Carter came out to collect me himself. He was the only person in the building wearing a suit, a suit so exquisite I had to resist the temptation to stroke it rather than shake his extended hand. He looked tired but handsome; his skin still bore the trace of a recent stint in a warmer climate, and his dark hair was so well cut that the handful of grey strands looked intentional.
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, before leading me to his office – a glass-walled cube in a corner of the building which immediately made me feel like a guppy in an aquarium.
‘Thanks for having me,’ I said as we sat. ‘I mean, thanks for seeing me.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said. He opened a leather-bound notebook and studied me briefly, as if weighing up whether I was worth sullying the soft, cream pages, before picking up his pen. ‘Tell me what you’re about.’
I launched into my prepared speech, outlining general marketing strategies and what I hoped were innovative plans to engage with customers. Carter looked stylishly bored. Sensing I was losing him, I ceased my monologue. In that moment I became tired of pretending. I had spent weeks maintaining an I’ve-got-everything-in-order front to friends, family and ex-colleagues – even I wasn’t buying it any more.
‘I can see you’ve got a lot of young staff in here, and I’m sure they’re full of fire and all that good stuff, but what do they know about drive? Drive is when you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids needing a constant stream of shit. And the people you’re selling to – company owners – they’re me, they’re my peers. I’m sure your team is full of bright ideas, but I’ll have the ideas that speak to your clients because I am them.’ Carter put his pen down. ‘Sorry about saying “shit”.’ He cleared his throat before speaking.
‘Where did you buy?’
‘Hackney.’
‘A good investment,’ he said with a brisk nod.
‘I hope so,’ I whispered. Carter glanced down at my CV before looking at me with his eyes narrowed. I believe that in that moment he decided I was a decent fixer-upper.
The problem with gratitude is that it makes you vulnerable. From the moment Carter called to offer me the role, I lived with the sense that I owed him, and part of that meant not revealing where I was failing. I could postpone the presentation, ask for more time, and Carter would probably be cool with it, but I’d still feel like I was letting him down. I did a quick search on social media marketing for conferences and printed off a few pages. I stuck those on to a clipboard I found in my desk drawer.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Annie. Annie was my assistant, officially. When Carter asked me if I needed help, I had answered emphatically that I was fine. Eventually he presented her like a new puppy one morning. He sent me a follow-up email explaining that I should offer her the benefit of my expertise and that she might be able to help me out with my workload. Annie even had the energy of a puppy, albeit a frighteningly ambitious one. On her first day, I told her to read through the client folders, and a few hours later she had reorganized the entire filing system. At five she came to me to ask for feedback. Annie has delicate features and curly blonde hair, and as she stood before me, her blue-grey eyes wide, she looked angelic. I told her honestly that she had been brilliant, really helpful and full of good ideas. I told her to let me know if there were any of my projects she particularly wanted to work on. She beamed.
As she left the room I heard Bettina mutter, ‘Big mistake.’
‘Pretty Woman?’ I said with a laugh.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Bettina, in a way that made clear she had no interest to.
‘The film. Are you quoting Pretty Woman?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Bettina, ‘that one about a woman who fails to recognize a conniving little witch after her job?’ I made myself laugh. It went against everything I tried to believe in to buy into the competitive-woman stereotype. Still, when Bettina spoke I listened, and it wasn’t long before I started to reflect differently on my words of encouragement. As the weeks went on, I felt Annie wasn’t so much watching me as examining me; not learning from me but learning about me, so that she might know my weaknesses. Her eyes flitted over my desk as she asked me how things were going.
‘All good, thanks. Just having a minute to myself to prep for the meeting.’ Annie glanced at my computer screen, still open to Google.
‘Anything I can help with?’ she asked with a sweet smile.
‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ I said, and watched her smile fade momentarily. It hadn’t occurred to me before then that she probably hated me a little bit. I remember being young and ambitious and thinking I knew more than my superiors, only in my case, I was probably wrong. By the time Annie had brought me my drink, the meeting was due to start. I thanked her and took a couple of mouthfuls, despite the fact it was still scalding hot.
‘Do you need me to carry anything for you?’ Annie asked. I stood up purposefully.
‘Thanks, I have everything I need.’ I patted my clipboard. Annie gave a little frown.
‘OK then. I’ve done a bit of research if you want it later. Emerge is a complex one. I’m sure you’ll be great.’ She turned on her heel and marched off to the meeting room. She liked to arrive promptly, get a seat at the front. Bettina shook her head.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I warned her.
‘I haven’t and I won’t, but if I did I’d say bring your A game, Ally.’
Carter was sharing some company news as I settled at the back of the room.
‘We’ll probably switch to a new client-management system in July.’ There were a few murmurs of approval. I slid down my chair; I had only just got my head around the last one. When the room was full, he announced the morning’s agenda: I was up first.
