The Dream Life I Never Had
by
Terri Douglas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author.
Also by Terri Douglas
Ro & Peas
Helly and Ron
Brain Fog
39 Weeks
Without My LCB
The ‘I Do’ Arrangement
Rainie Angel
- and The GAS-BAG Trilogy
GAS-BAG
GAS-BAG in Peril
GAS-BAG Salvation
1
Today is my thirty-first birthday so hip-hip-hooray and happy birthday to me. Today is also the official end to the dream life I never had. Of course for the last twelve months I’d known the end was nigh but there was a small part of me hoping that by some miracle it might still happen, the dream life I mean that I was supposed to be living by the time I was thirty.
It was never an impossible dream, in fact as dreams go it was quite a modest little dream and I suppose on some level you could argue that I’d achieved at least a part of it. But the part I had managed wasn’t exactly what you could call the successful life-stuff that dreams are made of, more of a shambolic parody if anything.
The original plan of my dream life had morphed a few times over the last fifteen or so years as life and circumstance had intervened and my day-dreaming became slightly more realistic, but now from my lofty view point at the grand old age of thirty one I had to admit I’d spectacularly failed on virtually all levels.
At the tender and innocent age of fifteen, well innocent-ish, I’d imagined my life to come. One wet lunchtime whilst hiding out in the homeroom at Thorpefield Secondary bored and trying to avoid the rain, my BFF at the time Claire Farmer and I hunched over one of the desks and planned with particular care and giggling unrealistic ambition how our dream lives would be.
I Sophie Mallons do solemnly swear that by the time I am thirty I will be running my own business, I will be quite rich – no make that very rich and have my own apartment probably in London. I’ll never be old or boring I will be glamorous and sophisticated, and I will have a handsome lover or three that all want to marry me but I’ll say no because I’m having too good a time being single.
A year or two later it became obvious that, that particular dream life probably wasn’t going to happen. For a start I’d mucked up my exams mostly because I hadn’t done the revision, not failed exactly but there were too many D’s for the brilliantly clever future career that Mum and Dad had been hoping for, and instead of college or university I’d gone to hairdressing school.
I guess technically I could still maybe one day have owned my own hairdressing shop and all the rest might have followed, but by this time I was earning a little bit of money sweeping up and being the junior at ‘Good-Grooming’ on the two days a week I wasn’t learning my trade, and instead of saving I was regularly blowing the lot on new shoes and Saturday nights out trying to get picked up by the local talent.
By eighteen I’d graduated from hairdressing school and was a qualified bona fide hair stylist, still working at ‘Good-Grooming’ earning a modest wage but not sweeping up anymore. The trying to get picked up on a Saturday night had been reasonably successful but now I’d outgrown all that, well almost outgrown it most of the time, and I was instead looking for more of a semi-serious relationship. Needless to say the glamour and sophistication along with the handsome lovers were non-existent. It was time for a new dream life plan modified and updated to suit my more adult status.
I Sophie Mallons do solemnly swear that by the time I am thirty I will be a top stylist at a proper salon and earning decent money. I will leave work to marry the man of my dreams who’ll be a doctor or maybe a lawyer. We’ll holiday abroad at least twice a year and have swanky dinner parties every weekend for our friends. We’ll have our own detached four bedroom house in Esher or possibly Thames Ditton with a garden running down to the river and talk about whether we want to start a family yet or not.
By the time I was twenty I was still working at ‘Good-Grooming’ and saving madly for my first holiday abroad, ten days in Ibiza with two of the girls from work. I’d recently met and started dating Martin who was an electrician still studying at college one day a week for his level three; he wasn’t the man of my dreams or the professional I’d planned on but he was a nice bloke and he’d do in the interim. I’d never even visited Esher or Thames Ditton, nor had I even been a guest at a dinner party never mind a swanky one and couldn’t have hosted one myself even if I’d known how as I was still living at home with Mum and Dad.
