Sleight of Hand (9 page)

I hear him sigh deeply on the other end of the line. “How come you're at her house, anyway? And how come you have her phone?”

“I had to stay. Because of Jenny. And the ambulance guys didn't give us a ten minute window to go around collecting her stuff.”

“Ambulance?” he says.
“God!”

“She was vomiting and …”

“She had a lot to drink.”

“It wasn't drink or stress. She had, like, an epileptic fit or something. Anyway, now you know. She wanted you to know.”

“Maybe I should call,” he says.

“I don't know. You can try, but they probably won't put you through.”

“I can't come back up. Not till the weekend. Can you …”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. Never mind,” he says.

“Tell her you called? Let you know if there's any news?”

“I suppose,” he says. “Both of those.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Right.”

I can almost hear him struggling to find the largesse to thank me. “Bye Tom,” I say, saving him the pain. “I have to go now.” I stand and move through to the lounge.

“Right. Yes. Bye,” Tom says.

I sink onto the sofa and look around me at the old-lady lounge and sniff the air and think about the strange flowery old-person smell the place has. It's actually making me feel a bit nauseous. Opposite, I spot a potential culprit – a plug in air freshener. I think about Jenny saying that the house,
“had death in it,”
and decide that making the smell of the place a little more neutral, a little less mumsy, can only be a good thing.

I open all the windows, and hunt down three plug-in air fresheners which I stick in a kitchen drawer, and two bowls of really stinky potpourri which I bin.

From the upstairs back bedroom – Marge's old room – I can see Sarah playing in the back garden with the neighbour's daughter. I stand unseen and observe her for a moment as she screams and runs around. She has grown up so much since I last saw her, she looks like a proper little person now. I wonder how well I will manage if I have to look after her tomorrow. I wonder what she eats. I wonder if she goes to the toilet on her own. What I don't know about … God, how old is she even? I squint as I calculate her age: four and a half, I decide. So what I don't know about four and a half year olds, would fill any number of encyclopaedias.

Back downstairs I pull a blanket over my shoulders against the breeze. The blanket too, smells distinctly floral.

I wander around the house with my iPhone checking for wifi and discover that if I lean against the right hand bay window, I can use an unknown benefactor's network. I check the time, and Skype the beach-house but there's no answer, so I text Ricardo asking him to phone me on the landline again.

And then I return to the sofa and lie back and close my eyes. I can vaguely hear Sarah screaming in the back garden, and as I drift towards sleep, I think for some reason that I'm back in Nice and that Jenny and Sarah are in the upstairs flat.

“Chupa Chups!”

“Ummm … God, I was falling asleep.”

“You want I call back later?”

“No! No, I want to talk to you babe. Where are you? Are you back home?”

“Uhuh. You don't have caller id over in England?”

“We do, but not in this house. It's all distinctly old-school here. But I found out that the neighbours have wifi. Do you want me to Skype you instead?”

“No, it's fine.”

“Skype is cheaper.”

“I don't want to mess around with the computer Chupy.”

“But I can Skype you on the landline.”

“It's
fine
. Are you OK?”

“Sure. And you?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“How are you coping?”

“Fine. I
said.”

“How is Paloma?”

“She's fine. She's fat babe. I think Maria feed her too much. How is Jenny?”

“She's almost unconscious.”

“Unconscious?”

“No, well, she
isn't
. But she's really really tired. She can hardly speak.”

“Oh, OK. Well, that's normal. After a seizure.”

“They're doing some tests – scans and stuff – this afternoon. I'm going back this evening to see if
she can come home. I hope she can, because otherwise I have to look after Sarah tomorrow.”

“Ah, little Sarah. Is still with the …
voisine?”

“The neighbour, yes. She doesn't like me much.”

“Sarah?”

“No, the neighbour.”

“How could anyone not like you Chups?”

“I know. Can you imagine such a thing?”

“And Tom. Have you seen more of Tom?”

“No. He lives a long way away, thank God. I had to call him though.”

“What for?”

“Well, to tell him about Jenny.”

“Right. What did you say?”

“I just told him she's in hospital.”

“Is he coming?”

“I don't think so. I don't think he can. Did I tell you what Sarah said? To Susan, the neighbour?”

Of course it's a mistake to tell Ricardo about Sarah's comment – that I'm the man who stole Mummy's boyfriend. That territory is too emotionally complex for Ricardo, so it merely puts the dampers on our conversation, it merely hastens its end.

I realise too, that I am talking about
me
again, but it's difficult to do otherwise when the only stuff happening in Ricardo's life – namely, his mother's death – is stuff he doesn't seem to want to discuss.

Still, I tell him I miss him and he says I'll be home soon enough, and I hang up feeling desperate for more, which is at least better than feeling like you've had enough.

I toast another round of crumpets. I'm sure I must be putting on weight on my new unhealthy crumpet diet, but when you haven't been able to get hold of a favourite food for years, it's just too hard
to resist. Plus, I tell myself that with all that is going on, I deserve a little treat. And then another. And another.

My fling with Cristina lasted four and a three quarter days longer than I intended – it lasted five. The sex was good. She was a horny bitch (she claimed that Carlos had gone off sex, but then doesn't every unfaithful woman say that?) and being in Bogotá was a good change for me. I got to see a lot of people I thought I had lost from view, you know, family, school-friends, people like that. And I felt OK about everything really; if I wasn't overly suffering from the disappearance of
mi mamá
it was in part, I'm sure, because Cristina was keeping me so busy. And busy we were.

The end was nearing though. We both knew from the beginning that our story would be a short one because it was limited in time by the return of Carlos on Monday and my own flight to Santa Marta now booked for Tuesday Morning. I would fly back and forget Cristina, and she would forget me, and everyone would be happy.

