Too Close to Home Read online

  Minny started to get up, but just then there was a thumpety thump from the back room and the baby came bustling round the corner, crawled up to her and grabbed her hair so he could get up on his feet to kiss her. She picked him up, wiping snot off her jaw, and carried him into the front room. At least it was Friday and her mother would be home soon.

  The front room was misleadingly subtle and sophisticated, at least when you looked in from the street outside and if you ignored the green plastic highchair. There was no TV because that was in the back room: instead it had the real-wood bookshelves and the walnut table and chairs; the carved mantelpiece with ceramic tiles and the big old-fashioned wooden globe their mother had bought on her honeymoon in Italy. You couldn’t see the baby toys from outside, stacked underneath the window, alongside the piles of books that had never fitted on to Babi’s shelves. Also it wasn’t mouldy, like most of the other rooms were in the corners, except when their mother had just been on one of her cleaning binges. Minny was up for playing cars with the baby for a while, but he’d already heard the Countdown music and was crawling next door, to Aisling.

  ‘You can go and do your homework,’ Babi announced, suddenly appearing in the doorway with a giant metal spoon and stepping over the baby. She had her house shoes on now, which were incredibly shiny, just like her outside shoes, but without the four-inch heel that could kill a horse. ‘I will look after him till five thirty.’ Five thirty was when their mother was meant to be home.

  ‘It’s Friday.’ She never did homework on Fridays.

  Babi shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. But I don’t have to cook till then. So …’

  Minny trailed upstairs. She didn’t get so much time free of sisterly duty that she could turn it down. Summer holidays soon though; her mother would be off work, more or less, so there wouldn’t be nearly so much for Minny to do in the house. Of course that all meant more time listening to her sisters babble. Sel just banged on and on about all this crazy Bible stuff she insisted on reading at the moment; Minny felt like she was sharing a room with all of them as well: Moses and Hagar and Jephthah and their nasty habits. And Ash lived in a world of her own, people were always saying it – with varying degrees of indulgence. Took up plenty of space in the real world as well though.

  It still seemed unnecessary to do homework on a Friday evening, so she went into her mother’s room and flipped open her laptop. It wasn’t supposed to be up here. Computing was meant to be done downstairs to ensure that no one happened on anything unsuitable. Still, whenever anyone said they had serious homework to do they were allowed to take the laptop to wherever it was quiet, and then no one ever remembered to bring it back. Sometimes all Minny wanted was a couple of minutes to talk to someone, an adult who wasn’t talking to someone else at the same time. And then email was the best thing on offer.

  ‘Howzaboy Kevin,’ she typed. Sometimes they addressed each other as if they were drunken American characters from P.G. Wodehouse books. ‘I had a triple-suck day today, having to listen to Penny gloat all morning and all through lunchtime about how much she snogs Jorge, and then horrible bitter Mrs Lemon said she couldn’t give back everyone else’s creative-writing homework from last weekend because she had to spend so long reading mine because it was twenty-two pages. And she said some of my sentences were nearly a page long too.’ She wouldn’t reread it now to check if that was true. She didn’t particularly want ever to reread it. ‘Like I was just a show-off and a suck-up. Like I’d ever try to show off to her, as if I didn’t know better. Everyone looked at me like I was the worst geek in the world.’ If only they knew; she’d had lunchtime detention on Monday because of the maths homework she should have been doing instead of writing the last ten pages, and failed a French test the same day. ‘Can’t WAIT till next year when I get a new teacher, though she’ll probably have put me down a set. Mum says she won’t, but I bet she does.’

  She never felt she had to think about what she was writing with her Uncle Kevin. He was all piled-up sentences and missing commas himself, so there was no great stylistic pressure, and she never worried that she was boring him because he remembered the tiniest things. He said her emails were like a soap opera set in a school, and that he loved hearing about teachers and about evil girls like Juliet and Emma. Mostly she resisted the temptation to make things up to please him. And he only asked the most general questions about Aisling or Selena so she didn’t feel like she had to keep him up to date on how school and Ash were getting on with each other. Which was good because it was depressing enough having to answer her mother’s questions.

