Page 107 of Short Stack 3

“Don’t you think, Laurie?”

I jump and return to the conversation at his mum’s query. “Oh, I don’t know,” I murmur, which is my handy standby at times like this.

“You don’t think Samuel Mapler should have won the Bucksbaum?”

I shrug. “Not really. He wouldn’t know human emotion if he’d painted with his own intestines.”

Mags chokes on his drink, and I direct a laughing glance at him.

“What abeautifullyvivid image over dinner, Laurie,” he drawls. “Thank you.”

I grimace because we both know there isn’t much that can spoil peas.

Frida pours another glass and makes a sound of distress when she finds the bottle is empty. “Carl, get another,” she orders in a manner I last saw deployed by a sergeant major.

Carl directs a sullen glance at her and slopes off to do her bidding. She says something to Mags in Danish, and I look at her contemplatively. She’s a beautiful woman with long dark hair that’s only lightly flecked with grey. She’s the origin of Mags’s high cheekbones and brown eyes, but unlike my bloke, her full mouth is pulled tight in discontent, and dark circles ring her eyes.

Her fingers are stained with paint, and although it’s a familiar sight to me, I still feel no comradeship with her. They say never meet your idols, and she was mine once. Her paintings are stunning — stark and so brilliant that they take my breath away. I’d once spent hours in the National Gallery looking at one of her landscapes. But that eagerness to meet her has been sullied by the way she treats Mags.

She’d greeted him with a vagueness that suggested she wasn’t quite sure who he was. Once his identity had been confirmed, she’d veered between distant affection and sneering at everything he stands for. Apparently, to her, defending peoples’ liberties is similar to the angst felt by Fred West’s parents when they found out about his extracurricular bricklaying.

The rest of the dinner is spent inhaling my peas and listening to her and Carl talk. They’re open about sex in a way that would make my stepfather clutch my mother’s pearls. It doesn’t offend me at all, but after listening to her discuss an orgasm she had last week, I have to wonder what it was like for Mags growing up in this environment. There’s something studied and ultimately false in their desire to shock, which reminds me of being eighteen and attending art college parties.

I sneak a glance at Mags, who is his usual urbane self. As if on cue, his phone alarm sounds.

“What on earth is that for?” Frida says. She tinkles a laugh that has zero humour in it, completely unlike Mags’s warm and contagious amusement. “Do you have some legal treatise to write, darling? Something else that the police can use to keep society under their jackboots?”

“That’s on a Thursday, Mother,” he says, and I can’t conceal my laugh. He reaches into his pocket. “Eye-drop time.”

I smile at him and take the small vial. Then I look around helplessly. He smirks and reaches into his pocket again, thistime producing a small tube of hand sanitiser and a flannel. “Thank you, Mary Poppins,” I say affectionately. I look over at his mother. “Do you mind me doing this at the dinner table?”

She waves the hand holding her glass, slopping wine on the tablecloth. “Not at all.” She stares at me as I douse my hands in sanitiser that smells overpoweringly of watermelon, put the eye drops in, and then dab at my cheeks with the flannel.

“Yes. Mags did say you’d had a problem with your eyes. How are you doing?” She shakes her head before I can answer, her face drawn with horror. “I cannotimaginewhat that must have been like. Your art is extraordinary, Laurie.” Once, I’d have been thrilled to have her sincere admiration, but not now, so I just smile politely. She continues. “To be faced with losing that gift, I woulddie. I couldn’t exist without my art.”

I take a moment to register her words, struck by the similarities of her sentiment to how I felt when I first had my diagnosis. It feels disorientating, as if I’m standing on a step that is disintegrating beneath my feet. The difference between that Laurie and now is immeasurable. Oh, I would still be devastated if I lost my art. It would be a wound that never heals. But I have more in my life now. So much more.

I smile at her, realising she’s waiting for a reply. Somewhat surprising, because she has main act written all over her, and when people are talking, she seems to be just waiting until she can speak again.

“Yes, it would have been awful, and I’m profoundly glad that I have my sight back now, but painting’s not what I would have missed most if I’d gone blind.” She looks flabbergasted, as if she can’t imagine what could be worse. “I would have lost the sight of your son’s face,” I say gently.

I look sideways at Mags. He’s unsmiling, but his eyes glitter with emotion. Then his face clears quickly, and it’s as though theexpression never happened. I watch as he gathers the detritus from my eye meds neatly together, ready to throw it all away.

His mother makes a scoffing sound. “Look at him. When he was a child, it was like having my father in the body of a small boy. Always so provincial andboring. Always looking down on me as if I were an endless disappointment.”

Mags rolls his eyes, and I grit my teeth to stop the retort I want to make. This is still his mother, and he doesn’t seem unduly bothered. But that makes me even angrier because to be this unbothered means the verbal abuse was a constant occurrence.

Carl laughs. “Like an old policeman,” he says, pointing at Mags. “Frida is always bemoaning the fact that she had the most boring child in history. Where is your helmet, Mr Policeman?”

“It’s not my helmet you should be worried about,” Mags says calmly. “It is my truncheon, yes?”

I snort, and Frida stands up and drifts off into the kitchen, maybe to check where the missing pieces of her heart are, and Mags follows, probably to grab another bottle of wine. I take the opportunity to lean forward and address Carl. “Hey,” I say.

He blinks and echoes my position. “Yes?” he says rather warily. It’s good that his instincts are working beneath the haze of dope and wine.

“You have a very nice laugh.”

He preens slightly. “Yes, it has been said.”

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