“I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so.”
“Ok. Well, I suggest you tell our daughter,” she stresses the word our, “to get her teenage backside back in this house immediately. You can also tell her that Lily has as much chance of being included in this family as Mother Theresa. Now, I am quite certain we will discuss this in greater depth at a later date, but for the moment, it’s been a terribly long day and I have some calls to make.”
Ruth pulls her briefcase onto the counter and clicks the lid open. She looks up to see David still standing at the other side of the counter, staring at her. “Was there anything else?”
“No.” David turns and heads towards the door. As he puts a hand on the gold plated door knob, he hesitates and turns to face her again. “Actually, yes. Yes there is. You want your daughter back; you ring her and tell her. She’s at her boyfriend’s.”
Ruth holds a bundle of papers, tied with a red ribbon in her hands. “I thought we agreed she wasn’t going to have boyfriends until after her exams?”
David takes a bunch of keys from his pocket and starts fiddling with the ring. He steps towards her, and throws half of them across the counter. “His name is Stuart. His telephone number is in the address book, under Robertson.”
“Robertson, Stuart Robertson?
“That’s him.”
“His father’s Brian Robertson, the journalist?”
“Goodbye, Ruth.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Enough, I’m leaving you.”
“How dare you? How bloody dare you? After what you’ve put me through? You’ve lied to me, your whole family has lied to me, for the past eighteen years, and now you expect me to welcome another daughter into our lives? We haven’t room. You’re already obsessed with the one that we’ve got. How will you find the time to fit another one in?” she screams at him. “You’re a coward; a lying, cheating, pathetic coward.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re not the first woman to call me that.”
“Get out then.” She pushes him towards the front door, jabbing at his chest with her fingers. Without her shoes on, the top of her head barely meets his chest. He stumbles backwards down the hall way, trying not to laugh. “And don’t think you’re getting the house. This is my house, I paid for it. Mine.”
“I don’t want the house,” he mutters, mainly to himself. “I never liked this house.”
“You can find some other mug to buy you the life you’ve become accustomed to. You’re not getting a penny from me.” He opens the front door. “You pathetic man.” She manages to make man sound even more of an insult than pathetic.
He strides down the gravel drive into the darkness without a backward glance. A few moments later, an empty gin glass whizzes past his left ear. He climbs into his car and locks the door from the inside. As he starts the engine he leans across the passenger seat and reaches into the glove compartment, pulling out a cassette box. He puts the tape into the car radio and ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ starts to play as the gates sweep open for him.
“Lily? Is that really you? Oh, sweet Lord.”
“Who is this?”
“He said not to ring you before eleven. I’ve had ants in my pants all morning.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s your grandmother. Oh I can’t wait to see you.”
“Oh my God.” Lily tries to wake herself up by scratching herself, her fingers making red lines along her forearms. “Hi. Sorry. I didn’t recognise…” she stops as she realises there’s no way she could be expected to recognise a voice she’s never heard. “I mean, Fiona’s told me a lot about you.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to meet you. David says that you’re beautiful, and too thin.”
Lily feels a bubble of excitement rise up through her windpipe She twists the telephone cord around her fingers. “Did he? So is, has, did he tell…”
“Oh, he’s told her alright. He turned up here late last night without so much as a clean vest.”
“Oh.” The smile on Lily’s face dies. She sits down with a bump on the bottom step.
“Now, don’t you go worrying yourself about Ruth. Is Fiona there?”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody’s here.” Lily cranes her head to see into the kitchen. “I think they’ve gone shopping.”
“Well, I’ll tell you a secret, child. Just between you and me. Never did like Ruth, although don’t tell your sister I said that, she is still her mother. But intelligence without wisdom – it’s not worth a penny. Oh I can’t believe I’m talking to you. I’ve thought about you so often.”
“I was asleep,” says Lily.
“How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know, different. Is David…”
“Don’t worry about him. You’ve done him a favour. Ruth too probably, in the long run. What?”
Lily hears the low thrum of male voices in the background.
“Well she has,” Lily’s grandmother says to someone else. “Talk about, ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’.” She turns her attention back to Lily. “Come for lunch, we have so much catching up to do. David says you’re beautiful. Not that I’m surprised, mind. Your mother was always a looker.”
Lily looks up to the ceiling, holding the phone an inch away from her ear. She has to blink several times. When she returns to the conversation, her grandmother says, “I’m sorry about your mum.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you come for Christmas Day?”
