Chapter One

 

Cruel Summer

 

Before they started in on one of their rows, they’d order Tim and me into the garden.  We would sit beneath my bedroom window with the sun making our eyes squint up.  Valerie was too selfish to buy us sunglasses; Dad didn’t give a toss.

One afternoon, Tim and I started fighting.  My brother had his hand in a jar of peanut butter, he scooped out lumps of peanut butter and waggled his fingers at me before sucking them clean. 

“You’re disgusting,” I said.

“Yep.”

Tim leaned over and stuck a lump of peanut butter in my fringe. 

“Piss off.”

He just laughed and carried on.

I wrenched the jar from his hands and chucked it in the flowerbed.  Tim trotted after it, but became absorbed with a stick and a lump of dog shit he found nestled in the rose bushes.   After a few minutes, he came and stood in front of me, with the dog shit just a few inches from my leg.  It smelt like everything that was wrong with my life.

“Touch me and you’re dead,” I hissed.

He stepped closer.  I got up, backed away.  But Tim was after me. If Dad had been in the garden instead of yelling at Val, he’d have sat in his falling-apart deck chair and laughed his head off, like he did when he was watching repeats of Benny Hill.  This laugh he had came from deep inside him.  You could hear it, building and building until it spewed out.  It would have made Tim even keener to get that dog shit on me.  Luckily Dad wasn’t around, so soon Tim got bored.  He scraped the shit onto some roses, where it hung like melting chocolate ice cream from wilting leaves.  Then he collapsed onto grass the same colour as the French mustard my mother bought because anything French was sophisticated.   

“Had enough, Big Boy?” I demanded.

Tim giggled, his blond hair flopping about like Dad’s saggy belly. 

I lay down on the dried-up grass beside him, plucked a dandelion, peeled up his grimy T-shirt and stroked the soft blond hairs on his chest.  Dad and Valerie had stopped shouting.  For a while there was silence, a breeze rustled pink blossom in the trees, a blackbird sang.  Then the front door slammed and our parents drove off too fast in their separate cars.   I kept on stroking Tim’s chest. He made contented little grunting sounds and eventually fell asleep.  When Tim was asleep he looked beautiful, a handsome angel with raspberry ripple pink lips and long spidery lashes. Sometimes I wished he brought friends home and that they were boys who were clever or good looking or superb athletes. I wished he had girls with shimmering hair and simpering voices calling him up and that he and Dad could exchange jokes and go fishing together.  Not that Dad liked fishing, and the river near us was polluted anyway.  But maybe, if Tim were like other boys, then maybe everything else would change too.

I lay next to my brother, thinking all this, thinking about what it would be like if he was smart, how our lives would be different then.  But the smell of shit kept wafting over and spoiling it all.  No one ever took our dog, Snoopy, for a walk and she crapped everywhere.

After a while the sky wasn’t so blue anymore and I started feeling chilly.   Tim’s breathing was heavy, as if he was making a dirty phone call, his hands lay across the swell of his belly, peanut butter lodged under his nails and on every finger.  I crept in through the patio doors and locked them behind me.  I wondered whether Tim would stay asleep until morning.   He seemed more at home outside, because that’s where animals belong.

 

Valerie was a connoisseur of ice cream; she bought it imported from abroad, or homemade at the delicatessen in the village.  It was her other great love, along with Jack Daniels.  My father, brother and I came way down the list. 

Vanilla was my preferred flavour, Tim liked chocolate.  I opened the freezer and checked out the contents.  Pecan Liqueur Swirl, Rum Raisin, Rum Baba, Pineapple Kirsch, Sherry Vanilla and, finally, Brandy Cruise Divine.    In the cupboard Valerie kept a stock of sauces and plastic tubs of hundreds and thousands and little crumbly nuts.  She favoured her ice cream with a drizzling of her friend Jack. 

I was scooping a mound of Sherry Vanilla into a bowl when Tim began bashing the kitchen window with his fat fists.  I walked up to the window with my bowl and made a point of lifting each spoonful slowly into my mouth, letting the ice cream melt on my tongue, like I was savouring the most delicious taste in England. 

“Let me in, Lydia, ” he shouted but he was laughing, as if I’d invented a new game for us to play.

