by Holly Seddon
‘It’ll put hairs on his chest, Viv. A bit of work’s no bad thing for a boy and he’ll have our Katie with him.’
I was treated like one of the family by then. A fixture, so confident of my place in their world that I could let myself in the back door without knocking. I could touch the TV and the new record player with its built-in tape deck.
Mick collected us at the end of our ‘skittling shifts’ and dropped me at the bottom of my drive. His car smelled of warm ale and cigarettes and I was allowed to sit in the front because I was taller than Paul. My arms and feet ached from the night’s work: stop-start, stop-start, yank the skittles into position as fast as possible or get a wooden ball in the shins. The journey home was only ten minutes but my head would droop over the seat belt. There were no seat belts in the back. Imagine that now.
My mother’s attentions had increasingly turned to London by then. She talked vaguely about some fashion project or other with her art school friends, but the black marks under her eyes when she occasionally reappeared told a different story. I prided myself on being less gullible once I hit the lofty age of double figures. My father’s business was experiencing some ‘bumps’, whatever that meant, and Mrs Baker was called upon to stay past supper and babysit, which she did only nominally. In the end, we all just did our separate things.
I didn’t have to beg or plead with my parents to go sticking up skittles, I just left through the front door and let myself back in afterwards.
‘You’re so lucky,’ Paul would say, and he’d roll his eyes behind his mum’s back when she fussed and worried.
Sticking up skittles was hard work and poorly paid, but we were desperate to do it because it seemed so undeniably grown up. We each got a quid, a bottle of pop and a bag of crisps from Lorraine behind the bar. Lorraine was the landlord’s eldest daughter, the closest thing the village had to a glamour puss. Her clothes were bright and thin. I used to see her getting off the bus from Yeovil on a Saturday, arms hung with bags from Chelsea Girl, Etam and Topshop. Of course, looking back I realise how much more glamorous my mother was, how Lorraine would have killed for a wardrobe like the one that my mum left behind.
Back then, Paul and I never let on to each other how much we despised those wooden skittles and the sweaty red-faced skittle players who yelled at us for not sticking them up quickly enough. We never acknowledged the splinters in our hands. I often dropped my pound’s wages in the car on the way home, it was never about that.
Paul stockpiled his earnings, making a careful note of his running total in a little book from WHSmith. Any chips or sweets he bought were deducted from the running total in the front. Written neatly in the back was a list of things he was saving for.
After a few months, the sticking-up job ended abruptly. Letting myself in to 4 Church Street to wait for Paul one day, I found myself eye to eye with Lorraine from The Swan. She was at the foot of the stairs, struggling into her boots, makeup harsher in the hall daylight. Mick was sitting, skinny and shirtless, a few steps up from her. I was so surprised that I just turned and left, all of us wordless. He never mentioned it to me, or I to him.
I wasn’t an idiot, I may not have understood it all but I knew she wouldn’t have been there if Viv hadn’t been at work. I knew something must have happened, something adult. It sat in my gut, wriggling and ever present, and I was distracted by that when we played. After a few days, I blurted it out to Paul. Even then, he barely reacted on the surface. His lip quivered and he balled his hands up into little fists but he didn’t say anything.
‘So your mum’s right,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Your dad is a randy bugger.’
Paul said nothing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
November 2012 – Sunday night
I wake up sometime after 4 a.m., alone in the lounge. I have the thick blanket tangled in my legs and my neck is cricked. For a moment, I don’t know where I am or why I’m folded instead of flat and I blink helplessly into the dark. Paul must have turned the lights off when he woke up and took himself to bed. I wonder if he watched me a while before leaving and flush at the thought. I tip-toe upstairs and try to remember which child is in which room, check their breathing and sniff the air for accidents.
I creep down the hall, the floor squeaking under foot. The master bedroom is the whitest of all. Chalky white walls, thick cream carpet, white curtains, white bedding, white lamps. Even in the deep of the night, it glows like a harvest moon. I discard my clothes in a heap and shiver into my pyjamas.
