Kismetology (27 page)

"Mac, I have something to ask you."

"Go ahead," I say, fully expecting what it is.

"Can I stay with you for a couple more nights? At least
until Tuesday when the surveyor has been and I know something is being done
about the kitchen."

Yep, that’s what I expected. "Of course you can,"
I tell her.

"And Baby and Pussy too?"

"Of course."

"Ahh, thank you so much." She comes over and hugs
me. "It just doesn’t feel right to be here, not with the kitchen all burnt
out like that. It feels so empty. Almost haunted… I don’t know. I just don’t
want to be here."

"I get that," I say, not really wanting to be here
either.

She sighs.

"You should get some clothes together so we won’t need
to come back again until Tuesday. I’ll take you shopping later to get some food
in and find something for the cat and dog to eat."

"Thanks, Mac," she says. "What about Dan?
Won’t he mind?"

"He’ll be fine," I lie.

Dan is going to kill me.

CHAPTER 42

"You did
what
?" Dan
practically screeches at me.

"I told her she could stay until Tuesday when the
insurance guy comes to assess the damage."

"Why the fuck would you do that?"

"Because she didn’t want to be alone in her
house."

"Well, you go and fucking move in with her then."

"There’s no kitchen, Dan."

He snorts.

"And it’s only until Tuesday."

"Mackenzie, there are three fucking suitcases in my
hallway. You think she’s staying until Tuesday? She’s moved in until she’s
seventy, more like."

"No, she hasn’t. She’ll go home on Tuesday. She said
that she’ll be more comfortable there when she knows something is being done
about the kitchen."

"She also said I tried to kill her."

"She told you that?"

"She implied it without using the actual word
‘murderer’, yes."

"Shit. I’m sorry, Dan. I told her to leave that one
alone."

"What the fuck ever."

He turns around and smacks the wall with the flat of his
hand.

"Mac, how do you propose she’s only going to be here
until Tuesday? Even when the insurance guy has been, there will still be no kitchen.
He’s not going to wave a magic wand and get it all sparkling and new. He’s
solely going to give the builders a budget to work with. These claims can take
weeks to go through, months even, and you expect her to live there for all that
time with no kitchen? And then when the builders do get in eventually, there
will be all the mess and dust and what have you. She won’t want to be there
then either."

"So, she’ll go back on Tuesday and just pop up to us to
cook her meals or whatever. Or get takeaways."

"Oh well, that’s okay then," he says
sarcastically. "Mac, have you even looked in our kitchen? My Belisana
stuff is all over the unit for the fucking cat to eat at its own free will
because she just cleared my cupboard out to put all her shopping in. Did you
even see how much she bought? It’s enough food to last two years, and you
expect her to go home on Tuesday? Get real."

"I thought she was just stocking up. She doesn’t have a
kitchen to put food in, Dan. The least we can do is offer her one of our cupboards."

"Yeah,
my
cupboard for restaurant stuff."

"Well, I didn’t tell her which cupboard to use. She
obviously didn’t know it was yours."

"She knew exactly whose it was. Why do you think she
used it?"

"Oh for god’s sake, Dan. Are we really arguing over a cupboard
here?"

"No, Mackenzie, we’re arguing over the fact that your
fucking mother has moved in to our house for the next twenty years and you
didn’t even consult me."

"I don’t know if you remember or not but you’d stormed
off to work in a strop…"

"Yeah, because her fucking little dog tried to eat me
alive for having the audacity to walk down my own stairs."

"They’re my stairs too, and, you know what, I didn’t
think you’d mind her staying a couple of nights given the dire
circumstances."

"Oh, for fuck’s sake. She didn’t die, Mackenzie. So her
kitchen is a little blackened. So fucking what? I wouldn’t be surprised if
she’d started that fire herself, just so she could come between us."

"Don’t be so damn stupid, Dan. That’s as bad as her
saying you tried to kill her."

"Oh come on. She hates me and so far nothing she’s done
to break us up has worked. She’s probably getting desperate and will try
anything to split us up."

