Maddy Wolfe wipes the corners of her mouth with the paper napkin, then screws it up and puts it on her empty plate. The starched linen napkins, Murano crystal glasses and Denby bone china plates are all in the dining room on the Christmas table she’s so carefully dressed for her Instagram posts. Trent was surprised when they didn’t eat lunch in there, but she told him that it wasn’t worth getting everything dirty when it was just the two of them, so they’ve eaten in the snug with the kitchen crockery. She regrets it now. Maybe if they’d eaten a proper Christmas meal they’d have had more to chat about, but, without Jamie, or any relatives to fill the table, the whole festive thing feels like a hollow charade.
She’s not going to tell her followers that, though. No, it’s important to keep up the illusion on her @made_home channels. The carefully curated photos of the Christmas grotto in the garden and her beautifully decorated table took weeks of planning, but her feeds look gorgeous – even if she says so herself. If Manpreet, the expensive media consultant, is right, she’ll soon have enough followers to make the sponsorship deals roll in. That’s the plan anyway. But, God, it’s knackering keeping up with the pressure of it all.
‘Thank you,’ Trent says, as she picks up his empty plate, but he doesn’t meet her eye. He drains the bottle of Malbec into his glass. His cheeks are starting to match the colour of his burgundy golf jumper. His boyish brown curly hair has always been one of his best and most defining features, but he’s going grey around his temples and it’s thinning on top. ‘That was very nice.’
Nice. The word is loaded with disapproval.
‘Yes, well, a turkey crown is less wasteful. And we’ve got some for sandwiches later on,’ she says defensively, trying to justify their unremarkable Christmas lunch. She notices, with distaste, that he’s picking at some food stuck in his gum line with one of the cocktail sticks from the pigs in blankets.
Is this what they’ve become? she wonders, as she takes the plates to the kitchen: reduced to conversations about future meals and sandwiches? She hears the echoes of Christmases past, the ones full of relatives, the laughter, her brother’s kids and Jamie careening around on new bikes or trikes, the din of new voice-activated toys, George Michael playing in the kitchen, as she and Trent juggled serving up Christmas lunch, whilst getting sloshed. But now, it’s like they’ve turned into her parents.
Things will get back to normal once Trent’s property development business is back on track and the deals start rolling in rather than evaporating into thin air, she tells herself. Who hasn’t had a difficult year? In the general scheme of things, however, she has an enviable roof over her head, designer clothes on her back, embarrassingly expensive highlights in her glossy blonde hair. Really and truly, she doesn’t have very much to complain about.
What she needs is to put her feet up on the sofa, with a large gin, she decides. In days gone-by, Trent would have already been on it, making sure she had a drink. She knows he’d pour her one if she asked, but the fact she has to ask spoils it. Like everything else, it’s best to do it herself.
She opens the kitchen cupboard, annoyed to see that the Sipsmith gin bottle is almost empty. She’s noticed it more now that she’s not drinking so much, but Trent has been hoovering up the booze for most of December. Pre-loading, he says, before the promise of a dry January. She waggles the bottle, holding it up to the light, but she’s going to need more gin than that to relax properly. She walks out into the utility corridor to get another bottle from her huge walk-in larder by the back door.
A tiny flashing red light next to the rarely used home phone catches her eye. That’s odd. Someone has left a message. She quickly scans through the possibilities as to the caller’s identity, but she’s spoken to everyone. Her parents are having lunch in their gazebo with their neighbours in Shropshire, her brothers are all with their families.
How has she missed a call on the home phone? Or Trent, for that matter? He’s been here all day.
She picks up the phone and presses the message button. She doesn’t dare to wish it, but who else would call on Christmas Day?
Apart from him?
Apart from Jamie …
‘Mum,’ she hears, and she lets out a yelp. It is Jamie. Her eyes fill with tears as she waits, listening to him breathing, but he doesn’t say anything else. The silence seems to stretch with all the words he can’t say. She knows what Trent would want them to be: that Jamie’s sorry, that he regrets their terrible row, that he’s stopped taking drugs and has pulled himself together.
But Maddy can’t help hearing other words in the silence: That he’s in trouble; that he needs her; that it’s Christmas and he’s homesick and weary; that he doesn’t know how to come back to her.
The message ends. There’s a click.
‘No, no, no,’ Maddy panics, playing the message over, before realising that in doing so, she accidentally deletes it. ‘Fuck!’
Hands shaking, she presses the callback button, hearing the ring tone drone on and on. She grabs a biro from the pot on the counter, but it doesn’t work. She yanks open the drawer and grabs a freezer-bag marker and turns over an envelope to write on the back. She does a callback again, making a note of the unfamiliar landline number, then rings directory enquiries. It takes a while to get through, but when she finally speaks to an operator, they tell her that the number belongs to a phone box in Brighton.
Brighton? What’s Jamie doing down in Brighton? She calls again, but the number rings and rings. She imagines the empty phone box, seagulls flying overhead, discarded chip packets blowing in the wind.
‘Fuck!’ she exclaims, smashing the phone back on its casing. She can’t bear it. She’s missed him. He’s not there.
Her mind races with questions as she scrambles to latch on to the fact that she finally has a location for their son. It’s like water in a desert.
Jamie left in February, just before the first lockdown, and she’s had all year to worry herself sick about where he’s gone and what he’s doing. Much as she’s tried to tell herself that he’s a grown-up and must make his own way, his absence sometimes feels all-consuming. Today, like every other day, Jamie was her first guilty thought upon waking.
