trying to get it to call her back, but was cut off by an incoming call.
From my mother.
Someone was definitely dead.
Or someone was about to be.
With a very unpleasant feeling in my stomach, I reluctantly answered the phone.
‘Mum?’ I grabbed a tea towel from the kitchen counter and wrapped it around my chest. It just didn’t seem right to be topless while on the phone to my mother. Thank goodness I’d put on pants. ‘Is everything OK?’
The last time she’d put in an impromptu call was when my dad was in hospital after enjoying a recreational batch of space cakes at my auntie’s house. Ever since, I’d been waiting for the call to say he was leaving her for the milkman or that he had defaulted on the mortgage to fund his crack habit. It was impossible to say which was more likely.
‘Angela Clark, do you have something to tell me?’
The quiet fury in my mother’s voice suggested that my dad wasn’t in trouble but that I certainly was. And I was almost certain I knew why. Louisa’s texts suddenly made a terrifying kind of sense as I put two and two together to come up with a big fat shiny emerald-coloured four.
‘Um, I don’t think so?’ I answered sweetly. Because playing dumb had worked so well when I’d ‘borrowed’ her car in the middle of the night when I was eighteen, only to return it with three exciting new dents. I thought they added character. She thought they added to the insurance premium.
‘Are you or are you not −’ she paused and took a very deep, very dramatic breath − ‘engaged to that musician?’
Sodding bollocky bollocks.
It wasn’t like I’d planned on keeping my engagement a secret from my parents, but circumstances had conspired against me. And by circumstances, of course I meant stone cold terror. I’d called on Christmas Day to deliver the happy news, but my mum had been so mad that I hadn’t come home for dry turkey and seething resentment, and so mad that I was choosing to stay in ‘that country’ with ‘that musician’, that I couldn’t seem to find the right way to tell her I had just accepted a proposal from ‘that musician’ to stay in ‘that country’ for the foreseeable. Then, as the weeks passed by, the more I replayed the conversation over in my mind, the less I felt like casually mentioning my betrothal.
‘Am I engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘To Alex?’
‘Yes Angela. To Alex. Or at least one hopes so.’
She used the special voice to pronounce my fiance’s name that she usually saved to refer to Sandra next door and Eamonn Holmes. And she hated Sandra next door and Eamonn Holmes.
‘Well, at least I’m not going to end up a barren spinster.’ Yes, dangling a grandchild-shaped carrot in front of her was a low blow, but needs must when the devil shits in your teapot. ‘Surely?’
‘Oh dear God, Angela, are you pregnant?’ she shrieked directly into the receiver before bellowing at the top of her voice in the other direction, ‘David! She’s pregnant!’
‘I’m not pregnant,’ I said, resting my head on my knees. I might be sitting half-naked on a dirty kitchen floor with a slightly grubby tea towel over my boobs, but I wasn’t pregnant. As far as I knew. ‘Seriously.’
‘Oh Lord, I should have known,’ she wittered on regardless. ‘Moving in with that musician, never calling, never visiting. How far gone are you?’
‘I’m not pregnant,’ I repeated with as much conviction as I could muster while simultaneously trying to remember if I had taken my pill that morning. ‘Mum, I’m not.’
‘How far gone is she?’ I heard my dad puffing his way down to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is it that musician’s? Is that why she’s engaged?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Even though they couldn’t see me, I couldn’t resist an eye roll and emphatic wave of the hand. ‘I’m genuinely not pregnant. Alex did not propose because I’m up the stick. To the best of my knowledge, it’s because he actually wants to marry me.’
‘Right,’ she replied with a very subtle scoffing tone.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Shall I book a flight? Do I need to go and get her?’ Dad was practically out the door already. ‘I’ll have to go to the post office and get some dollars.’
‘The post office,’ Mum seethed. Another of her arch enemies. ‘Go back upstairs. She says she’s not pregnant.’
‘She’d better bloody not be,’ he said, just loud enough for me to hear. ‘She’s not too old to go over my knee. That musician of hers as well.’
I fought the urge to remind him I’d only gone ‘over his knee’ once, when I was five and had purposely gone into his room, walked into the garden and thrown his best leather driving gloves into the pond so we wouldn’t have to go to my aunt Sheila’s. I was a petulant little madam. But he had apologized when I was twenty-five and told me I was right to have done it because my aunt Sheila was a − quote-unquote − right pain in the arse.
‘I can’t imagine why else you would think the best way for a mother to find out her daughter is engaged − to a musician, no less − that she has never met and who lives ten thousand miles away is to hear it from the village gossip on the Waitrose cheese aisle.’
I had to admit she had a point there.
The thing was, ever since my seasonal no-show, the subtle digs at Alex and his choice of profession had become out-and-out abuse. By the end of January she had written him off as Hitler and Mick Jagger’s love child. To most people, a musician was someone who played an instrument. To my mother, they had to be a lying, cheating drug addict whose only ambition in life was to knock up her poor, stupid daughter and then leave her destitute in a motel on the side of a highway with an arm full of track marks. It was a bit of a stretch. Alex didn’t even like to take Advil for a headache.
‘You told Louisa before your own family?’
Oh, Louisa, I thought to myself. Baby or no baby, you are dead.
‘Look, I wasn’t not telling you,’ I said, deciding to take a different tack. And to get off the kitchen floor because my bum was completely numb. ‘I just didn’t want to tell you over the phone. It didn’t seem right.’
Check me out − the dutiful daughter. For a spur-of-the-moment excuse, I thought it was pretty good. I tiptoed over to the sofa and replaced the tea towel with a blanket. Very chic.
‘Well, that’s probably because it isn’t right,’ she said, still sounding grumpy, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be disinherited. This time. ‘We haven’t even met this Alex character. It’s not right.’
‘He’s not a character, he’s a person.’ I took a deep breath, imagining the cold day in hell when Alex would sit down for afternoon tea with my mum and dad. ‘And you will meet him and you’ll love him.’
‘When?’
Oh
