Green Grass

Chapter 1

‘Can you balance a spoon on your nose?’

Laura is grateful that Inigo does not demonstrate spoon balancing, but instead contents himself with arranging all the glasses and cutlery on the table into a gleaming circuit, with fork following knife following spoon, each one balanced on the rim of a glass.

‘Everything has a point from which it can balance. The trick is finding it.’ Inigo pushes back the sleeves of his shirt. His watch glitters and beeps, becoming a green screen for a second. He flexes his fingers and balances a cigarette packet on one corner, then flashes a grin at his audience. Laura has of course seen it all before, but she knows better than to roll her eyes and sigh; instead she beckons the circling waitress and whispers instructions. Manfred, an art collector who flew in this evening from Munich to dine with Laura and Inigo, claps his hands and laughs out loud.

‘What a talent. What a talent,’ he chortles, slapping Inigo on the back with a broad, well-manicured hand. Inigo, lost in contemplation of the menu, is caught off balance and lurches towards Laura. The apparently floating tableware crashes down, spilling water onto Manfred’s soft black trousers and into his shoes. The flurry of napkins, the apologies and jangle of steel against glass and china goes unremarked in the roaring chatter and bustle of the restaurant. Laura takes a deep breath and exhales at length to stop herself saying something foul to Inigo. It is important to be supportive, she reminds herself, and anyway, there’s no point in getting het up about his table arranging.

Unperturbed, Inigo pushes back his cuffs again with a big-armed gesture and begins to rebalance his place setting. A thin blade of a man slides into the fourth seat at the table, kissing Laura’s cheek, winking at Inigo and shaking hands with Manfred, all in one smooth elision of movement and greeting.

‘Manfred, it’s good to see you again. Laura, Inigo, I’m sorry to keep you all waiting. Can I get any of you a drink or have you ordered a bottle?’

‘You didn’t keep us waiting, we were fine and we’ve ordered some wine.’ On this occasion Laura can’t quite suppress the bubble of irritation which blows up in her chest whenever she sees Jack Smack, Inigo’s agent. Most of the time she has it well under control, and can meet his oily gaze with serenity, but this evening she is tense and tired, and determined to puncture the smug slickness of his arrival.

‘Manfred wants to know more about Inigo’s working methods,’ she says untruthfully to Jack, who is painstakingly removing a fork and a knife from the suspension bridge Inigo has remade. ‘Why don’t you bring him along to the studio tomorrow morning, at about eleven, and we can show him something more substantial than these dinner tricks before he has to catch his plane?’

She smiles, her eyes demure, her hands folded in her lap. She knows that Jack is having a little more of his hair transplant done in the morning because his secretary Jenny told her so, and she can’t resist trying to catch him out.

But Jack looks regretful, pours wine and says, ‘What a wonderful idea – let’s do it next time. I’ve already fixed Manfred up to see one of my young Turner Prize candidates for breakfast in a caravan underneath the Westway. They’re being filmed for a documentary so we can’t really cancel. Sorry, Laura.’

Laura has to bite her bottom lip hard to stop herself saying, ‘Touché, Jack,’ but she is diverted by Inigo leaning over to whisper loudly, ‘Has Jack always had that scar on his head?’

Manfred and Jack are discussing something dreary: is it better to fly from Berlin to Gatwick or from Munich to Heathrow? Laura turns towards Inigo, putting her fingers up to his mouth and whispering in his ear, ‘Sssshhhhh! He’s halfway through having a hair transplant – haven’t you noticed all those tufts that have started to appear? No, don’t look now.’

But Inigo, to whom tact is a foreign language and subtlety another country, cranes past her to look, raising an eyebrow so it almost meets his own hairline. Laura presses her fingers on his arm and shoots him a warning look; Inigo is quite capable of asking Jack about the transplant, but instead he squeezes Laura’s hand back, and winks at her.

Manfred, watching them, beams approvingly. He likes to see a couple getting on well, and he likes it even more if they are attractive and are sitting with him. Inigo and Laura are striking, and although in a ideal world he would prefer to see a smaller nose on a woman, and perhaps long curly blonde tresses where Laura has an aquiline profile and auburn hair scooped up in a twist, he appreciates her creamy unlined skin, and her neat waist. His eyes linger for a moment on her stomach, or what he can see of it beneath the smooth fabric of her damson red skirt, then he coughs and asks Jack, ‘Did you say that Laura and Inigo have children? How long have they been married?’

