Lou kissed her mum on the cheek. Despite his grumbles, Phil was there behind her with an extravagant show of affection for his mother-in-law, encouraged by the warm, meaty smell coming from the steamy kitchen.
‘You’ve had your hair done,’ said Renee, looking at it from a few angles.
‘Birthday treat from the people at work. Do you like it?’ said Lou, preparing herself.
‘It’s a bit orange,’ Renee replied.
Renee had bought Lou a jumper for her birthday. It was a very nice plain black top, slash neck with three-quarter sleeves and four pearl buttons off centre.
‘Mum, that is really lovely,’ said Lou. ‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t a cheap one,’ reiterated Renee.
‘Mum, I know. It’s classy, I like it.’
‘It’s very slimming, is black,’ said Renee. ‘I didn’t know whether to get you a size smaller to give you some encouragement.’
Lou gulped her sherry. Her mother meant well, she told herself.
Renee Casserly served up a very nice pork lunch. Lou
noticed her portion was considerably smaller than Phil’s but she didn’t comment. It was, after all, very pleasant just to be sitting there whilst someone else did the cooking. She had been too cross last night to enjoy that particular pleasure in the Chinese restaurant.
Just after the washing up had been done, the phone rang.
‘Hello,’ said Renee, wincing as it rang again in her ear. She would never get the hang of these newfangled cordless things where you had to press a button to be connected.
‘Oh hello, lovey.’ Sunshine flooded her voice. Lou could name that caller in one. ‘How many degrees? Ooh, that is warm, isn’t it? It’s very cool here, but sunny and dry…Ooh, smashing…Yes, I’m very well, thank you…Yes, I’ve packed it. I just have to get it to the post office.’
Aha, thought Lou, listening and filling in the gaps. The preliminaries dealt with, Victorianna had got down to the real business in hand.
When’s my hamper coming, Mummy dahling?
‘…Tuesday, I hope. Elouise is here if you want to have a quick word…’
The life savings Lou would have put on the answer to that one being a yes were safe.
‘Oh, I see. Well, never mind, another time if you’re rushing…She sends her love.’
No, I bloody well don’t, Lou thought loudly.
‘Bye bye, dear…Yes, I love you too.’ Renee put the phone down looking as if she’d just had a private audience with Daniel O’Donnell. ‘That was Victorianna.’
‘Really,’ said Lou.
‘She sends her love.’
No, she bloody well doesn’t, thought Lou again.
‘Will you give me a lift to the post office with that parcel for her on Tuesday? Everything’s all wrapped up now,’ said Renee, pointing to an enormous box in the corner.
‘Course I—Flaming heck, Mum. That’ll cost you a fortune. I don’t know, she really is a…making you do this.’ Lou omitted the word. She was having trouble finding one that summed up Princess Victorianna without resorting to expletives.
‘She didn’t make me, she asked. I could have said no. Oh Lou, why are you always so aggressive where Victorianna is concerned?’ snapped Renee. ‘What on earth did she ever do to deserve all that sniping?’
Mum, you really don’t want to know the answer to that one
, Lou said inwardly.
‘You were so close when you were young as well,’ said Renee, shaking her head in exasperation.
That wasn’t quite the way Lou remembered it.
‘Anyway, are you going to do it for her or do I have to get a taxi?’
‘Yes, of course I will,’ sighed Lou, adding to herself,
but I’m doing it for you, Mum, not Goldentits
.
When it was time to go, she woke up Phil who was snoring in the armchair. Fed and watered, he had dropped off stretched out on Renee’s enormous leather recliner next to the radiator that was pumping out heat. When Renee shuffled off this mortal coil, he thought sleepily, he would have to make sure Lou got him that chair.
It occurred to Lou, as she walked out to the car, that she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had said they loved her.
‘Hello, Keith Featherstone,’ announced a voice thick with the smoke of twenty years of filterless fags.
‘At last, Mr Featherstone! It’s Mrs Winter,’ said Lou, with half-shock, half-relief at finding herself speaking to his actual voice and not the gravelly answering-machine message.
‘Ah, Mrs Winter, I am so sorry, everything’s been mad. I was going to ring you later on today.’
Yeah, right. Lou steeled herself.
‘Mr Featherstone, I really need you to finish this bathroom. It’s been over six weeks now since you left it.’ Lou dropped her voice so Phil wouldn’t hear the next bit, as he would have gone totally bonkers. ‘And I did pay you cash in advance so you’d treat this as a priority. As you promised you would.’
Lou felt sick saying it. Sometimes she was like a stupid daft puppy that trusted everyone and invariably got booted, although no one could have kicked her more over this whole bathroom business than she had kicked herself.
