Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.
December Third.
Belle.
Iam now officially unemployed. The creditors have been pushing and pushing and the company I worked for has been forced to file for bankruptcy. Whilst I’m grateful that they managed to pay us this month, I have no idea where next month’s money is going to come from.
I’ve spent the afternoon in the job centre, the evening on indeed.com and at gone midnight, when Chardonnay’s pilot pitched up again, I had jumped in my car and driven back to my parental home, unable to face another night of football-themed aural fun.
I quite like sneaking into my parents’ house in the early hours of the morning. There’s something forbidden about it, but it also gives me a couple of extra hours to enjoy the house without having to say hello to them first.
I may struggle with my family but I love this house. It was Nana’s and when she died it passed to Mum and we all moved in. It was before Dad had become super well-known and they were still besotted with each other. We have photos of moving day and the way he looks at her, and at the house, it’s as if he can’t believe his luck.
I particularly love my bedroom. It is tucked up at the very top of the house, where you have to twist and turn up narrow sets of stairs with aged, faded carpet, a feel of secret passageways and Agatha Christie novels accompanying you. A million coats of lead paint on the bannisters. It’s the one part of the house that is pure me, its closest contender being the room that Dad pretentiously calls the library but is in fact the old dining room lined with books that he has never read, their spines unbroken by any hand other than mine and Nana’s.
As you open the door to my room you see posters of epic performances blu-tacked on the walls, Fiona Shaw as Richard III, Jüri Järvet as Lear, Brooks’Dream, Gielgud’s Prospero, and they make me smile every time my eye catches them. Nana had worked in the wardrobe department at the RSC before getting married and moving to this house.The Tempestin 1957 at the Stratford-on-Avon theatre had been the last production there she had been involved with, so the Gielgud print was close to her heart and thus extra close to mine. I haven’t made it there yet, but one day I will.
I had toyed with moving the posters with me but until I have a permanent spot they can stay here. They help me when I have to come home and they keep some small part of Nana alive in this house, her house, where most evidence of her has been expunged, replaced with sleek surfaces and symbols of Dad’s success. With the posters here in my room, it feels like an extension of her and me. Special, just to the two of us.
There are secrets in my room, obvious ones like inside the wardrobe doors where I had spray painted peace and anarchy signs. My old bear, One Eye, still hidden between the mattress and the fabric struts of my bed after my mother had given him to my sister and whom I had stolen back, withstanding slapped legs and a week of high dudgeon. Plimsolls I’d refused to throw out after winning the egg and spoon race in them at primary school – my only sporting glory.
Through some magical psychic luck, last night I had dreamt of a secret stash tin that I had lost as a teen. It is nothing short of a miracle that I found it upon waking today, exactly where my dream had said, in the plimsolls. I remember losing it fifteen years ago; many tears had fallen as I tore my room apart.
I stopped smoking forever ago, when Marsha was born, bar occasional but rare parties and moments of weak will, but with today being my mum’s birthday and our first family get-together since the tabloid stories exploded, I reckon today constitutes both.
Tin in hand, I tiptoe down the stairs, in the most exaggerated fashion with arms wide, hands splayed, down through the front door and into the garden. If I avoid the kitchen I should be safe. My parents won’t expect to see me until noon. One of the advantages of being subject to such low expectations.
I sit myself in the low-hanging curved bough of a favourite tree, an old pine that had proved my haven for years. Here I playedPeter Pan,Wind in the WillowsandFairy Kingdomas a child, later becoming Ariel to the tree’s Prospero, Banquo to the tree’s Macbeth.
Currently though I am channelling my adolescence rather than my childhood and am wearing the most ridiculous short pyjama set that I had when I was sixteen. I’ve grown a little since then and my boobs are spilling over my top, and my shorts feel like they are extracting a kidney. I’m completing this high-fashion ensemble by being wrapped in an ancient, scratchy check blanket that I think has been around since my great-grandma’s time. It may still have smallpox.
I make and light the spliff and lean back against the trunk. Familiarity waves over me as I inhale.
My mind tracks back to yesterday. Any chance of paying back Chardonnay seems pretty weak right now. Am I going to panic? Thanks to my find – currently coursing in through my mouth and down into my lungs – probably not until tomorrow.
‘Stillsmoking?’ A deep male voice speaks behind me. The voice is vaguely familiar but out of place here. I spin around, my blanket slipping slightly with my movement, revealing a sliver of Snoopy chatting with Charlie Brown.
What the hell?
‘Rory?’
‘Hey, how you doing? I didn’t expect to see you today, but one sniff of that and I figured you must be home. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be Rose.’ He smiles and I remember the last time I saw him and my heart cracks a little.
‘Yep, back for the birthday.’ I wave the spliff at him.
‘Nah, you’re okay.’ He shakes his head, his dark red hair longer than I remember. He’s allowed his curls to develop instead of shearing them back and trying to pretend they didn’t exist as he had at eighteen. It suits him. He was always puckish but just a smidge. Willing to do as he was told, not go full carnival chaos. Mind you, Rory wasn’t all bad; from what I remember it was his girlfriend Jessica I had struggled with. She was one of those women that always seemed at ease with herself. A state of being I can only dream of. What must that feel like? To wake up every morning and not worry about whether you’re adequate.
‘Whose birthday? Not yours. Isn’t your birthday in spring? March?’ Rory’s question interrupts my reminiscing. How the hell does he remember that?
I remember the pitch of his keen. That will stay with me for ever.
‘Yeah, it’s Mum’s.’
‘Your dad said he’d be home with family, he didn’t say it was your mum’s birthday. How is she?’
‘Difficult. But still the better of the two.’
