Little Big Man

by Katy Regan

  A full circuit done, and it’s time for sit-ups – the absolute worst.

  ‘So, have you managed to do much exercise this week?’ Jason holds his hand out to indicate where my head needs to touch if I’m doing the exercise correctly. ‘Are you keeping your step rate up?’

  Step rate? What sort of question is that to ask your ex-girlfriend?

  ‘Yes,’ I groan. ‘How many more of these bastards?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Eight’s nothing, you can do that. Have you been practising?’

  ‘Yes!’ I say, because I have. Perhaps not to the extent Jason would wish, but it has been known these past few weeks for me to do sit-ups and squats while watching This Morning, instead of just eating toast, and that is something I never thought I’d be able to say.

  ‘Well, you can tell. You’ve definitely got more shape around the waist.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ I say, delighted, lying down and stretching out my sore abs.

  ‘Definitely.’

  We do two more laps of the field, Jason doing that thing of galloping at the side of me, because if he goes as slow as I do, then he’ll trip over his own feet.

  ‘You don’t have to make it that obvious.’

  ‘What obvious?’

  ‘That I’m so slow.’

  ‘You’re not that slow. Think what you were like when we first started these sessions, think how far you’ve come,’ he says. And he’s right, I think, I have come far. To imagine I’d ever suggest running around a park of an evening instead of watching telly and eating crisps – and not only that but enjoy it. Well, a tiny bit. It’s astounding, frankly.

  It’s almost dark by the time we finish. The air smells of spring and the recent rain, the birds are singing and I’m aware of not wanting to go home, not yet.

  ‘Do you mind if I just sit down for a bit?’ I say, still breathless, hoping to delay the point at which we go our separate ways a little bit longer. ‘I’m totally spent.’

  I lie down on the damp grass, hoping Jason might be admiring my new shapely waist, and my skin, which I hope is glowing in the lilac dusk like his. But I obviously look up at him for a moment more than is comfortable – for him at least – because he laughs nervously and steps back.

  ‘What are you doing? Looking at my nose hair?’

  ‘No,’ I say, smiling. ‘Just looking at you.’

  He holds out his hand. ‘Come on, up you get,’ he says, my comment having obviously made him feel awkward. ‘We should do some stretches before you go.’

  ‘Is there a rush?’ I say, as he helps me to my feet. ‘Because we could, you know, go for a walk, have a chat?’ I flutter my eyelashes flirtatiously, jokingly, clearly not joking at all.

  Another nervous laugh. He seems confused and we stand looking at one another for a moment or two before … I don’t know what comes over me – a rare moment of decisiveness, I suppose, of deciding life doesn’t have to be this complicated and maybe all my answers are standing right in front of me – but I step forward and go to kiss him.

  But he turns his head.

  ‘Jules …’

  ‘Oh God.’ I stare at the ground, my face blazing. ‘Oh God. Well, that was embarrassing.’

  ‘Look, I—’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ My eyes are smarting.

  ‘Well, it’s obviously not. You’re obviously upset.’

  ‘I just thought …’ What was I thinking? ‘I think I got carried away; thinking a few weeks’ exercise had completely transformed me! That I must be irresistible! But I’m not, I’m not.’ Jason stands there looking utterly awkward. This is utterly awkward. ‘I’m still …’ I blow my cheeks out – a lame attempt to make a joke of it, but Jason knows me better than to be joking about my weight so I guess I think I may as well go the whole way then; a no-holds-barred pity party. ‘Look, I’m not stupid, you know. I know it’s why you – men – don’t go for me.’ He’s shaking his head and looking away but I steam ahead. ‘It’s why I haven’t got a boyfriend, let’s face it. It’s why Zac’s big too and unhappy and gets bullied – why I’m not enough and he …’ I stop myself just in time. ‘It’s why Dom didn’t want to go anywhere near me … It’s why you didn’t want to go out with me. Probably.’ I know I’ve gone too far with that one and I inwardly wince, but it’s out there now.