The food arrives, and conversation becomes general, Inigo answering Manfred as he hands him a fork he has inadvertently tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket, presumably to save for a bit of balancing later when the table is cleared.

‘Yes, we’ve got two. Twins, in fact. They’re called Fred and Dolly. They’re thirteen now.’ He pauses, fishing for his glasses and putting them on to survey his food. ‘They’re bastards,’ he adds, scrutinising his plate, which must look very off-putting due to the green lenses in his glasses. ‘I thought I ordered organic mushrooms, but this looks like excrement.’ Inigo raises an arm to beckon the waitress.

Manfred looks shocked and cannot think what to say next. Laura places a soothing hand on his arm. ‘Oh honestly, Inigo, you don’t have to put it like that, do you? Sorry, Manfred. What he means is that we aren’t married.’

Neither Inigo nor Manfred is listening. Both are gazing at Inigo’s plate on which ooze some pieces of black slime. The waitress, her hands cupped in apparent supplication, is delivering an earnest lecture on organic methods of mushroom growing.

‘Well, I think they do grow them in compost, but I’m sure it’s well rotted and comes from completely organic cows, or sheep or whatever manure they use …’

‘See? I said it was excrement,’ mutters Inigo, lifting his plate up to examine it further.

‘For heaven’s sake, man, either eat it or send it back,’ Jack interrupts testily, having wolfed half of his vivid red mound of steak tartare and pushed away the plate, indicating his readiness for the removal of this course and the arrival of the next.

‘I’m going to eat it, I just want to know what’s in it. After all, this place makes a great song and dance about being organic and pure. I bet your beef is untraumatised, so why shouldn’t my mushrooms be serene?’

Laura eats her own, delicious salad, wishes she was thin enough for bread as well, and finds her glass is empty again. When Manfred fills it, Laura is faintly aware that this is the third time.

He asks her, ‘Are you against marriage for any particular reason?’

Bemused for a moment, Laura stares at him, noticing the kind eyes, the large cheeks, the soft fold of his chin dolloping over his stiffened collar. ‘Against marriage? What do you mean? Oh, us,’ she laughs, sips her wine, and because Inigo and Jack are talking now, and because she has had two glasses of wine on a stomach empty of all save lettuce, she launches into explanation.

‘No, I’d love to be married in some ways. Someone asked me once, but that was years ago, before I met Inigo.’ She pauses, fiddling with her glass, gazing at nothing; Manfred nods sympathetically. He is having a lovely time looking at Laura’s cleavage and hearing about her marriage, or rather her non-marriage. He hadn’t planned to buy an Inigo Miller piece – the prices have become absurd – but really, Laura is enchanting. Perhaps there’s something with an image of her on it. Or in it. He’ll ask Jack to sort it out. It’ll cost a bit, but what the hell. Maybe Laura could come along when Inigo instals it. He must make sure it’s something big which needs installing. And it had better be fragile, so it will need restoring by the artist. Laura must come to watch the restoration, of course. Mmmm … splendid. Manfred pops a piece of bread in his mouth and chews.

Laura is talking again. ‘Inigo and I had a commitment ceremony in New York. We’d been together a couple of years – longer, maybe – because Fred and Dolly were about two. We were all living in New York. It was fun, but hard work with small children …’ Laura tails off, lost in memories of dragging her double buggy up endless stairs to the apartment, of putting on and taking off toddler hats and gloves to keep the children from over- or under-heating. She loved her life then.

Manfred coughs gently, drawing Laura back. She smiles apologetically. ‘Oh yes, anyway, the ceremony. We were all on the roof of the gallery where Inigo was having his show, and he’d put up a huge Möbius strip studded with sequins and it was snowing.’

Manfred raises a hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ he beams, ‘I remember. I have seen a photograph of it in an auction catalogue. It is called Perfect Moment. I love that piece.’

