‘I’ll take that,’ says Floyd. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Well, I have a glass of wine, naturally.’
‘Are you dressed?’
‘Yes. I am fully dressed. I am even wearing slippers.’
‘Slippers, yes, carry on. What else?’
‘A big cardigan.’
‘Ooh, yeah. A big cardigan. How big exactly is your cardigan?’
‘It’s huge. Gigantic. Really long sleeves that cover my hands. And a hole in the hem.’
‘Oh, tatty then? A tatty cardigan?’
‘Very tatty. Horribly tatty.’ She laughs.
‘No, no, don’t stop!’ he jokes. ‘Tell me more about your big tatty cardigan!’
She laughs again and looks down at her phone as she hears another call coming in. It’s Jake’s number and Jake only ever calls her on a Wednesday, and she feels an instant jolt of primal worry and says, ‘Floyd, I’m going to have to call you back. Jake’s trying to get through to me.’
‘Quickly, quickly! What colour is it? Tell me it’s brown? Please.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s black! Now go! I’ll call you back.
‘Jake,’ she says, switching to his call.
‘No,’ says a female voice. ‘It’s not Jake. It’s Blue.’
‘Oh,’ says Laurel. ‘Hi. Is everything all right? Is Jake OK?’
‘Yes. Jake’s fine. He’s sitting right here.’
Laurel’s heart rate slows and she leans back into her sofa.
‘What can I do for you, Blue?’
‘Look,’ she says. ‘I’ve been wrestling with this all weekend. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. Your boyfriend …?’
Laurel’s heart rate picks up again.
‘I have a – a, like a sixth sense? And your boyfriend … his aura is all wrong? It’s dark.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Laurel shakes her head slightly, as if trying to dislodge something from her ear.
‘I have this gift, I can see into people’s psyches. Through the walls of their higher consciousness? Into their subconscious? And I’m really sorry, but the minute I sat down and saw him there, the minute he and I made eye contact, I knew.’
‘You knew what?’
‘That he’s hiding something. And I know you and I aren’t close, Laurel, and I know that’s mainly down to me because I’m so self-protective, but I do care about you, you’re the mother of the man I love and I want you to be safe.’
Laurel waits for a moment before forming her response, and then when it comes it’s a slightly unkind, disparaging laugh. ‘Good grief,’ she says. ‘Can you put me on to Jake. Please.’
‘Jake thinks the same,’ says Blue. ‘It’s all we’ve talked about all weekend. He totally agrees with me. He—’
‘Just put him on to me please, Blue. Now.’
She hears Blue tut and then her son’s voice saying, ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Jake,’ she says. ‘Seriously. Come on. What is this shit?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just …’
‘What, Jake? What is it?’
‘I can’t really explain it. It’s what Blue said.’
‘Oh, come on, Jake. I know you better than that. You’re not like her. That’s not who you are. You don’t have a … a sixth sense. You’re the boy who never noticed when a girl liked you. The only member of the family who didn’t notice when Granny Deirdre started losing her marbles. You’ve never been any good at reading people. So don’t give me that. What the hell is going on?’
‘Nothing, Mum. We just got a bad vibe off him. Floyd, or whatever he’s called.’
‘No!’ she snaps. ‘Blue got a bad vibe off him. You just got whatever vibe Blue told you to get because you’re her little lapdog.’
Jake falls silent and Laurel holds her breath. She has never, in all the time that Jake and Blue have been together, expressed any disapproval of their dysfunctional dynamic.
‘Mum …’ he starts. But he’s whining and Laurel cannot possibly listen to her adult son whining, not now, not when everything is going so well, not when she’s finally, finally happy.
‘No, Jake. I’m sorry, I know she’s your girlfriend and the centre of your universe and I know you really, really love her. She’s your rock; I get that. But I have been sad for so long and broken for so long and finally I have something good, something special, and I am not having you and your whacko girlfriend tell me that it’s wrong. Dad liked him and Hanna liked him and that is more than enough for me.’
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ says Jake.
But she can still hear the whine in his voice and she can’t stand it and so she says, in a very quiet voice, ‘I’m going now, Jake. I’m going to hang up. Tell Blue that I know she means well but that I don’t want to hear any more of her outlandish theories.’
She’s shaking when she hangs up and she feels nauseous. She grabs her wine glass and takes a huge gulp. She should phone Floyd back, but she can’t. What would she say? Oh, my son’s partner just told me that she thinks you’ve got a dark aura and now I’m too upset to have jokey conversations about cardigans with you?
So she sits instead and for an hour she slowly and deliberately works her way through her wine until her hands have stopped shaking enough to send Floyd a text: Sorry about that. Jake had lots to say and now I’m tired and heading for bed. I will be wearing grey jersey pyjamas. They’re relatively old ?.
His reply arrives a few seconds later: That will give me plenty of food for thought to get me through the night. Sleep tight my perfect girl. Speak tomorrow x.
She turns off her phone, switches on the TV, finds something mindless to watch and pours herself another glass of wine. For an hour at least she coasts through oblivion, feeling sweet numbness spread over her like a heavy cloak. Then when she feels nothing at all, she finally goes to bed.
‘Oh,’ says Laurel, coming into the kitchen at Floyd’s house the following evening. ‘Hi, SJ. I wasn’t expecting to see you.’
SJ is standing at the sink, a pint glass of water in her hand. ‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ she says. ‘Me and Mum had a big fight last night.’ She shrugs, rests her left foot against her right foot and then the right against the left. She’s wearing a black lace top with black joggers and scuffed silver tennis shoes. A constellation of hoops and drops glitters at her earlobes. She reminds Laurel of one of the fairies in a book she used to read to the children when they were small. The fairy was called Silvermist and had silver hair and silver lips and was always dressed in black. It was a sad fairy. Androgynous. It had secrets.
Floyd comes in after Laurel and sighs. ‘To be fair,’ he says, as though Laurel had said something, ‘it has been a very long time since Kate and SJ fell out.’
‘We haven’t fallen out,’ SJ snaps.
‘Well, had a fight, whatever.’
‘What did you fight about?’ asks Laurel. ‘I mean you don’t have to tell me, obviously …’
Sara-Jade casts her long-lashed gaze to the floor and says, ‘She doesn’t like my new boyfriend.’
Floyd makes a strange noise behind Laurel and she turns to give him a questioning look.
‘He’s forty-nine,’ SJ says.
Floyd makes another noise and looks pointedly from Sara-Jade to Laurel and back again.