Laying the Ghost (28 page)

15

Weekend Without Make-Up

(The Long Blondes)

IT WAS JUST
Nell and Mimi now, circling each other like angry cats. Nell had done the thank-God-you’re-alive bit; Mimi had done I’m reeaaaallly sorry. The kind but seen-it-all-before police officer had gone. Evie Mitchell (who had heard by way of Polly and the ever-busy text grapevine) and Tess’s mother Louise, who had turned up early to sympathize on the traumas that teen daughters put parents through, had hastily finished their coffee and left Nell’s kitchen clear for the inevitable fallout, of which there was an immediate explosion.

‘
Grounded?
But that’s not
fair
!’ Mimi wailed her reaction to Nell’s verdict. From the look of utter devastation on Mimi’s face, anyone would think the girl had been sentenced to several years in a hard-labour camp, no
remission,
not to a week confined to her own perfectly comfortable home. The no-going-out regime was hardly a massive deprivation, either – one weekend out of circulation wouldn’t mean eternal banishment from teen society, and it wasn’t as if Mimi was in the habit of midweek partying. She was to come straight home from school each day during the next week; no going to Tess’s, no hanging around outside Tesco Metro with the St Edmund’s boys, no staying on for play rehearsals, genuine or otherwise: the absence of a three-scene fairy wasn’t going to disrupt the drama department’s schedule significantly.

‘Oh it’s fair; it’s
more than
fair!’ Nell shouted back. ‘And it’s not as if you’ll be feeling like going out
this
weekend anyway, is it? You must be exhausted. I know I bloody am!’ And she was, she was. She was too old for staying up the whole night with only a few drifted moments of half-sleep on the sofa; you could hardly go to bed when your daughter had gone missing and could, for all anyone knew, be lying in a hedge, naked, raped and strangled. She didn’t need to thank Steve for these worst-case visions, either – any mother would have had them. Thank God she wasn’t one of the tragic few who were proved right.

‘But I told you; we didn’t
mean
to get locked in there! It was an
accident
! Why don’t you ever
listen
!’ Mimi stormed out of the kitchen, slammed the door and thumped up the stairs. Nell counted to ten: here it came – the music at
full
blast, The Killers, if she wasn’t mistaken – not the most subtle choice. If Ed and Charles were the complaining types they’d be banging on the door insisting that
some people
liked a bit of peace and quiet on a Saturday morning, if it was all the same to her. If only Ed
were
there, it crossed her mind. He’d have been just the person she’d have wanted to be with during that last terrible night. If he hadn’t been at his Dorset cottage for the weekend she would, without question, have knocked on the door and wept out the worst of her fears all over him.

Nell hadn’t the slightest doubt that spending the night in Kensal Green cemetery
was
accidental. Even in the worst spirit of sheer devilment it wouldn’t have been Mimi’s idea of a good time, for she was a girl who cherished her home comforts and each morning had almost to be surgically separated from her 13-tog goose-down duvet. She’d never spent so much as a night under canvas, and had refused to join the school’s Duke of Edinburgh scheme for fear of having to trek agonizing miles across freezing moorland in unsightly shoes. A year before, she had come home from three nights in a hostel dormitory on the school’s geography field trip so appalled at being deprived of her usual facilities (rainstorm shower, Aveda products, underfloor bathroom heating, bedroom TV) that anyone would have thought she’d been condemned to the most primitive Third World prison cell. Gillian had been in the house at the moment she’d
returned,
and hadn’t helped matters by sympathizing profusely as Mimi shuddered and trembled and lay on the sofa weakly pleading for tea and croissants.

‘Oh you poor darling!’ she’d crooned to her granddaughter, ‘surely not a
communal bathroom
?’ leaving Nell incredulous that this was the same woman who had guiltlessly packed off her own three daughters to five years of boarding school.

If a sense of humour ever returned, Nell knew the thought of the woefully spoiled Mimi shivering all night among the graves with nothing more comfortable to lie on than damp ground or icy marble might one day make her smile. Perhaps (oh please) a bit of domestic appreciation would result. And it wasn’t the staying out that Mimi was being punished for.
Of course
Nell knew she hadn’t intended to do it; no – it was the lying. What on earth had made her say she would be at Tess’s? What secret, underhand deeds had she planned that would need an elaborate cover story (and as it involved a boy, as if she couldn’t guess)?