I forgot about the dream life for a couple of years as I was too busy living my real one, but by the time I was twenty three and on the verge of getting married to Martin I thought about it again and had to laugh at the stupid idealistic ambitions I’d dreamed up. Now at this important crossroads of my life it was time to have a more realistic life plan.
I Sophie Mallons, soon to be Sophie Cromby, do solemnly swear that by the time I am thirty I will still be happily married to Martin and we will have three children. We’ll have our own house, a three bed semi with a large garden. Martin will be self-employed and I’ll be hairdressing from home to fit in with the children and we’ll have a holiday home in the Algarve. I’ll help out at our eldest child’s school and raise funds for the local playgroup. I’ll tend the garden and decorate our house making it beautiful and the envy of our neighbours and friends and spend all my spare time playing with our children and helping them with their homework.
For a while I really believed the dream life plan was possible, it’s what Martin and I had talked about and what we’d planned for, but as ever real life had other ideas.
At twenty five I was pregnant with Kate and still working at ‘Good-Grooming’ although by then it had changed its name to ‘Cut and Dye’ but was still the same salon with all the same staff and customers. Martin was working all the overtime hours he could wangle at Shepherds and was no nearer being self-employed than he had been two years previously. We rented a one bedroom flat over one of the shops in the high street and were desperately trying to get a big enough mortgage to buy a two bed terraced fixer-upper on Almond Street that was all we could afford.
At twenty eight we’d moved into number twenty three Almond Street but as yet hadn’t done much of the fixing-up the house needed. Martin was still at Shepherds but I’d given up work to look after Kate and was planning on going back as soon as Kate hit the three year deadline and was old enough to go to nursery. That is until I discovered I was pregnant with Ben.
And now here I was thirty one. Martin was still working at Shepherds but the way things were he could be made redundant at any moment and I had gone back to work part time at ‘Cut and Dye’ while Kate was at school and Ben was at nursery. We still lived in Almond Street and still hadn’t been able to afford much fixing up apart from a bit of painting and decorating, and we hadn’t even been on holiday in the Algarve never mind owned a property there. We were happily married, well we weren’t unhappily married but the magic sparkle had well and truly rubbed off and I suppose you could say we were settled.
So one way and another my dream life plan was a flop. True I was still married to Martin albeit not quite as blissfully as I’d envisaged and we had two of the three children we’d planned on, but having experienced the joys of motherhood twice number three had been relegated to the ‘I don’t think so’ category. As for all the other jigsaw pieces of my dream life, they were lost somewhere and the picture wasn’t looking at all like the one on the box.
All this time I’d thought thirty was a mystical portal to maturity and
understanding and that life would somehow be perfect or at least edging that way. Instead it was just more of the same relentless struggle to juggle everything; money, time, happiness, everything.
Quite why so many people’s life dreams have to be achieved by the time they’re thirty I’m not entirely sure but thirty does seem to be the success or failure timeline marker that you set for yourself, and today I’d officially passed my marker. Game over and no bonus lives earned.
2
It was twenty past five in the morning so only barely light outside, that weird dimness that’s neither light nor dark but somewhere in-between, and everyone was still asleep.
I was usually up at this time as there was a lot to do and it was no mean feat getting everyone including myself up and ready for their day ahead. Most mornings unless I’d had a particularly bad night and my precious eight hours, no make that six hours as that was more the normal, had been interrupted this was my favourite time of day. For twenty minutes that sometimes stretched to thirty if I was lucky, I had time to myself. I was at no-ones beck and call and could legitimately linger over a peaceful still hot cup of tea without interruption.
Most days it was so quiet and still everywhere with not a light to be seen in any of the neighbouring houses that it felt like I was the only person in the whole world that was awake. For those few minutes in the morning I could be me, not someone’s mum, not someone’s wife, or daughter, or employee, just me. This morning though with it being my birthday there was no lingering to be had in my precious solitude, tradition dictated that Martin would make sure Ben and Kate were awake early enough to give me their homemade birthday cards and make a coached fuss over me before the morning schedule began.
