Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘No good?’ I asked, knowing this was leading somewhere unsavoury, but not entirely sure where that place was.

  ‘No,’ she went on, turning her eyes from her sister and smiling again, at me this time. ‘Because it was sleeveless, you see.’

  ‘Sleeveless?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she responded. ‘Sleeveless.’

  I was just about to ask what sleeves or a lack thereof had to do with anything, when Kate’s expression suddenly reconfigured itself. Into something approximating the expression you might adopt if you’d just discovered you’d swallowed a slug . She blinked at her sister, she blinked at me, she blinked at the dog and then she narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh, I get it,’ she muttered. Morgan said nothing.

  I did. I said, ‘And what’s the problem with that, then?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ said Morgan, with some asperity.

  ‘You cow,’ hissed Kate.

  ‘Now, hang on –’ I spluttered. With some feeling. What on earth, I thought, was going on here?

  ‘You cow,’ Kate hissed again. ‘You absolute cow.’

  Morgan said nothing. Just carried on riffling through her file in the manner of a person who has not a care in the world. Well, almost. Her fingers, I noticed, were trembling slightly.

  ‘Look –’ I began.

  ‘Anyway!’ Morgan chirruped suddenly. ‘That’s about it, then, I think. Shall I put the kettle on, or open that bottle of Chablis? Hmm? Mum? Wine?’

  Kate, who might, on recent experience, be reasonably expected to leave the room avec much drama, remained, waxy-faced, in her seat.

  ‘Look,’ I said again. ‘What’s going on, girls?’

  Morgan got up from her chair and started bustling at the worktop behind me. I looked at Kate.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’m not completely stupid, Kate. If it’s nothing, then why do you look like you’ve just been slapped by a haddock?’

  ‘Nothing, OK? Nothing,’

  ‘Kate, it’s not nothing. Now will you please tell me what exactly is going on around here before I –’

  ‘Look, mum, it’s nothing, OK?’

  This was Morgan, still behind me, and now, presumably, uncorking the bottle of wine. I could hear the dry squeak of a corkscrew in cork. Kate’s gaze snapped up over my shoulder and back again. Then she scraped back her chair, pulled her trailing skirt to attention and stormed out, finally, as if prompted by a stage-hand, slamming the door hard for good measure.

  ‘Morgan!’ I said, as the air quivered around us. ‘What was all that about?’

  Morgan plucked out the cork and began untwisting the corkscrew. ‘Nothing, mum. Really.’ she said.

  The one thing a mother knows above all others is that ‘nothing’ is as loaded a word as exists within the familial lexicon, so I was not to be fobbed off lightly. But just at that moment, Jonathan called from the garage. I gave Morgan a stern don’t-move-until-I-come-back kind of look and took myself off to see what minor domestic tragedy had befallen him. It was, as ever, a Hozelock drama, Jonathan being utterly inept at couplings, so by the time I got back into the kitchen, Morgan, who was, of course, twenty-four and therefore not remotely impressed by the unspoken edicts of matriarchal superiority, had shot off.

  ‘Merlin,’ I announced, ‘something’s afoot here.’ And I took myself stealthily up the stairs.

  I’m not normally given to lurking at keyholes, and, in any case we didn’t have any on our upstairs door knobs, so I positioned my head flat against Kate’s bedroom door and pressed my right ear to the wood.

  They were talking at each other in the sort of tone that would have been a full-on shoutathon were it not for the minor inconvenience of having to be very, very quiet. I could barely make out what they were saying.

  ‘You cow,’ Kate was hissing. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t tell her – you promised! How could you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’ Morgan protested. ‘I never said a word! And besides, that wasn’t the deal! The deal was that you’d tell them. The deal was that you’d tell them six weeks ago. And you didn’t. Are you completely stupid? You’ve got to tell them! How long do you think you can go on hiding it? Well?’

  There was a silence, then the sound of a window being opened. And a plop as my stomach turned over. Oh, God.

  ‘Well mum isn’t stupid,’ Morgan continued. ‘So if I were you I’d get my backside off that bed and get down there and tell her, before she finds it out for herself. And she will you know. As will Dad. God! You are such an idiot, Kate! What were you thinking?’

