Something on
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Writing extracts by Rosa Barbour |
Something on
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Writing extracts by Rosa Barbour |
Later that night, after the tears and spilt wine and stilted apologies, I buried myself between the coats in my wardrobe and placed a hushed call to Caroline. The line was terrible; I was on the verge of emerging from the soft folds of 2009 Topshop and second-hand Whistles until I discerned some tinkly words on the other end. They sounded rather like ‘Highlands’ and ‘in touch’.
About a week later, Bron shuffled through to my room in her slippers. ‘Mum phoned. She said do we want to go up North to her new cottage. She said she’s got a surprise for me. I said no.’ ‘Bron, I think we should go.’ ‘She’s only doing this because she’s seen a baby in her Boden catalogue or something—’ ‘I think we should go.’ It must have been something about my tone, or perhaps she was just noticing the hollowness in my cheeks for the first time in the cold afternoon light, because she shifted on her feet for a moment before nodding almost deferentially. ‘It’s a boy, by the way,' she said after a pause. 'I know it. And he’s going to be virile and kind, not like his father. I’m going to call him Marius.’ ‘Marius is wet. Valjean is more alpha.’ ‘I can’t call my son Valjean, Cathy. Anyway, Hugo’s original Marius wasn’t wet. Everyone just thinks he’s wet because of Michael Ball.’ ‘I really like Michael Ball,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you call him Michael Ball? Both names, like the Tiger in Life of Pi.' Briar twisted her mouth about for a while, trying not to smile. I did the same.
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Bron looks tired and very pale. There’s a slightly mad look in her eye – the same one she used to get at the Woodlands Road flat if she’d been cooped up too long. I can’t remember the last time she changed out of her red dressing gown, and I don’t think she’s had a bath for two weeks. The overall effect is a bit like if Kate Bush in the Wuthering Heights video had been paused mid-pivot, dropped like a spider into a jam jar and told she wasn’t allowed to dance anymore.
Bron has always reminded me of Kate Bush, minus the dreamy, slightly wandered eyes. Bron could remained ruffled and unwashed for the rest of her life and her eyes would still be sharp and quick. If a bit wild. We play at Paste –
Till qualified, for Pearl – Then, drop the Paste – And deem Ourself a fool – The Shapes, tho’, were similar, And our new Hands Learned Gem Tactics Practicing Sands Emily Dickinson ☾⋆ ‘Shrink Plastic’, it was called. Louise didn’t like the name. ShrinkING Plastic would be better, she felt. The lack of ‘-ing’ was somehow unglamorous. It stripped the whole concept of its magic. The stuff inside the box starts off big, and then you do things to it - apply heat or something - and it ends up small. It’s fucking plastic… that shrinks! ShrinkING plastic. Take the ‘-ing’ away, and it sounds like it’s already shrunk. It sounds ominously practical. It sounds… kitchen-utility-ish. The box was pretty though, in a block-colour-clear-plastic-Tamagotchi-packet sort of way. She didn’t feel depressed when she looked at that box. She felt… wide-eyed 90s café girl. Making coffee in a big bright room. Morning radio. Flirting with Jack Davenport. Better, anyway. It was getting dark outside her studio. Louise could tell because she’d left the shutters open. She could see two boys scooting around on their bikes, edging carelessly into privet hedges and dragging their feet on the pavement. She could see the rosy glow from the restaurant across the road, spilling out when the doors were opened by couples and families from the nearby houses, ready for their Friday night treats. Louise liked her view. She liked the people in the restaurant window, and her amusing boyish bikers. Two weeks of filing precious metals with the shutters closed had knitted her muscles together. It was time to cut her shrinking plastic into moons and ice creams and sarcastic kittens, and bake them alive in the oven. ‘‘Dulce… Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’ this one’s called,’ says Matthew. ‘You know, for simplicity's sake.’