He picked up his stick and waved it about, tapping it against the glass, then grimacing and muttering.  I might have been wary if he’d been in the kitchen with me instead of outside shivering his balls off.  Tim continued like this for a while, and I continued eating.  Then before I went upstairs I unlocked the patio doors, opening them just a little way. 

I kept wondering if this time Val had left us.  As the afternoon had drifted into evening I’d expected the roar of her Fiat X1/9; I’d expected her to come and find us, complaining that she had no one to watch TV with.  Or that she needed me to dye her hair, or manicure and polish her nails.  Her face would be streaked with blue mascara from crying and she’d tell me my father was a complete and utter bastard.  She was always saying my father was a bastard, and she didn’t know why she stayed with him.  When she was young, she said, there were men queuing up for her.  Once when she mentioned this, I said it made her sound like a supermarket and she slapped me across the face so hard my cheek stung for hours.

I crept into my parents’ room, which was separated off from the rest of the house with a long corridor and a set of stairs.  Their room smelt of perfume.  Valerie sprayed it everywhere in an attempt to hide her secret drinking, which wasn’t really a secret to anyone, not even Tim.  Although no one told her that.    

I opened their wardrobe. Valerie’s clothes were lined up on cushioned hangers or heaped in shiny gold, mauve and tarty red piles at the bottom of the wardrobe.  She might leave her clothes, I reasoned, she’d never go anywhere without her make-up.  But it was all still there in the pink en-suite bathroom: smeary tubes of foundation, bottles of perfume which my father got Duty Free, hair dye and a gold powder compact.  On Dad’s side: shaving cream, orange-scented massage oil and several unwrapped condoms, which he’d tucked inside a box of Mandate.  It made me want to retch, thinking of my parents having sex; his flabby body climbing on top of her, her not knowing what’s going on, him not giving a shit whether she knows or not. 

Dad kept a stack of Playboys in his bedside cabinet.  They’d been there since I could remember.  Unlike Valerie’s drinking, he didn’t seem to mind who knew about them.  If Valerie objected she never said so.  Dad was a pilot.  All pilots are the same.   The media keeps this quiet.  Who would ever fly again if they knew the man in charge was more interested in his own joystick than the aeroplane’s?

 I lay down on their bed and, in the faded summer light, flicked through back copies of my father’s Playboys.  The women had mountainous tits with long pointed nipples and bleached blonde hair and fat glossy lips like pink slugs.  Outside, Tim was baying at the wisp of moon.  The moon was caught between those fluffy white clouds you get a lot in summer, and it hung there like the moon does, and I kept wondering why it didn’t just fall right out of the sky.  What was keeping it there?  Habit?  I suppose I must have fallen asleep.

 

“Lydia, how could you?”  Val’s voice cutting through an instantly forgotten dream, her face so close I could see blackheads and thread veins.  She was wearing sunglasses, expensive ones.  “How could you?  Your brother…your brother.”

“What?”

The sun was sliding up the sky and in the window of my parents’ bedroom.  I noticed stains on the peach sheets.  I tried to guess how many months it had been since she’d changed them. 

“Poor little lad.”  Valerie was crying by this time, poking trembling fingers under the glasses to wipe away her tears.  She liked to cry, she had a talent for it.  Val slumped down onto the bed, head in hands, shoving me away with her elbows.  I slipped off the other side of the bed, bringing the flowery eiderdown with me.  It slow-motioned onto the floor and I didn’t bother to put it back.  Neither did Val, who had opened a packet of Silk Cut.  Desperately, she rummaged around in her jeans for a lighter.  Then she took a deep drag of the lit cigarette, as if it was an asthmatic’s inhaler. 

“Where’ve you been anyway?”

“None of your business, young lady.”  Her tone was sharp, like my Gran’s knitting needles.  Click click click.   Tim and I’d be trying to watch entertaining crap on Saturday morning TV and Gran would sit upright and disapproving in an armchair furiously clicking drop stitch and mother of pearl.  I imagined her thinking that even if bad things happened to us, at least we’d stay warm in her star-patterned jerseys and multi-coloured balaclavas.  Gran and Val were so unlike you’d never believe they were mother and daughter unless you knew it for a fact.

“Where’s Tim?”

“Like you care.”  She took another drag.

“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t care.”

“I expect you were teasing him?”

I went into the en-suite bathroom and splashed cold water straight from the tap onto my face.  When I glanced at my reflection in the mirror I turned away quickly.  Sometimes it scared me how much I looked like Tim.  The same coarse hair, although his was fairer.  The same eyes, except his were rounder, bluer.   The same features, but his were prettier.

