Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [22]
‘Oh yes,’ Pauline said nervously. ‘The face creams and lipsticks. Very nice, thanks.’
‘Have you used them?’
‘Weeeell –’ Pauline began.
‘You haven’t,’ Lisa accused.
Lisa showered Pauline with expensive perfumes and cosmetics that she got in the course of her job. Desperate for her to have a bit of luxury. But Pauline refused to relinquish her Pond’s and Rimmel products. Once she’d even said, ‘Oh, your things are too good for me, love.’
‘They’re not too good for you,’ Lisa had exploded.
Pauline couldn’t understand Lisa’s rage. All she knew was that she dreaded the days when the postman knocked on her door and said cheerfully, ‘Another parcel from your girl up in London.’ Sooner or later Pauline was always called upon to deliver a progress report.
Unless it was a parcel of books. Lisa used to send her mum review copies of Catherine Cookson and Josephine Cox, in the mistaken belief that she’d love all that rags-to-riches romantic stuff. Until the day Pauline said, ‘That was a terrific book you sent me, love, about that East End villain who used to nail his victims to a pool table.’ It transpired that Lisa’s assistant had mistakenly parcelled up the wrong book, and it marked a new departure in Pauline Edwards’ reading. Now she thrived on gangster biographies and hard-boiled American thrillers, the more torture scenes the better, and someone else’s mum got sent the Catherine Cooksons.
‘I wish you’d come and see us, love. It’s been ages.’
‘Um, yeah,’ Lisa said vaguely. ‘I’ll come soon.’
No fear! With every visit the house she’d grown up in seemed smaller and more shockingly dreary. In the poky little rooms crammed with dirt-cheap furniture, she felt shiny and foreign, with her false nails and glossy leather shoes, uncomfortably aware that her handbag probably cost more than the Dralon couch she was sitting on. But though her mum and dad oohed and aawed respectfully over her fabulousness, they were fluttery-nervous around her.
She should have dressed down on her visits, to try to narrow the gap. But she needed as much stuff as possible, to wear like a suit of armour, so that she couldn’t be sucked back in, subsumed by her past.
She hated it all, then hated herself.
‘Why don’t you come and see me?’ Lisa asked. If they wouldn’t make the half-hour train journey from Hemel Hempstead to London they were hardly likely to fly to Dublin.
‘But with your Dad not being well and…’
When Clodagh woke on Sunday morning she was mildly hung-over, but in great form. Briefly at liberty to snuggle up to Dylan and ignore his erection with a clean conscience.
When Molly and Craig appeared, Dylan urged them sleepily, ‘Go downstairs and break things, and let Mummy and me have a snooze.’
Amazingly they left, and Clodagh and Dylan drifted in and out of sleep.
‘You smell lovely,’ Dylan mumbled into Clodagh’s hair. ‘Like biscuits. All sweet and… sweet
Some time later she whispered to him, ‘I’ll give you a million pounds if you get me some breakfast.’
‘What would you like?’
‘Coffee and fruit.’
Dylan left and Clodagh stretched like a contented starfish across the bed until he reappeared with a mug in one hand and a banana in the other. He placed the banana on his groin facing downwards, then when Clodagh looked, he faked a gasp and swung the banana upwards, like a quivering erection. ‘Why Mrs Kelly,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re beautiful!’
Clodagh laughed, but felt the familiar guilt begin its relentless creep.
Later they went out for lunch, to one of those places that didn’t make you feel like outcasts for bringing along two young children. Dylan went to procure a cushion for Molly to sit on, and as Clodagh wrestled a knife out of Molly’s hand she caught a glimpse of Dylan chatting persuasively with a waitress – a Bambi-limbed teenager – who flushed at her proximity to such a good-looking man.
That good-looking man was her husband, Clodagh realized, and suddenly, oddly, she barely recognized him. Assailed by that weird see-saw feeling of knowing someone so well that