A Not Quite Perfect Family

by Claire Sandy

  The house rose late on Sunday morning. Fern luxuriated in her lie-in. Nobody needed help with their nappy, or their homework, or their false teeth. Already, she was used to the leisurely schedule at Hal’s.

  Everything revolved around sex. Fern hadn’t tuned into a news broadcast or made a shopping list. It was the first weekend in years she hadn’t nosed around Sainsbury’s with a trolley. But I have had some rather splendid orgasms.

  Venturing downstairs for fresh supplies – it wasn’t fair to leave all the room service to her host – Fern left Hal sleeping, his mouth slightly open. She crossed her fingers that the kitchen would be empty, but it was already populated with folk standing around eating cereal from bowls held under their chins.

  None of the people making space for Fern would remember flares from the first time around, and half of them were in their underwear.

  ‘You must be Fern.’ A tubby Chinese girl bucked the trend by wearing an actual sweatshirt over actual jeggings.

  Foraging in cupboards, Fern smiled.

  A boy in striped budgie smugglers said, ‘Man, we’ve heard a lot about you. What have you done to our Hal?’

  They all hur-hurred good-naturedly.

  A girl in a sports bra and skater skirt said, ‘Shut up, Josh.’ She rolled her eyes at Fern. ‘Ignore them. They’re arseholes. Nice to meet you at last.’

  Realizing she thought of Hal’s housemates as ‘girls’ and ‘boys’, Fern was introduced to the cornflake eaters. She wondered how she could feel so connected to Hal yet poles apart from these jolly, welcoming people?

  Because Hal’s special.

  The crew in the kitchen, teasing each other and running cold water over greasy plates, were oversized, happy children. They helped Fern scrape together an approximation of breakfast. Another day of this and she’d start to fantasize about vegetables.

  Unpeeling a cheese string, one of the underpant boys said, ‘Actually, Fern, I think you might know my mum.’

  Her eyes on the godforsaken margarine tub, Fern shrank into herself as if a shaft of light had illuminated every wrinkle, as if her birth certificate was taped to her forehead. Looking up, she saw an absence of malice in the boy’s eyes. He’s not mocking me about the age difference. He really did just think she might know his mum.

  What’s more, Fern did know his mum. ‘Say hi to her for me!’ she called as she schlepped back up to the penthouse suite.

  ‘Sex please!’ shouted Hal from the bed as she staggered in with the tray.

  ‘Are you bionic?’ Fern remembered a bank holiday when Adam had made a victory lap of the bedroom because they’d ‘done it’ twice in a row.

  ‘We’re running out of time. You’ll disappear soon,’ said Hal. ‘When I call you, you’ll talk to me in your spy voice.’

  ‘Do I do that?’ That didn’t sound very nice to Fern.

  ‘I know you’re busy and I know you have people who rely on you. Just make a little space for me, yeah?’

  ‘I do make space.’ Didn’t Hal realize how much planning it took to get away? ‘If it were up to me we’d spend every weekend together.’ Although maybe not here, she added silently.

  ‘It is up to you.’ Hal sat up, arms resting on his knees, glowing flesh all on show.

  A timid knock sounded. Hal stepped outside, a pillow over his equipment, and had a whispered conversation, before returning with a towering wedge of chocolate fudge cake. ‘Seems they didn’t eat everything after all.’

  Fern almost had another orgasm at the sight of the cake. They shared it, one fork between them, not caring if they smeared it on the bedclothes. The only clean bedding available after the tray disaster was a Liverpool FC duvet cover. It smelled of Wotsits, somewhat marring the Claridges vibe.

  So what? What happened beneath the covers was what really mattered. When Fern and Hal’s skin touched it sizzled. Natural dance partners, they were always in step, the rhythm never faltering.

  Generous, soppy, suddenly thrillingly butch, Hal communicated his feelings through sex. Neither of them mentioned love; Fern respected the word too much to flirt with it. At another stage in her life, Fern would have needed to hear it before she dived into the sexual deep end, but now she was in charge of her desires, and didn’t need promises. She only needed what she saw in his eyes; I make him happy.

  He made Fern happy, too; it was enough.

  A shaggy male head appeared around the door. ‘Got a screwdriver I can borrow, Hal?’

  ‘Mate!’ Hal gestured, appalled, at Fern. ‘I’ve got company!’

