by Rachel Marks
Rachel Marks
* * *
Until Next Weekend
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Marks studied English at Exeter University before becoming a primary school teacher. Despite always loving to write, it wasn't until she gained a place on the 2016 Curtis Brown Creative online novel writing course that she started to believe it could be anything more than a much-loved hobby. Her inspiration for her first book, Saturdays at Noon, came from the challenges she faced with her eldest son, testing and fascinating in equal measure, and the research she did to try to understand him better. Every Other Weekend is her second novel.
For my mum and dad, Paula and Mike – the best parents a girl could ever ask for
CHAPTER ONE
One day, I will learn that turning up to work with a stinking hangover is a terrible, terrible idea.
‘Mr Carlton, there’s something stuck up my nose.’
‘What is it?’
‘My finger.’
‘Well, take it out then.’
‘Mr Carlton, Mr Carlton, will you open my banana?’
‘Yes, but can you ask Mummy to teach you to open it yourself?’
‘And me, and me.’
It’s like stepping on a wasp’s nest. Multiple bananas are shoved in my face and I spend the first ten minutes of my working day splitting open overly ripe fruit and wiping banana goo on to my chair. Where did it all go so wrong?
It does make me laugh sometimes – to think of the years of studying – and now I spend the majority of my working life teaching children how to take off their jumper (just pull it over your head) or drink their milk without spilling it or how to tell the difference between the fruit bin and the paper one (the fruit one has a lid, people).
I say sometimes it makes me laugh. Most of the time it makes me want to jump into a large pit with no method of escape. I didn’t exactly ‘fall’ into teaching. I’m well aware of the expression, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ And it probably does apply to me in some respects. I’m not sure there is anything else I’d be very good at (not that I’m particularly good at teaching). But it was an active decision. I do really like kids – their innocence, their honesty. I’m just not so keen on thirty of them, all trapped in a confined space, badgering me relentlessly.
‘Right, enough. Everyone sit down. If you need your banana opening, you will have to wait. I need to do the register.’
The obedient ones sit down, but there are still a few persistent pests that need swatting away – metaphorically, of course. Once they’re all finally sitting on the carpet, I clap my hands and they all clap back, out of time, and then this wonderful silence descends on the room, bringing with it the feeling of intense calm I imagine you would experience walking into a Buddhist temple.
It doesn’t last long. I’m only a few names down the register when Harley starts his usual morning routine of being a complete pain in the arse. First comes the jigging, the shaking, like an aeroplane with a major fault before it starts its catastrophic descent to the ground. Then the poking of anyone nearby (accompanied by over-the-top squeals from the victims).
I try to ignore as many of these misdemeanours as possible. In part because it’s a strategy we were taught at teacher training college, and in part because my head is pounding so hard that engaging in a heated confrontation with Harley, where he will only deny all wrong-doing, is not at the top of my current to-do-list.
I didn’t plan on coming to school with a hangover. I planned on taking my boys for a rare mid-week outing to the cinema to see the new Spiderman film, but then Kate rang to say they’d been fighting since the second they got home from school and that she felt it was important we gave them a consequence (the consequence being no cinema trip with me). She said it with the inflection at the end of the sentence, pretending it was a question, but we both knew it wasn’t. So, with a disappointment in the pit of my stomach that made me feel a little queasy, I decided to go to the pub. And now here I am deeply regretting that decision as I face another battle with the bane of my current working life.
‘Right, Harley, come and sit by my chair because I can see I can’t trust you to sit nicely with the other children.’
I don’t know why I waste my breath. I know he won’t. That he’ll use the other children as hurdles on his rampage across the carpet and then bolt for the door – Mrs Watson, my world-weary teaching assistant, preventing his escape with a subtle clothes-line manoeuvre before manhandling him back to the carpet.
That’s pretty much what happens, although Bailey saves Mrs Watson a job, grabbing Harley’s trailing leg as he leaps over his head and sending him flying, head first, on to the classroom floor.
There are shrieks, not just from Harley, but also from timid little hamster-like Annabelle, who is squashed beneath him. Mrs Watson glances over but chooses to ignore it, despite the fact I’m only halfway down the register and I’ve still got the joyous task of taking the dinner choices to contend with.
‘Uh, Mrs Watson, I think you might need to take Harley and Annabelle here and just give them the once-over to check they’re both OK.’
Mrs Watson looks at me like I just asked her to shovel shit and I make a mental note to print out a copy of her latest appraisal and pop it into her pigeonhole as a little reminder of her areas to work on, predominantly contributing more to the role than piercing the straws into the milk cartons at fruit and milk time. With a pointed sigh, she comes over and grabs both children by the arm, pulling them up to a standing position and removing them from the carpet area, the ringing in my ears gradually dissipating as she moves them further away.
