Getting Home Read online

  ‘Coach doesn’t want us getting fat,’ mumbled Molly from under her pillow.

  ‘Coach cares about cups and medals, doesn’t care whether you’re crippled at thirty. You’re just another body to him, he has no appreciation of adult female metabolic requirements. You’ll be out of his life in a couple of years and he’ll be starving a new team. Women who eat a diet deficient in essential oils and calories risk premature osteoporosis, you know that.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ was the defiant response. Topaz thought of what a labour camp could do for her sister’s attitude, but contented herself by dragging the Polly Pocket quilt off her prone form and warning, ‘And tidy this room up before you leave. Flora, you make sure it’s done. And don’t forget to wake Gemma.’

  While she rode over to the Magno store at Helford and labelled apples for two hours before school, she considered the question of the letter. Her mother’s business was carrying too much debt, it was sick. Actually, so sick they couldn’t sell it, although it was doubtful that her mother had marketed the enterprise sincerely. The stock turnover was virtually non-existent, because most of the plants they ordered died. While Gemma had a contract with Ted Parsons’ company she brought in enough money to keep the household afloat.

  Topaz asked herself why in the world her mother had suddenly elected to walkout on the job. It was quite typical of her to contract an inappropriate involvement, and, obviously, some kind of lover’s tiff had taken place, but in Topaz’s reasoning these considerations were trivial and easily resolved.

  Denouncement, that was the right strategy. And purge the opposition. Flora had a field camp meeting today in any case. And little Courtenay Fuller was coming back with Molly, and she was the mushiest creature in the universe. Luck had always smiled on Stalin, too.

  ‘Mum,’ Topaz began that evening, as soon as Gemma was standing contentedly in front of the stove stirring the rice, sipping from the glass of wine in her free hand, ‘I found this beautiful letter in the garden.’

  She unfolded the repaired page and held it carefully out of her mother’s reach. At the far end of the table, Molly and Courtenay looked up from their improvements to Polly Pocket’s Pony Gymkhana?

  ‘How dare you read my letters!’ Gemma exclaimed, putting down her glass and lunging for it as Topaz had anticipated. Gemma Lieberman was built to lounge rather than lunge. Wearing platform sandals and a long aubergine-coloured dress elaborated with ruffles and fringes and trailing cuffs, she was not dressed for quick movement. She dragged a lettuce off the worktop and scared the cat with a clatter of falling utensils while Topaz drifted serenely away behind the little girls without looking as if she had moved. ‘Give me that,’ she demanded, knowing her daughter had won again. ‘It’s private. You had no right to look at it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I thought it might be important. I’ve never seen a real love letter before. I didn’t know people still wrote things like that.’

  At the word ‘love’the attention of Molly and Courtenay was riveted on Gemma. ‘I said, give it to me.’ Gemma lunged again and her hair, which hung like unravelled rope to her waist, snagged in a door handle. She yanked it free and held out her hand, demanding the letter.

  ‘You tore it up,’ Topaz protested in her calm, deep voice, ‘and it wasn’t even opened. I thought you must have made a mistake. I mean, people don’t write love letters nowadays, do they? I thought you might want to keep it, it might be precious. I mean, supposing you both died and you never knew he loved you – wouldn’t that be tragic?’ The little girls were wide-eyed at the notion.

  ‘Come on, Topaz. You just think it’s tragic I’m not getting a paycheck from Tudor Homes any more.’

  ‘No, I don’t. It’s like …’ Topaz struggled for the words. Emotional stuff was so hard to express. ‘It’s like you said about love being sort of energy, like breath or something. I thought you couldn’t really want to just block it out like that.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. This has nothing to do with love.’ Gemma had a good sense for her eldest daughter’s strategies, but she could not decently accuse Topaz of having the mentality of a pimp in front of Molly and her friend. Nor could she claim that love was entirely out of the picture; Ted had been kind to her, a response for which she had not been prepared. ‘Look, you’ve got it wrong.’ She opened negotiations in a reasonable tone designed to give the lie to the usual allegations of irrationality, ‘That letter isn’t precious and it is not a love letter. It’s something I will never want to remember from someone I want to forget, and the kind of letter I hope you never have to deal with when you’re an adult. Which is why I threw it away. Now put it back in the rubbish where you found it. I promise you, that is its proper place.’ She was pleased with that, it struck the perfect note of high parental piety.

