Not because I’m expecting anything to come of the evening. But still, it’s a night out with an extremely handsome man, so I don’t want to turn up looking like something the cat dragged in.
Talking of something the cat dragged in, though … I’ve just made my way to Mum’s room, up on the third floor of the hospital, and a truly astonishing sight greets my eyes.
Not Mum, prone from her surgery. Mum, in fact, is nowhere to be seen. I mean, her bed is actually empty.
It’s Cass.
At least, I think it’s Cass.
She – the possible-Cass – is sitting next to an open window, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke out into the street below. Her hair is scraped into a ratty ponytail and she’s wearing – bloody hell – not a single scrap of makeup. I mean, not even concealer. Not even eyebrow pencil. She’s wearing leggings, and a baggy jumper, and the sort of papery flip-flops you sometimes get given after a posh pedicure.
She looks so different from the usual Cass – Cass of the five-inch heels, and the tight skirts, and the bouncy blow-dry; the Cass that I just saw the day before yesterday, in fact – that my heart skips a beat.
‘Oh, my God, Cass … is it Mum? Has something happened to her?’
‘What?’ she snaps. ‘No! She’s in the bathroom –’ she indicates the closed door on the opposite wall, from which I can now hear a shower running –‘getting herself freshened up.’
‘Then what … Cass, what’s wrong with you?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong! Zoltan’s fucking kids, that’s what’s wrong!’
Ah.
So the whole stepmothering thing isn’t going quite as well as she imagined.
‘Cass.’ I go over to the window, take her cigarette from her hand, and stub it out in a tea mug beside Mum’s bed before the smoke sets off any alarms and we get thrown out of the hospital. ‘What’s happened?’
‘They’ve only bloody come to live with us, the little fuckers!’
‘OK, you can’t call a six year old and a nine year old little fuckers …’
‘You can,’ she says, savagely, ‘if they are little fuckers.’
‘… but what on earth do you mean, they’ve come to live with you?’
‘It’s her. The ex-wife. Her revenge on me. She drove them round last night, just when Zoltan and I were about to go to bed with a bottle of champagne. Dumped them on the doorstep and said she’s going away to stay with a friend in New York for a few weeks, and they can stay with their father. Thanks to that, I’ve not had a single minute of Me Time all day! I haven’t so much as had a shower, or done my makeup, or my hair … and they went into my room, without asking, and started playing Shoe Shops with all my shoes! Sticky fingers all over my Louboutins! And snot – actual snot, Libby! – on my new Kurt Geiger sandals! I mean, they said it was an accident, but I don’t believe that for a minute, the horrible little vandals …’
‘OK, Cass, calm down. They’re just children. And come on, they’ve only been living with you for one day!’
‘Yeah, and it’s one day too fucking many, I’ll tell you that … anyway, what would you know? Little Miss Footloose and Fancy-Free.’ She scowls at me. ‘Why are you so glammed up this evening?’
‘I’m going out.’
‘Huh! Must be nice.’
‘Well, you know, Cass,’ I say, ‘if you hadn’t got involved with a married man with kids …’
She sulks, but doesn’t say anything.
“Look, can’t you and Zoltan have a proper talk? See if there’s a dignified way out of this mess?’
Cass crumples up her pretty, unpowdered nose for a moment, as she thinks about this.
‘You mean, tell him we need a full-time nanny?’
‘No!’
‘Two full-time nannies?’
‘Cass …’
‘Or are you thinking boarding school?’
I stare at her. ‘For a six and a nine year old?’
‘Yeah. You can get boarding schools for kids that age, can’t you?’
‘I’m sure you can. But why not just send them to the workhouse and be done with it?’
‘Ooooh, I haven’t heard of the workhouse,’ Cass says, leaning forward, eagerly. ‘Is it far away? Do they let them out for half-term?’
My reply to this – which contains more swearing than I’m normally comfortable with – will have to wait, because the bathroom door is opening and Mum is on her way out.
She doesn’t look too bad for a woman in her early sixties who’s just had her gallstones out – sorry, sorry, minor cosmetic surgery. In fact, in her silk kimono and what look an awful lot like cashmere slippers, she’s actually terribly glamorous. For a moment, and it’s a rare moment, I feel rather proud of her. There’s a certain kind of chutzpah, a certain kind of bloody-minded grit, behind the ability to look fabulous only forty-eight hours after invasive surgery, and Mum has it in spades.
‘Oh,’ she says, puncturing the moment with the sheer amount of dissatisfaction she can pack into one single syllable. ‘Libby. You’re here.’
It’s not that my own mother dislikes me, or anything – though it does occasionally feel that way. It’s more that she and I have literally nothing in common. And that Mum isn’t very good at feigning interest in people she has nothing in common with. Mum isn’t very good at feigning interest in people she does have things in common with. There are two things that matter to Mum: herself, and Cass. All right, maybe I’m being unfair: three things. Herself, Cass, and Michael Ball’s performance as Marius in the original London production of Les Mis in 1985.
There are then approximately two hundred things that intermittently matter to her a very little bit – depending on what else is going on with the three really significant things in her life – before you scrape right down to the bottom-ish of the barrel and find her elder daughter. Me.
‘How are you feeling, Mum?’ I ask.
‘Oh, well, you know, I’m a fighter,’ she says, in her best Bravery In The Face Of Adversity voice. ‘It’ll take more than being cut open on the surgeon’s table to get the better of me!’
‘Well, that’s good, then. You look really well,’ I add, in my best You Can’t Have It Both Ways voice. ‘Really glamorous and zingy, for someone who’s just had an op.’
She glares at me. ‘I’m trying to keep on keeping on for your sister’s sake, actually. Do you have any idea what a terrible time she’s been having? Stalked by paparazzi. Hounded by a vicious ex-wife. And now terrorized by these little horrors!’
‘Actually, Libby’s come up with a really good suggestion,’ Cass says, reaching for the contraband cigarettes on the windowsill beside her. ‘Have you ever heard of somewhere called The Workhouse, Mum?’
‘That wasn’t what I was trying to suggest, actually, Cass,’ I say, as Mum’s eyebrows shoot upwards. ‘I’m really trying to suggest that maybe it would be best for you to call it quits with Zoltan. I mean, it’s all very complicated, and it hardly seems fair to—’
‘Oh, well, I’m not sure that would be very sensible,’ Mum says, in the sort of disapproving