I lift the covers as carefully as I can, trying not to let the cold nip at Paul’s bare arms and feet. I shuffle in sideways and turn my back to him and am asleep seconds later. When I open my eyes again, Izzy is between us. Her whirligig legs work their way up and down my back as she burrows, snoring, into her father’s ribs.
‘How long has she been in here?’
‘Not sure,’ Paul whispers back. ‘I woke up and she was already here.’
I turn over slowly and kiss her puffed-up pink cheeks, smelling the sweet perfume of sleep. Paul smiles and kisses the top of her head, her dark hair tangled but shining. She’s one of those kids you just can’t keep your hands off. Even though she’s past toddler age, we’re always carrying her, cuddling her, kissing her and getting in the way of her busy work with our pleas for attention and affection. Since Harry turned a corner and immediately found all affection abhorrent, Izzy has borne the brunt even more.
I cuddle up to her solid little back and fall back asleep until the sun streams in and she’s sitting up demanding breakfast.
In the kitchen, I fumble around finding mugs and filling the kettle from a surprisingly feisty tap that sprays up my arms and jolts me awake.
‘Did you bring anything for breakfast?’ Paul asks without looking up.
‘No, why?’
‘The kids need to eat something.’
‘Isn’t there anything in the hamper? The website said they’d provide breakfast for the first day.’
‘They don’t like it, it’s all adult stuff.’
‘What constitutes “adult stuff”?’ I lower my voice. ‘Crack cocaine and dildos?’
Paul lifts his head and stifles a grin. ‘It’s granary bread and marmalade.’
I turn to look at the two panicky faces. ‘Oh guys, marmalade on toast won’t kill you.’
‘Dad!’ Izzy protests and Harry looks on the brink of tears.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’ll go out and get something.’
I look back from the hall and catch Paul watching me as I leave. He looks down quickly like he’s been caught out and I push outside, blinking into winter sun as the cold takes my breath away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Viv and Mick
Viv had come from a Romany family originally, a background that was entirely alien to me. She had surprising blue eyes, very dark hair and skin that had faded from dark almond to tired beige. Her Romany background was not something spoken about, or explored. It only came out in arguments, when Mick would yell that she was nothing but a ‘domesticated gyppo’, and Paul would nod sagely and tell me, ‘Mother has some Romany blood in her lineage.’
‘So do you then,’ I’d say every time. And every time he would look at me quizzically and then shake his head, like I’d said something so silly he couldn’t even respond to it, he just had to scoot over it to save my blushes.
Considering that Viv’s history made my children a quarter Romany, I wish I knew more. Their heritage is hinted at in their glossy near-black hair, if nothing else.
Viv loosened up about her past in later years, telling me the occasional story about her family’s squeaky-clean caravan, her mother’s jewellery collection, the money-making schemes her father came up with at the expense of idiot ‘gorgias’. Gorgia, she told me, was a Romany word for a non-Romany person, too arrogant to think they might ever be taken in by a gypsy.
Although I found out about the big Romany secret early on into my friendship with Paul, I ha
d no idea then how that little Romany girl had become a house-owning nurse with a gorgia husband. I only heard the real background story from Viv herself years later.
Viv had been one of four children, her father Fennix an important man in the traveller community and her mother, Bidi, something of a prized catch. Bidi had been whip-smart, fierce and creative. She’d demanded the best at all times, and that included from her children. All four kids had been educated by Bidi from what sounds like a curious and patchy mixed bag. Glamorous interpretations of history and English, absolutely no mathematics or geography and a very home-based version of science. Beyond this, Viv and her sister were exceptional seamstresses and her brothers were dangerously charming.
The family had lived on a semi-permanent camp just outside of Shepton Mallet, a few miles from Castle Cary.
