31
‘ U m, Essie?’
Janey is running late and has a packed day, as well as a kitchen that is covered in late-night toast crumbs. Janey just shouts up the stairs. If the girl is going to behave like a grumpy teenager, she’s just going to have to treat her like one. ‘Essie, where’s the car?’
Essie has tossed and turned all night. Every time she nearly dropped off, she remembered all over again. Were they broken up? Was this a fight they could fix? Why had she ever come back here?
‘What?’ she growls.
‘My car. You know. That you borrowed yesterday for all your smart friends and promised to bring back home clean and full of fuel?’
Essie sits up.
‘Oh, crap,’ she says. It is, of course, still sitting outside the End of the World. She’d meant to wake early and go and get it . . . she’d thought she’d be waking up with Connor, in his beautiful room with the rolltop bath . . . oh, crap.
She checks her phone and sees lots of missed messages.
He wants to talk, thinks he should come back and see her by himself another weekend.
She’s still utterly livid. With Connor, with herself, with Tris, with Dwight and his stupid greedy look; the entire bloody situation.
She needs quiet to think. She’s trying to work out what had happened last night.
All the boys, talking about money, talking to Dwight about money, while she was sitting right there.
Oh, God. And she had stropped out, and what had that gained?
Precious little, except the question in her mind: however sweet Connor was, did he really see her as something serious?
It didn’t feel like it. She finds herself wondering, too, was she trying to prove something to herself?
To see how much she could make him care?
Make him stay? Because there was a man in her life before who, the second she moved away, vanished immediately. Ugh.
‘ESSIE!’
‘For God’s sake, Mum, it’s at Shelby’s bar, stop freaking out.’
*
Janey walks up the stairs, trembling with rage.
She doesn’t know where this rage comes from suddenly, this towering fury.
It’s like a volcano going off inside her, hot and bitter to her very core.
She never thought of herself as an angry person – sad, of course, when her marriage broke down.
But jaunty, on the whole; cheery. This rage monster is absolutely blinding her.
‘Essie!’
‘Whaaat?’ Essie says through the closed door, sounding like Kevin the Teenager.
‘It’s my morning to go and see Johnson! To bring him his breakfast so he doesn’t start eating stuff he shouldn’t be eating, because Lish is working all night at the hospital. Then I’ve got a full clinic! Essie, how could you?’
Janey has had such a disappointing few days.
Getting to know Lowell, getting to know his family, even, feels like being shown a gift that is never ever going to be yours.
Here’s what you could have won. If you were younger and sexier.
Thanks for the sympathy though! She is feeling profoundly down and disappointed, and the last thing she needs is this – a fully grown adult in her house behaving as though she’s the unreasonable one because she needs her car. She erupts like a volcano.
‘You’re not even LISTENING to me,’ says Janey, almost in a shriek.
‘I run EVERYTHING for you, I run myself RAGGED shopping and washing and doing everything round here for you, and you treat me like absolute scum. I spend my whole life bending over backwards for you and terrified of upsetting you and I’ve just trained you to be completely selfish! ’
She regrets the words the second they’re out of her mouth. There is an ominous silence. Then the door opening. Essie looks absolutely numb.
‘I know.’ She nods. ‘I know how you feel about me.’ She is deathly white.
‘Don’t start with that CRAP,’ shouts Janey. ‘Haven’t you had enough self-pity yet? How long are you going to keep blaming me – not Colin, of course, not your dad, just me – for every stupid bloody thing that happens for the rest of your life? Well, have fun, because I am OUT.’
Janey is so blinded by tears she is not even sure she can drive by the time she stumbles to Shelby’s bar.
But she manages to go to see Johnson, who is insistent he can do everything himself – is better, even as he growls at her for not bringing him contraband cake.
She goes round the kitchen putting things he likes out of reach; he is still not steady enough on his feet to climb a chair to get at the chocolate biscuits.
She takes him out for a wobbly turn around the garden, and then hands over gratefully to Emma, who gives Janey a big hug that makes her feel worse instead of better.
Other people’s daughters seem to have no trouble hugging her. Then off to her clinic.
