The Flower Arrangement (25 page)

Madam? Suddenly Becca saw that the black dress was uniform. Flustered, she handed over the flowers and the present, still in its yellow plastic bag. The woman put them on the hallstand beside the roses.

A second girl in an identical dress appeared with a dustpan and brush and began to sweep up the glass. Becca bent down to help her.

“Don't worry about that.” It was Karen. Anytime Becca had seen
her before, she'd been wearing killer heels and business suits, but today she was dressed down in skinny jeans and ballet flats, a white T-shirt with a deep slash neck showing off her bony shoulders. “I'm so glad you could make it.”

She held out her hand.

“I'd better not.” Becca held her own hand up. Prosecco dripped from her elbow. “I brought you some wine but it's ended up all over your floor. I'm so sorry.”

“And over your dress. Do you need to change? You can borrow something if you'd like.”

Becca imagined trying to squeeze her curvy size-twelve body into one of Karen's tiny size-six dresses. “No, but could I use the loo to clean up?”

“Of course.”

Becca followed Karen out of the hall, past the open door of a huge, busy kitchen with one high glass wall.

“What an amazing house!”

“Oh, it's not a house, it's an albatross,” Karen sighed. “If I even start to think how deep in negative equity we are, I'll expire.” She turned left into a glassed-in corridor then right into a smaller hall and opened the door to a vast white-tiled bathroom. “I've got some baby wipes in here somewhere.” She walked over to a double sink and bent down to search drawers and cupboards. “I hope your dress is okay,” she said over her shoulder.

Becca caught sight of herself in the mirror. She had a horrible feeling that it wasn't. The children at St. Bart's had a uniform. Gray wool trousers for the boys, gray pleated skirts for the girls. A white shirt with a red knitted tie. A navy blazer with the school crest on the pocket. A black wool cap with a gray silk lining. The mothers had their uniforms too. Becca had studied them carefully. Skinny jeans with shearling waistcoats and UGG boots or tiny flowery dresses with outsize cardigans and ankle boots. Yoga pants and tees in ice-cream colors with down gilets, slinky black running gear with two-hundred-euro Nikes. Cashmere coats, expensive suits, heels.

She had tried hard to blend in on her limited budget, not wanting to let Josh down. She ditched her gel nails and wore stick-ons. She tinted the highlights out of her long brown hair and wore it loose. She got rid of the ten-euro eternity ring that she'd bought in River Island before she moved here. These women, she guessed, could tell a real diamond from a fake a hundred feet away.

“Here you go.” Karen handed her the wipes.

Becca began to dab at the splashes of wine that had soaked through the material to the inside layer of her lace dress. When she'd tried it on, she'd thought the dress was kind of Kate Middleton. Now, with her overdone makeup, she realized she looked more like Katie Price. Her eyes met Karen's in the mirror. “I didn't realize everyone would be so casual. I should have just worn my jeans. This is a bit low-cut, isn't it?”

“Maybe a little, but”—Karen dabbed on some lip balm—“you know what Nora Ephron says?”

“No.” Becca didn't know who Nora Ephron was.

“You should put on a bikini when you're twenty-two and you shouldn't take it off till you're thirty-four.”

Becca sighed. “I should put mine on next year, then.”

“And I should take mine off.” Karen shook her head. “God, you're only twenty-one?” She fluffed up her thin blonde hair and looked at herself regretfully. “I felt old. Now I feel positively ancient.”

“Well, you don't look it,” Becca said. Though if she was truthful—and she felt bad for thinking this way—Karen did have a kind of pinched look and a couple of frown lines under her fringe that made her look more like forty.

She had met Karen because it was raining. The heavens had opened as Becca ran up the long driveway to collect Josh. He was excited about a story he'd written and he wanted to show it to her before he put his coat on. Appropriately, it was about heaven.
Heaven is washing TV with my mum
, he'd written.
There are dogs in heaven. Heaven is when my dad techs me to say good night
.

She fought a pang of guilt as she tucked Josh's damp copybook back into his bag. She took his hand, and as they turned around, she saw a girl with long white-blonde hair spilling from beneath her hood hovering uncertainly at the bottom of the steps.