At thirteen, Viv had met Mick while she was out blackberry picking and he was pinching copper pipes to sell. For a smart girl with a trickster father, she was surprisingly taken in by Mick’s patter and the two started a clandestine relationship, kissing under the shade of trees outside of the camp, or cycling into Shepton Mallet for milkshakes.
Some time when she was fourteen, Viv’s older brother Robbie had followed her to a dusk rendezvous, suspecting she was up to something when she had rejected the insistent attention of a visiting boy of fifteen, one ideal for courting and likely marriage.
Robbie saw his sister kissing and holding hands with an outsider and returned a short while later with their younger brother Dukey and two cousins. Mick was beaten badly, his eye socket smashed and a rib cracked. The next week, after being given camp-wide silent treatment, Viv was driven to the house in which Mick and his father lived. The house in which Viv, Mick and Paul eventually lived. She was dropped at the door of 4 Church Street with two bags of clothes. The brothers dropping her off had intended to extract a dowry from Mick and his father but took one look at the house and decided not to bother.
They all left the county the day that Viv moved out. The whole camp, ten families in all, upped and left for good.
CHAPTER NINE
November 2012 – Monday morning
I’m underdressed in a pyjama top, cardigan and jeans. The urge to fix the breakfast problem, to make everything perfect, has taken the place of common sense. The kids could have waited while I got dressed properly.
The sea rages metres away and I fight my way through the wind as I lurch along the harbour. Eventually I shove my way into a shop, which doesn’t feel much warmer and doesn’t sell a great deal of anything. I panic-buy and return back to howls of delight as I tip the bag upside down and watch the packets of biscuits, currant buns and long-life muffins tumble out.
Paul frowns at the sugary haul and bites into his adult marmalade on toast while I reveal my offering for him: a local newspaper with a humorously naive headline.
SEAGULLS CAUSE £60 DAMAGE TO BUS STOP
‘Can’t believe I turned my back on the glamorous world of journalism,’ he snorts. ‘Pulitzer for the seagull scoop, for sure.’
‘Well, if you’d stayed in the high-octane world of B2B publishing,’ I test, cautiously, ‘we’d not be celebrating ten years of marriage.’
He smiles thinly then takes another bite of toast, swallowing noisily.
‘Hey,’ he says, as I pour us both more coffee, ‘what are you having for breakfast?’
I push my hand into my jeans pocket and feel the fold of the letter, pushing its edge under my fingernails until it hurts.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I say.
CHAPTER TEN
Mick and Viv
Mick was seventeen when he acquired a wife. After years living without his mother, at first a woman’s domestic touch was a bit like a holiday. Within hours of Viv’s arrival, the house was being cleaned – a full-scale operation that required the mouldering carpet to be pulled up and burned in the garden, the floor underneath mopped and polished like a skittle alley. Within her first few days she’d darned socks and seams, bagged up their washing and rearranged the kitchen.
With very few words, she’d extracted money for the laundrette from Mick’s belligerent father and cycled to the town three miles away, bags strapped to the handlebars and back of the bike, balancing like a circus act. She came back hours later with dried clothes ready for pressing. She did that every week but after the first few times Mick and his dad had stopped watching agog, and had started to complain that washing day was too infrequent.
Three years after she first moved in, Mick bought Viv a washing machine for her birthday – a big display of affection to apologise for a slip-up with a local girl – and she used the time it freed up to sign up for nursing college.
She’d wanted to be a doctor, but needed to earn money. She’d learned fast that both Mick and his dad earned sporadically and spent unwisely. Besides, she didn’t even have CSEs let alone O-levels. People like her didn’t do medicine degrees.
It wasn’t an unhappy marriage. In fact, it wasn’t a marriage at all, not legally. But ex-communicated from her family and her community, Viv’s name was no longer hers to use so she took Mick’s. Mr and Mrs Michael and Vivian Loxton.
