Getting Over Mr. Right (13 page)

Now that Lucas was twenty, he was at college, studying for an art foundation course that he hoped would help him make it to film school. Lucas looked every inch the art student that day. He would not have seemed out of place on the arm of one of the Olsen twins. He wore his dirty-blond hair straggly and long beneath a greasy old hat that had belonged to our grandfather (his gardening hat). His tight jeans were pulled bizarrely low so that his underpants were clearly visible over his waistband. Not such a good look, as far as I was concerned. Especially since I had no doubt that the underpants he was showing off had been bought by our mum. But Lucas’s bizarre fashion habits were apparently very hip and they didn’t seem to be costing him success with the girls. Since his voice broke (and actually before—he was a very sweet child when he wasn’t tormenting me), he had been surrounded by girls. When I arrived that Sunday, one of the latest batch of girls was just leaving. She sloped away from the house as though she
were sneaking past the paparazzi outside the home of Russell Brand.

“Did that girl stay the night?” I asked Lucas. She had a distinct walk-of-shame air about her.

“Uh-huh,” said Lucas.

“What? In your room?”

“Mm-hmm.”

That would never have happened when I was living at home. I wasn’t even allowed to sit at the same end of the sofa as my boyfriend if Mum and Dad were around. I tried not to be bothered by the fact that it seemed so unfair. After all, at age thirty-two, it was a long time since I’d had to answer to anyone with regard to who shared my bed at night.

“Is she your girlfriend?” I asked.

Lucas look horrified. “Why do you people have to label everything?” he asked me.

You people
? I felt incredibly old.

“And what have you done to your hair? It looks horrible.”

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“I hope that’s a wash in, wash out,” said my mother.

Dad was in the kitchen that day. Mum had bought him a cookery course for his sixtieth birthday, since she was determined that things would change before my father retired. She told me she wanted him to be able to cook because she had no intention of spending the rest of her life chained to the kitchen. When she retired, she was going to write a book and learn to fly. Dad would have to make his own toast.

Dad cottoned on at once to Mum’s plan but he had gone ahead and taken the course with good grace and discovered, to his surprise (and mine), that he really rather enjoyed it. Ever since, it had been hard to keep him out of the kitchen. That
day he was doing something complicated with beef. Though Mum joined me for an aperitif (Cinzano and lemonade) in the living room, I could tell that she was itching to be in the kitchen, overseeing what was bound (in her eyes) to be a disaster.

It wasn’t. Even Lucas managed to grunt his approval as he shoveled his food away in record time.

Now that Dad was doing the cooking, Mum had to do the washing up. This was a part of the deal she hadn’t bargained for, and she pulled the rubber gloves on with a hint of disdain. She’d forgotten that the best part of cooking Sunday lunch was getting to slob out in the conservatory afterward, while Dad and Lucas cleared away. I sensed she was wondering if delegating lunch was worth the sacrifice.

I joined Mum at the sink. They didn’t have a dishwasher. It was something to do with the lecture they’d received from the vicar who married them. He’d told them that the glue that held marriages together was making sure that you washed up together. As far as the vicar was concerned, there was nothing that couldn’t be resolved when you had to stand side by side for at least fifteen minutes a day. One washing, one wiping. It was for that reason that Mum and Dad didn’t have a dishwasher installed when they renovated the kitchen. Mum refused to budge on the matter, though I argued that when the vicar delivered his lecture, dishwashers had yet to be invented. Surely they could substitute going for a walk with the dog. The elderly family dog, called Ben, was a very fat spaniel and would have benefited enormously from that.

The washing up did, however, provide the opportunity for me to have a conversation with my mother. It was the first time I had managed to get her on her own. Dad was snoozing under the newspaper. Lucas was upstairs doing course work, or rather playing some zombie game on the ’Net.

“I don’t know what possessed you to dye your hair brown,” she said. She had been tutting about my new look all lunchtime. “You always had such nice hair.”

“I wanted a change, you know. After Michael.”

“For God’s sake, don’t go letting him ruin your life now that he’s left you. Have it dyed back how it was. Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

Mum had been remarkably kind and sensitive since the breakup, never once suggesting to me that time was running out if I ever hoped to have a husband and children. In fact, she once said to me that had she her time again, she would like to try out a life like mine. No responsibilities. No one to tell you that you can’t have a satin frill around the dressing table. I suggested to her that the very fanciest frill around the dressing table couldn’t, in my view, compare with having someone to come home to.

“Ha! The dog acts more pleased to see me than your father does. Unless your brother has already fed him.”

Ben the dog was in love with Lucas, which was only right, I supposed, since the dog had been bought to make up for the fact that after I left for college, when Lucas was just six and a half, he was effectively an only child. Their bond was unbreakable. When Lucas was upstairs, Ben would position himself at the bottom of the stairs, as if to keep guard over his master. I knew that everyone dreaded the day when the smelly old mutt finally passed on.

“You know we’ll always do our best to help you,” said Mum then.

And that’s when I had a very bad idea.

“Mum,” I began, “do you really mean that?”

“Yes,” Mum answered cautiously.

“Because you know how I’ve always said that I wanted to
get ahead on my own and would never consider asking you for anything more than your love?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it turns out I need a little more than love right now.”

Mum whirled around to face me. Her hands were still in the washing-up bowl.

“I need to borrow some money.”

“How much?”

“A thousand pounds.” I said it quickly, as if that might make the amount seem smaller.

