by Adele Parks
‘I’ve just called mum, and the kids seem fine without me,’ said Martha. Her voice sounded small and forced, as if she were actually trying to throttle the words before they came into existence.
‘That’s good then, isn’t it?’ asked Eliza. She thought it was, but already sensed that Martha didn’t.
‘Not really,’ Martha muttered.
‘Why, Babe?’ Eliza signalled to her boss that she had to take the handset out of the room. Her boss waved her hand impatiently. It was a divorce, not a death. Still Eliza didn’t cut the conversation short.
‘I know Mum and Dad mean well by coming to babysit two days a week, and of course it is very kind of them to offer to babysit tonight but…’ The tenuous bubble of happiness that Martha had been blowing – by abandoning a dull exhibition, eating a muffin and buying a pumpkin – had burst. There had been a few minutes when life had seemed bearable. But suddenly, Martha felt lonely and cold again. The sun chose that second to dodge behind a cloud. Martha shivered. ‘No one needs me. I can’t get Mathew to eat chicken with skin, I’m a failure.’ Martha was a sentence away from sobbing. The children being happy in her absence was in fact a tribute to her mothering skills; she wanted them to be confident with other people. And after all she hadn’t abandoned them in a station with a begging note tied around their necks, they were with their grandparents. But Martha had never felt more forlorn and alone.
‘What?’ Eliza was lost. She used lots of criteria to measure her success or otherwise as a person. Her achievements at work, whether or not she was in a happy relationship, if she remembered to send her parents an anniversary card – but getting Mathew to eat chicken with its skin on was a new one on her. ‘Look, we’ll talk about this when I get home tonight. I have to go now, my boss is looking for me.’ Eliza felt terrible but she had work to do.
‘Yeah, OK. My money is about to run out anyway.’ Martha was desperately trying to swallow back her sobs; Eliza could hear it in her voice.
‘Your money? Where are you calling from?’
‘A call box on the Caledonian Road.’
‘A call box?’ How quaint. ‘Don’t you have a mobile?’
‘No, Michael had one.’
The sisters paused. Eliza was fighting back the urge to blast Martha with the words, ‘Well, that’s no frigging use to you now, is it?’ Martha was still fighting back tears.
‘Well, you’ll have to get a mobile now you’re a single girl about town. They’re essential,’ said Eliza with a joviality that was entirely forced.
‘I don’t want to be a single girl about town.’ Martha’s needs and wants were very tame. She wanted a clean, warm and safe home. Something someone of her age, class and social position was surely pretty much guaranteed. She wanted her children to be healthy, happy and not absolute rogues in the playground. She wanted her husband to have a good income but – and this was the bit that was most important to her – she wanted him to earn it doing a job he liked. She wanted her parents to live to a comfortable old age. And she wanted to remember her friends’ birthdays.
She did not want to be divorced.
She did not want to be looking around garden centres on her own, aged fifty-five.
She did not want to be a single girl around town.
‘I know, Martha.’ Eliza’s resolve stiffened. ‘But you are.’
Like it or not.
18
Eliza got home just after nine that evening, which wasn’t late, considering she’d been working on the final edit of a video for a fairly prominent band. Often the way bands liked to work was that they’d arrive in the editing suite at about 11 p.m. and then insist on ordering takeaways, alcohol and drugs. Sometimes the real work didn’t even begin until after 1 a.m. Often the final approval wasn’t secured until dawn. Eliza, as the most junior member of the editing team, was always required to stay until the bitter end. Sometimes it seemed that the most important aspect of her job was scooping the band members into taxis, as discreetly as possible, at the end of the session. However, this band had been consummate professionals. They’d arrived in the studio at 2 p.m. as agreed, there were no surprises in the video treatment from the editors, nor were there any last-minute requests for changes from the band. The vid was very trippy, very cool; Eliza was proud to be involved in it, even in a small capacity. By seven-thirty everything was signed, sealed and delivered, and though Eliza had been invited out for a well-earned celebratory drink, she’d declined. She needed to make a quick detour to Tottenham Court Road, and then she wanted to dash home as quickly as possible.
