Not What They Were Expecting

by Neal Doran

  ‘Can’t quite believe Mum tried to discuss spring fashions with your mum.’

  ‘That was a lecture of sweatshops waiting to happen…’

  ‘What was that joke Dad tried to tell? Where you needed to have worked out the punchline was an anagram of botulism?’

  ‘I don’t know what was more painful, the silence or the polite laughing. He didn’t seem to notice, though. Naturally.’

  ‘And it was great being held up like a specimen. The future of humanity, right here under my jumper.’

  ‘And urgh! The childhood anecdotes.’

  ‘Actually that bit was quite funny,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘I didn’t see you laughing when Howard mentioned how you used to do an all-out ballet performance whenever anyone visited the house. Including the guy who was just there to read the meter.’

  ‘Shut it, bedwetter.’

  ‘The vision of you running at the poor bastard, who didn’t know he was supposed to catch you as part of the routine…’

  ‘Are you worried about that? Is it making you feel anxious? Would you feel better if we got a rubberised undersheet for tonight?’

  ‘Leave it, twinkle-toes,’ he said in his gruffest Sweeney voice.

  ‘It was a sweet story, that’s all. And now I know why you’re always so keen to keep on top of the laundry.’

  Hearing about an entirely forgotten spate of bedwetting when he was six, and not really coping with a shift from living in France to Germany, had been surprising, thought James. But not as surprising as hearing Margaret and Howard rallying behind the same side of one cause. Well, near enough the same side. Margaret must have let Howard get away with declarations that ‘queers’ could do what they wanted with their private lives because she assumed he was reclaiming the term, while when she mentioned ‘your community’ Howard must have assumed she was talking about Neighbourhood Watch and the golf club, rather than a group running the gamut from TV queens to muscle Marys.

  ‘Your dad and my mum. There may’ve been weirder coalitions, but I can’t think of any,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,’ Rebecca sighed. ‘I don’t think Dad even knows what politically correct means, he just uses it for anything lefties do that he disagrees with. I mean arresting people in toilets was always more of a Tory thing wasn’t it?’

  ‘Still, there’s always a chance it’ll break down any minute. All it needs is a casual statement on the world as it is from one of them and boom, the truce is off, back in your respective trenches.’

  ‘What was it last time? Dad and his “say what you like about apartheid, but…” speech?’

  ‘I thought it was Margaret and her “she’s not your partner she’s your indentured slave” routine,’ said James.

  ‘Mum…’

  There was a clatter from the kitchen as an overly-full tray of dirty pans grudgingly slid into the dishwasher.

  ‘I should go and give her a hand…’ Rebecca said.

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  ‘You stay there, it’ll be a chance for us to have a chat. You could go and join the grown-ups.’

  ‘Pff, I think I’ll just sit here gently rocking for a while instead. Thanks for the thought though, Becky.’

  She gave him an evil stare for using her hated family nickname.

  ‘I am so putting your little finger in a glass of lukewarm water while you’re asleep tonight.’

  Chapter 10

  As Rebecca entered the kitchen, Penny had her back to her at the sink, her shoulders heaving. Rebecca had frozen on the spot not knowing whether to go to her mum and give her a hug, or back away and leave her to her tears in private. Then she heard the splash and the clang of the roasting tin as she manoeuvred it in the water to open a new line of attack on grafted-on vegetables and realised it was scrubbing rather than blubbing causing it.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  ‘Oh hi, darling, just getting these out of the way while everyone’s busy. Can I get you anything?’ asked Penny.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘James need anything? A beer?’

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  Penny went back to her pan. As far as Rebecca could see it was clean enough, but her mum was attacking it again with a little green scrubber. She thought it might have been a sign of stress, but acknowledged that it was just as likely the reason all her mum’s kitchenware was spotless after years, and theirs looked like it had been bought fire-damaged.

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she asked.

