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“I’ll put her down for Table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said. “Lovely to see you. Well,” he said, “you must have lots of things to be getting on with. And,” he said, “I need to be getting to work.”
“I thought you had the day off.”
“Morning. I’ve got the morning off. And it’s nearly over. And I should be getting off to work now so good-bye.”
She clutched her handbag to her, and she stood up. Fat Charlie followed her out into the hall.
“Lovely seeing you,” he said.
She blinked, as a nictitating python might blink before striking. “Good-bye Daisy,” she called. “I’ll see you at the wedding.”
Daisy, now wearing panties and a bra, and in the process of pulling on a T-shirt, leaned out into the hall. “Take care,” she said, and went back into Fat Charlie’s bedroom.
Rosie’s mother said nothing else as Fat Charlie led her down the stairs. He opened the door for her, and as she went past him, he saw on her face something terrible, something that made his stomach knot more than it was knotting already: the thing that Rosie’s mother was doing with her mouth. It was pulled up at the corners in a ghastly rictus. Like a skull with lips, Rosie’s mother was smiling.
He closed the door behind her and he stood and shivered in the downstairs hall. Then, like a man going to the electric chair, he went back up the hall steps.
“Who was that?” asked Daisy, who was now almost dressed.
“My fiancée?
?s mother.”
“She’s a real bundle of joy, isn’t she?” She dressed in the same clothes she had worn the previous night.
“You going to work like that?”
“Oh, bless. No, I’ll go home and change. This isn’t how I look at work, anyway. Can you ring a taxi?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Hendon.”
He called a local taxi service. Then he sat on the floor in the hallway and contemplated various future scenarios, all of them uncontemplatable.
Someone was standing next to him. “I’ve got some B vitamins in my bag,” she said. “Or you could try sucking on a spoonful of honey. It’s never done anything for me, but my flatmate swears by it for hangovers.”
“It’s not that,” said Fat Charlie. “I told her you were my cousin. So she wouldn’t think you were my, that we, you know, a strange girl in the apartment, all that.”
“Cousin, is it? Well, not to worry. She’ll probably forget all about me, and if she doesn’t, tell her I left the country mysteriously. You’ll never see me again.”
“Really? Promise?”
“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”
A car horn sounded in the street outside. “That’ll be my taxi. Stand up and say good-bye.”
He stood up.
“Not to worry,” she said. She hugged him.
“I think my life is over,” he said.
“No. It’s not.”
“I’m doomed.”
