Laying the Ghost (23 page)

‘Please tell me you’re not serious,’ Kate said, pointing Alvin’s buggy in the direction of the koi carp pond. He leaned out sideways, reluctant to lose sight of the fascinating python-and-rat scenario.

‘OK, I’m not serious about court. I’d rather see him in a restaurant or a bar.’

‘Or in a bed,’ Kate said, wryly.

‘No, not that. Not any more.’ And she meant it – if she’d had even the slightest secret for-old-times’-sake fantasy in that direction, he’d killed it.

‘You never told me how it ended.’

‘Ah, the end …’ Nell sighed. ‘It ended how these things
always
end. Tears and blame and all the angst that goes with it. I got pregnant.’

‘Well, you’d been together so long, how could that be such a disaster? These things happen.’ Kate unstrapped Alvin and let him out, holding his hand as he happily scattered the entire tub of fish-food pellets into the carp pond. The fish splashed and snapped and shoved each other aside to get at the food. Alvin giggled and pointed at them, slapping at the water and shouting ‘Silly fish!’ Nell reached across and gripped the back of his jacket, tightly. The pond was very deep and dark.

‘Oh, Patrick saw it as a disaster. He went berserk. He didn’t ever want children, you see, not
ever
. He said I’d always known that was the deal, blamed me, all that.’

‘But men do change their minds. They all think that way when they’re young. Sean did, and now look. Mind you, he was slightly amazed each time I said I was pregnant. Aren’t they funny? Why is it always our fault? I sometimes wonder if they actually know how babies are made. We are merely flowers to them, mysteriously pollinated by bees.’

‘Patrick would never change. He had his reasons. I suppose deep down I assumed that one grown-up day he
might
change his mind, but it wasn’t going to be
that
time. It came down to a simple choice – babies or him. And as it happened, this accidental baby didn’t stick and I lost it about six weeks in, but the big damage was done and
something
else beside the baby had died between us. I went home to stay with my mother for a while to recover, and … well, she’d never liked Patrick really, always thought he was way too off the wall for me. She kept saying I’d be better with someone more
balanced
, that I’d always wish I’d had children and that I’d regret it years later. She gave me this scenario, that I’d get to fifty-something and have regrets, and that he’d leave me then and go off with someone young and new and have children after I no longer could. It was horrible. I was vulnerable: I’d lost a baby and I grieved for that and I thought, hey, you know, she’s right: I will want them one day. And with Patrick it simply wouldn’t be an option. So that was that.’

‘Didn’t he fight to keep you?’

Nell laughed. ‘What, go all romantic, come and chuck stones at my window in the night and beg me to come back? No. He wasn’t like that. If I said I didn’t want to see him, he’d just take that as what I meant. He went into one of his depressions and stayed quiet for ages. And then, somehow, he just … slid out of my life and vanished.’

‘And Alex slid right into it.’

‘Eventually, after a year or two in which I behaved like a stupid slapper with one-nighters I can barely remember. But that’s best forgotten! Yeah, Alex felt safe, easy, comfortable, reliable. Huh!’ She tried to laugh but it sounded a bit like the little caged marmoset that Alvin was now studying closely.

‘You know what?’ Kate said, putting an arm round Nell.

‘No – please don’t say anything. I’m feeling wavery. All those schoolkids are just coming in here and I don’t want to be crying like an idiot! They’ll take me apart, especially tadpole boy.’

‘OK, I won’t say anything about all that. It’s just …’

‘What?’ Nell felt impatient. Just leave it now, Kate, she wanted to snap.

‘You know when Alvin grows up?’ Kate said. ‘And when people mention Elvis and expect you to know exactly who they’re talking about?’

‘Elvis will be very old history by then,’ Nell told her.

‘Oh, he’ll be remembered … except by Alvin and all the kids who visit this place. They won’t be picturing some overweight singer in white spangly spandex, will they? Just some big, dozy crocodile.’

‘Bless. OK – let’s go and do the difficult bit. I can see they’re rounding people up for a show and tell. Let’s go and stroke an iguana.’

There was something about the pre-dawn hours that made you think far too clearly, in Nell’s opinion. The clock beside her said three forty-five a.m., but her brain’s activity-rating was more at the mid-morning level of powerful. What was that phrase, she wondered … something like ‘Don’t get mad, get even’? She switched on the lamp beside her and sat up, pushing the cat off her feet.
Pablo
opened an eye and gave her a wary look, annoyed to be disturbed at the wrong time.

