Beneath the Skin(27)
‘That’s nice,’ she says instead. It’s all there is to say.
‘Has Jimmy come with you?’ The light shines behind Candy’s brown eyes as she looks to the door and she struggles to heave her body from the chair.
Antonia opens her mouth to reply. It’s the same every week. Her mother’s excitement and her hope. Then her tears. It’s exhausting.
‘Now we’ve talked about Jimmy, haven’t we, Candy?’ The loud reply comes from behind Antonia, saving her from saying the words yet again. ‘Jimmy can’t visit because he died a long time ago. But your lovely girl here comes every Sunday, rain or shine. So are you going to give her a smile and tell her what you’ve been up to all week?’
Antonia nods her thanks to the carer, hoping to conceal the irritation she feels. She understands the staff are there to help, but she hates the lack of privacy, the way her mother and her history are public property. They once spoke so blaringly that she declared, ‘Mum isn’t deaf, you know!’ but she’s learned to be compliant, to keep her mouth shut. She’s swallowed the furious words that she’s wanted so often to scream at the do-gooders, the social workers and the doctors, ‘Where were you all when we needed you?’
‘So, Mum, tell me all about Sacha,’ she says brightly. She shakes her head, but not so you’d notice. She hated that dog. It belonged to her father.
Sundays are good, David loves them. Antonia goes early to visit her mum in Stoke but he has a lie-in, picking at the continental breakfast she leaves by the bed. Later, he has a pub lunch with the lads, a lazy afternoon in front of the TV and more often than not Antonia’s superb lasagne for dinner. But the best part is football, Sunday football for a local team. Eleven o’clock kick-off.
He turns on the shower in the changing rooms, his mind and limbs still buzzing from the match. It was a tough game in the best possible way. He really got stuck in, though the result was a ‘dirty draw’, as one of the lads put it.
David’s the oldest player by far. ‘Hey, I’m not forty yet!’ he says to the youngsters repeatedly when they take the piss. But he will be soon. Still, forty is only a number and the lads let him play every Sunday, hangover or not. ‘Go, Dave!’ they laugh when he shows some of the left-footed skill he was famous for at school and at uni.
It’s ridiculous, he knows, the desire to crow, ‘I was the captain of the first eleven football and cricket team every year at school,’ even after all these years. ‘Yeah, Dave. Whatever,’ would be the inevitable eye-rolling reply. But it was great, it was bloody fantastic to be talented at something and sport, like drama, came so easily to him.
‘Larger than life. And bright with it,’ Charlie says of him to anyone who’s listening. But David isn’t bright, he knows that, he struggles with anything too intellectual or demanding. He’s just good at talking, or at least pretending.
He sings, bellowing out an old song about a great pretender, as the hot water of the shower smacks his face.
‘Don’t give up the day job,’ someone calls from the changing rooms. ‘See you next week, chief.’
At that moment David is happy. Sport makes him happy. It doesn’t give him time to think.
Helen feels the heat of Charlie’s anger ballooning as she drives down the leafy lanes of Staffordshire towards home. He’ll burst if he doesn’t let it out soon, she muses to herself. But now isn’t the time for an argument. Rupert is slumped in the back seat of the car, cocooned in an enormous pair of headphones which she thinks look strikingly similar to the ear muffs she had as a child back in Scotland.
She could be angry too if she wanted to, but an astonishingly wide tractor has inhibited her view of the road ahead and she needs to concentrate on any opportunity to overtake it. She hasn’t time to be stuck here all day. There’s tomorrow’s lecture plan to complete and some marking to do. Her ‘daily dose’ of yoga too. She hopes to crack the Karnapidasana position before bed. Followed by the Savasana, the corpse posture, which isn’t as easy as it looks.
She glances at Charlie’s face, still beetroot-coloured from his explosion of squawks and spittle at the school. She hadn’t for a moment expected him to behave so bloody childishly in front of Rupert’s headmaster. He’s normally mature and sensible about everything, so cool in times of crisis. But then they are other people’s crises, not theirs. Crisis? What Crisis? she thinks randomly. A boy at Durham had bought her the Supertramp album of that name and they’d listened to it time after time, completely stoned. An early precursor to the corpse, she smiles.
‘It’s only suspension for two weeks, Dad. I don’t know why you’re so stressed,’ Rupert declares, the unexpected sound making Helen and the car lurch. ‘Tell him, Mum.’
‘I think he heard, darling. And you’ve promised faithfully to revise.’
Helen nods to herself as she negotiates a hump-backed bridge. She’s outwitted the road hog by taking an alternative route, and despite Charlie’s petulance in front of the headmaster, she’s negotiated a return for Rupert to sit his exams and then to go back to the school for a fresh start after October half term. All sorted without having to resort to Virabhadrasana, the warrior, she chuckles inwardly. She hums a tune as she drives. Everything will be in place and running smoothly by the time she’s on the aeroplane to New York, she’s sure of it.