The Great Escape (10 page)

‘Er, six weeks.’ Hannah pushes the main door open, steps out of Primark and takes a big gulp of cool air.

‘See! I’ll
have
to get it done today.’

‘I … I’m just not sure, Daisy. It’s quite a big, significant thing. You might feel sick and queasy and one of your parents should …’

‘No, I won’t. I’m never sick. I have
never actually been sick
.’

‘Really?’

Daisy shakes her head. They’ve stopped on the pavement next to a man who’s shouting that he can save everyone from all the greed and nastiness in the world. Hannah is tempted to ask if he can help out with the earring issue.

‘And it’s not a big thing,’ Daisy adds firmly. ‘It’s just two teeny holes and they use a gun.’

‘A gun?’ Hannah is trying to maintain a pleasant expression, which is becoming trickier as she recalls her own ears being pierced at sixteen, courtesy of a darning needle and a lump of cold potato held at the back of her lobe.

‘Yeah,’ Daisy says. ‘It’s really easy. Why don’t you phone Dad and ask him?’

‘I, er …’ Hannah pulls out her mobile. It doesn’t feel right, calling Ryan to confirm what she already knows; that he won’t allow it and, worse, it’ll imply that she’s incapable of handling the situation herself. She feels ridiculous now, having pictured the two of them trotting happily along Oxford Street, stopping off for cakes and Daisy realising that Hannah’s sole purpose isn’t to steal her father and ruin her young life after all.

‘Well, are you gonna phone Dad?’ she demands.

‘Okay. I’ll do that.’ Bristling with irritation now, Hannah calls Ryan’s mobile, which goes to voicemail. He’s not at home either, and she doesn’t bother leaving a message, because how pathetic would her voice sound, drifting out of the answerphone, wittering about earrings?

‘Claire’s Accessories,’ Daisy announces. ‘That’s where everybody has it done.’ Hannah smiles tensely. Then a brainwave hits her. Of course: Sadie will know what to do. Capable Sadie, who’s managing to live in that teeny village in the middle of nowhere without going mad, while raising not one but two babies
and
going to lunch parties. Hannah feels guilty now, being so distracted when her friend had called earlier. And if Sadie can’t offer a snippet of sage advice, then who can?

Damn, she’s not picking up either. Probably at another lunch party by now. ‘Phone Mum,’ Daisy barks. ‘Mum’ll say it’s okay.’

‘Fine, but I
have
to get something to eat first, okay?’ Boldly, without any debate, she takes Daisy by the hand and whisks her into Prêt à Manger.

Here, none of the sandwiches is deemed acceptable. A plain bread roll is chosen, even though it’s really offered to accompany soup (Daisy wrinkles her nose at Hannah’s suggestion of soup, as if she’s trying to trick her into consuming vomit).

‘Dad said I could have my ears done for the wedding,’ Daisy mumbles, picking a crumb off her lip.

Hannah has an overwhelming urge to tip a large glass of chardonnay down her throat. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she murmurs.

‘You’ve got
your
ears done,’ Daisy ventures as they leave.

‘Yes, Daisy, but I’m thirty-five! And I was sixteen when I had it done and you’re only ten. There’s a big difference.’

‘If you don’t let me have it done,’ Daisy growls as they head outside, ‘I’m not coming to your wedding.’

Hannah stares at her. ‘You really mean that? You wouldn’t come to your own dad’s wedding because of
ears
?’

Daisy shrugs. ‘No.’

‘But he’d be so upset! Can you imagine how he’d feel if you weren’t there?’

Daisy juts out her chin. ‘I want to wear earrings at the wedding.’

‘What about clip-ons?’ Hannah suggests desperately. ‘There were loads of nice clip-ons in New Look. Come on, we’ll go back and choose you a pair …’ The thought of braving that store twice in one day is beyond horrific. But Hannah is prepared to spend the whole damn
night
in New Look if it’ll settle the earring issue.

‘I don’t
want
clip-ons.’

Don’t wear bloody clip-ons then!
Hannah wants to yell. ‘Okay,’ she snaps, yanking her phone from her pocket, ‘I’ll call your mum and you can talk it over with her.’ A vein pulses urgently in her neck as she scrolls through her contacts.

‘Hello? Hannah?’ Petra’s voice is needle-sharp.

‘Hi, Petra, are you busy right now?’

