by Jenny Oliver
Stella slipped in beside her. ‘Nice one.’
Moira watched with a broad smile on her face, laughing at their antics; then she caught herself, for just an hour ago she had blamed Graham entirely for this fiasco with the septic tank and now it was done and dusted she felt a bit guilty that his going had made them experience this jollity. This bonding. All of them expanding into these new roles. Into Graham’s role.
She drew in a breath, felt for the first time a wash of sadness that it had come to this. With her head down she scurried back across the driveway to the house, past Jack as he made a sign of defeat and went to wash the gloves at the outdoor tap and then peel them off. Stella ambled over to help him. Amy put the bin lid back. Inside Moira put the kettle on, as if by resuming her normal role – retrieving a stack of Emma Bridgewater side plates from the dishwasher for the summer berry tart – she could make the significance of what they had done less prominent. She could feel less like she had usurped Graham and might in part be to blame for his disappearance.
But then she watched conflicted from the window as the others messed about in the driveway – Gus trying to get Rosie to catch rainwater in her mouth, then the others following suit, even Amy and Stella, heads back, tongues out. Moira would like to be in the garden, carefree in the rain, arms outstretched. Why should she be inside feeling guilty? Where had her anger gone? It wasn’t her fault, it was his, she thought, her familiar annoyance returning. One of the dotty plates slipped out of her fingers and smashed to the floor.
Stella stopped catching rain. ‘You all right, Mum?’ she shouted.
‘Yes, yes, fine.’
Moira was on her hands and knees with the dustpan and brush when they all trooped in to see what had happened.
‘Oh no, it’s one of your favourites,’ Amy said, looking at the broken plate pieces.
Moira had to bite back the urge to shout that it wasn’t. It wasn’t one of her favourites.
But the moment moved on, they were all pulling arms out of anoraks and smoothing back wet hair. Sonny and Rosie wanted their tart in front of the TV but Stella said they had to sit at the table. Jack said he might go upstairs for a shower first. Amy couldn’t work out how to fold up the plastic poncho so she just scrunched it up into a ball and shoved it by the boot rack for someone – most likely Moira – to sort out later. Stella edged past the broken plate pieces and started making the tea. Gus bent down to where Moira was laying out a bit of old newspaper to wrap the china in and said, ‘Do you want me to do that?’
‘No!’ Moira said, sharp and loud.
Gus looked taken aback.
Moira didn’t know why she’d shouted.
‘All right, Mum, he was only asking,’ Stella laughed, her expression as if Moira was living up to her usual neurotic self.
But Moira didn’t want to be seen as that self any longer. She wasn’t that self. She wanted to be the woman who had been outside laughing with the boys. The one who had changed – who had got stronger and braver.
But that would mean being brave. Confronting them.
She looked at the floor, then across at Stella’s feet – even those were daunting, slipped into some trendy brand of flip-flop and with pale grey nail polish that only someone like Stella could pull off. Moira’s position crouched on the floor suddenly felt symbolic. If it were yoga she would rise from this spot like a tree.
Stella stretched over her to get the teapot from the draining board.
Gus walked away to flop on the sofa.
Sonny asked whether he and Rosie could have chocolate ice cream with the summer berry tart.
Moira swallowed and stood up, leaving the makeshift parcel of newspaper and broken china to unfurl on the floor. She did a little cough, then said, ‘I think I’m the reason he left.’
Stella paused, the kettle hovering over the pot.
Jack stopped on the stairs.
Amy glanced round from the mirror.
‘Who? Dad?’ Stella said. ‘Why?’
Moira brushed some imaginary lint from her top, then stood with her hands on her hips in an attempt to brace herself. ‘I told him that he had become a burden.’ They all edged a little closer.
‘He wasn’t a burden to me,’ Amy said quietly.
‘Well, that’s fine, Amy,’ Moira tried not to snap, ‘but for me he was.’ She smoothed her hair back off her face. She could see Gus slump further down into the sofa, distancing himself from the family drama that had just a short time ago been all laughs. Moira was suddenly annoyed at herself for ruining it, for thinking she should say something. ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I’d had enough. He had just shut down so completely. I was vacuuming around him for goodness sake.’ She threw her hands up, then exhaled, feeling less brave than her imaginary self had expected her to feel when she finally unveiled all this. ‘It wasn’t the life I wanted. And I’m afraid I told him I was leaving him.’
