Perfect Daughter

by Amanda Prowse

  ‘This is not about laundry!’ Martha shouted.

  Jacks thought it might be hormones. Her little girl was probably a bit overwhelmed by the changes about to happen in her life and that was more than understandable – leaving home and moving far afield to live alone was a big deal. Not that she had ever done it herself, not really; she had simply swapped one street for another and instead of waking up and meeting her mum and dad in the kitchen, there’d been Pete there instead.

  She paused to let the air settle, then tried again. ‘Why are you crying then, love? Do I need to go and find another bottle of Buck’s Fizz?’

  Martha sat up straight and coughed. She tucked her hair behind her ears, trying to contain herself. ‘I’m not going to Bristol.’

  ‘So, Warwick then? That’s fine; it was the one you preferred, wasn’t it? Did I tell you I went online and had a look at their site; they’ve got a coffee shop, a supermarket, even a hairdresser’s, right there on campus. It’s amazing! Don’t be sad! It’s an easy decision, you funny little thing. Dad and I don’t mind where you go, as long it’s the right course for you and you are safe, that’s all that matters.’ Jacks squeezed her hand.

  ‘I’m not going to Warwick either.’

  There was a second of silence while Jacks digested her daughter’s words, trying to comprehend.

  ‘Don’t be daft, of course you are. You can get the grades, I know you can! This is just a pre-exam wobble, but you’ve had them before and you always come through. Always!’

  ‘I’m not going to university. I’m not going and that’s that.’ Martha withdrew her fingers from beneath her mum’s and folded her hands into her lap.

  ‘What are you talking about? Of course you are! Besides, I’ve already got you your sandwich toaster!’ Jacks felt her heart begin to hammer as a headache thumped behind her eyes.

  Martha took a deep breath, looked at her mum and swiped her eyes one more time. ‘I’m not! Don’t you get it? I’m not going anywhere!’

  ‘You are talking rubbish.’

  ‘I’m pregnant.’ Martha’s words cut through the air and plunged into Jacks’ heart like tiny daggers.

  ‘What?’ This had to be some kind of joke; only it wasn’t funny, not in the slightest.

  ‘I think you heard me, Mum. I’m pregnant.’

  ‘You can’t… no… I don’t… Tell me it’s not true,’ she stammered, aghast.

  Martha stood from the table. ‘I can’t tell you it’s not true, because it is.’

  There were several seconds of silence while Martha’s words bounced from the walls and settled in Jacks’ brain. She tried to steady her shaking hands on the tabletop as she heard Martha tread the creaky stairs. She replayed the tutor’s words loud and clear in her head. ‘The sky is the limit for a girl like Martha. With hard work and application, she can pick her path!’ No. No. No. No! This couldn’t be happening. She wouldn’t let it happen!

  Gripping the banister, Jacks climbed the stairs, her limbs like lead weights. She paused on the landing at the sound of her mum’s bell. Jacks opened Ida’s door, poked her head in and raised her finger, speaking a little more sharply than was necessary.

  ‘I’ll be one sec, Mum, just give me a minute. I’ve got to talk to Martha and then I’ll be straight in.’

  She shut her mum’s bedroom door tightly, then leant against the doorframe of the kids’ bedroom.

  ‘Are you going to keep it?’ she whispered.

  Martha nodded, her expression fixed. ‘Yes.’

  Jacks hovered at the end of her daughter’s bed, red mist clouding everything. Her breath came faster and faster as tears of anger and frustration broke the surface. Her limbs shook.

  ‘Are you fucking insane?’

  Martha stared wide eyed at her mum, but didn’t respond.

  Jacks bent low towards her daughter. ‘You must be. You must have lost the fucking plot!’

  ‘Mum!’ Martha wrapped her arms around her trunk and shrank back against the pillows. ‘You are really swearing.’

  ‘That’s because now is the time for swearing. It’s the right fucking time! Do you hear me?’ She spoke through clenched teeth.

  Martha closed her eyes, wanting to block out the words.

  ‘Have you any idea what you have done, any idea what you are doing?’ Jacks turned and slammed out of the room. The crash made Martha jump and she instinctively placed her hand on her stomach.

  Ida’s bell rang. Jacks stuck her head round the door, yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, give me a bloody minute!’ and withdrew. She stormed back to Martha’s room and wrenched the door open again.