The label, etched in monochrome by a local artist, bears a sturdy vanilla pod, held like a cigarette between painted lips. Jessica unscrews the lid. A sweet, humid smell pools into the air around her. It is the smell of her mother, before Jo. It is the smell of Matthew’s fingers on the beach, when he leant over and painted a neat strip of tanning oil on her nose. And something else, much further back. A sicklier odour, with the same mingling top-notes: Corinne, four months pregnant and still nubile on the floor of the girls’ changing rooms at secondary school. ‘Impulse’ body spray – the yellow one - cloys with the smoke hanging limply under the skylight. Corinne cackles as she takes her cigarette between her toes; angles her leg high to take a drag. Jessica stares in muted fascination as a tiny yellow thong disappears between stubbly, razor-burnt labia. ‘You looking at my cunt, cunt?’ She wasn’t. Well, not really. She was looking at the thong; imagining the thin material snaking its way up into Corinne’s stomach, and winding around her baby’s tiny, frog-spawn throat. Billie, it was to be called. After Billie Piper. Didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl: Billie either way. If Billie died early on, thought Jessica, maybe Corinne wouldn’t bleed as much as her mother had. ‘It’s tobacco. And vanilla. Like the Tom Ford,’ says Jessica presently, turning the bottle over in her hands. ‘There’s nothing on the back. No list, or… ingredients.’ Matthew saunters. Hands on her waist. ‘Ingredients? Well, no, my pleb. You’re in darkest Bohemia.’ Jessica lolls against him: indignant, delighted. Matthew, with all the confidence and radiance of immense privilege. He smirks lots. Too much. He is downright filthy. But his eyes are clever and warm. It is love. He consults his phone drunkenly, chin on her shoulder: Pedro Ximénez. Fortuna. ‘Here we are. Dulce Ahumado Vaina. Translation: sweet... well, I knew that. Sweet, smoky little pod.’ He looks at her. ‘Little pod. Just like you. Pea-pod. Cardamom. Vanilla.’ ‘I’m not a pod,’ says Jessica. Jo and Billie. They had been peas. Seeds. ‘Well, anyway,' says Matthew. ‘I’m buying it. Te amo, etcetera.’ For a week, the scent takes on new shape and depth. It changes. It mingles with their skin, with carotene and sea salt. With week two comes the morning sickness. Vomit, bile, ‘Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’glass, Matthew’s cigarettes - all but one – straight down the sink. When Paul’s face appeared, hovering anxiously at her hospital window, Jessica was very annoyed with her mother.
‘That poor boy. Look at him. He loves you.’ ‘Send him away, mum.’ ‘I can’t understand it,’ said Susan. There was no easy way to explain her rejection of Paul, the father of her unborn child - who loved her - to her mother. It was all tied up in orgasms. Whenever Jessica visualised her orgasms (as she often did, subconsciously, and usually at the moment of their occurrence), she thought in colour. Each one was a mass of pink and red, like the glow in front of your eyes when you close them and turn your face up to the sun. As she drew close to the edge, a tiny white circle of light would appear in the blush. In order to achieve the fleeting stabs of pleasure that were the top prize of each frantic endeavour, it was necessary to touch the light at exactly the right moment, with the correct amount of pressure; in doing so, the spot would grow brighter, more focussed, and eventually split the rosy haze. When she met Paul, Jessica had made the unpleasant discovery that it was possible to have an orgasm that was devoid of any pleasurable sensation whatsoever. Paul never touched the white light – never came close - but sometimes, when he was especially diligent in his efforts to stimulate her, Jessica would go suddenly numb; the orgasm had come and gone without announcing itself, and the little white spot would pale and fade as soon as it had appeared. No screams. No light. No relief. There wasn’t much worse. The unbearable frustration of it all aside, Jessica was squeamish, and the thought of these phantom climaxes made her uneasy. When she slipped on her underwear soon afterwards - as she always did with Paul - she could not bear the feeling of the thin net material against her. The skin that covered her engorged clitoris felt thin, stretched to the point of translucency. She would be spent for at least three hours, and yet had been robbed of the heady dose of dopamine and the pleasant smarting sensation that accompanied her real, blinding orgasms, which had only ever been achieved when she was alone. When she went for a pee after sex with Paul, there was always a twinge, at exactly the spot he should have hit. By pushing harder, she somehow hoped to trigger the lost throes. Eventually, she’d give up, pissing out yet another near miss. At length, after Paul had been dispatched, Jessica’s baby fell out of her. He was vividly coloured: red and yellow and blue, but quiet. Jessica, delirious and exhausted, giggled up at her mother as a doctor whisked him away. ‘Start as you mean to go on.’ Susan stared down at her daughter tremulously. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Another night owl. Sorry mum.’ Jessica slipped out of consciousness for a moment. When she woke, she cat-called the midwife in her lairy Friday night voice. ‘Let me have him! I don’t care about the slime.’ Looks were exchanged. Pros and cons weighed up in seconds. This happened sometimes. They were used to it. Eventually, the tiny purple body was placed gravely into Jessica’s arms. She held him happily for a moment, before her head rolled back, and she fell into a deep sleep. Susan caught the baby just in time. She threw up bile into the bedside sink as she imagined his head bruising, or not bruising. She wasn’t sure if you could still bruise when your heart had stopped. In her dream, Jessica is about twelve, on holiday with her mother and sister. She lolls around on a jetty, jutting out from the sand to kiss a glittering pink sea. She is bored and too hot, in her mother’s huge white pants. She jumps into the water, and cuts her foot on a stone. It's sore, but there is something pleasant about the way the blood feels, flowing freely from the puncture in her heel. Lots of it. Enough that the water around her foot feels warm. Her head feels warm, too. She has never fainted before. She wonders if you can faint in water. Her mother and sister’s voices bleat down at her. She leans her head back, and lets her hair billow around, like the blood. As consciousness drains from her, she pictures herself in a film, camera below her, picking up the beautiful colours of her mermaid body. When she wakes up, she is being held aloft by strong arms. They lay her down onto a terracotta floor. It is porous and warm, as though it’s been sucking in the sun all day. When she opens her eyes, they are met with the steady, calm stare of a man. Above his head, the sun splits a rosy cloud. She smiles, and stretches her arms up to him. She feels that if she is taken away from him, away from the terracotta, she will be cold, and unable to warm up again. She feels a woman’s hand on her face; it is too thin and feminine for this moment. She brushes it away. The man reaches down, and places his own hands on her temples, and holds them there. No one, not her mother, could ever protect her like this man. She gurgles happily, and rolls over on the terracotta, so that her cheek can rest against it. The tiles become spherical; she wraps her arms and legs around them. The dream landscape shifts; she is older, back in her hospital bed. She clutches the terracotta sphere to her stomach. It changes; becomes skin. Her skin. Her bump. The man who pulled her from the Spanish water stands over her. ‘I’m all sweaty,’ she says, holding her arms up to him. She likes the way she sounds when she says it. He puts his hands on either side of her head, at her temples, and holds them there. I know nothing stays the same
but if you’re willing to play the game it will be coming around again Carly Simon - ‘Coming Around Again’ Something is rotten in the bin in the kitchen. I smelt it yesterday, when I pressed my slipper down onto the pedal too hard and the lid swung back further than I used to let it. I can smell it now, even though I’m in my bedroom, on the other side of the flat, and all the doors are closed. I press my nose into my pillow. The sweet, putrid odour mingles with another; one I have, until now, been only half conscious of in the gathering weeks. It is intimate and bodily. It has been lurking in my bedclothes, subtle yet malevolent, since R’s departure. I know exactly what it is. The thing that’s rotting in the bin, I mean. It’s the tuna tin that I cut my finger on last week. I’d dared myself to do the dishes, just to see what would happen. When I did the dishes with R, we always put the radio on. He was baffled when I knew all the words to the old songs. ‘You know all the songs. How do you know all the songs?’ He said it every week, the same words, in exactly the same way. It always made me laugh, how impressed he was. I felt proud, as though I’d written the songs myself. Without R, without the radio, the tuna lid sliced right through the skin, and into my nail, too. I looked down in surprise. It seemed strange that pain could be so physical; so sudden and sharp. I was surprised, too, at the brightness of my blood. I watched as it swilled in with the remains of the tuna. I watched for five minutes, maybe twenty. Maybe forty! Until a noise like a gunshot made me jump in the air. A forgotten carton of orange juice, swollen with gas, fizzed quietly at the end of the kitchen table. It smelt like Bucks Fizz. I dropped the bloody tin into the bin, without pressing the lid down, like you’re supposed to. It was still full of tuna, and me. Project for today: take the rubbish out. Not because of the smell. Just as an experiment. Do things as I might have once done them, even though it’s all absurd now, living properly. I smile to myself, nursing the thought of my little excursion, and only admitting defeat when it crosses my mind that if my tears become any thicker, I could choke to death. * ‘Ow, you fohcking COHNT!’ R and I used to laugh a lot when the men came to collect the bins. We both had Thursdays off. One of the men is Geordie, and always swore because Mrs. Munro fills her bags too full, and they would always split. Mrs. Munro is in her seventies, and unwell. Nothing about the situation was very funny, but R did a good Geordie, and we were smug about being able to sleep in. Sleep together. ‘Nice cohnt,’ said R afterwards. One week, R got up early, went down into the garden with a binbag, and divided up Mrs. Munro’s rubbish for the bin-men. It was discovered that the Geordie’s name was Mark. He was from Gateshead. His twin brother had been a mountaineer. When Mrs. Munro got wind of the bin-bag conspiracy, she came down to our door, prodded R with a bony finger and told him not to be such a ‘fucking sap.’ It must be Thursday today. It is ridiculous to me that Mark is down there now, doing his swearing. I think of John Hannah in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. ee cummings. Or was it Auden? Stop the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the Geordie bin-man from swearing when I’m here on my own. He was my North, my South, my East, my West. He was the only one who could make me come with his tongue. He was twenty-nine. I’m only twenty-two. He was going to show me how to be an adult. I’m not old enough to be in so much pain. Outside in the garden, Mark’s cries of anguish have not dissipated into the morning air, as they usually do. They are growing louder, and more urgent. ‘JESUS FOCHKING COHNT. SHE’S SLICED ME FOHCKING HAND OFF.’ My heart gives a strange little flutter as I remember. Yesterday, maybe the day before, Mrs. Munro knocked on my door. She didn’t say a word when I finally let her in, just waddled into the kitchen and began to wrestle with the rotting rubbish. I hunched against the wall and watched as the potion of tuna, fermented orange juice and blood dribbled onto her dress. The smell, now that the bag was released from its metal container, was truly horrendous. I felt no embarrassment; I didn’t apologise, or move forwards to help her, or take the burden off her frail hands. Eventually, she was forced to wrap both of her arms around the heavy plastic sack. When she got to the door, she looked back at me. ‘Get the radio on again,’ she said. ‘THAT FOHCKING SILLY OLD BINT’S NOT DONE HER TIN UP; IT’S SEVERED MY FOHCKING HAND,’ bellows Mark presently. I creep to the bedroom window and fix my eye to the crack in my shutters. Mark’s hand shines with bold, bright blood. ‘Fuck mate. That is vivid,’ says the other bin-man. Mark looks up at him, clearly furious at the lack of gravity his colleague has attributed to his condition. Then, his face splits open into a grin; he throws his head back and laughs. It’s the loudest laugh I’ve ever heard. ‘Vivid! Yeah, it is that, mate! Vivid! It is that, mate, aye.’ * The air in the garden is heavy with vegetation and rain. It thunders down and soaks me. My bare feet slither over my flip-flops and touch the gravel on the path up to the dustbins. When I left the flat, the easy-listening DJ with her smooth Galaxy chocolate voice had just put on an old Carly Simon song. I set myself a challenge: sing the song under your breath while you take the bin bags out, and if you’re in sync with Carly when you get back into the flat, tomorrow will be a good day. I hurl the bag into the bin, and run back onto the grass to avoid the putrid puff of air when the lid falls. I don’t want to go back into the flat yet, so I lie down on the soaked grass and close my eyes. There are sounds on the air. They float to me from my open kitchen window, two floors up. It’s Carly, and she’s singing along in time with me. Jackie lay flat in bed, sniffing the air urgently. She had just finished watching a horror film: a young woman called Joan is robbed of each of her five senses, one at a time, by shape-shifting poltergeist with white gnashing teeth. In order to claim Joan's sense of smell for its own, the creature transforms into a tiny red ghost beetle (with white gnashing teeth) and burrows deep into her nostrils without her immediate knowledge. This modus operandi proves so effective that it is recycled later on in the film, when the demon-beetle burrows deep into the Joan's eyeballs (to her full knowledge), and absorbs her facility for sight.
