- -
- 100%
- +
‘Yes.’
‘Are you wearing a bathrobe?’ Two pink circles appear on his cheeks.
I roll my eyes. ‘I didn’t have time to dress.’ I peer at myself in the bottom of the screen but realise that he can only see my shoulders and head. ‘Come on Evan, what’s so important that you had to interrupt my bath?’
‘Well, like I said in my text, I’ve been thinking about Janis’ birthday and I’ve had a few ideas.’
‘Go on.’
‘Annie, what’ve you done to your nose?’
‘What?’
‘Is that a graze?’ He peers at me from the screen.
I touch the bridge of my nose carefully. ‘Yes. I… uh… tripped today in the park. Long story.’ I wave my hand dismissively, not wanting to share the finer details of my embarrassing fall with Evan, and I realise that I don’t want to tell him about Vlad either. ‘So what was your idea for Janis?’
‘Well, as it’s her eighteenth, I thought we could do something special. As a family, perhaps.’
‘With Henry and Anabelle?’ I hope that he isn’t about to propose anything that doesn’t include my youngest children. We come as a package.
‘Absolutely! I wouldn’t be so callous as to leave them out, Annie.’
‘Of course not.’ I’m so defensive where the children are concerned sometimes and I’m terrified of anything hurting them. I let out a slow breath. ‘So?’
‘How about an all-expenses-paid trip to New York?’
‘New York?’ I am filled at once with delight and confusion. I have always wanted to go to Manhattan but never had the opportunity. ‘How would we…’
He leans closer to the screen. ‘I have to go there in May for a company meeting at the Waldorf and they’re putting me up there for a week. Families are allowed.’ He grins at me and looks just as innocent and enthusiastic as he did when he was eighteen.
Families? ‘When exactly in May?’
‘The second week.’
‘Ah.’ My heart sinks. He’s still the same old Evan in so many ways, forgetting the crucial factors that rule our lives. ‘We can’t do that week.’
‘What? Why not?’ His dark brows form a frown and his sunny expression is clouded by doubt.
‘School.’
‘What?’
‘You know, the place where I work and where the children go. And Janis has college and exams.’
‘But Annie, surely you can miss a few days for the trip of a lifetime? I thought it was half-term around then anyway.’ His cheeks darken.
I shake my head. ‘We can’t all bunk off school. Some of us have commitments.’
He rubs a hand over his face and sighs. ‘I know you have commitments, Annie. Believe it or not, everyone has commitments of some sort or another. But this is a great opportunity for the children to see one of the best cities in the world. You wouldn’t have to pay anything; the company would cover all costs. It would mean so much to me to have Janis… and you guys… there. We could celebrate her special birthday in style.’
Celebrate. Typical Evan. His life seems to be all about living it up and visiting fancy places, about meeting with movie directors and game developers. He has no idea what it’s like to have a normal job with normal worries. Of course, he spends most of his life on the other side of the world, far away from his child and ex-wife, so how could he understand? ‘It sounds fabulous Evan, it really does, but it’s a no from me.’
He sits back and folds his arms across his chest and I know that I’ve hurt him with my refusal to be drawn into his enthusiasm. The bridge of my nose throbs and it makes my eyes water. As I watch him, I am reminded of how I used to feel when we argued, even over petty things like the washing up. He’s a good guy but he’s impulsive at times and I just can’t be like that. We are so very different, yet I wonder how it would feel to be the one who could act without regard for consequences or fears of the future. To be light and free to act upon a whim. Sometimes I wish I could let go, I honestly do, but the idea of losing control terrifies me.
‘So this is a no because of your job, right?’ He unfolds his arms and steeples his fingers under his chin. I wonder if he’s about to psychoanalyse me.
‘That’s right and because the children have school.’
‘It would hardly hurt the younger two to miss a week, would it?’ He’s so persistent and I realise that this is the part of him that needs to be in control emerging.
