Chapter 8
‘Mum, what’s our car doing here?’
As Celia climbs out of Terri’s Mini she feels the sharp wind hitting her cheek. She can also hear the rhythmic surge of the sea and taste salt on her tongue. So it would seem that her senses are in fully working order. But they can’t be – not properly – because somehow her world has stopped.
Geoff didn’t drive up north yesterday with Malcolm and Davie.
He came here, to his parents’ static caravan instead.
Perhaps golf is happening here and she misunderstood?
Celia looks around wildly, taking in the wooden site office and the tiny shop, supplier of tinned spaghetti and Cup a Soups, almost hoping to spot Geoff in his navy-blue top with the quarter zip, swinging a club.
‘I don’t know, Logan,’ she replies.
Terri frowns. ‘Is there any reason why Geoff would be here?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Celia murmurs. ‘I can’t think…’
‘D’you think Dad’s decided to do the place out to surprise us ?’ Logan is a man now. A fully grown man of six-foot-two. Yet sometimes his innocence snags at Celia’s heart.
‘I really don’t think so, love,’ she replies. ‘No, I can’t imagine that.’
‘Well, should we just go home or—’ Terri breaks off, tension flickering in her dark eyes. Celia sees that she has registered it too: what’s going on here. What has been going on for God knows how long.
‘Something must’ve happened,’ Celia says quickly.
‘Yeah,’ Logan says. ‘Maybe the site owner called him and he’s had to come over and check on something?
’ Celia catches Logan scrutinising her face, as if he wants to believe this.
She swallows hard, propelled back to when he was her little boy who loved going to the park with her, or to the cinema – or even for a trundle around Morrison’s, so long as they were together.
And all those tricky questions he asked:
Why is there war?
Will you and Daddy ever die?
And – the most difficult of all – Are you in love with Daddy?
‘Of course I am, sweetheart!’ Weren’t they happy as a family? And wasn’t she lucky that Geoff had ‘taken her on’?
‘Mum,’ Logan says, more firmly now, ‘are we going in, or what?’
Celia nods. Her mouth is dry, her heart banging hard. A gull observes them from the roof of the caravan, and she notices whitish poo streaked across a window. ‘Please,’ she says firmly, ‘both of you, go and wait in Terri’s car.’
Logan stares at her, frowning. ‘Why?’
‘Just do what I say, love. Please.’
Terri touches her arm. ‘Sweetheart, I don’t think you should go in if?—’
‘Both of you,’ Celia commands, waving them away. ‘Sit and wait in the car, just for a minute, all right?’ To signal that there will be no further debate, she turns away and crosses the square patch of neatly mown grass towards Ailsa View.
Even in her agitated state she carefully steps around a patch of pale-yellow primroses. Glancing back, she sees Terri and Logan climbing into the front seats of Terri’s car. Logan pulls a what-the-hell-are-you-doing? face, and she merely shakes her head.
Celia isn’t what you’d call a brave person.
Whenever the fairground came to town, she favoured the teacup ride over the chair-o-plane and has never sampled recreational drugs of any kind.
A sip of Red Bull once made her fear she was having a heart attack.
A single puff on a cigarette and she nearly passed out.
Yet now, conscious as she is of Logan and Terri watching through the windscreen, something seems to surge up in her.
As if her son and best friend are installed not in Terri’s ropey old Mini, but plush cinema seats.
And she is no longer real-life Celia Bloom, tender of plants and seller of peplum jackets and fascinators, but in a movie here on this windblown campsite on the coast.
She is playing a part. She can feel it, beaming into the back of her head – the combined unwavering gaze of Logan and Terri – and it’s propelling her towards the scuffed door of her in-laws’ caravan.
Oddly unafraid, she feels in her jeans pocket for the key.
It took some finding – this single Yale key with a paper label attached, in her mother-in-law’s handwriting: Caravan spare.
She hadn’t been able to find the main key on the sailing boat key ring.
As the caravan makeover was meant to be a surprise, she hadn’t quizzed Geoff about its whereabouts.
But now, even before Celia tries the door, she knows she needn’t have bothered rummaging through the jumble of cables and redundant remote controls in the kitchen drawer for any key at all.
Because of course Ailsa View is unlocked.
It’s unlocked because Geoff isn’t golfing up north with Malcolm and Davie.
He is here.
Quietly, she depresses the handle and pushes the door open. A dank mustiness seeps into her nostrils as she steps inside.
In the murky gloomy of Ailsa View, there is no view of anything as the flimsy grey curtains are drawn.
Celia waits for her eyes to adjust to the gloom in the main living space.
And as they do, and the familiar shapes of fitted seating and cheap melamine cupboards come into focus, she is aware of her other senses sharpening too.