Jackie was concerned. Szymon, her landlord, had knocked sheepishly on her door earlier that day to issue fair warning about the jellied fish he was planning on cooking for his parents. All day the pungent odour had stuck in the back of her nose and throat. Now she smelt nothing. She pinched her nose hard, just to be sure, and then burst into tears. It had been thirteen years since Jackie had watched a scary film. The last time - and every time before that - had been with Lisa, in her boxy teenage bedroom back in Glasgow. They used to lie on their stomachs on Lisa’s bed, bitching languidly about their other friends and various family members, until Lisa deemed the summer air outside her window to be dark and dense enough for the main event. ‘Do we have to ?’ asked Jackie one week, knowing full well the futility of her appeal. Lisa, a force to be reckoned with since birth, had become fixated on the gory, sexy 90s horror films she saw advertised on her cable TV – Scream, The Craft, Se7en,Sleepy Hollow, Scream 2 – and the focus of her adolescent world for the past several months had been to get her underage hands on all of them, by any means necessary. ‘Of course we have to,’ came Lisa’s mumbled tones from under the bed. She was hunting around for her latest acquisition, bare legs and feet waggling around above deck near Jackie’s face. ‘Hit the jackpot this week. Managed to smuggle it out of Oxfam with a dress I bought.’ ‘That’s terrible!’ screeched Jackie too loudly, attempting to delay the inevitable. ‘It’s Oxfam!’ ‘I put £2 on the video shelf,’ muttered Lisa, emerging red-faced, blinking and victorious from her scrabbling. ‘Look!’ Lisa looked. A shiver prickled on her neck before running, appropriately, down her spine. The video case showed a ghostly white bathtub with a woman’s disembodied hand clutching at the rim. Jackie didn’t like the look of that bathtub, or the hand. They meant trouble. They meant sleepless nights for the next three weeks, or until Lisa’s next score brought fresh nightmares. ‘I don’t like it,’ said Jackie. She turned the case over in her hand. A good-looking middle-aged couple peered fretfully out at her above the blurb. ‘You will like it. It’s Harrison Ford. Look at him.’ ‘I am looking at him. I don’t like him.’ ‘He’s FIT.' ‘He looks like your dad.’ Lisa laughed very suddenly and very loudly. It made Jackie jump. ‘My mum fucking wishes he looked like my dad.’ ‘Who’s the woman?’ ‘Who’s the woman!? It’s Michelle Pfeiffer. My mum wishes she looked likeher. Now move up. We’re watching it. If you don’t like it, just pretend you’re a reeeally scary ghost yourself. A real bad-ass. That’ll be me soon. A real-life ghost.’ Jackie didn’t like it when Lisa made light of her illness like this; it was morbid and irreverent, and it made Jackie’s chest ache with pain, but she knew what was expected of her. ‘Do you think you’ll be a good ghost or a bad one?’ ‘Bad one. Oh yeah, fucking definitely! I’ll get into bed with Harrison Ford when he doesn’t know it.’ ‘Gross.’ Jackie giggled, then went quiet. She knew her friend was right. Even in death, she’d be braver than Jackie was. Ruth lolled on the hot concrete of the airport car park and glared malevolently at her father. She felt he deserved it. He was wearing pink shorts with ducks on them and negotiating loudly with the bemused Portuguese man in charge of the Europcarrentals.
