CHAPTER TEN

All I know is that it happened in October. The leaves were just starting to change colour and at school, I had started to wear tights. That’s all I remember. There were no fights, no dramatic exits, no letters, no taxis leaving like in a soap opera where people cried and looked out of rear windows. It was one day she was there and the next day she wasn’t. Looking back now, it was as much of a shock to Dad as it was to us, so much so that he didn’t actually tell us what had happened and spent a week fobbing us off with excuses about hair appointments, bingo, and sick aunts in Suffolk. Being kids, we just took it all in. As long as the television worked and the spaghetti hoops were on the table, it didn’t faze us.

Then one day Ben noticed something. A duck on the mantelpiece, gone. He panicked. Mum loved that duck. Something had obviously happened. He turned and told Adam he was going to tell on him. He must have broken it. Adam shrugged his shoulders. He ran in to the kitchen to tell Dad. Dad was heating up something. Soup. Leek and potato soup. I followed Ben into the kitchen. Where’s the duck, Dad? He didn’t answer. Mum loves that duck, she’s going to go mental. Then he broke. Soup fell to the floor, looking a little too much like vomit. A ladle clattered against the tiles. He backed onto the cooker and tears fell down his chin. I don’t know, mate. I just don’t know. I felt Adam’s presence behind me. I remember running up the stairs and looking in her wardrobe, hearing empty hangers swing back and forth. That’s all I remember. An argument about a duck and soup on a kitchen floor. That’s all. She had just gone.

After that, to bring up the issue again with Dad felt a little raw and untactful and could have brought about more tears and his leaving, which was something we never wanted. So we never dug for any information nor talked to him about her again. We all had our suspicions: new loves, mental breakdowns, Ben’s dramatic take that she was wanted for being a drugs mule. But her abandonment and reluctance to try and find us or stay in touch, while it lingered, never consumed us; we avoided the issue, swept it under the subconscious, thinking one day it might re-emerge. One day. We just didn’t know when.

So it turns out to be today, in the early hours of Sunday morning while I’m sitting at the kitchen table sobbing my heart out in my sheep print pyjamas. I sip at lukewarm tea and study her face: still the same. Whereas Dad has lost most of his hair (he blames us) and lines are etched onto his face like old leather, she hasn’t aged one bit – her hair is still a mousey, shoulder-length bob, the lipstick still dark and plum. The clothes have been overhauled into a white shirt and jeans, not the eighties leggings I remembered with baggy tunic dresses, no Alice bands. But the headline. I’M NOT ALLOWED NEAR MY OWN GRANDKIDS. I read on, literally foaming at the mouth with tears.

‘When did you leave Jools, her brothers and your husband?’

“It was back in 1995. Juliet would have been ten. Adam was seven, and Benny was five.”

‘And was the split amicable? What happened?’

“I left because I fell in love with someone else. He was someone my husband worked with. When he found out, he went ballistic. He told me I had to leave. I wanted to anyway, but he said he was going to keep the kids and if I tried to take them, then he’d kill me.”

‘Really? Why didn’t you report this to the police? Go through the right channels to try and claim your kids?’

“Because I loved the kids and didn’t want to put them through that. After that, he told me the kids didn’t want anything to do with me and to keep away. So I did. I tried to get in touch when I heard Juliet was pregnant for the first time as I thought that’s when a daughter should have their mother around. I sent cards and gifts but I guess they never got to her. Until this day I still haven’t met my grandchildren, it breaks my heart.”

The article is complimented with pictures of my mum looking painfully into the air, trees in the background as she strokes pictures of us. Johnno doesn’t seem to want to let her words speak for themselves though, and has a final dig about someone who’d renounce their own mother and let a poor old woman not have ties with her family. I wipe the tears from my cheeks as the kitchen lights turn on and Matt put his arms around me from behind.

‘How bad is it?’

‘Shit, Matt. I don’t even know if it’s true or not. Why is she doing this?’

