by Sue Watson
Then I saw Craig and I stopped holding my stomach in, my heartbeat now pounding out a dance of death.
‘Oh hi,’ I said, unable to hide the disappointment on my face.
‘What’s up with you?’ was his opening gambit.
In that first sentence he’d managed to conjure up all the years of our marriage. What I wanted to say was ‘What’s up with me? You cheeky bastard, you are what’s up with me! You stole my youth, took the joy away from everything and turned me into a bored, bitter, empty woman who hated you. But more than that, Craig, you taught me how to hate myself.’
Of course I didn’t say any of that because it was pointless; he would look at me like I’d lost it and then I would want to kill him. I was also in the presence of my daughter and granddaughter and whatever I might think of Craig, he was still their family.
‘Nothing’s wrong with me,’ I said, standing back for him to enter, like a teenager letting a hated stepfather in. Honestly, I tried, but he was so infuriating. And he’d only just arrived.
‘Thought you were in Greece?’ he muttered as he walked down the hall.
‘Yes, I was… four years ago,’ I answered, wondering if it would be rude to order the Chinese now so he’d be obliged to go when it arrived. Then I remembered how thick-skinned he could be. In fact, I decided I’d hold off with the sweet and sour chicken because he might see it as an excuse to stay. I didn’t share my Chinese with anyone, least of all Craig.
I wandered after him into the living room. Emma greeted him – she’d told him it was her and Rosie’s last night before they went to Scotland for good, and apparently he’d felt obliged to pop round. We all sat down on respective chairs and the sofa and looked at each other. It felt awkward, like my past and my present had collided. I sometimes felt a bit mean about how I felt towards Craig, but he only had to say hello and it annoyed me. And I know the feeling was mutual; I irritated him just as much.
He’d never been able to understand why I’d left him and couldn’t see why I’d wanted to travel or do a degree. A mutual friend once told me that he’d said he hated the fact I was now ‘one of those students’. Apparently he’d said I should grow up and get a job and stop dreaming – which sounded just like him. Funny, when I think back to the blushing (pregnant) teenage bride I’d been, believing it was forever, that this was the man I would grow old with. At forty-six, with a failed marriage behind me, I was less naive now and knew nothing was forever – and looking over at Craig, now picking his teeth, I decided that was probably a good thing.
Rosie seemed quite happy that Granddad had arrived. Kids always like someone different appearing on the horizon – to them it’s someone new to play with, fresh blood for hide-and-seek. But Craig was socially awkward and had little imagination. Good luck with that, love, I thought, as Rosie attempted to adorn him in a pink feather boa from her dressing-up box.
I was finding the whole scenario intense and irritating, the three of us all looking at each other and poor Emma trying to make small talk. She tried to include me, desperately hoping I’d catch her rope, but for once I had no inclination to fill the silence. I removed myself by offering to make a cup of tea. I was angry at his intrusion. I knew it was selfish and immature of me – he was Emma’s parent too – but this was our last proper evening together at the house. It was supposed to be a girls’ night, with Chinese and Frozen and a nice bottle of Pinot – and monosyllabic Craig dressed in a pissing pink feather boa wasn’t part of that, he never had been. I went into the kitchen and boiled the kettle, hoping he’d feel he’d done his duty and would leave after a cup of tea.
I took the opportunity to sneak a look at Dan’s text again and felt a warm fizz in my chest. After a while, when I’d made the cups of tea as slowly as I could so I didn’t have to go back into the room, Emma wandered into the kitchen (it seemed even the small talk had dried up now).
‘Everything okay, Mum? Did you want to order the food now? I don’t think Dad will be staying much longer.’
‘I don’t mind if you’d like Dad to stay and eat with us,’ I said, trying to smile while holding my breath and hiding my horror at the prospect. I wasn’t going to be unreasonable – this was her dad, and Rosie’s granddad, so I made an attempt at being mature and behaving like a grown-up. I never once gave any hint that if he were to stay for Chinese, he was likely to be wearing a chopstick up each nostril, kindly inserted by me.