*
‘There is literally nothing wrong with you, and this is an NHS appointment. Other people need them!’
She is trying, but it is very difficult to be cross with Mr Zandisky for very long.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your ears,’ she says, examining them at some length. Although his large old nose has white hairs bristling out of it, there aren’t any in his ears. He has obviously had them groomed specifically for this visit.
‘I can’t hear so well,’ says Mr Zandisky.
‘You’re eighty-six,’ she says, not without sympathy. ‘This is just what’s going to happen.’
‘I think I have some wax.’
She looks again, and sees a little stick of something white. Frowning, she fishes it out with her blue clinical gloves and rolls it between her fingers.
‘Ah, yes, you see,’ says Mr Zandisky.
‘It’s wax.’
‘Yes, is wax.’
‘Mr Zandisky . . . is this candle wax ?’
He looks at her with a wide-eyed expression of innocence. ‘I do not think this can be.’
‘Have you been putting candles in your ears?’
There had been a fashion some time before for ‘ear candling’, a total load of hooey that involved people sticking candles in their ears to supposedly bring out wax and impurities from the brain, a physical impossibility, or so Janey most fervently hopes.
This resulted in a rash of burnt ears, stuck candles and even, in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, someone who’d managed to puncture their own eardrum.
‘Well?’’
‘I just think it is nice,’ he says defiantly. ‘To have very clean lovely ears. I am sure you agree with me.’
‘I do,’ says Janey. ‘But not to the extent of you cluttering up my surgery.’
Mr Zandisky looks sad and Janey immediately feels bad.
This trip to the hospital has probably been the highlight of his week.
He lives alone, all his friends back in Poland long dead, his children hugely successful and living in Paris, London, Sydney.
He worked incredibly hard all his life to raise a family and is now on his own, his smart suit and tie indicating a man who very much still has his pride.
It makes Janey’s heart slightly ache to see him, when there are so many who expect everything to be given to them. Mr Zandisky expects so little.
‘Let me just double-check,’ she says, and takes a surgical wipe and wipes it around his ear, removes the ear candle detritus, and puts in a little ointment, for absolutely no reason.
‘You have,’ she says, ‘the best ears for a man your age that I’ve ever seen.’
Mr Zandisky beams.
‘But no more sticking candles in them. It’s dangerous and ridiculous.’
He nods seriously.
‘Well done.’
‘I make other appointment?’
‘In two years,’ says Janey. ‘You’ll get a free hearing test.’
‘That is long time,’ he says.
‘Because you’re doing so well,’ she says, smiling encouragingly and standing up. She has a long list to get through. ‘You should be very proud.’
He nods, then brings out – oh, no, she thinks. Please no. But yes. A Tupperware of Polish sugar cookies he has baked for her.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ she protests.
‘But I wish to,’ he says gravely.
She knows he does, but now she will have to decant the cookies, he’ll want the Tupperware back, and then show them to everyone and she shouldn’t be eating sugar cookies anyway, she just can’t get away from it, miserable as this may seem, and he’s so kind .
. . maybe I should just date him, she thinks.
Make my life a lot simpler. But instead she takes the better lesson.
Don’t lose contact with people that you love.
Don’t ever lose contact with the people that you love.
So she smiles as she ushers him out; races through the rest of her appointments. And finally, just as she’s going to call her daughter, the phone rings. She grabs it in relief. But it’s not Essie. It’s him.
*
It takes a long time for Essie to leave the house.
She reads the messages. Connor is going home early, is the gist. He doesn’t say come.
He just says he’s had enough and he’s going home.
She feels so trembly and upset inside and doesn’t know what to do.
She should call Al, but he’s still furious about yesterday.
Everyone has gone.
The early sea mist is rising. The haar muffles the sound of the town, the tolling of the harbour bell, the chugging of the fishing boats, the shouts of the men, their boots stomping on the cobbles, as they head off to the tiny airport to take Gavin’s helicopter out to the rigs – Brent Spar, North Cormorant, Ninian Central – for eight weeks of solid toil in punishing conditions before they get back to dry land, swaying slightly to steady themselves.
She doesn’t even know where she’s going. Where is there to go? Nobody wants her.