Narrow Margins

Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2009

ISBN 9781908917508

Copyright © Marie Browne 2009

The right of Marie Browne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan CF46 6RY.

Cover design by Red Dot Design

Also Available by Marie Browne

This book is for my Mum and Dad – you have done so much for us that I'll just say thanks for everything, there's no way we could have done this without you. Lyrics from Jenny Greenteeth, reproduced by kind permission, © Nicole Murray 2002,

www.cloudstreet.org

Acknowledgements

Thanks must go to all the friends that have, in lots of ways, supported and helped us over the years. Arwen and Carl for gritting their teeth and putting up with us being weird and anarchic, Helen and Dave for being that still, small voice of calm when things became overwhelmingly chaotic, Vikki and Neal for their incredible scavenging abilities and their general loveliness, Charley and Dion for being the best neighbours anybody could want, and of course Tanya, really just for being Tanya.

We know we don't say enough to really let you lot know how much you mean to us but we often think a lot of good thoughts toward you. Thank you.

Chapter One
Four Little Words

‘R
OVER HAS GONE BUST
.'

It's a strange phenomenon, but there are certain times in every adult life where, for various reasons, the language you have spoken since birth becomes completely unintelligible.

Each individual word is clear but when placed within a sentence makes no sense at all and needs to be repeated again and again, the verbal equivalent of someone smacking you over the head with information taped to a hammer.

‘Rover has gone bust,' Geoff muttered.

‘Sorry, didn't get that,' I looked up from drying the cutlery.

‘Rover – has – gone – bust,' he spoke slowly and succinctly, holding eye contact throughout the sentence.

Just four little words, but, to us, whose entire – and rather nice – lifestyle was funded by the car manufacturer, they were an absolute death knell.

My subconscious was obviously far quicker on the uptake than my conscious and I found myself carefully hanging up the tea towel and very deliberately putting the carving knife that I had been holding into the fridge. Presumably my intuition felt that all sharp objects should be well out of reach at a time like this.

I turned to face my husband who had assumed a defensive position behind the table.

‘I'm sorry,' I said slowly, ‘say that just one more time. I'm still having trouble here.'

I followed his gaze to the well-read and slightly grubby letter he was holding and waited; he took a deep breath and repeated the words that, even with my subconscious now gibbering that life was just about to go horribly pear-shaped, I really hoped I'd misheard.

‘What do you mean, Rover has gone bust?' Finally bullying my mind to accept his words, I breached Geoff's defences at the table and took the letter from his hand. And ... how odd, now it seemed I couldn't read either. The crisp type flowed like film credits across the page; it may as well have been Ancient Greek for all the sense it made.

Geoff sighed; he had lived with me long enough to recognise the beginnings of a long trip down ‘de Nile' when he saw one. Leaning forward, he gripped the letter between thumb and forefinger and with only a slight tug managed to reclaim it. Making sure he had full eye contact he slipped into ‘lecture voice' and explained.

‘It means we're stuffed.'

Three hours later I was still at full rant and showing no signs of even taking a breath, let alone actually stopping.

‘How can they do this to us? We have an outstanding invoice with them for over £50,000! We're at the end of our money! They were supposed to pay tomorrow, tomorrow! For God's sake. Why now? Why us? What about the mortgage? What about the bills? What are we going to DO?'

Anybody who has been in a similar position will understand this predicament only too well. There are no easy answers. You go through the procedures of closing down your company; you apologetically fire the staff; you explore all avenues – real and imagined; you delude yourself; you shout at invisible people inside telephones; you wait for someone to tell you that it's all a joke, that huge mistakes have been made and your money's in the post.

After about a fortnight, I was exhausted and had to admit that Geoff's early assessment had been totally correct. We were royally ‘stuffed'!

When you have finally faced up to what is going on in life, you can start to think of the future, but it didn't look like we had one, at least not much of one anyway. In times of crisis my mother always used to trot out the well-worn cliché ‘When life hands you lemons, make lemonade' and it is in times of severe lemonade-drought that my personality flaws start to show.

I am, without doubt, a control freak. I am also completely convinced that with positive thinking and a little bit of ingenuity you can achieve anything. It is a great source of pride to me that over the years I have come up with some bizarre and ingenious ways to get us out of ‘situations'. I am also very proud of my useful ability to ignore all indications that it is usually one of my ‘great' ideas that gets us into these ‘situations' in the first place.

After ten years, some of my more ‘creative' solutions to an impending disaster make my poor, long-suffering husband nervous – very nervous. I can't really say I blame him because as bad plans and ill-thought-out schemes go, I have come up with some corkers.

So when I plonked myself down next to him on the sofa, my face pre-set in a caricature rictus grin and uttered the immortal words, ‘I have a cunning plan, Lord Blackadder', I got exactly the response I had come to expect. A soft groan, before he leant forward and gently banged his head on the nearest hard surface. I had his attention.

The banging ceased after about 20 seconds and strangled tones emitted from under the hair, ‘Yes, dear?'

Ignoring the rampant sarcasm, I leant forward and grabbed one of his ears to raise him into an upright position.

