by Carmen Reid
Denny and Tom had moved out that year. She had given them the deposit to buy a little ex-council flat round the corner. She was sure they were a bit young, just 17 and 19, but her flat was too small for them and their friends and the problems between her and Joseph were too big for everything to fit in.
'Why can't I aim for something better than this? Why can't I want to do well and earn more and move us up just a little bit?' Joseph had ranted at her. 'Why is it so wrong to you? I'm not saying I don't love you, I don't love your life. I just want something... more. You had it all once, Eve, the cars, the house, the money. Why am I not allowed to even want a little bit of that? Just because it hurt to lose it doesn't mean it will all happen again.'
'This is better, Joseph. You have no fucking idea how much better this is,' she spat at him.
And then the big slap in the face: 'Christ, you're so set in your ways, Eve. Maybe you're just too old for me.'
There were tears and forgiveness and makeup sex but then, just days later, another round of fresh rows. Until their life together became unbearably stormy. So perhaps she should not have been so surprised when he came home one evening and announced that his firm was setting up a new office in Manchester and he was going to be in charge there.
'Manchester!!!' she'd shouted. 'We are not moving to Manchester.'
He'd taken off his shoes, gone to the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice before telling her calmly: 'No, I didn't think that for a moment. They're going to pay for me to have a flat up there so I can stay Monday to Friday and be back here at the weekends.'
It was all decided and he was not consulting her on this, he was telling her how it was going to be.
'I see.' She'd crumpled down into a chair at the kitchen table because she knew this was the beginning of the end and she felt distraught and yet oddly relieved. She was worn out by him. She couldn't take all this fighting and unrest any more. It had sent the boys away out of the house and she missed them Godawfully and knew they had grown up now and would probably never live with her on a day to day basis again.
'Oh Joseph,' she'd cried into her hands. 'You're moving out too.'
'I'm not, really I'm not,' he'd insisted, 'I love you and Anna and us all. I just think a bit of space would be good. We'll remember what we liked about each other so much. Not what we dislike.'
'Oh no. You won't be part of the family any more. Don't you see? You'll only have Anna at the weekends, you won't know about all the daily stuff. You won't be here to tuck her up in bed and read to her every night. She'll miss you so much. And what for? For more money?'
When she lifted her head to look at him, she'd seen the tears in his eyes too.
'Eve, of course I'll miss her all the time ... and you. But if we carry on like this, we're not going to last another month together. I need to get out of this for a bit. Because I want us to stay together.'
'Space never solved anything. I promise you that.'
'Well what the hell am I supposed to do? They want me to do this job. I can't turn it down.'
'Of course you bloody can. You could get another job with another company here without even trying.'
'I haven't even been with this place for two years yet. How will it look on my CV if I up and leave now, when a promotion is being handed to me on a plate?'
She'd snorted at this. How would it look on his CV? Who was this person? What happened to the man who read French poetry aloud in bed?
How had she made such a big mistake? Had she completely misread his character? Had she changed him? Did he wake up one day and feel overwhelmed by his paternal responsibilities?
'I just knew,' she'd told Jen, feeling oddly calm. Probably the effect of Polish gin and the grass. "There's no affair or anything, but we're not his focus, not even Anna. I could just tell. He was distracted, he was thinking about something else, he was somewhere else even when he was with us. He didn't seem to care enough about our problems any more. He didn't want to argue, he didn't want to get me to change my mind about stuff. It was like he'd already made the decision to move on, he was just waiting for the right time to tell me. And it was once so equal between us,' she added. 'Now it's not.'
'You mean you were once in charge,' Jen had pointed out.
'No I wasn't,' Eve had answered, a little irritated. 'He helped, he did his share, did the time. But now, it's work this ... work that... I really resent it. I'm getting Dennis flashbacks.'
They'd sat in silence for a while, comfortably side by side on the sofa.
'Maybe he's pissed off you don't want to marry him,' Jen had suggested.
'Oh, I just can't do that again. It's too scary, I don't want to be a "wife" again. I did it all with bells on.'
'Don't you think you're confusing "marriage" with marriage to Dennis?' Jen had asked.
Eve had a suspicion that all marriages were fundamentally marriage to Dennis to varying degrees.
'I mean, I'm married, thank you very much,' Jen had reminded her. 'Do I seem a downtrodden doormat to you?'
'Why did you do it, though?'
