These Days of Ours (28 page)

‘Just one more chance?’ Kate had pleaded in a way she never would on her own behalf.

‘This is what he does.’ Esther had stood up in spattered overalls. ‘He makes the people around him responsible when what he should do is stand up and face the mess he’s
made. That look on your face,’ Esther had said, pointing. ‘That’s the look I remember on my mum’s face. She was broken in the end, and for what?’ She’d fiercely
buttoned up her parka. ‘So Big A can booze, that’s what.’

That Angus put Esther’s last card on the mantelpiece year after year, that he thought of her constantly when sober and cried for her when drunk didn’t matter to Esther. She knew what
a diamond her father was, but ‘none of that means anything day to day when you’re dealing with alcoholism and its power to spoil’.

The two note beep that heralded a text reminded Kate of the world beyond Astor House. A reassuringly normal place where people right now were setting their alarm clocks and brushing their
teeth.

All the lies, layered over each other, had solidified into a patina. Angus would never go to China. He barely went to the end of the street. He could tramp a path from society ‘do’
to PR bash and back to the club, to places where his endless drinking looked like high living and not low addiction.

Kate couldn’t persuade Angus to her own house, never mind China.

Love never came without strings. Kate was more than old enough to know this. It brought duty, too; she loved Angus and therefore she looked after him. Twice he’d gone cold turkey.
He’d meekly obeyed her (daytime) demand that he see a therapist. Every time that Angus drove Kate to an ultimatum, he vowed to turn over a new leaf.

Kate was stuck. As if the courtyard was paved not with Cornish slate but gum.

After one memorable abomination, Angus had hung his head and said, ‘You should leave me. Everybody walks away backwards in the end.’

Instead of leaving, Kate had pledged herself anew. ‘If you don’t care enough about yourself to clean up, do it for
me
.’

There had followed a period of calm and stability, which had erupted one night into chaos. Still, Kate hoped for change.

When Angus was what Kate thought of as his real self, she needed nothing more than his jokes and his giggling and the smell of his skin and the clumsy way he held her, to get her through life.
She fed off Angus, drawing energy from the light that surrounded him. There was always fun afoot, and after the fun there was the calm of their togetherness, when all was private and quiet and she
could see that he – miracle of miracles – felt the same way about her.

Reading the signs, Kate guessed that this Christmas chaos was the start of an epic binge. With the club closed for three days, Angus could apply himself to drinking with the diligence of a
professional, the shutters barred and a miasma of self-hate like a shawl about his shoulders.

If I left . . .
The front door was ten steps away, whether Kate walked there backwards or not. The cold dark street would swallow her.

. . . I could go to Charlie
. Charlie would take her in. He’d listen and expostulate and then he’d console. But he no longer loved Kate the way she wanted him to. The way Angus
loved her.

Like the carved man and woman on a wooden cuckoo clock, Charlie and Kate constantly missed each other. One came out as the other went back in. When she was single, he was in love, and vice
versa. They were obviously a pair but the mechanism that ruled their lives was implacable. Never together, eternally out of step, their segregation was preordained . . .
Or I could just go
home
. She imagined herself curled up in her own house, feeling it come back to life around her after months of neglect. She could be herself, not the person anybody else expected or wanted her
to be.

The shout from indoors shocked Kate. She’d expected two, maybe three hours of respite as Angus slept, comatose.

‘Damn her!’

Through the glazed door Kate saw Angus jigging about the back bar.

A flame soared. Kate leaped to her feet.

‘Little bitch!’ Like a pagan, Angus danced around the burning Christmas card in an ashtray on the counter.

Kate threw a glass of water over the small blaze. She hadn’t meant to cry, but he’d punched through to one of her fears. ‘Angus! You could have burned the house
down.’

‘I want to,’ said Angus, his face florid. ‘I want to burn down the world.’

‘Another round of shots, please.’ Even as Kate said it, she regretted it. The ‘reserved’ booth in the corner was anything but; Aunty Marjorie had never
tasted shots until an hour ago and now she was threatening to kiss the barman. ‘Just a Coke for me.’ Somebody had to keep their head. Becca, who was notionally the organiser of this hen
night, was already giddy and Mum was gearing up for a rendition of
Danny Boy
.

