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‘Bloody Marys,’ I say cheerfully, sweeping my hand in the direction of the kitchen island as if I’m introducing them to each other.
‘Thank you, darling,’ my father says, putting his hands on my shoulders briefly in what passes as a hug.
‘It’s warm in here,’ my mother remarks in a troubled way. She looks around with the restlessness of discontent, fanning her strange and unfamiliar face. ‘Isn’t it warm?’
It isn’t, actually, because the heating went off at ten, but my mother’s menopausal, so I agree with her. ‘It’s been very sunny today and hot air sinks, doesn’t it?’
‘It rises,’ my father says.
‘It must be affecting us on its way up again,’ I say brightly. Honestly, I’ve no idea who I am when I’m with my parents. They seem to bring out my inner inanity. When I’m with them, they’re the grown-ups and I regress to some attitude of despicable girlishness that isn’t really me at all.
I stir my drink with my celery stick, mixing in the spices and turning it dark brown. Wow, it’s strong.
They sit on the sofa with a sigh and I perch on the footstool opposite them with an eagerness I don’t feel. ‘How are the Bennetts?’ These are the old friends they’ve had dinner with.
‘Oh, you know,’ my mother says dismissively. ‘Ruth drinks too much.’ She pulls her cape around her and gulps hers down. ‘How’s work?’ she asks with an emphasis on work. Her voice is hoarse and it catches in her throat. ‘Still dressing people? However would they manage to go out in public without you?’
That’s sarcasm, that is, but it gives me the chance to look at her properly without appearing to stare. ‘How would they go out in public without me? Naked, I suppose,’ I reply, also with sarcasm.
‘Have people got no taste of their own?’ my mother asks.
I take a large gulp of my drink and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand in a show of reckless bravado. ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about people’s taste anymore, because I’ve been fired.’ I’d been dreading breaking this bit of news to them but now, ta-da! It’s done!
I brace myself for some yelling, because being with them is as nerve-racking as living on the edge of a volcano, but unusually for my parents they seem at a loss for words.
‘Fern, Fern.’ My father closes his eyes and shakes his head in despair. He looks more resigned than surprised. ‘You were fired? Why?’
I give them the short version of the story.
‘When did this happen?’
‘A month ago.’
‘And you’re only telling us now?’
They glance at each other over their drinks. I’ve confirmed their deepest fears about me.
‘What are you going to do?’ my father asks. ‘Are you getting Jobseeker’s Allowance?’
‘No.’ I wipe the condensation off my glass with my thumb. ‘I’m concentrating on my vintage clothing company. I’m a fashion curator.’
‘Really?’ My mother looks at me with a flicker of animation and for a moment we connect briefly with a small spark of mutual passion that makes my spirits lift.
My father, too, looks hopeful. ‘You’ve got business premises?’
‘I’ve got a stall in Camden Market,’ I tell them.
They freeze. It’s as if we’ve got some kind of satellite time-lapse going on; it takes them a few seconds for the horrible implications to sink in.
All empathy wiped clean once more, my mother says suspiciously, ‘You’re telling us you’re a market trader?’ as if it’s some elaborate story I’ve made up to make a fool of her.
I take a business card out of my wallet, which depicts me standing against a wall of flowers in a Sixties minidress. ‘Look!’ I say. ‘That dress is Pucci. You had one like that, didn’t you?’
She knows I’m trying to get around her and she doesn’t reply.
Some vague desperation for that old connection makes me persevere. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Marilyn Munro was buried in Pucci, you know.’
‘I’m assuming not in this specific dress.’
Ha ha, she’s hilarious, my mother.
She reads the business card slowly, at arm’s-length, too proud for reading glasses. ‘Fern Banks Vintage.’ She hands it back to me and sighs, summing up my enterprise with her own brand of snobbery. ‘In other words, you’re selling people’s cast-offs.’
That hurts.
I reply lightly, forcing a smile. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘And you hope to make a living this way?’ my father asks.
‘Yes, I do. I never pay over the odds. I look for styles and buy diffusion lines, nothing too out there, just clothes for women to look good in.’
‘As opposed to?’
