Single Mother on the Verge

by Maria Roberts

  ‘You said to me,’ I remind him, ‘“The house is a mess.” You said it was shabby and that we needed to do something about it. And I need to think about Jack’s wellbeing. So I’m doing something about it.’

  My tough-cookie voice isn’t working so I try a different approach. ‘It’ll be a few weeks of disruption and then, sweetheart, the house will look great.’

  My creepy-girlfriend voice isn’t working either because Rhodri escapes upstairs to the bedroom to change out of his work clothes. Meanwhile I email my boss, Athens, to tell him I’ll be in tomorrow, and the day after, then sit down at my computer for my latest assignment: I need to figure out how to promote an Asian lesbian, bisexual and transgender performing arts company to the regional press.

  ‘What would you like to eat?’ I ask Jack. ‘What do you want to eat?’ I ask Rhodri, peering up at the menu in the chip shop.

  My lucky, lucky family: a Friday night out on me. I’d rather go to a seafood restaurant for monkfish, but we’ll have to make do with a sit-down chip shop where we can get three meals, with drinks, for under ten pounds.

  Back home, much of the kitchenware has been packed away. This evening when Jack returned from school he saw all the boxes packed chock-a-block into the living room and scrambled over them as though he was climbing Ben Nevis.

  At the Formica table I pull out a notepad and biro to keep him amused. I write down a couple of sums, then put together a quick crossword and a wordsearch. Rhodri and I gulp tea from cracked old mugs as Jack swigs from a can of Coke oblivious to Rhodri’s disapproval.

  ‘It’s really very good of Eleanor and my dad to offer to help us prepare the kitchen,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Rhodri shrugs his shoulders. Makes some comment about no free time. Not his choice.

  ‘We’ll have to get up early tomorrow. They’re arriving at nine.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘You said.’

  The waitress brings us three plates of chips. We tuck into them silently. Behind us an eager young woman is chatting into her mobile phone about her move to a new flat.

  ‘During the week we’ll have to lay the laminate flooring,’ I say.

  ‘It’s too much of a rush.’

  ‘It’s the only way we could do it. Then the bathroom suite’s arriving.’

  ‘Where will we put it?’

  ‘In the living room and Jack’s room.’

  ‘We’ll have the new kitchen in boxes in the hallway,’ says Rhodri, ‘the contents of the old kitchen, with your office stuff, in the living room and our bedroom, the contents of the back room in there too, the new bathroom in Jack’s bedroom and the lounge. Where will Jack sleep?’

  ‘With us?’

  ‘Where will we eat?’

  ‘On the bed?’

  Annoyed, Rhodri turns away from me.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I urge. I explain to Rhodri that there are complicated conditions linked to the loan. He scowls all the more. The building society won’t release the money until the work is done, so to save on charges and so forth, much of the work has to be completed at the same time. And the house is freezing and draughty. We haven’t had heating or hot water for more than a month. Winter is taking grip. Jack has asthma. There’s no point in having a new boiler with rubbish old windows.

  ‘Think of how much energy we’ll save,’ I encourage him. ‘The carbon footprint. The money.’

  ‘But I planned on doing some activism,’ retorts Rhodri. ‘When will I have time for that?’

  I don’t know. Living in a warm house and paying the bills are more important to me than environmental activism.

  ‘Stop arguing,’ says Jack.

  ‘We’re not arguing,’ I clarify. ‘We’re simply having a discussion.’ Then I turn to Rhodri. ‘You always do this,’ I say to him, a comment that instantly catapults our ‘discussion’ into full-blown-argument territory. I eat my chips hurriedly, then stalk out of the chip shop. Jack plugs his MP3 into his ears and runs ahead of me towards the car.

  Rhodri storms down the road after us. ‘Your keys,’ he shouts, hurling them at me.

  They clank onto the pavement so I have to bend down to retrieve them. How humiliating.

  ‘I’ll make my own way home,’ he bellows. He turns on his heels and stamps round the corner, past the station and down the high street.

  At first I smile. Then I grin, and soon I’m laughing naughtily to myself. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it.

