The salsa was pretty hot, the soup was delicious and butter oozed fragrantly into the warmed baguette but Jo and Stella barely tasted any of it, their hunger for conversation outweighing what was to eat. Stella regaled Jo with the details of Elmfield Estates and it provided ample opportunity for the merry chinking of glasses.
‘Any news from Charlie?’ said Jo. ‘Dare I ask?’
Stella chewed thoughtfully. ‘Not a word. Funny how, before it all happened, you always used to call him Chuck—’
Jo interrupted. ‘And when it was all kicking off, I called him Twatface.’ She paused. ‘I did wonder – even after all this time – with what’s happening now, whether he’d be in touch.’
Stella shrugged. ‘So did I. Yet the fact that he hasn’t, well –’
Jo nodded. ‘The lawyers – it’ll be any day now, I expect.’
‘I know,’ said Stella.
‘You’ll call me – won’t you?’ Jo stretched over the crumbs, the globs of salsa and splashes of soup which now decorated the table like a minor work by Jackson Pollock. She squeezed Stella’s arm. ‘Call it the last piece of the jigsaw – the final nail in the coffin. It’s a good thing.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Stella said, raising a glass and sipping so that she didn’t have to talk about it any more.
‘By the way,’ Jo said and, slowly, she let a lascivious smile spread, ‘your hair is looking a bit mumsy.’
‘Well, you look like a wee blonde elf,’ Stella said, in her defence.
‘That, my love, is intentional.’
‘But I wear it like – this – for work,’ Stella demonstrated, scooping it away from her face.
‘That’s highly appropriate for an estate agent,’ Jo said measuredly, ‘but a bit dull for a gorgeous, single, early-thirties gal.’
‘I’m mid-thirties, practically. So what is it you suggest I do?’
‘You phone Colin at Pop, that’s what you do. And tell him I sent you. And don’t tell him what you think you want – just put your head in his hands. Promise?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘How is your ma?’
‘I’m seeing her on Sunday, actually. At Alistair’s.’
‘And how’s the Robster?’ Stella’s brothers were as close as Jo came to having any.
‘I’m seeing him tomorrow, funnily enough.’
Jo was pleased. Stella, it seemed, was emerging from her self-imposed hibernation. At long last.
* * *
‘Mummy?’ Will called. ‘Mumma?’
Where was his rucksack? The medium-ish bluish one with the Clone Trooper design? Where had his mum put it? He looked in the usual places where she thought she tidied but really it was just moving his stuff to higher levels, to free up floor space. Well, it wasn’t in any of those places. Nor at the back of the cupboard. Nope, not under his bed either. Where was it? ‘Mummy!’ He really didn’t want to take the greenish, smallish rucksack because that had Ben 10 on and he so wasn’t into Ben 10 any more. ‘Mumm-y!’ He opened his bedroom door and stood at the top of the stairs, placed a cupped hand either side of his mouth and bellowed for her again.
There was a tap on his shoulder and Will jumped out of his skin. How did she do that? That teleporting thing? Suddenly appearing right behind him with precisely what he’d been looking for all along, and that Am-I-or-Am-I-Not-the-Best-Mum-in-the-World look on her face? She was, of course, the Best Mum Ever – and he’d bought her the birthday card with a badge that said so – but she still liked to pull that particular face all the time.
‘Why didn’t you answer me?’ Will said. ‘I was yelling and yelling. I thought you’d been taken by aliens or fallen down the loo or something.’
‘Thank you darling Mummy for my medium-ish bluish rucksack,’ said Stella.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Mummy,’ said Stella.
‘Do I really have to be forty-five before I can just call you Mum?’
‘Absolutely. Now stuff in whatever it is you want to take to Uncle Alistair's and we’d better get going.’
Will went back into his bedroom and his mother went downstairs. ‘Remember the Stickies could choke on any small pieces of Lego,’ she called.
How did she know he was piling Lego into his bag? How did she know that? Will knew she had eyes in the back of her head – he’d known that from an early age. But how could she see through brick walls and closed doors? She said she’d tell him when he was ten – so just two years, six months and about a week of days and a zillion hours to go. He emptied out the Lego bricks and jumbled in some Bionicles pieces instead. His cousins – three-year-old Ruby and five-year-old Finn, commonly known as the Stickies on account of their constant general jamminess – were unlikely to eat Bionicles. Not once he’d explained their super powers and alarming weaponry. Anyway, his little cousins thought he was amazing in much the same way as he thought his older cousins, who he was seeing tomorrow, were incredible. And all his cousins called him Will-yum, sometimes just YumYum. Like he was delicious. And, as his mum told him he was precisely that, at least once a day, he sort of believed it too.
* * *
The Huttons were scattered over Hertfordshire; as if a handful of wild-flower seeds had been tossed from their mother’s front doorstep in Harpenden. Alistair lived with his family in a lovely 1930s semi in a good suburb of Watford just a stroll from Cassiobury Park. Robbie had settled with his tribe in St Albans, Stella had spent almost a decade just around the corner from Alistair and was now in Hertford and Sandie, their mother, still lived in the family home in Harpenden. Their father, Stuart, had a flat in Hemel Hempstead but seemed to spend most of his time with an odd woman called Magda at her bungalow near Potters Bar, though he resurfaced each Christmas and steadfastly made no mention of her. In terms of quality time, it was pretty much on a par with how much his offspring had spent with him when he’d been married to their mother. Whenever they referred to him, it was accompanied by a roll of the eyes and a quick tut – as if mention of him caused a minor tic. But it was indeed minor, Stuart having never played a major part in their lives.
The following day, Will could hardly wait for his grandma to get in the car and do her seat belt before he told her about Ruby putting the Bionicle piece up her nose yesterday, and sucking the bogeys off it before giving it an almighty chewing and denting it with her small teeth. He had to keep making the incident sound like an extraordinary happening where he’d somehow been both victim and hero, to deflect attention from the fact that everyone had said to him, Don’t Let Ruby Put Anything in Her Mouth. The grown-ups had given him responsibility. And though he’d failed, his expressive storytelling made it sound as though he’d saved Ruby and the Bionicle and he was fine about the fact that his toy was riddled with teeth marks.
His grandma was riveted. ‘Can you imagine if Ruby had swallowed it?’ She craned her neck to look aghast at Will in the back seat. ‘There’d be some poor Bionicle chap missing a vital part of his anatomy. Then how would the battles be won?’
‘Exactly,’ marvelled Will.
‘Exactly,’ Sandie concurred.
‘Mum!’ Stella protested.
‘Grandma, how old was Mummy before she could call you Mum?’
‘Twenty-eight and three-quarters,’ Sandie said, not missing a beat.
‘I