Free The Boy Who Fell to Earth by Kathy Lette Page B

up off the floor and out into the changing rooms. ‘What is the matter with you?’ she stage-whispered.
    ‘Well, that woman wouldn’t move an inch because she wanted to be “close to the plant”, which meant that I was contorted in the doorway, with no mat and lying in a tiny patch of somebody else’s sweat trying to do a downward dog,’ I explained, peeling off my lycra condom.
    ‘So you swore at her?’ My incredulous sister flicked on the shower knob and had a perfunctory paddle. ‘In the
relaxation
bit?’ Keeping her hair out of the jet stream meant craning her neck sideways, which gave her the look of a peeved giraffe.
    Later that night, when the Chinese takeaway hadn’t been delivered and I rang to demand, ‘Where’s it coming from exactly?
Beijing
?’, my mother was summoned back from her adventures. With Dad’s life insurance money all spent, my enterprising mum was now taking National Trust working holidays, where you help to protect some of Britain’s most beautiful historic houses. In exchange for labour, the Trust offered her hundreds of different activities, ranging from goat-herding to archaeology. Mum was currently tending the medieval knot garden at Norbury in Derbyshire before heading off to run a food fair at the Godolphin estate in Cornwall. She arrived in a dazzle of May sunshine, decked out in so much animal print she would have blended into the Serengeti.
    ‘I’m sorry I’ve been away so long, darling,’ she said, sitting herself down at the rickety little table in our overgrown garden. ‘Now, what’s going on?’ My mother gazed at me with an expression that was both tender and concerned. ‘These outbursts are so out of character, sweet pea.’
    It was wine o’clock, so Phoebe cracked a bottle of chardonnay as we half-watched my ten-year-old son re-enacting Shakespearean tragedies with plastic action figures. My mother sighed. ‘Lucy, darling, I was just like you, when your father died. I felt that I could never, ever be happy again.’
    My mother, who had spent her life tethered by her apron strings to the kitchen, cooking and cleaning and catering for Dad’s every thespian whim whilst, more often than not, supporting the family on her librarian’s wage, was decimated by his death. It took her a year but she finally found her feet again. ‘Life is in two acts,’ she’d told me at the time. ‘The trick is to survive the interval.’ Well, the woman was having a hell of a second act. She was only fifty-three when Dad died, so she decided that instead of having hot flushes, she’d have hot tropical holidays. And who could blame her?
    ‘The secret to happiness, Mother, is limbo-low expectations,’ I told her.
    ‘Darling, nobody’s saying you should be happy all the time. If you were happy every day of your life you’d be a breakfast television weather presenter,’ my mother philosophized. ‘But the occasional bout of mirth is allowable, dear, surely?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I stressed.
    ‘Oh, Lulu! You are so schizophrenic,’ my exasperated sister butted in. ‘You pretend to be all strong and independent, but secretly you’re so lonely.’
    ‘Hey,’ I jibed. ‘I may be schizophrenic but at least I have each other.’
    My family didn’t even dignify my verbal sidestep with an eye-roll. I didn’t mean to hide behind glib comments all the time, but it had become my default setting – a protective shell.
    ‘You’ve isolated yourself from friends,’ Phoebe went on. ‘I mean, when Mum and I are away, who are you going to call if you wake up in a hotel room with an overdosed gigolo?’
    ‘I would
never
wake up in a hotel room with an overdosed gigolo. Do you know me at
all
??? … And I’m not lonely. I’m thinking of joining a new social network called Faceless Book – for people of a certain age who believe that their private lives are no one else’s fucking business.’
    I could almost hear Phoebe poking out her tongue behind my back. My mother gave her