The Family Gift Read online

  Wrong.

  Mildred is lethal. She could rip the world’s self-help gurus apart in half a day.

  I sigh, look at my paper and draw a flower, then a couple of badly-shaped eggs in the top corner. Then a wonky chicken. Unlike Liam or my mother, I have never been God’s gift to art.

  Chicken. What else can we do with chicken?

  I have spatchcocked it, roasted it, doused it with lemon, olive oil and vine tomatoes. I have taught people how to stir-fry healthy, speedy foods for when they race in from work tired and need good food for their families. I have made it with Asian and Indian influences, bashed lemongrass into it and shredded it for healthy grain salads complete with bulgur, quinoa and jewelled pomegranate seeds. I have done everything with bloody chicken except serve it raw, which is never a good plan.

  Once upon a time, the ideas for recipes flooded in without me having to make an effort. I could magic a new chicken twist out of my head with half an hour of meandering in my pantry and some glorious cookery alchemy. I did not appreciate that at the time. Now, when the flooding-in bit has gone, I am like an icing bag with all the icing squeezed out.

  I fiddle around a bit with ideas but I am borrowing from other people and I know it. That is the kiss of death for my career.

  I have to phone my agent about this.

  Paddy, who runs a big agency between Dublin and London, has time for all his mainly non-fiction clients, and disproves all those jokes about agents being tough as old boots. He would give me a kidney if I asked, never mind giving me sound advice.

  But if I phone Paddy, if I actually say: ‘I have no recipes: my mind has dried up,’ then I would be making it all real. I would be saying that my career is in trouble. That I am not going to be able to fulfil either of my contracts, TV series or book. And I can’t do that. I have a family, responsibilities. I need to sort this out on my own.

  That’s how I do things. On my own.

  Still, when the phone rings, I drop the pretty purple ink pen like a shot and answer it.

  It’s Dan.

  ‘Hi, love,’ he says and I can hear the gulp in his voice. ‘Adele Markham was on to me this morning. The make-up, whatchamacallit, launch is this weekend and that’s when Elisa would love to see Lexi.’

  ‘Well, she can’t,’ I rage. ‘She’s doing her end-of-term exams.’

  ‘Elisa WhatsApped Lexi, apparently, and it seems she can.’

  I would sweep my fancy notebook to the floor with irritation if the desk wasn’t so chock full of stuff that it would take at least two piles of mail with it.

  Elisa, with her peanut-sized brain, has outfoxed me. This explains how jellyfish are still a species.

  ‘I will kill the bitch,’ I hiss.

  ‘Freya,’ says Dan, clearly startled.

  ‘Meet Freya the Slayer,’ I say. I am sounding unhinged.

  You go, girl, shrieks Mildred. Bet you’d get a nail gun in Lidl! They have everything. We should go now!

  ‘Freya, we have to do this, for Lexi’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, I know, for Lexi,’ I say and I grind my teeth. My teeth-grinding is increasing too. At this rate, I won’t need a nut cracker. I’ll be able to crack any nut myself with my teeth.

  That’s the recipe thinking session over for this morning, I decide. I will worry about it next week. Now, I just have to worry about Saturday.

  *

  I haven’t seen Elisa in the flesh for some time and when I do, the whole early Saturday morning of Lexi trying on every item she owns gets pushed to the back of my mind. Because Elisa is, and there is no other way of saying this, a green-tinged tan colour. I don’t mean her clothes. Her clothes are perfectly OK if you like that sort of I’m a twenty-four year-old going to a night club look (Elisa is not twenty-four and is not going to a night club, but I am not here to be bitchy, oh no).

  However, Surella appeared to have created, among their other products, a new high-speed fake tan that turns the wearer bronze with an unmistakable hint of green. I had the same problem myself once with a very famous tan that made other people a glowing brown and made me look like I was a troll’s love child.

  I wonder if it’s a trick of the light, because these Surella people are clearly spending money on the marketing and launch. Would they have let Elisa out if she was channelling Shrek? Or have the chemicals in tan affected their minds? Too long in the lab, and all that . . .?

