Saving from Monkeys (20 page)

Mrs Sinclair delicately placed her knife and fork in the proper 'pause' position on her plate and dabbed her mouth gently with her cloth napkin. Once everything was as it should be, she replied, "That's what I'm saying, there won't
be
anything to pick over. My mother has been relying on my money for years."

"And you think I care?" Elliot's harsh tone made me blanch and I eyed my fork wondering whether I could jab him into calming down the way he had with me. No, I decided, probably not.

"I think, like her, you don't have the faintest understanding of what it means to be an adult." Mrs Sinclair smoothed back her already impeccably smooth hair, apparently unmoved by insulting both her mum and son in one breath. "If my mother had put anything by, or ever looked to the future and beyond herself, there might have been something for you to take from this."

"'This
' being her death?" Elliot suddenly leant forward, as if he wanted to leap across the table at her, and his voice was positively dangerous as he snarled, "Every day I'm glad I'm not you. Every single bloody day."

His mum remained completely unperturbed, in fact she even smiled a tight, grim little smile as she said, "You're just like her, you know
, you think everything's so easy. You've grown up thinking your Nan is perfect; you never relied upon her to feed you, or clothe you, you had everything handed to you and then you could run to her for reassurance that mocking your way through life was acceptable."

My eyes widened so much they actually hurt, and my fingers took up their destruction of my top again as Mrs Sinclair continued,
"Like her you've never once made a hard decision or had to make do with a situation that wasn't exactly as you wanted it. Once you have, you've earned the right to judge me, Elliot, not before."

God, she was stealing from my script. More eloquently than I could ever have put it, and with
a sharpness I couldn't have conjured even on my crabbiest days, but that didn't change the fact that that was everything I'd been thinking all these years.

Oh
, monkeys, it wasn't
my
mum I had to worry about being. It was Elliot's.

There was a loud scraping as Elliot pushed his chair heavily back from the table.

"You know nothing about me," he said, and he matched his mother's icy tone in a way that made me shiver, even though the frost wasn't directed at me. "You’ve never spared me a second's thought when I wasn't right in front of you. Don't try to clue in 20 years too late and expect not to be judged."

"
Sit down." Mr Sinclair suddenly spoke, and I jumped, having completely forgotten that he was sitting there off to my right.

I looked round quickly to see what Elliot's reaction would be to this rare interference.
If his mum had been a robot while he'd grown up then his dad had gone that one step further and been a statue; an object that didn't interact in any way.

Elliot looked faintly amused, in the way I imagined a condemned man would upon hearing that rain had meant an hour's delay in his execution.

"How about you stand up, Dad?" He let his words hang in the air, but I was fairly sure I was the only one who heard the plea in them for his dad to step up, to do
something
. But he didn't, he just shook his head slightly as if he couldn't believe the drama he was being subjected to and Elliot said flatly, "No, I didn't think so."

I
t was no good then, he was on his own.

Or maybe not.
I felt Elliot press his fingers lightly to my shoulder and I shot to my feet. I hadn't been able to protect him from his mum like I'd tried to when we'd first arrived, but I could at least show that I was with him now.

It should have been a textbook storm out, but there was another scrape of chair legs against the floor and I looked back to see emotion cut across Elliot's mum's face like a scar.

"Leave her alone, Elliot." Her voice was so sharp, I winced as if she'd cut me. "Tonight you need to give my mother a chance to die in peace. She wouldn't want to hang around uselessly like this, it's cruel to keep her here just for your benefit."

Elliot didn't turn back, and Mr Sinclair kept his face resolutely focused on his dinner, so I was the only one who saw the pain stark across her features.

OK, seriously, was no-one going to remain in the roles I'd cast them in for so many years? Elliot was supposed to be a spoilt rich boy with whom I had nothing in common, Nan was supposed to be awesome in every way and Mrs Sinclair was supposed to be a cold hearted bitch without a single shred of human emotion. Life was easier that way.

I was far from forgiving
of Mrs Sinclair's coldness towards her son, but I managed a tight nod to recognise what it had taken for her to say what she had. Elliot, for his part, just kept on walking.

There was no question that I wouldn't follow him, but I didn't say anything as we went down the corridor and up the stairs to the second floor.

There was a hierarchy to grief, I realised as I trailed after him. Being with the stroke-affected Nan, knowing what she had brought to my life when I'd felt so powerless, had made me think I knew the depths anguish could bring you down to. Now, however, watching Elliot break apart with every step, I knew I came in on a lower rung. He was at the peak of the pain pyramid and, as someone below him on that
scale, I knew it was my job to look after him.

We were back outside his room and
, if I'd had the wherewithal, I would've tried to break the moment by pointing out how clean I'd made the corridor. I didn't, however, and besides, when Elliot opened his door other words popped straight into my brain and flooded out of my mouth.

"Have you been robbed?"

As I'd said to that Samantha chick, I really
had
spent time cleaning Elliot's room when I was younger, but that was when he was just some idiot rich boy. Now I was being forced to admit he was more than that, I had avoided it like the plague. Which was why I was so confused by the change in it I was seeing now.

When we'd left for uni, Elliot's room had been packed full of rich boy accoutrements. Snowboards, computer games, electric guitars he didn't know how to play, you name it
he’d had it, but now it was all gone. Even that monkey poster I’d hated so much had disappeared.

Elliot looked around his barren room, empty apart from the bare bones of furniture, but his eyes stayed glazed and uninterested.
"No," he replied shortly. "I haven't been robbed."

