If I were a checkout girl, I’d be scared. ‘How many others are taking part?’ I ask, imagining a legion of bearded young men, wearing barcode T-shirts, lying on conveyor-belts yelling, ‘SCAN ME,’ at petrified checkout girls.
‘There’ll be about ten of us.’
‘And will you all be lying on the conveyor-belts?’
‘No, just me. The others will be handing out leaflets to shoppers warning them of the dangers if we accept the proposed ID cards.’
‘I don’t get what the link is between supermarkets and ID cards.’
‘We’re being treated like objects. That’s the link,’ proclaims Rhodri.
Of course. I should have known that.
‘Why don’t you come along with Jack and hand out leaflets?’ he asks again.
As if I have time for that. ‘No,’ I snap. ‘There’s too much for me to do here.’ Then I propel myself into a full-on rant at him. Why should I be locked in the house weekend after weekend like a housewife? I work long hours. He works part-time. It isn’t fair. I’m left to be responsible for everything while he’s out with his mates disrupting shoppers. I can’t cope with it. I won’t cope with it.
Rhodri shouts back, ‘Shove the fucking washing-up your fucking arse, you po-faced bitch.’
Yes, I think, I might just shove the fucking washing up my fucking arse. It’ll be more fun than this. ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I shout back.
Hearing raised voices, Jack runs out of the house to the garden. ‘Stop shouting,’ he commands. ‘And stop swearing. I heard you swear,’ he points to Rhodri, ‘and you swear.’ He points at me disapprovingly so I’m forced to apologize to everyone, thus agreeing in principle that, yes, I’m a po-faced bitch and what I need to do is become even more laid-back – to the point where I’m as horizontal as a supermarket conveyor-belt.
‘We haven’t seen Scarlet in months,’ I say to Rhodri. He’s sitting on our bed watching me cram clean clothes into our wonky wardrobe. My attempt to interrupt his account of what happened at the supermarket is useless: I’d need a Trident missile convention to throw him off track, not an absent ten-year-old.
‘So I just lay there, yelling, “Scan me,” at the checkout girl, until she took the handheld scanner and whizzed it over my belly. I made beeping noises as she did it – it was great.’
I’m diverted for a moment. ‘Yes, but did people listen or did you make them angry by holding the queue up?’
‘A lot of people took leaflets and asked what it was all about and were interested.’
Unlike me – no, that’s unfair. I do enjoy listening. I just don’t want to listen right now.
Small thought: if I were to have placed a lonely-hearts advertisement in a newspaper would it have read, ‘Large-rumped and impoverished single mother complete with bad attitude and diamond aspirations seeks opinionated activist to lie on conveyor-belt at supermarket with for arguments, twice-monthly sex, and battles over the washing line. Interested? Call this number and yell BEEP BEEP BEEP’?
It has been a testing afternoon. Jack called at Scarlet’s house but she wasn’t there, so he had no friends to play with all day. It’s on weekends like this that I wish I had a brood of children. Enough for two five-a-side football teams – I’d have a nanny, naturally, and ten domestic staff, and an on-hand masseuse, hairdresser, stylist and makeup artist.
I’m worried for Scarlet, and miss her. Families usually stay indoors in winter, but I haven’t seen Scarlet since the day we went to the allotment. ‘Where do you think Scarlet is?’ I ask Rhodri.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, laughing to himself. He’s still high from the protest.
If I was anywhere near a decent girlfriend, I’d be basking in his jubilation. But I’m not, I’m a mean ole grumpy bitch of a girlfriend so I pull a cranky face instead.
‘Do you think Scarlet’s okay?’ I try again later when we’re in the kitchen.
‘She’ll be fine. Probably playing with some other kids.’
‘I’d really like to go on holiday,’ I say, to change the subject. ‘It’ll be Easter soon, and Jack will be on his spring break. We should arrange something. How about France? We could take Scarlet.’
‘I’m not flying,’ he scoffs.
‘By rail, then,’ I suggest. Then I go totally off on a tangent. ‘Let’s travel the world. We could even take Jack out of school and teach him ourselves.’
