Woman of a Certain Rage

by Georgie Hall

  Woman

  of a

  Certain

  Rage

  GEORGIE HALL

  Woman

  of a

  Certain

  Rage

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Georgie Hall, 2021

  The moral right of Georgie Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781800240025

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781800240032

  ISBN (E): 9781800240001

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Sarah Anderson, my wise, sage and irrepressible co-giggler.

  I’m Eliza Finch: wife, mother of three,

  Jobbing actor, cake baker, wine drinker.

  Now fifty, I’m also cursed to be

  A sweaty, sleepless over-thinker.

  The truth is I don’t feel any older

  Although I know that’s seen as risible:

  Women my age grow braver and bolder,

  And almost completely invisible.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Dog Fight

  1. Drive Time

  2. Me Time

  3. Family Time

  4. Play Time

  5. Meal Time

  6. Bedtime

  7. No Time

  8. Fixed Time

  9. Crunch Time

  10. Lunch Time

  11. Over Time

  12. Killing Time

  13. Tea Time

  14. About Time

  15. Two Time

  16. The Nick of Time

  17. Time Out

  18. Time Travelling

  19. Maritime

  20. Up Time

  21. Down Time

  22. Rag Time

  23. Time Immemorial

  24. Together Time

  25. Celebration Time

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  The Dog Fight

  Our dog Arty died a fortnight ago. She was sixteen, which is over ninety in dog years, the young vet told us kindly when he came to put her down. It was a very dignified departure. She was ready to go but the family was heartbroken. We all had a good cry that night, since when I’ve mopped my tears out of sight. Goodness, I miss her. She was one of those dogs who comes and leans against you when you’re upset, all kindness and patience. Even if I was angry – which I am a lot these days – she’d stick around and let it wash over her, although that could be because she slept a lot towards the end and was stone deaf.

  We put her basket, toys and bowls in the garage. Yesterday we went on her favourite walk by the River Leam to scatter her ashes. Edward had made a Nanoblock headstone and Summer read out a poem she’d written. There was a tricky moment when a jogger came past just as the wind was blowing the wrong way, but he took it in good spirit once he realised it wasn’t a beloved grandparent. Just a dog.

  Just Arty.

  It took all my powers of self-control to spare the family the sight of me sobbing uncontrollably on the riverbank like an ageing Ophelia. Instead, I gathered them in a group hug that was more of a head-butting rugby scrum, said a final thank you and goodbye to our darling old dog friend, then let them scatter away from this embarrassingly motherly display of affection as we turned to walk back home.

  That’s when Paddy suggested we should go straight out and get a puppy. A true family dog, he emphasised, as though Arty wasn’t enough of one. Summer was taking a sad-face selfie out of earshot and Edward had put his noise-cancelling headphones back on, so I ignored the suggestion, hoping he’d get the message and let it go.

  But he brought it up again later when we were on the big television-watching sofa, children upstairs, a void between us where Arty would have been curled up.

  ‘Come on, Elz. Let’s go for it. Let’s get a puppy.’

  I told him I needed a little longer. I felt tearful and panicked, as though this strange new dog was about to attack us. He said that I wasn’t being fair on the family, that Edward needs a dog (which is rubbish; he couldn’t have cared less about Arty; he wants a snake) and that it would be fun to have a puppy around the place. He got his phone out and started looking up litters on Gumtree, saying how he’d always fancied this breed or that breed. When I accused him of making it sound as though Arty wasn’t ever the dog he’d wanted, he pointed out that, as a Heinz 57 rescue dog, nobody had wanted her until we came along.

  ‘Anyway, she was always more your dog than mine,’ he said, and I felt indignation spark because that was never the intention.

  I still remember how heroic and noble we’d felt trooping to the National Canine Defence League to find our family best friend: Artemis, a strange mottled creature of indeterminate age, breeding and colour, one ear up and one down, one eye blue and one brown, with a long sausage body balanced on delicate Sheraton legs, a white plume of a tail and an overwhelming desire to love. Certainly, I was the one who fed and walked her most often, so perhaps it’s true that I got an extra dose of devotion, but she had plenty to share round.

  And here was my husband shopping online for another dog, preferably with a bit more love for him and less for me to balance things out.

  ‘You’ll feel much better if you cuddle one of these.’ He’d held up a screen full of Cockerpoo puppies.

  ‘I will not!’ I snarled, and that’s when the fight kicked off.

  Our dog fight.

  Once I’d made it clear that I don’t want another dog straight away, and he’d made it clear he does, we quickly ramped it up to ranting at each other, all sorts of nonsense, at the end of which Paddy accused me of not loving him any more. I was sobbing too much to deny it. At least, that’s my excuse.

  I slammed my way up to bed while he stayed downstairs. After a long cry, a self-pitying message left unsent to my best friend Lou and three podcasts I didn’t take in, I went back down and found Paddy asleep on the sofa, the TV still streaming back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones, all flying fake fur, plaits and blood. I’m not sure he took on board my apology as he zombie-ed up to bed; I’m not sure he even really woke up to hear me say that of course I love him.

