Happy Birthday and All That

by Rebecca Smith

  Happy Birthday and All That

  REBECCA SMITH

  To Sarah and Cecily

  Contents

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  August

  Here was Frank with a trolley that was empty but for Tom and the flowers that James had said he wanted to buy for Mummy, and there was Melody, standing on a podium next to the Take-Away-Style Curry counter. She was looking pretty cute in her green uniform and some inappropriate shoes. Every so often she interrupted the music to tell people about special offers. Frank hadn’t realised that it was a Superstore Party Nite.

  ‘There’ll be 30 per cent off for the next twenty customers at the pizza counter … and 20 per cent off all purchases of savoury bakery items tonight … And now a spot prize for safe trolley steering. My manager, Mike, is touring the store right now with a big box of Celebrations for someone with a wheely fantastic way with their trolley!’ Melody told the chilled air.

  ‘Go away Frank,’ she hissed away from the microphone. He took the bunch of flowers and poked her leg. James and Tom laughed.

  ‘Piss off, Frank!’ she said, perilously close to the microphone. ‘And now a prize,’ (she kicked at him with her spiky toes) ‘for our oldest and youngest customers. If you think that might be you then come on up to the stage by the curries. We’re looking for our oldest and youngest in store right now … piss off, Frank.’

  He was standing in front of her in mock-adoration, now strewing the stage with chrysanthemums. They’d been on special offer. The music started again.

  ‘Look. I’m going to the toilet until you’re gone. Now piss off or the manager’s going to be on to me.’ She jumped neatly off the stage and disappeared through a ‘Staff Only’ door.

  Those who fancied themselves the oldest customers were making their slow way towards the empty stand. People with babies just days old were starting to queue. Free nappies might be on offer. Frank picked up the microphone just as Melody reappeared.

  ‘Get down! I’ll lose my job!’ she laughed.

  ‘And our next prize,’ Frank said, ‘is for the couple who most resemble each other. Matching trainers? Similar girths? Same tattoos and haircuts? Get up here. We’ve a year’s free shopping to give away!’

  ‘Frank!’

  ‘Get down, Dad!’

  ‘What else are we looking for?’ he continued. ‘We’ve got prizes in these categories: most obnoxious toddler, heaviest and lightest pensioner, most ridiculous hairstyle - but our star prize of a lifetime’s supply of frozen food will go to the person who, in the judge’s opinion, least needs the contents of their trolley! So get yourselves up here.’

  Melody’s manager was back. He seized the mike and two security guards got Frank in an armlock and marched him out of the store. James, close to tears, pushed Tom in the empty trolley behind them.

  ‘Looks like we’re going to Tesco’s, kids,’ Frank said. ‘We can get Mum some nicer flowers and have chips in the café. What do you think?’

  ‘I saw Mrs Fleance in there, and another teacher watching you,’ said James.

  ‘It was just a joke,’ said Frank. ‘Mum will never know.’

  * * *

  Mum was at home, sorting out the washing.

  Her name was Posy, unfortunate but true. She had spent her life failing to live up to her namesake, Posy Fossil in Ballet Shoes. She tried her best, and wore scoop-necked T-shirts that were described as ‘ballerina-style’ in catalogues, swirly skirts, flat shoes, and now there was even a fashion for wrap-around tops, just like the pink ones her aunts had knitted for her. She’d given up ballet at twelve, concentrated on jazz dance and then nothing. Not dancing anyway.

  Posy had tried to give her own children (at least the boys) more sensible names. She had James, Poppy, Tom and Isobel, but then their surname was Parouselli.

  Parouselli. The name had seemed like a present. She heard carousel music, and saw candy canes and pink and yellow parasols. The merry-go-round ponies whinnied for joy at it; they pawed the ground and leapt up and down their poles. Dick van Dyke did a little dance. She had tried it out - Posy Parouselli - before she’d even met its owner. She’d been like her thirteen-year-old self, trying out her name with that of whichever boy she currently liked. Perhaps it was the name she’d fallen for. She saw it on lists for lectures and tutorials. Frank Parouselli. She was smitten.