‘Look …’ I’m talking too fast and too defensively, I know, but I want them to understand that this is something I can make a go of. ‘This is something I’m actually good at. And I’m building a decent client list.’ I’m stretching the truth a bit here, obviously. But it’s early days.
A deep weariness has come over them.
See? I think bitterly. Dressing people up in a department store doesn’t seem such a bad job now, does it?
My mother expresses her disapproval by emanating a dense and disappointed silence.
I play with a button on the Barcelona footstool. The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable, when: ‘How’s Mick?’ my father asks casually, breaking it.
That didn’t take long, did it? ‘He’s fine! He sends his love.’ I say that to annoy them. It’s not the kind of thing that Mick would do, send his love to my parents. They’ve only met once, briefly, on my birthday, and he wasn’t what they wanted for me. What he thought of them, he didn’t say. He never gives them a second thought.
They digest my comment for a moment.
‘Your mother and I have been talking about the flat,’ my father says, crossing one leg over the other.
‘Oh, really?’ I feel nervous, as if I’m no longer on solid ground, and I stare at his feet. For a moment I think that what I’m seeing is his pale bare ankle, but no, he’s wearing beige socks.
‘The reason we’re keeping it in our name, apart from the issue of capital gains tax, is because we feel it’s financially safer. For you, you understand,’ he adds.
‘How so?’
He and my mother exchange a look.
‘Have you thought,’ my mother says, ‘that Mick might simply be out for what he can get?’
This is a brand-new put-down out of a whole array of criticisms. I mean, Mick couldn’t possibly like me for my company, my looks and the fact the sex is good, could he? No. He’s after my flat. Correction: their flat. I take another mouthful of my drink. My eyes water. It hits the back of my nose like mustard powder. It’s more like a punishment than a cocktail.
‘He’s got his own house,’ I point out. ‘In Harpenden.’
That shakes them.
‘Actually his own?’ my father asks dubiously.
‘Yes. Actually his own.’ I’ve got a decent imagination, but even I couldn’t invent a house in Harpenden.
My mother gives me the look she uses when she suspects me of lying. I think of getting up to show her photographs of it on my phone, but I change my mind and sink back down again because honestly, it’s not worth the effort.
I crunch on my celery stick and look at her face with those new, strange eyes and wonder what my father thinks about it. The work she’s had done ages her. Only people afraid of losing their looks have that kind of extreme appearance, the kind that makes them look stretched and plumped and filled and tightened. When you see a face like that you immediately put them in the category of the middle-aged. When I was a personal stylist I saw the same shiny foreheads and immobile mouths on a daily basis. It rarely made women look young. It made them look as if the humanity had been taken out of them.
My parents are leaning towards each other on the red sofa, still recovering from the Harpenden house revelation, forcing them to come up with some new reason for protecting me from Mick or protecting the flat from me. Time to change the subject.
‘I saw an interesting woman today. You’d have liked her,’ I say to my mother. ‘She was wearing Chanel.’
‘You sold her Chanel?’ My mother brightens, visibly impressed. ‘Is she anyone we’d know?’
She’s got the wrong end of the stick, but I don’t want to ruin it, so I smile brightly. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say. Client confidentiality. Can I refresh your glass?’
Vodka, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, celery salt, fresh celery. Glasses refreshed, I sit down again on the red footstool and the hit of my drink is so strong that for a moment I have the horrible feeling I’m going to topple off it.
‘Is she a television personality?’ my mother persists eagerly, hankering after the days when she, too, was a name and hung out with the stars.
I smile enigmatically, not wanting to ruin it for her.
‘I can guess who it is,’ she says smugly, mollified by her own imagination.
The doorbell rings. In my semi-drunk state it doesn’t sound like the doorbell. It sounds like an alarm, harsh and urgent and motivating, and the three of us are galvanised out of our alcohol-numbed torpor into action, struggling to our feet in uncomprehending panic.
‘Who is it?’ my mother asks, keeping her voice low as if we’re in hiding.
I open the door and it’s my upstairs neighbour, Lucy. She comes in full of drunken merriment. ‘Hey! I saw your light on and I—’ She suddenly notices my parents. ‘Oh, hello!’
