by Adele Parks
Throughout my twenties I dated a series of different men. There was nearly always someone on the go. Sometimes relationships lasted a matter of hours, a couple lasted eighteen months. However long or brief they were, they followed a pattern. For all the years before my father left, I had watched my mother trying to make herself attractive enough to persuade him to stay as he always had one foot out of the door. She rotated through fad diets and punishing exercise and beauty regimes. Her tactic of being pretty and pleasing and pleasant (at least to him) was an unmitigated disaster and yet, without any other model, that was the mode I slipped into with men too. On dates I tried to be pretty, pleasing, pleasant. Young and still experimenting with my sense of self, I was happy to pursue the pastimes of my dates, I didn’t have any hobbies anyhow. So, if a new boyfriend wanted to play tennis, ride a motorbike, swim in the sea, play video games, watch horror movies – I agreed. I found myself agreeing with their politics, or at least not speaking up if they contradicted mine. I even wore the clothes they liked to see me in, and so swapped between preppy, grungy, jeans and hoodies, floral dresses. What harm did it do? There are much worse things to be than a people-pleaser. Besides, having spent years being my mother’s confidante in relation to how unhappy my father had made her, I find I’m a good listener. I don’t judge and I’m sympathetic to others’ struggles and problems. I get close to people quickly. There’s nothing weird about being interested in other people’s hobbies, families and lives. Not really. Maybe more people should try to be more accommodating. Maybe the world would be a happier place. Only I fell into the habit of moulding myself into their ideal. I was a chameleon. I gave each boyfriend the part of me I knew they would find palatable, but I never gave the whole package.
I guess I’d present myself as uncomplicated. Men adore uncomplicated. But I’m very complicated.
Mark is different. His life experiences are so much more profound than those of anyone else I’ve ever dated. He simply seems more grown up. He is thirty-nine, six years older than I am but besides that, he is a father and a widower. He hasn’t got time or patience for games. He is straightforward, honest, sincere. Not that he’s dull, far from it. It’s just his sense of humour is old-fashioned, non-satirical. He likes things that are borderline corny; he loves a bit of harmless slapstick. It’s pretty lovely.
Being with him is easy. These last six months have been refreshingly direct and purposeful. We have not played games. There are the boys to think about, games would be callous. The four of us left the hospital together. We shared a cab home. Relieved that Seb was glued back together. The thought, it could have been worse travelled with us in the cab. It turned out that we only lived ten minutes apart from one another. As I climbed out of the cab, he thanked me for everything I’d done and asked, ‘Would it be all right if I call you tomorrow?’
‘I’d like that.’
And he did call. He invited me over for tea. ‘The boys have been asking after the nice lady who helped,’ he told me, I guess making it clear that it was them who wanted me rather than him. He wasn’t the sort who would want to give the wrong impression. This wasn’t a date. It was fish fingers and chips, served with peas that were chased around the plate but hardly eaten. I was offered a choice of apple juice or water to drink.
‘Sorry, I made the mistake of promising Oli he could choose what we’d eat,’ said Mark as he apologetically put the plate in front of me. It was a noisy and disjointed evening. Mark hardly managed to get a sentence out uninterrupted but somehow, I still managed to find out more about him than I ever discovered about the closed and secretive men I’d dated in the past. Mark told me he had a sister who lived in Chicago, parents who lived in York. His best friend was called Toby and they’d been mates since secondary school. He went to university in Brighton, he dreamt of owning a boat but had never actually sailed anything other than a dinghy. He was a landscape gardener, which explained the tan and muscles, he admitted his business was struggling a bit because of juggling childcare since his wife got sick and then died.
‘People have been great. Frances’s parents live in the Midlands. They offered to move here but it was too much to ask of them. They need to stay near their friends in Frances’s childhood home – I mean, they lost a daughter.’ He shakes his head. ‘Her sister, Paula, has been very good. A big help. She’s north London.’ People think losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in the world. I glance at the young boys – who are absorbed in trailing Lego cars through apple juice puddles and therefore not listening to our snatched and whispered conversations – and wonder if the worst thing in the world is losing your mother. I suppose it depends on the age of the person who dies. It isn’t a competition. Grief seeps everywhere. ‘Her friends from the various baby groups have been very kind. They’ve done a lot of pick-ups and drop-offs but there comes a point when everyone has to get back to their own lives.’ He shrugged. Not self-pitying. Just a fact. He dug out a pea that Seb was trying to put up his nose, he reached for the kitchen roll, mopped up the apple juice, refilled Oli’s water glass. ‘Tell me about you? What do management consultants do exactly?’
