by Georgie Hall
Then I see breakfast laid out for us all, one of Ed’s Acts of Kindness, the cereal packets ranked in height order, a few garden flowers in a vase. A perfect family surprise. Not like my surprise.
I sit down by my heart-covered Emma Bridgewater Mummy mug and try not to cry.
Plugged into its charger on the peninsula worktop, my phone chirrups with an incoming WhatsApp alert. It’s Lou, insomnia night-shifting too, sending a picture of a tearful Lichtenstein heroine which she’s captioned 3 out of the 4 voices in my head tell me I need to sleep! I message back four screaming emojis and My voices now. Help! Then I switch my phone to silent.
It lights up with her call in seconds. It’s not the first time we’ve done this, although we usually only tell each other we’re knackered in dopey whispers.
‘Are you as knackered as me?’ she asks.
‘I’m going to run away,’ I tell her in an undertone, opening Ed’s Golden Nuggets cereal box to help myself to a couple.
‘What the actual fuck? No way you’re leaving Paddy!’
I don’t go into too much detail – the fluffy handcuffs will never be spoken of outside the marriage, and I’ll take that ill-advised kiss to my grave – but I do tell her that my family want to sell The Tempest, and as I go on to explain what I intend to do, I realise how much it helps to have an ally onside, even if she is a hundred and fifty miles away in Brighton. Lou gets why I need to do this, and do it alone.
‘“Be the heroine of your life, not the victim”!’ she tells me. ‘Nora Ephron.’
‘“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain”,’ I quote back. ‘Dolly Parton.’
I creep back up to bed, where I find Ed curled up in Paddy’s usual spot, playing with the spines on his ancient stegosaurus toy. He hasn’t done this for years. I get in and big spoon him, whispering, ‘Are you too excited about your trip to sleep?’
‘Sort of,’ he says in a drowsy monotone. ‘Why were you talking to yourself downstairs?’
‘Just Lou.’ Please don’t let him have heard, I pray. ‘Breakfast looks amazing,’ I say.
But he’s already asleep. Moments later, I am too.
*
My alarm is going off. It’s 6.45. Ed’s already up and away, stealing downstairs to put the finishing touches to his Act of Kindness. Alone on the bed, I want to pull the pillow over my head and make today go away. All the meticulous insomnia planning I did in my head is lost in the fog.
But I must get up, because I’m going to make things better. I’m doing it for my marriage and my family. And for the Bionic Woman. Above all, for myself.
What was it Summer said? Dare yourself again.
I very dare me.
17
Time Out
‘I’ve been offered a last-minute narration job!’ I tell Paddy and the kids over the Act of Kindness breakfast. ‘The actor they booked has a throat infection,’ I pretend to read an email on my phone (it’s just Dunelm offering me 20 per cent off garden cushions). ‘They need me to start today.’
Being a good liar doesn’t sit easily, although you could say professionally it comes with the territory. I always feel bad lying, and avoid it as much as possible, like salt and refined sugar. But like those naughty crystals, white lies can make things taste a lot better.
My fierce grandmother used to tell us ‘every lie is five minutes in hell!’. I’ve earned at least a weekend there this year alone.
‘It’s recording near Leicester over a couple of days, so they’ll put me up in a Travelodge,’ I tell them all, aware I’m already guilty of too much detail.
‘But it’s your anniversary tomorrow,’ Summer points out, looking at Paddy.
‘We’ll celebrate it another time.’ I look at Paddy too, but he refuses to catch my eye. ‘I’ll need to set off this morning if you can run Edward in?’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll make sure you are on the school-trip phone tree,’ I promise.
Ed’s watching me. ‘What’s the name of the book you’re narrating?’
‘The Secret of Dunelm Manor,’ I manage to wing it. ‘Have you packed enough thick socks?’
He nods seriously. ‘Also emergency rations, compass, whistle, bladeless multitool, fidget toys and dinosaur.’
This morning he’s setting off on his Year Seven outdoor activity trip to paddle, climb and whiz along ropes in the Welsh Marches. How foolish we were to once imagine that being on the spectrum meant he’d hate such unpredictable, wet, strenuous stuff far from home. Instead, he relishes the regimen and routine, the safety checks and meticulous run-throughs, fantasising himself a Sci Fi hero in training. They’re away until Friday and he’s been counting down the days all term.