“Are you in trouble?” Mum asked. Her eyes widened hopefully as she asked me, and I noticed that her gaze had drifted down to my stomach. After all those years spent lecturing me on how not to get into trouble, I knew that she wanted nothing more than for me to announce that Michael had left me with child. “Because you don’t have to do anything rash, sweetheart. You know that your father and I would be delighted—”

“I’m not pregnant,” I said quickly.

“Oh.” Mum’s eyes lost their grandma glow. “Then what do you need a thousand pounds for?”

“I want to do a course,” I lied.

“A course on what?”

“On … er …” I had to think on my feet. Rather stupidly, I hadn’t planned for this very obvious question. As I hesitated, Ben nudged the back of my knee in the hope of a tidbit, and it came to me. The perfect answer. “Dog grooming,” I said.

“Dog grooming?”

“Yes.”

I hoped that would be the end of it, but of course it wasn’t.

“What do you want to do a course in dog grooming for?”

“For my career.”

“But you work in advertising. You’ve got a good job. A proper career.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s tough out there. People are talking redundancies all the time.”

“Is your firm talking about redundancies?” my mother asked. She still had her hands in the washing-up bowl. “Phil! Ashleigh’s firm is talking about redundancies!” she yelled to my father, who was snoozing beneath the business pages. My father spluttered awake.

“They’re not talking about redundancies,” I said, “but I don’t think that anyone can really afford to be complacent right now. That’s all. I’m just trying to make sure that if anything were to go wrong, I would be in the best possible position to look for work elsewhere.”

“Then why don’t you take a course in cake decorating?” said my mother. “You’d find that more interesting. And you already know you have a talent! People will always want wedding cakes. You get a qualification in cake making and you could charge the earth for three tiers. That cake you did for your grandma’s eightieth birthday was a triumph.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

“That’s what you ought to be doing if you’re worried about your job. Cake making. There are courses all over the place, and I’m sure they don’t cost anything like a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds for a course in dog grooming!” She raised her eyebrows.

I could see the money I needed slipping away from me. I wished I hadn’t started it.

“I understand what you’re saying, Mum, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make anywhere near as much money in cakes.”

“But I should think that dog grooming is the first thing to go when people trim their household budgets.”

“Not necessarily. You know how much people love their pets,” I said, indicating Ben with a nod of my head. Mum always bought Ben birthday and Christmas presents. “There are
lots of lonely people who treat their dogs like children. They’re not going to cut back on them. So I think my idea, to do the dog-grooming course, is the best one for now. Can you help me?”

“I’ll have to ask your father.”

Thankfully, though he was officially the breadwinner, Dad deferred to Mum on all matters financial. When she gave her consent, he merely shrugged and said, “Dog grooming,” with a shake of the head, as though it were some obscure branch of psychology he had never previously heard of.

Mum wrote the check.

“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can,” I promised her. “Thank you so much. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”

That much was true.

That night I put the check in the middle of the kitchen table and looked at it guiltily. Was I going mad? I was planning to hand over a thousand pounds to a voodoo priestess in an attempt to win back Michael’s heart. Would I have been better advised to take a grand out of the bank in fifty-pound notes and toss them off Battersea Bridge and into the Thames?

I should have handed the check back and told Mum that she was right. It would be more sensible for me to do a cake course. But I thought of the promises that Martha/Tiberius had made to me over the phone. To get Michael back, a thousand pounds seemed a very small price to pay. Practically peanuts. And I was sure that if Martha did manage to work her magic and Michael and I eventually married, Mum would be only too pleased and amused to hear how she had made her contribution to my happiness.

The following morning I took the check to the bank and made an appointment to see Martha four days later, by which time the check should have cleared.

With that appointment in my diary, I actually managed to make it into the office for the next four days and did some useful work between looking at the Well-Sprung Interiors website and checking Michael’s updates on Facebook. (He seemed to think that “Kevin” had told him Alex was a boy for a joke.) Oh, Facebook. Source of such agony and comfort. Each time I logged on I held my breath and hardly dared open my eyes beyond a squint until I could be sure that Michael hadn’t changed his relationship status again, to engaged.

Back before Michael broke up with me, back when my brain was still working (just), I would have turned and fled home the minute I emerged from the Tube station nearest to the address that Martha the cat psychic had given me. I was carrying a thousand pounds in cash through a part of London that even the hardest character Clint Eastwood ever played would not have chanced to walk through alone. And I was carrying my one and only real designer handbag: a Prada number I’d found on eBay. Though I doubted that any of the local footpads would have believed that anyone who ventured into their hood would be so daft as to carry real Prada, I didn’t want to lose it.

I walked quickly, praying that I could get to Martha’s door without incident. I was on such high alert that when a twenty-something lad opened his mouth to say something (like
Gimme your handbag
, I assumed), I barreled on past him at high speed, so that he had to shout after me to tell me that my shoelace was undone, right as I tripped over it. Then I managed to get lost. The battery on my iPhone had died and I had to call Martha from a phone box while another fierce-eyed boy-man waited outside. A drug dealer arranging a drop-off, I was sure. When he opened the door, I handed my bag straight over.

“What are you doing?” he asked, giving the bag back to me. “I only want to know how long you’re going to be. I need to call my mum to remind her to record
Britain’s Got Talent
.”

When he’d finished calling his mum, he directed me to the block where Martha lived. I had been standing right in front of it.

Martha opened the door.

“I knew the Great Ceiling Cat would help you find your way here,” she said as she ushered me inside.