  The launch this Saturday morning (for brunch with Prosecco!!! as the invitation gushes) is in a very glamorous hotel called The Mercer where a large and achingly trendy room has been rented out.

  And then Dan moves closer to me and whispers: ‘Is she, like, green?’

  I love him fiercely at that moment. We are a team again, which we have not been for the past few days since he broke the news of this meeting.

  ‘It could be the lights,’ I say, trying to be someone kind and nice. I mean, I have to sometimes.

  We both look up.

  The lights in The Mercer Hotel are a subtle off-white, perfect for the launch of a new product. The lights are not at fault.

  From the lack of other non-Surella people and the scurrying around of two assistants putting neon-pink Surella bags on a long table and adjusting the flowers alongside a big cardboard Surella stand, it is obvious that we are not there for the launch as such.

  It appears that Elisa has organised this so that Lexi, Dan and I are there for the pre-launch. In other words, the bit before anybody gets there. Her mother isn’t even there yet, for which I am grateful.

  The thought of Adele Markham descending upon me like a designer vulture, all clattering genuine Chanel pearls and diamonds that would take the sight out of your eyes, is enough to give me a headache.

  Elisa has invited us along early so that Lexi can look around, marvel at how terribly beautiful and glamorous it all is and then leave.

  I figure that this scheduling plan is because of two things: one, which I have always suspected, is that nothing will age the endlessly ‘youthful’ Elisa faster than having it made obvious that she actually is thirty-nine and has given birth to a now fourteen-year-old daughter. And two, she doesn’t like sharing the limelight and I’m a lot more famous than she is.

  None of this is apparently affecting Lexi, who is looking around the way she used to walk around Santa’s grotto at Christmas in those early childhood days when there were sometimes real reindeer, or sometimes just fluffy big ones that she wanted to bring home with her.

  Once, memorably, there was an over-refreshed Santa who reeked of whiskey. It didn’t matter – it was all magic. There is a lot less magic today in watching Elisa wandering around with big heated rollers still on the top of her head to get that ever-important crown lift. She is shoehorned into a lizard-print stretchy fabric that would be a dress if there was more of it, and it has to be said, she’s thin.

  Not-eating thin? Liposuction thin? Vodka, cigarettes and cocaine diet thin?

  ‘It’s all beautiful,’ Lexi breathes.

  Finally, Dan and I chance another glance at each other. We are on the same page on this one. We don’t want our little girl to get hurt. That’s all that matters. And if Shrek hurts her, the bitch inside me will emerge pretty quickly.

  You never used to be this aggressive before the parking garage incident, says Mildred.

  Oh, shut up.

  We have been standing there for five minutes, having been let in by a tall, leggy blonde also wearing distinctly nightclub clothes, who then ran over to Elisa and told her, but beyond a limp wave in our direction, Elisa is still glued to her phone and has not come over to greet us.

  To my mind, she’s looking amazing despite the subtle greeny gold of the tan. Up close, the thinness looks like yoga-muscled thinness, which makes me feel envious. I want muscles from holding Warrior Two for five minutes and a belly that is definitely not held in with suck-i
t-in undergarments. But I have no time in my life for yoga and—

  You could do yoga yourself in the morning, the way you pretend to when you talk to journalists. As ever, Mildred is helping. Not.

  ‘Perhaps Elisa’s too busy today.’ As soon as I say it, I regret the words. This is about Lexi. Not me.

  Not me being jealous of where this other woman will fit into my daughter’s life. Or jealousy over where she once fitted into my husband’s life.

  ‘But we can wait—’ I begin.

  Too late.

  I have pushed Dan’s buttons and he’s irritated with Elisa.

  ‘Come on,’ he growls, steering our daughter in the direction of the woman he once married.

  Dan does not have a ‘let’s pretend’ voice – another reason I love him. He is straight as a die. Honest. While I feel spectacularly dishonest because I hate being here for a variety of reasons, I can’t say a thing. This is my stuff to deal with.

  ‘Lexi, let’s go and say hello to Elisa,’ Dan says.

