A Friend of the Family Read online

  A Decent Breakfast

  ‘There you go, angel.’ Bernie slapped a plate of toast, beans and bacon in front of Ned and beamed at him. ‘Bet it’s been a while since you had a decent breakfast, eh?’

  Ned thought back to his last breakfast, of home-made focaccia and sunshine-yellow eggs, huge chunks of terracotta chorizo and sour cream, sprinkled with freshly snipped coriander and eaten in his shorts on the terrace of a Bondi café, overlooking the sea.

  ‘Too right,’ he said, tucking in.

  ‘Where’s mine?’ said Gerry, looking sniffily at Ned’s breakfast over the top of his Guardian.

  ‘Over there,’ said Bernie, pointing at a jumbo box of Bran Flakes and turning back to beam at Ned again. ‘D’you want ketchup with that?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  She passed him the plastic tomato that he’d brought home in his pram from the Wimpy when he was two and into which Bernie still religiously decanted ketchup all these years later.

  ‘So,’ said Bernie, folding her arms.

  ‘What?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The deal. The story. The whole salami. Cough up.’

  ‘Dunno,’ he said, upending the plastic tomato and squirting ketchup all over his plate. ‘Just wanted to come home.’

  Bernie pursed her lips and threw him a look.

  ‘I’d just had enough. That’s all. Missed your cooking.’ He grinned, trying the sweet-talk approach, but Bernie just pursed her lips tighter.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’m not the one who should be explaining things. You two have got some real explaining to do. Tell me about that bloke. That bloke in my bedroom. Tell me about Gervase.’ Ned folded his arms and eyed his mother from his lofty position at the peak of the moral high ground.

  ‘You first,’ said Bernie, ‘then we’ll discuss Gervase.’

  Ned sighed. ‘It finished. With Monica.’

  ‘What do you mean, it finished? What happened?’

  Ned paused. He wanted to tell his mum and dad the truth, but that would mean admitting not only to ending the relationship with the girl he broke Carly’s heart to be with, but also to ending it in the most cowardly fashion imaginable – Mum would never forgive him. ‘She dumped me.’

  ‘She dumped you?’ his incredulous mother repeated in horror. ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anyway, it wasn’t just that. It was time to come home,’ he said quietly, his voice catching slightly. ‘That’s all.’Ned looked from his mother to his father, cleared his throat, and stuck his fork into his bacon.

  Monica was unlike anyone Ned had ever met before. She was like a bloke. She had muscles. And a strong jaw. And legs like sequoias. She played sports and drank beer and had her own drum kit. She shouted a lot and ate like a horse and made lascivious comments about women’s breasts.

  ‘Ned,’she’d hiss, elbowing him roughly in the ribs, ‘look at that.’ Her eyes would direct him to a girl in a lycra top or low-cut dress. ‘Look at the tits on it. Incredible.’

  She called people cunts and motherfuckers and got into fights. She could reach orgasm in thirty seconds flat and fell fast asleep on her back straight after sex, snoring like a warthog.

  ‘I’m going to Australia,’she’d said five minutes into their first conversation, at the sports bar in Leicester Square.

  ‘Oh,’Ned had said, ‘right.’

  ‘I’m going next month. In two weeks. So there’s no point in chatting me up.’

  ‘I’m not chatting you up.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you fucking well are.’

  ‘I’m not. I’ve got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh right. Like that means anything.’

  ‘It does, actually.’

  ‘So – tell me about your “girlfriend”.’

  ‘Carly?’

  ‘That’s her name?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘OK – tell me about Carly.’

  ‘Carly’s – Carly’s…’ Carly’s my girlfriend – that’s what he’d wanted to say. She’s always been my girlfriend, since I was fourteen years old. Carly’s warm and round and soft and knows how I like my tea and knows my shoe size and my parents love her like the daughter they never had. Carly has dimples on her knees and eats Wagon Wheels for breakfast. Carly lives up the road from me and Carly works as a pattern cutter for a company that make clothes for old ladies. Carly tickles my back for me and tells me when I need a haircut. She’s allergic to peanuts and bees. Her breasts are large and slightly pendulous with quite big nipples and she’s never had an orgasm just through sex. She’s my best mate and I love her.

