She watched Daisy walk over to the counter. The steely thing made her uneasy. She had absolutely no idea what Daisy was thinking or feeling or planning. There were Christians at school but they kept their heads down, whereas Daisy…She wasn’t a moose either, she hadn’t got a big arse or a weird face. She knew it, too, something about the way she carried herself, deliberately choosing to make herself look shit, a provocation, almost.
Daisy returned to the table with two black coffees and two flapjacks. They always put the napkin under the food. Which misses the point, don’t you think? Like she was thirty-five. How are you doing?
I’m dandy. Just dandy.
And how’s Ian McEwan?
Melissa thought Daisy was talking about a real person until she remembered the closed novel lying under her hand. It’s OK. They were playing a game, but it was against the rules to say so. We’re doing it at school.
I’m reading about vampires.
Melissa took a swig of coffee and relaxed a little. Twilight?
Daisy took Dracula out of her bag. Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to do some work for a mysterious count and it all kind of goes downhill from then on.
OK, said Melissa, carefully.
Except that Daisy wasn’t playing a game. This was serious. Usually she became tongue-tied and foolish when she wanted someone to like her, but with Melissa…Was this a kind of acting, too? Putting on your best self and coming thrillingly alive? Was this the Holy Spirit? God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Sorry about Alex.
Sorry in what way?
The slobbering.
Oh, I think I can handle Alex. Melissa wondered if she could make Daisy a sidekick for a few days. That would throw Mum and Richard. Her phone vibrated. CALLY. They watched it tango across the table. She looked at Daisy. What was her weak point? It wasn’t the religion, was it. But that first night, the way Angela reached across to stop her saying grace…Your mum thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t she?
We don’t exactly see eye to eye.
Your dad seems OK, but your mum…Is she, like, really unhappy or something?
That’s exactly it. Because Melissa was right, and no one else said it, did they? She doesn’t enjoy things, she doesn’t get excited. She bit off a piece of flapjack. Your mum seems pretty happy.
I’ll give it two years.
Yeh?
Tell me one thing they’ve got in common.
Daisy laughed. No one said this either. So…are you still running away, or are you coming back?
Melissa looked at her. Crazy hazy Daisy.
Daisy felt as if she was in a film. Something hypnotic about that gaze. The snake in The Jungle Book.
What do you think I should do? asked Melissa.
I think you should come back.
Then I shall come back.
♦
Angela finished her second Twix and put the scrunched wrapper into her pocket. Little canvases of dancing naked women, sheep made of welded nails. She wanted to buy the big bowl with ducks on because that’s what you did on holiday, bought stuff you didn’t need. Lovespoons and wall plates. Except they couldn’t afford it now. They’d stopped talking about money. He was sane again. Don’t look a gift horse. Five years of mortgage left, assuming they caught up with the payments. Then she could buy sheep made of welded nails. She tilted her head, as if taste were simply a matter of angle, but all she could think was, I like the ducks.
The china tramp. The Pineapple. She’d got it completely wrong. It wasn’t her house, was it? Like stepping out of a plane. It was Juliette’s house. She walked to the little wall and sat down beside an elderly couple eating cornets. She felt light-headed and shaky. It was Juliette’s dad who played Oscar Peterson. She tried to remember what music her father played, tried to remember her own bedroom. She realised for the first time that her parents had died taking secrets with them. Where was Juliette now? New Zealand? Dead? The pennies, the train to Sheffield, that was home, yes. But the doorway from which her father was always vanishing, what was in there? If only she could get closer and see into the dark.
She needed to tell someone, she needed to tell Daisy, and in her untethered state of mind it seemed entirely natural that the thought itself should conjure her daughter into being fifty yards further up the high street, but she was shoulder to shoulder with Melissa and they were laughing and Angela felt as if she had been slapped.
♦
Benjy loves being in the countryside, not so much the actual contents thereof, horses, windmills, big sticks, panoramas, more the absence of those things which press upon him so insistently at home. He occupies, still, a little circle of attention, no more than eight metres in diameter at most. If stuff happens beyond this perimeter he simply doesn’t notice unless it involves explosions or his name being yelled angrily. At home, in school, on the streets between and around the two, the world is constantly catching him by surprise, teachers, older boys, drunk people on the street all suddenly appearing in front of him so that his most-used facial expression is one of puzzled shock. But in the countryside things are less important and happen more slowly and you know pretty much exactly who might or might not appear in front of you. And his hunger for this calm is so strong that he keeps a little row of postcards along his shelf at home. Buttermere, Loch Ness, Dartmoor. Not so much windows on to places he would rather be but on to ways he would like to feel.
♦
Those first five years with Dominic were the first sustained happiness she had ever experienced. She worked in a travel agency, he played in two jazz groups and taught piano to private pupils. She can recall very little of what they did together, no romantic weeks in Seville, no snowed-in Christmases, finds it hard now to picture them doing anything together that isn’t recorded in a photo album somewhere, but that was the point, the ease of it, finally not needing to notice everything. Twenty-four years old and she was off duty at long bloody last. And nowadays when she thinks about her marriage, this is what depresses her, that she is back on duty again. Has Dominic changed? Or is his blankness precisely what she once found so consoling? She doesn’t mind the lack of love, doesn’t mind the lack of physical affection, doesn’t even mind the arguments. She wants simply to let go for once, wants not to have to think and plan and remember and organise. Cows like toy cows on the far hill. When she imagines the future, when she imagines the children leaving home, the truth is that she’s on her own. That dusty pink house sitting up there squeezed into the edge of the wood, for example, a little dilapidated. She can imagine living there, she can imagine it so vividly that it is like a taste in her mouth. Butterscotch. Marmalade. Job at a village school somewhere nearby. Tidy house, little garden, one day blissfully identical to the next and only herself to please.
♦
Daisy and Melissa are sitting in the back seat of the bus talking about Juno and Pete Doherty and Justin Bieber and the kid on crutches at Daisy’s school. Angela sits five rows forward feeling abandoned and petty for feeling abandoned, trying to read an article about the possibility of a coalition but being led astray by an interview with Gemma Arterton (they made a Lego figure of me).