  What a disappointment it would have been if Frank hadn’t been like himself: tall and dark with eyes the colour of a Cornish summer sky, the blue you see in August when you are swimming far out from the shore, and look back to where the sky meets the gorse-covered, pineapple-scented cliffs. Frank Parouselli. It was lounging in a stripy deckchair, licking an ice cream, reading something funny. Ah, first impressions.

  Frank played stand-up bass. His band ‘The Wild Years’ were slowly greying and balding. The New Year’s Eve gig seemed to come round more and more often. The twice-weekly practice sessions had become a weekly night down the pub with Melody, the pretty twenty-two-year-old who sometimes sang with them. They still had their spot at The Oak Tree and a number of other regular gigs too.

  Frank had sold his motorbike. The Parousellis had a green Volvo estate.

  ‘It’s a prep school car,’ the man at Ringwood Motors had told Posy, and she’d smiled; as if they’d ever be able to afford prep school. She entertained vague and silent hopes that the children might win scholarships, perhaps the boys might even go to Winchester College where their grandfather had been, but only as day boys of course.

  ‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown,’ Frank said, quoting the absent father in Swallows and Amazons, which James was ploughing through. Frank didn’t believe in private education, and nor did Posy, apart from for her own children.

  Frank knew that he was more or less the man in that Talking Heads song ‘Once in A Lifetime’. He and Posy had loved it when they were students, but now here he was waking up every day thinking ‘Well, how did I get here?’

  He was almost that man, but not quite. He loved Posy, he loved the children. It was all the trappings he could do without; the Jolly Good School, the importance of Start-rite shoes at thirty-seven quid a go (and he was going round in holey old deck-shoes, not that he cared, or damp beige desert boots, £12.99 from Portswood Shoefayre). He hated the chitchat in the playground that was oxygen to Posy, all the committees that she was on.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother. Why don’t you all just decree that every family has to give fifty quid a year instead of all this endless fundraising? Think of the time and effort you’d all save! Or just let somebody else do it.’

  ‘But what if everyone thought that? There’d be no pre-schools if nobody volunteered. I feel compelled …’

  So she spent long evenings at the Chair’s house making things out of saltdough, and stuffing felt Teletubbies and Tweenies for the St Peter’s Pre-School Autumn Fayre.

  The only time Frank felt like himself now was when he was playing; but even with The Wild Years he sometimes felt out of it. He was the only one who was married. Al was divorced, with one child, Finn, whom he didn’t see often enough; Rich and Ron were still single. They drove from pub to pub in Rich’s van, which was really the band’s as they’d all put £300 in for it. They hung out in student pubs and looked at girls. When Frank went out with them he felt about eighty years old.

  Posy folde
d the clean towels and jammed them into the airing cupboard. The slumbering volcano of quilts and blankets and swimming towels looked so inviting that she was tempted to throw herself in, to find oblivion in James’s leaping dolphins duvet cover. She must pull herself together, wake herself up, hit the Diet Coke. She didn’t have long before they’d be back from the supermarket, and Isobel might wake up at any moment.

  There were many things that Posy wasn’t allowed to do. These included being depressed. If ever Frank noticed her being sad or melancholy or miserable (it had to be quite extreme for him to notice, and involve audible sobbing) he would say things like:

  ‘Everyone feels like that Pose, you’ve just got to carry on,’ or,

  ‘But don’t you think that depression is the ultimate self-indulgence?’

  It was a different matter if Frank was depressed. His depressions were existential crises, intellectual matters. They’d last for weeks, usually around Christmas and New Year, or family holidays, the arrival of their babies, or other people’s birthdays. They involved him getting very drunk each night and watching action thrillers, aeroplane hostage movies, and made-for-TV dramas on Channel 5. The next day his breath was such that Posy declined any offers he made to do the morning school run. He would usually not be up in time anyway, having fallen asleep on the sofa, then woken up to find something else unmissable: ‘The Properties of Rope’ on the BBC Learning Zone, something like that. He would tell Posy all about it. It was lucky his work never involved early starts.

  That was the clean stuff put away. Now for the hip-high heaps of the dirty. She knelt on the landing and started to sort it into colours.

