Life After Lunch

by Sarah Harrison

  His office looked like precisely what it was – a grown-up playroom. An inflatable palm tree rocked gently on its rounded axis whenever the door opened. On his desk was one of those flowers that moved when you spoke, and a trio of plump ceramic pigs flew across the wall between the magic-eye posters and the floor-to-ceiling photo-collage of family, friends, clients, and permutations of the three. His chairs were red corduroy, his cushions had Mickey Mouse on them, and the expensive technology was completely swamped by an enormous volume of paper – cuttings, magazines, box-files, dog-eared lists and jottings and a blizzard of yellow and pink stick-its. Glyn didn’t employ a full-time secretary at home. The theory was that he could E-mail any necessary responses to Guys ’n’ Dolls in London for the company’s hard-pressed amanuensis to deal with. In practice Verity and I, and very occasionally Becca, with degrees of computer literacy ranging from nil to barely adequate, did a good deal of ad hoc clerical mopping-up. I kept the books in a big old ledger of my father’s, and only transferred them to a computer spreadsheet at the end of the financial year, for the benefit of the accountant.

  The children all featured in his celebrity photo-collage. But I was captured in a frame all to myself, forever twenty-one, in a pastel portrait done by a street-artist in Brighton. That was my husband for you.

  Glyn, though different in all sorts of ways from the usual run of long-stay husbands, and from a background as different as possible from my own, could always fit in anywhere. It was a miracle our marriage survived in the face of such complete compatibility. The pretty compliments of the itinerant Patrick Lynch, I fancied, would add no more than a retrospective lustre to our silver celebrations.

  After our gorgeous, toffish, Home Counties wedding we returned abruptly to normality and a one-bedroom rented flat in Queen’s Park. Shortly before Verity was born we graduated to two bedrooms in Willesden Green. Glyn’s adaptability, aptitude and charm saw him up to Diary Editor at the magazine, whence, through the good offices of Cy, he moved to be Show Business Editor of Hipster, then enjoying its heyday as the teenage monthly. By the time Josh started primary school we were in a three-bedroom house on the Archway fringes of Highgate and invited to more show business parties than we knew what to do with.

  When Hipster folded Glyn was in the happy position of being able to turn down another similar job in order to do what he’d always wanted, and set up a small management agency, Guys ’ n’ Dolls. He was really going back to his Fallen Idols days, mixing with what he called ‘the real music people’, doing deals, seeing people right, pursuing dreams – his own and other people’s – and generally playing in the showbiz sand. He bought premises near the Post Office Tower and made a go of it – just. He was too nice, too concerned with making things work for clients he liked (which was by definition all of them) instead of taking on clients who would make things work for him. It was something of a relief when the entrepreneurial Cy, who had been in another part of the forest unsuccessfully punting ideas for a pre-teen weekly (he was ahead of his time) came back on the scene and into partnership in Guys ’n’ Dolls. Cy’s business acumen, allied with an altogether less sentimental view of what would now be called wannabees, freed Glyn to do what he did best, which was keeping clients and managements happy, talking up – and to – new acts and disseminating favourable publicity.

  The agency became solidly established, and in the mid-eighties we moved from the house off Archway Road to the university town of Litherbridge, and 23 Alderswick Avenue. Cy and the troops ran the office by the Post Office Tower and Glyn continued to play happily and productively, based at home but zooming back and forth up the A1 in his beloved racing-green four-wheel drive two or three times a week. Launches and previews, bashes and binges, hyping and hustling, moving and shaking, remained meat and drink to Glyn: even under the influence of the more sceptical Cy he remained touchingly wide-eyed about artistes. When Isobel ‘was born’ or ‘died’ – I never know which to say since they were both the same thing – I received expressions of sympathy from several pop stars and a major impresario.

  I practically never went to the bashes any more. Our daughter Becca was the girl for that job. Her big hair, small clothes and drop-dead body were ideally suited to the company, and she could work the room to deadly effect, scattering smiles which, like the dragon’s teeth of legend, sprouted into erections in her wake. In fact it was at one of these dos – to promote the crucial follow-up album for the ragga band Anko Limited – that she met Roberto, who was to become our first sin-in-law, and father of our grandson Amos.

