Out on a Limb (12 page)

Chapter 11

A
POSTCARD
. F
RONTSIDE
:
LEANING
Tower of Pisa (by night). Backside:
Dear Mum, Jake, Spike and Nana, we’re not actually here. We’re in some bar in a place called Collesalvetti,(we camped here last night) having a drink while waiting to catch the train down to Florence. Nothing much to report. Big news here is that J thinks he was standing behind Jeremy Beadle in the bread shop this morning. I say not. I think he is hallucinating due to too much grappa. Tho’ the barman here has a sign up saying ‘Tony Blairs and family most welcome!’ We’re keeping our eyes peeled … LOL S xxxxx

‘Absolutely not,’ my mother says firmly. Despite the enthusiastic patter of her new number one fan, my mother doesn’t want to live at Abercorn Gate, and she doesn’t want the sideboard either.

Another weekend, another trip to the Myrtles, another sunny Saturday lost to Project Mum. ‘Oh, I don’t
know
,’ she sighs. She’s spent much of the morning wafting in skittish bursts about the living room like a wraith on a moped. ‘Do I want
any
of it, frankly?’ She lifts the hand without the sherry in it up to her brow and looks at herself in the living room mirror. She’ll want to take that, at least. Take all of them, no doubt. She smoothes her brow with a finger and pouts at herself. ‘Oh, this is all such a
chore
…’

‘Mother, you’ll need furniture,’ Pru says irritably.

‘The nest of tables?’ I suggest to Doug, who, along with Jake (who’s been a sweetheart), has been humping stuff since he got here and has by now adopted the sort of defeated and slightly desperate expression he usually reserves for Bristol City FC. I point. ‘And that armchair at the very least. And how about that bookcase, Mum? You might as well have a bookcase.’

But my mother is not to be jollied along. ‘Abigail, what’s the point? I’ve read every single book in the house already. And I certainly can’t afford to buy new ones.’

We all sigh in unison as soon as her back’s turned. ‘Let’s take the bookcase anyway,’ Pru whispers. ‘She can fill it with her bloody trophies instead.’

Which are currently parked in a box in the hall, along with all the theatre posters and programmes and framed reviews, and her ‘Best Legs on Telly’ award. It occurs to me that, no, she probably doesn’t need much else. She could live on thin air if it clapped her.

The house looks very different now. Denuded of its detritus and what things of Hugo’s Corinne decided to take away, it has the feel of a park the day after a funfair’s been through. Faded patches on the walls, dents and troughs in the carpets, assemblages of disparate items of bric-a-brac in untidy, no-place-to-go piles on the floor. On Monday, after we’ve taken what’s left on the want list (correction – the ‘oh, if I
must’
list), it will go through its final stage of dismemberment, when the clearance firm Corinne’s organised come and clear out what remains.

‘I feel disinclined,’ my mother says, sitting down heavily on the sofa she doesn’t want either, ‘to take
any
of it, frankly. And what’s the point,
really
? It’s all
far
too big. Given that I’m likely to be living in a shoebox.’

Shoebox notwithstanding, the day chunters on , and by mid-afternoon we wave off Pru and Doug, who have shoehorned such items as we’ve deemed worth taking into the hired van, which they are now going to drive back to Bristol. And there, in storage, will the said items stay until such time as another Abercorn Gate-type development elicits sufficient enthusiasm from her to allow us all the luxury of hope.

Having spent a decade and a half being married to a man who left items of apparel in just about every hotel room he ever stayed in, I’m just on my final check round of backs-of-drawers and corners-of-cupboards upstairs when I realise the hatch to the loft has been left open, and that the loft light is still on as well.

Thinking even as I’m doing so that their electricity bill really isn’t my worry, I nevertheless erect the step ladder and climb up to pull the light cord. The loft now is empty bar a couple of rolled offcuts of carpet, but as I reach for the light cord, I notice a familiar-looking object half hidden behind two of the struts. Not a shoe box, but still a box. One of my mother’s old hat boxes, in fact. I’m about to turn to leave it when I have a change of mind. Whatever else she really can’t be bothered with taking, my mother almost never ever parts with her hats. Perhaps this is an old one that got shoved up here when she moved in. I’d at least better check, so I climb to the top rung to reach it out.