  ‘Me, I’m absolutely fine. Lunch went quite well I thought. Never quite sure what to cook for Margaret and Ben. I thought about a curry, but it didn’t seem right on a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘It was delicious,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘It must have been three years since we saw them last. Margaret’s looking very well. She was saying she’s going to be sixty this year. You’d never think it to look at her, and not a spot of make-up. And good for her for still wearing mini-skirts. I wouldn’t dare these days…’

  ‘You look great,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Thanks darling, and you too. Still feeling tired?’

  ‘It’s getting better. And no real sickness to speak of either. You’d hardly think there was anything wrong with me…’

  ‘I remember with your brother, my morning sickness didn’t really start until the second trimester, so you might not be out of the woods yet. Awful it was, like an alarm clock. Every time I started getting sick it was time for your father to get up. Then I’d be fine again in the day and then I’d feel a bit queasy when it was time for Nationwide.’

  Always about you, Rebecca thought to herself, her inner teenager bristling.

  ‘Any signs you need a new wardrobe yet?’ asked Penny ‘As soon as you do we’ll go out and get some new things. Nothing too pregnanty just yet. We could invite Margaret if you’d like.’

  Rebecca scrunched up her face, her nose an accordion of wrinkles.

  ‘Perhaps just you and your old mum then,’ said Penny, ‘halfway through a pregnancy might not be the time to be trying the boob-tube look.’

  They smiled at each other conspiratorially. ‘My young mum, you mean,’ said Rebecca, feeling a little guilty for her earlier unsaid tantrum. She slid up onto a stool on the breakfast bar and started poking through the contents of the fruit bowl. ‘Are you OK with Dad taking all his dirty laundry out in public?’ she asked without looking up.

  There was a blast of water as Penny turned on the tap to fill the kettle.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, so he has to get that message across in whatever way he can.’

  ‘But it must be so humiliating for you,’ Rebecca said, her glance switching back and forth between her mother and a satsuma she was kneading between her fingers. ‘He asked you about it first didn’t he?’

  ‘Now don’t be like that, Becky, we’re just doing the right thing. And yes. Of course I knew. He mentioned he was thinking of writing a letter to the paper.’

  ‘A letter to the editor he said? I’m guessing he glossed over his hopes for front-page headlines. Typical. Next thing you know he’ll be dragging you into it – standing next to him in press photos. The loyal wifey standing by her husband.’

  Penny paused as she considered her collection of teapots.

  ‘There’s someone from the Focus coming around tomorrow lunchtime.’

  ‘Mu-um!’

  ‘Then that’ll be it, Becky, I promise. He’ll have had his say.’

  ‘And the police will just go away because he’s got his picture in the press?’

  ‘Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.’

  ‘They tried to do that already.’

  ‘But that was on their terms, he’ll feel better if he’s in charge of the situation. You know him, he just needs to find a way to feel in control.’

  The kettle boiled. Penny warmed the chosen teapot, and reached for the teabags from the porcelain jar proclaiming TEA. Rebecca lifted her hand to her
face and was momentarily distracted by the waft of citrus from her fingers; the surface of the satsuma in her other hand was pocked all over by her having absently stabbed it with her thumbnail.

  ‘You don’t think he did it do you?’ she asked.

  ‘Becky!’

  ‘I’m just saying… Soon as it hits the papers, it’ll be “no smoke without fire”.’

  ‘This is just one of those unfortunate accidents. It’s a misunderstanding, and you know your father’s sense of injustice. He can be very compassionate. He’d be just as cross if it had happened to James, or anybody…’

  ‘But James wouldn’t be…’ Rebecca stopped the thought before it got any further. That James wouldn’t be loitering in public lavatories because he isn’t…

  Penny plucked two clean, matching mugs from the cupboard and gave each one a splash of milk.

  ‘James has been very good actually,’ Penny continued. ‘He’s been very supportive. Your father was saying he’ll make a very good dad, was even wondering again if he might want to join the company at some point, now he’s going to be a family man.’