I realised he needed a change of subject. Talking about death is exhausting, even for the bereaved. I started to tell him about efficient supply chain management, integrated IT systems and maximising efficiency with human resource. He laughed and told me I sounded like a corporate brochure, but he wasn’t mocking, he was kindly, interested. ‘Tell me exactly what your day looks like. Talk me through it.’
So I did. Blow by blow. Each telephone conversation, the endless research behind the presentations, which I sometimes don’t get to present anyhow because someone more senior takes the credit. I told him about the long hours and weeks being sent away from your home. I told him how intense it gets with the people on your team, how we’re like a family for a few short months, living in one another’s pockets but then, when we are seconded elsewhere, we might never speak again. I confessed that it is a little lonely, working in this nomadic way.
Mark listened carefully asking the type of questions that proved as much. ‘Wow, I’m so impressed. I just couldn’t work in an office. I’d go mad. But I’m always so in awe of people who get their heads around business stuff,’ he laughed, good-naturedly. It was refreshing. Often, I have to play down my work because some men are threatened by a woman with a higher earning capacity than theirs. ‘Do you enjoy it?’ Mark asked, as though this was all that mattered.
‘I do, on the whole. It is stimulating. It pays well, which is great because it means I can treat my mum to the odd holiday. We grew up just the two of us, so I still sort of feel responsible for her happiness a lot of the time. And her bills. Earning well goes some way towards helping with that.’
I don’t know what made me admit this. Normally I go out of my way to hide my mother’s neediness. Mark just nodded. ‘That’s kind of you. Do you travel abroad at all with work?’
‘No, mostly in the UK. There are opportunities to transfer to overseas offices, but that’s never appealed to me. Well, again, my mum.’ I shrugged. ‘UK travel is disruptive enough. I haven’t bought my own place. I suppose I could afford something but it’s more of a question of where do I put down my roots?’ I realised that I might just have confessed to waiting to find the right man, to help me make the decision about the right place and so I hurried on. ‘I’m gunning for a senior manager role at the end of this year. If that promotion happens, a decade of hard graft will have been worth it.’ I wanted to ask what Frances did for a living, if she worked out of the house, that is, but there is no reason to assume she would because she had two young boys. I held back because I thought it might seem impertinent.
‘Frances was a teacher,’ said Mark, as though he had read my mind. ‘Although her career was a bit stop-start. Interrupted by two maternity leaves, two bouts of cancer.’
After tea Mark and Oli kicked a football around the garden. Seb wanted to join in, but Mark was being cautious because of his wound. Seb s
tarted to cry with tiredness and frustration. I instinctively picked him up, hitched him onto my hip and he rewarded my boldness by immediately settling, nuzzling into my neck. Mark looked relieved, grateful. I left just before the boys’ bathtime.
The second time I went around for tea, we had lasagne and a glass of wine. Quickly, visiting Mark and the boys became the thing I most looked forward to.
‘Are you dating him?’ Fiona wanted to know.
‘No.’
‘But you want to?’
‘Yes,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to look as though I was dissatisfied with our friendship, because I wasn’t. Not exactly. I was enjoying what Mark was able to offer, I couldn’t expect more. ‘But it’s not like that. He’s grieving. I’m—’
‘Handy.’ I scowled at Fiona. ‘Well, you are. Let’s be honest, an extra pair of hands at bathtime and bedtime. Least the kids’ bedtime,’ she added with a wink, letting me know she didn’t want to cause offence, she was just looking out for me.
‘We’re friends and I’m fine with that. I like going to the swimming baths and the park with them at the weekend. It feels really comfortable being around them all.’
