The Light of Amsterdam (20 page)

‘Well he moaned and groaned about it but he's a short memory. Seemed to have conveniently forgotten the golfing weekend and the weekend in Manchester to see United.'

‘They all have short memories,' she said, stepping aside to let a large man past whose beard reached to his chest and seemed to hang like a curtain on the rings of his lip piercings. His muscular arms were inked in a complex latticework of what looked like hieroglyphics from some ancient parchment.

‘I wouldn't fancy waking up beside him,' Veronica said, dropping her phone dismissively into her bag. Then she opened a cigarette packet and offered her one.

‘One bad habit I've managed to avoid.'

Suddenly Veronica began to cry and she wondered if she had said the wrong thing. She was snivelling, one hand enfolding her stomach while the back of the other that held the cigarette dabbed her eyes so that Karen worried that the two things might come into fatal contact at any moment. Taking the cigarette from her she handed over a tissue she had found in her pocket while putting a consoling hand across her shoulder.

‘There, there,' she said as if talking to a child. ‘What's wrong, Veronica? What's wrong, love?'

Veronica shook her head from side to side as if this might be a better way to get rid of the tears. ‘It's stupid, really, but I think I'm homesick. I'm not used to being away from the kids and Matt means well but he doesn't know all the wee things – how to do their breakfast the way they like it, how to mash it up so there's no bits; that sort of thing.' She reached out for the comfort of the cigarette. ‘I suppose I sound really stupid – you won't tell the girls, will you? They'll think I'm sad.'

‘I won't tell anyone and you're not stupid and not sad. It just makes you a good mother but we're only here for two nights – it'll fly in. And the kids will be just fine – they'll muck in and if nothing else it'll show him how tough it is being a full-time mum.'

Veronica had stopped crying and exchanged the soggy shredded tissue for her cigarette but continued to heave deep sighs.

‘Take a deep breath. That's a girl.'

‘Is my face a mess?' she asked, tilting it for inspection, the hand with the cigarette stretched out at an angle from her body, the two fingers holding it in a stiff V-shape.

‘Veronica, all our faces are a mess so I wouldn't worry.' And then with the tip of a licked finger she tried to erase the smudge of mascara that to the casual eye might just have been part of the tribal markings. Veronica tried to smile but the corners of her mouth trembled a little so that it looked as if she might start to cry again.

‘Let's go for a walk,' she said. ‘I could do with getting my head showered – I don't know about you but that music's too loud for me. We can go back in a minute – no one'll miss us.'

She linked her arm through Veronica's and they set off across the front of the bars and round the nearest corner, the night air cool against their faces. ‘So what ages are your kids now – I've lost track?'

‘Ethan's third birthday is next week and Ella is five next Easter.'

‘So Ethan was a Christmas baby?'

‘We brought him home just before Christmas. It was really lovely, Karen, the tree up and all. It was like getting the very best present ever.'

A rising breeze made them lean into each other and lower their heads, oblivious to any jokes made at their expense by passers-by.

‘You must be very excited by the wedding,' Veronica said, her tousled mass of red hair spuming up from under her headband. ‘And I think it's very big of you to have your ex at it. Shannon's really pleased that he's going to give her away. After all this time.'

She stopped suddenly, her arm stiffening and restraining Veronica's forward movement. She felt as if she was going to be sick.

‘My ex at the wedding? What are you talking about, Veronica?'

The sudden brake to her walk had caused her companion's headdress to slip and more of her hair seemed to spring free as if suddenly coursing with electric current.

‘Rob's agreed to give her away,' Veronica said, her eyes and mouth opening. ‘Shannon told us last week. Out of the blue, like. Oh my God, Karen, she hasn't told you.'

She unlocked her arm from Veronica's and turned back the way they had come. ‘Perhaps it's a mistake,' Veronica called after her, ‘perhaps I got it wrong.' She didn't reply but kept on walking and with each step she told herself that yes it had to be a mistake. It wasn't possible, not in a million years could it be possible. She felt sick and then something hardened and settled inside her, momentarily pushing aside everything except an anger that seared her throat with the words that wanted to score and scar the night. She glanced up at the sky and it was contracted into a deep blackness streaked with purple and spotted with the neon that dazzled and blurred whatever truth she tried to grasp. It had to be a joke, a bad joke. How could her daughter let herself be given away by a man who had already given her away all those years ago, who had walked out on his unborn child and never showed any interest in either of them? Her skin crawled with the thought of him taking Shannon's arm or even being at the ceremony and she shivered. Somewhere trailing behind, Veronica was calling to her, shouting stuff about perhaps being mistaken and not to tell Shannon that she had said anything. How many of the rest also knew? Shannon wasn't particularly close to Veronica any more – she guessed she'd only been asked for old times' sake – so if she knew, everyone knew. Even as her feet pressed the solidity of the pavement things felt as if they were crumbling and falling apart with each step, and it was as if she were to take away her anger then there would be nothing real at her centre to hold her together.

At the entrance to the bar two black-coated doormen momentarily barred her way, smiling as they asked if she had any dangerous weapons concealed on her body. Knives? Guns? Spears? She pushed past them as they laughed at their own joke, their shoulders rising and falling against the tight seams of their identical coats. For a few seconds the noise and lights made her lose her bearings. Everything in the bar seemed to have moved its position and been randomly shuffled but then she saw them and immediately her eyes picked out Shannon who to the compelling cheers of the other girls was drinking some pink-coloured cocktail in a frenzy of concentration, her face contorted by a distaste for its contents. Walking to the edge of the group she waited until the last dregs had been drained and the challenge passed to someone else before she caught her daughter's eye and signalled that she wanted to see her. Without explanation she gestured for Shannon to follow her to the toilets and only when in the narrow mirrored space did she turn to face her. Her daughter was brushing the back of her hand over her lips and still squirming from the legacy of whatever had been in her glass. As soon, however, as she saw the mirror she leant towards it as if to kiss it and delicately inspected her face with the tips of her fingers.

