Practice Makes Perfect

by Penny Parkes

  She rubbed her eyes exhaustedly and wondered what her mother’s excuse would be this time and, more to the point, how she would try to justify this latest fall off the wagon. After a hellishly long day filming, she just didn’t have the emotional reserves that she needed to cope with this. She could only hope that her shame had been limited to these four walls and not the whole town.

  She turned, fake smile firmly fixed in place, and waved into the darkness at Quentin’s departing headlights. His idea – the whole wining and dining persuasion routine. She couldn’t be sure whether it had made any difference to her decision-making process though, as she honestly had no idea what to do for the best. Larkford or London? Fight for Dan or run away? And where did her mother fit in to all of this?

  She walked into the sitting room and the combined aroma of whisky, vomit and urine made her heave. A rush of bile hit the back of her throat, all the memories of her childhood rushing in to overwhelm her; the child within her wanting to stamp her foot and shout, ‘It’s not fair!’ She’d worked so hard to build a relationship and a home here, but her screwed-up family seemed determined to contaminate that too.

  She stumbled back to the kitchen and filled a glass with Volvic from the fridge, trying not to cry. It was one thing to feel vulnerable, it was quite another to show it. She tore at the cuticles around her nails with her teeth, nervously running scenarios and conversations in her head as she stared out of the kitchen window.

  A gentle knock at the back door made her stiffen, hoping her silence might force whoever it was to leave. Instead she heard the sound of a key turning in the lock as Dan’s voice called out quietly, ‘Only me.’

  She flew to the doorway, catching the heavy oak door before it could swing open and reveal the chaos inside. She hovered uncertainly then, her face only inches from Dan’s and with no chance to wipe away the streaks of mascara from her tears.

  ‘Oh Jules,’ Dan said, with heartfelt sympathy. ‘Don’t do this. Don’t shut yourself away and cry. Please.’

  For a moment, she wanted to laugh at his immediate assumption that the tears were for him, for their shared heartbreak. She didn’t know how to tell him that with everything else going on, their break-up had been stuck firmly in her peripheral vision while other demons shouted louder.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asked politely.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s late and we’ve already said everything there is to say.’ She paused, reviewing their last conversation at the launch party. ‘You can’t carry on, remember. And I don’t blame you, Dan. I know I’m not easy.’

  He stepped forward and even as Dan’s warm arms slid around her waist, her head automatically sought its resting place against his chest. There was nowhere on earth she felt more at peace, but for Julia it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to ease the constant hunger in her for more – she didn’t honestly know what more meant, but she knew that it wasn’t enough.

  ‘You okay?’ he said gently.

  She shook her head, the softness of his shirt absorbing her tears, yet again, words eluding her.

  They stood there in silence for a moment, the warmth of his body slowly filtering through to her. She hadn’t realised until that moment that she’d been violently shivering – that hideous uncontrollable reaction you get when you’ve pranged the car unexpectedly.

  She knew Dan was the nominated PTSD sufferer in their relationship, but for the first time, she wondered whether it was something one could have by degrees. This extreme emotional reaction to finding her mother in this state in her home was not normal by any stretch of the imagination. Neither of them spoke, as he slowly took her icy fingers in his warm hands.

  There were no questions, no urgent requests as to what on earth had provoked this reaction, although she knew that Dan had every right to do both of those things. He just held her and, in that moment, she wondered whether just maybe she could bring herself to commit to the life he wanted: she didn’t yet know, but she was beginning to think perhaps she could at least try.

  The sound of retching and vomit splattering on the flagstone floor wrenched both of them from their reverie. Julia shuddered with repulsed disgust.

  She pulled back from Dan, breaking their intimacy and her train of thought. Who was she kidding? She didn’t get to have a happy ever after and it was time she grew up and acknowledged that.

  ‘I think you should leave,’ she said, her voice entirely devoid of emotion. ‘It was nice of you to come and I appreciate that, but I think you should leave.’ She pushed at his chest until he took a small pace backwards and she made to close the door.

