Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  If it hadn’t been for Josie we all would have starved. After an afternoon’s drinking even putting frozen TV dinners in the oven was beyond me. I drank less when Carl was around but when he was away, which seemed to be most of the time, there was nothing to stop me.

  It wasn’t meant to be like this.

  “I need help.” I finally plucked up the courage to tell Carl on one of the few evenings he was at home.

  “Help? For what?” Carl looked at me in a way that reminded me very much of his father, the man who for most of my life I had thought was my father too.

  “The house. The children. Someone just to do some of the housework would make life so much easier.”

  “Easier? Easier? What could be easier than the life you’ve got?” The contempt in his voice could not have made his disappointment in me any clearer.

  I tried to keep my voice calm. “There’s always so much to do. I’m never on top of it. We’ll never get straight without some help. It’s so hard looking after the house and the children.”

  “What’s hard?” Carl meaningfully looked down at his tray with the remnants of his TV dinner. Then he looked around at the room, cluttered and untidy. He stood up grabbing my arm and pulled me out of the living room and stood me in front of the hall mirror.

  “Look at you! Look at yourself! Now tell me what it is that you’re doing that takes so much time. You can’t even wash your hair, or get dressed, or shop, or clean the house, or help your children with their homework. What is it that takes so much time that you need someone to help you?”

  I knew I couldn’t answer. I just started to cry. He didn’t put his arms round me, he didn’t say everything would be alright in the end, he didn’t say he loved me. He just said ‘you’re pathetic’ and walked out of the house. I knew he wouldn’t be back that night. I sat on the bottom of the stairs and cried until I couldn’t cry any more.

  I hated being at home all day. I hated trying to run a house. I knew it was filthy and untidy and I hated Carl staying away, hating me. I hated looking after the children, I hated the children, I hated the work they created and I knew they all hated me.

  Resenting the children came very easily but disliking Carl, after all those years of believing I loved him, was the oddest feeling. He was not the person I had dreamed of, not the person I thought he was. I didn’t think of the possibility that perhaps I wasn’t the person he had thought me to be either.

  Carl and I had grown up together, living in the same house and spending every minute together for as long as I could remember. All our friends agreed with me that we were a couple, for life. We were until Sunday 19th May 1963 when, for reasons I have never understood, we were told we were brother and sister. Carl fled and I didn’t see him again until that Sunday 25th July 1976 when Ted finally told me the truth. For all those 13 years, 2 months and 6 days I had believed that Carl and I would be together in the end. I believed it through everything that happened to me and everything I did. I fell pregnant and was 17 when I married Joe Parry. In the black days of that marriage, as I had children I didn’t want and lived a life I hated, I always knew Carl would come to rescue me.

  It may have been naïve and simplistic, but we did meet again. And he did ask me to live with him.

  That bit worked out as it should.

  It was just the ‘lived happily ever after’ bit that didn’t.

  After Carl’s outburst nothing got easier but I did try harder to keep the house clean, to shop more sensibly and to drink less.

  I couldn’t make them realise how difficult it was for me. I’d never had to shop or cook in my life, I had had no idea how to gauge what would be needed. Some weeks I threw most of what I had bought away, at others we ran out of everything. When I was married to Joe we had a woman who came to do the cleaning, and Monika had helped every day with the children and it was she who had prepared something for the evenings when we were eating at home. How was I supposed to know how to shop and cook for six people, especially when four of them were uncooperative children who didn’t like anything put in front of them. He wouldn’t understand that I was honestly doing the best I could.

  Through 1980 things just got worse.

  Carl was away much of the time though where and with whom he never said and I dared not ask. Al and Jack resented everything as I suppose was only to be expected at their age. They had never settled in the small village school and things were even worse when they moved up to the local comprehensive. They were always in trouble, interested only in fighting and football, and none of the teachers seemed to make any effort with them. The teachers were even worried about Bill. They had no discipline and I had no experience to help me with three boys in their early teens.

  I still had occasional letters and cards from the past. Maureen would write asking me to visit, wanting me to tell her more about what I was doing with my time, but mostly her letters were about the minutiae of life in the village. Ted would write occasional but long letters asking how we all were, reminding me of things that had happened in the past and asking about the children. He was concerned about Max who seemed to be losing his grip on reality, wanting only to see Monika who seemed happy to see Charles and Holly and shut out the rest of the world.

  I would eventually reply to some of their letters saying that Carl was very busy and doing well, that I had an interesting part time job, that time flew by, that the children were growing up fast, that we were all happy but it would be impossible to get away to visit them.

  Some of what I told them was true.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I wondered whether Carl would remember my 34th birthday, our fourth anniversary, and, if he did, whether he would arrange something special. But he did what he always did when he was around, he came in without any greeting, poured himself a beer and sat down at the kitchen table to read the evening paper. He never looked at me so he didn’t mention that I appeared different. I had made a real effort having had my hair cut and styled and bought new clothes but, without looking up from the paper, he just asked ‘What’s for dinner?’

