On Top of Everything (21 page)

The grey was the emotional upheaval of having her sister try to take her own life, as well as the marriage break-up and me, I suppose, but the brown, I believe, was related to her health. I suspected that from the beginning but then when her doctor kept ringing, well, it seemed obvious.

But we’re all responsible for our own bodies and Florence was definitely passing the buck on hers. Even she would agree with that, I think. She hadn’t been eating properly, that was pretty clear. She seemed to live on white sugar and bacon and egg pie. And not enough of either to put much meat on her bones, if you’ll pardon the expression. She looked hollowed, is how I would describe it. She’s a beautiful woman but it’s as though she was wearing the shadow of her beauty, if you know what I mean, not the beauty itself. She didn’t fit her skin.

Of course, it wasn’t just her physical self that was suffering. Her unhappiness, I think I can call it that and not off end anyone, was as clear to me as her hip bones, her cheekbones, her long slim arms and legs. Her unhappiness was so obvious I could almost
reach out and touch it. That’s what I was trying to do when I told her about Jamie. I wasn’t emotional game-playing or trying to make her feel guilty or anything like that. That’s not me, I would never do that. I was just opening up to her in the hope that she could then feel able to open up to me. To be honest, I was also a bit sick of her shit by then and I wanted to put a stop to it. I knew I wasn’t really the enemy but I didn’t realise then just who, or what, the enemy was.

I don’t tell everyone about Jamie. I keep him locked inside me most of the time. I express my feelings about him, of course I do, or I have in the past, and it used to feel like I thought about him every minute of the day but with time that’s actually changed so my thoughts about him are more fleeting now, not all-consuming the way they used to be. It’s like he’s a thread in my tapestry, not the whole wall hanging, if you know what I mean. I don’t cry when I think of him any more, but if I happen to be crying I make sure there are some tears for him. And if I happen to be smiling, I make sure he gets a bit of that as well. He’s my angel. And I wouldn’t bring him out like that and introduce him to someone unless I thought it would be of some help.

You don’t need a diploma in intuitive therapy to see that Florence was in trouble back then and I was probably the last person she thought could help her but I could.

I knew from what Monty had told me that she had led a more or less blessed life up till then, apart from the passing of her grandmother before Monty was even born. While this charmed existence had made her the wonderful mother he has told me she always was, it had not prepared her to deal with the shit hitting the fan.

The fact is, and I’m not sure if Florence got this to begin with, in my experience nobody gets to lead a totally charmed existence. Nobody escapes the pitfalls of being a human being. It’s what
separates us from the zebras. Or that’s my theory anyway, formed when my first husband Steve and I went on safari in Tanzania after Jamie died, when we still thought that our relationship could withstand what we’d been through, when we thought going on an expensive trip as far away as possible could get us away from ‘it all’, which was a crazy notion but it was a crazy time.

I think I already knew it was over. We’d had a good relationship, a good marriage by most standards, but I don’t think I was really myself until my son died and stripped away everything that didn’t matter. The house, the car, the suburbs, the coffee mornings. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever wanted those things, what I had ever liked about them.

‘It’s grief, you’ll get over it,’ everyone said, including Steve. I had my doubts but I trusted everyone else more than myself then and so we went on this African trip, which was amazing, which made everything crystal clear.

We were standing in the back of a truck watching a lioness in the long grass of the Serengeti staking out her newborn prey when I realised my old life was over. The lioness started to track this female zebra and her baby, peeling them away from the herd. Steve was going nuts with excitement, the driver had to tell him to stop hooting, and he was taking a million photos as he watched it all happen, while I was just standing there crying.

Did you know that when a lion takes down a baby zebra in the wild, its mother doesn’t fight for it for even a moment? She doesn’t miss a hoofbeat, doesn’t even stop to look, she just runs to rejoin the herd as though nothing has happened, disappearing into a sea of black and white stripes, and suddenly everything is just the way it was before.

Steve wanted me to get pregnant again, straight away, to disappear into the sea of stripes myself, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t the same person. It could never be the way it was before.

