The Flower Arrangement (24 page)

She'd have to go to a proper florist, Becca thought. She picked the one on Camden Street with all the ivy painted up the outside. She told Josh that it was the beanstalk from the fairy tale and he gaped up at it, his hands planted on the hips of his Spider-Man costume, hoping he'd see Jack appear on the roof. Maybe that was a mistake, she thought as she pushed the door open. He was going to be gutted when he saw that it was just an ordinary shop. That was the problem with making stuff up—Santa, God, Debra the Invisible Zebra who knew when little boys were only pretending to brush their teeth: sooner or later Josh was going to catch her out. But inside, the shop wasn't ordinary at all. It was like something out of one of Josh's storybooks. A little cave full of flowers and candles and fairy lights. Tiny bells tinkled above their heads as the door closed.

“Whoa!” Josh gazed around in amazement. “We have to tell Dad about this!”

Becca gritted her teeth and fished her phone out of her bag and handed it over. That was the other problem with making stuff up—once you started telling a lie, it was hard to stop.

“Hello!” she called out. Silence, except for some posh piano music coming from hidden speakers. “Is there anyone here?”

Please, she thought, don't let the assistant be some patronizing cow and don't let the flowers cost a fortune. She had already blown thirty euros on a Moon in My Room for Darcy, seventy on the dress and shoes
she was wearing and fifteen on a bottle of wine that she had thought was champagne. And by the time she realized it was only Prosecco, she had already paid and was too embarrassed to ask for her money back.

“Sorry.” A tall, dark-haired woman was standing in the doorway at the back of the shop with a stack of vases in her arms. “I was upstairs, didn't hear the door. Can I help you?”

The florist was old, forty maybe, but her hair was even longer than Becca's. It hung over one shoulder in a loose plait tied at the end with a piece of twine. She looked posh, Becca decided, but not snotty. She seemed kind of familiar.

“Is Prosecco okay?” Becca blurted. “To bring to an afternoon party? Kind of a swanky one?”

“It's perfect,” the florist said firmly. “Luxurious but casual.”

“Really?” Becca bit her lip. “It's going to be all the parents from my son's school and I don't want to screw it up.” She lowered her voice so that Josh wouldn't hear. “I thought the whole schoolyard popularity contest ended when I left school; now here I am all over again, wanting the popular girls to like me so my son can have friends. Do you have kids?” She saw the quick flash of pain in the dark eyes. A memory surfaced at the back of her mind, then slid out of view again. “Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to . . .”

“No! It's fine.” The florist put down the vases and folded her arms across her green apron. “I don't have kids but I can imagine the pressure. I'm sure they'll like you.” She rummaged in the cubbyholes of the counter for a cloth. “But if my dad was here, he'd say, ‘It's not other people's job to like you, it's yours.'”

“I like that,” Becca said. She tucked it away in the back of her mind, where she kept all the little bits of wisdom she wanted to pass on to Josh. “Is it okay to just look around?”

“Absolutely.” The florist began to polish the vases. “Take your time.”

Becca walked over to the rows of buckets. There were a dozen kinds of roses. Four different types of lilies. And pails full of beautiful, exotic flowers she had never seen before. Everything looked kind of expensive.
“I've only got about fifteen euros,” she said uncertainly. “Is that enough for something that looks nice?”

“It's plenty! Do you want a hand?” The florist came out from behind the counter. “Right, let's see!” She looked not at the buckets but at Becca, and after a few seconds, she nodded. “I don't know if it's just that gorgeous red dress”—she went over to a bucket of mixed flowers, fished one out—“but you remind me of one of these.”

Becca looked at the tall, straight green stem topped with three red trumpets. “What it is?”

“It's an amaryllis. It comes from a Greek word, I can't remember which one, but it means radiant and sparkling.”

Josh had been off in a corner, but now he was tugging at Becca's sleeve. “Hey!” the florist said. “Superman, I didn't see you there!”

“I'm not Superman,” he sighed. “I'm Spider-Man. I'm just not wearing my mask yet.” He handed the phone back to Becca.
Dad
, his message said,
were inside a bees talk!!!!!! It is orsome. Xoxo Josh.
She pressed send for him and straightaway the phone gave a little ping.

Josh stood on his tiptoes trying to read the screen. “What does he say?”

Becca held the phone out of his reach and pretended to read. “‘Wow! That's so cool. If you find Jack inside the beanstalk, tell him I have that euro he lent me. X D.'”

“Dad knows Jack?” Josh's eyes widened. “That means he
exists
.”

Becca slipped the phone back into her bag. She held out the tall red flower for his approval. “For Darcy's mum—what do you think?”

“Why is Dad always in America?” Josh picked at the little nylon cobwebs under the arms of his costume.

“Why is the man in the moon in the moon?” Becca asked.

He frowned. “You're not supposed to answer a question with a question.”

The florist came to her rescue. “I have some more of those amaryllis upstairs. And I think I have some beanstalk seeds up there too but I might need a hand to find them.”

“I have a hand,” Josh told her. “I have two hands.”

The nicest thing about working in a flower shop, Becca thought, listening to their footsteps in the room above her, must be the smell. The office cleaning work she'd done after Josh was born had always left her hands smelling of bleach. Now, even when she wasn't in the nail salon, the sharp odors of glue and gel hardening under the heat lamp seemed to cling to her clothes and hair. It would be heaven to spend your days working in a place that smelled of roses and trees and damp clay, like a garden after the rain.

Josh came dashing down the stairs, one cupped hand full of tiny brown seeds. He counted them while the florist wrapped the amaryllis.

“They're sunflower seeds,” she whispered to Becca. “Plant them in a bit of soil in an eggbox to get them started. With any luck, they should grow to about six feet tall.”