  That he had forgotten the anniversary, or was just ignoring it, made me in an even worse mood than I had been all day.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t made any. I thought you might take me out.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  I poured myself a glass of wine, my first that day, and sat at the other end of the table. It all seemed unnaturally quiet.

  “Where are the children?”

  “Who knows? I don’t. And I don’t care. Perhaps they’ve escaped.”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “What do you think?” I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I had made a real effort to look good that evening and I hadn’t had a drink all day.

  “I have no idea.” It was his tone of voice, so like that of Charles, that made me lose my temper.

  “Bloody nothing to do with it being my birthday, our anniversary, that is if you can have an anniversary of living together. Bloody nothing to do with that.”

  He looked up from his paper, neither shocked nor angry, simply weary. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything, I carried on, letting off steam, trying to make him realise how unhappy I was.

  “I’ve got absolutely bloody nothing to do all day except see you all off into the world of school and work and then I clear up after you, I do the washing and the cleaning and then I start preparing to mess everything up again by making tea for the children and it’s not what I want to do with my life!”

  “Well you should have thought about that when you decided to get all maternal again.”

  “Why did you take us all on?” It was as if I watched the words coming out of my mouth in a bubble, I hadn’t meant to bring everything out in the open. When he didn’t answer I knew he was trying to find a way to say he regretted it. “You hate all this don’t you?” I continued to push him. I know I should have backed off, let him get over whatever it was that had upset him during the day, let mysel
f relax. But I didn’t. I ploughed on. “I’m a disappointment aren’t I? You wanted something different didn’t you? Why did you bother with us at all?”

  “Leave then.” He spoke softly before adding in his most sarcastic voice “Oh but sorry, I’d forgotten, there are the children.” I hated this argument. We had had it many times before. “You can’t leave because you have nowhere to go.”

  “So I’m trapped.”

  “And I’m stuck with the lot of you.”

  “At least you get away to work and to your other women.”

  “Oh shut up.”

  I knew he would slam the front door behind him and I braced myself for the jarring shock of it.

  Perhaps Charles had been right when he’d said I loved a Carl that didn’t exist and Carl loved a Susie who probably never had either. I’d told him to bugger off but perhaps he had known us better than I thought. I knew next to nothing of what Carl had done in the years we had been apart. He had graduated brilliantly, advanced his career, built a nationwide reputation as a presenter of historical documentaries on television and the radio and published books about his favourite man, Napoleon. But what else had he done in those years? I knew absolutely nothing and I had never dared ask him.

  There is a saying. Be careful what you wish for lest it come true. I have no idea where I first heard it but as I sat on that sofa, contemplating the disappointment that was my life, I realised the truth of it. Through all those years married to Joe, then after his death working so hard to make something of myself, I had believed that when I met Carl again everything would be perfect. Now what I had wished for had come true my life felt even worse because I had no dreams left.

  I would have to stick it out as long as Carl could.

  He was right, as long as the children were around there was nowhere I could go.

  On Josie’s 16th birthday, Halloween 1980, she came home early in the evening very drunk. As she climbed the stairs helped by a long haired but obviously male companion she announced that since it was now legal for her to have sex she was going to find out what all the fuss was about. She glared at me, daring me to stop her. Carl was away. If I made a fuss and tried to throw the boy out they’d only go somewhere else. It would only be bravado, they were both probably too drunk to do anything anyway. I said nothing. I went back to whatever soap opera was on the television. At least she was experimenting at home not on the sand dunes, in bus shelters and doorways as I had done at her age.

  When I tackled her the next morning she spoke in a condescending tone I had never heard her use. ‘No mother, we didn’t ‘do it’. I’m not quite as stupid as you were. Though getting pregnant wouldn’t be such a bad idea if it meant I could leave this place. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t leave the boys.’ She made it very clear that morning that she neither liked nor cared for me or Carl but, since we weren’t competent, she felt herself to be responsible for looking after her younger brothers. ‘I won’t leave them until they’re old enough to look out for themselves. If I didn’t worry about them, make sure they go to school, make sure they get home at night, no one would.’

  The six of us lived in the same house but to all intents and purposes we lived separate lives. God knows what the children got up to. Carl and I reached some kind of understanding that enabled us to live together but our lives, like our bodies, barely touched. I knew nothing of what he did, he no longer spoke about his work. He went away for weeks at a time, I didn’t know where or why, I just knew he didn’t want to tell me anything about what he was doing.

  Carl had, like his father, probably never been able to live with only one woman but perhaps, also like his father, he needed the security of his home. He had numerous one night stands and one or more longer term girlfriends but he always came back to us in the end. We bickered and argued as many couples do, but we were just living together until the right moment came to live apart.