I finish the register. Sadly the only child that’s away is the one you couldn’t pick out of a line-up anyway. And all the wondrously big characters (teacher code for little tykes) push on through, inflicting their snotty noses and diarrhoea episodes on the rest of us.
‘OK, dinners.’ I utter an internal ‘yippee’ that’s soaked in sarcasm and paint on my happy clown face. ‘So the options today – remember to listen so I don’t have to say them again, you know how it puts Mr Carlton in a grumpy mood to have to say the options lots of times’ (at this, a grimace dressed up as a smile) ‘– are beefburger, Spanish omelette or that old trusty favourite, jacket potato with cheese or beans.’
James raises his hand – well brought up, but full of inane questions.
‘Yes, James?’
‘What’s a Spanish omelette?’
For once, it’s actually a perfectly reasonable question. I have no idea what a Spanish omelette is, but the thing that’s served in the canteen by our very talented midday supervisors (formerly known as dinner ladies) will bear
no resemblance to it anyway, so I won’t bother to google it.
‘It’s made of eggs, maybe some tomato.’
‘It sounds disgusting,’ Layla says, wrinkling her nose like she’s detected a nasty smell.
I can’t help but laugh. ‘I’m sure it’s delicious,’ I say with absolutely no conviction. ‘So, Darcy, let’s start with you.’
Darcy stares at me, and it’s like her eyes are open but there is no discernible brain function. I repeat the options, for the second time of what will undoubtedly reach double figures, but she just continues to stare. I’m tempted to wave my hand in front of her face or tap my knuckles against her skull, but instead I try my most supportive smile.
‘Darcy, you need to choose something or you’ll be very hungry at lunchtime, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?’
Nothing. Just a world of blankness. I choose her a jacket potato, as it’s the least likely to offend, and move on.
‘Tommy?’
‘Last night, Mummy and Aunty Jo took me to the pub and then we went back to Aunty Jo’s but her and Mummy had an argument so then we had to walk home and …’
‘All fascinating, Tommy, but the question was, what do you want for lunch?’
Tommy doesn’t take a breath, ignores me completely and continues talking.
‘… then we went back to Aunty Jo’s and Nanny came over and …’
I mentally turn down Tommy’s volume and lean my head against the back of the chair. And just as I vow not to drink again on a school night, Harley comes bounding back in and I immediately know that I will be pissed by six o three.
*
‘Jerry Sedgeway here. Who’s calling, please?’
It’s at times like this I wish I lived in some supernatural television series, where you can send a poisonous signal through the telephone wire that kills the recipient on answering. Who answers the phone by stating their full name anyway? I’ll tell you who. Tossers like Jerry.
‘Kate’s not answering her phone. I want to speak to the boys.’
‘Noah. How are you?’
The tone of his voice is always so smug. It’s like everything he says is underlined with ha ha, I’m sleeping with your ex-wife.
‘I’m fine. Now please can I speak to the boys?’
‘They’re all in the bath together, I’m afraid. That’s probably why Katie didn’t pick up.’
The combination of him calling her Katie (she’s been Kate for the entire twenty-eight years of her life) and the image of her naked in his house makes the highly nutritious meal of pie and chips I stuffed myself with earlier rise in my throat. He’s been with her for what, just over a year, and he thinks he can just waltz in, give her a new version of her name and erase everything we shared, like I never existed. I was with her for eleven years. Eleven years. I know everything there is to know about her. And her name is Kate.
‘Get them to call me when they’re out, please. I promised I’d find out what the class thought of Gabe’s Lego model and Finn had his first full day today – I wanted to see how he got on.’
‘He was fine. He had a great day. He was full of it when I got home and Gabe said they thought his model was awesome.’
‘I want to hear it from them. I wasn’t asking you to tell me.’
‘Of course. I get that. Sorry. They’ll be out of the bath in ten. Once Katie’s got them all ready for bed, I’ll get her to call you.’
I hate it when he pretends to understand. He has no children of his own. How can he possibly know how it feels to have some other man hearing your children’s exciting news before you, sending your children off to school with a kiss in the morning, having them climb into his bed in the night when they have a bad dream?
‘Right. Make sure they call me.’
‘I will. Bye, Noah.’
*
Kate doesn’t call for at least another hour, and I spend the time productively, torturing myself with images of Kate and the boys in Jerry’s bath. When they used to share a bath at our house, I’d light candles and put them on the bathroom shelf, and take Kate a glass of bubbly. The boys always wanted to join in the fun so I’d pour them apple juice into plastic prosecco glasses and they’d all sit in the tub, which was overflowing with bubbles, and clink their glasses together like they were three girl-friends at a spa.
I open a bottle of beer, down it, open another one and then, finally, the phone starts ringing.
When I answer, Finn launches straight in.
‘Daddy, I stayed all day today. We did PE in the afternoon and I got to go on the big apparatus. It was so much fun.’