  The curls disappeared.

  ‘Sorry about him.’ Hal stopped the fork en route to Fern’s mouth. She whimpered; that cake was good. ‘Sorry about a lot of things.’

  ‘Like what?’ Fern took the fork out of his hands.

  ‘The flush not working. The mouse that ran across the floorboards. The midnight burping competition out on the landing. I live in a dump, don’t I?’

  ‘I once shared a flat where we got into a stand-off about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, so we all carried a personal roll in our handbags. You won’t always live like this.’

  ‘You’ll never come back here, will you?’ Hal was rueful, as if he wouldn’t blame her.

  ‘Overnight stays are tricky, Hal.’ Fern saw his face fall. ‘If you want a woman who’s always available, you gotta go fishing in your own age group.’

  ‘Not listening not listening!’ Hal jumped up and bounded over to the en suite. The shower sputtered into life.

  There was cake left. And then there wasn’t. Licking her fingers, Fern lay back against Liverpool Football Club’s red and white stripes. The silly indignities of Hal’s home weren’t a problem. What bothered her was how they highlighted the ravine between them. It wasn’t just about age; if anything, being with Hal made Fern feel younger. Blood pounded in her veins. She felt strong and powerful. I feel like a woman.

  The gap that really counted was the difference in experience. Fern was way in front, a few stops ahead on the journey. Hal was a beginner.

  When he hurtled, still damp, from the shower and rolled her over, tickling her, kissing her, that gap didn’t seem to matter half as much as the simple, sparkling euphoria she felt.

  ‘Mum? You look different.’

  Fern twisted this way and that, away from Ollie’s scrutiny and the half-smile on his lips.

  ‘Where have you been? Mum? What’re you up to?’

  ‘Let me get my coat off before you interrogate me.’

  Evka, in rubber gloves and a micro-mini, shooed him out of the kitchen before turning to Fern. ‘You been sexing it up good, yes?’

  ‘Yes. I mean no.’ Fern changed the subject, saying, ‘Rubber gloves? Are you . . . I can’t believe I’m saying this but are you doing housework, Evka?’

  ‘I clean loft.’

  ‘Did somebody hold a gun to your head?’

  ‘For Nora.’ Evka peeled off the gloves.

  ‘She won’t be home until Wednesday.’

  ‘No. She is on sofa watching Cash in Stupid Attic.’

  The hospital had discharged Nora early; something about overcrowding. Fern felt panicked. I should have been here. ‘Is she OK? Christ, her medication. Did the baby disturb her? How did she manage the stairs?’

  ‘We all help,’ said Evka, following Fern. ‘We manage.’

  ‘Auntie!’ Fern fell to her knees beside the armchair.

  ‘There you are!’ Nora, in a twinset and Crimplene skirt, looked more healthy in her natural habitat. ‘Did you have a nice time?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fern braced herself for an acerbic comment that didn’t come. ‘Are you warm enough? Did you take your tablets?’

  ‘Do not fuss.’ Evka was stern. ‘I have grandmother back in Slovakia and I take care of her. I know what to do. Don’t I, Nora?’

  ‘She’s an angel,’ twinkled Nora.

  Fern was silent for a while. She’d never witnessed a twinkle from Nora before.

  Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Halfway down
, then up again.

  Nora went to bed to rest, as instructed, but she was a demanding patient. I’ll have legs like a racehorse if this carries on, thought Fern, pounding up to the loft for the umpteenth time with a Woman’s Weekly and a Hobnob. She found Ollie there, sitting on the side of his great-aunt’s bed, both of them peering at the screen of his laptop.

  ‘And then you press that button.’ Ollie waited while the wizened finger dithered.

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Yup. See?’

  ‘This is miraculous,’ squeaked Nora. ‘This Internet lark will catch on, mark my words.’ She pecked at keys, exclaiming and giggling.

  ‘Do you want me to do your hair later, Auntie?’ Nora was dishevelled. With no real cure, it was important that Nora stay plugged into the world, not become the invalid at the top of the house.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d offer.’ This was Nora-speak for ‘yes, please.’

  ‘Switch off,’ Fern told her mind. It took no notice. Dryer needs emptying, it reminded her. Check Tallulah’s homework diary. As she wiped the work surface, her mind grumbled Not that cloth!

