‘Did Matthew talk about Amber last night?’
Becky keeps moving, and has to work to pull all the surprise out of her voice.
‘Amber Heath? No, he didn’t.’ She keeps her voice breezy, turns away to the cupboards and pulls out salts and spicing and rubs. ‘Can you pass me that … that thing?’ She motions to a spatula. ‘She’s just an actress trying to drum up some attention while she works out her disappointment at losing a role. Storm in a teacup. We had better things to talk about.’
But try as she might, in the last few days Becky has struggled to find any kind of peace, finding herself battling between an image of Amber between castings and gym visits and lunches and beauty appointments, strategizing and wringing the situation for all the publicity she can get – and another image of Amber broken and barely able to get out of bed. An online gossip outlet has recently published a picture of her in tracksuit bottoms and oversized sunglasses, hair scruffed up in a bun, which could cover both the realities Becky is imagining.
Things come back to gnaw at her. DB’s anger with Matthew. Antonia storming in to see him long before any story broke online. And her own skittish memories of seeing Amber there, her mouth opening as if to say something to the woman she must have seen in the kitchen. What had she intended to say?
Becky clasps a palm to her stomach where it twists and complains, and reaches for a clean chopping board from the dishwasher. A carving knife, positioned blade up, catches the end of her finger and a bead of blood forms at the tip. ‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Language!’
Maisie speedily hands her a folded clump of kitchen towel which Becky squeezes around her finger. Fleetingly her focus shifts and Becky finds herself understanding the calm relief that people report after cutting themselves.
Then she files that feeling away.
‘Jules the Viking is going to be at Lily’s and I said I’d pop by after dinner,’ says Maisie. ‘I hope that’s OK? Your lot’ll be on to the crap jokes and beer pong by then.’
‘Be back before eleven.’ Becky begins peeling, awkwardly navigating the potato skins with her kitchen-towel-bandaged finger. ‘What is he, exactly?’
‘What do you mean? Like, is he a werewolf? What are you asking?’ She is smiling, messing with her mum. ‘Relax. He’s my friend.’ Maisie is in a bouncy mood, full of questions tonight, and just when Becky is hoping for some quiet. ‘When you and Dad dated …’ Maisie begins again.
‘We never dated. We just liked each other for a bit.’
‘Enough to have me. So obviously it was meant to be on some level, you lucky people.’
‘What did you want to ask me?’
‘So Jules called me his Viking Queen yesterday. What do you think that means?’
‘It means he believes you are royalty and also that you are a member of a sea-faring race of warriors from—’
‘Don’t even try to be more annoying than me. Be serious.’
Becky can hear the girlish insecurity in Maisie’s voice, the need to know what this boy is thinking about her. She almost regrets teasing her: what if Maisie stops talking to her? Then how will she keep her safe? But Becky also thinks that Jules sounds bombastic and full of machismo, the kind of boy who is looking to get his rocks off at Glastonbury in an expensive tent bought for the occasion by his parents, who have positively encouraged he go, seeing it as a passport to adventure. All the while, Jules is probably planning how to get the pills and dreaming of deflowering someone like Maisie, perhaps Maisie herself, on the built-in groundsheet floor of his expensive tent.
She wants to tell her daughter that, whatever it is Jules means by his comment, she is without doubt so much better than this probably disappointing teen lothario, who is busy hiding a galaxy of insecurities behind his new leather jacket and his long hair and his loud voice.
‘If he’s teasing you? If he’s giving you nicknames? It means he’s thinking about you.’
‘Did you and Dad have nicknames for each other?’
‘I called him my Viking King, as it so happens.’
‘Mum!’
‘Sorry. Um, I don’t know, really. I’ve forgotten so much from back then already. I think I always called him Adam. He didn’t, I don’t know, he didn’t project a need for nicknaming. Does that make sense? Like, some people end up with ten nicknames given to them by ten different people. But others just get their birth name.’
Maisie has lost interest. There is something else she needs to press on her mother.
‘There’s this spare ticket for Glastonbury going round,’ she says. ‘He hasn’t offered it to me yet but Lily thinks he will.’
‘No. You’re not going.’
‘Give me three reasons.’
‘Pills and amphetamines and vodka.’
‘Mum, nobody does speed any more. It’s not 1975.’
‘Toilets, then.’
‘I think I’d survive them. Two hundred thousand people seem to manage it each year. I’ll get one of those portable travel things that women can wee into standing up, if you’re really stressing about it.’
‘You’re not old enough for a festival.’
‘How come the other parents think their kids are old enough then?’
Becky’s phone rings, flashing Sharon’s name up on the screen.
‘Hold on, I have to take this,’ she says to her daughter, clamping the phone between face and neck, wiping grimy and wet hands on a tea cloth, heart thumping with anxiety. ‘Sharon! How are you? How’s the head? Wasn’t last night fun? No,
