by Moran, Beth
“Yes.”
She looked up, waiting.
“It’s in my bag.” Squeak.
“Well, can you please get it out of your bag so I can see it?”
No! I can’t actually. This preposterous dress designed for an underfed child pixie will not allow me to do that.
She tapped her pointy shoes a few times on the wooden floor.
As slowly as if either trying to hide the fact I was drunk, or missing several of my vital faculties, I leaned forward and reached the corner of my bag with the tips of two fingers. Quickly coughing to smother the sounds of the further destruction of the pixie dress – rriiippp! – I yanked the bag close enough to open it and remove my CV while still on the stool. As I attempted to lift it out, it got caught on the bag’s zip. I could feel the sweat dripping at the edge of my hairline, and prayed it wouldn’t cause my foundation to run. After what seemed, both to me and I’m sure to Vanessa, like several hours, I managed to wrestle the document free and hand it over with minimal movement. My potential boss scanned it.
“No retail?”
“No. But I’m a quick learner, and prepared to work really hard. I could do a probationary period…” Yuck. I was grovelling. To Vanessa Jacobs. In a dress with a gaping hole down the back. I wanted to slap myself.
She held up one hand, like a stop sign. “You see, Ruth. My problem is this. We have a certain image to uphold at Couture.” She was rolling her words around her mouth, enjoying this, treating me like an idiot. “We are very proud of our clientele.” Who was the “we”? Mum said she worked by herself. Did she include her fake boobs as a separate person? “Our ladies expect a certain standard. A visit to Couture is not simply a shopping trip, but an experience. An event. We provide a complete service, including image enhancement, capsule wardrobes and personal styling. For that, the staff need to project Couture’s three ‘c’s – competence, confidence and chic.”
She looked me up and down over the top of her glasses. Squinted at my ill-fitting outfit, my sensible work shoes and flushed, blotchy complexion. “You don’t have any of those things.”
She sat back, and waited. I stared at the floor, remembering when Maggie brought home the African land snail from her infant school and Fraser trod on it. I considered my bank balance, added to that Maggie, and the image of day after day after day of living with my parents. Then took a deep breath.
“What about if I got some new clothes? I’d be happy to stay in the back, clean up, sort stock. I am great at accounts. That would leave you more time with the customers. The clientele.” I paused for a couple of seconds. “I know your grandmother needs quite a lot of looking after these days. I could help free up some time for you to be with her.”
She stared at me, confirming that yes, I was making a veiled threat referring to her grandmother’s toenails.
“New hair. New make-up. New shoes. New attitude. If you come back tomorrow looking reasonable I’ll let you have a couple of sample outfits from the shop at a discount. You can pay for them out of your wages. But I am serious about the attitude. No one wants to buy clothes from a failure. And you stink of failure.”
“Um. Would it be possible to take a jacket now? A long one?”
What I should have done then, I suppose, was stop in at the hairdresser’s to book myself an appointment for that afternoon, before going home to raid my mother’s shoe closet. But like any sane woman in my situation, I instead called in at the delicatessen and bought myself the largest cheesecake in the display case – a caramel baked mud cake with cappuccino flakes and extra whipped cream. I ignored the spasm of guilt at breaking into the emergency ten pound note hidden in the side pocket of my purse. The green and pink zebra-striped coat Vanessa had grudgingly lent me screamed “emergency”.
As I rounded the corner into the cul-de-sac, my mobile rang. It was the school secretary. Could I please come in and have a chat with the headmaster about Maggie’s first day? As soon as possible. No, I wasn’t to worry. Nothing bad had happened to her. But she was in big trouble.
To my great relief, Mum’s car was in the drive when I huffed up the road to drop the cheesecake off before heading over to the school. I let myself in, took a couple of minutes to change, hide the ruined dress under my bed, brush my hair (for the second time that day!), blow my nose and restore my make-up, then snagged the car keys from the wooden love-heart pegs by the front door.