  Lexi, ballet trained and walking like she should already be in the corps de ballet somewhere, glides excitedly over with him and I follow.

  Instantly, as if she was waiting for this all along, Elisa beams in our direction and hangs up her phone.

  ‘Darlings, I’m so glad you could come, and early too because we have all the press and it will be terribly boring for all of you.’

  If I’m not mistaken, Elisa is nervous.

  Her eyes flicker towards me and I realise that something has clearly changed with her. Before today, I’ve only met her five times but there’s something different now.

  Gone is the perpetual party girl who thought that the ultimate in cool meant designer clothes, fast cars, never having an actual job and counting many sub-celebrities among her ‘friends’.

  In her place is an extremely attractive dark-haired woman approaching forty. To my mind – to my mother’s mind – forty is just the start of another decade.

  To the Elisas of this world, forty is Armageddon.

  The time of reinvention or a major facelift unless you have married extremely well or have a career.

  I feel a hint of pity.

  ‘You look wonderful, Dan,’ Elisa is cooing and I zone back in to realise that all this time, Elisa is addressing Dan and hasn’t spoken to Lexi or me at all.

  The hint of pity vanishes.

  ‘Elisa, hello,’ I say cheerfully, because you can’t be on TV for a few years without learning a few skills, notably how to sound pleased to see someone when you’re not. ‘This . . .’ I gesture with my hands, ‘is all great fun. Well done you. Say hello, Lexi darling, you haven’t seen – er, each other for a very long time.’

  I stumbled there but I am not calling Elisa ‘your mother’. I’m Lexi’s mother. Even if I don’t have abs of steel or a beauty contract.

  ‘Hi,’ says Lexi shyly. ‘Nice to meet you. I can’t wait to see the products.’

  Elisa smiles and bends to hug Lexi, the child she has seen perhaps seven times since she officially gave Dan full custody and allowed me to adopt her.

  I am standing behind my daughter and I instinctively tighten my grip on her shoulders.

  ‘Mum!’ says Lexi, wriggling free.

  It’s like letting her go off on a gap year.

  They hug, and I watch with breath held.

  ‘You’ve grown so – uh, grown up,’ says Elisa finally.

  ‘I was fourteen in March,’ says Lexi.

  ‘OMG, really?’ says Elisa.

  There is a pause. Dan and I look at each other.

  ‘But you know that,’ he says easily, although to me, I can hear the steel in his voice. ‘Obviously, you wouldn’t forget that.’

  ‘Of course not,’ says Elisa. ‘Silly me. It’s just that, well – you’ve grown so tall . . .’

  Elisa still looks startled at this. Did she think Lexi was still in pigtails and little girl sweaters with fairies on them?

  Lexi beams at her. How could anyone resist this exquisite girl who is kind, funny and so talented?

  Both myself and Dan put a hand on each of her shoulders but she shrugs them off.

  ‘I follow you all the time, Elisa,’ says Lexi, who clearly doesn’t plan on calling this woman ‘Mother’.

  Small mercies.

  ‘You do?’

  Safer ground here. Elisa can do fans.

  Fans, but not daughters?

  ‘I should give you my autograph.’ Elisa is all perked up now. Bet she has a pink pen and puts hearts on the ‘i’s in her name. Fine until you’re twenty-five; worrying afterwards.

  ‘Not an autograph,’ I say, attempting my ‘isn’t this fun?’ voice. You do not give someone you actually carried in your body an autograph.

  ‘The girls in school would love it!’ Lexi says.

  Nobody in her school ever wants my autograph, I think glumly. But then, they see me picking Lexi up in a dirty car with my hair a mess and Teddy screaming things at us all from the back seat and tossing her small box of raisins around. That does take the glamour away, somewhat.

  ‘You’re right, Freya,’ says Elisa. ‘Instead, show them this!’

  She walks, in a rippling movement, over to one of the tables where she picks up a neon pink bag left to one side and tied with a white bow.

  She repeats the rippling walk back and I wonder if she’s had an eighth of an inch removed off one shoe, the way Marilyn was supposed to have done, in order to keep that exquisite hip movement going.

