The Society Game

by H. Lanfermeijer

  I would have retaliated and reminded her of the sacrifices I had made in my life to look after Mum but my defence was interrupted by Mr Thomas opening the door to his office to invite us in. He was a large man dressed in a linen sky-blue suit which was crumpled around his bulbous waist. His tan shoes were scuffed about his toes and his tie hung like a loose noose around his neck. His face slumped around a mouth which had given up the strain of holding a smile long ago; now there was an etched frown from the corners of his mouth all the way down to his triple chin which sat squeezed above his collar.

  The office was dark and smelt of dust and stale air. Bright beams of light squeezed through cracks in the window shutters, forcing me to squint as I edged my way to the only available seats in the office.

  ‘Er, welcome and I’m sorry to hear of your loss and so forth. Anyway, it’s very unusual to actually read a will,’ Mr Thomas began, ‘in fact, I’ve only done it once before. Legally, all I need to do is pass you both a copy – which I can do if you wish to read it alone elsewhere? The reason— oh please mind that pile, just step over it, I really need more cupboard space. Anyway, the reason I called you in was just to reassure you the changes that were made in your mother’s will were done more than six months ago. All is legal and above board as they say. Yes, do sit there – a favourite of my cat so please excuse the stray hairs – but be warned she may come in and sit on your lap.’

  I sat next to Janet, though my mind was straying to the comment she’d made earlier about my hair.

  ‘Would you like me to read it or do you want to take the copies away with you?’ continued Mr Thomas. He released the folded documents and then wiped his forehead with his hand and, with his wet fingers, he picked the papers up again and gestured for us to take our copies.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine. Please read what it says,’ Janet and I chimed in unison. Mr Thomas squelched his neck further into his collar, ‘As you wish.’

  I remember the tingle in my chest, which felt inappropriate for the reading, but I also remember my gasp as Mr Thomas continued to read that the woman who abandoned us, who concentrated on her life regardless of the difficulties I was facing caring for Mum; was to receive everything. Mum even sweetened the prize for Janet by describing how Janet had lit her life for so many years:

  ‘…Thank you for my grandson, thank you for your love and thank you for being my beautiful daughter. Please believe me, you are my loved little girl…’

  The grateful dripping tears from Janet’s face should have been mine. Instead, I felt the sting of hearing that the house I grew up in was to be given to Janet to bring up Jason.

  I marched out after a dignified goodbye to Mr Thomas. I contemplated the possibility that it was a scheme constructed by Janet and her new lover, Mr Thomas, but I rationalised these would be extreme measures even for her.

  Outside was a sharp, fresh day. The rain had washed the streets and the sun was dutifully drying the pavement. I squinted in the sunlight and stared at Janet. She was still whimpering, her lips shivering and her eyes dragged down to her cheeks.

  ‘She’s really gone. We’ll never hear from her again, we’ll never be hugged by her, we’ll never have her scones and jam. Nothing, she’s gone!’ Janet whispered to herself.

  ‘At least you’ll never have your arguments,’ I spat.

  ‘We didn’t argue? Why are you saying that? She was my Mum and I want her with me. Ah, poor Jay, he’s not going to know her,’ she paused and looked at me. ‘You okay? You look irritated. Are you sad? What’s the matter?’

  ‘£11,000, that’s it. I’ve lost my home and I have nothing to show for it…’ I began.

  ‘No, you have half her savings plus half of the house? What are you on about? She said we all live there but it is not to be sold until Jay is eighteen.’

  ‘So, because I don’t have a baby, my life is on hold? And her exact words were that Jason was to receive a share of the house which you keep in trust, so it’s not half is it?’

  ‘Okay a third, but oh my God! Is that it? It’s all about money? You weren’t moved by her loving words to you? ‘…my sweetest baby girl… so beautiful, my gorgeous dreaming girl…’ Jeez. What did you want Olive? What did you expect? What is wrong with you? We’ve lost Mum! It’s just you, me and Jay! You have a home with us, always. You have half her savings, you have her memory and you have a testimony which recounted how she treasured you to her last days… Olive she’s gone!’

