Spin Cycle Read online

  Before her first wedding, Rachel and Joe, being old-fashioned, unreconstructed leftie students at the time, had refused to even consider a huge ostentatious Jewish wedding on the grounds that it was a shameful waste of money. On top of that, Rachel knew full well her mother would hijack the entire event and that it would all end in lavender meringue bridesmaids’ dresses and tears.

  As a result, the couple decided on a secret wedding. Without telling either set of parents, they married in a register office late one sodden afternoon in November and spent the evening getting drunk in the pub with a bunch of their university mates. When Faye found out she wept for a week. Each night she would lie in bed with Jack demanding to know how her only child could have done it to her.

  “What sort of a daughter gets married and doesn’t invite her parents?” Faye sobbed. “Ever since the moment she came into the world, I have longed to organize her wedding, yearned for the day I would take her to choose her wedding dress. Now she’s denied me all that. How could she be so cruel, Jack? How could she?”

  When Jack made the tentative suggestion that Faye’s broken heart wasn’t entirely due to them being excluded, and that perhaps it had more to do with her realizing she would never get the chance now to organize a wedding reception seating plan that ensured that her first cousin Irene, who had supposedly snubbed her at Faye’s mother’s funeral in 1973, sat as close to the kitchen as possible, she bashed him over the head with a pillow and sobbed all the louder.

  It took months of begging and pleading on Rachel’s part before her mother finally forgave her. Jack’s hurt was noticeably more muted. Rachel suspected he was secretly grateful to have been let off the hook, billwise.

  A decade or so on, Rachel’s opinion of huge lavish weddings hadn’t changed. On the other hand, she knew how much pain she had caused her mother by marrying in secret and she longed to make it up to her.

  The moment Rachel heard Faye coming downstairs she slammed the catalog shut. If her mother got the slightest hint that she was up for discussing wedding plans, the woman would be on the phone to Hylda Klompus, making unilateral catering arrangements before anybody could say ice sculpture.

  Faye walked into the room looking positively stunning. She was wearing a cream woolen suit with a knee-length pencil skirt and short boxy jacket with a tiny collar and large pearl buttons. Her face was fully made up and her blond streaked hair looked like it had been newly cut and blow-dried. The effect was only slightly marred by the vacuum cleaner she was carrying and the faint trace of white powder above her top lip. Rachel also couldn’t help noticing her mother’s nose was running.

  “Hi sweetie,” Faye said, putting the vacuum cleaner down. Then she went over to Rachel, cupped her daughter’s face in her hands and kissed her. “So how’s my gorgeous grandson? Still doing the Barbra Streisand impressions? I tell you—you have to say something to that ex of yours.”

  Rachel got a whiff of Miss Dior. She also noticed a tiny plastic bag sticking out of her mother’s jacket pocket. It appeared to contain the same white powder Faye had round her mouth.

  “Mum, I’ve told you before,” Rachel said, her eyes shooting to her mother’s top lip and runny nose and back to the bag of powder again, “it’s a phase he’s going through. Please stop nagging me about it.”

  Faye shrugged, wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. Rachel noticed her mother’s eyes were watering. As her gaze returned to the plastic bag, her mind started to race. Christ, she thought, the evidence was truly overwhelming. On the other hand it was absurd to think that a sixty-something Jewish grandmother from Chingford had developed a cocaine habit. Unless, of course, her mother was going through some kind of acute psychological crisis. That could explain the bikini waxing. Perhaps she’d developed a morbid fear of growing old. Yes, that was definitely it. Faye was going in search of her lost youth and she thought waxing and doing the occasional line or two would help her find it.

  “So . . . Mum, you look amazing,” Rachel said uneasily, deciding not to mention the cocaine until she’d phoned one of the drug help lines and gotten advice about the most tactful way to bring it up. “That suit must have cost a fortune.”

  “It did,” she said, flicking more specks off the skirt. “God, this bloody stuff,” she went on. “It’s everywhere.”

  Rachel could hardly believe how open her mother was being about having spilt cocaine down her skirt.

