Chapter 13
Two days later, on a Saturday that was trying valiantly to be more summer than autumn, I drove to my parents’ house.
If anything could throw cold water over my silly infatuation with Cooper, it would be Mum’s garden-party extravaganza.
Nothing could kill a crush stone-dead like hanging around with my parents’ friends while they talked about colonic irrigation, all-inclusive breakfast buffets and everyone they knew who’d got married or had kids.
That last one with a lot of glances my way by Mum.
Then the inevitable listing of the ailments and the showing of the bunions, melanoma biopsy scabs and varicose veins.
I had never been able to see the appeal in sitting in your own back garden, yelling over music and drinking paint stripper masquerading as cocktails until two in the morning before passing out fully dressed or throwing up cheese and pineapple hedgehog.
It all felt one bowl of keys away from a swinger’s party.
Or worse, like a nineties kids’ party, plus lethal amounts of booze.
Give me a nice barbecue, a reasonable amount of wine and a ten o’clock bedtime any day.
But Mum was a partier through and through.
Even if her clubbing days were mostly behind her, she was bringing the spirit of two-for-one shots and stripper heels to her suburban garden. God help her neighbours.
When I was a teenager, she’d been the one loading up on Bacardi Breezers for my sixteenth birthday, while I trailed after her in the supermarket, whispering about the legal drinking age.
She’d wanted skimpy tops, spin the bottle and snogging at midnight.
I’d wanted a bonfire, s’mores and scary stories.
Sometimes it felt as if I was the frumpy old mother to her teenage party animal.
It made me feel like a constant disappointment.
However, her party would at least give me something else to think about. I’d already been using it as a distraction and to that end, I was accompanied by a specially made tropical Eton mess, strapped into the front passenger seat, where Richard should have been.
I reminded myself sternly that he would have been in that passenger seat because he insisted I be the designated driver for my parents’ parties, his response every time I asked if we could switch being ‘But, Tabs, you know I can’t cope with all that sober.
’ I’d laughed because, yes, the parties were always weird and awkward until you were a little bit sloshed.
But thinking back on it, I’m no longer sure he was talking about the parties specifically, and not just my parents in general.
I still hadn’t told them we’d broken up.
After trying that one time, I hadn’t so much as picked up the phone for another go.
Let Mum find out from someone else and have her first response far, far away from me – like when I quit drama club because I hated being on stage.
It was meant to get me out of my shell. To be honest, I think she’d secretly wanted me to become a child star à la Emma Watson.
I didn’t want to have to tell her about Richard.
Maybe she would just intuit it if I left things long enough, and decide it was too painful for me to talk about, so she’d better not ask.
Fat chance.
‘Tabby!’ Mum cried, throwing open the front door and nearly knocking the dessert dish from my hands. She wrapped me up in a hug, drowning me in a waft of knock-off ‘Hypnotic Poison’ that was most assuredly not by Dior, more like Dion from the market. ‘Where’s Richard?’
So much for intuition.
‘He um… he’s not coming,’ I said and pulled a regretful face.
I didn’t really mean to lie exactly. I just didn’t want to get into it on the doorstep.
Or in the hall, or anywhere really. Ideally, Mum would find out while I was, say…
camping for two weeks with no phone access.
She’d be over it by the time I got back, or at least in the sulking stage rather than the talking one.
Maybe Emma could suggest a nice yurt for me to take shelter in on a commune or something.
‘Aww, such a shame – well, come on in, you know where everything is.’ Mum’s sandals slapped back up the hallway and she called through the sliding patio doors to Dad. ‘Tabby’s here! No Richard!’
A dog barked in the distance and I heard a flurry of PVC windows slam in annoyance.
Now all the neighbours knew. Fantastic.
I put the dessert in the fridge, noting as I did so that it was packed with snack food in various stages of defrosting.
From the prawn-cocktail ring to the mini-eclairs and the prefilled vol-au-vents, Mum had gone all out.
It brought back all my childhood memories of Bonfire-Night parties with Viennetta and Sara Lee Gateaux on the picnic table by the patio.
Birthdays with apple bobbing and caterpillar cake.