  ‘You’re upset about it,’ Topaz countered.

  ‘I’m upset that you decided to get hold of it and read it, Topaz.’

  ‘I thought it was a sweet letter. He writes some lovely things, really quite poetic. Are you sure you don’t even want to read it?’

  ‘You ought to read it, Mum,’ Molly observed, her eyes huge with curiosity. ‘Supposing he died and you never knew he loved you.’

  ‘It’s trying to persuade me to do something wrong, Molly, so why should I read it? If I don’t want to be persuaded, I can just throw the letter away and then there’s no danger.’

  ‘Can I see it? What does it say that’s so lovely?’ Molly persisted.

  ‘Oh, that’d be so sad,’ sighed Courtenay, combing her micro-pony’s luxuriant mane.

  Gemma smouldered at her eldest daughter, indicating that she considered Topaz irresponsible for raising adult affairs in front of infants. Topaz iced her mother, conveying that a parent had no right to let personal feelings interfere with her responsibility to provide for her children. Hadn’t the brothels of the Caucasus funded the Bolshevik victory?

  ‘You’re treating me like Boule de Suif, Topaz, and I don’t deserve that.’ Gemma shoved her hair off her face and skewered half of it into a bun with a handy satay stick.

  With ceremony, Topaz folded the letter. ‘You might change your mind one day and want to know what it says. If you don’t want to keep it, I’ll keep it for you. In my room. So if you ever want it, just ask me.’ The entire household, even including the cat, knew better than to invade Topaz’s room.

  ‘Fine,’ Gemma shrugged her shoulders, hitched up her bra straps and turned back to the rice pot. Holding the letter with reverence, Topaz moved towards the spiral staircase incongruously introduced into the kitchen area sometime in the seventies when the house’s previous owner knocked out all the internal walls at the ground floor level. She took her time; Stalin knew when to be patient.

  ‘My dad says love is the answer.’ Courtenay turned back to her game and mounted a tiny plastic horsewoman on her horse.

  ‘My dad said if love was the answer he was glad he didn’t hear the question,’ Molly cantered her tiny plastic horse up to a tiny plastic gate, ‘but he’s a crazy person and they can say anything.’ A tiny plastic refusal occurred. ‘Bad pony. That’s three faults.’

  ‘Make him do it again,’ Topaz advised from the stairs. ‘You should never let a horse get away with a refusal, you know that.’

  In the deep of night, the telephone rang in the Parsons house. Ted was still awake. He had been sleeping badly. ‘We’ve got your son again,’ the caller told him, in a portentous man-to-man tone.

  ‘Oh God,’ he responded.

  ‘Yes,’ the caller affirmed, sucking in an accusatory breath.

  ‘Has he been charged?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I’m most grateful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there damage?’

  ‘Damage? Damage, John?’ the caller demanded of someone across the room. The answer was drowned. In the background his son was bellowing like a distressed bullock.

  ‘Some damage, yeah. A vehicle involved.�
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  ‘He stole a car?’

  ‘Nah – vehicle was one of ours,’ the caller confirmed. Then, without being asked, added, ‘We’ll bring him over. Ten minutes.’

  Ted and Allie slept in a super-king-size bed whose lavish latitude, covered in riotous rose chintz of an authentic nineteenth-century design, looked magnificent in photographs and suggested marital bliss of a high order. In reality it enabled the couple to sleep together with no fear of physical contact. Ted trekked around the bed to wake his wife. Gently, he put his hand on her shoulder. Violently, she reared up from her pillows and hit him.

  ‘Your fucking son,’ she yelled, sitting up and grabbing the quilt around her. ‘That piece of shit. Why doesn’t he just run under a truck?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were awake,’ he apologised, tasting blood from the inside of his lower lip.

  ‘Get out of here. Get out on the street. Stop them waking the fucking neighbourhood.’