‘That’s beside the point, Evan. Holidays during term time are frowned upon now. You’d know that if you were…’ I wince and grit my teeth. That was unfair. I was about to admonish him for not being a full-time parent, for not being here. I am hurled back in time to when he left. Janis was so young then; I’d tucked her into bed first and he read her a story. He’d packed his bags earlier that day when I’d taken her to the park, then hidden them in the small cupboard in the hall. My stomach churns as I picture those bags, filled with his things as we prepared to go our separate ways. After he’d kissed Janis goodnight, I followed him into the hallway and stood watching as he put on his coat and shoes. Everything in me was screaming out, insisting that I stop him, tell him that I loved him and that we could find a way to make it work. But I bit my lip until I tasted blood, believing it was for the best.
As he picked up his bags, he looked back at me and I saw my own pain reflected in his eyes. We had come together as kids – young, impulsive and bursting with dreams – but we’d been thrown into adulthood by getting pregnant. It changed everything and we drifted apart under the pressure. Just like my father’s death changed everything. Some things come along and change your life for the better. Some things change it for the worse. My father’s death cast a shadow over my childhood. Janis’ conception was a wonderful gift, but it came with a price. Yet there have been times over the years when I wondered if we made a mistake, if Evan and I could have worked it out. But it’s too late now.
‘You were going to say if I were there, as an everyday parent, weren’t you, Annie?’ Evan’s voice pulls me back to the present. His handsome face is blank and I search it for signs of how he’s feeling.
‘No. Yes. Uh… just, I can’t just pull the kids out of school whenever I feel like it.’
‘It’s always the same with you, Annie. You can’t relax your guard for one minute, can you?’
I sit up straight as anger fills me. So we’re back to that old argument are we? ‘Now look, Evan, I do have to hold the fort here, you know. I am responsible for three young lives, so I can’t just swan off whenever I feel like it to New York… or wherever else the fuck I feel like.’ Oh dear! I didn’t mean to swear but it seems that this man can get to me like no other; even after all these years. We have contact because of Janis but we also manage to avoid spending much time together when he comes over to the UK. It was like an unspoken agreement at first, that we try not to be in the same room for too long, and it just stayed that way. So a trip to New York together would probably be disastrous, even if it was during half-term. I don’t know what Evan was thinking.
‘Annie… all I’m saying is that you need to live a little now and then. Let your hair down.’
I take a deep breath and count to ten. ‘Evan, besides the fact that I cannot take the children away from their education, I have a steady job that I cannot walk away from. If I took a week off during term time, I would pay for it with my own blood!’ The faces of the school’s management team pop into my head and I shudder. Just the thought of trying to ask for leave of absence to go to New York, and that close to the pupils’ GCSE exams, brings me out in a cold sweat.
‘Oh don’t be so dramatic. I’m sure if you explained…’
I fight the urge to growl at the screen and instead dig my nails into my palms. ‘I cannot have days off work. The children cannot have days off school. Evan, I had to literally beg the head teacher last year just to get two hours off work to go to Henry’s Christmas play. She wasn’t happy about that and I’m sure she would have said no if she’d had a good enough reason. New York was a lovely idea but unless you can arrange it during school holidays then, as I said, it’s a no from me.’ I watch him slowly deflate so add, ‘I’m sorry.’
He looks unbearably sad and I am reminded of how he looked at me all those years ago when I told him that I couldn’t just strap our child to my back and travel the world as he carved out his career. Once Janis came along, she became my top priority. Evan was working all hours and I didn’t feel like his equal any more, because he was so determined to be the provider. It scared me, the thought of completely relying on him for everything, and what we had just eroded away.
‘Sorry again, Ev. Do you want me to get Janis?’
‘Not just yet. Wait a moment,’ he says. We stare at each other; miles between us, years of separation between us, a lifetime of hurt between us.
I get up to leave.
‘Annie!’ I turn back to face him and stare deep into his eyes, eyes that once made me dream of foreign beaches, fun and freedom, of a lifetime of happiness, contentment and love.
‘Yes?’
He opens his mouth but pauses and licks his lips. His eyes tell me a thousand things that he clearly cannot say. ‘Nothing. Just, take care. I’ll try to think of something else for Janis’ birthday. I didn’t tell her about this because I wanted to run it past you first.’
‘Okay. Speak soon.’ I smile briefly then leave the room and find Janis hovering at the top of the staircase, her face a picture of hope. I wonder how much she overheard. Hopefully very little, because who’d seem like the big bad mother in all of this?