  Housework bled into every corner of her consciousness if Fern let it. It was a full-time job masquerading as a sideline. Everywhere she looked, dumb objects found a mouth and screamed for her attention. The broken egg cup on the shelf beside the cooker had been awaiting a good glueing for weeks on end. A scribbled note commanding ‘Molly! urgent!’ had been pinned to the corkboard for so long that Fern no longer knew who Molly was. (She hoped this Molly wasn’t hog-tied in a disused lock-up waiting for rescue.)

  Shut up, Fern told the kitchen sternly, switching off the lights. Today she’d been chauffeur, hairdresser, agony aunt, cleaner, chef, nanny, good cop/bad cop/cuddly cop as well as a beauty therapist. For now, she was just Fern. Not a mother. Not a niece. Not a grandmother.

  I’m a lover. She was Hal’s lover. Fern said it aloud. ‘I have a lover.’ Not too loud, even though only Binkie, blowing off surreptitiously into a cushion, was around to hear. Fern liked being a lover; it beat being a partner hands down.

  The ties that bound her and Hal were gossamer, as opposed to steel. They dipped in and out of each other’s lives, always welcome but never staying too long. Fern knew he was out there somewhere, possibly thinking about her, possibly thinking about the Spice Girls or his feet. Who could say? Tomorrow she would meet him and the other dog walkers at the park gates and his mouth would twist into a skewed smile because Pongo and Maggie had no idea what Tinkerbell and Boudicca got up to in between rambles.

  They’d keep fastidiously apart. There’d be surreptitious winks. It was fun having a lover.

  Whereas Adam was no fun any more. Correction, thought Fern: Adam and me are no fun any more. He seemed to be laughing it up with Kinky Mimi. And Penny. Fern and Adam had lost their fun mojo. Adam was half the man he used to be in her company, as if he’d been warned not to engage with her, not to be interesting or interested. He was impatient to get away; only half his attention was on Fern.

  There were many ironies to splitting up, including the fact that it was only now that Fern appreciated how much Adam had done around the house. Accustomed to feeling like the martyred workhorse of the family, Fern had reminded Adam about pulling his weight every day of their life together.

  He didn’t think of it as ‘reminding’; ‘Stop bloody nagging me, woman!’ he’d yell, when she shouted something about the bins/the MOT paperwork/the cellar. ‘Don’t help or anything, Adam,’ she’d say, baby in one hand, saucepan in the other, the washing machine sashaying across the kitchen floor in a trail of suds.

  ‘I do have a career, you know,’ Adam would grumble, up a ladder, hanging a framed alphabet in Tallie’s room.

  ‘Me too. I have two, in fact. One that brings in money and one that doesn’t. You lot are a full-time job.’

  Now that there was only Fern to be Mummy, Daddy and chief exec of Homestead House, she saw the invisible stuff Adam had taken care of. He’d cleared the horror-film gunk from the pipes under the sink. He’d parked the car nose out, so she could exit the driveway without killing a neighbour. He’d known which recycling container was which. He’d read a Malory Towers to Tallulah every evening. He’d listened to and commented on Ollie’s playlists. He’d deflected half the insane requests Tallulah made. He’d shouldered half the telling-off duties.

  Sure, he’d never notice that they had no milk. He’d expect a home-made cake for everybody’s birthday, but hand him an egg and some flour and he’d probably cry. Adam had never typed an Ocado order while de-nitting a child’s hair, nor did he know which temperature to wash knickers at, but his absence taught Fern that for every petty chore Adam shirked there was another petty chore he’d done without fanfare.

  Settling down on the sofa, remote control close to hand, large glass of wine in hand, Fern wondered if they’d ever be able to talk to each other about how they felt right now. Splitting up with a man was as intimate as living with him, if you were bound by children and property and general blah.

  We used to talk about everything. Until they talked about very little. Later still, all they talked about was it. The problem. Their inability to keep the Carlile show on the road.

  For now, Fern had a couple of hours of quiet. Ollie and Donna were larging it (if that was what the yoof still called it) in a club; Amelie was snuffling in her cot; Tallulah was asleep with a book fallen over her face; Nora was, incredibly, surfing the net.

