by Rosie Fiore
It was a sad excuse for a tree, or that’s what Dad called it. But it was actually quite fun because Dad got some cheesy Christmas music to play on YouTube, and he let me and Marguerite decorate the tree any way we liked. Helen never let us near the tree. She said we would mess it up. We got to put all the tinsel and all the baubles on the tree this year by ourselves. Marguerite put them anywhere, but I made it tidy and arranged them nice and evenly.
There wasn’t a star for the tree – Dad hadn’t bought one. Helen had this super-fancy star she got from some expensive shop in London and which she kept in a box in the loft. I suppose it’s still up there, but I didn’t ask to get it out. It would have looked stupid on our tiny fake tree anyway. Still, I thought we needed one, so I drew a star shape on some cardboard and cut it out, and got the tinfoil down and covered it. It actually looked quite cool, and Dad made a wire holder for it and put it on the tree.
Decorating the tree made me feel happy for about ten minutes. But then I looked at it and I realized it was a horrible cheap Tesco tree in our horrible dirty house and that everything – everything – was different from last Christmas.
We are going to Granny’s house this year for Christmas. Not long after we went back to school in the autumn, Granny fell down when she was doing some gardening and broke her leg. That’s why she hasn’t been able to help Dad too much with looking after us. She’s much better now, but she still walks with a stick. So while Christmas is at her house, I think Uncle Tim is going to do the cooking, which is a good thing because he is a chef. Marguerite is worried because she says Uncle Tim puts too much garlic and burny spices in everything he makes, even scrambled eggs. But Dad made him promise not to mess with the turkey, although he didn’t say mess. He said another ruder word which he didn’t use to say in front of Marguerite and me, but now he says it every now and then, especially when he’s on the phone to Uncle Tim and thinks we aren’t listening.
Dad’s a tiny bit better than he was. I was worried about him a lot before. He was drinking a lot of beer. And I mean A LOT. The recycling was always full of bottles and he smelled of beer all the time. But now it doesn’t seem quite as bad. He still has beers in the evening, but he’s hardly ever on the sofa when we wake up in the morning. I think maybe he’s beginning to forget Helen, or maybe it’s because he’s having a better time at work. It has been bad for him at work, which is why we don’t have so much money anymore. That’s why we didn’t get a summer holiday this year. It’s the first time in my whole life we haven’t had a summer holiday. We spent our summer at Granny and Grandpa’s. They were nice, but it was boring and lonely and I hardly saw any of my friends.
I think another reason that Dad is better is Lara. She takes me to ballet on a Tuesday now and Dad takes me and Frances to dance school on Saturday. We all usually end up doing something together after dance school. We go for a milkshake or once we went to the cinema.
But then there was this one night last week when I woke up in the night because I was hot. I think the heating was still on, even though it was the middle of the night, and I was thirsty. The clock in my room said one in the morning. I got up to go and get some water in the bathroom, but I could hear voices talking downstairs. I walked quietly down the stairs and saw that light was showing under the living-room door, which was shut. I thought maybe Dad had fallen asleep on the sofa again and the TV was on. I thought I might go in and tell him to go to bed, but before I could open the door, the voices went quiet and the living-room door opened and Dad came out.
‘Hey, poppet!’ he said, and his voice sounded fake and cheerful. He pulled the door shut behind him. ‘What are you doing up?’
‘I was thirsty,’ I said. ‘Why are you still up?’
‘Oh, you know. . .’ and his voice trailed off. ‘I’m going to bed soon.’
‘You’ve got work tomorrow.’
‘I know.’ He smiled. I looked at him hard, but he didn’t look too drunk, which was good.
‘Were you watching TV?’
‘No, why?’
‘I heard talking. I thought you must be watching TV.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and then, ‘I was watching something on my laptop. Sorry if it woke you.’
We stood and looked at each other, and then he said, ‘Come on, let’s get you some water,’ and he came upstairs with me to the bathroom and got me a drink of water and then tucked me up in bed like I was about four years old. I lay there, and just before I went back to sleep, I remember thinking it was strange that he shut the living-room door when he came out to find me.