‘No, Mum, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘Dad doesn’t like Chinese anyway, remember? It gives him terrible heartburn.’
‘Oh, of course,’ I said, nodding vigorously in faux sympathy. Somehow I’d forgotten that particular joy – the romantic Chinese dinner where Craig retched over a kung pao chicken in front of the whole restaurant. No, the only thing he wanted in his mouth was of English origin – accompanied by chips and peas. ‘Foreign muck’ was Craig’s generic term for anything that wasn’t chips. Now I knew why I loved Chinese food so much; anything that made my irritating ex-husband’s oesophagus burn hotly was a friend to me.
I went back into the living room with Emma, handed Craig his cup of tea and sat down on the edge of the same sofa he was sitting on. I had no choice, Rosie had covered every seating area with toys – it was a hospital and apparently the patients were sleeping and couldn’t be moved. I was holding my tea by the handle, one arm folded around myself, clear in my body language that I was ready for fight or flight, whichever came first.
‘Granddad, do you love Nana?’ Rosie suddenly said into the silence, while checking a zebra’s ‘blood pressing’.
Craig almost choked on his tea, the spluttering made Rosie laugh and I looked away, unable to watch. Or listen.
‘Rosie,’ Emma said, stepping into the breach, ‘that isn’t a question we ask grown-ups, is it?’
Rosie began to protest, but Emma picked up her iPad and held it out to her. She wasn’t usually allowed the iPad ‘after hours’ so this was a rare treat and an indication of how much Emma didn’t want this discussion to be pursued. Neither did I!
‘Nana?’ Rosie turned to me and I held my breath. ‘Don’t you love Granddad any more?’ she asked, taking the proffered iPad and pushing it to the side for later, along with the zebra’s ‘blood pressing’. Rosie wasn’t bothered about the hospital or the iPad now, there was more sport to be had from torturing the adults. She clearly had more pressing matters to deal with before operating on teddies or enjoying any Dora the Explorer interaction.
‘Don’t keep asking questions, Rosie,’ Emma snapped, returning the iPad to her daughter’s hands. But Rosie apparently felt the need to have a frank and open discussion about the breakdown of her grandparents’ marriage.
‘Nana loves Dam now, Granddad,’ she said gently, bending her head to one side and touching his knee like she was the first one to break this to him.
I didn’t know where to put myself. I adored my granddaughter, but she had a tendency to keep going when other four-year-olds might have given up and moved on to the virtual world by now.
I grimaced at Emma, she mirrored back with a slight raising of the eyebrows, and I realised it would be easier for everyone if I made myself scarce. Rosie clearly had ambitions of the marriage guidance kind, and was keen to probe the relationship, deal with the tensions and bring them right out into the open. She was a mini Jeremy Kyle and it was only a matter of time before she was demanding lie detectors and paternity tests. And before this happened, one of us had to leave.
‘I’m just popping upstairs,’ I said brightly, placing my cup on the coffee table, and running up the stairs two at a time, like a teenager escaping questioning parents.
As soon as I was inside my bedroom, I leaned back on the door for a few seconds in case the mini marriage guidance counsellor chased after me, keen on an intervention.
I had this urge to climb out of the window and flee from Craig, the man who’d spent a lifetime making me feel worthless, stupid and insignificant. I’d even have foregone the Chinese and the Pinot – I just wan
ted Dan. And like a teenage girl, I unpacked my old rucksack, taking out the pressed Paris blossom, the postcards we’d sent each other, and the photos of the two of us in sunshine, somewhere in Europe.
Seeing Craig was always a good reminder of why I’d walked away from my marriage, my life. If I ever doubted myself, I would think about him and the life we had and remember why I left.
Dan’s text may only have been four sentences, saying he missed me, but it was so much more. I realised his apparent lack of enthusiasm or engagement when I called was probably more about hurt and pride and fear of being rejected all over again on his part. So, as I was now free as a bird for the summer, I was going to fly. Straight back to him.
