Losing Me (23 page)

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m sure you didn’t bully or torment her. Your mother may be old, but from the way you describe it, I think she’s being pretty manipulative.”

“How do you mean?”

“She made this all about her because she couldn’t face taking responsibility for hurting you.”

Barbara said she’d had the same thought.

“You were a child. An innocent. Even if she didn’t mean to, she abused you emotionally. Not only do you have the right to tell her how you feel, you also have the right to an apology.”

“I may have had that right years ago, but not now. Mum’s old. My emotions are too much for her to cope with. I left it too late. I missed my chance.”

“But you weren’t ready to do it when she was younger. You were busy running a home, raising two kids. And anyway, knowing your mother, I’m not sure that if you had confronted her earlier, her response would have been any different.”

Barbara shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. Perhaps it would have been the same.” She took a glug of wine. “All I wanted was for her to acknowledge that I had a crap childhood and to say sorry for her part in it. Then we could have moved on knowing that we understood each other. The only comfort she could offer me was that she’d done her best.”

“Nothing else?”

“She said I was planned and how much she loved me when I was born. Oh, and that she still has one of my baby bootees.”

“Which proves that until your dad got ill and everything went wrong, she had all the right maternal feelings. And even now she treasures those memories. You have to hang on to that. She didn’t set out not to love you.”

“I asked her if she loved me now.”

“And . . .”

“She said she did, and I want to believe her, but I’m not sure her heart was in it. She just said the words.”

“Oh, hon . . .” Jean reached out across the table and took Barbara’s hand.

“I’m too needy. I know I am. I’ve got to stop this.”

Jean let out a breath. “OK, what I’m about to say might sound harsh, but perhaps you do have to stop. You’ve reached out to your mother, tried get close to her. But she’s made it clear that it’s too painful for her. You can’t change her, so it’s you who has to change. I’m sure she does love you in her own way, and I know that doesn’t help much. But it’s time for you to stop living in hope and accept that your mother can’t give you what she doesn’t have.”

“Then what am I left with?”

“Frank. Your kids. Your grandkids. Me and Ken. The people who love and care about you.”

“Funny how you put Frank at the top of that list. You know as well as I do that Frank only cares about Frank. You said yourself, I probably can’t change him.”

For a few moments Jean didn’t say anything. Then: “All I’m saying is that with a bit of communication and compromise, you two aren’t beyond saving.”

“I try to communicate. He refuses to see my point of view. And as for compromise, I’m always compromising. Frank never even tries.”

“OK,” Jean said, raising her palms in front of her. “I’ve said all I’m going to say. It’s your marriage. You two need to sort it out. But meanwhile, try pulling back from your mother. That doesn’t mean you have to stop seeing her. It means you must start to disengage from her emotionally. I promise you that in the end it will give you some peace.”

“What makes you so sure?”

She smiled. “Come on—how many times have I told you about my wicked stepfather? I was this little girl whose real daddy had died. I was aching to be loved by my new father, but he saved all his affection for the children he had with my mum. Don’t you remember me telling you that in my twenties I was so depressed that I started seeing a therapist?”

“I do, but you never went into much detail.”

“OK. Well, she helped me disengage, to stop going to my stepfather for love and affection that wasn’t there to be had. Make no mistake, though—pulling back is hard. But if you want to stop the ache, you have to try.”

“I get that and I will try. I promise. . . . So what about your ache? Have you managed to stop that?”

“I’ve stopped seeing Jenson, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well done. I’m really proud of you. I was worried you wouldn’t be able to do it. You will get over him, you know.”

“I already have. Now I’m seeing Virgil.”

“Virgil . . . Bloody hell, Jean. What are you playing at?”

“The agency said I should give it another go. Try somebody else.”

“Of course they did! They want their commission. So what happens when you fall in love with Virgil? Will you carry on working your way through the agency’s entire list of men?”

“But suppose I don’t fall in love with him? Suppose I’ve got my emotions in check this time? I think with practice I can handle this. At the very least, I need to give it a go.”

“You’re crazy. Totally and utterly crazy.”

“Maybe I am. But please don’t judge me until you’ve walked in my shoes.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m just worried about how this is going to end.”

“Well, don’t. The worst that could happen is that Ken finds out, and I’ve told you I don’t think it would be the end of the world.”

Barbara sat shaking her head and helping herself to more Doritos. “God, we’re a right pair. There’s you with your gigolos. Me with my autistic husband. Here we are in your kitchen, stuffing our faces and dishing out advice to each other. I feel like we’re in some weird episode of
The Golden Girls
.”

“I guess that would make me Blanche,” Jean said, grinning. “I can live with that. So let me tell you about Virgil. . . .”

