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We got home at two-thirty and Eliza had to rush to get ready for her first rehearsal. There was a buzz and excitement about her which rubbed off on me like chalk dust. We sang songs from Chicago all the way to the rehearsal rooms with the car windows open, oblivious to the reactions of passersby. This was what being a good mother was all about and I mentally awarded myself a gold star. I drove back home still feeling exhilarated by Eliza’s buoyant mood, as well as by a sense of freedom as if I had finally deposited my luggage with an airline and could wander around quite unencumbered. What Jo did or did not do for the next six days was not my problem. Or so I wanted to believe.
With both girls occupied elsewhere, I had the house to myself and three hours to do exactly what I wanted. So I chose a particular CD which normally caused groans of complaint, stripped off all my clothes and danced around in the lounge to the thump and grind of Queen. As an afterthought, I quickly closed the curtains then turned the heating up and let myself go.
When I had exhausted myself, I simply wandered aimlessly around the house, looking at the photos on the wall and fingering ornaments as if I were a tourist looking around a stately home.
I found myself in the chaos of Eliza’s room, clothes strewn across the floor like the last day of the January sales, half-finished homework scattered across her desk, an old banana skin on the window-sill. Then I wandered into Jo’s room with its tidy, ordered rows of books and files. An island in our chaotic household. Lists and reminders were drawing-pinned to her notice-board with symmetrical neatness and dated in the righthand corners. The bin had been emptied, clothes folded away, and her dressing-gown hung where it should be, on the back of her door. The walls had been painted magnolia when we had bought the house but the paintwork had become chipped and scuffed in places with the passing of time. Jo deserved some fresh gloss, some new colour and brightness as a fitting background to her tidiness.
I decided to go to the DIY store. Jo would have a surprise waiting for her when she returned from her father’s and I would show her what a supportive, caring mother I really was.
Once at the store, I found myself staring helplessly at row upon row of paint tins, stacked like a child’s cylindrical building blocks, reaching to the ceiling. A small shelf, angled like a lectern, sliced through the endless continuity of tins. On this shelf lay books and leaflets containing square upon square, each labelled with a reference number and name. It was like a colour-coded plan of a cemetery.
The spectrum of colours to choose from was overwhelming, not helped by my difficulty in visualising these tiny squares as complete walls in Jo’s bedroom. It was like being given a daisy and expecting to know what Kew gardens looked like. I stared at the colour charts as if in a hypnotic trance until one square seemed to merge into the next so that all I saw was a swirl of pinks, purples and greens, like melted flavours of ice cream slowly mixing to one murky hue.
‘Too many choices,’ muttered a bewildered-looking man next to me.
‘Like life really,’ I answered philosophically. ‘Easier when the decisions are made for you.’
‘It’s the names that put me off—Cornish Cream, Avocado Mousse, Blueberry Pie. It’s more like a cookery book.’
‘Or a holiday brochure. Look—Blue Lagoon, Californian Sunset, Icelandic River. They’re not even accurate, I’d call that one Polluted Canal and that one Gangrenous Wound. Oh, look, here’s Fungal Foot Infection.’
The man laughed and reached for two large tins.
‘Well, I’m too set in my ways,’ he sighed. ‘It’s Boring Old Fart for me, or Magnolia as it’s known in the trade.’
Jo was not set in her ways, I decided. Surely there was a rebellious side to her that would respond to a black ceiling and purple walls, or clashing colours of orange or mauve. But I knew Jo was practical and sensible for one so young and would immediately see that such dark colours wouldn’t reflect any natural light and would certainly not be conducive to studying. She would want something different, novel and young, but light, subtle and individual. I tried to recall the tone of her car-pet and the shades of her bedroom furniture, but everything I visualised seemed greyer than it should be. I kept returning to the squares of green, one of Jo’s favourite colours. There was a shade called Mint which almost tasted of those squares of mint chocolate. This, I felt sure, would be Jo’s choice.
I put the tins into my trolley and headed for the checkout. Then I heard a familiar voice. I looked up and saw Alice in a grey trouser suit and chiffon scarf helping an elderly lady who was waving a stick and hobbling up the aisle.
‘Come on, Mother,’ she was saying, ‘Let’s get some nice new paint and then I can make a start on your bathroom. I SAID, “LET’S GET SOME NICE NEW PAINT, MOTHER.” Oh, never mind.’
I swivelled my trolley round quickly to escape in another direction. If only the front wheel hadn’t caught the edge of the paint tin at the bottom of the pyramid, I might have made it.