Bloody Patrick, Nell thought, pushing her tangled hair back from her face; why couldn’t he be the relaxed, casual sort of person who said hey, let’s have lunch and catch up? But the thing that was bugging her right now wasn’t just his cold hostility. She’d done the hurt-and-angry stage and was now, in the middle of this night, wondering
why
he was still so angry with her. It couldn’t be just about her … no one could sulk for over twenty years, surely. That cramped handwriting, the strange spacing, it just wasn’t like him. Perhaps, she thought, it
wasn’t
him. Suppose a jealous wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/enemy had got hold of her letter and had actually sent the reply instead of him? No … that would be ridiculous. And besides, it was too close to his writing, just … older, or something.

Nell pushed the duvet back and got out of bed. She wasn’t going to get any sleep while she felt like this – her thoughts were going round and round in her head and getting mixed up with the excruciating half-dream she’d been having that involved being trapped, naked, in Steve’s so-called puppy cage. There are, she thought, some very bizarre people out there. She didn’t intend to stop going to the Stay Safe classes – there were only two more in the course anyway, but, having written a card to Steve and thanked him for lunch, she wasn’t overkeen on having more one-to-one contact with him. Right now, what she
needed
was a cup of tea and a biscuit; that was the other downside of being awake for hours at the wrong time of night. Once your body woke up you got hungry and, in a jet-lagged kind of way, you needed the day to get going. How annoying it was that the rest of the population out there were sleeping peacefully as they were supposed to. Probably the only others pacing the floors of their own homes and waiting for the world to wake up had the excuse of small squalling babies.

In the kitchen, Nell switched on the kettle and took the HobNobs packet out of the cupboard. There were only two left. Mimi and Tess had been in after school, munching through the new pack and leaving only enough to show reasonable manners. They were like those women who drink almost a whole bottle of wine, but leave an inch in the bottom to kid themselves it was only a half-bottle. The awful evidence can then be dealt with the next day, when sobriety shows up the truth that there isn’t enough left to get a budgie drunk, let alone go down well with a prawn sandwich at lunchtime, but all solvable with a personal promise that this was just a one-off and wouldn’t ever happen again.

Nell hadn’t given up on replying to Patrick. That was what had really been stopping her from getting back to sleep, the mental planning of a response. She’d sorted the tone (cutting yet wounded,
deeply
wounded), but needed to see it all written down to work out the order of what
she
wanted to say. It didn’t have to be long and rambling, in fact the shorter and more concise the better. She could draft it out on a notepad, but really she wanted to play with it on her computer, and that was locked in the studio.

She went into the hallway, shoved her feet into her old Ugg boots and picked up Mimi’s long, black, hooded coat from its usual place, flung over the post at the bottom of the stairs. She collected her keys from the kitchen table and unlocked the back door. The cat startled her, sliding out into the cold air and skimming his body under the coat against her legs, his warm tail on her bare skin making her tingle. The air in the garden was very soft and still at this time of the night. There was a chill and a silent tension that made her feel as if time wasn’t ever going to move on from this moment. Nothing stirred, and with thick cloud cover there was barely any light other than a thin shaft from her kitchen window. All the nocturnal activity of animals, plants and insects seemed over for the night, and she felt she was intruding into a secret, suspended vacuum that came before the dawn.

With the hood of Mimi’s coat pulled up against the cold air, Nell crossed the garden as silently as she could, reluctant to disturb so much as a breath of the air, unlocked the studio door and went inside. The computer was recharging on her desk and she reached down to the floor to unplug it, knowing the layout too well to need to
switch
on the light. Quickly, she pulled the door shut behind her, relocked it and made her way back towards the kitchen door.

‘OK, give that to me! Now!’

