The Great Christmas Breakup (21 page)

Cecily 2’s snake-like eyes narrowed.
‘You can’t prove anything.’

‘Haven’t you heard of mobile phone cameras? They even take video!’ It was a complete lie – as if I would engage in the sick-making activity of filming my sister-in-law and my neighbor copulating.

‘You, no, you . . .’ Cecily tried but couldn’t get her tongue around a comeback that would give her leverage to stay put. ‘Fine, but this ends our sister relationship, bitch.’

‘We never had one, Cecily
2
.’

‘Maybe you’d better relax the situation a little, hot momma,’ Hammertro told her. ‘After all, you got
nothin’ to stay here for. You
got
fired from that job anyway, didn’t you?’

‘What!’

I honestly felt that my life had to be the brunt of someone’s bad joke.

‘
I didn’t get fired.’

Hammertro grinned like a loony.

‘Did you?’ I asked Cecily 2.

‘
No
t immediately,’ Cecily 2 yelled
defensively.

‘When, exactly?’

‘On the second day. They said I was too violent. Whadda they want? A flaccid dominatrix?’

‘
You’ve been living off us for weeks!’

‘So?’

‘M
aybe they didn’t
want you to beat people up?
’
Hammertro suggested, enjoying the brouhaha.

‘They should’ve said. Didn’t even want to pay me ‘cause of the hospital bills.’

Hospital bills?
Don’t even think about asking what they were for.

‘So why did they?’

‘I threatened to tell their landlord what they were up to in the basement.’

What a piece of work Carson’s sister
was.

Hammertro n
odded appreciatively. ‘That’s my
girl.’

Knowing that I’d put up with Cecily 2 for far longer than I
had
needed to made my head want to explode.

I held the door open and indicated the stairway with my hand.

Cecily 2 shuffled a couple of feet forward, then stopped again.

‘Can I am least take my stuff? If I leave anything here, you’ll probably sell it on eBay to pay
for your
porn-flakes.’

I nearly said they weren’t called porn-flakes
,
but then saw the looks Hammetro and Cecily 2 were giving eac
h other and decided to leave
that
topic well alone.

‘Fine, just pack your gear
as fast as possible
.’

Having been given a slight r
eprieve, Cecily 2 pushed it by making a new demand
.
‘
First
I want to speak to Carson.’

‘Tough.’

Carson is probably busy shagging his old girlfriend.

The clock on the wall said 6 p.m.
School finished at four. Where was he?

In the end, I packed.
It took all of three minutes – Cecily 2’s clothes were all made of stretchy nylon or lycra
or plastic
and didn’t require folding.

‘Mom will get you for this,’ she informed me, as she walked out, dragging her
small battered knock-off Vuitton
case behind her.
‘You owe us for that couch fiasco.’

Tough
.

Hammertro smiled a sorry little smile, until he noticed
that
Cecily 2 was going up the stairs, not down them.

‘Babe, wait, you want me to call you a cab?
Sexy momma? Ce-ce?
’

Cecily 2 kept walking upwards.

Serves him right.

‘B
y
e
Cecily 2,’ I said, closing the door on the
expletive she spat
in
response
.

Cecily 2 was Hammertro’s
problem now. I had other issues to deal with.

Including, but not limited to, the fact that
Mum was about to learn the extent of my failure.

To say noth
ing of
Carson
discovering
that I’d lost my job and thanks to shifty Robert Simp
son there was no money to make up the shortfall.

All things considered, m
oving upstairs with Hammertro and Ceci
ly 2 almost seemed like a better alternative.

CHAPTER TEN

Thursday, December 23

‘Our family makes us who we are,

acknowledge your part in its development.’

Jocelyn Priestly.

SOD OFF, JOCELYN.
Flipping the calendar over,
the only thing I was willing to acknowledge was that
I needed to speak to Robert about the windows
.
Deciding that I would complete the job anyw
ay – I had bought all the stuff and
paid Uncle Rabbit for his work, so I might as well do the install.

Besides, I guessed that legally, once the windows were complete
d
and photograph
ed, I could at
least cl
aim
the full amount Robert owed me.

I could ask Carson about my implied contract with
Chocolato
if we were talking, but having
learned his
mother-in-law had arrived
and his sister had been evicted,
he was refusing to speak to me about anything.

Mum
happily
accompanied me to the sho
ps while I worked,
but she was so excited about being in New York for the first time that I was distracted at every turn.

After we’d made the requisite visits to the Empire State, Saks, Bloomingdales and a couple of other tourist traps uptown, I managed to lure her in the direction of the shops and my work. 

However, w
hen
Robert
got wind of my continued labor in his establishment
s
, he called and said he
wanted to meet and talk things over.

‘The only thing I want to talk about is getting paid.’

‘Then meet me, and we can work it out.’

