Sex and Stravinsky Read online

  ‘Now, Caroline,’ she says. ‘My blood pressure. You’ll have to remind me to take my pills. Every morning and evening. Janet always reminds me to take my pills. And please remember that the doctor says I’m not to be upset.’

  On day one of week two, Caroline’s mother, after haunting the bus, hour after long hour, wrong-footing Josh in Caroline’s absence and bearing down upon poor little Zoe in a manner denoting the unconditional entitlement of grannyhood, finds herself suddenly in need of retail therapy and orders herself a cab to Marks & Spencer. This is when Josh, at last, can seize his chance. He dives upstairs and falls upon the matriarch’s hand luggage, in which he finds a one-way ticket to London Heathrow. The Witch Woman, as he’s begun to suspect, has no return ticket. He also finds a self-help book entitled Codependent No More. On the flyleaf of the book, Janet has written a chilling inscription.

  Dear Mum

  I hope that reading this book will help you as much as it has helped me. It will show you why I need to cut my ties with you completly.

  Best of luck and God bless. You will always be in our prayers.

  Love Janet

  Josh stuffs the book and the air ticket back inside his mother-in-law’s cabin bag. He is shaking so violently as he comes downstairs that he almost twists an ankle. He drinks a glass of water and tries to compose himself.

  He checks on Zoe, who is happily engaged with a pile of plastic bricks. He seizes a red marker pen from one of Caroline’s jars.

  ‘Hold on there, Zoe babe,’ he says and he blows her a jaunty kiss.

  He mounts the stairs. He reaches for the self-help book and opens it at the flyleaf. He makes an insertion mark between the ‘t’ and the ‘l’ in the word ‘completly’. Then he adds a bold red ‘e’. After that he goes downstairs to wait for Caroline to come home.

  ‘Oh poor Mum!’ Caroline says, when Josh tells her about the book and the inscription and the one-way ticket. ‘Oh my God, how terrible for her.’

  They are speaking in whispers from the lower deck, because Caroline’s mother, having tired herself out, is now having a lie-down upstairs.

  ‘But we have to confront her about her plans,’ Josh says. ‘We have to know where we stand. Caro, even you would have to admit that we’re a little bit crowded in here.’

  ‘OK,’ Caroline says. ‘OK. Let’s talk about it after supper.’

  And she sets about preparing a porcini risotto and a green salad made with lettuce and endive gathered from her vegetable patch, along with some young dandelion leaves.

  As an unpropitious prelude to the imminent confrontation, Caroline’s mother, having picked out all the porcini mushrooms from her daughter’s risotto and arranged them pointedly in a ring around the outer edge of her dinner plate, then turns her attention to finding fault with the salad.

  ‘I must admit that when I’m offered salad I expect it to be salad,’ she says. ‘I don’t expect to find myself wrestling with a pile of garden weeds. Caroline, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve got dandelions in here.’

  ‘Yes, Mum, but it’s just the new leaves,’ Caroline says. ‘Try them. They’re really good.’

  ‘No thank you,’ her mother replies. ‘Dad always put dandelions on to the compost heap.’

  Josh can suddenly stand it no longer.

  ‘Mrs McCleod,’ he says. ‘There is something I have to ask you.’

  ‘Call me Mum, you silly boy,’ she says.

  ‘Mrs McCleod,’ he says. ‘We need you to answer a question.’

  ‘Please, Josh,’ Caroline says. ‘Maybe not now.’

  ‘We need to get something sorted out,’ he says, and he clears his throat. ‘Have you decided to emigrate?’ he says. ‘Or do you have plans to go home? Either way, we need to know how long you plan to stay with us.’

  In the extended silence that follows, Josh can hear the rise and fall of his sleeping daughter’s breathing. And, finally, when his mother-in-law speaks, it is not to him but to her daughter.

  ‘You haven’t been reminding me to take my pills,’ she says. ‘Janet always reminds me to take my pills.’

  And then Caroline is reaching for tissues and soothing words as she gently helps her mother up the stairs.

  It is an hour before she comes down again, by which time Josh is resolved.