'You were there. Is it so hard to work out?' Jen had asked. 'So we could have a bloody great, happy party and tell everyone we loved each other. And I think the paperwork helps. We're that bit more bound together.'
'And absolutely nothing changed between the two of you after marriage?'
'Hardly anything.'
'So something did?'
'My family started being nicer to him. They finally accepted Ryan as a permanent fixture. Is that so bad? And we argued more about housework. Otherwise, everything was exactly the same.'
'Hmmm.'
'I'm absolutely starving.'
They'd both begun to giggle.
'We've got the munchies. This is pathetic. If Anna gets out of bed and sees us like this, I'm going to be mortified.'
'It's organic, isn't it?' Jen had held up her stub. 'Well, that's fine. Let her try a puff. Might mellow her a bit. She's so uptight for a five-year-old.'
'Shut up!' Eve had given her a mock slap.
So Eve and Joseph split with bitter tears and a small removals van. She was distraught. He was distraught and so were all three children.
Denny shouted round the house and told his mother there had to be something wrong with her. Tom actually cried over it and Anna took weeks to comprehend that Daddy didn't live here any more and she wailed with distress when she was taken away to Manchester for the weekend, leaving Eve alone in her flat for what felt like the first time in her life. Unbearably alone. She'd gone out and got the two kittens that very first Saturday.
There had been brief, muddled reconciliations, including a final one when it had been agreed that Joseph would spend the three days of Christmas with them, for Anna's sake. Somehow wine, candlelight and the little girl's delight at having them both there together had led to tearful, nostalgic lovemaking in the bath with water splashing all over the floor and Anna's rubber ducks, boats and bath people falling on top of them. For a few hours they had felt happy and healed.
But he was seeing someone else by then, he'd moved out of London . . . and she felt far too defensive and protective of her hurt children to want to risk 'trying' any sort of relationship out again.
'This is all too complicated. I have no idea what I want and neither do you,' he'd told her, stroking her hair as he'd kissed her good night on the cheek and gone to sleep on the sofa.
For that one Christmas splashdown to have resulted in another pregnancy had felt like some appalling cosmic joke. She'd been 39, not the age when you expect your body to spring fertility surprises on you, and had left it till week 15 before breaking the news to Joseph. He'd offered to come back and they had spent a long, draining weekend talking terms. She'd somehow thought another baby might bring everything back to where it had once been – the perfection of life when Anna was tiny. But he'd not been prepared to give up the job or the Manchester commute.
'Not everything can stay the way it was, Eve. Just because we're cha
nging doesn't mean it has to be for the worse,' he'd pleaded with her.
His final offer had been made on the phone, late at night, in tears and she'd turned him down, telling him no, it was over, despite the baby which she was determined to have.
'I'm never going to ask you again,' he'd shouted at her at the end of the call. 'Do you hear me, Eve? I'm not going to be the one who is ever, ever going to make the first move again. All you've ever done is shut me out. You never wanted to get married, maybe you never wanted me around. Maybe you prefer to be on your own with your children. Have you ever thought about that?'
She'd been too distraught to say anything.
'This is your last and final chance,' he'd warned, sobbing now. 'If you ever want me back again, you'll have to ask, I can't take this any more.'
Chapter Seven
Monday morning. Eve opened the door on her pokey office with a slightly heart-sinking feeling. No. The stack of files was still there where she'd left it on Friday. No paperwork pixies had been in at the weekend to go through it for her.
At least there was a square of sunlight on her desk and the smell of the hyacinths, which had opened up on her windowsill and were now drooping with thirst. It was the very start of April. She still had earth under her nails from a weekend of weeding and digging, planting and tending to seedlings. The daffodils were out, the tulips dotted all over were going to be colourful and the very first of her lettuces would almost be ready if she could just keep the slugs off them.
OK, but never mind all that. Here she was at work again, with a two-foot pile of case notes in front of her. But first she really had to water the plants, fill the kettle and consult with Liza and Jessie about a possible lunch venue.
Finally, unable to come up with any further distractions, she settled down to read the notes. Eve had been a supervisor of young offenders for the best part of fifteen years and there was very little wayward teens could come up with now that would take her by surprise.
