Saving from Monkeys (6 page)

Chapter 4
– The Statistical Inevitability and the Personal Space Invasion

A week or so after the lunch with Abi, Jonah, and Elliot, I was looking forward to enjoying a rare bit of time to myself in my room after one of those supremely knackering days. I'd had a coma-inducing corporate governance lecture followed by a gruelling accounting tute, and then five hours in the ref doling out and then cleaning up greasy uni food. My fellow students, as was becoming clearer with every shift, had obviously never mastered the cutlery-to-mouth method of eating, and I'd spent an inordinate amount of time scraping dried food off the tables and floor.

Needless to say, I was well and truly over the day and flopping down on my bed and not moving for the next week was pretty much my top priority.
Ever the dutiful daughter, however, I picked up the phone as soon as I got back to my room to perform the obligatory weekly, 'check in with Mum' call. To be honest, it was a ritual that was becoming more and more excruciating.

Mum and I had been so close when I was younger, but from the day I'd bounced in and announced that I'd been accepted into one of the best unis in the country, a little rift had snuck its way between us and it grew every year.

Not that Mum wasn't supportive in her own way; in fact, I probably wouldn't even have been at my top pick if it wasn't for her. Getting to attend my dream uni hadn't been too much of a problem marks-wise, but when it came to me being able to attend from a monetary point of view it got a bit more difficult. For goodness sake,
Elliot
had chosen to go to the same place as me, and if there was one thing I'd learnt in life it was that, if Elliot was involved, I couldn't afford it. Sure I had a government loan to get me through tuition, but I also had to have somewhere to live and food to eat and that's where things had become tricky.

I'd been all set to
attend a cheaper institution and dig myself into some serious debt with whatever bank would have me, when my mum, superhero-like, had come to the rescue. She told me she'd been setting aside some money for my wedding, but that she could see it would be put to better use getting me through my chosen uni reasonably debt-free. Once I'd gotten over my initial horror at the fact that the only time my mother had managed to save it had basically been for my dowry, I'd been overjoyed.

That money of my mum's paid for the ridiculously expensive uni accommodation, but more than that, it had been the gateway for my life over the past few years. Fundamentally
, it had paid for who I had become, and my current happiness, and there wasn't a night before I went to sleep that I didn't thank any omnipotent being that might have been listening for it.

Despite all that, however
, that afternoon once I'd told Mum that all my classes were 'good' and she'd told me things back at home were 'good', we pretty much ran out of stuff to talk about.

"How's Nan?" I asked, on a sudden brainwave. Keen as I'd been to put that night with Elliot out of my mind, I hadn't forgotten how he'd weirdly mentioned his grandma when he'd dropped me off.

There was a little pause and then Mum said sombrely, "Hasn’t Elliot told you?"

I felt my spine stiffen with unease and I sat up slowly on the bed to stare blankly at the ever-critical Mona Lisa poster. This time I could've sworn Da Vinci's muse was saying 'something's wrong and it's been over a month, why didn't you check on Nan earlier you silly, selfish girl?'

"I've told you, Mum, Elliot and I don't have anything to do with each other." As anxious as I was, I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but wasn't very successful.

"And I've told you that I think that's a shame," my mum said, so at least I wasn't the only one failing to not sound frustrat
ed. "Elliot’s a good kid and he could take you far in the sort of place you are now."

Which was hard to take any other way than
: 'Elliot, as a rich person, is better than you and, to achieve anything, you'll need to hang off his fancy coattails'.

Determined not to start an argument, I kept my voice controlled as I said, "Regardless, Elliot hasn't told me anything about Nan, could you fill me in?"

"Oh, poppet," my mum's voice instantly softened and my stomach clenched, instinctively knowing that whatever she was going to say next was going to be awful. "She had a stroke about a month ago. A mild one," she hastily added as I poured horrified silence down the line at her.

"How mild?"
I asked through clenched teeth, my mind making a firm connection with another event that had happened about a month ago.

"Some of her speech is slurred and she's weak down her left side. She's tough as an old boot, though, you know that." Something in her tone prompted me to ask,

"But...?"

M
um sighed and then said quietly, "But she’s not recovering as well as she’d hoped and the doctors say she's got a high risk of more attacks. She's moved into the big house so we can keep an eye on her."

And that last bit, more than anything, told me how serious it was. The Sinclair family owned many properties, one of which Elliot
's mum's mum was usually stationed in. That Nan had consented to being brought to the house Elliot's parents were based out of, AKA 'the big house', was horribly telling. Nan had always been the first to point out that 'big house' was a colloquialism for prison, a reference Elliot, Nan and I had always found particularly warranted.

"Is Nan there now?" I asked,
stung into action. "Can I talk to her?"

There was a moment where it was clear my mum was hesitating, but then she relented with the warning, "But don't keep her on long, she tires easily."

The straight talking, irreverent, dance until the sun comes up woman I knew being described as someone who tires easily was enough to make my eyes fill with tears. As I said goodbye to Mum and waited for the ringing extension to be picked up, I balled the hand not holding the phone into a fist to remind myself to hold it together. Nan didn't like sooky-la-las.

As always, Nan's first words were a kicker. I didn't even get the full way through 'hello' before she croaked,
"You slept with my grandson."

"
Nan
!"

"Now, don't try and deny your dirty deed, Elliot told me all about it."

The words were so her, but the delivery was all wrong. She was speaking slowly and she tripped over the t's like she was drunk. I tried to reassure myself that, being Nan, it was quite possible that she
was
drunk, but there was no getting past the fact that there was something seriously wrong.