But I’m OK with that. I mean, if we are all going to have tragedies, if none of us can escape them, then surely we have to learn from them, we have to gain something.

And we have to use what we have gained. Those of us who have fought tooth and nail to overcome tragedy are, after all, if nothing else, proof that such things can be survived.

So we can actually help others survive their tragedies
too.

As long as they’ll let us.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I toyed with being a bona fide alcoholic after I got back from Tannington Hall, after Crystal’s heartbreaking confession, after I felt I had exhausted all the sensible possibilities for coping with a depressed sister, a wreck of a house and a looming afterlife.

I wanted that bliss of not knowing; that escape from the pain of reality that drugs and alcohol promise. The trouble being that as Harry had always told me, I wasn’t a natural. DCI Jane Tennison made it look so easy in
Prime Suspect
— a swig here, a gurgle there, a glass or two of something at lunchtime — but honestly, you have to have the stomach for it.

The night I got back, after talking to Crystal, I tried throwing down a glass of whisky from a bottle I found hiding in the pantry along with three lots of triple sec (don’t ask me how they got there, I don’t even know what it is) but it was foul. It made my eyes water before I even got it to my mouth.
It tasted like a filthy old puddle that donkeys had peed in and rusty nails had soaked in for centuries.

I spat it out on the floor, then Sparky licked it up and he spat it out too. That’s how foul our whisky was. Then I started on the cooking sherry but that wasn’t much better. I hadn’t noticed when I’d downed it during the early stages of the Harry debacle how much it tasted like vinegar. And not the fancy deli sort of vinegar made by comely virgins on some otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Sicily or wherever, but the bulk-bin cheap-as-you-like strained-through-the-sweaty-sock-of-a-hormonal-teenage-boy sort. Mind you, I’d had it since 1993 so maybe that’s what cooking sherry is supposed to taste like when it’s that old. Either way, I threw it out and the next day went to Tesco to stock up on expensive New World wine instead: Chilean reds and New Zealand sauvignon blancs and Australian chardonnays.

It was a Saturday. Tesco was a zoo, and catapulted me into such a black mood with all the healthy people being so unriddled with disease and alive and well yet insisting on moving with glacial speed and bringing their caterwauling brats to run up and down raising merry hell in the booze aisle that when I got home I took to my bed with Sparky and the latest
Hello!
magazine.

To my surprise, mid-afternoon there was a gentle knock at my bedroom door. It was Monty.

‘Crystal told me about Poppy,’ he said, his beautiful eyes filling with tears. ‘Mum, I’m so sorry.’

And when I held out my arms, he walked into them. For a while he was my gorgeous boy again, my perfect son. It was like old times. We hugged each other the way we used to before he got a wife. Despite the circumstances, it was lovely to have him back to myself for those few moments.

Of course, it didn’t last.

‘I’ve just spoken to Archie,’ he said, pulling away and, embarrassed, wiping a tear from his cheek. ‘We’re going to head up to Tannington for a few days. Crystal’s going to try some reflexology with Poppy. She thinks it could really help.’

I wanted to talk to him about Crystal and her baby, tell him that we’d spoken and she’d given me the telling off I so richly deserved, and that I was sorry for being such a sourpuss.

‘You used to call him Grandad,’ I said wistfully instead. ‘I loved it when you called him that.’

‘Yes, but
he
didn’t,’ Monty said, with a flash of his father’s exasperation. ‘Please Mum. Let’s not get into all that now. Why can’t you just let me be my own man?’

‘Because you’re not a man, you’re just a boy!’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself. I knew as I was saying it that this would blow away our tender moment yet out it popped. What was the matter with me? Like every other child in the universe, Monty had been telling me since he was two years old that he was a big boy now. Boys never wanted to be boys. They always wanted to be men. And anyone who disabused them of this notion was asking for trouble.

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that,’ I said quickly, trying to recover. ‘I know you’re a man.’ But that came out not the way I meant it either. I said ‘man’ as in ‘Charles’ like it was a swear word or a joke. I wished it had been my wrists Poppy slit. I couldn’t get anything right.

