Home Truths Read online

Cat blushes and doesn't know what to say and Ben thinks It's funny so he dabs the tip of his ice cream against her nose. Then he kisses it off. ‘Thanks for your message,’ he says. ‘You're a madwoman. But I've given Marjorie a promotion.’

  They sit, busy licking, on the low wall outside their flat. Cat bites the bottom of her cornet, looks at Ben and then sucks until her cheeks pucker and the ice cream scoots down the cone. Her daft face makes Ben laugh.

  ‘I can't believe you save your Flake until last,’ Cat says, knowing She'd never have the self-restraint to push the chocolate down the centre of the cornet and studiously eat around it.

  ‘I Don't think I have a system,’ Ben says, ‘but I'm doing it because I know it'll wind you up.’

  ‘Bastard!’ Cat says softly. She's finished her ice cream now and she lays her head against Ben's shoulder. ‘I'm sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ says Ben. ‘I hate falling out with you.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Cat.

  ‘It's not what we're about,’ says Ben. He offers his cornet to her, He's nibbled down so the Flake, somewhat phallic, stands proud. Cat takes a bite. It's a beautiful evening. If they go inside, there'll be the television to flick on, supper to discuss, post to open. If they walk on, They'll hit that long patch of shade as the street bends right. So they decide to stay put, to sit on the wall and wonder what to say and who will speak first.

  ‘Do you not want to have a baby?’ Ben asks outright, because actually That's the basic question he needs answered.

  Cat looks uneasy. ‘No,’ she admits quietly, ‘I Don't. Not now.’

  ‘Not now, not never?’ Ben probes gently.

  It strikes Cat she hasn't actually thought about it to this extent. ‘I'm so caught up in the mess of the moment,’ she admits, ‘I can't see beyond the immediate future.’

  Ben nods. ‘I know how awful all these revelations have been for you,’ he says. ‘Actually, I Don't – I can only begin to imagine.’

  ‘It's thrown into turmoil all my plans, all my previous beliefs,’ Cat explains.

  Ben nods.

  ‘I'm not ready to be a mummy,’ Cat says sadly.

  ‘Because You're not ready to accept your own parents?’ Ben suggests. ‘In retrospect, your childhood may not have been perfect, but it is over.’

  Cat shrugs. ‘It's all been so – shocking.’

  ‘I know. But you need to confront it all,’ Ben advises, ‘somehow. Stacey said the same, didn't she? I Don't know if That's by soul-searching or full-on confrontation. You need to decide. But being in this vortex of bewilderment Isn't good, Cat. If You're stuck in a downward spiral, it figures you can't move forward.’

  Cat nods. Ben wonders whether to tell her about Django's call. But he can't really, the call was in confidence.

  ‘You have all these strands of your life, flailing around,’ he says. ‘You need to either tie them up, or cut them off.’

  ‘I know,’ says Cat, ‘but That's terrifying.’

  ‘You need to face facts – quite literally,’ Ben says. ‘You should go and see Django – just you. Without me. No sisters to hide behind. Talk. Shout. Cry. I Don't know. But you must have a million things to ask and he probably has a million things to tell.’

  ‘I can't believe my father is alive,’ Cat tells him. ‘I can't believe I am Django's daughter. I Don't want to see him, Ben. Should I have known? Shouldn't I have wondered at least?’ Ben shrugs and places his hand over hers. ‘Now that I know where I come from, I Don't quite know where I'm going.’ She pauses and rests her head on his shoulder. ‘That's why I feel ambivalent about starting a family.’

  ‘I understand you may feel this is not the right time to have a baby just now,’ Ben sighs, because actually he'd truly love to have his family under way soon. He's thirty-four years old, he feels It's right, logical, that he should feel broody himself. ‘But I also need to know that you are open to change. And most of all, I need to know that, theoretically, I'm still the bloke you'd want to have a baby with.’

  Cat jerks her head up from his shoulder and looks at him, shocked. How could big strong Ben doubt this?

  Ben shrugs. ‘You have to hug me back, sometimes, you know,’ he explains.

  She looks at him again and despite his strong physique, his handsome face, his silvering hair, just now he looks like a little boy. Cat stares at her knees, ashamed. Regards a smudge of ice cream on her jeans. ‘Of course there's only you,’ she whispers. ‘My family begins with you.’

