Courting Trouble (6 page)

‘Coming to live with me is a divine idea for the Devine family!’ my mother enthused when I broached the subject. ‘If only because I’m a much better cook, aren’t I, Portia, possum?’

My daughter nodded eagerly.

‘I can cook!’ I piped up defensively.

‘Darl, you cook the same meal over and over – “tuna surprise”. Well, there’s no bloody surprise in that “tuna surprise”, Tilly, I’m telling you. By combining resources we can all live like royalty. And we’ll be together all day! And we’ll make cupcakes! And plant a rose garden!’ Roxy enthused. ‘And I will be taller!!! Yes, somehow, I will be taller . . .’

Portia was giggling delightedly, but I was slightly worried about the Grand Canyonesque chasm between fantasy and reality. My doubts were assuaged by the fact that it would be good for Portia to have two full-time parents. Whereas my husband’s betrayal hurt me like a nerve exposed to air every time I remembered it, Portia was so happy in the company of her mischievous gran that she didn’t seem to give her absentee father a moment’s thought. Her blonde, layered hair fell in a big cloudy curtain around her smiling, elfin face. She was developing into the most original, independent girl. At school, her new geography teacher had asked the class to give an example of a natural disaster, and she’d replied, ‘The Kardashians’. And when my mother enquired about the rules of
The X Factor
, I heard her explain, ‘Contestants must check out of the judges’ hotel rooms by 9 a.m.’

‘United we stand because, divided, we’re screwed,’ my mother declared the day we moved into her Camden cottage, lock, stock and pet tortoise, Sheldon (so named because clearly he rarely came out of his).

The Countess frowned on the move. ‘Human beings are the only creatures on God’s earth who move back in with their parents after they’ve left the nest. It’s just not natural.’ The woman had the maternal instincts of a guppy fish. Despite the fact that I was her god-daughter, she’d always been slightly jealous of my relationship with my mother. ‘I hate children,’ I remember her replying to Roxy’s request for her to babysit when I was about eight. ‘How can you not detest people who can eat sweets all day without getting fat?’

But there were nice aspects about moving back in with my mother after fifteen years’ absence. Your mother is the person who can look in the bathroom cabinet and find the toenail clippers which aren’t there, cooks the best Thai curries, lets you win at Scrabble and thinks you’re wonderful, no matter what.

But other aspects were not so palatable. Roxy’s taste, for one thing. Notwithstanding her turquoise Le Creuset casserole dish, her Italian-style espresso-maker and her ‘Make Tea Not War’ tea towels, my mother’s idea of interior decoration is to drape everything in leopardskin. I had to do a lot of renovation and spent what felt like two and a half months in IKEA looking at bedrooms and bathrooms and wondering how my first from Oxford had led me to setting up shop with my deranged mother. If I never see another FAKTAG UPSLUG and IKBUND OBUNSTIK it will be too FRIKIN soon. I also had the embarrassment of dialling 999 after getting trapped in a flat-pack wardrobe I was assembling.

The other area of contention was our approach to romance. Basically, while I believe in love, my mother’s idea of commitment is a meaningful one-night stand with a toy boy or ten. When I complained that Roxy was sleeping with men younger than her own daughter, my mother replied, ‘Can I help it if I have voracious appetites? At least there’s no cholesterol in toy boys. Which practically makes them a health snack!’

‘How the hell does she do it?’ marvelled the Countess one day when Roxy disappeared for another ‘nooner’, this time with the local baker. ‘I think your mother must have beer-flavoured nipples. I mean, her carnal dance card is constantly full.’

When bored with stalking elks in Scotland or yachting on the Aegean, the Countess appointed herself our unofficial receptionist – which meant she then got to annoy me during office hours. ‘You, on the other hand, Tilly . . .’

I felt my face go clammy. I didn’t even
have
a carnal dance card. In the last month alone, my mother had bedded a Frenchman she called her ‘Louvre God’ (ho hum) and some businessman from the Middle East she conceded was more than likely ‘a wolf in sheik’s clothing’. I, meanwhile, had been on two blind dates in the space of six months, one with a physics teacher and the other with an accountant, which added up to exactly – nothing.

‘The men you go out with are so boring, Matilda, dah-ling. It seems as though the maths teachers are multiplying . . . Which is what they’re good at, I suppose,’ the Countess said, perching on one bony buttock on the edge of my office desk.

