Clementine was back in her car, her hand on the keys in the ignition, when her phone rang. She grabbed for it when she saw the single word on the screen: SCHOOL.
‘Helen?’ she said, to save time on the niceties, because it was generally Helen, the school secretary, who made phone calls from the school.
Her heart thumped. Disasters loomed now at every corner.
‘Everything is fine, Clementine,’ said Helen quickly. ‘It’s just Holly is insisting her tummy is hurting again. We tried everything to distract her but to no avail, I’m afraid. We’re at a loss and she’s disrupting the class and well … she seems so genuine. We don’t want it to be a case of the boy who cried wolf.’
Clementine sighed. This had happened last week too, and by the time she’d got Holly home her stomach had been magically fixed.
‘Do you know how her behaviour has been today?’ Clementine asked Helen.
According to Holly’s adorable, kind of dippy kindergarten teacher, Miss Trent, Holly had been having ‘occasional difficulties with her self-regulation’ at school, and as a result wasn’t always making ‘the right choices’. Certainly her behaviour at home hadn’t been wonderful. She was going through a naughty, whiny stage, and had recently perfected a brand new seagull-like squawk that she used instead of saying ‘no’. It set Clementine’s teeth on edge.
‘Not too bad apparently,’ said Helen cautiously. ‘The rain isn’t helping. All the children have turned feral. So have we, actually. They say we’ve got at least another week of this weather, can you believe it?’
Clementine looked at the wedding ceremony taking place in the park. The bride and the groom were facing each other, holding hands, while other people held umbrellas over their heads. The bride was laughing so hard she could barely stand, and the groom was supporting her, laughing too. They didn’t seem to care that their string quartet had vanished.
She and Sam had laughed a lot during their wedding ceremony. ‘I’ve never seen a bride and groom laugh so much,’ their celebrant had said acerbically, as though they weren’t taking their wedding seriously enough. Sam couldn’t stop laughing at Clementine’s Morticia hair, which had made her laugh too, and made it not matter.
But you couldn’t laugh your way out of everything. They’d had eight years of laughter; a good run. They’d vowed to be true to each other in good times and bad, but they’d laughed as they said it, because everything was just so, so funny to them. They thought a bad hairstyle was as bad as life got. The celebrant was right to be annoyed. She should have grabbed them by their shirtfronts and cried, ‘This is serious! Life gets serious and you two aren’t concentrating!’
‘I’m minutes away,’ she said to Helen.
chapter thirty-five
The day of the barbeque
‘Vid already knew me because he’d seen me perform,’ said Tiffany to Clementine.
‘Mummy!’ called out Holly from the egg chair. ‘Come and see this!’
‘Just a minute!’ called back Clementine, without taking her eyes off Tiffany. ‘So you were a performer …?’
‘A performer like you, Clementine!’ said Vid delightedly.
‘Not quite like Clementine,’ corrected Tiffany with a snort.
‘Mummy!’ shouted Ruby.
‘Just a minute,’ called back Clementine. She looked at Tiffany. ‘Are you a musician?’
‘No, no, no.’ Tiffany began stacking plates. ‘I was a dancer.’
‘She was a famous dancer,’ said Vid.
‘I wasn’t famous,’ said Tiffany, although she had been kind of famous in certain circles.
‘Were you a famous limbo dancer?’ asked Sam, with a glint in his eye.
‘No, but there was sometimes a pole involved.’ Tiffany glinted right back at him.
There was silence around the table. Vid beamed.
‘Do you mean you were a pole dancer?’ Clementine lowered her voice. ‘Like a … like a stripper?’
‘Clementine, of course she wasn’t a stripper,’ said Erika.
‘Well,’ said Tiffany.
There was a pause.
‘Oh,’ said Erika. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’
‘You’ve certainly got the body for it,’ said Clementine.
‘Well,’ said Tiffany again. This was where it got tricky. She couldn’t say, Yeah, too right I do, girlfriend. You weren’t allowed to be proud of your body. Women expected humility on this topic. ‘When I was nineteen I did.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’ Sam asked Tiffany.
Clementine gave him a look. ‘What?’ Sam lifted his hands. ‘I’m just asking if she enjoyed a previous occupation. That’s a valid question.’
‘I loved it,’ said Tiffany. ‘For the most part. It was like any job. Good parts and bad parts, but I mostly enjoyed it.’
‘Good money?’ continued Sam.
‘Great money,’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s why I did it. I was doing my degree, and I could earn so much more money doing that than being a check-out chick.’
‘I was a check-out chick,’ said Clementine. ‘I didn’t especially love it, by the way, if anyone is interested.’