The Yips

a) the cotton coverlet

b) the extraordinary racket her mother is making

c) the traumatized squeal of the bedsprings).

She eventually manages to extract herself and collapses, backwards, on to the carpet.

‘Ow!’ she groans, feeling blindly for her nose. ‘I think you might’ve … Woah!’

Her normal vision is briefly punctuated by a smattering of flashing, day-glo asterisks.

‘NO BLOOD ON MY NEW CARPET!’ her mother bellows.

‘Eh?!’

Valentine feels a sudden, inexplicable surfeit of warm liquid on her upper lip. She throws back her head, pinches the bridge of her nose and gesticulates, wildly, towards a nearby box of tissues. Her mother (unusually obliging) grabs a clumsy handful and shoves them, wordlessly, into her outstretched palm.

‘Didn’t you see me?’ Valentine demands, applying all the tissues to her face, en masse.

‘See you?’ her mother clucks. ‘Where?’

‘Where?!’ Valentine honks at the ceiling, through a mouthful of paper. ‘Under the coverlet! In the bed!’

Shocked pause.

‘You were in the bed?’

Her mother affects surprise.

‘Of course I was in the bed!’ Valentine squawks (through her mask of tissue). ‘You just jumped on me! You just landed on me! You just kicked me square in the face!’

‘Did I?’

Her mother seems astonished by this news.

‘Yes!’

Valentine straightens her head and stares at her, indignant.

‘Yes!’ she repeats, removing the tissues. ‘You did!’

‘Oh.’

Pause.

‘Well what the hell did you expect?’ her mother rapidly changes tack. ‘You were crawling around under there like some huge maggot! I panicked! I was terrified!’

‘But that’s hardly –’ Valentine starts off.

‘I mean you wake me up in the middle of the night,’ her mother interrupts her, counting off Valentine’s offences on to her fingers, ‘yell at me, accuse me of stealing the stupid remote …’

‘I never yelled at you!’ Valentine’s deeply offended. ‘I would never –’

‘Then you lure one of your stinking cats into the room.’ Her mother points to the door, dramatically.

‘I didn’t lure the cat anywhere!’ Valentine is gently feeling her nose for any evidence of a bump. ‘The cat simply …’

She shakes her head, frustrated. ‘The point is …’

‘You know I don’t like those cats in my room!’ her mother hollers, almost hysterical. ‘You know how much I loathe them! Petits cons! Les chats sont venus du diable pour me tourmenter! Tu es venue du diable pour me tourmenter! Vraiment!’

Valentine reapplies the tissues to her face again. After a few seconds she removes them and subjects them to a close inspection. The sudden flow of blood appears to have abated. She wiggles her nose and then sniffs, experimentally.

‘I’m very sorry about the cat,’ she finally volunteers, glancing up, ‘it just followed me in here out of habit, I suppose.’

‘You know how much I hate them!’ her mother hisses.

‘Of course,’ Valentine acknowledges, ‘it’s just …’ She hesitates, plainly conflicted. ‘D’you remember that conversation we had the other day about all the various adjustments we’ve been making ever since …’ She pauses, delicately. Her mother simply grimaces.

‘Well, one of the adjustments I obviously need to make,’ Valentine doggedly continues, ‘is to understand that your feelings have changed about the cats, that you’re not –’

‘I HATE THOSE BLESSED CATS!’ her mother yells.

‘I hear you.’

Valentine dabs at her nose again. ‘Although there was a time,’ she murmurs, smiling nostalgically, ‘when you used to actively encourage them into this room. You used to love having them in bed. You used to lie there with them draped all over you. In fact you and Dad were constantly at loggerheads about it …’

‘I don’t care! ’ her mother growls. ‘That was her. C’est hors de propos à ce moment! ’

‘Yes,’ Valentine sighs, standing up. She glances around the room and spots the fallen saint lying in a muddy patch of moonlight on the carpet. She grabs it and returns it to its original place on the windowsill, then cautiously picks her way around the foot of the bed, preparing to make her exit.

