How to Make Time for Me

by Fiona Perrin

  ‘And I just didn’t see you… not that that makes you invisible. In fact, I wanted to say I didn’t know how you could ever be invisible…’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I needed to get this man off the phone. We’d met because of an unfortunate accident, and it turned out he lived a few doors down, but I didn’t need his guilt or clumsy compliments. ‘It’s sweet of you to call but I have to get on now. There’s something I have to deal with. But cheers, BiL,’ I said, my thumb hovering over the red ‘finish call’ button.

  ‘I’m going to go with the Bill thing. Everyone I meet today, I’m going to tell them to call me Bill. Anyway, I’m just glad you’re OK.’

  If you only knew, I thought as I said goodbye. If you only knew.

  *

  Lily’s door was firmly shut against the new day. Even thinking about her for that brief second of passing made me feel the shiver I associated with her now: worry. It was always there in the background and I spent long hours trying, firstly, to work out what it was that was troubling her so much and, secondly, how to fix it.

  I gently pushed the door open and put my head round it. There was a lump in the bed clothes, the covers pulled right over her head as if she was not just sleeping but hiding.

  ‘Lily, are you getting up?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘It’s a new day.’

  ‘Same shit,’ came the unmistakable whisper from under the covers.

  I sighed. ‘Come on, I got knocked over last night and I’m still…’

  She sat up then, blinking long lashes heavy with effort and concern as she looked at me. ‘But you’re all right now, though?’

  ‘Bit bruised but fine.’ I sat down on the edge of her bed and held her hand, which lay limply on top of the duvet. ‘What about you?’

  What I meant was, What’s really going on with you, my darling? You’re breaking my heart with all this not quite knowing.

  ‘Just tired with all the revising,’ she said in a voice designed to ward me off.

  ‘Well, maybe have a bit of time off today? Daisy’s gone to her group; she’s not revising today.’

  ‘She holds all of it in her head better than me,’ Lily said.

  ‘Not true.’ Daisy could sink facts into her head for the short amount of time it took to remember them for the test, but the real difference was in her confidence about doing it. ‘You need a rest from all the late nights.’ I thought about passing her door and finding a light still on into the early hours. I wondered how I was going to hold off her finding out about this terrible issue with Wilf.

  ‘What’s Aiden up to today?’ I asked, crossing my fingers that her boyfriend was in a mood where he wanted to spend time with her.

  ‘He’s coming round to revise with me.’ She got up and stretched.

  ‘Well, maybe go out for a walk or go to the cinema instead?’ I rustled in my bag. ‘Here’s a twenty.’

  ‘The exams start so soon, Mum,’ she said as if I understood nothing.

  It was one of those things that no one told you when you had really young children: that they would need you as much when they were teenagers and in such a different way than they did when they were small and snot-nosed.

  ‘I still think it would be better for you to have a break,’ was all I said.

  My heart hurt for her, but I focused hard on what I had to do next – making sure that the boy she considered her brother wasn’t going to be taken away from us forever.

  *The group was named for the generation of people born between 1995 and 2015. What happens to the next lot?

  †‘I was sleeping but now I’m woke’ = being alive to new ideas and philosophies. Daisy loved people who were ‘woke’.

  ‡A reference to a particularly flash teen tribe that wears famous brands of sportswear and walks with a hunched slouch; related to ‘chavs’.

  5

  I pulled up outside Petra and Ralph’s house. It was a rental on an estate on the edge of the town – a cul-de-sac with spacious detached houses along it, the sort I secretly thought were soulless and vulgar. The lawns were immaculate, but the flower beds were too new to be full; there were shiny cars in front of several of them but no real signs of what I would call life. This was the environment Ralph hung out in now – maybe all this newness had painted over his sense of morality too.

  I tried to compose myself in the car but instead felt my outrage rise. I strode up the path and, as I rang the front bell, I tried to breathe but tapped my toes impatiently. My strategy had to be to get to Ralph and implore him to go wherever he wanted with Petra, but to leave Wilf very much with me.

  There was the sound of steps echoing inside. It didn’t sound like Ralph; it was the brisk tap-tap of someone with somewhere to go and places to be, moving down a hallway. Petra, then.