  ‘Er, hold on, that is enough,’ says Jason crossly. Jason rarely raises his voice and it shuts me up. ‘First of all, I did not say I didn’t want to go out with you. It was you who said you were in no state for a relationship, which is an entirely different thing, and secondly, the reason Dom didn’t want to go anywhere near you, as you put it, is nothing to do with your size.’

  I raise an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s because you’re unhappy, Juliet.’

  I look away like a moody teenager.

  ‘And full of self-loathing. Nobody wants to go out with someone with such low self-esteem.’

  ‘Low self-esteem,’ I mumble. Did I have low self-esteem? I knew, full well, the answer to that, but was it really that obvious?

  ‘Look,’ he says eventually, when I don’t say anything, ‘I just think you need to work a few things out before you start trying to have a relationship – work out what you really want – because, well, I don’t think it’s me.’

  I sigh. I guess I already know that he’s right. ‘Well, look on the bright side,’ I say, mustering everything I can to try and make this less awkward for us both, even though it still stings. ‘At least I didn’t hit you over the head with my handbag.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mick

  I can see Liam even now, Zac in the crook of his arm in the maternity ward, that look of love and terror in his eyes. I recognized that look so well from when my two were born, and after I’d kissed my daughter and met my first grandchild who I was daft about – everyone said it from the off – I’d ruffled Liam’s hair and joked, ‘Our Jules seems fine. You’re the one who looks like you’ve been hit by a train.’ He’d looked up from Zac, half laughing, half dazed, with that thought I also knew well written across his face: How the hell could anything so beautiful, so perfect, have anything to do with me?

  That was what Liam and I always had in common: low self-esteem, I suppose; this belief that we had to prove ourselves, that anything good that happened to us was a fluke. That was why I stuck up for him where Lynda was concerned, because I saw so much of myself in him. But it was also the reason I knew how to hit him where it hurt the most, too; how to destroy him. When he looked at Juliet like he thought he was the luckiest man alive, it was the same way I’d looked at Lynda thirty years before and continued to do until grief and bitterness ate her up. I was relieved, if I’m honest, to see Liam looking so smitten with his son because he’d gone AWOL for a while when Juliet first announced she was pregnant and I’d worried then, in case he actually was a dead loss like Lynda said he was; in case he was his father’s son after all. Vaughan may have been a mate (just a drinking mate, it turned out; unsurprisingly, he buggered off the minute I ditched the booze) but I didn’t want that for our daughter any more than Lynda did, even though she said I didn’t care, that I didn’t have high enough standards for our kids. That’s always been Lynda’s beef with me, that I have low standards.

  Lynda was devastated when Juliet told us she was expecting. She was livid, too, mostly with Liam. Juliet was only twenty, after all, and more academic, if she chose to put her mind to it, than our Jamie who was always more practical, and Lynda had big ideas she might be the first of our family to go to university. She’d already messed up her A levels by that point, anyway, because of Liam, Lynda said, although I knew my daughter (because she is so like me) and I knew that she let that happen all on her own, ruled by her heart, not her head; far too swept up in love to give a toss about exams. But she was retaking a couple of them that year, and although I can’t see she’d ever have left Grimsby and Liam to go to university, Lynda held out hope. That was
until one evening in November, when she came home, leant against the kitchen sink and made her announcement that was to be the beginning of the wheels coming off our lives. ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Lynda, like I said, went ballistic. I, apparently, didn’t go ballistic enough. (I was pissed. Course I was.) But what was the point, anyway? Where was ranting and raving going to get us? It had happened. She was over three months gone. Lynda told Juliet she’d ruined her life, that so many opportunities wouldn’t be hers for the taking anymore – a statement I know she regrets, despite everything, because she couldn’t love Zac more than she does. My only question, when things had calmed down, was, ‘And what does Liam say? Is he going to stick by you? Is he going to go to college and get a decent job?’ Because I knew more than anyone that being a fisherman in 2005 was no path to a secure life.