  ‘I picked all of this myself for you,’ she says, handing the bag to Lexi, who flushes with pleasure.

  ‘I’ve even signed the compliment slip inside,’ Elisa adds, ‘but it’s not an autograph.’

  This last bit is to me.

  ‘I’m not really famous yet and just so you all know, I’m using Elisabetta from now on. The Surella people love it. It’s classier.’

  ‘I love it,’ says Lexi happily.

  ‘Now, I know you came to see this, but it’s probably not a good idea this morning,’ Elisa – sorry, Elisabetta – says. She gives me a look that I instantly identify: anxiety over me being here.

  Elisa has decided she wants to be somebody – and that somebody does not want another better-known somebody in the background: i.e., me.

  Just to make a point about being a somebody: fame means nothing other than the fact that more people know you. That’s the way I’ve always figured it. I make more money by selling my books and my recipes on TV and going on radio shows and talking to people around the country and doing demonstrations. It’s my business and even though I love what I do, it’s a job, not a calling that places me on a higher plane to the rest of the planet. I’m not better or more special than anyone else because I am well known, so I don’t buy into celebrity. Except I have seen plenty of people who do. And it looks as though Elisa might be one of the converted.

  Fame on my level is limited. I get recognised on the street.

  But I still have to buy toilet paper and scrub the bath when Lexi’s used one of her colourful bathbombs and the bath gets covered in sparkles. I still haul groceries from the supermarket into the car, still have to put them all away when I get home, still realise I forgot the milk. In short, I have a job that means plenty of people know me but that’s all.

  There is a level of fame that includes murderous amounts of money so that people are insulated from all of this, but few people reach that level. I haven’t and I’m not sure I would want to.

  My other celebrity factoid is that fame maximises who a person is. If you’re grounded before it, you’ll be grounded afterwards. If you’re an adult who has never had a proper job and thought it a good plan to get her only child adopted, well, your chances of normality are limited.

  ‘Everyone tells me that to keep it professional, family gets in the way,�
� Elisa adds and all sympathy for her vanishes.

  ‘Let’s meet for coffee soon,’ she says to Lexi, who beams and says ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then, I have to rush because this is starting soon.’

  Someone is waving at her and her attention has waned.

  Stab her now, says Mildred.

  Just whose inner voice were you before you became mine? Vlad the Impaler’s?

  Since you mention it . . . Mildred, if she could, would be rocking with mirth.

  A man in an expensive suit appears. Definitely one of the people who are putting up the money for this bash. I know this because he is not green.

  ‘Elisabetta, people are going to be coming in in the next fifteen minutes, so are we ready to go? We need some shots beforehand and I want everything to start on time.’

  ‘Of course, Gavin,’ she says, and there is a hint of the old Elisa in that pussy cat purr.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve met Dan, my ex-husband and . . .’

  She turns to me as if she can’t bear to say my name, which is OK because I’m pretty much the same with her. ‘Freya, his new wife and . . .’

  Dan and I stop breathing for a moment, and then it comes: ‘Lexi, their little girl, isn’t she just adorable?’

  I can feel Lexi stiffen and the guy, Gavin shakes hands with everyone, smiles and tells me he loves my shows, and will I stay for photos, which does not please Elisa because she calls loudly for the hairdresser to come and de-roller the crown of her head.

  ‘No, they can’t stay,’ she coos.

  I can’t see Lexi’s face because I’m standing right behind her and I think of all the things my darling daughter could have said, like, ‘You didn’t say you were my mother once upon a time.’

  But our darling Lexi is not like that: she’s thoughtful, sometimes anxious. I wonder if I could possibly stand on Elisa’s unshod sandalled foot, put my heel through a few vital bones. It would make Mildred happy. Me too.

  ‘We’d better be going, Elisa,’ says Dan definitively. ‘We can see you’re busy.’

  ‘Of course. Talk soon!’ She hugs Lexi again and then waves, and rushes off in the direction of a woman with a comb in her hand.