Green Grass (2 page)

Laura washes her hands in cold water and presses them to her cheeks to reduce the burning heat of alcohol. She drinks water from the tap then dries her face, feeling better, more controlled. A glance in the
mirror above the wash basin confirms that her hair has come loose and her expression is glazed. Laura places her palm over her reflected face, wishing she could change into someone else. This evening is hard work. She feels heavy, dull and joyless. And old. Too old to gulp her wine and let Jack irritate her. And far too old to pour her heart out to Manfred. She must stop feeling sorry for herself; her face is definitely beginning to set in a downward droop. Not very becoming. Laura cranks a grin onto her face – it almost hurts, it feels so alien.

Unequal to dealing with her state of mind, Laura fiddles in her make-up bag for her lipstick She smoothes it across her mouth, repins her hair and makes her mirror face, with eyes wide, chin down and what she hopes is a sophisticated and provocative small smile playing on her lips. Making the most of having got this look right, she pushes wide the door back into the restaurant and stalks out with determined grace. The plan is that she will skim back to the table, and will be admired by all she passes for her smiling chic. Inigo will be amazed. Laura holds her head high, pretends to be a swan, and steps straight into a pile of white polystyrene boxes which are lurching along from the kitchens.

‘Ow! God, I'm sorry. Oh bugger. So much for being a swan, or indeed soignée,' she mutters, crouching to
help pick up the flimsy boxes, thankful that she is hidden from the restaurant tables by a frosted-glass screen. The man behind the boxes still has two, but he lets them fall and holds out both hands to pull her up from where she scrabbles for a lid behind the lavatory door.

‘I'm so sorry. Are you all right? I hope—' He breaks off as she faces him. He forgets his hands are still holding hers, tightening with amazement. ‘You're Laura. How extraordinary. It's Guy. Do you remember me?'

Laura pulls back, breathless and flushing, madly convinced for a moment that she is naked.

‘Guy,' she says and stops, unable to think of anything more to say. She stares at Guy who is taller than she is, even though her heels are so high she sways on them. The silence is a flash of time, but it is painful before Laura breaks it.

‘What are these boxes for?'

Guy laughs, and Laura stops feeling naked although her throat is thudding with shock and a sense of peeled-back years. She was twenty when she last saw him.

‘They're for my vegetables. I had to drive down with an extra delivery this evening. This place is getting through the stuff twice as fast as I anticipated.'

‘What did you bring?' Laura asks, afraid that to
ask anything less bland might bring back the naked feeling.

Guy grins, as if he knows what she is thinking. ‘Mushrooms straight out of a compost heap and still steaming. But this is incredible – to see you again.' He pulls her away from the screen, back towards the tables and the lit restaurant. ‘You've changed, and yet you haven't. You're looking lovely, Laura. Tell me, what are you doing here? How are you? I see your brother sometimes.'

Even though she doesn't, Laura says, ‘I know.' The swirling roar of the restaurant hovers between them as they stand silent for a second. Laura has a sense of toppling, which she puts down to her heels. She hopes Guy doesn't put it down to drunkenness. Determined to get a grip on herself she holds out her hand, intending a businesslike shake. ‘I must go back to Inigo and the others.'

Guy takes her hand and kisses it. ‘I'm so glad to see you,' he says quietly. She turns and walks away.

Back at the their table, Inigo is discoursing on his favourite topic, loops, to an audience of only Manfred. Jack has vanished.

‘You see, the Möbius strip is in essence a loop. It moves and changes, yet goes nowhere and stays the
same. It is a metaphor for the absurdity of life. Take Samuel Beckett …'

Manfred, who is writing notes, leaning forward eagerly across the table, nods and scribbles ‘Samuel Beckett' in his notebook.

‘Take
Godot
, for example.' Manfred takes
Godot
. Inigo interlaces his fingers and straightens his arms over the table, stretching his palms towards Manfred's eager nose and face. ‘In
Waiting for Godot
, nothing happens twice. It's brilliant. Superb.' Inigo stops, his expression arrested, gaze fixed on Manfred, waiting. Manfred chews his pencil, and looks blank.

Laura smiles encouragingly at him and kicks Inigo, muttering. ‘Don't start, please. I don't think Manfred is a Beckett fan.'