The next morning he was extra cheerful, even though he couldn’t have had much sleep. He was in the kitchen giving Marguerite her breakfast and I went into the living room to get my school bag. There were two empty wine glasses on the coffee table. Two glasses? So maybe the voices I heard hadn’t come from the TV or Dad’s laptop. Maybe someone was here. But who would be here at one o’clock in the morning?
I went through to the kitchen. ‘Who was here last night?’
‘Hmm?’ said Dad, but I know that hmm. It’s what he says when he doesn’t want to answer your question, so he pretends he didn’t hear you properly.
‘There are two glasses in the living room. Who was here? They must have come after we went to bed.’
I could see Dad thinking hard. He was probably trying to come up with a fib like ‘Uncle Tim’, but he knew I wouldn’t fall for that because Uncle Tim lives in Bristol and if he’s been here, we wake up and find him sleeping on the sofa.
In the end, Dad said, ‘Frances’ mum. She stopped by when she finished work. She works in a restaurant, you know that.’
‘One o’clock in the morning is very late to be stopping by,’ I said.
‘It is. But I was still awake and we fancied a chat.’ Then Dad got madly busy and started bossing us around about teeth brushing and packing bags.
In the end we got to school earlier than usual, and while we were waiting by the gate, I saw Lara and Frances coming down the hill, with Jonah running in front of them. I looked at Lara carefully. She looked tired, but quite happy, and while I was watching she gave my dad one of those special, secret smiles adults give each other and she mouthed, ‘Hi’ and waggled her fingers in a half wave. She didn’t come over to talk to us, and in a way that made me even more suspicious. If they were drinking wine at one a.m. in the morning, why wouldn’t she come and say hi? Instead she went and stood with some of the other mums on the far side of the playground and made a big point of not looking at Dad or talking to him. It was so obvious. She may as well have worn a big sign on her head that said, ‘I was kissing Miranda’s dad in the middle of the night last night’.
Anyway, I thought about it and I don’t really mind. I mean, Dad must be lonely, and she is nice. She’s quite pretty – not like Helen, but still okay-looking, and she’s still thin like a dancer even though she’s had two children. I like her house, and her mum, and Frances is my best friend now. I suppose. Jonah’s annoying, but then so is Marguerite, so I can’t complain about that.
We all went to a carol concert together last night at the local football ground, where we all got candles and sang. Helen would have packed an amazing picnic, but Dad and Lara bought sausages in buns there, and then we had candyfloss after, and that was cool. We’re not seeing them on Christmas Day, obviously, but we’re going to go ice skating outside the Natural History Museum on Boxing Day.
If you had told me last Christmas that our lives would be so totally, totally different by this Christmas, I would never have believed it. But here we are. Helen has vanished like she was a ghost and we are quite poor now. It should be the worst thing in the world, and in a way it was, but slowly things are getting back to normal. It’s a different normal, but some of it is quite good.
Sam
I stood outside Tottenham Court Road station, the seething river of people flowing around me, and rang Lara. Her voice sounded calm and quiet in contrast to the din around me.
‘Hi th
ere,’ I said, yelling over the ambient noise. ‘Listen, Chris just rang in a panic and he wants me to go and see a client in Tooting to take an urgent brief. Is there any way. . .?’
‘I’ll pick up the girls, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Just give the school a ring and get a message to their classes so they know to expect me.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, relieved. ‘You’re a lifesaver. I should be able to get back to yours about six. I’ll stop off at a supermarket and get pizzas for us all so you don’t need to worry about dinner.’
‘I’m working, so I’ll be gone by then, but I’m sure Mum would be thrilled to get pizzas,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’ll be sad not to see you.’ I was trying to sound tender and affectionate, but as I had to yell to hear myself, the effect was slightly lost.
‘Me too,’ she said.