  They sit on the wall and like the words.

  ‘But listen,’ says Ben, ‘I hate condoms. And pulling out is grim – and not sodding fair. Messy too.’

  ‘Blow-job?’ Cat says with meek coyness.

  ‘Swallow?’

  She giggles.

  ‘The pill?’ Ben asks.

  ‘But I put on weight and got spotty last time,’ Cat says.

  ‘I still fancied you,’ says Ben.

  And Cat knows that he did.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says.

  ‘For the time being, hey?’ says Ben.

  Cat gives a small nod and slips her hand into his. It's a good enough answer for Ben.

  Bad Seed

  And where is she? The mother who ran off with the cowboy from Denver when her daughters were small, who reappeared with bombshells to drop thirty years later, has since returned to the United States. It's now June and Penny has been home for a couple of weeks and though the weather is glorious, Penny hasn't once been for ice cream. Not even a pink taster spoon. Though she'd love a sundae, nowhere but Fountains will do. Once tasted, never forsaken. However, she hasn't felt like going there but she'd rather go without ice cream than compromise with a tub from her local store. And she'd rather go without than confront sweet Juliette and her hopes of hearing that closure was a magical thing.

  The house was sparkling, the fridge was full, the washing was done and the garden was so tidy that short of untangling blades of grass with a toothcomb, there was nothing more for Penny to do. The silence in the house was deafening but a coffee morning with Marcia and Noni would be more so. So she drove. All the way to the state line. Then she drove back and sat in the drive and berated the lawn for still looking so manicured and thus unmowable. She sat in the car with the engine running calculating the hours and hours until bedtime. A beautiful home, spick and span, empty and soulless. She phoned her home number from her cell phone and listened to Bob's voice on the answering machine. She phoned her home number again and cursed technology, denounced it as trickery that she could hear Bob's voice so clearly when the man no longer existed. She knew she ought to re-record the message. Some might think it macabre to hear a dead man's voice on it. And there was new information to record. She'd have to reword the message in the first person. No more ‘we’. But how could she wipe Bob's voice away?

  Penny started the car and headed out of town. She arrived at the intersection and turned right with a bit of a sigh and soon enough turned onto the mountain road. She wasn't heading for ice cream, or Ridge, she'd just stop at the first village, Hubbardton's Spring. There was an easy trail there that would take her to one of the most gorgeous panoramas in the vicinity. She drove through the village and along a no-through-route, parking up soon after the road petered out into an unsurfaced one. Her eyes were filled with the lushness of early summer; sumac trees and maples cloaked in such verdant hues it was difficult to imagine them ablaze in gold and scarlet and amber in a few months' time. Her sensible summer sandals were soon filled with powdery earth and the occasional small stone, viciously sharp despite its size. She headed for the vantage point high over the river, the land then surging and swooping to the mountains. It was one of Bob's favourite paths. Maybe he'd meet her there. She walked with hope though she chided herself an idiot for doing so. Wasn't she done with retracing old footsteps? After all, wherever she went now, she could look behind and see the unmistakable truth: there would only ever be one set of footprints.

  There was nobody there. Of course there w
as nobody there.

  Penny scrambled down to the cluster of flat rocks and took a seat. The purity of the air, the vividness of the view, the reality of the chill and scuff of the rock on which she sat, infused her with the clarity she needed.

  I guess there's no point in mourning him any longer, because he's not coming back. There's only photographs and memories. I can close my eyes and try to recall the sight and sound and smell of him but I can't hope to conjure him.

  I need to draw the proverbial line under it all. Re-record the answering machine. Find different trails to walk. I need to keep on going. Move on. I guess that's a positive thing to do – even if at the moment there seems to be a futility and finality to it which seems negative. If I can't hope for Bob – if I admit he's dead – will it somehow kill him off entirely? Death might be ultimately the simplest, truest thing we'll ever know – but it's way too complicated for the living.

  People are coming. I can hear them. I want to curse them for stealing my moment. I want to tell them they're trespassing. This is mine – take your picnic and your laughter some place else! But Bob and I often shared this hike with other people – friends and strangers – so I can't expect Bob's death to bequest it sacred, private land. I'll go. I'll nod at these people. Maybe I'll even say, Hi, enjoy the view, it sure is pretty today. Perhaps I can smile at them too.