‘Yeah, right, whatever,’ my son said, his face teetering on the brink of disgust. ‘I’ll see you when I see you then.’

‘Please, Monty,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’

He looked vaguely sympathetic for a moment then, my beautiful boy/man. The anger slid off his shoulders, relaxed his eyes, his mouth.

‘You used to say that all you wanted was for me to be happy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember that?’

‘Of course, I do,’ I said. It had been much on my mind of late.

‘So now I’m happy but it’s not what you want. What happened, Mum?’

It was a good question. What had happened? Well, for a start, it turned out I didn’t have a clue what happiness was. I thought I’d had it and I’d been wrong. For years, I had been wrong. And I did desperately want Monty to be happy but I wanted him to be the right sort of happy, the real sort, not the pretend sort or the wrong sort.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him because I didn’t want to admit I had no faith in his ability to find what I had not. ‘I’m just worried that …’ But my worries were so many and varied I didn’t know where to start. ‘I’m just worried,’ I said.

‘Well don’t be, please,’ Monty begged. ‘Despite not having a job, despite you and Dad, despite even poor Poppy, I’m having the time of my life, Mum.’

And isn’t that what I had always wanted him to have? Or had I wanted him to have the time of my life?

I hit my wine supply after I heard him and Crystal leave but I struggled to make the most of it. I probably could have managed a whole bottle on my own if I had started in the morning and kept sipping till bedtime but getting into it later in the day meant I ran out of steam before I got very far. I just didn’t fancy it really.

I tried starting earlier the following day but I was retching by the second glass. The trouble was that I felt sick to my stomach in the first place and because I didn’t know if this was just the worry or if it was the measles, that made me feel even more worried and therefore more like drinking yet at the same
time sicker and less able to do so.

If I could have scored some crack, I probably would have, although I was never much chop at drugs, either. I’d smoked pot twice at student parties and both times fallen asleep and Harry had had to carry me home. And when someone suggested a line of coke at a party a few years later all I could think of was spending Monty’s childhood locked up in Holloway jail with all the drug mules and prostitutes. I’d burst into tears, embarrassing everyone there, including Harry, who’d again had to carry me home.

I’d had no wild youth, that was the trouble. And now that I felt like having one, it was too late, my youth had up and left me, and worse, so had everyone else.

Well, there was Will, who would have been perfect, but I was trying to fire him so that I didn’t have to see him or smell him ever again as long as I lived (however long etcetera etcetera etcetera).

This was going to make having a wild youth with him quite tricky.

Although, as the hole in the floor downstairs suggested, Will had not taken to being fired quite as much as I’d imagined. I heard him arrive the next morning and stayed in my room attempting to seethe, not easy given my conflicted feelings.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked when I finally got dressed and went downstairs to talk to him. It was past lunchtime by then but I’d been rehearsing what I would say for hours. And I’d been changing my clothes. And I’d been putting makeup on and taking it off, then putting it on and taking it off again. Finally, I decided on clean jeans and an old but good button-up shirt, plus a light foundation and some lip gloss. I combed my hair but didn’t wear perfume. I wanted it to look like I was making no effort although he had already seen me in
baggy-bottomed tracksuit pants and an old T-shirt of Monty’s so I didn’t know why I was bothering. He would know I had bothered.

‘What do you mean what am I doing here? I work here,’ Will said, his head and shoulders poking out of the hole, a cobweb smeared on his collar. ‘Nice week away?’

‘Not particularly, no,’ I said as he jumped out of the orifice with athletic ease and stood beside me, wiping his hands on his jeans, then pointing back down into the smelly pit.

‘Sid has a mate in the scaffolding business and so we got all this for two and six. Looks like Stan has found some matching recycled floorboards up near Cambridge too. He’s gone to have a look at them.’

This did not seem to tally up particularly well with what I had discussed with the two of them before I went to Tannington Hall.

‘But what about …’ I started to say.

‘The smell?’ he suggested, although that wasn’t what I was going to say. ‘I know, there was a fox down there, I’m afraid. Or an ex-fox, to be more precise. I gave him an agnostic burial while you were away but the smell might linger for a while. Do you have any scented candles?’

