by Maeve Haran
My God, the Post must have run that piece she’d written without telling her.
‘Read it,’ advised a woman at her elbow. ‘Scare the pants off you. Where the hell are we supposed to work till we can claim our pension? That’s if we have a pension we can live on, and plenty don’t.’
‘Scandalous!’ agreed the woman in the next queue. ‘We’ll all be cleaning lavvies till we’re ninety!’
Sal bought three copies.
She was hot news in Tesco. That had to count for something. Suddenly, she couldn’t face going home. The worst thing about not having a job, apart from the lack of money, status, and something other than QVC to occupy your waking hours, was being stuck at home with no one to gossip with, no chats in the Ladies’ Loo about who’d done what to whom.
As she stood at the bus stop, surrounded by a small group of women who varied in age from her own to eighty-plus, including one old lady practically bent double by a nasty case of what used to be called dowager’s hump, Sal felt an unfamiliar pride. She had written something honest. It might not get her anywhere but she had made a stand all the same. She was fed up with pretending to be young and vibrant. Sick to death of dieting and Botox. She was going to start acting her age.
Well, if not her exact age, then within a reasonable proximity of it, say twenty years.
When she came downstairs, Ella found that Wenceslaus had clearly been up for some time. The kitchen was spotless and she could hear the whirr of the dishwasher which she’d forgotten to put on last night.
‘Would you like toasted bread? People in café eat a lot of toasted bread.’
‘I would love some toasted bread. Actually, we call it toast.’
‘Like in movie when they say, “You’re toast”!’
‘Exactly. Only that would mean overdone toast, burnt to a frazzle. By the way, I have a favour to ask you if you have any time.’
‘What is favour?’
‘To help me learn computer skills. Sometimes I feel like the last computer-illiterate person in a planet full of Facebook fanatics.’
‘Of course. I am delighted. But maybe first we should find cat?’
‘Why, isn’t he in the kitchen?’
Wenceslaus shook his head. ‘Disappeared. Like human-rights activist.’
‘Oh my God. TomTom! The last thing my friend needs is to lose her wretched cat! Where have you looked?’
‘I look all over house, under beds, in clothes-dry cupboard. When I was little kid, cat at home went there to have babies, but this cat not female?’
‘No, the clue’s in the name. TomTom. A tom means a male. Ginger cats are usually male, in fact.’
‘I look in garden. You ask neighbours. If I ask neighbours, they think I am burglar.’ Ella didn’t think burglars were ever as beautiful as Wenceslaus, but still. ‘Cats not faithful like dogs. Go to anyone who feed them.’
That was true. The other thing she asked herself is would TomTom try and go home? After all, in The Incredible Journey the cat found its way back hundreds of miles. All this one had to do was get from Old Moulsford to Laura’s house three miles away.
As she drew a blank with the neighbours, pictures haunted her of Laura’s cat torn apart by the foxes that barked so eerily at night.
‘I have idea,’ Wenceslaus suggested brightly. ‘We kill two cats with one stone.’ Seeing Ella’s face he added, ‘Sorry, not good joke. We make poster to help find cat and you learn computer at same time. Do you have photograph of cat?’ Ella shook her head. ‘OK, we get one from Internet that looks similar.’
Twenty minutes later they had created a poster in full colour on Wenceslaus’ laptop with a cat that would pass in an identity parade for TomTom. Ella almost forgot her worry she was so proud.
They went out together and fixed the poster to as many lamp posts as they could find. ‘Next thing I teach you is Facebook, which is like putting up poster, only bigger.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘You see lost cat has useful purpose. To teach you Facebook.’
‘I’m sure Laura will appreciate that.’
To Ella’s anxious amusement they created a Facebook page for TomTom the cat, announcing that he was lost and giving details of a reward for his return. It was all terribly exciting. Ella felt she had joined the modern age, even if she was disguised as a cat.
The best thing, Wenceslaus explained, would be to spread the word through Twitter. ‘You need to get famous person interested in lost cat to re-tweet, who has lots of followers of their own.’
