Parcel for you...Part 24

 

Vanessa passed a long, uncomfortable night. She couldn’t escape the sounds of her daughter, rifling through bags, stomping to the bathroom and back and chatting to friends on the phone far into the early hours of the morning. It didn’t bother Spencer, he was a machine and unaffected by such things, he spent the night in enforced shut down and woke up every morning fully refreshed.

 

‘I’ve made you tea,’ he said as Vanessa entered the kitchen in her dressing gown. ‘Oh dear,’ he gave her a lingering look, ‘you should avoid all mirrors for now.’

 

‘What?’ Vanessa yawned.

 

‘Seeing your own reflection might spark some negativity on your part. Your hair needs brushing, would you like me to do it?’

 

‘No, no thanks,’ she sat down at the table and began sipping tea. ‘I need more than a hair brush. I need a few hours in a hair salon, an expensive one, I need a facial, a glow-up, a few replacement parts and my brain needs something too, some sort of re-set.’

 

Spencer smiled widely and fidgeted as if feeling some sort of pride in his own superior life form. ‘Ha! I can do that on myself but not on you I’m afraid.’

 

‘Shame..That’s a very nice cup of tea, Spencer. Unfortunately I didn’t sleep well at all. Annie was quite active in the night and it made me feel on edge. It was just like when she was a baby. You know she’d sleep in short spurts and then wake up and start screaming and squirming in her cot, it made me feel constantly on edge. I’m not sure I’ve ever got over it.’

 

‘That sounds hard. They should get robots to look after babies at night so that their parents can sleep.’

 

‘You know that’s not a bad idea, Spencer.’

 

‘I can’t hear anything now. Maybe Annie is jet lagged after her long journey.’

 

‘Yes, she’ll be fast asleep now I’m sure. I need to go into work today for a course so you’ll be on your own with her for a while. Is that okay?’

 

‘Yes, yes that’s fine. What does she like to eat? I could start making her some breakfast. The clothes she left on the floor down here, they’re already in the washing machine. It smells very different with her in our house doesn’t it?’

 

Vanessa nodded, ‘I don’t know if you smell in the same way that I do Spencer but I don’t really like the smell, it’s stale and sort of mildewy. We should open the windows and I should go and get ready for work. It’s going to take a lot to make me look half decent today.’

 

‘You always look beautiful, it’s just this morning, your hair needs more guidance about which way to lie on your head.’

 

She went upstairs, laughing under her breath. Annie’s bedroom door was left ajar, she wasn’t in the habit of shutting it. Vanessa crept up to the doorway and carefully peered in, taking in the sight of her daughter sleeping, curled up on her side in her pyjamas bottoms and drug rug with Charlie sitting at her feet in a loaf shape. Annie was lovely when she was asleep, she looked like a child again, in the episode of her childhood when she was around eight to ten years old; past the toddler stage but not yet old enough to be opinionated, the eye of the storm.

 

It was a short drive to the office. Her workplace offered a bit of clean normality, a place where people had boundaries, mostly. It was buzzy, there were some new faces and old, a bit of gossip in the canteen. Even the presence of real human males offered a little bit of excitement, they had a different scent to Spencer and were more reactive. They had banter and expressive faces. For the first few hours, Vanessa felt glad to be at work but then the usual suspects surfaced with their typical comments and it rapidly became a bit tedious.

 

A large proportion of the workforce were employed to simply create endless complications, document and discuss them and then solve them and make a great play of it so that they could be congratulated and their position in the company justified. It was a veritable merry-go-round of self-complication and task embellishment, without it there would be nothing to discuss during the endless treadmill of meetings.

 

The course was two to three hours longer than necessary. Vanessa rolled her eyes as Colin Davenport dominated the discussion with flowery questions which were designed, not to resolve any uncertainties he had but to make himself look like he had more insight into the subject than any of his colleagues. He’d never missed a work event, never missed a course, a social or a team building exercise, he was always the one volunteering for first aid courses and charity bike rides. He never failed to be at the gym after work and was just the type of man who would drive any woman to go out and purchase a robotic husband. 

 

She fantasised about tying Colin Davenport to a chair for a month and making him watch while the company didn’t go into meltdown. With the rope chafing his wrists and ankles he’d have to observe nothing really changing and the smooth-running of the business continuing quite healthily without his presence. It would be agony for him, realising his own irrelevance while she fed him nothing but carbohydrates for four weeks.

 

Vanessa drove home feeling relaxed, relieved to be going home. She’d shown her face at work and hopefully that would be it for a while. There was always a concern that her bosses would suddenly request that she spend a bit more time in the office but that would mean leaving Spencer on his own. Now that he had access to a laptop he was capable of anything but banning him from using it made her feel like a dragon.

 

She was slightly worried about how the day had gone with him and Annie, home together all day. I wonder what they’ve been up to, she thought and imagined them watching a bit of television or going online to look at the places she had visited on her travels. It occurred to her that the worst thing of all would be that she would find the house empty and they’d gone out somewhere. 

 

As she turned the key in the door, Vanessa became aware of voices talking jovially, it sounded like more than two people. It was some sort of a gathering. Had Annie invited friends over to meet Spencer? Immediately she felt aggrieved and protective over him but then she paused and winced as she recognised the voice of her mother, June.

 

‘So,’ said June from the kitchen, ‘you were walking through the park just with an empty cone and no ice cream sitting on top?’

 

‘Yes,’ said Spencer, ‘that’s right, June because I have this cartridge, it sits up my backside but I can only have dry food and not very much of it either.’

 

June and Annie burst into howls of laughter while Vanessa very gently placed her keys on the hall table.

 

‘And what happens when the cartridge needs changing?’

 

‘Well, Annie, your mother takes care of that. I’m really at her mercy with these things otherwise I could find myself with blockages and resulting malfunctions.’

 

Vanessa walked in as June and Annie collapsed into another round of hysterical laughter.

 

‘Hello Dear,’ said June with tears in her eyes, ‘I’ve just met your husband.’

 

‘Yes, I can see,’ Vanessa said, taking off her coat and trying to diffuse her own mixed up emotions which were a combination of shock, annoyance and shame. ‘I was going to invite you round next week for lunch, to meet Spencer and spend time with Annie but I see you’ve beaten me to it.’ She lied.

 

‘I wish you’d introduced us earlier, I really do. He’s a lovely man, much better than any man you’ve ever dated,’ she turned to Annie, ‘sorry, Annie, I know he’s your father but I prefer Spencer. I just wish I’d been invited to the wedding!’

 

‘Mother, there wasn’t any wedding. It wasn’t like that.’

 

‘But you’ve both got rings. I knew, I knew,’ June’s voice went up into a shriek so high, it was bordering the pitches only dolphins can hear, this was something which occasionally happened when she was dismayed at something. ‘That time I came to visit you and I saw that man and you pulled the wool over my eyes, Vanessa. I knew!’

 

Annie’s face had changed from smiling to a wide-eyed stare. ‘Hey Mum, can I make you some chamomile tea? You look tired.’

 

‘I’ll do it,’ said Spencer, rushing to turn on the kettle, ‘your mother has normal tea, not herbal.’

 

Vanessa’s eye was caught by a dark patch on the back of Spencer’s hand. She bent over to get a closer look. ‘What’s that on your hand?’

 

‘It’s a henna tattoo. Annie did it for me. She said it makes me look more human.’