And now Martha too had apparently entered this world of sex and was at that very moment practising the art against the lamppost up the street.
Jacks sat on the stairs and waited.
It was half an hour that felt like a day before Martha placed her key in the door and came face to face with her mum.
‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting on the stairs?’ She looked bemused.
Jacks couldn’t help but notice that her lips looked swollen. ‘I’m waiting for you.’
‘Okaaay.’ Martha looked at her phone, her fingers red from the cold. ‘It’s not even ten o’clock.’ She pulled off her coat and shook her hair.
‘Come into the kitchen.’ Jacks stood and followed her daughter along the dimly lit hallway. ‘Sit down.’ She pointed to a chair. They both sat.
‘You like him, don’t you?’ Jacks watched as Martha’s eyes lit up and she nodded, trying to keep the smile from her face. ‘He seems like a nice boy.’
‘He is, Mum. He’s lovely.’ She smiled again with a dreamy-eyed tilt to her head.
‘I want you to be happy, Martha, I really do. And I want you to have adventures. But I’m worried.’
‘Well, you can stop worrying, because I am happy and I’m having a great adventure, so that’s all good.’
Jacks pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it with the band that lived on her wrist. ‘That is good. But what I’m worried about is you being distracted from your studies. That offer from Warwick means nothing if you don’t get the grades, and three As is going to take some work.’
‘I know that and I’m not distracted. I don’t see why I can’t have both. I will get my grades, but I need Gideon too.’ Martha looked close to tears.
‘You need him?’ Jacks was taken aback. This had clearly gone further than she thought.
‘I do, Mum. He’s makes me feel great. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I really like being with him.’
Jacks quashed her desire to scream. ‘I’m sure he is, but your life is just beginning and you are on different paths.’
‘You mean because he isn’t heading off to uni and isn’t desperate to leave Weston?’
‘Kind of,’ Jacks confessed. ‘Who knows who you’ll meet at Warwick.’
Martha rolled her eyes and pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands. ‘Maybe I don’t want to meet anyone at Warwick, maybe I like what I’ve found here – a local boy.’
‘No!’
‘What do you mean, “no”?’ Martha raised her voice to match her mother’s.
‘I mean you are too young to know what you want and I can see that this boy—’
‘Gideon!’ Martha corrected her.
‘Gideon, or whatever his bloody name is, might be the thing that stands between you and your dream of becoming a lawyer!’
Martha sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp. ‘You don’t know him, but you’ve made up your mind that you don’t like him. I can tell you’ve decided you don’t like who he is or what he does!’
‘That’s not true, I’ve nothing against him personally. But why can’t you just accept that maybe I might know what’s best for you? That maybe I have your best interests at heart?’
‘Because I know what’s best for me! And for the record, being a lawyer is your dream, Mum. It’s not necessarily mine!’
Jacks sat in silence, as though she’d been struck. This was the worst thing that she could hear.
Martha wasn’t finished. ‘I think the problem is that you are living your life vicariously through me. And that feels like shit. It’s unfair.’
‘Watch your language, please.’ It was all Jacks could say, because she didn’t know exactly what ‘vicariously’ meant.
‘You’ve got so many opportunities, Martha. I just don’t want you to waste your life, not one day of it!’ Jacks plucked a towel from the laundry pile on the chair and started folding it, using her chest and chin to assist.
Martha scraped her chair on the tiled floor. ‘I’m not wasting one day of it! I’m spending the time I’m not studying with Gideon, and that’s not a waste.’ She looked at her mum, waiting for a response that didn’t come. ‘I’m going to bed, in the room I have to share with my little brother!’ she snapped. And she flounced out of the room.
Jacks lowered herself to the floor and sat with her back against a kitchen cupboard as she scrunched the towel in her lap, giving way to the tears that had threatened. She sat for some minutes before managing to compose herself. Then she rose on shaky legs and rummaged through bundles of string, old tubes of superglue and a needle-and-thread kit before she pulled the pocket dictionary from the back of the crowded bits-and-bobs drawer.
