Chapter 11 ~ Family Rules – Part III
March 21, 2010
Jo heard the key in the front door and listened as Stuck-up and Trendy walked through to the living room. She hadn’t realized until now how much she’d been anxious about their return.
“Hi,” Trendy said.
Jo looked up from her copy of Cosmopolitan; an article about some place in Africa that she couldn’t pronounce and an issue she didn’t really care about, but at least it had passed the time.
Mentally, she finished the greeting: How’s he been?
Baby Kenny had been asleep when she’d arrived earlier this evening, so she really hadn’t had that much to do. As usual, they’d left pretty much as soon as she’d got there; itching to get out.
“Not a peep out of him,” she said, tossing the magazine to one side.
Stuck-up and Trendy; labels she’d draped upon them over the past year of being Kenny’s baby-sitter. Easy labels.
Trendy swayed slightly as he stood in the doorway.
It was true that she hadn’t heard Kenny make a noise all night. As he was right at the other end of the landing from the stairs, from his parents’ bedroom, from the rest of the house period, that wasn’t so much of a surprise, though. Frankly, he could have been crying all night and she wouldn’t have known.
If she’d been crap at her job.
But she was good at her job. So she’d checked on him every half an hour, popping her head around the door and listening.
Every thirty minutes.
Which was more than she thought they ever did.
Now they were here, Jo’s anxiety had doubled. She shook slightly at the thought of making the suggestion. Despite the television, the Cosmopolitan, the regular checks on Ken, it had been at the back of her thoughts all evening.
Her conversation with Jamie. The click of two and two coming together.
Dare she suggest it? Really?
“Do you want a coffee?” Trendy slurred.
She checked her watch. A little after midnight. She was going to have to get a cab anyway, so what damage could a coffee do?
Besides, it gave her breathing space.
As if she needed more of that.
She nodded and followed Trendy to the kitchen, noticing how Stuck-up walked into the living room and picked up the discarded magazine. She tutted slightly as she placed it back neatly in the rack at the end of the sofa.
In the kitchen, Trendy swayed while he filled the kettle, swayed while he ground the beans, swayed while he prepared the cafétiere. Water gushed out of the kettle as he began to pour, scalding his hand and wrist.
All of a sudden he wasn’t swaying any more.
“Fuck!” he yelled, dropping the kettle on the counter and spinning away from it. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
All instinct and preparedness, Jo sped across the kitchen. Though he turned in panic, tumbling into her, her momentum pushed Trendy back towards the sink, where she opened the cold tap, reaching out calmly to grab his forearm and shove his wrist under the streaming water. He went to pull his arm away but she shushed him with all the experience gained from ten years’ of baby-sitting and five years’ professional nannying.
“Hold it under there until it goes numb,” she said; voice of the catholic school, no debate.
He had begun to cry, so Jo held her arm around him while he waited for his hand to go numb. And even then, even with his skin reddening within the foaming jet of cold water, even in that moment of calm after the calamity, the suggestion still lurked, prodding at her, wanting to be spoken.
“I’ll finish the coffees,” Stuck-up said from behind them both, speaking for the first time since arriving home. She’d simply stood and watched the accident and, though Jo might have been inclined to put it down to drunkenness, she knew better. This one was a cold, cold fish.
Silence descended on the kitchen, punctuated by the Trendy’s sobs and the Stuck-up refilling the kettle.
And in Jo’s head, the suggestion, pushing like a contraction, wanting release, wanting out.
Eventually it was too much for her; the vacuum of the kitchen, sucking it right out of her before she could stop herself.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said quietly.
Neither of them said anything.
Had she said even said it out loud? She’d been rehearsing the conversation so much over the past week that she might well have just begun to run it through in her head again.
She couldn’t have said anything. Neither of them had even reacted.
She pulled his wrist out from under the water and looked at it. The scald was turning a nice shade of red.
“Have you got any Vaseline?” she asked.
“Huh?” he questioned, his eyes bleary with alcohol and tears. Across the kitchen, Stuck-up remained quiet.
“Some Vaseline, for the scald…”
“Oh,” he shrugged and gestured at one of the cabinets, “in there, I think.”
Jo walked over to the cabinet and opened it. It was full of all matter of bottles and jars, pills and ointments, bandages and boxes. The one thing she couldn’t see, however, was petroleum jelly.
She began to root around in amongst the flotsam, trying to unearth her prize, digging and dredging. Suddenly, Stuck-up was beside her pushing her out of the way and reaching up into the cabinet, retrieving a medium tub of Vaseline almost immediately.
“Here,” she said, shoving the jar forcefully into Jo’s hands, “and I’ll thank you not to go rummaging through my cabinets in the future.”
