Not listening! I’m not having an argument with someone whose face I pulled out of their own vomit last night, all right? You’re not doing so well, and that’s that. Neither am I. I think we need to make some changes. We need a new world order, because this one sucks.”
I’m saved from the oncoming tirade by a knock on the door. We both stare at each other, momentarily taken aback, before we hear a familiar voice: “Coo-ee! It’s only me!”
For once in complete agreement, Martha and I do a neatly choreographed eye-roll, and sigh in mutual exasperation.
“It’s Sunday, isn’t it?” I say, glancing at my watch and seeing that it is dead on noon. Our common nemesis is nothing if not punctual.
“Yeah. Shit. We forgot. How does Sunday keep happening so often?” she replies, looking genuinely confused.
“I don’t know … it’s like we’re trapped in some kind of hell dimension, doomed to eternal knocks on the door and ‘coo-ees’, and …”
“And the next line – any minute now …”
We both pause, our heads on one side like curious budgerigars, and grin as we wait for the inevitable.
“It’s only me!” shouts Barbara again, and I can just picture her on the doorstep, faffing with her scarf and checking her cameo brooch and sniffing the air like she’s a bloodhound on the track of moral iniquity. “Don’t like to intrude,” she trills, “but I’ll just use my key …”
Martha stares at me. I stare back.
“She’s lying,” says Martha, swigging down the last of the coffee. “She loves intruding. You should get the locks changed.”
She strides off to go and get properly dressed, and I attempt to smooth my crazy curls down into something less likely to make Barbara make the sign of the cross when she sees me.
It’s Sunday. Again. Which means that Martha gets the unrivalled joy of lunch with her grandparents – and I get a few more hours to plan our escape to the West Country.
By the time Martha comes home, I have e-mailed the landlady of The Rockery, checked out the courses at the college, and looked for dogs at the nearest rescue centre. I’ve made notes, and looked at our finances, and pondered the idea of renting out my flat to make it all stretch a little further.
I mean, it’s not like I need my flat any more. It’s across the road, the bottom half of a sandstone terrace, and is now more of a museum to my previous existence than a functioning residence. It’s full of books and clothes I’ll never wear again and cheap hippy jewellery I used to think made me look super-cool at festivals. I don’t need it any more – technically at least.
And yet for some reason, I’ve kept it – probably because in the same way that Martha needs that ‘I’m 16, you can’t make me’ reassurance, I also need my ‘I can run away if it all gets too much’ reassurance.
It has happened a few times – I’ve made the desperate dash over there, winding my way through the recycling bins and neighbourhood cats to let myself in. To lie on my own bed, in my own territory. In the end, I decide against it – I’ll keep the flat, and instead I’ll use my life savings. I’ve got an ISA – which Kate made me take out – that contains the less than impressive lump sum of just under £5,000. But I don’t need much, and that’ll keep me going for a few months at least, allow me to pay my way instead of just using Kate’s money.
There’s a lot to sort out, and I’ll have to think about it later – because right now, I can hear the strained chatter of Barbara and her husband Ron in the hallway.
I close the lid of my laptop, and hide the papers beneath it. Barbara has a keen eye for detail – especially any detail that backs up her belief that I am a terrible human being incapable of caring for her precious grandchild.
Martha slopes into the room looking sheepish and borderline embarrassed. I suspect this is because her grandparents have spent the last few hours telling her how wonderful she is, and she played along. I don’t blame her – it’s definitely the path of least resistance.
She left her nose and ear piercings out, and tied her hair up into a ponytail. To the casual observer, she could pass for a normal teenaged girl. ‘Normal’ in the sense that Barbara and Ron would use the word, anyway. I know that every time she does that, Martha hates herself a little. Tempestuous as our relationship can be, she can at least behave like herself when she’s at home – not the Stepford Teen version of herself that she presents to her grandparents.
Barbara is wearing a smart tweed suit that makes her look like one of the presenters on the Antiques Roadshow. Her hair is perfectly bouffed and frosted with spray, and her make-up is suitably age-appropriate for a respectable woman in her early 60s. Her smile, as she stares at me with laser eyes, is almost as frosted as her hair.
I suppose, if I were to look at myself from her perspective, I might feel a little frosty too. She’s never liked me. I was the bad influence, the wayward gypsy, the blemish in Kate’s otherwise perfectly managed childhood.
Barbara was always convinced that every wild thing Kate ever did – the travelling after she got her degree, the crappy jobs she started off with, the boyfriends with names like Chili Pepper, the fact that she became a single mum – was because of me.
It wasn’t true of course. There was a reason Kate and I clicked the minute we met.
A reason that Kate – clever, pretty, popular, from a stable home – immediately took me under her wing, despite the fact that I was none of those things. The reality was different. Kate had a wild streak all of her own – sometimes it even put mine to shame. She was daring and bold and yearned to break free of the constrictions of her cloying home life. The travelling – where she met Martha’s father (a polite word for ‘had a one-night-stand-with-while-under-the-influence-of-weed-and-booze’) – was nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even there.
The crappy jobs were just her way of finding out what she really wanted to do, before she settled on teaching. The boyfriends with names like Chili Pepper … well, to be fair, at least a few of those were down to me, and my borderline crusty pals with dogs on strings and only a passing acquaintance with personal hygiene.
Barbara either doesn’t know any of that, or wilfully ignores it. It’s easier to have a scapegoat. A scapegoat who is now sitting at the kitchen table still in her dressing gown, rocking electric-shock-chic hair and wired on coffee.
“Zoe!” she says, taking it all in. “How nice of you to make the effort! Late night, was it?”
Yes, I think. A late night spent looking after your butter-wouldn’t-melt grandchild. I don’t say this of course – especially as Martha is shooting me imploring looks over her shoulder. I take a deep breath, and remind myself that Barbara is Kate’s mother. That she is a woman who has lost her only child, and will probably never recover. She covers it as well as her make-up covers her wrinkles, but it is still there – the pain, and the anguish. The loss.
“Did you have a nice lunch?” I ask innocently, refusing to rise to the bait. I have mastered the art of war when it comes to Barbara – and I win my
