by Lucy Diamond
‘It’s fine, we’ve got a spare she can use,’ Em said. Then she peered a little closer at Maggie. ‘Is that okay? I did tell Jack you might have plans or . . .’
Maggie swallowed, thinking about her dad and wanting to put a stop to this whole expedition but too embarrassed to trot out her worries in front of this breezy, smiling stranger. You can’t wrap Amelia in cotton wool!, her mum had warned in the past. Yes, but why not?
‘It’s okay,’ she managed to say after a moment. She put her arms around herself, wishing she had on a dressing gown at least. The material of her pyjamas was horribly thin and a little bit coffee-stained, come to think of it. ‘We hadn’t made any plans.’
The woman grinned. ‘Same! Oh, good. I can never understand people who go on holiday with this full agenda. An itinerary! What’s that all about?’ She gave a hoot. ‘Nice to meet you, anyway. Oh – I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Maggie,’ she said miserably. Maggie of the pyjamas and unbrushed hair, that’s me. Not to mention the daughter who can’t wait to be shot of me.
‘Maggie, got it. I’m Em, as I said, and I’m here with George and . . .’ Spots of colour rose in her cheeks suddenly, for some reason. ‘Well, you don’t need to know all of that, obviously. Right! I’ll leave you to your breakfast anyway. Just come on over when you’re ready, Amelia, okay? Have a lovely day, Maggie.’
Maggie shut the door again, her heart thudding, feeling as if she’d lost face terribly. Lost a battle too. ‘So there we are,’ she said after a moment. ‘Looks like you’re going, after all.’ She was unable to look at Amelia in case there was a gloating light of victory in her eyes; she didn’t think she could bear it. ‘You’d better go and butter that toast before it gets cold,’ she added, as Amelia skipped away from her, a new bounce in her step.
Leaning against the wall, Maggie had the tight, miserable feeling of having been outplayed. Cycling on unknown roads, on an unfamiliar bike, with teenagers she barely knew, one of whom had been boasting about being able to sneak out some alcohol . . . This was not at all what she wanted for her girl. This was not remotely the lovely start to the holiday she had hoped for.
More to the point, she realized, with a startled jolt, if Amelia was departing for these new horizons this morning, what on earth was Maggie going to do with herself in the meantime?
Chapter Five
‘So I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Mack said, bending down to kiss her. Olivia was still in her dressing gown at the kitchen table, hair lank and unwashed on her shoulders, while the detritus of family breakfast lay all around: the smeary Weetabix bowls, the explosion-splatter of toast crumbs and the blobs of raspberry jam quivering like bright scarlet jewels beside the butter dish.
‘Yep,’ she said, not leaning into him like she might once have done. You could at least have helped me clear this lot up first, she thought with weary reproach.
‘Probably around five, depending on the traffic, but I’ll text if I’m going to be much later than that, okay?’ he went on, not seeming to notice how still she held herself, how tightly her hands were clenched around her mug. ‘Right, where are those rascals? Stanley? Harry? Come and say bye to Daddy. I’m going now. Boys?’
In they roared like a double blond whirlwind, her three-year-old twin tearaways, whose hobbies were wrestling, resisting naps and smashing things. ‘Where are they? Where are those boys of mine?’ Mack repeated, pretending to peer into cupboards and the fridge. ‘Don’t say I’ve lost them. Don’t say they’ve gone missing again.’
He crouched down to look under the table and this was their cue to launch themselves with whoops and war cries onto his back. ‘Whoa,’ he yelled, as their small plump arms fastened around his neck. ‘I’m being attacked! They’ve got me! They’ve got me!’
‘CHOP! CHOP!’ yelled Stanley, bashing the side of his hand against his father’s neck. ‘Chop off your HEAD!’
‘No chopping,’ Olivia said weakly, but her voice was unheard, unnoticed by the scrum of her husband and sons. They reminded her of a comic-strip fight, one depicting arms and legs emerging from a cloud of dust. Through the back window she could see next door’s cat saunter along the fence, a vision of leisureliness compared to the melee this side of the glass.
