by Fiona Gibson
‘We thought about it carefully,’ I say firmly, wondering how soon we can get the hell out of here without appearing rude. ‘But, you know, her exams had finished and we thought, if she’s going to give it a try, then the summer break’s probably the best time.’
Sally gives me a pained look. ‘It just seems a bit … shallow, I suppose. I mean there’s more to Rosie than that. She’s quite bright, isn’t she?’ Although not on a par with the genius currently mouth-breathing loudly behind the sofa …
‘Yes, but it’s just a sideline, like a summer job. She wants to be a vet …’
‘A summer job where you’re not allowed to eat!’ Sally chuckles, shaking her head in wonderment.
‘Well, it was a family decision. Anyway, we really should get back. Lots of packing to do … um, Gloria, I’ve left Guinness in his box in the porch, but I thought maybe I could put him in your shed? Would that be okay? I’ve brought his dry food and his water bottle so he’ll be fine—’
‘And his run,’ Ollie adds.
Gloria frowns. ‘His run?’
‘The big wire mesh thing Dad made,’ Ollie explains. ‘I’ll drag it out onto your lawn. As long as it’s not raining, Guinness likes to spend most of his day in it.’
Gloria looks nonplussed. ‘His run will be on my lawn? Will the grass be harmed?’
‘Not at all,’ I say firmly.
‘Well, he’ll poo, obviously,’ Ollie says cheerfully, ‘but it’s like fertiliser, it’s good for grass, it puts nutrients in and nitrates and stuff, and he’ll keep it nice and short …’
Gloria frowns. ‘So where are you going on holiday?’ Sally asks, tailing us to the back garden as we sort out Guinness’s temporary accommodation.
‘Just camping,’ I reply.
‘Oh, aren’t you brave! You are a one, Charlotte. I couldn’t spend one night in a tent. We’re going to Florida again. But camping sounds so much more, er, earthy. I take my hat off to you.’
Ollie keeps quoting Sally the whole drive home. ‘You are a one, Charlotte!’ he pipes up, making me crease up with laughter every time.
We arrive home to find Rosie slumped on the sofa, flipping channels between something about crop circles – ‘an area of high incidences of paranormal activity,’ the narrator says gravely – and a low-budget cookery show on which several people are cooing over a plate bearing a very plain-looking slab of cod. ‘Didn’t expect you back so soon,’ I say, kissing the top of her head.
‘It was a quick meeting,’ she mutters, settling now on a show about the perils of online relationships.
‘This programme’s so stupid,’ Ollie announces. ‘They meet people online who look like models or dancers or whatever, and surprise surprise, the person can never manage to meet up face to face … like, wouldn’t you be suspicious?’
Rosie throws him an icy look.
‘And then,’ Ollie continues, ‘they do meet, ’cause the presenters arrange it, and the guy she thought was a male model turns out to be really old – like, forty-two or something, with a massive beer gut and some kind of horrible skin disease—’
With a groan, Rosie turns off the TV. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
She shrugs and picks at a fingernail.
‘Did Laurie suggest how you might get more jobs?’
‘No she didn’t, okay?’ I step back, startled, as Rosie leaps up from the sofa. ‘She didn’t suggest anything, Mum. Well she did, but it wasn’t that …’ With a strangled sob, she runs out of the room and thunders upstairs, slamming her bedroom door behind her.
Ollie and I stare at each other. ‘Wait down here,’ I murmur.
I find her hunched on her bed, tapping away at her phone and refusing to look up at me. ‘Sweetheart,’ I say, perching beside her, ‘what happened today?’
‘Nothing,’ she mumbles, face half-covered by hair.
I look at her, wondering how to coax her to tell me what happened without making things worse. It never used to be like this. Rosie would tell me everything. ‘Did you have a nice time at Nina’s?’ I’d ask, and she’d reply, ‘Yeah, we made a sponge cake and then we had an idea to make it look like a bed with an icing duvet, so we did that, and guess what! Nina’s got a trampoline …’
And now? She’s a closed book. I lick my dry lips and glance around her room. There’s a clutter of scented candles and bottles of perfume and books and pens on her dressing table. A white ceramic hand, its elongated fingers draped with jewellery, is perched on a small plate bearing a half-eaten Maryland cookie.
