First published in Great Britain and Australia
in 2018 by Allen & Unwin
Copyright © Lizzie Lovell 2018
The moral right of Lizzie Lovell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
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This is a work of fiction. All characters and events have evolved from the author’s imagination.
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Ebook ISBN 978 1 76063 986 0
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Printed in Great Britain
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Eloise, my first gin-drinking pal
and most excellent cousin
A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in late September, a sniff of autumn in the air, a change in the light. Sunday afternoons used to be about the roast dinner and the lawn, me cooking, Mike mowing. Now it’s all veggie sausages, joss sticks, and rapper dudes banging on about stuff I don’t even understand. The joys of living with an eighteen-year-old. Only not for much longer.
‘Come on, Lauren, get a move on!’ I have to yell to be heard above the ‘music’ pounding from her bedroom.
No response.
Just the shoutiness of DJ Nobber, or whatever this one’s called.
Back upstairs then, for the sixty-fourth time today. It doesn’t feel like two ticks since I was trudging up these very same stairs to settle her of an evening, what with her colic and Harry’s toddler gymnastics. I could’ve done with a Stannah Stairlift. Which isn’t such a bad idea now I come to think of it. Not for me. I’m only a few months off fifty. (I have to whisper this number, even in my head.) It’s Dad I’m worried about. He’s doddery on his legs and I’d hate for him to have another fall.
I take a deep breath, steady myself, prepare to enter Lauren’s room.
‘Get a move on, Lolly.’
‘Calm down, Mother. We’ve got ages yet.’ She’s on her hands and knees, searching for something: DNA? A murder weapon? A dead body? It’s hard to tell with all her crapaphernalia. Meanwhile, Bob, our creaky old Jack Russell, is languishing on his back in a patch of sunshine on Lauren’s unmade bed, oblivious to the fact that his number-one fan is about to abandon him.
‘I don’t want to get caught in the rush-hour traf—’
‘It’s Plymouth we’re going to, Mum, not Manhattan.’
Plymouth most definitely isn’t Manhattan, but it’s got a university and that’s where I’m taking my daughter. If she ever gets her bloody act together.
‘How much more of that stuff are you bringing? My poor old Polo’s already crammed.’
‘Stop stressing,’ she says, using the voice that makes me stressed. She gets up off her knees, her search forgotten, in order to survey her room, hands on hips, hair in plaits, dirt on cheeks, like she’s Pippi Longstocking. ‘There’s just this suitcase. And my sleeping bag. And that lamp. And those Yankee candles I got for Christmas… and… oh, yeah, this box.’ She nudges the box with her foot. There’s a hole in her sock and a glittery toenail pokes through.
‘You really need a box of cuddly toys?’
‘I might get lonely.’ She slumps onto the bed and pulls Bob towards her, nuzzling her freckled nose into his neck.
‘Plymouth’s barely an hour away.’ I’m doing my best to be a model of calm but sometimes, right now, it’s not easy. ‘Why don’t you just take Mrs Pink?’
Mrs Pink, the one-eyed bunny with grubby fur and worn-out ears. She’s always been top toy. Goes everywhere with Lauren. School residentials, sleepovers, festivals. Now she’s going to be a frigging fresher.
‘But Mrs Pink needs Tinky Winky. They’re best friends, remember.’
I take a deep breath. I want to say in a very firm voice, Lauren, you are eighteen years old, about to embark on a chemistry degree, not infant school. But I can’t. ‘Just bring Mrs Pink and Tinky Winky. The others can stay here and guard your bedroom from the Bogeyman.’
This does the trick. I go on to say she won’t be allowed smelly candles because the powers that be don’t want drunk students setting fire to the halls of residence.
‘You sound upset, Mum. Are you going to miss me?’
‘Course I am, Lolly, but you’re going to have the best time. I’m so jealous. Me and your dad never got further than Dingleton Comp. You’ve done us proud.’
‘Where is Dad, anyway?’
‘No idea. He said he’d be here to wave you off.’
