Courting Trouble (16 page)

It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d told us about the footage of her rape, edited to hide the identity of her attackers and overdubbed with moans of pleasure. Roxy gave a flimsy smile. Phyllis, relieved, dabbed at her eyes with a hankie.

‘Carrie Katrona set fire to Mr Gove’s toupee today. I’ve got a photo on my phone.’ And, with that, Portia shepherded Chantelle off upstairs into her bedroom. As ever, I found myself marvelling at my daughter’s personality. She possessed a kind of radiance in which others liked to bask. If she got any more radiant, I would need some kind of personality sunblock, I thought fondly.

‘Sorry ’bout that, pet. Me fuse just blew. Can we still stay?’ Phyllis asked nervously, looking at me with cataract-clouded eyes.

I glanced out of the window. The press were now looking up at our house as though waiting for it to audition for
The X Factor.
I looked back at Phyllis, who was twisting her hankie anxiously between arthritic fingers.

And drew the blinds.

For the rest of the day, the nation’s airwaves crackled with heated debate about taking the law into your own hands. Talk-show shock-jocks were ranting and televisual rent-a-voicers raving. Law makers mounted their moralistic high horses and galloped around various media outlets condemning Phyllis, while many mothers rang in to praise the lioness-type love of the outraged gran. Despite the law that banned prejudicial press reports before the verdict of the trial, the Countess, who’d volunteered to go back and ‘woman’ the office, reported that the phone was shrieking with requests from journalists for comments – or ‘testicle testaments’, as Roxy called them. We left them to interview Pandora’s front door.

Still, having been totally ignored by the Bar, ‘Pandora’s – Thinking outside the Box’, Britain’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister, boutique feminist law firm was now the talk of the town.

From that day on, whenever I came home from work I never knew who was going to be in the kitchen. It could be a visiting celebrity sympathizer, or one of Phyllis’s ancient Cockney pals. The notoriety of the case meant that every vague acquaintance of my mother’s, from her gay dentist (whom we called ‘The Tooth Fairy’) to her tax accountant (whom we called as little as possible), also decided that now was the time to drop in.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more bonkers, a week later I trudged into my bedroom after work one night to find the Countess naked and fresh from the shower. My blow-dryer looked like a gun in her hands. She aimed it at me.

‘Do you want this back, dah-ling? I forgot mine, so we’ll have to share while I’m living here.’ The blow-dryer ticked like a clock as it cooled.

‘Living here? You’ve . . . you’ve moved in?’ My voice had gone up two octaves into a petrified squeak. ‘When did this happen?’

‘I’m having knee surgery tomorrow. Makes me sound so old. If anyone asks, just say I fell off my shoes during curtsey practice for my damehood, dah-ling. But I’ll need people to take care of me.’

I was suddenly going for gold in the Fixed-smile event. ‘Wait here, will you? . . . Although feel free to put some clothes on.’

I was down the stairs faster than a bobsleigh on the winter Olympics vertical-drop track. I found my mother in the ramshackle garden at the rear of the house, wearing her full bee-keeping suit. Harking back to her hippy days, Roxy not only tended a small vegetable allotment in abandoned factory grounds in nearby Kentish Town but also kept an apiary hidden away behind a patch of wild flowers, lavender bushes and the lemon balm she grew for calming tea infusions. She maintained it was her honey that kept her looking so foxy.

‘Bees are truly bloody remarkable,’ she said, replacing the top on the beehive. ‘I mean, you don’t see wasps making Worcestershire sauce or maggots making marmalade, now do you?’

‘You let the Countess move in! Are you crazy? We’re already overcrowded. A sardine would feel claustrophobic here.’

‘She needs me,’ Roxy said, removing her gauze beekeeper’s hat and heading back inside.

‘Hasn’t she got indentured peasants from the gulag to take care of her in her country mansion? . . . Hello! Serfs up!’ I said, closing the kitchen door on the February chill.

‘I’m her best friend, possum. The Countess and I will be friends until we’re old and senile . . . And then we will be new friends, obviously,’ she chuckled.

‘I’m sorry, but the answer’s got to be no, Mother.’

‘She’s just staying a week. Till she’s recuperated from surgery.’

‘But there won’t be any chance of her recuperating, because if she
stays
here I’m going to perform an autopsy. On her still-live body.’

