Laying the Ghost (22 page)

‘Come on, Mimi, for me? It’s just a one-off.’ Joel looked so anxious, she thought, as if she just might not want him enough. Oh, but she did. She did, especially when he looked at her like that. She’d do anything, just about, when he looked like she was all he wanted in the world.

‘Maybe. I’ll let you know later,’ she conceded, treating him to a teasing smile. ‘But what’s it for? Will I need money? I haven’t got that much.’ And what she had was soon to be on its way into Topshop’s till in exchange for a cute dress and some strappy wedges.

‘Bring what you can. And … can you tell your mum you’ve got something on after school? We’ll be really late back. It’s a long way.’

‘Another train trip?’ she giggled. ‘I don’t believe it! Can’t we stow away on a big ship to America or something instead?’

‘Do you want to go there?’ Oh, was he serious? If she cried a bit would he come up with a ticket? Or would he give her a lecture about how Brunel (and she’d done some
very
efficient Googling) had come up with the design for the SS
Great Britain
?

‘Course I do. My dad’s in New York, isn’t he? I’m going in the summer, though, with Seb. Mum said we can. I sort of want to and I sort of don’t. Dad promised
she
won’t be there at the time, it’ll be just him and Seb and me, but I bet she gets in on it somehow.’

Joel took a pack of mints out of his pocket and offered them to her. She took one, even though they were the really strong sort that made her go breathless.

‘She must want to meet you,’ he said. ‘Does she have a name?’

She gave him a sharp look. Was he ripping the piss? He didn’t seem to be – he just looked like it was a reasonable question.

‘She’s called
Cherisse
. Minging name, no?’

Joel laughed. ‘Wow. Nice one!’

‘Er … not! You know … maybe I’d want to meet her one day, but she’s not my
family
; I don’t want to meet her and have her think that just cos I say hi and have the manners not to hit her, that means it’s OK. It’s like she’s trying too hard, already. You know what she did? On Sunday I opened an email from Dad and it wasn’t from him, it was
her
! Can you believe that? And it wasn’t a new one; she’d pressed Reply to something I’d sent, which means she’d been reading my private stuff – I’d asked him about my Amazon account and was he still paying it.
There
she was, all like: “
Hiiii
”, all American and chirpy.’ Mimi laughed. ‘She was, you know. Have you been to America, Joel?’

‘Yeah, fly-drive holiday, Florida. Nightmare for parents, fun for us,’ Joel said, smiling at faraway memories.

‘Right, well, you know how the waitresses all go? Like, all singy-songy and trying too hard, it’s,
“Hi guys I wanna welcome you to Bart’s Restaurant my name is Cindy I’ll be your waitress for today can I get yous all something from the bar please go visit our delectable salad cart.”
Well, she was like that. Like it was a script.’

‘She said all
that
? And didn’t you say she was called Cherisse?’ Mimi closed her eyes and sighed. Sometimes, boys were just so
literal
.

‘No, of course she didn’t, idiot!’ She punched his arm. ‘She said something like,
“Hi I’m Cherisse and I’d like to say hello here and maybe get to know you, so please email me and do you want fries with that?”
No, not the last bit. That, Joel, was a joke. Anyway, I just wish she hadn’t used Dad’s address. She’d gatecrashed our thread and read all my private stuff. Made me hate her.’

‘And all she was doing was trying for the opposite.’

‘Yeah. Failing badly then.’

‘So one day soon? I want to take you to the seaside.’ Joel slid his arm round Mimi and nuzzled her neck softly.

‘The sea? Mmm. Candyfloss and chips. Excellent. Just
let
me know which day and I’ll tell Mum there’s a play rehearsal after school. No problem.’

Alvin was supposed to be awake. This afternoon’s outing was meant to be a treat for him. Instead he was head-back in the buggy, pudgy little nose pointed skywards and his eyes firmly shut. His breath was huffy like an old man’s, and in spite of being directly beneath Heathrow’s landing flight path he wasn’t showing any signs of wanting to return to reality on this warm afternoon in Syon Park.

‘I could prod him, I suppose. But then he’d wake up in a state and none of us would have any fun,’ Kate was saying as she and Nell took their time strolling from Nell’s car towards the Aquatic Experience building, where lived a wildlife collection that was surreally exotic for south-west London.