‘Just don’t let yourself be friend-zoned. Mark is really hot and there aren’t many hot men around. All these non-sexual playdates might be sending out the wrong message.’
After two months of ‘playdates’, Mark kissed me. We had been to Legoland and the boys had fallen to sleep in the back of the car on the journey home. We put them to bed clothed, not bothering to wake them to clean their teeth.
‘Stay for a glass of wine.’ I couldn’t tell from his tone whether it was a question or an instruction. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to say no. He got the wine out of the fridge but before he even opened the bottle, he marched over to me, put one of his hands on the back of my head and pulled my lips onto his. It was intense, explosive. The sort of kiss that oozes energy, purpose. In seconds I was bent over the breakfast bar, my knickers around my ankles. It was the right side of rough. It was fast, dirty, exciting.
Not friend-zoned then.
5
Leigh
‘Mark is a good man, one of the best.’ My mother’s voice oozes approval and relief. I smile, also relieved to have pleased her. Passed the test that neither of us thought I was ever going to get to sit. A man wants to marry me, a good man. I will be a wife. I’ve made it. ‘You are so lucky,’ she adds, a hint of wistfulness in her voice. I take a deep breath; the room has no oxygen. Never before has my mother called me lucky. I’ve longed for her to but the pronouncement, now it has come, seems bitter.
For as long as I can remember my mother has firmly asserted that we are unlucky. She and I. She said it often when I was growing up. Repeatedly. Small inconveniences would weigh on her disproportionately, but at the same time she seemed to expect and certainly accept the bothers, upsets and troubles, never challenging them or offering solutions, because she considered us unlucky. It was just the way it was. Not something to be contested, or even resented, something I ought to accept. My unluckiness. Goods arriving through the post, faulty or damaged, never got returned, she didn’t trust the retailer to send a refund so she would make do with whatever she’d received. When she discovered damp or insufferably noisy neighbours in a rental, she didn’t question landlords but instead shrugged and just complained of endless chest infections that she said were expected – and indeed they were under those conditions. I did not get into the outstanding comprehensive school in my catchment area but had to get on a bus to travel to a much bigger, rougher one several miles away, however she didn’t appeal the decision, the way some mothers successfully did, instead she just accepted it.
Then when, aged nineteen, I got mumps which led to the rare complication of viral meningitis, which in turn was identified as the reason for me having the rarer still case of early menopause at just twenty-four, my mother simply said it was unlucky that I had been born at a time before regular MMR vaccinations were the norm for schoolchildren. Just unlucky. She didn’t say the early menopause and my subsequent infertility was devastating, soul-destroying, catastrophic.
Just unlucky.
I have been waiting my entire life to hear her call me lucky – it is contrary of me, then, to resent the implication once the words have been delivered. She doesn’t think I deserve him. Not quite. My own mother. She thinks good luck, not good management, brought me to this point. She is secretly wondering, will my luck hold?
‘It’s a shame about the weather,’ she adds. This morning when I woke up, it was drizzly and not the bright summer day of my imaginings. I’m trying to ignore the fact. ‘Do you think that marquee will be waterproof?’
‘Yes,’ I reply firmly.
‘If it rains heavily no one will be able to hear you say your vows. That’s not something you’d have had to worry about if you’d married in a church.’
I reach for my phone. Check the weather. ‘It’s supposed to dry up in the next hour or so.’
We’re getting married in Mark’s garden. Our garden! We decided not to marry in a church because the last time the boys were in a church was at their mother’s funeral and Mark and I did not want to prompt any difficult memories. Mark has no problem with the fact we are skipping a church service, he is not religious; if ever he believed in a God he stopped after watching his wife die of cancer when she was just thirty-two. I consider myself vaguely spiritual, although not crazy about dogmatic patriarchal doctrines. I suppose I had probably always thought I would marry in a church – if ever I was to marry at all – not for me so much as for my mother.