With so much time to reflect, she can’t help feeling that she’s let him down. She should have backed him up, but Trent had insisted that they present a united front. And, at the time, she’d agreed. But that plan had backfired spectacularly and, in the row that had ensued, some horrible things had been said that no one can take back.
She’d reported Jamie as a missing person twenty-four hours after he’d stormed out, but she got the impression from the police that they had better things to deal with than a middle-class, middle-aged woman fretting over her adult son leaving after a row. She’d been frantic with worry, but it had been an agonising five days before Jamie had called to tell them that he wasn’t missing, but simply gone. She’d thought he might have mellowed, or been ready to forgive – or, even better, contrite and apologetic. But, if anything, he’d only become harder. In a steely voice, he’d informed her that he had no interest in being part of their family any longer. His words, etched for so long on her memory as justification for her letting him go, now make her feel ashamed and unworthy.
She thought Jamie had just been licking his wounds and that he’d come round and come home. How wrong she’d been. About that … about everything.
Mum. The word clangs like a gong in her head. What kind of terrible mother is she? He’s finally reached out … and she wasn’t there for him. Maybe he’s feeling sentimental. Jamie always loved Christmas when he was little. But then, as an only child, who could blame him? He was always spoilt rotten. She longs to tell him she’s bought a tin of Quality Street and is saving him the green triangles. She aches to remind him that they were once a loving family.
She runs back into the kitchen and sees Trent’s black iPhone on the counter next to another bottle of wine that he’s clearly just opened. She hears the downstairs loo flush.
Jamie hasn’t called her mobile and whilst she knows it’s ridiculous to think that he might have called Trent, if he was really in trouble, maybe, just maybe, he has.
She picks up the phone. To her surprise, it’s unlocked. Trent’s practically surgically attached to it twenty-four-seven, so it feels weird holding this familiar yet forbidden gadget in her hands. She looks at the unfamiliar apps and the odd layout of his screen. Seeing a number against the message icon, she automatically presses it. Please let it be Jamie. Please… please.
But there’s no text from Jamie, just a long list of texts from Helen. Her friend Helen. Helen Bradbury. Maddy recognises the tiny picture of her face, with her long chestnut brown hair.
A kind of sixth sense kicks in as she clicks on the top text, Jamie and his call momentarily forgotten.
On the screen, there’s a picture of Helen sitting in a chair taking an intimate selfie, one that’s so explicit it makes Maddy recoil and drop the phone.
Saliva floods her mouth as she steels herself and picks up Trent’s phone from where it’s spinning on the counter and looks at the picture again, noticing it has a banner over it flashing on the screen. Christmas Surprise WAITING FOR YOU. Miss you, Babes. There’s an animated stream of kisses and heart emojis.
Her skin is pricking all over. It’s a heady mixture of shock and a kind of recognition. Because now it makes sense. Her and Trent and the distance between them.
It’s not because of the stress of work … or Covid … or Jamie …
It’s because he’s been having an affair. With Helen fucking Bradbury.
Holding the phone gingerly, as if the photo of Helen’s minge might bite, she opens the call list. Dozens of calls. All from Helen. It’s all the proof she needs.
As if propelled by some other force, she calmly replaces the phone face down and then walks over to where the dirty lunch plates are still by the sink. She opens the dishwasher and starts stacking the plates from the side. It’s only when she hears Trent arriving in the kitchen that she realises that she hasn’t rinsed them with the snazzy hose in the sink.
She pauses, seeing him walk to the bottle of wine, as if everything is completely normal, and she feels a shaft of rage so violent that, before she knows what she’s doing, she frisbees the plate across the kitchen with a feral yell. Trent sees it in the nick of time and ducks as it smashes against the doorframe by his head and clatters to the floor in large chunks.
‘Maddy! What the fuck?’ he shouts.
She pauses only long enough to see that a splatter of turkey gravy has speckled the white stone tiles and blonde-wood kitchen units in a rather stylish arc, before she plucks another plate and chucks it in his direction.
It’s like she’s having an out-of-body experience and can see herself from the Bang and Olufsen speaker in the top corner like a wide-eyed spectator on Gogglebox. She’s really bloody doing it. She’s actually snapped.
‘You shit. I hate you,’ Maddy screams. The release of these words feels majestic. Her rage feels all-consuming – like she’s plugged into an electricity socket.
‘Jesus! Stop it! Calm down.’ Trent inches forward, tentatively patting the air.
Maddy stares at him, seeing him for what he is – a red-faced adulterous stranger. She storms towards him and picks up his phone from the counter. She presses it so violently against his chest he falls backwards.
She swoops down and re-joins her corporal self as she plucks the car keys from the reclaimed console table in the hall and swings her tote onto her shoulder. Slamming the wood and glass front door as hard as she possibly can, she notes that the wreath that she made by hand, which got over a thousand likes on her feed, has sprung off the door in solidarity and tumbled to the floor. She stalks out to the Porsche Cayenne on the gravel drive, opens the door and gets in, only realising then that she’s still in her Ugg slippers. It’s no matter. Her gym kit is in the boot.
Trent is on the front doorstep shouting, but she doesn’t wind down the window as he kicks the wreath. A string of lights – one of the twenty that Maddy put up single-handedly – falls and he battles with it like Indiana Jones being attacked by a snake. She beeps the electric gates and drives out of the driveway.
The white-hot anger still radiates from her.
She turns out of the lane and heads south. She’s going to find her son.