Stella’s jaw dropped. ‘What!’
Amy gasped. ‘Why?’
Moira saw Gus raise his eyes and make a face, like he was suddenly on the set of Coronation Street, and flinched at the airing of the family dirty linen. But she soldiered on, emboldened by the preceding events. Emboldened by her need to prove she could not only stand on her own two feet but also stand up to her family. She shook her head. ‘He had just become so detached from the world. From me. We’ve been unhappy. I can’t really say any more than that.’
She glanced to her left and saw Sonny, head hung, fingers toying with the fabric of his T-shirt. She felt terrible. She should have thought more about who was in the room before blurting out her confession, should have saved it for grown-ups only. She tried quickly to make amends. ‘But goodness, I mean, if you say he’s been swimming. And fishing!’ She gave Sonny a wide-eyed look of surprise when his gaze flicked up momentarily.‘In retrospect I probably should have made him talk a little more, but—’
‘He doesn’t talk,’ said Stella.
Amy started crying.
Moira sighed, wishing she’d never said anything. She searched in her pocket for a clean tissue and handed it to her.
Everyone stood awkwardly where they were.
Moira held her hands wide. ‘Well, there you go. Now you know. And it’s most probably the reason why he left.’
Amy blew her nose then hiccupped. Wiping her eyes, she said, ‘No. I think it’s maybe because of me. Because I left. I shouldn’t have left.’
Moira closed her eyes for a second. ‘Yes, you should have, Amy. You can’t be expected to stay at home for your father.’
Amy started crying again, furiously wiping at possible mascara streaks under her eyes.
‘Come on,’ said Moira, picking up the tart, trying to move them all on from this. She’d said her piece, she hadn’t wanted to upset everyone quite so much.
Then suddenly Sonny spoke. ‘It was me. I think it was my fault,’ he said, looking down at the floorboards, kicking them with his shoe. ‘I got really cross with him because he was pressing the iPhone buttons all wrong. He was tapping and it wasn’t doing anything.’ Sonny re-enacted the movement. ‘His fingers were too fat. It was too much pressure on the screen. I sighed at him. I joked that he couldn’t do it cos he was old.’ He pushed his hair out of his eyes and glanced up. ‘Then I got annoyed cos, you know, it was frustrating. I got really annoyed. I’m sorry.’ He did a big sniff like he was trying not to cry.
Moira wondered how long Sonny had been holding that to his chest. How long he’d thought that this whole thing was his fault.
‘Oh, Sonny!’ Moira watched as Stella swept across the kitchen and wrapped Sonny in her arms. His head pressed into her white vest, his hand giving his face a quick swipe. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the iPhone buttons,’ she said, kissing the top of his head. ‘Nothing. Do you hear me?’
Sonny nodded and pulled away from her, wiping his face with his sleeve.
She laughed. ‘You silly sod.’
Gus leant across from the sofa. ‘I know what you
mean though, if people press those buttons wrong, phew, it’s a killer.’ He shook his head.
Stella gave him a look. Gus turned away, deliberately expressionless. But Sonny laughed. Then he tugged at the hem of his T-shirt, readjusting himself back into teenage Sonny, immediately embarrassed that he’d cried.
Stella stood where she was, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked down at the floor, scuffing the boards with her flip-flop just like Sonny had, then glanced across at her mother. ‘I don’t think you have to blame yourself, Mum,’ she said. ‘At the pool Pete made it pretty clear that it was my fault. I was the one that destroyed him.’
Moira frowned. Normally she would have been in sidelong agreement but today she felt an unfamiliar rush of outrage. ‘He didn’t?’
Stella nodded.
There was silence. No one knew what to say. The sun fringed the black clouds like gold.
Gus said, ‘Looks like you’re all to blame.’
And Amy said, ‘Oh my God, Gus. Shut up!’
But everyone else sort of laughed.
