Suppressing her anger, Catriona – whilst Charlotte stood by, offering more sneering criticism: ‘Have you only got that kind of bread? And no cheddar?’ – made her a couple of sandwiches.
The girl ate ravenously and slurped from her glass of orange juice – this was one thing which appeared to be acceptable – whilst opposite her Catriona picked at the cooling mess of beans. She had almost no appetite, but she forced herself to eat. It would be a sign of humiliating weakness for her to reject the meal as well.
As she mechanically forked a few grains of rice into her mouth, she was aware that Charlotte was, in between noisily chewing savagely torn-off mouthfuls of her sandwich, watching her both attentively and speculatively, as if she were waiting for the right moment to ask her something.
Finally, she asked it.
‘Cat, what do you do about sex?’
Her aunt stopped eating, her mouth suddenly dry. As naturally and unhurriedly as she could, she put down her fork and took a sip from the glass of mineral water at her elbow. She thought she had prepared herself for the sex question. But it had arrived in an unexpected and particularly unwelcome form. Charlotte was not asking for information about changes in her body, or whether you could get pregnant from kissing a boy, or other such uncontroversial matters. This charmless, ill-mannered child was asking, in a tone of hardly disguised contempt, about Catriona’s own sex-life.
She temporised, searching for an appropriate, safe, non-committal formula. God, this was what being a parent was like, forever at the inquisitive whim of a junior member of the Gestapo.
‘How do you mean, do about it?’
The girl tossed her dark, greasy hair impatiently. ‘What do you think I mean? You’re not married are you? So, have you got someone regular you have sex with?’
Catriona decided the best tactic was to answer the question exactly in the terms it was put. ‘No, I don’t have anyone I regularly have sex with.’
Charlotte pursed her lips. ‘Then do you have a different man when you feel like it? And how often is that? Every day, every week?’ She paused, her lip curled in a sneer. ‘Every month? Every year?’
To her annoyance, Catriona could not prevent herself from blushing, with both anger and embarrassment. It was clear that this little bitch’s prurient interest would hardly be impressed or satisfied with anything less than a record of constant promiscuity. For a moment she considered lying, then, realising that it could rebound upon her if, as likely, it were retold by Charlotte to all and sundry, she resisted. She started to say, ‘Look, I don’t think you quite understand how adults relate together, I mean …’
Charlotte’s eyes flashed with irritation. ‘I don’t want to know about your stupid relationships. I asked you how often you had sex, got that? How many men? How frequently?’ Again, she paused; again, the sarcastic look appeared. ‘Or perhaps you don’t get it at all? Perhaps no one fancies you. I know Bill doesn’t. So do you have to make do with just playing with yourself? Is that how it is? Sad old auntie Cat wanking herself off in her single bed?’
Suddenly, she’d had enough. She snapped, reverting, in her temper, to playground abuse. ‘Shut your mouth, you nasty little cow! Mind your own bloody business!’
She got up from the table, collected up her plate and scraped the unfinished food into the pedal bin. She yanked open the dishwasher door with unnecessary force, making the dirty crocks inside rattle together, and jammed the plate into one of the racks.
When she turned back into the room, Charlotte had gone, and the music, louder than ever, was booming down the staircase.
‘Charlotte?’ She tapped again lightly on the door.
A muffled voice from within said, ‘Go away!’
‘I think we should talk. I’m making some breakfast. Sausages.’
‘Not stinking veggie sausages?’
‘No, real, one-hundred-per-cent fat, gristle, cereal, monosodium-glutamate and maybe-even-a-little-bit-of-meat sausages.’
‘All right. I’ll be down in ten minutes.’
She looked much younger that morning in her pyjamas – Mickey Mouse patterned, which were totally genuine, she explained, as they’d been bought on a family trip to Disneyland Paris.
‘Mum loathed it, but Bill was like a kid himself. I’ve never seen him like that. Most of the time he’s so uptight about his work and that, but he went on everything. Course, the old dad was still there underneath, ’cos when we were doing Space Mountain, which is a really, really scary ride, he was like, “We’re getting I calculate more than one g here”, while everybody else was screaming their heads off.’
She demolished the plateful of sausages, fried egg and baked beans and tomatoes while she talked.
Catriona had risen early and slipped out to the Asian supermarket at the end of the street. There she had stocked up with the sort of food that Charlotte would eat.
‘That was a great breakfast.’ She paused. ‘I was out of order last night. Sorry.’
‘No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m supposed to be the grown-up. I shouldn’t have said those things. I shouldn’t have got so angry.’
‘I shouldn’t have gone on about, you know.’
‘It isn’t, for me, the sort of thing I can talk about very easily, particularly not to someone I don’t know very well. There are private things which I like to keep private.’
‘Yeah, particularly from some snotty-nosed kid.’
Catriona smiled. ‘That’s not how I think of you. At your age, you’re coping with a lot of growing up at once. It’s painful. And then there’s everything that happened lately on top of that.’
‘But I was still rotten to say those things. Perhaps I’m not a nice person. Perhaps it was because of me that Mum went away. Perhaps I was so awful she couldn’t stand being around me.’
Catriona was on her feet in an instant, rushing to her niece’s side of the table. Crouching down she enveloped the child in a hug, drawing the blonde head against her bosom. ‘No, Charlotte, you mustn’t ever say that. I’m absolutely sure it had nothing at all to do with you. Your mother loved you more than life itself. She would have done anything for you!’
‘Anything but stick around! Anything but want to be with me! She must have hated me underneath, whatever she said, otherwise she would never have left. Now you hate me too. You must do after all those things I said. I didn’t mean to be so nasty.’ She struggled to raise a tearful face. ‘Those things I said, I don’t want you to think I’m a bad girl. We talk about things at school, that’s all. About … our bodies and how they make us feel and what it might be like to …’
‘I know, I know, I understand. Of course, it’s absolutely natural and normal to be curious. I was more upset than I would have been because of how I was feeling about your mother. Both of us are under a lot of pressure. It comes screaming out of us.’
‘She used to get mad at me.’
‘Everyone gets angry sometimes.’
‘Not just angry. Once she said I’d ruined her life. That she hated me.’
There were tears glinting in her eyes as she spoke.
Catriona was astonished. She’d always regarded Flora as the perfect mother, the mother she could never have been: endlessly patient, calm, unfazed by mess or stinks, practical and, more than anything, loving.
‘I’m