She’d been worrying about Martha even since she’d received the phone call about chicken skin a couple of hours earlier.
Bloody Michael.
When Eliza got home, the children were asleep in bed and her parents had gone home.
‘Where are Mum and Dad? Did you scare them off?’
Martha had the decency to look a tiny bit guilty and shifty. ‘I perhaps didn’t express my gratitude as clearly as I should have.’
In fact, Martha had bitten their heads off. Mr Evergreen had fixed the dripping tap in the downstairs cloakroom. He’d also changed two light bulbs and put up a shelf in Mathew’s bedroom. He was clearly commenting on Michael’s inadequacy in the field of DIY, and Martha took exception. Besides her triumph with the chicken, her mother had also had time to restock the fridge, cupboards and freezer. She’d vacuumed, and she’d changed the sheets on the bed. It was true Martha had let her standards slip a little since Michael had left. The house used to look like a show home, and now it looked more like a pigsty.
Martha really couldn’t see the point of tidying up; the house seemed to untidy itself the next day. In the past she had made it a point of principle that all the children’s toys were cleared away before 7 p.m. As were the clothes that had dried on the radiators during the day. (Michael hated to see that, it was so working class; what was the point of having a dryer if you were going to hang clothes on the radiators?) Now toys lay scattered on the floor, day in, day out, and it was surprising how much time that saved Martha. She didn’t use the time to pair up socks or slice vegetables, the way she’d always used any spare moments when Michael lived at home. Now she tended to squander her extra time watching soap operas and reading magazines. She took some comfort from the fact that the lives of the characters were even messier than her own. She couldn’t remember when she last washed out the inside of the fridge. Her mother’s industry today left Martha feeling inadequate and exposed. She was a lapsed housewife.
‘I thought they might have waited to say hello to me,’ commented Eliza, a little grumpily.
Martha decided not to mention that she’d led her parents to believe that Eliza wouldn’t be back until very late. She changed the subject. ‘You’ve had a telephone call.’
‘Who from?’
‘Hubert.’
‘Oh yeah, we met at your friend Chloe’s dinner party last weekend. I was sloshed, so gave him my number,’ sighed Eliza.
‘Give him a call,’ urged Martha.
Eliza did as she was told. She was losing interest in the search for Mr Pension Policy but felt she had to continue with it – because what other option was there? ‘Hi, Hubert, it’s Eliza Evergreen here.’
‘Eliza. Great to hear from you. How are you keeping?’
‘Oh, I’m fine.’ Eliza wasn’t prepared to be interesting.
‘Well, that’s good. I’m well too. In fact a funny thing happened today.’
Blah, blah, blah. Eliza doubted that anything really funny could possibly ever happen to someone called Hubert, so she tuned out of the conversation.
She only tuned back in again when she heard him say, ‘We should meet up.’
‘Why not,’ said Eliza.
It was all the encouragement he needed. ‘I’ll cycle over, if you like, we could have tea.’
Tea! Christ, she was about to accept a date with Rupert Bear. ‘That sounds great,’ said Eliza with fake enthusiasm. Luckily, Rupert Bear
was not too alert to conversational nuances. He lived in a world where meeting for tea really was a great idea. Eliza fixed a time and day and then put the phone down. She looked despondent. Tea was so cheap. He wasn’t even trying to impress her. He might have been thirty and single, but he was male, therefore nobody noticed. It was a crucial difference.
‘Mum left a beef casserole. Should I serve it up?’ offered Martha in an effort to cheer her up.
‘OK,’ agreed Eliza, instantly brightening. ‘But before that I have a surprise for you.’
Eliza left the room and Martha could hear her grunting as she shifted something in the hall. Martha crossed her fingers and prayed it wasn’t a puppy.