  ‘I’m taking off for Heathrow,’ he says. ‘I’m flying to Tanzania. I really need to see my father – and I’m taking Zoe with me.’

  ‘What? Right now?’ Caroline says.

  ‘Yes. Right now,’ he says. ‘Tonight. We’ll go standby. We’ll stay about a month. I’ll take good care of Zoe – and you can trust me to bring her back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Caroline says. ‘Please. I know that.’

  ‘As to this business,’ he says, jerking his head irritably towards the ceiling, to indicate a certain person ensconced on the floor above. ‘You can sort it out in my absence any which way you like. Only I want her out of our bed and out from under our feet.’

  ‘Yes,’ Caroline says.

  And Caroline does indeed ‘sort it out’, so that, once again, when Josh returns, he finds that she has made a plan. It’s a plan that he’s too worn out to query, given that his Tanzanian journey has concluded with a funeral – albeit a funeral with fabulous singing; African mission-school singing for a benign old unbeliever. His father, post-surgical procedure, had picked up a bug from one of his pupils; one of those activist Soweto kids who had made it across several borders. Then came the news that Jack was gone; vanished as if into thin air. Brilliant Jack, the housemaid’s son, who had been doing so well at school. These things made for a sufficient coming together to bring down a frail old man.

  Josh and Caroline fall with relief into each other’s arms, with Zoe sandwiched between them.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Josh,’ she says. ‘I’m so truly sorry about your dad. But how wonderful that you could be there for him. He always sounded such a darling man.’

  ‘He was beyond being aware of much,’ Josh says in reply. ‘He’d completely stopped speaking. He’d even stopped needing to pee. Just a corpse on a bed, but somehow still breathing.’ Then he says, ‘Shall I tell you the one and only thing he said, all the time I was there? He opened his eyes and looked at Zoe. Then he said, “Beautiful baby.” He even tried to raise his hand. It sort of fluttered on the sheet for a moment.’

  Both of them promptly start to cry. Their tears fall on to Zoe’s chestnut curls.

  ‘Thank you, Caro,’ Josh says. ‘For letting me take her. What I mean is thank you for trusting me.’

  What he doesn’t say is how seriously he thought about not coming back; about packing it all in and staying there, on the east coast of Africa; how it had crossed his mind as he sat there on the veranda of his mother’s little single-storey house. The three of them sitting at one of those wood-and-raffia tables that African craftsmen sell in the street. A set with matching chairs; the whole roped in a bundle and carried on the head. There was a beaded-mesh cover protecting the milk jug. His mother was wearing the sort of period-piece apron that she always wore in his childhood. God only knew where she’d got it. Rickrack braid on the pocket, he noted, as she fed Zoe blinis with blobs of her home-made cream cheese. She filled his coffee cup and talked to him, as she had always done, about the International Labour Organisation, and the statistics for agricultural production and the need for speeding up the training of local paramedics.

  She’s got so old, Josh was thinking. And her breathing isn’t great. And now she’s on her own. But she wasn’t really. Not on her own. As of old, streams of comrades came and went, day after day. And the kids from the nearby Lutheran Sunday School would go home via her kitchen, where she taught them how to make rock cakes and got them to do subtraction sums with the raisins. Ten raisins minus three raisins makes three to eat and seven to throw in the rock-cake mix. Then there was Liesl, the maid, who was roughly as old as Ida. The two of them were more like sisters. Intermittently embracing; sharing a little weep over the old man’s de
ath. Interesting, Josh thought, how ethnic difference begins to leach from the features with age.

  He noted that, while Bernie and Ida had transplanted themselves, what they had recreated around themselves felt much the same as before. He tried in his mind to put Caroline and Ida together; both with that resolute productivity. All that sewing and growing and organising. And yet. And yet.

  Ida hugged him when it was time for him to go.

  ‘My boy,’ she said. It was all she said.

  She gave him a cow-skin album pasted with all the photographs he’d taken during his visit. Most of them were of her and Zoe, or of Zoe with the Sunday School kids. One, taken by Liesl, had the three of them together. A couple were of Zoe with Liesl. Ida had added a few old photographs of Josh in childhood, with Ida and Bernie.