On her way out, she bumps into a wastepaper basket and almost upends it. She tuts, catches it before it tips, sets it straight, then impulsively pushes an exploratory hand inside it. Her idly swirling fingers soon make contact with something small, rectangular and plastic.

She calmly retrieves this mysterious object and holds it aloft, balefully, like a down-at-heel court official tiredly displaying an especially incriminating piece of criminal evidence to judge and jury.

‘Huh?’

Ransom’s virile tattoo slows down to a gentle pitter-pat.

‘I know who you are,’ Jen repeats (struggling to repress a grin), ‘I’m just pretending that I don’t to wind Eugene up.’

‘Eugene?’

Ransom’s tattoo stops.

‘Eugene. Gene. The barman. I love taking the mick out of him when someone famous comes in. It’s just this sick little game we like to play …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Or this sick, little game I like to play’ – she chuckles, naughtily – ‘kind of at Gene’s expense.’

Ransom stares at Jen, blankly, and then the penny suddenly drops. ‘Oh wow …’ he murmurs, instinctively withdrawing his fingers into his fists. ‘Oh shit.’

‘I mean don’t get me wrong,’ Jen chunters on, oblivious, ‘I love Eugene to bits, but he’s just so infuriatingly laid back’ – she rolls her eyes, riled – ‘and gentle and polite and decent, that I can never quite resist …’

She glances over at the golfer as she speaks, registers his stricken expression and then pulls herself up short. ‘Oh heck,’ she mutters, shocked. ‘Didn’t you realize? But I made it so obvious! I mean all the stuff about … about tennis and leeches and … and Norfolk. God. I thought I was telegraphing it from the rooftops!’

Long pause.

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah.’ Ransom flaps his hand at her, airily (although both cheeks – by sharp contrast – are now flushing a deep crimson). ‘Of course I realized! Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘Really?’

Jen isn’t convinced.

‘Of course I fuckin’ realized!’ Ransom snaps, almost belligerent.

Jen grabs his empty beer bottle, tosses it into a crate behind the counter and then fetches him a replacement (flipping off the lid by hitting it, flamboyantly, against the edge of the bar top).

‘Jesus!’ Ransom is leaning back on his stool, meanwhile, a light patina of moisture forming on his upper lip. ‘Jesus!’ he repeats, glancing anxiously over his shoulder, towards the kitchens.

‘Here.’

Jen hands him the fresh beer.

‘Cheers.’ The golfer snatches it from her and affixes it, hungrily, to his lips. Jen watches him, speculatively, as he drinks.

‘FUUUCK!’ he gasps, finally slamming down the empty bottle, with an exaggerated flourish. ‘What a gull, eh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘What a sucker!’

Jen looks baffled.

‘A gull – a stooge – a patsy!’ Ransom expands.

Jen still looks baffled.

‘Eugene. Gene. Your barman. What a gull! What a royal fuckin’ doofus!’

Ransom wipes his mouth with the palm of his hand and then burps, majestically. ‘That poor fucker was totally duped back there!’

‘You reckon?’ Jen’s understandably sceptical.

‘Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely …’ Ransom chuckles, vindictively. ‘He didn’t have the first friggin’ clue.’

‘I dunno.’ Jen’s still not buying it. ‘Gene’s a whole lot smarter than you think. Could just be one of those double-bluff scenarios …’

But Ransom’s not listening. His eyes de-focus for a second, and then, ‘My God!’ he erupts. ‘What a performance! You were completely friggin’ nuts back there! You were truly demented!’

Jen merely smiles.

‘And the stuff about selfish sports was a fuckin’ master stroke!’ Ransom continues. ‘It was brilliant! Insane! How the hell’d you just spontaneously come up with all that shit?’

‘I’m a genius.’ Jen shrugs.