‘Yes, just a bit, haha,’ Petra says, meaning,
when
am I not rushed off my feet
? Hannah wonders if she’s interrupted a performance, whether Petra’s gripping her bow in one hand, mobile in the other, bony knees thrust apart with her cello between them. This image makes her feel a tiny bit better.

‘It’s just—’

‘Is this urgent, Hannah, or can we talk later?’

Hannah glances down at Daisy who’s picking out a bit of bread from between her teeth. ‘It is urgent actually. I’m out shopping with Daisy and she’s decided she wants to get her ears pierced.’

Silence. No, not quite silence. Hannah can detect the faint whirring of Petra’s
incredibly
overworked brain. ‘Petra? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, Hannah. I’m just … digesting it.’ Hannah pictures a conductor drumming his fingers impatiently on a little podium thing.

‘Oh.’ Hannah bites her lip. She assumed Petra would deliver a brisk yes or no, not that she’d need time to mull it over. The silence seems to stretch for an eternity. Daisy squashes a smouldering cigarette butt with the toe of her patent boot. ‘Shall I call you back later?’ Hannah suggests.

‘No, there’s no need for that. We can talk now, even though I’m trying to do
fifty
things at once …’

‘Petra, look, if it’s not a good time …’

‘That’s not the issue,’ Petra barks. ‘It’s us, having this conversation about my daughter who you seem to think is perfectly old enough to have her body
disfigured,
her lobes punctured by some teenager wielding a needle …’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it disfig—’

‘She’s ten!’ Petra exclaims. ‘Do you think it’s okay for a ten-year-old girl to have something
irreversible
done to her body, with needles?’

‘Er, they use a gun these days,’ Hannah says dully.

‘A gun? Good God!’ Petra really is bloody unhinged, Hannah decides. She knows Ryan was devastated when she left – he made no secret of that. If she’d been him, though, she’d have been popping champagne corks and dancing wildly on the scuffed bit of floor in the attic where her cello used to stand. Petra is now babbling on about infections and pus. Daisy has extinguished the cigarette and is kicking it towards a smear of pigeon droppings. ‘It’s fine, Petra,’ Hannah cuts in firmly. ‘Actually, I thought you wouldn’t be keen. I just called because Daisy asked me to, and as you’re not happy, we definitely won’t do it.’

‘Well, I hope not.’ Her voice softens slightly.

‘Of course we won’t. I’d never do anything like that without asking you or Ryan first. Anyway, as you’re obviously in the middle of something …’

‘Bye then,’ Petra says curtly.

What a monstrous mother, Hannah thinks, not even asking how Daisy is, or saying a quick hello to her. Despite the disastrous nature of their day, Hannah has a sudden urge to envelop her in a hug.

‘What did Mum say?’ Daisy asks quietly.

‘Um, she’s not keen, sweetheart. But that doesn’t mean never. Maybe, when you’re a little bit older, you could ask her again.’

Daisy’s mouth sets in a scowl as, agreeing that they’ve run out of shopping steam, they march purposefully towards Oxford Circus tube station. Jesus, Hannah reflects, anyone would think the poor kid had asked for a facial tattoo.

Hannah can’t sleep. It’s unusually hot and stuffy for late April, and she tosses and turns, replaying her day in town. Unable to convey its true awfulness, she made light of it to Ryan and even threw in a few jokes about being trampled underfoot by herds of antelopes in New Look.

Ryan is sleeping soundly, but Hannah just can’t get comfortable. She’s replaying Daisy announcing, ‘Hannah bought me a plain bread roll for lunch!’ as they all sat around the dinner table, and Ryan throwing her a quizzical look, as if he imagined for a second that Hannah hadn’t given Daisy any choice. Slipping out of bed, she considers going downstairs to make a cup of tea, but is wary of being discovered by one of the kids as she sits bleakly in the kitchen in the middle of the night. She might look as if she’s losing it, which would cheer them up no end.

Instead, she heads up to the converted loft – formerly Petra’s music room – and now Hannah’s very own studio. Sitting down at her desk, she flicks on the wonky Anglepoise lamp she’s had since art college, then turns on her ageing computer and waits for it to whir into life. All around the room, canvases are stacked against the plain white walls. Cityscapes, mostly, exploding with colour. Although Hannah studied illustration at college, she still loves to paint. She runs her gaze along the row of canvases leaning against the wall. These were painted before she moved in with Ryan; he seemed entranced as she unpacked them and helped to peel off their protective bubble wrap layers. But there’s no evidence of recent painting activity. No tubes out of their wooden boxes, no brushes in jars or hardened worms of paint stuck to her palette. In fact, she’s only started one painting – a portrait of Daisy which she had to abandon because it felt wrong, the two of them up here with Daisy reminding her, in that prim little voice, ‘This used to be Mummy’s music room, you know. She kept her cello over there. That’s what made the scratches on the floor.’