  ‘Carly’s great,’ he’d said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Monica, ‘that was convincing. How long have you been going out?’

  Ned had shrugged, slightly embarrassed to admit to the fact that he was old fashioned enough to have a teenage sweetheart. ‘A few years,’ he’d said.

  But then he’d suddenly started to say something else, something he hadn’t intended to say. Jesus Christ, he’d said, the freakiest thing happened last week, Carly took me out for dinner and she made a really big deal out of it and then, just after pudding, she asked me to marry her, she proposed to me – what the fuck was that all about? – and now I feel, Jesus, trapped, I suppose because I always kind of thought we’d get married one day but you know, not now, not yet, and now I don’t know what the fuck to do, I mean I said I’d think about it and I’ve got to give her an answer soon and Jesus fucking Christ, am I freaked, I am just like completely, totally fucking FREAKED.

  And Monica had nodded knowingly and lit a cigarette and before he knew what he was doing he was telling her everything. The going-nowhere life, the living with his parents, the jobs that came and went and failed to satisfy, the long-term relationship with someone who he knew so well it was almost like she was his sister, or something. And she’d blown smoke into his face and said, ‘Come with me. Come to Australia – it’ll be a right laugh.’And for a second Ned had sat suspended in time waiting for his mouth to open and say something sensible like, ‘Don’t be stupid. I can’t go to Australia.’But the words hadn’t come out and instead he’d looked into the eyes of this defiant, strong girl, this stranger with thick-set legs and stubby eyelashes, and he’d found himself saying, ‘Yeah. OK then. Why not?’

  He still couldn’t quite believe he’d done it, even three years later, that he’d met a stranger in a bar and agreed to emigrate with her after less than an hour, that he’d been able to look into Carly’s big grey eyes and tell her that he didn’t want to marry her, that he’d met someone else and was leaving her and that he’d had the strength to walk away from her when she was almost doubled over with pain, like he’d just punched her. It was as if he’d been possessed by something, an external force. Because Ned just didn’t do things like that – he didn’t take risks.

  But he’d done it – ended his relationship, cleared out his savings, got his visa, booked his flight and headed off to Australia with a complete stranger. It had been messier than that, of course. There’d been a couple more scenes with Carly, his mother’s wrath to deal with, moments of uncertainty late at night. But he’d still gone through with it. And as he’d sat eating a rather tasty noodle soup on a Thai Air flight to Sydney two weeks later, with Monica knocking back rum and cokes at his side and a blanket of baby-soft white cloud beneath him, he’d felt serene and sure for the first time in his life.

  The regrets hadn’t hit him very fast. They’d taken a long while to percolate through the adrenaline. They’d treated it as a holiday at first, stretching out their savings, sitting on the beach, drinking beer at lunchtime. And even though Ned hadn’t been even slightly convinced that things would work out with Monica, they had, and at some point they’d fallen in love with each other and things had started getting serious. They both got jobs, working together in the same bar, and then they got a room in a flatshare with three other B
rits and became slightly obsessed with each other.

  Sometimes they’d lie in bed all day in their tiny little bedroom with sun pouring through the windows just staring at each other. Staring at each other, for hours. There had been moments when Ned had felt a bit silly, but Monica always had this way of making you feel like her way was the best way so if she thought that spending hours in bed staring at each other was a good way to conduct a relationship, that it gave depth to their emotions, then staring was what they’d do.

  Ned had got fed up with the staring stuff before Monica and that was part of the problem. Ned, surprisingly, turned out to be much better at being in a foreign country, meeting new people and doing crap jobs than Monica was. He found, to his pleasure, that he made friends very easily and seemed to be liked by most people he met. Monica, on the other hand, scared the living daylights out of people, particularly women, and her brusque manner and quick temper put a lot of people off. Consequently she decided that she didn’t like anyone and stopped going out, and Ned, fed up of the whole lying-in-bed-staring-at-each-other thing, started claiming back a bit of independence.

