The Love Shack (9 page)

‘GEMMA!’ Dan shouts.

I push myself up and shade my eyes from the sun. ‘Yeah?’

‘How are your guts?’

A wave of nausea washes over me. ‘A bit . . . unsettled, if I’m honest.’

I watch as he wades towards me, his expression shifting from mild concern to panic. ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

‘Oh God . . .’ he replies, hobbling out of the lake. Dan’s complexion has drained of colour and he’s staggering towards me like a dying Gladiator in a bad B-movie.

We link arms and stumble – him near-naked, me fully-clothed but in increasing discomfort – towards the main house. He pauses halfway and looks around in desperation. ‘God, I think I’m going to be sick.’

By the time we reach the house, my insides feel as though they’re about to explode, and Dan is clutching his stomach.

‘Take the downstairs loo,’ I splutter, deciding that he looks the most desperate. ‘I’ll go upstairs.’

We prepare to sprint Marine-style, to our respective targets, when Belinda twirls into the hall as if she’s hosting a cocktail party.

‘There you are! Dan, Gemma – I’d like you to meet James Shuttlemore, our new neighbour.’ She ushers him forward, apparently oblivious of my knotted brow, and the fact that Dan is doubled up and dripping wet.

‘James moved into The Stables several weeks ago, but this is the first time we’ve met. He’s an architect.’

James looks to be in his early sixties, but with all his own hair and only a slightly rounded belly he is, as my mum would say,
well preserved
– like a good piccalilli. He stretches out his arm to shake hands. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

I can virtually hear the contents of my boyfriend’s stomach climbing up his foodpipe as he turns and darts to the downstairs bathroom, almost concussing himself against the banister. I stand, swaying, as Belinda seems determined to act as though nothing untoward is happening.

‘Gemma works for a big advertising agency. She writes all the scripts. That’s right, isn’t it?’

I nod frantically.

‘I considered a career in advertising myself after I’d left the Army,’ he replies. ‘But I decided to make life hard for myself and train to be an architect instead.’

A conversation ensues that would be perfectly engaging were it not for the soundtrack emanating from the lavatory.

‘Were you familiar with Buddington before you moved here?’ asks Belinda coolly, as an explosion of coughing reverberates through the house.

James’s eyes shift to the bathroom door, then he refocuses. ‘I’d grown up in Cheshire as a boy, but it was only when my company relocated from Manchester that I decided to move back.’

Belinda smiles. Dan sounds like he’s slaughtering a warthog with a plastic picnic knife.

Every time I think I’ll make a getaway, Belinda yanks me back by asking about my earrings, my mother, my job, or any other number of subjects to which I’m unable to respond with anything other than a grunt. We run out of conversation at the exact moment that Dan’s latrine emergency draws to a close and the door opens.

‘Chuck my trousers in will you, Gemma?’ he groans and I hand them over silently as another hideous crunch hits my stomach.

Belinda claps her hands together. ‘How about a snack, everyone? I made some prune turnovers yesterday.’ At this, the only reaction I’m capable of is turning and stumbling up the stairs on all fours as Belinda cries after me: ‘I’ll save you one, shall I, Gemma?’

Chapter 9

Dan

After three and a half weeks, Mum has driven me to near distraction. I barely know where to start, but I’ll focus on last Saturday, just for the hell of it.

She’s taken to responding with quiet martyrdom whenever Gemma and I go upstairs to watch TV, as though we’re abandoning her to face a lonely, rat-infested death surrounded by her copies of
New Therapist
magazine. Gemma is very conscious of not hurting her feelings and therefore we’ve tended to spend at least half our evenings in the living room with her.

‘Janice Bozhkov, who worked in the same clinic as me when I started out in London, recommended this DVD when she was on the phone this week,’ she announced, just after dinner. ‘It was nominated for an Oscar. She raved about it.’

I was flicking through my phone, while Gemma scrutinised some home decorating magazines and therefore neither of us were paying much attention. Then I looked up and recognised the opening credits of
The Wolf of Wall Street
. I was immediately on edge: I’d never seen the film, but I knew it wasn’t classed family viewing.

This turned out to be a glorious under-estimation.

