by Jane Asher
Maybe they hate each other and they’ve been keeping up this amazing act.
‘I s’pose that, if my other parallel universes stuff is right, then there’s a world existing right now where none of this has happened. There’s a universe immediately next to us where Dad hasn’t gone and Mum’s cooking supper and not up in her room all the time and Dad’s opening a bottle of wine and I’m panicking about homework and not about my parents splitting. Anything that can happen, does happen. Somewhere.’
‘Yeah, right. So that means there’s also another universe right next to us where your mum and dad are getting divorced and I got run over crossing the road this morning.’
‘Thanks a lot, Hol. That really helps.’
‘It’s just I can’t stand it when you go off into your strange metaphysical things. You’ve got to learn to live in reality, Ben – and I know that’ll start you off again about what do I mean by reality and all that, but you know perfectly well what I mean. I don’t care how many universes you’re occupying, I’m staying in this one, and it may be shitty and parents may yell at each other and storm off but it’s all we’ve got. Isn’t it?’
‘I guess so.’
She gave one of her giggles and grabbed my chin with her hand and pinched it.
‘Oh, baby, don’t look so pissed off,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘It’s OK. You wait and see – it’s not as bad as you think. Do you want to know what I think reality is?’
I sighed a bit and reached across the bed for her hand and held it tightly. ‘All right, Hol, yes. Tell me. What is reality?’
‘This,’ she said, and she leant forward, pushed her lips onto mine and stuck her tongue into my mouth.
‘Can’t argue with that,’ I said, once she’d let me go.
Judy
I feel as if I forced him to go. It’s outrageous that I should: there’s no question that I’m the wronged party in all this (oh, Christ – I’m even talking like him now) but in a funny kind of way I know I am to blame. I don’t believe for one minute this bizarre nonsense about him having fallen for the fat girl at the supermarket checkout – that’s just too fantastic to entertain seriously, even of a man who’s patently into some kind of middle-aged crisis or male menopause or whatever you call it – but I do believe that he craves sex, and I feel so bloody stupid for not having realised just how much. And if the mounds of flesh surrounding that wretched girl have brought him to some sort of vortex of physical desire then I should have seen it coming, if you’ll pardon the unfortunate wording.
Oh, God – d’you suppose he has? Made love to her? I can’t picture it – if I try to I can only see him suffocating, immersed in her voluminous dollops of flesh. Ugh! It’s disgusting – even the thought of it. I can hear the doorbell, see the policeman on my doorstep: ‘Mrs Thornton, I’m so sorry to have to inform you that your husband has been found dead, buried alive in a supermarket checkout girl.’ God damn her.
After he left I opened the drawer of course and went through eighteen of them in one go. Didn’t help much, but it gave me something to do while I calmed down before facing Sally. When I eventually went downstairs and found her in the kitchen I didn’t know what to say to her. She looked up at me and it was like looking at myself: her expression reminded me of the one I’ve seen so often lately in my dressing-table mirror.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she said. ‘Is Dad coming back?’
‘I don’t know, darling,’ I said rather feebly. How does one behave in situations like this? Sally’s never been a child to accept comforting lies easily: she’s always been far too sharp for me to be able to fool her with the usual reassuring clichés. She would soon have seen through anything I could invent to make things look better than they were, and as the truth was equally unbelievable I stayed silent for a moment or two.
‘Where’s Ben?’ I said at last, praying that at least one of my beloved offspring had been spared my humiliation and the sight of his father flying the nest.
‘He’s at Holly’s. But he knows.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I told him. I rang and told him.’
I was suddenly enraged. I can see now of course that it was the horror of the situation and my own misery that exploded out of me in the way it did, but at the time I felt nothing but outrage and fury at the girl in front of me.
‘I do think a wife and mother should be allowed to tell her own son when his father has left her!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t see why you felt you had the right to take it upon yourself to tell Ben of my humiliation and degradation without consulting me. The least I can ask is that you show some respect for my – for my –’ and I went no further but at that point broke down into hopeless sobs.
‘It’s not just you he’s walked out on, Mum, if you want to get selfish about this. He does have a couple of children, you may remember, and, although you may understand what this is all about, believe me his son and daughter don’t.’
I was still crying and the more I tried to stop the worse it was. I could sense Sally’s anger: I must have looked like a self-pitying idiot. I couldn’t be the comforting, understanding mother I knew I should be in the situation and that just made me feel even more sorry for myself than I already was. Here was a moment when this sometimes difficult and independent daughter of mine really needed me and I was letting her down. God knows, it wasn’t her fault that Charlie was going through this breakdown or whatever it was.
‘Mum – please stop crying. We need to talk about this. Dad isn’t going to do anything stupid, is he? I mean – is he going through some sort of – you know, I mean is he OK?’
‘I don’t know, Sally. I don’t know what he’s going through. I’m the last person he’d tell in any case.’ I was gulping back the sobs now, desperately attempting to pull myself together and not succeeding. There was an accusative tinge to my voice and I knew it wouldn’t help: before I stopped teaching I used to see, over and over again, the damage caused by squabbling parents using their children as sounding boards for their own anger, and here I was doing it myself.