  All this time I was not simply presiding over hearth and home – what am I saying, could anything be less simple? Once Josh was at school I cast about for a good and remunerative reason not to keep the paintwork pristine. I had a 2:1 in English, a self-taught knowledge of the QWERTY keyboard, a clean driving licence and the average parent’s appreciation of the human condition and just how much of it could be fixed. The Citizens Advice Bureau took me on. I survived the course – one day a week for three months, plus homework – and found what I was good at.

  By the time we moved to Alderswick Avenue there was nothing I didn’t know about advice to citizens – no leaflet, benefit, grant, nor legal wrinkle with which I was unacquainted, no contingency which I could not, after a fashion, handle. This was the work for which my nature – unambitious, liberal and non-specializing – ideally qualified me. After the trauma of Isobel’s death it helped to ease me back into life. I loved it, but the satisfaction (great) was in inverse proportion to the material rewards (nil). We weren’t pushed for money, but I was sensitive to the widely held notion that an unpaid job was no job at all. I took a business and finance course at the local Poly and did a bit of book-keeping for local freelances, of which there were plenty in Litherbridge, Glyn included.

  My fitful bursts of number-crunching effectively financed my twelve hours a week at the Bureau.

  Glyn, unlike Susan, thought my involvement with the CAB fitted me for canonization. ‘If it was me going into one of those places,’ he said, ‘feeling insecure, not knowing my rights, looking for reassurance, you’re exactly the kind of woman I’d be hoping to find.’

  ‘What kind is that?’

  ‘Intelligent, experienced, mature, liberated—’

  ‘That’ll do. But a bit less emphasis on the mature.’

  Our three children grew up in their variously unpredictable ways. Becca, who at school had been strong, stunning and bright, became a single mother, twice. Verity, who had been dim and uncommunicative, took Jesus into her heart and became a shining example to us all with a job at the night-shelter, where she converted psychotic drunks on a regular basis. The jury was still out on sarcastic, clever, idle Josh. And I learned the truth of the runic saying ‘It’s not over till it’s over’. With families, it was never over. Like a town when the picturesque old centre has been ripped out by some brain-damaged planners in the sixties, it was no good mopping and mowing over what was gone. The past was not necessarily the repository for all that was good, beautiful and upstanding. The present, after all, was where one lived. Childhood may no longer have been all ankle-socks. The Wind in the Willows and china horses, and pubescence carried six times the dangers and scarcely any of the fear. But your children grew up, and even matured, in spite of you.

  The attic was now Josh’s lair. Verity’s room, Becca’s old room and the family bathroom were on the second floor, and our room, the smarter bathroom and the main spare bedroom were on the first.

  Our bedroom, like the rest of the house, had never quite achieved the dizzy designer heights I’d envisaged for it. I’d wanted coolness, and quiet, and ordered calm. We still had the Portobello Road brass bedstead we bought when we were married. And certainly my well-chosen leafy greens and cottony whites were a start. But our combined untidiness and Glyn’s late-night phoning, viewing and listening habits meant that the room was usually hijacked by the hurly-burly I had so much wanted to avoid.

  Verity’s room
was chaste and sparse, with a picture of Our Lord and a statue of Our Lady (as I’d learned to refer to them) and several well-tended plants. Verity did not believe in having any more clothes than one actually needed, and would donate any surplus to the night-shelter or the charity shops the moment it occurred. Which was just as well because Becca, even with a place of her own, was well on the way to filling two wardrobes and several square metres of floor on her old room at Alderswick Avenue. Constrained by income support and fitful handouts from us, she bought extremely cheap clothes on a wear-and-chuck basis, and would occasionally offer castoffs to her sister. ‘Want these?’ she’d say, appearing in Verity’s doorway with an armful of stained and scented garments, none of them more than a few months old. Verity always accepted, and washed and ironed everything meticulously. What the dossers and bag ladies made of these random harvests of basques, micro-skirts and shiny leggings it was hard to imagine.

