Julia Gets a Life

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Julia Gets a Life

  Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2007

  ISBN 1905170408 / 9781905170401

  Copyright © Lynne Barrett-Lee 2007

  The right of Lynne Barrett-Lee to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by her in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The story contained within this book is a work of fiction.

  Names and characters are the product of the author’s

  imagination and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording

  or otherwise, without the written permission of the

  publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St,

  Bedlinog, Mid Glamorgan, CF46 6SA

  Printed and bound in the UK

  Cover Design by Anna Torborg

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support

  of the Welsh Books Council

  For Peter, with all my love

  Author’s Note

  Back in 1998, when this novel was first written, both Julia and myself lacked a number of things, without which life today would seem bizarre. Mobile phones, for example. An internet connection. Any notion that the city of Cardiff might soon become such a hip and happening place. Thus most of what follows is very much of its time, and so would not easily accommodate too much authorial tinkering. That said, in the interests of connecting with today, I’ve put to bed both Julia’s Teletubbies and Max’s ubiquitous yo-yo, and replaced them with Tweenies and a Nintendo VS. Neither pleases me in quite the same way, but then one’s maternal history is invariably wedded to the cultural markers of its day. Conversely, marital strife – happily – is timeless…

  Lynne Barrett-Lee June 2007

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 1

  I always start with a list.

  Today’s list is written on the back of an old card. It reads;

  Clothes/shoes etc.

  Books – biogs. Not novels

  Car/engineering mags

  Wooden coat-hangers

  Dumbells

  Trouser press

  I keep cards (I keep most things), though not efficiently so. Like anything paper based that is unsuitable for immediate binning, I tend to shove them anywhere I can find a suitable nook. This one I plucked from a wodge on my bedside table, that were stuffed between Flat Stomach, Now! and Wild Swans.

  Inside the card there is a poem. It goes;

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  What more could I need,

  When I’ve someone like you?

  Though real flowers were never much of a thing with him, Richard did do cards. Rubbish cards, mainly (this one is a montage of hearts, flowers, ribbons and what look like mouse droppings but are presumably buds, all buried under a crusty overspill of pearlised glitter), but personalised in his own sentimental, if rather prosaic, style. And there’s more. It says, To my wonderful wife on our anniversary. Love you always. Kiss, kiss kiss. It’s old, this one. From three, maybe four years back. But not longer, I estimate, because it was four years ago that we had the new carpet.

  I know my list now so I rip it and bin it.

  The thing about spring cleaning your bedroom is that it is tangibly different from cleaning, say, a kitchen. When you clear out a kitchen it’s simply a case of pulling everything out, chucking away anything that looks like it might be a useful addition to a biology lab, scrubbing off all the crusty bits, and then lobbing it all back. But with your bedroom it’s all start, stop, inspect, peruse, recall, smile wistfully, regret, start again, stop again etc., etc.

  And filth, quite frankly, when you’re as slovenly as I am. For me spring cleaning is simply the conjunction of two entirely unrelated words; something that occurs when you’re flicking a duster and it just happens to be April.

  Today though, I am spring cleaning proper. As well as the vacuum and a rag made of old pants (my Mum’s speciality), I have cans of polish, bin bags, a selection of cardboard boxes, labels and Sellotape, and carrier bags. I considered bringing up a cheese sandwich in a lunch box to keep me on task, but I couldn’t because we’ve run out of bread.

  Which is a remarkably apt illustration of the quality of my housewifery skills generally. As I cast about me now I note that my bedroom is beginning to look rather like an extension of me – well intentioned, but tending towards disarray. This is because my possessions have all begun individual Triffid-like pilgrimages into previously uncharted regions. The top of the chest of drawers, for instance, was once home to just a lamp (horrible, wedding present), a photograph (of Richard and the children, by me) and a variable quantity of loose change. But now it looks more like Widow Twanky’s lost property corner; a sea of balled socks and odd socks, tights and frayed knickers, with two empty wine glasses coming up for air.

  Good God, my junk is everywhere. I really must get my head together and dump some. Except that the slattern in me has already sussed that I’m about to have a whole load more storage available, so my forays into strict and sensible space management seriously lack commitment.

  I move around to the floor under the other bedside table and transfer what feel like a hundredweight of What Car and New Civil Engineer into a cardboard box which I carefully label Mags. Then I pull out the drawer and inspect its neat contents; a hardback biography, a blister pack of aspirins, a Rennie; just one, with its wrapper intact. No cards in here, I note. No scraps of paper. No paper clips, shirt buttons, dry cleaning tickets. No nothing that makes him seem human and real. It’s so sad.

  He’s leaving today. I should write him a poem.

  Daisies are dismal

  Crysanthemums stink

  Have you back, dick-brain?

  What do you think?

  I have a five minute cry and then finish the packing.

  Chapter 2

  But in the main I have licked the crying thing now. (Though I should have known that going through the debris of the last fifteen years would set me off. I would have wept if I’d found the button off my old Jasper Conran jacket.)