‘He’s probably busy with her.’
I want to agree. I want to say yes, he’s probably having some afternoon delight with your chemistry teacher, Miss Melanie Barton. Yes, he’s probably right at this moment showing her his Bunsen burner. But, no. I am the sensible parent. And Lauren’s the last of our babies to leave the nest. Harry’s been gone a whole year, bartending his way across Canada. I’ve adjusted to his being away, to his random middle-of-the-night messages, the occasional FaceTime. But this is my little girl.
It’s only Plymouth.
‘Let me grab Granddad from the shed. We’re leaving in ten. At the latest. Text your father.’
She follows me downstairs, Mrs Pink under one arm, a wriggling Bob under the other, texting her father with her wizard fingers. The fingers that can turn magnesium into gold dust and Snapchat in the dark.
Mike pings back his apologies. Says Melanie needs some emotional support because her cat’s gone AWOL. I feel like texting him to say I’ve kidnapped her bastard cat and it’s currently boiling away to a pulp on my stove. But I like cats. And I’m the grown-up.
‘Never mind, Lolly. He’ll pop down and see you when he’s on the road. He’s in Plymouth a lot.’
I release Bob from her grip and shoo him out to the garden for a wee. He can’t half bark for a little dog.
Lolly stays put, at the bottom of the stairs, pouting. She’s five years old again, standing in her Mulan PJs, sucking her thumb, Mrs Pink’s ears nestled one against each side of her nose, waiting for her daddy to come home from work. ‘Where’s Granddad?’ she asks, wiping away a rogue tear.
Here he is, Granddad, wandering out of the kitchen into the hallway like he’s forgotten something, or is maybe looking for it. He’s not got dementia. He’s always been scatty. But now that he’s spotted Lauren, a smile spreads over his wizened face and he looks his seventy-four years and yet he’s also my dad from when I was a little girl, the spark in his cornflower-blue eyes still fizzing away with awe and wonder.
‘Here she is,’ he says. ‘The brain of Britain.’
‘Granddad. Don’t,’ she half-heartedly protests. ‘It’s only a degree.’ She blushes but she loves it. Laps it up and milks it for all it’s worth.
He hands her a bottle of his home-made damson wine. ‘This’ll make you friends and influence them.’
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘It’s
stronger than that cider you drink.’
‘You’re a legend.’
‘I certainly hope so.’
She kisses him and he slips a wad of cash into her hand. ‘A little something to help you on your way.’ He winks. ‘It’ll buy you a snakebite and a packet of condoms.’
‘Dad!’ He is so embarrassing sometimes.
He shrugs.
She stashes the notes in the back pocket of her ultra-skinny ripped jeans that remind me of the venetian blinds we had in the front room back in the day.
‘We don’t want any surprises. Not till you’ve graduated and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.’
Sexual-health advice from my father to my daughter. What next? I must sigh or look pained as he says, ‘Get a move on, Lollipop. Your mother’s hit that time of life where she’s likely to explode at any given moment.’ He hugs her. She hugs him back, tight, so tight she might fracture one of his ribs.
‘Don’t go losing that money,’ I tell her, heading back up to her room. ‘You can buy a heck of a lot of condoms with fifty quid.’
Dad does his Sid James laugh.
I can’t see my daughter’s face from here but I know it’ll be the colour of that damson wine.
AFTER SEVERAL MORE trips up and down those bloody stairs, and after much faffing and flapping, after she’s said her emotional goodbyes to the dog, to her grandfather and to all the rooms and bits of furniture, we get going, Dad and Bob waving us off until we can no longer see them even though they’re standing in the middle of the road.
‘Bye, House,’ Lauren whispers. ‘Bye, Road. Bye, Park. Bye, Library. Bye, Museum. Bye, Train Station. Bye, Sea—’
‘Why don’t you put on a CD, Lolly?’
She tuts, like I’ve suggested she winds up a gramophone, then connects her phone to my car stereo.