By eight o’clock, despite demolishing most of a jumbo pack of Doritos, they were starving. Jean called the local Thai and asked them to deliver two red curries. Barbara switched to Diet Coke because she was driving. By midnight they were “talked out” and Barbara was ready to head home. She hugged Jean, told her she loved her. “Please take care. I worry.”

“I will. Love you, too. . . . Oh, quick, before you go, I have wedding gossip. . . . Momzilla has decided to wear white, if you please. Emma finally lost it with her, and they’re not speaking. Adam is talking about the two of them eloping. Of course, Ken is encouraging it because he’s thinking about all the money he can save.”

“So everything’s still nicely on track, then?”

“You betcha.”

Once she was home, Barbara made herself some hot milk. As she stood waiting for the microwave to ping, she wondered whose problems she’d rather have—her own or Jean’s. Was it worse to be loved by a man who had no interest in sex, or neglected by a man who did? She couldn’t make up her mind.

Barbara took her cup of milk to the sofa and decided to check what was on TV. For some reason—most likely because her mind was buzzing—she wasn’t tired. She went hunting for the TV remote and finally found it down the back of the sofa, along with a moldy crescent of rock-hard pizza crust. Ben. She began channel surfing, looking for some late-night comedy to cheer her up. An hour later—the hot milk having done its work—she was fast asleep with
The Pink Panther
playing to itself. She didn’t hear Ben come home. Nor was she aware of him switching off the TV. And she certainly didn’t hear all the giggles and shushing coming from his room, which went on until dawn.

Chapter 9

B
arbara woke up with a thumping head and a bladder fit to burst. Fearing that her postmenopausal pelvic floor wouldn’t take the strain much longer, she practically sprang off the sofa.

She was about to open the door to the downstairs loo when it seemed to do so of its own accord. A young girl appeared. Seeing Barbara, the girl jumped. Barbara let out a tiny, simultaneous yelp. She also let out a trickle of pee, which began traveling down the inside of her leg. The girl—who was in her knickers and Ben’s
I Still Live with My Parents
T-shirt that Jess had bought him for Christmas—spoke first.

“Oh, hi. You must be Ben’s mum.” She was pulling her thicket of slept-in blond hair into a scrunchie. “I’m Katie. Sorry to frighten you. I just came down to make some coffee. I’m afraid Ben and I got pretty trashed last night.”

Barbara’s profound need to empty her bladder aside, she was in no mood to exchange small talk—and particularly not with some strange girl Ben had hooked up with and got pissed with the night before. He knew the house rule. Only steady girlfriends, to whom she and Frank had been introduced, were allowed to sleep over. She was of the firm opinion—and for once Frank agreed—that they should at least know the names of the women who clogged the shower with their hair, left their used contact lenses stuck to the floor, and finished all the no-fat yogurt.

“Help yourself to whatever,” Barbara said, trying to sound hospitable at the same time as tensing her pelvic floor. “There’s cereal in the cupboard. Milk and juice in the fridge. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to use the loo.”

“Oh, sure. Of course. Sorry.”

Katie moved aside, offered Barbara a timid smile and headed towards the kitchen. Barbara sat down on the loo and peed most gloriously. At the same time she recalled her prechildbirth, premenopause days, when her undercarriage had been as taut as a drumskin. Back in the day, Ginger Baker could have played a solo on her pelvic floor.

Afterwards Barbara went upstairs and ran a bath. As she got undressed, she considered Katie with her pertness and tendrils of blond hair falling around her face. The only tendrils Barbara owned grew out of her face, not around it, and she had a habit of not noticing them until they were two inches long.

She picked up her foot sander, perched herself on the edge of the bath and began grating the hard skin on her heel. If she didn’t do it regularly, she got cracks. As she grated, she reminded herself of her favorite maxim—the one about older women bringing more to the party than a perfect figure (naturally she included pertness and tendrils in this). She supposed her maxim was all well and good, so long as you’d been invited to the party in the first place. These days it felt like it was going on without her.

After a soak in the tub, her headache began to ease. As she finished getting dressed, she could hear Ben and Katie saying good-bye at the front door. There were a few long moments when nothing was said and she tried to stop imagining the tongue kissing that was going on. Then she heard Ben calling out after Katie, promising to call. The door closed.

“You never mentioned you were seeing somebody,” Barbara said, coming downstairs.

“I’m not. At least I haven’t been. Katie and I met last night at this club. She just sort of wandered over and said hello . . .”

“. . . with her vagina.”

Ben screwed up his face. “Mum. For God’s sake. Boundaries.”

“Er . . . I could say the same to you. You know the rule. No girls to be brought home until Dad and I have met them.”

“But Katie’s really nice. And you met her outside the loo. Surely that makes it all right.”