  I pulled my body to its full height. Petra was small, but her perfect proportions and upright stance shouted ‘brisk and efficient’. I could see her working out it was me through the glass of the door; there was a brief pause before she pulled it open. She was wearing very clean dark jeans and Converse that looked as if they’d just come out of the box, with a pale pink cashmere jumper; her face was set in what I imagined was her version of a sympathetic smile.

  How dare you feel sorry for me? I determinedly did not smile back.

  ‘Hello, Calypso,’ she said, and tried to make the smile even wider. Her voice was louder and shriller than it should have been, disguising the lilt of her South African accent. I was also sure she knew how much I hated being called the long version of my name, but she carried on using it anyway, even though I’d heard Ralph correct her a couple of times.

  ‘Petra,’ I said. ‘You won’t be surprised to see me. Is Ralph in?’

  ‘I’m so sorry but, no, he is not,’ she said, extending the sentence for far too long. ‘Would you like me to tell him that you reached out to him?’

  I wanted to scream, ‘Reach out? Are you a member of the Four Tops?’ But I bit my lip instead. ‘When will he be back, Petra?’

  I thought about the very few occasions when I’d previously been in the same space as her: there’d been a couple of school football matches where we’d stood uncomfortably on the sidelines, me trying to be super-civilised like the post-marital celebrity couples you always saw in magazines, who managed to have brunch with each other’s new partners while smiling for the cameras. We’d made polite chit-chat, mostly about the importance of Ralph taking vitamins and mindfulness classes as he got better, and how ‘dear Wilf’ was progressing at football. There were the times I’d picked up Wilf from her house and, again, she’d only take the opportunity to big up her role in Ralph and Wilf’s lives.

  ‘It’s like she wants to get one over on me in a way that I couldn’t care less about,’ I’d grumbled to Marvin.

  She hesitated for a brief moment, and I knew she was lying. She was smaller than me and I stood a good chance of getting past her. Ralph was hiding inside. ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ I said, trying to shuffle past and see into the hallway. ‘I want to see him, Petra.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible, Calypso.’ She did a little dance in the doorway and I ducked and dived, trying to look over her shoulder.

  ‘Ralph,’ I shouted. ‘You cowardly bastard. Come down here.’

  ‘There is no need to use such aggressive and inappropriate language,’ Petra said sniffily.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to Wilf’s father.’ Then I pushed her aside. She was even lighter than I’d imagined, like a feather in a breeze, but she resisted me. In the end, though, I was bigger than her and much, much angrier.

  ‘A court will note physical violence,’ she spat as I strode into the hallway.

  She was already talking about the law – well, she was a lawyer. I focused on the bigger task – getting hold of my spineless ex-boyfriend, who was hiding somewhere in this house.

  The hallway was wide, painted an expensive magnolia colour with fake floorboards. There were few pictures on the wall – it gave the air of so
mewhere Petra had no intention of putting down roots. There was a door I’d been through before on the right, which led to the sitting room – sparsely furnished in taupe-coloured soft furnishings – and, I knew, another door to a dining room on the right. It had made me laugh when I’d seen it – trying to imagine Ralph, albeit sober and having been dragged upmarket by Petra, sitting at the head of the big veneered table Petra had put in it, complete with candelabra.

  I started pushing at the doors and scuttling behind the sofas while she stood back with folded arms. ‘Ralph, I know you’re here,’ I shouted, throwing open the door at the back of the hallway where an expanse of kitchen spread across the back of the house. Everything shone in a way that was impossible in a house with three messy teenagers. I spun quickly on my heel, my face in a snarl, my pace picking up.

  Petra made a feeble attempt to stop me going up the stairs, but I moved with determination. ‘You want to come out and talk to me about it?’

  As I raced to the top Petra cried, ‘Ralph, babe, she’s gone mad…’ and then suddenly, there he was, emerging from one of the bedroom doors and holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender.

  ‘Callie, come on, there’s no need…’ He was wearing jeans and one of the polo shirts that Petra had bought him – today’s one in an incongruous pink with more than a hint of smoked salmon. But his face was white with fear – and that made me even angrier. He was terrified of a confrontation with me – but he wasn’t sorry.