The next twenty minutes represented, without question, the most excruciating in my life. If I was mortified by
Carry On Camping
aged ten (when my mother rocked with laughter as Barbara Windsor’s bra flew off), that was nothing compared with this.

I won’t bore you with the full, earth-shattering horror of what Gemma and I had to sit through, pretending
not
to watch. But I will say that the nipple-count couldn’t have been higher if I’d spent a year painting the window sills of a brothel.

I can’t claim to be a prude, or indeed deny that if we’d been viewing a similar display of debauchery without a parent in the room, there’s every possibility I’d have enjoyed it. As it was, my eyes were bleeding.

The worst moment involved a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, a prostitute and the most pornographically outlandish variation of cocaine ingestion that the human imagination has ever conjured up.

As the hooker removed her underwear and manoeuvred into the sort of pose you’d strike while looking under the skirting boards for a lost pound coin, Gemma and I quietly died inside.

At this point, most mothers would be sufficiently rattled to pick up the remote and switch over to
Casualty
. Not my mum.

She put her glasses on, leaned in, and commented: ‘What a strange thing to do!’ as if we were watching someone do the crossword upside down, rather than rectal drug abuse. ‘Is
that
what people do these days?’

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered.

‘Have you two ever done it?’

At which point Gemma and I announced we were getting a couple of hot chocolates and turning in.

The last weeks have been dotted with occasions like this, for there is no subject-matter Mum considers to be out of bounds – from menstruation to depilation, IUDs to STDs, we’ve had to listen to it all. Worse, despite our best efforts to maintain a semblance of having our own space, she is
always there
. Just . . . there.

She seems to be attempting to form some sort of bond with Gemma too. Not that I have a problem with that
per se
– I’m glad they get on. I just wish that didn’t involve flicking through old photos of me in an array of Superman pyjamas or the time when I starred as the arse end of a cow in a nativity play. I know we’ve been together for four years, but I’d like to retain some mystique in front of my girlfriend – and that’s very difficult when she’s constantly being told that I was still wetting the bed at six.

Plus . . . I don’t want to give the impression that I’m obsessed with this subject, but I need to get it off my chest. I have had conjugal relations with my infinitely desirable girlfriend, the woman I will love until my dying day, just
twice
since we arrived.

I know some men wouldn’t think this was too bad; if we were in our early sixties and had enough romance under our belt to last a lifetime, I’m sure I’d consider this to be passable. But I am twenty-nine years old. I have needs. She has needs. Not to put too poetic a point on it, we want to
get jiggy
.

Yet, despite attempting more positions than a rhythmic gymnastics team, we have exhausted every spot in the bedroom, bar the inside of the wardrobe, and can confirm that there is quite simply nowhere that doesn’t squeak. So we have to wait until Mum’s out.

And, for a reason I can only put down to the fact that she’ll never get a man after writing that bloody book (to which I resigned myself years ago), SHE IS NEVER OUT.

In amongst this is my growing concern that we are going out on a limb with Pebble Cottage. Although it’s still up for sale, I can’t see how it won’t already have sold by the time we’re in a position to put in an offer.

The prospect of where this would leave us (i.e. still here) does not bear thinking about. We need a Plan B.

It has also struck me that if that Plan B happened to involve us finding a cheaper house we could move into sooner, then all the better. Obviously, I don’t want to buy somewhere for the wrong reasons, but even a slim chance of precipitating our departure from Buddington Hall is worth investigating.

Gemma, to my surprise, agrees – something I can only attribute to her crumbling belief about my mum’s awesomeness. ‘Have you seen this?’ she asks as we pull up outside our first of five houses. She’s reading a story on the
Guardian
app on her phone.

‘“Dr Belinda Blackwood, the controversial figure behind the hit book
Bastards
is to pen another tome, updated for the twenty-first century, named
Beyond Bastards
”,’ Gemma reads out. ‘“Publishers are tipping it as one of the most hotly-awaited books of the year, and the announcement that Dr Blackwood was writing again sparked a bidding war that resulted in a six-figure advance for the manuscript. It remains to be seen whether the book will prove as big a success as it was twenty-five years ago – when one in five women in the USA owned a copy”.’

‘Hotly awaited?’ I mutter. ‘Not by me it isn’t.’

Gemma drops the paper in the footwell and opens the car door.