Straight away I can see that the top isn’t dusty, so I imagine this has probably been overlooked only due to being buried under another box of some sort. I reach for the cord carrying handle and slide it back across the boards. It’s also much weightier than I’m anticipating, and as the other carrying handle is missing, as I pull it towards me to get hold of it properly, I almost send the thing clattering to the floor, and myself tumbling headlong down the stairs.

And I’m right to be surprised , because once I’ve manhandled it down the step ladder and onto the landing, I see that there isn’t a hat in there. It’s stuffed with a large carrier bag, which, when I open it, I see is itself stuffed full: of papers and photos and cuttings. At first I think it’s simply more of my mother’s theatre memorabilia, but a quick riffle through straight away makes me realise it isn’t. These papers must all belong to Hugo. I pick up the first of them and start reading with interest.

It’s a copy of the local newspaper, obviously read, and folded so the middle pages are now on the outside. There’s a headline ‘Cardiff Weatherman Gabriel to marry his very own Angel’, beneath which is a photograph of Lucy Whittall and Gabriel Ash, emerging from the doorway of what looks like a restaurant, smiling happily for the cameras, arm in arm, heads close, her left hand held out to show the photographer her ring. I skim through the piece, which is reporting their engagement – I check the date; last Christmas – in the sort of relentlessly upbeat and sycophantic manner that local papers are often wont to do. I look further. Beneath it, there’s an almost identical photo, but this time it’s on a page torn from a magazine, and the headline this time reads slightly differently: Fair Weather for TV’s Fallen Angel?’ and the copy beneath it is altogether more cynical; wisecracking, sneering and determinedly mean-spirited. No forecasts of fair weather in this one, for sure. They predict, with much glee, stormy weather.

I look back in the box. Most of it, it seems, consists of similar things. Newspaper snippets, dating back years. From his appointment as a TV weatherman just over a year back, through various pieces, and correspondence, including some in Italian, going right back to a faded newspaper photo of a young team – football, I guess, because someone is holding one – beneath which his name is underlined.

I put it back with the others and close up the carrier, a small flame of excitement alight at what I’ve found. About twenty years’ worth of memorabilia, is my guess.

I put the lid back on the box and take the box down to my car, where Jake’s already installed and plugged in to his iPod. Mum’s two doors up, chatting with a neighbour in her front garden, while Spike, via a cocked leg and a ‘who, me?’ expression, attempts to claim ownership of her beds.

I stash the hat box carefully in the boot. If it’s left behind, the clearance firm will probably end up with it, and it seems to me it might be something Gabriel Ash would want. Perhaps this is the sort of thing he was hoping to find last time. Or, no, perhaps it isn’t. He’s not ever struck me as particularly interested in his father. Though not
un
interested, surely. How could anyone be? So perhaps this will be a pleasant surprise. Feeling mildly cheered about being the bearer of glad tidings instead of the harridan harbinger of doom, I insert a proper memo in my telephone reminder. I can check when he’s next due in at the clinic for his physio and present my box of booty to him then.

We have to leave Hugo’s car on the drive, of course, as there’s no one available to drive it.

‘Be best if we do bring it here, though, I suppose,’ I’m telling my mother, once we’re home and Jake and I have unpacked the car. ‘That way, I can put an ad in the paper and be on hand if anyone wants to see it. I’ll have to speak to Pru. See if we can sort something out.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ she replies, while Jake nudges her. ‘In fact, Jakey and I have been having a little chat.’

Jake and my mother chatting is not always, clearly, something about which to feel encouraged. From where I stand, at any rate. ‘Oh, yes?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ve told him he can have it.’

‘
Jake
? Have Hugo’s
car
? Mother, that’s ridiculous. It may have escaped your notice, but he’s only fifteen!’

‘Nearly sixteen, M um,’ he is quick to point out.

‘Yes, nearly sixteen, but that’s not seventeen, is it? What on earth do you suppose we would do with it for the next fifteen months?’

He shrugs. ‘Park it somewhere, I guess.’