  Those whom the gods wish to damn they first call promising. Frank Parouselli, BA Hons (First Class) English Literature, was a BettaKleen distributor. This was one of the day jobs that he couldn’t give up. Posy kept her eyes down as she worked so as not to see into the spare room with its stacks of the BettaKleen catalogues (most of the customers and the other distributors called them ‘books’) and the array of products awaiting delivery. Frank had to make up the orders, sorting the microwave cooksets, the sink tidies, the plate stackers, the ceramic teddy scouring-pad holders, the swing-bin fresheners, into the mean little bags that the company supplied. Frank was amazed that anyone could want any of it.

  ‘Hey!’ he nearly told his customers. ‘Don’t buy it. Won’t it just highlight the emptiness of your life, the futility of your existence? A viscose carrier-bag dispenser with cheeky chick motif won’t bring you happiness. Whatever need it is you are trying to meet, whatever void in your life you are trying to fill, the tartan trollymate isn’t the answer.’

  ‘I am a Pedlar of Pointlessness,’ he would tell people at dinner parties who asked what he did.

  ‘He’s really a musician,’ Posy would quickly add. They found that they were rarely invited back. Frank so often seemed to do something that Posy thought was inappropriate. There had been the time when he had eaten a huge platter of cherries that Posy said had been clearly for decorative purposes only. Not only had he wolfed down handfuls of them, implying that the huge five-course dinner he’d just eaten wasn’t enough, he’d put the stones back in the bowl.

  ‘You must have realised that they weren’t intended for consumption. There would have been a small empty bowl for the stones if anyone was meant to eat them,’ Posy told him later. She was also mortified because she thought that he had been much drunker than everyone else, sitting there like a grinning gnome, laughing when nobody else did.

  ‘Cherries for display purposes. So they live in a department store window. That’s obscene,’ Frank replied, and left for his shed at the bottom of their garden where he went to smoke and practise.

  Posy didn’t allow smoking in the house, so Frank was always walking out on the family, leaving for his shed. Posy insisted on it, but it made her feel as though he always had somewhere better to go, and that she was being dumped in the kitchen like someone boring at a party.

  Posy’s kitchen was sunny and yellow with a long farmhouse table where the children did painting. It was the kitchen she’d always wanted. She found herself smiling as she wiped crumbs and jam from the oilcloth.

  She and Frank had been together for years now. They’d first shared the upstairs of a Victorian house with a turret and slates and a pointy roof that made Frank think of the Dragonmobile in Wacky Races. The weekend that Posy found out that she was pregnant was the weekend after her father had died of liver failure. Her mother had died two years earlier of cancer, caused, Posy and her sister Flora were certain, by years of walking around with internally clenched fists, years of biting her lip and swallowing her feelings and anger in case she invoked the wrath of their father. Posy and Flora were left the Surrey Tudorbethan house they so hated. They sold it, and at twenty-five Posy had tens of thousands of pounds. She was glad that her father hadn’t known about her baby. She was planning to break the cycle, to be with someone not like Daddy. She married Frank.

  Frank advocated throwing Posy’s inheritance in the river, or giving it anonymously to a centre for alcoholics or the homeless or battered women. Posy thought he was probably right. She had hated that house. Every room had held some horrible tableau. The dining room was probably the worst, all the farcical family dinners, and the time he’d smashed their Easter eggs. Biff, biff, biff, his slow hand like a cartoon fist. He’d been jealous of the pretty eggs, even though he’d said he didn’t want one, that he hated chocolate.

  ‘Bloody great idea for a religion,’ he’d growled. ‘Glorification of a Roman torture method!’

  The real reason was that he felt excluded from something the ‘girls’ had. They’d watched open-mouthed, three empty eggshapes, and then Flora and Posy had fled to their friends round the corner, leaving their mother to face the music, again. The friends had been out, on the sort of Easter Sunday walk on Tadworth Common that other people’s families went on. They’d walked down to the garage and bought each other and their mother the only eggs left. Caramac.

