Laying the Ghost (24 page)

‘Last night she was hardly wearing
anything
. After that I couldn’t sleep properly. I kept listening in case she and Ed-next-door started creeping up the stairs together,’ Mimi said, shuddering at the memory.

‘And did they?’ Tess asked, in a mildly interested tone that suggested it might be a perfectly normal thing to do. Mimi wondered which of them was out of line here. This was her
mum
they were talking about. Didn’t Tess get it?

‘No, thank God. And don’t make me start thinking about sofa-activity possibilities, please.’

She stopped walking and looked down at the river. Below her, there were several people working on the moored restaurant barge, putting up pink and white flags and hanging baskets of flowers. It must be for a wedding at the weekend, she presumed. Would she have something
like
that one day? Would some lovely man ever ask her to spend the rest of her life with him? She couldn’t imagine anyone would. Did people really see more than a few months ahead? She definitely couldn’t. Even the summer holidays seemed a faraway blur, and it was already nearly Easter.

‘She had this big old T-shirt on and knickers – well, I suppose she did … I
hope
, but possibly not. She was being like she wouldn’t care either way. And Ugg boots and bed hair, and that was it.
It!
She probably thought the look was all Kate Moss at Glastonbury but really she just looked half-naked. And she’s sitting there in the kitchen with him from next door, not the old one, the hippie one with the hair … Oh God.’ Mimi shook her head hard, trying to erase the image. ‘I really thought they’d like, been, you know … and had got up for a cup of tea before he went home or something. Do old people do the sex stuff? When do they stop? And, if they
do
have to do it, they really should keep it well away from us. I’m at an impressionable age.’

She turned away from the sight of all these people working so hard on someone’s happiest day, and the two of them carried on walking into the town. It was busy – the pavement was clogged with cross mothers with double buggies and small whiny children overtired from a busy morning at preschool.

‘Don’t even go there,’ Tess giggled. ‘My mum and dad
only
have to get close to each other on the sofa and I’m like,
stop it, now
. Sex is only acceptable when it’s young and beautiful people like us. Except we haven’t done it. I knew there was a catch.’

‘No … well …’ Mimi looked around. You couldn’t be too careful. Half the school would probably know by the next day if you so much as whispered anything secret in any part of this place. If Polly Mitchell heard what she was about to tell Tess, she’d probably blackmail her for months.

‘What do you mean, “no, well”? Mimi … you haven’t, have you? With Joel?
When?
’ Tess looked surprisingly distraught. Mimi had second thoughts about telling her, deciding to backtrack and keep her half-formed plans to herself for now.

‘No I haven’t! Yet. But I was thinking, maybe sometime … soon. But only maybe. You know? We really like each other, Tess. And … he says he’s got special plans for Friday night.’ It sounded so lame. And when Tess asked her, she’d have to admit that so far they hadn’t done any more than full-on snogging. It could be a big leap, from that to the whole way. She didn’t even know how to do the bits that came in between. Did Joel? And suppose there was stuff that everyone but her did and she didn’t know and he looked at her in a
don’t you even know THAT?
kind of way. No, that wouldn’t happen. He was such a sweet one – he’d be fine.

‘You could give it to him for his birthday,’ Tess said grumpily. ‘And if you decide you wanna do that, we could just go home right now. Then we don’t have to trail round the shops looking for some old tat for him. Just get him a card and make it into a gift voucher, why don’t you? You could write “IOU Mimi’s virginity. A one-off special offer.” Every boy’s wet dream.’

Mimi laughed and pulled her arm. ‘Tess! Whassup, babe? Why are you being like this?’ They were now outside Gap. Mimi had a quick look inside, just in case her mother (or Tess’s) was in there. Or worse, Polly Mitchell and her slapper posse. If the posse heard the word ‘virginity’ being used out loud, she and Tess would never hear the end of it. At school there were girls who looked down on you if you’d lost it, and girls who looked down on you if you hadn’t. It was better not to mention all that. And ‘virginity’ was a funny word, she thought. So ridiculously like it was from another age, like ‘petticoat’ and … and … ‘sanitary’.

‘It’s nothing. You’re a bit young, that’s all – a few months off legal. It’s that conversation all over again like we had before, on your bed. Nothing’s changed, has it, you know, since … that time? You’re just the same, you’re still not sure what you want really, and if you’re not sure, then you shouldn’t do anything.’ Tess was looking at the passing traffic, avoiding Mimi’s eyes.

