I stifle a sigh. Patrick makes a clattering noise in the background, hitting the bucket against his folded ladders.
‘Oops, sorry!’ he shouts, coming into shot, and Mum’s set off, bringing her face right up to the screen.
‘Who’s that?’ she wants to know.
‘It’s Patrick, our grotto’s Santa?’ I say, knowing full well this’ll have her on the edge of her seat.
‘Oh yes, Patrick. Let me see him, then.’
I bite back the protest and instead hold the phone out, mouthing my apology to him behind the screen.
‘Hello, Mrs Frost,’ he says with all the politeness of a teenager meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. He waves into the camera, coming closer.
‘Ah! There you are, Patrick. I remember you. Like a young Patrick Swayze. Don’t I always say that, Margi? Margi?’
‘Yep, you do,’ I tell her off camera, and whenever she says it, all I ever hear is the ‘young’.
‘You’re a dog person, aren’t you, Patrick?’ she says.
‘He doesn’t want to adopt that beach dog, thanks, Mum,’ I cut her off. You can see why she’s indispensable at the dog rescue. Everyone she knows succumbs to the pressure eventually and ends up collecting their own Spanish mutt fresh from Heathrow quarantine.
‘Oh, I’d love to, only I work out of the house. Maybe one day,’ Patrick tells Mum.
‘Margi won’t take him, so there’s no point asking her. We always had dogs in our family, you know?’
‘We know,’ I say.
‘Margi’s in the foyer, you know, Patrick, with Gingersnaps, her sausage dog.’ She’s still shouting, loud enough to awaken every stray from Mijas to Malaga.
‘In the foyer?’ he repeats.
‘In the big frame.’
That’s when he catches on. ‘Oh, in the pictures?’
‘Yep, big gold frame, the royal wedding. That’d be nineteen eighty-one. Go and have a look.’
Oh no. I know exactly what she’s up to. It’s the FaceTime equivalent of showing him my embarrassing baby albums. Patrick’s way too polite to say no, so we both traipse through the doors and across the foyer to the cloakroom.
Beyond the sunburst windows, the street lights are just coming on and the sky isn’t completely dark yet so there’s enough light in here to find the picture Mum’s talking about.
Patrick examines the image in the frame. It’s an enlargement of a picture that appeared in the newspaper of Wheaton’s street party, a wash of faded red, white and blue. The whole village was there that day.
‘Can you see Margi and I at the front?’ Mum asks. ‘With her dad and little Gingersnaps?’
I oblige by pointing us out. I’m a gangly thing in a short kilt, Doc Martens and – oh Lord! – massively backcombed hair. I can smell the Elnett hairspray just looking at myself.
Patrick looks at me, and his eyes light up. ‘Nice hair,’ he tells me, not unkindly but definitely laughing. ‘Was Izz there too? I can’t see her.’
I look again. ‘There.’ Izz is right at the side in her sundress and strappy sandals. She’s smiling broadly and waving a Union flag.
‘Were you two mates at this point?’ he asks me.
‘Not yet. We didn’t really fall in together until Mum left for Spain.’
‘You’d be twenty-two or thereabouts when that was taken and studying at college,’ Mum’s saying.
‘What was twenty-two-year-old Margi like?’ Patrick’s asking through a grin, enjoying my discomfort, I reckon.
