Page 95 of Don't You Forget About Me

‘I’ve seen your like before. My friend Margie’s husband Hamish used to make her and the kids eat bread soaked in beetroot juice while he had steak and spent his pay packet down the bookies. You remind me of him. A nasty sort.’

‘Nana, you really need to stop …’ Mark says, desperately.

I start quietly laughing. I’m not trying to be outrageous but I can’t help myself. It’s bloody brilliant.

‘On what possible basis are you calling me a bad husband?’ Geoffrey says to Nana Hogg.

‘You’re a bully. Let her go to her husband’s grave.’

‘I’m not stopping her.’

‘You literally just told her not to go,’ I say. ‘And slagged my dad off. And called him a philanderer.’

‘Yes and I wonder which of his children takes after him.’

My mouth falls open.

‘Don’t you dare speak to my sister like that,’ Esther says, surprising us all. This has turned into a bloodbath, a one-set stage play. Mum is like a statue, eyes wide. Mark’s aged a year in minutes.

‘Nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of slap and tickle,’ Nana Hogg says. ‘If I still had her physique I’d be putting myself about a bit too.’

‘Right, that’s enough,’ Geoffrey stands up, makes a fuss of collecting his jacket from the coat stand in the hall. We listen to this, Mum motionless. Her instinct is to side with Geoffrey, yet even she’s got qualms.

He lets himself out and sits in his car, fully visible through the bay window, engine running, passenger side door thrown open ready for Mum to obediently scuttle out after him.

‘Should I go out and speak to him?’ Esther says to Mark, and even Mark shrugs.

Nana Hogg knits serenely through it.

‘Mum,’ I say, turning to her. ‘Don’t do as he says. He’s been a bad shit. Let him sweat on it for a night and go back tomorrow.’

‘She’s right,’ Esther says.

Mum looks at us, looks out of the window at Geoffrey, chews her lip. He slams the door shut, the tail-lights blaze, and with a squirt of gravel, he goes. Mum says the very last thing I’d expect.

‘Georgina, have you got any cigarettes?’

31

We stand quivering with cold in Esther’s garden, smoking menthols that Esther managed to unearth from the back of a cupboard. Being unable to provide Mum with Marlboro Lights is not a way I thought I’d fail her.

‘I’m so sorry you had to find out about Dad like that, Gog,’ Esther says, gripping her elbow.

‘Oh, Esther, I knew,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you two knew. How did you know each other knew?’

‘I saw Dad with her when he was supposed to be at Graham’s. I was with my friends and he was coming out of Atkinson’s, they were holding hands. I came home and told Mum. I was about ten.’

That long.

‘I knew anyway,’ Mum says. ‘From almost the start. He thought he could come home smelling of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and I wouldn’t notice. Silly sod.’

‘How did you find out?’ Esther says to me.

‘I caught Dad …’ Hmm. Best still be careful, ‘making plans to see a woman on the phone, the first weekend I was home from university. We had a huge fight about it, right before he died. I thought I should keep it to myself. Given Dad was gone anyway.’

‘Here’s us, thinking we had to keep it from you, at any cost. You were always so close, you had Dad on a pedestal. We didn’t want to knock him off,’ Esther says.

‘Thank you,’ I say, frowning. This is an adjustment, the idea they protected me.

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