Mimi thought back. Mostly what she could recall from
that
night was the all-over electric feeling of kissing Tess, of savouring her tongue with her own and how too-shockingly good it felt. She couldn’t at all remember what they’d talked about, but the scent of nail varnish was in the mix somewhere, with the warmth of Tess’s silky Marmite hair twined in her fingers and their soft bodies pressed together.

‘No. I’m not the same,’ she said, sliding her hand into Tess’s and pulling her close.

‘Mimi!’ Tess glared at her. ‘We’re in the middle of the town? Like, anyone could be watching?’ She pulled her hand away from Mimi’s, eyes wide with shock.

‘I was only going to hold your hand, Tess. I wasn’t, like, going to snog you up against the shop window or anything!’ Mimi yelled. Now people were looking. A man cleaning the windows next door at Oasis yelled, ‘Go for it, girls, don’t mind me!’ Two old ladies with wheeled shopping bags turned and gave them the big glare.

‘Oh, weren’t you? Well that’s a big disappointment! Not!’ They looked at each other and started giggling, heading into the sort of hysteria that was going to make their insides ache. This was better, thought Mimi, trying to get her breath and stumbling around on the pavement with Tess while they shrieked and howled helplessly and got in the way of people trying to walk by. It meant they didn’t have to talk about this for a while. Perhaps they never would have to again.

‘Tess?’ Eventually Mimi needed to stop laughing long enough to get an essential question out.

‘Yeah, what?’ Tess spluttered. ‘I don’t even want to guess what you’re going to ask me …’ And she went off into a fit of giggles again.

‘No, really, Tess, listen … On Friday Joel wants me to go out somewhere after school. I don’t know where it is because he won’t tell me, so I don’t know what time I’ll be back and … can I, like, tell my mum I’ll be at yours?’

Tess stopped laughing and frowned. ‘Why can’t you just tell her you’re going out with Joel?’

Mimi looked across the road, focusing on the window display in Monsoon. ‘Um … I dunno. Sometimes you just want to be sort of … private. I don’t want her asking questions and she hates it when I say I don’t exactly know where I’ll be, even though I’ve got my mobile. It’d be easier if she thought I was with you. It’s just in case.’ Did it need spelling out?

‘I’m not stupid, Mimi.’ Tess glared at her. ‘It’s in case you do something you don’t want to have to tell her about when she
does
ask you questions. What kind of mother do you think you’ve got? Do you really think she’d want full details?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mimi muttered glumly. ‘I used to, but she’s weird and different now. I don’t know what she might say to me or want to know. Or what she might
not
want to know.’

‘OK then. I’ll cover for you this time.’ Tess hit Mimi hard on the arm and ran off, squealing, ‘But after you’ve done whatever you do with Joel, I’ll make you answer all
my
questions instead!’

‘You look different,’ Charles told Ed. ‘Older, younger, I don’t know. Different, anyway.’

‘Spring, that’s all,’ Ed replied. ‘Just warm air and longer days. Spring lifts the spirits. Or did you mean it in a negative way?’

‘Well, if I did I could hardly say so, now that you’ve obviously taken it as a compliment,’ Charles said, sniffily. Ed looked at him, wondering why he was being so waspish. Was this a sign of grumpy-old-man territory?

‘So it wasn’t, then?’ Ed teased.

‘It was just an observation,’ Charles told him. ‘It meant nothing either way, though you have obviously chosen your own interpretation.’

They were out on the terrace with an early lunch (Marks & Spencer chicken Caesar salad), watching the birds. A blackbird, fearing for its nest, was sitting on the fence making the kind of furious warning racket that told them Nell’s cat was somewhere around.

‘Bloody cats,’ Charles commented. ‘They all need shooting. Is it Korea where they eat them? Or China? Wherever it is, they’ve got the right idea.’

‘I don’t think anyone eats cats,’ Ed told him. ‘But I could
be
wrong. I know they get skinned, alive and horribly, somewhere. You wouldn’t wish that on any creature.’

‘I expect they taste like chicken, or maybe like lamb. No, not like lamb, because cats are meat-eaters. They’d be more gamey than chicken, wouldn’t you say? Possibly like pheasant, then. Well-hung pheasant. And stringy. There’s not usually a lot of fat on a cat. They’d be tough, I’d imagine, to eat. They’d need long, slow cooking. Casseroled for several hours with shallots and bacon and tomatoes could work, and plenty of thyme, a bay leaf and some decent claret in there too.’