“That's Darcy!” Josh said in a loud stage whisper. “She's adopted and she has a seahorse.”

The three of them were sheltering under a dripping chestnut tree when the black SUV roared up and a frazzled woman in her work uniform climbed out. Becca caught a flash of red from the soles of her shoes. “Did you wait with her? That's so kind. Thank you. My husband was supposed to pick her up but he's gone AWOL. Sorry, I'm Karen.”

“Becca.”

Karen was belting Darcy into the backseat when she turned to look over her shoulder at Becca. “Are you waiting for Josh's mum to pick you up?”

“I'm his mum,” Becca said.

“Oh God!” Karen's light blue eyes widened. “We all thought you were the nanny.”

She had got the clothes right, Becca thought, so it must have been her accent that had given her away.

There was a long, awkward pause. The rain was really coming down. “Well, get in,” Karen said. “I'll drop you home.”

Karen slipped her phone headset on as she accelerated back down the drive. “Sorry, I have to take this,” she said. Becca tuned out her work call and lay back against the padded headrest, listening to Darcy telling Josh about seahorses. They mated for life, apparently, and swam with their tails linked together. The male seahorse had the babies. And it sounded to Becca that sea creatures the size of her thumb made a better job of relationships than most people did, herself included.

“This is us,” she said on Sandford Road.

Karen pulled over outside the neat redbrick town house swathed in Virginia creeper. “It's lovely,” she said, a little hesitantly.

Becca and Josh didn't actually live in the house but in the two-
roomed granny flat around the side. The rent had been eight hundred euros a month, but the owner had come down to six hundred when Becca offered to do her shopping and cleaning and keep the garden tidy. The shopping was the easiest part. Miss Swanson was in her seventies and seemed to survive almost entirely on cigarettes and anti-inflammatories. She only used one bedroom so the cleaning wasn't too bad, but Becca still vacuumed the entire house twice a week, washed the windows, mopped the floors and sorted out the little pile of laundry. She ended up dropping in every other evening. Josh sat up at the table with his markers and his coloring books and they'd talk while Becca gave Miss Swanson a manicure or set her hair with heated rollers. The old lady was lonely, and it wasn't as if Becca had anything better to do.

The flat had been in a right state when Becca moved in. She had scrubbed burned-in grease off the cooker and stripped the wallpaper and painted the walls white. Josh had the bedroom and Becca slept on the sofa bed in the living room. She was up first and last so it was easier that way. Sleepovers were going to be a problem in the future, but she could cross that bridge when she came to it. She had already crossed plenty of bridges to get here, and burned a few of them too.

Her mam was keeping her distance. Becca went back home every week but so far Mam hadn't come to visit them. She was hoping that Becca would crack without her and move back Northside. And without Miss Swanson to keep her company, Becca might have. She was lonely too.

The night that Karen gave them a lift, as Becca was edging the hot tip of the iron into the pleats in one of Miss Swanson's old-fashioned cotton nighties, she heard Josh saying his prayers. Thanking Allah and Jesus and Buddha for oven chips and Iron Man and for the invitation to Darcy's party, which meant that he would get to meet her seahorse.

And Becca, who didn't believe in any gods, threw a little thank-you prayer out there too. Because the party was for adults as well as kids,
and after six weeks of waiting, the door to the tight little world she'd moved into had finally opened.

*   *   *

There wasn't much that Becca could do about the dress, but, after Karen had gone, she used a baby wipe to scrub off most of her makeup. She was peeling off her stick-on lashes when there was a sharp rap on the door.

“Open up!” A male voice. “It's an emergency. I have a broken nose!”

Shit!
She stuffed the baby wipes, packet and all, into her bag and ran to the door.

A tall man in a clown suit was leaning on the doorjamb, dangling a squashed red plastic nose from a piece of elastic. He was wearing white face paint. A wide red mouth that stretched all the way to his ears. Black quotation-mark eyebrows that shot up his receding hairline when he saw Becca.

“You didn't tell me you'd invited the Kardashians,” he said and she saw that he wasn't on his own.