  Oh, God! It all fitted! Her mood swings! Her temper! Her refusal to eat! Her refusal, moreover, to use the communal fitting room when I’d bought her that new Diesel T-shirt last month! She’d got off the bed. I could hear her boots clomping. ‘Oh and you’re Mrs bloody goody two shoes, then, are you?’ A pause. ‘Yeah, right. And I could tell a tale or two, so don’t start preaching at me! It’s my life. It’s my body. OK?’

  Her body??? God, sleeves. I’d been sidetracked by sleeves. Were sleeves a euphemism for empire line, maybe? For dresses that would fail to accommodate the gentle swell of…..Oh, oh, oh! This was looking seriously bad. Go in? Stay out? Confront them? Keep listening? Make notes? I really wasn’t sure what. A silence had fallen. A bedspring went boiing. Keep listening, then. Just for a bit…

  ‘Sally, what on earth are you doing?’

  Jonathan’s voice. Bad. Because whatever appalling thing it was that Kate was being exhorted to admit to me (and I was quite sure by now that it was something about which I’d be seriously appalled) would, I was quite, quite sure, be best digested and given-serious-thought-to before being given an airing to her father. But here he was anyway. We must do this together.

  ‘Shhh!’ I hissed at him. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Listening? To what?’ He still had the chamois in his hand. He cocked an eyebrow.

  ‘To the girls, of course. There’s something very bad going on, and they won’t tell me what, so I –’

  ‘What sort of bad? Are they fighting?’

  ‘No! But rowing about something. I think…I’m not sure…. but Kate…’ I was groping for words.

  ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ He exhaled and approached the bedroom door. And then knocked on it. Rattattatat!

  And I prepared to be appalled.

  There are, of course, degrees of appallingness. Bracing myself for the news that my still-pubescent daughter was with-child (by her exploding faced werewolf of a boyfriend? Heaven preserve us), I followed Jonathan into the bedroom. To find – oh, joy! – that no, she wasn’t pregnant, that no, she didn’t have an intravenous drug habit either, and that no, she hadn’t signed up to join a faux-religious closed-order hippy encampment just outside Poona. Ergo, I was not as appalled as I might have been. Oh, no. Just relieved. Relieved beyond belief. What she did have, however, and it took mere seconds to discover it, was a slim tangle of blackly-inked barbed wire-type squiggles circumnavigating her upper right arm.

  I was dismayed, yes. Disappointed, certainly. But appalled? How on earth could I find space to be appalled when I was so busy giving thanks to the Lord?

  Which didn’t help much, because feeling thus (which is one of the very few fringe benefits of having such a manic and fertile maternal imagination) led me, quite naturally, to adopt the voice of calm-in-a-crisis, which, even more naturally, made Jonathan cross. His dudgeon was plainly as high as the Eiger and he wanted me up there as well.

  So I shut up.

  ‘Only a tattoo?’ he spluttered. ‘Only a TATTOO!!!’ True to type, and never having displayed much sense of perspective in the matter of teenagers and what they got up to (and, admittedly, a little professional exposure to frizzled septums and The Priory etc.) he was going a nice shade of sun dried tomato.

  Which looked all the more arresting for being highlighted by the shaft of warm sunshine that was wafting merrily through the
window, and in whose tender caress he now stood. He slammed his chamois down on Kate’s desktop. It sat there, weeping moistly, like a small pickled brain.

  ‘Yes, Dad!’ Spat Kate, who was now nose to nose with him and yanking her sleeve back down. ‘It’s only a Tattoo! God! That’s all! Chill, can’t you? What’s the matter with you?’

  Which (unconvincing) display of insouciance was a bit disingenuous, given that it occurred to me now that I’d not seen Kate sleeveless in best part of two months. Must step up on the vigilance, I thought.

  ‘What’s the matter with me?’ he barked. ‘The matter? Kate, you have disfigured yourself! You are sixteen years old and not only have you disfigured yourself for life, but you have also branded yourself as someone brainless and stupid and ignorant. AND you have lied to us.’ He stabbed a finger in the general direction. ‘Who did it? Who did this to you? Because so help me, I’ll see him charged. This is exactly the sort of –’

  ‘Dad, you’re being ridiculous! It’s just a tattoo, for God’s sake! Everyone has them these days. Everyone.’ Which struck me as ill-judged. And struck me correctly. Jonathan’s face was now red pepper red.

