Chapter Four
Dumping Shoes is Grounds for Divorce, You Know

TWO DAYS BEFORE OUR house completion, knowing that Happy Go Lucky had been on the market for some time, we put in a ridiculously low offer. Geoff lived in the hope that the offer would be accepted and I half hoped that it would be turned down. However, as moving day was rushing toward us, there wasn’t really that much time to gripe about it.

As the packing ploughed on we had a few minor tiffs, especially the day that Amelia, who was still emphatically against the idea of moving with us, actually put a plan into motion for once in her life, packed her own stuff up and moved into her boyfriend’s parents’ house. I wasn’t happy with the idea and had been expecting her to change her mind but, as she had so firmly stated, she was 18 and there was nothing I could do.

Luckily, Huw is lovely; 6' 4" and built like an overly hirsute piece of string, he actually took the time to come and try to allay all my fears and worries, which was very mature for an 18-year-old. It didn’t help at all but I appreciated the gesture.

We had met his parents who, strangely, seemed to be so convinced that they were taking on ‘a lovely girl, so helpful and polite’ that I came away from the meeting wondering if Amelia had paid a stand-in to cover for her as we seemed to be discussing a different teenager.

From the very start of the dreaded boxing-up exercise, Geoff had maintained that this was an excellent opportunity to do a major ‘life laundry’ and had blithely thrown away anything either he hadn’t used for a year or that he hadn’t seen me using. In the early days of packing I was more likely to be seen dragging things out of the skip than actually putting them in.

Things finally came to a head when he tried squeezing past me in our small hall with two very lumpy black bags.

‘What’s in there?’ I asked, failing to inform him that I had noticed a couple of stiletto heels sticking out through the plastic. Geoff’s eyes slid sideways and he took a step backward, ineffectively trying to push the bags behind him.

‘Just some last bits and pieces I found under the spare room bed,’ he muttered. Picking up the bags he tried to slide past me again.

‘Oh, no you don’t,’ I shrieked, ‘those are my shoes!’ I lunged toward him and grabbed one of the bags. Not only was it full of shoes, but boots and bags as well!

That was the final straw; I was tired, dirty and miserable. I had the choice of living with my mother-in-law, or on a floating coffin that smelled like we would be sharing it with the resident carelessly interred corpse, and as far as I was concerned that was no choice at all. Now this useless, hairy lump was going to throw my Jimmy Choos in the skip.

It was all his fault we were in this state, and it was his stupid idea that we go and live with his mum or on a boat (reality wasn’t playing a huge part in my life at this point), Sam couldn’t swim, so he was going to fall off the boat and drown about two minutes after we cast off and even if he didn’t die he was going to be so emotionally scarred by all this that he would probably end up with his own counsellor at ChildLine.

Geoff took one look at this wild-eyed and maniacally angry woman lunging toward him and decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valour. He dropped the bags and fled.

A couple of minutes later, he called gently up the stairs, his voice following the trail of scuffmarks that I had made in the paintwork as I had stamped past, swearing and dragging two bags with sharp heels sticking out, acting the part of expensive grappling hooks.

‘Are you OK?’

I stuck my head out through the bedroom doorway. ‘No I’m bloody well not, just leave me alone,’ I shouted down at him and, turning, stamped back into the bedroom, the angry slam from the door echoing around the bare room.

I leant against the door and stared at the dents and impressions in the carpet; it was as though my beautiful furniture was still there, just invisible, and for a moment I could forget that it was either sold, given away or just dumped.

Sighing, I emptied the shoes out of the bags and watched them bounce across the floor. I spent the next five minutes arranging the 30 plus shoes and boots into their pairs and placing them around the wall of the bedroom. Staring at them I sat on the carpet in the middle of my invisible bed and promptly burst into tears.

I must have cried solidly for a good ten minutes and then, finally getting angry with my pathetic self for being so upset over a couple of pounds of shaped leather, I stood up and walked around the room, picking up each shoe in turn and throwing it with as much force as I could muster against the opposite wall.