"Oh, and what exactly has she done to break us up?
Okay, so she’s a little overbearing, but she’s my mother. She’s just looking
out for me. Unlike you, who couldn’t even be arsed to get up in the middle of
the night to beat a burglar round the head with a baseball bat."

"It wasn’t a burglar."

"That’s not the point. It could have been. How would
you have felt if he’d have held me at gunpoint and stolen all our stuff?"

"It wasn’t a burglar."

"But it might have been. You didn’t know that it
wasn’t. It could have been a deranged serial killer, and he could have done
anything he wanted to me, all because you think sleep is more important."

"I think it actually was a deranged serial killer. I
mean, your mother isn’t far off, is she?"

"Oh, shut up."

"I can’t believe we’re still talking about this. It was
three in the morning, I was knackered, and you’re still on my back about it
because you had to answer the door to your own fucking mother."

"I didn’t know it was my mother. It could have been
anyone."

"Yeah, and what happened to being an independent woman
of the twenty-first century? Since when do you need a man to protect you at all
times?"

"It’s got nothing to do with that. I was vulnerable,
Dan. It was a situation I needed you to take charge of and you wouldn’t."

"It was answering the door to your fucking
mother!"

"I didn’t know it was my fucking mother!" The
words explode from my mouth in an angry shout.

"You’ve been dating too many old guys who still live in
the nineteen-fifties and think women should be seen and not heard and that you
should just be the little homemaker and let the guy do all the hard work."

"Defending from burglars is a guy’s job. At least, it
would be nice if I had a guy who would do that for me. At least you know how to
swing a baseball bat. I don’t. I was just holding a big stick."

"It wasn’t a fucking burglar."

"That is not the point."

"I want to ask how you can be so goddamn impossible,
but I know exactly where you get it from—your bloody mother."

"Can you keep your voice down, please? She’ll be back
any minute."

"And, oh dear, she might hear me? Oh dear, she might
find out that I don’t fucking want her here? Oh dear, what a shame."

"Oh, shut up, Dan."

"Where’s she gone, anyway?"

"She’s taking the dog for a walk."

"So it doesn’t crap on my carpet, no doubt."

"It’s not just
your
carpet, you know. This is
our
house, Dan. I wouldn’t object if your mother’s house nearly burnt to the ground
and
she
had to move in for a couple of days."

"That’s because my mother would have the decency to
stay in a hotel and not deposit a menagerie of animals and three large suitcases
on our doorstep."

"That’s because your mother lives two hundred miles
away, not three doors down. And what a horrible son you would be if you didn’t
even offer up your couch for a few nights to save her shelling out for a hotel
room."

"She’d be reimbursed by the insurance," he sneers.

"Yeah, and we live three houses away. The nearest hotel
is miles away and probably doesn’t allow animals."

"Who the fuck cares about the animals?"

"She does. And I do. You can’t just chuck ‘em out on
the street."

"There’s nothing wrong with her own fucking house,
Mackenzie."

"Her kitchen is a charcoaled husk."

"Yeah, which she probably did on purpose so she could
come between us."

"Don’t be so bloody paranoid, Dan."

"I’m just surprised it’s her sleeping on the couch and
not us. I thought you would have offered her our own bed, right from under our
noses."

"I did. But she said she was fine with the pull-out
sofa. Wasn’t that nice of her?"

"No, it was downright stupid of you."

"Well, we should have a spare room, shouldn’t we? Oh,
wait, hang on, we do have a spare room. At least, we would do if it wasn’t full
of your junk."

"Maybe you don’t remember, but
we
discussed this
and we
both
decided that if we did that room up as a bedroom, we’d have
your mother staying over every damn night.
We
decided to leave it as it
is."

"It’s not even useable, thanks to your shit filling it
up. Who the hell buys all that sporting equipment and never uses it, anyway?
Who the hell needs a boxing kit when they’ve got nowhere to hang it up? Or a
rowing machine? And, seriously, when are you ever going to use that damn
canoe?"

"I’m busy. Working, you know? That thing that doesn’t
involve painting white stripes on pink nails or setting up useless love
matches."