Eliza staggered back into the room carrying a large box. ‘Clear a space.’
‘A computer?’ asked Martha, not attempting to hide her disgust.
‘Not just a computer, but the key to your chastity belt, fair maiden.’
‘What?’
‘No mobile: therefore no text messages. No computer: therefore no email. How do you hope to flirt in the twenty-first century?’
‘I don’t propose to flirt at all.’
‘Awful defeatist attitude,’ snapped Eliza bossily, and for a moment Martha felt like the little sister. ‘Here.’ Eliza tossed a smaller box over to Martha; it was a mobile phone.
It took them four and a half hours to set it up. Neither woman could honestly list ‘instruction comprehension’ as a skill on her CV, but both had to admit to a huge sense of satisfaction when it finally whirled into action, and the little icons declaring ‘email facility’, ‘Internet Explorer’, ‘my briefcase’, ‘recycle bin’ littered the screen.
Eliza was thrilled. The phone and computer had been the most expensive gifts she had ever bought anyone, and she had enjoyed being generous. Martha wouldn’t accept any rent, and so for the first time since moving to London Eliza felt a bit flush.
Martha was dubious. ‘But what use will it be?’
‘Well, you need access to the Internet.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s lonely living in the Dark Ages.’
Martha looked concerned and cautious.
‘Email is great fun,’ encouraged Eliza.
Martha still wasn’t convinced. She feared that email might just turn out to be like her answering machine, another reminder that no one cared.
As if reading her mind, Eliza said consolingly, ‘Look, at the very least you can shop.’
November
19
Maisie would be a year old in mid November. Martha had set herself a target to get Michael to return home by the time Maisie was due to blow out the candle. She had ten more days to succeed. Surely this silliness wasn’t going to last longer than that.
Was it?
Martha wasn’t certain.
Since Martha had thrown the glass of wine over Michael they had not seen each other without the restraining presence of the children. Michael used them as a shield to avoid any difficult questions or discussions, so she had no idea what his current thinking on their situation was. Martha’s head hurt from beating it against the invisible brick wall that had grown up between them. If only she had the confidence to admit, even to herself, that she was becoming heartily sick of his sanctimonious mutterings –‘Not in front of the children, Martha, we’ll talk about it later.’ When? When was bloody ‘later’? The whole situation was beginning to have a horrible sense of ‘already too late’.
Michael’s visits to see the children had been less than satisfactory. He often arrived late, he always left early. His excuse was invariably the same: he was tired; he was so busy at work. Somehow Michael had managed to claw his way up to the moral high ground. He repeatedly insisted that Martha was hysterical and impossible to talk to.
Which was true, and therefore it was rude of him to draw attention to the fact.
Martha was frustrated, angry and bewildered – which tended to manifest itself in hysteria. She bounced from tears, to remorse, to fury, as though she were a premenstrual, pre-exam, mid-acne-outbreak adolescent. Despite this rainbow of emotions, she still could not bring herself to regret the wine-throwing incident.
Michael thought this was proof of her hysteria.
Eliza thought this was progress.
Martha didn’t know what to think.
‘I see you’ve bought a computer,’ commented Michael on this particular evening. He and Martha were standing in the kitchen, but to know that she had a computer he must have been into the dining room. Martha wasn’t hosting any dinner parties at the moment, and the family had taken to eating in the kitchen – it was cosier – so the computer was set up in the dining room. Eliza had wanted to put it in Michael’s den, but Martha wouldn’t hear of it. She preserved the den as though it were a shrine, even though dusting the collection of over 100 Matchbox cars was a fiddly job. So, then, it was yet another contradiction that Martha felt ever so slightly irritated that Michael had been poking around the house. Which was silly, of course. It was, after all, still Michael’s house, it was still their home and Martha wanted it to be so.
It was just that recently it had seemed more hers than theirs.
Of course he could snoop wherever he chose, including in the dining room. After all, Martha had no secrets.
