Free I Heart London by Lindsey Kelk Page B

moment I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she reached out and rubbed a tough finger on my cheek. ‘You’ve got mascara all under your eyes.’
    ‘All right, Mum,’ I said, nodding at her and wishing I’d put on more lip balm. ‘Nice to see you, Mum.’
    ‘Hmm.’ She looked me up and down quickly. ‘New bag?’
    ‘Well, not really.’ I looked down at my Marc Jacobs satchel and thought back to when it was new. ‘But new to you.’
    ‘I don’t even want to know what it cost,’ she said, turning on her sensible heel and taking off across the arrivals lounge. ‘Come on − the car park costs a bloody fortune.’
    ‘Yes, Mum.’ I looked down at my handbag and, not for the first time, wished it could talk. It would have been lovely to get a quick reminder that I’d actually spent the last two years in New York and that they weren’t picking me up from my first semester at uni.
    ‘All right, love?’ Dad patted my shoulder and took the handle of one of my suitcases. ‘Flight all right?’
    ‘Not bad,’ I replied. ‘Although I do appear to have flown into the Twilight Zone.’
    ‘Eh?’ Dad trundled after my mum, leaving me behind. ‘
Twilight
? Your mum was reading that. Nonsense, if you ask me. I watched the film. Not my cup of tea but it passed an evening. Come on − I’m gasping for a coffee and she won’t let me buy one at Costa now I’ve got a Gaggia at home.’
    Not ready to discuss my mother’s progressive choice of reading material or my dad’s new espresso machine, I played the dutiful daughter, stuck out my bottom lip and did as I was told.
    Home, sweet home.
    ‘News, news, news.’ My mum looked over her shoulder from the passenger seat to make sure I hadn’t bolted out the back of dad’s Volvo. Fat chance, since Dad had activated the child locks. ‘You know Vera from the library?’
    ‘Yes?’ I was clutching my phone so tightly my knuckles were white. I didn’t have a blind clue who Vera from the library was.
    ‘Dead,’ Mum announced. ‘Cancer.’
    And now it seemed I never would.
    ‘Brian as well, from the butchers,’ she continued, looking to the heavens as though more dead people I’d never met were going to wave down and remind her they’d carked it. ‘Who else? Well, Eileen, but you didn’t know Eileen. Oh! Do you remember Mr Wilson?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Yes you do,’ she encouraged. ‘He used to walk his dog past our house. Every day!’
    ‘Ohhh,’ I exclaimed dramatically. ‘That Mr Wilson.’
    ‘Dead,’ she declared. ‘He didn’t have cancer, though. Something wrong with his pancreas, I think.’
    ‘It was pancreatic cancer,’ my dad said, snapping his fingers. ‘Went like that.’
    ‘Patrick Swayze, Steve Jobs and Mr Wilson who walked his dog past our house.’ I stared out of the window. ‘Pancreatic cancer certainly has claimed some of the greats.’
    I was fairly certain I heard my dad turn a laugh into a cough, but it was covered up by my mother’s continuing list of obituaries. To take the edge off it, I swiped my phone into life and checked for messages. Nothing. Nothing from Jenny to say she was on her way, nothing from Alex to say he’d lain awake all night sobbing into my vacant pillow, and, most importantly, nothing from Louisa to apologize for leaving me at the mercy of my parents.
    ‘And her from the post office had another baby,’ my mum carried on. We’d exhausted the funeral roll call and moved on to who had had a baby and whether that baby was in or out of wedlock. ‘And Briony, who you went to school with − she’s on her third. Third! Two different dads, though. And of course there’s Louisa’s little Grace. What a beauty.’
    ‘Speaking of Louisa …’ I leaned forward to rest my chin on my mum’s seat. ‘Where is she?’
    ‘Oh, Grace was a bit colicky this morning and she couldn’t leave her,’ she replied as though my best friend abandoning me was no big deal. ‘Your priorities change when you have