*   *   *

The house was enormous. A dozen silver helium balloons were tied to the wrought-iron railings. Beyond them, on a manicured lawn, a sheet of matching silver water poured noiselessly over a gleaming steel sculpture the size of a motorbike.

“What's that?” Josh peered through the railings.

“It's art.” Becca imagined sneaking back in the dead of night and plonking her mum's garden gnomes around it. Throwing in a couple of ceramic fishing frogs just to scare the natives.

She took Josh's hand and they went up the sweep of granite steps to the white front door. From behind it came the sound of people talking, glasses clinking, laughter.

“Your hand is wetting,” Josh complained, wiping his own palm on the leg of his red pants.

“Tell you what,” Becca said, taking a deep breath, “why don't we count to twenty before we knock?”

Josh's eyes, denim blue, fringed with eyelashes that were so long
they looked fake, narrowed with scorn. “Counting to twenty is for babies.”

“Not if you do it in French.” Becca hadn't learned French in secondary school but they taught it to six-year-olds at St. Bartholomew's. That was just how they rolled over here on the Southside.

“Ooon, duh,” Josh said carefully, as if the words were inching unsteadily along the tightrope of his tongue, “twah . . .”

Becca tweaked the hem of her dress down again. The nude slip kept riding up under the red lace. She took the not-really-champagne bottle out of the plastic Smyths Toys bag, tucked it under her arm and held the tall red flowers out in front of her like a shield.

Josh was still counting, saying something that sounded like “cat-whores.”

Her mam had told her that if she ever got pregnant, she would have to move out. When Becca said she was keeping the baby, Mam had come home with a bunch of official forms—children's allowance, rent allowance, that sort of thing. “If you're doing this, you're on your own.”

It was just another of her tactics to scare Becca into having an abortion, but it had the opposite effect. Becca had given up school and moved into a bedsit above a chemist's shop ten minutes on the bus from her mam's house, and had stayed there until Josh was four.

The estate had a bad enough reputation when she was a kid but the recession had pushed it over the edge. Gangs of boys hung around the corner of her street in the middle of the day drinking, shouting, lobbing their empties at passing cars. The guards were afraid to go into the flats by the roundabout, and then a drug dealer had been shot in the chip shop four doors up from the bedsit. That was when Becca had cracked.

Her mam, who had been dead set against her having Josh, then adamant that Ferndale was no place to bring up a child, had thrown one of her fits when Becca told her they were moving away. “You can't just pull the poor kid up by the roots and drag him to the other side
of the city,” she had said. But by then Becca would have taken her son to Mars to get him away from Ferndale.

After she'd shouted herself hoarse, her mam had changed tack. “I thought you said you wouldn't touch that man's money?”

“I won't touch it. I'm not going to spend a cent of it on myself.” The money was going to pay for Josh's school fees. She had been very clear about that. “Donnybrook is only six miles away, it's not Outer Mongolia. You can come and visit.”

“Right,” her mother had said sarcastically, “I'll apply for a passport. He'll be a fish out of water once he crosses the Liffey, Rebecca. I'm warning you.”

Her mam had been wrong about Josh, though. In his first week at Bart's he'd made a dozen or so friends. Sage and India—they had names like that here—and Arlo and Milo. It was Becca who was having trouble fitting in. And she had to fit in. If she wanted Josh to be part of this world, she had to be part of it too.

It had taken forever to get this invitation. Weeks of hanging around after Josh went through the quaint arched wooden door, of waiting for one of the other mums to include her in the called-out invitations to coffee mornings and Pilates classes and book clubs. She got an occasional “Hi!” from a couple of them, but most of them looked straight through her as if she was invisible.

She definitely wasn't invisible to the handful of dads who showed up to do the school run. She'd caught them checking her out, sneaking little glances over the shoulders of the kids who were kissing them good-bye.

One of them, a short guy old enough to be her dad, kept smiling at her. He drove a massive BMW but he dressed (at his age!) like one of the deadbeat kids back in Ferndale. Baggy jeans and outsize sweatshirt and trainers so brightly colored they could be seen from space.

Last week he'd been parked at the gate checking his emails and had rolled his window down when she passed, asking her if she needed a lift. She had her headphones on and kept walking, pretending not to hear him.

“Deese-nuff. Vont!” Josh looked at her. “That's twenty in French, Mum.”

Becca lifted the heavy knocker. Head up, she told herself. Sparkle.

*   *   *

The door was opened by a beaming Asian woman of about thirty in a black dress. A friend of Karen's, Becca guessed.

“Welcome,” she said, making it sound like two words.

“Hi,” Becca said, trying not to let her jaw drop. About twenty people were standing around sipping wine and chatting in a black-and-white-tiled hallway that was bigger than her mam's entire house. What looked like a hundred white roses cascaded from a huge urn on an ornate marble hallstand. An aquarium ran the length of one entire wall. A girl in a bumblebee costume and a boy dressed as a pirate had their noses pressed up against the glass. Josh ducked under Becca's arm and ran to join them.

“Sorry! That was Josh,” Becca said, “and I'm Becca.” People in Ferndale didn't kiss one another, but the St. Bart's mums air-kissed one another at least twice a day. She leaned forward to kiss the Asian women, then stopped when she saw her look of horror.

“We're invited,” she stammered, holding out the flowers and the present as if they were proof, forgetting the bottle that was tucked under her arm. It dropped and exploded, scattering shards of glass and splattering Becca and the Asian woman with wine. The chatter in the hall stopped abruptly, as if a switch had been flipped.

“Oh God,” Becca gasped. “I'm so sorry!”

“It's okay, madam,” the Asian woman said smoothly.