  ‘For the little girl,’ she said.

  ‘I was foul to you before I left,’ Josh says to Caroline. ‘I’m sorry. I was stressed.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. It’s OK. Look, Mum’s in a B & B, by the way, but it’s only for a few weeks. She’s been there since yesterday evening.’

  Caroline’s ‘plan’ has been to put on hold their own intended house purchase and to buy for her mother instead.

  ‘She’ll be right on the edge of the city,’ she says. ‘We did a massive consumer survey and she fell for this brand-new little semi. The good news is that, because it’s so new, it needed quite a small deposit and the developer sorts out the mortgage. She’ll exchange contracts in about two weeks. It’s all going through very quickly. It’s using up nearly all of our savings, Josh, but I promise we’ll build them up again. And I’ll be responsible for the monthly payments and Mum’s allowance. You won’t need to notice a thing.’

  Neither of them has the stomach to bring up Caroline’s previously stated intention to work part-time and have another baby, or to move out of the bus. Josh finds that right now he’s so wrung out that he’s completely beyond caring. He’s desperately in need of sleep. He’s home again. The Witch Woman is patently no longer in his bed. Besides, it’s not he but Caroline who longs to have more children. Josh is wholly focused on Zoe. He’s more than happy to have her remain as his precious only child.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘It’s all fine, Caro. Just so long as we’ve got each other.’

  Then he climbs the stairs of the old red bus and he falls asleep in his clothes.

  Chapter Two

  Zoe

  Zoe is really upset about the French exchange, and all the more so because it hasn’t even started. She’s feeling extra apprehensive, not only because it’s going to be three whole weeks, not two, on account of Mrs Mead, head of French, believing in what she calls ‘total immersion’, but she’s the only girl in the class who’s been teamed up with a boy. All the boys in her class have got French boys for partners and all the girls have got French girls – that’s except for her. Unfortunately, there’s been a not quite correlating boy–girl take-up in each of the two schools. This is what Mrs Mead has explained, so somebody’s got to have the extra boy on the other side of the Channel. And – guess what? – that somebody is going to be her. Zoe Silver. Of course.

  And it’s so unfair, because it could have been Gemma, or Gemma’s best friend Becca, both boy-mad and both with their proper grown-up lacy bras and their scary mixed-sex birthday parties that they’ve been having since they were eleven. And now Gemma’s been moaning her head off non-stop because her thirteenth birthday is going to happen while the class is away on the French exchange and she’s going to have to postpone her party till they get back. Just like other people didn’t have much worse things happen to them – e.g., like being teamed up with a boy, when the whole idea of having to go and stay with a bunch of people you don’t even know is quite scary enough. Zoe just can’t stop worrying about it.

  Most of her class have given up birthday parties for the moment because at twelve, and especially thirteen, you can’t very well go on having those babyish all-girl parties with treasure hunts and loot bags, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and with your mum making you a novelty cake of your choice, with candles on it. Well, you can if you’re Emily, of course, but then Emily is so kind of floaty that she doesn’t even notice. And, on the quiet, all the girls really enjoy her parties, because Emily’s mum keeps everyone so busy there’s no time to get bitchy or to feel left out, like there is at Gemma and Becca’s parties, where you stand there wishing you had different shoes on and that your mum had let you have your ears pierced and that you knew about kissing and stuff.

  Zoe’s mum, Caroline, used to do those four-star kids’ parties for her, except that she always insisted Gran come and only once, two years ago, did she agree to make Zoe a ballerina cake.

  The next year she said, ‘Not again, Zoe. That’s just boring. And aren’t you getting a bit too old for all this ballet stuff? What about the belle époque, if you’re wanting something a bit girly? Or how about we make you a map of Middle Earth?’

  Zoe really doesn’t like Tolkien. It seems to her it’s a lot of weird boy-stuff that, for some reason, her mother thinks would be better for her than reading ballet books. It’s probably because her mum was young in the 1970s, so she thinks that girls should be forever doing plumbing and welding along with cooking and sewing, to show how liberated they are. And she won’t let Zoe have ballet lessons, because she says they’re much too expensive and that Zoe must absolutely not go leaning on her dad.