‘Be kind, Tilly. It’s not as though she’s got any loving children to take care of her. Like I do.’

‘Don’t count on it.’

‘We’re her only family.’

‘It’s not too late to have IVF.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, dar-ling. I don’t want children.’ I turned to watch the Countess waft down the hall in a long black kaftan, vodka tonic in hand. ‘It’s better to have loved and lost . . . than to get up for the 2 a.m. feed.’

‘Well, I, for one, am looking forward to you moving in!’ Roxy enthused. ‘It’ll be fun. We can all take up the instrument we gave up in our youth and have a really bad band. Sax for me, violin for you. Tilly?’

‘Hmmm.’ The Countess looked me up and down judgementally. ‘Triangle? Or bongos? We’ll need some percussion.’

‘Surely we can just use our low-hanging labia to beat out a tune?’ my mother suggested. ‘Or the testicles of men who’ve annoyed us as maracas.’

‘Yes. We’ll send you out to shoot off a few for us,’ the Countess said to Phyllis.

The three women cackled loudly. It was worrying me how much they were enjoying each other’s company. ‘People left in this house longer than sixty days must have a forwarding address and will be towed away at their own expense!’ I threatened to deaf ears.

Over the next few days, I realized that I was of very little importance in this domestic set-up. I got the newspaper
after
it had lined Portia’s pet tortoise’s cage. I got the food rejected by Phyllis’s ferret. It’s hard to pinpoint the worst aspect of my new living arrangements, but I think it might have been the post-operative Countess, lying supine on the couch, ringing her little silver bell for alcoholic top-ups.

‘I’d like to have a vodka with a vodka, and a dash of vodka with that,’ she ordered the moment she returned home from day surgery.

‘You drink way too much, you know. You’re practically an alcoholic.’

‘I most certainly am not,’ she snapped. ‘Alcoholics go to meetings. I’m a drunk –
I
go to parties.’

Six people in the house plus endless visitors and three rescue dogs meant constant chaos, but my biggest worry was press intrusion. With straggling snappers camped outside, my mother’s tendency to walk around naked took on a new horror. Roxy’s pubic area is so forested, it looks as though she has one of the Jackson Five
circa
1970 in a headlock. Portia and I were used to it, but I wasn’t sure the
Daily Mail
readers would quite understand her Aussie laissez-faire attitude to forestation and nudity.

Lack of sleep wasn’t helping the situation either. This was mainly due to the older women’s tendency to chortle into the small hours. ‘I do hope my sleeping isn’t disturbing your loud and raucous partying,’ I called down from the stairs every night, to no avail. When I did finally get to sleep, I’d be woken by the dulcet strains of Phyllis’s snoring reverberating through the wall. The fugitive granny was sleeping on the pull-out bed in the study right next to my bedroom. When she snored, which was often, it sounded as though she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head through her nostrils.

The only truly serene member of the household was Sheldon, Portia’s tortoise. Mind you, if he
had been
enduring inner conflict, it would have been quite hard to tell.

Another week of this bedlam and I started wriggling my eyebrows mutely towards the front door. ‘Surely you’d be more comfortable in your own home, Countess?’ I pleaded, only for her casually to announce her decision to have a chemical peel and a jowl-ectomy, which meant she would need to stay a little longer to recover.

‘What?’ I fretted. ‘Why not employ Roxy’s home-grown solution to double chins and just wear a turtleneck sweater?’

‘Well, I may rethink the chin op. But I’m definitely going in for the chemical peel, to erase laugh lines around my eyes and mouth.’

‘A simpler solution would be to move in with your mother. Believe me, you will never laugh, smile or feel happy ever again,’ I said despondently, to nobody in particular.

When I complained, my mother jauntily replied, ‘Darl, it’s only
you
who’s incompatible. The rest of us are getting along fabulously.’

Roxy tilted her head in the direction of Portia, who was bent over her homework at the kitchen table. The tip of her tongue innocently caressed her top lip as she puzzled over a mathematical equation, totally at ease in the happy chaos. The other house guests were sitting in companionable silence on the living-room couch, watching reruns of the old American staples favoured by Phyllis.