  Posy decided to buy the biggest, most beautiful house she could afford. It was Edwardian with five bedrooms, sash windows, fireplaces and stained glass, and overlooked Southampton Common. She had fallen in love before she’d even crossed the doormat. The hall had black and white tiles. There were so many rooms that she and Frank joked that they could spend the whole day there and never meet. They could sleep in different postcodes. There was a lot to be done, but she thought that they would slowly do it all.

  When Posy chose her house she had no idea about the wildlife that would come with it. There were foxes and badgers and squirrels on the Common across the road from them, a hedgehog in their garden. A grey squirrel liked to sit on their fence and eat from Plested Pie bags and Ginsters pasty wrappers. Their garden was visited by woodpeckers and wood pigeons, chaffinches, treecreepers, wagtails, goldfinches and bullfinches. She wondered if it was the proximity to the Common that gave them such huge spiders, spiders whose steps across the ceiling at night were audible, spiders that terrified Poppy.

  Until she had her house Posy hadn’t known that slugs came so big, or in such an array of colours: horrible oranges, deathly greys and colourless ones like creatures from the deepest, coldest oceans. Perhaps that came from living under the Parousellis’ bath and in the cupboard under their sink. She never knew when she was going to come across some fresh horror. And having children made it much worse. Today there had been a curled-up, dessicated caterpillar in James’s pocket. Trouser fluff had clogged its little boots. She had taken it into the garden and tried to revive it in a puddle. She left it beside some tasty-looking leaves. When she checked later it had disappeared, but she feared the worst. She decided that she would have to talk to James about it, explain that caterpillars had a right to freedom. He would probably cry, even though she’d tell him that it had probably survived and crawled away. Oh remorse, remorse.

  There was ivy growing on the front of the house. Posy chopped it back and tried to drag it down when it m
anaged to penetrate the windows. It forced its way in overnight, coming through the gaps between the upper and lower casements. If ever they went away, Posy imagined that it would have taken over the house by the time they came back. They’d return to find it sleeping in their bed; it would finish the jam and let dirty mugs pile up in the sink.

  The house had leaks and missing tiles, and rattling, rotting windows. The outlines of the floorboards were visible through some of the carpets.

  ‘Don’t pay someone to do it. I’ll fix it,’ Frank said for the first few years, but he never did. Eventually all the money was gone, and paying someone was no longer a possibility. Posy looked longingly at the ads for builders and roofers and handymen in the back of the Advertiser. She knew that there was an underground stream nearby. She thought that it was flowing away with her chi, as well as causing the damp stripes along the walls. Frank had no time for any of it.

  ‘Hey! I thought I married a Bohemian, someone with values, so why are you always spluttering about guttering? Did you ever see a house fall down? Well, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Re-pointing is necessary!’ Posy said. ‘I keep having bad dreams about falling through rotten floorboards. Other people’s windows aren’t like this.’

  ‘Oh Pose, you don’t want to fall for any of that replacement windows crap. It’s all a scam. A capitalist plot.’

  ‘I didn’t say replacement windows. Perhaps when Isobel’s a bit older I could do some of them myself.’ Perhaps she would sit happily in her pram whilst Posy rubbed down, filled and repainted some of the windows.

  ‘Why don’t you get Flora to sort the windows out for you?’

  ‘Because we haven’t got any money.’

  Flora was the ideal person to solve the Parousellis’ damp and window problems, to re-point everything. She was the proprietor of ‘Perfect Solutions’, a company dedicated to sorting things out. ‘If it’s legal we’ll do it!’ the leaflet boasted. Flora organised parties, anniversary celebrations, sometimes whole weddings. She cleared out cupboards, streamlined houses (feng shui an optional extra), imposed filing systems, hired and fired cleaners and gardeners, obtained quotes and engaged plumbers, builders, roofers and handypeople of all descriptions. She easily tackled the simpler repairs herself. She did other people’s Christmas shopping. The floor plan of John Lewis was behind her eyes like a circuit board. Her clients received complimentary Christmas presents from Perfect Solutions: L’Occitane lavender bath milk for the women, a delicious-smelling, soothing shaving gel for the men. Perfect Solutions knew how busy and stressed they were, that they needed a treat. Flora had even written people’s thank-you letters for them. She assembled self-assembly furniture. The coming of Ikea to Southampton would see her profits soar.