by Georgie Hall
‘A chill pill?’ He exchanges a look with Summer in the rear-view mirror.
As we crawl along, I feel that throat-grip of worry about Paddy and the fissure between us.
‘Why not have a night or two away together?’ Joe’s not letting it drop. ‘You said you’re not recording next week, and Ed’s just told me he’s away at PGL camp?’
‘And don’t forget I’m staying over with Alice midweek so we can rehearse late!’ Summer adds over-brightly. (I always suspected there was something behind that plan.)
‘Has Dad put you up to this?’ I demand.
‘Hardly.’ Joe leans in between us, hat brim tipped back. ‘You know what he’s like? He sounded a bit down yesterday, that’s all? Maybe you could both use a change of scene?’
I swallow the tight knot again and say nothing.
‘Give it some thought maybe?’ Joe’s the family diplomat.
‘Of course I will, but I do have more than one job to keep this family afloat and I am actually working next week.’
I know they think I’m having a little dig at their father, and I feel bad, because I am.
Then Summer mutters ‘Edible undies party,’ and they both snigger.
‘That was years ago,’ I huff, aware she’s got me back on Paddy’s behalf.
*
As an occasionally ‘resting’ actor, I’ve waitressed and temped, manned tills and reception desks, entertained at children’s parties and spent one unforgettable summer sweltering in a fake fur bear costume as a local theme park’s mascot, accompanied at all times by a minder to stop children throwing food at me.
Being an Ann Summers ‘Party Ambassador’ was, briefly, a terrific earner. Girls nights in, hen parties, birthdays, I’d turn up with a box of goodies and earn enough to keep my (then tiny) children in Mini Boden. Paddy was going through his bad patch, so I played down the sex toy side of things and let him think it was more of a beauty accessories line. In the end I gave it up after just a few months; the acting work had picked up and I’d already plundered most of my young mum network from nursery and primary school – plus continual exposure to a sisterhood pissed on prosecco and giggling over Rampant Rabbits was quelling my desire ever to have sex again.
The reason the children now know and tease me about the ‘edible undies parties’ is because years later Arty found her way into a box of leftover stock in the garage I’d completely forgotten was there. A half-chewed liquorice mankini thrown up on the sitting room carpet while you’re all watching Thunderbirds is hard to ignore.
Of all my ‘resting’ jobs, the estate agency work I do now is the one I enjoy most, accompanying viewings for Warwickshire’s funkiest all-female estate agency. It’s flexible and pays for my wine. I already have a riverside retirement flat booked in at ten tomorrow and there’s two more pencilled in afterwards. That’s the Aldi Pinot Grigio sorted for the week.
One job I’m guaranteed never to do when resting is driving instruction.
*
Still trying to get out of the bus lane, Summer’s distracted by Joe asking, ‘Is Kwasi still working at your school?’
The car drifts tellingly as she starts gushing about his creative genius.
Joe and Kwasi Owusu – the digital image wunderkind who assists in Summer’s art class and stirs her wakening heart – overlapped at sixth form college and briefly even played in the same band. It marked the start of Summer’s crush, and it makes the situation at school doubly awkward because she first viewed ‘Mr Owusu’ as one of her brother’s peers; although a year older than Joe and already out grafting for his art, he now seems a lot more grown-up.
‘You should have seen his Generation Fluid exhibition in the Art House,’ Summer’s babbling, car veering towards the kerb now. ‘It was like so groundbreaking. He’s doing a shoot with Lady Charlecote next week which he’s—’
‘BRAKE, Summer!’ The back end of a bus is coming up to meet us.
She does a very creditable emergency stop inches from a tailgate wrap poster for Toy Story 4. Woody looks down on us kindly.
‘Quick reactions, excellent,’ I congratulate, waiting for my heartbeat to drop below a hundred and fifty, and try to lift the mood with a ‘Yee-haw! Giddy-up partner! We’ve got to get this wagon train a-moving.’ My kids were raised on Toy Story.
‘Reach for the sky!’ Joe gets behind me.
‘Who sang that?’ I hum the melody. Pop trivia always soothes Summer.