  Dan hesitated for a moment, rebuffed and hurt, and she could understand why.

  Her heart was crying out to thank him, reassure him, to have the conversation they both so clearly needed to find closure or even to agree to another chance. Her head, however, had switched into self-preservation mode. She’d done this particular shift too many times before. As the door slammed shut, she let out a tiny sob before the habitual tightening in her face turned her expression into a mask. She reached under the sink for the rubber gloves and the Dettol, poured another glass of water for her mother and walked into the sitting room and away from the man on her doorstep who, for a brief moment, had offered her a different life.

  She wondered whether she should just have let him in. Maybe it was better that he saw her reality now, warts and all, before romantic notions got the better of him and he got all misty eyed about bringing another little drunk into the world. Genetics did have a habit of being passed down after all . . .

  Julia watched her mother fitfully sleep – the hours of being passed out cold had evolved into patchy naps, punctuated by intermittent bouts of vomiting and crying.

  She felt cold, despite the blanket around her shoulders and she shivered. The heavy dread had settled in her own stomach at around 3 a.m. and now, with dawn beginning to break outside the windows, she allowed herself a moment of honesty. Silently weeping, she struggled to admit, even to herself, the source of her grief.

  It wasn’t, as Dan might assume, that she was upset about their break up, or even worried about her mother, perhaps fearful of what would happen next – although all these things were also true. What gnawed at Julia’s soul this morning was the hollow, empty feeling that overwhelmed her when she looked at her mother. Sure, there were wisps of emotion around the edges of her consciousness – fear, disgust, defeat – but the tears stemmed from a deeper source. Julia rubbed at her eyes in frustration as she struggled to acknowledge the truth: when she looked at her mother now, there was a blank space where the affection used to be. It was upsetting and liberating in equal measure.

  There was no love, no shared emotional bond tying them together. It was all gone. Tested beyond reasonable belief, with no happy memories to call up, to reignite the fire. There were simply decades of abuse and drunkenness and guilt. Dear God, there had been so much guilt, Julia felt as though she might suffocate under its pall. Add together a Catholic education and an alcoholic mother and it was actually a wonder that Julia was able to function on a daily basis at all. The sudden void and exhaustion as all of that left her, made Julia want to crawl into bed and sleep for a year, just to wallow in this nothingness. In itself so cold and horrific, but yet still so much better than what she had been living with before.

  She looked down in horror, as a sharp pain bit through her finger, where she had systematically been shredding her cuticles with her teeth as the hours ticked by. She hadn’t even been aware that she was doing it, although the metallic taste of blood in her mouth now registered beside the tangy saltiness on her lips.

  ‘He seems like a lovely young man, your Dan,’ said Julia’s mother out of nowhere, pushing herself up from horizontal and wincing at the jarring pain that was clearly shooting through her temples right now.

  ‘He is,’ replied Julia coldly.

  Her mother looked shifty, obviously annoyed that her usual cocktail of
inveiglement and insincerity was not having its usual guilt-inducing effect.

  A sneer lifted one side of her thin, once beautiful, mouth. ‘I imagine he’ll be in trouble for seeing all your filthy secrets, won’t he, Joo?’

  Julia shuddered slightly at the nickname and the accuracy of her statement, pulling the blanket tighter around her. Her mother was a professional at this part of the proceedings. Deflecting blame, stirring discord, undermining choices – these were her mother’s long-honed weapons of choice. She did her work well.

  ‘You can tell me yourself, or I can fill in the usual blanks, but it might be easier if you just stopped playing games. What happened this time? And I’m not interested in another dose of bullshit.’ Julia caught herself before her rant could escalate further.

  ‘Your father called. He’s leaving me,’ said her mother in the lightest of whispers. ‘I don’t think I can do this without him.’ The voice was vulnerable, but the gaze was defiant. ‘Please help me, Joo. I need someone to help me, if your dad’s not going to be around.’

