I Should Be So Lucky (6 page)

‘Or just buy … stuff?’ Rachel suggested, feeling she probably had a more realistic grasp on the workings of young minds than her dad’s idealistically hippy sister.

‘No – I’m not having that!’ Gemma laughed and shook her head, her beaded dreadlocks dancing about. Rachel had always thought they looked like half-cooked pasta that someone had dropped into a bucket of hay. ‘I’ve decided he was fond of an evening’s dog-racing, out with his ancient mates for a night of beer and betting – so greyhounds it is.’ She opened a box of buttons. ‘What do you think? A mixture? Big, bold ones? Metallic? We’ll have to leave the elbow patches on, so we don’t want it too bright. Pheasant feathers would go well too, do you think?’

Rachel reached for the scissors, took the cardigan
from
Gemma and started snipping carefully at the thread beneath the leather buttons. ‘These buttons might look good on something pink, or maybe pale green?’ she suggested. ‘A girly cute cardigan that you wouldn’t expect to see big leather things on. Like the opposite of Doc Martens that have got ribbon instead of laces.’

‘Great idea,’ Gemma told her, laying out a selection of buttons. ‘You’re getting a really good eye. If I give you a few of these to take home and gussy up, will you be able to get them back to me in time for next Friday’s market? You can come along and help if you like. What’s the school situation? I don’t want to get you into trouble, so don’t just skip classes if they’re essential ones.’

Rachel thought for a moment. If she and her classmates had to pick a favourite day on which to bunk off, almost any of them except the geeks would choose Friday. The girls almost had an unspoken rota, because there were only so many of them who could claim to be off to the dentist or begging early leave for long trips to visit the distantly located half of their divorced parents. Ah – but last night her mother had told her they were moving out of the flat and back home (Yes! At last!). Maybe she could pretend she had to do something like … oh, go and look at a house? The school didn’t have to know yet that ‘We’re moving house’ meant going home to their old place that was actually closer to school, rather than further away.

‘Yes – I think I can do Friday. I can get the bus from outside school and be there about eleven.’ That would mean missing quite a lot of the morning as well, she realized, feeling a bit guilty. But it was a one-off. And by then it would only be a couple of weeks till the school holidays. Not
that
big a deal. And really, if you thought about it, working on a stall on Portobello Road should actually count as work experience.

Later, she strolled up the last few yards of Kensington Church Street and headed for Notting Hill Gate tube station to get the train home, hauling her school bag plus a bin liner with six cardigans from Gemma’s collection in it, along with a selection of trimmings to stitch on to them. She loved it that Gemma trusted her to revamp them, using her own ideas and taste.
I’m a designer
. She tried the words on for size. Not quite fifteen and her own efforts were going to be up for sale on Portobello Market. Yes! Lost in her thoughts, she had to dodge sideways to avoid a chihuahua on a pink lead at the top of the station steps and she crashed into a boy who was running up them. The bin bag fell and the staircase was strewn with knitwear and buttons.

‘Sorry!’ she called to him as she raced down the steps to scoop up the garments before grubby-footed commuters could trample them into the London grime.

‘ ’S all right,’ he drawled, picking up the tobacco-coloured cardigan. ‘Eugh, this yours?’ He held it up and pulled a face, then handed it to her and she stuffed it
into
its bag, feeling flustered and hoping she hadn’t lost any essential buttons. ‘You don’t
look
like a vagrant,’ he said, staring at the whole length of her, rather rudely. He was smirking at her, the expression on his face thoroughly supercilious.

‘No, well, I wouldn’t,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t see a lot of those in a school uniform, do you?’

‘Oh yah – funny!’ He was now walking down the last of the steps with her. ‘Which school?’

‘Not round here, miles away, near Richmond,’ she said, making her way down the steps. He wasn’t bad-looking. Not that she was staring at him. Why had he now changed direction to come down to the station with her? They’d reached the barrier and she swiped her Oyster to open the entry gates.