  I always regret shouting the first thing that comes into my hot head when we fight. But I was still furious with him about the dog idea. And now I was angry with myself for jabbering out a tired surrender.

  I lay awake until dawn, feeling like the world was about to end, although that’s nothing new either. (Hello insomnia! What doom shall we showcase at 5 a.m. today? Ah yes, Paddy leaving because you said such unforgiveable things. Then there’s your failure to make your children’s futures safe. And if we need more, there’s the old undiagnosed tumour worry again…) The only thing new was that Arty no longer crept up into the bed to try to lick my tears away. Kind, gentle Arty, who wasn’t afraid of death, while I am terrified. If I die, I wondered, will Paddy b
e straight on his phone, swiping left and right to try to find my replacement too?

  Arty’s dead, the disloyal bitch, and I miss her revoltingly.

  I don’t want another dog.

  Another life, that’s a different matter.

  1

  Drive Time

  Sorry! I mouth at Paddy who is reversing out of the drive to take Edward to school after a quick car shuffle.

  Our younger son’s taken against the transport that the council provides to convey children to his special school an hour’s gridlocked rush-hour drive away. This morning’s meltdown on the driveway was his fiercest yet, our new neighbours peering from an upstairs window. It’s the third day in a row Paddy’s been forced to take Edward in by car. Sitting beside his father, earphones on and waving goodbye, Edward looks as though the last half hour of screaming, biting and kicking hasn’t happened.

  Paddy raises his hand farewell, stone-faced, as wrung out by it as I am. We’re still licking wounds after the dog fight and now this. He thinks I’m too soft on Edward; I think he shouts at him too much.

  I wish I could have been the one to take him in, but I need to be at work in twenty minutes and it takes half an hour to get there.

  I manoeuvre my car back up the drive, and leave the engine running while I dash in for my work bag and to brief Summer whose bus isn’t for another hour. ‘Can you remember to hand that form in to the office or we’ll be fined, and please look for your lost jacket and art portfolio today? Cat out of your room before you leave the house.’ I’ve been saying much the same since she was in Year Seven like Edward and she’s now taking A levels with no noticeable improvement. I hug her. ‘Goodbye. Love you.’

  She shrugs me off. ‘You need to do something about that parting, Mum. It’s M40.’ We grade my grey regrowth according to roads, from Unmarked Lane through B and A to the dreaded M.

  ‘I’m going back to my roots, like Bob Marley.’

  ‘That is oh so wrong!’

  ‘God, was that racist?’

  ‘Odyssey sang “Going Back to My Roots”.’ She and Paddy are big music trivia buffs. ‘And yes, it’s poor taste.’

  ‘Don’t hate me.’

  ‘I’m a teenager; I’m morally obliged to hate you.’ She smiles to show it’s a sort-of joke, but we both know she says it like she means it painfully often.

  *

  ‘I hate you!’ were, coincidentally, the first words I ever said to Paddy, although I was definitely joking. And laughing. And staring at the Adonis in a beanie who had just correctly identified that it was Supergrass who sang ‘Alright’, not Blur or Suede or one of the other Britpop bands breaking at the time. I’d had a tenner riding on Pulp, which was all the money I had left to buy food for the week.

  It was 1995, one of those grey February days when it never seems to get light. I’d been shut in an unheated scenery workshop with fellow members of the Cat’s Pyjamas Theatre Company since breakfast, devoting our precious Saturday to painting the set for a low-budget bit of fringe agitprop. (For set, read a pile of splintered packing cases, several of which disintegrated under the weight of a thin layer of emulsion.) Our director had disappeared hours earlier to source more and we’d turned on the radio to dance round, too busy squabbling over the identity of the band on John Peel’s live session to notice him return. He’d brought his new flatmate with him, a man so tall, blonde and handsomely chiselled, he should have come with Heartbreaking Bastard stamped across his forehead.

  ‘Paddy here’s agreed to build us a stage set.’

  ‘I love you!’ were the second words I ever said to my husband. I still remember the way he looked at me, and my goosebumps doing Mexican waves. He was that hot.

  I thought I had his measure. I specialised in broody bastards at the time, mascara-wrecking heartbreak being a badge of honour for most twenty-something single girls of my acquaintance, along with Red or Dead boots, hanky-hem tops, CK One and a copy of Prozac Nation. We knew the score: meet him and register mutual attraction, flirty date one, fall for him, mark the phone for a week and tell friends he could be The One. Flirtier date two, mark the phone for two weeks and pretend not to care he hasn’t called whilst secretly feeling suicidal. Very flirty date three, borrow his toothbrush, straight into date four, falling fast now, intense flirtation, lots more sex, the meet-the-friends date, all good, a weekend away, falling at warp speed, so much sex I get cystitis. Ouch. Most bastards baled here, but a few toughed it out longer: upscaled sex, more friend events, another weekend away. Staring into each other’s eyes, not quite ready to say it yet, me free-falling dizzyingly. Crash landing is inevitable. Perhaps the pregnancy scare will do it, or the meet-the-parents. Then there’s all those wedding invitations with a handy plus one. Oh, here we go. Calls are coming less frequently. He has a lot of work on, he says. Then calls stop. Mark the phone and just know. Shout at the phone. Leave light and breezy answerphone messages full of unspoken pain. At last it comes: it’s not you, it’s me; you’re too good for me; I’m not ready for this; I’ve met someone else. Cry a lot. Broken.