My mother is a regular churchgoer but she stopped trying to drag me there when I was nine; she was embarrassed in front of the other churchgoers by my open lack of enthusiasm for the prayers, recited by rote, that seemed to fall on deaf ears. That was around the time my father left us. My mother’s response to his departure was to up the ante with God. No longer satisfied with weekly visits she went to mass daily; it wasn’t clear who she was praying for – my father or herself. Despite not attending personally, my mother’s beliefs – and her guilt and fear – have permeated my entire life. I have a very acutely developed conscience and actively choose to do the right thing whenever I can, even if it is inconvenient, boring or genuinely hard. It was difficult to know what the right thing to do was in the case of deciding where to marry, considering my mother’s desire for a church wedding but playing that off against the boys’ trauma. I briefly wondered whether I could simply find a church that was completely dissimilar to the cool, grey-stoned, nineteenth-century one Frances’s funeral had taken place in. Mark pointed out that modern churches don’t make for great photos anyhow. I backed the boys. My mother is delighted she’s going to be a grandmother but irritated that I didn’t marry in a church because she thinks the whole thing seems a bit improper. Not sanctified. I put a lot of energy into not letting her view get inside my head.
‘Today, darling, try not to resent how much attention the boys will get.’ I mentally roll my eyes at her but outwardly work hard to keep every muscle in my face still. For as long as I can remember I’ve aimed not to let her know what I’m really thinking. Focus. I’m getting married. I will have a new family. I don’t need to care what she thinks or says anymore.
‘Why would I resent it?’
‘Well, no one would blame you, darling, if you did,’ she says hurriedly. Identifying her mistake, a moment after she’s made it. Situation normal. ‘It’s just that traditionally brides expect to be centre stage and command all the interest.’
I’ve insisted that the boys are very much centre stage throughout. I was the one who suggested that they invite their friends, that they should stand with us as we say our vows. That they wear navy blue linen suits, that echo their dad’s. If I tell her all of this, it will sound as though I’m over-explaining. Somehow my sincerity will sound contrived. I simply add, ‘It’s really important that they are a big part of the celebration, that they know we are all
in this together. I’m more than happy to share the oohs and aahs with the boys.’
Luckily at that point, before things could get heated, Fiona calls up the stairs that the car is waiting to take us to the wedding. If we don’t get a move on, we’ll be late. ‘You don’t want Mark thinking you’ve changed your mind,’ Fiona yells.
Our wedding is a happy, chaotic, boozy, child-friendly affair. It flashes by as everyone warned me it would; a series of Technicolor images, clinking glasses, broad, sincere smiles. I expected to be the one who oohed and aahed the loudest over the boys but in fact when I saw the three of them stood at the top of the aisle waiting for me, I was swept away by a far greater emotion than considering how cute they looked. I cried. Big, gulpy, happy tears rolled down my face, ruining my make-up but making Mark’s day. When I reached the top of the aisle, I could hardly stutter out my vows, I was that overawed. That damned happy!
Our guests look elegant, healthy, excited, every last one of them. I invited my friends, a couple of work colleagues, one or two of my mum’s friends and their families. Naturally, Fiona is my bridesmaid. Mark invited more than twice the number of people I did, not at all kowtowed by the traditions that dictate second weddings ought to be smaller, quieter. He invited his entire extended family and all his friends. I try not to think of how many of the guests at my wedding were Frances’s friends. To be fair, it is impossible to tell because everyone is thrilled for us, for him. I’m showered in compliments and congratulations. If people secretly think Mark marrying within a year of his wife’s death is a little too soon, they have the good manners not to say it aloud.
After the ceremony, when we are milling around in happy clusters and I’m straining to keep my weight in the balls of my feet so my heels don’t sink into the grass, I stand with Fiona, peaceful, content. I allow my gaze to drift across the scene of celebration and make an effort to lock it in my mind. All day I’ve consciously tried to hold onto the precious moments: Mark’s expression as he first saw me drift towards him, the boys’ laughter breaking through the chatter at regular intervals – my ear is attuned to that sound now, I can identify their laughter in amongst other kids’ – the beautiful flower arrangements that are everywhere and fill the air with a heady, intoxicating scent, the fizz of champagne on my tongue, although I don’t really need alcohol, I’m already drunk on joy. Seb’s hot little hand has been firmly wedged in mine for a lot of the day but he slips my grasp and joyfully dashes off to join Oli and some other children who are clustering around the cupcake table.
