Christian is very quiet. And white.
“Hangover?”
He nods and then looks as if he regrets it.
“Did you go out?”
“No.” He forgoes a shake of the head. “Watched Match of the Day with Rob.”
“Who was playing?”
“Er…”
I smile indulgently. “It must have been a great match.”
“Er…”
“Not that it matters,” I say. “I haven’t a clue who any of the teams are anyway. Want some tea?”
There is an infinitesimal movement that indicates a yes. “Advil? Dark glasses?” I think that’s a yes to all of them. His eyes are the cerise-pink color of pain, and every time he blinks I can tell that his eyelids are grating over his pupils like coarse-grade sandpaper. His nose is running and he is sniffing tiredly.
“Give me a minute,” Christian says hoarsely. “I’ll be fine.”
“You must have done a lot of cheering.”
Christian sinks lower toward the table. “Yeah.”
Elliott comes into the kitchen and leans up against Christian’s chair. “Are we going to do skateboarding?”
“In a minute.” Christian is looking less than convincing. I turn away to hide my smile.
“Anything to eat? Eggs and bacon?”
Christian gives an involuntary shudder. “No. No bacon.”
“Just eggs?”
“No. No eggs.”
“A minute’s gone,” says Elliott.
I think Christian is beginning to realize that having a hangover does not preclude you from parental duties. A child who wants to be entertained cares little for any fragility in your constitution. I bet he wishes that he’d stayed at home in his cozy bed rather than rushing round here first thing this morning.
If Christian spent most of last night drinking, I lay awake most of the night worrying. Don’t ask me what about. Everything is the short answer. The universe was bombarding me with worry vibes. I even got to wondering why I’d failed my maths “O” level, and that was about a hundred years ago and hasn’t made the slightest difference to anything at all, nothing whatsoever, since. I tied myself in several knots over a scarf I have that belonged to my grandmother that’s been kicking around since the 1950s which now has a nice hole fraying in one corner—not surprisingly. It was about three o’clock when I decided I ought to ask Jemma’s advice on stopping the steady erosion of the fragile material. It’s the sort of thing she would know about. She acts like she’s the world expert on everything anyway. And then I worried why I hadn’t thought of doing that earlier. See? I think I was avoiding worrying about the big issues really, like how are my children coping now that we are a dysfunctional family and how I’m going to pay my bills now that Kath Brown has bulleted me. I nearly, nearly rang Christian, but you know how it is. I didn’t want to wake him up and then have him lying awake worrying that I was worrying.
“I’ll come and watch you practice what I taught you yesterday, and then, when I’m feeling a bit better—” Christian looks remorsefully at me “—I’ll show you some more. Go and put your knee-pads on.” Personally, I’d be happier if my child was wearing full body armor. Elliott, placated momentarily, heads for the door.
“How much time did that buy me?” Christian asks.
“With Elliott, not much. He’s far too astute to allow a mere adult to blackmail him.” I am quietly pleased at how quickly my lover is learning to manipulate his way round the minefield of child care.
“I’d better go out then.” Christian pushes away from the table rather unsteadily.
As he passes me, head hung low, I touch his arm. “I missed you last night,” I say.
“I missed you too.” And he looks so hang-dog that it makes me smile again. “I love you, Ali,” he says, his misery turning to seriousness. “You do know that?”
“Yes.” I nod reassuringly, but my heart starts to pound. Though at times, I do wonder why, I want to add. This can’t be an easy situation for my young, beautiful boy. He takes my hands and puts them to his lips. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked and I bet his breath smells like a brewery.
“I’m sorry I got drunk.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “You’re entitled to some fun. You’re young. And foolish.”
“I am,” he says, and follows Elliott out into the sunshine. And I stand at the kitchen sink and wonder why I feel like crying. I start to prepare some food on autopilot, moving around my kitchen with a familiarity that belies the fact I haven’t been a permanent resident for quite some time.
I can hear Elliott giggling, the carefree laughter of childhood, and I feel awful that in our cruel adult way we are compromising him, blighting his memories, marring the days that should be all sunshine and roses. It gives me a quiet surge of warmth to know that something as simple as a skateboard can provide temporary relief from his worries. Will I ever find the right time or the right words to tell him that we, Ed and I, never meant any of this to happen? It wasn’t in our plan. Yet, all over the country fathers, and sometimes mothers too, are leaving their children. The divorce rate is so high now that I wonder it’s not possible to see them streaming away in droves from their suburban houses in their Ford Mondeos—a mass exodus of confused, bewildered, displaced adults. What are the statistics now? One in three? Every minute someone is born and every minute someone dies, and in the blink-of-an-eye gap in between, someone leaves their family to the clutches of the legal system. I wonder how many of these leavings are premeditated, planned over months, years, of unhappiness and deadness? Men frustrated with their lives, their work, their softening stomachs, their receding hairlines. Women who, tired of years of picking up socks, decide to find themselves before it is too late and they are lost completely in a world of detergent adverts. And maybe for some of them it isn’t like that. How many of them consider themselves happily married and then, through a series of silly and unfortunate events, find themselves outside that marriage, adrift on a raft of accusation and recriminations?