Summer’s busy messaging her @Summer_Time followers on her phone promising exciting news and live streams later.
‘You are dropping me at the bus stop, Dad?’ She doesn’t look up. ‘I’m on a tight schedule.’
She’s also away, spending a couple of nights with her best school friend and bandmate. They claim they need to rehearse for their upcoming debut tour of three local village fetes and a fun run, but I’ve long suspected an ulterior motive, possibly involving hair dye.
This is why Paddy planned our surprise getaway, I realise sadly. Now he’ll be home alone. Phone still in hand, I stealthily change the online shopping delivery from this evening to this lunchtime.
His face darkens when I break the news that he’ll have to come back and wait in for it, but it’s worth it to be certain he’ll be here. I need a head start, and while I hope I can rely upon this evening’s cricket nets, the pub, then Xbox to keep him busy, I don’t trust him to stay in his workshop by day.
I remember to go on to Google Maps and stop sharing my location. Best not linger on the cosy cluster of circular avatars at home: Einstein for Edward, a big-eyed selfie for Summer and a silhouette egghead for Paddy. Quick scroll out to Joe’s cartoon drum set in Exeter. Feel better. We’re family. Wherever we go.
I’m doing this for all of us, I remind myself. But most of all for me.
*
I go outside to wave everyone off and I’m granted a rare gangly hug with my son during which I force myself to look at his father over his head. ‘Take care. I’ll call.’
Paddy nods, umbrage pulsing off him like gamma rays.
‘I don’t want to go, Mum,’ Ed says in a low whisper. ‘You might need me.’
‘Of course you must go!’ My heart thuds and I stroke his hair, wishing his anxieties were easier to predict. ‘I will love you, miss you and wait for you, OK?’
He goes rigid. ‘It’s a-me, Mario! Thank you so much for playing my game!’ Then he peels away and clambers into the car. ‘Let’s a-go, little guys!’
‘He’ll love it when he gets there, Mum,’ Summer reminds me as I swipe a stray tear. Grateful, I make to hug her too. But she steps back swiftly, heaving a huge backpack and her guitar into the boot, and I half wonder if she’s running away too. We’re on the shakiest of truces, my hot-mess mothering only forgiven because my double denim Mr Vella outburst has so far received almost two thousand likes, shares and comments including Kwasi and a social influencer called Zenny All who everyone follows.
She asks if I have any cash. In a panic of over-compensation I give her forty pounds. She’s thrilled. Bribery pays off. I get the hug.
The moment Paddy’s truck turns out, with me waving like I’m seeing them off to battle, New Neighbour appears, hip baby death-staring. ‘Have you had the solicitor’s letter yet?’
‘Not to my knowledge. And I’m working away this week.’
‘What is it you do again?’
‘Hired assassin.’
Her face remains frozen, but from nowhere a shrill laugh. ‘What do you charge? I’ll hire you to kill my hubby!’
‘I’m offering 20 per cent off for Father’s Day.’
Her voice tightens to a confessional bleat. ‘He won’t let me order a new kitchen. The one in there’s four years old
and glossy white. The quote’s ready to go. Inky blue and copper, bespoke, a dream. Too expensive, he says.’
From the gods comes an olive twig…
‘I bet Paddy could do you the same kitchen for half the money,’ I pimp shamelessly. ‘Warwickshire Life once called him Leamington’s Tom Howley with enough backbone to take on Smallbone.’ No lie. It’s verbatim. My mother said it was ghastly grammar.
‘I heard his company went bust. What went wrong?’
‘Family tragedy. We don’t talk about it.’ Not a complete lie. ‘By the time he’d bounced back, his business partner had taken the money and run.’ He did. ‘Paddy Hollander Kitchens are,’ best breathy designer voiceover, ‘rare objects of desire. Ginger Spice has one now she’s upper class.’ (OK, that’s a seriously manipulated truth – Paddy made a kitchen for a barn conversion Geri Halliwell once briefly rented.)