"That was below the belt, Dan. My job is just as much a
job as yours is."

"All right, I’m sorry," he says. "But you
insulted my canoe."

"The damn canoe has been taking up space since we moved
in here. You don’t even know how to canoe. And do you see a river anywhere near
here? Or a lake? Or somewhere you could actually use a boat?"

"It’s not a boat, it’s a canoe, and this isn’t about my
canoe."

"No, it’s about the fact that you’re complaining that
my mother is in the way, when she could be not in the way if your bloody sports
shit wasn’t taking up the entire spare room."

"Excuse me, I seem to recall that you have half your
college stuff in there. Most of the room is taken up by the fake hands you used
to practice your nail shit on."

"Oh please, there are two fake hands and a couple of painting
kits. Which take up less space combined that your stupid step machine which you
never even got out the box."

"You bought the fucking thing for me. I don’t even know
who told you I wanted a step machine anyway, they’re a load of rubbish."

"You did. You looked at it in the Argos
catalogue."

"Oh, Mackenzie, leave it out. The simple fact is that
you invited your mother to stay without even asking me, and now her cat has
pissed on my new carpet and her dog is chewing up everything it can get its
teeth into."

"
He
is not an it," I say. "And if you
didn’t want your suede slippers chewed up then you shouldn’t have left them on
the floor."

"This is my fucking house. I can leave them wherever I
want to."

"It’s our house."

"So
we
should be able to throw the fucking dog
out, but
you
won’t let me."

"She’s
my
family, Dan. And, as sad as it seems,
her animals are
her
family. They have just as much right to be here as
she does."

"She doesn’t have any right to be here. She should be
in a hotel. She would be if you weren’t such a pushover."

"Oh shut the fuck up. I asked her to stay the first
night, and I was going to offer her a few nights longer anyway."

"You keep telling yourself that, Mackenzie. You just
keep telling yourself that."

"I will keep telling myself that because it’s true, you
idiot. If I didn’t want her here then she wouldn’t be here. At least she cares
about me. Unlike you."

"Are we back to the fucking burglar again?"

"Yes, we’re back to the fucking burglar again. I told
you, I was in a very vulnerable position and I hate being vulnerable. And you,
the one person in my life I thought would protect me, you roll over and tell me
to go back to sleep."

"You’re twenty-nine-years old. You should be able to
take care of yourself."

"I can take care of myself, but it would be nice to
have someone else take over occasionally."

"Oh, come on! I take care of you all the time. And I
take care of your fucking mother half the time as well. You don’t think I’m a
good boyfriend? What other boyfriend would have let you spend the past few
months dating anything with a pulse, huh? What other boyfriend wouldn’t have
minded you seeing other men almost every night for months on end?"

"Daniel, it’s up to me who I date."

"Oh, we’ve resorted to full names now, have we? Okay,
fine. Mackenzie Atkinson. It is not up to you who you date when you are already
dating me!"

"How can you say that? The dates I was going on… They
were with men old enough to be my father. Some of them older than my
grandfather. And they weren’t even real dates, for god’s sake. They were in
your
restaurant. It wasn’t like we were going to nip off to the bathroom for a
quickie, was it?"

"I have no idea."

"Is that why you wanted me at Belisana? So you could
check that I wasn’t copping off with a seventy-year-old?"

"No, Mac, that’s—"

I’m too mad to care about interrupting him. "You really
think that’s what I want? Dan, I haven’t met a normal man in weeks. Every time
I was with a loser twice my age I couldn’t wait to get home to you. Because no
matter how many dates I go on for other people, I’m dating you, Dan. And that’s
all I want. Are you seriously telling me that you don’t know me well enough to
know that I wouldn’t date anyone twice my age in a million years? That you
don’t know me well enough to know that the only man I want to date is
you?"

"No, Mackenzie—"

"Don’t ‘no, Mackenzie’ me. What you’re saying is that
you don’t trust me. You think that just because I’m forced to have dinner with
some old age pensioner that I’m automatically going to go home with him?"