His arms squeeze tighter as I hear footsteps behind him. I wipe my face to think it might be the kids.

‘I found these two at the front door.’

It’s Adam and Ben. Ben with briny tracks down his cheeks, Adam all pale and withdrawn. Matt puts the kettle on and gets the leftovers of my brownies out of the fridge as we all sit there in the early hours of the morning, this routine becoming a little too familiar.

‘This is my fault.’

Dad shakes his head as Adam and Ben sit around the table, grey and staring into space. I have my suspicions that Adam may be drunk. Dad is quiet, wistful; Ben is teary, silent; whereas I am hyper-emoting, more on an asthmatic, foaming snot level. The littlest brother comes over to embrace me.

‘If I hadn’t done that Guardian interview and just let things lie, this would never have come to light.’

Nobody answers, everyone probably exhausted from this having materialised so quickly in the space of twenty-four hours. One minute, we’re motherless and quite content to be so, the next there’s hours of phone calls, tears, and conjecture. She’s back. Adam picks up the newspaper and stares at it with a good dose of venom.

‘Must be the money. Not that I expected differently.’

Ben shakes his head.

‘Maybe they twisted her words. Like they did with Jools.’

A possibility. But Adam’s not buying it. Neither am I. Dad doesn’t respond. I just stand there staring at her picture, willing it to talk or move so I can slap it. I’m wondering how she thought this scenario would pan out? Oh, I haven’t spoken to my kids in twenty years, here’s an idea, I’ll do it through the national press. And while I’m at it, I’ll spout a whole load of bullshit too. Why? Whywhywhywhwhy? The question fills my guts with such incandescent rage I want to run through the street, release some sort of primal scream from deep within my being, and wave my fists at the sky. I keep looking at Dad, who just stares into space, like he knew this day would come but still has little to no answers about how to approach it. Adam looks enraged, verging on demonic with disdain, Ben is paler, like he might just want to go lie down in a darkened room.

‘It sounds like she wants … you know …’ says Ben, tentatively.

Adam and I look at him curiously.

‘… to get back in touch.’

I see Adam’s palms roll into fists. I shake my head at Ben. Never. She burned those bridges many years ago – burnt them to the ground, down to the river below taking the cinders far, far away. I feel the emotion swell inside my torso and stand up. Must do something else. I bend down in the kitchen to keep an eye on my chicken. Matt has taken the kids to Donna’s party and given us some space to talk. Thinking it might help, I’ve decided to roast a chicken, like in some way being domestic and doing Sunday things might lift me out of this weird emotional plateau.

‘Are you doing roasties?’ asks Adam.

I was. But I over-boiled the potatoes so they’re becoming mash. I take out my chicken and he sits there, a little burnished, a little fragrant, a little like he’s wearing wet tights. Everyone is still strangely quiet, the room just fizzes with a million and one things that need to be said. I don’t know what to say any more so I just take my chicken out of the roasting pan and sit him on the chopping board. Then I hack away at the poor bugger like it’s done me some great injustice, flesh flaking onto the counter, gravy seeping into my drawers.

‘Shouldn’t you leave that to …’

Dad stands up to quiet Adam. I really go for it, stabbing at it until all that’s left is a carcass with its legs askew like it’s mid-yoga pose. Until Dad realises the knife needs to come out of my hands. He comes over and pats me on the back.

‘That’s a big bird. Leftovers will be good for sarnies.’

I stare at him as his eyes remain fixed on the chicken. You need to talk. You’re not allowed to be practical Dad right now. Someone has opened up these massive floodgates into an event which will always hold epic importance to us. It’s not time to talk about sandwiches.

‘Tell us what happened.’

Adam and Ben shake their heads with worry. Dad just looks at me and knows. He sits down and scratches at his corduroy-clad thighs.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Who was Brian?’ I ask.

‘Bloke from the school. Taught geography. I didn’t know him that well but your mother did. All I remember is that he had a beard like David Bellamy.’