I glanced up at her and saw her face tighten in disapproval. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised to hear that, Mum,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The amount of time you spend on your work or up in your room I’m amazed you know any of us exist, let alone are aware of what we may be going through, as you put it.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that, Sally? What could you possibly know of my work or of my problems and what I’ve had to cope with? How can you pronounce on my relationship with your father when you know absolutely nothing about it – of what I’ve had to put up with over the years’ (oh, God, there I went again) ‘or of what we’ve done for the two of you.’ (Oh, no, surely I wasn’t pulling that tired old cliché on my own daughter – I’d be starting the next sentence with ‘when I was your age’ if I wasn’t careful.) She’d frightened me, that’s why I’d lashed out at her – I hadn’t appreciated how obvious my excursions to the bedroom had become. I would have to be more careful. I could see every word of this conversation being relayed within minutes not only to Ben but to her coterie of close friends as well – mobiles and e-mail have a lot to answer for.
‘Sally – I’m sorry. You’ll have to take anything I say at the moment on a sort of temporary basis: I’m more shocked than I’m letting on, I think. Yes, of course your father and I have had our difficulties: marriage isn’t the simple business it appears to be, you know –’
‘Oh, Mum, come on, I’m not stupid. I’m only too well aware of how things are. That’s why I’m never going to get married – I’ve told you that loads of times. It’s just not natural to expect two people to hang around for zillions of years together. But if you are together you might as well be happy, don’t you think? I mean you and Dad always used to get on so well and be good friends and all that crap and then suddenly you both seemed to get irritable with each other and be tired all the time. It just seems such a waste, that’s
all I’m saying. He’s a good bloke, Mum, and you’re throwing him away.’
Out of the mouths, etc. I resisted the urge to yell back at her: it seemed hardly fair to accuse me of being the one to throw away the husband who had recently walked out on me, but there was something in what she was saying that penetrated my outraged shell and hit me somewhere very vulnerable and, as I had innocently thought, hidden.
‘Was I tired, Sally? And irritable? I was looking after you all just the way I always did, wasn’t I? What have I done wrong? Why do you think he – oh no, I can’t do this to you, darling. I’m sorry – this isn’t fair: you’ve had your father walk out of your life – even though I’m sure it’s only for a little while, darling – and I’m trying to talk to you as if you should be helping me, instead of the other way round. I’m sorry, that’s so selfish of me. Forgive me, sweetheart.’
I sat down at the kitchen table opposite her and put my head in my hands. I didn’t have the energy to pretend a stoicism I didn’t feel, and I sighed deeply. I felt a light touch on my hair and I raised my head to see Sally smiling softly at me, leaning forward across the table with her arm still reaching out to stroke me gently and comfortingly.
‘It’s OK, Mum. Wait and see – it’ll be OK. Just talk to me more, to me and Ben.’
‘But I’m always talking to you – and especially to Ben. Have you any idea how much help I give him with his homework? And how else do you think this house functions except by me looking after all the finances and running everything and getting everyone organised and –’
‘Yes, of course we know all that. I’m not talking about all the stuff you do to look after us, that’s not what I mean at all. It’s just that – well, the more you seem to be so capable and able to handle everything and sort everyone out, the less we seem to really know you. It’s not enough just to be our mum any more, you see. Everything you did was perfect and wonderful when we were little – and that Dad did as well, in his own way – but now we’re adults we need to know you as a person if we’re all going to get on and make things work. I’ve got to know that I like you as a woman, as well as love you as my mother – and that’s quite a different thing, isn’t it? It frightens me sometimes when I think that maybe we wouldn’t get on at all as friends if it wasn’t that I happened to be your daughter, because then how can we possibly go on living so closely with each other? Even if I’m off at uni or whatever, we’ve still got to try and function as a family.’
‘This is so unlike you, Sally – in another mood I’d find it pretty sickening, I have to say. All this about getting to know each other – for heaven’s sake, child, can’t we just get on with things? We’ve always laughed at all that embarrassing stuff about women being their daughters’ best friends instead of just being good mums. Don’t you remember telling me about that ghastly mother of one of your friends who insisted on dressing the same way as her daughter and joining in their boy talk? And dancing about and telling risqué jokes and smoking pot with them when they just wanted her to go away or tell them off or something more normal and mum-like? You don’t want me to go all trendy like that, do you, Sal? Surely not?’
‘No, Mum, I don’t. That’s not what I mean, either. Not that you need to worry,’ she laughed. ‘You’ve got a long way to go before you’re in any danger of being “trendy” as you put it. Even the words you use to try and describe it automatically put you out of the picture as far as that’s concerned.’
I was amazed to find myself laughing as well as I grabbed the hand that was still stroking my head and gave it a little slap. ‘Don’t be so cheeky!’ I said, and kissed the smooth white back of it. The skin was almost as soft as when she was a baby, and I laid my cheek on it for a second. ‘Oh, Sal – I don’t know. I really don’t. Everything’s gone haywire and I just don’t know what to do next, or how to behave. Will you help me?’