I pop downstairs to check on Henry and Anabelle but they are immersed in competitive colouring with the dogs watching their every move. I hope that they remember to tidy up properly afterwards so that Dragon doesn’t eat their pencils again. As they are occupied, I seize the opportunity to creep back up the stairs to finish my bath. There is an ache in my chest that I blame on a pulled muscle and I’m hoping that the warm water will help to ease it away.
When I am immersed in the lukewarm water – the bubbles have long since disappeared – I surrender to my confusion. I do not like to argue with Evan; I never have. Splitting up was the right thing to do all those years ago because things just weren’t right between us, and we’ve managed to be very grown-up and civil for Janis’ sake.
But with Dex’s wedding on the horizon, I’m aware that for the first time in a long time, Evan and I will be forced to spend a considerable amount of time in the same room. And right now, that idea makes me feel rather uneasy.
Chapter Six
In the Middle of the Night
I don’t know why I agreed to this, I really don’t, as my instincts are screaming out against it. Perhaps it was guilt over the New York trip, but whatever my reasons, I caved and there is no going back now. That’s the problem with denying the children an opportunity – even if it was an impractical and impossible one – I just feel guilty and as if I need to compensate in some other way.
Henry has been asking for months if he can get a bearded dragon like his friend Joshua. Apparently, Joshua’s two bearded dragons turned out to be male and female and within months of them cohabiting, the female laid eggs. The eggs hatched and the ‘baby beardies’ – as Henry calls them – need homes.
Joshua’s parents are quite laidback, so much so that their house is full of different types of animals. It kind of freaks me out whenever I go there to pick up Henry after a play date, but I think it’s just because of all the things you hear in the media about reptiles and unusual pets. I mean, they actually share their home with spiders and snakes. Joshua’s father, Ken, works in one of those out of town exotic pet shops, so he often brings work home, and his mother Julie is a social worker. I’ve known them for years because Joshua and Henry went to the same nursery.
I knock at the door of their terraced house and wait. Henry is beside me and he hops from one foot to the other. ‘At least with it being half-term, I can help him to settle in, eh Mum?’ he asks me, his eyes wide with excitement. I nod and smile but my stomach is in knots.
What if it escapes? What if it bites? What if it carries diseases and one day I don’t turn up for work and three weeks later we’re all discovered covered in boils and…
‘Hey Annie, Henry and Anabelle! Come on in.’ Julie stands aside and ushers us into her cosy three-bedroom house which is positively bursting at the seams with vivariums, children and animals. Yet it smells very pleasant, like apple pie and fresh linen. In spite of my fear of the spiders, I feel like I could sit on one of the large sofas in the lounge, tuck my feet under me and take a nap. Let someone take care of me for a change.
Henry disappears with Joshua almost immediately to see the baby beardies and I bite my tongue to avoid telling him to watch out for spiders and snakes.
‘Mumma, can I go and play in the garden?’ Anabelle asks when she spies one of those plastic sit-in cars through the French windows.
‘Of course you can,’ Julie replies and directs Anabelle through the kitchen and outside. I briefly wonder what pets they have living in the garden, then my attention is drawn to Julie’s t-shirt which appears to be moving. It’s like she has one boob that’s developed the ability to wriggle. ‘Oh!’ She pats her chest gently as she catches me staring. ‘I’m just keeping Bertie warm.’
‘Bertie?’ I ask, even though I don’t want to. I try to tear my gaze away from her chest. What kind of animal is Bertie? I’m terrified that it’s going to be a big hairy spider.
‘Yes,’ Julie tucks a hand down her neckline and extracts a ball of mink fluff, ‘he’s a baby chinchilla.’ She holds the creature out and I peer at it. It jerks in her hand and I jump back. ‘Oh, Annie. He won’t hurt. He’s just sleepy. Here, you hold him.’
I cautiously take the fluffy thing and cradle it in the crook of my arm where it settles immediately and falls back to sleep. She’s right. He is soft and warm and kind of cute.
‘So do you have everything ready for the baby dragon?’ Julie asks.
I nod. She sent me an email listing everything we’d need so I took it to the pet shop where Ken works. ‘I’ve set it all up according to the manual. The only thing is… I’m a bit worried about the feeding thing. I bought some of those dead bugs, you know, crickets in a jar.’