‘So, Emerge,’ I said carefully, ‘as in arrive, turn up, show up, spurt.’ There was a snort from the back of the room. I probably should have edited the list I printed from the online thesaurus. I flipped the page. ‘Anyway, the plans for launching this conference are to –’ I glanced down at my printed sheet – ‘create an online buzz using quality advertainments focused on the conference’s main objectives.’ I paused to let my words sink in.
‘Which are?’ asked a guy called Tom. Tom’s brawny, six-foot-something frame seemed to contradict his thin, plummy voice. He always had over-gelled hair and his face, when at rest, formed a scowl. He was in charge of video production for the organization, so his question may have been a valid desire to understand the tone of his future work, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an attempt to trip me up and enjoy the fall. I waved my hand around, hoping to convey that I was leading up to something important, but I was trying to buy myself time because I could not for the life of me remember the brief.
‘Do you know the feeling you have when you’re creating something, when you start to gain momentum and there’s a point when you feel like you’ve taken off and after that you’re flying? This conference wants to sum that up.’ I reeled off some vague and completely fabricated statistics about the effect of community on personal growth and the significance of leadership. As I spoke, I heard some murmurs within the group, but my discomfort didn’t offer me the headspace to assess the tone of the reaction I was receiving. I decided the important thing was that I had said something; I could iron out the details later.
‘Thanks, Alison,’ said Carter, when I was silent for long enough to indicate I had finished. ‘Elle, do you want to update us on the financials?’ Elle, a kind-faced, quiet woman, stood up and smoothed down her short black dress. She walked purposefully to the front of the room, and gently but firmly pushed me aside so she could take my space. She pressed a button on a small remote in her hand and a large projector behind us came alive, displaying a colourful pie chart.
‘This is an overview of this quarter’s spend,’ said Elle. I took my seat and focused on looking engaged for the rest of the hour.
‘It was good,’ said Annie as I shredded the papers from my clipboard, ‘absolutely fine.’
‘Thanks, Annie,’ I said, although I was not particularly grateful for her answer to a question I hadn’t asked.
‘But I was thinking that maybe I could send out an email, with an overview of the aims and how we can support the conference. You know – for clarity.’
‘Sure. That might be helpful.’
I returned to my desk and scoured my inbox for the original brief. My throat grew tighter as I read it – Emerge was an event for orthodontists and not, as I had assumed, some form of spiritual-growth seminar.
‘What was that?’ asked Bettina from behind her monitor.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the meeting – you were just rambling.’ I rubbed the back of my neck to try and ease out the tension that had been growing there throughout the morning.
‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’
‘It was that bad,’ said Bettina bluntly. ‘What’s going on? Trouble at home?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Problems with the kids?’
‘No. I mean, no more than usual.’
‘Dylan then?’
‘No, of course not. Everything’s fine,’ I said, and I had no idea why that made me feel so nervous.
3
EVERYTHING WAS FINE. My children were healthy and, whilst not always happy, they had no real reason to be unhappy. Dylan was the same affable, easy-going guy I had met fifteen years before. The person I was at that time is unrecognizable to me now, but in all those years, Dylan had hardly changed. A few grey hairs around his temples, one or two fewer beers of an evening, but he was more or less the same man who’d pulled up to my house in a Corsa to collect a frightened twenty-two-year-old girl. Dylan had been my driving instructor. I’d just graduated and was working in a pub whilst trying to secure a job in PR. Nothing seemed to be panning out as I had been promised. I had believed that if I worked hard and tried not to stuff up too much, I would leave university with the door to a sparkling career wide open, and maybe a soon-to-be fiancé as a bonus. The reality was that my on/off (but more off than on) boyfriend David had dumped me in the middle of my final exams. The rejection resulted in more time spent crying than revising, and three years of study ending in an academic whimper. With no experience, I was having difficulty convincing an employer to look past my uninspiring grades. I lived in the box room of a shared house in North London. My housemates’ only ambitions were to out-party each other. The eldest was a thirty-six-year-old man who scraped together a living writing pornography – I was very keen to find a new tribe.
I decided that learning to drive might be my ticket out of there. My own transport would allow me to move somewhere cheaper and look for jobs further afield; and more than that, it would give me a sense that I was taking control of my life. I needed my foot on the accelerator. I had next to no money. I kept a weekly food budget of eleven pounds, which I managed to achieve by exclusively buying food in plain white packaging. My transport budget was even more meagre, which meant walking miles across the city every week. I chose Dylan as an instructor for no other reason than he was very, very cheap.
When I opened my door to find him there in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up over his firm biceps, I admit I took a second out of my nervousness to note that there was an attractive man before me. Everything, from the deep tone of his greeting to his handshake, so strong I could feel the throb a few minutes later, shouted ‘man’. Everything except his smile, which was that of a mischievous little boy, and remained on his face the entire time I told him my fears about the open road. When I had finished relaying the various ways in which I could very possibly die, he grabbed my hand. I remember thinking it wasn’t the most professional move but I didn’t want him to let go.
Dylan spent the entire hour trying to fill me with reassurance. He was largely unsuccessful. At the end of the lesson I pulled up a few metres from the house and I could almost smell the relief that filled the car.
