Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (5 page)

Jessica was about to say something when her mobile started to ring.

‘Jess?’

It was Lennyher stepmother.

She didn’t feel like speaking to Lenny right then and started to scratch nervously with a drawing pin at the edge of her desk.

‘I was just phoning to see if Arthur got into St Anthony’s.’

‘I don’t knowthe post hadn’t arrived when I left this morning.’

‘Oh.’ Lenny paused at Jessica’s flat tone.

Jessica let herself fall back in her chair, slouching uncomfortably as she started to swing it from side to side.

‘Well, give us a ring later.’

‘I will. How’s Dad?’ she said, with an effort.

The line started to break up and Jessica, now swinging aggressively from side to side, hoped they’d lose the reception altogether, but Lenny was still there. It was something she’d been trying to come to terms with since she was fifteenthe fact that Lenny would still be therealways.

‘I saidhow’s Dad?’

‘He’s fineengrossed in some new cat-deterrent he got by mail order this morning.’

At the beginning, because of what happened between Joe and Lenny, it had been more necessary for Lenny to get on with Jessica than it was for Jessica to get on with Lenny, and this early imbalance in their relationship had never really been redressed. Lenny had made huge effortsJessica could see that now, from the vantage point of being thirty-fiveand not only out of necessity. Lenny had genuinely cared, but at the time Jessica felt she was owed too much to bother responding to overtures made by the woman her father had been having an affair with while her mother was still alive, who became the woman he moved in with after she died.

‘You keep cutting outwhere are you?’

‘I don’t knowsomewhere between Brighton and Birmingham; on a train. How’s work?’

‘Fineyeah, it’s fine.’

‘Well, you know where we are if you need anythingwhy not bring the kids down and have a weekend to yourself?’

‘I don’t knowit’s busy at the moment.’

‘We haven’t seen them in ages, and Dad’s started on that tree house for Arthur.’

Jessica tried to think of something to say to this, but couldn’t.

‘And I miss EllieI really do.’

‘I’ll call,’ Jessica said, as the line broke up for a third and final time.

As she came off her mobile, the office phones started to ring. ‘Lennox Thompson sales departmenthow can I help you?’

‘I’d like to speak to someone about the Beulah Hill house you’ve got on the market.’

‘Well, you’re speaking to the right person.’

‘Wait a minuteis this Jessica?’

‘This is JessicaJessica Palmer.’

‘Jessicait’s Ros.’

‘Ros?’

‘Ros Granger from No. 188?’

‘Ros…’ Why was Ros calling? Ros never called her…

had never called her since she took Toby to McDonald’s in Peckham that time for Arthur’s fourth birthday. In fact, nobody from the PRC apart from Kate had phoned since Arthur’s fourth birthdayand that was nearly a year ago.

‘Sohow’s it all going?’

‘Fine.’

Ros let out a long, smooth laugh as though Jessica had just said something funny. ‘I was phoning to arrange a viewing -.’

‘You’re not thinking of moving as well, are you?’

‘Who else have you been speaking to?’

‘Nobody,’ Jessica said quickly.

Ros paused. ‘Today would be good.’

Even late as she was after the impromptu Beulah Hill viewing, Kate still found time to stop at St Anthony’s vicarage on the way to Village Montessori. Jolting over a speed bump at the crest of the hill, she was sure she saw someonethe vicar?in the vicarage garden, and on an impulse decided to stop, parking behind a distinctive black Chrysler just pulling away, whichif she hadn’t been so preoccupiedshe would have recognised as Evie McRae’s.

She got out of the car and started to walk through the dull April drizzle, trying not to slip on the overspill of gravel from the vicar’s newly gravelled drive. Ignoring the increasingly invasive smell of wet tarmac, which always made her panic, she emerged from behind a bank of hydrangeas with what she liked to think of as a healthy smile on her face.

‘Hi,’ she said across the uneven trail of hydrangea cuttings littering the immaculate lawn.

The Reverend Tessa Walkerit
was
the vicarlooked up, a pair of secateurs in her hand. She managed to master her annoyance at the interruptionthe second interruption that morningbut it left her face looking glum.

After what felt like a minute’s silence, Kate said, ‘Sorrythis
is a bit impromptu; I should have phoned. Actually, I did phone, but no one was in and then I was driving past and I saw you in your garden and…’ She inhaled a lungful of wet tarmac and then panic set in as the memory of long wet suburban days fell over her…She stared blearily at the Reverend Walker, trying to claw her way back into the present moment. ‘I tried to phone, but there was no answer and…’

The Reverend Walker lost the grip on her secateurs so that they hung from the band round her wrist. She didn’t attempt to speak; she just carried on staring at Kate.