  “God, do you know, I’ve breathed in so much of this stuff, I can feel it going to my head. Plus my nose has started running like a blinkin’ tap. I must be allergic to it or something.”

  “No, Mum, I don’t think you’re allergic—that’s what it does to most people.”

  “Really? That’s outrageous. I mean, it could be dangerous. They should be forced to take it off the market.”

  “What do you mean, ‘off the market’? It’s not exactly on the market.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I bought it in Waitrose in Buckhurst Hill.”

  “What?” Rachel said incredulously. “You bought it in the supermarket?” She had a sudden image of her Jewish mother and some Tommy Hilfigered geezer with wraparound shades skulking next to the fish counter.

  “Yes,” Faye said, nodding slowly as if to a visiting Venutian. “Come in planet Rachel. That’s where we Earthlings buy Shake ‘n Vac.”

  “Shake ‘n Vac?” Rachel repeated. “That’s what’s in the little bag?”

  “Yes,” Faye said with a puzzled laugh, “what did you think it was?”

  “So it’s not . . . ?”

  “Not what?” Faye asked, giving her daughter a bewildered look.

  “No, er, nothing. Forget it.” So her mother wasn’t some bizarre new breed of suburban smackhead. Rachel’s relief was almost palpable.

  “I was Hoovering upstairs,” Faye started to explain, “and I dropped the Shake ‘n Vac container on the marble hearth in the bedroom and it burst. Bloody stuff ended up all over the bed, the dressing table and me. At least I managed to scoop up some of it.” She took the plastic bag out of her pocket and put it down on the counter.

  “So where are you off to, dressed up to the nines?” Rachel said, anxious to get the conversation back on track.

  Rachel noticed Faye hesitate before answering.

  “Oh, I’m not off,” she said. “I’ve been and come home again. An old school friend took me out for an extremely posh lunch in town. We got to talking, went out for tea and I only got back when I called you.”

  “Who were you seeing?” Rachel said, giving her mother a bemused look. “You’ve never mentioned before that you keep in touch with anybody from your school days.”

  “Haven’t I?” Faye said. She sounded distinctly agitated, Rachel thought. She was also starting to color up.

  “No, you haven’t,” Rachel said. She watched her mother pick some mail up from the counter and pretend to glance through it.

  “Oh,” Faye said, without looking up, “I’m sure I must have mentioned my friend Tiggy Bristol . . . Goldberg that was.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, I have,” she persisted, laughing nervously. “I’ve talked about her hundreds of times. Her husband’s a millionaire. Made his money in paper. I tell you, Rachel, for them it really does grow on trees. . . .”

  “Mum,” Rachel said emphatically, “I think I’d remember a name like Tiggy Bristol, don’t you?”

  Faye shrugged.

  Rachel sat thinking. She was absolutely convinced that her mother had never mentioned the name Tiggy Bristol. She couldn’t be certain, but she was pretty sure Faye was lying. Her edginess said it all. First there was the bikini line waxing, now she was inventing stories about whom she was meeting for lunch. Rachel was positive her mother was up to something. Precisely what, she had no idea.

  “So where’s your father?” Faye said, clearly needing to change the subject.

  “Dunno,” Rachel said vacantly. She was still mulling over the Tiggy Bristol issue. “He w
as on the phone when I arrived.”

  Faye went back to the mail.

  Just then Jack came into the room singing “Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut-case / Crazy for those Cadbury’s nuts and raisins. . . .” He gave Rachel a don’t-breathe-a-word-about-the-opera wink.

  Rachel smiled back. She looked at him with his paunch and fawn polyester slacks with the elasticized waistband and then back to her mother with her size ten figure and exquisitely cut suit.

  “So, Jack,” Faye said, looking up, “have you been yet?”

  He grimaced and waved his hand in front of him as if to say “don’t ask.”

  “The thing is with you, Jack, you don’t eat enough roughage. Your idea of a balanced diet is a fried egg sandwich in both hands. I tell you, carry on like this and you’ll end up with a colostomy. Look, your sister dropped off that Boots enema this morning. Why won’t you at least give it a go? She said your brother-in-law only used it once. And she sterilized it thoroughly afterward.”