  ‘Everyone told me to let things run their course, said that I was overreacting! But I bloody knew, I knew the moment I saw you talking to him that you were going to fuck up your life! I prayed I was wrong – you have no idea how hard I prayed – but no one was listening.’

  The sound of Martha’s tears broke the silence between her rants.

  ‘Do you have any idea what you have done? Do you? You have put a noose around your neck. In fact, no…’ Jacks ran her fingers through her hair and turned in a circle. ‘A noose would be too quick. You have injected yourself with a slow poison. It’ll kill you in the end, but it’ll take twenty years. Twenty years of fucking mediocrity that you will have to wade through until you drown in it!’ Her face flushed scarlet, her eyes were wild.

  Martha cried silently now.

  Jacks wasn’t done. ‘Each year the air will get thinner and your heart heavier, until one day you just won’t bother getting up any more. Look at me! Look at my life!’ She beat her chest with her fist. ‘I have one bra, did you know that? Just one greying bra that I wash, dry, wear, wash, dry, wear. That’s it, just one. I have hairy legs to save on razors and waxing. “Why don’t you ever get new clothes, Mum? You look like a tramp, Mum!”’ She imitated the kids’ voices. Martha sobbed. ‘Why? Because there isn’t the fucking money for clothes, not for me! And there’s me dreaming of a bloody conservatory when I can’t even buy another bra – how funny is that! And my kids, who have a ten-year age gap, have to share a bedroom. Things are shit.’ She clenched her fists. ‘Absolute shit and I wanted better for you. I wanted you to travel, to be someone, to move away from here! And you could have, you can! You have the offers and the ability!’

  Jacks felt the strength leave her legs as she slumped down on to the worn carpet with her back against the bed frame.

  ‘I will be someone, Mum. I…’

  ‘No! No you won’t. Don’t even say it! You’ll be like every other girl who waits at the bus stop, tapping into her fucking pay-as-you-go phone while her baby sleeps in a dirty pushchair. And you could have had it all!’

  Martha stood. ‘I have got it all! I’ve got Gideon and I’m having our baby.’

  ‘You don’t even like babies. Remember what you said about Jayden, next door? “He’s a squirmy pink little thing,” that’s what you called him. You said you couldn’t see what was so sweet about him.’

  ‘And you said it’s different when it’s your own.’

  Touché.

  Jacks’ eyes blazed. ‘Listen to yourself, Martha. You sound so stupid! And I never had you down as that. You can pick your path and you are choosing this?’ Jacks laughed, an unnatural, high-pitched giggle. ‘And I know you think that Gideon is the one.’ She laughed again. ‘I’m sure you see yourselves growing old together with roses around the bloody door. But you won’t. It’s a trick. It wears off, no one tells you that, and the love you think you’ve found? Jesus Christ, that person might not even remember you in a few years! No matter how often you think of him, crave him! He’ll only have a vague recollection of you, this boy who’s stolen your heart.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like for us. Or how we feel about each other!’ Martha raised her voice.

  ‘Don’t I, Martha?’ Jacks scrambled to her feet and clenched her fists. ‘Do you think I was born like this?’ She plucked at her jumper. ‘Born knackered? Of course I wasn’t. Wh
en I met…’ She hesitated, checked herself. ‘I… I was just like you, bathing in the glow of first love, wanting to touch him, wanting him to touch me, constantly. I watched him sleep, drank in his words; he was like a drug and I would have done anything he asked, gone anywhere he wanted, because all that mattered was being with him. It was like an addiction…’

  Martha looked at the floor. It sounded familiar.

  ‘And do you know what happened? Do you? Suddenly I’m retrieving Pete’s dirty socks from the floor, arguing about how and where to save money and climbing over his naked arse in the middle of the night to go and tend to my mother. And it happened in a blink.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘A blink!’

  ‘That won’t happen to us. I rea…’

  ‘…lly love him!’ Jacks finished her daughter’s sentence. ‘I know, Martha, and no one has ever loved anyone how you love him and how he loves you and no one else on the planet could possibly understand because what you are feeling is unique. I get it. But what you need to realise is that you are only reciting the lines that every woman comes up with when she meets a Gideon or a George fucking Clooney lookalike with all the chat and a few quid in his pocket. You aren’t unique, you’re not even right, you are just at that stage.’