  And that was when everything had started going wrong.

  Mad Monica. That’s what everyone had ended up calling her. Everyone who’d witnessed her psychotic behaviour, heard the tinkle of Ned’s mobile phone every ten minutes as she sent him text messages, taken the hysterical phone calls and seen the unannounced arrivals when Ned was supposed to be having a night out without her. She’d hit two girls, too. Just walked straight up to them and punched them on the jaw, because she thought they were flirting with Ned. As the months had gone by she’d become weirder and weirder. She started pulling her hair out, a strand at a time, until she was left with little bald patches all over her scalp. And she stopped eating properly and did a lot of rocking back and forth.

  Ned had tried to talk to her – it was obvious she was deeply unhappy. He’d tried to persuade her to go home. He’d phoned her parents and talked to them at great length about their troubled eldest daughter. But she refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong. He even finished the relationship on at least three occasions, trying out the tough-love approach, figuring that it was him that was making her so unhappy. But she’d pretend she didn’t understand and there she’d be the next day, outside his office, at the other side of the bar, on the beach, staring at him with those lashless eyes.

  So, he’d left. Well – run away, to be more honest. He’d been wanting to come home for ages and then when Dad had sent him the e-mail about Mum’s surprise party and offered to help pay his fare – well, it had only taken him about thirty seconds to make up his mind. He’d left Mon a note, tried to explain everything, but he knew that it hadn’t really been enough. He owed her more than that.

  He gulped and tried to swallow a piece of toast, but it got caught in his throat. He washed it down with lukewarm tea and cast his eyes downwards again, feeling hot with shame and guilt. But then he reminded himself: it wasn’t his fault. He’d done his best. He’d tried, for three years. It wasn’t his fault she’d gone mad. You know, you have a certain amount of responsibility within a relationship, obviously you do – but surely at a certain point, surely when the other person has just gone completely psycho, surely when you’ve tried everything you can possibly think of to make that person happy, surely when that person is no longer a person in any way that is recognizable, surely then it’s not your responsibility any more? Is it?

  And how strange it was, thought Ned, to have crossed the planet to live on the other side of the world among strangers and away from your family and to end up feeling that the only thing that was weird was the person you went with.

  Dinner at Mickey’s

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sean – it’s your mum. I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  She always said that these days, as if he was some frantic, intense genius who worked through the night and was constantly in the midst of some unstoppable stream of consciousness.

  ‘No,’ he said, dropping the Tiffany’s bag on the floor. ‘Just got in.’

  ‘Not at Millie’s tonight, then?’

  ‘No, she’s got assessments and I need to put a wash through.’

  ‘Good. Look. Are you free tonight?’

  ‘Erm, yeah, yeah. I think so. Why?’

  ‘Me and Tony and your dad are going down to Mickey’s. For dinner. Will you come?’

  ‘Course I’ll come.’

  ‘And Millie?’

  ‘No, I told you. Millie’s at home tonight.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t she catch a bus or something?’

  Sean raised his eyebrows to the ceiling. What planet did mothers actually live on? ‘Mum, she lives in Paddington. She’s hardly going to trek halfway across London for a plate of overcooked meat at Mickey’s.’

  ‘Oh Sean, love, I know you’re trying to keep things cool and I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but it’s been nearly two months now. I bet you’ve met her parents, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, actually, I haven’t…’

  ‘And I’m sure Millie’s probably dying to meet us by now – find out where you come from. Please, Sean. And besides – I’ve got a surprise for you. A big one. One that I think Millie will like, too.’

  ‘Mum, she’s not coming. OK?’

  ‘We’ll be good – promise. I’ll even tidy up a bit. We won’t embarrass you.’

  ‘Look. I will bring her over soon. I promise. Just not tonight, that’s all.’