  “Rachel, tell your mother she’s mad, will you? Who in their right mind uses a secondhand enema?”

  “I’m mad?” Faye retorted. “May I remind you that I’m not the one who sees eating a bit of broccoli from time to time as a threat to his manhood. And I told you, she sterilized the enema. Rachel, tell your father he should give it a go.”

  Having no desire to be drawn into an argument about her father’s bowels, Rachel decided to say her good-byes.

  It was only as she pulled up outside her flat, having spent most of the journey home trying to figure out if Tiggy Bristol was real or an invention—and if she was an invention, why—that she remembered she’d run out of orange juice. It wouldn’t have mattered, except Sam refused to put anything else on his cereal. Each morning she went through the same routine, trying to convince him that milk was food and far more filling than juice, but he wasn’t interested. What was more, since cereal was the only thing Sam would agree to eat in the mornings, failure to provide the juice to pour on top of it meant he would go to school on an empty stomach. Since there was more of the Jewish mother in Rachel than she cared to admit, she wasn’t about to let this happen. If he went to school hungry, she reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. It then followed that if his blood sugar got dangerously low, he could pass out. If he passed out he could hit his head. As she turned off the car ignition, there was no doubt in Rachel’s mind that if she didn’t find some orange juice tonight, by midmorning tomorrow her son would be lying on a gurney in the Royal Free Hospital, with a concussion.

  The 7-Eleven was a five-minute drive away. She decided to pop round the corner to the pub and see if Terry could spare a carton.

  As usual on weekday nights, the Red House was pretty quiet. She walked toward the bar. From what she could make out, Terry, the excabbie, salt-of-the-earth landlord was the only person serving. He appeared to be pulling a pint for a youngish bloke who was sitting at the bar doing a crossword. She was struck by his pallor—he looked like a blood donor who couldn’t say when—and his wild Bob Geldof hair.

  Having eyed the hair for a moment or two she decided he didn’t use Wash and Go—he used wash and forsake. She leaned on the bar, a couple of feet from him. Terry looked up, smiled and mouthed that he’d be with her in just a sec.

  “OK, Tel,” Rachel heard the mad-hair guy say, “what about three across? Exclusively female, ending in u-n-t.”

  Terry continued to pull gently on the pump.

  “Aunt,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, right,” the bloke said, drawing on his cigarette. “Course it is. Otherwise three down—largest antipodean country—would’ve been Custralia.”

  Rachel shook her head and laughed quietly to herself. She watched him cross out his previous answer. He was wearing a very fitted seventies-style royal-blue velvet jacket with wide lapels. Underneath it was a tangerine-colored shirt unbuttoned to the chest, with a long pointed collar and frill down the front.

  He threw the newspaper and pen down on the bar and grinned.

  “Right. Finished,” he declared. “OK, I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday morning after Kilroy. Three more in the afternoon. Twenty minutes now. So that’s what . . . ?”

  “Five hours, twenty minutes,” Terry said, picking up another glass.

  “Wick-id. Blimey, I reckon that’s my best time yet.”

  “So it took you as little as five hours then,” Terry said, putting the pint glass down in front of him, “to do the Sun crossword.”

  “Tel, mock not. You know how dyslexic I am.”

  He uttered the word dyslexic with two hard, back-of-the-throat, phlegm-clearing sounds common to consumptive tramps and heavily accented Liverpudlians. “I mean you know as well as I do, I can’t count m’ balls and get the same answer twice. Right, I’m off to the can. Put the beer on me tab.” He stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  It was only when he stood up that Rachel noticed he was tiny—no more than five five—and that along with the velvet jacket he was wearing skin-tight black leather trousers and platforms. What a poseur, she thought. But he was good-looking, she supposed, in a disheveled, Byronesque sort of way—albeit a half-pint version. He wasn’t her type, though. She’d never found men with pale skin particularly attractive. Unlike Shelley, for whom the warmed-up corpse look was a definite turn-on.