‘If Mister Ed could really talk, why didn’t he ever complain about standing in his own urine-drenched straw all day?’ Portia called over to Chantelle. The shattered teen who’d been numbing her way through each day managed a feeble smile with one corner of her mouth. Since viewing the footage of her attack, the sixteen-year-old wanted to be cuddled and cradled like a baby. Phyllis was even cutting up her food. Only Portia seemed able to lift the darkness from her eyes.

When she wasn’t cheering up Chantelle or completing assignments, Portia was organizing environmental campaigns. ‘It’s quite a good idea to save the planet, because we don’t actually have anywhere else to go,’ she explained to Phyllis, who instantly converted to recycling. The radicalized gran was soon spending all her time helping to paint antilitter posters, which read ‘Don’t be a tosser.’

In the pursuit of domestic harmony, my diplomatic daughter hung up a ‘Thank You for not Snoring’ sign outside Phyllis’s bedroom and cheered the Countess by suggesting she forego cosmetic surgery and simply embrace her status as an iconic seventies model by putting out a fragrance.

‘Great idea! We’ll call it “Better than that Crap Liza Minnelli is Flogging”,’ she hooted at the dinner table.

‘Or maybe “Really Old Spice”,’ I grumbled to Sheldon and the ferret, who were the only members of the household who ever seemed to listen to me.

Just when I’d reached breaking point and started taking chocolate syrup intravenously, Phyllis’s case was scheduled for June. I counted off the remaining months, like a prisoner crossing off days in her cell.

If only doctors had a cure for the human condition. Why wasn’t there a prescription available to alleviate all the misogyny suffered by the clients of Pandora’s? This was the thought that preoccupied me as I prepared for Phyllis’s trial and Roxy managed our practice’s caseload.

According to my mother, if you gave a man a fish he would eat for a day. If you taught a man to fish, he would lie in a boat all day quaffing beers and dreaming of porn. She was busy organizing legal aid for a girl who had endured the worst first date ever with a bloke she met on Facebook. He asked her to give him a lift, claiming he needed to pick something up from a mate. She drove him to a shopping mall, where he left her for five minutes. He returned in a flap, yelling ‘Go, go, go!’ She then drove back to his house. They’d just settled down for a get-to-know-each-other beer when the police arrived and arrested them both. The young woman was astonished to find the police accusing him of robbing a betting shop at knifepoint and her of being his get-away-driving accomplice. ‘She thought she’d be ending the night in his arms and instead she ended up in the long arms of the law,’ Roxy explained, as she set off to the police cells.

Another client wanted us to bring a sexual harassment case against a crusty old perv who managed a local department store. He’d insisted all the girls sit on his lap – only he wasn’t dressed as Santa and it wasn’t Christmas.

Roxy was also organizing bail for a woman who had tried to overdose her violent husband by mixing pure, liquid, medical-strength morphine with chocolate body paint and coating her vagina before cunnilingus . . . forgetting that pussies are porous. She survived her overdose, only to find herself on a trip of another kind, to the cop shop on a drugs charge.

And then, of course, there was Jack. The emails started a week after I’d promised to go out with him.

Dearest Tilly,

I’ve been waiting to hear from you. Are you in prison? If not, I’ve been invited to dine with the Lord Chief Justice. Would be a good career move for you to join me.

Love, Jack

Jack,

Legal dinners are so stiffly formal they make tea with the Queen seem like a quick pint with a stripper down the pub.

So that’s a no.

Matilda

Dear Disgruntled but Still-gorgeous Girl,

A client has given me two tickets to the opening night of
Hamlet
at the National. I know how you love theatrics, Tilly.

Then we can go to the after-show party and mingle with the stars.

Love, Jack

Jack,

Opening nights are full of people introducing you to people who need no introduction. Opening show parties are where the hors d’oeuvres get speared in the middle and the guests in the back. So that’s another no.

Matilda

When I rejected his next offer of a day at the races as being too elitist, he insisted with some irritation that ‘It’s just a bunch of horses hurtling around the track.’

‘Yes,’ I emailed back. ‘And hell is just a sauna.’

Jack: ‘Dinner atop London’s highest building, the Shard? We’ll drink
Shard
onnay.’

Me: ‘Vertigo. I have no head for heights. I’d get a nosebleed from all that social climbing.’

Having given up on cultural and charity events, Jack then tried to tempt me into conquering the Great Outdoors, starting with a cycle along the Thames from Hampton Court to Richmond.