‘I’m KateKate Hunter? I come to church here on Sundays. Every Sunday…here to St Anthony’s every Sundaywell, most Sundays…’ She paused, letting out a nervous laugh that made her feel like the only child in a roomful of adults.

The Reverend Walker said nothing. She was too busy thinking…this woman comes to my church every Sunday and I don’t recognise her. It made her feel old.

The drizzle was gaining momentum. There was going to be a downpour, which hadn’t started yet, but there was so much moisture in the air that Kate could feel it collecting on her eyelashes.

The sound of children being let out onto a playing field reached them through the dense, moist air and she started to panic again. Nurseryshe needed to collect Findlay and Flo from nursery. ‘I came here to talk about a child,’ she said suddenly. This sounded epic; she hadn’t meant to sound epic.

The Reverend Walker said, ‘A child?’

‘My sonFindlay.’

‘You want to talk to me about your son?’ the Reverend Walker said, helplessly. Was this the first time the woman had mentioned a child? She didn’t know any more. It just seemed as though she’d been standing on her wet lawn among the hydrangea cuttings for weeks, and now wasn’t a good time for anybody to be talking to her about their
childrenbecause she was undergoing a crisis of faith; a profound crisis of faith. With an effort, she twisted back to Kate. ‘You’re having concerns about your son?’ she said, trying to sound less helpless this time.

‘Concerns?’ Kate echoed.

‘Spiritual concerns?’

‘He’s five years old,’ Kate said, trying not to yell. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. I just came to check that you wrote the letter to St Anthony’s confirming the fact that Findlay comes to church here on Sundays. You needed to write a letterabout Findlay. It was part of our application, and I just wanted to check that it was done because I got a letter this morning saying he didn’t get a place.’

A place where? Heaven? Full of a sudden dread, the Reverend Walker wondered whether they were talking about a dead childthe woman’s son? Was he dead? Had there been a funeral she’d forgotten to attend? A child she’d forgotten to bury? She started to walk slowly, earnestly, towards Kate.

‘We’ve been coming here to church since he was nine months old and this morningthis morningI find out that he doesn’t have a place at St Anthony’s, and nobody seems to know why. Every Sundaynearly every Sundayfor over four years, and he doesn’t get a place.’

The clouds gathered and the moisture thickened until it officially became rainthe steady sort of rain the birds carry on singing through.

Kate tried to breathe in but there was no air anywhere, her nostrils were full of rain and it seemed as though the Reverend Walker was staring at her from the end of a long green tunnel.

‘We’ve been coming to St Anthony’s every Sunday,’ she said again, before realising that she was repeating herself.

Somebody’s voicea long way offwas saying, ‘Only fifty per cent of places are offered on the basis of faith; the other fifty are offered according to catchment area criteria and whether a child has siblings at the school. Do you want to come inside?’ the Reverend said at last.

‘We’ve done everything righteverything,’ Kate yelled. ‘Right down to sitting through sermon after sermon on those fucking Sudanese orphans.’ She broke off, vaguely aware that the rain was running so steadily down her face now it was impairing her vision. The right-hand side of her head seemed to be filling with blood, and the weight of it was pulling her down through the rain towards the lawn. She stumbled, but managed to regain her balance. This prompted the Reverend Walker to say, ‘Come inside,’ again.

Kate stared at her, suddenly intensely aware of the fact that she was, in effect, accosting the vicar in her garden. If she took a look around her, the evidence would be there: her footprints in the gravel on the drive, and across the wet lawn behind her. God. This was exactly the sort of thing her mother would have done. God.

The church bells began ringing and, pushing the vicar’s hands away, she turned and ran back across the lawn and gravel drive, her head thumping so badly with migraine now that it was beginning to seriously affect her balance. She staggered towards the Audi. Somewhere beyond the bells there were screaming children and, beyond them, a dog was intermittently whining and yapping.

A workman standing in front of a Portaloo on the drive next door was staring at her. How long had he been standing there?

Ignoring him, she yanked open the driver’s door and fell into the carthe sound of the wet afternoon immediately muffled by safety glass as she slammed the door shut.

What was it she’d yelled at the Reverend Walker? Something about Sudanese orphans…?