She ran her palm over the cover, which was slightly sticky in one corner. It had been her dad’s crossword companion for more years than she could remember. She cracked the spine and let the flimsy pages flutter against each other. Her eyes crinkled in a smile as she noted the occasional little red dot marked against a word. If ever her dad had had to look up a word, he would place a little red dot next to it; if he looked it up twice, he wrote it out three times to make sure he learnt it properly. There were never three dots.
Jacks held the book at arm’s length and there, nestling between vicar and vice, was vicarious. ‘Vick-air-ee-uss.’ She sounded it out and then read the definition: Experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.
She closed the little book and stuffed it back in the drawer. Well, Martha was right, she did do that. But what mother didn’t? She recalled the ballet class Martha had attended at primary school, full of slightly podgy mums lined up on chairs at the back of the church hall, every one of them picturing their precious daughter in an elaborate tutu as she stood with an arm full of flowers, taking a bow at the Royal Opera House. It was a world away from Miss Greenwood’s shrill instruction to ‘point and smile, point and smile!’ And these mums weren’t only thinking of their ungainly cygnets transforming into swans; they were imagining themselves in the audience, graciously accepting the smiles in recognition of their daughter’s brilliance.
Jacks was no different, only her aspirations didn’t lie in tutus and tiptoeing on pointes. She saw Martha travelling business class, with a Jaeger suit and a corporate credit card. They could keep the Royal Opera House. Her girl was heading for the city and no brooding teenager with an aptitude for snogging and a lovely set of teeth was going to keep her from that.
Jacks felt her tears rise again, and then, as if on cue, the bell rang. ‘Fucking hell!’ she whispered as she trod the stairs.
12
Nineteen Years Earlier
It started out as a regular day, nothing to mark it as special. Jacks had walked to school and sat through double English followed by art, during which she tried her best to capture the bowl of fruit that sat on the table, while trying not to daydream.
She now stood tall in the lunch queue – being in the upper sixth afforded her a certain kudos in the school community. Her eyes darted to the doors every time they opened as she sought out Gina, preferring to be with her mate than without her during break times. Luckily she had a copy of Marie Claire rolled into the top of her school bag, should she find herself alone.
She waited for the slow queue to move along. The littler kids seemed to be taking an age, umm-ing and ah-ing over whether they wanted peas or beans and fumbling with cutlery, school bags and juice cartons. With her orange plastic tray resting on her hip, she sighed, trying to decide between a ham roll and the soup of the day. Two girls in the year below stood facing each other, close together as if colluding. Jacks tuned in to their conversation as soon as she heard Sven’s name.
‘Yeah, that Sven – the one with the funny jumpers who comes from Norway.’
This made Jacks smile. Norway? Stupid girls. But her smile soon evaporated.
‘He’s moving to America! I mean, that’s really cool, isn’t it? Even for a weirdo like him. My aunt
y went to America, said it was lush. I bet he’ll go to Hollywood and everything…’
Jacks felt her legs shake. She walked backwards as if she were casually removing herself from the queue and not because she felt like she might throw up. As she replaced her unused tray in the stack, Gina came rushing over.
‘Hiya! What we having? Go grab a chair and I’ll come find you!’ Gina shimmied her large frame as she broke into song, giving a heartfelt rendition of ‘Baby, Come Back’, quite oblivious of her friend’s situation.
‘I… I’ll be back in a bit,’ Jacks managed as she left the dining hall. She raced along the corridor and past the common room, where a quick scan told her he wasn’t inside, then up to the physics lab, where he was sometimes allowed to hide out, being a star pupil. But that too was empty.
She ran down the stairs. Her heart hammered, tears gathered behind her eyes and something close to rage coursed through her veins. She readjusted her bag strap on her shoulder with trembling fingers and held the handrail to stop herself from tumbling. By the time she found him, skulking outside, sitting under the large oak tree at the side of the school field, her pulse was sky high.
