Calamity in Camberwell

by Alice Castle

  By the time Beth had been to the car, fished the parcel out of the glove compartment, and brushed off a few boiled sweets, used parking stickers, and various urgent briefings from school that she really needed to read carefully one day, ten minutes had ticked by. When she let herself back into the house with a cheery, ‘Hello,’ she wasn’t that surprised to be greeted by silence.

  A quick tour of the downstairs confirmed that Ben and Jess had probably gone up to his bedroom. No doubt, in a few years’ time, a discovery like this would lead to all kinds of moral panics about teenage goings-on, but today she wondered briefly whether she could just leave them to it, crack on with the supper, and then use the gift as a bargaining tool to get Jess to open up later. She hesitated, her hand on the smooth grain of the oak newel post, looking up the stairs to the dimness of the landing beyond. It was quiet up there. Too quiet.

  With a sigh, she trudged upwards, then swung open Ben’s door. Sure enough, both children were there, sitting on Ben’s floor, with no fewer than three open giant-sized bags of crisps, as well as a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk that Beth had been planning to smuggle into her work stash, and the half-eaten box of Marks and Spencer chocs that neither Ben nor Beth loved – a present from her mother’s last visit.

  Ben’s face was a picture. There was the horror of discovery, the guilt of the theft, the surreptitious pleasure of all this contraband, and the unmistakable flush of a sugar overload. Plus, the camaraderie of suddenly finding himself in a gang of lawbreakers, ie. Jess. Added to that, the paprika beard he’d acquired earlier now had unmistakable chocolaty additions. Jess herself, meanwhile, just grinned impishly up at Beth. Maybe her own mother would be able to decode all the meanings behind that smile, but Beth certainly wasn’t going to bother trying.

  ‘Well, you two have been busy,’ she said sternly. ‘Ben, I’m not impressed. At all. And Jess, well, I don’t know what your mother’s going to say about this,’ she said.

  ‘Are you going to tell Mum? Do you think she’ll come round and get me? She hates me eating too many sweets,’ said Jess, now with unmistakable eagerness written all over her face. Aha, thought Beth. Is that what this had all been about? An attempt to get her mother involved?

  ‘I’ll certainly ring your mum right now. Do you want to talk to her?’ said Beth, not even trying to keep up the cross act. Ben looked as though he was still waiting for the axe to fall, but Jess was transparently eager to get on the phone to her mum, even if she thought a ticking off was coming. It was heart-breaking.

  ‘Come on downstairs then, and bring that lot with you,’ said Beth.

  Ben jumped up immediately, gathering up the contraband, glad to have been given something to do that looked reassuringly like a punishment. Jess followed at Beth’s heels and they were soon settled at the table, Beth tapping the dial icon. The phone rang and rang. Jess, who’d looked as keen as Magpie expecting a cat treat, gradually subsided across the table, ending up lying with her cheek pressed against the scrubbed oak. Beth tried again, and again the phone rang out. Jess shut her eyes. Ben, shoving the crisps back into cupboards, missed seeing a lone tear trickling down Jess’s cheek.

  ‘When did you last speak to your mum?’ Beth asked the girl gently, her hand on her arm.

  Jess instantly withdrew. ‘Dunno. Ages ago. Dad says it’s because I’ve been playing up.’ Her head was down, and the last sentence was mumbled into her jumper.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not it, Jess. Your mum’s probably just away, or working really hard…’ Beth thought quickly, trying to come up with something, some excuse, that would make sense to a small girl who missed her mother. But there was no reason in the world Beth could think of that would keep Jen from at least talking to her daughter, if not seeing her on a regular basis. And how mean of Tim to suggest to his daughter that it was her fault her mum wasn’t around. Alarm bells were going off so loudly in her head that Beth was surprised the children couldn’t hear the clanging.

  At least one thing had been made a lot easier by the evening’s events. ‘Neither of you are going to be very hungry, are you? So we can all make our own sandwiches for supper,’ said Beth brightly.

  The girl might be worried, but there was nothing she, or maybe anyone, could do at the moment. So why not take her mind off things with a bit of fun? Ben, still a bit worried that a severe talking-to was imminent, instantly brightened. Sandwich-making was one of their best things. Little did he know, but Beth chiefly brought this into play when she was too tired, for one reason or another, to make a ‘proper’ supper involving cooked vegetables, traditional servings of protein, and so on. Sandwiches covered these bases, but were a lot more fun all round, for exhausted cooks and small kids alike.