I decided to take the cheesecake with me, eating a third of it sitting in the school car park, figuring I would need the energy boost before facing yet another headmaster’s office. At least there was a new headmaster, new school building and therefore new office since I had donned the Southwell Minster school uniform, which slightly helped me to remember that I was the parent here, not the naughty school girl.
The headmaster seemed like a nice, if slightly world-weary, bloke. He hadn’t wanted to suspend Maggie on her first day, despite this being the standard procedure for grabbing another girl by her ponytail and slamming her head into a locker, then wrestling her to the ground in some sort of rolling around cat fight.
Maggie wielded her sympathy card with skill and expertise.
“She disrespected my hair. Said my alcho mum had cut it.”
Currently, her hair was mostly short and black, to represent being severed from her old school, her friends and her house. A white fringe hung down past her nose, signifying the part of her that wanted to hide. One blue streak remained tucked behind her ear, as somewhere behind all the fear and sadness was a strand of hope that felt excited and optimistic to be starting a new school (I wondered if a boy in a battered black jacket had anything to do with this).
“And that my druggie dad dyed it.” Oh dear. “Someone told her about my dad, so she shoved her face right up into my personal space and laughed. She said that explains it.”
Maggie looked straight at Mr Hay. “Sir, are your parents still alive?”
“We’re not talking about me, Maggie.”
“Sir, if someone said your dad, who had died, had coloured your hair, wouldn’t you get mad? Wouldn’t a normal, rational, human reaction be to slam their head into the nearest hard object? I’m fourteen. The nerve synapses to my pre-frontal cortex are breaking down, I am pumped full of crazy teenage chemicals and there isn’t a single other person in this whole school who’s got my back. If I had let that comment slide, I would have been done for.”
“In situations like this one, the best course of action is to talk to a member of staff.”
“Get real, sir. You know in situations like this one talking to a teacher is a suicidal course of action. Sir – she brought my dad into it.”
We agreed to an after-school detention and a promise to work on controlling her behaviour. Maggie returned to class, and I went back to the cheesecake. Back in the car, as I contemplated whether my churning insides could handle another piece, the passenger door opened, startling me into jerking the cake box off my lap.
“Careful with that! I’m commandeering it for emergency relief.” Lois slid into the passenger seat and grabbed the box.
“Half a Delilicious cheesecake gone. I’m guessing a visit with Mr Hay.” Lois stabbed the plastic fork into the rich brown caramel swirls and shovelled a monster piece into her mouth, proceeding to talk around the food. “I’m up next. See that broken window? Seth threw a chair through it. I’m supposed to be taking Freya for a check-up this afternoon. Matt is having to miss a meeting with his regional minister buddies to take her. Is it okay that I’m a pastor’s wife but sometimes I want to throw Seth’s parents through a window for managing to so spectacularly screw that boy up? Right, I’m done.” She wiped her fingers on a napkin and fluffed her hair in the mirror. “I’m already ten minutes late, but if you want to chat about why you’re sitting in the school car park with a six thousand calorie dessert, call me later. Or even better, come round. Bring the remains of the cake. We can swap war stories about how we are failing our wayward teens.”
She hopped o
ut of the car and marched towards the school entrance with the efficiency of a mother of six on the case. I watched her go and wondered how the girl I sat next to in English had transformed into this strong, loving, impressive woman. And how I, according to the business acumen of Vanessa Jacobs, stank of failure. Well, at least now I stank of failure and caramel mud cake.
When I got home, I found a letter waiting for me in the hand-crafted Fairtrade letter rack. Apparently a credit card account, held in my name, had racked up debt to the tune of five figures. The monthly interest alone would swallow up most of my wages from Couture if I got the job. The address on the account was Fraser’s old company. Someone in his office had finally got around to forwarding the letter to our house in Liverpool, and the new owners had sent it on.
I crawled up to my room, stuffed the letter in my tampon box where my post-menopausal mother wouldn’t find it, and buried myself deep underneath the duvet of denial, where I planned to stay for a very long time. I couldn’t even think about Dad’s cheque still loitering in the shoebox. Was it okay to cash in five-thousand pounds’ worth of guilt money, if the person was right to feel guilty? If you took the money, did that mean the debt was paid, they were forgiven, and you couldn’t feel mad at them any more?