  One Sunday morning in early January 1982 we were reading the papers, me sprawled on the living room floor, Carl sitting in his armchair, his legs crossed in exactly the same way I had remembered his father sitting, radiating pomposity. Josie was clearing up the breakfast things and the boys were taking advantage of the day without rain to play in the garden.

  “Coffee?”

  “Thanks.” I answered meaninglessly without looking up from the paper.

  It was as though neither of us ever had the courage to talk about anything important. As long as we spoke only about day to day things we were safe.

  He brought in two coffee mugs and, giving one to me without a word, sat down to continue reading his Telegraph.

  When we had first lived together we had discussed all the issues of the day, me always slightly more left wing than Carl. He had argued with me when I had spoken scathingly about President Ford’s comments about Eastern Europe but he had listened, even a year later he had treated my views on Mugabe in Rhodesia with some respect, though he had completely disagreed. But after three years any comments I made about the troubles in Northern Ireland or Margaret Thatcher were treated with impatient derision. For some time we had read our papers in silence.

  “Good God!” I couldn’t help exclaiming a few minutes later.

  “What?” Carl was not pleased that his silence had been interrupted.

  “It’s Max. Max Fischer!”

  “There’s only one Max. What about him?”

  “There’s an article about him.”

  “Well obviously. What’s he done now?” Even with sarcasm Carl couldn’t completely hide his interest.

  “He’s contributed loads of money to some charity or other, there’s a picture of him presenting a cheque to the patron, some minor royal.”

  “He’ll get his gong.”

  “That’s a bit cynical isn’t it?”

  “Not for Max. He wants to be ‘Sir Maximilian’ so he’s quite prepared to pay for it.”

  I read on for a while in silence, saying to myself ‘that’s not true’ ‘that’s rubbish’ at the points where the reporter had misreported Max’s history. He was not an Austrian aristocrat disinherited by the Nazis. He was not a man who had worked his way back to prosperity only to spend his wealth on creating employment in the area. He was not a man who had devoted himself to good works after the tragic death of his wife and young daughter.

  “This is all complete rubbish. Where do they get this stuff?” I must have spoken out loud as Carl answered me.

  “They make it up. ‘Fuck the facts get the story’.”

  “But really this is all so wrong!” I wondered what other people who knew Max would make of the story, if they were reading it. Ted would be amused. How would Maureen feel? And David?

  I had had so little to do with these people for years. They had been my friends and I had all but completely shut them out of my life because I could not admit how great a mistake I had made. Perhaps this would be an opportunity to get in touch, to write to David and to Ted and have something to say other than lies about my own life. I drank my, now cold, coffee and gazed out of the window.

  “Well I can trump your story of Max.” Carl interrupted my thoughts.

  “What?” I knew he wasn’t going to give his story away as easily as I had given mine. “What is it?”

  “Not ‘what’, ‘who’.”

  “OK Who is it?”

  “Graham.”

  “What’s the little shit done now?” I didn’t like my cousin Graham. I had only ever met him at my mother’s funeral when he had shown himself to be crass and rude. But I remembered David had said he was involved with the Indian. I had forgotten how.

  “He’s dead.”

  “How did that happen?” I couldn’t feel surprise since, from what I had heard about Graham, he was always close to the wrong side of the law.

  “An overdose apparently.”

  “Why do you say ‘apparently’?”

  “Well they’re quite mysterious about it.”

  “Read.”

  “Graham Tyler, 30, of Cr
oydon, Surrey, died on Monday. He was jailed in 1977 for the murder of his ex-wife’s father and mother Matthew and Mary Eccleston of Toronto, Canada. A registered heroin addict, Tyler appears to have taken an overdose and slashed his wrists with the pen-knife that was found by the body which was discovered at 6am. An enquiry is expected.”

  “I bet it finds nothing other than that he killed himself.”

  “There’ll be trouble that he got hold of drugs.”

  “And a knife.”

  “At least Holly won’t have to worry about him any more.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Carl could be concerned about what worried Holly. It seemed a long time ago that I had wondered whether there might have been something between them. I had dismissed the possibility. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything more either.

  “Why are you concerned about what worries Holly?”

  He must have been surprised at my tone of voice because it was a few moments before he replied, and then, I thought, rather defensively. “She’s a good friend.”

  “Are you fucking her?”

  When he didn’t answer I repeated the question. “You’re sleeping with her aren’t you? You fucked her that summer when she was dangling Charles around her little finger. Neither of you could resist the pathetic blonde tart. You and Charles, you’re both so fucking stupid.” I’m not sure why I was so angry.

  “And you’re a fucking stupid bitch.”

  I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I knew Carl had had many one night stands and longer relationships since we had been living together, I’m not sure why knowing one was with Holly was particularly hurtful.

  “She’s conned you just as she conned Charles. All she’s after is someone to look after her. As soon as her parents died she married Graham and then when a better bet came along she dumped him. So she’s working on you in case it doesn’t work out with Charles. She knows which side her bread’s buttered.”