Beneath the Skin(31)
She goes back to Olivia. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Olivia. Don’t you get fed up at times?’ The words are out, and Antonia winces. She hadn’t intended them to sound as they did, like a criticism of Olivia’s life.
‘Actually, I do get fed up sometimes and I take it out on Mike, which probably isn’t fair of me.’ Olivia’s pale eyes drift away and she frowns. ‘He was the first to go to Hannah this morning,’ she comments, as though to herself.
‘If you ever want a break, I’d be happy to look after the girls.’ There they are again, Antonia’s thoughts popping out as words. But she says them quietly, her body rigid with the anticipation of rejection. ‘Seriously, I’d love to help, it would make me feel useful.’
‘Aren’t you lovely,’ Olivia replies, her face flushing with unexpected colour. She leans forward and gives Antonia a brief hug. ‘I might just take you up on that. But they’ll run rings around you, so don’t say you haven’t been warned!’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Antonia drives straight down Barlow Moor Road from Olivia’s house to Southern Cemetery. She even buys flowers from the extortionately priced shop on the busy road catering for the bereaved. And busy husbands, she thinks with a smile. Two bunches in a single day, though the petals of the red chrysanthemums she clutches in her hand are already browning at the tips.
She parks her car between two trees on Nell Lane and notices that a block of pale-brick apartments with trendy wooden balconies has been built since last she came. The wood looks weathered already. She fleetingly wonders whether she’ll remember where to go, but her feet seem to know the way as she tiptoes between plots to prevent the heels of her boots sinking in the grass. She ponders why she’s come. She hasn’t visited the cemetery for a long, long time. Perhaps it’s Olivia’s words about family and the smell of a home. Or perhaps it’s that rarely felt need to be normal, to belong.
‘God knows, we try our best to be good parents, but we don’t always get it right,’ Olivia said earlier, her face pensive and almost tearful.
‘“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”,’ Antonia responded bravely, hoping she’d quoted the poem correctly. ‘“They may not mean to …”’
‘Absolutely! I love that poem,’ Olivia replied, her face clearing, leaving Antonia feeling inordinately pleased.
‘Your dad’s in pain. And sometimes he gets full of anger and disappointment, that’s all,’ her mother would say, ever forgiving. ‘It’s the drink that’s talking, not him. He doesn’t mean it, Chinue.’
Candy’s love and tolerance for Jimmy was constant. It must have been mutual once, that adoration, Antonia muses as she walks into the breeze. They were people before they were parents. As a small child she’d seen the photographs, a bundle of sticky snapshots tied together with a perished rubber band. She’d found them at the back of a drawer in an old shoebox, along with her birth certificate and a few one-pound premium bonds. An array of happy photographs taken at the seaside. Her dad thickset with sideburns and a quiff and her mum, stunning in a headscarf, larking around on the sand and the pier with another grinning couple. The snaps fascinated her. She took to gazing at them in secret when her parents were still in bed in the morning, trying to reconcile the smiling man with her angry father. But then one day she became complacent, she laid the photographs out on the threadbare carpet like a pack of cards, guessing the order in which they were taken. So absorbed, she didn’t hear the groan of the stairs or the creak of the opening door, just the sound of his gravelly voice behind her.
‘What have you got there? Pass it here.’ So she stood with jelly knees, turned and handed him the bundle she’d frantically scraped together from the floor, her eyes fixed on the swirls of the brown carpet, waiting with breath taut in her lungs.
‘That’s Scarborough,’ her father said eventually, his voice smiling. ‘Bloody hell! That’s a blast from the past. With Marcie and Ben. Call your mum down for a laugh. Just look at my hair!’
Sophie isn’t a person given to nerves. Except when it comes to anything medical, which she knows is stupid. Even more so, given that both Norma and Barry are nurses. Or perhaps that’s why. Bloody parents. But then there’s the dentist too. Her mum dragged her kicking and squealing for the twice-yearly check-up as a child.
‘It’s your fault,’ she said to Norma when they were last friends. ‘My dental phobia. You made me go to that bloody maniac when we were small.’ But the reality is that Sophie didn’t have one single filling as a child, it’s only as an adult, when she can choose not to go, that she has the problems. Indescribable toothache from an abscess just a few months ago. Pain nearly as bad as the ‘I told you so’ look on her mum’s face when Sophie asked her to go with her to the bloody maniac, who was as kind and as patient as he’d always been.
‘Fuck!’ Sophie says to herself in Sami’s full-length mirror. Even without her contact lenses, she can see she looks a mess. She’s stayed in bed all morning, valiantly resisting the urge to have a glass of wine and go back to sleep. But sleep isn’t an option when she’s worried, when her mind is churning out thoughts and spiky memories.
‘You did go for that smear appointment, didn’t you?’ Norma asked when Sophie still lived at home, when her mum could still nosey through her post, even if she didn’t go so far as to open it.