But Inigo is warming to his theme, and he delves in his pocket to bring out a strip of black rubber which he passes to Manfred. Manfred shrinks back; it looks like something for taking blood pressure, or more likely an implement for kinky sex. He wants none of it.

Inigo's eyes are blazing enthusiasm as he changes gear and motors smoothly on with his theories. ‘You see, the Möbius strip has no end and no beginning. Look at it. Look at life. We are born, we wake up each day, we eat, we go to sleep, and at some point we die and are replaced by the next
generation. It is futile and wonderful, moving and petrifying.'

‘It's just one of his strips,' Laura hisses to Manfred. ‘Do you see? It looks like a link of a chain or a figure of eight, but actually it is a form with one side and one edge. It was invented by a German mathematician, in fact. August Ferdinand Möbius was his name.'

Manfred watches her run her finger along the whole of the black rubber thing, proving presumably that it has one side. This is lost on him, but he does like leaning towards Laura, breathing in the scent of her hair and her perfume as he looks over her shoulder at the strip.

‘What's it for?' he asks.

‘It's not so much that it's for anything, it's a physical manifestation of an idea,' Laura begins to explain. She loves amassing, reconstituting and doling out information. Some people, including her older brother when they were children, and her own children now, interpret this as control freakery and appalling bossiness, but Laura sees it as a way of keeping some part of her brain alive. There have been times in the thirteen years that she has been a mother, when she has felt her brain beginning to sidle softly out of her head. Without a concerted effort to return it to position, Laura imagines her brain might just bob away to a peachy cloud where it will live in peace for
ever, wallowing in the luxury of having continuous, uninterrupted thoughts whenever it wants to. She would then be left, lobotomised and dutiful, to meet her family's needs without ever complaining or thinking for herself. In many ways it would be a huge relief.

Jack reappears at the table, brushing a casual hand across the light down on his head then leaning over to kiss the crown of Laura's.

‘I've got a taxi waiting outside. I'll take Manfred back to his hotel and we'll talk in the morning,' he says, folding the receipt ostentatiously into smaller and smaller rectangles, just in case anyone missed the fact that he has paid the bill.

Manfred rises and reluctantly bids Laura farewell. He would like to stay drinking coffee and schnapps and preening his intellect; he thinks it is a bit much of Jack to drag him away as if he is a schoolboy, but it is difficult to argue with someone who presents his own suggestions as a fait accompli.

Laura and Inigo, left alone at the table, are suddenly and simultaneously overwhelmed with a desire for sleep. He smiles and holds out a hand to her.

‘Come on, let's go home, it's late.'

The winter sun wakes Laura, and she opens her eyes to a dazzle of pink, glad for once of Inigo's belief that curtains would cut off his creative dynamic with the world. Buoyed by the roseate joy of the morning, she rises, determined to be serene today, and performs what should be a short but satisfying sequence of yoga stretches on the floor at the end of the bed. In fact it is nothing of the sort. Collapsing with a groan from the agony of doggy position, she decides to look for an alternative exercise programme. Inigo sleeps on. All she can see of him is the black slash of his hair on the pillow. In all the years they have been together, he has never woken up before her; even if his alarm clock is set, Inigo is incapable of being first out of bed. He likes someone else to pave his way.

Outside, sunbeams stretch across the street and the cars parked on each side of the road glitter and sparkle, coated with frost like the crystallised fruits Laura's mother always has in the house for Christmas. Slapping
her feet up the rubber-floored staircase Laura realises with horror that no thank you letters have been written to her mother for the Christmas presents she sent the children, and now it is almost March. She wonders whether to try and get them to do it this morning, but decides it will be easier to forge their handwriting herself and fake the letters. That way at least they might appear to be a tiny bit grateful for Dolly's flower press and Fred's mouth organ.

She opens the door to Dolly's room, but the bed is already empty, the curtains flung back to let in the light and a rap music station is pulsing from the radio next to the bed. Dolly is in the bathroom. The air is thick with her favourite ozone-killing body sprays and hair volumiser, and the floor is littered with towels, T-shirts and trainers. Clearly Dolly is choosing her outfit for the day. The scene in Fred's room is somewhat different. A fug of dark, silent warmth greets Laura when she opens the door. She tries a schoolmistress approach first.