  ‘You know what a pushover he is,’ she said. ‘He’ll start going without lunch just to pay for you to have lessons.’

  So Zoe hasn’t said a word to Josh about it. She’s kept it to herself.

  But, about the birthday cakes, the only really embarrassing time was once, when her mum and dad had to be away and Gran did her party instead. She just insisted and Zoe didn’t know how to tell her not to. Gran made this horrible iced cake like a Christmas cake that looked like a tombstone and inside was that kind of claggy fruitcake, when everyone knows it’s a chocolate cake you’re supposed to have. Anyway, nobody ate it. They just broke it up into bits and then Gran kept saying cringeworthy stuff out loud in front of Zoe’s friends, like, ‘Personally, I can’t abide the waste!’ and, ‘It makes you wonder what sort of homes they come from!’ that just made everyone giggle – especially as most of them have got quite smart houses and it’s Zoe’s family who still live in a bus – though not for very much longer because when she gets back they’re going to be moving into a house where she’ll have a ‘proper’ bedroom.

  Except that, last weekend, when her dad had a sneaky plan that he and she – just the two of them – should go and camp in her new bedroom overnight, they’d got there and Zoe had refused to sleep in the house, because the bedrooms had these really horrible old nylon carpets that stank of wee, with creaky floorboards underneath, and all the door panels were painted orange and lilac with, like, brush hairs stuck in the paint, though her dad said that Caroline was going to ‘work miracles’ on the house while they were away. But, anyway, her dad said never mind, they’d just practise a few headstands against the walls downstairs for a bit and then they’d go back home to the bus.

  Her bedroom in the bus is just about big enough for her bed with drawers under it, plus with about forty centimetres running down the side, so that she has to keep all her ‘hanging-up’ clothes in her mum and dad’s room, but at least the bus is kind of stylish-looking inside and her friends really like it.

  Doing the headstands was fun and now Zoe’s really sorry that she wouldn’t sleep in the house with her dad, because she’s not going to see him for ages and ages until they both get back. She’s quite good at headstands and so is her dad. She used to be scared of doing gym, but when she was six he’d taught her to do forward and backward rolls on this big trampoline they’d found on a rainy beach in Devon and after that she’d got much braver about it.

  Anyway, about Gran and the embarrassing birthday party, she said all Zoe’s friends had to eat up the sandwiches first b
efore they were even allowed any cake, so no one had room for it by then. Emily’s mum’s a widow and she’s a doctor who works with people who’ve had head injuries, so revolting Sadie once passed this note around the class saying that Emily must have had a head injury, which was where her mum had got all the practice. But, instead of passing the note on, Zoe just shoved it into her desk, because it was so mean and horrible. Sadie had only written it because Emily’s a bit goofy-looking and her ears are quite sticky-out. And just because she’s got this quite big sort of a mole thing on her chest, Sadie’s note also said had anybody noticed Emily had got ‘three nipples’.

  Then, later on, one of the senior girls, who must’ve been snooping in Zoe’s desk during geography, had gone and found the note and given it to the head and Zoe’d got the blame for it, just because she wouldn’t tell who’d sent it. Well, you can’t tell on people, can you? Even if it’s someone gross, like Sadie. Then afterwards Sadie thought it was all dead funny about the head and all, and she started behaving like she and Zoe were kind of ‘together’ because of it.

  But, anyway, about the boy thing and the French exchange, Zoe’s already tried getting her mum to go up and have a word with Mrs Mead, but Caroline’s refused, because she says Zoe should learn to fight her own battles, and anyway she thinks it’s ‘a bit silly and bigoted’ of Zoe to mind having a boy. And, worse luck, her dad, who’s usually better at understanding about when you’re scared, was staying over in Bristol all of that week, though he’s usually only there over three nights. It’s because of some funny little opera thing he’s putting on together with the music department, which is all about this lechy old tutor who’s in love with his beautiful young orphan pupil, and everyone ends up getting married to the wrong people. Her dad says this is fairly unusual for a comic opera, but that it’s maybe a lot more like real life.