Alice and the Fly (4 page)

Mum doesn’t suit the kitchen. Her hair kept slipping from its bouffant and she spent several minutes tutting and fiddling in the crème brûlée mixture with a bread knife, trying to pick out what I assume was a chipped nail. Mum doesn’t suit doing many things any more. Except drinking cocktails. She can stand and drink cocktails better than anyone I’ve ever met.

Mum’s worried because the Hamptons are coming over in a couple of weeks. Ken and Ursula Hampton are Mum’s best friends. Ursula Hampton uses words like ‘Golly’ and ‘Jolly’, which makes her hard to trust. Ken Hampton has a stake in several of Skipdale’s most successful local businesses, including my father’s clinic. He owns several sports cars and sometimes goes to parties with the mayor. It was Ken who gave me the back-lad job. He told Mum I needed to socialise more, that the work environment of the butcher’s would be good for my confidence. It’d turn me into ‘one of the lads’. Ken Hampton’s about five foot tall. He used to be ginger, properly carrot-coloured, till one day his hair just turned black, overnight, which we’re not allowed to mention.

The Hamptons come over from time to time for meals. My sister and I make ourselves scarce. Mum has to cook. My father has to socialise. I don’t think they enjoy it, no matter how much they pretend to. Every meal tends to serve a purpose. This time it’s to show the Hamptons the new white Italian leather couch. It also pretty much guarantees Mum a place at the Hamptons’ New Year’s bash, which is a hotbed of social activity. Today Mum tried out her latest menu: blackened fillet of salmon with chipotle squash purée and mango rice. For dessert Mum baked individual crèmes brûlées with cranberries and orange cream. Crème brûlée is Mum’s signature dish. She has her own blowtorch.

My father spent most of the day in his study – a room he refused to let Mum de-wall in her open-planning. He has a heavy oak-effect door he keeps locked at all times. He doesn’t know I have his spare key. My father is a surgeon and a part-owner of Burke’s Clinic. (Who ‘Burke’ is, I’ve never found out. I think they just made the name up.) He helps lift people’s confidence through surgical improvement. Burke’s Clinic has pictures of all their employees on their website. (It is important for a business to have a public face.) In my father’s photo he is standing in a white surgical room in blue cap and gown, a facemask hung round his neck. He is smiling, one hand holding a raised scalpel, the other giving a thumbs up. Beneath it says: ‘Howard Hall: Breast Man’.

My father’s latest secretary is called Joanna Hewitt. He calls her ‘Jo’. Joanna’s Burke’s Clinic picture is cut from a group holiday photo. She has long blond hair and a low-cut top. She is both pouting and winking at the camera. There is a definite resemblance to a young Pamela Anderson, especially the breasts (which I’d guess to be at least a size DD), and also the nose, which is narrow with that distinctive bump at the end. I’d love one day for my father to employ a male secretary, flat-chested with natural black hair and a fat nose. I think it’d stop Mum getting so tense.

At 17:02 Mum shouted that dinner was served. I switched from the window seat to my seat at the table. Mum laid out four plates of blackened salmon. She was wearing a blue strapless dress with earrings: diamonds. Her nails were also blue, as were the heels she was trotting around the table in. She laid out napkins beside each plate before taking her seat, to the left of me. She smiled, not at me but occasionally glancing over to me. Sundays are becoming kind of a big deal because it’s the only night my father eats with us.

After a few minutes my father emerged from his study. He took his seat beside me, opposite Mum. My father is an extremely handsome man, especially for someone in his fifties. He’s well groomed. He still has all of his hair, which he gels daily. When I was little I remember it being longer and blacker and always slicked back, and over the past couple of years his hair has not so much greyed, as silvered. At one of their dinner parties, whilst complimenting his work on Ursula’s implants, Ken Hampton described my father as ‘the George Clooney of breast augmentation’.

Tonight he was holding a collection of photographs of inframammary infections, which he set out on the table to browse through whilst he ate. He was also nursing a glass of either whiskey or Scotch (I’ve never worked out the difference). He smelt of cigarettes, which is what he usually smells of nowadays, since he promised Mum he’d quit and so has to kneel on his office chair, smoking out of the study window. As soon as he’d sat down my father started on his salmon, separating the blackened and non-blackened parts with his fork, scooping the least burnt bits to his mouth. Mum frowned. She asked if maybe we could have some manners for once and wait until everyone’s seated before stuffing our faces? My father sighed and let his fork fall to the table. It landed with a sort of semi-silenced clatter, speckling the tablecloth with salmon crumbs. My father didn’t seem to notice, he was still looking at his photos. Mum’s eyes stayed fixed on the fork for a good thirty seconds before she turned to shout for Sarah again.

