bottle. ‘Drop of shampoo?’
Champagne on a Monday night where I lived was because someone had got out on appeal. ‘Just a drop, thanks, cos I’ve got to drive back,’ I said.
‘We’ll call you a cab. You can leave the car here.’
Clover must have seen the cash register tinging in my eyes. ‘Anyway, we can worry about that later. You can still have a glass.’
I wiped the rim of the tumbler she gave me with the bottom of my sweatshirt while she had her back turned.
‘Bottoms up,’ Clover said. Just as we clinked glasses, the kitchen door opened and a tall, slim man with dark, curly hair came in. It had to be Lawrence, Clover’s husband. He was an older, more groomed version of Orion. In his suit, he looked as though he’d stumbled into Glastonbury by mistake. Clover introduced us and he said hello without really registering me, just raised an eyebrow at the champagne bottle. He poked about among the roasting tins, colanders and saucepans piled high in the butler’s sink, pulling out a rainbow-coloured welly before he found a mug.
Although nothing suggested he was the least bit interested in who I was or what I was doing there, Clover filled him in. ‘Poor old Maia’s had a terrible day. Hugo was beastly to Maia’s son, and they got into a bit of a punch-up and Hugo came off worse. He’s an arrogant little sod, he had it coming to him.’
‘Like mother, like son. Jennifer’s pretty arrogant herself,’ Lawrence said. I was surprised to hear a Mancunian accent.
‘She’s not that bad. At least she does all the class admin like the fete and tickets for the school play that no one else wants to do.’ Clover topped up her champagne. I shook my head as she pushed the bottle towards me.
‘Don’t be so naive. She loves lording it over people. If Jennifer hadn’t managed to trap Leo, she would still be touting cheese and pickle rolls around Canary Wharf,’ Lawrence said.
‘That’s not fair. Lawrence works in the same department as Jennifer’s husband, Leo,’ she said, turning to me.
‘It is fair. You’d think someone who tracks Japanese investments for a living would have enough brains to remember the condoms when he’s shagging the sandwich trolley dolly.’ Lawrence tried to squash an empty jar of coffee into an overflowing bin.
It was so rare for anything to surprise me in a mouth open, bloody hell sort of way, but Jen1 being from the wrong side of the tracks shot onto the list. I sieved through my dealings with her for the tiniest clue that her diamond studs had once been hypoallergenic lumps of glass from Topshop. Nothing. The woman had studied the middle-class stage and learnt her lines well. That accent. Christ, Jen1 could topple Queen Lizzie II off her throne if she got any posher. Still, the mean part of me would always want to start singing, ‘Prawns and mayonnaise? Bacon butty? Egg and cress?’ whenever I saw her now. On the other hand, if I ever managed to get posh myself, she’d be able to sing, ‘Pan scourer, bog brush, bin bag’ at me, so for now, I’d just sing it in my head.
I tried to look as though I wasn’t even following the conversation. I didn’t want to give Lawrence a reason to ask me about my background. Usually when I said I was a cleaner, a fidgety silence followed while people searched for something good to say about that ‘career choice’. Except Clover who said, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell Lawrence, he’ll want to marry you.’
Just as I was about to go out to call the children in, they came trooping back, trailing great puddles of water and demanding food. I started rounding mine up to leave when Einstein came flashing through the air to shrieks of delight from Harley and Bronte. Lawrence ducked as Einstein whistled past his head, which made him knock over his coffee.
‘Fucking parrot. I’m going to wring its neck one of these days.’
The parrot sat perched on the top of the kitchen door. I swear it was smiling.
‘Poor old Einstein. He doesn’t have very good spatial awareness any more. It’s his age.’ Clover started mopping up the spill with a tracksuit top.
Harley was over by the door, trying to get the parrot to speak. ‘Pretty Polly, hello, Einstein?’ Einstein replied by squirting out a white and brown jet of parrot poo down the door, which had the girls squealing with laughter.
Orion came over. ‘Listen to this. What’s your name?’
‘Einstein,’ came the parrot’s raspy voice.
‘Where do you live?’ Orion waved some kind of seedy snack at him.
‘In a fucking mad house,’ Einstein said, before snatching the snack and cracking it open.
‘I spent ages teaching him that.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lawrence shaking his head.
Stirling Hall seemed to have a fundraiser almost every week. What they were raising funds for was a mystery, given that there were only so many grand pianos, Mercedes minibuses and Olympic-sized trampolines a school could need. A couple of Saturdays before February half-term it was Fete Day – yet another occasion when Bronte sulked off in front of me and I trailed behind questioning whether I’d made the right decision to send her here.
She stomped into the school hall, without even glancing at the stalls around the edges, as though welly-wanging or marking the treasure on the papier mâché island were beneath her. She was carrying the shoebox she’d covered in old wallpaper and filled with baked beans, bread rolls and teabags destined for the local old people’s home. The night before, she’d moaned that all the other mothers went out shopping specially for the Fete Day charity donation rather than bunging in anything that wasn’t out of date in the kitchen cupboard. Since the prof had died and Cecilia had given me the boot, I was fast becoming a charity case myself. I hoped that Edna, Gertie or whoever was unlucky enough to get our box would forgive me for the budget biscuits that Colin said tasted like bus tickets.
Just as Bronte was hiding her box in the corner, Jen1 pushed past me in a way that made it difficult to know whether she had underestimated the size of her arse by a few centimetres or was looking for a punch-up. She hadn’t glanced in my direction since the Harley–Hugo fiasco. I should have gone over and had a straight conversation with her, but a quiet word was never an option given that the pipe cleaner people she hung out with always surrounded her. Now, at school pick-up, I had to steel myself to get out of the van. I wanted to be oblivious to her but instead I felt the drain of energy it takes to ignore someone.
One thing it was impossible to ignore, however, was her ‘charitable contribution’. All that was missing from her wicker basket was a man with a trumpet. Snuggling in the red tissue paper were pineapples, goji berries, organic lentils, wheat-free muesli, miso soup and a coconut. I imagined some poor sod with arthritic fingers trying to hack into the coconut or getting goji berries stuck in his false teeth when all he wanted was a cup of PG Tips and a ham sandwich. Maybe my baked beans weren’t so bad after all.
‘Bowl of adzuki beans, anyone?’
I swung round. Clover was a sight to behold in turquoise flares that only a six-foot model should attempt, not a stout woman on the wrong side of short. She pressed a couple of pounds into the twins’ hands and told them to ‘bugger off and have a go on a few stalls, but don’t buy any crap’.
‘Otherwise you find that all the junk you got rid of for the white elephant stall is replaced with someone else’s shite,’ Clover said, taking my arm. ‘Now, let’s get this tattoo stall up and running.’
Through the doors leading out into the playground I could see Lawrence setting up the football nets for Five for a Prize. Even though it was drizzling slightly, I wished we were outside. Instead, we fought our way through children clutching coins and grandmas with pushchairs going nowhere fast. Our table was at the side of the hall between the Knock Down the Can and the Wild West shooting