‘So what are you doing over here, with your bag of old clothes?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ She was thrilled by his curiosity. That was the thing with girls’ schools, you felt so ludicrously pleased if a boy who didn’t look totally bleugh so much as glanced at you. She really
was
staring at him now, taking in his soft, round face, perfect teeth, blue-grey eyes, blond surfer-streaky hair that was too long, but in a good way, not in the old Justin Bieber wraparound way. It was private-school hair, she decided; it was falling into his eyes so he had to keep flicking, and only posh boys flick. She should just wave goodbye right now and go down the last steps to the platform, but here
were
the two of them, going nowhere, one each side of the entry barrier as other travellers rushed through.

‘I just like to know who’s hangin’ down ma endz.’ He shrugged and grinned at her. ‘Catch you round?’

And then he was gone. Hadn’t even asked her name. Getting her number tagged in his phone would have been something to tell at school. She felt deflated, disappointed, even though he had that yah yah voice that she and her friends always found so funny, especially when he was trying to talk rapper. If her best friend Emmy was with her, they’d be giggling, ‘Eugh, he’s like
soo
Jack Wills,’ and pulling faces the second he was out of sight.

But all the same, he’d said this was his ‘endz’. Notting Hill was also Rachel’s endz because it was her father’s and she was often there. Maybe the boy was right; she might see him around. She really hoped so, anyway.

FIVE

IT WAS FRIDAY
evening before Viola got a chance to talk to Naomi about moving back home. Naomi had been out with her friends Monica and Elspeth in the afternoon to see a horror film and had come bouncing back home glowing with the thrill of having watched something truly, disgustingly macabre. ‘Only a nice
Midsomer Murders
repeat will settle me now,’ she said with deep satisfaction, leaving Viola wondering what kind of woman finds a crime drama with at least three gruesome murders ‘calming’. Viola made a jug of Pimm’s and they sat out on the terrace in the warm evening sun.

‘I feel a bit bad about leaving you here alone,’ Viola said, once she’d managed to tell Naomi her plans to move back to her own home. ‘Are you sure it’s all right? Kate thinks I’m being selfish.’

‘Of course it’s all right! I’ve been living here on my own for years. I’m not going to start mithering about the
lack
of company now. It’s not about that business the other night, is it? Because moving out for that would be just plain daft.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing to do with that.’ Viola briefly crossed her fingers against what wasn’t far off a lie. ‘I’d been thinking about moving back and now the tenant’s given notice and is going a bit early it seems like a sort of sign.’

Naomi, superstitious to the point of crossing the busiest road to meet a black cat, looked satisfied enough with that. ‘I know you feel you and Rachel need to get on with your own lives in your own home, and I’m glad you knew you had this place to run to when you needed it. But don’t think you’ve got to rush at it, just because your house is empty. If you need more time here, you can stay as long as you like. Because you’re the one that needs looking after, aren’t you? Not me. So when you do go, promise me you won’t do anything silly.’

There was a pause while Viola mentally filled in the words: ‘Like hook up with yet another complete no-hoper of a man.’

‘No going up ladders,’ Naomi warned after some long seconds, her forefinger up, threatening to wag.

‘Mum, that was nearly twenty years ago!’ Viola laughed.

‘Seems like yesterday to me. You wait till Rachel’s the one sneaking out nights and then trying to climb back in way after midnight like you did. Even now I worry
when
you’re out that you’ve lost your key again, and you’ll do something daft and break your neck trying to get in. You were lucky it was only your ankle that time.’

Viola briefly thought back to her teenage years and how she and her friends had only really felt like ‘themselves’ when they were out. How else, other than by some dangerous climbing, were you supposed to get back into the house when you’d lost your key down the loo in the pub and were sliding home at 2 a.m., hoping you could sneak into bed without your mum noticing you were way past curfew time? It had only been as her foot had gone through the rotten tread on the ladder that it crossed her mind there’d been a good reason why it had been left to fall apart beside the log pile rather than been tidied away in the shed.

