Laying the Ghost (2 page)

‘Because I, like,
really
don’t want to meet her.’ Mimi stripped another prawn and bit it clean through its
middle.
‘I don’t want Dad getting the idea that I’m
ever
going to think it’s OK for him to go off and be with someone else. And suppose …’ She looked at her next prawn as if she’d just noticed something truly bizarre about it. ‘Suppose …’ she hesitated again. ‘Oh God, do you think they might …?’

Nell couldn’t eat any more, not without choking anyway. What a waste – only half of this delicious food gone. It was now too much to ask even of shepherd’s pie to provide comfort here. For this was the big question, wasn’t it? Would Alex and Cherisse make beautiful New York babies together? How long would it take Nell to get to the point where that kind of question, any kind of question about Alex, simply didn’t matter? They didn’t tell you the answer to that one in
After He’s Gone
, the Brown-Owl-brisk, faux-jolly guide to post-divorce life that so-efficient, so-helpful Kate had provided as essential holiday reading. On balance, Nell thought she’d have preferred some blood-curdling thriller-chiller.

‘You know what, Mimi? I can’t even begin to guess what they might do,’ Nell told her, adopting the book’s recommended rise-above-it attitude. ‘I don’t want to think about any of it – not until we get home anyway, and even then I think we should all get going on the moving-on stage. Let’s just enjoy these last few hours here, shall we? We don’t want to lose sight of what this week was all about. It’s been about
us
and about having a
good,
fun time. But right now it’s only about lunch, OK?’

She could feel her voice becoming artificially bright. She’d even been
that
close to saying the tritest thing, that schmaltzy ‘And whatever’s happened between Alex and me, he’ll
always be your dad
.’ There’d been a lot of that brightness lately; a lot of trying on a ‘make-the-best-of-it’ tone so that Mimi wouldn’t sink into a depression. Seb didn’t agonize – or didn’t seem to. He just did that boy thing, that ‘
Please
don’t make me talk about feelings’ look of dread whenever such a possibility loomed. His idea of a bad day wasn’t his dad leaving to shack up with a floozie on the far side of an ocean, but his mum dragging him and Mimi into the kitchen and saying, ‘Let’s have a group hug.’ Not that Nell would, she’d known better than that since they’d stopped falling over in the playground and grazing their knees. And besides,
she
didn’t fancy the group-hug thing either. It would be one more all-American irritating item to add to the list.

Anyway, Seb was away now, on an art course in Falmouth where he could shut down completely from home concerns and simply get on with becoming whatever he wanted himself to be. His opting out was so absolute that he had completely immersed himself in surf life and spent every spare weekend in the sea. Still teen-selfish, he made it pretty clear on his few home visits that, fond as he was of his home and family, each second spent in south-west London would be better spent in south-west
England.
Where did ‘divorce’ come on that well-known scale of the most traumatic life events? For the absent Seb it might rate no worse than maybe a flat tyre, but for Nell, well, she’d read that it was rightly considered one down from a family death, but was it above house-moving and giving birth, or maybe between the two? And at what level was it going to be for Mimi?

Mimi had finished her prawns, rejected a little heap of tomatoes and was now digging her fork into the demolished remains of Nell’s mashed potato.

‘Have I got time for another swim before we go?’ she asked. She was already looking out at the ocean, then at herself reflected in the big mirror placed beside the restaurant so diners could always get a sea view; maybe she was watching to see if a turtle might be swimming close to shore so she could go and float lazily beside it. How lucky it was for teenagers that their attention flittered about like a bee on buttercups. Nell had been looking forward to a dreamy couple of hours on a beach lounger, thinking of nothing but what colour to paint the kitchen. She now had a horrible feeling that while considering some fancy contrast tones for the ceiling, she might also be wondering which shade of white (creamy, or bluish, or hint-of-jasmine) would also look OK for the bridal lace of her replacement.

‘You can swim if you wait fifteen minutes for your lunch to go down first and so long as you won’t complain
about
spending the night on the plane with cold wet hair.’

Mimi sighed, scowled and growled. Nell didn’t blame her – she didn’t like her own bossy tone either. She’d stopped short of reminding Mimi how much she’d feel the cold in the early Gatwick morning after the blazing heat of this week, but all the same, Nell was fully aware she was going to be the only Bad Cop in the family from now on. How very, very dispiriting.