CHAPTER 14
That evening there was a new cosiness to the house. The septic tank ordeal and the string of confessions had brought them all together. Everyone was exhausted but more relaxed, more comfortable with each other. Moira had made a light supper which they ate dotted about the living room – the kids and Gus watching TV, Amy sitting at the kitchen counter, Jack standing forking food into his mouth quickly while his bath was running, Moira and Stella at the table with the French windows thrown open, everyone holding back on questions they were itching to ask, like they’d come in from battle and needed time to unwind.
The thunderstorm was long gone, raging somewhere out to sea. In its place was a gradually clearing sky and finally some freshness. The air warm but no longer humid, a breeze fluttered the curtain of the open dining room window bringing with it the sound of the rain-flattened sea.
Jack went up to have his bath. Rosie got ready for bed. Sonny stayed half-watching TV, half-watching Gus who was on the sofa trying to master a computer game that Sonny had downloaded on his phone. He sniggered every time Gus died.
After putting Rosie to bed, Stella sat with her mum at the long table drinking red wine and talking in hushed voices.
Amy came downstairs having taken a shower. She’d needed a break from it all. Wearing her watermelon-patterned pyjama bottoms and a white T-shirt, her hair wet from the shower, clipped back because it was too short to tie up, she felt a bit calmer. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said as she took a seat at the table.
‘Nothing,’ said Stella, dismissive. ‘Wine?’
‘Yes you were,’ Amy felt immediately defensive, hated being shut out of their supposedly adult chats. ‘No, I’m OK,’ she waved the offer away.
Her mother said, ‘We were talking about my decision to leave your father.’
‘But you’re not actually leaving him, are you? You didn’t mean it,’ Amy said, looking between the two of them.
Stella just shrugged.
‘You can’t leave. You love each other. You’re our family. This is our family.’ Amy felt her heart pound and wondered if it was doing any damage to the baby.
Her mother retied her hair in the tortoiseshell clip she always wore. ‘We don’t have to be together to be your family, Amy.’
‘Yes you do,’ Amy said, stubborn.
‘It will be weird, Mum,’ Stella said, sitting back, arms crossed, sipping her wine.
Moira looked around her to see if anyone else was hearing this. Gus and Sonny were locked to their screens. ‘Does it occur to either of you to think about whether it will make me happy?’
Neither girl said anything. Amy toyed with the cord of her pyjama bottoms.
‘I just don’t want you to do anything rash and regret it,’ Stella said in the end.
‘Oh believe me, it’s not rash,’ Moira said, pulling over a copy of Country Life and viciously flicking through it.
‘What about the house?’ Stella said. ‘You’ve only just done it up.’
Moira didn’t look up from her flicking. ‘Well, it’s the perfect time to sell it then, isn’t it?’
Amy gasped, her hand went to her chest. She loved this house. It meant everything to her, like a physical manifestation of her stability. It was her family, her childhood. She knew the sound the stairs made at night when as a child she thought it was the noise of monsters and as a teenager how to creep in past midnight, the sound of the grandfather clock ticking like white noise, the waves in summer, the waves in winter – nose pressed to the glass ogling the surfers. She had been bribed by Stella to creep into the dark cellar, she had played tea-parties in the back garden, she had been kissed against the cool grey bricks of the outside wall.
This house was one of them. It had been where she had run to when Bobby died, black tears seeping into the stone. She had sat crippled by the claustrophobic quagmire of grief at the top of the stairs, on the toilet floor, in the spider-ridden garage with her face pressed against the muddy wheel of Bobby’s motorbike. There was an essence of Bobby here, an essence of her. It held too much of them to merely pop up on Rightmove and then be gone. But more than any of that, she felt that she would be needing to run back again very soon. Her default vision of the early days with baby were of it crawling across this living room rug, her parents the scaffolding for her unknown foray into motherhood. She couldn’t do it on her own, and she sure as hell didn’t want to do it with Gus.
‘Please don’t sell the house,’ Amy almost whispered.
Her mother sighed as she flicked the magazine pages. ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’
Stella raised a brow and then took a silent sip of her wine, one hand running over the gold S on her chain, back and forth over and over.
Moira looked up. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Amy, when did you have your hair cut?’
‘A while ago,’ Amy muttered, deliberately non-committal to punish her mother for deigning to talk to her after unveiling such traitorous plans. She sat pushing sulkily at her cuticles.
‘I like it,’ Stella said.
