Book Club Box Set by Alka Joshi

Author:Alka Joshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

I’ve single-handedly created the ideal life for myself in London. I have a home that is adequate to my current needs, a job that is appropriate to my skills and easy access to cultural stimulation. Except for my working hours, I have control over every aspect of my existence. I did, until recently, have what you might loosely term a “partner,” but it was a relationship of convenience for us both; a simple arrangement that delivered the benefits of an intimate association with a member of the opposite sex but at no emotional cost. As soon as I discovered that chance, fate, bad luck—call it what you will—had seriously compromised my position, I severed our association cleanly and swiftly. My world remains impregnable, although that description seems a little ironic in the current circumstances.

In contrast, as my taxi pulled away from New Street station and headed toward Blackthorn Road, I felt the disquiet I’ve always experienced on returning there. Perhaps that feeling derives from my almost pathological phobia of suburban life, of its seductive insularity and mesmerizing obsession with the mundane. Perhaps, more than that, it derives from the stirring up of memories of a past that I’d much rather forget. I have the terrifying sensation that my carefully constructed life in London is simply the dream of an unhappy girl, a dream from which I’m about to be woken. Irrational, I know.

Watching the familiar streets passing by through the taxi window, I cast my mind back to last Easter. I’d traveled up to Birmingham in time for my mother’s usual Saturday tea of ham sandwiches, fruit salad and Victoria sponge. Reluctantly, I agreed to accompany her to church the following day. She had never, to my knowledge, had any religious faith, but in the last couple of years she’d started attending St. Stephen’s, a church that I walked past countless times as a child. I wondered whether my mother’s strokes had made her think about her mortality, prompting her to hedge her bets with God. Or maybe she was starting to lose her faculties and was becoming more susceptible to the influence of other people; Margaret and Stan had been trying to lure her through the doors of St. Stephen’s for as long as they’d been her neighbors.

“You’ll enjoy it, Susan,” she assured me as she put on a flimsy lilac cardigan and took a clean handkerchief out of the kitchen drawer. “I was nervous before I went, but straightaway it felt so familiar. It takes me back to when I went to church as a youngster. You’ll feel the same, I’m sure.”

“We didn’t go to church when I was a child, remember?” I replied, heading to the hallway for my jacket, which was hanging on the peg rack by the door. “You never took us. You and Dad were atheists. You reap what you sow, isn’t that what they say in the Bible?”

My mother joined me in the hallway, fumbling for the keys in her handbag. I spotted them on the hall table and handed them to her.

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