I can guess what my mother is thinking behind her frozen face. She hates people who drop in unexpectedly. She thinks it’s the height of rudeness.
‘Bloody Mary?’ I ask Lucy.
‘Ooh, yes. Is this a party?’
Lucy’s got curly blonde hair and the kind of cheerful superficiality that actors are good at during those times when they’re not talking about a new role. They take acting seriously, but they treat life with a very light touch, which is a welcome relief if you belong to my family. Lucy’s wearing a black unstructured asymmetric dress with a lot of zips. Comme des Garçons. I know because I sold it to her. She’s playing Lady Macbeth at The Gatehouse and she still has her stage make-up on. She’s electrified with post-performance adrenaline.
Lucy’s ambition is to direct. She’s been in all the best crime dramas: Scott & Bailey, Silent Witness, Endeavour, Shetland. Whenever she’s in something, she invites me upstairs so we can watch it together on her flatscreen TV and she points out the flaws in the acting, things that I’d never have noticed – like when someone fluffs a line, or winces before the knife’s been raised, or fails to respond to the scene.
And that’s the way she’s looking at me now, slightly critically, as if I’m not playing the part of host very well, so I introduce her to my parents and while I mix another jug of Bloody Marys she fills us in on how the night has gone. The theatre was packed. There had been a heckler. The audience was so caught up that at the end there was a long, thick silence after Malcolm’s closing lines.
‘Malcolm McDowell?’ my mother asks hopefully, ready to claim acquaintance because he bought her a drink once.
‘Malcolm. Duncan’s son,’ Lucy says. ‘“This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”.’
My mother’s disappointed. ‘A dead butcher?’ she echoes, confused.
‘He’s talking about Macbeth! The fiend-like queen – that’s me. And they’re holding up Macbeth’s head and this orange light comes over them – it’s like an Isis video. Cheers!’
Lucy brings a whole new element to the night. There are some things that my parents will only say to me, which shows some kind of loyalty, I suppose, so the conversation stops being personal. Lucy sits on the footstool and I sit on the Barcelona chair while my parents loll on the sofa. We’ve reached the hazy stage of drunkenness where words become particularly meaningful.
Lucy’s still talking about the play and her excitement about the concept of the ‘Pahr off sgestion’.
We’re momentarily perplexed but rooting for the concept anyway. ‘Par? Path?’ I prompt helpfully.
She takes a couple of shots at it.
‘Parf – parf –.’ She takes another sip of the drink to clear her head and leans forward. ‘Power of suggestion,’ she says, exaggerating the words at us as if we’re deaf. ‘The three Weird Sisters, psychics as we call them, I play second psychic as well … anyway, the thing is, they put the idea into Macbeth’s head. They plant it there. Hadn’t occurred to him to become the Thane of Cawdor before then but he thought, you know what? I can do that. See what I mean? It’s dark, right?’
‘Aha! Brainwashing,’ my father says.
‘Not brainwashing.’
‘Visualisation,’ I say.
‘You see?’ Lucy asks happily.
‘They didn’t read the future, they just gave him a goal to aim for,’ my father says.
‘Yes!’
My mother’s face turns my way. ‘What are your goals, Fern?’
‘To make a success of my business.’
She remains unimpressed. ‘That’s it?’
‘Well,’ I shrug, ‘the Thane of Cawdor thing’s already gone.’
My mother hates flippancy. ‘She had so much promise,’ she says, turning to Lucy for support. ‘She’s thrown it all away. She needs to do more with her life.’
‘Why does she?’ Lucy asks. ‘She’s got a nice life. You’ve got a nice life, Fern, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I want to hug her.
My mother says icily, ‘She’s got a market stall.’
Cheerfully unaware, Lucy replies, ‘I know. Great, isn’t it? There was a waiting list and everything! She was really lucky to get it, weren’t you, Fern?’
My mother’s not used to people disagreeing with her. She glares at Lucy from the depths of her narrow eye sockets. When Lucy remains oblivious to the silent death stare, my mother stands up and announces coldly, ‘I’m going to bed.’
Retires: hurt.