‘Ha!’ Ransom grins at her, grotesquely, like an overheating bull terrier in dire need of water.

‘No joke,’ Jen says, firmly, ‘I am a genius. I have an IQ of 210 …’

‘Pull the other one!’

Ransom kicks out his foot. ‘It’s got bells on!’

‘… which is apparently the exact-same score as that scientist guy,’ Jen elaborates.

‘Who? Einstein?’ Ransom quips.

Jen thinks hard for a moment. ‘Stephen Hoskins …? Hokings? Hawkwing?’

Pause.

‘Hawking?’ Ransom suggests.

‘The one who wrote that book about … uh …’

‘Time travel. A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking.’

‘Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Hawkwing. We have the same –’

‘Haw-king,’ Ransom interrupts.

‘Pardon?’

‘Haw-king. You keep saying Hawk-wing, but it’s actually …’

‘I’m crap with names,’ Jen sighs. ‘People automatically assume that I’ll have this amazing memory just because I’m super-brainy, but I don’t. My short-term memory is completely shot. I’m not “clever” at all – at least not in any practical sense of the word. I’m intellectual, yes – hyper-intellectual, even – but I’m definitely not clever. The embarrassing truth about intellectuals is that we can be amazingly dense sometimes. And clumsy. And insensitive. And really, really tactless. And incredibly forgetful,’ she sighs. ‘It just goes with the territory. Remember Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind?’

‘I saw it on a plane,’ the golfer murmurs, eyeing her, suspiciously, ‘twice. But I fell asleep both times.’

‘Because our brains are generally operating at such a high level,’ Jen expands, ‘that we simply don’t have the space up there for all these reams and reams of more conventional data …’

The golfer gazes at her, perplexed, noting, as he does so, a slight, pinkened area – almost a gentle chapping – on her upper lip. This idle observation sends a frisson of excitement from his inside knee to his thigh.

‘… data relating to, say – I dunno – table manners,’ Jen rambles on, ‘or road safety, or basic personal hygiene. Take me, for example,’ she expands, ‘I actually started reading Aristotle when I was five – in the original Greek. By seven I’d discovered that a particular chemical component in bananas advances the ripening processes in other fruits. A tiny fact, something people just take for granted nowadays. But it was a huge revelation at the time – had a massive impact on the wine and fruit export industries …’ She shrugs. ‘I got my English language GCSE when I was eight, maths A-level when I was nine. But I was actually twelve years of age before I was successfully toilet-trained.’

‘Wuh?!’

Ransom’s horrified.

‘And I never learned to tell the time.’ She points to her wrist. ‘Couldn’t ever really master it, somehow. I just thank God the world had the good sense to go digital …’ She fondly inspects her watch, notices a tiny smear on its face and then casually buffs it clean on her breast (Ransom observes these proceedings with copious levels of interest).

‘Even tying my own shoelaces was a nightmare,’ Jen continues. ‘At school I always wore trainers with Velcro flaps …’

She illustrates this poignant detail with a little mime. Halfway through, though, Ransom clambers to his feet, reaches over the counter, grabs her arm and yanks her, unceremoniously, towards him.

She squeals, half-resisting. He ignores her protests, roughly twists her wrist and pulls the newly buffed timepiece right up close to his face. He inspects it for several seconds, his breathing laboured.

‘You manipulative little cow,’ he eventually mutters.

Much as he’d surmised, her watch has a leather strap, a gold surround, a traditional dial and two hands.

* * *

‘So you just took out the batteries and then tossed the casing into the bin,’ Valentine murmurs (more rueful now than accusing).

Her mother gazes at Valentine in much the same way a slightly tipsy shepherd might gaze at the eviscerated corpse of a stray sheep on a neighbouring farmer’s land (a gentle, watercolour wash of concern, querulousness and supreme indifference).

‘Well it’s my remote,’ she eventually sniffs, ‘so I can do what the hell I like with it!’