“He was teasing me.  Tormenting me, actually.”

“Poor little man, you just won’t leave him alone,” Val continued, as if she hadn’t heard me.

“He won’t leave me alone.  Maybe that’s because his mother is too pissed to notice him.”

Val touched her mouth like I’d punched her in it. 

But I had more to say. “Tim said he wanted to stay outside.  He hates it here.”

More tears slipped beneath the sunglasses.  I went to give her a hug but she pushed me away.  She was always pushing me away.

 

We ate fish and chips in the kitchen.  Tim licked the salt and vinegar off his chips, then let them hang between his lips like broken fingers, before sucking them into his mouth.

Val wasn’t into cleaning.  “We’ve got a lady to do that,” she’d say to Dad when he suggested she tidy up.   The floor was scattered with paper from the chippy and plastic bags from Tesco where she’d gone to buy a few groceries. She was wearing a flowing Laura Ashley dress and had washed her face.  Sometimes she tried to act like a real parent.  You’d think she’d have followed the example of her own mother, but instead she watched The Stepford Wives and copied the robot women.  

“Would you like anything else to eat?” Val asked politely when we had finished the fish and chips.

“Dessert would be nice,” I said equally politely.

“Dessert,” shouted Tim, and chucked the remaining piece of his fish to Snoopy.  Dogs have no loyalty, they’ll take food from anyone.

“Dessert it is,” Val said, dramatically opening the door of the freezer.  She brushed strands of brown hair from her face and peered in.  The buttons along the back of her dress were coming undone, but I didn’t bother to tell her.

“What about chocolate pudding?” I asked.

“With hundreds and thousands,” Tim added.

“Or vanilla slices,” I suggested.  “Or lemon meringue pie.”

“We have that at school,” Tim muttered wistfully. 

Tim went to a special school, it cost my parents a fortune.  Dad was always moaning about fees, explaining that Tim’s school bled him dry which was why I had to go to the comprehensive.   Dad promised Val and me that Tim would be almost unrecognizable by the time he left school.  I supposed all that money must be worth it then.

“We’ve got ice cream and that’s it,” Val said, smiling like she’d just swallowed a mouthful of detergent.  I knew she’d hate being reminded that a proper mother would have a choice of desserts.

Valerie washed bowls and found three separate scoops for the different flavours.  Tim had Brandy Cruise Divine, I had Pineapple Kirsch, Val had Pecan Liqueur Swirl.  She ran the scoops under the hot tap.   She arranged the tubes of sauce, plastic tubs containing nuts, hundreds and thousands and glace cherries on the table. Val was big on presentation as far as ice cream was concerned.  Tim grabbed the black cherry sauce, squirted it clumsily into his bowl, then used his spoon to mush everything up.  Valerie decorated her pecan liqueur swirl with a strategic squirt of toffee sauce before adding nuts and scatterings of hundreds and thousands.  She was like an artist creating a picture, taking her time to get it right.  I knew she’d want to add whiskey but she resisted the urge while we were with her.  I just splattered my pineapple kirsch with black cherry sauce and ate it, like a normal person.  Like someone who wasn’t really anything to do with my family at all.

Tim liked me reading to him.  Once we’d eaten, I told him to get into his pajamas and I’d read him a story.  Any story was Tim’s favourite.  He didn’t care whether he was listening to Topsy and Tim at the Farm or an interview with Boy George in Smash Hits.  Val glanced at me gratefully.  She was all worn out with being our mother.  As soon as we left the kitchen I knew she’d be rooting in the cupboard for her stash of bottles.

 

Tim’s room always stank.  He never opened the windows and the cleaner wouldn’t go in there because of the mice.  The mice used to be mine, I kept them in a cage with sawdust sprinkled on the floor and a pretty plastic house.  Tim was always sneaking into my room to poke them and let them run up his shirt sleeves.   He enjoyed setting them loose in my old doll’s house, and flashing a torch into their frightened pink eyes.  He loved those mice so much Valerie decided Tim should have them instead of me.  But they got away and we’d never been able to find them.  The cleaner said it wasn’t her job to deal with vermin.   Tim didn’t care whether he or his room stank. Sometimes he wore the same clothes during the day and then to sleep in.  Val and Dad never said anything, Valerie probably didn’t even notice.  I told him off about it though.  It was bad enough that the kids round there said stuff to me about my brother being a retard, I didn’t want them saying he smelt too.

