Nearest Thing to Crazy (17 page)

‘Perfect!’ I cried out in a sing-song, happy voice.

We walked back down the lane. My stupid heels clip-clipped on the tarmac as I walked a couple of paces behind Dan. The moon made long skinny shadows in front of us and the world had taken on a monochrome hue. Over the hedge I could hear the heavy breathing from some of Nick Gale’s prize beef cattle. An owl hooted and another one answered. A few yards ahead of us a dead badger lay against the verge, an oily black slick oozing from its innards onto the tarmac.

‘Oh, poor thing,’ I said. ‘They are so stupid.’

‘It was probably killed in a trap and thrown onto the road to make it look like an accident.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep. That’s what farmers do these days.’

I was quiet for a few more paces pondering the lengths people would go to in order to cover up their tracks, and then I couldn’t help myself: ‘You’re going to take Laura to meet her tomorrow, then?’

‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You don’t have a problem with that, do you?’

‘Why would I?’

‘God knows. I don’t know what’s up with you at the moment, Cass. Every time I looked across the table at you, you looked so bloody miserable . . . it was embarrassing.’

‘I was cold – frozen, actually.’
‘You could have asked her for a jersey.’

‘She could have offered . . .’

‘Do you have any idea how childish you’re sounding?’

‘Dan, fuck off!’

‘Steady on. That’s a bit unnecessary, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? Why don’t you just stop getting at me for once? I really would rather, you know, if you can’t say anything nice then just keep quiet. Shut up.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into you.’

‘Nothing’s got into me. I’m fine. I just would like to have a conversation with you that somehow doesn’t involve us biting each other’s heads off.’

‘I’m not biting your head off. I’m merely trying to talk to you.’

‘God, you can sound patronizing sometimes. I’m
merely
trying to talk to you,’ I mocked.

‘You’re just so strung out it’s impossible to reason with you at the moment.’

I clamped my lips together. We’d both had far too much to drink and I didn’t really want to have a screaming row in the middle of the road. For all I knew our voices would be drifting back up to the barn and all the other guests and our lovely hostess would be able to hear Mr and Mrs Daniel Burton ripping each other to shreds.

He carried on more softly, ‘I’m just concerned, that’s all.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Thanks’ I said as I exhaled. ‘Now can we leave it?’

‘If you want. But I’ve also been thinking about Laura’s twenty-first.’

‘I wonder why you’d be thinking about that.’

‘You know why. Don’t you think it’s time –’

‘When I’m ready. That’s what you promised . . .’

‘But you never are ready, are you?’

She’d made it pretty obvious during the evening that she was upset with me. I honestly thought that asking her to do my garden would be taking advantage of her, because there would have been that awkward thing about whether I should pay her or not, you know . . . me insisting . . . her refusing . . . So I just thought it would be more considerate towards her if I did my own thing, with Amelia.

I’d just said goodbye to the rest of the party – you know how it is when someone is the first to go? Everyone feels they’ve got to make a move too, so they all left pretty promptly. A few minutes later I was back in the garden, clearing off the table, collecting up dead bottles, when I heard their voices drifting through the night air. It’s amazing how sound carries at night. I could hear them so distinctly they could almost have been just the other side of the hedge. She was shrieking at Dan like a fishwife. I couldn’t believe it. You know, one minute she’s sitting there meek as anything and then the next I could hear her yelling at him to fuck off.

Sally telephoned me on Sunday morning and she said how she’d thought Cass seemed really edgy and defensive. I recall she was drinking heavily, so heavily that she fell over at one point. Poor Dan, I really felt for him. I mean I felt sorry for her too, but for him it was all just so humiliating, really. I suppose if you pushed me I’d have to say she was showing some worrying signs, even then.

CHAPTER

8

My head hit the pillow and the next time I opened my eyes the bedside clock told me it was 5.25. My thoughts span around my head like laundry on a turbo cycle but unlike stains, the mess in my head would not come out with a dose of Vanish. I lay awake and listened to Dan breathing steadily beside me and envied him. It was all right for him. Eventually I couldn’t stand listening to him enjoying his contented sleep anymore and slipped on my dressing gown and headed down to the kitchen.

After I’d made myself a comforting cup of tea I pulled Laura’s clean washing out of the tumble drier and got the ironing board out. The flat she lived in had a perfectly adequate washing machine, but she still brought her stuff home because she believed that it pleased me to mother her. She told me that, as I moaned at her because she couldn’t be arsed to separate her coloureds from her whites, I would probably be happier doing it myself. I know that makes me into a mug but I think it meant that she came home more often, and unlike my husband and daughter, I’d never really taken on board that it didn’t pay to be good at the domestic stuff.