  ‘…I do know she’s not here, I also know how I was always with her, how all you two did was argue but just because you have Jason, you’re her ‘special little girl’ and you get everything.

  I gave up so much of my life to care for Mum – dressing her, feeding her, getting her to the toilet, wheeling her around the park in between cleaning the house and giving her her medication. Is this what a woman my age does? Not going out, not shopping for me or partying? No. I forfeited my life for Mum and I’m thanked with a third!!’

  I moved aside for a passer-by who stared at us. I then walked to the fountain where the taxi ramp was.

  ‘Wait! I’ll get a taxi with you…’

  ‘Well you can afford it now, can’t you – perhaps it should be me getting the bus or maybe I should just walk – you’d like that as you drive by!’ I twirled around to join the queue.

  ‘Where are you getting this? I loved Mum! She was the woman who kept me going these last few years. She was the woman who reminded me my life wasn’t completely rubbish. I’m sorry I didn’t do as much as you, I have Jay remember? but I still miss her. I no longer have our daily chats and I’m sinking. I’m not coping.’ I could see Janet’s lip quiver; she looked up at the sky to calm herself, ‘Okay, I’ll assume you are just missing Mum so instead of slapping you I’ll remind you we have each other and we can be a family just as Mum said in the testimony. Please Olive, right now we need each other.’

  Janet’s dishevelled fringe flopped around her sad face.

  ‘I’m getting a taxi home,’ I screeched.

  Janet leant forward and sharply said, ‘You live alone in your head Olive. Mum loved you and wanted us to be sisters again. That is all that happened. You’re a selfish, self-centred, egotistical dreamer.

  What’s worse, Olive, you don’t recognise who loves you. Instead, you bury your head in magazines and dream of a day that you can be one of those materialistic, vain women that prance about on each page. Get a grip, Olive, life isn’t about money and clothes, it’s about family. Mum served you tirelessly; her life was dominated by making you happy. But for once, Olive… jeez don’t ignore me, I’m trying to help you…’

  I slammed the taxi door and urged the driver to speed away. As he did so I looked at Janet standing alone. I reassured myself that I wasn’t a dreamer, I was a realist. Go get life, I thought. Maybe go to Australia? I had always dreamt of that and how jealous anyone who knew me would be, especially Janet, stuck in my home. She could have it. I was going to grab life and enjoy it from now on! I’d go travelling to the party country without Janet, without Mum and without anyone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jason

  This self-righteous crap had taken me to one in the morning. She went on about how life was passing her by, how she had needed to escape the house that my mum now owned. I couldn’t get my head round what she was drivelling on about with the house. This 1960s bungalow was in all our names and it was eventually sold seven years ago; it paid off my parents’ mortgage, gave me a deposit for my house and the final third morphed into my aunt’s bank account.

  My night had been cut short to a cat nap and, as I lay awake in the dark, I thought of my earliest memories of Aunt Olive but they were clouded by recent events. I couldn’t see her or the picture she’d spoken about; a picture I’ve passed loads of times without acknowledging it as anything other than another memory on the wall.

  She did have a point about me. Like her, I lov
ed books, plays, films. I used to want to be a screen writer. But that road was too thorny to follow and instead I chose the easy money path. So, after leaving university I followed the financial railway tracks into the city. A train I’m still catching today.

  My alarm shook me awake. My eyes begged me to stay shut for a few seconds more. But the reality of a breakfast meeting yanked them open and my brain kicked me out of the warm bed to a cold sharp slap of my bedroom air. This was my usual morning, which began too early for my health and too suddenly for a comfortable ease into the day. Unlike my aunt’s day, every part of my morning routine was timed to get me to my desk with the least amount of time and effort for just a few extra precious moments in bed. It’s a strategy which has never let me down but I still don’t wake and function coherently until just after nine – everything before then is a daily blur.

  On the train to work I stroked the rough edges of my aunt’s envelope. I looked around at the other passengers. They were duplicates from the original mould of the city work force; tired and ragged in pin-striped suits. I wondered what they did to pay their mortgage. Whether, like me, they spent their life hours rushing from one unfinished project to the next in pursuit of promotion.