For a moment I wavered uncomfortably between following the 'you slept with my grandson' conversation path,
or pointing out the elephant in the room by asking how she was. Having grown up spending whole afternoons curled up listening to Nan's imperious views on the world ('never trust a boy who puts his hands in his pockets, you never know what he's doing down there'), I knew what was expected of me.

"He's been awfully loose with that information," I said through gritted teeth, genuinely annoyed at Elliot, but also aware that I was hamming it up a bit for Nan's sake. "What? Was he texting you during or something?"

Her dirty cackle was fainter than usual and so devoid of her usual spirit that I wondered whether she was acting for my benefit like I was for her. What a depressing thought.

"He's a good
boy; he knows what'll amuse his old nan in her decrepit state." As if to provide emphasis to her 'decrepit' point, she stopped talking and I could hear guttural gulps as if she was struggling to swallow.

My hand gripped the phone tighter and I was swamped by a flood of sadness and guilt.
Nan had been the blasting light of the Sinclair household; her visits had been some of the happiest times of my life. When she'd grabbed me to her bony chest and demanded that I call her Nan, just as Elliot did, I'd felt like I belonged in a way I never had before. So why hadn't I followed up on Elliot's weird little question about her sooner? This question led to: why didn't someone tell me what had happened? Then reached its natural conclusion: why didn't
Elliot
tell me?

"I can hear you thinking nasty things about my progeny, you know," the voice trembling down the phone distracted me from doing exactly what it accused me of. "I had hoped that finally working out your passions on each other would make you like each other a bit more."

"Despite what you might have heard, he's not
that
good in bed," I said dryly before finding myself choking in surprise as she replied tartly,

"From what I
have
heard, how would you know?"

"God, is there anything that boy
doesn't
tell you?" I groaned. "Your relationship is weird, you know that? Seriously weird. Why can't you have normal grandson to grandma interactions, where you make thinly veiled racist comments and he looks past them because you're old and don't know any better?"

Her chuckle was dry and raspy, but sounded genuine for which I was incredibly grateful.

"Darling, I was campaigning for equal rights long before my daughter became the inevitable consequence of the 'free love' movement. Elliot will have to talk to his parents if he's after unenlightened opinions." This kind of comment would usually have been delivered with the speed and cut of a whip, but no more. It took her a lot of stops, starts and stumbles, but she got there and her words still made me smile.

"You see that it's strange, though, right?" I asked, curling my legs up underneath me as I realised that, even though her allegiance was in Elliot's camp, I still wanted some reassurance from her about what had happened. "That Elliot and me...you know."

"I think what's strange is that you didn't do it earlier," she said, her tone definite despite the slight slur. "You were two moderately attractive teenagers who saw each other unsupervised every day in a house with multiple bedrooms, it should have been a foregone…thing…" She faltered, clearly searching for the word and then finished, "…conclusion. What happened was just statistical inevitability catching up with you."

I rolled my eyes, having heard this all before. All through our teenage years Nan had taken every opportunity to make cracks about Elliot and
me getting it on; nothing gave her greater pleasure than to see us squirm in embarrassment. Knowing this, the first creep of an idea threaded its way into my head. Nan had always wanted us together and then pretty much the day she'd had a stroke...It all made a horrible sort of sense.

"I'm going to have to cut this short, darling." I was drawn back to the present by Nan's newly feeble voice. "There's some witch doctor of my daughter's coming to prod and poke me in a moment, as if there's any cure to being old."

I knew this was as much of a reference to her stroke as I was going to get out of her so I asked delicately, "Yeah, how's things, Nan? How do you feel?"

"
Fine, and I'd be even better if people would stop asking me about it," she said, crabbiness clearly warring with fatigue now.

"Well
, at least it hasn't impacted your manners," I said, trying to sound cheeky through the lump in my throat. "It was good to talk to you, Nan. You take care."

"
You
take care," she retorted. "I intend to do no such thing."

We said goodbye and
, after I'd hung up the phone, I sat still for a while, feeling shaky and numb. My head churned with half-formed thoughts, accusations and fears, and when the door suddenly burst open, it took me a good couple of seconds to register the arrival of Abi and Jonah.

There's an expression that says 'no one knows what goes on in a relationship except the two who are in it'. I'd like an amendment to that which goes something like, 'no one knows what goes on in a relationship except the two who are in it
and
the roommate'.

When they came stumbling in I knew immediately that they hadn't expected me to be there
; everything about them screamed 'we're here to have sex'. In return everything about me screamed 'not while I'm here you're not!'

"Oh," Abi stopped fumbling with Jonah's top abruptly as she saw me sitting stiffly on
my bed. "Sorry, we were just-" she stopped trying to cover the awkward moment as she saw my face. "Hey, are you OK?"

The coolest person I know is hurt and sad and no-one told me
, I ranted internally, of course I'm not OK!
Out loud, however, I said, "Yep," accompanying the syllable with a brisk nod.

Because Abi looked worried I added, in silent, mind-to-mind, best friend speak, 'no, I'm really not, but I
don't want to get into it whilst Jonah's here'.

She replied in kind,
telepathically relaying, 'right, but let me know when you're ready to talk. Oh, and sorry about the almost having sex right in front of you thing.'

I raised my eyebrows slightly to say, 'really? Or are you just sorry you had to stop?'
She grinned cheekily and then we broke eye contact and I saw that poor old Jonah was looking between us bemusedly.

Ha! Maybe he had Abi every second of every day now, but it looked like he hadn't yet got the hang of silent girl conversation, something I was very glad about.