Except for the stack of washing that needed to be ironed, which – as luck would have it – she had hurriedly stashed in the dining room; it was a bit shame-making that Michael would know that she was behind on her ironing. She had never let things slip so dramatically when he lived at home but, recently, doing the ironing no longer struck her as a genuine priority. Martha blushed on the inside; she didn’t like him thinking of her as less than perfect.
Suddenly, somehow, his presence seemed a little intrusive.
‘No, actually, I didn’t buy it. Eliza bought it for me. Don’t you think that was generous?’ smiled Martha, trying to put the vision of crumpled washing out of her mind.
‘Well, she is living here rent-free.’
‘Would you like my email address? I’m finding surfing on the Internet fascinating, and there are some great educational sites for Mathew.’ Education was Michael’s big thing as far as the children were concerned. She didn’t bother to explain that she wouldn’t dream of taking money for rent off her own sister. ‘And I have a mobile.’ Martha held up her handset.
Michael took it from her and swiftly appraised it with an expert eye trained in assessing gizmos and gadgets. ‘Top of the range. Has Eliza won the Lottery?’
Martha was hurt. She’d secretly hoped that Michael would be impressed with her modernity. He spent hours on the Internet and she’d thought, hoped, he’d be pleased with her for taking an interest in something new. He’d often suggested that she needed a hobby. Although Lord knows how Martha had been supposed to find time for a hobby when Michael lived at home. But he didn’t congratulate her, or ask for her mobile number, nor did he seem to notice that she was wearing make-up. Which was a shame, because he’d often encouraged her to make more of herself, and now that she had made an effort… he was oblivious to it.
Martha shoved the thought from her mind and tried to tune into what he was saying, tried to find it interesting.
Michael had talked a lot about money recently. He’d asked how much Mathew’s new shoes had cost, and muttered that it seemed to be only five minutes since they’d bought the last pair. Which was almost true; that was growing children for you. He’d checked the phone bill and observed that maybe Martha should make an effort to call her parents after 6 p.m. When she told him what she was buying Maisie for her birthday he remarked that their daughter would be happier with a cardboard box, and it would be a lot cheaper. It was a comment that’s often made about children, but in Maisie’s case it wasn’t true: she really didn’t like cardboard boxes; she really liked plastic toys with bells and buttons.
‘I’ve sent out the invites for Maisie’s party next week,’ said Martha. ‘We made them ourselves – Maisie, Mathew a
nd, well, me. Me mostly, but it was very jolly.’ Martha showed Michael an invite. It was a piece of pink card cut into the shape of a balloon; Mathew had added glitter and stickers, Maisie had added fingerprints and saliva. They’d had a lovely, squabble-free afternoon making them and Martha was really proud of the results. But looking at them now, as Michael was looking at them, they looked tatty and amateur.
‘Very nice,’ murmured Michael, just as he had muttered that the weather was ‘very nice’, the biscuits Martha had baked were ‘very nice’, the colour she’d painted the hall was ‘very nice’. Martha wasn’t sure how it was possible that the words ‘very nice’ could sound so bored, so critical.
Martha had been thinking a lot about Maisie’s birthday. Every little baby’s first birthday was obviously a very significant date, but to Martha this particular birthday was monumental. How was it possible that only a year ago Michael had counted the seconds between Martha’s contractions, told her she was a clever girl, told her he was proud of her, cried with pleasure when the midwife put Maisie into his arms… and now he lived alone in a hotel? How was it possible? Martha didn’t know the answer but she was determined to correct the situation. She was determined to get Michael to come home. To put a stop to this silliness.
She had planned a surprise for Michael. Three years ago her grandmother had died and left her and Eliza a small inheritance. Michael had insisted that Martha open a post-office account and put the money there. He’d insisted that she didn’t squander it on kids’ toys or clothes. He’d wanted her to buy something important and meaningful with it. Something of her own to remember her grandmother by. Which was lovely of him and proved that he’d once loved her very much.