“Actually, no, it doesn’t. . . . So what does Katie do?”

“Trainee investment banker.”

“So she’s in finance,” Barbara said to Jean, who’d called to see how Barbara was feeling after yesterday. (Still a bit wobbly.)

“And your problem with that is . . . ?”

“I dunno. I guess I’m just a bit disappointed.”

“What—that she’s an evil capitalist and not some nice Marxist feminist he met at the food bank?”

“Very funny. I’m just worried that she may not be right for Ben, that’s all.”

“Good God, you make it sound like he’s already proposed to her. And how do you know she doesn’t give to charity or volunteer?”

“I don’t. . . . OK, perhaps I’ve got her wrong. But it still bothers me.”

“Maybe it does, but at the risk of stating the obvious, this is Ben’s life—not yours.”

“Jess and Matt won’t like her,” Barbara said, thinking about the Occupy London posters in Jess and Matt’s flat.

“It’s not their life either. The lot of you will just have to butt out.”

Jean said she had to go because she needed to get ready for work. “By the way, quick FYI about the wedding—as of this morning Felicity’s agreed not to wear white and she and Emma are speaking again. But as a quid pro quo, she wants all the men in top hats and tails. As you know, Ken isn’t one to lose his temper, but I think he could be on the point of telling Felicity her fortune. I’ll keep you posted. . . . Oh, and Ken and I are off to Devon tomorrow for a few days’ break, so I’ve put your birthday pressie in the post.”

•   •   •

One by one Barbara’s girlfriends are turning eighteen. Coming of age. Their parents are marking the occasion by giving their daughters pieces of jewelry. Nothing fancy. These are blue-collar families. The lockets, charm bracelets and watches have mostly been bought on the high street. But to the girls showing them off in the school cafeteria they are parental love tokens—keepsakes that they will treasure for a lifetime.

“Mum,” Barbara says one night after dinner, “I was wondering if maybe I could have a small piece of jewelry for my eighteenth?”

“What sort of jewelry?”

“I don’t know. A locket, maybe.”

When Barbara’s birthday comes around, Rose and Stan hand her a card. Inside are two fifty-pound notes.

“Buy whatever you want,” Rose says.

Barbara goes out alone and buys a gold-plated heart-shaped locket. She shows it off in the school cafeteria. Now she’s the same as everybody else. Only she isn’t.

•   •   •

Barbara had been trying to forget it was her birthday on Sunday. She didn’t feel much like celebrating. Given the choice, she would have spent the day on the sofa drinking tea and watching True Movies back-to-back. It didn’t help that friends kept reminding her that this birthday was “the one before the big six-oh” (or as old Mrs. Bernstein down the road put it: “the big six-oy”). On top of that, the Zuckerberg boy was still pushing over-fifties health insurance and cheap funeral plans at her. These days whenever she saw his name, her eyes performed what she could describe only as an ocular spoonerism and the Z in his name became an F.

But wallowing and getting cross with Mark Fuckerberg wasn’t an option. By half past seven, Cleo and Atticus would be on the phone singing “Happy Birthday.” (They would most likely have been up since six, nagging Jess to let them call.) Then there was the family tradition of the birthday tea party to be upheld.

So she’d wallowed the night before instead. As she lay in bed, she was beset by maudlin self-pity and fear. She hadn’t reached the autumn of her days, but summer was definitely on the wane. How much time did she have left? How many more long girlie lunches with Jean? How many more Wimbledon finals? How many more orgasms? They were already pretty thin on the ground. Her life, which had always been about counting up, was now about counting down.

Being an atheist, she couldn’t even cheer herself up with thoughts of frolicking in the afterlife. Barbara hated how her mind was attracted to proof and scientific evidence rather than faith. While other people found it so easy to make a case for a divine creator, she wore a
Richard Dawkins Is God
T-shirt in bed.

Religion offered so much more than atheism. For a start, there were all the twofers: Believe in God and we’ll throw in free salvation—yours to enjoy for all eternity, no hidden extras. . . . Take the Lord into your heart and we guarantee you free entry into heaven. Rapture for all the family.

As an atheist, Barbara prayed she’d got it wrong. She so wanted there to be a heaven. How atheists had ever managed to sell oblivion, she had no idea. She’d often pictured atheist suits knocking on doors. “Good morning, madam. We’re here to share the truth and the light. . . . Here’s the thing: Life’s crap. Then you die. And when you do pop your clogs, there’s nothing. Zip. Bubkes. You cease to be.”

Hey! Awesome! Put me down for that.

In twenty years she would be almost eighty. Of course, eighty wasn’t what it once was. These days, octogenarians ran marathons and caught sexually transmitted diseases. But once a person hit eighty, oblivion could strike at any time.