‘You are totally right, Mrs Winter. I feel awful about it, and I will be along as soon as I can. I’ll ring you this
afternoon when we’re a bit closer to completing this job that we’re on with now.’
‘I’ll be at work. Have you got my mobile number?’
‘I have indeed, Mrs Winter, and your home number just in case.’
‘I must have this finished. It’s not very fair of you.’
Crikey, talk about the hard-line tactics she had planned. She’d stamp her foot in a moment and that would really show him.
‘I can’t leave what I’m on at the moment, that’s the problem. Old lady, you see, got broken into and her windows and doors are all totally smashed. You should see it, Mrs Winter. Terrible. I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t sort her out.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Lou, feeling humbled and a little like a child screaming for cake after just being told there were children starving in Africa.
‘I’ll be there as soon as this is finished, Mrs Winter. I promise.’
‘OK, Mr Featherstone. As soon as you can then. Thank you.’
She could have sworn she heard sniggering before the line went dead.
Her phone bleeped the arrival of a text message as Lou pulled into the office car park. It was from Michelle.
LETS GO OUT FRIDAY TO CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY. SORRY HAVEN’T RUNG. MET G
8
BLOKE. BEEN IN BED ALL W/END. WOW!! NEED TO TALK SOON XXX
Lou shook her head. She thought back to the one and only time she had agreed to go out with Michelle on a Friday night after a campaign of constant badgering.
Needless to say, Phil hadn’t been very pleased about it, so Lou had underplayed the excitement she felt about getting dressed up and going for a rare girly night out on the town.
Once she had been released into the town, it took Lou about five minutes to discover that she wasn’t an integral part of their evening at all. Her whole evening consisted of being dragged from pub to pub whilst Michelle trailed after various fanciable men and then, when she got an audience with one of her quarries, Lou was pushed off to entertain ‘the mate’. At one point Lou spent an exhilarating half-hour with a drunk who had a bruise under his thumbnail in the shape of the Phantom Flan Flinger, so at least they had a talking point (well, in his case a slurring point). At the end of the evening, just when she thought her feet might drop off from shoe-pain, Lou was forced to stand for another three-quarters of an hour at a freezing taxi rank whilst her ears rang with the echoes of the weird and over-loud electro music that had been playing in the club. But before Lou could end her evening, she had to take an extremely drunk and sobbing Michelle home and make sure she was locked in safely and tucked up in bed with a pint and a half of water and two paracetamol in her stomach. Then, and only then, could she jump back into the waiting taxi to head across town to her own house. The taxi driver could barely steer for imagining how much his passenger was going to have to fork out for this fare. It would have been cheaper for Lou to charter the
QE2
home.
She had never really bonded with Phil’s house but felt like throwing her arms around it and kissing it when the taxi pulled into its drive. It was worth every penny of the
exorbitant fare just to take off her shoes in the porch. Going around town at seventeen in skyscraper stilettos with mates like Deb was brill, but doing it in her thirties, with someone like Michelle, had been excruciating.
Lou remembered trudging up the stairs, stripping off her clothes and leaving them in an uncharacteristic heap on the bathroom floor because she just wanted to go to bed and snuggle into Phil’s back. However, he was sulking and shook her off. He continued to sulk until the following Wednesday. Not even a lamb roast and a chocolate brandy roulade, the size of a Californian Redwood trunk, could bring him round, although Lou thought her cooking magic had worked on the Monday because he had woken her up in the middle of the night by silently caressing her and they had made love. Lou gave herself wholly, glad this was the end of his drawn-out tantrum, but when he was satisfied, he had once more turned his back in bed and carried on ignoring her for another forty-eight hours. Boy, that had hurt.
When Michelle finally did ring her that weekend, it was to ask if Lou was up for another ‘fun night out’ as she laughingly put it. ‘When the disciples partied in hell’, was the phrase that crossed Lou’s mind at the time. Lou used Phil as a convenient excuse, saying that he wasn’t keen on her going out at nights. That exchange marked the start of the first big crack in their friendship as Michelle made a couple of snide comments about Lou being under the thumb, saying that she should stop letting herself be manipulated. Under pressure from Phil’s punishing, cold attitude, Lou had snapped back that she was trying to hold her marriage together and chasing men around pubs wasn’t the best way to go about it.
Michelle had burst into tears and said she had felt very depressed recently and wasn’t thinking straight. It had the desired effect of making Lou feel like a right old cow and she’d dashed round to Michelle’s house with a couple of strawberry tarts from the bakery and a bottle of wine. She hadn’t seen then that Michelle could out-manipulate Phil when she wanted.
