When she handed it back she saw he was craning his head around her, trying to catch a glimpse into the house.
‘I could open the fly screen so you get a better look,’ Lara said.
‘Sorry, ma’am. It’s just—’
‘Yes?’
‘Is this—’ the delivery guy blushed – not a good look in his sweat-soaked brown uniform. ‘Is this the Larssen place?’ He wrinkled his nose as he said the name.
‘Larssen? I have no idea. We’ve just moved in.’
‘Oh. OK, then. Me and my big mouth. Gotta split. You have a nice day, now.’
He handed her the package and turned to go, hurrying down the steps and across the front lawn. Like the supermarket security guard, he had something of Olly about him. Perhaps it was a generic American look – tall and gangly with a slightly swaggering walk. Before he got into his van he turned, took one last glance at the house, and grimaced.
Lara watched the vehicle disappear into the distance. Strange, she thought. Larssen place?
The parcel was addressed to James, but she was pretty sure it was the ‘rowter’, so she took it indoors and ripped it open anyway.
She was annoyed to find the packaging had been opened; they had sent one that someone had used and returned or something. But, after half an hour of fiddling around, she managed to get online and had a fruitful session catching up on emails and Facebook, connecting with work and friends back home in a world that seemed, even after only two days, another lifetime away.
‘SO YOU’VE HAD A BIT OF A GANDER, THEN?’ MARCUS SAID, HELPING
himself to another plate of pasta. Lunch was early, because everyone gathering downstairs to pick at the Reese’s Puffs like scavenging animals had prompted Lara to prepare some proper food.
‘It’s
so
dead here,’ Olly said.
‘There’ll be loads going on. You’ve just got to hunt it out,’ Marcus said, chewing. Lara wished he wouldn’t eat so noisily, but he always maintained that table manners were for the bourgeoisie.
‘You reckon?’ Olly picked up his plate and licked it, something Lara had also given up complaining about.
‘And once you get to know the actors and theatre people, well, that’ll be fun.’
‘There’s James and Betty’s party tonight for starters,’ Lara said.
‘What party?’ They all turned to look at her.
She slapped her forehead. ‘I completely forgot to tell you, didn’t I? It’s tonight at seven thirty. After the show. “Meet the guys”, James said.’
‘Do we
have
to go?’ Olly said.
‘Of course you have to go,’ Marcus said. ‘You were complaining how there’s nothing to do, and now you don’t want to go to a party.’
‘Chill pill.’
‘I hate it when you say that.’ Marcus glared at his sullen son.
‘That’s why he says it, Father,’ Bella said.
‘Where is it?’ Marcus asked Lara.
‘Out in the sticks somewhere. I’ve got the address, and, now the internet’s working, we can Google Map it,’ Lara said.
‘We’re online?’ Marcus said. ‘Well done, you clever little geek.’
‘And James said something about there being a big surprise for us,’ Lara added.
‘Ooh, a surprise from James. Can’t wait,’ Olly said, waving his hands in the air.
‘You watch your step, young man,’ Marcus said.
‘Chill pill.’
Marcus’s riposte was swallowed by the slow crescendo of a siren somewhere close by. It grew until Lara had to put her hands over Jack’s tender ears, for fear of them being hurt. Then, as slowly as it started, the noise faded, leaving a dense silence in its wake.
‘What was that?’ Lara said. She felt as terrified as Jack looked.
‘It was the same yesterday,’ Bella said. ‘When you were in town.’
‘It’s cool.’ Olly shrugged. ‘It’s some practice for terrorist raids. I read about it.’
‘Oh did you?’ Lara said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Actually,’ Marcus said, through a mouthful of the pasta he had continued to eat throughout the siren, ‘it’s a test for the fire brigade. They do it every day at noon during the summer. James told me when it went off once when we were Skypeing. So,’ he said, shovelling the last forkful into his mouth, ‘chill pill, Olly.’
‘Right,’ Lara said when they had finished their meal. ‘You lot are going to clear up and I need a couple of Jack-free hours this afternoon to get this place together.’
‘I’ve got lines to do,’ Marcus said, shrugging.
