Getting Over It (24 page)

Chapter 33

A
S PEOPLE WHO’VE NEVER HAD
anything bad happen to them always say, something good comes out of everything. So when I drive to the video shop on Saturday evening and see a young man crossing the road with a copy of the
Sun
and a four-pack of toilet rolls, I grin because I’m reminded of Luke and how much closer we’ve become in the six days since Marcus evicted me. Six days since I saw Tom! It seems like an age. Anyhow, Luke is a lot more fun now we aren’t living together. For the first time in years, the two of us spent three hours together without scrapping.

Vivienne had invited my mother for Saturday tea—“A sympathy tea! To make up for not inviting me for Christmas. But it doesn’t make up for it at all!”—so I called Luke and suggested he come round. My excuse was that Fatboy was demanding that Luke exercise his visiting rights (a lie, as Fatboy’s affection for anyone evaporates the second he swallows the last lick of pâté).

The truth was that while I did want to see Luke, I was more impatient to know if Luke had seen Tom the night before, on his lads’ night out. Just to be sure. But Luke sounds so pleased to be invited—“Should I bring a tin of tuna in brine or pilchards in tomato sauce?”—I feel instantly ashamed of my duplicity.

“Just bring yourself!” I exclaim guiltily and rush out and buy two tubes of Cheese & Onion Pringles (Luke’s motto: “Crisps, crisps! Food of the gods!”).

When Luke arrives bearing pilchards and tuna, I hug him hard and feel chipper for the first time in days. I make coffee, present the crisps, and retrieve Fatboy from his new napping spot (the blue metallic bonnet of next door’s Volvo). I watch Luke watching Fatboy, who bolts the pilchard juice, yawns pinkly, and stalks off to lie in a shaft of sunlight. Then I ask casually, “So how was last night?”

Luke scratches his ear deeply and wipes his finger on his crumpled blue shirt, leaving a waxy yellow smear. His face breaks into a wide smile. “Yeah! It was great. We had a great laugh.” He embarks on a long story which begins with ten pints apiece in a functional no-frills pub and continues with a boisterous meal in an Indian restaurant, where Luke’s mate Gobbo (who sounds like a sweetie, although I’ve never had the pleasure) leans back in his chair and tells the bloke on the next table to “Shut your mouth, you nobber, or I’ll stick that table up your fucking pooh hole,” and continues further with Gobbo punching Luke in the kidneys and Luke about to leave it until Luke’s mate Parky says, “You’re not going to let him get away with that, are you?” and Luke doing this move he learned from a Jackie Chan film, flipping Gobbo over his head and Gobbo landing on his back like a turtle and Parky killing himself laughing and Gobbo all red in the face and saying it was a fluke and that Luke knows “SAS—Shit About Shit!” and Parky laughing, and Gobbo thinking Parley’s laughing because Gobbo just said something clever, when in fact Parky’s laughing because Gobbo thinks he said something clever and—

“Was Tom there?” I say after twenty minutes of this yarn.

Luke stops mid-sentence. “No.” He seems surprised at the question.

I try to act relaxed, but my head jerks forward involuntarily and the words slide out in a sharp tumble, “But I thought you were going to ask him.”

Luke’s response is to wedge seven Pringles into his mouth and a short battle ensues between his jaw joints and the mass of crisp and until Luke gains control and his cheeks revert to their normal shape, I am forced to wait.

Luke swallows and replies, “I spoke to him, but he was going away.” He looks at me nervously.

“Oh, really?” I say. “Did he mention when?” Luke shakes his head. “Or with who?” Luke shakes his head again and digs into the Pringles tube with such force, his hand is, for a few tense moments, stuck. As he wrestles it out, I abandon all semblance of dignity and ask, “So is Tom going out with someone? Apart from me,” I add hurriedly, seeing his confused expression. “He’s not going out with me, remember?”

Luke blurts, “Doesn’t he fancy you anymore?”

I say, with effort, “No.”

Luke crunches loudly, becomes aware of the deafening crunch-crunch sound echoing round the kitchen, and tries to crunch more quietly. He then coughs, spewing a fine Pringles spray over the table. “Can I have some water?” he croaks.

Luke downs the water in one, then says slowly, “He might be seeing someone, I don’t know.”

I squeak, “He might be! What does that mean?”

Luke pours a caterpillar of crisps onto the table and starts to devour it agitatedly, wodge by wodge. “Luke!” I say awkwardly. “It’s just that I like him, I just wondered. I think I blew it.” I tell him about Dogs’ Bottom Night in the hope that the background information will spark a faint light in the dimness of his head.