  Penny could have gone home. Hubbardton's Spring was pretty much equidistant from Ridge where Fountains was, and Lester Falls where she lived. But it was a fine afternoon. And there was nothing to do at home. And still there were hours until bedtime. Anyway, perhaps Juliette didn't work Sundays. And with the trails now fully open, the parlour would be fuller anyway. Though there were more cars parked along the way, people were obviously out and about on the trails because Fountains was no busier than when Penny had last been in.

  ‘Well look who it is,’ said Juliette, rushing to the counter to have Gloria load a taster spoon with Coffeebanoffee. ‘So good to see you!’ she told Penny. ‘Sit! How was your trip?’ Juliette's mousy little face, with her generous smile and button-black eyes, was alert with anticipation and affection. Penny fixed a beatific smile to her face which she hoped would tell the girl all she could possibly want to know. And shut her up. She sat at the table and chided herself for not ordering her ice cream to go; for coming here in the first place.

  Juliette returned with the sundae and loitered, waiting for Penny to engage her in conversation or even invite her to sit. But Penny appeared not to notice her, so engrossed was she in a leaflet she'd picked up outside the gallery in Hubbardton's Spring. When Penny noticed that Gloria was busy serving at the counter and Juliette had gone through to collect orders, she left the parlour and her uneaten sundae.

  ‘Hey – Penny? Wait up.’

  Penny turns to see Juliette hurrying down the street, with her sweet smile and a warm wave and something held aloft in her other hand.

  ‘Hey Penny,’ says Juliette, a little breathless, ‘here. You hardly ate a bite.’ She hands Penny a polystyrene block encasing the tubbed-up leftovers of her sundae. Juliette regards her, tilts her head, frowns a little whilst smiling. A contradiction in terms, Penny thinks to herself, like so much of life.

  Love blossoming from a bad seed.

  ‘You crying?’ Juliette seems perturbed.

  Penny touches her cheeks and swipes away the tears.

  ‘I don't know whether our relationship was blessed or doomed,’ Penny announces and is helpless to stem the flow of words streaming out. ‘I try and defend my actions, I try to justify that I was young, that it was the 1960s, that I was a crazy mixed-up kid, that I wasn't in love with Nicholas anyway. But actually, what Bob and I did was wrong. Love blossomed from a bad seed – it screwed with the lives of others.’ She stops abruptly, gasping a little.

  ‘I think you have it wrong, Penny,’ Juliette says with a caring tilt to her head. ‘It's not your fault Bob died – and it's not your fault that you guys fell in love,’ and she touches Penny's arm tenderly.

  Penny feels surprisingly irritated. How bizarre to feel the need to defend the bad in herself. ‘But my dear, you really don't know me,’ she protests in an accent more English than at any time over the last three decades.

  ‘Sure I don't know the ins and outs – who does? But I'm a good judge of character,’ Juliette says, a little defensively, ‘and I sense you and Bob shared something beautiful.’

  ‘We did,’ Penny says flatly, ‘but at a high price. And I'm sorry, Juliette, but you are not a particularly good judge of character – you have me all wrong.’

  ‘Great love isn't given to those not worthy of it,’ Juliette says. Then she quickly regards her feet and looks a little bashful. ‘That's a song lyric by my favourite band, actually. But it says what I believe. You were lucky, you and Bob. You were blessed.’ She looks up and gives Penny, who is glowering, a little grin.

  ‘But those around us weren't,’ Penny says stonily. ‘Juliette honey, I'm tired and I just want to drive home.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ says Juliette, but still she loiters. ‘It's just I didn't like to hear you say you were a bad seed – you're not, you're what me and my mom call a good egg.’

  Suddenly, Penny is disconcerted that her words have been listened to so earnestly but that the impression they've given is erroneous. And that this sweet young girl, troubled by the death of a useless alcoholic father, should have Penny so wrong too. Penny might once have been wryly amused at being glorified, but just now it seems immoral.

  ‘You draw a picture only from what you've heard,’ Penny tells Juliette. ‘Believe me there's a whole bunch of stuff you wouldn't want to know.’

