Tell her how nice her new haircut is!
Ask her where she got the kitchen table from!
‘Well, it’s not exactly as if you work either,’ Lauren said, watching her mum’s face twitch and flicker.
‘Fuck!’ her mum cried – a strange thing to cry, Lauren thought, until her hand emerged from beneath the suds, and Lauren saw the dark flower of blood pumping out from her clenched fist, curling quickly around her wrist, then beginning to drip from her elbow and spatter on the floor.
‘Shit, keep still, put your hand up,’ Lauren instructed, trying to lift herself up out of her seat but feeling pinned by a woozy gravity, her own head spinning as the blood landed, too loudly, on the kitchen tiles. ‘I’ll get a towel,’ Lauren said, but she didn’t. She couldn’t get up.
Lauren hated anything at all to do with blood.
When she was little she threw a tantrum in the doctor’s, during her one and only blood test.
She’d screwed her eyes shut and gripped her mum’s hand, squealing just from the feel of the cold, wet swab of cotton wool, before the needle even went in, and then, when it did, she couldn’t help herself: she opened her eyes and looked, even though it was the thing she was scared of most of all, and she saw the cylinder filling with bright red liquid and almost fainted.
‘We’d better call a taxi,’ Lauren’s mum said, holding her dripping elbow over the sink. ‘This is going to need stitches.’
‘Right,’ Lauren murmured, still unable to stand.
She pushed out her chair and sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, closing her eyes, taking deep breaths, fighting back the nausea, as her mum took the large cordless phone from the table with her good hand and calmly thumbed through for the taxi number.
* * *
While Lauren was out walking around the village a few nights later, just as she used to do when she was a stroppy fifteen-year-old – just to the post box on the green and back – her phone began buzzing in her pocket.
Paul, she thought, but the display read EMILY T. Emily was a large, hippyish girl from her third-year post-colonial literature and theory module, who was always up for going for a drink afterwards, and who always wore bags and headbands with little circles of mirror sewn into them, and who Lauren could never quite work out if she was actually friends with.
‘Hello?’ Lauren answered cautiously, one quarter of her suspecting that this was an accidental call, that all she’d hear on the other end of the line were the muffled swishes of the inside of Emily’s mirrored handbag, full of joss sticks and tobacco-free cigarettes and dream catchers.
‘Hey,’ Emily said, happily, friendlily, as if she was carrying on a conversation from last week. This, Lauren remembered, was one of the things that had annoyed her about Emily: a general lack of self-awareness. ‘I was just calling to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye?’
When Lauren reached the post box, she stopped walking and touched the cold, dimpled top of it with her palm.
‘Yeah, I’m leaving Nottingham,’ Emily said. ‘I’m going to Canada.’
‘Oh, wow, um, great,’ Lauren replied.
‘Yeah, I got a year’s working visa sorted out,’ Emily continued. ‘It just came through. Only applied last month.’
Why is she telling me? Lauren wondered. Is she just doing it to show off?
‘Great,’ Lauren said again, as she looked at the sooty little houses hunched around the edge of the green, then back down the lane towards her mum’s. The sun was dipping behind the trees and this view should be pretty and tranquil, but instead it just looked so miserably small, so depressingly English, so un-Canadian, where things would be large and spacious and new-built, probably.
‘How about you?’ Emily asked. ‘What are you up to? How’s Paul?’
‘I thought you might’ve heard,’ Lauren said. ‘We broke up.’
‘Oh, so what are you doing now?’ Emily asked.
Emily was like Lauren; her parents were rich, she didn’t need a job. At uni, between semesters, she’d disappear off to places like Goa and Bali and Fiji and always come back with a dusty-looking tan and braids in her hair and anecdotes about bonking – who the fuck called it ‘bonking’ in 2004? – boys in teepees.
‘I’m living at my mum’s for a bit. Just until I know what I’m doing next.’
‘Oh shit,’ Emily said. ‘Sorry, Lozza.’ (She was the only person who ever called Lauren that.) ‘That’s rubbish.’
‘Yep.’
‘So what are you doing next?’
‘All I’ve got pencilled in,’ Lauren said, ‘are a few more weeks of moping around in my dressing gown and a few more arguments with my mum.’ She was hoping it would sound funny, but it didn’t. It just sounded depressing.
‘Come to Canada, then.’
‘What?’
‘Come with me. Why not?’
Lauren ran her hand back and forth over the cold dimpled top of the post box and tried to come up with a good reason.
Three weeks later, Lauren showed her mum how to use the computer, the once-top-of-the-range Dell that had been sat yellowing in the study, gathering dust and static, for the past three and a bit years, ever since she’d insisted on keeping it during the divorce. It creaked and groaned like an old person when they turned it on.
‘Does it always make noises like that?’ Anne asked.
Ignore her, Lauren told herself.
She’s just playing up her uselessness, her fear of technology.
Lauren told her to sit down, in Dad’s old office chair.
‘I’m warning you, by tomorrow I won’t remember any of this,’ Anne muttered as she slid into the creaky Aeron chair and Lauren stood behind her.
Once the computer had finished booting up, Lauren guided her, step by step, through the process of connecting to the internet, ignoring her when she winced at the dial-up noises, then showed her which icon to click on (which she insisted on calling ‘The Earth’ even though it clearly said Internet Explorer beneath it), her still-bandaged right hand pushing the mouse cautiously around its mat, as she navigated herself awkwardly towards the Hotmail sign-up page.
To reach this point took almost half an hour.
Everything about it was a struggle.
It was like some sort of awful failed sitcom pilot (Net Mums: ‘Mothers and Daughters Attempt to Surf the Web Together with Hilarious Consequences’).
‘I