Everything is shimmeringly vivid to her. She can smell spores in the air. She can feel them clinging to her face and hair and knows she will take them home with her when this is done. When her life has turned on its head and there is no going back to what it was before.
Her with a baby as well, Celia heard her mother telling a friend on the phone. He’s a saint, I tell you! A living saint!
She can taste dankness at the back of her throat.
And she can hear something too. A soft sigh which could have just been the wind.
Outside the caravan, something rattles tinnily.
She pictures Logan and Terri waiting anxiously in the car and wonders briefly if she has got this wrong.
And then, as another sound fills her head, she knows she hasn’t – and now everything makes sense.
Why Geoff was delighted to be gifted this caravan by his sister. Why he was so keen for Celia to attend Amanda’s wedding in London that he threw money at her to make her go.
The hotel! The train ticket! Did she really think he’d booked and paid for all of that out of the goodness of his heart?
The noises grow louder. There’s a gasp and a squeal. Then rhythmic thumping as if someone is whacking a hefty gardening manual against the thin partition wall.
‘Oh, oh, OHHH !’
Now it’s Celia’s heart that’s thumping – also rhythmically, although not quite in time with the commotion in the bedroom.
No, her heartbeat is faster. It’s actually racing.
She’s amazed they can’t hear it battering against her ribs.
But then they’re lost, aren’t they? Lost in the moment.
Is this what it’s like, she wonders, when sex is passionate?
Celia’s mind shoots her back to that other time she was lied to, when she was eighteen years old.
How different her life would have been if she’d had proper sex education.
Or Google! Why hadn’t Google existed in 1994?
Celia has actually googled Google to find out when it came out.
And what about contraception? She’d murmured something about it – whether it would ‘be okay’ – and he’d said, ‘Yes, don’t worry, I’m infertile. ’
Celia had never heard the term before. Only ‘fertile’, connected to soil and growth and making beautiful things happen.
And it did, in the form of her baby boy, and of course she adored him from the moment she first saw his little face.
But still she was lied to and no one will take her for a fool ever again.
It’s like a switch in her. No one seems to hear her footsteps on the grubby carpet as she treads carefully through the dingy room.
No one registers her presence as she stands there at the open bedroom door, her vision filled by her husband’s naked hairy backside in front of her.
She might have struggled to remember him from her maths class, when he’d turned up at her house with a bunch of carnations from the petrol station.
But she’d recognise that arse anywhere – she could pick it out in a police line-up – even before he spins around and sees her standing there.
‘Celia! For fuck’s sake!’
His lady companion – who’d been on all fours, Geoff’s hands clamped to her hips – flumps face down onto the bed as if shot.
‘What are you doing here?’ he yells.
‘Well, that’s nice,’ Celia shoots back. ‘That’s very nice, Geoff.’
‘Oh my God,’ the woman cries, and there’s a flurry of sheets as she scrambles up to a seating position and tries to cover herself.
Rod-straight dark hair, thin face with concave cheeks, looks significantly younger – early thirties, maybe?
As Celia is registering all this, Geoff stumbles naked off the bed and snatches at clothes from the floor.
While feeding one leg into his boxers he seems to be addressing both women at once.
‘Yes, I know. I know what I said! I’m sorry!
Celia, wait. Hang on. It’s not what you think… ’
The woman is gulping noisily and Celia thinks, why is SHE crying ? Is it shame or embarrassment, or had Geoff lied that Ailsa View was more at the luxury end of the mobile home scale? Had he promised her a hot tub?
She also realises that she knows her from somewhere. At least, they have met before in a very different situation to this one. For one thing, Celia is pretty sure the woman was wearing clothes.
‘Celia,’ she starts, wiping at her face. ‘I’m so sorry—’ But the rest fades away as where they’ve met comes to her.
This woman works with Geoff at PPP. At least, she’s connected to the company somehow because she was doing the rounds of the conference room, handing out samples when they launched their haggis-en-croute.
It was their attempt to go upmarket and attract ‘a more discerning customer.’ Celia had taken one just to be polite and had to spit it out into a napkin – thick, oily pastry with a clump of grainy, pungent meat buried within.
Whose idea had that been? Geoff’s, as it turned out.
Bile rises in Celia’s throat as she turns away from the bedroom and stomps through the caravan towards the door. As she steps outside, the wind whips at her hair. Despite what she’s just witnessed, it’s a relief to be able to breathe again. No one has followed her out.
Spotting her, Terri and Logan leap out of the car and hurry towards her. Terri is hugging her now as Celia spills it all out.
No, her friend tells her, she’s not the idiot. Not one bit – and she mustn’t think like that. ‘How could this possibly be your fault?’
‘Of course it’s not, Mum,’ Logan cries.
But really, Celia thinks: the way Geoff had bounded off, when he’d shovelled her onto that London-bound train? The way he’s been with her all of these weeks, months – years?
She should have known.