Focusing on the screen now, Hannah begins to type:

Girls, hope all’s well. Been missing you loads lately and I’ve had an idea. I’m planning a hen weekend, just the three of us. How d’you fancy going to Glasgow for old time’s sake?
Her attention is momentarily diverted by a painting of the Clyde, silvery-green beneath a searing blue sky.
Sadie,
she continues,
I know the babies are still little, but d’you think Barney would be okay with you coming away? And Lou – I know York’s hardly on the doorstep but d’you think you could make it, get some time off work? We could go to all our old haunts, try to track down some of the old crowd, maybe even find Johnny, although God knows where he disappeared to. Or maybe it’d be better just the three of us.

So what d’you think? Shall we talk about dates? I know you’ll be at the wedding in just a few weeks, but I honestly think I’ll burst if I don’t see you before that. No pressure though!!

Lots of love, Han xxx

As she clicks ‘send’ and turns off her computer, Hannah feels her spirits rise as she pictures the three of them – the Garnet Street Girls – back together again.
Please come
, she murmurs as she pads back down to her and Ryan’s bedroom.
Please, please say yes
.

FOURTEEN

Lou feels renewed after seeing Jo, the friend who championed her jewellery, helping to get it stocked in various boutiques and gift shops around York. It’s a bright, sunny day and she’s glad she’s following her new rule to make the most of Sundays. Spike hadn’t wanted to come. ‘Brunch?’ he’d laughed as she was heading out. ‘Who has
brunch
? I mean, what’s the point of it?’

‘The point,’ she explained, ‘is that there isn’t any point – it’s just
nice
.’ And she’d skipped off, relieved to escape the flat which now felt as if there was no air left in it at all. She’s glad, too, that Spike didn’t come. He still tends to slip into flirt mode, his default setting with women, which might have been vaguely charming when he was in his mid- or even late-thirties, but is less endearing at forty-eight. In fact, although Lou’s wide circle of girlfriends know him well, and aren’t averse to bantering lewdly with him, she worries sometimes that he might be starting to come across as a slightly creepy middle-aged man.

On a whim, Lou had two Bloody Marys, which have made her feel pleasantly woozy as she takes the walkway along the river before turning up into the slightly grubbier neighbourhood where she and Spike live. But as she steps into the hallway, before she’s even climbed the narrow stairs to their flat, she senses her
joie de vivre
ebbing away. She inhales a vaguely unsettling scent of something germy and festering. The smell leads her into the flat where her boyfriend is curled up on the living room rug, the gas fire flickering its feeble orangey glow. Some old black-and-white sci-fi movie is on the TV with the sound down, and the rug is strewn with crumpled tissues.

‘Hi, love.’ Lou bobs down to plant a kiss on the top of his head. ‘It’s a gorgeous spring day out there. D’you really need the fire on?’

‘Yeah. I’m feeling kind of shivery.’ To demonstrate, he shivers dramatically.

Lou straightens up and observes him. Spike has constructed a sort of nest for himself on the floor with the sofa cushions, plus her fluffy pink dressing gown, which he’s bunched up and fashioned into a fat pillow. ‘Maybe you should get out, have a walk or something,’ she suggests. ‘It’s really stuffy in here. No wonder you feel awful.’

He looks at her with mournful eyes and dabs his nostrils with a wet tissue. ‘I don’t really feel well enough for that, Lou-Lou.’

She frowns. ‘You seemed okay when I left. Just had a bit of a sniffle, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, well, it’s more than that now. It’s a
lot
worse than that.’ He delves under her dressing gown where, much to her consternation, he seems to be storing yet more tissues, like a squirrel secreting away nuts for the winter months. Lou glances around the newly-appointed sick bay. Their flat is shabby, and bits have started to ping off the Ikea shelves. There’s a fine layer of dust on the TV screen, and the wicker newspaper rack is overflowing with ageing papers. Clearly deciding that Lou isn’t being nearly sympathetic enough, Spike picks up a tatty paperback, finds his page and holds it open at arm’s length.

‘I don’t know why you don’t get reading glasses,’ Lou offers, carefully sidestepping the collection of abandoned mugs.