He rubs his chin at this point, wondering if his lack of facial hair meant their relationship was doomed from the beginning.

‘And they fell in love. She told me one day, she told me she wanted to be with him but he didn’t want to be father to another bloke’s kids. So that was that.’

We all sit there quietly as he says it. Like that’s the end of the story. But he tells us she did get in touch with Dad every so often (every year if she remembered our birthdays) and Dad would not have a lot to say to her bar the fact we were all right. She’d blether on about her new life with Brian as a lead in to find out if Dad had ever replaced her like she may have hoped, but Dad always replied no, even when he dated that woman he’d met on the internet who was nice enough but somewhat obsessed with all things crochet. Dad said that the one thing that was true was that she did send a card when Hannah was born. It had a pink teddy on the front and Mum wrote inside how happy she was to be a grandmother. Dad didn’t know if that was meant sarcastically so he kept it from me. I had a lot to deal with in any case. I wasn’t sure if I minded. We all believed Dad, of course, there’s no reason not to, and the portrait she and Johnno Elswood had painted of Dad being a “push a woman up against a wall by her throat and fighting tooth and nail over his kids” kind of man was as far off a comparison as we could think for the old fella. As he tells us everything, all I can think is that Mum maybe did this as some deluded attempt at getting our attention and coming back into our lives. Yep, way to go, Mum. Talk down the man who’s single-handedly raised us for the last twenty-odd years. That’ll work.

‘I should have told you this sooner. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.’

Ben cries a lot at this point. Adam shakes his head like he’s going to uproot things and tear at bits of paper with his teeth. I’m pissed off at his need to apologise.

‘Dad, you have nothing to be sorry about. We only wanted to hear things when you were ready to tell us.’

The boys nod their heads and look over at him as he looks at her picture on the table.

‘She still looks the same though, eh?’

I watch his expression, wondering when and if he ever shed any tears for her. He never did in front of us, I’m not sure if we ever gave him the time, but I think about lonely nights in bed when he would have thought about why and how things had come to be as they were. It makes me twist my lips around each other and go over to the carving board again to hack at the chicken while apologising at it profusely. That poor bloody chicken.

My chicken hacking is soon interrupted by the phone and Dad again, who is a little scared for my chopping board and the fact I’ve managed to spray gravy all over the ceiling. I grab at the phone.

‘Jools? Luella here.’

The need to rant still simmering in me, I don’t think she’ll mind being a soundboard for all my woes.

‘Hon, how’s it going?’

Her tone is matter of fact. She’s been a little furtive since yesterday, reticent because she couldn’t block the publication or intervene with the paper as much as she’d have liked. She also met everyone for the first time yesterday; she liked Matt and his stripy jumper, my motley crew of children even more so. But meeting my fifty-five-year-old dad and realising he was going to be attacked most in the tabloids tomorrow really got to her, at least halving her normal rate of words per minute.

‘How are Frank and the family holding up? That was a shitty piece of journalism if ever I saw one.’

I retire to the hallway and back up against the wall.

‘We’re all right. But Luella, I’m so pissed off. This isn’t about me, that article made my dad out to be some sort of tyrant. It really isn’t fair to him.’

‘So it’s all lies, yeah? We could force them to print a retraction, come back with a counter story. It’s what I would advise.’

Yet again this idea of putting my story out there and going at it tit for tat feels useless, like I could be doing that for the rest of my life without anyone knowing the real truth.

‘I just think I want to stop. It’s really not worth it in the long run.’

I feel relieved as I say it. I look at the clock. 4.56 p.m. This would normally be the time when Antiques Roadshow would be on and you knew your weekend was coming to an end. The sky is changing colour and that Sunday gloom just sits in the air waiting for the working week. And I think about what Matt said. This isn’t us. This is where it needs to end.

‘Really?’

‘I just seriously don’t have the energy to do this. I want to kill Johnno Elswood, I really do. But I can’t sit back and let them tear into my family like this. I just can’t.’