Despite DJ Nobber blasting my ears, despite Mrs Pink and Tinky Winky making it tricky to see out the back window, and despite the fact that I keep bashing the lamp with my hand every time I go for a gear change, we’ve done it. Me and Dad. We’ve got Lauren on her way. Our little girl’s all grown up.
‘What’s a “snakebite”, Mum?’ she asks, fingers flying over her phone as she Instagrams every moment of our epic journey down the A38. ‘How can you buy a snakebite?’
God, I feel old. God,
THREE HOURS LATER and I’m driving back up the A38, alone in an empty car. All that’s left of my daughter is the smell of ylang-ylang and a Quavers packet screwed into a ball on her seat. At least I can listen to the radio. Leif Garrett is singing ‘I was Made for Dancin’’, a proper tune. I used to have a life-size poster of the gorgeous one, blew kisses at him from my bed, before I even knew what a proper kiss was. That happened a few years later, school leavers’ disco, July 1984.
Now I’m officially an empty-nester, Harry and Lauren off on adventures, and while I’m pleased for them, proud of them, this isn’t how I imagined my future panning out. Thought we were doing all right, me and Mike, not bad for a couple with just a handful of O levels and CSEs between them. We were on course, two relatively functioning children, a semi-detached house with off-road parking, permanent jobs, three more years to pay off the mortgage, and a cruise booked. I never expected to be driving home to my dad in a rattling old Polo, worrying about student loans and pension funds and a marriage breakdown. But then I never thought Mum would go first or that Mike would be such a tosser.
‘I’m well annoyed with Dad,’ Lauren said earlier once we’d reached her halls and started to unpack the car.
We’d lugged all her stuff – the suitcases, the rucksack, the bedding, the crockery, the sleeping bag, the lamp – into her new room, just Lolly and me between us. And her room, her room is all right. A pod with a desk, a bed and an en-suite. I’ve never had an en-suite but I don’t begrudge her that. She’s worked hard. Extra tuition. Which is where Miss Melanie Barton entered stage left and exited stage right with a middle-aged man who happened to be my husband. A man I’d been with ever since school.
‘I’m well annoyed with him too, Lolly. Well annoyed. But you’ve got a fresh start and it’s going to be bloody brilliant.’
I gave her a hug and left her organizing her Sharpies and make-up and socks to go back up the A38 to my increasingly empty life.
‘Forty-nine years old, Lief.’ I say this out loud, in the safety of my car. ‘Forty-nine!’
Lief carries on singing. He’s not bothered.
But I am.
THE SUN IS setting by the time I get home and our street is Sunday-night quiet. There’s a van on the driveway. Mike. I pull in next to it. Twice the size of my rust bucket and yet he couldn’t take his daughter to university. Couldn’t even wave her off. Wait till I get my hands on the little ratbag.
I turn off the engine and sit for a while, eyes shut, hoping that when I open them, his van will have disappeared.
It hasn’t. I’ll have to go in. Besides, I’m gagging for a G and T. Better still, Dad’s got a bottle of sloe gin from last autumn. He’ll be happy to crack it open. It’s almost time to make this year’s batch. And today’s rite of passage should be marked somehow.
I get out of the car, knees clicking, back sore. I’m reaching for my bag on the back seat when I notice something, someone, left behind on the floor. Mrs Pink.
Bugger.
I pick her up like she’s a newborn, hold her tight, sniff her, and have to resist the urge to suck my thumb, though I do rub those worn-out ears. They feel like silk. I feel like bawling. But I will not let Mike see me upset. Oh, no.
MIKE IS FRATERNIZING with my father in the shed. It was newly constructed by Mike last year as an attempt to lure Dad to move in with us after his fall. He didn’t break any bones but he was shaken up and riddled with grief because it happened within a few weeks of Mum dying. The existing shed, Mike’s, wasn’t big enough for Dad’s stuff so this clinched the deal for my eccentric father to sell up the old house. When Harry left to go travelling, Dad moved into his room. Not so long after that, Mike moved out. And now Lauren.