In truth, I just couldn’t subject men to my mother. The trouble was, in the past, if I brought home a man whom Roxy didn’t like, she would parade about the place in her lime-green thong, which was usually enough to put off my more reserved suitors. If she really disliked him, she would play her Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols and Grateful Dead albums at full volume after hiding the remote.

Still, even though I was as devoted as Roxy to bringing to justice the men who’d used and abused women, I remained at heart a closet Jane Austen-addled romantic optimist. What my mother called ‘a pathetic heroine addict’.

‘I don’t want to find the perfect man,’ Roxy protested, ‘I just want to be able to eat pudding without getting podgy. Besides, I found Mr Right once, remember?’ My biological father’s betrayal had left her opinion of men so minusculely low you’d need a microscope to find it.

The Countess had given up on men, both perfect and imperfect.

‘Oh, the relief of no longer having to fake orgasms,’ she admitted one day, breaking off from her haphazard document-filing.

‘I don’t fake orgasms,’ my mother confided. ‘I’m faking being six foot one and seven stone.’

‘Really?’ From her lofty six-foot height, the Countess peered down at my mother, who was squashed into a lurex miniskirt, the buttons of which were bursting across her broad stomach. Then she deadpanned, ‘And how’s that working out for you?’

They chortled like two schoolgirls. The once-sought-after model was now said to be a ‘handsome’ woman. ‘That’s ugly with money,’ the Countess had explained to me, self-deprecatingly. Not only did she own a race horse, but, as her long, elegant face lost collagen with age, she’d started to resemble one. However, around Roxy, she never stopped smiling.

While I often wondered what the world would be like if God had had a daughter, I most definitely had not gone off men. Unfortunately, only one man pursued me with any enthusiasm – the one man I didn’t want. ‘Your silence is causing me stress,’ Jack Cassidy emailed. ‘And stress could give me a heart attack.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I pinged back. ‘If you have a heart attack, I’ll send for an ambulance . . . by carrier pigeon.’

But decor and dating aside, my mother and I were united in one thing – making Pandora’s a success so that we could help women who’d been handed the hard cheese from fate’s
fromage
trolley.

We hoped to go far. Of course, the Establishment thought the further away we went, the better. But the case that was about to change our fortunes was headed straight for us like a giant boomerang. I was just thinking, ‘Why is that boomerang getting bigger?’ and then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it hit me.

It was one of those days when I wanted to swap my life for what was behind door number 1. Not only had I endured a date with a man who spoke for an hour about his fossil collection, but then I’d been flashed by a raincoat-wearing perv in the park on the way home. (I just pointed at his groin and said, ‘What do you want me to do with it . . .
floss
?’) In other words, the whole night had been a total waste of waxing. I flumped into an armchair and broke open a block of dark organic chocolate to keep me awake while I waited for Portia to come home from her best friend Amelia’s birthday party. Suddenly, my mother burst through the door with a pensioner who was toting a rifle. Both of them were covered in blood.

There was a time when my mother bursting through the door with an armed, blood-soaked septuagenarian would have kicked me into cardiac arrest. But bursting in with a gore-splattered fugitive just seemed kind of normal after working at Pandora’s for over a year.

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Your Amish prayer meeting got a little out of hand?’

But then I saw my mother’s strained face and realized it was not a prank. ‘This is Phyllis,’ she said. ‘She’s just shot her granddaughter’s rapists in the testicles.’

I looked at the little woman before me. Then I looked at the gun in her hand.

What’s fascinating about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big hole it would make in your social life. I looked back at the diminutive grandma. She was in her early seventies, with a face as warm and round as a muffin. In her floral dress and patterned cardigan, she did not look like a psychopath. She looked more like something that had fallen off the side of a ceramic Cornish teapot.

‘I think you should have a stiff drink, Phyllis,’ my mother advised the gun-toter. ‘Vodka?’ she asked, pouring a glass for herself and downing it in one gulp.

‘I only drink water, Roxy, pet,’ Granny Phyllis said, her voice as sweet as her soft, even features.

‘Vodka is just water with attitude,’ my mother advised, thrusting a drink at her with one hand, while gently prising free the gun with the other. My mother’s nod indicated that I was to distract Phyllis while she stowed the firearm in the hallway broom cupboard.

