Time Out

by Emma Murray

  Time Out

  Emma Murray

  For the three great loves of my life: my husband, Sam, and our two daughters, Ava and Anya. (I can already hear the two girls arguing over whose name goes first.)

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  More from Emma Murray

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  Part I

  London, Past and Present

  Motherhood is tough

  But loneliness is far worse

  Friends help us survive

  1

  London, Now

  I’m not going to lie – I am nervous. It’s not often you find your whole future determined by an innocent-looking blue and white icon on your computer screen. But Skype is not flashing yet, and so I wait impatiently with sweaty palms and a whirring mind.

  I glance at the clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. It is 2.05 p.m. on a hot, clammy Wednesday afternoon in late July. The waiting is unbearable. My agent, Harriet Green, is late. She’s currently at a book event in New York and as usual she has no concept of the time difference. This is particularly annoying when I’m trying to schedule calls during my four-year-old daughter, Anna’s, afternoon nap. I drum my bitten fingernails on my desk. If Anna wakes up soon, any chance of a real conversation will be scuppered.

  With a quick swivel of my chair, I turn towards the small window of my tiny home office –i.e. the spare room, hoping for some kind of distraction. My husband, David, Anna and I live on one of those mean, narrow south-west London streets, in an area called Woodvale, which is neither woodsy nor in a valley. It is the sort of place that estate agents call ‘quaint’ or ‘bijou’ – in other words, totally overpriced.

  Rows and rows of identical red-brick Victorian terraced houses cling to each other as they line the busy, impractically narrow roads. Despite being in a firmly middle-class postcode, the shrubs and pavements are almost always covered in a mixture of dog and fox shit, a recurring topic raised on ‘Vale Mums’, the secret local Facebook group administrated by fellow ex-antenatal group mum and Nazi sympathiser Tania Henderson. (I have no evidence to suggest she has ever been affiliated with the Nazis, but if her strident approach to parenting is anything to go by, I think I have a strong case to argue.) Personally, I think Vale Mums should come with the tagline, ‘the home of First World problems’.

  While I’m waiting for Harriet to figure out what time zone I’m in I swivel back to the screen and log into Facebook to check out Vale Mums for the latest ‘news’. Much as I loathe the futile commentary and no-offence-intended grinning emojis, like reality TV, I find Vale Mums both appalling and fascinating in equal measure. A quick glance at the latest news feed tells me: Amanda has ‘FINALLY’ found the perfect cupcake recipe (I can safely sit back from the edge of my seat now); Karen ‘desperately’ needs to know how to remove limescale from her kitchen kettle (Google it, Karen!); and Bethany is ranting as usual about the amount of dog shit on the street outside her house (I think you’ll find it’s ‘steaming dog shit’ in this heat, Bethany).

  So far so boring. As I am scrolling down to see if there have been any juicier entries, I see Rosalind’s name pop up. Like Amanda, Karen and Bethany, I have never met Rosalind, but I’m willing to bet I know more about her than close members of her own family. Rosalind has three boys under the age of six (‘Three boys! THREE!’). She is about to turn forty (‘Any ideas for a fortieth celebration for a very tired mum?’); she currently has no childcare (‘Help! My nanny has just quit – by text message!’); and her husband works in Dubai for three weeks out of every month (‘Anyone else have a husband who works abroad?’ Followed by face-screaming-in-fear emoji).

  Rosalind is a frequent visitor to Vale Mums and seems to treat it as a sort of oracle. If one of her children has a high temperature, she goes on Vale Mums for diagnosis; if she wants to buy a gift for her husband, she asks the other mums for advice; and most recently, she posted a photo of a spider in her bathroom in her house and asked the mums to identify its type (answer: a house spider). I have concluded that Rosalind’s posts imply that she is either very lonely or very bored, or perhaps a combination of the two.

  Today, Rosalind’s burning question is what to make her ‘very fussy’ two-year-old, Jacob, for breakfast. I suck my breath in through my teeth and shake my head in despair. Oh, Rosalind. Poor, naïve Rosalind. Never post a ‘food’ question on Vale Mums. You’re leaving yourself wide open to all sorts of self-righteous comments from ‘the Organics’, a disturbingly large subset of Vale Mums led by aforementioned Tania Henderson.

  To qualify as an Organic, you must feed your children only top-of-the-range organic food (preferably grown in your back garden, the more worms and muck the better) in order for your children to grow up happy, healthy and savvy enough to attract a partner with a trust fund. It goes without saying that being an Organic automatically makes you a better mum.

  And so it is, with no small measure of trepidation, that I start to read the comments under Rosalind’s ‘breakfast plea’ post. First to reply is Tania.

  Shocker.

  Hi, Rosalind! Why not make Jacob some organic porridge mashed with organic strawberries and blueberries? If the crop in your garden isn’t doing well, there is great fruit picking at Johnson’s farm in Surrey at the moment!