‘It’s stars. S Club 7. Reach for the stars,’ she corrects, still glowering and adding her own Woody catchphrase, ‘This town ain’t big enough for the two of us.’
I manage to stop myself singing the Sparks song. At least the hot flush has abated and soon we’re heading away from Warwick and they’re singing ‘You Gotta Friend in Me’.
I say, in my calm, modulated instructor voice, ‘You’re going to turn right ahead where it’s signposted Barford.’
Still singing, Summer takes no notice.
‘You should start to slow down about here.’
Her phone is in the holder clipped to the air vent on the dash and rattles like mad when the car goes over forty. As she reaches out a hand to steady it, I realise she is singing into it.
Is she recording this?
‘Slow DOWN! Mirror, signal, manoeuvre!’
‘See what I have to put up with, people?’ she tells the phone camera as she looks, indicates, brakes and executes a perfect turn.
‘Slayed it, sis!’ Joe encourages.
‘You’re doing really well, Summer, but this phone goes off.’ I pluck it out and put it in the glove box.
‘That’s so unfair!’ She’s yet to learn this gets her nowhere, fourteen years after first coining the phrase. She still stamps her foot too, the speedo rapidly passing forty.
‘Summer, don’t go too—’
‘I do know the speed limit, Mum? I passed my theory already?’ To prove her point, Summer cruises at fifty. It feels ludicrously fast.
Behind us, in his noise-cancelling headphones playing with a puzzle cube, Ed is oblivious to the danger we’re all in. Joe’s also surprisingly chilled. He passed his test two years ago but hasn’t got his own car and rarely ever drives, so I suspect he hasn’t enough practical experience on the roads to appreciate that almost the entire Hollander family may be wiped out at any moment.
I drive faster than this along here, I remind myself. But irrational, over-imaginative terror has gripped me all too often of late, and I can work up a tragedy out of any scenario: I’ve become a nervous flyer when I used to love it; I fight panic on big theme park rides; I dislike being alone in crowded public spaces. On a recent trip to London, travelling in the Underground, I grew so obsessed that an abandoned Maltesers box on the window shelf behind me contained an incendiary device that I started to silently hyperventilate, first swapping seats, then changing carriages at the next stop and finally getting off at the station after that to wait for another Circle Line tube, on which I sat down to find myself beside an abandoned Quality Street box.
I never used to be this phobic, this illogical, and I know that it’s connected to menopause, but that doesn’t stop me being scared stiff that I might never get my reckless streak back.
And I may be a pathetic wimp compared to my elderly mother who wants to travel along the Amazon or my little brother learning to fly, but neither of those two have volunteered to sit next to Summer doing sixty miles per hour along a country road, I notice.
*
‘If I’m going to beat Uncle Miles to a licence, I need more practice like this,’ Summer says as we race through tree-dappled sunlight towards Barford. ‘He’s already flying solo. Did you hear that, Joe? Miles is flying solo!’
They’re soon having an animated conversation about Uncle Miles, who they both adore and proudly support his new-found openness about his sexuality.
‘Flying’s like a metaphor for his freedom, yeah?’ Joe insists.
‘He must have always known?’ says Summer. ‘It’s
not like it’s a choice.’ She checks her mirrors and indicates to overtake a cyclist. ‘It’s so sad that Boomers like Miles still felt they had to deny nature and live a lie.’
‘We’re not old enough to be Boomers!’ I interject but am ignored because a) I’m being shallow and b) they’re already hot-swapping a timeline of Gay Pride, Stonewall, AIDS, Section 28 and same-sex marriage at such competitive, bright and brilliant speed that even though I’ve lived through it all, I’m not sure I know enough hard-and-fast facts to contribute, or that my terminology is up to date.
Summer’s driving beautifully, albeit whilst banging the steering wheel saying, ‘HIV’s amplified media stigma vetoed too many men’s freedom to be out without prejudice!’
How does she know so much, I wonder? At their age, I hoped George Michael and Princess Diana would shack up and have a clutch of ravishing children. I didn’t even guess Elton John was gay until he came out. Not a clue.
