Page 20 of The Woman in the Middle
‘That it?’ asked Balls and went to close the door, but Shay hadn’t finished with him. Her hand came out to keep it open. The look on Balls’s face was priceless; his mouth a stunned long ‘O’.
‘You’re going to turn my mother’s house into a semi-detached, Mr Balls, and I’m not going to let you do that, I’m afraid.’
‘You can’t stop me,’ he replied. ‘Permitted development. I can change my garage, I can build at the back, I can add another storey on without having to ask you jack shit.’
Shay’s breath caught in her throat. ‘You’re building on another storey as well?’
‘What’s it got to do with you what we do?’ He tried to shut the door again but Shay’s hand didn’t budge.
‘What it’s got to do with me is that you’re taking away my mother’s privacy, her light, you’re spoiling her house, you’re devaluing her home.’
A nasty smile bloomed on Drew Balls’s mouth.
‘Oh I see, that’s what this is all about now,’ he said, his grin wide and quite horrible. ‘The senile old cow’s ready for croaking and you’re worried about your inheritance.Fuck off, you greedy bitch.’ The door then slammed hard in her face.
The strength left Shay’s body, as surely as if someone had pulled out a stopper in her heel and let it drain away at speed. Her head was prickling with anger, shock and shame that such an untrue accusation could be levelled at her. She couldn’t move for a long moment, then she jumped, feeling a warm arm placed around her shoulder. Nagraj. She had no idea he was nearby. As he led her back down the Balls’s path, she could see all the residents of Merriment Close, bar Roberta, on the pavement. They’d all heard the exchange, if the looks on their faces were anything to go by: a spectrum of quiet, stern-faced rage through to sympathy.
‘I should have warned you that the voice of reason was not going to work,’ said Nagraj.
‘Surely no one thinks that about me?’ Shay said. Her voice was shaking, her whole body was shaking. The accusation that money was at the forefront of her worries, before her mother’s welfare, had scored a brutal bullseye.
‘Of course no one does,’ said Nagraj firmly.
Inside Shay, adrenaline was busy transforming her upset to anger.How dare they, she thought, how dare they think they could ride roughshod over a vulnerable old lady.
She turned to the building site that was the Balls’s house then and screamed at it, hoping her words would penetrate the walls and assault his eardrums.
‘Get ready, Balls, I’m coming for you. Do you hear me?’
A hand patted her arm. She looked to her side to see the smiling face of Dagmara.
‘Go and see to your mama, Shay. Don’t you worry. Leave it to Lady Karma, she’s a bitch.’
Shay hoped Dagmara was right and that Lady Karmawould come and bite the Balls on the backside. But she also knew she didn’t always come and mete out what she could. That’s what made her the biggest bitch of all.
Roberta was sitting on the couch, reading from a pile of books beside her, oblivious to the floorshow that had just happened outside her house. Shay tilted her head to read the title but it was written in Cyrillic.
‘Russian novel?’ she ventured, trying to sound normal and not as someone reeling from a very public humiliation.
‘Russian love poetry,’ Roberta corrected her. ‘My favourite of the languages and the one I would be most sorry to lose.’ She tapped her head then before continuing. ‘Listen to this, Shay.’ She read a poem aloud; Roberta Corrigan, who wittered about skips, reading poetry flawlessly and beautifully in perfect Russian. Shay couldn’t understand a word, yet it brought a lump to her throat and that was because her clever, erudite mother was back with her, whole again, as Shay would always want to remember her: reading books, notepad at her side, leaping around in words that fired up her heart.
‘Pushkin,’ said Roberta at the end of it. ‘Such strength of expression, glorying in excess. In my opinion there’s no better language for poetry, no richer vocabulary.’ There was a brightness in her eyes that Shay had not seen for a long time, and it cheered and saddened her in equal measure for its transience.
‘What’s it about?’ asked Shay.
‘A past love,’ Roberta answered with a smile. ‘A hope that though it was not to be for them, another would love her as tenderly and sincerely as he did.’ She closed the book slowly. ‘It’s ridiculous how much Russian I retain when more and more of my own language is eroded every day. Dagmaraand I sometimes speak it and I never stumble over words. Why is that, do you think? No doubt some professor somewhere will have done a paper on it. And if they haven’t, then they should.’
A whirring drill started up, as irritating as nails down a blackboard. It sounded as loud as if it was on her mother’s side of the wall rather than the other. Roberta’s fingers pressed against her ears.
‘Oh, not again. That’s been on and off since this morning. It’s relentless.’
‘You don’t need to worry, Mum. I’m on it. I’ll get it all stopped. I’ll fight them for you.’
Shay would give it everything she got, but then she was used to fighting harder for others than she’d ever fought for herself.
‘What did Paula cook for you when she came?’ Shay asked at the kitchen table where her mother was sitting with her favourite post-tea dessert, one of the huge éclairs from the local Potterworth’s bakery.
‘Nothing. I wasn’t hungry. I told her not to go to any trouble.’