It had led to all sorts of muddle and confusion and ultimately to sheer bloody panic, the involvement of police and some frantic calls to Alex who – though he couldn’t do much from three thousand miles away – was at least the one person who could be relied on to worry about Mimi as much as she was doing. It must have been around four in the morning, his time, when she was
finally
able to call and tell him, in a rare intimate moment of absolute empathy, that all was well. She wondered what Cherisse had made of it all. Had she stayed awake, pacing and imagining the worst alongside him, or had she calmly gone through her usual night-time maintenance routine and meticulously cleansed, toned and moisturized (and anxiously inspected for new lines and wrinkles) before getting into bed, mildly resentful that men of a certain age came fully loaded with complications?

Nell switched on the kettle again for about the fifth time that morning, and sat down at the table. Exhausted, she laid her face against the wood, feeling its rough but comforting grain against her skin. The tears that threatened could be from relief or sheer bloody misery, either would do. When the doorbell rang she could barely make herself move from the chair through weariness.

‘My God, you look terrible!’ was Kate’s greeting. ‘So … the naughty minx is back, then. I saw Evie outside Waitrose just now. She told me what happened. Evie says Tess is in big trouble for covering up, too. Why didn’t you call me last night, Nell? I’d have come straight over and stayed. You shouldn’t have had to go through all that by yourself!’

‘Thanks, Kate; I thought of it, but Louise came over for a while as soon as she’d dragged the truth out of Tess, and the police were great. I also thought, well, you’ve got Alvin to deal with, and besides, if it hadn’t been a good
outcome
…’ Nell’s voice faltered. ‘I’d have … well, it would have been today I’d have needed you.’

‘Another time, though, promise me,’ Kate said, hugging her. ‘Though God knows, let’s hope there isn’t one! Now sit down,’ she ordered, marching Nell into the kitchen, opening the fridge and pulling out a pack of bacon, ‘you need food. How do you switch this grill on? I bet you haven’t eaten a thing, have you?’

‘No, not since lunch yesterday,’ Nell admitted, flicking one of the oven’s switches. She was suddenly ravenous for a bacon sandwich, smothered in ketchup – oh, that deep, eternal comfort of well-loved food. ‘Mimi has, though. Can you believe, she and Joel had a full-scale breakfast somewhere on Ladbroke Grove before they slunk back here? The kind man in the cemetery office let them use his phone – I bet they aren’t the first idiots he’s found shivering by the gates when he unlocked it – so I thought, hey, they’ll head straight back, but no!’

‘Oh I can believe it,
no
problem. I’ve had two teenage boys, don’t forget. The food thing won’t be Mimi’s fault – once they’d let the parents know they were all right, Joel’s mind would have turned straight to food.’

‘I hope Louise isn’t too hard on Tess,’ Nell said as she made yet more tea. ‘I mean, when you think of it, covering for each other is what fifteen-year-olds do. We’d have done the same. I just wish … well, she held out till past ten last night, not saying who Mimi was with, only that
she
was sure she was OK. And then when she and Joel weren’t at his place either, that was when even Tess realized it was serious.’

‘I know,’ Kate sympathized. ‘You imagine the worst – it’s only natural.’

‘I thought at first – and I know this is mad – I had this idea they’d gone on some silly mad trip to New York to see Alex, a big crazy adventure, but Mimi’s passport was still in her room. I almost wished it wasn’t – then I didn’t have to think something horrible had happened to them. Mimi doesn’t have such a terrible life, either – she’s got no reason to start lying or running off.’

‘They do get into all sorts of muddles, though, honestly. One of the boys in Matt’s year got arrested once for doing something stupid like peeing in a shop doorway,’ Kate said as she assembled the bacon sandwiches. ‘Hmm … maybe I’ll just have a little one, to keep you company.’ She then continued, ‘He was as drunk as a skunk, so they put him in the cells and rang his folks, who were out. And when they got back they didn’t bother picking up their messages so the poor boy was in there for twelve hours. By then, of course, his parents thought he’d been knifed and left for dead in some alley and were going mad. It was only when
they
got in a panic and called the police that a cop who was using the communal brain cell put two and two together.’