As if to prove this point, categorically, she marches over to her daughter, snatches the remote from her hand and returns to her bed again.

Valentine remains where she stands. ‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Mum –’

‘Frédérique,’ her mother interrupts.

‘Sorry?’

‘Frédérique,’ her mother repeats.

Valentine struggles to maintain her composure.

‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Frédérique …’ (she pronounces the name with a measure of emotional resistance), ‘no one’s denying that the remote is yours. It’s more a question of …’

She is about to say trust.

‘Piffle!’ her mother snorts (before she gets a chance to). ‘Absolute, bloody piffle!’

Valentine freezes.

‘I do find it odd how it’s never a question of ownership,’ her mother grumbles on, oblivious, ‘whenever I happen to own something.’

Valentine doesn’t respond.

‘I mean don’t you find that just a tad hypocritical?’ her mother persists.

Still nothing from Valentine.

‘Well don’t you, though?’

Her mother squints over at her daughter through the gloom.

Valentine is silent for a few seconds longer and then, ‘Piffle!’ she whispers, awed.

‘What?’

Her mother stiffens.

‘Piffle!’ Valentine repeats, raising a shaky hand to her throat, her voice starting to quiver. ‘You just said … you just said …’ She can’t bring herself to utter it again. ‘That was one of Mum’s favourite …’

‘I’M FRÉDÉRIQUE!’ her mother snarls, pointing the remote at her (as if hoping to turn her off with it – or, at the very least, to change the channel). ‘Don’t you dare start all that nonsense again!’

Valentine promptly bursts into tears.

‘STOP IT!’ her mother yells.

‘I can’t stop it!’ Valentine sobs, the grip of her hand on her throat growing tighter. ‘That was one of Mum’s favourite words, don’t you see? She used to say it all the time! Not in a nasty way. Not in a mean way. But when there was some … something she didn’t like on the TV or the ra … radio. “Piffle!” she’d say. “Absolute, bloody p … piffle!” And then she’d reach for the –’

‘FRÉDÉRIQUE!’ her mother screams, covering her ears.

Valentine’s suddenly bent over double, her chest heaving, her face convulsing. She can’t breathe.

‘GET OUT! GET OUT! I HATE YOU!’ her mother yells, then hurls the remote at her. The remote flies over Valentine’s shoulder and hits the wall behind her. Valentine turns, feels blindly for it in the half-light, locates it, grabs it and then darts for the door. She staggers out into the hallway.

‘I feel dizzy, Mum,’ she pants, clutching at her throat again. ‘I can’t breathe. I think I might be going to … I think I might be …’

Her voice slowly fades down the stairwell. In a neighbouring room a child is crying. Valentine’s mother cocks her head and listens intently for a while, then, ‘VALENTINE!’ she yells.

Pause.

‘What?’ Valentine finally answers, hoarsely, from some distance off.

‘How about twice of thirty-one?’ her mother demands.

‘What?’ Valentine repeats, incredulous.

‘Twice of thirty-one. Twice of … Merde!’ her mother curses. ‘Tu es sourde ou seulement –’

‘SIXTY-TWO!’ Valentine howls. ‘SIXTY-TWO! DOUBLE! DOUBLE! DOUBLE!’

Jen snatches her wrist from him, clamps her hand over her mouth and staggers backwards, her eyes bulging, bent double, convulsing, like she’s choking on something.

Ransom gawps at her, in alarm, then realizes (with a sudden, sinking feeling) that she’s not actually choking, but laughing – at him.

‘Oh God!’ she wails. ‘I’m so sorry! I just couldn’t resist …’ And then, ‘Urgh! Look! How disgusting! I’ve snotted on my hand!’

She holds up the offending digits and then goes to grab a napkin.

To mask his confusion, Ransom lunges for the beer bottle and tries to take a swig from it, but the bottle is empty.

‘My dad always says if there was an A-level in bullshit then I’d get top marks …’ Jen chatters away, amiably, ‘but, as luck would have it, I’m compelled to operate within the tedious constraints of a regular school syllabus.’