I organized her clothes into a tidy pile and then set to work on her creases. It was fiddly work; a lot of her things were miniscule and some were downright immoral. But, as Dan had reminded me, she was nearly twenty-one, and if she wanted to wear knickers that consisted of two pieces of string and a piece of fabric the size of a postage stamp then I suppose that was up to her. I found ironing quite therapeutic – an outlet for my pent-up aggression, maybe. I thumped that iron down so hard sometimes that the legs of the board groaned in pain. I’d had to do my own and my mother’s from around the age of ten or eleven; I didn’t get pocket money unless I earned it from chores. And as I got better and faster at my jobs, Mum always found new ones to add on. She used to tell me that it was all good training for making me into a decent wife for someone. By the age of fifteen she even had me cooking the weekend roasts. Perhaps that’s why I was soft on Laura, really, not wanting to repeat all that negative conditioning. Laura didn’t get pocket money either – no, Laura got a monthly allowance, paid into her very own bank account so that she could spend it on whatever she chose. Except for clothes, because clothes were something that I liked to shop for with her, it was something we could do together, and it suited Laura, because if I paid she didn’t have to use her allowance. Laura didn’t have to do chores because she was always so busy studying for her exams; I never had time to study because I was always busy doing chores. I admit it could be argued that I was also partly responsible for spoiling her. It almost killed me to admit it, but our relationship had never been an easy one, and since she’d gone to university I was finding it more and more difficult to reach her – apart from that one time when she had really needed me. You would think that a shared secret would have created a bond between us, but instead it seemed as though she was somehow angry with me and I didn’t understand why.

Laura had been what the health professionals called a
‘challenging’ baby. She looked like an angel, but at the time I sometimes wondered if I’d given birth to the child in
The Omen
– correction, had her excised from my stomach. I hadn’t even managed to have a normal birth, which was why Dan was the first to hold her. I was too fuzzy, he told me afterwards, and he was worried I might drop her. I wasn’t too fuzzy to notice that he wouldn’t give her up. But from the moment he, at last, handed her to me it seemed like she just screamed and screamed and screamed. Her tiny little head would turn from delicate pink to livid beetroot as she filled her lungs and howled the place down. No matter how much I shushed and rocked and walked and crooned, Laura screamed. Even breastfeeding was a failure. For Laura, my milk seemed to be the concentrated essence of Brussels sprouts. I would present my nipple, ever optimistic for the first few days, and her whole body would tense, her head would strain away from me, and she would howl some more. My breasts became the battleground of so-called ‘breast-feeding counsellors’ drafted in to help fight the war taking place at number 12 Park Hill Road. I became used to having them manhandled by strange women; squeezed this way and that as they were pushed towards Laura’s dainty, rosebud mouth, while a firm hand was clamped behind her head, forcing it towards me. It was amazing how much resistance was contained in that tiny little body. Laura was having none of it. I couldn’t understand why, if she was hungry, she couldn’t accept what God had specially prepared. During pregnancy I had imagined how much we would bond, my baby and I, during the nursing process. We would spend magical hours together, just the two of us, locked in our own little private world, forming a tie that would last forever.

‘She’s not thriving. She needs to eat,’ the health visitor said.
‘There’s no shame in it. It happens to lots of people. It’s nothing to do with you. You mustn’t feel you’ve failed. And look on the bright side
– you won’t be a slave to her feeds for the next six months or so.’

When Dan picked her up she would stop crying. She would let out a big sigh almost straight away, and then her little body would soften as the tension melted out of her rigid muscles. Even before her first smile, her face seemed to be arranging itself into a pre-smile canvas of contentment, practising for when the beam would break out. And Dan would smile down at her, and they would look so beautiful together. I would busy myself with the steriliser and the bottles and the measures of powdered milk and then Dan would say:
‘I’ll feed her if you like.’

My ineptitude formed a drawbridge that everyone could cross in order to tell me what I should be doing; from how I should hold her to how long I should let her sleep, how I should push her around, how often I should feed her. Everything I did carried someone’s caveat of ‘perhaps you should do it like this . . .’ I could just never get it right, it seemed. Then I began to fantasize about how it would be if I just went away and left them all to it. I began to wonder if perhaps Dan would make a better fist of it if I was out of the way. He seemed to know far better than I did what to do with her. She loved him. And I knew she didn’t love me. I wondered if Laura really did hate me and whether she would be happier, if everyone would be happier, if I was out of the picture. And what frightened me most of all, what just seemed the
most
unnatural thing of all, was that sometimes, although I’d never admit it to anyone, I found myself feeling that I hated Laura too.

Sally turned up just after Dan and Laura had left to go and have their little pre-lunch drinkies with Ellie. I would have thought that, knowing Sally, she would have been busy preparing her own Sunday lunch, but I was delighted to see her. ‘Glass of wine?’

‘No thanks. Bit early for me.’

I looked at the clock: 12.15. ‘I suppose you’re right, and I did have quite a lot last night and woke up bloody early this morning. Still, at least I got all Laura’s ironing done.’

‘You ought to make her do it herself.’

‘Yes, I know. But it makes me feel good to do these little things. Makes me feel needed – and I know you understand what that’s like.’

Sally looked confused.

‘You and Patrick, remember, that conversation we had at Amelia’s?’

‘Oh, vaguely.’

‘Dan and Laura have gone to see Ellie, for drinks.’

‘Yes, Ellie said they were going when I spoke to her this morning.’

Cosy, I thought. But then why wouldn’t Sally call her to say thank you for the night before. I suppose if I was a normal guest I’d be doing the same. That was part of the entertaining ‘deal’ wasn’t it, that all the girls could talk, have a post-mortem the next day about the kind of stuff that we women find so fascinating? It occurred to me, suddenly, that I might be the prime topic of conversation.