Then Mum turned to me, as if she’d just remembered something of great importance. She asked if I’d taken my pill today. I nodded. She always asks at dinner whether I’ve taken my pill and I always nod because I take it first thing in the morning. I used to take it at school on my lunch break but then Goose found them in my bag and showed them to Ian and he stood up and read the label out in front of everyone and so now I keep them at home. They’re powdery, horrible-tasting pills and I have to let them dissolve on my tongue, so I take one just before I brush my teeth. I don’t know why Mum feels the need to keep asking me about them at dinner. I think maybe she’s just making conversation.

After a few minutes my sister came galloping down the stairs. She was wearing her dance leotard, earphones tap-tapping away. She took her seat opposite me, between Mum and my father. She smelt like dancing.

Mum gave a single nod and we began. The salmon tasted charred. I tried my best to eat it but the blackened parts were hard and reminded me of burnt toast. Sarah picked at her rice. She nodded a beat as she ate. Sarah is a slave to the rhythm.

My father continued one-handed. Mum always sets him a knife out just in case but I’ve only ever seen him use it once, on a particularly well-done piece of steak, and he sighed and muttered the whole time as if he wasn’t sure how to use the thing. This uncertainty with knives is odd, considering his profession. It’s possible my father’s not-using-a-knife is to distance the concept of food from that of surgery. Or, more likely, my father’s such a busy person he can only dedicate one of his hands to the task of eating. Mum kept smiling, watching him sip from his tumbler, watching him turn a page, watching him scoop and swallow his salmon.

Mum was the first to speak. She asked my father what he thought. He said, ‘About what?’ and she said this was her Hamptons meal and my father nodded and said, ‘Very good.’ He lifted a photograph from the bottom of the pile. It showed a woman with two different-sized breasts, one red and bulbous, far beyond the level of regular post-op swelling. He put his fork down and reached into his top pocket to retrieve his glasses.

Mum turned to Sarah. ‘What do you think?’

‘What?’ she shouted.

‘Do – you – like – it?’

She pulled out one of the buds of her earphones.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

I waited for Mum to ask me. I had all these answers prepared in my head about how delicious it was. About how flavoursome the blackened parts were. About how it was definitely not weird to mix mango with rice. But Mum didn’t ask me. She just smiled at her salmon.

She said, ‘I bet Ursula Hampton doesn’t even know what a chipotle is.’

And I knew then, that this was not the end. That this was one of her long-term projects. That every night until the Hamptons’ meal Mum will cook blackened fillet of salmon with chipotle squash purée and mango rice and will want to know if the salmon tastes any more perfect and, even if she asks me, I won’t know what to say, because to me it will taste exactly the same. My favourite meal is Waitrose Maple Triple Nut Muesli (with the clusters). My favourite drink is the sweet milk that’s left at the end, the odd raisin floating in it. I eat breakfast alone so I can drink it straight from the bowl.

My sister swallowed a couple of forkfuls of salmon before excusing herself and bounding back upstairs. I ate as much as I could but I never have much of an appetite and it put me off altogether when she starting heaving in the bathroom. Sarah always forgets she shouldn’t dance straight after eating.

My father frowned at one of his photographs. He turned it upside down. Then his BlackBerry began to hum-hum and he stood and said, ‘Hey, Jo,’ and Mum looked down at her plate again. Mum rarely challenges my father’s work. Once or twice I’ve heard her comment on his long hours but he just sighs and gives her that glare over the top of his glasses and says, ‘Credit cards have interest, Deb,’ and Mum looks around at her house and furnishings and the vases of black glittering twigs and nods and carries on smiling.

I tried my best to show Mum I was enjoying the salmon. I smiled and hummed a few yummy noises. I even waited around after I’d finished, waited for the crème brûlée. I’m not sure she noticed. She was too busy nibbling and staring at her plate. She said the rice needed more mango. I don’t know if she was talking to me.