‘They dropped me,’ she announces suddenly.
‘You mean the agency?’
‘Yup.’
‘Really? Why?’
She shrugs, casting her phone aside on the rumpled duvet.
‘Was it because you didn’t turn up for that job?’
‘No, of course not,’ she exclaims. ‘It’s just, she – Laurie, I mean – started going on about my homely face. That’s what she said, Mum – that I’m homely! What does that even mean?’
I look at my lovely daughter whose eyes are brimming with tears. ‘Oh, darling, I have no idea …’
‘Well,’ she charges on, ‘that’s why the mitten people liked me, she said, and she thinks I’m not really right for fashion – that I’d be better modelling for home catalogues, like standing in kitchens and conservatories and all that, being the teenage daughter perched at the breakfast bar, she said, that’s how homely I am—’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I retort, glancing round for evidence of how wrong Laurie is. I point at our decommissioned cat-shaped biscuit barrel which Rosie stores her hair accessories in. ‘That’s homely. I’m homely, probably. Grandma Maggie and Grandpa Peter, they’re homely. Grandma Gloria … well, maybe not so much. But you’re only sixteen, Rosie. How can she possibly say—’
‘Anyway,’ she interrupts, ‘Laurie reckons I’d be better with another agency, one that specialise in those sort of girls – the homely kind. She’s got a friend who runs that kind of agency. “Her girls are always working!” she said …’
‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,’ I suggest, putting an arm around her narrow shoulders.
‘You think I want to be in sofa adverts?’
I don’t answer that. Nina would be delighted to, I reflect, instead of doing all those extra shifts at the Harvester. We lapse into silence. Ollie has put the TV back on downstairs – it’s blaring at what Rosie calls ‘old people’s volume’ – and it sounds as if Gerald is giving his lawn one of its thrice-weekly mowings. Nipper, who takes issue with the mower, is yapping insistently.
‘It’s not what I thought, Mum,’ Rosie mumbles.
‘You mean modelling?’
She nods. ‘I thought I’d get to travel and stuff. Meet people, wear lovely clothes, be in magazines …’
‘You have been in one,’ I remind her.
‘Yeah, with you.’ She raises the tiniest smile.
‘Hmm. Sorry about that. I couldn’t stop myself, you know, muscling in …’
She lets out a small, hollow laugh. ‘That was the best part actually, that first shoot. Well, compared to standing there sweating like mad on a beach and getting a rash from the wool. I thought it’d be a bit more …’
‘Glamorous?’
‘Yeah.’ She shrugs again, as if shaking off the day’s disappointment. ‘Anyway,’ she adds, ‘what happened with Fraser?’
Odd that she’s only just asking now. Perhaps the burning desire to meet him has cooled a little. Or maybe being described as ‘homely’ is of more immediate concern.
‘It was fine,’ I say, sensing my cheeks flush. ‘We got on well, and he wants to meet you, if you still do—’
‘Yeah, ’course I do! When?’
‘Soon. We’ll sort something out, okay? We’ll talk it over with Dad …’
‘But Dad’s in Scotland.’
I pause, wondering how she’ll react to my plan. ‘Yes, and we’re going up to see him – you, me and Ollie. That’s where we were when
you came home. We’d been to Grandma Gloria’s to drop off Guinness …’
‘Are we going to fly?’ she asks, still thrilled by the possibility.
I shake my head. ‘We’ll have to drive, I’m afraid.’
‘So Dad gets to fly and we have to go in your smelly old car?’
‘Well, yes – it’s the only one I have at the moment.’
She nods, looking a little shamefaced. ‘All right.’
‘And we’re going to camp,’ I add.
‘Camp?’ she exclaims. ‘Oh, Mum, do I have to come?’
‘Yes, you do. You can bring a friend if you like. The tent’s huge, remember …’
‘You’re really selling it to me, Mum,’ she groans.
‘What about Nina? D’you think she’d like to come?’
Her face clouds. ‘Um, things are a bit weird at the moment …’
‘Delph then?’