She gently blots the tears from the corners of her eyes. ‘I got such a low score for my maths GCSE that my teacher took me aside and congratulated me for it. She said it took a certain measure of creativity to get a mark that bad.’ Jen blinks a couple of times as she speaks. ‘Are my eyes still all red and puffy?’

She leans towards him, over the bar top.

Ransom puts down the bottle and gazes into her eyes, noticing – as she draws in still closer – that she has a tiny tuft of tissue caught on the side of one nostril and that she smells of raisins, industrial-strength detergent and baby sick.

‘You’ve smudged your make-up,’ he mutters (there’s a thin streak of black eye-liner on her cheekbone). He takes the napkin from her and gently dabs at her cheek.

‘Thanks,’ she says, surprised.

After he’s finished dabbing he doesn’t immediately pull back. Three, long seconds pass between them in a silence so deafening it’s as if the bottles of spirits behind the bar have just thundered out the last, climactic notes of a rousing concerto. This hiatus is only broken by the quiet beep of Ransom’s phone.

‘So you’d do anything to stay at the Leaside?’ he murmurs, ignoring the phone and focusing in on the nostril again, his tone ruthlessly casual.

‘Pardon?’

Jen blinks.

‘Earlier’ – he grins – ‘I thought you said …’

As he speaks, he notices how the milky-white flesh of her inner arm is now stained by an angry, red handprint. His grin falters.

‘I have a boyfriend,’ Jen says, stiffly.

‘God,’ Ransom mutters, withdrawing slightly, his mind turning – briefly – to Fleur, his deeply suspicious (and litigious) American wife. ‘I feel really, really pissed.’

He glances down at his phone and then back over his shoulder again, as though willing Gene to reappear, but Gene’s nowhere to be seen, so he lifts his hands and rubs his face with them (as if trying to revive himself, or excoriate something, perhaps). Jen, meanwhile, has tossed the used napkin into the bin and strolled over to the till, where she starts to cash up.

‘You know we had a kid like that at school,’ Ransom mumbles, dropping his hands. ‘Percy McCord. Played cymbals in the band. Wore lace-up boots, knee-high green socks an’ a pair of burgundy, corduroy knickerbockers. Total mooncalf, he was.’

‘Talking of performances’ – Jen smirks at him over her shoulder – ‘you put on a pretty impressive show back there yourself if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean all the crazy stuff about your plaits …’

Jen twirls her two ponytails at him, teasingly.

‘My …? Oh. Yeah …’ Ransom winces, pained.

‘EVERYBODY REMEMBERS THE PLAITS!’ Jen bellows (in a surprisingly passable northern accent). ‘THE PLAITS ARE BLOOMIN’ LEGENDARY!’

‘Hah.’ Ransom smiles weakly as he reaches for the pocket containing his cigarettes, but his hand is shaking so violently that he quickly withdraws it again.

‘I was really getting into character at that point,’ he mutters.

‘Well you deserved a bloody BAFTA!’ Jen heartily commends him. ‘Not that those things are worth diddly-squat, quite frankly,’ she adds.

‘I did a guest appearance on Neighbours once,’ Ransom recalls, almost poignantly, ‘and the director said I put in one of the most gutsy performances she’d ever –’

‘I MODELLED IN PARIS FOR JEAN PAUL GAULTIER!’

Jen strikes a gruesome array of camp poses in rapid succession.

Ransom grimaces. A tiny pulse starts to throb in his lower cheek. His phone beeps.

‘So will we let him in on the whole thing when he eventually gets back?’ he wonders, glancing down at his phone and casually scanning through his messages.

‘Who?’

Jen coldly inspects Ransom’s hairline as she speaks (it’s slightly receding), and the way his golfer’s tan kicks in halfway down his forehead.