Tim pulled on a shrunken pair of Dad’s flannel pajamas and I opened a book.  It was meant for children years younger than my brother.  For a couple of seconds I felt sad about that, but then I got on with reading.  Tim curled his arms around his toy kangaroo, closed his eyes. His breathing became soft and drowsy.  I put the book down, pulled back the duvet and climbed in beside him, pushing assorted teddies aside.  His eyes blinked open for a second and he smiled before closing them again, twisting his legs around me.  His skin was warm. 

“I’m sorry about last night,” I whispered.

Val told me Mrs Harrison had seen Tim curled up on our drive when she was taking their Labrador for a walk; Tim was whimpering, shaking with cold.  Mrs Harrison rang the bell but I didn’t hear it.  Tim spent the night at the Harrison’s immaculately tidy house in their guest room.  He’d wet the bed.  When Mrs Harrison brought him back she had stern words with Valerie.   My mother had got in late and was trying to sleep off her hangover on the sofa.  Mrs Harrison disapproved of our family so much it was like we were her latest hobby.

Chapter Two

 

Alive and Kicking

 

The first thing you can remember is Valerie’s sweet, delicate breathing on your eyelashes, sniffing in your smell, your baby boy smell.  You smelt of talcum powder and walls painted blue and bubble bath.  Wasn’t she always smiling then?  Yes, you think so.  Her skin softer than clouds and her lips dropping giggles and peppermint kisses over your dimpled legs.  You slept deep peaceful dreams of little boats like the ones that floated above your cot. These memories are peaceful.

Later you remember Valerie forming strange shapes with her mouth, slowly making a word.  It looked as if it was hurting her.  One word, then another.  And she wasn’t smiling, she was crying and it was something to do with you, wasn’t it?  Mummy, Daddy, Lydia, book, toy, bath, sweetie.  Over and over again.  Her tears fell into your eyes, ran down your cheeks, tickling you, making you laugh, making her cry more.  

Your Mate says you were a slow talker.  A slow everything.  But there is plenty he doesn’t see.  There are things you notice, like the way people eat their nice cream, sucking it carefully if they’re unhappy, as if it will heal them.  Or gulping it down if they’re excited, hardly noticing the chill in their throat.  No one told you this.  There are lots of things Your Mate doesn’t know.

Chapter Three

 

A Ghost In My House

 

Tim was drawing deformed animals on yesterday’s grease-splattered fish and chip paper, with fat felt tip pens, while Valerie made breakfast. 

“I’ve done fifteen kangaroos,” he said, flapping a page in front of my face.  The kangaroos had red and green striped tails and baby kangaroos in their pouches.   

“Kangaroos are just like rats,” I said.  “Except they don’t eat meat.”

Tim seemed pleased with this comparison.  “Rats are almost as lovely as kangaroos, but not quite.”  He picked up a grey pen and sketched a rat outline.

          “What’s going on?” I asked, observing Valerie taking a box of eggs from the fridge.

          “I’m cooking breakfast,” she announced proudly.  She’d even got dressed although it was only just ten o’clock. 

          I glanced suspiciously at her.  “But why?”

          “Because I’m your mother.  Yesterday you had fish and chips – highly nutritious – and today you’re having eggs.”  Her voice lacked conviction.  What did Valerie know about vitamins?

          She cracked speckled brown shells and tipped the contents inexpertly into a sizzling frying pan. 

           “We haven’t got any bread.”

          “Shit.”  Her face, puffy from the lack of her usual ten to fifteen hours sleep, collapsed like one of her homemade cakes. 

          “Maybe we can have boiled eggs instead, they’re alright without bread.”

          “Don’t be ridiculous.  I don’t know how to cook boiled eggs…you’ll just have to take the Fiat and buy us a loaf in the village.”

          “But Mum, you know I’m too young to drive.”

          “You never try at anything,” she said, feverishly sprinkling pepper over the eggs.  “If you tried at things, maybe you’d be happier.”

          “I don’t like bread,” Tim said.

          “Bright boy,” Valerie observed.  She slopped eggs onto two plates and slammed them down in front of Tim and me followed by a bottle of tomato ketchup.  “That’ll keep you going.”

