‘Lillian, hello—’ she began but a diatribe interrupted her greeting.
‘I have sand all over my front garden and where the bloody hell are you?’ shrieked her mother.
Shocked, Lou stammered: ‘Lillian, I’m away and I didn’t know they were coming—’
‘You always come to me that day,’ interrupted her mother dramatically. ‘I was exhausted, utterly exhausted and I had told you I was getting sand. It’s not too much to expect you to do one little thing. I don’t know why you ran off. You’re being overdramatic, as usual, and Gloria said—’
Toni, who was suddenly looking slightly green, grabbed the phone. ‘Lillian,’ she snapped. ‘We’re away. This can wait. None of us can help you right now.’
‘Toni, where are you?’
The tone of their mother’s voice had changed and Lou heard it as clear as a bell. She wondered how she had never noticed this difference before. Lillian spoke to her in two ways: either as sweetie, milk of human kindness, or as if she were a Victorian scullery maid who could be screamed at.
Toni had somehow managed to get their mother off the phone at high speed.
‘Why—’ began Lou, but Toni interrupted her.
‘Can’t talk,’ she said, looking even more green. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘The prawns!’ said Trinity, horrified.
Toni clamped a hand over her mouth and began to run to their door.
After an hour of going in and out to Toni in the bathroom, holding back her hair as she was sick and supplying her with face cloths and water, Lou came in with more towels and water and sat on the edge of their bath.
‘Why is Lillian different with you than with me?’ she asked, holding onto the rehydration salts that Toni said she couldn’t possibly look at now.
Toni leaned over the bowl again, wondering whether the desire to eat would ever return. She cursed all shellfish and the horses they rode in on. Was she going to vomit again ...?
‘Why does she treat us differently?’ asked Lou again.
‘You have no sense of timing,’ Toni said weakly as the nausea passed. She didn’t have the bandwidth to think about their mother’s behaviour now.
Sinking back onto the floor, she lay on the bath towel and thought she had never lain anywhere as wonderful. If she was offered the presidency,anypresidency, she would have to say no because this, this towel and this bathroom floor, was the most wonderful place in the world to lie very, very still, so she would not want to vomit again.
If she promised to some higher deity that she would never eat a mollusc or oyster or anything that crawled along the seabed again, would she be spared? A vision of herself offering a sacrifice to the deity came into her head. What would she have to bring? Something valuable? The vintage Pucci scarf she’d bought in that designer second-hand shop in the Portobello market in London? Her ancient black platform Gucci mules that she’d actually bought new but were now so old that they qualified as vintage. They were older than Trinity. She envisioned Trinity, clad in a toga and flowers, presenting the Pucci scarf and the mules on an altar while a phalanx of Roman goddesses looked down their aristocratic noses at the offerings and argued about who’d get what.
Pete’s mother would have a fit, she thought with the limited amount of wild amusement her weakened body could manage.
‘I think I’m having a hallucinatory moment,’ she said to Lou, who snorted with derision.
‘What is wrong with you, Lou?’ Toni asked crossly. ‘You always take care of sick people. Why not me now?’
‘I told you not to eat those prawns,’ said Lou with equal irritation. ‘I don’t care how freshly they were caught or how quickly you meant to come home from the market, you insisted on stopping for coffee, it was twenty-one degrees outside and prawns do not like heat.’
Toni scowled. ‘If I didn’t love you, I would hate you at this precise moment,’ she said.
‘If you’d listened to me, you wouldn’t be sick right now!’ Lou continued. ‘Nobody listens to me!’
‘I do listen to you,’ said Toni wearily. She might as well tell Lou where she’d been going wrong all these years. There was no point in circling around the fact: Lou needed to know.
Not knowing stuff was too painful, as Toni now knew. If someone had told her that her husband was a gambling addict, things would have been very different. She’d have money in the bank and she might still have a viable career. Knowledge truly was power.
‘I’m going to be really honest with you, Lou, probably because I’m ill and my electrolytes are all over the place. So don’t kill me afterwards, OK? Lillian treats you differently because you allow her to: it’s that simple,’ she said tiredly. ‘You have a co-dependent relationship with her. She’d love to behave that way with me, but I said no a long time ago. I did not want to run around after her and tell her how fabulous she is.’
‘Co-dependent relationship?’ Lou said, confused. ‘With my mother?’
‘One person is a caretaker and the other takes advantage of that fact. You take care of other people ...’ She stopped because she could hear Lou’s sharp intake of breath.