  Also you could talk about books to him, stuff you’d read and stuff you might read, without feeling like an idiot. He had time and he was interested. The day Minny had learned to read and knew she had, they ran all the way home from school so that Ash had to ride the last quarter-mile on their mother’s back, and as soon as they were in, bundling up the stairs to their flat, Nita had phoned Kevin at his bar in Ireland and got her, Minny, to read out two verses of a poem. Dylan Thomas, it was. And Uncle Kevin burst into tears. Minny missed him, not that they’d ever seen much of him, but he’d always been on the phone to one or other of her parents, and sometimes he’d visited, laden down with bags of chocolate bars. Now her father was gone it was only emails.

  Anyway he already hated Mrs Lemon and he’d be sympathetic. English was supposed to be her favourite subject, not the one she dreaded only slightly less than PE. It was her thing, reading books and writing stories, what she had always been best at, not just compared with how she did at other things but compared with the rest of the class. Only Mrs Lemon hadn’t given her anything higher than a B all year, and mostly B minuses. ‘Don’t know what to read next. Mum says it’s time for Jane Austen but I’m not sure.’ She might just spend the weekend on Malory Towers or The Railway Children, but that wasn’t something she would tell Kevin.

  She was thinking of a sign-off when she heard Selena’s squeak and the scuff-thump of the baby climbing the stairs. The stair gate clanged against the wall and then the door flew open.

  ‘Babi says she’s got to cook now and you’ve got to have Raymond!’ Selena announced, puffed from carrying the cat and circling the baby.

  ‘Why me?’ Minny pulled him onto her lap. He was a devil with the computer. It was just like her grandmother to offer so aggressively to look after him, so that you would start doing something, and then ditch him on you before you’d finished. ‘Couldn’t you watch him just till Mum gets home?’

  ‘No. He was crying to get up the stairs.’

  Minny wasn’t really cross. She loved him. He was her favourite and she was his – after their mother, which didn’t count. She fluffed up his hair and batted his hands away from the keyboard. ‘Well, can you just play with him till I send this?’

  There was no room for them to sit on the floor – their mother even had to keep her knickers in a plastic bag at the bottom of the wardrobe, so Selena got the jewellery box from the dressing table and she and Raymond got stuck into it on the other end of the bed. It was even smaller than Minny’s room, which had bunk beds for her and Sel; only Aisling’s was more tiddly. Ash had to have her own room because she got up at five o’clock in the morning. Her stuff was so wedged in there that the door didn’t open properly and you had to climb over the bed to get in.

  Minny finished her email, knees drawn up to protect the laptop from Raymond. ‘I’ve got to go now because the baby’s going nuts and there’s no one to look after him as usual except me. Babi’s too busy making Czech fish stew, which smells completely ram and will probably make us all violently ill – but I thought I’d tell you so you can start thinking of books for me and ways to murder and dispose of Mrs Lemon and think of me when you’re having a NICE dinner this evening with no fish heads … Minny.’ She turned round to find that Sel was checking out her reflection in two necklaces against her school jumper, with another in her hair and four rings on her wiggling fingers, while the cat purred in her lap with a bracelet a
round his ear, and Raymond looked gravely disgusted and had two strands of a beaded earring dangling from his mouth.

  ‘Selena! He could choke on this kind of crap! Have some sense, will you.’ She put her little finger into the corner of his mouth and he opened it unwillingly. She pulled the earring out. It looked intact, although with her mother’s jewellery it was hard to tell.

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been my fault.’ Sel threw all the necklaces down. ‘I’m only seven.’

  ‘Oh, and I’m sure that would have been a great comfort to you as he breathed his last,’ Minny snapped. ‘Now tidy that stuff up.’

  ‘You tidy it up.’ She stropped out, banging the door behind her. Raymond reached for another earring.

  ‘No no no. Give it to Minny. Listen, there’s the front door. Mummy’s home. You go and find Mummy. No, leave Guts alone.’ She tried to keep him away from the fleeing cat with her knee while she bundled all the jewellery back into the box. Her mother would probably never be able to unravel a single necklace from the clump.

