catchpoles. No witnesses.' He looked down at his hands, lying symmetrically on his thighs like the hands of a pharaoh's statue, and it seemed that he politely swallowed a belch although the convulsion might have been emotional in origin. ‘I always thought it was bizarre she called it The Magpies. Birds of ill omen, aren't they?'

To the faraway drone of the traffic on the 31 a bigger noise was added, a jet overhead, straying from the flight-path. Matters had been arranged so that air traffic was routed over Helford, where the citizens cowered behind their double glazed windows in fear of falling lumps of frozen excreta and environmental health officers staunchly maintained that the showers of coarse black dust which also fell from the sky must be occasioned by defective domestic boilers. In summer, when the airport seethed with holiday-makers day and night and planes almost grazed wingtips in the congested sky, aircraft were directed to circle over the river and occasionally roared over Westwick.

The wing lights moved steadily between the stars, the thunder of the engines engulfed them like a giant's heartbeat, drowning all other noises until it faded. The women stayed quiet, hoping in vain for more, but all Rod did was sigh and scrub his fingers in his hair at the back of his neck. He had impossible hair, short, dark, slick, bratpack hair which grew just right and fell just right and got cut just right by the same boy at The Snipper on the Broadway who had once turned out Stephanie with ringlets and a french pleat for the Berkman & Sands Christmas dinner.

‘Bizarre.' Gemma twisted her glass by the stem, watching the paler meniscus on the ruby liquid tilt around the bowl. ‘At least it's plural, so we get two for joy and counting. I guess she didn't know. Let's face it, she doesn't know much. When I told them Mr Lieberman had a bi-polar disorder she told the rest of the teachers the girls had congenitally deformed teeth. Next thing I knew I had that Carman woman creeping round me for weeks saying it was wonderful what orthodontic surgeons could do nowadays and why didn't I bring them all to her clinic? Now what I think's bizarre,' – she turned to Stephanie, just in time to blow away the fresh cloud of despair creeping over her – ‘is how all these women go glass-eyed when you talk to them about plants. Have you ever noticed that?'

‘Uh-huh. They look at you like you're an alien visitor and your interpreter circuits have blown.'

‘They're actually threatened that you can grow things. Isn't that weird? They all live here for the gardens and the trees and stuff and they can't make anything grow. I mean, I should talk …'

‘I'm going to test your soil,' Stephanie responded unexpectedly. The offer had been earning interest in her conscience for some time.

‘Ah – I tested it, it's acid. What can I tell you?'

‘Yeah, Well obviously its acid.' Through the insulating blanket of alcohol, Stephanie groped for the explanation. ‘I mean test for minerals. You must have some imbalance somewhere, nothing else, would make stuff die the way it has. There's a lab I used to use when I did commercial Schemes, they'll do a full chemical breakdown. I'll do it tomorrow.'

‘I do hate everything dying around me,' Gemma admitted fretfully.