I’m not going to mope though I do have the right to feel narked.
This shed might be huge but it’s stacked with Dad’s stuff: books, vinyl, fossils, mysterious scientific objects, Kilner jars, recycled bottles, an old nappy bucket filled with corks. A home-brewing/distilling aficionado who thought nothing of roping in child labour when needed. It’s entirely clear where Lauren found her interest in chemistry. Watching her grandfather turn fruit into moonshine, hooch, cider and gin was like being in the presence of an alchemist. A magician. She always loved a trick. The coin behind the ear, the nose in the fingers. She wanted to be Hermione Granger and use real magic, not just sleight of hand or misdirection. Dad’s booze-making intrigued her. His ginger-beer plant was the stuff of legends and watered the whole of Dingleton at one point. Chemistry was the closest she could get to this. Though I have no doubt she’d have taken a degree in brewing and distilling if she could have.
I turn my attention to Mike, slouched in a deckchair, one of a pair we used to take on holidays, a traitorous Bob curled up tight on his lap.
‘Drinking tea?’ I ask, surprised, seeing as he’s normally on the beer when he’s with my father.
‘I’m driving,’ he says.
‘So you are.’
I wait for him to carry on.
He coughs, that clearing-his-throat cough he does when he’s embarrassed. ‘Sorry, Jen,’ he mutters. ‘About the mess-up earlier.’
Apparently the scraggy cat returned at teatime, smelling of lavender and smoke. Mrs Baxter, who lives up the road from the dirty lovebirds, is number-one suspect. I tell him, all calm like, that I don’t give a flying monkey about Mrs Baxter and her personal habits. But I do care that he wasn’t here for our daughter. I tell him Lauren was disappointed and he’d better visit her soon. He says he’ll go mid-week.
‘Make sure you do.’ I am so annoyed I can’t look at him so I busy myself hunting down that remaining bottle of sloe gin. It�
��s in here somewhere.
And now Mike’s moaning to Dad, about Melanie, about how she nags him which is something I never did. Probably should have. Though I am now. Which is better late than never. And how dare he? How dare he grumble about Melanie, the woman he left me for? It’s no use Mike offloading onto Dad. My father’s not listening to a word; he’s gone elsewhere, deep inside his head. He’ll be thinking about stuff most of us never will, such as how many smells your nose can remember (fifty thousand) and which day of the week you’re most likely to have a heart attack (Monday).
I do not want to hear about Mike’s troubles.
Though I do confess to a certain smugness.
All is not rosy then.
‘Ah, gotcha.’ I hold up the bottle in a moment of triumph.
‘The secret is to use decent gin,’ Dad says, back in the room, when I pull the cork out of the precious bottle. ‘The sloes are all the happier for it.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I say. ‘You get what you pay for.’ Life advice from the man who forages in hedgerows and loiters around bottle banks. The man who makes booze that can knock your head off: elderflower fizz, damson wine, blackberry liqueur, and my favourite, sloe gin. I might be the owner of depleted hormones, a diminishing family and zero sex life, but I’ve got Dad and his home comforts.
I grab a couple of dusty tumblers from the shelf, look in my bag for a tissue and there she is, Mrs Pink. I pull her out, a rabbit out of a hat, hold her up for my audience of three, give them a moment to absorb the significance.
There’s an intake of breath.
‘Bugger,’ the men say in unison as Bob whines.
I use Mrs Pink to wipe the glasses, pour a generous one for Dad and an even more generous one for myself.
Mike looks up, expectant. ‘What about me…?’
‘You’re driving,’ I remind him.
‘So I am,’ he says.
‘You’d better take Mrs Pink with you, Mike. Your daughter needs her. She needs you.’
We watch as Mike struggles out of the deckchair and makes for the door, off to his home, Melanie the Moaner’s home, Mrs Pink clutched in his hand. If I were a kinder person I might feel a teeny-weeny bit sorry for him. But obviously I’m not and I don’t.
The Juniper Gin Joint Page 1