‘Who?’ Ransom snorts, looking up from his phone and focusing in on Jen’s lips. ‘Your idiot barman, who else?’

‘I keep telling you’ – Jen’s lips tighten – ‘Gene’s not an idiot. He’s really wise, really funny, really emotionally intelligent –’

‘Emotionally intelligent?’ Ransom butts in, sniggering. ‘Next you’ll be calling him “one of the good guys”!’

Jen lets this pass.

‘Emotionally intelligent?!’ Ransom repeats, a single brow raised, tauntingly.

‘He runs marathons,’ Jen attempts to elaborate, evidently discomforted.

‘Marathons?!’ Ransom gasps. ‘No! Seriously?!’

‘Sponsored marathons,’ Jen snaps. ‘He organizes them.’

‘Sponsored marathons?’ Ransom clutches on to the counter, for support.

‘And triathalons.’

‘And triathalons?! Wow-wee!’

Ransom swoons across the bar top, overwhelmed.

‘Last year he raised almost fifteen thousand –’

‘I once raised double that amount in a single afternoon,’ Ransom interrupts her, straightening up, ‘for a land-mine charity. Just after Diana died, it was. My rookie year. I had this little, pre-match wager with Jim Furyk’s caddie …’

‘That’s very impressive,’ Jen concedes, ‘but have you ever been diagnosed with terminal cancer?’

‘Sorry?’

Ransom’s temporarily thrown off his stride.

‘Cancer. Gene’s had it, almost constantly, ever since he was a kid. In pretty much every region of his body. Twice it was pronounced terminal. But he’s fought it and he’s beaten it – eight or nine times. He’s a miracle of science. In fact he was awarded an OBE or a CBE or something,’ she adds, nonchalantly, ‘for his voluntary educational work in local schools and colleges.’

Ransom receives this mass of information with a completely blank expression.

‘And he does all these fundraising activities for armed forces charities,’ Jen persists (with a redoubled enthusiasm). ‘His grandad was a war veteran. Gene always dreamed of becoming a soldier himself, but his health got in the way of it. His parents were both Carneys: – his dad worked as a mechanic and his mum was a palm-reader. She came from a long, long line of palmists. Her great-uncle was Cheiro …’

She glances at Ransom for some visible sign of recognition. ‘He’s really famous.’ She shrugs (having received none). ‘Anyhow, Gene’s family toured all over Europe with loads of the big fairs, but when Gene started getting sick, he couldn’t stay on the road. So they dumped him here, in Luton, with his paternal grandparents. His dad’s dad suffered from severe shell-shock. He was a lovely guy, heavily decorated – amazing brass player. He actually lived on the same street as my mum: Havelock Rise, near the People’s Park. All the local kids were scared of him. He’d be sitting quietly on a bench one minute, then the next he’d just go nuts. Start screaming and yelling …’

‘Hang on a second’ – Ransom’s overwhelmed – ‘his mother was a famous …?’

‘No,’ Jen tuts, ‘his mother’s great-uncle was Cheiro. He was the really famous one – wrote loads of bestselling books and stuff. Although his mother was pretty talented herself, by all accounts, and so was Gene. Had a real gift for it, apparently. Like I said, he toured with the family before he got sick. His sister did this amazing contortionist act …’

She pauses to adjust a false eyelash, blinking a couple of times, experimentally. ‘And another thing,’ she adds (unwittingly knocking the fleck of lint from her nostril with her cuff), ‘about three or four years ago, just when he was really starting to turn things around, his sister and her husband were involved in this awful car crash. They were both killed. Gene was sitting in the back with his stepson and their daughter. His stepson was unharmed. Gene’s legs were completely smashed up. They’re held together by these massive metal pins now, but he still ran the London Marathon last year in under three hours …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Oh yeah, and they adopted his niece – Mallory – which is French for unlucky, and then his wife became a hardcore Christian – a Pentecostal minister …’ She pauses again, frowning. ‘Or – I forget – is she with the C of E?’