Best-case scenario: she fell asleep one night—having danced at her hundred and tenth birthday with her new boy toy, who later made passionate love to her—and didn’t wake up.

She dreaded a long, drawn-out illness. Her uncle Sid had died of lung cancer. In his final weeks, he had taken to his bed. Bit by bit, the chintzy bedroom he and Aunty Beryl had shared for fifty years was transformed into a hospital room. First came the oxygen tank. Then the hospital bed with a water mattress so that he didn’t get bedsores. A large bottle of morphine stood on the dressing table next to Aunty Beryl’s eau de cologne. Sid lay there, parchment and bone and hollow chest rattle.

But at least he’d died at home and not some hospice. Who in their right mind wanted to die among the dying? Or surrounded by a load of caring, sharing hospice nurses hell-bent on making sure you’d drawn up a “good death plan.” If you were having an OK day, somebody might wheel you into the hospice garden and sit you on a wooden bench donated by relatives of a former dying person. From there you would, no doubt, have an uninterrupted view of the ornamental fountain and fiberglass flamingos.

Then the memories came flooding back—testaments to her advancing years. She could remember London in the fifties and sixties when it was still moth-eaten with bomb sites. Sometimes there might be one house left standing in the rubble, its sidewalls blown off. Looking at a cross section, you could see the remains of living rooms. Each one had different flowery wallpaper. But most extraordinary—to Barbara’s mind at least—was the column of unscathed fireplaces, each one the centerpiece for five families who’d lived stacked one on top of the other.

She could remember coal fires, thick yellow with pea-soup fogs. When the fog came down, nobody was allowed home after school until an adult arrived to collect them. Mums and dads turned up with torches. People wore scarves over their mouths. It went without saying that Barbara was always the last to be collected.

She could see her parents’ black-and-white TV being delivered. Everybody on it spoke like the Queen. She remembered hopscotch and jacks, kiss-chase and riding on steam trains, the coalman, the sweep, the knife grinder, French onion sellers, washing lines full of billowing drawers, families decked out in their Sunday best at the seaside. She could remember
The Dick Van Dyke Show
,
The Defenders
and
My Three Sons
. She could still see the black armbands the day after Kennedy was shot.

Barbara couldn’t sleep, so she went downstairs to make some hot chocolate. Her mind went back to Jean’s sixtieth birthday party and the comment she’d made—albeit when she was drunk—about the importance of leaving a legacy. Jean had a wonderful legacy: the hundreds, if not thousands, of healthy babies she’d delivered.

For her part, Barbara had all the kids she’d helped over the years. But the truth was she hadn’t achieved that much. It hadn’t been for want of trying. For once she wasn’t blaming herself. She was blaming a system that was underfunded and callous. Many of the children she’d taught over the years had needed a damn sight more than a couple of hours a week spent in her cubbyhole. They’d needed three decent meals a day. Some had needed counseling. They’d all needed new homes. A few she could mention had even needed new parents.

A tiny minority, the ones who managed to get an autism diagnosis or were thought to have serious learning difficulties, got transferred to specialist schools. The kids who were merely “a bit slow” or “lagging behind” or who had emotional problems didn’t. There was no budget to help them—beyond what teachers like Barbara could offer. Some of them, the ones like Armani, the confident, likable kids who didn’t have a problem beyond their noisiness and attention-seeking personalities, would make their way in the world. Others wouldn’t.

•   •   •

Back in bed, she found herself looking at the envelopes on her nightstand. Her birthday cards had come in that day’s post, but she’d decided not to open them until tomorrow. In addition to the cards, she’d received a magnificent bouquet of white roses from Frank. They’d come from Stems, the chichi, not to mention pricey, florist down the road. (As part of their chichi priciness, they didn’t deliver on Sundays.) The card read:
Sorry can’t be there. Missing you. Have a great day. Love you, F. xxxx

When Frank bought her flowers, it was usually a small bunch of her favorite yellow freesias. On her birthday they tended to go out together to choose a present. The bouquet of roses was unusual—a grand gesture. It occurred to her that he was starting to feel guilty about the way he’d treated her.

•   •   •

In the end it was Frank who called first.

“Happy birthday! Sorry to phone so early, but it’s two a.m. here and I’m starting to nod off.”

“Don’t worry. I was already awake.” In fact, she’s been sound asleep. She pulled herself into a sitting position. “I’m amazed you stayed up.” He was definitely feeling guilty. “And thank you for the flowers. They’re gorgeous.”

“I’m glad you like them. Look, I’m really sorry I’m missing your birthday, but all being well, I should be back by the end of next month. So I thought we could have dinner somewhere a bit posh and have a belated birthday celebration. Maybe we’ll splash out and go to La Buvette.”