‘Jake, you can’t just ‘park it somewhere’. Not for over a year. It would have to be taxed. And besides, you can’t just leave a car parked for that length of time anyway. The engine would seize up.’

‘So you drive it in the meantime,’ my mother suggests, quite reasonably. ‘It’s a lot better than that smelly old crate you rattle around in at the moment.’

I’d quite like to point out that it’s the very same car that I rattle
her
around in. To Yoga, to Bridge, to Celeste’s, to the tea-dance club (where she doubtless sits and seethes), to her bloody am-dram…, and that she should, perhaps, be bloody grateful. But she’s right; from almost any perspective, it is a sensible, rational, reasonable point. My car is an all but knackered, ancient heap, and has been around several hundred blocks. And yes it does smell. But only of Spike. So that’s fine. My mother’s fur coat smells of mothballs and cigar smoke, but I don’t imagine she’ll be putting it on eBay and replacing it with an anorak any time soon.

But she’s right as in yes, in the fullness of time (and full-er-ness of bank account, obviously) I’m going to have to trade it in for a new one. Well, new-ish, anyway. But not now. And not for Hugo’s. Not in a million years. Hugo’s car is, well, an old person’s car. An old person’s car which is the colour of a rich tea biscuit. Or Complan. Or a pair of surgical stockings. An old person’s car with a sensibly small engine. A car unfettered by delusions of being built for a driver. A car that glories in being just like every other car that’s parked in the day centre or bingo hall car park. Which means I could never drive it, ever. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Jake will/would be able to, of course, because when you’re seventeen you can drive an old person’s car with humour and irony and a ‘needs must’ expression, add go-faster stripes and put a sub-woofer in the boot. But I can’t. I know it’s the most shallow thing imaginable, but driving in my heap – with all its memories and prangs and battle-scarred poppy red paintwork – at least helps maintain the fiction that I am young and up for it and still a bit of a gal. It has character. Personality. A sense of humour. A sense of fun. But if I swap my little Peugeot for my elderly mother’s dead husband’s hearing-aid-coloured car, people will assume that I have exercised choice and in doing so chosen, well,
that
one. And thus another little flame of youth will be extinguished and I will age fifteen years in a second. I will become the sort of person who has a ‘mum’s taxi’ sticker in the back (oh, how they’ll laugh) and calls her transport ‘my run-around’. Someone –
mon dieu
! – who wears drip-dry elasticated skirts.

And who lives with her elderly mother.

I know it’s only a metaphor for the way I’m feeling right now, but just thinking about it is depressing.

‘Yeah, Mum!’ Jake says. ‘That’s an idea. Then I could have your car!’

Oh, y es. He can do irony if needs be, my son. But given the choice,
he’d
rather drive my car as well.

I shake my head and pat his shoulder. ‘It’s not an idea, Jake, and it’s not going to happen anyway. Nana needs to sell Hugo’s car to put towards her new flat. You know that. I’m sorry, hon, but let’s talk about cars when you
are
seventeen, shall we?’

He doesn’t look too crestfallen. After all, it was a pie in the sky idea in the first place. But then he delivers his
coup de grace
, straight out of left-field.

‘Why does Nana have to go and get a flat anyway?’ he asks, and I’m quite sure he asks it quite innocently too. We both turn. Two lots of breath are now bated. ‘Why doesn’t she just stay living here?’ he asks me. ‘You know. Like, permanently. With
us
.’

Chapter 12

T
EXT
; L
UV U
2. No. Florence bit dull (no REALLY). On nite train 2 Rome now. Oh – also plz put some credit on J’s fone! Also ask him got my txt? If not, £30 resrve min. Ta mum S xxx

Ah, the innocence of youth. What a precious thing it is.

And , sometimes, from where I stand, what a
pain
. There were about three seconds during which nobody breathed. Jake because his brain was already occupied in trying to interpret the doubtless confusing array of expressions that my face was conveying to him from over his grandmother’s shoulder, myself and said grandmother because our sharp intakes of breath were so very sharp that they’d sucked almost every last molecule of air from the room.

My mother cracked first. ‘Gracious, me, Jakey!’ she twittered. ‘I’m quite sure your mother doesn’t want an old lady like me rattling around cluttering up the place.’

