Green Grass Read Free Page B

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 would be so enjoyable, such fun. Laura has forgotten how to have fun. Somewhere on the way to becoming a thirty-eight-year-old mother of adolescents, a wife manquée for fourteen years, she has left having fun behind.
    Sighing, self-pity welling, Laura opens the fridge, reaching before she looks and thus dislodging a pyramid of eggs. One rolls out and breaks softly on her foot. ‘Sod it,’ she murmurs.
    â€˜If we had a dog your foot would be licked clean in a nano-second,’ says Fred from the doorway where he has chosen to stand to eat his cereal. He prefers not to sit at the table, it makes the prospect of conversation with his sister more likely. He grinsat Laura, and despite the small humiliations of the morning concerning owl spit and feet, Laura smiles back, love surging because he looks so scrubbed, his hair slicked back with a wet comb from his brow, freckles a splash across his nose, and the hollow at the back of his neck visible again now after a severe interlude at the barber’s shop, reminding her of long-ago life when he and Dolly were babies and she lay with them in bed feeding them for so long it seemed for ever.
    â€˜Mum, why are you standing there with egg on your foot?’ Dolly is at the table, her hair a sliding copper curtain as she leans over her bowl, shovelling spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth fast, flipping the pages of an exercise book between gulps. ‘We’ve got a maths block test this morning. Do you know any algebra formulas?’
    â€˜You mean formulae,’ Fred interrupts triumphantly.
    â€˜Oh, shut up, you swot,’ growls Dolly, sticking out her foot to trip him up. Fred flounders but doesn’t fall, and Laura is wrenched back from the misty memories of their babydom by them hurling abuse and shreds of breakfast at one another.
    Having just read a manual on how to raise happy children, Laura suppresses her maternal instinct, which is to scream, ‘Shut the hell up, you two, or I’ll bang you heads together,’ and opts for thepsychologically correct response: ‘I see that you are both angry – shall we all sit down and talk it through?’
    Inigo walks in as Laura is saying this and looks at her incredulously. ‘Get a grip, Laura. They’re never going to take that hippy crap seriously,’ he says to her, adding, ‘What is that disgusting slime on your foot?’ before clapping his hands like a tinpot dictator and yelling, ‘Dolly! Fred! Enough.’
    Irritatingly for Laura, they both shut up for an instant, but then explode into giggles.
    â€˜It’s egg, Dad. Mum’s covered in egg.’ Fred sighs a last snigger and gulps milk from the carton. Inigo deliberately averts his face and props three spoons together to form a wigwam on the kitchen table. Fred looks at him, measuring up his mood. He decides to risk it. ‘If we had a dog, it would have licked her foot clean by now,’ he says, edging away towards the hall and his coat and bag as he speaks.
    Inigo doesn’t hear, he reaches into the fridge and emerges with three eggs. He rolls one out of his palm and on to the knuckles of his right hand while throwing another to Dolly. ‘What did you say, Fred? Here, Doll, catch this. I liked your egg pyramid; shame Mum got to it.’ He shakes his head sorrowfully in the direction of Laura’s