Amy looked up and made a face. ‘It’s awful. It’s too short. I look like a boy.’
‘You don’t look like a boy!’ her mum said, shaking her head as if Amy always managed to surprise her with the stupidity of her comments. ‘You look beautiful.’
Amy tugged a strand of the hair. She hated it. She hated its choppiness, its fluffiness, and its white blondeness – and more than that, she hated what it represented.
‘Why d’you do it, then?’ Stella asked.
Amy shrugged. ‘Just cos.’
But of course it wasn’t just cos. It should have been a major movie moment. She’d been in London a month before she walked into Toni & Guy for the chop.
When she’d first arrived in the city, she’d never have believed she was capable of such a dramatic restyle. She’d moved to London in an impulsive whirlwind after her mum had booted her out. The suggestion that after two years grieving it might be time to start thinking about living a little had felt like a hammer blow. Amy cringed now when she thought of all her flouncing and foot-stamping snot and tears. In retrospect she could grudgingly see that it probably was the best thing for her, but she’d never admit that to her mother.
Answering the Gumtree ad for a flatshare, she’d had aspirations of a glamourous central London apartment. But it had turned out to be a box room in a flat above a cab company in a grotty Hammersmith side street with two girls – Kat and Cath, who had matching pastel pink balayage through their blonde hair and called themselves the KittyCats. She’d arrived with two suitcases, all her other possessions in boxes in her mum and dad’s attic. All her married life packed up and labelled. She’d got a temping job in Leicester Square designing in-house promotional materials for an Icelandic shipping company. Her first night she’d wept on her single bed nearly the whole night, listening to the cabbies laughing and smoking outside her window, then she’d
been woken up by a tramp vomiting on the doorstep. If she hadn’t made such a fuss with her mother she’d have got the first coach straight back to Cornwall.
The KittyCats were hardly ever home, they’d leave scrawled notes to join them at some club, which for Amy, who hadn’t been out clubbing since she’d got married and had spent the best part of the last two years snuggled up on the sofa with her dad, was all a bit daunting. It had led to a lonely first week. When quizzed over breakfast – a KittyCat Eat Clean Smoothie Special – about her life to date, Amy lied that she’d just split up from her husband. They weren’t the kind of girls you told that your husband had died, smashed on the head by his surfboard in waves that he was more than able to handle. It would have infuriated him, had he known, that that had been the cause of his death. He’d have wanted a freak super-wave not an above-average Cornish spring tide. At the funeral his best friend had stood up and said that Bobby would be happy that he’d died doing something he loved but they all knew that was a lie. If Bobby hadn’t have died, his friends would have mocked him for the pathetic wipeout. Amy wished she’d stood up and said so because now it was all she remembered of the day – the whitewashing of the truth to suit the situation. She’d wanted the friend to have been brave enough to say, ‘Bobs is up there kicking himself about how shit that wave was!’ and everyone would have laughed. But then Amy wasn’t in a position to blame anyone considering she hadn’t been brave enough to stand up and speak at all. It also occurred to her that maybe Bobby wouldn’t have wanted everyone to laugh, he was never very good at being the butt of a joke.
If she’d told the KittyCats any of that they wouldn’t have known quite how to respond. They weren’t in London to offer sympathy to a weeping widow. They were there for Tinder, #hairgoals, #fridaycocktails, Saturday morning #insanity, Saturday night #partytime.
She was pretty sure they would have rescinded the flatshare had they known about Bobby. It was the decision to lie about her past, however, that altered the course of her future. In the eyes of the KittyCats she went from being boring new housemate to super-fun #project. They dragged her out of herself. They dressed her in their bulging wardrobes of Primark onceworns. They enrolled her in their Pineapple Studios Freestyle Hip Hop class and then chivvied her into Covent Garden bars for an #aperolspritz! And it had been more liberating than Amy had expected. It had, after a daunting first week, begun to feel like a holiday from herself. It had been the freedom and anonymity to laugh raucously, to wrangle free Prosecco at brunch by pretending they were famous YouTubers, to shop all Saturday and dress up for Saturday night, to loll hungover at her desk, to skive work for a spa day, to giggle with the safety of the KittyCats as she got cornily chatted up in clubs. It had been expectation-less.