Cecily 2, however, didn’t see the funny side. ‘I’m gonna kill you, Howie, I swear it!’ She didn’t mean it – if there was one overindulged child living on that mobile home site, it was Howie Teeson.
Knowing this, Howie just laughed and asked his grandmother for some proper food – like chips or chocolate.
Tottering into the well-appointed kitchen of the caravan, Cecily began opening and shutting cupboards while Cecily 2 provided important information regarding her latest ‘assignment’.
‘There’s this guy, works down near the Blue Bruiser. Well, his sister’s boyfriend’s uncle had some sort of mail order business and they are moving into films and they said I was just what they were looking for. I’m gonna work for a week. Pays well. A couple of thousand and some stock to resell. Cash in hand.’
I guessed she didn’t mean the Wall Street kind of stock.
Carson was practically hyperventilating in an attempt not to laugh out loud again, and I was finding it hard to keep it together too.
There were two possibilities regarding Cecily’s employment – one: they’d just recruited their worst nightmare as a call girl; or two: there are some really kinky people buying mail order films in the USA.
So it was all terribly funny, until, Cecily 2 revealed where the job was.
‘Brooklyn.’
Oh no. Don’t say it.
She said it. ‘So I thought I could stay with you.’
It wasn’t a question. She was telling us.
I looked at Carson and mouthed, ‘No way.’
My darling husband began fidgeting, rolling his hands together as he did when he was nervous.
God, he was going to cave, wasn’t he?
‘Look, C2, we’ve got the tiniest flat and–‘
‘Cecily doesn’t mind sleeping on one of the kid’s beds, does she?’ Carson’s mother, fresh from finding some ten-year-old Kit Kats in the back of the bread bin that doubled as her larder, squeezed onto the sofa next to me. ‘Jessie or J can sleep on the couch.’
‘No they can’t!’ I protested. ‘It is far too uncomfortable and they have to be fresh for school.’
Rufus mumbled something about a hotel room but the Cecilys shouted him down.
‘I suppose it is only for a week,’ Carson said, avoiding my eyes. ‘We can make it work.’
Can we?
I wanted to shout and scream but there was no point.
Bitter experience had taught me that.
- Cue horribly vivid memory birth story:
‘It’s a girl!’ The doctor on call, a lady called, implausibly, Dr Happy, handed me J.
Carson and I smiled at each other, still in love and utterly bewitched by our ability to produce a perfect human being.
‘Whatcha gonna call him?’ Cecily 2 cried, barging past the exiting doctor and pushing the midwife aside to get a look.
‘We thought Hugo, or Oliver. Nice English names.’ Carson smiled at me, rubbing my arm, besotted by our newborn.
Cecily made her entrance. ‘Where is little Josiah?’
Coming up quickly, she squinted as she took in the tiny features. ‘Ugly brute, isn’t he? Then again, so was Carson, and look how wonderful he turned out.’
‘His name is not Josiah, Cecily.’ I gave a little chuckle, because I assumed my mother-in-law was making a joke.
‘Yes it is,’ said Cecily determinedly, ‘after my late husband.’
‘His name was Carl,’ I protested, before realizing that Carl was almost as bad as Josiah.
‘But he always wanted to be called Josiah, so I promised that his first grandchild would be called Josiah.’
‘But Howie is his first grandchild,’ I said, confused.
‘Speaking of which, where is Howie?’ Cecily 2 asked.
The child was a baby; only two months older than J.
Cecily 2 looked around, put a finger to her lip to contemplate matters, then said, ‘That’s right, he’s with Rufus.’
‘Howie was named after my own father, dear. So Cecily 2 has done the right thing, now it’s your turn.’
Carson was strangely silent. It was the first time in our marriage that he hadn’t immediately stood up for me. Surely he wasn’t contemplating this?
Josiah?
No way.
His puppy dog eyes, red rimmed from lack of sleep and emotion, pleaded with me. ‘What can it hurt, Scar? If it makes Mom happy?’