  Juliet was very defensive, emotional. ‘Of course he’s standing by me!’ she was shouting at the top of her voice. ‘He’s not just going to run off, is he?’ But then he did. A week later, he just disappeared. Juliet told us that it had been a shock and he just needed some space but I was worried then. I sobered right up. I thought, You fucking dare, Liam. You fucking dare leave my daughter in the lurch. I’d have been ready to take it up with him and Vaughan if he had; I’d have gone ballistic enough then. Lynda, of course, was all ‘ I told you so’ in that defeatist, fatalistic manner that has always been her way, but which masks the fact that she’s as scared as anyone else.

  But then, after a week or two, he came back. It turned out Juliet was right. He just needed to get his head together. Of course, we worried he would do it again, but I can honestly say that from that moment on, you couldn’t have asked for a more devoted and committed partner for your daughter, a better father for your grandson. It was like he’d been waiting for this chance to shine all his life. And shine he did. Even Lynda changed her tune.

  ‘I don’t get many people wrong, but I got him wrong,’ she said out of the blue to me one night and I’d dared to smile smugly – her response to which was to whip me around the earhole with a tea towel. But it was true. You couldn’t have wished for better. He was shaping up to be a great son-in-law, father and mate for Jamie. Because, this was the thing – it wasn’t just Juliet he got on with; he and Jamie hit it off. Liam benefited from Jamie’s bolshy confidence and social ease, and Jamie loved how laidback and good-tempered Liam was. How he never expected anything from anyone. That’s the Liam I remember. That’s the Liam I knew. But then what happened happened, and we were back to square one. ‘I told you so,’ Lynda was saying again, but with real venom now our son was dead, and those words, Jesus Christ, they still cut like a knife.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Zac

  Fact: The building of Manchester was started in AD 79 when the Romans constructed a wooden fort.

  Life is full of peaks and troughs. The peaks are the up, good bits, and the troughs are the bad, down ones. It’s like when you go out on your bike and you go down a dip, there’s always a hill after it. You can’t have one without the other, it’s just a fact of nature. And that’s what life is. It’s like rhubarb and custard days, but bigger, because it’s not just what a typical day is like, but your whole life.

  The best thing is when a peak happens when you’re not expecting it. They don’t happen that much; you’re really lucky if you get one a year. I thought I’d had mine when Mum said she’d help with the Find Dad mission, but then something even better happened … Mum said we could go to Manchester! We could go to find my aunty Kelly’s house and ask her where my dad is.

  Mum came to meet us from school on Thursday especially to tell us. We walked home and she waited till we were just turning the corner, near the Casablanca Club, to drop the surprise. I think the Casablanca Club has got good karma, because only good things ever happen there.

  ‘So, I’ve got a bit of news for you both. As part of the Find Dad mission – our mission – I’m going to take you both to Manchester on Saturday.’

  ‘What?!’ Me and Teagan both said it at the same time, it was funny.

  ‘I’ve found out that that’s where Kelly lives – and we’re just going to take the plunge and go there. We’re going to put a rocket up this investigation’s bum, as you would say, Teagan.’

  ‘YES!!’ I did a punch in the air.

  ‘Teagan, I’ve asked your mum, and she says it’s fine. As long as – as long as’ – she had to say it again to make sure Teagan was listening, because she was already doing gymnastics on the pavement, she was so excited – ‘you take your inhalers and a spare one and wear a cardigan all the time.’

  ‘I am not wearing a cardigan. Joking! I’ll wear my Minions onesie. I’ll go naked as long as I get to go,’ she said, doing a cartwheel.

  Kelly is Dad’s half-sister. She’s only a half-sister because they’ve got the same mum, but Kelly’s dad isn’t Vaughan Jones, it’s another man we don’t know the name of. My mum has even met Kelly, because when she was pregnant with me, before my dad just disappeared, her and my dad went to visit her. Then a few days ago, she looked Kelly up on Facebook. She found out she still lives in the same area in Manchester that she used to. Mum has her address, so we’re going to go to her house, to see if she knows where my dad is. Mum’s already sent her a message on Facebook to say we’re coming. I’m dead proud of her for her dedication to our mission.

