by Emily Dean
‘I APPRECIATE your child has been hit by a car but I can’t take him to the hospital as I am READING MY BOOK!’ we whined, in Californian accents, hoping they would see the grave consequences of their dangerous free-thinking. But Mandy and my mother just howled with laughter. I felt a sense of pride at being the architect behind our collective friendship with the Goldmans. It was a friendship thrillingly unique to Rach and me, one cultivated rather than inherited, that couldn’t be threatened by adult tension over politics and loans.
Jane’s mum Mandy had been friends with Lynsey long before she’d arrived in Holly Village, since they were twentysomethings. Mandy was vivacious, wore Vivienne Westwood creations and red lipstick, allowed us to swear and called everyone ‘darling’, all of which enabled me to see my mother’s unconventional maternal energy though a more tolerant prism.
Rach and I were deeply envious of Jane’s bedroom, a fantasy kingdom with a dressing table stocked with brightly hued make-up. ‘I call that blusher “the killer”, watch out!’ she’d warn us. She had a pale pink sofa for entertaining and a coffee table covered in piles of subculture magazines like The Face. She played us David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, talked about horror movies and carried a bottle of Perrier every day as a lifestyle accessory. The pretty blonde icons my friends admired were absent from her world; the aspirational picture on her wall was of a dungaree-wearing character called Doris from the TV show Fame, famous for her smart remarks. Jane took a kettle as a handbag into school, and if her classmates sniggered at her it simply seemed to validate her belief that different was better.
By the time we were turning into teenagers, Jane, Rach and I had become a gang all of our own. We used to pile into Jane’s mum’s white Mini and she would drop us in Covent Garden, me in Jane’s trilby and garish make-up, feeling like a glamorous pop star, Rach and Jane similarly decked out in odd ensembles, all of us giggling, singing and celebrating our difference rather than trying to fit in. It felt strangely liberating not to be hiding. Rach and I were no longer posing as members of a club to which we would never really belong. It was as if we had finally been offered membership to a different place: one where we were accepted. Just as we were.
Although, in retrospect, the trilby really was a colossal mistake.
Chapter Six
‘It’s morally wrong!’ my father declared.
My parents were arguing about education. My mother had managed to charm a huge loan out of our sleazy bank manager, in order to send us both to a smart private school for our secondary education. It was one of the first times she had openly defied my father over a big life decision. I suspected it had a lot to do with A Woman in Your Own Right.
‘He’s hiding behind politics,’ she told Rach and me. ‘Mean bugger doesn’t want to cough up!’
I had never seen her like this before, insistent and angry. She told us she needed to ensure we had a future where we weren’t ‘dependent on a sodding man!’
My father’s refusal to involve himself in any sort of life admin eventually allowed her to get her way but it drove a firm wedge between them. As did the list of additional expenses for this rarefied universe we were entering.
‘A hockey stick? Oh, for God’s sake!’ my mother wailed one night, furtively checking the letter headed ‘School Accessories’ while my father immersed himself in poetry. She scoured junk shops until she found a battered antiquity from the Fifties, handing me white bandages from Boots to tape over its vintage origins. The expensive ski trip we planned to cry off with fake illnesses, but the brown modesty games knickers, worn to prevent ‘unfeminine reveals’, were the final straw. ‘Shove a white pair in the wash with a dark T-shirt, they’re only bloody pants,’ she sighed.
The sense of otherness that always lurked within me had been temporarily lifted by the arrival of Jane in our lives and Lynsey next door. I had a novel sense of safety in numbers. But the feeling was about to come rushing back, exploding into something altogether more overwhelming in this rarefied world. We weren’t in dog-family country anymore. We were in housekeepers and heated pools country. Our classmates were the children of wealthy captains of industry, some of whom lived behind electric gates. A world that couldn’t be exposed to bailiffs and a stripper called Johnny da Silver. Which meant a whole new, epic level of concealment. My occasional trips back to the gentle world of the Simpsons felt like a return to lost innocence compared to this terrifying new terrain.
