Kismetology (32 page)

"She’s just fine," the receptionist says.
"She’s been telling us all about your job and the men you’ve been finding
for her."

"Really?" I look up from my heavy breathing a
minute to check her face and see if she’s joking or not. She doesn’t appear to
be.

"I’ll just call a nurse for you," she says.

Within a few seconds a round-faced, smiling nurse appears
and beckons me to follow her through the doors. "I’m Nurse Winston,"
she says, still smiling. "We spoke on the phone."

"Ah, yes," I say.

"It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mackenzie,"
she says. "Your mother has been telling us all about you. What’s your
fee?"

"My fee?"

"For finding a bloke? I could use a nice date or two.
All the men I meet are lunatics. And that’s not just because I work part time
in the psychiatric ward."

"Um," I say. To be honest I hadn't even thought
that far ahead. "It’s two hundred and fifty quid," I blurt out a
figure off the top of my head.

"Well, that sounds like a small price to pay for such a
great service. Where do I sign up?"

"Sign up? You want me to set you up with men?"

"If you wouldn’t mind. You’re not too busy, are
you?"

"No," I admit. "You’d be my first paying
client."

"Well, then. What an honour." She grins.

I can’t help thinking that this is quite an unusual
conversation to have while walking down a hospital corridor, waiting to see if
your mother is dead or not.

"Here we go," the nurse says finally. She pushes a
door open and I see Mum. She’s sitting on the side of a white bed in an all
white room, fully dressed and looking annoyed.

"There you are," she says. "You took your
time."

"Sorry," I say, surprised. "I… I thought… I
just… Are you okay?"

"Yes," she says. "I’m fine. I was starting to
think you weren’t coming."

"I drove as fast as I could."

She shrugs. The nurse sits down in the chair opposite the
bed.

"Now, what were we talking about earlier?" Nurse
Winston asks Mum.

"Yes, I know," Mum says guiltily. "I must
always keep a full inhaler on me, no matter how good my asthma has been."

"So, are you all right?" I ask, looking between
them. "What happened?"

"I just started to feel like I couldn’t breathe,"
Mum says. "I was really struggling for air so I called an ambulance."

"You should have called me," I say.

"I tried. It was engaged."

"Oh yeah, Dan was talking to one of his mates for ages
earlier. Sorry."

"It’s okay. I’m fine now."

"But make sure you keep your inhaler in check from now
on," Nurse Winston says. "No excuses."

"So, what caused this?" I ask. "It’s been
fine for so long."

"They think it was a reaction to the dust the builders
made," Mum says.

"But that was last week. And we cleaned. Well. Really
well."

"It’s just the dust particles in the air, and the fumes
from whatever chemicals the builders used. They lie around in the air for weeks
afterwards, and your mother has been breathing them in for a week. It built up
in her lungs and it had to come to a head sooner or later. And, of course, it
wouldn’t have been such a problem if she’d have had a decent inhaler in her
house."

"Don’t worry," Mum says. "I’ve learned my
lesson."

"You had better," I say. "And I’m going to be
keeping an eye on you from now on."

"So, are you ready to go?" Mum asks.

"Yeah, sure," I say. "As long as you’re
positive you’re okay."

"I’m fine," she says. "I’ll be glad to get
out of here."

"And I thought you liked us," Nurse Winston says
jokingly.

"Oh, I do," Mum says.

"She certainly likes bragging about you, Mackenzie."

"Oh no." I feel my face go red.

"Yes, very much indeed. So, how do you go about this
business thing?"

"Well," I say. "Are you sure you want to do
this?"

"Yes, positive. You’re exactly the sort of service I’ve
been looking for without knowing I was looking for it, if you know what I
mean."

"Oh yes," I say. "That’s what I was hoping
for."

She smiles.

"Okay, er, I’ve not got an office or anything yet, but
how about we swap contact numbers, and I’ll give you a ring on Monday and we’ll
arrange to meet for coffee, and we can have a chat about what you want in a
man, and then we’ll go from there. How does that sound?"

"That sounds excellent," she says.