‘Let’s go round to the pond-dipping section and sit in the sun for a bit,’ Nell suggested. ‘A breeze on his face might do the trick. And the squawking of the parakeets.’ On cue, a flock of them swooped overhead, screeching, landing in a beech tree.

‘He’s used to those. They’re in our garden all the time, nicking the blossom, the buggers. They need culling.’

Kate wheeled the buggy past the circular pond where a couple of mallards swam, watched by a big black and white cat, past the cage from which Ossie the Siberian owl glared moodily, and round to where an excited crowd of
primary-school
children were wielding fishing nets and plastic boxes and trying to catch examples of pond life for identification.

Kate and Nell chose a bench out of range of the wet, flicking nets and swathes of blanket weed that the children were hurling at each other. No one seemed to be in charge; a young woman who could have been a teacher, but who looked more like a terrified teenager, was concentrating on the finds of a small group of easy, studious pupils and their neat array of netted bugs. Nell didn’t blame her for keeping out of the way. She’d have done the same. Any pond life with a brain cell would do well to consider choosing a big pebble to hide under until this crew left.

‘Poor tadpoles,’ she commented, watching a boy holding one up by its tail while his classmates squealed and laughed. ‘They must be a very long-suffering lot to survive here.’ The boy threw the creature at one of the girls, who screamed and ran.

‘Oy you!’ Nell shouted to the child, just about managing not to add ‘you little shit’. ‘Treat the animals with respect!’ The boy gave her a look that was way too old for his years and went chasing after the squealing girl.

‘I suppose Alvin will be doing that in a few years,’ Kate said, looking round and glaring at the oblivious keeper of the unruly mob. ‘He’ll be a holy bloody terror. In the garden the other day, he’d put together a little collection
of
snails – got them all lined up, really neatly, about thirty of them. They looked like a solitaire board, you know – the real sort where you had marbles, not solitaire the card game. And I thought, aah, he’s fond of animals; that’s so sweet, maybe one day, twenty years from now, I’ll be watching him presenting a wildlife telly show and remembering this moment. And the next thing, there’s this crunching sound and he’s laughing like a demon and I go and look and he’s stamped on every last innocent one of them, loving the sound of the shells crushing.’

‘I could tell you it’s just a phase,’ Nell said, looking at the cherubic just-waking face of the snail-murderer, ‘but you’ve been there twice already, you know.’ Alvin yawned, stretched his hands out towards the group of children who were now trying to catch a dragonfly in their fishing nets. He looked as if he’d love to join the bad kids.

‘The other two didn’t do things like that. They wouldn’t have had the nerve or the imagination. Maybe it’s partly because this time round I don’t give him the attention. Too old, too tired, too jaded. Blame the mother, as ever. Nothing new there.’

‘Hey, he’s awake now. Let’s go and show him the crocodiles,’ Nell said. ‘See if he fancies his chances stamping on those.’

They went round to the front of the building, paid the entrance fee and were given small pots of food for the koi carp, then went in through plastic swing doors, almost
knocked
over by the steamy jungle heat inside. It was other-worldly: the light was low, thick tendrils of damp creeper hung from the ceiling, monkey cackles sounded, there was a lazy swoosh from waterfalls and an earthy, reptilian scent. And all this, Nell reminded herself, in a worryingly rickety prefab, only three miles from Heathrow.

‘I don’t give Mimi the attention she needs either,’ Nell told Kate. ‘I’ve been distracted and weird since I got Patrick’s letter, and she looks at me as if she thinks I’m losing the plot. I’m not really surprised. I got a bit pissed when I had lunch with Steve and she came home from school and found me asleep on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon. I cried last night for twenty whole minutes over some stupid thing that happened on
EastEnders
. And over supper last night I asked her if she thought I should try emailing James May off
Top Gear
and asking him out.’

‘James May? Do you fancy him?’ Kate asked, looking foxed.

‘Yes, of course I do – he’s very tasty in that dishevelled, don’t-care way! You should be pleased – you keep saying I need a new man. Not that he’d look twice at me, but even thinking about it is a start, you’ve got to admit. But poor Mimi, she’s being the grown-up and she shouldn’t have to at fifteen. She keeps looking at me as if she really disapproves. It’s so unnerving.’