Afraid, she phoned Robert, but Robert didn’t answer his phone.

She pulled up in front of Village Montessori nearly twenty minutes latewhich, following stringent regulations, she’d have to pay for by the minutewith a full-blown migraine; but at least the rain had stopped. She retrieved Flo from the sensory room where she was lying on her back with fifteen other babieswho looked as if they’d just been thrown out of heaven, and landed on a rug of synthetic furall jerking their arms and legs towards the ceiling where silver spirals were revolving, overlooked severely by the black and white faces on the Wimmer-Ferguson Mind Shapes mural. There was a CD of rainforest sounds playing.

Mary handed her Flo from among the minute bodies jerking on the floor, and Kate wasn’t entirely sureif it hadn’t been for Marythat she would have recognised her daughter. The lighting in the sensory room was eerily low and Kate wondered how Mary coped, sitting among the parakeets and the jerking, snuffling bodies, with the door shut. Surely Village Montessori was in breach of EU health and safety regulations?

Once in her mother’s arms, Flo showed absolutely no sign of recognition. It must have been the same with Findlay at
this age, but with Flo, for some reason, Kate felt less able to cope. Flo twisted her head blearily from side to side, blinked her wet eyes at nothing in particular, posited a dribble of something white and curdled on Kate’s lapel then concussed herself on her collarboneand started to cry. Kate felt a wave of violence pass through her that she found difficult to controlbecause of the migraine.

Her arms started to shake and she experienced an almost vertiginous nausea as she tried to remember the names of familiar sights and sounds. This had been happening to her at least twice a day since Flo was bornthe first time, slumped in a hospital bed at King’s, she had been staring past the mass of bouquets on the table at newborn Flo, in her Perspex hospital tank, and there, right in front of her, her daughter turned into a piglet.

Findlay, sitting on the end of the hospital bed, pushing a small fire engine with a broken ladder along the railings, became a centipede, and Robert became a beara huge bear clumsily trying to pull the blue curtains round the bed for some privacy.

Now, all she wanted to do was hurl Flo over Mary’s shoulder through the silver spirals and into the wall behind her, where the impact would no doubt make various bits of Flo burst open and trickle over Wimmer-Ferguson’s impervious black and white faces. Then everybodyincluding Marywould be able to see that Flo wasn’t a human baby after all; she was in fact nothing more than a tiny pig.

Kate stood with her arms shaking, listening to Mary give her a rundown on all Flo’s bowel movements since 8.30 a.m.

Then it passed, and after it had passed, she remembered to smile adoringly at Flolike the woman on the front of the Johnson & Johnson’s wet wipes packetand nod and say ‘great’ in response to Mary’s monologue.

Mary looked surprised, indicating that ‘great’ wasn’t quite right.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Kate said, hoping she was still smiling.

‘I saw Findlay todayhe’s a big boy nowhe’ll be leaving us soon?’

Kate was aware of Marywho had been Findlay’s primary carer as wellwatching her.

‘I know,’ she said vaguely.

‘Where’s he going?’

A pause. ‘St Anthony’s.’

‘That’s gooda good school. A lot of my friendstheir children, they all went there and now they go to university.’

Mary was smiling at her.

‘And Findlayhe told me Flo had an accident this morning. He told me she fell off the bed.’

‘I know,’ Kate said again, sounding as though she was confirming gossip she’d heard about another person’s child. ‘She did sort of roll offonto the duvet, fortunately. Our duvet was on the floor.’

Mary carried on smiling, and carried on watching. ‘I think she has a bump, just on her left temple. There’s a swelling.’

Mary’s finger hovered over the pink and green protrusion.

‘But the duvet was on the floor,’ Kate insisted, taking in Flo’s swollen forehead.

Mary nodded. ‘I didn’t put her to sleep this morning.’

‘She hasn’t slept?’

‘I didn’t want tonot with that swelling. It’s not good for them to sleep after a head injury.’

‘Head injury?’

‘I think she should see the doctor,’ Mary said calmly.

Kate watched her take hold of Flo’s hand and balance it
on her finger and for a brief moment it became a tiny trotter she saw balanced on Mary’s index finger before the tiny trotter became a tiny baby hand again. After reassuring Mary that she would take Flo to the doctor’s that afternoon, she finally managed to exit the sensory room with the A4 sheet of paper she was given every day, accounting for Flo’s dietary and excretory highs and lows.