There was an increasingly fractious atmosphere at home.
‘They’re rowing,’ Rach would say, shutting the door on the raised voices downstairs, turning up Adam Ant on the second-hand custard yellow FisherPrice record player. Rach had opened it with horror on her last birthday, her hopes dashed after months of pestering for a stereo ‘like everyone at school!’
She was thirteen now, to my eleven, and drifting into the arena of floral fragrances, eyeliner and crushes on boys. The whole shared room thing was getting a little old. She often moaned about privacy, locking herself in the bathroom to get away from my childish games and my parents’ excess. ‘I can’t even start my PERIOD in peace,’ she said angrily, as my mother and father greeted the news with a celebratory dance and loud chorus of the song ‘Congratulations’.
Our regular weekend visits to my grandmother’s eccentric lair felt even more surreal alongside our new privileged world. Rach and I began to resent turning down our peers’ exciting invitations to burger restaurants and ice-skating trips to honour our ‘quality time’. Jane drew a cartoon in a gesture of solidarity, captioned ‘Em, Rach and duvets going to Nan’s again!’ We stuck it on the kitchen pinboard in protest.
Lynsey took Rach and me out to dinner in a local restaurant for ‘a girls’ chat’. I felt honoured. It was as if we’d become the ladies in Dynasty, worthy guests in our own right rather than tolerated children. But then she brought up the subject of my mother’s need for ‘support’ when the pudding arrived, like a private wealth manager delaying the fragile matter of the unapproved loan. And I wondered what was being said in those conversations à deux they had in her living room.
Given the constant talk of money problems and the increasingly bad vibes, we weren’t prepared for the news my father shared one morning. ‘How would you like to go to Germany, girls?’ he asked. Noticing our stunned expressions, he swiftly explained that this wasn’t an entire life relocation. It was a family holiday. Those things that the organised, forward-thinking dog families had.
‘We’re going to stay with the Kaiser!’ he told us. The Kaiser was a German director friend of my father’s, who generously tolerated his offensive nickname. My father had us at the mention of his swimming pool. But lost us with the next revelation. My mother wasn’t coming with us.
‘Why can’t you come, Mum? I don’t understand,’ I asked, panicking over the prospect of my father’s exposure to the complicated details of travel. He struggled to make it back from work without losing his house keys, so the idea of him returning with three intact passports seemed optimistic. But mostly, the whole thing just felt a bit off. Our troupe was a fixed quartet. My mother evened out my father’s oddities, smoothed over his interactions with strangers. It was her who talked airport staff into letting us board our flight past the final call. She smelt of amber and warmth and Holly Village. I needed her to come with us.
She mentioned a play she had to finish writing and brightly suggested we buy new outfits for this slightly disquieting trip. ‘Just don’t tell your father, for Christ’s sake!’ A week later our new triumvirate headed off to Germany, swiftly rearranging our performance to cover up the absence of our recently departed front woman.
‘Why aren’t you swimming, Rach?’ my father asked, as he and I splashed around in the pool on our first day, with the Kaiser’s daughter and glamorous second wife.
Rach was sat in the shade buried in a Jackie Collins novel – which was, I felt sure, the real reason behind his sudden urge to interrupt her.
‘I don’t want to. I’ve got a …
sore tummy, Dad,’ she said. Hoping he would understand the twee euphemism our teachers used for periods.
He was having none of it.
‘Rachael, you seem to have this curious philosophy that life is designed around what you want. Swimming is good for your general … feminine health,’ he finished awkwardly. ‘I would encourage you to get in the pool.’
The gold swirly font on the jacket of the Jackie Collins novel hit the ground as Rach abandoned her angelic white swan role in a fit of frustration, heading into the house in humiliated fury.
‘He doesn’t understand about periods and things, Rach,’ I consoled, having fled to join her indoors, my damp swimming costume leaving sodden patches on the Kaiser’s high-thread-count sheets. I felt smug suddenly in my uncomplicated pre-pubescent body, free from emerging hormones and curious sprouting body hair.
