Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

They were quiet for a while, sipping their drinks and smoking, Bart’s leg draped over Bettina’s. Two empty champagne bottles lay on top of the bedsheets, dripping out their dregs onto the purple silk and creating perfect dark circles.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ said Bart, eventually, ‘if we ended up hating each other?’

‘Oh, I would hate that,’ said Bettina.

‘You would hate the hate?’

‘Yes, I’d abhor it. You’re my absolute favourite person.’

‘Same,’ he said, smiling. ‘I am my absolute favourite person.’

‘Bart!’ She nudged him with her elbow, causing his drink to slosh inside the glass. ‘You pretend you’re joking but you aren’t really.’

‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘Possibly.’ He puffed on his cigarette with little smirk creases along the side of his mouth. ‘In any case, I fucking adore you and if things ever soured between us I think a part of my soul would shrivel up. The scant ember of optimism in my heart would go out and I’d become an altogether bleaker human being.’

‘Likewise,’ said Bettina. ‘I would become a crone, living in the shadows. A hag. I’d never be invited to parties.’ She pulled a sad face and he laughed. ‘We must promise to be kind to each other, always,’ she continued. ‘Kind and tolerant. And we mustn’t be dreadful hypocrites about everything.’

‘No,’ agreed Bart. ‘And we must always try to have fun. Because otherwise, what’s the point?’

‘Cheers to that.’

They clinked glasses and drank.

‘Cheers to the queers,’ said Bettina.

‘Hurrah for the inverts!’ said Bart.

They splurted out laughter.

‘I love that we’re funny,’ said Bart. ‘It’s my favourite thing about us.’

‘Me too,’ said Bettina, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘And I love that I’m the funnier one.’ She turned onto her side, as did he, wiggling his behind into the dip of her crotch. He grabbed her arm and wrapped it around himself. ‘You be the big spoon.’

January 1990, Silverbeach Residential Home, Brighton

The snow was settling thick and deep, in a way it rarely did this close to the shore. Tabitha was not a good driver, had never been a good driver, and driving in snow gave her a sinus headache. But her son was drunk. Look at him, she kept saying to herself. He was side-slumped in the passenger seat, his face smearing the window. Just look at him. She pulled up onto Silverbeach Drive. The car ahead was parked at a 90-degree angle to the kerb and most of the snow on its bonnet had been scooped off. She lit a menthol cigarette and shook her son by the shoulders. ‘Freddy. Freddy.’

‘OK, OK, I’m awake.’ He had a crease like a bracket around one eye from where his cheek had been pressed to the glass.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing through the windscreen. There was a news crew gathered outside the home – three men and a woman standing near a BBC van, all wrapped in winter coats and scarves with puffs of fog coming out of their mouths.

‘Fucking vultures,’ said Freddy.

‘Well, of course they’re vultures , darling. Will you comb your hair, please?’

He looked in the rear-view mirror and ran his fingers through his greying curly hair. He needed a haircut and a shave. Probably a wash. He’d been blessed with such lovely looks, his grandfather’s looks, and now his stomach bulged out like a darts player’s and his earholes were clogged with thick black hair and dead skin cells. Frankly, it was wasteful.

‘Do eat some breath mints,’ she said. ‘You know they’ll want to talk to us.’

Frowning, he helped himself to one of her cigarettes and tucked it in the corner of his mouth. ‘How shocked they’ll be that Bettina and Bartholomew Dawes spawned a bunch of pissheads. What a gobsmacking revelation.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ She went into the glove compartment and pulled out some Mint Imperials. ‘Please,’ she said, holding out the tin.

‘After my fag,’ he said, taking a handful. ‘Can the heating go any higher?’

‘No.’ She watched as the front door of Silverbeach opened and a care worker stuck her head out. She said something to the reporters and closed the door. ‘Probably telling them to bugger off,’ said Tabitha. ‘I don’t know what they’re hoping to achieve. I mean, are they honestly expecting my eighty-five-year-old mother to Zimmer her way out into the snow and confess to a murder that happened half a century ago? Preposterous. Freddy?’

‘I’m listening.’ He was fiddling with the heating knob.

‘I told you it was on full. Why don’t you ever—’

‘OK. Just checking.’ He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. ‘I personally would love to see Nana swan out here and confess to murder. In a Givenchy gown and her old fox fur, with a piss-bag strapped to her ankle.’

‘Don’t be mean.’

‘With a cigarette holder longer than her arm. Remember that one with the diamonds going in little spirals? “I, Bettina Dawes, wife to the great thespian of yesteryear, Bartholomew Dawes, have a confession to make.”’ He tilted up his chin and smoke wafted from his nose in an oyster-white plume. ‘“The gun belonged to me! I murdered him. And goddammit, I’d do it again! Oh, bother, one seems to have shat oneself. Nurse!”’ He hunched over laughing, spilling the mints onto the floor of the car.

‘She’s nothing like that, Freddy. And she’s not incontinent. Hurry up and finish your cigarette.’ She took her lipstick out of her purse and reapplied – her lips in their natural state had lost entirely all their colour. She was getting pouchy little flabs under her mouth, at the corners, and she hadn’t enjoyed a jawline in twenty years. So bloody what? She was a sixty-one-year-old lawyer specialising in wills and probate. Nobody would expect her to look fantastic. Except… well, they might. Because look at her parents.

Freddy stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Showtime.’

As they pushed open their doors and got out, the female reporter’s head snapped around.

‘Oh, look out,’ said Freddy. ‘She’s got a whiff of carrion.’

‘Don’t you dare say anything rude,’ said Tabitha. ‘Take my arm, please.’

‘What am I supposed to say to them when they ask questions?’

‘No comment. Say you don’t know anything. If they mention the gun, say you knew nothing about it.’

‘I don’t know anything about it. Nobody knows anything about it.’

‘If they ask about your grandfather—’

‘Which they undoubtedly will—’

‘No comment. Just say no comment. Like in the films. And for God’s sake, don’t let them smell your breath.’

The snow under their shoes gave way in a flumpy-soft crunch. Tabitha almost lost her footing on a wedge of crystallised snow and Freddy held her up, barely, his feet skidding. The houses in this street were huge, with three levels and long, ploughed drives within beautiful landscaped gardens. Not too dissimilar to the sort of house she’d grown up in, actually. Possibly even a little inferior. The reporters watched their slow approach. She’d had dealings with reporters before, but never the predatory sort. Just magazine journalists wanting to ask the same tiresome questions about her parents. ‘Retrospective,’ was the word they often used. The last one had been trying to draw parallels between her mother and Zelda Fitzgerald, which was ridiculous and trite. Most asked about her father, who after all had been the more well-known of the two, and were often a smidge sycophantic, trying – quite transparently – to make her feel like an important person: but that was to be expected, and she didn’t mind indulging them. Only it all felt a little pointless. Because everything had already been said. Until now.