  ‘Where’s Rhodri going?’ asks Jack.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answer.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  We climb into the car and wait for a few moments. Sure enough, Rhodri comes round the corner. At first he strides fiercely, but as he nears us he lollops boyishly. When he reaches the passenger side of the car, I press the fob to unlock the doors.

  ‘I don’t know which bus to catch home from here,’ he says, sliding onto the seat.

  ‘Fancy a lift, then?’

  ‘Go on,’ he says, clipping the seatbelt over him and switching on the car stereo.

  7

  ‘Where’s Rhodri?’ asks my dad. ‘And where’s my cup of tea?’

  ‘Cup of tea right here,’ I say, handing him a mug.

  My stepmother Eleanor is amusing Jack with a red balloon in the hallway, bouncing it on his head until he yelps, ‘No, no, no! Do it again! Again – again!’

  ‘Any biscuits?’ asks my dad.

  ‘Coming right up,’ I chirrup. Rhodri doesn’t get this, that when people – my family to be precise – come to the house to carry out odd jobs, they expect to be waited on.

  ‘So, where’s Rhodri?’

  ‘In the garden,’ calls Jack. ‘Pretending to be a bird.’

  On your average day this comment would swoop over my head. Today, with an audience, it’s bizarre. Cringing, I look out of the kitchen window to see if what Jack has said is true. Sure enough, Rhodri is on the grass, flapping his arms up and down as he strides the length of the garden, our two fat white rabbits hopping at his feet. My father is standing behind me. ‘What is he doing?’ he mutters in disbelief.

  ‘Qigong exercises. That,’ I point out to my father, ‘is the Flying Bird.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to be ripping out the kitchen.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, picking up a hammer and walloping the kitchen cabinets. ‘You tell Rhodri that.’

  *

  The old kitchen cabinets are out and lying in broken bits by the back gate. Rhodri sloped off at various points to do more flying exercises around the garden. ‘I have a sore back,’ he insisted, ‘from that very bad car accident I had four years ago. Remember?’

  I’d forgotten about it. ‘I have a sore back too,’ I replied petulantly.

  Other times he said he needed a rest and took himself off to the cluttered living room to lounge on the sofa and sift through the Review section of the Guardian. I smouldered a bit but I didn’t burst into flames.

  This evening Rhodri and I have been laying the laminate floor. I can honestly say it has brought us closer together: I held the planks in place as he banged energetically. This joint effort brought with it many curses, accompanied by deep satisfaction. If it weren’t for the fact that Jack is sleeping in our bed, there’s a bath on his bed, a flat-pack kitchen in the hall, no carpet on the stairs, nowhere to move in the living room, and no curtains in the kitchen, this would have been Rhodri’s lucky night. I’ll keep his gold stars for extra-good behaviour in his sexual-favours savings account. If he accumulates ten, I’ll treat him.

  He’s doing a wonderful job. When he’s warm and obliging like this, I adore him. I forget all my other frustrations: his acute environmentalism, the never-ending lectures on the evils of Persil…

  The next phase, even though the kitchen is still in progress, is the bathroom. Damien’s father, Eddie, has been hauled in for that job. I’m going to pay him with cans of Boddington’s bitter. I’ve estimated that eight cans should do it, approximate value nine
pounds (a professional wanted to charge me a thousand to fit a bathroom – what was he thinking?).

  According to Eddie, we have problems with the soil pipe, which runs from the toilet into the kitchen. For some reason he’s had to cut a section out of it, and says he can’t get a replacement fitted until tomorrow so he’s bunged it up with a rag. Now he’s gone off to play a round of golf. We’re without a kitchen and have no bath, no wash-basin, and an unusable toilet.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ said Eddie, ‘do not flush the toilet.’

  So, there’s a bucket in the bathroom to pee in, and if we need a number two we’ll have to go to Philomena’s house. She won’t mind. We can take our own toilet roll. That would be polite.