‘I miss Mum, you know,’ said Rach, sadly. ‘I wish she had come with us.’
‘Rachael!’ I shouted, mimicking my father’s formal tones, ‘you seem to have this curious philosophy that life is designed around what you want!’ She smiled at our familiar collusion. But it wasn’t enough. Mum just knew how to handle moments like this.
We went for a walk, the next day, in the forest near the Kaiser’s house. My father encouraged me to climb on his shoulders. It wasn’t something we had ever done before, a confident paternal activity. But I was happy to collude in the performance, as he rose up, crying something about ‘standing on the shoulders of giants!’ Warming to the audience approval, he began to run while singing ‘The Long and Winding Road’.
‘Stop it, Dad!’ I yelled as he raced through the forest, lost in his reverie.
‘Don’t worry, darling!’ he reassured me before colliding at speed with a fallen branch, sending me flying over his head to land on the muddy ground.
‘Dad, you idiot!’ yelled Rach, rushing to examine the trickle of blood under my nose and removing the bracken from my hair as I looked up at her in confusion.
My father patted my back guiltily, calling himself ‘a twenty-four-carat turd’, for once lacking the elegant wit to disguise this moment of drama.
I knew he was embarrassed that his clumsy attempt at normalcy had backfired. He simply didn’t have the capacity to park his abstract thinking and pull off a family walk. Without my mother’s restraining influence, we were all slightly adrift; just as without his rational analysis, my mother’s more emotional nature often sent moments into high drama. It took both of them for our particular family engine to judder along without stalling.
The rest of the holiday passed in better spirits as we made an unspoken decision to seek out things that suited my father’s traits better than outdoor pursuits. We bought coloured stationery from a bookshop while he flicked through the Brecht and Kafka, and giggled at German soap operas. Rach and I came home tanned and excited, for once returning holiday-makers rather than bewildered newcomers to a strange country.
‘When we get back Mum and I have something to tell you!’ my dad said as we made our way down the rain-slicked motorway to north London, the ancient car wipers squeaking like Greek furies.
‘What is it? Will we like it?’ I asked.
The swell of Stephen Sondheim’s dark operetta Sweeney Todd thundered out of the car stereo.
My dad glanced over his shoulder at us briefly. ‘We’ll see!’
Our parents turned off the television for the news my father had trailed in the car. Danny the ‘dead pussy’ had only warranted a dip in TV volume, but this revelation was getting a total media blackout.
‘So, your mother and I …’ began my father, ‘your mother and I … we have decided that we are going to separate. For a bit,’ he added, the lollipop after the injection.
‘What do you mean “separate”?’ I cried even though I knew exactly what he meant. I was buying time to absorb the news. In the early Eighties, people’s parents separating was a new and scary concept, unusual enough to form the plot of the entire film Kramer vs Kramer. It happened to rich people in newspapers, to characters in the American soaps and was addressed in the teen fiction we read. How was it happening to us?
‘So that means you’ve getting divorced,’ said Rach bluntly, already making a sophisticated mental leap to a place from which I recoiled. Separation meant maybe, divorce meant definitely.
‘We didn’t say “divorce”, darling, we said … separated,’ Mum said. ‘Dad needs to be near the BBC so he’ll stay with friends. And we thought we could do with … a break.’
A break. Breaks were what you had in school. They meant delicious sips of hot chocolate from the vending machine, laughing about boys and singing Madness songs. Breaks were positive, full of possibility. This was ominous and life-altering and shameful. This was no break – it was a hideous rupture.
Rach and I exchanged stunned looks. I decided to hop on board with her teenage cynicism and stop buying what they were selling. I hadn’t heard of any other fathers reluctantly abandoning the family home in order to live next door to their work. Especially not work that involved wandering around in socks saying to female colleagues, ‘Annabel, you’re looking dangerously bewitching today.’
‘We asked in the car if it was good news. You said “we’ll see!”’ challenged Rach, evidently finding it easier to focus on my father’s breach of taste rather than the traumatic revelation itself.