Nell saw the boy waiting on the pavement as she and Mimi dragged their bags off the Gatwick car-park courtesy bus. From years of living with a football nut, she recognized his top as Manchester United’s current away strip. He was leaning on the side of the bus shelter, chewing his thumbnail and breathing thick drifts of mist into the freezing early air. It was much later when it crossed her mind that not only was the name ‘Callaghan’ beneath the no. 8 on his shirt back in the place where surely ‘Rooney’ should have been, but that with no baggage (not even a coat, and it was freezing), and no in-charge adult, he definitely didn’t look as if he was somewhere between parking a car and boarding a plane.

‘I’m so
cold
,’ Mimi wailed as they crossed the road. It was barely light; the rows of tightly parked cars were silvered by frost and all looked the same – line after line of unidentifiable sparkly greyish lumps. Where
was
the bloody Golf, Nell wondered, knowing that if Alex had
been
with them he would, by now, have been marching firmly in the right direction, having had the exact location logged into his Blackberry. Also, he wouldn’t have left the car-park ticket carelessly exposed on the car’s dashboard to show a potential TWOC-er that escape from the car park would present no difficulty. And of course, unlike Nell, he’d have prepaid online, triumphantly saving several pounds, via the right website. A long, long time ago he’d found Nell’s scattiness amusing. Over the past year he had simply found it annoying, clucking and sighing at every small evidence of inefficiency. ‘How can you draw so meticulously,’ he’d said once after she’d left a casserole in the oven for seven flavour-draining hours while she worked on a last-minute alteration to a double spread for
Pond Life
(third in an educational series, sales rivalling Dan Brown’s in thirty countries), ‘and yet be so bloody disorganized?’ He was probably right, she now thought as she peered through the blue-grey half-light in the remote hope that her car would get out of its line and come to greet her.

‘You are sure you left it in Zone X, aren’t you?’ Mimi asked her.

‘Definitely,’ Nell told her as she settled her handbag on her shoulder, bumped her case heavily up the pavement edge and wondered if she’d ever be so well travelled that she’d master the art of manoeuvring wheeled luggage. Why was it that some things which were meant to make
life
easier just created their own difficulties? The bag wobbled and tottered like a drunk companion as she hauled it carefully through many rows of parked cars, trying not to set off alarms or scratch paintwork.

Alex used to deal with the more unwieldy holiday baggage, enjoying any opportunity to pace around looking strong and blokey. Getting the knack of putting together a tiny capsule wardrobe was going to be essential for any future trips Nell might be lucky enough to have. She could possibly never travel again without clothes that would cram into a manageable shoulder bag. That would completely rule out a ski trip, for a start, which actually was not a bad thing, in her opinion. Alex was the sporty one. Not having even to pretend to join in with that was one to put on the list (as recommended for compilation in
After He’s Gone
) of post-divorce pluses.

‘So
where
then?’ Mimi squinted through the shadowy dawn at the cars, as if theirs might have grown a tail to wag at them in welcome.

‘Oh come on Mimi,
you
were supposed to be the one who remembered which row,’ Nell reminded her. ‘It was the
one thing
I asked you to do. Please don’t tell me you’ve completely forgotten.’ She wanted to get home. She wanted to listen to early-morning political bickering on Radio 4 and be soothed by
Thought for the Day
. She wanted to sit at her kitchen table and open a stack of terrifying bills while eating toast and thick gooey honey.
Then
she wanted to decide what to wear to the Mitchells’ twentieth-wedding-anniversary party that night, while wondering if going to bed early with a messy three-pack of Cadbury’s Flakes and an undemanding novel might be a wiser option than facing the neighbours’ collective curiosity and making a defiant, jet-lagged start on this new, single, reality.

‘You were the one driving, Mum. Why don’t
you
remember where the car is?’

‘Oh great – the daughter quits! What a surprise!’

Mimi ignored her and stared up at the sky, dreamily and unconcernedly watching a Virgin 777 approach at what looked like a dangerously slow speed for its size.

‘Why don’t
I
remember? Because, Mimi,
I
was the one remembering little things like passports and booking references and whether that scrappy bit of computer printout was really going to be enough to get us checked in because I’m old enough to be more comfortable with proper in-your-hand tickets, and then there was whether I’d got the credit card I’d actually used for the reservation, or had I thrown it away because it had expired, oh and the BA club card and all that stuff! And what did you have to remember? It was which zone, which row and to get some factor 25 in duty-free. Nothing else! God!’