  And Richard was not leaving, as such, because he actually left eleven weeks back. It was just his stuff that he was moving out. And not leaving, as such, because he was in fact propelled. By me. On a Thursday – or the small hours of Friday, if we’re going to be precise. The night of the Cefn Melin Primary School Family Disco.

  ‘Do I have to go to this?’ He had asked me, plaintively. ‘I’ve got a project meeting with the Council on Friday. And it’s at 8.30 in the morning. Please. I could do without this.
’

  ‘But you promised to run the bar.’ I gave him the familiar recap. He had. A week earlier, with a good two or three witnesses. I generally relied upon witnesses these days. Since the contract for the hotel Richard’s building became part of our lives, a big part of his had been put out to tender; to be snapped up by builders and quarrymen and surveyors, while the hotel that Richard’s firm were bringing into being heaved its sluggish way out of Cardiff Bay.

  Move on then, to our house, a few hours later, where much of the backbone of PTA Fund-raising were assembled, many half cut, on our sofas and floor. You can picture the scene. Moira Bugle, on the carpet, on her bottom, trying to make some sort of sense of the CD player.

  ‘Haven’t you got any records?’ and so on. And ‘They don’t seem to care about words any more. And all this boomy stuff makes my teeth rattle. I’m sorry, but give me Ivor Novello or that John Denver any day..’

  ‘They’re both dead…’

  ‘Well how about Tom Jones, lovely? Or those new ones. Now they are nice boys. Robson and Jerome. Julia, how about by there? Do you have any…no, I supposed not. Be a love, Derek, and help haul me up. ’

  And Rhiannon De Laney. How best to describe the bitch to you? Bitch works for me, of course. But if I’m being ruthlessly objective (and I’m sure there’s a library book upstairs that would urge me to be so, as part of the healing process) I’d have to place her in the above-average-looking to beautiful category, but only if you like that sort of thing. Tall; she has those backwards flamingo type folding legs, thin, reddish/brunettish big hair, big nose (plus hook), big eyebrows, big lips. In fact, gross lips, like slugs. She wears lipstick always and she does that brown line round the edge which looks really stupid. In fact, there was an article in one of the Sunday supplements – Depth, perhaps? – that said brown lines are really uncool now. It showed lots of pictures of uncool celebs (mostly ropey soap stars with perma tans) and pointed out how naff they looked. Hah! I’m so pleased. Hah!

  Though on the down side, I rang my friend Colin last week, and he says guys actually quite like big lips because it puts them in mind of big…... And also made them think the woman would be good at performing a Monica Lewinsky. Which is a touch depressing. My lips are only averagely thick, and I’ve heard collagen lip injections are the most painful thing a woman can undergo after giving birth and passing kidney stones.

  Anyway, you get the picture. Big, brazen and looks like she’s begging for it, is how Moira’s Derek once described Rhiannon, though obviously well out of Moira’s hearing. So she was always going to be trouble. And she is available. She is Cefn Melin’s token single mother. Not that she fits the bill conceptually. For starters, she has a brand new teeny weeny two bed townhouse, on the first phase of the new development just outside the village. It has a wrought iron knocker and a floodlit mini-rockery, and she parks her pastel hatchback on the herringbone drive. Rhiannon was once, it seems, married to a local businessman, but threw him out after some sort of scandal with a typist. So she says. As she would. There is one child, Angharad, who is six and seems to sport cream broderie anglaise trimmed socks with everything. The bootleg trouser must be a thorn in her side.

  By day Rhiannon houseworks and networks around North Cardiff’s under fives haunts doing her Seedlings book parties. By night, she is, of course, a witch.

  So why on earth did I agree so readily when she offered to stay and help clear up? Was I mad? Am I mad? Not at all. Just the victim of my own indignation. I can remember thinking at the time ‘bloody right, she can stay and help clear up for a change. I’m sick and tired of her drifting along to everyone else’s house after school fund-raising events and then wafting around the living room so the men can all look up her skirt. And then leaving all the mess for everyone else to deal with. Especially given that the nearest we’ve ever got to an invite to her house was a (book party, naturally) coffee morning (ten to eleven thirty) with only one sort of biscuit and serious pressure to sign up for an encyclopaedia on CD Rom. Yes, I can remember thinking all of that. I even made sure I was the one who got the rubber gloves.

  How silly I was. This was clearing up as foreplay.

  So then we move on to Richard’s return. He, naturally, had been required to walk Rhiannon home; a round trip of thirty minutes, perhaps. But as I had gone to bed already, I hadn’t any firm idea of how long he’d been gone. It was late, we were all tired and we’d all had rather more to drink than we’d intended. I came back down simply because he seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to come up to bed. The normal pattern of sounds hadn’t happened. No bolt, no fridge opening, no glass being clinked as he poured out some juice. No flick of the light switch or rustle of the paper. I’d called out to him but had received no reply. I crossed the landing. He was down in the hall, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He was as still as a photograph, stiff and waxen.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He started. ‘Oh! I…er…didn’t hear you. I…’

  ‘Come on, come to bed…’

  ‘I’m just going to sit down here for a while. I’m…’

  At which point, he stopped speaking.