Laura sighs, slumping her head on one hand. ‘Well, it should have been a perfect moment, just Inigo and me and our children and this lovely priest we met out there, but then Inigo and Jack decided that it would make fantastic art so they invited all the critics and a few favoured clients and said it was an exclusive Private View. Inigo took photographs between vows, and released a limited edition of twenty prints. Some are called Private View and the others are called Perfect Moment, depending on whether the photograph has us kissing or not. They went for a fortune, but I would rather have had my ceremony to myself.’

‘But Laura, my sweet, then I wouldn’t have got my forty per cent.’ Jack leans across to break up their conversation and Laura, her cheeks suddenly burning from the wine and the memories, pushes her chair back and crosses the restaurant towards the lavatories.

Inigo watches her move between the tables. She catches the heel of her shoe against the leg of someone’s chair, stoops to apologise, and continues. Inigo grins to himself, unconsciously playing with a pen, threading it between his fingers, twirling it around the middle finger then balancing it on its point on his thumb. Laura is like that, so is Fred. At home, Inigo likes clear surfaces on which he can place objects, position them perfectly, move away and come back to look at them. He likes to suspend things – a compass perhaps or an ivory paper-knife, from invisible thread, so the object hovers just above the mantelpiece or the kitchen shelf. His daughter Dolly shares his fascination with the way things are in their space; she too finds it hard to walk past a pile of books or a bowl of fruit without rearranging it. But then Fred or Laura come in and the constructions are doomed. Fred throws a school bag on top of a pyramid of lemons and paperclips on the kitchen table, Laura, searching for her keys, which are never where she thought, elbows a hovering display of glass prisms above the mantelpiece so they swing and tangle in rainbow-lit abandon. It’s not intentional; Laura and Fred are simply clumsy. Dolly finds it maddening, but Inigo has endless patience for recreating poise in their wake. Laura, in turn, finds this maddening.

Laura washes her hands in cold water and presses them to her cheeks to reduce the burning heat of alcohol. She drinks water from the tap then dries her face, feeling better, more controlled. A glance in the mirror above the wash basin confirms that her hair has come loose and her expression is glazed. Laura places her palm over her reflected face, wishing she could change into someone else. This evening is hard work. She feels heavy, dull and joyless. And old. Too old to gulp her wine and let Jack irritate her. And far too old to pour her heart out to Manfred. She must stop feeling sorry for herself; her face is definitely beginning to set in a downward droop. Not very becoming. Laura cranks a grin onto her face – it almost hurts, it feels so alien.

Unequal to dealing with her state of mind, Laura fiddles in her make-up bag for her lipstick She smoothes it across her mouth, repins her hair and makes her mirror face, with eyes wide, chin down and what she hopes is a sophisticated and provocative small smile playing on her lips. Making the most of having got this look right, she pushes wide the door back into the restaurant and stalks out with determined grace. The plan is that she will skim back to the table, and will be admired by all she passes for her smiling chic. Inigo will be amazed. Laura holds her head high, pretends to be a swan, and steps straight into a pile of white polystyrene boxes which are lurching along from the kitchens.

‘Ow! God, I’m sorry. Oh bugger. So much for being a swan, or indeed soignée,’ she mutters, crouching to help pick up the flimsy boxes, thankful that she is hidden from the restaurant tables by a frosted-glass screen. The man behind the boxes still has two, but he lets them fall and holds out both hands to pull her up from where she scrabbles for a lid behind the lavatory door.

‘I’m so sorry. Are you all right? I hope—’ He breaks off as she faces him. He forgets his hands are still holding hers, tightening with amazement. ‘You’re Laura. How extraordinary. It’s Guy. Do you remember me?’

Laura pulls back, breathless and flushing, madly convinced for a moment that she is naked.

‘Guy,’ she says and stops, unable to think of anything more to say. She stares at Guy who is taller than she is, even though her heels are so high she sways on them. The silence is a flash of time, but it is painful before Laura breaks it.

‘What are these boxes for?’

Guy laughs, and Laura stops feeling naked although her throat is thudding with shock and a sense of peeled-back years. She was twenty when she last saw him.

‘They’re for my vegetables. I had to drive down with an extra delivery this evening. This place is getting through the stuff twice as fast as I anticipated.’