15
Katy Perry and a Rabbit Called Keith
I said a tearful goodbye to Rosie and Emma the following day, and it was one of the hardest goodbyes I’d ever had to go through. I didn’t tell Emma of my summer plans – I didn’t want to overload her with too much at a time when she already had enough on her plate. So for the next few weeks I worked at the salon and waited for my degree results to come through, and talked to ‘my girls’ most days. It would start as just a quick call from Emma but then Rosie would grab the phone and before we knew it, we’d been talking for an hour. There were Skype calls too.
I was able to chat to Rosie about everything that was familiar. I told her about bumping into her friend Elsie from the crèche who said hi, news from customers and staff at the hairdresser’s, with cleaned-up messages from Mandy (without the punctuating ‘yaas, bitch’). Meanwhile, Rosie shared snippets of her new life with me, usually from her laptop in her bedroom, supervised by Emma.
‘I love your room,’ I said, admiring the pink princess bed, the princess wallpaper, the princess cushions, princess lamp and every tomboy princess’s must – a Darth Vader. I longed to sit in there with her, playing princesses with the teddies, both in our tiaras. ‘So, is that a new princess dress too?’ I asked.
She nodded vigorously, so vigorously in fact that she lost her balance and disappeared from view. I leapt up, wanting to pick her up and help her. Thank goodness Emma was there to rub her forehead and plonk her back on her seat. Of course she was – they didn’t need me to look after them anymore, which caused a little pang in my heart.
‘Well, Nana – that wasn’t supposed to happen!’ she said, looking at the camera, rolling her eyes and straightening her crown.
I laughed softly. I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her, but she was just so funny. How I missed her camp little mannerisms and pseudo-grown-up remarks about how she was finding her new boyfriend ‘difficult’, her friend Megan ‘tricky’, which she didn’t expand on, just rolled her eyes and folded her arms. I knew where she was coming from – I’d had a few ‘tricky’ friends in my time, they didn’t need expanding on. I’d been so involved in her big little life when she lived here, I sometimes felt an emptiness where she’d been. I also found it hard to accept that Rosie had new friends, new interests beyond what we’d shared – and would soon be starting school. I’d miss the watersheds, the special moments, the impromptu dancing, the swirling, twirling madness that made up a four-year-old.
‘Nana…’ she was saying now.
‘Yes, darling.’
‘I’m not a real princess, you know.’
‘Oh really, I thought you were?’
She shook her head again and laughed loudly. ‘Nana, you’re silly – I’m a bruddy unicorn really!’
I could hear Emma in the background muttering a reprimand, as Rosie pulled a face reminiscent of Emma’s when she was fourteen and I said she couldn’t stay out late. Here was a little girl who was ten steps ahead of everyone; her confidence, her humour and her character were testament to the fact that she was happy and secure. It was everything I wanted for her, and though I wasn’t there, I was strong enough to see this move had been good for both Rosie and Emma.
Katy Perry (our cat) had stayed behind with me because Richard suffered allergies. Obviously, Rosie was sad to leave her, so I promised she’d Skype and Rosie insisted on this at the most difficult times, like when Katy Perry went missing for three days – ‘She’s gone on holiday,’ I’d said.
‘She has to talk to me. Nana, get her back from her holidays now, there’s a good girl.’
I knew Rosie would be devastated if she thought she was missing, so I made the lies more elaborate. ‘She’s gone off in a hot-air balloon today,’ I offered, then she was out on a date with her boyfriend, gone to a birthday party, a cat fashion show. None of these were questioned; in fact, I was expected to tell Rosie all about Katy Perry’s adventures until she eventually turned up late one night, meowing for food. Today she joined us at the screen and wandered along the keyboards of my laptop, looking for somewhere to settle. ‘She’s writing a book,’ I told Rosie, who roared with laughter.
‘Read it to me, Nana,’ she said, and I realised I’d just signed myself up for the next six months to ‘reading’ a non-existent literary work supposedly written by a cat.