Findlay was retrieved from the Butterfly Room and coaxed into his coat. It was all looking normalno sign of pigs or centipedes. She even managed a breezy smilein case Mary was still standing in the corridor behind them, watchingand a light-hearted, faux commander’s, ‘Okay, people, let’s move out,’ for Findlay.

Ignoring his retort‘We’re not people, I’m Spiderman’she propelled them across the playground past the nursery’s chicken coop, and through the security gate. There, on the pavement by the Audi that they were two instalments behind on, was Ros Granger, mother to Lola and Toby Granger.

‘Kate!’ Ros called out, dismounting from her Dutch-style bicycle, ‘I’ve been trying you all morningwhere’ve you been? Did you get my message?’

Kate nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and wondered how it was that, despite the rain, Ros didn’t look bedraggled. Her skin was tanned and the white T-shirt advertising her company,
Carpe Diem Life Classes
, was still white. Ros was somebody other women wanted not only to emulate, but to
become,
and here she was walking towards Kate, her eyes glistening with an obscene wellbeing she just couldn’t keep to herself. The overall effect was pathologically upbeat. She looked as if there wasn’t a thing in existence she wouldn’t be able take succour fromnot even mobile-phone adverts that used Holocaust survivors to imply that global communications had the ability to wash away all tears.

Ros was
the
postcode prototype of a young, successful
mother. Within their groupthe PRCshe’d gained herself a reputation for originality that was, if you looked closely, nothing more than a highly evolved form of plagiarism. When Ros dropped her wheat intolerance for lactose intolerance, everybody followed suit becauseas Ros pointed outif you were still wheat intolerant it was because you weren’t buying sourdough bread. So then everybody had to buy sourdough bread from the deli andafter the lactose intolerance phasemake sure their fridge was full of soya milk.

‘So -.’

‘Sowhat?’ Kate managed to say cheerfully back, pretending not to understand while knowing exactly what was coming next, exactly what question she was going to be asked.

Here it wasin Ros’s clear, ecstatic diction: ‘DidFindlaygetin?’

The letter was crackling in the pocket of Kate’s suit jacket just above her heart -, as if it was about to start talking. With an effort, she managed a slow up and down nod and the sort of smile somebody recovering from a minor stroke might produce.

Ros couldn’t quite work out what was going on.

Kate, who had never seen Ros’s eyes darken with doubt before, saw them darken now, and had a sudden apocalyptic vision of just how lonely her future in the postcode would be if she were ever excommunicated from the PRC. She would become Jessicaand nobody wanted to become Jessica. Suddenly terrified, she threw the arm that wasn’t holding Flo up into the air and screamed an evangelical, ‘YESSSS!’, walking for no reason whatsoever into Ros’s arms.

The next minute the two women were hugging and Ros was the first to pull away. This unexpected physical contact with a woman she didn’t even particularly like provoked an
unexpected, almost uncontrollable urge in Kate to cry, and to counteract this she started mumbling, ‘I can’t tell you how…how…’

‘…relieved,’ Ros put in, letting out one of her light-hearted laughs.

‘Relievedthat’s itI am about the whole St Anthony’s thing.’

‘And now you’ve got Findlay in, getting Flo in won’t be such a hassle.’

‘Exactly,’ Kate said heavily, while thinking, who the fuck’s Flo? Then remembering, and patting her on the back, hoping this wouldn’t make her posit anymore.

‘Soeverybody’s in,’ Ros said.

Apart from me, Kate thought, staring at her. ‘Everybody?’

‘Evie, Harriet, me, you…everybody in the PRC.’

‘What about Jessica?’ Kate asked.

Ros’s pause suggested that this question wasn’t strictly necessary given that Jessica wasn’t a fully acknowledged member of the PRC, but she showed magnanimity by shrugging and responding with, ‘I can’t get hold of her.’

‘Me neither,’ Kate lied.

A strobe-like frown flickered over Ros’s face, then she was smiling again because life really was unbelievably goodapart from when you had to run past people in mobility aids. Although, in her darker moments, she had to admit that the thought of the cripple’s eyes on her honed body as she streaked past, fully functioning legs pounding, did thrill her.

‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the bike for a minute, would you? Just while I nip in and get Tobessaves me locking it up. Bless you,’ she said, squeezing Kate’s arm and jogging past her through the security gates and into Village Montessori.