Mum’s Christmas buffet, which must have cleared out at least one Iceland on a good year.
I smiled to myself and closed the fridge.
Some things never changed, and that was what made them so reassuring.
Even if now, as an adult, I was included in the more raucous, exhausting side of the parties instead of being packed off to Lou’s after dark.
‘All right, Tabby?’ Dad asked, ducking in to get a beer from the separate drinks fridge.
Okay, my second chance to just tell the truth was here.
Dad was neutral, like Switzerland. If I told him he could break it to Mum later and absorb some of the fallout.
I took a breath and stepped forward. I was going to get it over with right now.
Then the rest of the party could just go ahead as planned. It didn’t have to be a big deal.
‘Actually, Dad…’
The doorbell went and Mum skittered past, waving for Dad to go back to the garden and finish setting up. I sighed as he shot me a regretful face and hurried back out. Later, then. It would have to wait.
While Mum welcomed the guests at the door (from all the shrieking, it sounded like her friend Mary from the salon and probably Mary’s husband Jim – though he wasn’t making a sound, bless him), I went into the garden.
The patio heater was in pride of place and, judging from the greyish sky and the breeze creeping in, we’d be needing it.
So much for the last blush of summer. Not that rain was a worry.
The huge striped awning had been winched out from its dock on the side of the house and it covered the paved garden and the gravel patches where succulents had once grown.
The awning was one of those giant things you see advertised during the day, between reruns of Midsomer Murders and Poirot.
Mum had thrown a party to celebrate its installation.
Dad passed me on his way to the barbecue – a three-grill monstrosity imported from America, which it took him several days to put together. It was gleaming red, like a sports car, and he polished it and tucked it into a weatherproof cover every year.
‘Can you give a bit more puff to the flamingos? They’re looking a bit limp,’ he said, handing over a bicycle pump which he’d been carrying around in his ‘sexy bare chest’ apron.
‘Sure.’ Mum’s new collection of inflatable flamingos were arrayed around the hot tub (also inflatable) and under a gazebo made of inflated palm trees.
One wrong move with a ragged hangnail and that whole end of the garden would be gone.
Just blown up into the sky like a leftover birthday balloon.
I gave each droopy bird a few pumps to perk them up a bit and then put the pump back in Dad’s shed.
Mary and Jim were in the garden now, accompanied by Mary’s daughter, Gina, and the few neighbours who were still talking to Mum after successive decades of very loud parties.
Graham and Mark from across the way thought she was ‘a hoot’ and had brought their golden doodle with them.
I watched it sniffing at the flamingos and hoped it wouldn’t scratch at one.
Mum was busy passing out drinks from a pink tray – they were in glittery martini glasses and sporting skewers of raspberries and pink umbrellas. Clearly her theme for this one was based on the new flamingos. With her distracted, I went into the house to do a quick check on my old room.
As I climbed the stairs, I stopped to look at the family pictures hung all the way up the wall, each frame at precise angles.
They’d repainted the downstairs about five times since I’d moved out but the pictures were always the same.
Only the frames changed. Currently they were glass with silver glitter stripes.
The walls painted a pale green. Combined with the brown stair carpet it gave the impression of mint chocolate ice cream.
On the landing was my favourite picture.
Mum and Dad in paper Christmas crowns, raising glasses of bubbly, and sitting on the floor in front of them, was me with Aunt Lou, both of us smiling as she showed me how to crochet a big granny square with my new plastic hook.
Even with the distance of time, I could remember the sheer unbridled joy of being good at something.
Of not having to struggle or get frustrated as I had on Christmases past. Mum had picked out presents she would have probably loved as a kid, but which only brought me fresh disappointment in her eyes.
Days spent failing to master roller blades, a twirling baton, a make-up set and myriad hair-styling tools.
The less said of the ‘teach yourself Spanish’ DVDs the better.
To be fair, I think those were because she wanted a translator on holiday.
Crochet made sense to me, right from the start. It was one of the only things in life that always made sense. I smiled at the faded photo and pushed open the door beside it, into my bedroom.
‘Jesus Christ…’