href="#ulink_f6926a86-f9fb-5d47-b0cf-898e5df792d9">Saturday Morning – Church Street
I had forgotten to switch off my alarm. At seven thirty the voice of Sue MacGregor, joking with a sports reporter on Radio 4 brought me into consciousness – seven thirty on a Saturday. The sports reporter was giving the racing selections for the day: Loyal Boy in the three fifteen at Chepstow. It was seven thirty on a Saturday. I was disgusted. I needed a drink of water. I put the light on and looked blearily round my bedroom. My bedroom was fairly disgusting in its own right. Clothes everywhere, blobs of dust on my chest of drawers where I keep my hairbrush and my collection of small earrings for court and I could see a spider’s web up in the corner above the bed. It was still dark. It was seven thirty.
Was this a sign? A message that if I got up now and cleaned the flat then I could spend the rest of the day slobbing around?
I made a bargain with myself. If I did the vacuuming in half an hour I could have a blueberry muffin from the freezer for breakfast, back in bed.
‘It’s a deal,’ I said aloud and twisted out of bed. My whole body ached and my eye throbbed. For a moment I couldn’t think why I felt so terrible but the memory came flooding back and filled me with despair and alarm and a nagging worry. Hoover therapy seemed as good an idea as any.
As I dragged the machine from its place at the back of the cupboard I greeted it like an old but distant friend. I clicked the Motown Dance Party cassette into my Walkman, slipped the Walkman into the pocket of my dressing gown, switched on and started. I vacuumed, I dusted and I put bleach in the toilet. I was just wiping round the window frames, singing along with the Velvelettes, ‘He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin”, when I noticed the red light flashing on the answer machine. There had been no messages when I came in after my adventure the night before. Someone had rung me while I was cleaning. Yet another reason why housework is a bad idea. You clean, you miss phone calls. I rest my case.
I pressed the playback button. There was a long silence.
‘Bugger,’ I shouted. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
I rang 1471 and was told that the caller, who had rung twenty minutes earlier, had withheld their number.
Miserably I made my coffee, heated the blueberry muffin and went back to bed, but the muffin stuck to the roof of my mouth and the coffee grains floated to the top of the cup and niggled against my teeth. I hate missing phone calls. To take my mind off the frustration I began to worry at the quick crossword of the day before. Slowly I relaxed and had even got as far as referring to my Thesaurus when the phone rang.
I snatched it up and breathlessly said, ‘Hello?’
‘Oh, Frankie, that was quick. I didn’t even hear it ring.’
It was my mum.
‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’ She explained that she had one or two Christmas presents she had to buy (it was October after all, she reminded me) and she wondered if she could come and stay.
I walked with the phone into the bathroom to clean my teeth. That’s the effect she has on me.
I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I had a black eye. How would I explain that to my mother?
‘I’m going out,’ I said desperately.
‘That’s all right, I’ve got a key.’
‘No, I mean tonight.’ It wasn’t true, but something might come up. ‘I might be in really late.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll make up the bed and switch on the TV and it’ll be just like home.’
I sighed. I don’t know why I even bother to try. If my mum wants to come and stay, my mum will come and stay. I thought it best to wait and tell her about the black eye face to face. She’d only worry.
‘I’ve got a black eye,’ I heard myself blurt out.
‘A black eye? Why, whatever have you been doing?’
I looked at myself again and my mind went blank. ‘I walked into the door,’ I said. ‘The bedroom door,’ I explained, adding detail to make it sound true. ‘I switched off the hall light before I switched on the bedroom light and I forgot.’ I wasn’t taken in, was she?
She sighed. ‘Well, as long as you don’t have a friend who has one just like it.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking of the owner of the pock-marked face with its sly grin, unsullied by bruise or cut, but with hopefully fatal internal injuries. ‘I don’t fight, Mum,’ I said, thinking, Not very well anyway.
‘I’d hate to think it was in the genes,’ she said, obviously thinking of my father’s uncle, who had a reputation for assaulting his women friends.
The consolation was she didn’t think I was the victim. But then, which was worse? To be the victim or the aggressor?
‘I don’t think it’s a genetic thing, Mum, I just have a black eye. It happens.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’
At least the house was tidy.
The phone rang again. It was Lena.
‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’
‘Where are you ringing from?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were in Paris.’
‘I’m back. I came home early,’ she said, too brightly.
‘Where’s Sophie?’
‘Oh, she’s still there.’
‘Are we having coffee then?’ I asked. ‘The Blue Legume in twenty minutes?’
‘That would be great.’
‘I’ll bring the brandy,’ I said and rang off before she burst into tears. She and Sophie, what a pair.
Slowly I put on some jeans and a faded black sweatshirt. My muscles were creaking. I wondered if I had overdone it. Physical assault followed by housework, not a good combination. As I bent to lace up my Doc Martens my eye twinged, reminding me I should wear dark glasses. I went to the sunglasses shelf on my bookcase. In front of three volumes of Stone’s Justices’ Manual of 1992 and two volumes of Rayden on Divorce lay twelve pairs of sunglasses, most purchased on holiday because of my habit of forgetting to pack the pair I bought last year.
After five minutes fussing in front of the mirror I had chosen a groovy round wire-rimmed pair that looked as if they came from the thirties and convinced myself that the black eye was scarcely visible. I nearly broke my neck going down the steps of my house because the lenses were so dark, but it was a bright sunny day and I got used to them.
I walked down to Church Street and found Lena already at a table in the gloom of the small café. I stopped in surprise. There was something about