Theatre’s diversity came as a revelation for a girl from the provinces, and the friendships I made through my twenties taught me life lessons about sexuality and acceptance I’ve never forgotten. But it wasn’t until we moved to Leamington that I realised how rare and urban my experience is for my age group, certainly among the fellow parents, village league cricketers, canal enthusiasts and even the arty-farty theatre lovers that form our social circle. Our leafy Regency spa town just isn’t gay enough – the one exception being each August when it hosts Warwickshire’s annual Gay Pride, a family-friendly jamboree in the Pump Room Gardens, its inclusivity lovely, but all too transient.
Given my insight, my brother’s news didn’t come as the shock it was to some, although I hadn’t taken any suspicions very seriously through his lifelong smokescreen of gorgeous girlfriends and car-crash marriages.
We still don’t really talk about it, Miles and me. As siblings, we have remained extremely childish into adulthood. When together, we’re never the grown-ups.
Our children’s generation, by contrast, are very grown-up indeed, and like nothing more than playing Eye-Spy Gender and Diversity Bias to pass a journey.
‘I can’t believe Dad cancelled Miles as soon as he came out as gay,’ Joe says.
‘I thought they fell out because Miles chose flying over barging?’ Summer suggests, her loyalty torn.
‘It’s sad that Dad can’t see how loudly his silence speaks against LGBTQ plus acceptance?’
I grumpily want to ask if ‘pastsexual’ qualifies for a letter but instead say, ‘Your father is not homophobic!’ Because he isn’t. ‘Look, your uncle lost interest in the narrowboat, that’s all. We’re all of us anti-hate in this family, even the “Very Elds”. I’ve never heard your dad say a word against anybody gay.’
A pointed look passes between them via the rear-view mirror and Joe says gently, ‘What you need to understand, Mum, is that anti-fascism has been repurposed? It’s not enough to be anti-homophobic or anti-racist or anti-sexist these days? You have to be actively anti?’
‘I marched for this stuff before you were born. And please stop saying everything like it’s a bloody question!’
‘Sorry. Let’s not argue about it.’ He pacifies, my tactful envoy for his shiny post-millennial generation with its sad social conscience and upcycled vocabulary.
‘The struggle is real. Hashtag Mum’s Triggered?’ Summer always likes to have the last word.
‘Hashtag, Watch your speed?’ I mimic the inflexion. I like having the last word more.
They titter, although I suspect that they are laughing at me not with me.
I’m starting to sweat up again, the flush circling back round like a storm. On days when I get five or six in quick succession, I try to be positive by counting them cumulatively, like magpies – two for joy – but I nevertheless long to wail ‘it’s so unfair’.
*
Life is unfair. We campaign against it when we’re young, grumble when we’re older, chip away at it in between. Then our children start talking down to us, think they’ve reinvented protest, accuse us of bigotry without context, and it’s not fair.
I did it to my own parents, so I’ve had it coming, this middle-aged portal which transports us from passionate young things to reactionaries in the blink of the media’s eye, in the same way it offers us ‘retro’ music and thinks we should start planning for our retirement. We don’t just age, we are aged, herded together somewhere around fifty and tagged ‘Over’.
If my children think I am no longer ‘active’ enough, they obviously have no idea what goes on in my head. This Over is an overactive over-thinker through and through.
*
Summer’s mobile starts ringing in the glovebox while we’re driving through the picturesque, traffic-calmed village of Barford. A moment later, I feel my stomach hollow as we fly over a speedbump she’s failed to spot.
Like me, she assigns family and friends personalised ringtones; whoever ‘Vossi Bop’ is must be important, because she goes on to mount the curb and then stalls at the mini roundabout, embarrassment and road rage building. ‘Who put that thing there!’
‘Vossi Bop’ stops. I tactfully say nothing – mainly because I’m still too winded by my seatbelt – and Summer restarts the engine. My hot flush has now been topped up by an adrenaline spike and I’m overheating so much my eyelashes have sweat beads in them.
I stick my head out of the window for a moment to breathe in some cool rushing air. (It feels good. No wonder Arty used to do it, ears inside out, tongue lolling out. But I don’t try that.)
When I duck back in, hair on end, Joe and Summer are chatting about the family getaway to Cornwall later this summer. Apparently it’s the poorest county in England, my holiday choice no doubt yet more evidence of our lack of active anti-fascism.