By rights being the birthday girl, I should have been able to linger away to my heart’s content and spend a leisurely day indulging myself in whatever took my fancy, but cold hard reality and the unrelenting need to earn a living meant that wasn’t possible. Already I could hear the thumping footfalls of the children getting out of bed and Martins stage whispered instructions as to what they should say to me when they got downstairs.
The dream life birthday morning was all happy birthday Darling from Martin together with a passionate embrace and a stolen French kiss while the kids weren’t looking. It was a happy birthday Mummy from my adoring children who would present me with two interesting looking festively wrapped birthday gifts, that I already knew were homemade treasures and that I’d unwittingly caught Martin helping them with the day before but was pretending I hadn’t seen. Martin’s gift would be an elaborate bunch of flowers, a surprise gold something in the jewellery department, and the promise of a romantic dinner for two later on while Kate and Ben stayed at their grandparents for the night.
The actual birthday morning went slightly differently.
‘Happy bersday’ Ben shouted clutching his homemade card as he burst through the kitchen door. Then tripping over his pyjama bottoms in his haste to reach me and bumping his head on one of the cupboards, crumpling the card beyond recognition in the process, promptly let out a wail.
I jumped up to rescue him, sat him on my lap and did my best to soothe him while trying to iron out the card. By this time Kate was standing next to the table holding her card and waiting not very patiently for her brother to shut up for long enough for her to deliver her own birthday greetings. After only a minute or two and still no sign of any let up from the injured Ben she decided she could wait no longer and loudly shouted ‘happy birthday Mummy’ over the din and thrust her card under my nose.
Martin who’d stopped off to visit the loo on the way down came in the kitchen with his hands over his ears saying ‘what’s all the racket, I thought you two were going to wait for me so we could all come down together to wish your mum a happy birthday?’
‘I tried to wait but Ben wouldn’t wait and he ran downstairs before you finished’ Kate said.
‘Ben why didn’t you wait with your sister?’ Martin said rather sternly I thought, and evidently Ben thought so too as he promptly let out fresh wails of agony.
‘Aren’t you going to look at your card?’ Kate demanded of me.
‘Course I am’ I said smiling sweetly over the top of Ben’s head. ‘Martin could you?’ I asked as I tried to extricate myself from my son’s iron grip and hand him over to his father.
‘Come on Ben’ Martin said holding out his arms, but after his rebuke Ben was having none of it and buried his head further into my shoulder.
‘Ben why don’t you sit with Daddy for a bit so that I can look at your sisters beautiful card?’ I said coaxingly.
‘Ben Ben we are men, we never cry, we never lie, we like pie till the day we die’ Martin said in his gruff caveman voice chanting the father-son war cry they’d invented together.
Once again the familiar, in our house anyway, male rallying call did the trick and Ben stopped crying and leaned over towards Martin. ‘Ben Ben we are men, we never cry, we never lie, we like pie till the day we die’ they growled at each other as Martin scooped Ben from my lap.
Kate rolled her eyes and slowly shook her head in despair at all the male bonding, looking more like a bitter and twisted fifty year old spinster than the cute five year old she was.
I dutifully inspected the homemade cards from both my children and ooh’d and aah’d at how beautiful they were and how clever my offspring were to produce such masterpieces, which thankfully pacified Kate. Ben though didn’t really notice as he was still busy snarling ‘we like pie till the day we die’ in his three year old caveman voice over and over again.
After I’d been presented with my annual box of mint creams from the kids; a stupid mistake I’d made a couple of years ago when I’d foolishly said they were my favourite and that meant I was doomed to receive a box every birthday and Christmas forevermore, I managed to get everyone seated at the table and eating their cereal while I made the lunchtime sandwiches.
‘Happy birthday Soph’ Martin said belatedly between mouthfuls, and without interrupting his breakfast munching momentum produced a card from inside his work jacket with his free hand.
