The Hive (14 page)

Melissa walked out into her front garden. Rachel followed behind, pushing the buggy.

“It's a bit larger than the Mead Avenue average, isn't it?” Rachel could now see that Melissa had at least an acre, which was unheard-of in that neighborhood.

“All of Mead Avenue was this garden, until about twenty years ago. The previous owners sold the land for building. This used to be the countryside.”

They looked around them. It was early afternoon now, and the houses were starting to come back to life. People were returning home, cars were driving down, lights were going on. Rachel could picture the beauty of the place as it had been, before this estate had been thrown up, and shook her head.

“What a shame,” she said with sympathy. “Imagine it. You could have had this beautiful house, practically in the middle of nowhere…”

Melissa laughed and strode down the garden, breaking off a wayward branch as she moved. “I can't think of anything worse. Look at all these gardens—so beautifully cultivated. And I love being smack bang in the community like this. Why on earth would I want to be stuck out on the side of a hill, up some long drive, with nobody else around?” She looked down at the buggy. “Very nice of you to have someone else's baby for the day…”

“Do you know,” Rachel stroked the sleeping head, “I've loved it. And the funny thing is I've achieved more with Hamish today than I have on my own for weeks.”

“Weird. And why was that, do you think?” Melissa was puzzled.

“Phhh. I dunno.” Rachel shrugged. “'Cause he's got a timet
abl
e, and such a good routine, I s'pose…”

“Really?”
Melissa stopped short while she digested this astonishing revelation. “And you think that made things better for
you?
”

“Yeah.” Rachel thought about it. “I do actually. The imposition of order upon chaos—seemed to be just what I needed.”

Melissa was looking at her like she was, at the very minimum, the new St. Francis of Assisi. “So you believe in routine, in pattern, in order? That those things can make everything seem better, the hard things of life feel easier?”

Er, apparently so. Rachel had never given it a moment's thought and yet suddenly the idea was taking flight before her eyes—a fully fledged, long-held philosophy of life. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I do.”

“Fascinating.” They walked together, each matching the step of the other. “Jeez Louise, does this baby
never
wake up?”

“Almost never.” Rachel leaned over the buggy and wiggled it a bit. “Hamm-y. Come on. Let's go and find Mummy.”

Hamish opened one eye and gave a fleshy, gummy smile.

“It certainly seems to work for him,” agreed Melissa.

Georgie was leaning against the fence. A lit cigarette was between the fingers of her left hand and her eyes were closed. At the sound of Rachel's approach—she recognized the light wheels of Hamish's buggy—she peeled back one eyelid and glimpsed her baby. Asleep, divine, delicious. And coming to the end of one whole precious day in his life that she could never now reclaim. She was some distance from being able to forgive anybody for the ordeal that she had been put through today.

“Do you know,” said Rachel, parking Hamish beside her, “I've realized something. It's just occurred to me, walking here. It's Hamish who made me see it…”

“No, thank you for asking,” interrupted Georgie irritably. “I did not have a nice day. Actually. I have just returned from a living bloody hell.”

“We need a routine. That's all.” Rachel was abstracted, in a world of her own. “Me and Chris and the kids. We can't muddle on like this. We need a routine, an order, a pattern. We can't move on because our whole system, our organization has fallen apart.”

“Hello? Remember me? The mug you sent round to Tight-wad Towers for an entire lunch? I'm wiped out. I've been on my best behavior all day, I'll have you know. You cannot imagine the rot that I have been forced to listen to. God, it's exhausting always being so polite. How does a normal person cope?”

“From now on, we're going to have a timetable. None of this swirling chaos of Chris turning up when he feels like it and doing what he likes with them. We're going to draw up a system and stick to it.”

“That house. Christ,” Georgie continued, shuddering. “Everywhere you look there's a rogue apostrophe or exclamation mark. I've got a very low pain threshold for that sort of thing, you know, and I don't think you take it seriously enough.”

“Sorry.” Rachel was back with her at last, and smiling. “Tell me. Did they end up really hating the old bag?”

“Did they hell. They all cooked and cleaned and served her while she sat there on her big fat arse—”

“It's not, to be fair, a big fat arse.”

“OK, her hard little bony arse, and practically awarded them marks out of ten and then charged them at the end. Fifteen quid! You owe me fifteen quid.”

“Fair enough. But surely even they must be a bit pissed off with her?”

“Nope.” Georgie shook her head in despair. “All as delighted at the end as they were at the beginning. I fear I have to declare your little experiment a right flop.”

She went through the rigmarole with her cigarette end and gathered up Hamish, who buried himself into her neck without waking.