So, these notes were all the usual stuff – poorly educated, badly parented kids getting into trouble. The same kind of trouble, the same kind of kids and it just seemed to happen over and over again. She saw the same names, the same faces and sometimes wondered if she was operating a dishearteningly revolving door service. But then, tucked in a bottom desk drawer were the reminder notes and sometimes even photos and letters from the ones who did get away. The ones who did learn something useful on community service or occupational therapy or who met someone new... or maybe, just maybe, took something she said or did for them to heart and got out, changed, stopped coming back for more.
Almost an hour of reading later and it was time for her first interviewee of the day, 19-year-old Darren Gilbert. Picked up by the police in a stolen car with a package of cocaine in the boot – nice.
He shuffled into her office, baseball hat jammed onto bald, shaven head. Hands shoved deep into pockets.
'Hello, Darren,' she said, but made it sound as headmistressy as possible. Even she thought he looked hard for a 19-year-old. He was wearing a tight red tracksuit top and baggy denim jeans that she recognized as some hip and culty label. Teenagers and their pathetic label fetishes! As if some label made you a better person or brought you closer to Posh and Becks. A metal ID bracelet and watch clanked together on his wrist.
He fell back into the chair, hoicked a heavily trainered foot up onto his knee and let it rest against the side of her desk, where she tried to ignore it.
So they did the interview, Eve making it clear she wasn't buying much of his 'just helping somebody out... didn't know the car was stolen' story.
'Has it ever occurred to you, Darren, that the owner of the "minicab" office is some hard nut drug dealer?'
'Nah,' he replied, but so unconvincingly she knew he'd already figured out exactly what was going on.
'You're just 19 and you're working for the kind of bloke who will probably send someone to put a bullet through your knees if you mess up. Nice one. And I don't think your mum is going to be too chuffed with you either, is she?' She'd read the case notes, she knew his mother was an A&E nurse.
Darren didn't say anything to this, but she had his full attention now, absolutely no doubt about it.
Then came the bit where she spelled out her rules and explained to Darren what he was going to have to do if he didn't want to spend time in jail in the future. She liked to use as many 'tough cop' phrases as possible because teenagers raised on a diet of gangster films seemed to respond to that: 'Show some respect', 'Are you the man?' All that kind of thing.
'Maybe we can even train you up to do something a little bit more useful,' she told him at the end of her spiel.
Darren was looking out of the window, so she couldn't read the expression on his face. But the ankle had come off the knee, the trainer off the edge of the table. Oh, I'm really quite good at this, she couldn't help thinking.
'OK,' she started to write in his file now, 'we have another appointment next week. In the meantime, lie low. If you're contacted by the cab office, tell them you're not going to get anyone into trouble, but you can't help them out any more.'
Darren had hardly slouched his way out of the office when there was a rap on the door and Lester, her boss, put his head round.
'Hello, Eve, have you got a few minutes for a chat?' he asked.
'Yeah sure,' she replied.
'Big news,' he said, closing the door behind him and sitting down at her desk.
'Good news or bad news?' she wondered.
'Oh good, very good.' He smiled at her, folded his hands together with the index fingers pointing up under his chin and challenged her to guess.
'We're all getting a six-week sabbatical to go on a team building course in Tuscany?'
'No.'
'No? Didn't think so somehow.'
'I've got a new job and I'm leaving in six months' time.'
'Oh God!' was all she could manage for a moment, because it was such a surprise, but then she rallied and added, 'Lester, that's great, fantastic – but how the hell are we going to manage without you?'
'Well...'
'And where are you going?' she interrupted.
'Out of London. I've finally found a nice little position doing this job in a bigger department in Ipswich. Trish's family is from round there, as you know, so we're going to sell up, buy a place out in the countryside, get some dogs, hopefully the kids will come and visit once in a while, but you know teenagers ...'
'Indeed I do. Personally and professionally.'
'They're not even teenagers any more,' he remembered. 'What's the term for moody young twenty-somethings?'
'Post-adolescents or "thresholders", that's very now.'
'Yeah, well...'
'That's great. I had no idea you were planning all this.'
'I don't tell you everything, Eve.' This said with a little smile, before he added, 'But I'm telling you ahead of everyone else because I'm going to recommend you for my job. What do you think of that?'
'What do I think of that?' she repeated. 'Now I really am surprised.'
Lester was a good man to work for: kind, fair, older, wiser. All the qualities you could have hoped for in a boss in this line of work. He was the reason she hadn't moved areas for an almost unheard-of amount of time. Well, that and the fact that she had never wanted much in the way of promotion. She'd been happy with her lot under Lester.