Lily hears more background conversation.
“Ok then, Boxing Day,” the older woman says to Lily. “Wednesday. Six days.”
“Well…”
“Promise?”
Lily scratches the back of her neck. “Ok.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Lily’s grandmother gives a small gasp of pleasure. “Perfect. I can’t wait to meet you. I haven’t seen you since you were five days old.”
“Could I speak to Da… David, please?”
“Of course, he’s right here. So, I’ll see you on Boxing Day, about eleven?”
“Eleven? Well, I’ll have to find out about trains.”
“Well, let me know if you’re going to be late. Hang on, here’s your father. God love you, Lily.”
“Hi, Lily,” David’s low voice hums down the line.
“Hi, er, hi.” Silence fills the telephone. “Are you…ok? How did… Fiona’s mum take it?”
“I should really speak to Fiona. Is she there?”
“No, she’s out shopping. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“Well, could you just tell her she might want to give her mother a couple of days to calm down before she rings her.”
“Days?” Lily tentatively teases him, ready to pretend she’s misheard if it backfires.
He gets the joke. “Maybe weeks. I’ll see you soon, Lily. Boxing Day it would appear.”
Lily puts down the receiver and hugs her bare, knobbly knees to her chest. She lies back on the staircase, her face to the ceiling, and shouts up the stairs. “Anybody in?”
The silence echoes around her. In the kitchen Lily finds breakfast dishes on the table and a note from Jo and Fiona. ‘Gone shopping. Back after lunch. x’. Lily flicks through the shelf of vinyl records in the front room, selecting ‘This is the Sea’ by the Waterboys. As soon as ‘Don’t Bang the Drum’ starts, Lily starts to dance.
Lily fills the kettle and reaches for a cigarette, but the packet is empty. She glances at the clock on the kitchen wall. It’s ten past twelve. While she waits for the kettle to boil, she washes the dirty plates, singing as she does. ‘I wandered out in the world for years. While you just stayed in your room. I saw the crescent. You saw the whole of the moon’.
Jo and Fiona burst through the door at half past three, with arms stretched to the limit by a dozen carrier bags. Lily is still in her pyjamas, but the kitchen is spotless.
“Wow, you’ve been busy,” says Fiona, as she heaps a clutch of bags onto the kitchen table. “We’ve got paper chains.”
“Fiona, er, you’d better sit down. Your dad rang. He’s staying at your granny’s house for a few days.” Lily anxiously watches Fiona’s face for signs of trauma.
“Oh. Well at least he’s told her. Mum, I mean.” Fiona pulls a tinsel fairy with purple wings from one of the carrier bags. “Isn’t she gorgeous? She’s for the top of the tree.”
“What tree?”
“It’s being delivered later,” says Jo, as she rummages through her own collection of carrier bags. “And we got fairy lights.”
“Did you get cigarettes?”
Jo throws Lily a packet of Marlboros across the kitchen. “Stick the kettle on, Lil. We haven’t stopped. I’m knackered.”
The telephone rings while Lily is pouring the tea. Jo goes out into the hall to answer it. Moments later she kicks open the kitchen door, while speaking into the handset in a foreign accent. “Ah, no, no, me no speaka...” She beckons to Fiona, holding the phone in her palm, her fingers tightly clasped over the mouthpiece. “It’s your mum.”
Fiona shakes her head. “I’m not in.”
Jo pulls a face and raises her eyebrows at Lily, her hand firmly pressed against the mouthpiece. She holds the telephone out to Lily. Lily moves away from the proffered phone as if it were an undetonated hand grenade. “I’m not speaking to her.” She turns to Fiona. “She’s your mother.”
They all stare at each other for several seconds, until Fiona reluctantly moves into the hallway and takes the telephone from Jo. “Hi, Mum.” Lily can hear Fiona’s mother’s tirade from the other side of the kitchen; exploding down the receiver like firecrackers.
Fiona holds the telephone a good thirty centimetres away from her ears. Jo stands with her back pressed against the kitchen door, holding it open so that Lily can see Fiona on the telephone. She keeps opening her mouth to speak, but never getting as far as forming the words; all the time a thin, tinny rant buzzing from the receiver. Eventually the noise stops and Fiona carefully hangs up the phone. She turns to Jo and Lily. “Well, that went well.”