She pauses for a moment as I inhale deeply. I’ve made my decision. No more spotlight.

‘It’s just, love, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this but I’ve been doing some digging. Turns out they found your mother through a private investigator that was paid for by …’

My ears prickle for a second.

‘By who?’

‘McCoy. He’s on a mission, love. He’s using you in the worst possible way, really trying to ruin your credibility.’

I pause for a moment, clutching on to the phone, knowing not to drop it this time. If I didn’t feel anger before, I felt it now. Searing through my veins, bubbling through my nostrils like a bullock on heat, making my eyeballs fizz in their sockets. How fucking dare he.

‘Jools? You there?’

‘Yeah. If he wants war, I’ll give him a war. Let’s take this bastard down. Call me tomorrow.’

And with that I hang up, a little abruptly. But there is something I need to do. I burst into the kitchen, stride over to a cupboard retrieving the Tommy McCoy cookbook I have in my possession, and throw it in the sink, before grabbing a box of matches and setting them alight. Ben has his hands over his mouth, Adam runs around the kitchen realising he can’t get to the sink to get water. The book goes up pretty quickly. Of course, as I stand there in my temporary fit of insanity, staring at his pretty face go up in flames, it’s Dad who knows what to do. He backs away casually from my semi-carved chicken, before grabbing the kettle and throwing it over the mini bonfire, using the other hand to switch off the smoke alarm. He looks down at the embers.

‘You scalded the sink, love. That will need replacing.’

I just stand there as Ben reaches over to embrace me and Adam starts to laugh. If Tommy McCoy wanted war, he was messing with the wrong, if slightly demented, woman.

And now it’s evening. I’m not sure what I’ve started. I haven’t spoken to Matt about it at all, and the sink is black and looks like a cauldron, Hannah says. The pizza party at Donna’s was a success. Matt, however, said the parents who were present mainly used it as an opportunity to fire questions at him. Was it true I’m estranged from my own mother? Am I getting paid for my interviews? Is it true I slept with Tommy McCoy? In the end, he said he probably ate more pizza than he needed just to have something in his mouth which meant he didn’t have to talk.

So now I’m sitting in the kitchen doing what I do best: staring at the wall, sipping tea, and avoiding chores. I wonder if this is what my mother did days prior to her leaving. Did she just sit around, dreaming about a better life with her bearded lover while a half-eaten chicken sat on the kitchen tabletops? When she was on the edge of the loo watching us in the bath, was she just plotting the best ways to abandon us? My mother was this grey area I never really thought about too often. When I did now it was in comparison to my own adventures in motherhood, so for every time I licked a tissue to wipe my kids’ mouths down or gave them oven chips for dinner, it came with the reasoning that I could do a whole lot worse. Nothing was resolved today with Adam, Ben, and Dad. While we talked more readily about the circumstances surrounding her departure, we came to little conclusion over why she had done what she did or what we intended to do with the information. Except procrastinate and stare at the wall. Or begin a personal vendetta to take on an almighty TV chef. My last words to Luella still ring in my ears. Let’s take the bastard down. With what exactly? A half melted spatula? Fish fingers? What exactly have I started? I think about the kids again. Maybe I’m doing this for them. I stare at a half-sodden copy of Delia on the counter top. Doesn’t she have enough money that she can buy football teams? Money. We need money. This could give us money we don’t have. I hear the creak of Matt’s footsteps upstairs, hovering in the bathroom, and feel myself tearing up again. Shit. I go to the fridge to distract myself and grab instinctively at a Muller Corner and a bottle of Matt’s beer. I then open the laptop on the kitchen table, looking for distraction. Facebook. Chatrooms. Maybe they can provide sanctuary and diffuse the stress so instead of being riled by mothers and chefs, I can read what people I don’t give two hoots about think of me. Mumsnet. Wow, there’s even threads dedicated to me. I say me, but it’s mostly mothers talking about themselves and how much better they are than me. So you make your own fish fingers, good for you. I log on to Facebook. I scroll down my homepage. Nothing. Friend requests at twenty-nine. I click on the link. Don’t know you, may have gone to school with you, definitely know you. Then a chat box flickers up.