“Trouble is,” she was rhythmically stroking the baby's back as she thought out loud, “they do just worship her. They're like in some weird cult for weirdos.” She gave, in her view, an excellent rendition of the
X Files
sting. “A weird cult for weirdos who, I can tell you, eat a weird amount of duck.”

She looked across at Rachel, nervous that all this might upset her again, only to see that Rachel was smiling. Beaming. She was leaning forward, flickering her fingers in a flirty little wave, like a…like a…well, like a weird weirdo in a weird cult, as it happened. Her big brown eyes—all warm and deep and soupy—brought back to mind the eleventy million soufflés Georgie had eaten and her stomach gave a lurch. Ugh. She might actually puke.

“Hi. Hey. Thanks so much for today,” Rachel was saying, as someone Georgie had never met came gliding towards them. “This is my friend Georgie, who I told you about.”

Georgie gave one of her speciality gruff nods, and was nearly dazzled by the returning smile.

“Georgie,” said Rachel with pride, “this is Melissa.”

“Well, well, well.” The vision before her came into focus and Georgie started to smile. “And he-llo.” This was odd. She'd been given bugger-all to drink and yet she was starting to feel a tiny bit squiffy. Someone must have spiked those soufflés.

“Melissa has just moved here for her—” Rachel stopped. “Sorry, what is it you do, anyway? I forgot to ask.”

“Psychotherapist,” Melissa answered, smiling at Georgie. “Just part-time. Over at the hospital.”

“Huh!” replied Rachel. “See why you came our way. Plenty of nutters and loonies round here to keep you busy.”

“Interestingly,” Melissa intoned, “since post-Victorian reforms, the terms ‘nutter' and ‘loony' have fallen from professional use…”

Gosh, thought Georgie, properly impressed. That Stephen Fry impersonation was quite close to brilliant.

I
f Heather had been facing forward as Rachel walked up the hill towards her, then the shock might not have been so great. As it was, Heather was bent over Maisie, fussing and fiddling with the strap on her backpack—she was always fussing and fiddling over something or other—so it wasn’t until she was at close range that Rachel first saw it: the new Heather. The new, specs-off, contacts-in Heather Carpenter, dressed top to toe in white and doing more than a passable impression of a newly shorn sheep—pale, blinking, vulnerable. Rachel gave a little jump of alarm.

“Morning.” Heather smiled. “Feels funny, I must say. Funny but amazing. First time without glasses since infant school. I can’t believe I’ve never done it before.”

“And what made you do it now?” The girls were already ahead and giggling. More of Mr. Orchard’s Funny Jokes, she presumed. That was all that Poppy ever talked about these days: Mr. Orchard and his Funny Jokes.

“Colette. Colette has just taken me over.” She beamed.

“Aren’t you the lucky one?”

“Hey, Rach.” Heather stopped and grabbed her arm. “I bet I could get her to take you on, too. I mean, I could ask anyway.”

Rachel carried on walking. “That is so sweet of you, but you know what? I think I’m fine as I am. Just at the moment.”

Heather nodded with sympathy. “I know. It’s early days. But if or when you decide that the time has come for a makeover, you just let us know, OK?”

Let “us” know?

“Colette did say she was dying to get you into her Serenity Spa and give you a good old seeing-to only the other day.”

“Really? Is that what she said?”

“Mm. She was saying that she thought you had real potential.”

“Gosh. Well. Hey.” Rachel’s hands were balled tight into fists. “That’s really sweet of you to pass it on.”

“You’re welcome,” Heather trilled. “So. Looking forward to tonight?”

“Well. Ish. S’pose. Hey, I meant to ask you: do you want to go together? I don’t mind driving. Won’t drink much anyway. I could chauffeur you and Guy, how about that?” And Guy could lecture her on the niceties of the Highway Code and her miles per gallon.

“Aw, Rach.” Heather scrunched up her face. “We’re all going to Colette’s to get changed together. It’s going to be a total hoot, actually. Six of us! Nails. Hair. Dresses. C-razy. Then we’re going to meet the boys”

The what?

“there and—hopefully,” she gave an atypical little wiggle, a wiggle that she had obviously borrowed from someone and in Rachel’s view really ought to give back, “stun them with our awesomeness.”

“Oh. Right. OK then. Doesn’t matter.” Oh hell.

“Colette’s so excited about her silent auction. She’s got the headmaster to put himself up!” Heather laughed with glee.

“Himself?”

“Yes. Isn’t it brilliant? He’s a lot all on his own: Dinner at the new French place in the High Street with the headmaster. And Colette is going to win him, whatever he goes for. She thinks tonight might just be her night.”

“Poor sod.” How utterly humiliating. Rachel could just imagine how he would feel unable to refuse that. She felt genuinely sorry for him.

“It’s going to be a great little earner, I think, the auction. Bubba’s got lunch in London with Andy Farr.” Heather was still beaming.