  The finger jabbed the air again. ‘You are not everyone. You are my daughter, young lady. And I am appalled and disgusted. As you will be once you’re adult enough to realise what a stupid, immature thing it is that you have done. What about your career? What about the rest of your life? What about all the years to come in which you will be ashamed of your own body? (Which I thought was overdoing it a tad) And don’t even think of giving me a catalogue of celebrity icons (he waved a hand around the room here) who are similarly disfigured. I don’t care if Madonna or that bloody Aminem lout has one. Because if these are the sort of people you look up to and respect, then God help us, my girl.’

  He then dropped his voice to a terrible whisper. ‘I thought I could expect better from my daughter.’

  Morgan and I stood like a couple of shop window dummies while Jonathan continued to exude deep disappointment and the dust motes danced round his head. Kate, in a corner so tight now that she couldn’t manoeuvre, and having had her last counter blow pre-empted so cruelly, did the only thing one can reasonably do in such circumstances, and burst into big gulping sobs.

  ‘It’s that boyfriend,’ Jonathan announced grimly, over supper, once the girls had gone off with the dog. They’d made up and were friends again, but it occurred to me as it had often lately, that the age gap between them seemed to be growing ever wider. The more assured and grown-womanly Morgan was becoming the more distant and uncommunicative Kate seemed to be.

  Calm, of a sort, had at least been achieved. After numerous petitions from both myself and Morgan, Jonathan had refrained from dragging Kate down from the bedroom (where she had elected to stay, in order to better consider the general unfairness of life, parents and western post-feminist society, presumably), and, more importantly, given that I was chief henchman, from impetuously imposing sanctions on her social life in perpetuity. But the feeling that a big and terrible milestone had been reached hung over the rest of the afternoon and early evening, and would do so, I suspected, for days. Thank God he was back off to London tomorrow and could take his deep disappointment along with him.

  He curled his lip, as if he was chewing on a bluebottle. ‘She’s been a different girl since she started hanging about with that Carl yob. I’m quite sure it was him that put her up to it. We’re going to have to start keeping her in a bit more.’

  By ‘we’re’ he meant me, naturally, for it would be me that would have to cope with all the tears and the shouting. Me that would have to do all the dirty work.

  ‘He looks worse than he actually is,’ I lied smoothly. ‘And anyway, I’m quite sure she’ll grow out of him soon enough on her own.’

  This much was, I felt, true. One thing I did know was that for the sixteen year old Sally Bradshaw (also blessed with a father of Dickensian tendencies) there was nothing so compelling as the company of a boyfriend of whom her father violently disapproved. Loyalty, I knew, was a different country for a teenager. The more Jonathan ranted, the more she would dig in her heels. And he wasn’t that bad. His mother was perfectly pleasant. He just wasn’t quite good enough. That was all.

  ‘Hmmph!’ said Jonathan. ‘That’s not much of a comfort. What else is she going to get up to before that happy day dawns? Eh?’

  And so the evening and his huffing and puffing rumbled on. I cleared away the dishes (God! Young people today!), I loaded the dishwasher (bring back National Service, I say), I put a machine load of washing on (he’ll be on drugs too, I imagine), I fed Merlin (and shouldn’t she be at home revising anyway?) I gathered up the newspapers from their basket and put them in the recycling bag (you’re too lax with her generally), I took it out to the dustbins (silence. Bliss), and I sat down, eventually, to watch some TV.

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ announced Jonathan, ‘I’m sick of this wretched wedding. It’s causing nothing but arguments. And it’s still four months off! I had no idea there would be this much hassle and grief and rowing involved. Why can’t people simply go off and get themselves married without all this stupid, tedious fuss? Hmm? Why?’

  It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t try to answer. And though I could have, with feeling, I was now way too tired.

  Ours, for all sorts of important reasons that I could now not recall, most, if not all of which were nothing to do with me, had been a well attended but rather low-key affair. My mother, who had had all sorts of reservations about the wisdom of taking on a man with another woman’s young daughter, had, to her credit, thrown herself into things wholeheartedly. She made my dress herself – in ivory silk – and she had made Morgan’s, too. We made such a pretty pair. But what I do recall, and with feelings I’m still not sure I’ve quite come to terms with, was the strange undercurrent of almost memorial sadness that had hung like a billowy veil over the day. The streams of people I’d barely yet come to know, who were unfailingly pleasant and jolly and friendly, but who had known and loved Trisha and been at her funeral less than eighteen months previously, and who seemed – to me, anyway – to be connected by the occasion to a hotline to the feelings of grief they’d all shared. It seemed to overlay everything. The gentle hands that patted Morgan’s little head. The faces that smiled. The moment when I’d heard someone speaking to Jonathan, saying ‘how has she been? Is she finding this difficult? It must be such a terrible strain on you all.’