‘Who’s chopping me? Who’s daring to chop the mighty Daddy?’ bellowed Mack, straightening from his crouched position so that the boys, thrilled, were forced to cling onto him tighter in order to avoid falling to the floor. ‘And where are my boys?’
‘Here we are,’ squeaked Harry breathlessly, wriggling and squirming, drumming his small bare feet against his father’s hip. ‘Here we are!’
‘Aha,’ cried Mack, grabbing a foot as Harry giggled and yelped. ‘And another one!’ he cheered, clutching Stanley’s ankle with his other hand. ‘I’ve got me two boys now. What shall I do with them?’
‘Mack . . .’ Olivia said, because neither he nor they ever knew when to stop with these rough-and-tumble games, whipping each other into such a state of frenzy that they almost always ended in injury and tears. It drove her mad that he would work them up like this just before he left the house, so that she’d have to deal with the fallout once he’d gone. It was still only eight-thirty in the morning and they were already wild. Meanwhile the cat outside had dropped in one liquid movement to the flowerbed, like a commando trained in stealth, and she felt a pang of envy for its freedom to go where it pleased. ‘MACK,’ she said again, louder this time, because the three of them were still grappling and yelling. ‘Don’t you need to go?’
He stopped and the game was over, but the boys weren’t ready for it to end and charged at his legs, pummelling his thighs and trying to haul him over, with protesting shouts. ‘No, no,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Mummy’s right, that’s enough. I need to go.’
Mummy’s fault, more like, Olivia thought dismally as the boys howled and stamped. Mummy the killjoy ruins everything again. She could smell her own unwashed body as she bent to try and console Harry, and wished she’d had time to shower before Mack left. With the boys now wound up like battling clockwork toys, it would be ages before she could manage five minutes to herself for such a luxury.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said over the ruckus, extricating himself first from one red-faced twin, then another, and walking quickly away. ‘Bye, boys. Be good for Mummy!’
Olivia sat there like a piece of stone while the boys roiled and boiled around her. She put her head in her hands and tried to calculate how many minutes and hours it would be before he walked back through the door again, but her brain was too fogged with the bad night she’d had to compute that far. A lot of minutes, anyway. Too many hours. They stretched out before her like empty boxes on a conveyor belt and she wondered how she would fill them. If she would ever reach the end.
Pinned up on the fridge with a Peppa Pig magnet was one of their wedding photos, and her gaze rested numbly on it for a moment. It was like looking at a pair of strangers. There they were, she and Mack, so happy on their special day. Olivia in her lace-sleeved dress, her hair pinned up in an elaborate style, her face so bright and joyful as she leaned against her handsome husband, the two of them with their arms around each other beneath a rose-covered arching trellis in the hotel grounds. She loved the way that Mack’s shock of unruly brown hair was just starting to loosen from its previously controlled neatness, that his tie was already askew. It was as if the real Mack, who was happiest in a pair of knackered shorts and a beat-up old T-shirt – the Mack who resisted suits and hair products as if he had some kind of allergy – was on the verge of bursting through Wedding Mack in all his finery.
Just look at them both, though, innocents that they were. They had no idea that eleven months later they would be parents of hell-raising twins and would never sleep again.
Meanwhile the boys were still fighting, she could hear their muffled thuds and yells and knew she should go and separate them before one of them was hurt or something got broken. And yet inertia had already settled upon h
er. A deadening sort of paralysis. Annoyance – no, actually, anger – at the fact that Mack, having worked long hours out at work all week, could then just go off on a bender with his mates for the whole weekend like this without a second thought. As if she didn’t matter. As if she had nothing better to do than the endless laundry and cleaning and childcare. Her next job would presumably be to disentangle her bloodthirsty boys without any of them losing a finger or eye in the process. Great.
His life hadn’t come to a screeching halt three years ago, had it? Oh no. Quite the opposite in fact. Mack’s star was very much in the ascendant, with great demand for his company, which specialized in turning around struggling businesses. He was proud of his longer days in the office, proud that he could support the family with his run of big contracts.