          Tim shook the bottle of ketchup; the contents were pink, as Valerie had added milk to make the sauce last longer.  I pierced a yolk with the prong of my fork and watched the yellow spread.  It looked like a country on an atlas, somewhere that hadn’t been discovered yet.

          “Fried eggs seem weird without bread,” I complained, pushing the plate away.

          With fumbling hands, Val lit a cigarette, and inhaled like it was her last breath.  “All I ever get is moaning from you.  I don’t know why you can’t be more like your brother.”  Tim grinned at her as he poured ketchup messily onto the edge of his plate.  Valerie smiled back at him, from behind the curls of her cigarette smoke.

          “The experts reckon smoking does untold damage to your skin,” I told her, tipping my uneaten food onto Tim’s plate.  “You’ll probably look fifty once you hit forty.”

          “So what do I care?” my mother asked, as she took another drag.  “With any luck, I’ll be dead by the time I’m forty.”  She laughed smugly to herself as she squashed her cigarette into the sink.

“What we doing today?” Tim asked, cramming more egg into his mouth, dribbling yolk.

“The property market,” Val said in an important voice.  “We’ll be checking out the property market.”

 

          “Hurry up,” Valerie yelled over her shoulder at Tim and me as we scrambled out of Dad’s gold BMW.  “Why do you take so long to do anything?”  Her white stilettos clicked ominously on the pavement as she strode ahead of us. She’d tied her hair up into a plait and it bounced and flicked with every confident movement she made. 

          “She’s acting like she’s got a bomb up her backside,” I whispered to Tim.  He laughed in that almost hysterical way he had, this way of making me feel like I’d told the most amusing joke he’d ever heard.  When he grabbed my hand as we crossed the road, I was sure there wasn’t any other boy I’d rather have for my brother. 

The estate agent, Your Move, had taken a chess theme to the extreme; pictures of houses in the window were set against real chess boards.  When we stepped inside there were even a couple of child-size cardboard chess pieces waiting behind the door for Tim to crash into. 

          Valerie was already in deep discussion with a woman I didn’t recognize, who wore a pale lilac skirt and shoulder-padded jacket.  Her skin was the shade and smooth texture of peanut butter, making her smile seem wider and whiter.

          “This is Fiona,” Valerie said, introducing her like she was a long lost sister.

          I shook Fiona’s hand with its long purple nails, but Tim got all shy and hid behind Valerie’s blood-red skirt.

          “He’s at that age,” Valerie shrugged.

          Fiona nodded. I could tell she thought there was something weird about him.

          “Fiona’s got a lot of properties we might like to see.”   I stared at Valerie, wondering what she meant.  Usually she just wanted to discuss how much our house might be worth in the present market.  Then she’d tell Dad and he’d snap open a beer and say in a satisfied voice that she could have the designer jacket she was after.  

          “There’s been a few more that have come on the market since you were in a couple of weeks ago,” Fiona said.  I tried to catch Valerie’s vacant gaze, but she was resolutely ignoring me.  Fiona opened a mahogany filing cabinet and began to flick through cardboard dividers in various pastel shades, pausing every so often to gather together a few sheets.  She handed the sheaf of papers to Valerie.

          “This one’s in an excellent location,” Fiona said as Valerie stared at one of the papers. Her eyes looked glassy and I hoped she wasn’t about to cry.

          “It’s very nice.”  Valerie passed the sheet to me.   I skimmed the optimistic, ‘tastefully-decorated, modern-fitted-kitchen’ jargon and took in the photo.  The house looked cold and imposing, the way teachers seem to primary school children. 

          “What d’you think, Lydia?” Valerie’s face was eager as she waited for my approval.  Her eyes bulged optimistically.

          “It’s alright.”

          “Kids,” Fiona muttered and raised her eyes to the artex ceiling.  Valerie smiled but I could tell she was upset.

          “Does Dad know you’ve been here?”

          Fiona’s telephone started ringing. She grabbed it and began talking in a shrill voice to the person at the other end.  Valerie twisted her hands together as if she was trying to tie them in a knot.  “Of course he knows.” 

          “He never mentioned we were going to be moving.  He likes our house.”

          Valerie sat down suddenly on one of the chairs opposite Fiona’s desk, as if her legs had given way beneath her.  She glanced urgently at Fiona who was trying to sell a converted barn to a prospective buyer; it was obvious Valerie was hoping she’d hang-up.  She waited a full minute, which I timed on the black and white checked wall clock, before turning her attention to me. 