  He took cash from the safe in the dressing room and filled his wallet. A few minutes later he was fully dressed, and waiting at the roadside ready to begin damage limitation when the squad car appeared. Whispering, which induced the police officers to lower their voices in imitation, Ted got the party into the house. The neighbourhood, he calculated, was less likely to wake than Cherish and Chalice. Poor sleep patterns seemed to have been passed on in his genes.

  Damon, now unconscious and heavy as a horse, was manhandled to the sofa in the family-size eat-in kitchen, and the officers assembled around the oak farmhouse table to begin the paperwork.

  The charges were to be assault with a weapon, criminal damage, resisting arrest, using insulting language, possession of marijuana and damaging a police vehicle. ‘He followed a woman out of Filthy McNasty’s bar in Helford.’ The senior officer related the events with fatherly regret. ‘Asked her to come home with him and pulled a knife. Four guys from the bar saw it and piled in. Bar windows are out, he threw a table. Glass injuries, broken bones. They got the paramedics out, he attacked them. Terrible language. Tore the buttons off one of my officer’s uniforms with his teeth. Parked his lunch in our car, just to finish things off nicely.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Ted wanted to crawl under the table and scream.

  ‘So’re we. Can’t take it off the road tonight, we’re a car short already.’

  No, he wanted to be a long way away, say up on Strankley Ridge with the rabbits and no representative of any other mammalian species, especially not Homo supposedly-sapiens.

  Among his minor weaknesses, Ted counted a tendency towards honesty. Devious went against the grain with him, but he would do what had to be done. He rubbed his eyes and nerved himself. The first time Damon had come home in a squad car, the arresting officers had patiently talked him through the routine. Now he was getting suave with it. ‘What can I do?’ was the opening move. ‘Let me get an idea of the level of damage we’re talking about here.’

  He had the charges down to drunk and disorderly plus plain assault, and was about to explore the possibility that the bar owner would prefer restitution of a direct and personal nature to waiting on the deliberation of the Criminal Compensation Board when Allie appeared in the doorway. She was fully made up and wearing a pink silk kimono which ended above her knees. The famous lock of silky blonde hair fell over eyes now blue with innocence.

  ‘Oh dear. I am so, so sorry.’ She perched on the sofa’s edge to smooth her poor boy’s troubled brow. ‘He’s just under so much stress with his exams, you know. There’s so much pressure on children these days, it’s just too much for them, don’t you think?’ She crossed the kitchen and got some glasses from a cupboard. The three officers were mesmerised by the flicker of sinews in her calves. ‘Have we offered you something? Or are you still on duty?’

  It was established that the senior officers were about to go off duty, while the youngest was driving. Ted invited them to sample a bottle of fifteen-year-old Island malt which an associate had given him that very day. It transpired that the senior officer’s ancestors were from Skye. His wife enjoyed Family First very much and looked forward to baking the Cake of the Week. The Lemon-and-Lime Mousse Gateau had not risen as it should, although it had tasted superb all the same.

  ‘We’re doing Chocolate Pecan Brownies this week.’ She invested the promise with as much glamour as if they were planning to confide the secret formula of Coca-Cola. ‘It’s such a great recipe – I’m sure they’ll be just perfect. Of course, we have a professional caterer test all our recipes, but we had to change the firm we used a while ago because we were getting complaints. You must let me send you some tickets for the show – it’s so good when we get a really smart audience in, the whole thing just gets wild.’

  The senior officer was gratified to have his opinion validated.

  ‘And this poor girl.’ Allie pouted in sisterly compassion for her son’s victim. ‘How is she? She must have been petrified. He’s a big boy now.’

  ‘She was pretty mad,’ the junior cop contributed. ‘She was saying all kinds of things.’

  ‘Mad?’ Allie’s eyes widened with hope. ‘You mean – she’s not quite right?’

  ‘She’s right enough if you ask me,’ answered senior officer, draining his tumbler which Ted solemnly refilled at once. ‘Works in some law firm. Hot stuff. Spouting this act and that case.’

  ‘Oh – not a secretary, then?’

  ‘Trainee, she said. Mind you, these women tell one story to us and when you get to court it’s another thing.’

  ‘Terrible shock for a young woman. I’m sure she was nice looking.’