“Oh,” said Rachel, flatly. “Who the hell is Andy Farr?”

Heather stopped walking, and—temporarily—beaming. “Do you know, that’s what I thought, but I was too embarrassed to say anything. I just presumed he was really famous and I was being thick. But he’s a celebrity, apparently. So Bubba says.”

“Can one be a celebrity, would you say, if no one has actually heard of one?”

That was a bit semantic for Heather. She brushed it away. “Help, we’re a bit late. Would you mind scooting Maisie in for me? I’ve just seen everyone’s already waiting over by the car. Tennis this morning. What a day. Mustn’t be late.”

Rachel walked with the girls, down the corridor to their neighboring pegs. The cloakroom was quieting down now; the bell would go any minute. She grabbed a wrist of each and crouched down to them.

“Hang on a minute, girls. Before you go. The other morning, I heard some not very nice stuff coming from you two about someone or other and I would appreciate the lowdown, if you don’t mind. And right now, pronto.”

Maisie and Poppy chewed their lips and consulted each other with their eyes.

“I’m waiting. Are you or are you not in training for the Big Bully Olympics?”

Poppy went first: “No. Scarlett is, Mummy.”

“Scarlett?”

“She’s just being so mean to Milo,” added Maisie.

“Like really mean, and he cries every single break time.”

“And we feel really sorry for him.”

“And Miss Nairn couldn’t care less.”

Then the bell did go.

“We’ll talk about it later, OK? Now have a good day and don’t get yourselves in the middle of anything.”

Rachel opened the fridge door in search of something to help her celebrate. And there was the same old mold and stale stuff that everyone had turned down at breakfast. Fancy that. Yet again, a fridge elf had failed to nip down to Waitrose and fill it up for her. Who’d have predicted it?

She leaned against the cool door and sighed. It was a brutal truth of single parenthood—one that slapped her in the solar plexus a minimum of three times a day: nothing ever went into that fridge anymore unless she put it there. She had once known a time when she could open it and the cheerful little light would shine its sun upon some wonder never before dreamed of in her philosophy. Not a full family shop, admittedly—it would require swine flu or actual childbirth on her part for that to happen. But still, some small and beautiful domestic miracle—an M&S meal for two or half a cheesecake that Chris might have bought at the station or the remnants of a bottle of wine. Not anymore. Its powers had shrunk. Her fridge was no longer capable of any existence independent of Rachel. Like the rest of the cottage, and the garden, and the wretched, useless car, it had become yet another dependent, colonial outpost of the sovereign state of her own mind. Which was a bore, because she really was starving.

And she did want to celebrate. Ellie’s wellies had had their adventures, and were back in the cloakroom. The book was finished and, in her expert opinion, it wasn’t half bad. It might not be an artistic masterpiece, she may just miss out on this year’s Turner Prize—though the way she captured the light on those shiny toes was actually pretty brilliant—but it had a certain charm. And she was at last due a certain paycheck. So she could now even afford to eat.

She picked up the milk and sniffed it—approaching the turn but not as yet in full pong—and was immediately shot back into her marriage. She smiled. While others may be transported to their memories by music or madeleines, there was nothing like a “best before” to remind her of Chris.

It was in the last month before he left that she and the kids had come bowling back from the leisure center and into the kitchen at eleven o’clock one sunny Saturday morning. And they had found Chris sitting alone at the table, staring into space, tucking into a couple of dry pork chops without any evident pleasure.

“Hungry?” she had asked him.

“Not really.” He was chewing hard, in a busy, workmanlike, let’s-get-it-over-with kind of a way. “But they go off tomorrow, and we’re going out.”

“Oh. I see. Would you at least like some applesauce, to cheer them up?”

“Nah. I’m all right.” He swallowed in lumps, washing it down with the occasional slurp of cappuccino. “Be a waste.”

And that was the moment, the tricky moment about which neither of them had ever spoken, when Rachel caught the look in Josh’s eyes. And it really was only a moment, because as soon as Josh saw that his mother had seen it, he wiped his eyes clean, with a shake, like his head was an Etch A Sketch. And his look was then a blank one, which told nobody anything. But Rachel knew what she had seen: she’d seen a flash of disloyalty, and a hint of confusion and shame, and words that if spoken would have said something along the lines of “Man, dood, why is Dad like this totally tragic freakin’ dweeb?”

Looking back from where she stood, Rachel found she could only agree with him. It was interesting that Chris had shown such scant regard for his marriage vows, when he worshipped the sell-by date like something Moses might have carved on a tablet. She picked up some bacon. It didn’t go off till next Tuesday, yet it was dried up, greenish, crusty. “And guess what?” she said to herself. “You can chuck it. Just like that. Throw it out. Your colony, your rules.” The phone rang and she almost skipped over to it.