‘What did you bring?’ Laura asks, afraid that to ask anything less bland might bring back the naked feeling.

Guy grins, as if he knows what she is thinking. ‘Mushrooms straight out of a compost heap and still steaming. But this is incredible – to see you again.’ He pulls her away from the screen, back towards the tables and the lit restaurant. ‘You’ve changed, and yet you haven’t. You’re looking lovely, Laura. Tell me, what are you doing here? How are you? I see your brother sometimes.’

Even though she doesn’t, Laura says, ‘I know.’ The swirling roar of the restaurant hovers between them as they stand silent for a second. Laura has a sense of toppling, which she puts down to her heels. She hopes Guy doesn’t put it down to drunkenness. Determined to get a grip on herself she holds out her hand, intending a businesslike shake. ‘I must go back to Inigo and the others.’

Guy takes her hand and kisses it. ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ he says quietly. She turns and walks away.

Back at the their table, Inigo is discoursing on his favourite topic, loops, to an audience of only Manfred. Jack has vanished.

‘You see, the Möbius strip is in essence a loop. It moves and changes, yet goes nowhere and stays the same. It is a metaphor for the absurdity of life. Take Samuel Beckett …’

Manfred, who is writing notes, leaning forward eagerly across the table, nods and scribbles ‘Samuel Beckett’ in his notebook.

‘Take Godot, for example.’ Manfred takes Godot. Inigo interlaces his fingers and straightens his arms over the table, stretching his palms towards Manfred’s eager nose and face. ‘In Waiting for Godot, nothing happens twice. It’s brilliant. Superb.’ Inigo stops, his expression arrested, gaze fixed on Manfred, waiting. Manfred chews his pencil, and looks blank.

Laura smiles encouragingly at him and kicks Inigo, muttering. ‘Don’t start, please. I don’t think Manfred is a Beckett fan.’

But Inigo is warming to his theme, and he delves in his pocket to bring out a strip of black rubber which he passes to Manfred. Manfred shrinks back; it looks like something for taking blood pressure, or more likely an implement for kinky sex. He wants none of it.

Inigo’s eyes are blazing enthusiasm as he changes gear and motors smoothly on with his theories. ‘You see, the Möbius strip has no end and no beginning. Look at it. Look at life. We are born, we wake up each day, we eat, we go to sleep, and at some point we die and are replaced by the next generation. It is futile and wonderful, moving and petrifying.’

‘It’s just one of his strips,’ Laura hisses to Manfred. ‘Do you see? It looks like a link of a chain or a figure of eight, but actually it is a form with one side and one edge. It was invented by a German mathematician, in fact. August Ferdinand Möbius was his name.’

Manfred watches her run her finger along the whole of the black rubber thing, proving presumably that it has one side. This is lost on him, but he does like leaning towards Laura, breathing in the scent of her hair and her perfume as he looks over her shoulder at the strip.

‘What’s it for?’ he asks.

‘It’s not so much that it’s for anything, it’s a physical manifestation of an idea,’ Laura begins to explain. She loves amassing, reconstituting and doling out information. Some people, including her older brother when they were children, and her own children now, interpret this as control freakery and appalling bossiness, but Laura sees it as a way of keeping some part of her brain alive. There have been times in the thirteen years that she has been a mother, when she has felt her brain beginning to sidle softly out of her head. Without a concerted effort to return it to position, Laura imagines her brain might just bob away to a peachy cloud where it will live in peace for ever, wallowing in the luxury of having continuous, uninterrupted thoughts whenever it wants to. She would then be left, lobotomised and dutiful, to meet her family’s needs without ever complaining or thinking for herself. In many ways it would be a huge relief.

Jack reappears at the table, brushing a casual hand across the light down on his head then leaning over to kiss the crown of Laura’s.

‘I’ve got a taxi waiting outside. I’ll take Manfred back to his hotel and we’ll talk in the morning,’ he says, folding the receipt ostentatiously into smaller and smaller rectangles, just in case anyone missed the fact that he has paid the bill.

Manfred rises and reluctantly bids Laura farewell. He would like to stay drinking coffee and schnapps and preening his intellect; he thinks it is a bit much of Jack to drag him away as if he is a schoolboy, but it is difficult to argue with someone who presents his own suggestions as a fait accompli.

