Chapter 28
‘You knew?’ Celia starts.
Logan nods mutely. No further information is forthcoming and now he has turned away.
‘How on earth did you know?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum. I saw something of Dad’s.’
For a moment she can’t speak. She doesn’t know what to say. All she can think is that he kept something from her. And for how long? ‘What was it? What did you see?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just forget it.’
‘How can I forget it? Tell me, Logan. Tell me now?—’
‘No!’ he snaps and so her brain races to fill the gap.
A new tie, she wonders? She mustn’t panic.
Maybe it’s something innocuous like that and Logan spotted the new purchase still in its bag.
Geoff still wears one occasionally – he’s clinging on to the tradition – whenever he feels the need to emphasise his status and professionalism (for him, the downslide of society began when Tie Rack went bust).
Or was it a new shirt, or a pair of fancy underpants?
A date outfit ? A receipt for flowers or a mini shower gel brought home from an illicit encounter at a hotel?
Many years ago, en route to a family holiday in Cornwall, Celia, Geoff and Logan had stayed at a motorway Travelodge.
Geoff had gathered up the tiny coffee sachets, the teabags and little packets of oat cookies, stuffing them into his suitcase – stopping short only of wrenching the fixed shower gel dispenser off the bathroom wall.
‘Logan, I have to know what it was,’ Celia insists. ‘Please – just tell me.’
He fiddles with his rumpled dark hair and finally looks at her. She notices a crumb of something caught in it. She often has to restrain from picking bits off him, like a monkey – a speck in an eyebrow, a pillow feather stuck to a sweater sleeve. ‘All right,’ he murmurs. ‘There was, uh… something…’
‘What kind of something?’
He stares at the floor. ‘Something… in the toilet.’
‘What, the toilet here?’ she exclaims.
‘Yeah?’ His look says, What other toilet would it be?
‘Oh God, Logan,’ she murmurs, closing her eyes momentarily. She knows what it was. A used condom. That’s why Logan hadn’t told her; because it could only mean one thing.
Geoff definitely brought that woman here – to their home – while Celia was advising customers on whether a shrug, a capelet or a chiffon bolero would work best with that summer frock.
And he’d tried to flush it away – but flushing the loo effectively has never been a particular talent of his.
It had bobbed right back up again to laugh at her silly, idiotic face.
Only she hadn’t been here, had she? Her son had found it. What has this done to her darling boy?
‘When was this?’ she asks shakily.
‘Erm, a while ago now.’
She winces. ‘Can you think when?’
Logan bites his lip. ‘February, I think.’
‘You think ?’
‘I haven’t been making notes, Mum! I don’t keep a log!’
She rubs at her face, as if this will help to dissipate the terrible feelings swirling around inside her. ‘You were home for a few days then,’ she murmurs.
‘Yeah, I was.’
‘That’s four months ago,’ she adds. ‘And you’ve known about this all that time.’
Logan shrugs and they slump into a terse silence.
So Geoff and that woman must have snuck out from work together during the day, Celia figures.
A day when she was working at Elegance and Logan was home from university.
She tries to rack her brain as to what he did those few days, and recalls a meet-up with his old friends from the school chess club.
Geoff must get off on the element of danger, she decides, fury surging up inside her now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says firmly. ‘It sounds like I’m angry with you and I’m not. But I wish you’d told me because that really is disgusting, that you had to see that.’
Now his eyes flicker in confusion. ‘I, um… I just fished it out, Mum.’
‘You fished it out? What, out of the toilet?’
He nods. ‘Yeah.’
‘With your hand ?’
‘Yeah!’ He looks bewildered now. ‘What else would I?—’
‘You actually touched it? Did you use rubber gloves?’
‘No!’ he exclaims. Then, in a softer tone, as if she needs careful handling, ‘Mum, it was no big deal. I just didn’t want you to see it and feel hurt, you know? I didn’t know what to do so I decided not to say anything. That’s all.’
She looks at her son, trying to make sense of all this, and overcome by an intense rush of love for him.