'So what the hell?'
I wanted to demand. It shouldn't have even rated a flicker of a thought in the scheme of things, but I needed to focus on something that wasn't as soul-destroying as the dinner we’d just sat through so I hovered in the doorway cataloguing everything that was missing.

It would amount to a fortune, I realised. All his stuff had been top of the line, even three years later the sheer amount of stuff missing would have resulted in a very tidy sum indeed. But that was stupid, Elliot didn't need money.
Then his mum's question from just before came back to me. 'How are your finances?' She'd asked, almost as if... as if she didn't know.

My eyes met Elliot's and I could see that he knew what I was thinking.

"I sold it," he said hoarsely, his shoulders jerking up in a 'what the hell' kind of shrug. "You were right when you talked about me studying history. My parents don't like it and they thought they could dictate what I did by threatening to cut off the money. I got sick of it. Selling all my crap sorted it."

My mouth was dry, but I managed to croak, "Your car?"

"You always said it was worth some people's houses," his bitterness caught at the back of my throat. "Well, I stuck the money from it into a high interest account and it was enough for rent on my flat. And the odd trip to Papua New Guinea when necessary."

Don't tell me this
, I wanted to shout.
Don't give up, don't change things
. I didn't, though, that would've been too contrary for words. Hadn't I been the one complaining that he was keeping secrets?

He
wanted a reaction, though, that was obvious. He stalked back and forth in his empty room and stared at me,
spoiling
for a fight. Seeing that I was holding my tongue, he reached for more bait.

"And you know my Experience of War class? That's a first year course, I don't study it,
I
tutor
it." He waited for a beat and then added, "As a
job
, for a
wage
."

A job, he had a job?
A monkey trucking
job
? I would've laughed if my throat hadn't already closed over in reaction to the ache so evident in his face. After everything, what was I supposed to say to that?

"...
OK." Was what I finally managed to choke out.

I knew immediately I'd said the wrong thing.

"OK? Fucking
OK
?" He lashed out, his hand grabbing a side-table and throwing it with a crash against the wall.

I pressed my lips tightly together, determined not to say anything else to set him off, and his already dark eyes darkened further as he saw my decision.

"You fight me every step of the way, you lose your mind about me keeping secrets...?" He broke off suddenly, but started again, taking an almost menacing step towards me. "So that's not enough? You want some more truth? OK, I didn't tell you about selling my car or working for the uni because I liked having one over you when you were so holier-than-thou about money. That's all, nothing better than that, so if you want to get angry Rox, you get angry because you have every right to."

I pulled at the hole in my t-shirt again, twisting it round in my fingers as I admitted, "I don't want to get angry."

"
Why
not
?" He pretty much yelled, pushing his fingers through his hair and yanking at it. "Because now I'm not just some vacuous rich boy that makes everything alright? You know what you are, Rox? You're a snob, a bloody reverse snob. Having a job doesn't make you a better person, you know, even arseholes sometimes work for a living. Sorry if that ruins your twisted view of life, but there it is."

I wanted him to stop, how did I get him to stop? I briefly considered that this was his way of healthily releasing his angst, but this was nothing like the way I'd cried on him. I could see that shouting at me was making him feel worse, not better.
So how did I save him from himself?

And then it hit me.

"Your vagina and Elliot will thank you for it!" I threw the words out like I was shoving a plug into a hole in a dam. I just hoped it fit.

It certainly drew him up short, frozen in shock for a moment before he stumbled over a confused, "What? Just...fucking...
what
?"

"That's the last thing Nan said to me," I explained, and it was like I'd put
a boot to his bruised gut. He took a couple of steps back and hit the wall, sliding down until he sat slumped on the floor.

"I don't want to talk about Nan." His voice was hard, but blunt, like he'd used up all his sharpness shouting at me before.

I took a couple of hesitant steps forward and then, when it was clear that the tsunami of his anger had passed, slid down the wall beside him.

"Yes you do," I contradicted him quietly and he suddenly didn't seem to have the energy to protest.

"She was talking about personal grooming," I explained, too horrified by everything I'd witnessed that night to be embarrassed by what I was saying. "She seemed to think that my refusing to have a Brazilian wax, was the reason we'd only been together the once."

He didn't respond, didn't crack even the tiniest smile or make any smartarse comment about my privates. Still
, what had I been expecting? What was the state of my pubic hair compared to a complete emotional breakdown?

On the other hand, I'd obviously got him thinking because, after a brief period of silence, I saw his Adam's apple work up and down a few times and then he said,
"People who go on and on about things that have already happened are the ones no-one wants to sit next to on the bus." He obviously saw me looking at him and added, "That's the last thing she said to me."

"That's actually quite deep," I pointed out, my own throat muscles starting to contract as I felt tears building.

He did smile then, even if it was twisted.

"The
second
last thing she said to me was 'if you'd inherited your grandpa's penis, like I hoped you would, Rox would never have forgotten what you did with it'."

That surprised a strange, bubbly little laugh out of me.

So that had been the last she'd imparted to us? Two completely inappropriate comments about each other?

"She was trying to set us up." I spoke my realisation out loud, but it didn't seem to be anything new to Elliot, who just nodded his head wearily.

I could see he was starting to suffer that bone deep fatigue that comes after an explosion of feeling and, in deference to this, I didn't say any more. Instead, I leant my head back and closed my eyes, giving him the time he needed to pull himself back together.