Lily spits out a mouthful of tea in a spray across the kitchen table. Jo laughs.
“She’s looking forward to meeting you both,” Fiona says as she starts to laugh too.
“She’ll come round,” says Fiona, once the laughter has subsided.
“What did she really say?” asks Lily. “Does she hate me?”
“No. Let’s talk about something else. I was getting tired of doing what I was told to do anyway.”
“Oh, Fiona, do you think you should-”
“And don’t you start telling me what to do either,” Fiona says to Lily. “I know what I want.”
“Come on,” says Jo, “we’ve got decorations to put up.”
“God, I wish we had a spliff.” Lily puts her forearms on the kitchen worktop and lays her head on top.
“There’s wine in the fridge.”
“I don’t want to drink that cheap shit anymore.”
“Well, you have seventy-five thousand ways round it.”
Lily lifts her head slightly. “What?”
“Lily, you have seventy-five thousand pounds under the floorboards,” says Jo, “you can afford a bottle or two of expensive wine, if that’s what you’re after.”
Half an hour later Lily is dressed, and the three of them are in Oddbins. They choose four bottles of expensive wine; red, white, rose and sparkling. The bill comes to one hundred and thirty-three pounds.
When Stuart arrives home that evening, having worked a double shift, the flat is unrecognisable. Tinsel adorns every surface, including the banisters, and a brightly coloured cardboard montage of Father Christmas and his eight reindeers, flies across the hall wall.
Friday morning, the morning of the Christmas party, Fiona wakes up in bed with Stuart next to her. She watches him sleep for a moment, smiling at his long sleeve T-shirt. That had been the compromise; he had wanted her to sleep in Andre’s room, with Jo and Lily, and she had wanted to sleep with him. They had eventually agreed on sleeping together, but clothed. She even had to keep her socks on because he’s always had a thing about her feet. She bends down and places a kiss on his dark curls.
He stretches in his sleep and opens an eye. Fiona kisses his cheek. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He opens both eyes. “What time is it?”
“Ten past six.”
“In the morning? Oh, Fiona.” Stuart groans and pulls the duvet over his head.
“You can’t go back to sleep, we’ve got so much to do.” She bounces off the bed to open the curtains, and then claps her hands together. “Oh look, snow.” Another muffled groan comes from under the bedclothes.
Fiona stares at the lumpen mass for a moment and then shakes her head. She runs down the stairs, pulling on Jo’s boots and grabbing her coat from the bottom banister on her way down. When she opens the flat door, the street is deserted, and the snow is virgin. Looking up to the skies, she sees heavy white clouds hanging low above her, promising more of the same. Fiona picks up a handful of snow, rolls it into a ball in her hands, and throws it high up in the air.
Three quarters of an hour later, Lily is dressed and making tea and crumpets for breakfast. Stuart is sitting at the kitchen table writing down the instructions for Christmas dinner. Jo peers over his shoulder as she enters the room in her dressing gown, her hair sticking up at right angles to her head. “2pm, switch oven on?” she reads. “Aren’t you going to be here?”
“I’m at work until four.”
“So we’ve got to cook without you? Christ. Pass us a fag, Lil.”
“You’ll be fine. Just follow these simple instructions, you can’t go wrong.” Stuart starts a second sheet of paper.
Fiona is sieving flour into a bowl. Jo scowls at her. “Fiona. It’s seven o’clock in the morning. What are you doing?”
“I’m making the pastry for the mince pies.”
“And why are you dressed?” Jo asks Lily.
“I’m going to go into town at eight. I’ve got to get in there before the crowds or I’m a dead woman. I suddenly realised it’s the weekend tomorrow, and then Monday is Christmas Eve. If I don’t go today it’s all over.”
Jo flicks her ash into the sink and then opens the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream she and Fiona bought yesterday. She adds a liberal capful to the bowl of mincemeat next to Fiona. “Well, suppose I’d better get dressed.”
Lily has only one carrier bag, but it’s heavy enough to make the veins stick out in her forearms, as she climbs the stairs. Jo and Fiona are both in the kitchen, with the radio playing Christmas carols. Jo is wrapping chipolata sausages in strips of bacon and Fiona is peeling sprouts. Lily stands unnoticed in the doorway, marvelling at how life has changed. Fiona swears under her breath as she catches her thumb on the knife she’s using. “I’m going to wrap a few presents,” says Lily. “I’ll help out in a bit.”