  ‘He’s been talking to James?’

  ‘Oh you know – not talking. Texting, emailing. Can’t keep your father away from the computer…’

  ‘He didn’t set this up, did he? With his dad?’

  ‘That was all your father’s idea. He’s just been bouncing ideas for the wider campaign off him, and you know, probably every other project he’s in the middle of at the moment.’

  Rattled, Rebecca stood up. Her husband hadn’t said a word about this. But she didn’t know what to do next. Go and see James? Find out what on earth he’d been doing? What did she mean, there was ‘a wider campaign’? Angry thoughts flashed through her head like a faulty fluorescent light. No one was telling her anything. These ridiculous things were going on in her own family and no one was telling her. They were treating her like…they were treating her like they did her mother. She was about to let rip, and James was going to get the brunt of it, when Margaret came back into the house followed by the men, Howard barking away. Rebecca couldn’t do it in front of her.

  ‘Tea’s just made,’ said Penny brightly.

  ‘Would you have any filter coffee?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘I’ll get the caffetiere,’ said Penny.

  James ambled into the kitchen from the living room, alerted to the bustle and voices coming back inside.

  ‘Finished your plans for world domination, guys?’ he asked.

  ‘Bloody freezing out there!’ said Howard. ‘Old Fidel had the right idea, he didn’t have to put up with blinking weather like this.’

  ‘We were just discussing the horror of becoming grandparents,’ said Margaret with an exaggerated grin, used only on the rare occasions when she wasn’t taking herself too seriously. ‘Thrown on the scrapheap of Western culture’s disposable youth culture.’

  ‘Totally irrelevant, we’ll be,’ chuckled Howard. ‘Maggie was saying we should move to India and we’d be ruling the roost.’

  James stood behind Rebecca. She was ignoring him, but not in a way that would make it obvious to their parents in the room. Or even to him.

  ‘We’re just jealous of you,’ said Penny to Rebecca, ‘getting to become a mum for the first time.’

  ‘You’re going to have a wonderful experience. Very energising except when you’re exhausted. Your body can do the most amazing things,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Although I’m not sure I’d want to go through birth again,’ said Penny, ‘but it’s probably different these days.’

  ‘We don’t have to worry about that stuff too much do we, James, eh?’ said Howard. ‘Thank goodness. What’s that thing they say? About it being like squeezing a watermelon out of the old John Thomas? Excuse the language…’

  ‘If you’d seen the size of James’s head when he was born – and that I came out if it with barely a centimetre tear – you’d understand how the human body creates its own miracles every day,’ continued Margaret.

  James put the word ‘tear’ in the context of what they were talking about. Looking at Rebecca, he tried to ascertain silently that they weren’t really talking about what he thought they were talking about. And also if what was being talked about really was what he didn’t want to even think about ever being talked about, could she do something to just stop it? Rebecca looked back at him with a shrug that said yep, we’re talking about precisely what you’re thinking about. And this is what happens – deal with it.

  ‘Nothing miraculous about Becky,’ said Penny. ‘I got to know about every junior doctor in the hospital the way my stitches kept popping’.

  James bit down on the end of his thumb and tried not to hear what was being said.

  ‘You had that blow-up rubber ring to sit on didn’t you? I gave it to the kids when they were older for the paddling pool,’ said Howard.

  Even Howard’s joining in? thought James. This conversation cannot get any more painful.

  ‘Of course the labial massages Ben gave me every day throughout the pregnancy helped with that,’ said Margaret.

  A sound emerged from James, that was somewhere between a squeal and a whimper. Meanwhile Howard gave Ben a quizzical look. Ben, as usual, wasn’t really paying attention.

  ‘On that lovely thought, I think it’s probably we time we hit the road,’ said James. ‘Not that it’s reminded me of anything I have to do, just…well, just I need to go and wash out my ears with corrosive acid.’