It turned out by a stroke of luck that the lead singer of the cult band The Dogs was actually a cat lover. He tweeted about TomTom’s disappearance and TomTom was suddenly the most famous lost cat in West London, possibly the world. But what if Laura saw it? Then she remembered that Laura was probably even less tech-savvy than she was.
‘You see how easy it is. World is such a small place through Internet. Now I show you how to blog.’
And it was blogging which Ella found she really took to. Blogging was, it seemed to her, basically a development of the teenage diary, only instead of writing: ‘STRICTLY PRIVATE NO ACCESS ON PAIN OF DEATH – AND YES, MUM, THAT MEANSYOU!!!’, you basically invited everyone in the world to read what you thought.
This could be fun, Ella realized. I could put down all my thoughts, all those little wasted observations I have no one to tell! And she knew that she wanted to tell the world, candidly and honestly, what it felt like to grow old when you felt young.
What she needed was a catchy title, something that would grab people’s attention and that she could also hide behind, because there was no way she was doing this under her own name.
Ella sat and thought about this.
She seriously considered WILL YOU STILL NEED ME, WILL YOU STILL FEED ME? but it was too long. And, surprise, surprise, crowds of other oldie bloggers had bagged WHEN I’M SIXTY-FOUR.
Ella stared at the screen. She wanted something quite sharp because if she did transmit her thoughts, she wanted them to be honest and true. To make people sit up and pay attention. To agree or disagree. To generate discussion through blogs of her own.
And then it came to her. MOAN FART DIE. It was so wonderfully rude and unromantic. So utterly unladylike. And it was just right to tell the unvarnished truth about what getting old was really like. The more she looked at it the more she liked it.
And the best thing of all was that no one need know it was her.
She thanked Wenceslaus and shut off her PC.
She’d just settled down on the sofa with a glass of wine, so taken up with blogging that she’d forgotten about the cat, when the phone rang. It was Laura’s daughter, Bella, and she was in a panic.
Poor kid, had she heard about her father leaving already?
‘Oh my God, I had to call,’ Bella explained, distraught. ‘The lost cat on Twitter, tell me that’s not our TomTom? Only Sam’s had him since he was six and he’d be heartbroken if anything happened to him.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ella’s heart started thumping. ‘I was just learning to tweet and I used TomTom to practise. When does your mum get back?’
‘She’s on her way now. She and Dad have asked me and Sam to stay in later. You don’t know what it’s about, do you?’
Oh God, poor kids. Their nice safe suburban world was about to be blown apart. And one thing they could do without was losing their cat. Ella put down her glass and started another search. Where was that wretched bloody animal?’
Laura drove back from Brighton in a blur of pain and uncertainty. Had she over-reacted? For the sake of her twenty-five-year-old marriage should she be giving Simon a second chance to explain things? Telling Sam and Bella was so final and it would hurt them so much. She could always invent some excuse for his absence while they thought about their future. He was away often enough.
Then the voices of her friends came into her head like a kind of Greek chorus: Ella always so reasonable, Sal intolerant of men generally, Claudia realistic and down-to-earth. Get real, Laura. He d
oesn’t care about you. If he cared, he would have put up a fight.
And, of course, they were right. This wasn’t just some affair. The woman wanted him to live with her and he had gone, just like that, on their anniversary, of all days. Admittedly, it had been she who had told him to go but he hadn’t shown any real regret or appreciation of the pain he was causing and it struck her that there had always been callousness in Simon. He probably called it focus, the capacity to concentrate on his goal. And this Suki was his goal now, not she and the children. The painful realization came to Laura that, in fact, she had offered him the chance to stay if he gave the woman up and he hadn’t even replied.
She’d had no option.
Besides, Bella would guess that something disastrous had happened. She was like a litmus test where emotion was concerned and she had been involved in planning the surprise, so she would know instantly that something was wrong when Laura returned alone. If she lied to Bella, her daughter would work it out and be furiously angry that they had tried to conceal the truth. They would be better off telling her the real situation because Bella would guess it anyway.
