AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘How’s Dad?’ The inevitable question, always asked at the end. She drains the pasta, phone in the crook of her neck.
‘All right,’ her mother replies. The tiniest inhalation.
‘What?’
‘Rhianna is pregnant.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’
‘Hey! Swearing.’
‘No but really.’
‘I know,’ her mum sighs. ‘He’s a fucking arse.’
They both laugh. Samantha eats the pasta standing at the kitchen counter while her mother fills her in on her father’s embryonic new family. Rhianna, Dad’s new girlfriend, is five years older than Samantha. Her pregnancy means that Samantha’s new half-sibling will be a year younger than her own daughter. But then, at forty-one, her father is only two years older than Peter.
‘Let’s hope that by the time the silly bitch hits forty, he’ll be too old to muck about where he shouldn’t,’ her mother says, by way of a wrap-up. ‘For the baby’s sake.’ She gives a dark laugh. ‘You should go and see him, you know. You have to forgive him sooner or later.’
It is only once Samantha puts the phone down that she remembers the extra poem. The argument with Peter, the baby’s constant demands and the rather depressing talk with her mother have conspired to flush it from her mind. She read Tommy’s, Lana’s and Jenny’s clerihews on the bus before she reached her stop, but now she settles with her folder and a cup of decaf coffee on the sofa. She is calmer than she was; she has rationalised it. Quite simply, in a fit of enthusiasm, one of them has written two poems and wants her to look at both. No big deal.
Lovely Daphne’s is top of the pile:
Michael Jones
Had good bones.
His smile she trusted.
After his Greek-god bod she lusted.
‘Brilliant,’ she says aloud, laughing softly, and flicks to the next one:
Sean Worth,
Last man on earth.
Everyone’s disappeared without a trace
So now it’s down to him to save the whole human race.
‘Bravo, Sean!’ She jots some encouragement before leafing through the rest. Aisha’s is a political verse about Boris Johnson, which ends on a clever rhyme concerning VAT and Macavity the cat. Trust an English graduate to throw in a reference to T. S. Eliot. Suzanne has written about Kylie Jenner, who borrowed a tenner – she spent it on an exotic pet, apparently, and is now in debt, ha!
Reggie has written an accompaniment to the Mick Jagger poem from this afternoon. ‘Bill Wyman,’ Samantha reads under her breath, ‘broke many a hymen.’ This makes her laugh out loud. Good old Reggie, giving her a giggle after the tension of the evening, her father’s continuing and barely believable crassness, her poor mother.
Still chuckling to herself, she slides Reggie’s work to the bottom to find the last clerihew – the ninth poem. Anticipation catches in her chest. There is no name at the top or bottom of the page. The sheet is unlined. The poem has the correct number of lines: four. But when she sees her own name at the top, her laughter dies on her lips.
Little Miss Frayn
Will be driven insane.
She thinks she’s the only one
But her happiness will soon be done.
Eleven
Samantha drops the poem, watches it skitter to the floor. She jumps up, tears a strip off her thumbnail with her teeth. The shutters are closed. She strides over to them and pushes them open, just a little. Outside, the black sky is hazed in orange from the street lamps. She paces out of the living room, across the hallway to the kitchen. Checks the back door. It’s locked. She lowers the blinds on the back windows, pulls the heavy curtains across the patio doors. Opens the curtains a centimetre and, hand visor-like to her brow, nose touching the cold glass, peers out.