  ‘It isn’t a stage. It’s real!’ Martha wailed.

  ‘No it isn’t. But part of the trick is that it feels real! And by the time you realise that, it will be too late.’

  ‘I think I know the difference, Mum. You have to give me some credit.’

  ‘Do I?’ Jacks snorted. ‘This is not why I had you, Martha. Not to lead that life.’

  ‘Not why you had me?’ Martha stared at her mother. ‘It sounds like I was bred for a specific purpose!’ She rubbed the tops of arms.

  ‘Maybe you were, maybe I had you to make something of yourself, to live a really great life.’

  ‘Or maybe you had me so I could live out your dreams, do all the things you didn’t and couldn’t, isn’t that more like it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, a bit. But in a good way!’

  ‘What possible good way? What’s good about taking all your failings and the gaps in your experience and trying to make me do them? Maybe I don’t want what you want.’

  ‘Well, I think we’ve established that!’ Jacks snapped.

  ‘Is this because you don’t like Gideon? Is it about him?’

  Jacks sighed and rubbed her hands together. ‘It’s always about him, Martha! And it always will be until you see sense!’

  ‘Or see it how you want me to see it.’

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  Jacks looked at her daughter. ‘You are only half formed; you’re like a cake that’s not done in the middle. One that looks lovely on the outside but needs another twenty minutes until it’s cooked through. You aren’t ready yet!’ Jacks was screaming now. She banged the wall with her flattened palm.

  ‘Ready for what?’ Martha looked confused.

  ‘For anything! Anything!’ Jacks took a deep breath to calm herself. ‘You’re only eighteen. You think you’re grown up, but you’re not, you are still so young. Trust me, I know. And nature can be very confusing and a bit cruel, giving you boobs and urges and cleverness. But essentially you are still a young girl and you have to believe me when I tell you that the further you get from eighteen, like when you’re thirty, forty, fifty – which, trust me, will start coming round way too soon – you will realise that I am telling you the truth.’

  ‘I don’t see what age has got to do with anything! I’m old enough to make decisions and you’ve always told me to trust the voice in my head and I do! It’s you that doesn’t trust it.’

  Jacks considered this. ‘I have a voice in my head too and mine is screaming at me that you are making a big mistake!’

  ‘Well, maybe you should tell your little voice that my mum has raised me right and I trust my own thoughts and decisions!’

  Jacks opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Martha’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I love you, Mum, but you’ve got to let me live my life. There’s the clue, right there. My life. Not yours, mine.’

  Jacks looked into the face of her determined child, a girl on the verge of womanhood.

  ‘Martha, please,’ she begged, her voice quieter now. ‘I know you are smart, smarter than me about nearly everything, but I have lived, I have been through the cycle and I can talk from experience.’

  Martha pulled her ponytail tight and hopped off her bed. She dried her tears and picked up her bag.

  ‘I am begging you, begging you. Please don’t have this baby. It will be the end of you, the end of everything.’

  ‘You met Dad when you weren’t much older than me,’ Martha shot back. ‘Are you saying that was the end of everything for you?’

  There it was, the ace in the pack. The indisputable fact. How was she to answer? How could she use the words that danced on her tongue, words of bitter regret that could never be erased. She and Pete had worked hard to shield Martha all these years; she wasn’t going to come clean now. She wanted to say something, wanted to say, ‘Yes! I thought it was the end of everything because it meant the end of dreaming, it meant being abandoned by the man I loved!’, but she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t ruin it all now.

  She looked into Martha’s eyes, which were brimming with tears, and reached for her hand. ‘No. No, my love. Of course it wasn’t the end of everything. Because we had you and that was the most precious gift in the world! But it was hard, too hard sometimes, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices. We still do.’

  Martha headed for the door. ‘If you don’t want to wake up next to Dad’s arse every day and you hate your life so much, do something about it. But don’t confuse your life with mine. We are having this baby and that’s that.’

  An hour later, Jacks heard the front door slam. The bell rang as if on cue. She made her way into her mum’s room.

  ‘I appear to have passed water,’ Ida sang.