  When she came downstairs with Raymond under her arm, her mother, Nita, was still in the hall, taking everything out of her shoulder bag and spreading it all to the corners they lived in. ‘Hello, sweet angel,’ she said, rescuing Raymond as he tried to dive head first over the banisters to get to her. ‘And hello, other sweet angel.’ She aimed a kiss at Minny. ‘Good day?’

  ‘No, rubbish.’

  ‘Oh no. I smell fish stew though.’

  ‘I know.’ They both squeezed their faces up. What Minny had said to Kevin had only been for effect, and because you couldn’t say you loved fish stew; actually it was one of Babi’s best, and though she said the stench would kill her, she often made it on Fridays. Friday was non-meat day. They ate so much dead animal that Minny’s mother got fits of conscience about it and insisted on one day off; they’d picked Friday because they were usually out of meat by then anyway, and Selena still went to Catholic primary school and Friday was the day recommended there. Though that meant the weekly risk of some anticlerical feeling getting aired at the dinner table. Also, since they usually cheated and ate fish, Minny wasn’t sure there was any point.

  ‘Oof,’ her mother said, bending down to pick up her mobile, which Raymond had dropped, then straightening up again. ‘You are a big heavy tubby, aren’t you? Where are the others?’

  ‘Watching TV, I suppose. I had English today.’

  ‘Oh yes? Was it good?’

  ‘It’s never good, I told you.’ Minny came down a step. ‘Mrs Lemon made me look like an arse for writing a long story. She said it showed bad judgement and she didn’t have time to mark any of the others just because of mine, and that I was self-indulgent.’

  ‘Oh, Minny.’

  ‘She’s a cow.’

  ‘Of course she is. A big Friesian heifer. Don’t worry about it – she was probably just having a bad day.’

  ‘Good, she deserved to. It was embarrassing.’

  Her mother was looking up, but she wasn’t listening now. Aisling was calling her, monotonously, from the back room. She headed off. ‘What’s wrong, Ash? All right, I’m coming. Mama, when’s dinner? And where’s Selena?’

  Minny would have liked to go back upstairs on her own, but it was all hands on deck between Nita getting home and dinner being dished up. She had to look after Raymond while her mother first spoke to Selena about kiddy stuff at school and let Sel drivel on about some project she was doing on Ancient Greece, and then started going through Ash’s homework. Mostly the teachers emailed it to Nita because Ash never wrote it down properly. On a Friday the two of them always had to plan minutely when it was going to get done. Meanwhile Raymond kept shoving The Hungry Caterpillar in front of her face. Normally he liked Minny reading to him, but not on Fridays when he’d been at nursery all day and their mother hadn’t come home till five thirty.

  At ten past six Nita finally came running into the back room with the baby chewing the corner of his book, ditched him on the floor and flung herself onto the sofa. ‘My God, that was a hard day. I need to lie down. You can all do what you want. I’m just going to lie here.’

  Aisling, who’d been drifting around muttering about The West Wing, immediately went to lie on top of her. Nita groaned. Selena started bouncing up and down and shouting, till Minny took her cue and went to lie on Ash so that Sel could lie on her. ‘Chaos, Minny,’ Ash said from underneath, ‘you brought chaos.’ All-pile-on was a tradition. It put everyone in a good mood, unless you happened to get an elbow in your collarbone.

  Dinner was usually when they were all together for the first time. They weren’t a picky family – they ate anything put in front of them while exchanging news and opinions so fast that food had been known to fly across the table. But not that day, because just as they were all rolling around on the sofa trying not to fall on Raymond, who was engaged in climbing on top, the doorbell went. Selena sucked herself off the heap and flew towards it as usual. No one else in the house had had the chance to open the front door for about five years. Even political campaigners and Mormons had learned to miss out their house now because they had to struggle through five minutes’ really intense conversation with her before they got to see anyone else. Minny wasn’t sure why Sel found the ring at the door so exciting, but it was a disappointment this time because it was Gil.

  ‘Hallo, Selena,’ he said in his fake jolly way, taking off his stupid hat. ‘Am I on time for dinner?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sel put her finger in her mouth as if she was four, and ran away. Babi came out of the steamy kitchen and hung his hat up for him.

  ‘Darrrlink,’ she said in her throaty voice, ‘I am just serving up. Won’t you go and sit down for two minutes till everything is ready?’