  My children’s rooms perfectly illustrated their relationship to the parental household. Verity, who spent the most time at home, was almost painfully clean and contained. Becca, with a perfectly good house of her own, had still succeeded in colonizing vast areas and contaminating them with dirty underwear and make-up with the tops off. Josh in his eyrie was with us but not of us. About twice a year I ventured into his territory, armed with the domestic equivalents of a whip, a chair and a flame-thrower, and emerged in a state of shock.

  Our living-room should, like our bedroom, have been a tranquil zone in which music might be listened to, books and papers read, selective television watched and intelligent conversation engaged in at our leisure. In the décor I had striven for the atmosphere in which these activities could flourish: clusters of large plants, a big mirror opposite the window and another over the fireplace, a polished wooden floor, fan-shaped uplighters and large copper lamps, two deep sofas, like gondolas, to lounge in in privacy among berry-coloured cushions … But this delightful environment was not enough to counter the habits of a lifetime. Glyn’s amiable restlessness and my own inability to set any kind of firm precedent were far more influential than my aspirations. The living-room had a transitory, excitable feel like a railway station. It was never tidy, nor tranquil, and probably the only time it served the kind of purpose I’d dreamed of was when we had friends for dinner. I had to admit Glyn and I did nothing to help ourselves. We were never the sort of parents who insisted on our routines, our space, and quality time together. And as ye sow, so shall ye find half a dozen spaced-out teenagers occupying the comfortable chairs, or one’s grandchildren eating kettle chips in front of Dumb and Dumber when the classic serial is on … We were our own worst enemies.

  I made myself a coffee and went out into the garden. I sat down on the peeling green park bench outside the kitchen window. The daffodils and narcissi were out and in a week or so the grass would need cutting. From the house next door where our neighbour taught Suzuki violin came the endlessly-repeated strains of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’.

  I had originally planted ‘Isobel’ against the south-facing fence to the left of the kitchen. But like her namesake she had failed to thrive and I had since transplanted her three times, with an increasing sense of desperation, and at the moment she occupied a corner of the raised bed at the edge of the patio. She was hanging in there – just. Each summer one or two frail white roses appeared and trembled for a week or so until their waxy petals fell. There were never more than two, and no second flowering. This saddened me. When Susan asked how her present was doing, I lied.

  The squeaky little violin next door kept plugging away. Glyn had alternative words: ‘Starkle, starkle, little twink, who the hell you am I think?’ I got up and was stooped over the bare rose twigs, examining them for signs of life, when the phone went.

  ‘I have a call for you from a Miss Lewis, will you pay for the call?’

  Becca was in a towering rage. ‘ Mum? Is Verity there?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact she’s—’

  ‘Then can you please come and take the kids off my hands? I’ve got this bloody stupid man harassing me—’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’ve had an accident in the car. It absolutely wasn’t my fault—’

  ‘Is everyone all right? Are the children all right? What about you?’

  ‘Mum! We’re all fine except that the car’s a write-off.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Does it matter? Can’t you just get over here? Like now?’ Becca’s tone implied that I was focusing, typically, on trivia like life and death instead of the far more pressing matter of bailing her out.

  ‘Well – where are you?’

  ‘I’m – Christ, I don’t know–’ I heard her open the door of the call-box and ask impatiently, ‘Where is this? No – what’s the name of the road?’ During this interval I heard Sinead wailing in the background.

  ‘Is Sinead okay?’

  ‘She’s perfectly okay, but this idiot keeps picking her up—’

  ‘Which idiot?’

  ‘Look – can you just get here?’

  ‘You still haven’t told me where—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ She was exasperated with my nit-picking need to know the facts. ‘It’s the corner of Selwyn Street, near Planet Burger!’