‘Good morning, Fred. It's a lovely, lovely day – do look.'

Her son does not move or make a sound, despite the rude crack of his blinds pinging up and the searchlight of morning sun falling onto his pillow and his turned-away face. Laura tugs at the duvet, and the visible part of Fred vanishes under the covers accompanied by a low groaning sound.

‘Come on, I'm making breakfast.' She turns to leave the room, trying not to look at the heaped clothes, the sliding piles of books and hurled odd socks. Picking her way out, Laura stands on something soft and yielding yet crunchy.

‘Urgh, gross. It's something alive, I think!' she shrieks.

Fred is out of bed in a flash. ‘Where? Let's see.' He kneels next to her, scrabbling on the rug, then sighs. ‘Mum, you've trodden on my owl pellet. That's so annoying, I was going to dissect it.'

Laura shudders. ‘Why was it on the floor then? What's in it anyway?'

Both of them crouch on the floor, examining the desiccated mess of mangled feather and bone. Fred picks up part of a tiny skull.

‘Look, this is a shrew, I think. I didn't know London owls ate shrews.'

‘Where did you find the pellet?'

‘Under the oak trees on the Heath. I think the owl's got a house in there. It's right by a rubbish bin and that was where I thought he got his food.' Fred is wide awake now, picking over the bits of reconstituted owl dinner. Laura glances at her watch.

‘Come on. You'll have to leave it for now. Just hurry up and come down for breakfast.'

Fred scowls at her. ‘All right, all right, there's no need to get in a psyche, is there?'

Laura doesn't answer. She bangs on Dolly's door as she passes and shouts, ‘Breakfast Doll, come on,' with little hope of being heard above the whirr of the hairdryer and the thud of the radio. She runs downstairs and into the kitchen, imagining with savage pleasure the children's horror if she were to revert to a version of their behaviour and lie in bed refusing to get up or brush her hair or eat what is provided – Laura pours tea and places packets of cereal on the table, lost in her reverie, imagining herself lolling in the back of the car while her children drive, picking her nose, dangling her shoes from her toes and sighing at the choice of radio channel. It would be so enjoyable, such fun. Laura has forgotten how to have fun. Somewhere on the way to becoming a thirty-eight-year-old mother of adolescents, a wife manquée for fourteen years, she has left having fun behind.

Sighing, self-pity welling, Laura opens the fridge, reaching before she looks and thus dislodging a pyramid of eggs. One rolls out and breaks softly on her foot. ‘Sod it,' she murmurs.

‘If we had a dog your foot would be licked clean in a nano-second,' says Fred from the doorway where he has chosen to stand to eat his cereal. He prefers not to sit at the table, it makes the prospect of conversation with his sister more likely. He grins
at Laura, and despite the small humiliations of the morning concerning owl spit and feet, Laura smiles back, love surging because he looks so scrubbed, his hair slicked back with a wet comb from his brow, freckles a splash across his nose, and the hollow at the back of his neck visible again now after a severe interlude at the barber's shop, reminding her of long-ago life when he and Dolly were babies and she lay with them in bed feeding them for so long it seemed for ever.

‘Mum, why are you standing there with egg on your foot?' Dolly is at the table, her hair a sliding copper curtain as she leans over her bowl, shovelling spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth fast, flipping the pages of an exercise book between gulps. ‘We've got a maths block test this morning. Do you know any algebra formulas?'

‘You mean formulae,' Fred interrupts triumphantly.

‘Oh, shut up, you swot,' growls Dolly, sticking out her foot to trip him up. Fred flounders but doesn't fall, and Laura is wrenched back from the misty memories of their babydom by them hurling abuse and shreds of breakfast at one another.

Having just read a manual on how to raise happy children, Laura suppresses her maternal instinct, which is to scream, ‘Shut the hell up, you two, or I'll bang you heads together,' and opts for the
psychologically correct response: ‘I see that you are both angry – shall we all sit down and talk it through?'

Inigo walks in as Laura is saying this and looks at her incredulously. ‘Get a grip, Laura. They're never going to take that hippy crap seriously,' he says to her, adding, ‘What is that disgusting slime on your foot?' before clapping his hands like a tinpot dictator and yelling, ‘Dolly! Fred! Enough.'