‘You did well,’ said Dylan.
‘I did not,’ I said, and then started to cry. It may have been an overspill of adrenaline but it felt like more than that. Looking back, I think I was weeping from the recognition that it might never be easy to get what I wanted.
‘Let’s get a pint,’ said Dylan. I nodded my head.
Set up in the shady boozer round the corner from my house, I was able to focus on the man before me. He had a way of cocking his head when I was talking that made it feel as if he was really listening, trying to hear something beyond the words. He encouraged me to tell him about the messy unravelling of my relationship. I asked him about his own romantic history.
‘I got divorced last year,’ he said. I felt ashamed. This was a real-world, grown-up problem; I was still playing around in the sandpit of life. ‘Yeah, it was hard but necessary. Some people are only meant to be in our lives for a limited time.’ I laughed.
‘Like you,’ I said. ‘After I get my licence, we’ll never see each other again.’
‘That’s why I like my job,’ said Dylan. ‘I get to come into people’s lives and help give them this … gift. And then never see them again.’ I raised my glass.
‘I look forward to never seeing you again,’ I said. Dylan knocked his pint against my wine glass.
‘To never seeing you again.’
Of course, it didn’t work out like that. The day I passed my test, I ran across the centre car park waving my certificate in the air. When I reached Dylan, waiting anxiously in the doorway, he grabbed the paper from me and without pausing to look at it, he kissed me. I don’t know if he had been waiting until the end of our professional partnership or was just caught up in the moment, but I know that it was welcome and did not feel unexpected.
Following that, we were largely inseparable. When Dylan was at lessons I’d wait in his bed, eager to return to snack-based meals and action films. Dylan educated me on the finer points of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and, despite a hatred of guns, car chases and very unsubtle good-versus-evil plotlines, I found myself falling for them. He made everything, even the mundane, better. When I worked my shifts in the pub, Dylan would sit in a corner, nursing an ale and completing his crosswords. He told me he wanted to keep an eye on the (primarily geriatric) regulars and he would wait until I had cashed up, wiped down all the tables, and swept the cigarette-butt-strewn floors before walking home with me. As I remember it, when we weren’t sleeping, we were laughing. That’s what I remember, nothing but laughter. Dylan knew all the bouncers in London and, when it seemed necessary to expose ourselves to the potentially dangerous influence of those outside our gang of two, we would head out for a dance. He was never the best mover; I was always slightly nervous for the unfortunate souls who found themselves beside him, but he did it because I liked it, and seeing him jam along with live bands and drunkenly chat to students from Barcelona felt like I was getting a glimpse at a completely different side to him. And I liked that side to him, but I also liked the quiet, steady, patient parts of him. Despite having been burned by marriage before, Dylan wasn’t bitter. If anything, he seemed determined to do it again and do it properly. He asked me to marry him after we had been dating for six months; I laughed and told him to ask me again in a year and he did, to the day.
Dylan supported me through my first marketing internship, boiling pasta and running baths, ensuring that I didn’t have to worry too much about how to stretch the pittance a multi-million-pound company was offering each week. I think it was the ease with which he cared for me that inspired the idea that he could be a good father; one who would be present and proactive, the kind my mother told me would be impossible to find. But ideas are only sketches, scribbled quickly and lacking in detail. The theory became practice and it didn’t match up to the picture I’d had in my head. Everyone told us that children change things; I hadn’t realized they meant everything. We didn’t make a childcare plan because I’d assumed it would be obvious – he’d help when help is needed and perhaps occasionally when it
’s not.
I cried when we found a childminder for Ruby. She was five months old. Dylan held me and allowed my nose to run on to his T-shirt but offered nothing else, not to work less and have the baby or to work harder so that I could be at home. When I collected her at the end of the day and she would fall asleep in the back, sated by care that I should have been giving, I would cry again in the dark of the parked car, careful to recompose my face before carrying her into the house. So, to some degree the deceit started long ago.
Everyone said it would get easier as they got older, but by then I knew better than to listen to everyone. There was even more to organize – parties, play dates and school places – and it seemed like I had even less help to get it done. Dylan didn’t change other than to become a slightly opaque version of the man I had met. His tendency towards introversion blossomed into a personality trait, and the drive I thought he might develop was nowhere to be seen. Even the girls knew that I was the general and Dylan my lieutenant, and every working day offered a window of peace until half past three, when the missives would roll in: ‘WHERE IS MY SWIMMING COSTUME???’ ‘WHAT DID WE SAY ABOUT PIERCINGS?’ ‘CAN WE GET A GERBIL. PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE.’ I rarely complained because it wasn’t exactly a hardship. There were no helplines for married mothers with two well-rounded children, but when I was made redundant I picked up a newspaper for the first time in years and read a piece about emotional labour, how it was not the doing that was exhausting but the being – being all things to everyone. But even after I knew it, I couldn’t stop, because you can’t change course without something to push you from the path.
More Than a Mum Page 2