‘Bella? Olly? Can you look after your brother for a bit?’ She would have liked Marcus to take responsibility just for once, though. Rehearsals started in two days, and he would be completely out of the picture. She resented having to use up her twin babysitting hours too soon.
Olly groaned.
‘I suppose we can take him to the playground,’ Bella said after a pause.
‘There’s a playground? Fantastic!’ Lara said to Jack, whose ears had pricked up.
‘I’d hardly call it that,’ Olly said. ‘Crap would be a better word.’
‘Well, whatever, you’ll help your mother out,’ Marcus said, standing up. ‘Now. Washing-up. I’ll wash and you two dry and put away.’
‘And don’t forget Jack’s sunblock,’ Lara said. ‘His skin’s not like yours, remember?’
‘I think we know that by now, Smother,’ Bella said.
Lara gave her daughter a look. Then, without warning, her insides cramped. She gasped and grabbed the back of a chair.
‘Everything all right?’ Marcus said.
‘Yes,’ Lara said. She didn’t want to tell him. She wanted to look forward rather than back.
‘You sure?’
‘I’m fine, really.’
As the others carried the plates into the kitchen, Lara headed off upstairs to unpack, picking up her laptop on the way to provide her with a bit of music while she worked. She paused at the bottom of the stairs and wondered what it was about that part of the house that made her want to run through as fast as she could. In the centre of the pale brown hall carpet a large dark purple blotch stared up at her. It could possibly be, she thought, an Agatha Christie set dressing. She knelt and sniffed at the stain. It smelled faintly metallic and rancid, like a rusty saucepan containing some old dishwater, and it was slightly rough to the touch.
She sat back on her knees and surveyed the hallway. The carpet was fitted to the room, so was no theatre prop; it must have been here for many, many years. She would ask James if she could pull it up.
Up in the bedroom, she set The Smiths’
The Queen is Dead
going on iTunes, using the drum break of the first track to give the energy to haul the suitcases on to the bed.
Lifting Jack’s clothes out of the case she had shared with him, she placed them in neatly folded piles on the wooden shelving in the eaves room at the side of the bedroom.
She liked unpacking. Even if they were only going away for a night or two, she would find a home for everything. To an outsider, it might look like a housewifely habit, but it was only partly that for Lara. If things were organised, lined up in piles, serried in their ranks, then she could cope. The same love of order had drawn her to graphic design as a career. It was also why she found Marcus and his slobbish chaos so infuriating. If it weren’t for her, the children wouldn’t ever have clean clothes, food in their bellies, dentist appointments …
She stopped that train of thought and instead applied her mind to getting the individual pills and creams out of the first-aid kit and lining them up on the shelf.
Circumstances had forced domesticity on to Lara at an early age. When she was nineteen, her plan had been to go to drama school, to train to be an actress. But during her year off, when she was working as a barmaid at the Dirty Duck – the Royal Shakespeare Company actors’ watering hole in Stratford-upon-Avon – she met Marcus. Thirty-one years old, a proper actor, he seemed impossibly glamorous to her. He asked her out and in six months’ time they were married – a royal one in the eye for Lara’s staid parents, who had found her theatrical plans hard enough to stomach, let alone an older man taking her, their only offspring, for his child bride.
Morrissey’s vocals and Johnny Marr’s jangly guitar pulled her back, as they always did, through the fabric of her past.
She tried, as she placed the box of plasters next to the antiseptic lotion on the shelf, to recall the feeling of excitement she had experienced whenever Marcus came into her bar.
It was hard to remember. A short while after their wedding – a while Lara tended to gloss over – they moved to Brighton and the twins were born. Marcus had to be available to go off to, say, Pitlochry, for, say, five weeks, at the drop of an agent’s phone call, and it would have been unthinkable for Lara to get a job when the twins were tiny. With no qualifications beyond her A levels in Art and Drama, she would never earn enough to cover two lots of childcare. So that was when the pattern was set: he went off and she found herself stuck at home with not enough pairs of hands to care for her two voracious infants. That was the end of any acting thoughts for Lara. She stepped off the ladder before she had even found the first rung.