It was Charles’s afternoon for his Classical Civilization class. Ed guessed he only went so that he could pounce on any mistakes the class tutor might make. Charles, all-round scholar and widely read bibliophile, could outwit any upstart teacher-type presumptuous enough to think they knew anything at all about the political intrigues of Ancient Rome. Ed wouldn’t have minded an excuse to be in the room, spotting the other class members exchanging glances as the know-all geek with the half-moon glasses chipped in yet again with an alternative opinion on the events leading up to the downfall of Nero.

‘What are you doing after this? Haven’t you got some kind of meeting?’ Charles asked.

‘Yep. About marking A-level papers. It’s just a refresher – I went to the one last year and it’ll be much the same, but they like you to make the effort. I’ll see you later –
I’ll
be back in time for supper. It won’t be cat, though.’

The District Line platforms at Richmond were deserted, which meant a train must have just gone and another one, even if it arrived in the next few minutes, wouldn’t leave for ages, this being a terminus. Nell muttered ‘Bugger’ to herself. She was supposed to be meeting her agent in Kensington and would now be late. She started to walk further down the platform to wait on a bench and her foot slipped on half a crust of soggy bread. She said ‘Bugger’ again, but not quite quietly enough, and earned a glare from the bird woman, who was throwing chunks of bread and handfuls of corn to the pigeons from a super-size bag on wheels.

Which was more anti-social, Nell wondered, glaring back, a murmured curse or the wilful fattening-up of a thousand feathered vermin? She’d seen the woman before. She was a well-known local character who seemed to be everywhere, trundling her sack of corn and loaves of stale bread and distributing them wherever pigeons gathered. They probably followed her like the Pied Piper’s rats by now, knowing a soft touch when they saw one.

‘At the risk of being karate-chopped to the floor, hello, Nell, and could the old bat get an ASBO for doing that?’ a voice whispered in her ear, startling her. For a moment she thought of Patrick and his legal-action threat, and imagined she was being followed by his lawyers. She
hadn’t
yet written her letter to him. The night-time events in her garden had lightened her mood to the point where the fury was now downgraded, in the manner of stormy weather on the Beaufort scale, from ‘anguished outrage’ to ‘disappointment’. Today, she hadn’t had time to think about it. Patrick could wait.

‘Ed! Oh, hi! An ASBO for feeding pigeons? I expect so – even if it’s only on grounds of littering. It would take a braver woman than me to challenge that woman, though,’ Nell told him, moving the two of them further along the platform, safely away from the swooping pigeon flock. ‘She’s half-barking and comes out with a tirade of abuse if you dare suggest maybe they’re undeserving, disease-ridden pests. In her opinion, it’s people who are.’

‘Well, in some cases, I suppose she’s not wrong. I expect she sees it as her mission in life; somewhere between the bird woman in
Mary Poppins
and St Francis. Where are you off to? Somewhere fun?’

‘Not really, I’ve got a meeting near Gloucester Road with my agent about some more work. I need to up the amount I do if I’m going to keep the house. The mortgage is all paid off but the bills don’t get any smaller. I sometimes think we should move, but I can’t face the hassle. I’d rather see if I can keep the place going – otherwise I’ll feel that Alex has kind of … well, won, I suppose. What about you? A fun date with a foxy sort?’

Nell and Ed sat on a graffiti-scribbled bench, well out of
the
way of the pigeon woman, facing a poster advertising free chlamydia tests for under-25s. ‘Not for
you
,’ the poster seemed to be telling her. ‘
You
’re way past having the kind of frenzied sex life where you might catch something.
You
’re way past having one
at all
.’ Great, she thought – remind me, why don’t you, that I’m heading fast for a celibate lifetime of sensible knickers and old cronedom.

‘Hardly! I’ve got a catch-up session on exam-marking techniques somewhere near Paddington. I don’t know why they bother. It’s the same old pep talk every year and soon they won’t need any more than a basic computer to sort out the grades. It’ll be nothing more demanding than some random multiple-choice stuff, like: Duncan was murdered because: a) he had it coming; b) Macbeth fancied himself in a big crown; c) Lady Macbeth was a bit pre-menstrual and told her old man to show her what he was made of.’