The tape machine in her car clicked to the end and switched itself over. Simon had often laughed at her for having a car old enough to still have a tape machine. But Laura liked things that were serviceable rather than flashy. Perhaps she had always thought her marriage fell into that bracket. How wrong she’d been.
All at once the car was full of the one song she didn’t want to hear: ‘Under the Boardwalk’. She pressed eject, pulled it out and unravelled it before flinging it out of the window, watching the tape unwind like silly string in her rear-view mirror. The sign for a petrol station came up and she pulled into its car park, a sense of loss finally engulfing her. And as the tears blurred her vision and her chest hurt so much she could hardly breathe, a random thought came into her mind: By Bexleyheath Services I Sat Down and Wept.
Life was not grand and dramatic, it was small and ordinary, predictable and repetitive. People got married. They fell out of love, they were unfaithful, they got divorced. She looked around at all the normal, everyday people going about their business. Half of them, maybe more, if the statistics were right, must have been through what she was experiencing. It wasn’t Anna Karenina. She wouldn’t jump in front of a train.
And yet, what the hell was she supposed to do with her anger? She had always tried to be a good wife and a good mother. Now it seemed that being a good mother would mean hiding her feelings of betrayal and resentment. She would have to pretend to be reasonable when what she really felt was I hope you both die in a plane crash!
She began to see why discarded wives went around cutting the arms out of their husbands’ suits or scrawling Adulterer on their office wall. It was because they felt so powerless and humiliated.
She cleaned up her mascara-stained face with a wet wipe, conscious that she was the kind of woman who kept wet wipes in her glove compartment even though she no longer had small children; good old competent down-to-earth Laura. She drove on round the perimeter of London, taken with the fantasy that as the motorway was circular she could keep driving round and round and never get to her destination.
Except that there was her turn-off. The road home. Where everything would be changed forever.
And now she was actually in her own road.
She parked in the driveway. Bella, as she had often done as a child, heard the car and immediately opened the front door, her pale face against its black Goth hair lit by a sweet and welcoming smile.
At least we produced you and Sam, so our marriage can’t be a complete waste.
‘Hey, Mum,’ Bella greeted her, skipping down the steps of the porch, ‘how was the big romantic surprise?’
‘Not quite what I expected.’ Laura had to fight not to break down.
‘Well, you know Dad. He only likes surprises if he organizes them. Where is he, by the way?’
‘He’s coming later. Where’s Sam?’
‘Where would you expect? Playing World of Warcraft. I said to him, “Don’t you think you’re a bit old for that?” and he said the average age of gamers is thirty-five. God, do men never grow up?’ She put her arm protectively round Laura, all the sullenness of previous days forgotten. ‘So what’s this big-deal announcement anyway? You’re not getting divorced?’ She laughed at her own joke, skipping back up the steps so that she didn’t see the anguish on her mother’s face.
‘I’ll just take my bag upstairs and unpack.’
‘Want a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks. I may have a relaxing bath.’ At least in the bathroom she could lock herself in and be alone.
On the way up she pushed open the door of the sitting room. ‘Hello, darling!’ she called to Sam.
‘Hi, Mum,’ he replied, raising a hand in salute, and went back to his game. Laura’s mother, a stickler for good manners, said Sam was offhand, but Laura attributed his lack of social graces to a sense of security, something she herself had never had as a child and had been determined to give him. He didn’t feel the need to curry favour. What would happen to that now?
With so much emotional upheaval it seemed strange that the exterior of her life was so unchanged. Her bedroom was just as she’d left it, the bed made, the cushions straight, flowers on her bedside table. She liked to leave a room perfectly tidy, already imagining how she’d feel when she walked back into it. Was that weird and anal? Did this Suki live in a whirlwind of clothes thrown everywhere, nothing planned, everything exciting and spontaneous, including the sex?