This makes Rhodri stop to listen: he thinks I should home-educate Jack before he’s institutionalized and becomes yet another sad victim of ‘The State’.
I’ve no idea how we’d finance a round-the-world trip but it’s good to dream. Maybe if Rhodri were in demand as a high-class escort… ‘I’ll get the globe,’ I say, sensing an opportunity. I head to Jack’s room and unplug the broken lamp that doubles as a globe. I hunt through his bedside drawer for a pencil. When I’ve found one Jack follows me from his bedroom to ours, then tumbles onto the bed next to me and I begin plotting our journey. ‘So, if we start north we can go to Russia, then on to China on the Trans-Siberian Railway, catch a boat to…’
This trip could take decades, not months.
‘What you doing?’ asks Jack.
‘Plotting our round-the-world trip.’
‘When are we going?’
‘September.’
Jack points out all the countries he wants to visit. ‘Kenya.’ He giggles. ‘I want to go to Kenya on safari. See the animals.’
Rhodri joins us, I can feel him disapproving of this suggestion: it reeks of fuel, a plane journey, and many trips in a four-by-four looking at caged animals in compounds, not his thing at all. Still, I’m sure we could swap Kenya for New Zealand and Jack would be happy.
How exciting that we’re making plans as a family. We’re going to travel the world. I can’t wait.
12
Because Rhodri is busy again, on Sunday morning Jack and I go for a play date at my friend Lucy’s house. Lucy and I met in the refuge. She has two daughters, one of ten and the other of eight. They live in the most splendid semi-detached house with a garden the size of a football pitch filled with toys, swings, a slide and an enormous trampoline. Our children don’t remember living in the big safe-house together but they do feel bound to one another. Jack adores Lucy’s girls. To him they’re princesses.
I ring the bell once. Lucy opens the door and embraces me tightly. ‘Hello, little man,’ she says, rubbing Jack’s head. ‘Look how big you’ve grown.’
Jack puffs out his chest so that he looks macho.
‘The girls are in the garden if you want to run and play.’ On cue, Jack sprints off and, seconds later, we hear the creak of a swing.
‘Come in, come in,’ says Lucy. She looks at me. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ She sweeps her hand over and around my body. ‘I can feel it. I’m very spiritual today. I’m going to read your cards and consult the oracle.’
My aura must be a funny colour or something. Usually I don’t go in for all this fortune-telling crap. For a start, I don’t want to know what the future holds because I’ve only ever just about got a grip on the past and the present. And, also, Lucy is a conduit for dead people who make an appearance from time to time in her kitchen. During a reading she glazes over, the room feels cool and creepy and I expect the lampshade to shake. Then she’ll start a conversation with a spirit. It freaks me out. I saw a ghost once and I was petrified – so no ghosties for me. Not even people I once knew. Dead people should stay dead.
‘You’re not happy, love. I know you.’
Is there a flashing ‘unhappy’ sign stuck to my forehead?
I’ll never forget what you looked like when you started going out with him.’
Before Lucy was into spiritualism, she was a reflexologist and beauty consultant. She thinks Rhodri isn’t the one for me. She’ll never forgive him for the summer he convinced me not to depilate any body hair, and I swapped roll-on deodorant for a block of crystallized salts. Then there was the Mooncup he wanted me to use in place
of tampons. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a rubber contraption that collects menstrual blood, which you wash at intervals, much like the teat on a baby’s bottle. When Rhodri balked at me wearing perfume and make-up, I gave them up too. Lucy watched me turn from Betty Boop to a Scottie dog overnight.
She tuts loudly. ‘You’re letting yourself go again. I don’t like it.’
I know I look a mess. I’ve seen the photographic evidence. I don’t need reminding.
‘Take a seat,’ she says, handing me a coffee and pulling out a chair. Expertly, she shuffles the cards and sweeps them out across the table. The reading claims I will find myself single, an older man will appear on the scene soon, I will enter a new career and become stinking rich. Tarot readings always say I’m going to become stinking rich. I wish it would happen this week.
‘Well?’
She wants me to tell her that it all sounds possible. ‘Maybe.’ I shrug.
