‘Sorry I answered,’ said Erika. She was sorry.
‘Obviously you don’t need to be sorry, I just need to recalibrate. Tell you what, why don’t you just listen while I pretend to leave you the message I had all prepared?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Erika. She looked out at the rainy street where a woman battled with an umbrella that wanted to turn itself inside out. Erika watched as the woman suddenly, marvellously, lost her temper and jammed the umbrella into a rubbish bin without losing stride and continued walking in the rain. Good on you, thought Erika, exhilarated by this little tableau. Just throw it out. Throw the damned thing out.
Her mother’s voice got louder in her ear as if she’d repositioned her phone. ‘I was going to start like this: Erika, darling, I was going to say, Erika darling, I know you can’t talk right now because you’re at work, which is such a pity, being stuck in an office on this beautiful day, not that it is a beautiful day, I must admit, it’s actually a terrible day, a horrendous day, but normally at this time of year we have such glorious days, and whenever I wake up and have a peek outside at the blue sky, I think, oh dear, oh what a pity, poor, poor old Erika, stuck in her office on this beautiful day!, that’s what I think, but that’s the price you pay for corporate success! If only you’d been a park ranger or some other outdoorsy job. I wasn’t actually going to say the park ranger part, that just came to me then, and actually I know why it came to me, because Sally’s son has just left school and he’s going to be a park ranger, and when she was telling me, I just thought to myself, you know, what a marvellous job, what a clever idea, instead of being trapped in a little cubicle like you are.’
‘I’m not trapped in a cubicle,’ sighed Erika. Her office had harbour views and fresh flowers bought each Monday morning by her secretary. She loved her office. She loved her job.
‘It was Sally’s idea, you know. For her son to be a park ranger. So clever of her. She’s not conventional, Sally, she thinks outside the box.’
‘Sally?’ said Erika.
‘Sally! My new hairdresser!’ said her mother impatiently, as if Sally had been in her life for years, not a couple of months. As if Sally were going to be a lifelong friend. Ha. Sally would go the way of all the other wonderful strangers in her mother’s life.
‘So what else was your message going to say?’ said Erika.
‘Let’s see now … then I was going to say, sort of casually, as if I’d only just thought of it: Oh, listen darling, by the way!’
Erika laughed. Her mother could always charm her, even at the worst times. Just when Erika thought she was done, that was it, she could take no more, her mother charmed her back into loving her.
Her mother laughed too, but it sounded hectic and high-pitched. ‘I was going to say: Listen, darling, I was wondering if you and Oliver would like to come to lunch at my place on Sunday?’
‘No,’ said Erika. ‘No.’
She breathed in like she was breathing in through a straw. Her lips felt wonky. ‘No, thank you. We’ll be at your place on the fifteenth. That’s when we’ll come, Mum. No other time. That’s the deal.’
‘But darling, I think you’d be so proud of me because –’
‘No,’ said Erika. ‘I’ll meet you anywhere else. We can go out to lunch this Sunday. To a nice restaurant. Or you can come to our place. Oliver and I don’t have anything on. We can go anywhere else but we are not coming to your house.’ She paused and said it again, louder and more clearly, as if she were speaking to someone without a good grasp of English. ‘We are not coming to your house.’
There was silence.
‘Until the fifteenth,’ said Erika. ‘It’s in the diary. It’s in both our diaries. And don’t forget we’ve got that dinner with Clementine’s parents on Thursday night! So we’ve got that to look forward to as well.’ Yes, indeed, that was going to be a barrel of laughs.
‘I had a new recipe I wanted to try. I bought a gluten-free recipe book, did I tell you?’
It was the flip tone that did it. The calculated, cruel brightness, as if she thought there was a chance Erika might join her in playing the game they’d played all those years, where they both pretended to be an ordinary mother and daughter having an ordinary conversation, when she knew that Erika no longer played, when they’d both agreed the game was over, when her mother had wept and apologised and made promises they both knew she’d never keep, but now she wanted to pretend she’d never even made the promises in the first place.
‘Mum. Dear God.’
‘What?’ Faux innocence. That infuriating babyish voice.