Nell gasped as she was grabbed from behind by someone strong and overpowering who was trying to wrestle the computer from her. She immediately dropped it on the grass, relaxed against her attacker’s body and heard a gratifyingly pained curse of ‘
Shit!
’ as she scraped her boot down from below his knee. She then squeezed out from beneath his grip by wriggling downwards and backing him away in the way Steve had taught the class. He recovered, hissed, ‘No you fucking don’t,’ and grabbed her right hand in his left. Somewhere inside her head, Nell wondered why she was finding it impossible to scream. She didn’t seem to have the breath spare. Surely it wasn’t a politely pathological fear of waking the entire street? It should be the one easy thing she could do to save her life, but it just wasn’t happening. What she could do, though, was sidestep this man, twist his arm back and …

‘
Fuck!
That
hurts
!’ he shouted from down on the grass as she leaned on to his awkwardly skewed arm. Oh thank you, Steve, Nell thought, wondering where to go from here. This should be the point at which she did the screaming. Had she won yet? Who was this bastard?

‘You sure picked the wrong house …’ she began, knowing this wasn’t the thing to do. She mustn’t give him time
to
fight back. The back door was only steps away – she should be in there by now, forget the computer.

‘Nell?’ came a muffled voice.

‘Huh? Who’s that? Oh God – Ed!’ Nell let go and Ed stood up, rubbing dew and grass from the front of a sweatshirt that listed Led Zeppelin’s US tour dates in 1973.

‘Why are you in my garden?’ she asked.

‘Why are
you
?’

‘God – I thought you were a burglar!’ she told him.

‘I thought
you
were! I was up and about – wandered into the kitchen and saw you through the window.’ He looked her up and down and laughed. ‘You must admit, you look the part. Big hooded coat, dark boots, stealthy creeping.’

‘I wasn’t stealthily creeping!’ She hit his arm and he flinched.

‘Hey, no more violence!’ he pleaded, hands raised in surrender. ‘You definitely won there. I’ll think twice before challenging an intruder another time, that’s for sure.’

‘Oh Ed, I’m so sorry. Look, come on in, let me make you a cup of tea. You can have the other biscuit. Mimi only left me two. In fact you can have both of them … you deserve it for being brave enough to come out and defend my property like that.’

‘Sure, even if it was only from yourself,’ he commented wryly, picking up the computer and following her into the
warm
kitchen. ‘And I should be apologizing to you for pouncing on you like that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Nell said. ‘You can hardly go up to a villain and say, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I was wondering if you are up to
no good
.”’

And when Mimi came into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes, she found the two of them sitting at the table over mugs of tea, giggling together.

‘Er … what’s going on?’ Mimi said. ‘And, God, Mum … er … like,
clothes
?’

‘Oh Mimi! Sorry, baby, did we wake you?’ Nell asked.

‘Er … yes? And
Mum
…! Both of you, you’re not …’

‘What?’ Nell looked down at herself. She’d taken the big coat off and was down to an all-enveloping extra-long, extra-large T-shirt with a picture of Björk on the front. She’d thought it went rather well with the Ugg boots.

Mimi ran the cold tap, hard, and filled a glass with water. ‘Mum, you’re just not
decent
,’ she hissed.

‘No. I’m probably not, entirely,’ Nell laughed. ‘But I’m decent
enough
; it’ll do. OK?’

13

Big Wheel

(Tori Amos)

‘SO THAT’S ONE
more thing I have to leave out of emails to Dad,’ Mimi grumbled to Tess as they walked across the bridge towards the shops. It was lunchtime – Mimi wanted to get a birthday present for Joel and needed Tess to help her find the right thing. What did boys of sixteen want? Girls of twenty-two, at a guess.

‘I tell you, Mum’s losing it, for sure. It’s getting like Dad sends me one and says, tell me what’s happening and that, and all I can say is, “Hi Dad. I’m all right.” I wish he was back here. She was normal then.’

It sounded disloyal. Her mum might have been ‘normal’, but that had been normal as in not very happy. She might be strange, just now, but you couldn’t say she looked all that miserable – just … manic.

‘She’s still not at the Carly’s mum stage though, is she?’ Tess tried to reassure her.

‘She’s not going around in a studded biker jacket and red patent stilettos with the Perspex heels.’ Mimi thought for a moment, remembering the time at Evie Mitchell’s when Nell had been eyeing up the pink shoes. Well, at least she hadn’t bought them … but she’d been thinking about it, definitely thinking. It was the next, dreadful stage. After that would come the little baby-doll smocks from Topshop and mad purple hair. She hoped she’d stop short at things with frills or a pierced lip, or tattoos. Mothers. What could you do?