Not a single person in my set has a surname beginning D, E, F or G, so for a lot of lessons I sit next to Ian Connor. I was there the time he snorted four lines of pepper in Media Studies. I was there the time he chewed that massive golf ball of sugar-free gum, telling everyone that the sugar equivalent was a laxative and having to run home with his hand down the back of his trousers. I was even standing at the window the time he rode the cafeteria trolley down that slope by the Lipton Building and crashed into Mr Cullman’s Ford Capri, littering the bonnet with chocolate éclairs. Although we’ve never actually spoken I still know Ian better than Goose or Sam Johnson or any of those skater kids that follow him around at lunch. I know that he draws bar codes on the back of all his exercise books and writes swear words as their ISBNs. I know that at the start of every lesson he biros over the lines of the smiley face on the palm of his hand, so hard that by now it’s tattooed into the creases of his skin. I know that at least twice a day his mum texts to see if he’s OK and that, although he takes his time reading the texts, he never responds.

Ian and I sit on the back row in English Lit. Goose sits on the table opposite. I don’t really get why they call George Lambert ‘Goose’. I used to think it was his laugh (quite nasal and quack-like) but once I heard Ian say it’s because he looks like someone in the year above whose nickname is also Goose. Nicknames are funny things. There’s this one kid in class, one of the Oxbridge kids that sit at the front: ‘Eggy’. Apparently he farted once in assembly in year seven. That’s it. Now he’s ‘Eggy’ for the rest of his life. I’d like it if someone just called me ‘Greg’. ‘Psycho’ is a hard nickname to live down.

Today Ian and Goose spent English Lit passing notes. Ian scribbles notes to Goose on scraps of paper, usually ripped from the book we’re studying and chucks them across to his desk. Goose scribbles a few lines and throws them back. It’s like very slow tennis. When most people read or write notes they tend to cover what they’re reading or writing with their arm, but Ian doesn’t bother. He writes about girls a lot. Today the notes were about Ian and Lucy Marlowe getting together at the Halloween party a few weeks back and Ian not remembering and Goose saying Lucy must have slipped something into his drink and taken advantage of him. They didn’t use terms like ‘getting together’ or ‘taken advantage of’ though. I still remember Lucy Marlowe from year seven, sitting out on the steps of the Lipton Building with her glasses and her
Star Trek
lunchbox while the boys kicked their football at her. I wouldn’t have believed it was the same girl if I hadn’t stayed in her set through school. If I hadn’t witnessed the slow transformation: the fake tan, the contact lenses, the pink fur-collared coat. If I hadn’t been there the day she came to class with an explosion of dyed-blond extensions and heard Mr Cullman say, ‘Well, Lucy, it’s nice to see you’ve finally found yourself.’

Lucy’s been absent since Thursday. Goose wrote that last week he and Sam Johnson snuck into the girls’ changing rooms during hockey and painted ‘Flat-Chested Slut’ in Tipp-Ex on the back of her blazer. Apparently Lucy spent all last lesson without even realising the sniggers were about her (and it was History with Mr Finch so he wasn’t likely to notice). She probably walked all the way home without realising. She probably sat down and relaxed and watched TV (maybe even the odd episode of
Star Trek
for old times’ sake), completely oblivious, until her mum arrived home from the health spa and screamed at the flaky white letters dried into her daughter’s back … hand to her mouth … face Tipp-Ex white …

The notes became a discussion of the possible reasons for Lucy’s absence. Goose’s theory was that when Ian had had intercourse with her he was so big he’d ruptured her ovaries and over the last nine days bits of her insides had been slipping out when she peed and this morning she woke up screaming in a bed of blood with the remainder of her womb smeared across the mattress. Ian giggled at this. I had to look away, had to scratch at my leg under the table. It makes me sick, that kind of talk.

Neither of them has yet considered the possibility that Lucy is pregnant. Teenage pregnancy statistics are high in the Pitt but I’ve never known a pregnant teenager in Skipdale. I wonder if it’s because in Skipdale we don’t have as much of that stuff going on, or because our parents have enough shame to march the kid straight down to the appropriate clinic and get it dealt with.

I didn’t get a chance to read the last note Goose threw over but it must have been hilarious because Ian spent the rest of the lesson giggling with his head in his hands. Miss Hayes carried on reading. Miss Hayes once intercepted one of Ian and Goose’s notes. It was one of Ian’s girl stories and was full of swearing and graphic sexual imagery but Miss Hayes read it out to the whole class the same enthusiastic way she reads
An Inspector Calls
. I think she wanted to embarrass Ian but he laughed louder than anyone. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Miss, I’ll give you a go too, if you want.’ He got two weeks’ detention for that. He still passes notes but Miss Hayes tends to ignore them.