Luke almost picks his nose, thinks better of it, and sits on his hands and says sadly, “He didn’t say. We talked about football.”

I feel like a sparrow pecking at concrete in the hope of it yielding a worm. I rub at an imaginary smudge on the table and say, “I don’t suppose he mentioned me, did he?”

Luke desperately wants to say yes, because his heart is as soft as strawberry creme. So when he says “No,” he cushions the blow by offering me a Pringle as he says it.

I grin and say, “It doesn’t matter.” I add jollily, “As someone else’s mother would say, plenty more fish in the sea!”

Luke smiles and says, “Yeah, but who wants to shag a fish?”

After this philosophical exchange, I decide not to mention Tom ever again ever, and we sit on the living room carpet and Luke plays “Snake Style versus Cat’s Claw” with Fatboy—who may look like a sumo wrestler , but judging from Luke’s ravaged hand has an aptitude for kung fu. I make Luke wash his wounds under the tap, explain that Fatboy doesn’t mean to be spiteful, he’s just competitive—“He’s a feline version of your friend Gobbo,” I add in a burst of inspiration—and after this Luke cheers up and we chat about Christmas.

Luke hadn’t a clue what to get his parents, so he rang his dad to ask if he knew what Mum wanted as a present and Dad revealed that Mum had been dropping hints about a pine bathroom and so he’d bought her a pine toilet seat and if Luke wanted to buy the matching doorknob, he was welcome. Dad reckoned it “wood go down a treat!”

I snort and snicker until I notice Luke looks confused. “What?” he says, half-smiling in an I-don’t-get-it way.

“What do you mean, what?!” I squawk. “He’s joking, isn’t he?”

Luke shakes his head, panic-stuffs in four Pringles, lights a fag at the same time, and says (though the words are muffled), “Don’t you think she’ll be pleased?”

I slap the tabletop and squeal, “
Luke!
I swear on my life she will not be pleased! My god, now I know where you get it from!” I am explaining to Luke the golden rules of female present-buying (Quick guide: Cheap functional jokey token items = Go away, you stingy bastard; Thoughtfully extortionate big frivolous items = Excellent, you gorgeous man) when the phone rings.

It’s Lizzy. Can she pop by? “Of course!” I boom. “Luke’s here, too!”

Lizzy beams down the phone, “How lovely! I’ll see you in a tick!”

I replace the receiver, smiling. “Lizzy bought all her presents months ago,” I say to Luke, whose mind remains derailed by the pine toilet seat bombshell. “She’ll tell you how it’s done.”

As it happens, Lizzy doesn’t tell Luke how present-buying is done. She shows him. She is still doing self-imposed penance for Dog’s Bottom Night—even though I have waived the crime about thirty times—and is keen to “make amends,” as she puts it.

“There are no amends to make, you idiot!” I say, as she hands me a large parcel. “This is very unnecessary,” I add—you have to say that if someone gives you a present and you’re over twenty-five—“but very sweet of you.”

Lizzy clasps her hands and whispers, “I do hope you’ll like it! I asked Brian to bring it back from Hong Kong! He found it in Staunton Street, the old part of Central.” Lizzy and Luke watch, breathlessly, as I lift away the delicate wrapping and a heady waft of incense floats into the stale carroty smell of my mother’s kitchen.

Lizzy clutches my arm and says, “It’s, well, I—I thought it would be, well, it’s more a present for your father than for you! But I thought it would be nice for both of you.” She shrugs.

I stop unwrapping. “What do you mean?” I stammer.

Lizzy squeezes my arm even more tightly and says, “I hope I did the right thing! Open it and I’ll explain.” I put the wrapping to one side and lift out the biggest item.

It is a cellophane-enclosed pack of confectionary—“Hichiload creamy milk choco bar with assorted flavor,” it reads on the side. The pack is as light as air and purports to contain small boxes of chewing gum and biscuits, too. I smile weakly and don’t know what to say. Has Lizzy lost it? Her jokes are usually of the most inpeccable taste. What does she expect me to do—sprinkle crumbs on the cold stone of my father’s grave?

Luke seizes a wad of what looks like toy money, also encased in cellophane. “One-million-dollar notes!” he squeaks. “The Hell Bank Corporation promises to pay the bearer on demand at its office here one million dollars!” I look up and he flaps the money about and says defensively, “That’s what it says here!”