  “Terry,” Rachel said, suppressing a giggle, “who on earth is that?”

  “ ‘Im?” Terry said, grinning. “That’s Tractor.”

  “Come again?”

  “Tractor. Apparently his real name’s David Brown. And David Brown happens to be the biggest-selling make of tractor in Cornwall. So everybody calls him Tractor.”

  “But he sounds like he comes from Liverpool,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah, I thought that was a bit strange—still . . .”

  “And does he always dress like that?”

  “Always. He reckons the seventies was the most stylish decade of the twentieth century. To be honest, I can’t see it myself—all those perms and droopy moustaches. And that was just the women.” Terry burst out laughing.

  Just then Rachel noticed a copy of The Clitorati lying on the bar. Blimey, she thought. What was it about this book that attracted such knobheads?

  “Somehow I don’t see him as the kind of bloke who’d be into heavy feminist literature,” she said, turning the book over and glancing for a few moments at the blurb on the back cover.

  “Oh, no, he’s not reading it,” Terry said. He leaned forward and looked quickly to the left and right and said, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but he uses it to pick up women.”

  “To pick up women? You’re joking.”

  “No, straight up. He calls it ‘is ‘ticket to Tottieville.’ Says it makes him look intelligent and sort of new mannish. Doesn’t seem to be having much luck, though.”

  “Really,” Rachel said sarcastically. “You do surprise me.”

  Terry chortled. “So, Rachel. What can I get you?”

  She explained about having run out of orange juice and asked if he could possibly spare a carton.

  “No problem.” He walked the couple of paces to the fridge. She started to tap her hand on the bar in time to the music. Somebody had just put ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” on the jukebox.

  “There you are,” he said, putting the carton on the bar.

  “Thanks,” she said, handing him a fiver.

  He turned toward the till.

  At that moment, Tractor returned and sat back down on the bar stool next to Rachel. She continued to face the row of bottles behind the bar, but out of the corner of her eye she could see him looking at her.

  “Great book,” he said, picking up The Clitorati.

  “So I’ve heard,” Rachel said, turning to give him a half-smile.

  “In my opinion,” he said, lighting up, “it’s a profound and thoughtprovoking historical analysis of gender conflict.”

  He drew hard on the cigarette.

  “Funny,
” Rachel said, ostentatiously fanning away the smoke, “those words are identical to the quote on the back cover.”

  “I don’t believe it. You have to be kidding,” he said.

  “See for yourself.” She reached across and turned the book onto its back and tapped the cover.

  “I am gobsmacked. Totally gobsmacked,” he said. “Who’d have thought it? Well, you know. Great minds and all that.”

  “You reckon?” she said, smiling. He was a total twonk, but part of her couldn’t help finding him entertaining.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Funnily enough,” he said eventually, flicking ash into the ashtray, “I know this great clitoris joke. D’you want to hear it?”

  “Er, not really,” she said.

  “OK, right. Well, there’s this woman walking past this pet shop and she sees a notice in the window advertising a clitoris-licking frog. She’s intrigued so she goes in and says to the bloke behind the counter, ‘Excuse me, I’m inquiring about the clitoris-licking frog’ and he says . . .” Tractor paused for effect. “And he says . . . ’Oui, madame.’ ”

  Tractor started guffawing. Despite herself, Rachel’s lips were starting to quiver.

  “Get it?” he said, between laughs. “It’s frog as in Frenchman.”

  “Yeah,” she said, stifling her giggles (laughing would only encourage him, she thought). “I get it.”

  “I love this song, don’t you?” he said after a moment.

  “It’s OK,” she said.

  “So, er, what’s your favorite record then?”

  By now Terry had returned with her change.

  “Linford Christie’s hundred meters,” she said, turning away from him to take her change.

  “Cheers, Terry. Bye,” she said.

  She smiled briefly at Tractor and started walking toward the door.

  “Wey, hey, Terry, I reckon I’m in there,” she heard Tractor say. “She really fancies me. She’ll be back, mark my words.”