  I stopped at the top stair and looked at him with disgust. ‘How could you do this to me? How could you do this to Wilf?’

  Petra was halfway up the stairs behind me and said, ‘He has every right to live with his real parents.’

  Ralph held up his hands again at this and mumbled, ‘Petra, babe, it might be better if—’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘We need to protect our legal position.’

  I turned on her. ‘You might be a lawyer, but this isn’t about a legal position,’ I said as quietly as I could. ‘This is about the future of a child; it’s about his happiness.’

  ‘Callie, babe—’

  ‘Don’t babe me,’ I snapped at him. Since when had he called me – or anyone else – babe?

  ‘What I mean is, we need to sit down and talk about it…’

  ‘And that’s what you wanted when you sent me a solicitor’s letter?’ He must have heard the betrayal in my voice because his face took on a new shade of grey.

  ‘That was to protect us against precisely this sort of scene,’ Petra said, as if she was quoting some sort of law book again. She probably was. ‘You hadn’t been very forthcoming in our strategy to move forward as a family. We thought you might understand legal communication.’

  ‘Did you think I wasn’t going to fight for him?’ I asked her. What had she thought? I would meekly read their letter and then nip into Wilf’s room and start packing his suitcases?

  ‘But now we should sit down and talk about it like adults,’ said Ralph with some of her sanctimonious air. Christ, he’d changed. ‘Come on, Cal, we need to explain.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I said and burst into tears.

  Petra looked at me and folded her arms, as if to say, ‘I knew we could expect this kind of emotion from her.’ But I ignored her as the tears rolled.

  ‘I can’t believe you would take Wilf away from me, after all this time.’

  ‘We’re not taking him away from you.’ Ralph came closer to me but stopped short of touching me on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re taking him to the other end of the world. You know I think of him as my son.’

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Ralph. Helplessly, I started to move downstairs, Petra leading the way into the beige-zone of the sitting room. She tried to offer me a box of tissues, but I pushed them away angrily.

  ‘Could we talk alone?’ I asked Ralph, glaring at Petra.

  ‘I’m his stepmother,’ Petra said, ‘and that counts for a lot in the eyes of the law.’

  ‘Will you please stop talking about the law?’ I howled through tears that were now flowing like Niagara on the day of a rainstorm.

  I grabbed one of the tissues from the box and collapsed onto one of their sofas, which looked soft but was hard. Ralph sat down on the one opposite. He looked ridiculously healthy, as if he was mainlining vitamins and sleeping properly too. I wondered if Petra had also booked him in for Botox as part of her Rehabilitation-of-Ralph programme.

  She sat down beside him and held his hand in a gesture of coupledom. ‘We thought,’ she began, speaking slowly as if I were a child of six rather than a grown woman, ‘that it would be easier for you to receive a letter from an independent person…’

  ‘Than his own father? Ralph? What’s going on?’

  He had the grace to blush, which made his face clash with his salmon shirt; he let go of Petra’s hand. ‘You see, Pet’s got offered the most brilliant job in Cape Town and…’

  So, it was about Petra and her career. Or at least that was why they were moving.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, ‘but why do you have to take Wilf? I mean, he’s happy, his GCSEs are in a couple of years…’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said ‘Pet’ in the same patronising voice. ‘It’s important that we take the chance to maximise Wilf’s educational chances by moving him at the right time in his development. And we don’t want to affect his opportunities in the vital late stage of adolescence.’

  OK, she’d not only been swotting up on the laws on parenthood, she’d been reading books of bollocks on how to bring up kids. I took a deep breath. ‘Do you reckon you could let Ralph speak?’

  ‘Yeah, so I can’t leave Wilf here,’ Ralph said. ‘I know he’s been living with you for the past couple of years without me, due to what went on. But he’s my blood, Cal, even though I’ve let him down, and I want to carry on making it up to him.’