She wondered if that was the root of her current disgruntlement. Thwarted ambition. It was, she thought, like a maggot boring into an apple. Just one small hole, but the entire fruit ruined. Looking back over the first three years of the twins’ lives, she couldn’t recall any sort of interaction with Marcus. He was there sometimes, though. He must have been there.
Perhaps that was when she began to shut down. But she knew it wasn’t. She could pinpoint
that
moment exactly, and it was even earlier. But she refused to let herself think about it any further.
She lined Jack’s few toys up on a low, reachable shelf: Floppy Dog, Woody, Power Rangers, some Star Wars junk.
In the end it was the Art A level that took her out of the house. When the twins hit three, they qualified for free day-care while Lara did a part-time Visual Communication course at the local college. Initially she had signed up as a way to regain her sanity after spending her early twenties up to her neck in baby paraphernalia. By the second year, she began to see its potential. She even managed to acquire real-world clients for some of her final-year projects. After she graduated with a distinction, she won a grant to buy an Apple Mac, scanner and printer, and set herself up in a corner of their front room.
She didn’t earn much, but felt good bringing at least some pennies in. And she could fit around Marcus’s work, which was brilliant in theory, except he was going for months at a stretch without so much as an audition. This was useful for Lara, because she had become quite busy and she welcomed the free childcare. But he hated it.
‘It’s just that the right job hasn’t come along yet,’ she would say, trying to cheer him up. ‘It will, soon.’ But it didn’t, or it didn’t very often. And if it did, it would be Equity minimum wage for some small part in a tiny regional theatre hundreds of miles away. He got these jobs through old friends putting in a good word for him. Not once after Bella and Olly were born did he find employment by stunning a director with a blinding audition.
Lara dutifully dragged the twins up and down the country so some wardrobe assistant could mind them for a tenner while she watched her husband perform. She remembered the moment – during an Agatha Christie as it happened, in a theatre somewhere up North – that the penny dropped for her. It had always been a given that acting was the only thing Marcus knew how to do. In the long, penniless stretches between jobs he refused to do anything else to earn money. While he never exactly said it was beneath him, he maintained it would be a diversion from the main project. He had to be ready to act, he said.
But that day, sitting in the dark of the auditorium watching him mark his way through the play, Lara realised his main project was missing something. His neck and shoulders had tightened up; his voice was slightly strangled. What had once looked as natural as breathing for him now appeared false and strained. He was committing that most awful of actorly sins: he was being unbelievable.
The lacklustre production – a stilted postmodern rendering that failed to be sufficiently ironic – didn’t help; but, the truth was, Marcus stank.
Of course, as she went backstage afterwards she couldn’t tell him. No one would tell him, she thought as she kissed him and said how marvellous he was. The work would just trickle away slowly as the same realisation struck the people he relied on for employment. Back then, when the children were tiny, she hated herself for disrespecting him. She had made her choices and she worked hard at keeping to them. Knowing he was a bad actor was very difficult for her.
She sighed at the memory and studied the two suitcases side by side on the creaky bed. Her own clothes were rolled into cigar shapes as her house-perfect mother had taught her to do when they went on their package holidays to Corfu or Majorca. ‘You get more in,’ she had said. ‘And the creasing is minimal.’ This habit her mother had of talking like a walking advertisement had always irritated Lara. It was one of the many things she now checked in herself – little genetic or habitual tics that parents, willing or not, hand down to fuck you up.
The random scramble of mostly chinos, baggy shorts and T-shirts in Marcus’s case showed he was not what you would call a natty dresser, and he didn’t exactly take care of his clothes.
It was this chaotic side of Marcus that finally got in the way of her working at home. He didn’t respect her time or her space, interrupting her to ask her where the toilet paper was, filling the house with fellow unemployed actors who would sit around all day, drinking endless cups of tea – graduating in the afternoon to wine – and bitching in well-modulated tones about
this
director or
that
agent.
Lara sat at her desk in the corner of the living room, trying to concentrate on her Quark layouts. Her job was to bring order and form to the bare text she received from clients, and the noise and desperation around her made her wince.
She thought about renting an office, but it seemed like such an enormous leap. At twenty-four she had been too young, too green. She hadn’t had a head for business – for example, her prices were far too low – and besides, she was too tied up at home to take any big risks.