‘Lizzie…Oh, dear. We can’t just leave these here. I’ll go and get someone.’
I couldn’t really leave her deaf, disabled mother unattended so I just stood there awkwardly.
‘Who are you?’ she barked.
‘LIZZIE, ROGER’S WIFE. Ex, I mean.’
‘There’s no need to shout. I’m not deaf. My daughter’s staying for a few days. Pain in the arse. Wants to paint my bathroom. I bet she makes me have it done in pink.’
‘You can choose what colour you want. It’s your bathroom.’
‘With Alice in charge? You’re joking. Help me along to the paint area, then we can choose.’
With that, she sprinted down the aisle, holding her stick out in front of her, and was stretching up towards the tins of black and purple paint before I caught up with her.
‘Take me to the checkout,’she said, linking her arm in mine.
Alice eventually caught up with us after her mother had bought the purple and black paint.
‘Mother, my goodness. I see you’ve already purchased your paint. Marvellous.’
Alice’s mother winked at me.
‘Thank you, Lizzie,’ Alice said. ‘I had a feeling you and I would end up very good friends.’
I stopped myself from wincing and made a dash for the car before Alice noticed her mother’s choice of paint and blamed me. With the paint in the boot, I just made it to the rehearsal rooms in time to pick up Eliza, congratulating myself on coordinating my afternoon so successfully. But as we approached the driveway, Eliza asked, ‘What’s for supper, Mum?’
…So I prepared her a farmhouse stew full of goodness and vitamins, went out into the yard to milk the cow and prepared to invite the neighbours round for a game of charades…
Actually, I’d somehow forgotten about the small matter of eating, and Eliza deserved a treat, I told myself. So we phoned for a takeaway pizza, slumped onto the settee and glued ourselves to her favourite film, Chicago. It should have been boring by this, our twentieth viewing, but I never tired of taking sideways glances to watch Eliza watch her two heroines.
If I looked right into Eliza’s eyes, I could almost see her mind turning herself into Catherine Zeta Jones or Renee Zellweger. This time her focus was on Zeta Jones and Eliza was there in the film, tapping out every dance step in her mind, reaching for every note, feeling every emotion. Melted cheese and tomato dripped down her chin as she fed herself by touch, her eyes fixed firmly on the oblong screen in front of her. My vision as a perfect mother did not include slobbing in front of the telly with a pizza. Still, I told myself, it was a special occasion. Was that what it was? A special occasion because we did not have the adolescent tension of Jo in the air? I felt I had failed in some way but I quickly replaced that thought with a vision of Eliza and me singing a duet in a Hollywood musical. In Eliza’s world, everyone would create a song and dance about everything.
Monday morning came and I had to put Jo’s room on hold while I went to work.
I put on my black executive suit, threw some extremely important papers into my executive briefcase and made a quick phone call to ensure my executive car was on its way to pick me up and take me to the city where I would be handling investments of millions of pounds.
I arrived at the sandwich bar and put my vision on hold for later—I did still have that idea of running my own café. I rushed in, late as usual, washed my hands and got stuck into scraping butter across bread and spooning in the fillings for workers picking up their lunch sandwiches on the way in. Trish busied herself by dispensing caffeine to a hundred lethargic businessmen and we kept up this frantic pace for nearly an hour.
It was only later, when Trish went out in the delivery van, that I could no longer ignore my screaming thoughts about what Roger had said. Of course I had noticed that Jo was looking a bit thinner and of course I had been a bit worried. But Jo losing weight? That didn’t fit. She had always been active and healthy, not one of those children who pick up every little cough and cold going round, always with a runny nose and alarmingly pale skin. In fact, I had rarely been to the doctor with Jo, for she had never suffered from anything more than the usual childhood ailments, which she always shook off very quickly, and she had barely missed a day of school. As I chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers, the word ‘cancer’ floated into my mind uninvited, but I soon pushed it out again. I clung to more logical explanations and somehow managed to keep my anxiety in check.
I reminded myself that Jo was pretty good for a teenager. She had largely conformed, and had kept her mood swings firmly locked in her bedroom, never opting for the throwing-crockery-at-your-mother option. I had had many a long chat with Scarlet’s mother, who had torn clumps of her own hair out in the frustration of trying to control her daughter.
‘If I tell Scarlet to be home by half past eleven, she’ll turn up at a quarter to twelve just to prove a point. If I ask her to clear the coffee-cups out of her bedroom, she’ll bring down just the one and then take up a new cup of coffee and a plate.’