She knelt beside Alvin’s buggy and pointed through the glass wall. ‘Look, Alvin, look at the crocodile – he’s called Elvis. Isn’t he lovely?’ Alvin blinked at the long, olive-coloured creature which was safely behind floor-to-ceiling glass, lying on a slab of rock in the centre of his pond, surrounded by lush foliage. Beneath the water, close to the wall’s edge, giant catfish were swimming around, along with another, far bigger crocodile which was – according to the sign on the wall – called Houdini. Nell didn’t want to speculate on how he got his name, and hoped there was no chance of him showing them why he’d been given it. Houdini swam closer and gave them a close-up view of his terrifying teeth. Alvin pointed at him, shouted ‘tummies’ at the fish, laughing at their pale silvery undersides as they swam into the glass and turned, rolling idly away.

‘Wow – impressive creature, that croc,’ Nell said, backing away as Houdini swam so close he was nose to nose through the glass with Alvin.

Kate giggled. ‘I wouldn’t fancy his chances against my boy. Maybe you should bring Mimi here for a bit of mother–daughter bonding. No, second thoughts, she’d surely prefer a Topshop gift voucher. That might take the “could do better” school-report-look off her pretty little face.’

‘Too right. And I
will
do better,’ Nell laughed. ‘Yep, that’s me: I’ll get right back to whatever kind of normal it is
when
your husband’s gone off with a young American slapper and the only man who fancies you keeps a cupboard full of S&M gear in his hallway, but, hey, I’ve finished the vegetables and I’ve got an artist’s impression of a holiday complex in the Cotswolds to do next. It’s so boring, but it’s architectural and complicated enough that I won’t be able to think of anything else while I’m doing it.’

‘So – you’ve thrown that letter from your nasty ex away, haven’t you?’

‘Er … no. I was thinking …’ Nell walked on through the tangle of trailing lianas towards the python pit. It possibly wasn’t the best moment, she thought, from Alvin’s point of view, as one of the Aquatic Experience assistants was dangling a dead rat from a stick in the direction of one of the snakes.

‘Shall we move on to the turtle pond so this doesn’t blight his life?’ Nell whispered to Kate, anxious about the effect on the child of seeing what looked like a cuddly toy being slowly devoured by a massive python. If he could stamp on snails, it was anyone’s horrible guess what he might do to any future pet gerbil if he watched much more of this.

‘No, look – he loves it.’ Alvin’s eyes had gone wide with delight, watching the snake’s huge mouth engulfing its lunch, inch by furry inch.

‘Quite. That’s what I’m worried about.’

‘No, it’s fine, it’s keeping him quiet. And don’t panic, I’ll keep a careful eye on any future furry pets we’re ever daft enough to get.’ Kate then turned to confront Nell. ‘Now, you – don’t you even think of saying you were planning to write back to that man after what he said! Have some dignity, woman!’

‘Yes, but …!’

‘Yes but
nothing
! He’s a
git
! You were together
five years
and he can’t even scrape up enough respect for a barely human response? All he had to do was tell you
nicely
and
politely
that it’s good to hear from you but no thanks, he’d rather not see you. It would be basic good manners. Legal action! Who the hell does he think he is, Madonna?’

Nell giggled. ‘Maybe I was just a crap shag!’

No you weren’t, her inner voice told her. They shouldn’t be talking about this. It made something painful stab at her soul. She would almost prefer to take her chances in Elvis’s compound than have this conversation with Kate.

‘It must have ended really badly,’ Kate said slyly, looking at Nell.

‘It did – but not badly enough to deserve that. That’s why I wanted to write again – let him know how hurt I feel.’

‘And then what? Suppose he sets his lawyers on you?’

‘Yeah – maybe I’ll end up with an ASBO. That’d go down well with Mimi, wouldn’t it? The shame of it: ASBO
Mum
in Stalking Ban. I could be excluded for ever from Oxfordshire. Well, bring it on, Patrick, bring it on.’

‘Quite possibly.’ Kate sounded serious. ‘You’d definitely get at least a lawyer’s warning shot. He sounds that kind of bastard.’

‘Oh, he never was a bastard, though, Kate; something really strange must have happened since. But I’ve thought of the lawyer one. I’d just write them an equally up-yours note, something like,
Dear Sirs, Thank you for your letter. I suggest you deal with Mr Sanders and his ludicrously pompous overreaction by telling him to fuck off. Yours faithfully
. You see? I can do ludicrously pompous too.’ She laughed. ‘It might be fun to see him in court, though. I wonder how he’s looking these days? He was so beautiful. I can’t imagine him any older, greyer, balder, fatter, whatever.’