I could point out that they were happy enough to take all the cream teas, pasties and surfing on offer during last year’s fortnight in St Ives with Granna, Grandpa, Miles and his wife (their last summer together, although nobody guessed at the time). But I don’t want to risk touching on the new-found divide between their father and uncle again.
We slow behind a tractor with a faded, peeling LIBERTY & LIVELIHOOD sticker in its rear window, a collie smiling back at us over it.
I feel another pang for Arty.
And then I remember something Paddy said during the Dog Fight.
*
‘I don’t want a new dog!’ I’d sobbed. ‘Losing Arty was like losing a part of me, and I want her back! I don’t want anything else. Her love, her friendship, her loyalty. She needed me and I miss her, Paddy. I miss her needing me.’
I wasn’t just talking about Arty, although I didn’t realise it at the time.
The pent-up anger that came out of him rocked me back on my heels. ‘All those things you mention – friendship, loyalty, love even – they’re based on trust, not need. Why does everyone in your bloody family mistake the two? If I trust somebody, I don’t expect them to change the rules without warning. I don’t bloody need that!’
This was quite a speech for Paddy, and one I took at face value. I thought he was talking about the change in me: hotter, fatter, angrier, less sexual and a lot harder to love. That change of rules. It cut me to ashes, and the argument turned nastier, my hackles high, my ego shredded.
Now I replay it with less red mist: If I trust somebody, I don’t expect them to change the rules without warning.
He couldn’t have been talking about Miles, could he?
10
Lunch Time
‘Told everyone you’d be forty minutes late!’ Reece is on bristly form, first in line to welcome us into the Prettiest Garden in Warwickshire. ‘Joe my man! Join the chaps for a Bloody Mary and tell us all about life in your university backwater. Summer and Edward, the girls are hosting a croquet tournament and need another pair. Eliza, your sister’s giving her all to a rack of lamb in the kitchen, and would appreciate moral support. Granna was helping but she’s had to lie down with one of her migraines.’
Joe murmurs under his breath, ‘You did remind Auntie Jules I’m vegan, Mum?’
Bugger.
Inside, Jules’s hot flush makes mine look like a cold snap as she broils, chops, pounds and curses. ‘Do not touch a fucking thing! I have this completely under fucking control!’ My sister’s a fantastic cook, but a very uptight one. It’s genuinely the only time she swears.
‘Smells delicious.’
‘Crustless watercress quiche with pear salad, then herbed lamb with goose fat roasties and buttered baby veg, polished off with Eton Mess. If anyone complains, I will fucking stab them. Could you check on Mum?’
I put off mentioning the vegan thing.
Upstairs, Mum’s lying in her darkened bedroom listening to the radio, a funereal violin dirge with a piano plinking at annoying intervals. She likes to set a scene.
‘Come in, darling girl.’ She raises a frail hand. ‘Is Joe here?’
‘Yes, we’re all here, except Paddy of course. How’s your poor head?’
‘I don’t have a migraine; I needed to calm down. Your sister’s being insufferable.’ She sits up and pats the bed beside her.
‘I’m sure lunch will be worth the stress.’ I perch, not wanting to be played against Jules.
‘Not that. It’s this obsession with bungalows. She quite upset your father last night, banging on about our impending decrepitude, not to mention haranguing Miles for signing away his half of the company and the flat and not having a divorce solicitor.’
‘It is her profession.’
‘And your brother’s profession is being entrepreneurial. He started working on something as soon as he got here, still very hush hush, but I know he’s excited. That boy can make money in his sleep.’
‘It’s relationships he can’t keep hold of,’ I say a bit testily.
‘He just hasn’t met the right person yet.’ Mum’s loyalty will never waver. ‘Oh, I know he can be cavalier and secretive – he gets that from your father.’ There’s a beat in which she looks quickly away, family secrets swiftly tidied from her thoughts. ‘But he’s generous to a fault, your brother.’ She stands up, crossing the room to draw open the curtains and look down at the garden. ‘Aren’t my roses lovely this year? Come outside and I’ll give you the tour. Do you want to powder your nose first?’