  My dad’s arriving in an hour to finish the last of the flooring and fit new taps ready for our brand new kitchen sink. I’ve had to switch my mobile to silent and stop answering it. I have loads of freelance jobs on but I can’t work and oversee renovations in the house at the same time. Paid employment and the Asian-lesbian performing troupe will have to wait.

  Father and I are admiring the copper piping ready for the new kitchen sink. Before Dad went bankrupt during the recession in the 1980s, and lost his home, his business, wife and kids, he was a plumber. Now he’s a gas engineer. A good copper-piping job is, to my father, the plumber’s equivalent of a Rembrandt. Rhodri is upstairs changing into his DIY clothes.

  ‘That’s quite something,’ I say.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ agrees my father, rubbing his hand over his baldy patch. ‘See how I’ve curved the pipes there?’

  I lean in closer. ‘Beautiful. You’ve done an amazing job, thank you.’ I kiss his forehead lightly. But Dad isn’t satisfied with just a few compliments so I go on and on about the piping. ‘Look at those parallel lines,’ I try.

  ‘Hmm…’ he says.

  ‘Brilliant, beautiful,’ I say again. ‘A work of art.’

  He’s happy with that: a work of art.

  Just then the rag fires out of the soil pipe, we hear a heavy thud, and water shoots all over the new laminate floor.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ I shriek, horrified. ‘I told him not to flush the toilet!’ My brand new kitchen floor is now covered with sewage.

  ‘What?’ says Rhodri walking into the kitchen, munching a bag of sunflower seeds. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’

  ‘The soil pipe,’ I shriek, holding my nose.

  Fucking hell.

  I want to cry.

  ‘You’re doing a fabulous job,’ I tell the fitter. I couldn’t persuade any friends or family to install the kitchen in exchange for beer so I’ve had to pay someone. I’m trying not to think about the cost.

  Everything is marvellous. It’s taken less than a week for the new kitchen units to be assembled and placed in situ. I watch the man shaping a worktop with his circular saw and play with the wicker baskets, sliding them in and out. Oh, yes, we have wicker baskets for vegetables and fruit, a stainless-steel oven, and a chimney extractor-hood thing. At last we’re middle class.

  ‘I’ll be finished by the end of the day,’ the kitchen fitter shouts, over the loud grinding of his power tool.

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ I yell back.

  I hand him yet more tea and biscuits, remove myself to the living room and, on a small corner of the sofa, squashed between boxes, get back to work.

  A week has passed since the double-glazing arrived. Rhodri and I admired the shiny new windows. I kissed the glass and thanked God for the man at the mortgage company. ‘Stop stroking the windows,’ Jack shouted. ‘Anyone would think you love them.’

  ‘I do love my windows.’

  ‘They’re just windows.’

  They are not just windows. The woman who lives at the end of our terrace thinks she has the nicest windows, but actually I have – by miles. All week I’ve enjoyed endless hours on the sofa gazing at my beautiful double-glazing with complete adoration because the house is less draughty and wondrously quiet. I can’t even hear the hum of the motorway.

  Rhodri didn’t agree with the uPVC element because it doesn’t biodegrade, but what can I do? Hardwood from sustainable UK forests is just too expensive. The alternative would be cheap wooden imports. The trouble with globalization is that, although prices go down, your carbon footprint goes up.

  Today will see another triumph: our new boiler is being fitted. Far too many men are trampling through the house swearing and moaning as they install it. In the meantime I sit at the kitchen table, wrapped up warm and wearing red-leather gloves as I type a feature for a magazine. They must think me some sort of leather fetishist.

  At last we’re blessed with warmth and comfort. Jack won’t need to sleep with his jumper on top of his pyjamas. As for me, I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be stripped naked. It’s definitely warmer in the bedroom tonight, and because of the radical change in temperature, Rhodri and I are about to enjoy a jolly good fumble.

  8

  My phone vibrates. It’s a text message from my boss, Athens:

  M. Need to know what days you are working this week.

  Athens often calls me M, like I’m a Bond girl or something.