  ‘What about next week? Tony’s birthday? She will be coming to that, won’t she?’

  ‘God, Mum, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh come on, Sean – Tony said he invited her. She’s got to come.’

  ‘Look. I’ll talk to her about it. We’ll see.’

  ‘Good, good. How’s the writing going?’

  Sean felt himself stiffen. ‘Fine,’ he said flatly, ‘good.’

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you from it, Seany. See you tonight.’

  ‘Yeah, Mum – I’ll see you tonight.’

  Sean sighed and put down the phone. He’d never before had any qualms about introducing a girl to his mum and dad – he was as proud as hell of his mum and dad and the strange bohemia into which he’d been born. But it was just that this thing with Millie… it was so perfect, so precious and he was scared to hold it up to any kind of scrutiny in case it just disappeared into the ether or came crashing down around him. But Sean was also realistic enough to know that their relationship couldn’t exist in a vacuum indefinitely. So far their love had been blossoming under glass; eventually he would have to plant it out in the real world and see what happened – just not yet.

  Tony was already in a funny old mood, before they even got there. He had an edgy, uncomfortable feeling, like his clothes were too tight, like there wasn’t quite the right amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Ness was sitting way too close to him and he jiggled around a bit in the back of the cab, hoping she’d get the message. But Ness was in a great mood. Ness was always in a great mood, particularly when they were going to see his parents. Both Ness’s parents were dead and she’d embraced the London family resoundingly from the moment she met them. She and Bernie got on like best mates from the outset and even went out occasionally, on their own, which Tony couldn’t help but feel a bit unnerved by. Ness and Bernie even looked vaguely similar, with their yellow hair, long legs and strong features. Except, of course, that Mum was ten times better-looking than Ness, even at fifty-five.

  The front door of 114 opened before they’d even had a chance to ring the doorbell and Mum greeted them in a red velvet blouse with her hair in a top-knot and a glass of wine in her hand.

  ‘Bernie!’ Ness threw her arms around her and hugged her hard. ‘You look beautiful – where did you get that blouse? It’s gorgeous!

  ‘River Island!’ Bernie exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Reduced from £34.99 to twelve quid! It’s nice, isn’t it?’ She gave a little dance to show off the bargain blous
e.

  ‘Now, close your eyes,’ she said to Tony, closing the front door, ‘no peeping.’

  ‘Oh God. Do I have to?’ Tony groaned.

  ‘Come on, just do as you’re told.’

  Tony closed his eyes reluctantly and let his mum lead him through to the kitchen. Tony could smell the comforting aroma of dad’s roll-ups and hear Goldie’s overgrown toenails clacking against the wooden floor.

  ‘OK – you can open them now.’

  He parted his eyelids slowly and at first could make out only the blurred outline of someone standing by the kitchen table. And then his vision cleared and he saw a lanky bloke with a beard and shoulder-length hair grinning at him.

  ‘All right?’ said the skinny bloke.

  Tony’s face broke into a massive grin. ‘Ned!’

  They strode across the kitchen towards each other and shared a rib-crushing bear-hug. ‘Jesus, Ned. What are you doing here? Are you here to stay? You know? Or are you…?’

  ‘I’m back for good. Back for ever.’

  They pulled apart and regarded each other affectionately, their eyes searching for physical evidence of the three years that had passed since they’d last seen each other. And in Ned’s case there was plenty of it. Creases had started to form at the corners of his eyes, his Adam’s apple had begun to soften and there was definitely a little more beef underneath that baggy T-shirt. He’d left a boy and returned a man. Well, as much of a man as a skinny, bespectacled geek like Ned could ever hope to be.

  ‘What the hell is going on with your hair?’

  ‘What?’Ned pulled a hand through it.

  ‘You look like you’re wearing a fucking wig.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start. I’ve already had Mum and Dad taking the piss. What d’you think of the beard, though, eh?’ He ran a hand over it, thoughtfully. ‘Cool, huh?’