Not much to complain about but I had noticed that Scarlet’s mother had started to chew her fingernails lately. Scarlet had a belly piercing, one dolphin tattoo on her shoulder and another on her arm which nobody has dared ask the meaning of, and she had brought home at least three inarticulate, nicotine-stained boyfriends. A tame rebellion compared with many, but more than Jo had succumbed to. Jo didn’t seem to have this drive to battle with authority, she had other priorities. It was much later that I realised she was rebelling in her own way, and I would gladly have swapped what happened next with any number of body piercings.
‘I’m not sure I want this,’ muttered one of my regular customers.
I looked at his sandwich. It did look rather thin and lank. He lifted up the top layer of bread to reveal a very thick spreading of butter but no filling whatsoever. He then lifted up the lid of his coffee-cup where, like a magician, he slowly revealed the whereabouts of the missing filling, which was floating on the coffee like seaweed in the ocean.
‘Sorry, Reg, I was miles away.’
‘Last week you were imagining yourself serving food in a beach bar on Mars. Where were you today?’
‘I was solving the mystery of adolescence, but I think serving coffee on Mars is more realistic.’
That night it was fish and chips in front of a quiz, justified by my plan to make a start on the decorating. After supper, I creaked up the stairs to Jo’s room, looked around, and decided I could muster up enough energy to shift the furniture to the centre of the room, pull back the carpet and get all my decorating gear ready.
I stood for a while and stared at the room. Beginning any-thing was always hard and I imagined Michelangelo must have felt the same as he stood inside the Sistine Chapel. Before I allowed my imagination to let me plan something rather too ambitious for Jo’s ceiling, I went back to the kitchen and found a couple of cardboard boxes. I carted them upstairs and filled them up with books and ornaments.
Once I had begun the task, my earlier enthusiasm returned and I began to enjoy myself as I stripped the bed and lifted the notice-board off the wall. There was something very sat-isfying about this sort of job. It reminded me of taking down Christmas decorations, hoovering up the pine needles and starting a fresh new year with the old one wiped clean away along with its stale habits, overdone arguments, regrets and remorse.
I began to hum and whistle like a jovial morning milkman as I went about the business of dismantling Jo’s room. It was as if I was taking her life apart to spring clean it, give it a lick of paint and then put it back together again—as if I was certain that that was what was needed.
It didn’t take long to pack the loose items away and I set about the task of hauling the bed and chest into the middle of the room. I slid the top drawer out and found it neatly lined with underwear. At the back were two chocolate bars which Jo must have forgotten about.
The second drawer jammed and I had to rattle and shake it to pull it right out. It was full of black and grey tops and a couple of pairs of shorts which looked like Eliza’s cast-offs. At the back of this drawer were two sandwiches which were as hard and dry as cardboard, the edges bending up like brittle autumn leaves. I took one out and held it in my palm studying it, trying to work out why it was there. Like frantic moths, answers flew into my mind but could not settle.
I placed the stale food on the window-sill and tugged out the remaining drawers, pulling jumpers and tops aside frantically, desperately, like a hungry dog trying to dig up a buried bone. Nothing.
Smiling at my own stupidity, I dropped the stale food into the bin liner and grabbed the radio from the hallway. I switched it on and allowed the rhythmic thump of some old rock music to smother any remaining illogical fears.
Almost cheerily, I pushed the bed away from the wall and picked up Jo’s school bag which had been lying underneath. As I moved it, some books and a lunch box slapped down onto the floor. The lunch box was unexpectedly heavy and I peered through the plastic lid at its contents. There was no mistaking it. I peeled off the top to reveal the spaghetti bolognese I had served up days earlier. I stood still and stared at it for what seemed like hours. Then my brain jolted into action again and I tried to apply some logic.
Of course Jo had already unexpectedly declared herself a vegetarian so why hadn’t she told me instead of stuffing the meat into a plastic box and hiding it under her bed? I supposed she must have thought I would be disapproving or critical. Would I have been? Possibly. I had always cracked jokes about vegetarians being wind-powered and likened tofu to small pieces of mattress. I cringed when I thought of all those stupid remarks I had made about deep-fried Brussels sprouts and plastic sandals. Perhaps the answer was to become a vegetarian myself and declare the house a meat-free zone, but then I thought about bacon. I could almost smell it. Still, surely I just had to reassure Jo that she didn’t have to eat meat, and she simply had to reassure me that she would get her nutrition in other ways.