He didn’t need to confirm the news. One look at his face as he shifted his focus, unable to look her in the eye, told her all she needed to know. It was true. He was moving to America and he hadn’t even bothered to tell her.
She dropped to her knees in front of him, both the adrenalin and her anger now subsiding, leaving her spent.
‘I… I’ve got something to tell you.’ He looked serious.
‘Don’t bother, I already know.’ She plucked at the buckle on her school bag. ‘Thanks for that. How do you think it felt, hearing it from some bloody lower-sixth kids in the dinner queue?’ Her lip quivered despite her best efforts to stay calm and her tears spilled. She looked downwards, embarrassed and sad.
‘I only just heard myself. I… I wanted to tell you in person, but Mr Quidgley asked me if I could head up the team for the Physics Olympiad next term and I told him I wouldn’t be here and he asked why and… it just came out.’ He snapped a dark twig between his fingers and shook his head as if searching for the words.
‘Thanks a bunch, Sven.’ She was angry for so many reasons; only one of them was hearing the news secondhand.
He leant forward until they were inches from each other, face to face. ‘I didn’t sleep last night. My parents made the decision: my dad’s going to take up a lecture post at Harvard, we’ll be living in Boston and that’s that, I can’t do anything about it. But I don’t want to leave you. I want you to come with me!’ His eyes sparkled as if this was the brilliant solution they had been searching for.
‘How can I come with you? Don’t be ridiculous! What, just pack up my school bag and follow you to Boston? This is real life, Sven, not one of your bloody poems with a romantic fairy-tale ending.’
‘You’re bigger than this place, Jacks; bigger than anyone in it. Don’t let this postcode become your shackle. Come to America – you’ll be eighteen in a few months and you can do what you want! We can travel, you can work, we can plan a future!’
He beamed and Jacks found herself smiling too. It felt possible, it felt like she could go and live with the boy she loved and see the country she had always wanted to go to.
‘I don’t know how…’ She paused.
‘We’ll find a way!’
‘But my mum and dad…’
‘What about them? Are you going to tie yourself to them for the rest of your life? Stay here like a child, walking up and down the pier until you grow old? Or are you going to come with me and see the world?’
She looked at him, wondering how to explain that what she wanted and what she felt she was able to do were two very different things. He made it all sound so easy, so possible.
He took her hand and looked at her earnestly and in that moment she knew she would have to find a way. She would go to America!
13
Jacks sloped into the kitchen with a plastic basket full of dirty bed linen. The first wash of the day but certainly not the last. She piled it into the machine. ‘I’m going to make some bunting,’ she announced.
‘What, for breakfast?’ Pete laughed. ‘Why can’t you do toast like everyone else?’
She ignored him. ‘For Christmas. I was thinking it might be a way of brightening up this crappy kitchen, make it more homey. I saw some in a magazine.’
‘How do you make bunting?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure, but I’ll figure it out. Can’t be that hard.’ She sat at the table.
‘You look tired,’ Pete observed as she took a quick sip from her first cuppa of the day. It had gone cold while she tended to her mum.
‘I look tired because I am tired, so I guess that makes sense.’ She shook out a cup full of detergent and poured it into the dispenser.
‘What can I do to help you?’ he asked. ‘I could make the tea tonight?’
Jacks smiled. ‘No, love, but thank you. You’re out working all day, least I can do is cook your tea. Plus it’s just easier to get it done and get it all put away.’
‘You saying I’m messy?’ He grinned.
‘Pete, you are beyond messy. It’s like there’s been an eruption at a food factory by the time you’ve finished.’ She laughed in spite of herself. ‘Has Martha told you she’s got a boyfriend?’
She stuffed the sheets into the machine and kicked the temperamental door, then reached again for her cup and held it between both palms.
‘Well, I know she’s got a boy friend, but is he a boyfriend? Probably not, she’s only young.’ He shovelled a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth.
‘She’s seventeen, eighteen in January and he is a boyfriend boyfriend, make no mistake.’ She sighed. ‘I saw them snogging last night. In the street.’