  ‘Yep, although do you know what? What you mean is no such thing. You mean you’ve shat yourself again or if we are lucky it’s just piss.’ She pushed her mum back on the mattress and pulled up her frock. ‘Changing you is like being given a raffle ticket, I never know what I’m going to get.’

  ‘I’m expecting a letter.’

  ‘You’re not.’ Her tone was sharp. ‘You’re not expecting a letter. No letter will come. Do you understand?’ Jacks shouted as she raced around the bed and threw open the bedroom window.

  ‘Toto?’ Ida looked towards the door.

  ‘I’m going mad. I’m going fucking mad.’ Jacks breathed deeply as she braced her arms on the windowsill and looked out over the rooftops of Sunnyside Road. The big blue sky had disappeared, giving way to cloud that was grey and miserable. It looked anything but sunny.

  Jonty had been given an early tea and was watching telly when Pete came through the door.

  ‘Evening folks!’ he called from the hallway.

  His jovial tone set Jacks’ teeth on edge. He sauntered into the kitchen in his sweatshirt that was covered in mud and dried cement and splotched with pale patches where weedkiller had spilled. He took one look at his wife’s face and placed his large hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s going on?’

  He scanned the darkened kitchen; the only light came from the single bulb in the cooker hood. The oven was cool and dark, no tea had been prepared. ‘Is your mum okay?’

  Jacks nodded, irritated that the only possible reason for their routine being upset would be if Ida had popped her clogs.

  ‘Have you seen Martha?’ she asked, checking to see if they had conspired, wondering if she had been the last to know.

  ‘No. What’s up? Is she okay?’ Concern was creased across his face as he took the seat next to his wife. ‘Jacks, what’s going on? You’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m scaring myself, actually.’ She gave a small laugh. ‘She’s pregna
nt.’

  There it was, delivered without preamble or discussion – she was capable of neither.

  ‘What?’ Pete squinted as she sat back in his chair.

  ‘You heard. PREG-NANT,’ she enunciated.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ Pete ran his dry, cracked fingers over his face. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Do I look like I’m kidding?’ she barked.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked softly.

  Jacks shrugged.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  Jacks looked up at him, realising that she had forgotten to ask. ‘I don’t know. I can’t believe it, Pete.’

  ‘How far gone is she?’

  She hadn’t asked that either. ‘I don’t know. I lost it. Shouted at her. I’m so mad! So angry, I can’t think straight. She’s messing up her life.’

  Pete stood and reached for the car keys on the sideboard. ‘Do you think she’ll be at Steph’s?’

  Jacks didn’t know how to respond. She had no idea where her daughter was. She’d heard the front door slam while she was dealing with Ida, that was all she knew. Pete’s words made her feel bad.

  ‘I’ll go and see if I can find her.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jacks wanted Martha home; there was still time to make her see sense.

  ‘I can imagine how disappointed you are. Upset. But it’ll be okay, Jacks.’ He gave a small smile, as usual looking for a way to placate, make things better.

  She looked at her husband. ‘Will it?’

  He smiled. ‘It will. It’s not the worst thing that can happen, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. No, love, it isn’t. You know that.’ The two exchanged a long look. ‘We need to talk. Later, when Jonty’s in bed. I’ll go see if I can find her. Shan’t be long.’

  Jacks sat at the kitchen table, wishing she were able to go and find Martha herself, fearing they were all in conference somewhere. She wanted to intervene, have her say. She was worried that Pete would simply say that things had a way of figuring themselves out and then they’d all sit back and watch another life spiral out of control.

  She imagined confronting Gideon, pictured their exchange. Dipping into her mind, she sorted through the fog of anger and upset, plucking phrases that she wanted to launch at him. ‘Why do you think you might be good enough for her?’ was one she kept repeating. Along with, ‘She had the whole world at her feet and you came along and pulled her off track, so now what? You are destroying her chances and one day she will resent you for it!’ Or maybe she would try a softer tack, try appealing to the kind nature he had displayed when he brought her flowers and chatted to Jonty. ‘It’s not too late, Gideon; it’s not too late to change the outcome. Everybody makes mistakes.’ Even me, she thought. ‘But you are both so young that you can fix things and put it all behind you and have the life you were supposed to have…’ The life I was supposed to have… This thought caused her tears to spring again.