‘You think Delph’d want to sleep in a stinky old tent?’
I sigh and get up from her bed, deciding not to get drawn into this. In my own bedroom I pluck Will’s leather trousers from the charity pile and take them through to show Rosie. ‘I thought we could take these with us to Scotland,’ I add.
‘Oh my God, Mum,’ she says, giggling. ‘Does he know what happened? Was he upset?’
‘No, he doesn’t know. I, er, haven’t had a chance to tell him.’ I pause, wondering why he hasn’t been in contact: I’d have appreciated a call, seeing as I’ve just lost my job, and it’s so unlike him not to keep in touch with the kids. No response to my text, either, when I joked about being impressed by the size of his inkcap. Am I doing the right thing by dragging Rosie and Ollie all the way to Scotland with a leaky old tent? Christ, I hope this won’t blow up in my face.
‘Can’t we stay in hotels?’ Rosie asks hopefully.
I shake my head. ‘Sorry, no. Look, love, things are tricky at the moment. I’ve been made redundant from Archie’s.’
‘No!’ she gasps. ‘God, Mum. What are you going to do?’
I muster a big smile. ‘I’ll find something else, don’t worry. But in the meantime, we’ll have to be pretty careful. Anyway, camping’s fun …’
‘Sure it is,’ she says with a wry smile.
‘And we’re leaving early tomorrow,’ I add, ‘so could you pack a bag tonight?’
*
It’s midnight by the time I’ve gathered my own clothes together, and unearthed our camping stove, sleeping bags and roll-out mats from the cupboard under the stairs. The tent isn’t there, though. Must be in the attic, requiring me to lug the ladder upstairs and clamber in through the hatch on the landing, whilst trying not to disturb the kids.
I click on the light, scanning the travel cots and car seats and Ollie’s old activity arch with all the Winnie the Pooh characters dangling off it, thickly furred with dust. There are boxes of books, a long-deceased Amstrad computer and our fake Christmas tree, used only once since Gloria remarked, ‘Pity you didn’t get a real one!’ and which was regarded as substandard by the children ever since. That was the Christmas when she also announced that it was a shame we hadn’t had the children christened. ‘Does that mean I don’t have a name?’ bleated Ollie, who was only four at the time.
I prowl around in the gloom of the single bare bulb, picking up long-forgotten books – I have no idea why we’ve kept them all – and a clear plastic sack of fairy story cassettes which both Rosie and Ollie insisted on listening to over and over in bed every night.
Dust catches in my throat as I spot a shiny silver biscuit tin sitting beside our tent. It’s full of photos from a pre-digital age that seem to mainly depict our early family holidays. I crouch down, flipping through them, realising how much younger Will and I looked then. In one photo – I’m not sure where it was taken – the four of us are on a beach. I’m wearing a bikini and Will’s in trunks. This was before the kids started making vomiting noises on glimpsing us in our swimwear. We looked pretty good, I think. Will is deeply tanned and looks as if he’s casually flopped an arm around my shoulders. We must have asked a stranger to take it. In another, obviously taken on the same day, we are all smiley and happy with our arms wrapped around each other in the dunes. Tears prick my eyes.
I flick through more photos, stopping when I find the only one I kept of Fraser and me; I lied when I told Rosie I didn’t have any. I was scared of upsetting Will by showing it to her, and I suppose I’ve pretended it sort of melted away in the attic. My hair is very long, with what looks like a self-cut fringe, and he looks extremely handsome with his messy fair hair and bright, white smile. We are standing on a footbridge spanning a canal in Amsterdam – another picture taken by an obliging passerby.
I place the rest of the photos back in the tin, except this one. Then, being as quiet as I can, I carry it – plus our enormous, unwieldy tent in its nylon sack – down the ladder and deposit it on the landing. I climb back up to replace the hatch, then prop the ladder against the landing wall and go down to the kitchen.
There, I take out our kitchen scissors and cut up the photo of the young, smiley couple in love. I don’t need it anymore. Rosie doesn’t need to see it either because soon, she will meet him for real.