‘You are kidding?’
‘You can see it on her Instagram feed.’ I make to look it up on my phone, then stop. ‘Oh, no, of course it’s on Geri’s friend and family Finsta. She doesn’t share shots of the house on her public profile now she’s rah.’ I’m overacting wildly. Five minutes more in hell, Granny.
But her eyes have brightened through the freeze face. ‘Do you have a card?’
I hurry inside to dig out one along with an old brochure.
She flicks through it. ‘I’ll get him round straight away.’
*
Paddy’s erstwhile backer got mullered by the credit crunch when redundancy from his analyst’s job ended his high-flying career. He needed his investment back at the worst possible time: orders for handmade kitchens had flatlined, Paddy’s mind elsewhere as it spiralled through the grief of losing his dad, then his mum’s diagnosis, my professional work drying up, the children a non-stop triple act.
Paddy and his friend fell out over it big time, which I still feel sad about. He’d been Best Man at our wedding, a loveable rogue whose generosity had helped Paddy out of trouble more than once. And it was his money to take back, but Paddy so badly needed a demon, and there he was.
Word is he bought a farm with another old mate just over the Welsh border from his childhood home. Last we heard, he was making craft gin there. I hope Paddy makes it up with him one day, just as I wish he would patch it up with Miles. Old friends matter at our age.
*
I text Paddy as soon as I’m back inside: If neighbour calls about a kitchen, DROP EVERYTHING.
Now it’s a quick change from the comfortable-but-professional layers to getaway camouflage: crop jeans, Breton top, boat shoes, hoodie, the fifty-something middle-class uniform guaranteed to render me even more invisible. Let’s leave the pearls on for luck.
Edward and Summer have taken the only functional backpacks. I cram my things into a flight case with an extending handle and wheels which is all a bit The Apprentice for such an intrepid mission but will have to do. Then I catch myself adding the novel I’m halfway through and stop. What am I doing? This isn’t a holiday. I’ll be packing family board games and favourite films and box sets next.
As I head downstairs, I try to remember the name of the eighties television series my husband treasures and that Matteo was so obsessed with he still longs for a canal barge. Damn this menopausal memory! I go into the sitting room to scour the DVD collection – shelves beautifully handmade by Paddy – and right at the top, where we keep Trainspotting and Kill Bill and all those nineties action movies I always forget are so violent until I agree to re-watch one, is the one I’m looking for, Travelling Man.
As well as a traditional red narrowboat, there’s a picture of its lead character, Lomax, smouldering on the box, played by eighties British heartthrob Leigh Lawson, AKA ‘Twiggy’s husband’. I know his name because it says so, and I know he married Twiggy because my middle-aged brain, whilst unable to retain a shopping list for more than an hour, can retain ancient celebrity trivia indefinitely.
I want to know how Travelling Man captivated the two men so much.
I accidentally slot Disc Two in, but it hardly matters. I only need a sense of it, and I select an episode called Moving On, which seems fitting.
It opens with a vintage Granada Television logo then straight into a scene set in a rural Black Country pub in which a local (played by an actor I’m certain was one of the Play School presenters and is trying hard to look sinister) arm-wrestles a man with a bad Australian accent and a mullet. Edgy synth chords say this is serious. An open Zippo lighter flame burns Aussie Mullet’s hairy elbow when he loses. They make some sort of deal for a fiver (which they both agree is a lot of money) and then the title sequence starts, all terrifically eighties, a little sliding mosaic of video clips forming into the shape of a canal boat. The music’s unexpectedly haunting and mellow.
Action switches to a derelict house. A long-lens camera is clicking, an unseen photographer spying on Lomax wandering around in a leather jacket looking very Roxy Music video.
My God, Leigh Lawson was scrumptious! And curiously Italianate, now I look closer. In fact, add on thirty years and a beard…
Stop it, Eliza. You’re just punishing yourself. I go to a drawer to fetch some paper to write a note for Paddy, then find myself in front of the television again.
Lomax is swigging on a can of Top Brass lager as he motors gently along a sunny canal on Harmony, her red paintwork gleaming prettily in the sunlight, a far less showy old vessel than The Tempest, but the resemblance is clear.