‘Well,’ my dad said, and then paused. ‘It could be a preferable outcome.’
There are some phrases you turn around in your head for a long time trying to make sense of the various possible meanings. ‘Preferable outcome’ would join them.
I began to cry and my mother wrapped me in braceleted hugs. Rach shed angry tears, wiping them away furiously, conned by this news, the lazy plot twist that makes no sense of the preceding action. Except when you replay it, and notice the giant red flags you failed to see all along.
We may have never been a dog family. But now? We weren’t even a family anymore.
I had never considered the possibility of our quartet being ripped apart like this by creative difficulties. We laughed off disagreements, we coped and got on with the show like professionals. Our odd tribe of four, with our own language and dynamics, always returned to each other after our adventures into other worlds. How could it all cease to exist?
‘Maybe you’ll get back together one day?’ I offered, with the false hope of the recently dumped, who hasn’t grasped that the person delivering the news made their peace with it long ago. There are no deals to be struck, no reprieves. They are just assessing how to get out of this conversation with the least collateral damage.
‘Who knows!’ my father replied, half-heartedly.
Rach and I went upstairs to put on our pyjamas at the premature hour of 5.00pm. Perhaps we were trying to remind them that we were just kids. We used precocious language, knew never to serve sweet wine and how to talk to the Leader of the Opposition but we were eleven and thirteen. The pyjamas seemed the simplest way to say, ‘We’re scared.’
Over the next few months Rach and I clung to each other. She reminded me, ‘We ALWAYS have each other, Emmy.’
I told her about the girl at our smart school in whom I had stupidly confided. ‘That’s absolutely GHASTLY!’ she had said, before spreading the news everywhere. Our Gaza Strip chats went on all night as we tried to make sense of it, digging into the corpse of the marriage like forensic pathologists.
There was fighting over which parent would move out. My father described himself as a homeless man trying to con his way into someone else’s house. I felt he didn’t really want to leave. He moved between friends’ spare rooms, spent several months with a TV presenter, had an awkward spell with a male producer who made a pass at him, and a few weeks with a couple who brought him out with the cognac to perform eloquent tricks.
My mother was keen to shield us from some of the more unedifying details of their split and insisted that he visit us every weekend for ‘family time’. But in a moment of
indiscreet fury, she told us the truth – that he was in love with Anita from the BBC. Anita didn’t seem like much of a TV-advert mum anymore. Apparently the affair was over. Anita had an adoring husband who was a rather safer long-term bet than my father.
Mum decided not to name Anita in the divorce papers, saying, ‘There’s no need for her children to suffer.’
Rach and I imagined their continued blissful ignorance as our lives fell apart.
We never mentioned Anita to my father. And eventually my parents drew a veil of good-natured civility over the whole business. Every weekend my dad dutifully arrived at Holly Village and ate roast lunch as he always had, before returning to his new bachelor life.
My mother, aware that his involvement in our lives required daily stage management, sometimes suggested he took us for a day out. His first attempt saw the three of us drifting around like an aimless teenage gang, until somehow we ended up in a dark alley near Archway tube station. ‘There we go, food!’ he said, pointing at a strip-lit fast food café.
It was in Burger Delight, over limp chips and warm Fanta, that we learned he ‘never really wanted marriage and children.’ It was something he had simply fallen into. His eyes filled up as he said that we had nevertheless become ‘the only true and good things in this absurd life.’ He told us he had no place in the new independent existence my mother craved. And chose not to refer to the extra-marital indiscretion.
A few months later he introduced us to a new girlfriend. The Russian, as we called her, had a townhouse in Chelsea that smelt of incense and was scattered with Tibetan antiques. She made films about human-rights violations, always wore silk underwear to war-torn countries and was friends with both the Dalai Lama and Colonel Gaddafi (whom my mother insisted ‘she DEFINITELY went to bed with’).
‘Do you want frankincense in your slippers tonight, darling?’ the Russian asked my father one night as Rach and I sat awkwardly in her kitchen, sipping iced water.