“Rachel. It’s Bubba. Are you free?”

“Yes. Yes. That’s exactly what I am. I’m free. I am a sovereign in control of my whole empire and I am free.”

“Oh, thank God.”

Rachel noticed there was a shake in her voice.

“Can you come over?”

In fact, she sounded very rocky.

“It’s A Moveable Feast.”

Was that a stifled sob?

“I gave them a four-grand deposit. Bea
told
me to give them a
four-grand deposit.
And I did. And they’ve taken it. And I think, well, it seems, no, they have…they’ve just totally buggered off.”

Bubba sat at the kitchen table, which was covered with bits of paper. Every time she picked one up, her hand shook. And everywhere she looked there were numbers. Numbers numbers numbers. Numbers that never seemed to add up or do the decent thing and at least balance each other out. Numbers galore, every single one of them hell-bent on negativity. And Bubba had always disapproved of negativity.

She had never even liked numbers—much more an
ideas
person. And empathy, of course. That was her big thing, the Bubba trademark:
empathy.
Numbers had always bored her rigid. And it was funny, looking back on it, that numbers were there, a constant, at her introduction to motherhood. All that incessant counting which was supposed to help—according to every childbirth know-all and clever-clogs—with the pain. So like a good girl she’d sat there, fatly, on a beanbag, puffing and chanting and expecting that baby to just sort of pop out on the count of three or whatever and after a few days of that—or was it years?—she had finally been wheeled into theater for a Caesarean.

And then those first few months at home, before she had hired the first nanny. (God, nannies: something else she didn’t want to count.) All those ounces and milliliters—she’d never even
heard
of a milliliter before she had a baby. Why would she? So small it was quite
pathetic
—and hours in the night and doses in a Calpol bottle. Counting, counting, numbers, numbers, and all so boring and
unsympathetic
really that she had just gone running off back to work where there were huge
departments
full of people just there to do the counting for you. They completely
loved
it, sitting there with their little machines adding everything up so that she, Bubba, could concentrate on her
sympathy
and her
empathy
and all the other things for which she was valued.

And then ten years later, after all the nannies that couldn’t be counted, she was back home and counting all over again. Sit-ups in the gym and sausages per person and standing in the petrol station which she seemed to do about ten times a week—it
guzzled
the stuff, that bloody car—just watching the numbers spin up and up and willing them to get to the top before every single one of her mental marbles was lost and gone forever. So, just to keep her sanity really, she had come up with this huge project, this ball, which would be the perfect showcase for all of her creativity and originality and social—well,
genius
for want of a better word, and what happened? She was sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the numbers and knowing, just knowing, that they were never going to add up.

She wanted to cry, but she mustn’t. She really mustn’t. The others would be here soon, and she needed to hold it all together, but really, if she had just one regret in the whole history of her forty-whatever years—and Bubba did not like regrets, on the whole, didn’t
approve
of them really, they were just more negatives—that one regret would be ever thinking up the St. Ambrose Christmas Paradise Lakeside in Winter Seaside bloody Beach Ball.

Rachel and Heather swooped onto the gravel at the same time, ripped their keys from their ignitions, flung open their doors. Sharon and Jasmine were just getting out of their cars and running under outstretched coats through the pelting rain and into the house. Clover’s large rear was disappearing through the front door. This is rather exciting, thought Rachel. Get us. We’re practically
The Sweeney.

Bubba was wringing her hands, both trying and failing to suppress her sobs. “I gave Bea the check last week when she asked and they cashed it the bastards cashed it”—sob—“I just heard from the bank and it was my money I just thought I’d float it you know just till we’d sold all the tickets”—sob—“and then I thought this morning this is jolly odd isn’t it jolly odd that they are supposed to be doing dinner here for one hundred and fifty people in”—wail—“God in about eight hours and there’s nobody here and no equipment they said they’d be bringing ovens and warmers and of course food there’s no food here nothing at all not a fucking sausage not a loaf of bread and so I rang them and—”

“OK, I think we get the picture,” said Rachel.

“As I thought,” chipped in Clover. “Pam the crooked dinner lady. Got her fingerprints all over it. Her MO completely. I did warn—”

“We need a Plan B,” Rachel said over her.

“—you, but did anyone listen?”

“How much have we got to play with?” Rachel went to the kitchen table in the hope of finding some sort of budget.

“That’ll teach you.” Clover shook her head, more in sorrow than in anger.

“Shut up, Clover.”

But there was no budget here, just thousands of numbers scrawled over hundreds of pieces of paper, as if Bubba was a mad physicist trying to crack a new theorem rather than a parent running a fund-raiser. How on earth, thought Rachel to herself, did this woman ever hold down a job?