  Juliette looks a little taken aback. ‘But I like you.’

  ‘Juliette,’ Penny says, scrunching her eyes shut against the headache of it all, ‘if I told you I had three daughters – whom I abandoned when the youngest was just a baby, would you believe me? Would you like me then?’

  Juliette balks. What a weird question. ‘Of course I wouldn't believe you,’ she says.

  ‘Well, I did,’ Penny declares hoarsely. ‘I did the unbelievable, OK? I walked out on three little girls. And you know something, I actually never regretted it. Now you stand there and tell me that the love I had with Bob was a good thing. You stand there and tell me I'm not a bad seed. You tell me you like me now.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I'm no better than your father – in fact I'm worse. He treated you bad when he was drunk and in some ways not accountable for his behaviour. I walked out on my children when I was stone cold sober.’

  Juliette stares; disbelief and hurt and horror striating her face. Penny perversely welcomes the scorch of shame which cuts through her. ‘You know what,’ Penny mutters, ‘I have to go.’ And though Juliette stands there motionless, dumb-struck and bereft, Penny walks the short distance to her car, dumps the polystyrene container in a trash-can on the way and drives off without a backward glance.

  What is one more person hating her? What is one more person to have let down? Join the queue, Juliette, join the queue.

  Penny is still awake in the early hours of the next morning. She's sitting in the dark, in Bob's chair, wondering why. In the last twelve hours, she's said goodbye to Bob at the vantage point near Hubbardton's, she's revealed the ugly truth of her life to Juliette and she's re-recorded the answering-machine message. So why does she feel so anxious and fretful? Why is there no sense of peace, of relief, of lightness, of that oft-bandied term closure?

  Penny knows why. She can't achieve closure because the door cannot yet be shut. It is jammed with issues she must confront and own, see in black-and-white in the clear light of day, acknowledge out loud. Where she'd gone that previous afternoon, what she'd spoken of to Juliette, what she'd recorded into the answering machine, were single strands in a knot of loose ends which need to be untied.

  Stray Cat Blue

  Ben hadn't asked Cat what she was going to do on her day off which, this week, fell on a Wednesd
ay. He hadn't asked and she hadn't mentioned it because he seemed a little distracted anyway, somewhat stressed. He was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through the newspaper as if every item of news irked him.

  ‘Everything OK, doctor?’ she asked, handing him a mug of coffee and then giving his neck a quick rub.

  ‘What? Oh, fine,’ said Ben. ‘It's probably going to be a bit of a full-on day, babe. I may be home late.’

  ‘I'll have your pipe and slippers waiting,’ she laughed, stroking his closely cropped hair; the flecks of grey catching glints of silver as she did so.

  ‘That's my girl,’ he said.

  ‘Although you may have to fetch your slippers yourself – I might be late home too,’ Cat said.

  ‘Oh? Staff meeting or something?’ said Ben.

  Cat shook her head. ‘It's my day off,’ she said. She took a seat beside him, pulled the chair close so their knees touched. He looked at her: her cheeks were a little flushed, her eyes flitted with whatever she was on the verge of saying. She gave a quick shrug. ‘I'm going to go to Derbyshire. Just a day-trip.’

  Ben stared at her, fighting hard to keep horror from his face. He must not let his dismay show. He must say nothing. He must smile and nod and instead say, Wow, babe, wow. He must fight the urge to say, Don't! You can't! Not today, Cat! He can't warn her that today's not a good day for a round trip to Derbyshire. Because then she'd ask why. And he couldn't say, Because Django's coming to see me. Because, as a doctor, he was bound by the Hippocratic oath. And anyway, just look at her, all flushed with the supreme effort of arriving at such a proactive and possibly tough course of action. How much late-night thinking had she done to come to this decision? How much soul-searching had she accomplished to be ready to go home and face her father? Ben loved her so much for her courage and her reckoning, but as full as his heart was for her, it bled for her too. Ben had been so anxious that Django might not make this trip – but suddenly he was hoping this would be the case precisely. Ben felt torn and compromised. He'd made the appointment on Django's behalf and without Cat's knowledge because he was worried about Django. Because he had thought it was the right thing to do. Just now, though, he wondered what right he had at all. He felt quite sick.