“Isn’t it funny how Europeans never sing with an accent?” whispered Peggy. “Look at Abba.”
“Dietrich and Pavarotti,” Iris grunted.
Even the dwarfs looked pissed off with Rosalyn. This year it was their turn to make leering jokes for the baffled audience. Mark didn’t find them half as funny as Conrad. At the end of Act One they returned from a days work at the mind, each clutching a can of 7-Up, and singing the theme song from An Officer and a Gentleman, ‘Love Lift Us Up’.
“They never had 7-Up in those days,” Sally complained above the clamour of children and parents stamping out for the interval.
Mark asked, “How do you know it’s not happening now?”
Sally sighed. “All fairy tales are a long time ago. Wooden houses and people singing. It’s obvious. She had a broom and no Hoover.”
Iris ushered them along their row. “Are we going for a drink?”
“So why do they have 7-Ups?” Sally demanded.
“Um,” Mark began. “Listen, I’ll go up to the bar and order—you go to the loo with Auntie Iris and your nanna. They’ll explain.”
“Thanks, Mark,” Peggy hissed as they entered the swell and press of the crowd.
“I THINK SHE’S A DREADFUL WOMAN.”
Sam’s judgement had been final. Mark wasn’t allowed to contradict her, although he had already admitted to a sneaking admiration for the woman who had taken up his wife’s space in Peggy’s house and made irrevocable changes. A Tuscany patio, with herb garden. The dining room knocked through.
“She acts like she’s something.”
“She is something. Your mother’s lover.”
They were still newlyweds. This was seven years ago, and Mark didn’t yet know how far he could push Sam. She burst into tears as they walked back to their flat. His heart went out to her because he saw she still had a smear of grease on her trembling chin. She chews when she cries, he noted with a shudder.
“You’ll have to get used to it,” he said gently.
“I can’t. It’s so awful. She’s so fat.”
Mark sighed in the manner Sally was to pick up at an early age.
He carefully set down the interval drinks. The table was next to squabbling kids clustered about the coloured monitor showing the safety curtain lowered onstage. They were delighted by the idea that they could watch the show up here on television if they wanted. They fought over the best view. One was asking his mother if they could stay up in the bar. She cracked him one.
That evening with the grease on Sam’s chin had been the last time they had met as a happily fulfilled foursome, for dinner at Peggy and Iris’s. Soon afterwards Sam had started up the feud, with all the zest she usually employed in feeding used boxes to the cardboard crusher at work.
Iris had cooked and then insisted that they watch an American TV movie together.
“Oh, no,” Mark had smirked, “not the Freak of the Week movie. Which minority are they tastefully handling this week?”
Iris smiled serenely. “It’s called Mom’s Apple Pie.”
It turned out to be about a single mother who tells her children, in the most tactful manner possible, that she is a lesbian. The children eventually, after about ninety minutes and a good many phone calls, come to accept her as still the same old mom and she makes them a nice pie at the end to prove it.
Mark watched, slightly bemused, soaking up the therapeutic benevolence Iris was sending out in waves as she snuggled massively up to Peggy. Peggy was, however, stiff and alert, watching for Sam’s reactions.
Sam was furious, Mark could tell by the extra-deliberate way she smoked a whole pack of Marlboro Lights and refused to take her eyes away from the screen, even during adverts. When the credits rolled she locked herself in the downstairs toilet.
“Sam, love?” Peggy rattled the doorknob for a few minutes, then joined Mark and Iris over the washing-up.
“We’ve upset her,” she said, watching Mark’s patterned arms wiping suds away.
“Maybe that’s what she needs,” Iris said blandly, rubbing plates dry. “Shocking her into facing the truth.”
Peggy winced. Iris kissed her nose.
“I didn’t mean that nastily. It all shows just how much she feels about you.”
Later, under the streetlamp, with Sam sobbing in his unresponsive arms, Mark related this conversation in the hope she would be touched.
“What?” She drew back. “I was furious—and that showed how much I loved her?” She laughed bitterly. “How fucking typical! Typical fucking selfish, the pair of them!”
Mark frowned at her.
“Couldn’t they tell—couldn’t they even fucking tell that I don’t care that much about them and their doings? I was crying for myself. Too selfish even to see that. Those poor kids in the film—they were just like me and what she’s been putting me through.”
DID MARK LOVE SAM?
It was all so complex now. So tied up in vested interests, matters of life and death.
These days it was so hard to get a straight answer from him. He had no objectivity. If someone stopped him, here in the bar, someone leaned across from another table and asked, as a matter of interest, “Do you still truly love the woman you married in the eyes of God and the law?”, he’d be utterly stuck for words. This was one of his worst-case scenarios, this abrupt question. It was one that must come sooner or later, from some quarter. It was the test he was most likely to fail.
He couldn’t say yes or no.
He’d come through with flying colours on Take Your Pick.
Like a cassette player with heads so dirty they snag the tape with their accreted scum and release it