When Kate had gone, Nell fell into bed and drifted in
and
out of sleep for a couple of restless hours. Eventually, realizing that proper sleep wasn’t likely, she went and had a long, reviving bath and washed her hair. On the radio as she lay drowsily soaking,
Weekend Woman’s Hour
had a feature about orgasms in which Jenni Murray led a brave man and a giggly woman in intense discussion on clitoral stimulation. Although the woman enthused about Practising Alone, no one suggested the pink plastic Rabbit as recommended by Kate. Nell snarled, ‘Oh
shut up
,’ to the earnest lot of them and thumped the radio’s off switch, feeling grouchy. Then, remembering the advice in
After He’s Gone
about going for as near-happy as possible, she made a special effort to blow-dry her hair the way she most liked. If the rest of the weekend with Mimi was going to be like treading on eggshells, she might as well have at least one minimal aspect to feel good about while having to pace this domestic cage with a moody daughter. Following the same train of thought, she chose a newish dress (a silky blue one from Whistles) and put on her last-year Prada-sale boots, reflecting (though without much regret – for there was many a classy bargain in the Tesco Florence and Fred range) that there probably wouldn’t be any more footwear of that elevated calibre in her life. Well, that was OK – it would neatly match the lack of orgasms. Terrific.

There was no sound from Mimi’s room as she passed the door on her way back down the stairs, and she envied
teenagers
their ability simply to fall into a deep sleep at any time of the day. Her fury had now abated and she wished better dreams for Mimi than the potential graveyard horrors that the previous night’s sleeping companions might well trigger.

Back in the kitchen, Nell opened her computer and read a brief email from Seb describing yet another surf session. She hoped he was finding time to fit in some work and sent a reply aiming to put this across without being too bossy-mum. Just before she switched off, she checked the Junk Mail folder as she always did, in case something work-connected had mistakenly been routed there. There was the usual pharmaceutical selection promising to gee up her non-sex life, and some requests to update account details at banks she never used. At first she almost overlooked an unfamiliar sender’s name: ‘Tricksand’ looked like any made-up trash name, maybe inviting her to lose her entire income playing online poker, but the subject heading, ‘Hallo Eleanor’, caught her eye just before she pressed ‘delete’.

Nobody on the Internet knew her as Eleanor. With a rising sensation of prickly nerves, she clicked the message open. And there he was – ‘Tricksand’ – Patrick Sanders. OK, she thought, despondently clicking the ‘not junk’ icon and putting off the moment where she read the next instalment of dry-frozen fury, what was he going to throw at her this time? What delightfully over-the-top reaction to
her
last letter? A writ? Threats of sending The Boys round? Just when she’d thought the weekend couldn’t get any worse … Expecting yet another complete heart-sink moment but deciding she might as well get it over with, Nell read the message.

Eleanor – I got your bizarre note and I’d say it was great to hear from you but I’m completely mystified. What letter? I haven’t written to you since about 1984! And if I had, I wouldn’t have been ‘vile and hurtful’ as you put it. Why would I? What’s going on here? Let’s sort this out and then do the how are you/what’s happening bit. If you want to, that is. Patrick xxx

Eleanor read it at least five times. What on earth was he talking about?

‘So – what happened? I got into big trouble because of you so you owe me the goss.
Every detail
. Starting with
why a cemetery
?’ Tess sounded scary, like a threat. Mimi wasn’t properly awake and was snuggled down with her now-charged phone under the duvet. She had an unreal feeling, as if whatever had happened the night before had been something she’d dreamed. A dampish, woodsy smell in her hair told her it was all too real, as did the bruise on her shin where she’d banged it on a piece of broken-off gravestone when she and Joel had raced away towards the
chapel
in a panic, thinking there was someone (or something) creeping in the dark towards them. Joel had told her it was probably a fox and maybe it was. Or maybe it was the ghost of Thackeray, whose grave she had sat on earlier. Either way, Joel had sounded just as petrified as she’d felt.
Not
reassuring – which he should have at least tried to be, seeing as it was all his fault.

‘The cemetery is because Joel is mad. His hero, the great Brunel, is buried there and having a birthday picnic on his grave is Joel’s idea of a fun day out. Me, I’d have settled for a kebab and a movie. And …’ She could hear Tess breathing down the phone. She knew what she wanted to hear and was going to disappoint her. ‘And nothing happened.’ Mimi rubbed her eyes and sat up in bed.