I turn to Lizzy who bursts out, “It’s a Chinese buddhist custom!” She grabs at another plastic pack and thrusts it at me. It looks like a child’s toy set—a gold pair of glasses, a gold and silver watch with “Rolex” printed on its face, a silver bracelet, a gold cigarette box, a pen, and a gold ring and a gold necklace, both with green bits stuck on them—all made of stiff paper and set against a bright red paper background.

“You burn it!” cries Lizzy. “It’s a man’s gift set! A jade ring! And the money, see! And look, a box of paper cigarettes with paper lighter, and look! A paper Mercedes! I didn’t know what car your dad drove, so I told Brian to get a smart one! You put it in a sack and address it to your father, see look, here’s the sack.” She sifts through the pile and waves a gray paper bag printed with Chinese figures and burning joss sticks. “You put it all in the sack and you seal it with this yellow sash—it’s a heavenly post office stamp—the spirit will know it’s his parcel when he collects it and”—at this point she glances at me and falters—“you can glue on the sash with Pritt Stick, it’s fine to do that, and you write the date you burn everything on a Post-it note, which you stick on the sack and, well, I thought it would be a comforting thing to do. Especially at Christmas. You don’t mind, do you?”

She points at the Hell Bank Notes and says hurriedly, “I know it says Hell and don’t think that means he’s in hell, they all say that, all the money you burn says that, it’s just, I suppose that, er, people are at different places in the afterlife and, um, they’re covering all possibilities.” She peers into my face. “Are you okay?”

I nod, put my head in my hands and wail, “It’s such a wonderful, it’s such a beautiful thing, Liz, it’s so sweet of you! Oh god, what an amazing thing!” At this point someone hits me on the spine so hard I am flung forward and nearly poke out my eye on a candlestick. “Thanks, Luke,” I mumble. “You don’t have to pat me on the back anymore, I’m okay now.”

Lizzy runs to the side, rips off a square of paper towel, and hands it to me. I dab my eyes and try not to think of how touched I am because I don’t want to start blubbering again. I wipe my nose, scrunch up the paper towel, and say snufflingly, “A candle on a wooden stick.”

Lizzy gasps and says, “Oh, yes! The red candles symbolize food!”

Luke pokes at a long plastic pack and cries, “Joss sticks! Reminds me of being a student!”

I say witheringly, “Reminds you of last week, more like,” and he grins, relieved that I’ve stopped grizzling.

Lizzy smiles and says, “You burn the joss sticks first, three of them, and that gets your dad’s attention.”

I say, “Can’t I just pretend I’m about to get a tattoo?”

Lizzy giggles and says, “Well, if you want to be doubly sure.”

I wave a hand in front of my face to indicate that I’m shutting up, and gesture for her to continue. Then I notice something else in the pack. “What’s this! It’s beautiful. Look, Luke, sheafs of silver and gold leaf on funny thin paper!”

I look questioningly at Lizzy, who sighs beatifically and says, “It’s traditional Chinese money—you burn it, too. You fold it first, in the shape of a gold tael—the Chinese weight measurement thingy for a gold ingot. Look, like this, in the shape of a fortune cookie. There you go! Although I do think it looks too pretty to burn, but it’s nice to think you’re sending your father such pretty things!”

I nod. It seems a shame to say that my father never noticed pretty things when he was alive—not liking yellow ruled out sunflowers and cornfields and daffodils—so I say nothing. Maybe death will have mellowed him.

“Where do you burn it all?” I say.

Lizzy pauses. “Well,” she says, “anywhere, really. In Hong Kong, you can burn it in your apartment block staircase if you want. You don’t have to do it at the grave. You can do it at the roadside, although maybe in England it’d be better to do it in your garden. I thought the cigarettes would be nice for your dad—you said he smoked a lot.”

I say, “But you hate smoking!”

Lizzy shrugs and says awkwardly, “Yes, but if he’s already dead, I suppose it’s okay.”

I look at Luke nodding in wise agreement and growl, “You’re still alive! So don’t think that ruling applies to you!”

Luke pokes out his tongue and lights up. Lizzy continues. “You can also lay out your dad’s favorite meal or snack—you don’t burn it, but you can eat it later. But do you want me to write it all down for you?”

I say, “Yes, please,” and smooth a finger across the shiny gold leaf. I stare at the gold leaf for a good three minutes while Lizzy scribbles frantically on a piece of paper. She then hands it to me and I read it and smile. She has written:

R
ITUAL

 1.  Light three joss sticks to summon Dad. Concentrate on his name. Let sticks burn for five mins. (Can be on Chinese New Year, but not essential.)

 2.  Light red candles. Say few words—tell spirit what he’s got coming.