          “It’s a surprise…I was thinking we should look around for a new place.”

          “Why?”

          “We might find a house that would make us happier.”   

          I sat down on the other chair.  “You should have just said so.”

          “Perhaps…but…” Her voice trailed off as Fiona hung-up. 

          I wondered whether Valerie would stop drinking if we lived somewhere else and if Dad wouldn’t go away so often.  But then, I couldn’t even remember Valerie not drinking and flying planes was as natural to my father as farting.   

           “Well,” said Fiona, taking a set of keys from her desk drawer and jangling them at us enticingly, “as soon as my colleague arrives we can go and see your dream home.”

          “Dream home,” Valerie repeated faintly, as if she was talking in her sleep.

          “Kangaroo wallpaper,” Tim mumbled hopefully.

 

          Fiona met us at the house an hour later.  We were a few minutes late and she glanced at her watch to indicate she’d noticed, as Valerie pulled into the drive.

            “I don’t want to live here,” Tim said, running up to Fiona, and then quickly away again, afraid she might chase him.

          “You’ll love it when we go inside,” Valerie reassured him.

          “Of course he will,” Fiona agreed briskly, as she ushered us through the freshly-painted front door with long jabbing fingers.  Her nails dug into my spine, while the unaccustomed smell of air freshner tickled my nose.

          It felt wrong to be in someone else’s home, without them there, even if we were thinking about buying it.  And it was as different from our own sprawling house as it could have been. I imagined myself as an adult living somewhere like this.  I’d be a journalist, a company director, a doctor: someone important. I’d have the dining room converted into an office like the couple, Mr and Mrs Roberts, who lived here.  The carpets were the lightest grey, the furniture was black ash, framed Monet prints hung above the elaborate marble fireplace.  I could fantasize myself living here, but not my family, who made large spaces seem small, their paraphernalia spreading like bacteria.  Magazines and cracked picture frames, empty cartons of ice cream, one-hundred percent polyester baby clothes from the seventies, teddies with thin patchy fur. 

          “It feels a bit strange, bit empty,” Valerie whispered confidingly, mistaking my quietness for disappointment.

“That’s what I like about it.”

We traipsed after Fiona, who was showing Tim around the bathroom.

“Real gold these,” Tim announced breathlessly, turning the bath taps on and off, like someone in an advert.

“They’ve only just had this suite put in,” Fiona informed Val and me as we peeked around the door.  “Avocado green – very contemporary, isn’t it?  And so restful.”  I admired the matching carpet and the sophisticated arrangement of jade bottles on the glass shelves.

But Tim insisted the bathroom was, “snot-coloured,” and to

 emphasize his comment poked a finger up one of his nostrils.        

“Shall we see the bedrooms?”  Fiona suggested quickly, taking

Val’s arm and leading her into the Master Bedroom, as if they were lovers.  I went to stand with my mother at the window, our elbows on the sill, looking down onto the rectangle of garden below, with its neat patches of colour-coded flowers: ruby, yellow, cobalt.  Bright, naively hopeful like one of Tim’s pictures. 

          “This house - it’s a bit small for all of us, isn’t it?”

          “Well, we’re not going to be together for always, like we are at the moment.”  She brushed a curl away from her forehead, which was indented with fine lines.  Her skin looked waxy, shadows rested under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept all night.  Even her plait seemed limp, with strands of hair escaping from it.  The confidence she’d exuded that morning had all but disappeared, she’d shed her self-assurance like it was a style she’d grown weary of.

          “What d’you mean?”

          “I don’t suppose I mean anything very much really…it’s just you’re almost grown-up now.”

          I glanced over at Tim who was lying on the enormous double bed with his hands behind his head.  Lumps of dried mud from his trainers rested in the creases of the ivory eiderdown. “I want this room,” he said.

          “Seems like we’ve won him over.” Fiona patted Tim’s arm as if she was making a fuss of a puppy.  “Now perhaps you’d like to see the rest of the bedrooms?”

          Valerie shook her head and more hair came loose from her plait.  “I don’t think so.”

          “No?”  Fiona looked incredulous, then annoyed.  Spots of pink splashed her cheeks.  “It isn’t for you then?” 