I couldn’t even wallow in peace. Mum returned home in a jolly whirl of enthusiasm and hope, wanting to hear all the details of the job interview, bellowing up the stairs, wondering where I was. I lay there, sweaty from the heat of the duvet, and listened to her rattling pots in the kitchen, hoping to lure me out like a chicken from under a bush. I threw back the bedding (quietly) and slowly slid my bedroom window open. With the practised ease of every female who has survived an overly smothering mother, I nimbly lowered myself onto the conservatory roof and slithered down to the window ledge behind the bookcase, out of sight from the kitchen. I had done this a thousand times before, in another life. Although those times I wore trainers, and no holly bush grew underneath the window.
With scraped feet and grazed elbows from crash-landing onto the patio, I scuttled around the side of the house to the car, before remembering the car keys were in my bag, and my bag was in the house.
Right. Regroup. I could give up and go back inside. But I was a long sob-fest away from facing Mum. I had no shoes, no phone, no purse. And the unmistakable smooth figure of Dad now rounded the corner at the bottom of the cul-de-sac.
Quick, Ruth: think. Where can I go to stress, cry, wait things out and figure out where I’m going to get new shoes, new hair, new make-up and a new attitude before nine o’clock tomorrow morning?
I went to the only place. The place I had always gone. It was cool and dark. The summer’s growth had brought the heavy boughs of the willow tree low enough to brush the grass in front of the Big House. The leaves were layered thick and deep, allowing only a few faint chinks of light through the canopy of arching branches. I burrowed in, shuffling back along the mossy ground until my back hit the trunk in the centre. The tree stood only six feet or so tall, the circle of branches just broad enough for me to lay down without my toes poking out of the edge. It was like being enclosed in a magical tent, with walls in constant flickering motion.
I leaned back into the rough bark, inhaling the scent of dank earth and crisp late summer leaves, and began to focus on the rustling of the boughs and the soft, murky atmosphere. As the distant rumble of cars, the sounds and sights of life and all its confusion and difficulties, faded into the tender gloom beneath the willow tree, I faded with it, into the stillness. The tangled web of thoughts inside my head gradually eased, as I continued to breathe deep and slow with the rhythm of the old tree. The brain-buzzing stopped, the permanent crick in my shoulders unfolded a little. I stretched out on the brown grass, melting into my surroundings, and stared at a caterpillar dangling from a branch above my head. And for a short while, for the first time in several eons, I just was. I was me.
For about half an hour I daydreamed about previous days and nights spent under the willow, playing with the insects there, having picnics, talking, laughing, making plans, being with David. Allowing myself this indulgence as compensation for a bad day. Half asleep, I recalled the last time I heard David’s voice, which had led to a mammoth fortnight of similar indulgences, leaving me riddled with guilt and spiralling into six months of depression.
Maggie was five. I hadn’t seen David since that awful night. The jagged pain of missing him had gradually faded to a dull, background ache I had grown accustomed to but could always find if I looked for it. I had known, and loved, David for almost as long as I had known myself. Like two trees sprouting from seeds planted close together, we grew up each of us entwined in the other, and the damage done when we ripped apart had snapped off parts of me that would take a long, long time to grow back.
I was eighteen when I left him. My family thought that, given time, distance and the perspective of maturity, I would see my feelings for David to be nothing more than teenage infatuation. A crush to smile wistfully about in years to come as I fondly recalled my obsession with the boy next door.
No one questions a child loving their mother or father, grandparents, siblings, a nanny – a dog! – with fullness of heart, true intensity and utter devotion. That to lose them at any age can cause deep sorrow and anguish, changing them forever. That they would always feel that loss. David was not dead. But I had loved him this way. I had loved him and then lost him.
So, when Maggie was home from school with tonsillitis, spending the day curled up on the sofa watching kids’ TV, at first I thought I was imagining it, that I must be coming down with a bug too.