Geoff has often retorted that Logan needs to ‘man up’ and ‘grow a backbone’.
But what had it taken, to do that for her?
He’d plunged his hand into the toilet water and disposed of the vile thing in order to protect her feelings.
She knows he’s an adult, but to Celia he’s still a boy.
In normal times she loves it when he’s home, and not only because it feels as if they’re on the same side.
She simply enjoys him being around; the way his presence diffuses things as he lopes amiably around the flat.
She loves the way Terri comes down and fusses over him, bringing him cake and teasing him about his mycology studies, making terrible mushroom jokes.
They are a gang then – a little gang of three – and during those brief periods, Celia feels that she belongs here in her own home.
That, in fact, there is nowhere else she would rather be.
‘Oh honey,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Mum, really,’ Logan says, frowning, ‘it was only paper…’
‘What d’you mean, it was paper?’ Is this what they’re made of now?
She can’t imagine it’d be substantial enough to withstand vigorous activity but then she’s never encountered one at close quarters.
It was the pill once Geoff came along, and in more recent years, an IUD; he’d never wanted a child of their own together.
‘Logan’s enough,’ he’d insisted, which Celia didn’t quite know how to take.
Enough in that their little family had felt complete?
Or that, secretly, Geoff found him a pain in the arse and didn’t want any more like him?
Christ, he should count himself lucky if reading a book at a football match is the worst thing he’s done!
‘It was just something Dad had written down,’ Logan says, squashing a pink wafer between finger and thumb. ‘And he’d thrown it in the loo.’
She looks at him confusedly. ‘What was it?’ A list of her failings? A draft letter to a lawyer saying he wanted a divorce? Why hadn’t Logan said it was a written thing at the start?
‘A poem,’ he replies.
‘A poem?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You mean a poem… Dad had written?’
He nods, reddening. ‘I guess so, yeah…’
‘But Dad doesn’t write poems!’
‘He does, actually,’ Logan mutters. ‘It was all torn up into pieces but I saw these bits of words?—’
‘Bits of words? What words?’
‘Just words , Mum. And I picked them all out and I dried them on my radiator and then I pieced them all together and stuck them?—’
‘And when you were doing all this piecing and sticking you didn’t think to tell me?’
‘No!’
She stares at him as if he’s a stranger to her. Like some imposter Logan who’s appeared to mess with her mind. Is this really happening or has all the pink dye in those biscuits altered her brain chemistry? ‘D’you still have it?’ she barks at him.
He moves away from her, backing up against the fridge. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘You do, Logan! I can tell. Go and get it and show it to me now.’
‘Mum, stop this! You’re making out it’s my fault!’
‘No, I’m not,’ she cries, feeling wild now. One minute he’s telling her it was a condom – hang on, he hadn’t actually said that – and now it appears it was romantic verse. ‘Was it a love poem?’
‘I don’t know, I?—’
‘A limerick?’
‘What?’
‘You know – “There was a young lady so cute, As tasty as haggis-en-croute?—”’
‘I can’t handle this…’
‘Please tell me, Logan. Tell me!’ She grabs his arm but he tries to shake her off. She clings on tightly, gripping his hoodie sleeve – ‘Get off me!’ – and in the scuffle that follows he pulls free and hurries towards the kitchen door. ‘You’re mad,’ he cries out.
‘Logan, come back!’ It’s so shocking to her – that he’s about to storm off – that she grabs the nearest object to hand. As Logan is leaving the kitchen she flings the missile at the back of his head.
‘Mum!’ He whips round to face her, clutching at his scalp as if she’d lobbed a grenade at him. ‘You’ve lost it.’
‘Sorry! I’m so sorry,’ she cries.
‘You threw something at me. That’s common assault?—’
‘It was only a biscuit!’ The lightest of biscuits , she wants to call after him. A flimsy little wafer. But he has rushed off to his room and she knows better than to follow him there.
Instead, she stands in the middle of the kitchen, not knowing what to do next. She is shaking and crying, and when she hears Logan leaving, banging the front door behind him, she feels as if her heart has cracked.