‘What about our child? How can someone with a ridiculous, old fashioned biblical name be happy in a school full of kids named after R&B artists and pieces of fruit?’
Placating me with a kiss on the lips, Carson insisted that I would see things differently when I’d had some sleep. ‘It isn’t such a big deal. We don’t even have to call him Josiah.’
‘But your family will – the kid will develop schizophrenia!’
‘We don’t have any diseases,’ Cecily 2 said, overhearing. ‘Not since Mom got rid of that rash behind her left butt cheek.’
‘I am not calling my first born Josiah,’ I told Carson. ‘End of discussion.’
But it wasn’t the end of the discussion, because somehow, Carson made a deal with me. We’d call the next child after my mother or father, and we’d call the new baby Josiah, but J for short.
‘We can spell it Jay for school – Mom won’t be any wiser.’
‘That’s for bloody sure,’ I said, but stupidly, I agreed to it.
It was something so important – and I had given up without a proper fight.
Because I loved my husband.
No wonder Carson thought I was a pushover.
No wonder he treated me like one.
We returned to Brooklyn, carrying with us the dismal knowledge that in three days’ time, the putrid Cecily 2 would arrive on a bus to take up residence for a week.
When we got to our apartment, we found the front door on the floor again – kicked inwards this time.
There was a note on the fridge indicating that burglars had been and were, it seemed, disgusted at what was on offer.
‘Waist of are time’ read the note.
Carson ripped it off and rolled it up. ‘The nerve.’
‘Won’t the police want that?’ I asked.
‘Is that how you spell time?’ Jessie asked, which sent Carson off on a rant about the standard of education in New York State schools.
I walked around the flat looking for missing items, but the only thing that had been taken was Jessie’s MP3 player – which was last year’s Christmas gift from the Teesons. It wasn’t a great loss, given that would only play the first song, over and over.
How utterly depressing that we had nothing worth stealing.
To think that my mother had been so proud when I moved to America.
Well, originally, she’d been petrified that I would get shot, but once she’d established there were less shootings in New York than in some cities in England, she’d conceded it was a good idea.
- Cue fond memory of conversation with Mum:
‘You’re going where?’ Mum rubbed her hands on her apron. It was one of those flowery ones with cute cats in a basket. Dad said that Mum was born without taste in everything but men, and mostly, this was correct. Mum had horrible taste. Our house paid homage to worst of Seventies style: brown lampshades, orange tiles in the bathroom, strange psychedelic wallpapers in the kitchen that put you right off your food.
It was little wonder I was slim during childhood.
‘New York City. I’ve been accepted on a fashion course. A scholarship!’
Mum’s slim, vein-riddled hands shot to her mouth. Those hands were at odds with the rest of her appearance. Even though I was twenty-one, her appearance was of someone in their late thirties. Her hands, however, were those of a retiree’s.
‘No, you can’t possibly, Scarlet. You’ll be gunned down in the crossfire of a Mafia shootout!’
‘That’s ridiculous, Mum.’
‘Look at John Lennon.’
‘John Lennon was famous and killed by a
nutter who was stalking him. If I get famous, I’ll come back to England, okay?’
A few hours of persuasion later, and after the provision of reams of statistics about gun crime, Mum finally realized what a wonderful opportunity had befallen her only daughter.
‘I am so proud,’ she declared. ‘But how will you afford to live?’
‘I’ll get a job.’
I spun, around and around, in the small, vomit-inducing kitchen. ‘I’ll design clothes, and then I’ll work with the big shots, get my own label – and fly you and Dad out first class!’
‘Just concentrate on the job so that you have somewhere to live,’ Mum said. ‘That will be enough for us.’
But her eyes were gleaming, and I was glad that, for once, I had made her proud.
The fact that New York turned out to be such a vile disappointment was a fact I had hidden from my parents for years.
And thanks Mum’s health making it impossible for her to fly, it was a ruse I had easily kept up.