Chapter Forty-One
We set off just before 6 a.m. and arrive at our campsite, tucked behind a dramatic sweep of Northumberland coast, just after lunch. Cranky from being confined in the car for so long, Rosie and Ollie grudgingly help to pitch our tent; in fact, it’s Ollie who barks instructions, while I wrestle with poles and acres of rustling nylon. ‘Delph’s going to Italy on Monday,’ Rosie reminds me. She has assumed a flat expression as if I have dragged her to a B&Q car park.
Thankfully, though, the grey sky clears, the sun peeps out, and to my surprise, Rosie pulls off her sandals and heads for the sea to paddle. She’s soon joined by Ollie. I watch from the dunes with my bare toes tucked in the soft, warm sand as they mess about in the shallows, the way they used to. It’s already starting to feel like a family holiday. The only difference is, Will isn’t here.
After drying off, we head into the village in search of fish and chips. There’s a pretty Norman church, an old-fashioned sweet shop and a proper butchers, manned by a jovial-looking chap in a navy and white striped apron. It’s all very pleasing – homely, in fact. A cluster of elderly ladies are chatting outside a bakery. I have yet to spot anyone under the age of fifty here. The place has a sleepy, amiable air, plucked straight from a children’s storybook; several passersby have already said hello, and commented on the beautiful afternoon.
We buy fish and chips to eat back at the campsite. ‘I was thinking, Mum,’ Rosie says, crunching batter, ‘I need a job. A proper one, I mean – not going to castings and having someone pretending to look at your book and flipping through it in about two seconds …’
‘You’re going to look for a summer job, then?’
‘Yeah. As soon as we get back.’
‘Maybe Nina could put in a word for you?’ I suggest.
I expect her to scoff at my crappy idea. ‘Yeah. I feel kind of bad, actually. I haven’t seen much of her lately—’
‘If you get a job at the Harvester,’ Ollie interrupts, ‘does that mean we’d all get a discount at the salad cart?’
‘You always say cart,’ Rosie sniggers. ‘It’s salad bar.’
‘Salad cart makes it sound like it’s for hooved beasts,’ I remark, which makes the two of them giggle.
This is all right, I decide. It’s not Florida; in fact I’m not sure Sally would even class it as a proper holiday. I just hope Will doesn’t mind us descending on him tomorrow. Since the mushroom picture there’s been no communication from him. I’d thought the shaggy inkcap was a sort of peace offering, but it looks like I read too much into it. This would suggest that he really does want a clean break, i.e., possibly one that goes on and on forever and is actually more commonly known as divorce.
Bloody hell. I can’t even bear to think about that. But right now, although I�
�m pretty sure he’ll be delighted to see the kids, I’m not at all certain he’ll feel quite the same way about me.
*
As a trio, we are more effective at disassembling a tent than erecting one, and after a pretty restless night we are on our way to Scotland before any other campers have emerged from their tents. The atmosphere as we drive north is cheerful and jokey, especially after a stop-off for breakfast. They can’t wait to see their dad, I realise, with a sharp pang. They’ve missed him, perhaps more than they’ve even realised.
The second campsite I’ve booked is more of a wild and windy affair, without a shop or any facilities, apart from a bleak-looking shower block, a mile or so from the charity’s headquarters. Once our tent has been pitched, we go for a walk along the rugged coastline. I try Will’s mobile as the kids dawdle behind, but it goes to voicemail. ‘Hi, Will,’ I start, ‘it’s me. Just wondered how things are going …’ Friendly auntie again. ‘I, er … well, I have a bit of a surprise,’ I add, ‘so could you call me please?’ Then I ring off.
‘Mum, look!’ Ollie yells. ‘Look over there. Seals!’
I turn and stare. ‘Wow,’ I exclaim, amazed at how inert they seem, flumped on the mottled rocks. Slowly, one of them rouses itself and flops into the sea.
‘They’re, like, so lazy,’ he chuckles.
‘They’re amazing,’ Rosie marvels, taking pictures with her phone.
We stand and watch them for ages. I can see why Will was lured up here, but the thought of him settling here, without us, makes me feel as if my heart could burst.
‘I’m starving, Mum,’ Ollie announces as we head back to camp.