What kind of builder knew about scented candles?

‘But I thought I told you,’ I said, ‘I’ve gone off the whole idea of a tearoom. I don’t want to do it any more and now there’s this hole in the floor and all this scaffolding and the pong, not to mention the £30,000. The not having it, I mean.’

Dad’s cheque was burning a hole in my bedside table drawer upstairs. I could almost smell the smoke from where I was standing, guiltily unable to stop scratching my neck, which is exactly what body language experts looked for in liars.

‘Florence, we are going to do this,’ Will said, quite bossily,
sort of, but in a gentle reassuring way. ‘We have to.’

‘But what about …’ I started again.

‘Trust me, Florence,’ Will said. ‘Can you not just do that? Can you not just trust me?’

The thing is, it’s very difficult to fire someone you absolutely want to have sex with on the grounds of never wanting to see them again because of course, deep down, you really do want to see them again no matter how much you try to tell yourself you don’t.

‘I just can’t afford it,’ I said, looking at the steel cap of Will’s left boot. ‘On top of everything it’s just … I’m so sorry, but you really have to …’

‘Give me the week, Florence,’ Will insisted. Truly, he was making getting rid of him impossible. ‘How about that? Just give me the week?’

I’d run out of ways to fire him by then. I’d run out of ways to do anything. ‘Is that the time?’ I asked instead, pretending to be aghast, looking at the space on my wrist where my watch usually was. I couldn’t take another second of him. ‘I really have to go up to the kitchen,’ I announced agitatedly, and off I took.

The moment I was up there I whipped the cork off another bottle of something fruity from New Zealand. I was shaking my head at my idiocy and contemplating the first sip when Will appeared.

‘Tell me what’s going on, Florence,’ he said.

‘I haven’t any more money,’ I answered, wondering if my nose was growing like Pinocchio’s as I spoke. ‘I can’t pay you,’ I added, my snout positively tingling. ‘It’s all spent, gone, kaput.’ My nostrils were going to poke out the window on the other side of the room if I kept this up.

‘Yes, I know that,’ Will said. ‘I’m doing it as a favour. Stan
is doing it as a favour. Sid doesn’t work for cash anyway.’

I took a slurp of the sauvignon blanc. I’m blowed if I could work out what the fuss was all about. It tasted horribly acidic to me. Like gooseberry juice spiked with flea powder.

‘No good?’ Will asked, nodding in the wine’s direction.

‘Not exactly my cup of tea,’ I answered, wishing like hell that’s what it was but cups of tea don’t help you forget your troubles, that’s alcohol’s job. ‘Would you like a glass?’

Will shook his head. ‘Don’t drink,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

I wondered if he was an alcoholic and if it would be rude or insensitive to ask for some pointers.

‘Health reasons,’ he answered, as though reading my thoughts. ‘Mental health reasons mainly. Florence, may I sit down?’

I pulled the bottle of wine closer to myself and nodded.

‘What’s going on? What’s made you change your mind?’ he asked as he sat. ‘About the tearoom? It can’t be the money because we don’t need any more just yet. That’s not the hold up. We’ll work that out, I’ve told you that. So I’m just wondering, Florence …’

I choked down another mouthful of vile gooseberry-flavoured flea juice and said nothing.

‘I’m just wondering if it’s me,’ Will said. ‘If it’s what happened the other day. Because we may just have gotten our wires crossed and if that’s the case then all I can do is say again how sorry I am. In fact, I can’t apologise enough. I just couldn’t forgive myself if you gave up your tearoom because of me. Because of a misunderstanding about what did or didn’t go on upstairs.’

I took another slurp and some sauvignon blanc trickled down my chin. I couldn’t even keep the wretched stuff in my mouth.

‘Florence?’ I nodded so he knew I was listening even though I didn’t really want to. ‘Because if our wires weren’t crossed,’ he continued, ‘if it wasn’t a misunderstanding, if there’s something else going on that isn’t about upstairs, I would really like to think we could talk about it.’