Chapter 2
‘Hey, Enzo?’ Laura starts. ‘Can I ask a favour?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ He pours a coffee while gripping his phone.
‘Just a little thing. Mathilde’s a bit het up about it. Would you mind looking after—’ The call cuts out. Her phone must have died and Enzo lets out a sigh.
Laura is the mother of their nine-year-old daughter, Mathilde.
Enzo has a great deal of admiration for his ex-partner.
She is smart and ambitious and a fantastic mum.
As a travel PR, she is also brilliant at chaperoning journalists and influencers on press trips all over the world.
However, while Laura manages her professional life with remarkable flair, she is less hot on details when it comes to her own domestic arrangements.
Hence previous panicky requests for Enzo to take care of various pets when she’s been going away on a trip.
Exhibit A: Magnus, the ill-tempered tabby, who clearly found his temporary accommodation lacking.
B: The hamster, Fluff – ‘you won’t even notice he’s there,’ Laura insisted – who kept Enzo up from dusk until dawn every night as he scampered in his wheel.
And C: Fin, the goldfish, who had the audacity to fucking die on him!
What is it this time?
Only a plant, as it turns out, when he arrives at Laura’s flat. Spike the cactus whom Mathilde was worried about leaving alone for ten days. ‘That’s no problem,’ Enzo says, relieved. It’s like thinking you have a cancerous growth and being told it’s only a boil.
A cactus won’t tear at the sofa and protest-pee on Enzo’s pillow.
It won’t escape during the night – Mathilde swore she hadn’t left Fluff’s cage door open – and finally be found trying to burrow its way to the core of Enzo’s mattress.
The cat has already been dispatched to a friend’s, the hamster is long deceased and the goldfish was never replaced.
‘You do know cacti are indestructible though,’ he says.
‘Yes, but it’s the longest I’ll have been away,’ Laura says firmly.
She has already explained that, on top of the planned New York trip, she has been asked to cover a sick colleague’s Alaskan tour.
‘You’ll just feel better with him being with you at Dad’s, won’t you?
’ she asks. Spike’s pronouns have always been he/him.
‘Yeah.’ Perched on a kitchen stool at the worktop, Mathilde swivels round from her intricate drawing. ‘He shouldn’t be left alone all that time.’
‘You know, Mathilde, cacti are desert plants,’ Enzo remarks. ‘They live for decades – hundreds of years, some of them. They hardly need any water or anything at all. They actually hold their water stores inside their?—’
‘Daddy’s mansplaining,’ Laura cuts in with an eye roll. ‘Yes, we know that, Enzo. Thank you. But just in case, okay? You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not. It’s not a problem at all.’
‘Great.’ She adjusts her neat blonde ponytail and swills out her mug at the sink.
Enzo and Laura are on good terms. They always have been, apart from that hellish period five years ago when she’d had an affair with some guy who’d resurfaced from her university days.
She had confessed, saying it was just a crazy mistake.
But things were never the same after that.
Their once happy and easy-going relationship felt like a broken vase that they’d tried, clumsily, to glue back together. Now the cracks were all they could see.
Months of bickering followed until, tearfully, Laura decided that they weren’t doing Mathilde any favours by doggedly staying together. They’d be better parents – better friends – if he moved out.
Enzo was prepared for it to be awful and depressing but weirdly, it wasn’t.
He rented a flat a few streets away, and once they had settled into the new shape of things, a different kind of relationship emerged.
They had become friends. Proper friends who hung out and shared in-jokes and sent each other silly memes.
Although Laura has had a couple of relationships over the years, and Enzo too has dated occasionally, she is currently single and they still spend significant amounts of time together as a family.
Some summers, Laura had even joined them for a few days at Enzo’s parents’ thatched cottage close to Brittany’s south coast.
Enzo and his sister had grown up in that house.
One of the benefits of being a teacher – like Enzo – are the long holidays, which allowed him and Mathilde to spend a whole month with her beloved grandparents every summer.
Enzo enjoys working at a big urban state secondary school – never a dull moment there – where he is Monsieur Fontaine and teaches French.
Yet sometimes he misses being in nature.
Tending an overgrown hedge, or digging away at the earth with his father, always brought a sense of calmness that he had never experienced in the classroom.
Then Enzo’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack in the very garden he’d loved so much.
And pretty soon it became clear that his mother wasn’t coping, that things were changing at the family home.
The ramshackle but always welcoming house took on a smell – an odour of not coping – and Enzo’s sister Valérie called with the startling news that their mum had taken to wandering through the village with her top half on, all ready for church (best blouse, smart jacket), but only tights on below.
As if, part way through dressing, she had lost interest .
On a hastily arranged visit, Enzo had seen that their mum was struggling to cope, and that the house was beginning to fray at the seams.
As time went on, he was on hand as much as possible but it was his sister – whom Laura fondly refers to as Sainte Valérie – who insisted that they respect their mother’s wishes and arrange a rota of carers instead of moving her into a home.
She passed away a year or so later in her favourite chair with the garden view.
Feeling somewhat helpless and guilty at living so far away in Glasgow, Enzo insisted on taking responsibility for the clearing of the family home.
He hadn’t imagined that, at seven years old, Mathilde would want to come with him.
‘It’ll be too sad, darling,’ he told her, ‘with Mamie and Papi not there any more. I don’t want you to see it like that. ’
Laura agreed. ‘Better to remember it how it was, sweetheart,’ she said. But Mathilde had insisted on coming, and as she and her father had wrapped and packed up her grandparents’ possessions, her constant chatter had stopped him from wallowing too much.
‘Can we take Spike home with us?’ she’d asked when everything was done. She had always been fascinated by her grandparents’ tall, spikey cactus which occasionally sprouted vivid pink blooms.