It’s strange; you can only cry and wail for so long before your conscience starts to metaphorically tap you on the shoulder and every single time, the voice it uses sounds just like your best friend – at least mine does.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ it scolded. ‘Either you stop now or you’re going to end up with a nice jacket to match those shoes, one of those popular styles with the arms that tie behind you. You started this, shit happens – either sort yourself out or be miserable, your choice.’

Helen, a no-nonsense paramedic, has been my best friend for about 15 years and throughout that time I have always relied on her to give me a major verbal slapping when necessary. It has happened so many times in the past that she can now accomplish a good dressing down even when she isn’t actually there – not a bad trick.

Geoff had given me the mandatory half an hour to calm down and had finally worked up the courage to brave the shoe- and furniture-deprived psycho wailing banshee-like in the bedroom. He stepped through the battered door carrying two cups of tea and a large bar of chocolate.

Looking around, he took in the shoes scattered around the room and the dents in the paintwork. (I suppose I should apologise profusely to the new owners but, in view of the price they got the house for, I’m not going to. So there!) He put the tea and the chocolate down and then started to gather up the shoes. He handed them to me, one at a time and I quietly placed them back in the bin bags. There was one pair, a beautiful pair of black leather boots, well worn and well loved, that I had real trouble putting in the bag. I stood there, hugging them for a couple of seconds until Geoff came over and gently took them from me. I assumed he was going to throw them into the bin bag but instead he left the room with my boots tucked under his arm. A couple of minutes later he returned, carrying a suitcase. Unzipping it, he placed the boots reverently on the top, and making sure they wouldn’t be crushed, he zipped it back up and turned to me with an enquiring look on his face.

For some reason, this struck me as really sweet and started the tears again. I was blotchy and sniffly but managed to give him a weak grin. Through all this, he hadn’t said a word. Handing me my tea, he unwrapped the chocolate, broke off a large piece and, leaning down, held my nose until I opened my mouth which gave him somewhere to stuff it. Standing up again he picked up the bin bags and put them outside the door where I couldn’t see them. When he returned to sit down beside me, he stole half of my remaining chocolate to go with his tea.

We sat there chatting about nothing; I knew it was just an excuse to give me time to completely calm down. When he judged that normality had returned, he handed me the last piece of chocolate and very quietly stated that he had just got off the phone to the marina, our offer had been accepted on the boat, but that if we went ahead the present owner wanted no comebacks.

‘What does that mean? “no comebacks”,’ I asked.

‘It means that if the survey is poor or if there are any issues that arise from the survey, we can’t ask him to drop the price any further, although we can still pull out of the sale altogether,’ Geoff explained.

‘Oh.’ I stared into the last inch of my tea and tried to think about what all this meant on a grander scale, but being completely exhausted from my crying and shoe-slinging marathon, I found it really hard to make head or tail of the whole situation.

‘So what do you want to do?’ I turned to face him. ‘If the survey’s bad, at least we can pull out.’

Geoff shook his head ‘Your call,’ he grinned, ‘what do you want to do?’

I stared at the dents in the wall and ran my finger around one in the carpet. This was, I realised, a very last opportunity to get out of this. I knew it and Geoff knew it.

Stealing his hanky, I blew my nose hard and drained the last of my tea.

‘Call the surveyor,’ I reached down and, grasping his hand, completely failed to pull Geoff to his feet. ‘Tell him we need a quick appointment, the less time I have to stay with your mum the better.’

Twenty-four hours and two crying bouts later, we had managed to pack a desirable four-bedroom detached house (with large garage and a range of outhouses) into one transit van and the boot of my car.

Actually, we had managed to pack the absolute essentials into one transit van and the boot of my car. Everything else was either squashed into storage, cluttering up my father’s factory or peering at us mournfully from the top of a very, very overloaded skip. We had also, over the last two months, become very intimate with eBay and a lot of friends had picked up some great, if slightly embarrassing, bargains.

I deliberately didn’t hang around to say goodbye to the house. A four-hour drive to my mother-in-law’s in Cumbria with a tired, stressed child and an ancient, smelly, narcoleptic dog with a weak bladder was going to be difficult enough without the added trauma of another bout of tears, and anyway, I’d had enough of crying. What was done was done. There was no going back now.