jeans were giving her a camel toe.
Victor pushed his chair back. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, making an apologetic face to Phoebe.
She shrugged. ‘Say hello to everyone for me.’
I wobbled, nearly weakened, then managed to stay, if not stuck to my guns, within grabbing distance in case of an ambush. I followed him out, double-checking that he had money for an Uber and a key to get in.
Mum proved a good distraction with her anecdotes about her over-65s fitness class, giving us just slightly too much information about how she had All Bran for breakfast, ‘Just to make sure I go, you know, before.’ She carried on. ‘My friend Dolores gets dreadful wind when she does a squat.’ Phoebe and I were both impressed when Mum showed us how she could do the plank, then the tree pose. ‘My instructor says it’s good for your pelvic floor, definitely improves things.’
Phoebe looked suitably horrified that Mum might segue into a discussion about either the importance of the pelvic floor in sex or for not wetting yourself and leapt up to show her how she could do one hundred sit-ups without stopping. I clapped her through the last twenty, properly impressed.
‘Amazing! You are so fit!’
She told Mum all about Victor’s training sessions and how she was drinking banana smoothies and eating peanut butter on toast every day to give her energy. ‘I never even used to eat breakfast.’
Mum tutted at that. ‘Most important meal of the day.’
Phoebe nodded. ‘Yeah, I can’t believe I didn’t know that before.’
In my mind’s eye, I pictured a sewing machine doing zigzag stitch across my mouth in order to stop myself shouting, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t as I’ve probably been saying it every day for about five years’.
After dinner, we even managed to find a film without swearing or sex so I didn’t have to cringe and sit in frozen silence until it got so bad, I had to fast-forward. We’d had such a peaceful evening, I couldn’t help wondering if what Phoebe really needed was a bit of time with me, without competing for attention with Victor, or indeed, Patrick. I was just about to walk Mum home about 11 p.m. when the doorbell went.
‘Have you got friends coming round, Phoebe?’ I asked.
‘Er, no. They’re all at a party…’
I opened the door to find Faye, dishevelled and wild-eyed.
‘Hello. Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Is he here?’ she shouted.
‘Who? Patrick?’
‘No, Victor!’
‘No, he’s at a party. Has something happened?’
Faye thrust a little plastic bag of coloured pills at me. ‘I’ve just found these in Georgia’s room. We’ve got a new desk arriving for her tomorrow and I was shifting her bedside table and they were under her lamp. With this!’
She shoved a mini Polaroid print of Victor and Georgia kissing at me. It was a proper tongue down the throat job, but despite that, my immediate thought was ‘Thank God they’re not naked.’
‘Why don’t you come in?’ I said, deciding that inviting her in was a lesser evil than the neighbours overhearing what she was yelling.
She stepped into our hallway, trembling with anger and flapping the tablets at me. ‘God knows what he’s getting her hooked on.’
I sensed a movement behind me. ‘Phoebe, can you just keep Nan in the sitting room and shut the door?’
I turned back to Faye, put my finger to my lips and whispered, ‘My mum’s here,’ as though that had any chance of making it through the fog of her fury. I bustled her through to the kitchen, where she slammed the little pill packet on the table.
‘This can’t go on, Jo. What will it take for you to sort this out? Will one of our girls have to die before you do something?’
I tried to get my brain to hurry up with a response, but the force of her accusations was paralysing me.
‘Hang on, do you even know what the pills are?’ I picked them up and peered at them but knew immediately that I wasn’t going to add value.
‘It’s ecstasy.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I looked it up on Google.’
‘OK. So what does Georgia say about it?’
Faye put her hands on her hips. ‘I haven’t spoken to her. She’s at a party right now and not answering.’
‘So why did you come round here?’ I felt my fear dissipating and the stirrings of my own anger sparking about at the bottom of my stomach.
‘Oh my God, literally, are we going to have this conversation again? No one – absolutely no one