Read Laying the Ghost for Free Online

leave her own needs? How was she going to carry on doing Being Fifteen and all the glorious self-centredness that went with it, if she had to think about being careful not to add to her abandoned mother’s woes? She’d had a quick skim through the
After He’s Gone
divorce book over in Barbados, but the author had carelessly left out a chapter aimed at teenage daughters who were going to have to deal with the fallout from … well, the fallout. There were girls younger than her – she’d seen
The Jeremy Kyle Show
– who were looking after entire dysfunctional families almost single-handed. Kids with no money, having to juggle the lone mum’s benefits and drug habits and casual loser boyfriends. Obviously she hadn’t got it
that
hard. But that was the trouble with it not being
that
hard by regular standards. There just wasn’t any kind of manual for it. And what a number her dad had laid on her: ‘Take care of your mum. Keep an eye on her.’ Final fucking last words before the one-way to New York. Great, so helpful. Lay it all on me, why don’t you?
    Mimi closed her eyes and thought of lying in the sea again, weightless and carefree. Her hair still had a slight sandy residue and smelled of sea life and she pulled a thick strand of it across her mouth, tasting salt. This time yesterday … the boy who strolled up the beach in the mornings selling shell necklaces, palm-frond hats and ready-rolled spliffs; the tiny silver-striped fish that nibbled her ankles as she paddled out to the waves. The sun blonding her hair, the heat making her body tender and lazy. All of it was stuff that made you feel good. Not like this huddly cold, not like this late-winter loneliness. What a long, long time it was going to be till summer.

3
    No Surrender
    (Bruce Springsteen)
    ‘NELL!
LOVELY
TO see you!’ Evie Mitchell kissed the air alongside each of Nell’s ears as she let her into her pink-lit hallway. From further into the house Nell could hear distant-motorway waves of conversation and party laughter and suddenly wished she’d stayed home, in bed with the chocolate, the cat and some well-worn comedy repeats on the telly. Evie was an excited blonde flurry of cream lace and spray tan and looked like a cappuccino. ‘I’m so sorry about it being a school night,’ she giggled. ‘It’s just that … I know it seems odd but Don and I always think it’s
really
important to celebrate our wedding anniversary
on the actual day
, don’t you agree?’
    Evie’s eyes then widened and she clapped her hand (café-au-lait nail extensions) over her mouth. ‘Oh I’m
so
sorry, Nell! How tactless of me! And you were
so
sweet to come tonight!’ She lowered her voice as her daughter Polly sidled up and, with a sullen lack of grace, due to being under strict orders to be helpful, grabbed Nell’s coat out of her hands and stamped up the stairs with it. There was an airport duty-free Dior lipstick in the left pocket – would it still be there when she went home? Mimi had said Polly was on a warning at school for thieving cash from the Year Sevens.
    Evie took hold of Nell’s wrist and gave it a waggle. ‘We’d have
completely understood
if you’d decided to give us a miss, you know. We’d have been sorry if you had, of course, but we’d have understood. Drink?’ She handed Nell a glass of champagne and then steered her towards a relatively uncrowded corner of the sitting room, a space that Nell rightly guessed to be unpopular because of the icy blast coming from the open French doors, beyond which she could see Don Mitchell out on the terrace. He was waving a big knife, tending skewers of something on his gas-powered all-dancing barbecue and being effusive to whoever would listen about the upside to global warming, under a pair of blazing patio heaters and an array of multicoloured fairy lights. Why would anyone want to have a barbecue in February? Wouldn’t a vat of warming goulash or comforting cassoulet have been more the