The Woman Next Door(7)

‘When are you planning to get ready?’ she says crisply. ‘This is your party, after all.’ Downstairs there is a metallic clatter as the caterers begin to pack away some of their equipment. One of them laughs loudly and says, ‘You wish!’ A song from Melissa’s youth – ‘Babooshka’ by Kate Bush – wails tinnily from the radio on the windowsill. She has already asked them to turn the radio down once. Thank God they are almost done.

Tilly’s eyes are already being dragged towards the abyss of her iPad, where Walter White is paused, staring out at red, baked earth. She has been on a Breaking Bad marathon for the last two days, only pausing to sleep and eat.

‘Soon, Mum. I promise.’

Tilly disappears back into her bedroom.

It’s the gentleness in her voice that has prompted Melissa’s eyes to prickle and ache, unexpectedly. As if Melissa were being humoured. She has made it quite plain that she doesn’t really want a party. But she will obviously play along, just to keep her mother happy. In her own time.

She’d always imagined, in the days when all her tiny daughter did was cry, shit, and feed, that the compensations would come when she was older; when she was a proper person, they would do all the things she never did with her own mother. Melissa pictured her and Tilly cosy on a sofa, bonding over 1980s movies like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Or mother and daughter puffing out their cheeks and complaining good-naturedly about aching feet as they sat down to a good lunch, surrounded by bags from a morning spent shopping.

But none of these fantasies had ever quite come off.

Tilly didn’t like what she called ‘girly’ films, preferring instead to watch violent science fiction thrillers with her father. And the few times Melissa had coaxed her daughter into the West End to shop, they had ended up falling-out and glowering at each other over uneaten salads in Fenwick’s café.

Melissa thought it would be nice to celebrate the end of the GCSEs, that was all. It seemed like the kind of thing a family like them – secure, middle class, loving – should be doing.

Secure.

Middle class.

Loving?

That’s what she’d thought.

Mark is a doctor, specializing in IVF, who had made a decent living by combining private work with his NHS practice at the Whittington Hospital. But two years ago he had taken part in a BBC documentary set in the private clinic in Bloomsbury where he worked two days a week.

The programme was called The Baby Business and it became something of a hit. Every week, thousands of people would discuss the ins and outs of various couples’ reproductive failures and successes (more of the former than the latter) over their morning coffees or at bus stops.

There was Janine and Paul, a young man who had almost died from testicular cancer who longed now to be a father; the Hewlett twins, a pair of sisters who caused a spike in egg donation numbers for a few weeks in late 2013; and a stubbornly un-telegenic, spiky-mannered couple called Trudy and Gary. Every week they bickered with each other on camera and argued with the medical advice given. They were media catnip and Trudy’s lugubrious expression even prompted an internet meme in which her face was overlaid by a bleating goat. When their third attempt at IVF failed, the atmosphere shifted and she became Tragic Trudy.

But Mark was the real star of the show. His salt-and-pepper hair, and warm twinkly manner as he delivered both good and bad news, proved to be a ratings winner. Before long he began to receive invitations onto various daytime television sofas.

The BBC commissioned a follow-up series of TBB, as they called it. At home Mark privately called it BBB, for Babies Bring Bucks. All of this had been welcome in terms of money, but for Melissa, having a spotlight shone into her life, a spotlight that could throw every long-abandoned and grubby corner into the sharpest relief, it felt like a particularly cruel cosmic joke.

Mark couldn’t understand why Melissa wouldn’t accompany him to the various events he was invited to with increasing frequency. She’d always managed to find an excuse. It wasn’t her thing. Or she felt like a night in. No one wanted her there, after all. They’d only be talking shop.

And it was true that she had no interest in this world. Television people bored her. Their natural privilege was a balm that lubricated their way through life, so they never seemed to snag and falter. They had no idea, the Emmas and the Sachas and the Benedicts, of what the world was like for most of the population, despite the desire to entertain and document them.

But her avoidance of the limelight had blown up in her face in more than one way. Firstly, Mark claimed that her unwillingness to enjoy his success helped push him into the arms of Sam. Mark said that the affair was over, really, before it started.

‘It meant nothing. It was a terrible mistake. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

As though it wasn’t far too late to say this.

As a rule, Melissa worked hard to keep her younger self hidden; the small, hard Matryoshka doll that lurked beneath lacquered layers. Mark’s grovelling words, which seemed to drip so easily from his lying lips, finally forced her out of hiding.

Melissa was as shocked as he was when she hit him, and the yellowish patina of his bruised cheek was noticed by Make-Up when he next turned up for filming.

But Melissa was being carried on a tide now, one that washed her to Sam’s flat in a mansion block in Swiss Cottage. The younger woman’s eyes rounded almost comically and she gave a small gasp, like a hiss of gas from a balloon, as Melissa stepped out of the shadows and stood in front of her.