Laura and Inigo, left alone at the table, are suddenly and simultaneously overwhelmed with a desire for sleep. He smiles and holds out a hand to her.

‘Come on, let’s go home, it’s late.’

Chapter 2

The winter sun wakes Laura, and she opens her eyes to a dazzle of pink, glad for once of Inigo’s belief that curtains would cut off his creative dynamic with the world. Buoyed by the roseate joy of the morning, she rises, determined to be serene today, and performs what should be a short but satisfying sequence of yoga stretches on the floor at the end of the bed. In fact it is nothing of the sort. Collapsing with a groan from the agony of doggy position, she decides to look for an alternative exercise programme. Inigo sleeps on. All she can see of him is the black slash of his hair on the pillow. In all the years they have been together, he has never woken up before her; even if his alarm clock is set, Inigo is incapable of being first out of bed. He likes someone else to pave his way.

Outside, sunbeams stretch across the street and the cars parked on each side of the road glitter and sparkle, coated with frost like the crystallised fruits Laura’s mother always has in the house for Christmas. Slapping her feet up the rubber-floored staircase Laura realises with horror that no thank you letters have been written to her mother for the Christmas presents she sent the children, and now it is almost March. She wonders whether to try and get them to do it this morning, but decides it will be easier to forge their handwriting herself and fake the letters. That way at least they might appear to be a tiny bit grateful for Dolly’s flower press and Fred’s mouth organ.

She opens the door to Dolly’s room, but the bed is already empty, the curtains flung back to let in the light and a rap music station is pulsing from the radio next to the bed. Dolly is in the bathroom. The air is thick with her favourite ozone-killing body sprays and hair volumiser, and the floor is littered with towels, T-shirts and trainers. Clearly Dolly is choosing her outfit for the day. The scene in Fred’s room is somewhat different. A fug of dark, silent warmth greets Laura when she opens the door. She tries a schoolmistress approach first.

‘Good morning, Fred. It’s a lovely, lovely day – do look.’

Her son does not move or make a sound, despite the rude crack of his blinds pinging up and the searchlight of morning sun falling onto his pillow and his turned-away face. Laura tugs at the duvet, and the visible part of Fred vanishes under the covers accompanied by a low groaning sound.

‘Come on, I’m making breakfast.’ She turns to leave the room, trying not to look at the heaped clothes, the sliding piles of books and hurled odd socks. Picking her way out, Laura stands on something soft and yielding yet crunchy.

‘Urgh, gross. It’s something alive, I think!’ she shrieks.

Fred is out of bed in a flash. ‘Where? Let’s see.’ He kneels next to her, scrabbling on the rug, then sighs. ‘Mum, you’ve trodden on my owl pellet. That’s so annoying, I was going to dissect it.’

Laura shudders. ‘Why was it on the floor then? What’s in it anyway?’

Both of them crouch on the floor, examining the desiccated mess of mangled feather and bone. Fred picks up part of a tiny skull.

‘Look, this is a shrew, I think. I didn’t know London owls ate shrews.’

‘Where did you find the pellet?’

‘Under the oak trees on the Heath. I think the owl’s got a house in there. It’s right by a rubbish bin and that was where I thought he got his food.’ Fred is wide awake now, picking over the bits of reconstituted owl dinner. Laura glances at her watch.

‘Come on. You’ll have to leave it for now. Just hurry up and come down for breakfast.’

Fred scowls at her. ‘All right, all right, there’s no need to get in a psyche, is there?’

Laura doesn’t answer. She bangs on Dolly’s door as she passes and shouts, ‘Breakfast Doll, come on,’ with little hope of being heard above the whirr of the hairdryer and the thud of the radio. She runs downstairs and into the kitchen, imagining with savage pleasure the children’s horror if she were to revert to a version of their behaviour and lie in bed refusing to get up or brush her hair or eat what is provided – Laura pours tea and places packets of cereal on the table, lost in her reverie, imagining herself lolling in the back of the car while her children drive, picking her nose, dangling her shoes from her toes and sighing at the choice of radio channel. It