I also took the name Loxton when we married. Taking my husband’s name felt like a nice thing to do, the ritualistic satisfaction of a new signature. The unusually ceremonious and celebratory feeling to something as mundane as picking up new bankcards, the smile of the cashier when I asked for them.
For me there was no wrist wringing. Howarth meant nothing good to me, and ‘Kate Howarth’ had been dragged through slime and was ready for the bin.
Besides, while I never grew up coveting a husband’s name (or a husband, for that matter), there were many years I wanted nothing more than to be a Loxton. To be truly one of the family.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
November 2012 – Monday morning
For our fortieth birthdays in September, we stayed in Whitstable in Kent. The dying summer air was thick with fish guts and ozone and we soon got sick of walking up and down the same little strip of jelly bean beach huts or the short sliver of cutesy shops before bursting back out into the pound shop territory at either end. The kids were miserable the whole time, real little whinge-bags. Harry bore the brunt of it. As the oldest, he’s often charged with dragging Izzy down with him, or – if they’re having a good time – getting her overexcited.
Paul and I were both only children: Harry and Izzy’s dynamics are a mystery on some level, and curiously familiar on others.
I remember one childhood Saturday when Paul and I had been driving Viv to distraction with ‘I Know a Song That’ll Get on Your Nerves’. We’d both been singing it, I may have even started it, but it was Paul who got clobbered because I was ‘a guest’. Worse still, Viv made Paul apologise to me because I had to watch him get a hiding. Paul fumed all night and into the next day, eyes pink with rage. I gloated a bit and then said he could give me a dead leg to even things up. He made a fist, but never struck.
Anyway, Paul hated Whitstable’s pebble beach and seemed almost affronted, as if someone sneaky had designed it to mess with him. I took the blame because I’d made the booking. I felt sick with regret by the third day and probably took it out on the children. They were already miserable, they couldn’t run around on stones and they wouldn’t eat the seafood. I secretly didn’t blame them. I couldn’t swallow oysters for years after a university friend joked that that’s what performing cunnilingus is like.
After living on chips and trudging around miserably for three days, we cut our Whitstable stay short. It had been a write-off from the moment Paul saw the stones.
After Whitstable’s Big Birthday let down, it was even more important to get the Big Anniversary stay just right.
All eyes on Cornwall.
Harry and Izzy are wedged into opposing ends of the big sofa, staring at the television screen. The cottage came with a basket of assorted DVDs, all of which could have been grabbed en masse from a petrol station, and so far the kids hav
e been mutually delighted by the exploits of a cartoon rat who works in a commercial kitchen.
The chill of the outside still sits stiffly in my bones so I go to the bathroom to shower. There is a beautiful roll-top bath – white, of course – standing in the middle of the room. Before Paul and I were together, he once sat beside me for ages cheering me up while I wept into the bath. It felt like a watery rock bottom at the time, but there were so many more depths to plunge.
I slip into the shower and crank it up as hot as I can get it.
Back in the kitchen, I spring the kettle on for a cup of tea and ruffle my damp hair with the towel. The underfloor heating is heaven-sent and my joints have stopped aching with cold. Right now, I’d be happy spending the whole week just tucked up in this little cottage, hiding. In truth, I know it’s only a matter of time before the kids go stir crazy and we have to get out before we kill them.
It’s obvious as I step back into the lounge that the kids’ pact has already broken down and they’re fractious and in need of fresh air.
‘Where have you been?’ Paul asks, his eyes narrow. In a laser like beam of sunshine I see the wrinkles around his eyes, just like his mum had at his age. For all his expensive grooming products and his £80 haircut, he’s still his mother’s son.
‘I just had a shower and made a cup of tea.’
Paul says nothing.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ I add, avoiding his gaze.
‘I think we should get moving.’
Paul, of course, showered earlier so he’s ready to go. The kids are dressed in numerous brightly coloured layers under their thick winter coats. Izzy has her toy cat hanging from the top of her coat like a papoosed infant.
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ I whisper to Paul, who doesn’t respond.
