Work Text:
"But do you even need your liver, Pats? I thought it was like that thing, that other thing you don't need. Saffy, what's that thing called?"
Saffron tore herself away from her homework - homework, Patsy sneered to herself, doing homework over Christmas - long enough to scowl at them. "It's called your appendix. And no, mum, she does need her liver."
"I told them to take it out," Patsy said. "Rip it out, fry it with onions, bring me the fava beans and pour the chianti. Wouldn't do a thing. Said I'd die or something. Might as well be dead if I'm not allowed to drink any more. Bloody doctors."
"Bloody doctors," Eddie agreed. "Holistic medicine, that's the only real science. I told you about my new acupuncturist, didn't I? Uses needles and crystals and chimes and all sorts of lovely things? You should make an appointment. A couple of little pricks, darling, and you'll be back on a hundred units a day."
Saffron slammed her textbook closed. "Mum, that's really dangerous! Were you not listening? If she drinks too much she could die." Patsy might have found it in herself to be touched at the concern, if she hadn't followed it up with, "And I bet she'll do it in here."
Patsy thought about it and shrugged. If she was going to drop dead, better Eddie's kitchen than a toilet at Stringfellow's. The thought of Saffron coming down for breakfast and finding her face-down on the table was pretty good, too. Patsy had never thought about life after death - too busy squeezing in as much life as possible before it - but any afterlife worth hanging about it was bound to incorporate some post-mortem traumatizing of dear Saffy.
She'd never understood why Eddie had had children, anyway. One you could write off as carelessness. Two started to look suspiciously like some sort of maternal instinct.
She pictured some sort of baby mini-Saffron creature squirming out of her, totally dependent on her for life, and shuddered. "I say we make a run for it," she'd told Eddie seventeen years ago, feeling paranoid and uncomfortable in this ward of babies and pastels and NHS patients. "Take the wristband off, they'll never know. They probably don't even count them." But Eddie had stared down into the cot with a cult-member smile and said, "Isn't she lovely? Hello, sweetie, I'm your mummy, yes, I am..."
She'd regained most of her sense after the drugs wore off, of course, but she'd never been quite the same again. As for the kids, Serge had been all right, and he'd decently vanished as soon as he was old enough. Saffron clung on like a malignant, sucking, fashion-challenged leech.
"What is this thing you're wearing?" Eddie pulled at her sleeve. Saffron snatched her arm away. "This, this shapeless, horrible thing? What is it?"
"Gran bought it for me. I think it's nice."
"M and S shat it out, Debenhams set it on fire and Gap had a slash on the ashes," Patsy said, tapping out another cigarette.
Her face pinched into a sulk, Saffron picked up her books. "I'm going to do my homework at Claire's house."
"Oh, Claire, Claire, I don't know why you don't go and live with Claire if she's so wonderful!"
The door slammed so hard the ashtray rattled.
"She never stops talking about Claire," Eddie said. "Ooh, Claire's mum's a social worker, Claire's a vegetarian, Claire can clone the bloody human bloody genome, darling."
"So the bitchlet's got herself a little girlfriend, has she?" The cigarette packet was empty. That couldn't be right. She'd only taken the plastic off ten minutes ago.
Eddie sagged back in her chair. It was scarves this week, Patsy noted, lots of them; her best friend looked like she'd been attacked by a midget's clothesline. "I wish it was that, Pats. She'd be so much more interesting if she was just a teensy bit lesbian, wouldn't she?"
She grunted. "If they gave her a personality transplant."
"One of the girly ones, obviously, with nice clothes and a pretty girlfriend I could introduce people to at parties. `This is my lesbian daughter, Saffy, and this is her partner, Claire, they work at some terribly important science job together and are adopting two beautiful Vietnamese river-orphans...' "
Patsy had stopped paying attention. "Ciggies," she said, shaking the packet. "Vanishing ciggies! That's my last pack!"
She had to survive a whole eight minutes before Eddie dug up a packet in her room, and by that time she was too strung out to give Saffron another thought.
Sobriety was no fun. She didn't know what the AA people saw in it. Even her usual treble-brandy nightcap was off limits, and so now she couldn't sleep.
They'd run out of decent cigarettes, too. She was back in the kitchen, sellotaping three Silk Cut together, when Saffron came slithering back. Patsy looked up in surprise as the back door opened.
"I thought it was after three."
Saffron checked her watch. "It is after three."
Christ, it was three in the morning and she was sober. She threw the cigarettes onto the table, giving up on ever getting a decent draw. "Bit late for you, isn't it? Always thought you turned into a cockroach if you stayed out after twelve."
"You mean a pumpkin," Saffy informed her haughtily.
"I know what I meant."
"I'm going to bed."
She passed close enough that Patsy's highly-trained nose caught a faint whiff of something on her breath. Sweet. Fruity.
*Alcoholic.*
"You've been drinking!"
"No I haven't!" But she was blushing, shifty little eyes darting back and forth, and Patsy suddenly hated her with the searing force of ten thousand Daily Mail columnists.
"You're doing it to spite me, aren't you?" she hissed. "You know I can't drink so you go and get pissed on kiddy Bacardi Breezer filth that isn't even proper booze. Just so you can taunt me with your working liver."
"Yes," Saffron said, nodding so fast she looked like she belonged in a car's back window. "Yes, that's what I was doing. I'm sorry. I'm going to bed now."
It beggared belief that someone spawned by Eddie could be such an appalling bullshitter. Patsy's eyes narrowed.
"What have you been up to? It can't be drugs, you're not that interesting." She could move fast when she felt like it, as most of her ex-boyfriends would attest; she was out of the chair and gripping Saffron by the collar before the girl could weasel away. "You weren't wearing this when you left the house."
"It's Claire's," she said, face lighting up like a belisha beacon. "I... spilled something on mine and she lent me this one."
Being right was one of Patsy's favourite pastimes. "You are shagging the genome tart."
Caught out, Saffron just nodded. "Don't tell mum, will you?" She grimaced. "I mean, I know I'll have to, eventually, but she's going to be so... pleased."
She weighed it up. On the one hand, well - she was right. And she liked being right, especially when everybody knew about it, and this was enough material to wind Saffron up till the day she died.
On the other, if Eddie knew, she'd want to be involved. She'd want to spend time with Saffron and talk about Saffron and pick out famous, pretty girlfriends for Saffron, and where would that leave Patsy? Second fiddle, that was where, to a seventeen-year-old lesbian with bad hair and a Linda McCartney complex.
That would never do.
"I won't tell her," she said, shrugging, as if it was no concern of hers. "You should, y'know. Go to bed or something. Probably got stuff tomorrow. School."
"It's the Christmas holidays." Saffron was staring warily at her. "You really won't tell mum? And you don't want anything?"
Good point. Prime blackmail material. Except there was only one thing, one in the whole world, that she wanted. "Find me some way to drink again," she said, sitting back down and going back to constructing her uber-cigarette. "You put that science brain to work on that, and I won't tell her."
Her mouth didn't taste as foul as it usually did in the mornings. No hangover, either.
God, she missed the hangovers.
Eddie's table had become very soft during the night. Patsy frowned, still half asleep, and felt around under her head. Somebody had put a pillow under her head. There was something under it, too.
She pulled out the neat pile of papers and squinted at the first page. The title read Breakthroughs in Liver Transplants.
She never did tell Eddie.