I was in the kitchen, scooping ice-cream into a bowl to soothe her raw throat, when I heard his voice. Gentle, strong, warm. With trembling fingers I put down the spoon and clutched hold of the worktop, straining my ears above the sudden roar of adrenaline. It was him. It was him.
David had a way of speaking that smiled, even in those rare moments when he was angry, or scared, or sad. I could feel him, helping me over the fence at the back of the farm where we tracked foxes. Grabbing on to me, hands trembling, before opening his acceptance letter to study Zoology at Bristol University. Tucking my hair back behind my ears as I ranted about the one million ways my family had upset me. I could see him. His hair, peppered with streaks of blond from endless hours spent outside, eyes watchful as he examined another specimen, then dancing like quicksilver as he recounted to me his latest discovery.
I walked into the living room and lowered myself onto a chair. Maggie had fallen asleep so couldn’t see my legs shaking, hear my heart hammering to get out of my chest, back to him, to where it belonged. The television screen displayed a rainforest, and there, in the centre of the screen, stood David. Talking to the camera about snakes, he wore dark green trousers and a light green T-shirt with a knapsack slung over his shoulders. He grinned, stuck his tongue out to demonstrate a snake smelling his environment. He looked a little broader across the shoulders, his face showed the weathering of a life spent outdoors, but it was David. Still that same generous ease of movement. Still so alive and awake and aware. He spoke to every child watching as if only to them, as if they were as fascinated, delighted and inspired by boa constrictors as he was. And just as he had done for me in the wilds of Nottinghamshire so long ago, he couldn’t help but draw the viewer into his world, to see it as he did: a remarkable, miraculous, spectacular feast of discovery and wonder.
I reached for the remote control, eyes never leaving the screen. When the camera moved to a close-up of a python I searched the TV guide for the name of the programme – Whole Wild World, on every weekday at eleven o’clock, and again at four. I found a blank DVD and set the player up to record.
The ice-cream melted into a puddle on the worktop.
For the next two weeks I watched every episode. Many, many times. Maggie had gone back to school, and Fraser went on a conference for a week. The house fell into chaos, we lived on junk food and ready meals, and I only turned the TV off
for the few hours every day between Maggie coming home and her going to bed. Once Fraser was back, he still spent so much time out of the house working or playing football that things weren’t much better. I walked around in a trance, like an addict on a fix, my head, my heart, my dreams full of David. Riddled with guilt. Knowing I was cheating on Fraser as surely as if I had invited another man into my bed. I had moments of crippling awareness about how I would feel if Fraser thought this way about another woman. But I had opened a door and, like any addict, it was always one more episode, a promise that tomorrow I would leave it behind and get on with the life I had chosen.
Eventually, after a particularly bad couple of days, Fraser noticed. It says a lot about how things were between us – it took him weeks to become aware that while my body remained in the house, in every other way I was no longer present. We weren’t having sex, which was unusual, but not unheard of at that point in our relationship. I had been sleeping badly, growing increasingly anxious, scared I would say David’s name in my sleep. Yet, like so many who keep secrets, something in me hoped I would; that Fraser would find the DVDs; that I would be discovered, because I wasn’t sure how to stop myself and I knew this behaviour was killing me. Killing us.
Having observed my twitchiness, my bad temper, my lack of interest in anything, he confronted me over an Indian take-away.
“What’s going on, Ruth?”
I choked on my naan bread, coughing then drinking some water as I scrabbled for composure. “What?”
“I want to know what’s going on. You’ve been on edge all weekend. And you look terrible.”
“Nothing’s going on. I’ve been feeling under the weather. I think I’m fighting a bug, that’s all.”
“Maggie told me she’s seen you crying. More than once.”
Maggie had seen me.
“I said I’ve not been feeling great. And I always get weepy this time of the month.”
“Did something happen when I was away?”
This was how Fraser dealt with me. He didn’t bother to argue or discuss. He asked until I answered.