I hand her a business card and write down her phone number.
This is amazing, and I realise that I have to make a decision about my job for
real now. If I’m going to do this, I have to go for it right here and right
now. I have to get an office, get registered as a business, and—here comes the
scary part—quit my nail technician job.

And I can’t wait.

CHAPTER 51

After I’ve dropped Mum off at home
that night, given her the spare key back and told her to come over any time she
wants and to call if she so much as coughs, I go home. Dan is sitting on the
sofa, staring blankly at some sci-fi movie on the TV screen, feet up on the
coffee table, as usual. I’m surprised he’s still up. It’s after one in the
morning—I thought he’d be in bed by now.

"We need to talk," he says when he sees me.

"Yes, we do."

"I can’t believe you did that tonight."

I stare at him. "You can’t believe I did what?"

"That. When we were all set to go to bed, to have a
nice night together, and then your damn mother calls and you go running out the
door."

"She was in the
hospital
."

"I don’t care where she was. It’s every fucking time.
‘We can’t have sex tonight, Dan, my mum is downstairs.’ ‘I can’t touch you
tonight, Dan, my mum might hear from three doors down.’ ‘No, don’t kiss me,
Dan, my mum might be somewhere within a five hundred mile radius.’ You always
put her first. I feel like I’m not as important to you as she is."

"Dan…" I don’t know where to begin. "Dan,
it’s not a competition to see who’s more important. That’s just stupid. It’s
not that she comes first, or you come first, or whatever. It’s just that she’s
had a bit of a nightmare lately with the fire and then the asthma thingy
tonight. She’s needed me a little lately, so I’ve been there for her."

"Well, what about me? I’ve needed you a little lately
too, and you haven’t been there for me."

"That’s just crazy. I’m always there for you, Dan. We
live together. But you haven’t had your kitchen burn down or your lungs try to
kill you recently. She has, and she’s needed us to help her out, and we have.
And now I hope that everything can get back to normal."

"It will never be normal with her living three houses
away."

"Look, I agree that it was a mistake to move so close.
I agree that we should have moved a few miles away—"

"Skipped the country, more like," Dan interrupts.

"That’s not the point. The point is that I’ve been
working my butt off for the past few months, trying to get us more space, more
privacy from her, and it may not have worked yet, but it will. You have to
believe that. It will work."

"Nothing’s working anymore, Mac."

I nod. I know what he means, and I’m half ready to admit it
myself, and half not ready to give up on us yet.

"So, what do you want to do?" I ask nervously.

"We can’t carry on like this," Dan says. "I
can’t deal with your mum all the time, and I can’t deal with always coming
second."

"You don’t always come second, Dan. It’s just
that—"

"It feels like I do."

"Well, perhaps if you’d let me finish a sentence,"
I snap.

"Sorry."

"Fine. It’s not that you always come second, Dan. But
you must understand that things have been a little crazy lately. It’s not
normal that my mum’s kitchen caught fire and she had to stay with us for a few
days. It won’t always be like that. She’s not going to stay with us
again…"

"Until the next time she tries to burn something down
just to come between us."

"Oh, for god’s sake—"

Dan cuts me off again. "It’s not just that, Mackenzie.
Take tonight, for instance. She snaps her fingers and you jump. Eleven o’clock
on a Saturday night, and all it takes is one phone call and you’re jumping in
the car, driving god knows where, just to pick her up when she could just as
easily have called a cab."

"Daniel, she was in accident and emergency. She
could’ve had something seriously wrong with her. She could have been dying. If someone
phoned up and told you that your mother was in the hospital, are you seriously
telling me that you wouldn’t jump in your car and go straight down there?"

He shrugs. "Not if she was a demanding, old bitch like
your mother is."

"Don’t call my mother a bitch. She’s lonely, Dan. I’m
trying to solve that problem, but you’re not exactly helping right now."

"She’s not that fucking lonely," he says.
"She keeps going on about her dog being her family and she’s got all the
old biddies from her yoga lessons. She’s not fucking lonely at all, she just
damn well hates me."

"I’m starting to see her point," I mutter.