  There is nothing so acute as the sense of foreboding. The man at the foot of the stairs looked suddenly no longer like Richard; and things, as they say, were not as they should have been. Knowing even then that there was something unpleasant about to unfold, I padded barefoot down the stairs and followed him into the kitchen. Then I said,

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ He was facing the window, his back to me. But I could see his expression reflected in the glass. I didn’t like what I saw.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes!’ Slightly aggressive. ‘I mean, no. No, I’m not.’ And then he turned around and I knew he was going to tell me something bad.

  Which is exactly what he did. He told me that he had just been to bed with Rhiannon De Laney, and that he didn’t know what had possessed him, and that it was the most awful thing he had ever done, and that he was sorry and that he loved me and that he didn’t know how he would cope with the rest of his life if I left him, and that he deserved for me to leave him and that he desperately hoped I would forgive him. That’s about the gist of it, anyway. His exact words were difficult to pick out, because I was yelling at him throughout.

  Eventually I went so wild that he became rather exasperated with me, I think. I don’t know quite what he expected my reaction to be – do men hope their wives will turn into their mothers in these situations, and be calm and understanding and make cocoa perhaps?

  He kept trying to shush me and eventually said, quite sternly, ‘Julia, we are grown ups; we have children sleeping upstairs. Please try to hold yourself together.’

  There have been few occasions in my life when I have wanted to throw something at somebody. We had a row once that resulted in a full English breakfast being flipped up to the ceiling. The bean splats were still in place when we moved, three years later. But it was Richard who threw it up there, not me. At this point though, I can clearly recall scanning the kitchen for appropriate items. My bud vase? Too delicate. My flambé[JAH1] dish? Too loud. The washing up bowl? Full of washing up (which was another thing). I finally settled, bizarrely, on one of my Ikea seat pads; silent, unbreakable, on elastic (so re-usable) and, if aimed correctly, it could pack quite a punch, and perhaps a small gouge from the tab on the zip. And boy, did I want to hurt him. I plucked it, matador style, from the chair, and slammed it at his face with all the force I could muster.

  We had by now reached the point where in all those forties Doris Day/Rock Hudson style movies the man, (smiling sardonically, naturally) gently but firmly takes hold of the woman’s flailing wrists and gathers her to him in a fond embrace. This was real life, though, so Richard just ducked. And said ‘for Christ’s sake, Julia, pack it in.’

  I replied; ‘No (thwack), I (thwack) bloody (big thwack) won’t.’

  H
e left soon after. Took his car keys, his coat and his mobile phone and without looking back he galumphed up the path.

  I tidied the (already quite tidy) house on autopilot. Some of the most thorough cleans I’ve done in my life have been in the aftermath of a blazing row. It’s such a productive use of time that would otherwise be spent in pointless pursuits such as sitting with a mug of cold coffee saying why why why and suchlike. Instead, cushions got plumped, knick-knacks got straightened, and a million and one small items of debris – from woodlice to gravel to shards of stale Pringle, were plucked from the hall and the stairs and the living room, and deposited in the bin in the kitchen, which I then emptied and scrubbed and sprayed with germ busting spray.

  I ran the dishwasher, laundered a half load of socks, gave the kitchen skirting boards a scrub with an old Mr Men toothbrush, then did them again with Richard’s as well. I considered the writing of a small, pithy note, half wrote it in my head and then abandoned the idea. He had gone, like I’d asked him to. Back to Rhiannon’s? And this time we both knew it was serious.

  I sat in the kitchen for a good hour, undecided as to whether I felt vindicated in my zero tolerance stance, or simply frightened that he’d taken any notice of it. My stomach, confused and bewildered, convulsed, as picture upon picture of them flashed up to taunt me. Part of me wanted to dial his mobile and make up. Another part carried on silently fuming. The bastard. The bastard. How could he do something like that? At three thirty seven, the bastard part won. I locked the doors, drew every bolt I could think of, and, flicking the light switch, I walked up the stairs and trod the few yards to our bedroom.

  Then I climbed on the bed, lay face down on the duvet and cried pretty vigorously for two whole hours. But quietly, as grown ups with children must do.

  *

  I woke at seven, still dressed, with a dead arm and a headache, and reality seeped and then deluged my consciousness. I went downstairs to find a post-it note (one of mine, from the car, no doubt,) that he’d slipped through the letterbox, having, I assumed, failed to get in. It said,

  ‘God, I’m so sorry. Please call me asap. I’m at the Pontprennau Road Inn. I don’t know how to – I turned it over. It was a very small post-it note – begin to tell you how sorry I am. Please call.’