‘Let’s consult the oracle,’ she says, hauling out a board with weird signs on it. ‘Place your hand in the middle and close your eyes.’
I do as I’m told.
‘Now ask the oracle a question.’
In my head I whisper, ‘Will I stay with Rhodri?’ My hand moves up and towards the left.
‘Now let your finger settle,’ instructs Lucy. She looks at the symbol and searches for the answer in her fortunetelling manual. ‘You’ll never get the commitment and love you need from this relationship.’
Lucy doesn’t know I’ve asked the oracle about Rhodri.
‘Ask another question.’
I ask the same question again to trick her. My finger lands on the same symbol.
‘You’ll never get the commitment and love you need from this relationship.’
Drat.
‘I’ll ask another question,’ I say, before she has me hooked up to a crystal for some healing.
Lucy looks at me mischievously: ‘What did you ask?’
‘I’m not telling.’
Jokingly, I whisper in my head, ‘Should I pursue Toga?’
Then Lucy begins to pace the kitchen floor. ‘Ssh. Something’s coming through.’
‘Oh, I do hope it’s my wisdom tooth and not a dead person.’
‘Don’t look at me like you don’t believe me,’ she insists. ‘It’s a man. He says you know who he is. When you were kids he used to play tricks on you. Do you know who he is?’
‘No.’
‘He says he’s been playing tricks on your mum.’
‘It could be anyone.’
‘He’s holding up a pair of jeans. He’s holding them up high because he says you’ll know what this means.’ Lucy leaves the room to pace the hall. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
I don’t want to disappoint her, but neither do I wish to admit she can talk to the recently deceased either. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’ But I do know who it is. It’s my stepbrother who died of a heroin overdose. I have one favourite memory of him. He’s in the cellar at my mother’s house, aged about sixteen, standing by the washing machine holding up a pair of new Wrangler jeans, grinning.
‘Try the oracle again,’ says Lucy.
I ask the same question: ‘Should I pursue Toga?’ My finger moves to a symbol.
Lucy checks her manual. ‘ “If you follow this route,” she reads to me, ‘ “it will lead to happiness.” ’
I ask the oracle out loud, ‘Are you tricking me?’ Some force moves my hand to a symbol: ‘No.’
Lucy looks at me. ‘I told you,’ she says proudly.
‘I’ve been looking for ways to cut down on my diesel consumption,’ remarks Rhodri. ‘A co-operative runs a biodiesel station over in Ancoats. I’m heading out there this afternoon. Are you coming?’
I remember my (now almost redundant) New Year resolution to be a better girlfriend and agree. In one of Manchester’s seedier areas, we pass a line of prostitutes working the streets.
‘Why are those women wearing funny clothes?’ asks Jack.
‘Read your magazine,’ I respond. ‘That one must only be about fifteen,’ I say to Rhodri. If we were truly good people, we’d give a prostitute some money so she didn’t have to work the streets tonight.
‘They charge twenty pounds,’ he says.
‘What do you get for that?’
‘I think everything.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because a prostitute shouted it at me once when I stopped at the traffic lights.’
Rhodri pulls in to the community biodiesel station, which is housed in an abandoned garage. It doesn’t look safe to me. One stray match and we could all blow up. He stands talking to a young man with wild curly hair and a stripy knitted jumper. I daren’t leave the car because the vegans will see what a pariah I am. I’m wearing a Primark vest top, a supermarket skirt and leather shoes. The lad peers through the window. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he says.
‘This is Blue,’ says Rhodri.
‘Hello, Blue,’ I say.
Jack waves at Blue from the back. He must have met him before.
‘I’ve invited Blue and his girlfriend, Joy, to come over for dinner next week,’ says Rhodri, as we drive home. The sun is slowly setting and all along the red-light district more women are making their way onto the dusky street. Jack is singing along to Johnny Cash on the radio.
‘Blue and Joy are vegan and teetotal so you don’t need to buy any wine.’
A teetotal dinner party: how novel. ‘Is Blue his real name?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says Rhodri, as though I have no business questioning why a grown man is named after a primary colour.