‘You’ve got another guest.’ The barman gestured at a tall figure further down the bar, shrugging off a coat. ‘Nice-looking bird.’

‘But everybody’s here.’ The eleven hens were all present and correct. Kate peered at the well-built lass grinning at her, lipstick all over her teeth.
‘Charlie?’

His legs supermodel long in thick tan tights, Charlie’s little black dress clung on for dear life. Mincing towards her on stiletto heels, he grunted with pain at each step. ‘You
women deserve a medal,’ he said, ‘simply for being able to walk and talk at the same time.’

‘You make an . . . interesting woman,’ said Kate through her laughter. ‘That’s quite a cleavage.’

‘Too much?’

‘
Too much
he asks, standing there in a Dolly Parton wig and sparkly eye shadow. You look amazing. The hens will
die
.’

They almost did. The corner booth erupted as the giantess approached. Aunty Marjorie crossed herself over and over, and Mum had to dig out her glasses. ‘You make a better-looking woman
than Kate!’

‘I don’t understand.’ Becca didn’t join in with the jubilation. ‘Charlie can’t come, he’s a bloke.’

‘I had to be here,’ said Charlie. ‘Couldn’t miss the hen night of one of my favourite women. Equality!’ He punched the air and his bangles rattled.

‘You’re very welcome, Charlie,’ said Mum, making space beside her.

‘Why didn’t you bring your girlfriend?’ Becca was as arch as somebody who’d been alternating shots with vodka jellies could be. ‘Does she have to be up for school
tomorrow?’

‘She’s picking me up later,’ said Charlie, pretending the query was kindly meant.

‘On her skateboard?’

‘Shush, Becca!’ Kate was determined to keep the peace.

‘Don’t shush me,’ said Becca. ‘You’ve told me you think it’s daft. A thirty-seven-year-old man running around with a twenty-year-old girl.’

‘We don’t run around,’ said Charlie. ‘And I’m plainly a thirty-seven-year-old woman.’

‘Easily the most terrifying thirty-seven-year-old woman I’ve ever seen,’ said Kate, grateful that the barman took that moment to arrive with the shots. The combination of booze
and an opportunity for sexual harassment distracted Becca from goading her ex-husband.

‘Do you really think me and Anna are daft?’ asked Charlie, discreetly.

‘You know I do.’ Kate saw no reason to pretend. Zipping around in his new camper van, hanging out at music festivals he hadn’t even heard of before he met Anna, texting Kate
snaps of himself bare-chested in love beads, Charlie was having lots of fun but it smacked of displacement activity. He and Anna never sat still; she wondered how well they actually knew each
other.

‘I love her, you know,’ said Charlie, in a wounded voice at odds with the hell bent hedonism of the rest of the table.

That was the trouble: Charlie
always
loved them. He wasn’t to know that his declarations cheapened Kate’s memories of when he’d said the same about her. With Lucy
she’d understood, but Anna was vapid and . . . there was no flowery way to put it, the woman wasn’t
nice
.

‘Flo likes her. Flo
loves
the camper van. I’m not an embarrassing dad.’ Charlie made a noise in his throat. ‘Not yet.’ At eleven, Flo was nearing the tipping
point whereafter
everything
Charlie said, did or thought would mortify her.

‘I can’t take anything you say seriously when you have eyeliner on. Oh my God.’ Kate put her drink down. ‘In drag, you look just like . . .’

‘I know.’

Kate and Charlie both looked across the table at Becca, partway through some complex joke which would have no punchline, tossing back her blonde extensions and fixing her cantilevered black
dress’s neckline.

‘It’s uncanny.’ Kate needed a shot, suddenly. ‘It would take a troupe of Freudians to work that out.’

‘Becca’s
furious
with me,’ said Charlie. ‘I won’t back down. I’ll fight her on this.’

‘This isn’t the time or place to discuss that.’ Kate didn’t want the latest bone of contention to ruin the hen night.