  By the time the doorbell rang, two eager sous chefs had done their best to convert Beth’s tidy kitchen to chaos. Beth, getting up from a table festooned with small dishes of sliced cucumber, cherry tomatoes, grated cheese, bits of chorizo, and dollops of mayonnaise and Ben’s inevitable ketchup, realised that it was bound to be Babs at the door. She hastily rinsed her hands and dried them on her jeans, striding to the door.

  Babs stood there, pristine in a little fitted charcoal grey work suit that clung to a carefully toned figure. Over it was a camel coat of a type that Beth had long ago decided reluctantly was incompatible with everything about her lifestyle and her budget. It would have lasted two minutes in her house before becoming speckled with toothpaste or bestrewed with Magpie’s generously-shed hairs. The whole ensemble was topped off by a gauzy scarf in a shade of fuchsia that Beth knew would make her look both fat and gaunt at the same time, but was perfect with Babs’s sleek halo of dark hair.

  ‘Come in, come in. Sorry, it’s in a bit of a state, only just finished supper,’ said Beth as airily as she could. As she struggled with OCD tendencies, she hated others seeing her home when it was less than pristine. But short of brushing her entire kitchen under a non-existent carpet, there was nothing she could do except hope to style it out. She rattled some plates together and dumped them in the sink, wiped the table top with a cloth, and automatically popped the kettle on.

  ‘Tea?’ she asked, more for form’s sake than anything. Mothers almost always shared a debriefing session after a playdate, unless Armageddon had broken out and one side or the other needed to rush off and regroup.

  Babs, unsure of the etiquette, hovered on the kitchen threshold, clearly transfixed with horror at the state of the place. She kept staring from the floor to Beth again and again, not managing to say a word. Beth tried to look at it through a stranger’s eyes, and knew the blobs of ketchup on the floor, the grated cheese drifting across the table, and the abandoned crusts with crescent-shaped bites taken out of them, did not look good. But on the other hand, with her years of hard-won tidying experience, she knew it wasn’t going to take more than a few moments to deal with this lot.

  As she got out two mugs, she rushed round with a sponge and her trusty Flash spray, picked up here, there, and everywhere, and by the time the water was boiled, things were down to manageable levels of chaos. The wedding present, which was still unopened and with its once-sleek wrapping now lightly encrusted with grated cheese, was shoved to the back of the work surface by the sink. It definitely wasn’t the moment to be brandishing Jen’s gift around, in front of her erstwhile love rival.

  ‘Builders’ or Earl Grey?’ she asked. Earl Grey was the usual Dulwich option, but some people, York for example, liked to keep it real with a bit more of a tannic blast from their cuppas.

  ‘Um,’ said Babs, settling herself gingerly on the very edge of one of the kitchen chairs. She clearly thought she was risking contamination. And, Beth thought with an inward sigh, she was probably right. There was a smear of what looked like brown sauce on the back of the chair. Which was odd, as Beth was pretty sure she hadn’t deployed the HP at supper time.

  Beth dithered. To wipe or not to wipe, that was the question. On the one hand, she could hardly bear to see such a lovely outfit ruined. On th
e other, this was Jen’s nemesis, the woman who had made her friend suffer for years. All right, that was all through the agency of Tim’s boundless twattishness, but still, Babs had to bear her share of the blame. He’d been firmly married when they’d met.

  ‘An Earl Grey, please. Just a drop of milk,’ said Babs with a tentative smile, and made as if to lean back. Despite herself, Beth swooped forward with her sponge and just got the blob off before at least two hundred pounds’ worth of designer suiting stuck to it. Babs, aware that Beth was faffing around behind her, sat forward again and gave her a quizzical glance.

  ‘Just making everything nice and tidy,’ said Beth, knowing she was coming over as a deranged Martha Stewart-type but not caring over-much. She’d done the right thing; by the dry cleaners in the village, if not by Jen. ‘Don’t know where those children have got to,’ she added. ‘But they’ve been playing nicely.’ She wasn’t sure if that was entirely true. She was pretty certain, biased though she undoubtedly was, that Ben had been led astray in the matter of the unauthorised snacks, but she wasn’t about to grass Jess up.