I had thought he might stop me completing the windows
by telling me I was trespassing
, but I supposed he figured that if he couldn’t have me in a
comprising sexual position, he might get
so
me nice store windows for free.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you owned
Chocolato
?’ I asked, nodding to Mum who was excitedly pointing at the horse and carriage trotting past.

‘I didn’t want you to know that I was attracted to you.’

Bollocks. He was attracted to the ide
a of a threesome with a loser housewife who he figured was bored and desperate.
I didn’t press the issue.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘l
et me finish the job, then pay me. Everyone ends up happy that way.’

‘Alright.
Meet me in an hour at
Starbucks
,
opposite the midtown store.’

‘No, first we meet in front of
Chocolato.
I want to show you what I’ve done.’

I wasn’t going to have him pester me or stop me from finishing my work, now. At the very least, I wanted a snapshot of the shop windows before he tore the whole lot out again.

I didn’t trust Robert Simpson. Perhaps I never had. Perhaps, deep down, that’s why I chose to continue dating Carson instead
of taking a chanc
e on the
dapper, wealthier Robert?

*

I had to confess to Mum pretty much straightaway.
It was hard to cont
inue the
pretence of wealth when the pantry was bare – except for con-flakes.

Mum took it like she’s always taken everything – stoically.

‘But Scarlet, if you are so unhappy, come back with me, to England. I am sure we can find some space on the ship for the three of you. I can apply for extra credit on my card; you can pay it back when you find a job. After all, you have a degree.’

Another lie about to
be exposed. I choked back tears.

‘Darling, what is it?’

‘Mum,
that was
a lie too. Carson is a teacher who barely earns enough to feed us, his family
are horrible and no help at all.
I flunked out of college, because I was rubbish at fashion design, and the only decent job I’ve been offered in all t
he years I’ve been here was the
window display
I’ve been doing
. But now I find o
ut I was offered the assignment
because the guy wanted a threesome with me, him and a transsexual club singer.’

To my embarrassment, I began to bawl.

Mum held me tight. ‘Oh my poor darling.
Why didn’t you say anything?
’

‘I just couldn
’t face telling you the truth;
that I was living far away from you and it wasn’t even worth it.’

Mum pulled my head into
her lap. ‘Nothing ever works out the way you think it does, Scarlet. But the question is, are you happy
with Carson as he is
? Because if you’re not, then you need to do something
about it. Lying to me and your d
ad is one thing, lying to yourself is quite another.’

‘I love my kids, Mum. And I
think I still
love Carson.
I’m not completely sure that I trust him, but I love him.
Things might be okay if all the rest wasn’t so difficult.
It’s his awful family that really makes things unbearable. They’re the real reason I started lying to you in the firs
t place. Like you said, maybe by
lying to you, I was lying to myself, telling myself it was okay to put up with people like that.’

‘Are they really so bad?’ Mum asked, stroking my head.

‘You saw Cecily 2 with your own eyes,’ I cried. ‘How is
she
not so bad? The mother is about ten times worse.
She calls me Scarface.
’

I felt Mum stiffen. Mental note: do not let Cecily and Mum meet. Ever.

‘If you don’t have to see them too often, maybe you can forget they exist – at least for long enough to ease the tension.’

What exactly was she saying?
I cranked my neck to look at her face, but when I did, I saw she wasn’t looking at me, but off out the window, at the m
ess of buildings on view in the distance
.

And there was a solitary tear running down her left cheek
.

‘Mum,’ I said gently. ‘Do you know?’

I promised myself
that
if she said ‘Know what?’ I would forget the whole thing about
Dad and that woman and make a
joke about me going senile.

But she didn’t say that.

Instead, she just said, ‘Yes.’

*

‘Right,’ I called to the assistant in the midtown
Chocolato
, ‘switch them on.’

Instantly, a thousand little twinkling lights lit up the navy backdrop of the window. Three huge chunky
ark
s, cleverly c
reated by Uncle Rabbit, hid large
blocks of ice in insulating blocks,
ensuring that the hundreds
of chocolate animals weaving their way around the window on various levels into the
ark
remained
chilled.
It had taken me hours to arrange those animals, particularly as they had to sit on insulating bags that had to be placed in the exactly the right position
s
from the start. If I made a mistake, or wanted to
make a change
, I
had to start the whole placement again.

‘Oh Scarlet, you are a genius,’ Mum exclaimed, hands thrown up in wonderment.

Since our conversation the night before, Mum and I seemed to have a renewed spring in our respective steps. Having cleared the air of secrets and lies, I was thrilled to have her in New York, and pleased to be able to share my moment of triumph with her.

Immediately, a crowd gathered outside the shop.

‘This is as good as that window at
LollyBliss
,’ a young woman in an elegant grey suit told her friend.