Yet I knew that such easy communication had broken down between us. Something told me that this wasn’t going to be at all straightforward. If Eliza hadn’t bounced into the room at that moment, I do believe I would have slumped down onto the bed and cried.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
‘Nothing sweetie, it’s just…Jo’s become a…’
‘Lesbian?’
‘No.’
‘Drug pusher?’
‘No.’
‘Prostitute?’
‘Of course not. Jo’s become a vegetarian.’
‘Oh, is that all? How boring, everyone’s a vegetarian.’
‘Actually, Eliza, I don’t think she’s eating properly.’
‘No one eats properly, Mum.’
‘But Jo’s so thin.’
‘Then make sure she eats more.’
It didn’t seem right to be confiding in a ten-year-old. Yet sometimes it takes a young soul to see everything in its simplest terms.
‘How an earth can I get her to eat?’
‘Use your imagination.’
Yes, I was good at that. Wasn’t I?
FOUR (#ulink_78b75f74-bb6f-562a-832b-e3dc8eaad07e)
I WANTED to go to Dad’s in August. Not because it ‘made a pleasant change’ as Mum said, but because he always left me alone to get on with it. To get on with what? Thinking, working it all out, making lists. He never went in for talking much. Talking can interfere with thinking. He’d moved to the country. It was only just under an hour’s drive from us, but as you got nearer it got greener. Fields full of cows. That sort of thing. Decent cottage, I suppose. Bit small. In a kind of village full of commuters and ladies making jam and divorced fathers. There was a town nearby—market town, they call it. Never seen a market there, though. You could walk into town in twenty minutes. The bus was quicker, but always full of ladies with baskets, wearing brown macs and staring.
Mum and Eliza stayed for lunch. That was when I found out I couldn’t eat in front of Mum. Eating is a bodily function and like all bodily functions it should be done in private. When Dad lived at home they would shout at each other. They would say what they thought. Everything would be on the surface, on view, like portraits in a gallery. Now they sit and smile and clip their words so they do not fly off in the wrong direction. It is the gaps between the sentences you have to listen out for. I preferred the arguing, the obvious tension.
Tension makes the air thick and difficult to breathe in. It makes voices high-pitched and annoying. It was like sitting in glue that lunchtime. Mum and Dad were trying to do and say the right thing. I knew how hard that was. I wanted to tell them not to bother, that it wasn’t worth the effort. But effort made them feel noble and righteous, or something.
When Mum and Eliza left, the air cleared like the morning fog lifting and the sun coming through. We cleared the plates and talked of this and that. I asked about Alice.
‘It’s a pity Alice isn’t here this week,’ I said.
‘She had to go and look after her mother.’
I wanted to ask whose idea it had been. I hesitated.
‘Did Mum make her go?’
‘Of course not, it’s just how it worked out.’
I wished I hadn’t asked. I invited the lie and then was disappointed when it came. Let down. Kind of.
‘I’m playing darts tonight. Come along if you want, but I told Keith and Bev next door you might babysit—thought you could do with the money—but it’s up to you, your choice.’
‘Yeah, I’ll babysit.’
The next morning I woke up and my period had started. It was about ten days early, dragged forward by a vicious moon. I hadn’t come prepared. I padded my knickers out with toilet roll and went downstairs.
‘No breakfast for me yet, I’m just going to the shop.’
The best thing about Dad—you didn’t always have to explain yourself.
‘I’ll come too. We need some more milk.’
‘I’ll get the milk.’
‘OK.’
The next best thing about Dad was he didn’t feel the need to shadow me. And he was practical.
‘Great. That gives me some more time. We’re playing in a tournament at Brampton. Got to rush.’ Dad coached an under-sixteens football team.
The worst thing about Dad? He never changed his arrangements because of me. Maybe that was good, I could never work it out.
I walked to the village shop two streets away. My body was slow and heavy. Every step was an effort, like I’d already walked ten miles or something. I folded my arms across my aching breasts. As if I could stop them getting bigger. I felt messy and grubby and infected. I had a disease that I didn’t want and the only cure was to travel backwards in time.
I opened the shop door to let an old lady out. Then I backed in. I resented spending my babysitting money on tampons and paracetamol. I didn’t look at the girl when I paid for them. I envied Eliza her pre-menstrual childhood.
When I was ten I would run everywhere. There was an urgency about life, as if time was running out. I ran to see friends, I ran up the stairs, I ran races with myself in the garden. Now, as if I wanted time to stand still, I swung my legs slowly back up to Dad’s. I hauled myself up the path to the front door and heaved along the corridor to fall heavily onto the bed.
‘Do you want to come to the football?’