‘Run smoothly, does she? Built for the heat?’ Ruth’s mother Susan’s voice was the next to reach her on the gentle Iberian breeze. ‘Ohforfuck’ssakePete. Christ.’ Ruth hoisted herself vertical. Her brother Luca, eight years old and seven her junior, was close by, pulling a stranger’s discarded bubble-gum from a crack in the ground. ‘How much do you hate dad? Look at his shorts,’ said Ruth, shuffling up beside him. Luca remained silent, committed to his sticky task with uncharacteristic solemnity. His loyalty, Ruth knew, was based almost entirely on a pleading bribe extended to him on the plane by their mother. Mention had been made of a certain inflatable pool-toy from the resort shop, pined after fruitlessly by Luca on holidays gone by. Rendered in the (somewhat impractical) shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was red, it was Luca’s heart’s desire and - for the first time - it was within his grasp. All he had to do was ‘behave himself’ from plane to villa. Luca was not sure where exactly Susan would pin his current business with the bubble-gum on the ‘behaving himself’ spectrum, but as it was a quiet preoccupation and his father’s own antics had once again taken centre-stage, he thought he was probably alright so far. At any rate, he was not inclined to destroy his chances by allowing his sister to draw him into one of her conspiratorial parent-bashing sessions. Luca knew from experience that being discovered as a participant in Ruth's vicious tête-à-têtes did not, in general, result in any T-Rex-based rewards... unless you counted the admittedly reptilian transformation of his mother when she reached peak anger zone. And yet... The resort shop was not known for its consistency of stock. This year round, they could just as easily be kitted out with benevolent, Herbivorous, greeninflatables. Herbivores would not do. Green would not do. Susan was on shaky ground with the T-Rex bribe, and they all knew it. As such, Ruth persevered with her provocations. ‘Look how annoying dad is. Just look at him. Even if you couldn't hear him, he'd be annoying. Mum’s about to lose it, look.’ Luca, thinking resentfully of Diplodocuses - the gentle, boring fools - allowed himself a glance in the direction of his parents. Sure enough, Susan was at breaking point, shifting from foot to foot, beetroot-faced as Pete bellowed on about air conditioning to the now rather alarmed-looking car dealer. ‘Imagine you were mum and you had to kiss dad,’ whispered Ruth in Luca’s ear. Luca screamed. She clamped a hand over his sticky mouth. To her astonishment, the kerfuffle went unnoticed as their father opened, slammed and re-opened the driver door for the final time. ‘Okay kiddos! All in order. Thunderbirds are go.’ Ralph gazes at the vast array of food laid out on the kitchen table.
‘Hey, wow, it’s quite the… smörgåsbord!’ Stellan glances up at us, licking meatball sauce from his thumb. ‘Hi. Yes. Yeah, it is.’ He’s stooping slightly, too tall for my kitchen. He’s wearing the navy linen shirt his mother sent him for his birthday. ‘So this is… from your country?’ offers Ralph. He hasn’t quite caught up with his breathing after the stairs. ‘We eat this kind of thing a lot in Sweden, yes. But it’s just, y’know, fish and meat. British fish and meat, in this case.’ When Stellan first opened that shirt it was practically rigid with starch. We laughed about it. He said this was typical of his mother; she had probably washed and treated it herself after buying it. I can see that it is soft now. It ripples slightly over his naval as he bends to roll a herring fillet. ‘So what do you guys call this… you know… type of… thing?’ asks Ralph, touching the tablecloth lightly. ‘A smörgåsbord,’ says Stellan mildly, skewering the herring into position with a cocktail stick. Juliet snorts unhelpfully from the couch. ‘How was Jo or whatever his name is.’