As she looked at me across the table I felt more like her child than her parent. We were still smiling at each other and I knew we were closer at this moment than we’d ever been before. I understood what she meant about having to get to know each other as adults – I’d relied for far too long on the natural adoration that had been mine since her and Ben’s births; now I had to earn it all over again.
‘Yes, Mum. I will. If you really want me to – then I will.’
Stacey
I felt ever so good when I saw the two of them when I come off my shift. For a second it was like they was waiting for me – like when Janet or Sheila come out and there’s Gary and Nick and all them others hanging about outside. I pretend they’re waiting for me as well as Sheila sometimes – ’cos she likes to come out arm in arm with me in any case, so it don’t look as if she’s hoping to see the boys. She always looks surprised to see them and it makes me laugh ’cos she’s only spent an hour and a half in the loo making up her face, ain’t she? And she’s not doing that to go down the Chinese with me, I can tell you that for nothing.
So it was fucking great coming out and seeing lovely Warren with the old guy, and the two of them looking at me when I come out. I got stuck again like I always do, and I couldn’t hide behind Denisha or Sheila or any of the others ’cos I’d come out on my own as Mrs Peters had let me go early as it wasn’t long since I’d been off sick.
‘I feel poorly, Mrs P,’ I said when I’d got her over to my bell. ‘I’m going all swimmy with the bleeper and I’m starting to make mistakes. Mr Chipstead said I was to take it easy since I’ve been off sick, so can I go now?’
It always gets her, that. Once Sheila had a fainting fit and when they checked her till receipts she’d sold all this wine and stuff for about two pounds instead of more like fifty. She’d turned off her bleeper and entered all the prices in by hand, you see, and Sheila never was one for knowing about prices. I can’t do my adding and stuff but I do know about prices: Mrs Peters says she can ask me for a price on something and I’m quicker than her handheld. I always wish she’d say that in front of Warren, but she never. I’ve tried to get her to say it but if I ever speak to her when he’s around then she just says, ‘Get on with your work, dear’, or something else fucking patronising.
So, anyway – if we ever want some time off we’ve only got to say we’re having trouble with our bleepers and can we turn them off and they look right shit scared. Denisha said we should get onto that Claims Direct and sue SavaMart for the bleepers making us feel bad but Mrs Peters heard about it and said it wouldn’t work ’cos they change us around to different jobs enough for them to be covered or something. And she says Claims Direct has gone bust in any case, but I think that’s rubbish ’cos they was always advertising on TV so they must have loads of money. Anyway, that decided me ’cos I don’t want to be took off the till more than I am now: it’s a right nightmare if I’m put into the back depot to stock-take or something. I can’t get between the stacks any more and if they see I could be out of a job – and Denisha says I couldn’t claim for unfair dismissal or for them being ‘fattist’ as Crystal calls it ’cos if I can’t do my job then it’s not their fault. And they don’t like to put me on shelf-filling, I know, ’cos I put the customers off their food and that ain’t exactly what you want when you’re in the grocery business, is it? They never say that, of course, but I’m not stupid: I know if some cunt’s in here looking to buy a dessert for her tea and she sees me standing by the frozen steam puddings it’s gonna make her think, ain’t it? So I just shut up about that, but if I can get off a bit early sometimes then I do.
My coat was caught on the door again, and Warren was watching so I was trying to make it look as if it was the coat button that was caught like it could happen to anyone and not my tummy that was stuck. It looked like he’d been talking to the old bloke, and when they saw me they said something to each other that I couldn’t hear. Then the old guy started to cross the road towards me and I felt right scared for a second ’cos I was stuck and Warren was walking away down the street. I felt like calling out to him, but I knew I was being stupi
d, and then the guy shouted out good night to him – he even called him by his name so maybe they knew each other or something – and then Warren said good night back to him and I felt a bit better.
The old guy said, ‘Let me help you’, or something and he took my hand and he sort of half pushed open the other door and held it while I got through. I must tell Denisha this tomorrow, I thought. I feel like a right princess in a story or something, with this guy taking my hand and helping me. He was ever so gentle and he looked at me ever so kindly, as if he really cared about me being OK.
‘Thanks,’ I said. And I didn’t feel a bit scared now, fuck knows why. There was just something in the way he looked at me that made me feel safe and he’d pulled back a bit and was watching me like – oh, I dunno, it’s hard to say, but as if – well, as if he was proud of me, that’s the nearest I can say. Like when I got my NVCQ and my mum opened the envelope with the certificate and then took that picture of me holding it. She looked just full of love, really, and ever so proud. That’s a bit how the guy looked. Not creepy and with those horrible glazed kind of eyes that the freaks get when they look at me, like they want to lick me or something.
‘Shall I see you home, Stacey?’
That made me wobble a bit, though. We had such strict instructions about ‘not fraternising with customers’ or however Mrs P put it, and we’d heard so many scare stories that I couldn’t help wondering what he wanted. I had a lovely quick daydream about him trying to rape me and Warren breaking down the door just in time and coming to save me, but then he spoke again.