  I sigh. This is vintage Tania. Like the other eight hundred people on Vale Mums, she knows full well that Rosalind has no childcare, an absent husband, and has barely slept in six years. Does Rosalind sound like the type of person who has the time to be cooking porridge or driving to fucking Surrey to pick fresh fruit, let alone grow fruit in her own garden?

  But wait, another comment has just flashed up. It’s Caroline, another member of the Organics crew.

  Excellent suggestion, Tania! My LO [little one] also loves porridge with freshly picked fruit, but how about giving him some yoghurt too?

  Although I find Caroline’s allegiance to Tania vomit-inducing, I can’t totally fault her response. Yoghurt is a handy stopgap; at least Rosalind can buy Jacob a few cartons of yoghurt from the shops. But I have given her too much credit. Another comment from Caroline flashes up.

  Whoops! Just reread my last post and realised that I meant to say home-made yoghurt. Steer clear of the shop-bought variety – obviously. Too much sugar!

  She signs off with a smiley emoji.

  My fingers itch to respond. I rarely partake in this futile mum-off but I am too fired up to sit back and watch. I quickly write a response and post it before I can change my mind. I keep it simple. It’s only one word.

  Cheerios.

  There will be reprisals.

  I am distracted by the sound of an angry car speeding down my road – clearly ignoring the 20 mph signs plastered everywhere – in a race to get to the end of the street for fear it might have to pull in for the ten seconds it takes to allow another car past. My shoulders bunch in irritation. I can’t stand speeding cars, especially when there are so many young children about. For the next couple of minutes, I
fantasise about having my own speed gun, but because it is a fantasy, I switch it to an actual gun, a sniper rifle, and start mentally shooting at the car’s tyres. Not for the first time, I wonder how I have become the type of person who fantasises about shooting out someone else’s tyres. Shaking myself out of my reverie, I click back to Skype, but Harriet is still not online.

  When I first met Harriet, roughly six and a half years ago, I was desperate. I had ditched my fancy marketing job in a fancy big bank – as well as my long-term lawyer boyfriend – to become a full-time writer, moved into a flat with a twenty-something hipster called Joss, who was far too cool for me, and spent six months and most of my savings writing a novel, before coming to the horrifying conclusion that the book was shit. And I’m not being too hard on myself here: it really was shit. If I was honest with myself, I knew fiction wasn’t really my thing, the trouble being, I didn’t know what was. So I popped six months of hard work in a box under my bed and started to freak out.

  After I’d spent a couple of weeks stunned by my shockingly low bank balance, an email advertising the London Book Fair popped into my inbox. Without even thinking about it, I bought a ticket. Maybe I would meet some fellow writers there who were as miserable as I was. But instead of meeting other writers, I met Harriet.

  To be honest, first impressions weren’t great. Having spent hours going around smiling benignly at people representing different publishers on different stands, I was ready to give up. With aching feet and a self-critical voice in my head berating me for not having the confidence to strike up a conversation with one single person, I had headed outside for a breather. Lost in my own misery, it took me a moment to notice a woman gesturing to me.

  ‘The time!’ she said crossly. ‘Do you have the time?’

  She had long, shiny brown hair, sallow skin, and was smartly dressed in a beige cashmere coat, impatiently arranged leopard-print scarf, and expensive-looking tan mid-ankle boots. She would have been pretty if her mouth turned up at the corners, which I would soon find out never happened.

  Flustered, I told her it was almost four o’clock, but she didn’t move away. Instead, she took out a cigarette, put it in her mouth, and started talking.

  ‘If I have to negotiate one more book deal with those tight-arse international publishers, I’m going to murder someone,’ she said, in a public-school accent, through a cloud of smoke.

  My head shot backwards: she was an agent! A real-life book agent. Exactly the person I needed to talk to.

  The only problem was I had no idea what to say to her without sounding needy, so I just stood there, paralysed by my own desperation.

  She took a deep drag, cocked her head to one side, and said, ‘What do you do, then?’

  And so I took a deep breath and told her. I told her everything about how I had given up my job in a bank to become a full-time writer, only to realise I was shit at fiction, and now I was seriously stuck.

  When I had finished, she stared at me for a bit, grounding out her cigarette stub on the pavement. I didn’t feel like this was the right time to point out that she was standing next to a bin.

  ‘There’s no money in fiction anyway,’ she said, with a grimace. ‘Have you ever considered ghostwriting?’

  Immediately a red flag went up. Ghostwriting? Wasn’t that just for lazy celebrities with giant egos and people who wanted to share their horrific stories of child abuse and sex trafficking? I couldn’t handle the egos or the sad stories. Both would make me cry.

  I was just about to tell Harriet that ghostwriting wasn’t my thing when she said, ‘I have a couple of professionals on my books looking for some help with their business books. You have experience working with corporate types, so you could be a good fit.’

  And that was the start of my ghostwriting career – working with the same type of people that I had just spent almost a decade working with in a bank. It may not have been the writing I thought I was going to be getting into, but at least I was writing.