  My breakfast meeting consisted of deflection of faults to delegation of tasks from one department to the next. It was the usual roundabout that I’d sat on since the day I started at Morgan and Price. That morning, I left deflated that the work I had slaved over for the last two months was rejected as it no longer fitted into the working model of ‘today’.

  ‘Nothing changes, Steve.’ I said. ‘Same crap, different arse.’

  Steve was one of my team and he had his eye on my job. I didn’t care; I had my eye on my manager’s job. The whiff of promotion was in the air and we were all pushed to give more of our lives to the office in the hope we would slide up hill.

  ‘What changes, mate, is the weather, that’s all you can count on. By the way, where were you last night? We all ended up at the Hog’s Head for lock-in, but no Jay!’

  One thing about Steve, his daily routine doesn’t include sleep.

  ‘Sorry mate, I was knackered. Needed to be in for this meeting and, after last week, I needed sleep. Seriously Steve, I don’t know how you do it. I’m up every day at five-thirty for the piggin’ 6.17 train. Why can’t a day start at ten? Worked for my aunt.’

  ‘Know what you mean, slept for twenty minutes on the lav yesterday – longest sleep I’ve had in ages.’

  I picked up the manila envelope and showed it to Steve.

  ‘Well it’s here,’ I said.

  ‘That’s either the yellow pages or Aunt Olive’s famous tell-all gossip,’ Steve clapped his hands. ‘Mate, give us the lowdown.’

  ‘I read it until one in the morning.’

  ‘Damn! Nice going, Jay-boy. So? Was it worth missing the beers with the boys?’ Steve said.

  ‘So far, it drones on about her start in life and how she was cheated by everyone she knew, how life was hard as a poor girl living with her mum, who died when I was born. Then she inherited money but somehow Mum was the cause of all her misery – I didn’t get very far and I think I’ve got to her buggering off to Oz leaving Mum on her own.’

  ‘You look pissed mate.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘didn’t really know her that well so don’t care. You know how it is.’ I threw the letter on the desk.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. See what you mean, Jay. How is your mum? If you don’t mind me asking?’ he asked sheepishly.

  ‘Mum’s bearing up as best she can. She still jokes that it’s another drama in Olive’s life and there’ll be another around the corner, but I know she’s finding it difficult.’

  Steve lent in and almost whispered, ‘And your Aunt Olive? How is she?’

  I backed away to check if I had any messages on my phone and reluctantly replied, ‘Dunno, same old I guess. Her letter is all I can go on. Weirdly, she tells me how much she loves me, but I don’t really know her and reading this, so far, I don’t really like her. I don’t know why she’s telling me about where she grew up, arguments she had as a child and all that bollocks. I don’t get it mate.’

  Steve then stood up to face me.

  ‘We’re all born and we’ll all die, no one can change those facts about us, but it’s the life we lead in between these dates that we are allowed to manipulate to make the beginning and the end worth our while,’ he said.

  ‘Mmmm, not sure what relevance that has to my aunt? But thanks.’

  Steve continued, ‘You may not like her but maybe you can understand her, you know, where she started? Ah, don’t laugh Jay, just thought you should know like.’

  ‘Right, yeah, thanks. Seen Peter’s new Audi R8?’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, sweet. Jammy git!’ Steve smiled and returned to the audit he was working on.

  It was past ten o’clock when I finally left the office. Admittedly two hours of my office time was spent in the Fox Tavern but, thanks to the late hour, my company paid for a taxi back to my house. The drive home afforded me a little more reading time in an attempt to calm down from the day at work:

  Olive

  ‘Jason, our ideas for our life are often easy to formulate yet nearly always impossible to execute. Sometimes it is easier to delegate plans to the dreams’ department. My dreams knocked at my daily thoughts and kept me happy as only dreams of a promise of better times can.