For Mack, fatherhood was having a picture of the boys in his wallet; it was wrestling matches and water fights, for as long as he felt like it. He was the Mighty Daddy, the fun parent, who still got to go to football matches and stag weekends and drinks with his mates, assuming all the while that Olivia would be there to hold the fort in his absence. And to be fair, she had gone along with this division of labour initially: they both knew she was so determined to be a good mother to the boys that she wanted to be there for them for every night-waking, every feed, every cry. Call it atonement, call it proving a point, she was dogged in her belief that this was her work, the least she could do.
Until she realized just how hard it was anyway, how utterly exhausting. How broken she was starting to feel. Was it pride or embarrassment that kept her from telling Mack she was struggling? Or sheer maternal guilt? Whichever, he didn’t seem to have noticed her feelings of failure.
His parents didn’t help matters, either. They were up in Aberdeenshire and had traditional ideas about child-rearing, namely that it was solely the preserve of a mother and certainly not to be farmed out to any third parties, even the child’s own father. ‘Don’t tell me she’s got you changing nappies,’ Olivia had overheard her mother-in-law exclaiming with horror the first time they’d come down after the boys had been born. ‘For heaven’s sake! When you’re out working hard and earning all the money for the family, as well. Whatever next?’
Like Olivia was lounging around eating peeled grapes all day, like she wasn’t working hard. There were times when she looked back on her old job in the university library and it seemed an oasis of calm concentration, practically a holiday, compared to her current job as a mum. Sometimes she could weep for that civilized life of politeness and order, of lunch-breaks and set hours, where nobody was fighting or throwing things or bellowing urgently that they needed the toilet. To think that before the boys she had taken such luxuries for granted!
This was her world now, though. ‘No need to worry about rushing back to work,’ Mack assured her whenever she broached the subject, to the point where his success and wealth had begun to feel like a prison door slamming shut on her. He thought he was being kind, doing her a favour, but in truth she was gripped by the queasy conviction that she was just not cut out for full-time motherhood. Oh, of course she loved the small rampaging tyrants who had totally annexed her life, she adored every inch of their grubby, wriggling bodies, right up to their flaxen-haired heads, but if she was honest with herself, she loved them most when they were asleep. At the end of the day, when they were lost to dream worlds, side by side in their junior beds, long eyelashes fluttering on perfect peachy cheeks, she felt her love for them unfurling, albeit in a creaky, reluctant sort of way sometimes, if they’d had a particularly punishing day. It returned every night, a well that never quite ran dry.
Yet, anyway. That was what worried her.
‘Ow! That hurt! Mummy!’
‘Get OFF! Mummy!’
She was jerked back to the present by indignant yells from the next room. She should probably go and do something about it, she supposed dully. Mack, meanwhile, would be halfway across town by now, the radio burbling cricket scores from his car speakers; he would have switched off thoughts of Olivia and the boys, and would be looking forward to his session with the lads. Left here to fend for herself, his wife was drowning, her head sinking beneath the surface, uncertain if she could make it back to shore again.
‘Mummy! He hit me!’
‘He hit me first! MUMMY!’
The boys deserved better than her, she thought. They deserved a proper, capable, fun mother, who wanted to build forts with them and bake biscuits and play football for hours on end in the garden. A laughing, energetic woman who didn’t keep dissolving into hopeless tears. Who didn’t feel half-dead with exhaustion.
‘MUMMY! Come and tell him!’
And yet here she was, lumbering to her feet like a weary old mule, knowing that her work for the day had only just begun. Knowing, too, that if this was her penance, then it was the very least she could do. ‘Coming,’ she said miserably. ‘Just coming.’
Izzie’s long caramel-coloured hair streamed out behind her as she freewheeled down a hill with Jack and Amelia on the way towards Falmouth. This was her Summer of Yes, the summer that was supposed to be changing everything – and yet here she was, forced into chaperoning her annoying brother and the girl he fancied. It was not going to earn her any points on the group chat leaderboard, that was for sure.
‘This summer,’ Lily had said, shortly after their last exam, when a group of them had been lying in the park passing around cans of raspberry cider, ‘we should all pledge to be wild. To say yes to everything!’