          Valerie pulled off one of her stilettos, unselfconsciously she rubbed her shoeless foot and then sniffed her hands.

          “Another fungus infection,” she murmured. 

          “Well, I’ve got a very busy morning,” Fiona hinted, inching away from us.  “And I expect you’ve things to be getting on with.”

          “Not really,” Valerie said, slipping her shoe back on.

          Tim scrambled off the bed and went to stand next to Valerie.   

          “Will you still be wanting to see other properties?” Fiona asked as we went downstairs.

          “I don’t know.”  Valerie said each word with difficulty, squeezing them out, as if her throat had been clamped shut.  Fiona glanced back at her.

          “Are you all right?” She said it in a tone of voice that indicated she wanted my mother to say she was fine, even if she wasn’t.

          “Not really, no I’m not.”  And Valerie started crying, the kind of heavy deep sobbing I’ve always liked to do by myself.  A self-indulgent weeping, rocking and swaying.  It was as if she’d lost control of her frail body and some invisible person was making it take part in a bizarre dance. I imagined her bones cracking and splintering apart, poking through her thin flesh, her ribcage smashing open and her heart, still beating, falling out onto the grey carpet.  This would be her grand finale.    

Valerie’s crying cast a spell over Tim, Fiona and me, freezing us where we stood, like children playing a game of Statues.  I kept hoping she’d stop, blow her nose and tell us she was just being silly, we’d get in the BMW and drive away.  If we saw Fiona again, we’d pretend we’d never met her.  But Valerie slumped down on a stair and carried on as if she was never going to stop. 

          “Perhaps you and your brother would like to watch television for a few minutes?”  Fiona seemed irritated but resigned.  Once Tim and I had squashed past her, she went and sat on the stair next to Valerie, draping an arm lightly over her shoulders.

          “Now what’s this all about?” she asked, quite kindly.  “Is it because the house isn’t what you wanted?”

          “It’s nothing like that,” Valerie blurted out in a teary voice, as if Fiona should have realized.

          “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the problem is?” Fiona was smiling her professional shark smile and simultaneously looking at her watch.  She was just like the psychiatrists I’d seen talking on TV chat shows, superficial understanding.

          Tim and I went into the lounge, leaving the door half-open. Tim switched on the television.  There were cartoons showing, but I was trying to catch what Valerie was saying to Fiona.

          “We’re not going to live here, are we?” Tim wanted to know.

          “We’re not going anywhere,” I said, sinking into the luxurious black leather sofa and reaching for the remote control. 

         

          Half an hour later, Valerie was driving us home, a Silk Cut stuck between her lips.

          “That bloody bitch,” she said.  “What does she know about shitty marriages?”  My mother took a long drag of her cigarette, breathing the cloud of smoke out indignantly.  “What does she know about life?”  Valerie ground the gears. Tim and I on the back seat, were slammed against each other as she took a corner too tightly.  “She’s probably a lesbian anyway.”  She spat her cigarette into the road.  “Never be a lesbian, Lydia, it’ll only make you bitter, like Fiona.” 

          “I wasn’t planning on being a lesbian.”

          “Well, now you know how bitter you’ll end up, you won’t want to be, of course.”

          “So what did she say to you, then?”

          “She said, Lydia, that I should get a job and stop feeling sorry for myself.”

          “And you don’t agree?”

          “Of course I don’t bloody agree…what a bitch.  I thought she was a soul mate.”

          “Are we going to look at any more houses?”

Val’s shoulders slumped.  “I don’t think so, Tim.  I think we’ll be staying where we are for the time being.”

          She pulled into a free parking space, right opposite her favourite village shop.  Above it was a sign in black swirly writing: Ye Olde Tuck Shoppe.  Wooden boxes of European cheese, dusty bottles of wine with hand-written labels, and multi-layered cakes on silver stands, fought for window space.

“Are either of you hungry?  They’ve got a new flavour of ice cream, Lemon Zest.”

Neither Tim or I spoke. “Sounds gorgeous, doesn’t it?” Valerie prompted.  She opened the glove department and felt around for change among the empty cassette cases and used tissues.  “We’ll all have a bowl of Lemon Zest for lunch, shall we?”

          She unlocked her door and stepped out into the muggy afternoon, her hair, pulled loose from its plait, draped around her shoulders.  “What would we do without ice cream and whiskey?” she wondered.