‘This is all I need,’ Carson said, as he stood looking at the door lying horizontally on the ground. ‘The hinges are totally ruined. How the hell am I supposed to put this back together now?’
How do we put things back together?
That’s the eternal question, isn’t it? Perhaps Jocelyn Priestly had the answer? I might find her email and ask how you reassemble a marriage that has crumbled into millions of pieces.
But I wouldn’t have to wait for a response to guess the answer.
I knew it already.
You don’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Black Friday November 24
‘It’s important to give and take in a marriage. Occasionally, you may feel that you are giving more than your partner, but remember that it isn’t a competition. It’s love.’
Jocelyn Priestly.
‘IT’S BOLLOCKS,’ I SAID to the calendar, as I read the day’s ramblings of a love lunatic. Not that I could actually concentrate properly on the words. Out in the hall, Hammertro was trying to help Carson with the new door.
The task seemed to necessitate them going into the living room to hunt loudly for tools.
Hammertro didn’t usually come further than the kitchen, which is at the front of the flat, so he now looked around in astonishment.
‘Fuckin’ H, they cleared you out, man,’ he said, wide-eyed at the mess.
Carson scowled. ‘No, this is just how it looks, Hammer Throw.’
Fair enough, the living room was a pit. Jessie and J had been looking for the Wii attachment I’d picked up at a charity shop to take to Cecily’s mobile home and the result was catastrophic.
Carson didn’t like Hammertro, but he didn’t have the guts to make his feelings known.
‘Why bother?’ he’d say, after complaining for hours over the thumping music coming from the flat above. ‘I’ll probably end up knifed in the back alley.’
‘Hammertro wouldn’t do that,’ I had told Carson. ‘And there isn’t any back alley nearby to end up in.’
Hammertro was now staring out of the living room window. ‘You get a good view from here. Perfect for a sniper attack.’
Thinking about Cecily 2’s pending visit, I told him that we were a more close-range type of family.
‘Really? You wanna buy a silencer to go with your gear?’
The handsome face winked at me, telling me he was joking, but Carson took umbrage.
‘We don’t have weapons in this house, young man.’
‘Sex can be a weapon, you know,’ Hammertro replied illogically.
That shut Carson up – I mean, how do you reply to that? – so the two of them trundled back into the hall to try to shore up the door permanently, using nothing more than their wits.
Eventually, they worked out that wasn’t going to work, either.
‘You might need a carpenter dude for this,’ Hammertro told my husband.
‘Can’t afford it, especially not this week. We have another mouth to feed.’
Intrigued, Hammertro asked if the mouth came attached to a ‘fit, you know, body’.
Unable to resist winding Hammertro up, I said that Cecily 2, Carson’s sister, had a job nearby, modeling for a catalogue.
‘Reeelay, a model? . . . You gonna put in a good word for old Hammertro, then?’ The grey eyes sparkled in anticipation of yet another shag.
‘Of course.’ I almost added that he’d need his ‘gear’, or other appropriate weaponry, if he was going to engage with Cecily 2.
‘My sister is married,’ Carson hissed through gritted teeth, more at me than Hammertro.
Unperturbed, the younger man pressed the point, ‘But is she hot?’
Carson was flummoxed. ‘I suppose . . . we’re related, I don’t think of her that way.’
Awkward. I beginning to giggle at Carson’s obvious discomfort.
‘She’s attractive, yes.’
‘Being married hasn’t stopped her yet,’ I told Hammertro, trying not to laugh at Carson implying that Cecily 2 was good looking.
If she was a looker then Genghis Khan was a pacifist.
The thought of Cecily 2 with Hammertro would give Carson a few sleepless nights, so it was worth encouraging it.
Something had to keep me going through the next week!
‘Let’s do it like this,’ the rapper said, after considering the issue for a moment. ‘You get me a date with your hot sista, I’ll get you a better carpenter than me to help with the door.’
‘You’re not a carpenter at all,’ Carson said, but I nudged him to keep quiet.