  ‘Depends what your taste is,’ the driver replied, watching with a sour face as his superiors lowered the level of the precious malt at an astonishing rate. ‘Didn’t reckon much to her myself.’

  ‘A woman can always make the best of herself,’ Allie observed brightly.

  ‘She’d done that. She was having a night out, no question.’

  ‘The poor girl,’ Allie sighed, and the drinkers drank, ingesting also the impression that daylight would reveal Damon Parsons’ potential victim as a stupid, unstable young slapper unlikely to cross-examine well.

  At 5 am, after an egg-and-sausage breakfast enthusiastically cooked by Ted, the officers left, leaving both whisky bottle and Ted’s wallet empty. In exchange, the senior officer handed over Damon’s weapon, a rusted Swiss Army penknife chosen for the implement for getting stones out of horse’s hooves.

  ‘Get him off there,’ Allie commanded Ted when he returned to the kitchen. She was walking up and down the room, jittery with anger. ‘That sofa’ll be ruined if he pisses himself.’ And because her husband did not react immediately she picked up an empty glass and threw it at him. It hit a worktop, fell to the Provençale tiled floor and shattered.

  ‘I can’t carry him,’ he told her, aware of his cut lip now smarting from the whisky.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to carry him. Let him lie on the floor, for God’s sake. Disgusting thing. Disgusting. Look at his shirt, for God’s sake, look at it. I’ll kill you if you get that on the covers. He’s an animal, he should lie on the floor.’

  Fearing the rising hysteria in her voice, Ted slowly rolled his son on his side and eased his bulk, legs first, down on the tiles. ‘Lucky he stayed in the area this time. At least the cops know us.’

  ‘If they hadn’t banned him at the Wilde At Heart he’d never have got into this state.’

  Wearily, Ted stopped himself contradicting her. Damon had been able to get into this state wherever in the world he was since the age of ten.

  ‘He’ll have to go back to that re-hab place.’ She was approaching the knife, which lay on the table with the blade open.

  ‘He won’t stay. He checked himself out after a day and a half, remember?’ From the corner of his eye he saw that Cherish, in her Forever Friends pyjamas, had appeared silently in the doorway.

  ‘Must you be so negative? If that place isn’t secure, I’ll find a place that is. Find somewhe
re that locks’em up. God knows where you think I’m going to get the time to run around the country looking for a place, but I’ll do it if you won’t. He‘s not bitching up my life as well as his own. I’ll have him locked up – why not? He’s a fruitcake. A secure mental hospital. What they call it? Sectioned? It’ll be for his own safety, he’ll kill himself at this rate anyway.’

  ‘He’s not mad,’ Ted protested, keeping his distance and trying not to look at the knife in case she followed his glance. ‘He’s just dumb.’

  ‘You’d know, would you?’ she demanded, getting into a well-worn groove. ‘Where were you when he was screaming his guts out round the clock from the day he was born? Out to meetings, out to lunch, out to dinner – that’s where you were. Your usual table, sir. May I recommend the fucking Krug, sir? And I was locked up with him in this fucking house. Don’t tell me he’s normal.’

  He breathed easier as she walked past the knife. Too soon. She heard him. Quick as a lizard she whirled around, seized it and ran at him.

  Cherish let out a screech of utter fear. Ted dodged the blade and grabbed for the arm which held it but the whisky had made him clumsy and she was too quick for him. ‘Get out of here,’ she screamed at the child, waving the knife furiously at father and daughter in turn. ‘You fucking little bitch, you had to get up, didn’t you?’ Cherish let out scream after scream. Blonde like her sister, she was undersized for eight and pitifully thin. The exertion brought no colour at all to her little grey face.

  On the staircase behind her, Ted saw Chalice appear, trailing a quilt. Another scene.

  ‘Alex,’ he said, hoping her real name would connect her with reality if only for an instant, ‘the girls are upset. Let them see you put the knife down so they’ll know everything’s OK.’

  ‘Everything is not OK,’ she protested with bitter sarcasm. ‘Their brother is dead drunk, their father is dead beat and their mother will be on camera after two hours fucking sleep.’