  ‘Now, I don’t want you to get your hopes up, you two, though, because even though she’s said we can go, she might not want to tell us much information.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, people, life … It’s just complicated, Zac.’

  You thought you couldn’t get a bigger peak, but then Mum told us the next bit: that before we go to Kelly’s house, we’re going to go to the Sea Life Centre, which is a massive aquarium. Mum’s saved up the tokens on the side of our Cheerios packet so that it’s miles cheaper. (The last time we went to an aquarium was three and a half years ago when I was seven and I touched a stingray. It’s in my top ten best things that have ever happened in my life – and now I’m probably going to get to do it again.)

  ‘What’s an aquarium?’ Teagan said, which was dead funny because she’d squealed when Mum said it, but she didn’t even know what Mum was talking about.

  ‘It’s like this amazing big place with loads of fish in it,’ I said.

  ‘Eh? But Grimsby’s got the most fish in it of anywhere else in the world.’

  Me and Mum laughed when she said that. She’s not going to be able to believe her eyes when she sees the aquarium. It was fate she had her asthma attack and couldn’t come to Skegness, because there was a much bigger peak, just around the corner. That’s what I mean about life – you just never know.

  It’s a hundred and sixteen miles from Grimsby to Manchester. After London, which is a hundred and ninety, it would be the furthest I’d ever been in my life. You could get food on the train but it was daylight robbery. So I’d made my special sandwiches for everyone. I just took Jason’s favourite two, and did those. We had Aero chocolate mousse too. (They were only 30p in the six o’clock fridge.)

  Mum let me and Teagan sit next to the window after we’d eaten our sandwiches (we ate them as soon as we got on; it was only 10 a.m. but we couldn’t wait), then we did a challenge. The challenge was to see how long we could look at one thing out of the window, and how much we could remember about what we’d seen as we went past. I wanted to remember everything but your eyes couldn’t beat how fast the train was. You could try, but you could never do it, so you just had to give in because it was too frustrating.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Mum. It’s just a saying – you say it when someone looks like they’re thinking. I was thinking about Nan and Grandad, hoping they wouldn’t find out we were going to find my dad. I knew they’d (especially Nan) be mad if they knew, like they were mad on Easter Saturday, but Mum says I’m not to worry abou
t it anymore. She says Nan is just upset with Dad for leaving us and she’s being protective. I know that’s nice, but I don’t understand how you can be the same angry with someone ten years after they’ve done the bad thing. It’s impossible. Sometimes, if me and Connor or even me and my mum have a row, I promise myself I won’t talk to them for ages, but I only ever last an hour, max. It’s just boring and lonely, basically, being in a mood with people. You end up missing them, so you can’t keep it up.

  ‘Your eyes look mad,’ Teagan said.

  ‘Do they? What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re going like this.’ She made her eyes go dead fast from side to side. She looked like Mr Dabrowski who lives on our estate. He’s blind but his eyes move all the time.

  Me and Teagan decided we needed to go and explore. We had to find a place for an urgent FDMC meeting, to discuss what we were going to ask Kelly when we got to her house. Mum wasn’t going to come inside with us, you see. She said it was for the same reason she thought it was a good idea that I sent the letter to the council instead of her – adults are more likely to listen to children than grown-ups.

  There were loads of weird people on the train. You could have a good time just looking at them. There was a woman with loads of black make-up on and tattoos all over her arms – she was definitely a vampire – and there was a man snoring. It was the funniest thing ever. He was just snorting like a pig with his mouth open and didn’t even know.

  We got to a door that said First Class. You could tell it was First Class already, because even the glass of the door and the sign were posh. There was nobody stopping us going in, so we just sat down for a bit. I was scared in case there was a secret camera and we’d get charged loads of money, but Teagan didn’t care.

  ‘Let’s have our meeting in here.’

  ‘But what if we get done?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Zac, honestly. First Class is where all people hold important meetings. You can’t have it in the normal bit where there are loads of little kids crying because they’ve dropped their felt-tips.’