  Julia stood up abruptly and dialled her father’s mobile number, with little regard to the earliness of the hour. She’d expected it to ring out, as he blearily emerged from sleep, or perhaps to ping straight through to voicemail. She had certainly not been prepared for the automated message that the number dialled was no longer in service. He hadn’t just left her mother and all her problems behind. It rather looked as though the ever-patient man from Dorset had left her too.

  Coldly immune to the heaving and retching behind her, Julia walked to the back door and pulled it open. The cold air made the raw skin around her fingernails sting with a sudden intensity, paling by comparison with the searing wrench in her chest.

  Her life here in Larkford, so carefully crafted and protected, was supposed to have been her salvation. A fresh start. She looked down the driveway into the town below her, the Market Place already starting to come alive with the farmers’ market. She imagined the pity that would replace hard-won respect in her patients’ eyes . . . Her mind running on, she saw consequence after consequence of letting her mother back into her life on a permanent basis and none of them were good. There was no way that she’d be able to keep all this a secret in a town this small, especially when she had a film crew on her tail for half of every week.

  She’d be back to trawling the bars at closing time, looking for her mother to bring her home, or worse, bailing her out yet again. When her mother fell off the wagon, she did tend to take it to extremes. Julia simply wasn’t sure that The Kingsley Arms was ready for a drunken pensioner who thought she was Brigitte Bardot.

  How did this work, she wondered.

  If parents care for children and provide love and nurturing and support, it only seems fair for the children to step up when the roles are reversed, surely? But what if there was no tit for tat – if the child in question had been abandoned from the very beginning, clothed and fed, but emotionally starved and ignored – what then? Was the familial contract still valid?

  She was to all intents and purposes an orphan with living parents, she decided – all the obligations and hassles and none of the benefits.

  ‘He ran off with that blousy Do-Gooder from the town-hall, if you’re wondering?’ her mother said, when Julia eventually came back in to the kitchen to find warmth.

  ‘Who?’ asked Julia distractedly, flicking on the kettle and noticing her mother already had a mug in her hands, having relocated to the kitchen table. A strip of paracetamol lay beside her.

  ‘The woman who worked on reception. Apparently they would have their little getting-to-know-you-chats while I went to that AA meeting your dad insisted I went to. Well, I guess we know his motivation now, don’t we? Less of the sober wife, more of a quick feel of the Double D-cups.’ She all but spat the last sentence, but the pain in her eyes was too vivid to hide. ‘Screw him, eh, Joo? She’d need to be a bloody saint to put up with his moods.’ She laughed. ‘We’ll be alright together, you and me? You won’t let your old mum down, not my Julia, eh? You know I wouldn’t feel safe on my own.’

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Julia said automatically, thinking that if anyone in this scenario had been a saint, it was her dad for the last forty years. Maybe he deserved a bit of happiness in his twilight years, but did he have to shaft his daughter quite so comprehensively in the process?

  ‘Course I can, love.’

  ‘No. You can’t, because I don’t want you to. There is no place in my life here for you. You have to go home. There’s no place here for you.’

  Julia’s mother paused, almost as though recalibrating her approach. She carried on then, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘I won’t take up much space and it’s not as though I’ve got a lot of clobber with me. And,’ she eyed Julia carefully, before playing her trump hand, ‘your beau didn’t seem to think it would be a problem, not when he invited me to stay. Maybe I could help? You both work long hours – I could get the food in and cook?’

  Now there was a joke if ever she’d heard one – throughout Julia’s childhood, the family had mainly existed on Fray Bentos pies, Findus Crispy Pancakes and, if they were lucky, a dented tin of peaches with evaporated milk. Until she was fifteen, Julia hadn’t known that stewing meat didn’t always come in a can. She doubted whether her mother would know how to sear a tuna steak if her life depended on it, let alone roast a chicken or prepare a salad. She doubted very strongly, whether her mother had ever spent the weekly grocery money on anything other than vodka and fags. ‘I think we both know that’s a joke,’ she managed, ‘and Dan has nothing to do with this.’ She didn’t feel the need to share the fact that he didn’t love her anymore; her mother would only take it as an invitation. ‘This is about you and me and too little, too late. You don’t get to call in your chips now.’