  Their mother had to change Raymond’s nappy before dinner, and Selena, being seven, could scamper wherever she wanted whether there was a guest or not. So that meant Gil watching The Simpsons with Ash, because Minny was reading. She didn’t like him. He had a lot of virtually white hair which he swept in a puffy ring around his red bald patch, and he wore mossy jumpers. Babi was never polite to Minny’s friends, in fact she went out of her way to blow smoke at Penny, so why should Minny be friendly to Gil?

  ‘You watch this every day, Aisling?’ She just nodded and hummed. She didn’t like Gil being in the house either, because he was new, and a man. ‘I’ve only seen it once or twice. Is it good?’

  ‘Roger Ram is up and Roger Ram is down,’ Aisling shouted suddenly.

  ‘Christ!’ Minny shouted too because she hated to be startled.

  ‘Roger Ram is dancing all around the town.’

  ‘Shut up, Aisling.’

  ‘Why don’t you like it when I sing that?’

  ‘You don’t sing it, you scream it.’

  ‘And it makes your heart jump,’ Ash added joyfully. Minny had made the mistake of saying that to her about eight years ago and she never forgot stuff that tickled her. Minny didn’t like to say they had a pensioner with them and shocks probably weren’t good for him. ‘I sing about Roger Ram sometimes when I’m feeling stressed,’ Ash explained to Gil.

  ‘Oh dear, are you feeling stressed? And on a Friday night?’

  Minny felt sorry for him in a way. They weren’t the easiest family.

  At dinner they all had to be polite instead of just eating. Gil had never come for a normal dinner before, and his arrival had always been announced. Babi refused to look at anyone. Minny was wondering if this meant he’d be popping by all the time now, and could see her mother was wondering it too. Nita was the world’s most polite and friendly woman, it was sickening sometimes, but she struggled with Gil. Anyone would feel weird with someone dating their mother, particularly their sixty-five-year-old mother, and it was so hard to imagine what Babi could possibly see in this red-faced old man. Say what you would about their grandmother, she wasn’t Minny’s cup of tea, but she was sort of magnificent. She had a very sharp pure black bob, sticking-out cheekbones and deep hoo
ded eyes, and she kept herself pretty trim.

  Then there was their grandfather, who to be fair had died eight years ago – but he was supposed to be this extraordinary man. Minny didn’t remember that side of him because she’d been too young, but she remembered looking forward to seeing him – he wasn’t so much the kind of grandfather who took you to the playground; he’d taken them to theatres instead, or to museums, and then, when they were flagging, to beautiful restaurants for tea. Once there had been a cake with silver icing. And the carousel on the South Bank. And he was this great political writer and everything, and knew everyone in the world that was famous and interesting, and Babi had apparently worshipped him. She was miserable when he died. And now here she was doing whatever she was doing with the old bloke from the greengrocer’s on Grenville Road. Minny wasn’t the snob in the family, Babi was. So it all seemed a bit mysterious.

  Nita tried to be nice, like she always did. She didn’t have much chance to pay attention to him because she had to feed the baby and talk to Selena and Aisling, neither of whom had ever grasped that you were supposed to wait for a gap in the conversation before you started telling an irrelevant story. It all went much as usual: Selena tutted and sighed because there was chaos going on after she was ready to say grace. Then, when everyone had said amen, she immediately opened her eyes and said, ‘Victoria got told off today because Lily and Fran were fighting over who was going to be her partner in baseball. It was really unfair.’

  ‘Mmm, this is tip-top tasty,’ Aisling said, at pretty much the same time Gil said, ‘Nita, can I pass you the pepper?’ Their mother had to accept it brightly while blowing on the baby’s bowl to cool his dinner down, fastening his bib and listening to Selena. While she was telling her completely boring and structureless story about three girls in her class that no one else knew, Aisling was repeating ‘tip-top tasty’ at increasing volume because no one had acknowledged her. When their mother finally did get to say, ‘That’s great, Ash, good,’ Aisling straightaway said, ‘That’s another thing that’s wrong in The West Wing, you know, this man says that Franklin Pierce – you know, the president? – he says that he was his great-great-grandfather, only Franklin Pierce never had any grandchildren, so he can’t have been.’