I’ve seen enough. I mute the sound and sit down at the coffee table with the paper and a pen.
It takes me fifteen minutes and a lot of tear splotches to compose just one sentence of my farewell note: I was going to get you a puppy for our anniversary, my love, but you’re my best friend and I hope I can remind you why. I can’t think what to write next.
I stare tearily down at the page again. While I’m determined to do this, to run away, I don’t want Paddy to think it’s forever.
I hope we can still celebrate tomorrow. I’ll call to say where. I sign off with an extravagant Exxx wondering if I’m tempting fate.
I add: PS: Dress up.
I head upstairs and tuck it between the bedcover and his pillow because I can’t risk him finding it before bedtime. Then fetch the Avon Navigation Guide out of the en suite where it’s deemed essential loo-side reading by Paddy.
In the sitting room, the old episode of Travelling Man is still playing silently: Lomax and Harmony the barge are now deep in a fierce canal lock while two men with mullets throw firecrackers down her chimney. I watch in alarm; I hate locks. And mullets.
I hunt for the remote, give up and instead head into the kitchen to pack some emergency rations – on-their-date sausage rolls and a few apples. Crouching down to cram them in the front pouch of the Apprentice case, I realise the TV remote is in my back pocket, along with several pens and an old dog toy. I hurry back to eject the DVD.
On screen, Harmony is now crossing the Chirk Aqueduct, a ten-arch stone construction that carries the Llangollen Canal across the Ceiriog Valley. Not far from where Paddy grew up, it’s giddyingly high.
The shot switches to a crop-duster helicopter buzzing towards the great waterway in the sky, piloted by the actor with the bad Australian accent from the first pub scene.
This is the scene Paddy and Matteo bonded over, I realise.
I unmute it.
Lomax is halfway along the aqueduct and minding his own sexily brooding business listening to some Donizetti while Aussie Mullet – looking very Top Gun in aviator shades – starts taking aerial swoops at him in the helicopter. It looks incredibly dangerous. And very real. No stunt doubles here; Leigh Lawson’s acting his heart out up there.
He’s overboard! Where’s the bloody lifebuoy ring? The very one that now hangs on our cellar wall here in Leamington Spa is missing from her stern.
I hurry closer to the screen as Lomax scrambles up out of the water onto the aqueduct wall – nothing between him and a seventy-feet fall,
not even a rail – and, running backwards, gets swiped by the crop duster again. That helicopter is crazily close. As it circles away, Lomax dives in and swims after Harmony, still chugging along in forward throttle, and finally clings onto her stern as she heads into the tunnel.
I’m breathless. Forget Harrison Ford; Leigh Lawson is a stunt god.
I eject the DVD with shaking hands, quietly terrified.
Today, I plan to steal a narrowboat and hide it. I’ll check the buoy and life jackets are on board first. And I’m going nowhere near any aqueducts.
I have something to prove here.
*
Although I’d hesitate to describe Paddy as a sexist, he did come preloaded with a lot of assumptions when we met, not least that women aren’t as practically-minded as men, particularly when it comes to boats.
While it’s true that his mum Ruth’s interest in her husband’s Lady Love didn’t extend much beyond brewing up and making sandwiches in the galley, I wanted to skipper.
This tested the fledgling romance. Paddy had explained that barges don’t handle like cars, don’t have brakes and that while they travel very slowly, heavy old birds like Lady Love are steel-hulled and very hard to stop. What he hadn’t explained was the strange groaning, shouting and lecturing sounds the men on board would make every time I got it slightly wrong and how bloody off-putting that would be.
After I’d battered her sides, run her aground and eventually got her wedged broadside across the canal whilst being talked down to all the time, I resigned my captaincy. And while I’ve returned to the helm many times in the years since and pretty much mastered the steering, it’s not my idea of a relaxed day out.
Something I have never done in my life is taken her out single-handed.
Until today.
*
I am on my way to Stratford, Annie Lennox cheering me on with ‘Sweet Dreams’.
The rust bucket’s hands-free Bluetooth is a cheap, voice-activated gadget we bought from Aldi and it is notoriously glitchy.