Shivering inside creased and inexplicably damp cashmere, Nell pointed her key at the cars in front of her and pressed the remote lock, hoping to see a welcoming
flash
of orange lights to guide her to the Golf. There was no response.

‘Er … maybe it was, like row 5 or something?’ Mimi pointed vaguely across to the other side of the car park. ‘I think. I do remember it was a long walk.’

‘OK – we’ll go in that direction and I’ll keep pushing the button.’ Nell felt depressed. There was no one else around now. Everyone who’d been on that bus (all in cosy twosomes, not surprisingly as it was term-time; some of them had been hand-holding honeymoonish – well good luck, was her bitter thought) had claimed their cars and gone. They would be way out on the motorway by now, carloads of post-holiday relaxed pairs, telling each other what a wonderful time they’d had, how they couldn’t wait to pick up the dog from the kennels and how brilliant it had felt, escaping from the winter cold, but it was all right, spring would be here soon and the daffodils would be up in the garden. Bloody coupledom. How long would it be, Nell wondered, before she looked at lovers and didn’t seethe at Alex’s abandonment. Perhaps she shouldn’t go to the Mitchells’ party. She might end up snarling at any paired-up folk who dared to look even halfway happy together.

There it was, at last. Nell flicked the switch again and along by the fence her Golf responded with a couple of little blinks of light. And that was when the boy swooped. As he wrenched Nell’s bag from her hands, time slowed to
something
that resembled television scenes of dancers caught moving like half-speed angels in strobe lighting. She heard Mimi shriek and swear and felt a rush of warm, cigarette-scented air as the boy shoved against her. Then he raced away. When safely distant but still in full flight, he ripped open the bag, frantically hurling the contents on to the ground. She watched as, just too far away to be worth the chase, he scrabbled among her possessions, grabbing what he wanted and racing off, leaving the rest strewn about like the contents of an upended rubbish bin.

‘Shit, Mum! Are you all right?’

Was she? Or was this an almost triumphant final bloody straw that she could blame – one way or another – on Alex?

‘Yes. Well I think so, suppose so. That was a nice bag.’

It was a mad thing to say; such a frivolous, irrelevant first thought when there was going to be the nightmare of the credit cards to sort. Her driving licence was in there, too, and several store cards. And the bag wasn’t at all nice, really. It was hardly a Chloe Paddington, or whatever the current two-thousand-pound must-have was. There was a stain underneath where she’d put it down in a puddle, and the zip was iffy. But you got fond of bags; their shapes became cosy, worn, softened and familiar. She tried not to think: like men.

‘Right. OK.’ Mimi looked, she realized, more nervous of this reaction than of the mugging. Nell leaned against the
car,
strangely comforted by the feel of its door handle against her hip, the familiar curve of the Golf’s door.

‘I’ve still got my passport – it’s in my pocket. My phone’s locked in the glove compartment, and I’ve got the car keys.’ Her mind whirled; having thought of what
hadn’t
gone, she tried mentally to list what she’d had in the bag. Not a lot of personal stuff, no irreplaceable photos, thank goodness. She’d stripped the contents down to the minimum for the trip … Mimi was stroking the back of her mum’s hand and it was going numb.

‘We’ll go then, shall we, Mum? I’ll go and pick up what he’s left? We’ll tell someone on the way out. Police and stuff?’ Mimi opened the car’s boot, carefully stashed both bags then opened the driver’s door, tenderly pushing Nell into the seat.

Nell sat for a moment trying to remember how to drive, how to breathe. She was shaking but she wasn’t going to cry; not here, not yet. She would save that little treat for later when she’d added this one to Reasons for Tears. ‘Pick up what he’s left?’ – wasn’t that what Mimi had said? There was too much here of what had been left – not just receipts and the paracetamol packet, the lipsticks, pens and spare glasses that were scattered like sad garbage all over the tarmac, but
herself
. Thanks so very much, Alex, you bastard, she thought, finding it easy enough to add this mugging to the list of grievances against him. Just as she turned the key in the ignition, up came that question
that
had never been quite far enough from her mind – according to Alex’s bitter parting words – during the entire twenty years of their marriage. Would it have been like this if, so many years ago, she’d hadn’t, after all, left Patrick?