Perhaps it was the sweet intensity of freedom from school and GCSEs, perhaps it was the lukewarm fruity cider they were sharing, but everyone, Izzie included, had seized upon the suggestion. Yeah! This would be the summer when they lived life to the full and grabbed every opportunity with both hands. They were sixteen and ripe for adventures of whatever kind.
Since then, a leaderboard had started running on their group chat, with points being allocated for various daring acts of behaviour:
Ruby had scored ten points for dirty dancing with the boy she fancied at a house party, then another fifteen for kissing him, tongues and everything.
Tej had scored ten points for nicking a bottle of vodka from the corner shop and then another ten for gatecrashing a sixth former’s party in her street.
Miko had chatted up a hot boy at the Sandford Park Lido the other day (ten points) and apparently flashed him her boobs behind the changing-room door (fifteen).
Lily had bagged herself twenty points for some naked snogging – ‘heavy petting’, she called it coyly – with her boyfriend Jordan and looked set to earn quite a lot more, having wangled the two of them tickets for a music festival in August. How many points do I get for sharing a tent with Jordan? she’d asked the others.
Depends what else you’re sharing . . . Ruby had replied, with a load of winking emojis.
Izzie, meanwhile, was yet to register a single point. Clearly she was hopeless at being as cool as her friends. She felt squeamish whenever they talked about sex or boys and never knew what to say. The smell of cigarettes grossed her out, and she privately thought alcohol was disgusting. Being on holiday in the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly going to help her score either, not least because Seren kept barging into her room all the time and was a total snitch; it would be impossible to get away with anything, let alone go as wild as her friends. Izzie didn’t wash her hands, Seren had reported last night at dinner. Izzie was on her phone really late last night, she had said at breakfast, presumably having been creeping about spying, like the annoying weirdo she was. Izzie won’t let me join in, she had moaned earlier, when Izzie was having a conversation with George and ignoring all Seren’s attention-seeking interruptions. Yeah, no shit, Izzie had thought, rolling her eyes.
It didn’t help that her mum was being so sickeningly happy and loved-up all the time. Was there anything more pukesome than your mum with a new boyfriend? Hello? If anyone should be blushing and feeling fluttery in their family, it was her, the actual sixt
een-year-old, not her cringey old mum. Even Jack was having more luck than Izzie, now that he’d clapped eyes on Amelia and seemed revoltingly pleased with himself. It made Izzie feel more of a freak than ever.
As for George, well, he was a whole other problem.
Izzie still burned with embarrassment whenever she thought about the first time she’d seen him back in the spring. She’d been out at Wagamama in town for Tej’s birthday treat, and a group of them were sitting at a table by the window, cracking open their chopsticks and tucking into steaming mounds of yaki soba, as the conversation turned to boys at school. Miko was swooning on about Ryan Michaels, in the sixth form, and Ruby was sighing shiny-eyed about Conor Perry; and even Tej, who had recently come out, was joining in, confessing her crush on Lia Mendelson in a breathless, excited sort of way. Izzie had kept quiet, not really having anything to contribute, until Lily had elbowed her and said, ‘Go on then, who do you fancy at school, Iz?’
‘God, no one at school,’ Izzie had said, possibly too quickly and defensively. ‘They’re all so lame and immature. Give me an older guy any day.’
She wasn’t even sure where this had come from – a bluster, a bluff, to try and throw the limelight away from herself. There was no older guy on her mind whatsoever. The whole idea of falling in love with anyone seemed remote and impossible to her; it was something for other people to get all weird about. Unfortunately, her friends took her comment at face value.
‘What, an older guy like him?’ Tej sniggered, pointing across the restaurant to where an elderly gentleman with a magnificent curly white moustache sat alone with a bowl of noodle soup.
The others fell about tittering and Izzie felt her face grow hot. She had very pale skin that went from milk to lobster in the space of seconds, and she hated wearing her embarrassment so publicly. ‘Not like him! Like . . .’ Izzie scoured the restaurant for inspiration – absolutely none – then turned her attention to the world outside. ‘Like him,’ she said triumphantly, pointing a chopstick.