  ‘How are you getting on with all the childcare stuff?’ said Beth, making conversation but also genuinely curious. It couldn’t be easy taking on someone else’s child, at a late stage, particularly when you had no experience with kids yourself.

  ‘It’s quite… well, you know,’ said Babs, clearly fearing to commit herself. ‘It’s certainly different.’

  ‘Ha, you’ve got that right,’ Beth smiled. ‘I think it’s like having pets. Better to get a cat when it’s a kitten, then it can train you. Same with babies. I’d never even held one, till I had Ben. I had no idea what to do. You learn on the job. But you’re brave, taking this on,’ she smiled encouragingly at Babs, who was taking a cautious sip of the still-hot tea.

  She put it down again and seemed to have made up her mind to speak.

  ‘I had no idea it was all so tiring,’ she said, then let out a whoosh of breath. ‘Gosh, it feels good even to say that. I can’t say a word to Tim, he’s Jess’s dad – and it’s not as if Jess isn’t great, she is, don’t get me wrong…’

  Beth, leaning forward despite herself, and fervently hoping no small ears upstairs were catching any of this, silently willed Babs on. There was clearly a ginormous ‘but’ looming.

  ‘But… to be honest, I have no clue what I’m doing. Jess seems to hate me, and I’m just so fed up with getting every single thing wrong.’

  To Beth’s consternation, Babs put a hand to her eyes. Oh no!

  To some extent, she’d been willing Babs to admit how difficult this whole mothering thing was. There was such an image these days, of gorgeous mummies gliding around baking cupcakes with one hand and French-plaiting their children’s hair with the other. Making it look so easy. But the reality of parenting was, in Beth’s experience, often more like a slow-motion car crash, or if not quite so catastrophic, then at least a major tug-of-war between opposing factions with entrenched views and wildly differing aims. She’d have liked Babs to have said she suddenly realised how hard women like Beth had it. Maybe they didn’t have lovely little suits, maybe they just had the modern-day flak jackets of mothering that were tatty joggers and worn-out jumpers, but they deserved medals, every single one of them.

  Unfortunately, Babs wasn’t focusing on the wonderfulness of Beth and mothers like her, but instead, predictably, was brimming over with self-pity. Quite literally, as a tear started to dribble down her beautifully made-up cheek, taking a little fuchsia powder blush – a perfect echo of Babs’s gauzy scarf – with it.

  If there was one thing Beth couldn’t stand, it was grown ups blubbing in her kitchen. Unless it was her doing it, of course, and even then it should only be in the still watches of the night, when no-one, but no-one, was around to witness it. In her view, all this touchy-feely stuff that was so fashionable had a lot to answer for, letting people dangle their feelings out all over the place. Ok, she’d been probing a bit. But she just wanted to find Jen. She did not want a closer glimpse at the darker corners of Babs’s psyche.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you’re doing a fine job. Jess seems… quite fond of you. That’s better than most stepmothers,’ said Beth as bracingly as she dared without coming over as totally uncaring. Anything to get the emotional genie back into its bottle. To her surprise, it seemed to be working. Babs looked up, her nose a little raw-looking, but her swimming eyes full of hope.

  ‘Really? You think I’m better than most stepmums you know?’

  Beth nodded enthusiastically. Given that the only stepmothers she could think of were the Wicked Queen in Snow White and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, it was pretty much a dead certainty that Babs was streets ahead of the competition. That was presuming she didn’t actively want to kill Jess, or keep her in a coma for a century or two; Beth was going to give her the benefit of the doubt on that. Having got to know her slightly better, it certainly seemed that Babs was well-intentioned, but out of her depth – not waving, but drowning.

  Still, concern for Babs shouldn’t deflect her from her mission, thought Beth. ‘But what I really wanted to ask was, do you know where Jen actually is at the moment? I’ve been trying to get hold of her, and I think Jess is missing her.’

  ‘We’re all missing her. No-one more than me,’ said Babs, with heavy irony.