R: Jools? Hon, how are you? We def need to talk.

I have no instincts at this point. I’d even forgotten I added him as a friend all that time ago. I just stare at the computer screen, at the stamp-sized picture of one Mr Richie ‘Love rat’ Colman.

R: Jools? You there?

I haven’t even read the story he sold to the papers. With all the emotional fuss and confusion over my mum, it seemed irrelevant to even bother. We def need to talk? Intrigued, I scramble through the papers on the table and flick through to the article. In the meanwhile, I reply in the most nonchalant way I know how.

J: Hi

I finally find him, relegated to page ten and eleven. A double spread where a picture of us from college is used as the centrepiece. I gag a little to see it – mainly because my jeans seem to be halfway up to my chest but also because of how young and happy I look. He looks like he always did – kind of like Ryan Giggs with brown, curly hair that I thought at the time was luxurious and cute but in truth, made him look like a spaniel.

‘… when we finished she just found the next bloke, the first bloke who came along, and the next thing I hear, she’s pregnant. I tried to meet up with her, tried to make sure she was all right but her bloke, Matt, warned me off. He was really angry, like we had a proper fight about it; he even hit me. To be honest, from that point I was just worried about the sort of bloke she was now with …’

My eyes fizz with tears as I read on:

‘I mean, I knew when we were going out that was what she wanted, to have the family and be the mother she never had. But she did it all really young and then she got married well quickly. I knew her heart wasn’t in it. I knew she still had feelings for me …’

I freeze for a moment to process everything.

R: You must be so angry with me. Really I can explain.

My fingers hover over the keys. How dare you insult my husband like that? How dare you assume so many things about my life, about my family? But the thoughts don’t process themselves as such.

J: What do you mean Matt warned you off? You came back? You tried to meet up with me?

I press enter and see my haste there on the screen. Part of me is simply curious, thinking that Matt and Richie were always separate threads in my life never destined to meet. Had they done, the universe might have imploded. I wait for his reply and scan through the rest of the article, the photo of him now. He looks different: receding hairline, in double channels down the front, and yes, yes, yes – quite a sizeable paunch – an affliction many of our male comrades from university seemed to have fallen victim to given they seem to have survived for the past ten years on combinations of takeaways which slower metabolisms won’t forgive them for. I click on his profile. He’s working for some top-notch engineering company that his photo albums seem to suggest send him around the world. Other albums suggest nights out in exclusive London bars, a flat in Putney, and a flashy hairdresser’s sports car. He still likes the same dance music, his favourite film is still Back to the Future, and his favourite quote is from Terry Venables circa Euro ’96.

R: Do you remember that girl I was with?

J: Dawn the Biochemist.

Pause. I maybe shouldn’t have remembered her name with such speed.

R: Yep. It didn’t work out with her.

Not surprised.

R: When it didn’t I tried to get in contact to patch things up but Matt and you were already together and you were pregnant.

I’m not sure how to reply.

J: Yes, I was.

R: I mean it happened so quickly, of course, I was worried about you. When I called round yours to check on you, Matt went off on one. It got pretty nasty.

J: I don’t believe you. Matt’s not like that.

R: So he never told you.

J: Why are you lying like this? The article is a joke, Richie.
Why would you talk about Matt like that? Why would you
trash me like that?

R: I’ll admit, a lot of it was twisted about. That Elswood
journo bloke wrote a load of crap but that stuff about us
fighting was pretty true.

I don’t reply. If it is the truth, I half hope that Matt left a great big imprint in his face. On the other hand, I’m now asking myself why I didn’t know about this – why the secrets? Was I too emotional and pregnant to have not sensed the furore going on around me?

R: BTW, no one’s called me Richie for a long time. It’s Rich
now

I still don’t reply. I stare at the screen and the picture of him in the paper on the table.