When I lied to you, I knew immediately that it was a stupid thing to do. You asked me if I was back at home and I did a split-second mental calculation on the current state of the chess board and decided that it was riskier to admit that I was still in Bogotá than it was to lie and say I had returned back home.

But I regretted it the second I said it, Chupy, because as soon as I said that, I had to start calculating all the future moves. I had to think about how you might find out that I lied: if you phoned the house, if Maria told you, if you suddenly found out
that you did have caller id after all, and I had to start working out what I would say to cover my tracks if that happened.

That did me good though, because I realised suddenly that I was taking risks, and I realised that the one thing I didn't want was to fuck everything up.

I wish that I had gone back one day earlier though: Cristina made us a romantic farewell roast pork dinner with candles and Champagne, which honestly was the
last
thing that I wanted because I was all about breaking the links, not strengthening them. And then she asked for my phone number, and I said I would think about it, and she got angry and cried and dumped the dinner in the trash.

Afterwards I gave her a wrong number (I swapped two digits so that she might think she had made a mistake) but it made her happy, so we had a farewell fuck and smoked a joint and ordered pizza to replace the pork.

I left Bogotá with a sick feeling in my stomach. I left with an unnerving sensation that somewhere along the line I had made a false move, that I had somehow overlooked a vital corner of the board and left my king exposed to future attack. But then, as I travelled home, it seemed that I had got away with it, and I started to feel better; I started to feel quite pleased with my little Bogotan adventure.

I thought that they would tell me something as soon as I came out of the scanner. I thought they would show me the scan, in fact. They slid me from the machine and helped me down onto the wheelchair, and I asked, as planned, “Did you find anything?”

I had rehearsed that phrase over and over as that terrifying machine buzzed and whirred around me. And I had rehearsed the answer too. I knew with absolute certainty that the reply would come in the form of a joke.
“Absolutely nothing, love. Your head's entirely empty.”

The nurse I asked wasn't apparently the right nurse. He shrugged and nodded at another guy stepping from behind a computer screen.

“Did you find anything?” I asked again.

And he raised an eyebrow and said, “We'll get a doctor to come and explain the results to you.”

Which wasn't, of course, how the dialogue was supposed to go.

He didn't look like he was joking. And he
didn't
look like there was nothing.

The doctor took an hour to come along. It's a cliché of course, but that hour was no ordinary hour. Einstein was right – time is not linear.

When the month-long hour was up, a doctor appeared. A tired, grumpy doctor with sprouting nasal hair that I couldn't seem to stop looking at.

He pointed with his chewed ballpoint pen to a vague shadow on a sheet of paper. The pen left
marks, and I remember thinking that he should retract it and show some respect for my brain scan.

I asked him how big it was, because that's something people always say on TV dramas, and he said,
“Pretty big, about the size of a golf ball,”
which
didn't
sound like something they say.

I didn't tell Mark when he came in. I pretended to be too tired to talk.

I was still feeling sick and vague and stunned. That was maybe part hangover, or maybe from the drugs, or possibly from the seizures, or perhaps from my “golf-ball.” I couldn't really tell which feeling was coming from where.

But mainly, I didn't tell Mark because I simply didn't want to. And there were so many reasons for that.

I hadn't even begun to deal with the information I had just been given. I had a whole backlog of things to deal with from Mum's death to living with Sarah in the house, to … well, Mark turning up.

And it seemed that telling Mark what was wrong with me somehow opened a door to let him in. He would have time to think about what that meant for me, even before I did, and I didn't want that. I didn't trust him enough to let him get there before me. I'm not sure that makes any sense, but it's what I thought.

And then they gave me another round of the pills that made me feel sick, and told me to, “Lay back and try to relax.” And I thought,
“Yeah, Right!”

I'm awoken by the doorbell, and as I fumble and stumble into my clothes, I realise that I have slept well for the first time in a week. Feeling normal because of something as simple as a good night's sleep is an invigorating, optimistic experience.

As I hop into my jeans, I peer out and see Susan and Sarah on the doorstep.

The second I open the front door, Sarah runs past me shouting, “Mum? Mummy? Mum! We had pancakes and strawberries and maypole syrup.”

“Maypole
syrup,” I laugh, and Susan smiles at me for the first time ever.

“I told her she's not here,” she says. “I said she's at the hotel, but it goes in one ear and out the other at that age. Sorry if this is a bit early, but we have a long drive ahead.”

I glance up at the hall clock. “Six-thirty! Wow. I haven't seen six-thirty in a while.”

Susan nods. “Your lie-ins are over,” she says. “This one goes off like an alarm clock every morning at six.”

“Six?”

“Sometimes earlier. Will you be OK? She's a bit of a human dynamo.”

“I'm sure I'll cope somehow.”

Susan hands me a folded post-it. “My mobile number,” she says. “Just in case.”

I blink slowly at her. “Thanks for that.”

“We're back on Sunday.”

“Right.”

Her husband appears holding his daughter's hand. I nod a “hello” at him and he nods back and then stares at his feet.

“You must be Franny,” I say to his daughter. “Hello!”

She too nods and stares at her feet. She's a rotund little girl, which I guess is what having a mum who makes pancakes for breakfast will do for you.

“Shy,” Susan says. I'm not sure if she means her daughter or her husband or both. “Did you find the keys?”

“Keys? Oh! Yes.”

“Because I
do
have some. I, um, forgot.”

“It's fine. I found some. Keep them.”

“Right.” Then clapping her hands and turning away, she shouts, “OK, let's get this show on the road.”

When I close the front door, Sarah is clambering back downstairs. “Where's Mummy?” she asks.

“At the hotel,” I say. “Susan told you.”

“The same hotel? With the polish machine and the magic fridge?”

“Polish machine?”