Chapter 20
Well, you’d think he’d died. You’d think Geoff was Joyce’s own flesh and blood – her beloved son – who had carked it in a particularly tragic manner. ‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ she cries, eyes bloodshot and neck mottled pink.
‘Mum, please don’t be like this.’
‘Springing this on me!’
So it’s Celia’s mother who’s the wronged one here?
At just gone one o’clock she has been drinking already, Celia suspects – or perhaps this is how she appears at lunchtime these days, still rough from the night before.
With her heart in her mouth, on many occasions Celia has tried to broach the subject of her mum’s ‘relationship with alcohol’, as it’s termed on any advisory websites she’s looked at.
‘So I enjoy a drink! Doesn’t everyone?’
‘No, Mum, not really. Not like you.’
Her mother has flown on to the defensive, then become upset, belligerent and hostile. Celia is at a loss as to how to help her.
Now Joyce has flung open her rickety back door and marched out to the garden. It’s raining lightly and the sky is a blanket of pale grey. She pulls a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her slim black trousers and lights one.
She’s looking awfully thin, Celia notices.
Her mum has always kept a tight rein on her calorie input and as a younger woman, had been proud of her neat size.
A woman didn’t have a ‘body’ then but a ‘figure’, implying that numbers – vital statistics – were what mattered.
On several occasions Joyce has remarked that Celia could lose a few pounds.
However, in recent years, her mum has started to look drawn and undernourished and, judging by the contents of her cupboard and the scatterings of crumbs about the place, Celia suspects that much of her nutrition comes via a steady supply of Ritz crackers.
She watches as her mother paces back and forth on the narrow path that’s barely visible among the undergrowth.
At seventy, Joyce lives alone in the house Celia grew up in, although there are no traces of her lovingly cultivated garden now.
The weeds had already begun to encroach, once Logan arrived.
Now almost a quarter-century of neglect has allowed them to run rampant and the abandoned cooker is a rusting hulk.
The trailing plants she’d grown to shroud its ugliness have long gone.
A frayed washing line, bearing several laundry items, is strung between two rusty iron poles.
Joyce snaps into action and starts tearing down patterned blouses and silky dresses and exotic embroidered underwear – her ‘smalls’ – sending pegs flying everywhere.
She has always loved to dress up and make the best of herself.
So many high-end lipsticks are crammed on her dressing table that Celia can’t understand how she can afford them all.
‘Why buy Maybelline when you can have Dior?’ she crowed once.
Perfume, too; her mother has gallons of the stuff in sparkling bottles with gleaming gold tops.
‘Mum, it’s raining,’ Celia calls out. ‘Leave the washing. It’s wet anyway. Please come inside and sit with me.’
Joyce swings round to face her. ‘You’ve given up on a good marriage. What’s got into you?’
What should Celia do now? How should she own this? ‘I’ve explained, Mum. I’ve told you what happened. I caught him with someone else and a week’s gone by and he hasn’t had the decency to contact me to apologise or even try to explain. So how d’you think that makes me feel?’
‘You could call him.’
Celia blinks at her. ‘Why should I when he?—’
‘Well, it’s only sex, isn’t it?’ she blasts out across the neighbourhood. ‘Just a fling, probably? You know what men are like.’
Celia hates herself for cringing, for wanting to burrow deeply into the earth, like a worm. ‘What does that mean?’
A sheer burgundy negligee is torn from the line and another peg flies into the weed-strewn rhubarb patch.
Celia recognises this behaviour. As a child she’d privately labelled it ‘doing furious chores’.
Angry washing-up, incensed mopping and demented hoovering; these never seemed to happen at Amanda’s house.
In her orderly home, housework was undertaken in a normal fashion.
Celia often wondered what that must be like.
‘I mean,’ Joyce announces shrilly, ‘it’s just a human function. A biological need, especially for men?—’
‘So you think it’s okay that he needed to do it with someone else? That was fine, was it?’ Celia knows she shouldn’t react but she can’t stop herself.
‘Well, no. Not exactly.’ Joyce stops washing-snatching for a moment and shoves back her dishevelled dyed brown hair. ‘But men are men, you know?’
‘I do know, Mum. I know what men are. I’m forty-three.’
‘Your dad had a fling.’
‘And you got divorced!’