R: How are you anyway? This stuff with McCoy and your mum must be getting to you. I know you.

I re-read those last three words.

J: You knew me.

I remember a time when I was a lost teenager without a mother and Richie Colman persuaded me to go to Leeds with him. He’d look after me, he said. He knew all the angst and turmoil her absence had caused and knew it was deeply embedded in my psyche. We used to sit in his bedroom on his Argos bed sheet set and talk tearfully about loss and aching and wishing one day she’d come back into my life. To know he knows as much is both heartbreaking and a tad disconcerting.

J: You knew a very different person then. I’ve changed a lot.
For a start, even if you and Matt had a fallout all those years ago, I think it’s highly inappropriate you go and tell a national paper about it.

That’s good. That’s conveying my annoyance with him and a loyalty to the man I’m now with. And I am a very different person to the high-waisted denim girl I was back then.

R: Why did you think we fought?

J: If you did ever have this ‘fight’ …

R: Maybe we fought over you.

J: Really? *sarcasm* Pistols at dawn to win the lady was it?

R: I just didn’t get how quickly you jumped into that. You and this guy. I guess I just assumed it to be a passing phase, that maybe I could win you back.

J: But I was pregnant. … with his kid?

R: How was I to know the baby wasn’t mine?

I’ve never moved my fingers so fast over a keyboard in my life.

J: Because she isn’t. Hannah is most definitely Matt’s daughter. You got an A in Biology – I thought you knew how that all works.

I’m slightly unnerved to think I’ve never given that another moment’s thought. They were sexual partners at least five months apart when we found out I was pregnant.

R: Crumbs, A Level Biology. Blast from the past there.
Didn’t we have sex in one of those labs in the science department?

I simultaneously want to blush and throw the computer out of the window. How do you respond to that? Yes, we did. Thank you for having fond memories of the occasion but if I remember correctly I ended up with ladders down my new tights and I’m not sure it was entirely pleasurable from where I was perched. I don’t reply. I should log off because this is bordering on weird. This was supposed to be a distraction from mothers, from emotions, from the shittiest day I’ve had since this all started. I should be angry with you. I should be laying into you; about the way you unceremoniously dumped me, the way you forgot about four years of a relationship we’d cultivated over sixth form discos and exam halls. The way you’re talking so lightly about something as important as my daughter’s parentage. The way you’ve talked to a newspaper when we were done a very long time ago. But instead I’m shocked into silence, unable to take any more information into my little brain.

R: Do you ever think about the what ifs?
Don’t look at it. Don’t respond.

R: I’m sorry I treated you the way that I did. I loved you very much – I was just young and stupid. I wish things could have turned out differently.

And that’s when I do slam the laptop shut, my heart pounding like it could fall out of my mouth. But an ache. Like a very tiny heartstring being plucked. The what ifs? As much as I hate him right now, how he wishes me all the frigging best, I hate how the sentiment pokes at that little bit of my heart that thought life would end up differently. With him, maybe. With a mother. It’s what this whole day has been about – greener grass, a life different to the one I have now. The emotion yo-yos inside me, playing tag with my insides.

Matt. Think about Matt. Good, dependable Matt who could have easily buggered off eight years ago but didn’t. I think about when he’d stay up with Hannah in our crappy Leeds studio apartment and play her Zero 7 CDs to try and get her to sleep. I think about someone who would carry me to bed even though I was six months pregnant and probably weighed the same as a small walrus. Think about your kids. Think about how life wrote you another ending and in the greater scheme of things, you ended up with the better lot in life. Think about your own mother, how she went with her different ending and it ended up hurting so many. Think, think, think. But all I can see is my life having veered off the beaten track, a life over which I’ve never had much control. Fricking Richie Colman. On the other side of the fence waving at me. It makes me wonder, it makes my heart beat a little faster. Think, think, think. But not too much or Matt will tell you off for ruining the laptop with your tears.