  Beth was startled. For years, Babs and Jen had been locked in mortal combat. One or other of them would pop up at every carol concert or summer fair, but never both, for fear that the universe would implode or that the gossips of Dulwich would have a real live catfight on their hands.

  ‘Really? I didn’t think you got on?’ she said warily.

  ‘I tell you, I used to yearn for the day when poof, Jen would just disappear. She used to be hanging around all the time, those hurt eyes, that poor-me look, making me feel really rotten, even though Tim swore to me right from the start that everything was dead between them, that she hated him and they hadn’t, you know, had sex since 1995 or something. I’m beginning to think that was all a big lie. And now we’ve got Jess all the time. The joke was on me all along. Jen’s got over Tim completely; she’s got Jeff, who’s pretty gorgeous, and she gets to swan around the place, taking off whenever she likes, with free childcare laid on by yours truly. I don’t even get time to go to the gym any more. My arms are getting flabby,’ she said, lifting up her arm, rolling back a sleeve, and displaying a string of muscles which, while not quite a condom full of walnuts, would have still have done Popeye proud. ‘Honestly, that woman. She’s getting away with murder.’

  Beth looked at Babs, startled both by her biceps and her vehemence. This wasn’t just self pity. She’d thought Babs was irredeemably shallow, but her rage certainly seemed to have hidden depths. And she seemed particularly bitter about looking after poor Jess. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted children?’

  ‘I do,’ said the woman simply. ‘I want my own children. Unless you’ve had to deal with other people’s, you just don’t understand. Everyone seems to think the sun shines out of their own kids’ backsides. Well, it damn well doesn’t shine out of other people’s, that’s for sure,’ Babs hissed across the table.

  ‘Jess is a lovely girl,’ Beth remonstrated.

  ‘I bet she’s lovely to you. She never speaks to me. I get up in the morning, make her breakfast, get her bag ready, I’ve already washed and ironed her clothes – after literally picking them up off the floor in her room – then I brush her hair, if she’ll let me, give her a lovely healthy snack for break time, which she never bloody well eats, and send her off to school with her dad. Then I pick her up, make sure she does any homework, watch those bloody awful kids’ TV shows with her, make her tea, try and chat to her, I even put her to bed most nights and read her a story, for God’s sake. Tim always makes sure he’s back too late from work. Not a word of thanks, from either of them. Tim thinks I should be happy as Larry, looking after his precious daughter. Especially as we’ve spent years, you know, trying for our own. He’s alwa
ys told me it’s the best possible practice. Ha! But Jess? She’s just an ungrateful little… beast,’ said Babs, drawing breath briefly then bursting into speech again.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, if she just said something to me. Not even thank you. Just a “hello” would do. Once a week, maybe. But do I ever get a single word out of madam? Nope. Not a syllable. Not. A. Single. Word. Ever. She literally won’t speak to me, won’t look me in the eye. It’s like I’m a non-person. And she’s pretty much as nice as pie to her dad, but when she goes up to her bedroom every night, if he’s not around, she slams that door like she’s going to break it off its hinges. I go in to read to her and turn off the light, but it’s like I’m there on sufferance; she turns her face to the wall. I’m reading Harry Sodding Potter to myself, night after night. The Chamber of Doom, that’s her bedroom, that is. It’s doing my head in, I don’t mind telling you,’ said Babs, even pinker in the face now than her scarf, after her tirade. She drank down some of her tea, fighting for composure.

  At least anger had replaced tears, Beth was glad to see. But it did, indeed, sound like a horrible way to live. All your efforts ignored, your overtures spurned. How soul-destroying. Like living with an unrequited love, and allowing them to show you an Arctic shoulder all day, every day. Most people in this situation would break off all contact, go cold turkey for a while, and move on. But you couldn’t do that with other people’s children. You were well and truly stuck with them – nominally, until they were eighteen, but in truth, way beyond that. And the reason why it cut so deeply was that Babs, despite herself, had clearly grown fond of Jess and just desperately wanted the girl to like her back.

  Poor Babs. Isolated and under siege at home, where she was supposed to find peace and relaxation. Meanwhile, the mums at school also treated her like a plague-carrier, and Tim, no matter how he felt about being lumbered with total responsibility for his daughter all of a sudden, would be as unenthusiastic as any parent to hear a whisper of criticism of his greatest creation.