The terrace house we’ve come to see is £20k cheaper than Pebble Cottage, with a pleasant, if modest front garden. The area isn’t quite as nice, the front of the house not quite as quaint – but it’s still more than passable in my book.

‘Looks like it’s got potential,’ Gemma smiles. I try not to get my hopes up.

We’d agreed to meet the estate agent at 1 p.m. because the couple who own the house work in hospitality and are both hard at it every Saturday. It’s a couple of minutes past now.

‘Maybe we should ring the bell – perhaps the estate agent’s inside,’ I suggest.

Gemma presses the buzzer, but there’s no response. ‘I could’ve sworn I heard someone,’ she frowns, before the noisy clatter of high heels diverts our attention. Their owner is a woman in her early fifties, who has either had a lot of Botox or a head transplant from one of the dummies in the window of House of Fraser. She’s out of breath when she reaches us.

‘I’m Hannah Bailey,’ she pants, flipping a shawl over her shoulder. Gemma holds out her hand.

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Gemma.’

But Hannah Bailey barely notices Gemma. Instead, she turns and focuses her gaze on me.

‘
Hellooo
,’ she says, shaking my hand. I smile and try to pull it away, but she’s like a Cocker Spaniel with a novelty rubber turkey and refuses to let me go.

I glance at the door. ‘Shall we go in?’ I suggest. She releases me and grins.

‘Why not? Lovely property this one,’ she begins, pushing a key into the door. ‘Nice young couple like yourselves own it. They’re moving to Bristol. Chefs. Must be an interesting job. Long hours though. Go on in, Gorgeous,’ she winks at me.

I glance at Gemma to see if I can detect any jealousy, but she’s too busy examining the double glazing.

‘Here we’ve got a beautiful inglenook-style fireplace with a spacious, newly-carpeted lounge area,’ Hannah says in the living room. ‘The windows are recently double glazed, the décor is contemporary yet homely. The radiators are all less than ten years old and there’s an efficient combi-boiler upstairs. Any questions?’

‘Not so far, thanks,’ Gemma says. She doesn’t look massively impressed but, as I’ve come to learn, that means nothing.

‘Follow me,’ Hannah instructs as she leads us to the kitchen. There, she announces: ‘Here we are in the kitchen!’ which is the kind of technical detail we’ve come to expect on these tours. ‘And what a lovely room this is. Practical but stylish, lots of cupboard space. A large, bright window, more generous space under the sink for your cleaning items.’ She turns to me and softens her eyes. ‘I bet you’re good with a feather-duster . . .’

She grabs me by the arm and leads me to the stairs. We’ve viewed the spare bedroom, the bathroom and are heading for the main bedroom when I’m sure I hear a thud. ‘What was that?’

Gemma shrugs. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Go on in,’ says Hannah, opening the door. We shuffle in and my eyes are drawn to a grim fitted wardrobe with a gold trim that clearly hasn’t been updated since
The Professionals
was on television. Gemma gasps.

‘Not great, is it?’ I have to agree. ‘But we could tear the fittings out.’

Then I look up and realise that the source of her horror is not the wardrobes. She is gazing at a pair of legs. And feet. And tangled sheets with the outline of a hairy bum underneath, frantically pumping up and down like the piston in a 9,000 horsepower steam locomotive.

Mr and Mrs Withers, it appears, are not out. They are very much in. And out.

‘Oh God!’ cries Hannah. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

The three of us trip over ourselves to try to leave, which in our haste creates enough of a pantomime to prompt a temporary cessation in between-sheets activity.

‘What the—’

The refrain comes from the owner of the hairy bum, who sits up, fumbles with his glasses and, once in position, gapes at us as sweat glistens on his brow.

‘Mrs Withers, there appears to have been a mix-up,’ Hannah babbles, as the woman starboard side of hairy bum bloke attempts to hoist up the sheet to her chin. ‘I’d been told that nobody was in and therefore I was to do the viewing.’

Mrs Withers’s face is ashen. ‘The viewing’s tomorrow – Saturday. That’s tomorrow.’

‘No, it’s today, I’m afraid.’

‘But it can’t be.’

‘It is.’

‘No, no, it really can’t.’

‘Ask these two,’ she says, exasperated, at which point Gemma nods. ‘Sorry.’