‘That wasn’t the reason, not that silly floosie…’
Out of nowhere Celia wants to run to her mother and take her hand, coax her inside, make her a cup of tea. ‘Mum, Dad moved away to Wales .’
‘Oh, I don’t mean her,’ she says quickly. ‘I mean Sandra Balfour from the paper shop.’
Celia stares at her. ‘Dad had a thing with her?’ Sandra ran the newsagent in the next street.
She always gave Celia a Curly Wurly whenever her mother sent her to buy her cigarettes.
Illegal of course, to sell ciggies to a child.
But it appears that around here, the line between right and wrong was so blurry it might as well not have existed at all.
‘It didn’t mean anything,’ her mother retorts.
‘Well, I think these things do mean something. They mean a lot.’
‘What I’m saying,’ she goes on, ‘is that Geoff’s a good man. D’you remember how bad things were for you, when he first came round to take you out?’
‘I’d just had a baby,’ Celia says steadily. ‘I know I was young, and it wasn’t ideal – but I was happy, you know.’
‘Yes, happy being with Geoff. And now look what you’ve done?—’
‘Mum, I haven’t done anything,’ she snaps. ‘All I did was catch him at it. I haven’t said it’s over or that I want a divorce or anything, you know?’ Her throat catches and she blinks wetness from her eyes. ‘And when I said I was happy, I meant happy about being a mum. Happy that I had Logan.’
Joyce purses her lips. ‘And Geoff took you on.’
‘Can you please stop saying that, like I was a derelict building or something?—’
‘Raised someone else’s child,’ she announces. ‘Brought up that boy like he was his own?—’
‘ That boy ?’ Celia turns away from her mother and strides back into the house. She plucks her jacket from the kitchen chair and tugs it on roughly.
A few moments later Joyce appears with an armful of wet washing. ‘I just meant,’ she starts, ‘that it can’t have been easy for Geoff.’
‘Which part is that, then? Which part wasn’t easy?’
Her cheeks flush. ‘The not knowing who the father was.’
It takes Celia a moment to scrabble together the words to respond to this.
‘Geoff knows. I told him.’ Of course her mother had wanted to know, when the test had been positive.
She’d pleaded and nagged, and then raged, but Celia had stood firm.
She wasn’t prepared to talk about him to anyone then.
Not even Amanda. She wanted his name to disappear from her consciousness.
Now Celia glances out of the open kitchen door to see the pegs scattered all over, tiny glimmers of red and yellow peeping through untended grass. What she wants to do is go out there in the light rain and gather them up, but she will not allow herself to do this. She will not pick up the pegs!
Kitchen drawers are being opened now and rummaged through frantically. ‘Mum,’ Celia says, ‘I’m going now.’
‘No, don’t go.’ For a moment Celia imagines that her mum is sorry and wants to make amends. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes,’ she adds. ‘Run over to the shop for me, Celia.’
‘No, Mum.’
Joyce gusts out air. ‘Well, thanks.’ She storms through to the living room to delve through the cupboards there. Celia follows her through and watches her from the doorway.
‘You haven’t even asked about Logan,’ she says.
Her mother frowns. ‘What about Logan?’
‘How he’s taking all of this.’
Joyce closes a cupboard. ‘Well, he’s an adult, isn’t he? Not a little boy any more…’
‘He’s twenty-four. A young adult.’
‘That’s virtually middle-aged!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Celia exclaims.
‘Please, go to the shop for me. I’m tired.’
‘Mum, I’m not going out to buy your cigarettes. I’m not eight.’
And that’s when it hits her that things have to change, and that perhaps this is what Amanda meant when she said she needed to ‘own’ a situation.
To take control. Because Celia is not eight any more.
Not the child who’d wandered into the kitchen to see the terrible mess and her mum howling, ‘Our guests are coming and look at the bloody state of the place!’
Already tipsy, Joyce had had a notion to cook a butternut squash for what she’d grandly termed a ‘dinner party.’ She’d dumped the entire vegetable – unpeeled – into a pan of fiercely boiling water and the thing had burst, splattering orange flesh and seeds all over the kitchen.
Ten years later, when Celia was eighteen and with that man from the park, the image of the splattered squash had filled her mind at a crucial moment.
It informed her decision. It changed everything.
And from then, there was no turning back.