‘Spectacular set of penguins,’ Rachel said.
Mum ignored her completely.
She scooped up a little of the meat, seeing the juice dripping through the metal slits and thinking that this looked like the stuff that spurted out of hedgehogs on country roads. She took a quick breath to swallow it.
Mary set her fork down and turned her head slowly towards Rachel. ‘Do you know what I think?’
She looked up, puzzled – was she supposed to guess? She shrugged instead.
‘I think you belong here.’
There was no warmth in it, no sense of sadness or hope.
‘Mum, we’ve been through—’
‘You …’ She lifted her arm and pointed directly at her, then she gazed across the walls, at the floor, then finally up to the ceiling. ‘You belong to this house.’
Rachel waited and pondered the words. ‘Can’t you hear how odd that sounds?’
‘Truth sometimes is odd. You should be back here.’
‘But I couldn’t, could I? I could never live—’
‘Don’t say never …’ Mary pushed a finger toward her own lips, which glistened with juice from the meat. For the first time she looked like she had emotion in her eyes. A sort of twitchy sadness.
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but it’s not going to happen, but you could always visit me in—’
‘Shhhhhhhhhh.’ She put both hands back on the table by each side of her plate, fingers arched like a spider.
‘It’s not that I don’t …’ Rachel felt her tongue pushing the back of her teeth to form an ‘L’ sound, but she trailed off from saying ‘love’ and did something else instead. She started to reach her hand across the table, sliding the wrist along. The one that was raw from scratching. She reached her fingertips toward Mum’s hand. There was a distinct slowness to it, a cautiousness and Mum stared down at the approaching touch with something like confusion. The impending experience of physical contact. ‘I do love you, Mum, but—’
She yanked her hand away from Rachel just before they made contact and she pushed her chair back with a crack. She swigged the last dregs of vodka from her mug and looked over at what looked like a bottle of grape juice on top of the fridge. ‘I suppose you’ll want a drink now.’ Like thirst was a crime of utter selfishness.
Rachel pulled her own hand back instantly; a futile attempt to suggest it had never been reaching out in the first place. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
Mum stood on her tiptoes, trying to grab the grape juice that was just out of her reach.
Sad events … get through …
Rachel swallowed, then quickly stood up. She moved towards the fridge. ‘Let me help, Mum.’
‘You don’t know where anything is.’
She reached up for the grape juice. ‘I’ll just grab—’
‘You don’t know where anything is!’ She grabbed the bottle.
Rachel got the message. She moved back to the table and sat back in her place, staring at the tablecloth, at her fingernails, at anywhere but her mum’s eyes, which were also avoiding hers. There was that horrible buzz of emotional electricity in the air, which she was tempted to break with a joke, like she often did as a kid. I say, I say, I say, what’s brown and sticky, Mum?
But she sat there and listened to the air crackle instead.
The bottle of grape juice looked years, maybe even decades out of date, which prompted a wild thought as Mum sloshed liquid into two grimy glasses. She’s going to poison me with this stuff. She’s going to trap me in this house and store me with those penguins in the space she left on the shelf.
Mary stumbled a little as she set the drinks on the table. ‘A toast, then.’
Rachel slowly took her glass and felt a shift in her own facial muscles, a resignation because this was a familiar thing. She knew what was coming.
‘To Stephanie …’ Mum’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling and she pushed her glass up towards it, all the way, until her elbow locked. Click. ‘And to our little Holly. May they both find peace. And may they come and see us whenever they want.’
Swig.
And this is why I stay away.
They drank and ate, knives clinking and clattering, loud and noticeable in the silence. Every now and again Mum’s new cat would wander under the table and press itself against her shins, slinking itself around her like a snake. All the while she tried throwing conversations over, only to see them fizzle out like crap matches. Bored, she glanced around the room and saw a local paper curling off the edge of a side table. The headline: Masturbating Man Flees School Gates!
Sheesh. Being back in Menham really was a riot.
Suddenly Mum plonked two satsumas in the middle of the table, which turned out to be dessert. Her heart sank.
It was a ground-shaking, call-Sky-News shock when Mum finally said something that wasn’t about Holly or this town. An actual question about her daughter’s actual life. ‘I suppose you still work in that horrible big building? The one with the glass?’
‘No,’ Rachel sighed. ‘Remember I called you a couple of months ago?’
Actually it was four months ago, Rachel realised. She knew that because she remembered standing in her flat that night, building up to the call, pacing the room like Rocky Balboa prepping for a big finale fight.
‘I said I was moving to a new company? That I’d be recording sound full-time?’
‘Oh.’ She lazily grabbed a satsuma and started to sink her sharp nails into it.
‘I’ve started that now and I’m getting more and more work.’
‘Well …’ she said, with a horribly dismissive wave of the hand, ‘there’s a hell of a lot more to life than money, and you