  And Evka was out there somewhere, in the rainy metropolis, seducing another Englishman to add to her collection. Fern burrowed beneath the blanket Tallulah kept on the sofa, grateful to be indoors on such a damp, inky night. Evka wouldn’t permit any worrying about her, but lately Fern had started to fret when it got late and there’d been no jangle of buckled boots on the stair.

  I have enough people to worry about without adding to my assortment. Evka held herself so haughtily high that it had taken a while for her to get under Fern’s skin. Since Nora fell ill, Evka had come into focus, sharpened up until now she was solidly 3D. The selfishness had fallen away; she’d do anything to make the old lady comfortable. More than once, Evka had compared Nora to her grandmother in Bratislava.

  Fern hadn’t exactly been eavesdropping as Evka told Tallulah about her family, but she hadn’t exactly walked away, either. In fact, she’d glued her greedy ear to the door as Evka described the full house on Dargovska Street.

  ‘Grandmother, mother, father, uncle, four cousins, three brothers and me all live together,’ Evka had said, in her brittle accent. ‘All in close. Like birds in nest.’

  ‘Do you miss them?’ Fern had saluted: that’s my Tallie, getting to the heart of things as usual.

  ‘No.’ Evka had been so firm, it could only be a lie.

  Zapping through the channels, disregarding the ruby rings discounted from lots of money to hardly any money, the made-for-TV films about a beautiful woman in danger from a very bad actor, and the endless squabbles of EastEnders, Fern settled for an old episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  Shouting ‘B: a form of nut’ or ‘C, you fool, C!’ at the screen, Fern wondered if Evka had been drawn to Homestead House not because it was cheap, but because it was full of people. Doctor Fern diagnosed homesickness. The flinty exterior is armour; deep down she’s sad.

  If Adam were here, he wouldn’t let Fern watch Millionaire and he’d warn her against reading people’s minds. Not another lame duck! he’d plead, but Fern liked her ducks lame. True, Evka didn’t seem all that sad when she staggered home covered in love bites, but melancholy takes many forms.

  The walls juddered. Far above Fern’s head, an elderly lady was banging a shoe on the floor and hollering her niece’s name.

  Hurtling up the stairs, grateful to Amelie for snoring through the outcry, Fern burst into the loft. ‘What? Are you OK?’ She had visions of another stroke; she’d almost had one herself.

  ‘Fern!’ Nora sat up straight, her face bright as if she�
�d seen a vision. ‘I’ve had one of them epiphany things!’

  Slumping with relief, Fern sank to the bed. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘I want people to be sorry when I die, Fern, not relieved!’

  ‘Nobody would—’ Fern was cut off, as Nora carried on, shouting like an old-style preacher.

  ‘I want to know love! I want to inspire love! I want to feel it! I want to mean something! I want to know people!’

  ‘Oh Auntie!’ Fern was on the verge of tears. ‘That’s so sweet.’

  ‘I want an orgasm!’ bellowed Nora.

  ‘Yes, well, that too,’ said Fern, no longer needing to cry.

  ‘Is it too late, Fern?’ Nora reached out and clasped Fern’s hands.

  ‘It’s never too late.’ Fern wanted to believe this.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘What for?’ Fern knew what for, but was keen to absolve her aunt. The sad biography she’d heard at her hospital bedside had explained the woman’s quirks.

  ‘I’ve been a right . . .’ Nora mouthed the word ‘bitch’.

  Pretending to be scandalized, Fern assured her that she hadn’t.

  ‘You lie as badly as you make moussaka,’ said Nora, who had some way to go before she was reformed. ‘You’re a good girl, Fern.’

  ‘It’s nice to be a girl.’

  ‘Help me with this website form, will you?’ Nora swivelled the laptop. ‘How do I send it?’

  Fern scanned the page. ‘Um, are you sure this is what you want?’

  ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in me life.’

  ‘In that case, press that little arrow there.’

  Nora clapped at the swoosh sound effect, as her dating profile went off to twilightdating.co.uk.

  Downstairs once more, Fern paced, the glass of wine swapped for a bigger glass of wine. Amelie was tucked into the crook of her arm, her face placid. Only minutes ago the baby had been squirming and screaming, but a little cooing and a little rocking had calmed her down.

  Amelie had a habit, however, which made her parents despair. However gently they put her back into the cot, the moment her bum met the mattress she began to grizzle again. Fern had no option but to keep the baby up, in the hopes that prolonged jiggling would send her off to sleep.