Kate put Flo, in her car seat, down on the pavement next
to the railings and got Findlay into the car, pushing on a nursery CD whose tracks she now heard in her sleep. Satisfied that Findlay’s head was bobbing in time to the music, and that his laughter wasn’t hysterical, merely effusive overflow from some complex childhood game, she scanned the contents of the Sainsbury’s Organic Bag bulging out of Ros’s bicycle basket, and had just managed to uncover a tub of natural cherries and a bar of Valrhona chocolate, some luxury Jersey cream and a gluten-free swiss roll, when Findlay’s window whirred down and Findlay called out, ‘That’s not yours.’

‘I know that, FindlayI wasn’t looking in it, I was looking after it,’ Kate explained as Findlay swung his head out the window. ‘There’s a difference.’

Findlay grinned, nonplussed.

What did that grin mean? Was Findlay being
ironic
?

‘My bike’s got four wheels,’ he said.

‘Four?’ she said, uninterested, but relieved he’d changed the subject. Her mind swung back to the natural cherries and gluten-free swiss roll…she was sure there’d been something heavy at the bottom of the bag as wellpotatoes? Keeping her eyes on Findlay, she gave them a quick squeeze. Definitely potatoes. Was Ros making tortilla for the PRC that night as well?

Kate had, she realisedstaring into the abyss of perfectly honed merchandise in Ros’s bicycle basketset her heart on tortilla for the PRC that night, and making something else instead just wasn’t an option at this stage. She had eggs in the fridgein fact eggs were about all she had.

Findlay was saying, ‘Soon it’s only going to have two.’

‘Two what?’ Kate asked, preoccupied.

Findlay was staring at her and there was a baby whimpering somewhere nearby. ‘Wheels,’ he said after a pause, still staring.

Did she have time to get up to the allotment this afternoon? If Ros
was
making tortilla as well, wouldn’t home-grown potatoes give her tortilla the edge? Kate let out a sharp, involuntary chuckle: a home-grown tortilla.

Behind her, the nursery security gate clanged shut, the sound searing through her cranium as her entire head continued to pulsate with migraine.

‘Thanks for that,’ Ros called out, and was soon strapping Toby and Lola into the child-carrier attached to the back of her bike.

Toby sat staring blankly through the PVC window at Findlaywho was still hanging out of the caras if he’d never seen him before. Kate thought Toby Granger might be autistic, but even if he wasor ever turned out to beRos would somehow manage to turn her son’s autism to her advantage. As Ros always pointed out, whenever she had an audienceeven a non-paying audience: everything you do, right down to whether you decide to pick up that piece of litter on the pavement or just walk on past, defines you. So why, with a maxim like that, didn’t Ros look more exhaustedsurely there were only so many definitive moments one person could sustain in the course of a lifetime, let alone on a daily basis.

‘Harriet wants us there by eight tonight,’ Ros said, as she tucked in the ends of the Sainsbury’s bag that Kate had undone and forgotten to push back down again. ‘A Labour councillor’s meant to be turning up.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘To talk to us about getting speed bumps on Prendergast Road. It was Evie’s idea.’ She paused, adjusting the Sainsbury’s bag again. ‘You know Evie’s been campaigning for speed bumps? I meanI’m thrilled about the speed bumps, it’s just the focus of tonight’s meeting has to be the street party: it’s less than two months away now.’

‘My digger,’ Findlay started to yell, ‘I want my digger.’

The digger was in the boot of the car and Kate was about to get it when she remembered that the Pampers extra-value pack she’d picked up in the chemist that morning on the way to work was also in the Audi’s boot. Members of the PRC didn’t do Pampers or Huggies, and they never did supermarket own brand. They bought Tushies, Nature or the German
Umweltfreundlich
brand, Moltex Öko, which looked as though they’d been made by young offenders as part of some community project. Ros, of course, used non-disposable nappies. Buying Pampers was on a level with buying nonorganic food or Nike baby trainers or getting Flo’s ears pierced or naming your children after luxury goods. Getting Findlay’s digger out of the boot was out of the question because it would give Ros, perched on her ergonomic bike saddle, a bird’s-eye view of the Pampers value pack…and Ros mustn’t see the Pampers value pack.

‘My digger,’ Findlay carried on yelling. ‘I want my digger.’

‘Seems like he wants his digger pretty badly,’ Ros said with an indulgent smile.

Kate was about to answer when she heard a car door open behind her and, turning round, saw Findlay climb out and make his way towards the boot. ‘Findlay…Findlay!’