I hung up. We were doing a good job of using all the right words and being kind and sweet to one another, but there was a slightly stilted feel to it, as if we were saying lines in a play. She was lovely of course, and always eager to help. Almost too eager. But who was I to complain? She made my life easier.
What I didn’t tell her was that Chris hadn’t really given me a choice about the meeting. He’d called me in again to look at my figures, which were still way down. I knew I was doing better (if not turning up to work drunk counted as ‘better’), but my heart wasn’t in it, and I’d missed out on signing a few crucial deals.
‘This should be a walk in the park,’ he said, about the Tooting client. ‘They want a poster campaign. See if you can upsell something digital as well. I need you to pull something out of the bag here, Sam. Otherwise we’re going to have to seriously reconsider our position.’ By our position he meant my position, and I knew a threat when I heard one.
The brief-taking meeting went smoothly and quickly. I managed to persuade them that they needed an email campaign and some banner ads too. The guy said if I got costings to him that evening, he’d sign everything off because they were on their month end and he had the budget to spend.
It took me less time to get back to north London than I’d expected. As a result, I was walking around Waitrose with a basket by around 5.30. It was a novelty not to be in a desperate hurry, so I was rather enjoying pottering through the store. I thought that perhaps I should get some flowers for Lara and her mum. There were some lovely gerberas. We needed a couple of things for home too – toothpaste and bread – so I strolled around the shop, picking up what I needed.
As I turned into the toiletries section, however, I stopped dead. A woman was standing looking at the shampoos at the far end of the aisle, her back to me. She was wearing jeans and a pink fluffy jumper, with a floppy, knitted hat at a jaunty angle on the back of her head. The hat covered her hair, but the stance, the curve of her hip and waist, the way she rested one foot in the instep of the other while she contemplated the products on the shelf. . . It was Helen. I was sure of it.
After the last debacle, when I’d hooted at the woman in the traffic, I decided to be more circumspect. I backed out of the aisle I was in, went to the next one along and swiftly walked the length of it so I could come into the toiletries aisle from the other end to catch her face to face. But as I swung around the corner, she came from the opposite direction and hit me squarely with her trolley.
‘Sorry!’ gasped the woman who was clearly not Helen.
‘No, no, my fault.’ She’d caught me sharply across the shins, and the pain shocked me into reality. She was a twenty-something blonde, with slightly protruding front teeth, pretty in a round-faced, sweet way. Close up, I could see she was a good inch or two shorter than Helen, and nothing at all like her.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she said, her eyes wide with consternation.
‘Absolutely fine,’ I assured her. ‘I should pay attention to where I’m headed.’
Never a truer word, I thought, as I backed away and went to the tills to pay.
Once I’d got the kids home and into bed, I drank my way through six beers and half a bottle of vodka. When I woke up at 5 a.m., on the floor of the bathroom, I remembered the quotation I was supposed to have got to the man in Tooting. I couldn’t even stand, let alone sit at my computer and create a spreadsheet. What was I going to tell Chris? I thought I saw my vanished wife in the supermarket so I drank myself stupid and missed the deadline?
Lara
So what is this thing between Sam and me? I don’t know. I won’t allow myself to even think the L-word. I think about him a lot but not in a mooning, teenage way. I worry about him, and I try to think of ways to make his life easier, and I wonder what he thinks about me. I also find myself wondering what’s going to happen, because if we keep seeing each other, there’ll be some big logistical issues involved in uniting our two households, if that doesn’t sound too Shakespearean. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll still have to see him at school every day for at least the next five years, which could be fantastically awkward.
I like him very much, but it’s hard to separate that from pity, for a start, because he has had a shitty time of it. And it’s also hard to imagine how we might have an easy, normal romantic relationship. We’d have to get past the issues of our four children, my live-in mother and his missing-but-still-lawfully-married wife. Not to mention Marc, who, if he hears I’m seeing someone, is liable to appear out of nowhere and complicate things. Christ. It was a lot simpler when it was just snogging behind the bike sheds, wasn’t it?