‘Thanks’ I said taking it from him.
‘I’ll get your present’ he said as he stood up and shovelled in the last mouthful of cereal. He planted a brotherly type kiss on my forehead leaving a sugary milk imprint and disappeared back upstairs.
‘Ooh I wonder what it can be’ I said excitedly and hamming it up a bit for Kate and Ben’s benefit.
Kate giggled to herself and Ben said ‘we’re not telling bout the steaming, it’s a secret’.
‘Steaming?’ I said.
‘You wasn’t supposed to tell’ Kate shouted crossly at her brother.
‘I didn’t, I said we’re not telling’ Ben said emphasising the not.
‘You said steaming’ Kate argued.
Luckily Martin returned carrying a large tall unwrapped box before the sibling bickering descended into a proper argument. The size of the box told me instantly that this wasn’t going to be an intimate present of the jewellery, perfume or lingerie variety, and as he stood it on the floor beside me unadorned with any wrapping as it was I could tell from the pictures on the box it was a non-intimate present of the cleaning variety, in fact a steam cleaner.
As steam cleaners go this appeared to be an all singing all dancing state of the art steamer with all sorts of attachments and nozzles to enable not only floor cleaning but would reach into all the nooks and crannies you might ever want to attack with steam.
‘It’s a steam cleaner’ I said trying to infuse some enthusiasm into my words.
‘I knew you wanted one’ Martin said looking smug.
‘Yes I did’ I said. And I did want one, just not for my birthday present.
‘It was too big to wrap’ Martin said turning the box so I could see the pictures on the other side.
‘Wow look at all the things it can do’ I said.
‘D’you like it Mummy?’ Kate asked looking nearly as smug as her f
ather.
‘Yes’ I said brightly.
‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’ Kate said.
‘Yes . . . I am . . . and I really want to try it out . . . but not right now. Right now you have to go to school and I have to get ready for work and if we don’t get a move on we’ll all be late’ I said.
‘But you like it?’ Martin said.
‘Oh yes it’s just what I wanted’ I lied.
‘Right well I better get a move on I’m supposed to be giving Lenny a lift this morning, he’s dropping his car into the garage for its MOT and I said I’d follow and take him on to work’ Martin said all business-like.
‘Oh okay, I’ll see you later then’ I said. ‘Thanks for my steamer Martin.’
‘Bye love’ Martin said planting another brotherly kiss on my cheek. ‘Bye kids be good. Oh I might be a bit late tonight Soph; I’ll have to give Lenny a lift back to the garage to pick up his car again.’
‘But it’s my birthday’ I said.
‘I know but it can’t be helped I already promised him. I’ll try not to be too late’ Martin said as he grabbed his sandwiches and keys and hot-footed it out the door before I could say anything else.
Bloody Lenny I thought. Martin and Lenny had been mates since starting secondary school, had hung about together as teenagers, qualified as electricians together and now worked at Shepherds together. Lenny had been one of the drawbacks to marrying Martin, always hanging around, always right there enticing Martin to ‘go on the pull’ before he was married, or to get drunk, or both.
A few months after our wedding Lenny had married Jackie and for a while I thought I’d been given a reprieve and that he would grow up a bit, maybe settle down and see a bit less of Martin. I’d even been friends with Jackie, for Martin’s sake really so we could all hang out together as a foursome, but a year later she decided she’d had enough and left Lenny for a double glazing salesman she’d been seeing on the side. Lenny wasn’t as devastated as he should have been and went straight back to his drunken womanising ways, which he’d never truly given up if the truth were told and was probably the real reason Jackie had been seeing someone else and eventually left him, and he once again started hanging limpet-like around Martin trying to tempt him to do likewise. Martin though wouldn’t hear a word against Lenny and although he didn’t join in with the womanising was a bit too eager for my liking to go with him for a drink in the Cricketers at least once a week, hence the ‘bloody Lenny’ sentiment.
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