Later as I’m washing Jack’s hair in the bath, I find myself mulling over what Lucy said. Destiny is such a tricky concept. When I found out that I was expecting Jack I thought it was my destiny. (I’d missed a contraceptive pill, then swallowed half a packet in an attempt to make up for it.) Even when I ended up in the refuge, I thought it was my destiny. When I met Toga I thought it was my destiny. When I first laid eyes on Rhodri I thought it was my destiny. Perhaps destiny isn’t kind. But what if the spiritual malarkey was right about Rhodri? What a mess.
‘I’ve soaked some field beans for dinner,’ Rhodri shouts up from the kitchen.
‘Did you have fun today with the girls, darling?’ I ask Jack.
‘Yes,’ he says, running a small car along the rim of our beautiful new bath. ‘Can I have a trampoline?’
‘When we have a house with a bigger garden. We’ve nowhere to put a trampoline right now.’ Surely he must see that there’s no room in our garden for anything.
‘I wish we had a garden like Lucy’s.’
‘You can play any time you want to at Lucy’s.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Field beans,’ shouts Rhodri, ‘and salad.’
‘Great,’ I yell back. ‘Lovely.’
Jack screws up his nose. ‘I don’t want any of that.’
‘I’ll make you something else,’ I say, to mollify him. ‘But try just a little, please, for Rhodri?’
‘A tiny bit.’
I hate field beans. There are few foods I truly hate – even sprouts make it down the hatch – but I can’t stand field beans.
On Wednesday, keen to rise to the challenge of a teetotal vegan dinner party, I make a lentil dish I find in my vegan cookery book. As Blue, Joy, Rhodri and I sample my pulse mush, we talk about the end of the world, and how nigh it is. It’s so nigh that we might as well be dead now. It’s so nigh that I should let gas stream out of the cooker and flick on a light switch so we all go BOOM.
Joy and Blue tell us about their plans to go to France and settle in a commune. I should suggest to Rhodri that we move to one of those polyamorous communities that are so hot in the States. Being polyamorous is a ‘lovestyle choice’, you know, ‘not a lifestyle choice’, so don’t go getting the two things confused.
Polyandry, which is when one woman has many husbands, could be seen as a practical solution to a very mode
rn problem. I read an article on the Internet claiming that men do just eight per cent of domestic chores. If that’s true, then a woman needs at least 6.25 husbands before they even begin to fulfil their share of the housework. As Rhodri does five per cent, I’d need at least ten husbands before I stopped complaining.
When Joy and Blue leave, Rhodri and I trawl upstairs. We make love skittishly to the burr of a helicopter hovering above the house. Flashes of light sweep across the estate in search of a criminal. For a while we carry on following one position with another, but then the helicopter remains over our house for an unfeasibly long time – so long that I suspect the police have given up searching for criminals and are instead tantalized by the thermal-imaging outline of Rhodri and me shagging. So I tumble off Rhodri and lie by his side, listening to the drone of the helicopter as it whirrs away.
13
It’s not quite a cross-country trail along the Trans-Siberian Railway, but a bolt up the M62 to Yorkshire. What a bad idea to set off for this scriptwriting course so late in the evening in blizzard conditions. I flick on the windscreen wipers. Useless. Moments later the glass is obscured again. Visibility is so poor that I can barely see the cars in front of me. There is nothing but black sky ahead and black sky behind me. Cats’ eyes blink up at me from the tarmac.
I’m breathless with panic. If I continue on the road to Yorkshire, I’ll die in a car accident. If I turn back, I’ll die. If I pull onto the hard shoulder, I’ll be hacked to pieces by a madman. If I pull into a service station, a rapist will be waiting in the toilets. I would book into a motorway motel for the night but then some trucker waiting in the corridor might abduct me, holding me hostage for months in an underground pit before burying me alive.
How will I get out of this simple car journey alive? If I had a suicide pill in my pocket, I’d take it. When fear grips me like this I become hysterical, then utterly defeated. What will Jack do without me? Will he live with Damien? I hope not. Perhaps he could live with Rhodri.
Single Mother on the Verge Page 9