‘I don’t think we’re allowed to take live plants out of France,’ Enzo explained.
‘Please, Daddy. Please. I want to look after him!’
‘No, we could be in trouble, honey. And what if the customs people confiscated him?’
Enzo did look into it, briefly. But it seemed that it would be possible only with the correct documentation, and by the time he had driven his parents’ ancient furniture to various antiques sellers in a hired van, he was in no frame of mind for wading through the paperwork necessary in order to import what was, in fact, a very ordinary cactus.
If Mathilde really wanted one, he’d buy her one in Asda. They could call him Spike Two.
That afternoon he called Laura, and naturally Mathilde wanted to chat to her mum. ‘Mathilde says you’re trying to palm her off with a supermarket cactus,’ Laura reprimanded him.
‘No, I’m not,’ he protested. ‘But it is only a plant.’
‘You and your cold heart! I’ve looked it up,’ she breezed on. ‘To bring it to the UK, all you need is a phytosanitary certificate?—’
‘Laura, I don’t have the time or?—’
‘It’s the only thing she wants from her grandparents’ house,’ she retorted.
‘To remember them by.’ With his ex-partner and daughter railing against him, Enzo was relieved when he had to break off to let in the house clearance men, who had come to take away the last of his parents’ things.
And when that was done, he looked around the empty house in which he’d spent his entire childhood.
The garden was already running wild, the herb pots shrouded in weeds. The fig tree had been damaged in a storm and had to be severely cut back. Enzo rubbed at his wet eyes, determined not to get upset in front of Mathilde. Then he took her by the hand and locked the front door for one final time.
Spike! He’d forgotten to rehome him with his sister or a neighbour in the village. Too late now. He must have been thrown into a box or, more likely, slung somewhere in the overgrown garden by the rough-handed house clearance guys. To Enzo’s relief, Mathilde seemed to have forgotten all about him.
She seemed in oddly high spirits as they stopped off at Valérie’s for sweet, buttery gateau breton , and then hugged goodbye and drove onwards to the Roscoff ferry.
They watched a movie on the crossing, and Enzo kept checking his daughter’s face, expecting her big brown eyes to be moist, her mouth crumpled into a frown.
She still seemed eerily fine. Happy, even.
And the whole drive back to Scotland she chattered away, and they played I spy, slipping effortlessly between English and French.
Back in Glasgow they pulled up outside Enzo’s flat and started to carry in their bags and the boxes containing a few choice items from his parents’ house.
The hand-embroidered white tablecloth that had only ever appeared on special occasions.
A set of branded Orangina tumblers and the ceramic storage jars – marked farine , sucre , sel – that Laura had always admired, which Valérie had been happy for him to take.
There were some of his dad’s favourite leather-bound novels, silver cutlery in a velvet-lined box, and a small oil painting of the beach at Le Pouldu where Enzo and Valérie had played as children.
Boxes of memories that they unpacked at the kitchen table, and pored over.
Still Mathilde seemed fine as she lifted her lilac backpack onto the table and unzipped it.
Out came a colouring book, a bunch of crumpled T-shirts and a see-through pouch of hair accessories.
And her furry dog pyjama case, lovingly named Hector, that she’d had for years.
‘Daddy?’
‘Uh-huh?’ Enzo glanced round.
‘Look.’
She unzipped Hector’s stomach and peeled the opening apart. Enzo strolled over and saw immediately that it wasn’t pyjamas in there. Unless nightwear had suddenly become dusky green and covered in spikes?
‘Mathilde!’ he exclaimed. ‘I told you. I said we couldn’t bring him home!’
‘Nobody found him, did they?’ She regarded him levelly.
‘No, but they could have.’
‘But they didn’t.’
‘Yes, but…’ Sensing himself being pulled into an endless loop, Enzo sighed heavily, carefully lifted Spike from the pyjama case and tried to assume the demeanour of…
what, exactly? What was appropriate here?
At school, with the kids, he knew how to handle pretty much any situation.
There was jovial Monsieur Fontaine, let’s-get-serious Monsieur Fontaine and, very occasionally, this-is-unacceptable-behaviour Monsieur Fontaine – because you can’t let the kids run the show.
However, Mathilde wasn’t a pupil. She was his daughter and she had just witnessed the dismantling of her grandparents’ home.
So what did it matter that she’d smuggled Spike into Scotland?
Now, as he and Mathilde get ready to leave, he catches Laura’s eye, understanding the silent message being transmitted: I know it’s a bit silly asking you to cactus-sit, but thanks for going with it.
Then, looking relieved, she hugs Enzo, and Mathilde, and wishes her a brilliant time on the school trip to Scarborough.
It’ll be her first trip away without at least one of her parents.
From beach games and fairground rides to a visit to a castle, as far as Enzo can gather, an enormous amount of activities have been scheduled for the four-day trip.
‘Remember every detail, darling,’ Laura insists. ‘I want to hear everything about it!’
‘I will, Mum. Good luck on your trip!’
‘Yeah, hope it goes well,’ Enzo says, and off they set, to spend a chilled Sunday afternoon at his place before he needs to think about revving up for school in the morning.
He’s thinking tacos and a movie and, of course, agreeing on a suitable spot for Spike for the duration of his stay.
Mathilde has her backpack, and Enzo is carrying the cactus extremely carefully in his red ceramic pot as they walk; it seemed like the safest option, rather than risk him being knocked around in a carrier bag.
Obviously, Spike’s wellbeing is of the upmost importance – and that’s fine by him.
At least it’s not a goldfish , Enzo muses. There’s no way he wants a repeat of that.