  I knew Ralph’s guilt too well. After every episode of bad parenting, drunkenness or drugginess, he would crawl back to me and plead how awful he was – and for a long while I’d believed him: he would change, stop, grow up, get better. More importantly, at the point of his abject remorse, he’d believed it himself too. And despite everything that had gone on, Wilf was his only child and I’d never doubted that he loved him very much. ‘So, I can’t go without him, especially now I’m better and in recovery.’

  I acknowledged this with a nod. ‘But he’s happy with us,’ I said, ‘and it works, and I love him. And what about the girls?’

  ‘Well, I thought they’d come and visit us too,’ said Ralph. ‘I’ll have loads of time, what with not being able to work for a while with the visa thing, so I could hang with them and Wilf. Daisy and Lily would love a trip to South Africa.’

  They probably would, but I’m not sure that would make up for losing the kid they thought of as their brother. ‘You know Lily is so…’

  ‘Yeah, Wilf said she’s got a bit jumpy,’ Ralph said. ‘Exams?’

  ‘I think it’s more than that.’ I put the tissue to my eyes again and spoke quietly.

  Petra looked at me with more pity. ‘So, you’ve got quite a lot on your plate?’

  Ralph turned and raised eyebrows at her. ‘Worrying time,’ he said, direct to me.

  ‘And you’re going to make it so much worse for her,’ I said. ‘She’ll react badly to think she’s losing Wilf.’

  ‘With respect,’ said Petra, ‘she’s not losing him, he’s just relocating.’ She obviously wasn’t kissed by the empathy fairy as she fell to earth.

  ‘Why can’t you go without him if you have to go? He could come and visit you instead.’

  ‘I just can’t leave him,’ Ralph said. ‘Even when he’s stayed at yours, I’ve seen him a few times a week and we’re really getting back on track. I miss him all the time. But you know how grateful I am to you for keeping him when everything was going wrong for me.’

  Keeping him? He made it sound as if I’d been doing him a favour rather than revelling in r
aising his son. I remembered the quick conversation when Ralph had finally left. Wilf had looked up at me in the kitchen and said, ‘I can stay here, Cal, can’t I?’

  And I’d just hugged him and said, ‘Forever.’

  ‘We’re both really grateful,’ said Petra. I shook my head and grimaced; all this anger dried my tears though. ‘But Ralph has also consistently expressed a desire that Wilf now move in with us as his proper parents.’

  ‘How long have you known about this?’ I asked Ralph, but she jumped in to answer.

  ‘I got approached a couple of months ago for a key new position offering me an excellent career opportunity with outstanding development potential,’ she began. ‘And, of course, the recruitment process was especially rigorous, so it’s only been solidified in the last few weeks. Then my husband and I…’ I raised my eyebrows again at her – seriously? ‘… had a lot of productive discussion and we made a decision, and then we aimed to provide as much notice as we could to you and dear Wilf.’

  Dear Wilf? Ralph sat silently while she spoke all this bullshit. ‘And why the solicitor? Why couldn’t you have just come and talked to me?’

  ‘Pet thought it would take the emotion out of the situation,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Cowardly.’ He blushed.

  ‘The law is quite clear,’ Petra said, back in her lawyer tones. ‘You have no rights over Wilf, as a minor.’

  ‘But you must know he won’t want to go.’

  ‘He’ll want to be with me, though?’ Ralph said. ‘Seriously, Cal, I’ve been working really hard on rebuilding my relationship with him. And he’s getting on all right with Petra now…’

  ‘It really is a significant opportunity and provides me with the platform to return to my own motherland,’ Petra said. ‘I have family back home too, you know.’

  ‘So, you always meant to go back?’ I asked her. ‘And take Wilf with you?’

  ‘Well, when Ralph and I were lucky enough to seal our special union,’ she started. Did she speak like this all the time? How did Ralph not throttle her in her sleep? ‘We were focused on ensuring that that element was successful. Ralph was very vulnerable.’ She actually patted his hand as she said this, and he looked at her with calf eyes. He was like an unfinished project to her, I thought – that was what she got out of it. She’d always deserve his gratitude for fixing him. ‘But as we progressed, we recognised that a new start would be of further benefit to him…’ what, going to another country? ‘… and, of course, that will always include our son.’