  For the first couple of years, ghostwriting was good – really good. Turned out that these people were willing to pay big money to get out of having to write their books themselves. Sure, part of me had always hoped that one day my own name would grace a front cover, but still, I knew I was lucky to make a good living out of writing, and I decided to take every opportunity that came my way.

  But then last year, it all stopped. Harriet told me in her offhand way that nothing was coming in, and I started to panic. I had heard of the plight of the freelance writer – either feast or famine – but I never thought it would happen to me. For the second time in my life, my bank balance was reaching a critical point, but this time there was much more at stake. I had a child due to start school soon, an overly inflated mortgage to pay, and a husband facing the real prospect of redundancy. We desperately needed the extra income.

  So you can imagine how excited I was when, after months of zero contact, Harriet emailed me about a ‘promising new book project’. Now I am prepared to do anything to get it.

  More minutes go by and still nothing, so to stop myself biting my nails, I click back to Vale Mums to check the extent of the fallout of my ‘Cheerios’ comment. Eleven comments in less than five minutes. At first glance I can’t make out the text for all the smiley emojis, a sure sign I’ve offended most of the people who have bothered to reply. I scroll down, bracing myself for the passive-aggressive onslaught. Someone called Danielle posts:

  Saoirse – totally agree that Cheerios are so handy in the morning (smiley emoji) but thinking there are healthier alternatives maybe??? (Three more smiley emojis.) Besides, I’m fed up of stepping on them every time my LO chucks them on the floor! (Horror face plus crying laughing emoji.)

  As judgements go, Danielle’s isn’t so bad. It follows a fairly standard format for the more decent members of Vale Mums – I’ll pretend to agree with you, then add what I really think (couched in a plethora of emojis), and to take the sting out of judging you, I’ll try to balance it out with something annoying about my own child.

  A few other mums have posted in a similar format, but just when I think I have got off lightly, I reach Tania Henderson’s post. As ever, her judgement is loud and clear.

  Cheerios??? Have you READ the back of the packet? The amount of sugar! Soooo bad for our LOs (sad-faced emoji).

  I sit on my hands to stop myself from replying in anger. After all, this is my own fault; I shouldn’t have participated in the stupid exchange in the first place.

  But then a familiar name pops up and a jolt of relief runs through me. Before I even read the post, I know I have been saved.

  Harry had ice cream at 5 a.m. – with chocolate sprinkles on top.

  I burst out laughing. It’s from my best mum-friend and fellow secret Vale Mums addict, Bea, who has swooped in with a show-stopping comment to save me from any further judgement from the bloody Organics. Breathless with anticipation, I wait to see if anyone dares to reply. Some will think she is joking, and the ones who think she is serious won’t be brave enough to take the chance. To be honest, I’m not even entirely sure if she’s joking – you never know with Bea. Minutes go by and the feed stays quiet. It’s a small victory, but one to celebrate none the less. I grab my phone to text Bea a ‘thumbs up’ but a loud tuneless sound stops me in my tracks. With a jolt, I realise that the screen is flashing. Harriet is finally calling me over Skype. I nervously push my unstyled and undyed, shoulder-length brown hair (a few bits of grey, but nothing to worry about just yet, according to Frank, my hairdresser) behind my ears, hurriedly making sure the camera is not pointing any lower than my face – so that Harriet can’t tell that I am still in my pyjamas at 2.20 p.m. – and finally answer the call. Deep breath. Shoulders back. Here we go.

  ‘Hi, Searcy,’ Harriet says, leaning in so close to the camera that all I can make out is part of her chin and blindingly white lower teeth.

  Oh, yes, that’s one thing I forgot to mention: Harriet has never bothered to get my name right.
My name isn’t Searcy. It is Saoirse – Saoirse Daly, in fact. ‘Saoirse’ is an Irish name which means ‘freedom’, which is ironic given that freedom is exactly the thing I’ve lost since having Anna. As I don’t live in my native Ireland any more, I have spent my whole life correcting people on the pronunciation, sometimes patiently, more often, not. When the talented young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan burst on to our screens with starring roles in the hugely acclaimed movies Atonement, Brooklyn and Lady Bird, I thought all my prayers had been answered. Finally, people would pronounce my name correctly – and certainly more people had. Apart from Harriet, that is, who still insists in calling me Searcy (I can only imagine she’s a big Game of Thrones fan, given one of the lead characters is called ‘Cersei’). Despite subtly pointing out the mistake on several occasions, sending her the phonetical spelling (‘Seer-sha’), plus smiley-faced emojis to soften the blow of shitting all over her pronunciation, Harriet still insists on her own version.

  So, our conversation has barely begun, and I am now both nervous and irritated. And desperate. Let’s not forget desperate. I greet Harriet with a tight smile and a forced ‘Hello’, one hand clutching the computer mouse, and the other placed on my stomach in an effort to calm the churning inside.