It started as you might expect – lots of long chats over dinners with the kids and walks in the park. Then text messages about who had Miranda’s ballet shoes became daily ‘How was your day?’ exchanges, then late-night text marathons and long phone calls.
We were texting one night when I was at work and it was quiet. I said I thought I’d close up early – it was about 9.30 and the pub was all but deserted.
‘I know this is impulsive, but why don’t you come by mine?’ he texted. ‘Girls are asleep. I’ve got a nice bottle of wine.’
I know a proposition when I hear it. I knew if we didn’t have sex that night we would certainly be moving into a different phase in our friendship. I didn’t respond immediately. I walked away from my phone and left it for ten minutes while I went to tell the kitchen to pack up. When I came back, he’d texted again.
‘Oh God. Did that come out wrong? I read it back and it sounded really sleazy. I’m so sorry. Forget I said it. How do you get texts to self-destruct?’
I laughed, despite myself, and typed a reply. ‘It didn’t sound sleazy, unless you plan to be reclining on your chaise longue wearing nothing but a cravat and a cheesy smile. I’ll hop in a cab and be over in half an hour, if the invitation still stands.’
He replied instantly. ‘It does. Yes please. I’ll get dressed now and pack the cravat away for another time.’
We didn’t have sex that night, although there was a palpable tension in the room. We sat in the dimly lit living room, with the door closed, and talked quietly. It felt secret and intimate. I stayed for an hour, and then thought it best to head home, so I called another cab. When I stood to go, he stood too and moved close to me. The kiss was tentative, sad and sweet, and long. He stepped back, holding me lightly by my upper arms and searched my face with his eyes.
‘Yes? No? Bad idea?’ he said. ‘I mean, I know it’s a terrible idea on all sorts of levels, but I’ve been wanting to do that for the longest time.’
‘Me too,’ I said and I meant it.
I leaned in and kissed him again and this time the kiss got heated and we pressed close together. I could feel the warmth of his body. He’s a tall, broad man and I could feel the strength of his desire. On the inside of my eyelids, I could see flashes of what was to come – him unzipping my skirt, pushing me back on to the sofa. Our trying to keep quiet but gasping with the urgency of it all. It felt rushed, and slightly terrifying. For him too, I think, because we pulled back at the same moment, both breathing hard.
‘Oh
my,’ he said, and in the darkened room his eyes glittered almost dangerously.
‘I should go.’
‘Let the record show I don’t want you to go,’ he said in a rough whisper. ‘But you’re right, for all sorts of sensible, grown-up reasons.’
I didn’t move, and we stood looking at each other like a pair of cage fighters about to go in for another bout. At that moment my phone began to buzz – the taxi driver, waiting outside. When I looked over Sam’s shoulder, I could see the glow of the headlights catching the upstretched branches of the tree outside the window.
I looked back at Sam. ‘We’ll talk,’ I said, bending to pick up my bag without taking my eyes off him.
My knees actually shook as I walked to the taxi. But for what reason, I couldn’t actually say.
That night was four weeks ago. We’ve had sex since then – a lot of sex – quick, urgent, silent, standing up with my back pressed against a closed bedroom door, on sofas in his house and mine. None of it has been leisurely, loving or kind. All of it has been hurried and furtive, but in its own way exciting. Once, things were just getting heated between us when we heard Miranda in the hallway outside. Sam pulled away, went out to her and took her back to bed. It was a close thing. She could easily have walked in on us.
We’ve talked very little. We haven’t discussed what this all means, or how we feel, or what the future might hold. I’m terrified to have those discussions, but I know we have to. Every time I go to his place on my way home from work, or when he comes to mine when the girls are staying over at their grandparents’, I promise myself that I will initiate the adult conversations we need to be having. But I know as soon as I do, I’ll break the spell, and the rare magic of this secret connection will be lost. So much in our lives is ugly, or disappointing, or banal or caught up in the grinding passage of the day-to-day. I want to have this strange, dangerous, unnamed thing for a little while longer.