  It was like a red rag to a bull and Julia’s mother leered forward, with both hands planted aggressively on the kitchen table. ‘Oh really? Are we actually going to play this game, Miss High and Mighty? You turned out alright, didn’t you? Got you to medical school, didn’t we, your dad and me? Only to be expected that you’d be an ungrateful little snob, I suppose. But we didn’t bring you up to think you were better than us.’

  ‘You didn’t bring me up, you dragged me up and then dragged me down,’ said Julia with no emotion in her voice, just an echoing tiredness of having had this conversation a million times before. ‘Do you have any idea what it was like growing up like I did? Never knowing how each day would end? Scraping you and your vomit off the floor? Never having friends round in case you were on one of your binges? You turning up drunk to the school play and trying to kiss my English teacher at parents’ evening? And that’s if we put aside the constant put-downs, the screaming, the rage . . . I have got the life I have despite you, not because of you.’ The only hint of emotion came in that final comment, as Julia’s voice wobbled slightly. She looked at her mother and it was like looking at a stranger. ‘I won’t have you here.’

  Her mother sipped at her coffee mug slowly, not looking up. ‘I don’t think you have a choice, Joo-Bear. After all, what would that lovely TV production company think, if they knew their beautiful TV doc was a heartless bitch who abandoned her mother when her good-for-nothing father walked out after forty years of marriage, hmm?’ She stood up and drained her mug. ‘I think I need a shower and then we can sort out that bed in the study for tonight. The one your lovely chap said was mine for as long as I need it. If I’m moving in for a bit, you can’t expect me to stay on the sofa-bed.’ She leaned in to Julia and the wine fumes wafted over her face in warm gusts with each word. ‘And maybe the apple doesn’t fall that far from the tree, eh, Joo? Nice drop of Pinot you’ve got hidden in the back of the fridge there.’ She pushed the empty mug across the table and the dregs of wine in the bottom were clear to see. ‘Notice you don’t mind a drop of the hard stuff yourself sweetheart.’

  Chapter 31

  Holly turned to Taffy and pulled a face. ‘Good luck.’
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br />   He shook her hand. ‘You too.’

  As one, they leaned forward and pushed open the double doors to The Practice. It was only one hour since Julia’s e-mail had popped up in their inboxes, not so much an invitation as an early-morning summons. ‘And you have no idea what she wants to talk to us about?’ Taffy clarified.

  Holly frowned. ‘There’s so much going on,’ she hedged, ‘it could be anything.’

  They walked through to the doctors’ lounge, the whole building eerily quiet at this hour and wondering why they needed a meeting before the start of the working day and what was so urgent it had required them to deliver the twins to Lizzie’s house, still dozing in their pyjamas.

  The large pine table in the lounge had been scrubbed clean and cleared of all magazines, quizzes and the Rubik’s Cube that had been tormenting them all for weeks. Instead there were neatly printed out agendas, six coffees from The Deli and a platter of Danish pastries. Julia sat at the head of the table, with Grace already seated beside her. ‘Come in, come in. I’m so glad you could come,’ Julia said, on her feet and greeting them as though to a family wedding.

  Holly and Taffy exchanged glances. Julia’s normally immaculate appearance had clearly taken somewhat of a battering and she now looked an awful lot like Taffy’s mad Aunt Ivy. He gave her a look that said, ‘See, I told you this meeting was because Julia’s finally gone off her rocker.’

  Dan pushed open the door behind them and the pad-padding of tiny paws followed him, Alice virtually silent in her ballet pumps. Poor girl, thought Holly, she looked utterly discomfited and Holly’s own frustration at Julia’s dramatics was in danger of reaching critical mass. Taffy, attuned to her wavelength, hurriedly pressed a coffee into her hand and plonked an apricot Danish on a plate in front of her. ‘Never murder a colleague on an empty stomach,’ he murmured under his breath and Holly had to swallow hard not to choke with laughter. He gave her knee a squeeze under the table, a kind of Morse code SOS that made her smile.