I almost bumped into a swing as I navigated the toy maze that was this garden. I could only assume that all of this stuff was for the many nieces and nephews that Andrew had warned me about. And as we got closer to the house, I heard the noise. No, it was more than a noise, so much more: it was a boisterous cacophony. Those were the right synonyms, weren’t they? Or was the right one more in line withcaterwauling.
‘Sounds like the family is here,’ Andrew stated casually.The family?A family of what? Of laughing hyenas. There were loud pool splashes, the shriek of children’s laughter, the laughter of adults, the sizzle of meat cooking on a barbecue and the barking of what sounded like a very small dog. One of those grumpy chihuahuas that always thinks it can attack my much larger dogs. The front door was open, and Andrew made a beeline for it. I, on the other hand, froze.
‘Uh . . .’ I looked around frantically and then gazed down at Sixty. He looked relaxed, not like me. He was lazily swimming through the water, totally oblivious to the noise of this new environment. He was in the same, safe environment he’d always been in. I wished that I could somehow move through the world like that, inside a protective and familiar bubble.
‘You okay?’ Andrew asked.
‘I think I just need a moment,’ I said softly.
‘Sure.’ Andrew led me to some chairs on the veranda. They were old, plaited-wire chairs, the kind that had been very popular in the eighties but that you never saw any more. I put Sixty’s bowl down on the table; it was also old. It was obvious that the chair leg had been repaired many times over. His home was the opposite of mine, but not in an unpleasant way at all. I scanned the garden. In the only flowerbed was an old, chipped garden gnome with one arm and a rusted watering can that looked like it had been lying in the sun for twenty years. The postbox, too, was worn and rickety and looked as if it had been repaired dozens of times. There was no grass on the lawn, only sand; I assumed from the usage of the many playthings. In the shade of a tree, the only tree in the garden, a dripping tap had caused a flourish of strange grasses and weeds to grow up underneath it.
‘My parents don’t believe in throwing things away,’ Andrew said as I fixed my gaze upon a wheelbarrow with a too-big tricycle wheel attached to it. ‘They believe in fixing and repurposing things until they cannot be used any more.’
‘Reduce, recycle and reuse,’ I said. ‘I’m a big proponent of that. That’s why I buy most of my things second hand. Not my clothes, though. I don’t like the idea of wearing someone else’s clothes. But furniture and electronics.’
‘It used to embarrass me when I was younger. All my friends had new things.’ He shrugged. ‘But now I like it.’
I was about to open my mouth when a woman stuck her head around the door.
‘I thought I heard voices!’ she said, beaming. Andrew jumped up and hugged her.
‘Mom!’ They rocked from side to side in one of those really big hugs that people give when they truly like each other. I hoped she wasn’t going to give me a hug like that.
‘So happy you’re here!’ she said, releasing him from her grip. I didn’t want a hug, so I stood up quickly and thrust the fishbowl out in front of me, blocking any kind of approach.
‘Happy sixtieth, Mrs Boyce-Jones. This is your present. I hope you like fish. I found him all alone in a tank at the back of the pet store; he was sick. But don’t worry, I’ve been medicating him and he’s doing much better. But if you look at his back, it looks like there’s a sixty on it, that’s why I got him. His name is Sixty!’ I finished my preamble and pushed the bowl into her arms so enthusiastically that some of the water splashed out onto her shirt. I hadn’t meant that to happen. That wasn’t good. But she seemed oblivious to the water or, if she wasn’t, she was pretending to be. She looked into the bowl and laughed.
‘I don’t believe it. It’s a sixty. Look at that!’ She graced me with a massive smile. Her face was make-up free, wrinkled, and her hair was unstyled and poofed up in places, as if she’d been sleeping on one side of it for so long that the hairs no longer flattened there.
‘But you’ll have to give this to the real birthday girl. Not me,’ she said, pushing the bowl.
‘But you’re Andrew’s mom.’
‘I’m only one of his moms. And call me Grace. It’s so lovely to finally meet you, Pippa.’ Unperturbed by the bowl, she reached right over it and pulled me into a half-hug. I stiffened a little but forced myself to hug back with my one free arm. When she pulled away, she looked back down into the bowl and laughed again.
‘Isn’t that amazing. It’s a sixty. As clear as daylight. Your mom is going to love it,’ she said to Andrew, and then walked inside.
‘I’m confused,’ I whispered, following Andrew inside.
‘I forgot to tell you. I have two moms.’
‘Two moms,’ I said thoughtfully. My brain was taking ages to compute. I’d had an expectation when he’d said ‘parents’. I’d imagined a mom and a dad. Whenever an expectation of mine wasn’t met, it always took me time to readjust, time to understand the new parameters. We walked through the lounge and headed for a door at the end of it, and as we approached it . . . ‘OOOH! I see.’ I smiled at myself, pleased that it hadn’t taken me that long to get there. ‘My best friend, Jennifer, she’s also a lesbian –shit.’
I stopped dead. The noise around us stopped too, and suddenly what felt like a million pairs of eyes were blinking at me.
‘Um . . . Unless you find the term “lesbian” offensive?’ I asked the pairs of eyes. ‘Gay? Homosexual coupling? Or was it that I just assumed your pronouns? Uh—’ The eyes continued to blink. ‘I have a fish,’ I said, thrusting the bowl out again so enthusiastically that a huge splash of water landed on the floor at my feet.
I felt an arm come up around me. ‘This is Pippa, my girlfriend. She’s brought a fish and her best friend, Jennifer, is also a lesbian, and she makes really loud entrances that may or may not be offensive.’ He squeezed my shoulder in a way that felt playful and caring.
I grimaced and shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ I said. The eyes had stopped blinking now, and instead a group of faces with growing smiles all looked at me.
‘God, it takesa lotmore than that to offend us, dear,’ one of his sisters said, breaking the ice.
CHAPTER20
I was engulfed. That’s the only way to describe the feeling of people wrapping me up in hugs and passing me around. It was never-ending, non-stop and relentless, and all I wanted was for the wave to die so I could stop riding it. Mass hugging like this made me so uncomfortable, and coupled with the fact that I didn’t know these people and was in an unfamiliar environment, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. But I bore it as best as I could until finally the wave did hit the shore and fizzled. I found myself standing in front of Andrew’s other mother, Rebecca – Becca for short. She was the only person I hadn’t hugged yet, and I intended on keeping it that way.
‘His name is Sixty,’ I said, passing her the fish as quickly as I could.