‘Well, I wouldn’t break any bones climbing in here, would I? The flat’s on the ground floor and the lock on the French doors would probably give way with a sharp tug. In fact, before Rachel and I go back to Bell Cottage, I’m going to make a list of things that need mending here. We must get someone in to fix them for you. Or … I was just wondering about that place where Monica lives. Have you ever thought of …’

‘No, I haven’t thought,’ Naomi interrupted abruptly. ‘I’m staying here and I don’t want any fuss.’ She was starting to get huffy. ‘
And
I don’t want folks in here, poking around. The fixtures and fittings have stayed in one piece this long, I reckon they’ll see me out.’ She got
out
of her chair, moving as nimbly as a twenty-something, the tiny mirrors on her old Moroccan hippy skirt twinkling in the sunlight. ‘Right,’ she said, with a sudden sunny smile, ‘I think a nice piece of ham, an egg and some fried potatoes would be the thing. Then
Midsomer
.’

There were some occasions for which you were very grateful for a bit of backup, Viola thought, as she sat squashed beside Rachel in the back of Marco’s Mini watching Oxshott woods roll past. One more person on her side in the face of Kate and Miles’s opposition to her moving out of their mother’s house was very welcome. Rachel was quiet, absorbed in stitching a row of silver sequins round the neckline of a fluffy lime angora cardigan. Naomi was in the front beside Marco, for once having very little to say other than questioning the accuracy of the satnav and asking him to switch off the voice on the grounds that they knew perfectly well how to get there and that it ‘sounds bossy’.

‘Pot and kettle,’ Viola heard him murmur, catching his eye in the rear-view mirror and sharing a humour moment. She was so glad he’d called on Saturday morning to ask her out for one of their regular lunches. ‘I’ll be all alone,’ he’d told her. ‘Poor darling James has been forced to go to an
utterly
dull team-building thingy in the Midlands. What paintballing your workmates has to do with banking is beyond me. It probably explains
a
lot about the state of the global economy.’ She could almost feel him shudder down the phone, and he’d been delighted to be asked along to Kate and Rob’s with her today instead. Kate didn’t mind at all about the extra guest – she and Marco had always got on well. She’d even made lusciously opulent velvet cushion covers for the flat where he and James lived.

‘It’ll be fun to see Kate again,’ Marco had enthused. ‘I hope she’s doing her roast pork. I shall wear pink. It always makes Rob feel so chuffed that I’m being a screaming stereotype. It’s something to tell his golfing chums.’

Rob and Kate lived in the middle of a golf course in a house with toughened glass windows. Viola wondered how they could feel safe there in summer, when if they were out in the garden a mishit golf ball could (and did at least daily) come hurtling over the fence at any moment.

‘You can see all the way from the fourteenth tee to the water hazard from our top windows,’ Rob would tell visitors, as proudly as if this was right up there with a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

‘You couldn’t risk a greenhouse,’ was Naomi’s opinion. ‘I met a woman once whose greenhouse window was broken by a golf ball and when she made a salad months later she found glass
inside a tomato
.’

‘I don’t know why
he
had to come with us.’ Naomi
had
got Viola to herself in the kitchen while Kate was down the garden showing Marco and Rachel the frogs in her pond. ‘It’s supposed to be a family day.’

‘Marco
is
family, Mum. He’ll always be Rachel’s dad, and besides, you know I love him to bits – we’re still absolutely best mates. You have to get over this; it’s been years.’

‘Oh, you know I adore him really, but he should never have married you. Not if he were going to change his mind and start preferring men. I mean, a husband who suddenly decides he’s
on the other bus
; what does that say?’

Viola picked up Kate’s Cath Kidston floral oven glove, took the lid off a pan and prodded a fork into a piece of boiling carrot. It was the safer alternative to prodding it into her mother, who was on one of her favourite long-term topics: that Marco turning out to be gay after marrying her daughter was a slur on Viola and by extension a slur on herself and her entire family, possibly going back several generations and set to afflict many a one to come.

‘He was only young. We both were. We hardly knew what we were – apart from me being a bit pregnant.’ Viola added teasingly, ‘And anyway, it could just as easily have been me. I could have discovered I was a lesbian and run off to live with a girl.’

‘Now you’re just being daft,’ Naomi said. ‘You’re only saying that to provoke and it’s water off a duck’s. I just
hope
the next man you take up with isn’t as much of a disaster area as the first two have been.’

Viola drained the carrots into a colander and considered possible interpretations of the term ‘justifiable homicide’.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, feeling a bit deflated. ‘There won’t be a next one.’