Maybe, once upon a time, Lou might have been under the illusion that Michelle’s birthday invite was borne of selfless motives. But not now. She texted back:
GLAD ABOUT THE MAN. TALK LATER
.
CANT DO NIGHTS SORRY XXX
.
The reply came back almost instantaneously.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE XXX
Lou thought again of that interminable wait at the taxi rank to get home with her feet throbbing like an AC/DC track.
SORRY SORRY SORRY. LUNCH WOULD BE GOOD THOUGH XXX
The few lunches she and Michelle had together in the beginning were nice.
IF WE MUST
text-sulked Michelle, although Lou knew it wouldn’t happen. There weren’t that many desirable men to stalk at noon in the Edwardian Tea Rooms over giant scones.
Lou walked into the office and her heart sank immediately on seeing that Karen’s space was unoccupied. Stan wasn’t in either and Zoe was gazing intently at her screen and looked as if she had been crying or was just about to. Nicola was sitting at her desk. She made a deliberate head-swivel towards the clock after spotting Lou. It was
a move intended to needle because they both knew Lou was never late. But as usual, it didn’t work.
‘Where is everyone? It’s like the
Marie Celeste
in here,’ said Lou to Zoe when Nicola had marched off with a very important walk and a folder.
‘Stan’s wife phoned him in sick–migraine, apparently–and Karen’s little boy is poorly so she’s taken a day off,’ said Zoe in a voice more cracked than Keith Featherstone’s smoke-ravaged voice.
‘Hell, girl, you should be at home with that throat!’ said Lou.
‘I rang in this morning but
she
said that if I didn’t get in here then I’d be in trouble, what with everyone else being off.’
‘Someone really should have a quiet word with HR She can’t do this sort of thing.’
Although, as they all knew, there was no such thing as a quiet word or an ‘off-the-record’ chat with Human Resources. It was a department full of cans of worms and as soon as you opened your mouth in there, you turned into a tin-opener.
‘Yes, but she can do it because she is doing it, isn’t she, Lou?’ croaked Zoe.
The skip was just being lifted by the truck when Lou arrived home. She spotted it from the end of the street and was all too aware that as soon as she had, her foot pressed down on the accelerator. She tore down the culde-sac like Nigel Mansell.
The big skip man acknowledged her with a nod, but to her disappointment it wasn’t Tom. She had been really looking forward to seeing Clooney too. She had a bag of
dog biscuits with his name on in the house–safely hidden away from Phil, obviously.
‘No dog today?’ she said lightly, despite the sensation of a cannonball in the pit of her stomach. ‘I was really looking forward to seeing him. The German Shepherd,’ she clarified.
‘Clooney, you mean? He’s the boss’s dog. Only ever goes with him,’ said the skip man.
‘Oh, what a shame. That’s the bloke who usually comes, is it? He’s the boss?’ Lou said with breezy innocence. ‘I didn’t realize he had anyone else working for him.’
‘There’s a few of us,’ said the skip man, pulling at the net, which had snagged on some wood. ‘There’s me, Steve and “Part-Time Eddie”, except those two are off at the mo’ and Tom’s not been working the last couple of days, which is why we’re short handed and I’m having to do this so late on.’
‘He’s not ill, is he?’ said Lou, poking a little further.
‘No, he’s not ill, but someone in his family is.’
‘Not one of his children, I hope?’ said Lou, slightly ashamed that she was being so nosy, but she was unable to stop herself all the same.
‘Tom’s kids?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tom ain’t got any kids. I think it’s his sister who’s poorly.’
Tom ain’t got any kids
.
That little cloud nudged in her chest although she was then cross with herself for not having the forethought to say, ‘Not his
wife
or his children, I hope?’ If she had got it wrong about the children, he might not be married
after all. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but then she didn’t half the time–well, when Phil wasn’t around anyway. Then again, what difference did it make if he was married with forty-five children or single, gay or celibate, for God’s sake? She was married, and Tom Broom was a bloke who was nice and chatty because he had a business to run and he was probably extra nice and chatty to her because she was probably bankrolling his business from all the skips she was hiring. Anyway, even if he was straight and unattached, he wasn’t exactly going to be interested in a dumpy little married woman coming up to the back end of her thirties with a bum so big it could be seen from orbit. Considering she wasn’t interested, she was spending a lot of headspace on not being interested, she realized. What the hell was up with her?
Lou went inside and checked the phone when the skip man had gone. There had been no missed calls, which meant bloody Keith Featherstone hadn’t rung her on the house phone either, because he certainly hadn’t rung her on the mobile. But then, had she really believed that he would?