  Most of all, Tricia’s parents, a shadowy presence, whom Jonathan, in his wisdom, had browbeaten into coming, because they were, as he’d pointed out, Morgan’s grandparents, after all. These were the stuff of my memories of that day. Of the same streams of people that had appeared shiny faced and in confetti coloured clothing in the photo that had sat like a talisman on Jonathan’s piano until the day and the row came that saw it finally off. Off to where it lived now, at the top of his wardrobe, along with the rest of his Tricia-shrine stuff.

  I had no bad feelings about Jonathan’s first wife – I had never, of course, met her – but, oh, how I envied Morgan her freedom from Tricia-awareness. In every way other than biology, it was I and not Tricia who was the mum in her life. I who would make sure her wedding was perfect. Joyous. Sublime. The one that I hadn’t quite had.

  ‘Because,’ I said now, ‘that’s not what most people do. People get married as a celebration. They want to share it with people. Not sneak off and do it on their own.’

  ‘Hmmph.’ he growled, flinging his newspaper at the basket. ‘Well I suppose I should be grateful she’s not marrying some yob. At least Cody’s respectable and upstanding and clean. Why can’t Kate find someone like that?’

  I woke, that night, at three twenty seven, and I decided I would go on the Drug U Like weekend. Because all of a sudden I felt old. It suddenly seemed to me that my time at the familial helm was getting close to being up. That our little girl was no longer a girl, but a woman. That in a few sho
rt years, she’d have left us and gone, and would be able to make all the mistakes she wanted. I tiptoed into her room, rubbing my arms against the chill – Kate always slept with all her windows open – and peering down at the young woman sleeping before me. Her tattoo, no longer clandestine beneath T-shirts and nighties, was etched cleanly and prettily across her long slender arm. I wondered if she would regret it twenty years down the line. Look back and wonder what on earth she’d been thinking. What would she be, I wondered? A dancer? An actress? She so wanted that. She’d be good at it, too. Then married, perhaps. Children. Middle class lifestyle. She stirred in her sleep, her long lashes quivering. I smiled to myself. Regret? I thought not.

  Chapter 7

  We had arrived at the Porth Merthyr Management Training centre on a wet and unprepossessing Saturday afternoon, whereupon, having had it helpfully explained that Porth meant gate and Merthyr meant martyr (ho ho ho), we were almost immediately instructed to get kitted up, go off to an assault course, and perform life-threatening stunts without benefit of having the remotest idea quite what it was we were supposed to be doing. Or, indeed, why. But this was the nature of teambuilding, apparently. It didn’t seem to have a point other than to assess our responses to its pointlessness. Not that I cared. I wasn’t washing or ironing or vacuuming bedrooms or negotiating with caterers or running up costumes or cooking any meals or, indeed, haranguing any MPs. I wasn’t altogether sure what it was that I was doing, but this little point didn’t worry me unduly. Because neither was anyone else.

  And now it is Monday, and in the same spirit of bemused incomprehension that has been largely evident across the whole range of activities other than the procurement of large quantities of alcohol and obscure crisp selections at the bar in the evenings, we have been shepherded off to a shack in the woods, many miles from human habitation.

  On the plus side, I am not with Ruth, because she’s ducked out of this one. She is big-time sick and hungover today. Which is good because I do not wish to have to deal with vomit. Also on the plus side, I am not with the man from Horsham with the alarming hair and the whistling front teeth. On the minus side I am with Russell, who generally effects dismay at the prospect of finding his way to the contact lens cupboard, let alone doing ‘outside’ without wheels and some shades. And on the oh-so-very-plus side that I am beginning to feel that it might just turn out to be a serious minus, we have Nick Brown as our very own Hike U Like representative; here to help shepherd our feckless duo to success. He arrived at eight thirty this very morning – a vision in khaki – and since then, it must be said, I have somehow metamorphosed from happy-but-cynical forty something on a beano to Baden Powell’s newest and most exhilarated recruit.