  Don’t get me wrong, I broke a few hearts back. But I always fell hardest for the bad boys.

  Nowadays being ghosted is all played out digitally, as instant as tapping an X on a screen. Back then, in real time, exorcism was a slow and painful process. They were devils, those beautiful nineties bastards.

  Except Paddy Hollander, it turned out, wasn’t one. He might have looked like a stud for whom bastardy behaviour should be second nature, but he was steadfastly kind. As a favour for his new housemate, this sex-on-legs cabinet maker whose handmade sideboards were all the rage in Shad Thames, built us a set even the National Theatre would have been proud of. When he realised I had nothing to eat, this demigod in 501s went to Safeway and bought me three bags of groceries and decent wine. He was laid-back; he was generous; he was funny. His Shropshire accent was the loveliest imaginable, his brevity of words thrilling. The intensity of his eyes spoke volumes. I’d never met anyone like him before, not just because his upbringing was so different to mine, but also his values. He didn’t play games at all. And he was heaven in bed.

  Paddy always called when he said he would. He bought me cranberry juice when I got cystitis. He liked going to weddings. Even my parents didn’t put him off. This time, when I fell, I landed in his arms, safe and loved. His leap of faith was no less trusting, this pragmatic Shropshire artisan who fell in love with a highly strung actress. Call it a trapeze act.

  It’s more than two decades since I first span round with paint on my face and saw the man I’d share all the years to come with. I have never once said ‘I hate you’ to Paddy again, no matter how many times he beats me at music trivia or turns his back to my tears or shuts me out from his demons.

  But I don’t say I love you as often as I once did.

  And I don’t feel as loved.

  *

  Hell. It’s eight forty-five. I am going to be so late for work. Outside our new neighbour – twenty-something trophy wife and hair extension enthusiast – is loitering on the shared driveway demarcation zone, baby on hip. ‘Helloooo! Laith can’t reverse the Jag if you leave your car there.’

  Tall Victorian townhouses like ours weren’t designed for modern car owners. They have three (company, SUV and convertible, all alpine white) to our two (utilitarian rust pile and family banger), but they park theirs with precision neatness whereas I keep ruining the mutual turning geometry with my The Sweeney style arrivals.

  ‘It was just for a minute while we got the other car out and I—’

  ‘This is becoming an issue, Eliza.’ Neighbour death stares me. Hip baby death-stares me too.

  ‘Yes, absolutely. But I’ve got to go now, so—’

  ‘We were told you were considerate neighbours.’

  ‘We are! And my apologies that some of us have to get to work but—’

  ‘I have a career too! I’m on a baby break.’

  ‘And he is beautiful.’

  ‘She.’


  Fuck.

  ‘Non-binary babywear. So on-trend. Clever you!’ That throws her long enough to make my escape.

  I need to drive like a maniac to get to work in time, cutting up cars on the A46 all the way there. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’

  There’s always one who takes it personally. Today it’s a lorry that I nip in front of at traffic lights. Its driver leans hard on his horn and then tailgates me for two miles.

  I dodge lanes, trying to lose him, but he’s not dropping it. This could be movie car chase stuff if it weren’t for the fact it’s a Portaloo truck, its cargo of peppermint green sentry boxes wobbling each time we all brake.

  Portaloo lorry driver is upsides now, yelling something at me. His cab’s so high all I can see is a tattooed arm – barcode, Roman dates, Aston Villa lion – and chunky gold ring.

  I buzz my passenger window down jerkily, shouting, ‘Sorry!’ over a traffic reporter chirpily telling me I’m in a three-mile tailback.

  ‘I said you deserve to crash and die, mad old bitch!’

  ‘Sorry!’ I say it again automatically before realising what I’ve heard.

  I flick a V, but I’m just insulting a row of green loos.

  He leaves at the next exit and I try to put the encounter behind me. A death threat’s hard to brush off before your first cup of coffee. ‘Old’ will take longer to process.

  *

  I’ve got more assertive as I’ve got older – positively crabby, lately – although I still try as hard as ever to balance bad karma. When I mess up, I’m quick to apologise. (Except perhaps in my marriage.)

  It shocks me how unforgiving society has become, particularly men. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I’ve now realised how much I once got away with. It’s not just the digital age of trolls and memes; it’s always been like this. Being young and female is simply more forgivable than being old and female. Over fifty, apologies carry less weight. Which could be why I repeat mine so much.