‘Having a good time, Mum?' she asked, her eyes still searching for any damage to her make-up, and then shook and flounced her hair as if to stir its sleeping form back to life.

Part of her wanted to grab her by that same hair and hurt her in the same way as she was hurting but there was no pain she could inflict that would match her own and she tried to steady herself with one hand holding on to the coldness of a washbasin.

‘How could you do it, Shannon? How could you do this to me?'

Her daughter smoothed the skin at her throat and she knew right away from her expression that she understood what she meant.

‘Who told you?'

‘It doesn't matter who told me because it wasn't you.'

‘I was going to tell you before we went home. I wanted to find the right moment.'

‘So go on, Shannon. Tell me now. I want to hear you say the words otherwise I won't believe it's true.' Behind her daughter's head someone had drawn a smiley face in red lipstick. The tap close to her hand was dripping. The basin had a web of fine cracks. Outside the music sounded like an incoming sea and for a second she felt as if she might drown in its riptide. ‘I'm waiting, Shannon. I want to hear you tell me.'

‘I've asked Dad to come to the ceremony. I should have told you before you heard from someone else.'

The word Dad was a hook tearing her open. She wanted to grab her and push it back down her throat and tell her never to let it pass between them again.

‘How can you do this to me? How can you do this to yourself? After all these years what right have you to bring him back into our lives? And he's not your dad! A dad doesn't walk out on his child before she's even born. Have you forgotten that, forgotten everything?'

‘He's changed, Mum. He's sorry about what happened.'

She felt sick, felt the tumble and loosening of it in her stomach as she realised for the first time that they had been in contact.

‘How long have you been seeing him?'

‘About a year. It happened by accident. We met in town one day. He knew who I was and said he often thought about me.'

‘And you believed that? You believed everything he said. How stupid can you be, Shannon?'

‘He's sorry about what happened. Knows he can't change anything but he'll come to the wedding if I want him there.'

‘And what about me? What about what I want? Did you even for one second stop to think about that?' She waved her arm in the air and its reflection in the mirror made it look like the broken fluttering of a bird's wing as it tried to lift itself into flight.

‘He says that he would have played a part in my life but you didn't want him to. And no matter what happened in the past he's still my father and I'd like my mother and father at my wedding. The way everybody else gets to do.'

She had deceived her. Deceived her for a whole year. ‘The way everybody gets to do' – so she was to set aside everything he'd done so that she could make her marriage measure up to everyone else's. And in those words she knew what she had really always known but had chosen to ignore, that her daughter, this child of hers whom she brought into the world on her own and reared on her own, valued nothing but appearance and nothing even came close to matching that importance. She felt a sharp surge of shame that she had allowed her to grow into this and for a second wanted to put the bitterness of that knowledge into words that would shake her child into some better understanding of what she had become but even then in her anger she knew that it was no longer possible, that it was too late. Too late for all of them.

Ellie's voice came through the half-open door: ‘Everyone all right in here?'

‘Just give us a few minutes, Ellie,' she said, without looking at the bodiless face that had appeared in the doorway. She turned to the mirror but didn't meet her reflection and instead held the basin with both hands. It felt cold against the heat of her skin. She waited until the door had closed.

‘I'm afraid, Shannon, that this is one thing you're not going to be able to have because if Rob's going then I won't be. So whatever way you plot and scheme this there's only going to be one of us there so you go ahead, take your time and make your mind up.'

‘Why does it have to be like this? Why can't this be my special day? Why can't you just do this for me? You don't even have to talk to him or anything.'

She heard the whining, victimised voice adopted by her daughter, saw the practised expression of suffering of someone who has been hard done to by an unfair and malicious life, and all her anger flooded up and threatened to breach the trembling remains of her restraint.

‘Mum, it's just one day.' And now she was pretending to cry.

Just one day. Not even one day, just about the time it took to write a scribbled letter on a page pulled from a spiral notebook. And it was doubly her fault. Firstly in her daughter's eyes because she thought that she had prevented her father having a relationship with them and secondly because she had let her daughter become something she was no longer sure that she could ever love in the way she had always done. They had both cheated on her, taken her for a fool for their own selfish purposes.

‘I think you're being selfish, Mum.'

Something that couldn't be held back any longer coursed over and swept away all instinctive caution and before she could stop herself she had slapped her daughter's face with her open palm. For a second they stared freeze-framed at each other with shocked fierce eyes until a piercing wail broke the stunned silence. Her hand trembled at her side and she wanted at first to reach out and soothe the pain from her daughter's cheek but as she gently and tentatively raised it Shannon shrugged it away, her shrill child's cry subsiding into a lumbering sob. She softly repeated her name and if she had been allowed she would have poured out all her remorse and begged forgiveness but her anger flared again as she watched her daughter turn to the mirror to assess if any collateral damage had been caused by the blow.

‘Selfish? When I'm the person working every hour God sends to help keep you in your style and saving every penny I make for this wedding so you can act the grand lady. Selfish? Shannon, you're the selfish bitch here and that's the truth.'