‘I do suggest you slug it down, Phyllis. It’s medicinal . . . So what exactly happened?’ I asked, steering the small woman across our living room and into an armchair. When she sat back, her dainty feet in their scuffed slip-ons didn’t even reach the carpet. Blue veins, like lumpy knitting, ran from chubby ankle to dimpled knee. What poor tiny feet, I thought, to carry such a heavy load.

‘Chantelle. My darlin’ little granddaughter. She was raped. In a stairwell. By two gang members. Off the estate. She was on ’er way out to celebrate ’er birthday. Her sixteenth birthday. She wouldn’t give ’em a “shiner”. That’s what all the girls are expected to do,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Blow job,’ my worldly mother translated. ‘Go on, Phyllis,’ she urged, sitting by her side and taking her wrinkled hand. They were the hands of a labourer, the hands of a woman who’d spent her life cleaning other people’s toilets. Provocation or mental impairment, I calculated: three years – max. Plus great mitigating circumstances . . .

‘Uppity, they called ’er. Snobby an’ that. So she was targeted and punished. She called me on ’er mobile, Chanty did. I went straight there. ’Er mother’s in prison. Drugs.’ She waved her hand in a weary way. ‘I’ve raised ’er. My darlin’ Chanty. She’s the most sweet and lovin’ angel. And there she was. Lyin’ on the ground, beaten, sobbin’, broken.’

She faltered, pausing to retrieve a hankie from inside her cardigan sleeve to wipe her red-rimmed eyes. She then took a ragged breath and gulped down the vodka, flinching at its bite. ‘She gave me a description of them, Chanty did – leather jackets, tatts, the lot. I got me car and got ’er to the ’ospital, then drove back to their end of the estate. I followed those rats to see where they lived. Took photos on Chanty’s phone. Then went back to the ’ospital to show ’er. She identified ’em. So I took me ’usband’s old gun – he used to shoot rabbits, back ’ome in Derry, before the emphysema got ’im – then went round to their flat and knocked on the door. When one of ’em opened it, I shot ’im in the gonads. The other one I only grazed, I think. But I doubt he’ll be playin’ Hide the Sausage any time shortly. Then I came straight to Roxy.’

My mother and I exchanged wide-eyed, raised-brow glances.

‘You took photos of them before the attack?’ I asked, my heart sinking. This was premeditation. The prosecution would put her away. Ten years minimum.

Phyllis extracted her granddaughter’s mobile phone from her cardigan pocket. She patted the side of the armchair as an indicator that I should perch beside her. She scrolled through the photos she’d surreptitiously snapped of her granddaughter’s attackers. The two men, in their late twenties or early thirties, were pictured swigging from beer bottles outside the local pub. In their regulation leather jackets and huge biker boots, they looked as though they’d just popped in from the Hun/Goth-infested Dark Ages of evolution. The tall, bulky one had the body of a stegosaurus, with a brain to match, no doubt. He had pale, acned skin and his dirty brown hair seemed to have been styled with a whisk. The shorter one was Asian – wiry, brittle and mean-looking, like a halfstarved, malicious ferret.

My mother and I stared at the photos for a while in silence, contemplating the veracity of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis.

‘Honestly, Phyllis, I too have a beautiful granddaughter,’ my mother finally sighed. ‘I would have done the same thing myself. The low-life, cowardly scum.’

‘Mother!’ I reprimanded her. ‘We’re not in downtown Mogadishu. We don’t go around blasting the balls off rape suspects.’ I turned my attention back to our visiting pensioner. ‘So, what did he say, when he opened the door – the first man – and saw you aiming below his belt?’ I probed.

‘He said, “Don’t shoot me in the nuts! What if I wanna have babies?”’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said, “You? A father? I’m doin’ the world a bleedin’ favour.”’

‘Too right,’ Roxy agreed, patting Phyllis’s hand, which, I now noticed, had started shaking uncontrollably. ‘Clearly, his gene pool’s as shallow as a mud puddle. It was really just an impromptu vasectomy. Saved him the trouble.’

‘Roxy!’ I looked at my mother, wondering if it was too late to put myself up for adoption. ‘It’s grievous bodily harm is what it is. Attempted murder. You must plead guilty, Phyllis. With extenuating circumstances . . . We must also call the police immediately.’

‘We will,’ Roxy said. ‘I’m just getting the story straight. So, what did the other guy say? The second rapist?’

‘“Gimme a chance, lady.”’