Well, that wouldn’t last. Laura sat down on the bed. That was almost what depressed her the most. Simon would go and live with this woman and their life would become more like his life with Laura. That was the way of commitment; it was shaped by habit and routine. In a good marriage that could be comfortable and reassuring. The routine could hold you up like scaffolding when you felt shaky until you felt strong again.
Habits could be good. She thought of the cup of tea they drank in bed together every morning. It was companionable. You chatted about the day, the children, your worries. It was more important than it seemed. It glued the edifice together. Sex at the end of the day helped too, but of course that was the bit that got forgotten first. It struck her that lately Simon had taken to doing the crossword or even checking his emails on his phone when they used to talk. Maybe she should have noticed the signs. A broken pole in the scaffolding.
She noticed the photograph she always kept on her bedside table. It was of them both looking incredibly happy, on some holiday or other, laughing. She threw it across the room, grateful that the distant boom of World of Warcraft muffled the sound of broken glass. The depressing truth was that there was nothing really wrong with their marriage. It was a perfectly good marriage, solid and serviceable like the tape machine in her car. And yet it hadn’t been enough for Simon.
And then she remembered how much he’d hated her tape machine.
The sound of steps on the gravel of their driveway penetrated her thoughts. Simon must have come early. For a brief moment her spirits lifted. If he walked in, ashen-faced, abject with apology, insisting it was all a terrible mistake, would she take him back? Yes, she probably would.
She quickly picked up the broken glass, shoved the picture frame in a drawer and went downstairs.
Simon was in the kitchen with Bella. He was neither ashen-faced nor abject. Just a little jumpy. ‘Where’s Sam?’ he asked.
‘Where do you think?’ Bella shrugged. ‘Sa-am!’ she bellowed in the direction of the sitting room.
‘Why don’t we all sit down,’ suggested Simon as Sam appeared, as if it were the beginning of a board meeting.
They sat round their familiar pine table, the one they’d sat round for supper every night for so many years, with its familiar bunch of daisies and fruit bowl in the middle. Sam and Bella exchanged bewildered glances.
‘The thing is . . .’ Simon hesitated, then went back to the speech he’d presumably
prepared. ‘I know you’re all going to hate me, as I’m the villain of the piece; I’m a shit, I accept that, but the thing is—’
‘You said that,’ Bella interjected rudely.
‘The thing is, I’ve fallen in love with somebody else and I’m going to live with her.’
Bella and Sam stared, not quite understanding fully what he was telling them.
Bella was the first to recover. ‘So this is all about you, then, is it?’ You’re not going to bother with all the “your mother and I really love you and this isn’t your fault” stuff?’
‘No. Although obviously that’s also true.’
‘You mean you’re leaving Mum?’ Sam asked, beginning to push his chair back, ‘and us as well?’
‘You’re not children any more. I know this is hard. It’s hard for me too.’
Sam stood up. He was as tall as Simon. ‘And you think it’s OK if you say, “I know I’m a shit”,’ Sam’s voice, on the edge of tears, nevertheless shook with anger, ‘well, you’re right. You are a shit and I’m glad you’re going. I couldn’t live with someone I’d thought I could respect who behaved like you. We’re the kids here but you’re the one who should BLOODY GROW UP!’ He ran from the room before they could see his tears.
‘So how old is this woman you’ve fallen for?’ demanded Bella.
‘I don’t really see how that matters.’
‘How old?’
‘Thirty-six. And her name’s Suki.’
‘I bet you’re her boss.’
Simon looked embarrassed.
Unlike her mother, Bella had no problem with anger. She couldn’t believe that her parents could betray her and Sam as well as each other like this. Despite her outlandish appearance she had a powerful sense of morality, and this to her was a simple breach of loyalty. Forget the divorce statistics. Her parents had made a promise to each other and, implicitly, to their children and they were breaking it. ‘You do realize what a walking cliché you are?’ she accused Simon furiously. She suddenly turned towards Laura. ‘And what about Mum? Don’t you care how much you’ll hurt her?’