  With Sinead’s wails ringing in my ears I drove like a doctor on call, and arrived with my legs shaking and my heart pounding at the corner of Selwyn Street. There was no mistaking the place – a small crowd had gathered. I pulled up in the cycle lane and left the car with its hazard lights on. Becca’s battle-scarred purple Mini and a black Granada Scorpio had come to rest in the side-street. The Granada was in front, and unmarked as far as I could see. The Mini had a bloody nose. So not only had it been Becca’s fault, but she’d come off worse, a state of affairs perfectly calculated to send her ballistic. On the other hand this was also the sort of situation she could manipulate to good effect with her eyes shut and one hand tied behind her. She was holding the tearful Sinead (presumably rescued from the idiot) in one arm, and an enraptured Amos by the hand. In her black shirt, skin-tight Levis and fringed Red Indian boots, she quivered with righteous indignation, a tigress in defence of her young.

  ‘We could all have been killed!’ she asserted vehemently as I came round the corner. The focus of her attention was a plump middle-aged man in a grey suit, his pleasant face pale and concerned.

  ‘It’s all very well for you, driving around in that great tank,’ continued the incandescent Becca. ‘But not all of us are so well protected!’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the man. I bet he was, too.

  ‘Becca?’ I ventured. ‘Darling?’

  ‘This is my mother,’ said Becca. The emphasis on the first word indicated that she’d been giving me some sort of build-up. ‘She works in the Citizens Advice Bureau.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked the man, smiling with anxious politeness in my direction.

  ‘Yes, actually—’

  ‘She knows the law,’ added Becca threateningly.

  ‘Granny!’ whined Sinead. ‘ Granny!’

  Becca let her slither to the ground and Sinead rushed into my arms. I picked her up and stood at Becca’s shoulder, completing without really meaning to, an affecting family tableau.

  ‘Look,’ the man took a wallet from his breast-pocket and fished out a business card, ‘this is me. If I can just take down your name and address this whole thing can be sorted out and over and done with.’ It occurred to me that under Becca’s onslaught he was beginning to revert to the language of the nursery. She snorted like a palfrey. ‘It was an accident,’ he went on. ‘These things happen. You were driving a tad too close—’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry – you weren’t paying attention to the lights!’ Becca retaliated. ‘Big fast car, too much attitude—’ how did she have the nerve? – ‘you thought you’d slip across on amber and then changed your mind, with the result you had to slam on your brakes – I never stood a chance of stopping!’

  �
��Perhaps you were thinking of slipping over on amber too,’ suggested the man with a commendable but foolhardy glimmer of spirit.

  One of the bystanders made a ‘Who-ah!’ noise in anticipation of further fireworks. Never one to disappoint her public, Becca narrowed her eyes and stepped forward.

  ‘Don’t you dare try and tell me what I was thinking!’

  ‘Becca,’ I said, catching her sleeve. ‘The police are here.’

  ‘And about bloody time.’

  ‘Now then, love,’ said the first officer, who was young and hunky. ‘Take it easy. Why don’t you just tell us what happened?’

  I told Becca – or rather, I told the second police officer to tell her – where I was going, and then piled Sinead and the extremely reluctant Amos into my car, parked it on a meter, and went to Planet Burger. It was packed, with several queues snaking back from the counter and not a free seat in the place. We loitered next to a group who seemed about to finish their Family Fun Meal, but they were quite impervious to hints. The glares and fidgets of the children, my weighty sighs and repeated declarations that ‘We wouldn’t be long’ did nothing to prevent them toying with their last few fries as if they were alone on a Cornish beach. At last they got up, pointedly ignoring us to show that their decision to leave had nothing to do with us, and I thrust Amos into the banquette.

  ‘You stay right here, don’t move, and say these seats are taken, all right, love?’

  ‘Okay!’ He was completely sunny – his day so far had been almost perfect.

  ‘Sinead, you come with me and we’ll choose.’

  Normally Sinead would have taken the Granny option like a shot, but on this occasion her eye was caught by a Family Fun Hat which the previous occupants had left behind. It was a kind of cardboard forage cap densely decorated with Ray Robot, the Planet Burger logo, in the corporate colours of red and green. At the very moment she reached for it Amos snatched it up and plonked it on his head. If Sinead had wanted the hat before, she would now willingly have died for it.