  One consolation of my sister moving into my house was being with you every day. I remember how you learnt to crawl by first shuffling backwards then progressing to an army belly-pull using just your arms to propel yourself around the room. I was mesmerised by how you were able figure out your world around you and how at age three you gabbled away about everything you saw and touched; so, it was probably you and your charm that stopped me from entering a travel agent’s shop and buying my ticket to Australia until I was twenty-two.

  The catalyst to walking into the shop was Janet; she dared me, gently at first then with a bit more vigour until the taunting began. She claimed I would never leave, that I would sit around the house irritating her until I was grey-haired, owned a brown sofa and cuddled my cats all day. ‘No life and no hope,’ she would tease.

  I didn’t deserve the taunts from Janet or the pitiful looks from the neighbours and I didn’t deserve the gossiping from past school pupils. Admittedly, nothing was ever directly said to me but I heard them daily via their sly secretive glances, their strained smiles as they passed me and their covered chats to one another. Conversations I could still hear as I lay in bed or prepared the dinner or when I walked pass the travel agent’s shop.

  ‘Pathetic,’ they would gossip, ‘still living at home.’ ‘She needs to get a life,’ was another taunt, ‘thank god I’m not her.’

  ‘You’re paranoid.’ Janet said one afternoon in the high street. ‘Nobody is saying any such thing about you and, even if they were, why should you care?’

  ‘You would say that, you’re not the one broke without a future – I’m twenty-two and I don’t have a job, a boyfriend or a life,’ I cried.

  ‘Well get one, as I keep saying to you time and again.’ Janet replied.

  ‘What a boyfriend?’

  ‘No, a life. In fact— ooh, look where we are! How convenient.’

  I looked around to what she was referring to and felt the nudge on my arm pushing me into the travel agent’s shop.

  Janet spoke on my behalf about where I was to land in Australia, the internal flights I was to take and how long she wanted me away for. Janet had planned everything.

  ‘If I didn’t do it, Sis, then your sulky face sure as hell wouldn’t. But regardless, everything is negotiable and changeable apart from cancelling. So, you’re going and it’s happening in less than one month.’

  I turned and looked at Janet.

  ‘You look shocked,’ she said,
‘but take heart my sweet Olivia,’ she continued, ‘one of your personality traits is that you’re easy to push and pull around; maybe a disadvantage in your eyes, but for me, it has meant I can send you off to Oz without a quibble. So now, my beloved, stop obsessing about what people think of you and grab your life. Can I have a smile, and maybe a thank you to your sister who just wants you to be happy?’

  Instead, I just nodded and I kept nodding whenever anybody asked me about my trip and how excited I must feel. All I could muster was a, ‘Yeah, very excited, thanks’.

  ‘So exciting!’ said my neighbour, ‘Where do you start first? Your sister said Sydney. Where are you staying? Oh, you must be so excited; oh, and after everything you and your sister have been through! It’s about time life turned around for you both. How exciting. I was chatting to John only yesterday…’ John, her husband, who doesn’t know me and undoubtedly didn’t care. ‘We were just saying how excited we are for you, how excited you must be. So pleased, how exciting…’

  I hoped my excitement would grow to match hers. I hoped it would bubble from my stomach to snatch a breath and give involuntary giggles as I thought of my journey to Australia. Instead, I felt permanently nauseous as fear gripped my throat and churned my stomach. I fidgeted from one sleepless night to another right up to the day Janet accompanied me and my 70-litre rucksack to the airport.

  After twenty-three hours sitting in the same cramped conditions on a Boeing 747, I landed in Australia. I walked through to the arrival hall laden down with my rucksack, which felt like a huge lazy bear on my back.

  (In years to come, I discovered the maximum rucksack size for my height and weight was 55 litres and not the 70 litres I lugged around with every available crevasse and corner rammed with ‘just in case’ clothes. At least my future chiropractor will be pleased for my vanity. For those about to embark on a tour of down-under all you need are two pairs of shorts – one smart and one for the day, three tops – which can be smart or casual, one pair of flip-flops, one pair of trainers and one hooded top; you certainly do not need to take two sets of bed-linen as I had done).