“Hi!” His friend was wearing normal clothes. If it was normal for a man in his thirties to dress like a teenage skateboarder. He smiled at Becca. “Remember me?” And she did. It was Mr. BMW from the school gates.

“It's all yours,” she said.

“Now that,” she heard the clown say as she walked away, “is my kind of
fancy
dress.”

It was sunny in the garden but the air was still cold. All the women were clustered around the heaters in the marquee that extended out of the back of the house. The men had ventured down onto the middle tier of the long, sloping lawn where a chef was basting a whole hog on a spit. Beyond them, the children were swarming all over a huge bouncy castle. Becca could just make out Josh, one of at least five Spider-Men in among a blur of bouncing pirates, robots and princesses. A waitress offered her a glass of real champagne and she stood on her own,
holding it nervously, her arms folded, trying not to look conspicuous, before she spotted Karen through the crowd.

“Glenda, Emma, Alannah. This is Becky, mother of the adorable Josh.”

“It's actually . . .” She wanted to correct Karen but didn't. “Nice to finally meet you.”

Emma—who was dark and pretty—was the only one who smiled. “I'm India's mum.”

“I'm old enough to be
his
mum.” Alannah turned to ogle a passing waiter. “Do you think he'd mind?”

“Ignore Alannah.” Emma rolled her eyes. “We're having a serious conversation about Pilates for kids.”

“It's ridiculous!” This must be Glenda. She had a feathery cap of dark red hair and a gray jersey dress that showed off her perfectly toned body.

“I know.” Becca jumped right in. “Kids don't need exercise classes. I mean, they never sit still, do they? Josh runs rings around me in the park.”

“Oops.” Alannah raised her glass to hide a little smile.

“I meant,” Glenda said, “that it's ridiculous that St. Bart's won't offer classes. I teach Pilates. It's a wonderful practice for children. Juvenile obesity is an epidemic, you know.”

“Yes,” Becca backtracked. “Of course it is.”

A roar of laughter rose with a plume of smoke from the spit.

“Men and barbecues!” Alannah sighed. “It's all fun and games till they start battling it out to decide who's Lord of the Wings.” She looked over her shoulder. “Which of those Neanderthals is yours?”

“None of them,” Becca said. She had rehearsed this. “Josh's father is not in the picture.”

*   *   *

What do Northsiders use for protection when having sex? Bus shelters.

What's the difference between a Northsider and Batman? Batman can go into a shop without robbin'.

What do you call a Northsider in a suit? The defendant.

Becca had thought the whole Northside/Southside thing was just a joke till the winter she was sixteen, when she got a weekend job in a shop in a Southside shopping mall.

“You'll need an interpreter,” her friend Jasmine said. “They won't understand your accent south of the Liffey.”

But it wasn't the river that divided north from south, Becca soon realized. It was an attitude. The teenagers who came into Shoe Locker acted as if they owned the world and she was only there to keep them happy.

The day she met Gavin, she had been running to and from the stockroom getting endless pairs of trainers for a fourteen-year-old girl in a Juicy Couture tracksuit who had barely even looked at her.

When she came out after searching everywhere for the last four pairs, the girl was wandering off, leaving behind a jumble of shoes strewn all around the floor.

“Hey,” a guy in a white Hollister sweatshirt yelled after her.

The girl turned and her fake-tanned face lit up when she saw him. He was over six feet tall. Blonde hair stood up in random spikes around his freckled face as if he'd been electrocuted. He was ridiculously hot.

“You forgot something!” he said.

“What?” She flicked her ironed blonde hair and batted her fake eyelashes.

“Your manners.” He picked up one of the trainers and pretended to throw it at her. “You're supposed to say thanks.”

“It's her job.”

“Lovely.” He turned to Becca but she wasn't buying it. He was just going to be another flavor of arrogant; give him five minutes and he'd find a way to humiliate her.

She went back to the storeroom and put away the trainers the girl hadn't bothered to try on. When she got back, he was sitting on the padded bench, sorting the other pairs out and putting them back into their boxes.

“You don't have to do that!”

“I want to.”

“Well, you don't always get what you want,” she said. “Actually, around here,” she muttered, “you probably do.”