The sound of Finn’s voice down the phone always gets me. It’s like someone’s got me in a chokehold and I’m tapping out, but they won’t release their grip.
‘Sounds brilliant, buddy. You’re such a big boy going to school all day.’
‘I know. I’m four.’ He says it like he’s announcing the title he’s just won.
‘Daddy’s proud of you for being so brave. Daddy misses you.’
‘Miss you too, Daddy.’
The grip around my neck seems to get that little bit tighter and my next words come out as a splutter.
‘I’ll pick you up on Friday from after-school club, OK, buddy? Only two more days.’
‘One, two.’
‘That’s right. One, two. Now put your big brother on. Love you, monkey.’
Finn doesn’t remove the phone from his mouth when he shouts for his brother and it batters my already sore head. There’s some shuffling, an argument about a toy of some sort and then Gabriel’s voice.
‘Hi, Daddy.’
‘Hey, little man. How are you?’
‘I’m OK. I’m really busy on the PlayStation so I can’t be long or I won’t finish the level before bed.’
Rationally, I know his eagerness to get off the phone doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love me, but my neurotic heart is determined to make me think otherwise.
‘Who lets you play on the PlayStation before bed?’
‘Mummy said it was OK, just for thirty minutes.’ Then a pause. ‘You always let me.’
Fair point.
‘OK, well just make sure you’re still doing lots of other cool stuff, building dens and kicking a football around, you know, that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t worry, I am.’
‘So tell me then, what did the class think of your awesome shark mech?’
‘They loved it.’ I can hear the happiness in his voice and picture his face, his blue eyes sparkling.
‘Did you tell them you made it at Daddy’s house?’
‘No, I forgot. Anyway, I’ve got to go.’
‘Oh, OK. Don’t forget I love you, will you? And look after your little brother for me, OK? I’ll see you Friday. We’ll do tons of amazing things together, I promise.’
‘Can we stay up late and have film night?’
‘Film night, popcorn, sweets, pancakes for breakfast, soft play … whatever you want, we’ll do, OK, buddy?’
When Kate and I were still together, there was this ‘dad’ advert on the TV that really annoyed me. It depicted all these different family situations and one of them was Weekend Dad. He was this super-cool fun guy who took his kids to all the best places and they looked up at him like he was some kind of god. I’d sit there – this grumpy git who stomped around the house telling the boys to put their shoes on the rack and go to bloody sleep and stop leaving their foot-piercing Lego on the floor – and I hated Weekend Dad, getting all of the good bits and none of the crap, and being put on a pedestal because of it. I used to shout at the TV, ‘Be responsible, make them do chores, don’t always take them to Pizza Hut and the cinema like every weekend is a holiday,’ and then one day, suddenly, I became him. I’m now Weekend Dad. And it’s like you put on a costume and no longer are you nerdy Clark Kent, you’re fricking Superman and every weekend they stay with you has to be extraordinary. No more rules, no more Mr Miserable, just fun, games and their fortnightly sugar allowance e
xceeded in one fell swoop. But when I drop them off and return home, I feel more like Batman at the start of The Dark Knight Rises – decrepit, washed up, alone.
‘Awesome. Love you, Dad.’
It’s a recent development – this occasional dropping of the -dy – but even though he’s only recently turned eight, I can’t help feeling that bit by bit, syllable by syllable, I’m losing my little boy and he’s being replaced by someone altogether more knowing, more autonomous and far less dependent on me. And what’s worse, I’m missing so much of it.
‘You too. Hand me over to Mummy, will you?’
‘OK, she’s in the kitchen. I’ll just take the phone down to her.’
I listen to the sound of his footsteps, the change in his breathing, as he charges down the two flights of stairs in Jerry’s glorious three-storey mansion to their modern, spacious, open-plan kitchen.
‘What’s up, Noah?’
‘Don’t I even get a “ hello ” these days?’
‘Hello. Now, what’s up?’
‘I just wanted to check you’ve remembered it’s my weekend with the boys this weekend?’
‘Really? You know it’s on the calendar, that I would never forget and that the typical reason plans change is because you ring up to cancel them.’
‘That’s not fair.’
It’s actually totally fair because it’s a fact. The truth is that sometimes, because it hurts how much I miss them, I don’t show up. I know. It makes no sense. Report me to the logic fairies. I always intend to go, I want to go. I adore my boys. When I’m not with them it feels like my internal organs are in a vice that just keeps tightening. I wish I understood the dark, confused place that is my brain, but I don’t. Maybe it’s just easier to pretend they don’t exist sometimes. Because then I don’t have to face the fact that they’re getting on with their lives so happily without me.
Kate lets out a long sigh. ‘They’re looking forward to it, Noah. Make sure you’re there at half past four on Friday, OK?’