Insinuating that Cecily 2 was ‘hot’ had to be a breach of some sort of legal misdescriptions’ legislation, hadn’t it?
‘It’s a deal, Hammertro, now where is this carpenter?’
‘My Uncle. Bob Cotton. We call him Uncle Rabbit, get it?’
‘Very droll,’ Carson said.
‘Not a troll, man. A rabbit. ‘Cause they are cottin’ tails.’
‘Oh, we get it now,’ I said quickly, to stop Carson throttling our neighbor.
‘I’ll call him.’ Hammertro whipped out his brand new iPhone and pressed it to his ear. A brief conversation later and our door was guaranteed to be fixed by the day’s end.
‘Don’t you forget your part of the bargain though,’ Hammertro warned Carson.
Knowing that Cecily 2 would, in all probability, leap on the gorgeous Hammertro the moment she saw him, I felt confident in assuring Hammertro we wouldn’t back out.
‘She arrives Monday, why not take her out Monday night?’ I suggested.
That way, we’d save on dinner – for one night at least.
‘Niiiice,’ Hammertro said, licking his lips in anticipation.
Carson turned on his heel, saying he had to collect his stuff so that he could head off to school to prepare reports or something.
Hammertro slid out of the door with the aid of an impressive and in ten minutes I was left alone.
I went into the kitchen and found a left over, half-eaten chocolate from the previous evening that Jessie had discarded on the worktop.
As I ate, I ruminated over the fact that the Teesons expected us to feed and board Cecily 2 while she earned good money really irked me – but I knew that the moment I said something, the small matter of my sofa debt would be raised.
Again.
- Cue embarrassing tale of debt to the Teesons:
‘It’s a bargain,’ I told Lolly, as we stood in the iconic Manhattan furniture store Brietar.
‘It’s two thousand dollars,’ Lolly said, shaking her head. ‘How can you afford that? Carson is a teacher, remember?’
‘We can pay it off, over two years, interest free. And I do love it.’
‘Interest free, you sure?’
‘That’s what the salesman said.’
Lolly frowned and said I was mad, but I wanted something decent to sit on – and we’d have it for years, wouldn’t we?
My parents had always had a pathetic Victorian hardback
contraption that made watching TV for any length of time impossible because your backside froze up thanks to the hardwood and sagging upholstery.
Carson, on discovering I’d purchased something so large without his input, was placated by the interest free option, and we enjoyed a happy twelve months of TV watching and the occasional bonk on the lovely deep leather three-seater.
And then the red letter had landed on our doormat.
‘What’s this?’ Carson threw a sheet down in front of me. It said that because we hadn’t been paying the right interest rate for six months, we now owed a whole heap more money, thanks to the interest being compounded.
It turned out that the Brietar sofa was only interest free if you paid the whole thing off over six months. The interest rate if you paid it off over two years rose to a stonking 25%, and included interest from the first six months too.
We had to pay up or Brietar threatened to take us to court.
Immediately.
‘400 dollars. Where are we going to find that?’
Looking around desperately for the original contract I signed, I was beside myself. ‘We can’t owe that – that salesman must have lied to me.’
‘Try proving it now, Scar.’
I began trembling. ‘But what are we going to do? Can’t we just give back the sofa?’
‘Sure, but a used sofa is almost worthless. It wouldn’t cover the debt, would it? Plus our credit rating will be shot. We can kiss any chance of buying a house goodbye.’
After squeezing every cent out of every credit card we had between us, we were still short.
So Carson took the only other option – asking his family for the money.
Luckily, Cecily had just sold a load of fake Tiffany necklaces and Carson begged her to part with some of the cash.
He tried not to involve me, but Cecily wouldn’t budge without full details and proof of debt.
‘Tell your posh wifie that she’s not in Bath now,’ Cecily had told Carson to relay to me.
And, stupidly, he had.
Once the interest was paid off, we sold the sofa to pay the rest of the debt, and what was left – about eight hundred dollars, we slowly paid off over a year.
The Great Christmas Breakup Page 3