Jake glance d up at me for corroboration. ‘
Well?
’ his face intimated, ‘
is that right?
’. ‘You don’t clutter up the place,’ he then said, with commendable sincerity. ‘It’s nice having you living with us.
Isn’t
it, Mum?’

Jake, of course, would say something like that, for he is (happily) not daily flagellated by the countless irritations of living with her. He doesn’t shop for her, cook for her, do her handwashing-in-Dreft for her, drive for her, or put up with her tantrums and gripes. Mainly, though, he doesn’t have
issues
with my mother, because she’s not
his
mother, is she? He’s her most favourite grandson and he loves her to bits. I know that. I applaud that. I think it’s rather special. I’d just enjoy it so much more if she lived somewhere else.

‘Of course it is,’ I sa id anyway, because it would take a much doughtier person than me to make any other sort of response to that question in these circumstances. ‘But Nana needs peace and quiet – she needs her own routine, her own space, Jake. And there’s precious little of that around here, is there?’ I added a laugh. For levity. But it didn’t leaven much. Just hung in the air, like a smell.

‘And so does your mother,’ mine added, smiling nicely. ‘Oh, and speaking of which, I’ll be out from under your feet tonight, dear. Bridge Club’s at Mary’s. Can you drop me there at seven?’

I breathed out. First round over. ‘No problem,’ I told her.

‘And I imagine I’ll need you to pick me up at ten-ish. But naturally I’ll phone and let you know.’

And thus we roll around to yet another Sabbath, which is why I only swear under my breath.

In The Beginning, as is documented in the Bible, God was a pretty busy Deity. What with heaven and earth to get made, day, night, moon, clouds, sun, rain and so on to get organised (not to mention preparing the foundations for a later-date flood), plus with all those fig trees, asps, wanton women etc. to fashion, he must have been pretty darn knackered. God, however, being the Supreme Being (or so I imagine) didn’t have to concern himself with kip.

Sadly, supremacy is not my main forte. Thus sleep (shut-eye, rest, slumber, repose, any form of unconsciousness will do, frankly) is now very much my major concern. Much as I thought I empathised with Pru’s bleats on the noise front, the reality that is living with my mother is so very much worse than I’d ever imagined.

Which may sound rich coming from someone whose existence happens to a background of decibels in three figures, but the noise my mother generates is just
horrible
. Fingernails down a blackboard horrible. From the dawn chorus (show songs, phlegm removal, chanting, Darth Vader breathing) right through to the small hours night watch (channel five, tea cup banging, phlegm removal, gargling) there is a constant backdrop of insidious, irritating noise.

I know, I know. It’s probably just because it’s
her
. Though I hold fast on anyone’s phlegm removal, frankly, I dare say I’d have no issue with most of the rest of it were it emanating from Jude Law or Ewan McGregor. But there are times in every relationship where one person’s endearing trait becomes another person’s incitement to murder most foul. This is very nearly that time.

Worse than that, being woken in the small hours is one thing. Being woken in the small hours when your brain is actively looking for things to be awake
about
, is quite another. My brain goes ‘yeehah, gal! Let’s fire up those neurones!’, so, once conscious, I simply cannot get back to sleep. I fret about Charlie being unhappy, I fret about Sebastian getting mugged, I fret that I should re-locate Jake to stage school (how? why?), I fret about Spike being ten and a half. Memos to self (urgent) Monday thru Friday: Get over yourself, will you? Just STOP IT.

Because
everything
seems worse at three in the morning. Everyone knows that. I certainly know that. But at three in the morning I always forget.

And I’m always wide awake at three in the morning. Thus by Thursday night, seven-ish, when Charlie calls my mobile, I am almost asleep on my feet.

Charlie calling, moreover,
again
. Two weeks, three days and seven hours. That’s exactly how long it’s been since I’ve spoken to him. I know I shouldn’t be counting (I’m way too busy to be counting), but, like a prisoner in Alcatraz, I find the notches on the calendar are soothing somehow. Will take me steadily, week by week, towards freedom. In that time, he’s phoned me five times. He’s left voicemail messages. Sent texts. Made enquiries via Dee. He’s even sent a postcard of the hospital (where’d you get
them
from? And who would want one anyway? ‘Hi all! It’s me! I’m feeling dreadful!’) on which he wrote, rather unimaginatively, ‘wish you were here’. But I have been strong. I have resisted. I have failed to respond. And I certainly don’t intend responding now.

