‘Morning, Mum. How are you feeling today?’
‘Today is a good day.’
Lana smiles brightly at her mother. Both look forward to the good days. The good days are what keep them going.
‘Didn’t you have to go to work today?’ her mother asks.
‘Nope. Got fired yesterday.’
Her mother shoots her a surprised, worried glance. ‘Sit down. I want a word with you.’
Lana sits and her mother puts a bowl in front of her. ‘Is this man really giving us the money?’
‘Unless he backs out,’ she says and pours some cereal into the bowl.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Blake,’ she says pouring milk.
Her mother sighs. ‘Are you purposely making this hard?’
‘All right. His name is Blake Barrington.’ She sprinkles two spoons of sugar on her cereal.
‘Barrington?’ Her mother’s forehead creases into a frown. ‘Why is that name familiar?’
Lana finishes chewing before she answers. ‘Because it’s that famous banking family,’ she mumbles and quickly spoons more cereal into her mouth.
Her mother gasps and sits on the chair opposite her daughter. There is something in her mother’s eyes she has never seen before. ‘How long have you been seeing him?’
‘I met him yesterday.’ More cereal gets immediately shoved into her mouth. She wants to end this conversation as soon as possible.
‘You met him yesterday and he agreed to give you fifty thousand pounds.’
‘Mmnnn.’ She makes a production of munching.
‘Why?’
‘Guess it must have been love at first sight.’
Her mother’s eyes narrow. ‘Is there something you are not telling me, young lady?’
‘Nope. The rest are all gory details,’ she dismisses cheerfully.
But her mother is not put off. She is like a hound that has scented blood. ‘How old is he?’
‘I didn’t ask, but he didn’t look a day over thirty.’
‘So he’s not an old man?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘When do I get to meet him?’
Lana slips out of her chair with her empty bowl and goes to the sink. ‘Soon, Mum. Very soon,’ she says, quickly rinsing her bowl and spoon.
Her mother sits at the table as still as a statue. ‘Does Jack know?’
‘Jack?’ Lana turns to face her mother. ‘We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, you know.’
‘I know, I know but…’
‘But what?’
‘Well, I always assumed you’d end up with him.’
‘We don’t feel that way about each other.’
She sighed. ‘You just seem so right for each other. I always dreamed that he’d be my son-in-law.’
‘Since when?’
‘You could do a lot worse than him, Lana. He’s tall and handsome and he’ll be a doctor soon.’
‘I’m not marrying Jack, Mum. He’s like my brother.’
‘The path of true love is not always smooth,’ her mother insists stubbornly.
Lana goes into her bedroom, puts the orange coat on a hanger, picks up the orange shoes from the floor, and goes out of the door, saying, ‘Popping over to Bill’s.’
Seven
he door next to their home is open. Lana enters her Tneighbor’s home without knocking or calling out.
The air is full of the smell of bacon cooking. A big woman wearing a faded apron in the kitchen shouts out to her.
‘Morning, Jane,’ she replies and takes the blue stairs two at a time. Billie has been her best friend since they were in primary school, and she has been taking these stairs all her life. She doesn’t knock on the door, but enters and shuts it behind her. Billie’s room has exactly the same view and dimensions as Lana’s but it has been done up in myriad colors and is perpetually messy. When it is clean, it reminds Lana of a piece of modern art. She hangs the orange coat on a hook behind the door, opens a cupboard, puts the shoes inside and closes it. Then, she carefully sidesteps over a mess of clothes and a pizza takeaway box to sit at the edge of the single bed.
Billie has her head buried under a pillow. She was born nondescript with pale eyes and mousy brown hair and given the equally nondescript name Jane, but when she was eleven years old she reinvented herself. She turned up in school one day, her hair bleached white and turned into an Afro.
‘Why have you done that to your hair?’ the bad, white boys taunted.
‘Because I like it,’ she said so coolly and with such confidence that their opinion no longer mattered. She had become a law unto herself. She changed her name to Billie knowing that it would be shortened to Bill. Then she found a tattooist in Kilburn High Street, who agreed to tattoo a spider on her left shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t a butterfly have been better? Spiders are so creepy,’ her mother worried. But more and more spiders crawled onto her back, down her thin left arm, and eventually a few small but intrepid ones began to climb up her neck. Now Bill Black has given up the Afro, but her hair is still dead white and her lips perpetually crimson.