Julie grimaces. ‘I’ll be honest, Annie, the dragons aren’t fussy on those things. They much prefer the live ones.’ Funny, she repeated exactly what her husband told me yesterday. ‘Tell you what, keep the jar for emergencies and I’ll give you a pot of live ones. Only trouble is, they’re normal black crickets and not the silent ones.’
I smile and shrug. It makes no difference to me whether they’re noisy or not; bugs are bugs and they terrify me. I could never go on a TV show where I’d be sent to a desert island or into the jungle because the sheer amount of insects around would totally freak me out. Having bugs crawl all over me? No thank you! As for crunching on bugs when one day we run out of other food sources, as some experts are claiming we will… there’s no way I could ever put something like that in my mouth.
Julie leads me into the hallway and up the stairs. I keep a hand over the chinchilla and negotiate the steps carefully because every one seems to have a tower of paperbacks, a pile of ironing or a pair of shoes on it. With me being rather clumsy, I’d never manage to live here. I’d be sure to break a bone every day of the week.
At the top of the stairs, we turn right then head up another flight. Joshua’s room is up in the attic. It’s a fabulous conversion that Julie showed me two years ago after they had it done. With four boys, a husband and all their pets, they needed to make the most of what space they had. When we reach the top of that flight, we walk across a small landing and through an open doorway. Henry is sitting on the floor with Joshua and they are staring into a vivarium full of tiny bearded dragons.
‘Look Mummy!’ Henry squeals. ‘Joshua has so many of them. He’s really lucky!’
I smile and take a step closer. The lively black and green creatures scuttle about inside the blue-lit tank, chasing after small crickets. They hop and jump in the pursuit of food, their instincts driving them to feed, to survive, to be on top. I think briefly about school but shake the thought away.
‘Which one do you want, Henry?’ Julie asks.
Henry stares hard at the viv. ‘Um. I don’t know. I wish I could take more than one home.’ He eyes me over his shoulder, chewing his lower lip, his childish attempts at manipulation being honed even at this early stage. I will myself to be strong, to take only one lizard home with me. Not every animal needs to be paired off like in some perfect children’s movie, surely?
‘Choose, please, Henry. We can’t keep Julie and Joshua waiting. And we have to get back for Janis.’ The latter comment isn’t strictly true, although having three children does give me an excuse if one of them is dallying somewhere.
‘Okay…’ He sighs, defeated, and points to one of the babies.
As Joshua places the dragon into a plastic tub, Julie hands me a smaller tub full of crickets and explains about feeding times. ‘It’ll be like having another baby,’ I say, though at least once the lights go off, these creatures apparently sleep through the night. I eye the plastic tub in my hand and shiver as the contents shuffle around; they remind me of currants with legs.
‘You’ll love him!’ Julie replies. ‘They’re such friendly creatures and he’ll have such fun roaming your house.’
I’m not so sure that’s a good idea as I think about Dragon and Fairy Princess and how they love chasing house spiders and woodlice. There was also that time when Janis was looking after the school hamster and it escaped. We only found it when Dragon refused to leave the fireplace in the living room because he could smell it under there. At the time, Dex had been with us and he’d had to remove the front of the fire to get at the chimney space. By then, the hamster was a little worse for wear and we’d had to nip out to the pet shop and get a new one while Janis went to Cassie’s for an hour. I just didn’t have the heart to tell her it had died. She was too young and being my first, I hadn’t gone through all that before. Henry is tougher though, more of a realist. For instance, when he had goldfish, I bought him a proper tank that we put in the kitchen on the Welsh dresser and for a few months it was his pride and joy. He’d feed the fish every morning and clean them out at weekends. Then one Saturday, we came down and the biggest fish, Bob, was gone. It had just disappeared. I thought that the other fish might have eaten it, but there was no evidence left in the tank. Henry had thought about it quietly for a few days in that way he does, then one day over pizza, he’d announced his conclusion. Bob had leapt from the water and fallen to the floor, where Dragon or Fairy Princess had consumed it. And just like that, without emotion or elaboration, my son had cleared up the mystery. To this day, I still don’t know if he was right, but we don’t have a cat, and as the dogs spent the weeks following the fish’s disappearance lurking in front of the tank, watching the remaining fish intently, I had to accept that perhaps my then six-year-old son was in fact correct. Bob had leapt to his death, a bit like my post when it falls through the letterbox and into Dragon’s mouth. I hope that this bearded dragon won’t suffer a similar fate.