Without another word, she turned her back on her husband and Jo and poured the coffee. Once the liquid was steaming in the mugs, she crossed to another cabinet and pulled out a sugar bowl, with a little silver spoon, which she placed alongside. That done, she walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and up the stairs.
The lady had retired.
As Jo went to get the coffees, she heard Trendy tut behind her. And knew just how he felt.
She approached the kitchen table and he gestured to the other chairs.
“Sit down, why don’t you?”
She went to do so but just before she sat, remembered the Vaseline across the kitchen, next to the kettle.
“Hang on a second.”
Back at the table, she opened the jar and slathered a generous amount of the jelly on his scalded wrist. He winced as she did so, inhaling and exhaling in short bursts.
“There,” she said, “we’ll just put a bandage on that and you’ll be fine. That was a pretty nasty burn…”
She found herself looking down the hallway, at the empty space his wife had left behind; the care she should have shown.
As Jo stood to find a bandage, Trendy stopped her with a simple sentence: “What was your idea?”
“Pardon?” she asked, anxiety flooding back into her as she turned back to face him.
“Your idea,” he replied, “you said you’d had an idea?”
“Oh that,” she said, thinking hard, “it’s nothing. Not important, really.”
He looked at her for a long moment, staring right in her eyes. She felt pinned against the cabinets like a butterfly under glass.
“We can bandage this later,” he said, breaking the silence between them, “but for now, let’s just talk, eh?”
This time he pointed at the chair opposite him.
“Sit,” he said and she followed his instruction like a dog at obedience class.
She didn’t know where to start. All that rehearsal and practice and turning it over and over and over until her head seemed to have turned upside down and now she just didn’t know what to say to him. It had seemed such a simple thing when she’d been talking it through with Jamie. Such a simple thing.
“Well?”
“Ummmm…”
He dipped his head, raised his eyebrows, looked up at her, willing her to speak.
“Oh, come on,” he said, “you’ve not gone all coy on me, surely?”
“Well,” she took a long slug from her coffee, like she’d been crossing a desert for days.
He nodded at the cup. “You want something in that?”
After a moment’s thought, she nodded. “Why not?”
He stood and walked out the kitchen, leaving her alone with her thoughts for a moment. Either he did it on purpose, giving her time to think, or it was just a lucky providence because by the time he returned with a bottle of single malt, she’d decided that this was the right time and that she would run the suggestion past him.
As he glugged scotch into her mug, she spoke, bringing a drunken smile to his face.
“Have I ever told you who my sister is?”
He thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“Thought not,” she said.
“Anyone I know?” he asked, regaining his seat opposite her.
She nodded. “Jamie Masters.”
He looked at her blankly for a second. “Jamie Masters,” rolled the name around his mouth, closed his eyes, thought. “Jamie Masters, Jamie Masters, Jamie… Masters…”
She couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard of her. She was everywhere at the moment. On almost every newspaper and beginning to show up on television as well. He must have heard of her!
“Jamie Masters,” he said finally, “it rings a bell but…”
Jo lent towards him, pouting a little and half-closing her eyes. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Look at me,” she said.
He did but there was no sign of his noticing her hint.
“Oh, Jesus! Do I have to spell it out?”
She fell back into her usual routine, undoing a couple of buttons at the top of her blouse and pulling the two sides apart until the bottom of her bra showed, her breasts curving up and out. She wasn’t as buxom as Jamie but they were sisters and the same genes underpinned their size and shape. Though she couldn’t have gone into the modelling game, but Jo knew how to fill a bra. She pouted again, pushing her shoulders forward slightly, arching her back so that her cleavage tightened.
“Now do you get it?” she asked and was amazed to see the light-bulb click on, just as it always did when she aped her sister.
“No way!” he suddenly shouted. “Not that Jamie Masters? The Jamie Masters?”
She was used to this reaction, this incredulity; all because her sister showed her tits off in the tabloid press.
“Yes, that Jamie Masters,” she said, buttoning her blouse and drinking from her coffee while he regained his composure.
“Wow!” he said when he’d got himself back under some measure of control. “But I don’t get it; why tell me now?”
Now it came, all the preparation, the rehearsal, the practice, the turning over of angles and comments.
“She’s going to have her own television show,” Jo said quietly, “and they… Well, they…”
He was leaning forward, listening intently.
“They what?”
She sighed heavily.
“Well, you’re both out so much and I have Ken most of the time and I… Well, I thought that…”
“What?”
“They need a baby on the show and Jamie thought that they could use Ken. She loves him.”
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Eventually, watching his face carefully, trying to read every emotion it held, Jo spoke.
“Probably a good thing Stuck-up went to bed, eh?”
He nodded, not even noticing the label.
“Fuck the coffee,” he said, pulling the scotch bottle towards him and pulling out the cork, “I need a drink before we can talk about this.”