"Exactly. You see that? She’s been trying to come
between us since day one, and now it looks like she’s succeeded. Tell her
thanks from me, Mac."

"I’m sorry," I say. "I didn’t mean that. But
you can’t expect me to cut my mother out of our lives altogether."

"I don’t," he says. "Not altogether. But I do
expect you to set some boundaries. Like it’s not okay to come around here at
three o’clock in the morning. When we say the dog mustn’t chew the carpet then
she has to stop the fucking dog chewing on the fucking carpet. You told her the
dog wasn’t welcome here after the plant incident, and the next day she bought
the fucking dog round again, like she’d ignored every word you’d said."

"I know," I say. "But it’ll get better. If I
can just figure out who this mystery man is then we’ll have scored. She can go
spend all her time with him instead."

"I don’t think this so-called mystery man even
exists."

"Why do you say that?"

He shrugs. "I reckon she just doesn’t want to meet a
man so she can concentrate all her energy on splitting us up. She’s telling you
she’s in love with someone so you’ll spend all your time concentrating on
finding a person who doesn’t exist, and not on finding her anyone she can
actually be happy with."

"That’s insane."

"Maybe I am insane. Didn’t your mother tell you that?
Because, you know, according to her, I’m also a murderer who made an attempt on
her life."

"Did you?"

It’s his turn to stare at me. "And that just
illustrates my point," he says eventually.

"Why bring it up again, then?"

"Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I was accused of being
a
murderer
!"

"You don’t have to shout at me. I’m sorry, okay?"

"It doesn’t matter," he says. "You’ll never
be able to see me for what I am, because your mother will always get her
opinion in first and cloud your judgement of me."

"Well, that’s just stupid," I tell him. "My
mother can think what she wants about you or anything else. She doesn’t cloud
my judgement. I do love you, Dan, and nothing someone can say or do is going to
change that."

"I’m not so sure about that."

"What? Why?"

"Because you’ve just asked me if I deliberately blew up
your mother’s fridge."

"I’m sorry," I say. "I didn’t mean it."

"Yes, you did, and we both know it."

"Well, what do you want from me?" I snap at him.
"There aren’t unlimited hours in a day, you know. I’m sorry that you and
my mother don’t get on because I’m the one stuck in the middle. But you could
try to be a little more tolerant of her, Dan. It’s not her fault that the
kitchen caught on fire and the builders made a mess."

"Oh, I tolerate her just fine, but it would be nice if
once in a while she looked at me like a person instead of like something the
cat threw up."

"You’re always so moody. Every time she so much as
calls, you huff and puff and do that exaggerated sigh thing you do, and
basically make it blatantly obvious that she’s not welcome here. She’s not
blind, Dan. She gets that too."

"She’s
not
welcome here."

"Yes, she is. Sometimes. And if your mother lived
nearby, she’d be more than welcome here."

"Yeah, but she’d have the common decency to not spend
every waking moment here."

"Oh, she doesn’t spend
every
—"

"And my mother would know that it’s not protocol to redecorate
while we were at work."

"She was just trying to help."

"I don’t remember you saying that at the time. In fact,
I remember you being angrier than I was and threatening to paint her living
room brown."

"Black."

"And she wasn’t trying to help, Mac, and you know that
as well as I do. She was trying to discredit what we have here. It was her way
of saying that I’m a bad boyfriend because I’d pushed you into buying those
curtains or those cushions, and I’d forced you into moving in with me when
you’d rather be at home. It was her way of trying to push me out of this
house."

"That’s ridiculous."

"No, it’s not. You know she doesn’t like me."

I sigh. I’m torn between wanting to hug him and agree with
everything he’s saying just to make things okay again, and wanting to slap him
round the face. I want to brush it all under the carpet and tell him I decided
to quit my job tonight and really make a go of it as a matchmaker, and I also
want to break his nose.

What am I even doing here? I know deep down that things
aren’t right between us, and it’s not because of my mother, or the colour of
the paint on our walls, or our jobs or anything else. It’s because of us. I
take a deep breath and pluck up the courage to ask the question that needs
asking.