‘The End,’ I said one afternoon after regaling her on Skype with a particularly hilarious adventure involving Katy Perry, Keith the rabbit from next door and an empty cardboard box. In the days since Emma and Rosie had been gone, I’d been thinking a lot about my own life, and the phone calls and Skype sessions had convinced me even more that there was no reason now why I couldn’t follow my own path and head out to Australia. But I still had to break the news to Rosie – and Katy Perry was going to be my way in.
‘So, Rosie, Nana’s going away for a little while. What do you think Katy Perry would say about perhaps doing a long sleepover with Mandy?’
‘Oh, that would be fuuuun,’ she said, big, long nods almost causing the tiara to wobble off. ‘Will Katy Perry have her nails done?’ Probably, I thought, knowing Mandy, who had been delighted when I’d asked if she’d have Katy Perry. I reckoned it would be a match made in heaven because Lady Gaga (Mandy’s hamster) had died some years before and she said she’d never really got over it. According to Mandy, Lady Gaga had committed suicide because she was depressed. Despite us explaining that hamsters only had a lifespan of about two years and she’d probably died of old age, Mandy couldn’t get over it and for some time had pondered the reasons for her hamster depression. ‘It was that bloody wheel, round and round and round… You’d top yourself if you had to do that all day and night, Faye,’ she’d sobbed. Yes, Katy Perry would be as good for Mandy as she would be for her, and she’d clapped her hands like a child when I’d asked if she’d mind having her for the foreseeable.
So, telling Rosie and finding accommodation for Katy Perry had been the easy bit. Later, I called Emma to break my news to her.
‘Wow!’ she said, ‘Australia’s a long way, Mum.’
‘You’re okay with me going, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely I am. Mum, it’s exactly what you should do – and we can still talk to each other whenever we want. Rosie knows Nana is only a few clicks of the computer away and I think that’s really helping her settle here.’
‘Good,’ I said, pleased I was still part of Rosie’s life. Being able to chat whenever we felt like it had helped me adjust to them being away too.
So that was that. I had the blessing of my daughter, granddaughter and cat – I was on my way to Sydney and a new exciting adventure. I couldn’t wait to see Dan. We’d texted a few times, but I’d kept things cool – no declarations of undying love yet. I realised a rekindling would take some effort on my part. I had a lot of making up to do, but once I’d booked my flight and made my intentions clear, it would all come together. I just missed him so much. I wanted to be with him, sharing his new exciting life, tasting his recipes, feeling that sun on my face and his kisses on my lips – we had so much to look forward to. I was finally free to run away to Australia and a brand new life and finally say yes to the only man I’ve ever loved.
Having made up my mind, it took a matter of weeks to pack up the rest of t
he house (leaving my stuff in storage at Mandy’s) and book my flight. One-way. I wasn’t messing about, this time I had to show Dan that I was prepared to commit. I’d taken his heart and I’d basically turned it into mincemeat, but it was now my turn to hand my heart to him, and knowing he might still be feeling wounded from my previous rejection, I’d be upfront and clear about my feelings. So, once I’d booked my flight, I called him, eager to hear his voice, and excited to tell him I was a matter of days away.
‘Dan, I’m jumping on a plane… to Sydney.’
‘Oh.’ Silence, then, ‘You’re kidding, right?’
I was sure he wanted me there, but was probably just scared that he was letting himself in for more heartache. ‘Hey, Dan, I’m not going to back out this time – this is it, me and you for good.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘Yeah, well, it’s just… There’s a lot to think about.’
I couldn’t believe his response. Jumping on a plane at a moment’s notice so we could be together was the kind of thing Dan did without a second thought. He was the one who always told me to ‘dive in’, ‘say yes to everything because life’s short’, so why wasn’t he on board with it now?
‘Unexpected? But I thought it was what you wanted?’
‘It was… It is, I just…’
‘What?’
‘I’m just surprised at this sudden… change of heart.’
‘It isn’t a change of heart, Dan,’ I said, a little hurt at this – he knew my feelings were genuine. ‘You know why I stayed here, it wasn’t about us.’
‘But it was though, and I kind of feel like you put me through it and now I’m starting to get over it, you want to fly over, like nothing happened. Do you have any idea of what you put me through, Faye?’