Five minutes later, he calls me again. I don’t respond.

When he calls me a third time in as many more minutes, I do, I am the first to admit, teeter on the brink of doing so. But then he rings off in any case. And then I get a text.

‘Okay,’ the text says. ‘Ignore me if you must. On your own head be it. Okay?’

And that’s it.

* * *

Which wakes me up and then sends me into a panic. What does he mean by ‘On your own head be it’? What’s happened? What’s
that
all about? I put my phone on the kitchen table while I fashion a few frames of a slash movie, most of which feature his wife coming at me with a meat cleaver, yelling ‘Adultress! Temptress! Jezebel! Trollop!’, and cleaving said cleaver to cleave off my head. On my own head be it. Oh, damn him. Should I ring? Or should I not ring? Is this just another ploy to engage my sympathies? And why is he after my sympathy anyhow? Sympathy is
nothing
like sex.

And not sexy either, which is fine from where I stand. If only he could see that as well and move on.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ says my mother, entering the kitchen. She sees me trying to stare out my mobile, and leans across me to inspect it. ‘Who was that?’

I snap it shut. ‘Oh, no one,’ I say breezily, as I have managed to do a thousand times and in a thousand similar situations before this one.

‘I’m going to get myself a sherry,’ she announces. ‘Can I pour you one, dear?’

‘No thanks.’ Not for at least another twenty-five years hopefully. I’m sure drinking sherry will do things to my brain. Perhaps I
should
send a text. Just to check he’s okay. I fashion another few frames. Soft focus ones this time, in which Charlie has become a sort of Nelson-come-Russell Crowe in
Master and Commander
fusion, and is sprawled on the deck of his clipper, shot to buggery, and telling his first mate that he needs…groan …to get …gasp… a message…wheeze, death rattle etc…to his beloved Lady Hamilton (or whoever that woman is Russell Crowe married in the end) and he can die a happy(ish) man… Except the ship’s sinking fast and Morse Code hasn’t been invented yet, and the boy who’s supposed to do the flag signalling thing is holed up in the rum store saying prayers…

And then the doorbell rings.

‘Door!’ chir rups my mother, causing Russell’s anguished features to dissolve into the cannon smoke. She always does this. The doorbell goes (which I, of course, hear) and she goes ‘door!’. The phone rings (which I also, of course, hear) and she goes ‘phone!’. All this despite the fact that, for the past twenty-four-odd years of my life, I have been responding to doorbells and phone bells quite successfully without any vocal contribution from her. In a domestic situation full of major irritations, this is, admittedly, only a minor irritation, but it’s a sad fact of life that irritations, like radiation, are cumulative beasties. Give it six months and it will become major. Give it twelve and I might need therapy.

‘I know. I heard it,’ I say (preternaturally nicely), walking across the kitchen. ‘It’ll doubtless be someone for Jake. JAAAKKE! DOOORRRR!!!’ I then bellow up the stairs. Because that’s different. He
doesn’t
hear, obviously.

My mother winces, as she always does, at my unmaidenly pitch and volume. All this shouty stuff visibly pains her. But then she’s never done boys, has she? Perhaps it will remind her just how very much she
does
value her peace and quiet. One can but hope (and – memo to self – be very noisy). She takes her sherry back off to the living room and whatever soap opera it is that she’s currently perched in front of. She watches them all, and it doesn’t escape my notice that we’re all busy starring in one of our own.

Jake clatters down the stairs. ‘Probably Hamish’s mum come to pick him up,’ he says, loping past me to yank open the front door. But it isn’t Hamish’s mum. It’s not anyone’s mum. It is Charlie who is standing on the doorstep.

‘Good evening,’ he says pleasantly, while eyeing my tonsils. ‘I’ve come to collect my…er… son.’