  Good question. It’s a Wednesday afternoon, early December, and I haven’t made an appearance in the office since last Friday. I work fifteen hours a week for Athens, administering a literature website and arranging meetings. I work on flexitime, but I may have flexed a step too far. Athens is very understanding: the fifteen hours can be spread over different days, and different times. Occasionally I get to work from home: Athens is very rational about my single-mother status – I can have time off for school assemblies, school holidays, and sickness.

  I text back – best to be cheery: it’ll quell any suspicion that I may be skiving.

  Hi! Working from home today! Be in tomorrow. Mx

  That little ‘x’ should dampen any dispute. I’ll work really hard this evening, I will.

  Okay, but you must come in on Friday. I’ll see you at ten.

  Oooh… I consider myself ticked off. I check my work email… 2,789 million unread messages. Great. I sift through them. Most offer me hanky-panky with Russian girls, but one is an utter gem of an invitation: tonight, in Manchester, at a world-famous hotel (cue fanfare), a literature award dinner is taking place. There are some speeches to sit through but I’ll be rewarded with a three-course meal and wine. All I need is to be a member of the press.

  My mind is working overtime.

  Now then… If only I can find someone who will commission a piece about an award dinner because I’m bloody starving. All that vegan cuisine I’ve been cooking just doesn’t hit the spot. I call a few contacts, then email my friend Emmeline, who works on the features desk of a newspaper.

  Emmeline is going. I definitely want to go now. I telephone a few more regional publications. No luck. I sense they don’t want to pay me to have a free meal.

  As a last-ditch attempt I call a website – and what do you know? I can write about the event for no cash remuneration. A small exchange for delightful food and lashings of free wine. A quick telephone call to the PR firm and all is arranged. I won’t be eating mung beans tonight; instead I shall have a medium-rare steak.

  I need to make an effort to look good, but there’s nowhere in the house to have a thorough wash because Eddie has ripped the entire bathroom suite out, and we’re waiting for him to plumb in the new one. Last time I had a shower was two days ago, or was it three?

  There isn’t enough time for me to shower. Unless… I’ll shower at the local leisure centre. While Jack’s enjoying his swimming lesson, I’ll dart into the changing rooms, don my bikini and wash my hair.

  A couple of hours later, I arrive at the hotel. The black dress I’m wearing delivers quite a cleavage, and it only cost me four pounds on the reduced rail at Asda.

  Emmeline should be around somewhere. I pick up a glass of red wine… then another. Lots of men in penguin suits are sauntering around the foyer to the d
ining area, prattling and guffawing about one thing or another, mostly literature. A quick glance around the room reveals that approximately 70 per cent of the attendees are silver foxes – that is to say, attractive men who are well and truly over the hill. They’d be lucky still to have their own teeth.

  ‘Good evening,’ a silver fox says, prowling straight past me.

  ‘Good evening,’ I purr.

  And another silver fox: ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Good evening.’

  And another silver fox: ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Good evening.’

  I could keep this up all night but time’s getting on and my stomach’s rumbling. Rhodri was a little peeved to discover that he was babysitting while I headed out for a posh dinner but, being the peacemaker that I am, I bought him a packet of organic smoked tofu.

  I nip outside for a social cigarette. I don’t often smoke, but ‘Have you got a light?’ works well as an opening gambit when I find myself alone at an event, which frequently I do. If I give up smoking completely, what will I say then? Something inviting, such as ‘Hello, my name is Kitty Luscious, and you are?’

  A few minutes later I’m standing by the seating plan, looking for my name, when I realize I know the silver fox standing next to me. He was my ever-lovable tutor at university. He gave me endless essay extensions when I landed in his office looking a fright, with excuses such as ‘My boyfriend says he’s going to kill me, so I can’t finish this essay on Byron until next Friday,’ or ‘I nearly died the other day so I’m a bit behind on this presentation.’ He never snarled at me but reached into his heart for a metaphorical prop and shoved it up my back so I didn’t collapse. A year later, I walked out of there upright.

  ‘Hello, Professor,’ I say. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he says.

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I do. How are you?’

  ‘I’m really well, thanks.’