  Chapter 11

  It wasn’t as soon as they got in the car that the row started. James at first was too excited to be out of there to notice his cheerful observations were hitting a wall of silence.

  ‘Talk about an ambush,’ he said, ‘the first thing I thought when I walked in and saw Ben was we’d come to the wrong house and my mother had become a late convert to the Dulux shades of magnolia range.’

  He shifted his big frame in the small car to look at Rebecca in the passenger seat – he was driving since he’d only had a glass of wine, knowing it wouldn’t be the day to have two or three and risk a domestic in front of the in-laws. She was watching the parked cars whizz by in her wing mirror.

  ‘All right, babycakes?’ he asked.

  Rebecca didn’t say anything for a minute.

  ‘I can’t imagine it must have been that much of a surprise to you,’ she finally said, just as James was coming onto a busy roundabout.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said as innocently as he could manage as he indicated to come off at their exit.

  Rolling back over the way the afternoon panned out, he figured that the appearance of his parents had sparked Rebecca working out that he knew more than he let on about Howard’s court case. At least that was what he suspected, but he wasn’t going to admit anything until he had to.

  ‘Everybody conspiring away behind my back, having great larks embarrassing my whole family,’ Rebecca continued.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, as confused as he could manage, as they sat at a pedestrian crossing. That’s it, the Penny’s definitely dropped, he thought to himself. He winced inwardly at the pun on his mother-in-law. And the realisation he was turning into his father.

  ‘You knew what was going on. You’ve been planning this along with him, like it’s some kind of jolly wheeze.’

  ‘What do you mean…’ James started, before giving up the pretence with a deep sigh. ‘I really didn’t think he’d go through with it.’

  Rebecca didn’t say anything back. Just sat there shaking her head in a way James found absolutely infuriating.

  They drove the rest of the way home in silence, Rebecca radiating fury silently, James steaming internally – indignant at the thought that she couldn’t see that, OK, maybe he was in the wrong, but it was for the right reasons. That he was protecting her.

  Pulling up to the house, the silence in the car was even more prominent as the engine was turned off. It was momentarily broken by James abruptly snatching the door
handle and swinging open the door. He didn’t move then. Rebecca quietly opened her side and left him sitting in the car. He sat there as she walked around the car and up the drive to their front door, fingers pumping the palms of his hands.

  ‘You’ve got the keys,’ she said just loud enough so he could hear.

  With a slam that was louder than he intended, he locked the car, brushed past her and let them into the house.

  ‘I’m going for a lie down,’ she announced quietly, her hand on the banister.

  ‘You never want to hear about this stuff,’ he finally exploded. ‘You disappear whenever we start to talk about it.’

  She was stood one foot on the first step, one on the second, making them on eye level with each other. They looked at each other for the first time since some time just after lunch.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said flatly.

  ‘It fucking is! You’re always too tired the second it comes up, and I…’ He threw his hands up in frustration. The back of his hand rapped the living room door frame. He turned and faced the wall shifting from foot to foot with the pent-up anger, and to try and disperse the stinging pain from his knuckles.

  ‘I get tired. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I am twelve weeks pregnant.’

  ‘Oh don’t use that as an excuse,’ he said turning to face her again. ‘I’ve tried to ask you loads of times, and you always find a way of getting out of it. Always shut down like you don’t give a shit.’

  Finally an angrier edge came into Rebecca’s responses.

  ‘You could have warned me. And you should know not to encourage him.’

  ‘Christ, would you have wanted him picketing outside the bogs at the station, wearing a sandwich board and handing out leaflets? That was one of his ideas you know. He was going to march on Parliament, starting out near Newcastle or something, walking from public convenience to public convenience.’

  James could see Rebecca visualise the idea in her mind, and that the controlled anger directed at him was being diffused. He pushed on with the point.

  ‘He was going to buy wet weather gear and a flat cap, collect signatures for a petition along the way and raise money for charity. Why he thought the Dog’s Trust would be a good choice I don’t know.’