One thing that immediately becomes apparent is that as neither Jake nor Charlie seems in the least aghast at this state of affairs, I am the only person in the environs of my hallway who is mute and in a state of utter shock. I lean against the kitchen door in the hopes that it will absorb some.

‘For Hamish, right?’ says Jake. He yanks the door open wider. ‘Come in,’ he says brightly. ‘We’re just getting his stuff.’ Charlie wipes his feet then does as instructed. ‘Righty-ho,’ he says. This has got to be a dream. ‘Righty-ho.’

Another thing that almost as immediately becomes apparent as well is that things are clearly not as they might seem. Hamish, then, (for there is only Hamish left residing in Jake’s bedroom right now, the other two having been picked up by Tom’s mother half an hour back) is –
must
be – Charlie’s son. But Charlie doesn’t have a son called Hamish. Charlie has a son called Oliver, who lives just outside Oxford, with his mother and his half-sister and his brother. And a cat.

Except he obviously does. He just said so , didn’t he? He said ‘I’ve come for my son’ and Jake said ‘for Hamish, right?’. What the hell is going
on
here?

In the five seconds it has taken me to reach the conclusion that I have failed to reach any sort of conclusion, Charlie has shut the front door behind him and engaged me in the sort of wordless conversation that goes ‘See? You silly mare. I did try to tell you. But would you listen? Not a bit of it.’ (I, of course, am still going ‘
whhaaaattt????
’) And now he’s grimacing a bit too. I close my mouth and let go of the door jamb.

‘
Hamish
?’ I mouth.

He nods. He looks sheepish. ‘Oliver,’ he says. ‘Hamish to his friends. It’s the Scott bit, of course.’

Of cour se. I should have realised.
No
. There’s no ‘of course’ about it. How would I disseminate that from that? Gawd, and of all the bands in all the world, how come he walked into Jake’s one? I’m stupefied. ‘But he lives in Oxford.’

Charlie shakes his head. ‘Not any more. They’re here now.’

As in Cardiff. They’re all
here
now. ‘And he’s joined Jake’s band. Good God.’

Charlie frowns. ‘It would seem so. I believe he answered an advert.’ We’ve been keeping our voices low, but a series of bumps and bangs and guffaws overhead seem to indicate that the getting of stuff is still in mid-operation. We both look upwards. He takes a step towards me and speaks normally again. ‘I had absolutely no idea, Abbie,’ he says. ‘No idea whatsoever. Not until Claire rang me and asked me to fetch him. I couldn’t believe it when she gave me the address.’

Claire.
Claire.
I try to recall the last time Hamish was collected after band practice, and more specifically if I saw whoever it was that collected him. I can’t. But then I often can’t. I’m often out, or in the kitchen, or just simply not involved. They come, they practice, they get collected at some point. I sometimes have a chat with Tom’s mum (they’ve been pals for some years now), and I used to see David’s dad from time to time. But not much. Their parents usually wait in the car. We don’t engage much. That’s the way it works once they’re older. Which means – and I start at this thought – that Charlie’s
wife
has probably been here at some point. Collecting Hamish – well Hamish/Oliver – and I never even
knew
.

And neither did she. ‘Oh, God. This is awful,’ I say. And I mean it. It doesn’t take a genius to collate the implications, from the jolly doorstep encounters with Charlie’s wife over amp leads, all the way up to One Black Lung’s ‘best of’ farewell gig at the Royal Albert Hall, in fact. Will I ever be free of him?
Them
?

‘You’re looking good,’ observes Charlie.

‘You’re not,’ I respond. And I mean that as well. ‘You’ve lost weight.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No. Well, not as in –’ He stops and glances upwards. ‘Look, Abbie, can’t we do dinner one night? Just dinner. That’s all. No games. I just need to –’

‘No, Charlie! God, please don’t go there. Not now.’ Oh, this is too, too dreadful. And what’s most dreadful about it is not that he won’t stop asking such things, but the realisation that what I would most like to do at this moment is to take three steps across the hall and gather him into my arms for a cuddle. To make him feel better. To stop him hurting so much. But, no. I’m wrong.
Most
dreadful is making eye contact with him, and the realisation in doing so that that is precisely what he’d like me to do too.