‘No!’ Pete smirked.
‘Yes! And I don’t find it funny.’
‘Do we know him?’
‘His name is Gideon.’
‘Gideon?’ He laughed. ‘What kind of a name is that?’
‘Pete, his name is not the issue here.’ She sighed again, louder this time. ‘He works at a garage in town.’
‘He’s not at school then?’ Pete looked up.
‘No, he’s a couple of years older.’
‘Well, as long as he looks after her and she’s happy…’
Jacks shook her head. ‘Are you nuts, Pete? We don’t want her having a boyfriend!’
‘We don’t?’ He looked confused.
‘No! She needs to study, needs to get them As! Christ, am I the only one that can see that?’ Jacks slammed her cup on to the table.
‘She’s not daft, Jacks. She knows what she needs to do. And the worst thing you can do is to object – you’ll only make him more attractive.’
‘Make who more attractive?’ Martha asked as she came into the kitchen.
‘Your boyfriend,’ Pete answered honestly.
Martha smiled at her dad. He never lied to her.
‘Why don’t you bring him home for tea one night?’ Pete asked, ignoring Jacks’ glare, which bore into him from the sink.
‘Do you think so?’ Martha asked nervously.
‘Yes!’ Pete said. ‘We’d like to meet him properly, wouldn’t we, love?’ he said, turning to Jacks.
‘Mmmnn.’ She nodded as enthusiastically as she could.
‘Okay, I’ll ask him. Have I got a shirt, Mum?’
‘In the airing cupboard.’
‘Mu-um, I can’t go to school today!’ Jonty yelled from the bedroom.
‘Why not?’ Jacks shouted from the bottom of the stairs.
‘I’ve got period pain in my tummy!’
Jacks collapsed in a heap on the banister. Martha fell against the wall giggling and Pete guffawed loudly.
‘Why are you all laughing?’ Jonty shrieked. ‘I have! Martha was allowed to stay off when she had it and I’ve got it!’
The three only laughed harder.
Ida started r
inging her bell. ‘I need help! I have passed water!’
Pete was still laughing as Jacks stepped back into the kitchen and ran the tap. ‘We are the most bonkers family in the street! God knows what Giddyup or whatever ’is name is will think of it all!’ He smiled with something close to pride. ‘He’ll probably run a mile!’
And even Martha chuckled.
We can only hope… Jacks thought as she ran up the stairs with her bucket of water, detergent, rubber gloves and sponge.
A few days later and Jacks’ bunting was coming along nicely. She ran her fingers through the triangular pendants that she’d cut from a mishmash of charity-shop fabrics and threaded together on red ribbon. Still three weeks to go until Christmas Day, she thought, as she removed the growing pile from the kitchen table. She ran the hoover over the house, tidied the lounge as best she could, lit a scented candle on the mantelpiece and set places at the table.
Martha, meanwhile, split her time between checking her phone repeatedly and looking at her face in the hall mirror. ‘I feel mean, Nan eating upstairs while we’ll all be down here,’ she offered as Jacks set Ida’s tea tray.
‘She likes eating up there, love. And it’s only for one night. She might get a bit flustered with someone she doesn’t know, and besides, there are only five chairs around the table and that’s a squash. Where we would put her – on top of the fridge?’
Martha smiled.
‘Or maybe we could put Jonty up there? He’d probably like it!’ Jacks giggled.
The doorbell rang and Martha dashed to the front door, skidding in her socks along the hall floor and arriving before the bell had given its final chime.
Jacks noted her eagerness and took a deep breath. She looked at her own reflection in the window and saw her dad’s face, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m trying, I really am.’ She turned, smiling, to greet Martha’s boyfriend.
‘Hello. Thanks for inviting me. I bought you these.’ He handed her a bunch of tiny yellow roses.
It was the first time she had been given flowers in a very long time. ‘Oh, Gideon, you shouldn’t have done that! Thank you!’ She was touched and immediately set them in the glass vase that lived in the cupboard under the sink.
Perfect Daughter Page 10