Bronwen draws on her cigarette and exhales slowly, eyes dark. When she speaks it’s in the resigned, dull monotone that spells imminent booze and recklessness. ‘He was boring. Very, very fucking boring. He knew he was boring, so in the middle of the night he pretended to sleep-talk. So that he would seem less boring. This is a thing people do now – I’ve seen them doing it on Big Brother.’ She draws again on her cig, eyes foggy. ‘Only fairly recent Big Brothers, though. See, even in 2010, when people were cunts, they weren’t such cunts as they are now. Have you noticed that?’ I’m about to ask her how she knows when it’s fake, but I know exactly. You just do. Well, people like Bron and me do. This is our magic. It is also the thing that will probably kill us. Without taking her eyes off the telly, Bron slithers her hand out from beneath her nest of blankets and grapples about on the sideboard for her bottle of wine. ‘Was he nice, though?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh. What are you watching?’ I try to keep my voice light and cheery in the hope that hers will miraculously follow suit. ‘Celebs Go Dating.’ ‘Doesn’t that have sleep-talking cunts on it?’ ‘No, s’good. Can you get me a thing of seafood from the fridge?’ ‘What do you mean seafood?’ ‘It's in the fridge.’ Uneasy, I shuffle in my slippers to the fridge. In it there are ten packets of Waitrose seafood antipasti, neatly piled on top of one another. There is also a carton of Alvalle Gazpacho and three bottles of James White organic carrot juice. And nothing else. ‘Where’s the Waitrose?’ ‘Dornoch.’ ‘How did you get to Dornoch?’ ‘I got the bus. That was my activity for today. Anyway, no he wasn’t nice. He kept trying to fuck me when he’d already come, and he also didn’t put his boxers back on between sessions, which I hate. So he was lounging about in my bed, flopping about like a cherub in one of those paintings, with his small, out-of-proportion arse. Then he tried to fuck me again with his flaccid Botticelli cock and I got fed up and asked him if he understood basic anatomy and he went all quiet and then he thought about it a bit more and was downright fucking raging and said to me, what the fuck were you thinking calling your son Marius—' Marius comes thudding down the stairs, and for a second it’s as if the whole thing is a sitcom, except it isn’t, it’s our lives. ‘Mummy, were you talking about activities? Because our activity today was potato painting and Jeremy said—’ ‘Which teacher did potato painting with you and called it potato painting’ says Browen, seething. ‘Miss Hynes.’ ‘Is Miss Hynes the one who gave you the idea to call your grandpa Pap-Pap?’ ‘Bron, don’t.’ Maris’s little tummy inflates and deflates as he breathes quickly, keeping up with the change of tack. ‘Yes, Miss Hynes said grandpa was Pap-Pap because it’s a song: WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY SNAP-SNAP, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD PAP-PAP. FOR OLD PAP-PAP WON’T BE HERE LONG, SO LET HIM PLAY AND SING ALONG.’ Bron stares at me, enraged. ‘What’s snap-snap?’ ‘Bronwen, don’t.’ ‘I told mum, the last thing I TOLD HER BEFORE SHE DIED… is that he’s not going to a primary school with five other ffffff-ing children in it—’ ‘WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY RAM-BAM, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD GRAM-GRAM. FOR OLD GRAM-GRAM LIKES… ehhh… LIKES PLAYING TOO, AND SOON SHE WON’T BE HERE FOR YOU.’ Bron sinks back into her armchair and pulls the blankets tightly around her as Marius pulls his t-shirt up, swells his tummy out as far as it will go, and beams at me. ‘And guess what?’ I kneel, twisting my arms around his sticky neck. 'Miss Hynes made those songs up herself!' |