Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva - Sarah May - Страница 7

Deep in a valley in the heart of south London, Kate Hunter woke up suddenly among the kind of rumples only a nightmare’s sweat can give black sateen sheets. It was 4.52 a.m. She pulled the sheet up over her head, not wanting to see the early hours’ outline of their IKEA wardrobe, IKEA bed, or IKEA chest of drawers - in case she saw something else that wasn’t meant to be there; something that didn’t feature in the IKEA catalogue - excluding Robert.

The only thing she could remember about the nightmare - and it was a vivid memory - was the feeling of water beneath her. She’d been floating effortlessly until she became aware that the dress she was wearing was beginning to pull her down - was in fact weighted in some way. As soon as she became conscious of the dress, her legs fell down through the water and she started to drown.

She and Robert had argued the night before - or rather, she had argued and he had watched. This was the way they rowed these days. What had the row been about? She didn’t know any more - all she remembered was Robert sitting on the edge of the bed, looking sad and slowly undressing.

For a moment she thought it had started to rain, but it was just a dry April wind brushing through the branches of the rowan tree outside.

Peeling the still-damp sheet from her face, she watched orange streetlight and flat moonlight fall through the broken blinds and compete for space on the bedroom walls. Turning towards the unconscious hump of Robert’s back, she curled into his warmth, her fringe tickling his spine in a fragile apology as she let her nostrils fill with the scent of his skin - and drifted back to sleep.

On the brink of losing consciousness, she thought she heard a strange, sobbing scream. Her body jerked momentarily awake. One of the children? Robert’s mother - Margery - asleep on the sofa bed downstairs? Whoever it was, she wished… she wished…her right leg slipped out of the side of the bed until her toes were hovering just above the floorboards. So that it looked as though she’d been dancing.

At that moment, Robert Hunter woke up without meaning to, unsure whether it was the scream - which he’d heard in his sleep - or Kate’s hair and breath running up his spine that had done it. Rolling carefully onto his back and trying not to trap any of his wife’s hair under his shoulder blades, he listened. In his muddled, pre-dawn mind, he became convinced that Kate’s breath on his spine and the scream had conspired to wake him.

The scream unsettled him and, not entirely convinced he wasn’t still asleep, dreaming, he took himself off to the bathroom and had a perplexed, early morning wank in the shower.

Afterwards, he let his back slide down the tiles until he was crouching, hot water pounding on his bent head.

Today he was teaching Jerome.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, he taught Jerome - and today was a Thursday. He didn’t know when exactly it had happened, he was only aware that now he plotted his week mentally around when he did and when he didn’t teach Jerome.

There were children who got to you and then there were children who got inside you. Every teacher he knew - apart from himself, up until now - had one, and his was Jerome. When he shut his eyes he could see Jerome’s face more clearly than he could see his own son, Findlay’s, and what terrified him more than anything was that Jerome was changing him in a way nobody else had; not even Kate, not even his children… and he hated Jerome for that. He’d never been afraid of teaching before, but he was afraid now.

The dry April wind carried on making its way up Prendergast Road through the branches of winter-flowering cherries, silver birches, poplars and more rowans, past bay-fronted Victorian terraces whose drawn curtains were meant to conceal nothing more than healthy functioning families coping with life’s run-of-the-mill ups and downs. The wind knew better, but didn’t have anybody to tell.

As it brushed past No. 112 (which had featured on TV’s Grand Designs only a fortnight ago), Evie McRae - in the grip of exhaustion-induced insomnia after having scored more than a line of cocaine in her garden office - left the house with her five-month-old daughter, Ingrid, and headed for the 24-hour Sainsbury’s where she did the McRae weekly shop.

Ingrid was an abnormal baby.

She slept through the night - often for more than twelvehour stretches - leaving Evie with very little to talk to other women about. So she’d woken Ingrid up - partly because she hated spending time alone and partly in the hope that by 8.00 a.m. she would have the same shadows under her eyes as everybody else she knew - and was now pushing her, screaming, down empty aisles towards the one open checkout.

At No. 188, Ros Granger woke up in an empty bed. It was only 4.52 a.m. Martin was sleeping on the floor of his office at Curlew & Fokes where they were so stretched on the immigration case that most of the lawyers working on it were only getting a maximum of four hours’ sleep a night. After making sure the alarm was set for 6.30, she buried her face in the pillow that still smelt of him and waited to fall back to sleep. ‘I deserve to be happy,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘I do deserve to be happy.’

At No. 236, Harriet Burgess woke up to eight-week-old Phoebe’s still newborn-sounding screams. She had been dreaming that Miles had grown breasts and was feeding their daughter. Probably because her sister had phoned last night to tell her she’d just found out that prehistoric Irish chieftains used to symbolically breastfeed their entire kingdom - men, women and children. What sort of person knew this kind of thing? What sort of person thought other people wanted to know this kind of thing? Hauling herself out of bed, she went through to Phoebe, the sensory-triggered security camera they’d had installed in the hallway training its lens on her as she plodded past.

At the top end of Prendergast Road - beyond the crossroads with Whateley Road - Arthur Palmer, aged four and three quarters, woke up screaming. His mother, Jessica Palmer - only half awake - stumbled automatically into his room, tripping over a garage and farmyard, until her hand grasped the foot of Arthur’s bed where Arthur was sitting screaming, still asleep. He was having a night fright, the extremist form of a nightmare.

Even in the half-light, Jessica could make out the muscles on his neck as his body took the strain of fear. He looked like he did when he was having one of his bad asthma attacks and she grabbed his inhaler off the bookshelves.

As she sat down next to him on the end of the bed, closer than she wanted to, the screaming stopped.

Arthur raised his arms weakly - one hand clutching his favourite Transformer, Burke - before sinking untidily back onto the duvet.

Jessica waited, then yawned and got slowly to her feet, creeping out of the room.

In the hallway, eyes nearly shut again, she walked into her sixteen-year-old daughter, Ellie.

‘Everything okay?’ Ellie asked.

‘Oh - everything’s…yeah, it was just Arthur, one of his…one of his…you go back to bed.’

They eyed each other uneasily and, after a moment’s hesitation, Ellie walked unsteadily back into her room on her spindle legs.

‘See you in the morning,’ Jessica called out after her, hoping it sounded natural, then went back to bed herself, thinking she’d fall straight to sleep again; only she didn’t. She rolled around in the big empty bed that seemed to get bigger and emptier every night, then listened to the central heating coming on and - realising that she wasn’t going to get back to sleep until it got dark again in twelve hours’ time - got up.

Downstairs in the kitchen, she stared at her day, plotted out in blue marker pen on the whiteboard next to the fridge.

Her neighbour, Kate Hunter, was picking Arthur up from nursery at 4.30 and taking him to Swim School with Findlay then bringing him home, because Jessica had viewings booked throughout the afternoon. She yawned again as the wind changed direction outside and the fan in the kitchen window started to clack unevenly in its broken frame. When would she get round to mending that? Probably never.

Turning round, she saw the pot of chrysanthemums on the windowsill that she’d bought because she liked the colour pink they’d been in the shop. When she got them home the pink seemed different, and she couldn’t work out why she’d bought them when she’d never liked chrysanthemums anyway. Now they were half dead, the leaves and petals shrivelled.

She went over to the sink, filled an empty milk carton, and was about to water the plant when she stopped, suddenly pouring the contents of the milk carton back down the sink and lighting a cigarette instead.

She stood by the windowsill, smoking and staring at the chrysanthemums, not thinking about anything much.