At the door, I give the sleeping chinchilla back to Julie and Henry holds on tightly to the plastic tub containing his dragon. He and Joshua share a smile and Joshua solemnly tells Henry to take care of the beardy and to bring him back to play any time he likes. Just imagine! A reptile play date.
As I open the door, I realise that something is missing.
Anabelle!
‘Julie, is Anabelle still in the garden?’
Julie slaps a hand to her chest. ‘Oh my lord yes! She’s so quiet, I’d completely forgotten.’
We rush through the house to the kitchen and peer through the window. And sure enough, there she is, my beautiful little girl, driving around in the red plastic car talking away to herself. Then I look more closely and there, on the dashboard, I can just make out a green shell.
Julie rushes out into the garden and I follow.
‘Oh thank you, thank you!’ she gushes as she scoops the shell up. ‘You’ve found Larry!’
‘Larry?’ I ask as I help Anabelle out of the car and let her take the tub of crickets from my hand, hoping she doesn’t loosen the lid in the car.
‘Yes, our tortoise. Joshua let him out the other day for some exercise but he forgot about him and it was dark by the time he realised. We thought he’d escaped under the fence so it’s an enormous relief to see him again. Well done, Anabelle!’
My little girl smiles and nods, as if it’s an everyday occurrence to find a missing tortoise and take it for a drive, then she takes my hand and we head home.
****
Later that night, after I’ve tucked Henry into bed and checked on Anabelle, I pop my head into Janis’ room. ‘How’s it going, sweetheart?’
She glances up from her laptop. ‘Hey Mum!’ She removes her earphones and I realise that she probably didn’t hear me.
‘Everything okay?’ I sit on the edge of her bed and look around her room. I come in here all the time to drop ironing off and to speak to Evan on the laptop but I rarely actually register how it has changed. The little-girl pink was painted purple a few years ago then covered in posters. It makes me smile as I meet the eyes of long-haired rockers and smouldering movie stars, the beautiful people who grace our screens and make us dream of another life. The room could do with a fresh lick of paint but Janis would not be happy at all if she had to remove all her images of rock gods and stars of the silver screen, as well as her inspirational quotes and study notes. It seems that every spare inch of wall has a yellow sticky note bearing some literary quote or revision tip on it.
When did she grow up? When was it that her feet grew so much that she now wears a size and a half bigger than I do? I’m often struck by how quickly time passes. I take each day as it comes and work busily through it but at moments like this, when an evening stretches out before me, these niggling thoughts creep in and I feel sad that time has passed so quickly, that my babies are growing up and I’m hardly aware of it until another stage in their lives has passed.
But I can’t stop it can I?
It would just be nice if I had someone to share it all with, someone who understood.
I think then of my mother, the woman who gave up so much for me. She worked all hours and never once complained, not even when I had to tell her that I’d gotten pregnant, that all her hard work had been in vain. She surrendered some of the best years of her life working two jobs just to make ends meet and saving every spare penny so that I could go to university. She wanted me to achieve my dream of being a globetrotting photographer, to be independent, self-sufficient and to experience a freedom she never could. How did she feel when she found out that I’d risked all that for love? She didn’t try to encourage me to get an abortion and she didn’t even shout or cry, she just nodded and asked me what my plans were. She must have been disappointed, yet she took it all in her stride. Did she ever look at me in the same way I look at my children and think how quickly I’d grown? Did she ever wonder when I changed? These are questions I’ve never asked her, things I fear questioning her about in case she tells me something that hurts, that confirms my worst suspicions – that I did hurt her when I let her down.
I briefly contemplate ringing her but she’ll probably be on her third glass by now, surrounded by her sophisticated French friends and her doting husband. She lives in France on her husband’s vineyard and I’m happy for her that she has a second chance at love and happiness. After my father died, she remained strong. She never revealed distress or weakness, although I knew that she suffered; she just did it silently. I always wanted to make her proud and I swore that a man would never leave me in the situation that my father left her in. I couldn’t bear to be abandoned like that.