‘Has Jaffa . . .’ Charlie didn’t seem able to finish the sentence. The dog, an OAP, had been poorly.

‘He’s here tonight,’ said Kate. She nodded cagily at an urn in the middle of the table.

Charlie’s eyes widened. Kate knew he was sorely tempted to laugh. Instead he whispered, ‘R.I.P. Jaffa.’

A man loomed over Kate. She jumped, startled, when she realised he was a policeman. ‘We’ve had a serious complaint,’ he said, silencing the cackling hens. ‘About the
bride to be.’

His uniform’s very tight
, thought Kate.

‘The complaint is,’ the officer continued, ‘she’s too SEXY!’

And with that he whipped off his trousers.

‘Dear God no!’ shouted Kate, who had a long-standing fear of male strippers.

‘Yay!’ shouted Becca who’d booked him and would book one for herself every evening if only Leon would allow it.

‘Where’s this naughty bride?’ shouted the officer, who smelled strongly of self-tan.

All fingers pointed and, her hands on her head, screaming with mingled humiliation and excitement, Mum stood up and yelled, ‘Arrest me, officer!’

The crowded wine bar clapped along to Right Said Fred’s
I’m Too Sexy
while the stripper whittled Kate’s mother’s nose to a point with his groin.

‘Jaffa’s loving it,’ said Becca, sentimental tears in her eyes as she cradled the urn.

‘Why,’ said Charlie, clapping out of time and avoiding the gyrating man on the table, ‘did Jaffa have to shuffle off his mortal coil just when I need Becca to be rational? I
wanted to discuss the situation this evening.’

It was all Seattle’s fault. If that rainy city had sufficient home-grown camera operatives with a degree in media technology then Leon wouldn’t have been offered a job in one of that
city’s cable channel newsrooms.

An opportunity for Leon, an adventure for Becca, the job spelled misery for Charlie.
I’d be relegated to part time dad
, he raged.
I’d only see Flo during school
holidays
.

At loggerheads with Becca, Charlie stopped short of canvassing Flo. The girl remained silent as her parents raged behind her back, at the heart of the conundrum yet removed from it. Still a
goth, Flo was sparing with words. Perhaps growing up with Becca, who spent them like a sailor on shore leave, had made her that way. Such a sensitive girl would see merit in both her parents’
viewpoints – as did Kate – but would Flo, like Kate, believe that the need for a father and daughter to be close trumped everything else?

When the stripper had bared all – Kate tried not to stare; her mother let out a frank
Jayzus!
– Becca shouted, ‘Speech!’

To wild applause and stamping of feet, Mum stood. The smile on her face, a rarity during Kate’s childhood, was now a constant. ‘I’ve found my Dodi,’ she told the faces
turned towards her. Kate could tell who among them were Princess Di fans from the reaction; only the women who remembered the unfortunate who died alongside Diana in the Parisian car crash
understood. Mum had persevered in her belief that Dodi was the love of Diana’s life, despite evidence to the contrary. It suited the myth. ‘I was introduced to the love of my life . .
.’ She turned to Kate. ‘By Angus.’

When Mum had arrived home after the 2012 Christmas lunch at Astor House, she’d invited the lady driver in for a cup of tea, as would any self-respecting Irish woman. ‘Lovely woman,
that Mary,’ she’d told Kate the next morning. ‘And a divil for country music!’

Mum’s allegiance to Garth Brooks – inferior only to Princess Di and the baby Jesus in her personal pantheon – had driven Kate’s father to distraction. At Mary’s
suggestion, Mum joined her line dancing club. Mary bought Mum a Stetson for her birthday. They popped out together to car boot sales and country pubs.

Kate and Becca discussed this new friendship. ‘Has your mum, you know,
realised
?’ Becca would ask.

With boyishly short hair, Mary was refreshingly free of make-up, just her ever-ready smile brightening her face. Always in jeans and plain shirt, Mary favoured a lace-up brogue. Kate concluded
that Mary was either Amish or lesbian. ‘And,’ she added, ‘she’s not Amish.’