I call the boys in for lunch, and amid the vast issues of the breakdown of family life, still find the time to admonish myself for being a lousy cook.
We have finished lunch, such as it was. All that Ed has in the freezer is pizza, and I feel like offering to do a big shop at Tesco’s for him to stock up, but I’m not sure how he’d take it.
Christian is struggling to force down some pizza, but I can tell his heart and his stomach aren’t in it. But then, the pizza does vaguely resemble roadkill. He’s looking a lot perkier though, and some blood has returned to his face. Elliott’s has no blood, anywhere. And I’m truly grateful. His skateboarding lesson has again passed without incident which I feel is something of an achievement for an activity that is so potentially lethal. Elliott has decided that Christian is totally cool and they are happily bonding.
I prized Thomas away from Harry Potter to join us. I worry that Thomas is becoming quieter—along with everything else. Tanya has also graced us with her presence. She is wearing too much makeup and too little clothing. My daughter is treating Christian with an air of studied indifference that screams she also thinks he is totally cool.
“I want to pop round to Aunty Jemma’s,” I say. “Anyone want to come?” My children stare blankly at me. “Don’t all shout at once.”
“I want to stay here with Christian,” Elliott announces.
“Me too,” Thomas says, which is a bit surprising.
“Tanya?”
She shrugs.
“Is that a yes shrug or a no shrug?”
She shrugs again, but more emphatically.
“Shall I go on my own?”
“Yes,” Elliott says, peeling a mushroom from the abandoned remains of his pizza crust and licking it. “We’ll take care of Christian.”
“Oh good.” I look at Christian, who seems unconcerned about being abandoned in the depths of my family. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yes,” he says, and I wonder if he’s still a bit drunk.
“I won’t be long. I just want to borrow some bikinis and bits for the holiday.” I want to ask her about mending Grandma’s scarf too, but don’t dare confess this anxiety in public. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
They all stare at me as if I’m mad. “Well, I’ll go then,” I say hesitantly. “There’s ice cream if anyone wants it.”
“Fine.” Christian gives me a wan smile over his plate littered with pepperoni debris. “I’ll sort it out.” And my children look at him as if they have no doubt that he can.
I shoot over to Jemma’s, all in a flap and a panic. And when I get there, she’s not really in the mood to talk. She’s all grunty and distant, but obviously doesn’t want to tell me why. I keep looking at my watch, and that irritates her a bit more.
“I never see you these days, Alicia,” she moans.
“Come back with me now,” I say. “I don’t want to leave Christian alone with the children for too long.”
“Why? Do you think they’ll scare him off?”
The thought had crossed my mind. “He isn’t used to them.”
“Well, he’s going to have to bloody well get used to them, isn’t he?”
Clearly, my sister has not put a shilling in her sympathy meter today.
I give up trying to verbalize my anxiety and trail after her into her immaculate designer boudoir with her light oak wardrobes and her snow-white linen and her church candles that are never, ever burned. Jemma’s picked out some of her poshest bikinis for me, which is very thoughtful of her, but how I’m ever going to get my bum in them I’ll never know. I don’t feel like exposing the full glory of my bare bottom to her ridicule, and so I stuff them in my bag with mumbled thanks and think that I’ll try to rush into Marks & Spencer this week and spend some more money I haven’t got on a bikini that’s designed to hold a sagging posterior. They might even do one with a built-in secret tummy-control panel and my tummy could do with all the secret control it can get. I am torn between not wanting to look like mutton dressed as lamb and not being mistaken for Christian’s mum. A bikini feels like a fairly big danger zone.
“Will you look after the shop if I decide to go on holiday?” she says. “Seeing as you haven’t got a job now.”
Thanks for reminding me, Jemma. “Yes. Of course I will.”
“Good.”
“When are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you thinking of?”
“What’s this, Alicia?” she snaps. “The Spanish Inquisition?”
So, he’s married and they’re waiting to see when they can get rid of his wife. What’s new? I make my excuses and prepare to leave, and my sister takes our grandmother’s scarf as if it is an old dishrag and says she’ll look at it, but I suspect it won’t be this millennium.
I rush out as slowly as I can, promising to send Jem a postcard, but I expect I will exact a minor spite and won’t. But then I’ll probably buy her something nice when I get back to make up for it.
I fly back across London, careless of the lurking speed cameras, and can feel myself race into the gravel drive, so sit and make myself count to ten when I pull up in the drive. The gravel always heralds an entrance, but no one comes to greet me. Not even Elliott.
When I have served my patience penance, I find the kitchen is deserted, apart from the dirty pizza plates, and the ice cream is out on the table, melting. And when I go into the lounge I find out why.
Christian is fast asleep, stretched out on the sofa. Elliott is wedged along the length of his body, sucking contentedly on his thumb. Thomas is flat out on the rug in front of the fire, head resting on a cushion. And Tanya is flaked out in the armchair, showing an alarming amount of leg. I have never seen my children in this soporific state on a Sunday afternoon. Normally they are bounding around with energy like a pack of caged tigers. Some tired old film, possibly the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair, is playing away to itself on the television with the sound off. I tiptoe into the room, and they are blissfully, peacefully unaware of my presence. My heart lurches, and I’m not sure if it’s for the family I have lost or for the one that I have just found.