‘Listen,' I took a deep breath (positive thinking, gallons of lemonade and a set of lungs like a blue whale have got me a long way over the years). ‘As far as I can tell, we have a couple of choices: we can find work and eventually pay off our debts and the mortgage – but this will mean both of us working full-time, which means we will have to pay childcare and travel to Birmingham every day because the last thing you're going to find in Herefordshire are big multinational companies that need project managers. Even then there is no guarantee both of us can find a job because, let's face it, neither of us have been working much over the last three years, the staff did all the work and we charged vast amounts for it.

‘The other option is that we don't find work, we lose the house and end up in a scummy flat, still with huge debts, no work and general misery all round. Have I summed it all up OK?'

Geoff pursed his lips and muttered, ‘I don't think it's that ba–'

Cutting him off before he could pour reality onto another of my plans, I continued, ‘… or we could sell the house, pay off the debts and still have enough money to buy a boat.'

‘A what?' Geoff frowned.

‘A house boat. You know, to live on. I've been looking on the net, and talking to Sarah and Drew – they love theirs – we could buy one, too. Just think, no neighbours, no one telling us where to go. We could move it down to Cambridge to be with Arwen and Carl and all that crowd, Sam could go to school with their kids; it would be great and just think …' Light-headed from lack of oxygen, I took a much-needed breath and callously played my trump card ‘... we would own it outright, no mortgage, no rates – in fact, no debts at all!'

With the trump card played, there was nothing to do but sit back and wait out the ensuing silence. If I can just touch again, briefly, on personality traits, anyone who knows me would say being quiet isn't one of mine, and patience is on the ‘B' list as well. But you don't live with someone day in, day out, and not know when to shut up.

Geoff does ‘thinking in silence' so well that over the years his silences have actually become rateable; with ‘one' being a short silence with raised eyebrows to portray ‘Yes, dear – not a chance in hell' to a ‘ten', with a complete range of facial expressions. This one broke all previous records and went to about a ‘twelve', lasting about four or five minutes, which is an eternity to sit still, looking innocent.

‘What about the kids?' he mused aloud. ‘It's going to have to be quite a big thing to fit four and a half of us on.'

There were actually three children: Sam, master of chaos and destruction, age six; Amelia, bored, gothic, art student, eighteen, from a previous marriage; and Charlie, all gangly knees and elbows, age eleven, also my daughter from the previous marriage, but a bi-weekend visitor.

We also had Herbert ... The vet assured us that he is actually a dog. He may have also been classed as a terrier at one time but was now so old that he bore a startling resemblance to a mobile piece of dirty carpet. He has three teeth, two of which actually stick horizontally out of his mouth giving him a permanent sneer; a mad coat and ears that look like they have been chewed by a weed-whacker complete his own special little picture. I didn't really feel Herb was going to be a problem as he spent most of his time asleep. This was a major blessing as, every time he moved, he exuded his own ‘interesting' aroma which could be a bit unnerving if he cornered you in an enclosed space.

As usual, Geoff had managed to highlight the major flaw in my plan. Out of desperation I tried a bizarre tack – the ‘truth'. You never know, it might just work.

‘Yes, it's going to be tight,' I sighed theatrically and tried to fix a look of thoughtful concern on my face, ‘but Charlie is only with us every other weekend and with Amelia's tendency to use any house like a hotel and a bank, we should be OK.' I paused. ‘But even if they were both with us all the time, I would still rather they live in the countryside where they might have to work at getting into trouble, than on a huge housing estate where you have to permanently battle with them picking up other people's ideals and where trouble comes to them.'

Geoff went back to thinking. Eventually, he leant forward, and the next four fateful words dropped like small explosive charges into a moonlit pool of sleeping fish…

‘Show me the website.'

We spent most of that night scouring the net, our discussions and plans becoming more surreal the closer we got to dawn. By the time the first birdsong could be heard, we had convinced ourselves that the plan was actually quite a good one, which surprised me more than anybody. All we had to do now was get the rest of the family's consent, sell the house, buy a boat, find a mooring, change all the kids' educational facilities and find a way to store or – heaven forbid – get rid of all our possessions.

At four o'clock in the morning, and after twelve cups of coffee, we were convinced that all this would be easy. We were certain the kids would be delighted and it was going to be fun. This plan would solve all of our problems.

Four hours later, I beamed happily at the bleary faces around the breakfast table. Luckily this was a ‘Charlie weekend', and our plan was to tell them all together, enjoy a happy breakfast answering lots of excited questions, then go out and celebrate. We had noted down a couple of local marinas that would, we were sure, have a huge selection of suitable boats from which to choose. Having already explained to the kids all about what had happened to the company, we assumed they would be expecting some changes.

‘OK, listen up, folks; we have made a decision.' I raised my voice over the bickering and poking taking place on the other side of the table. Amelia and Charlie looked up suspiciously, having overheard a fair amount of swearing, shouting, crying and screaming over the past couple of weeks; Sam continued to balance his spoon on his head.

‘What sort of mad plan have you come up with this time?' Amelia sighed.

I gave her ‘the look' and continued with the prepared speech, ‘OK, now, please just give this idea some time to sink in before you say anything ...' I belatedly wondered if the kids were actually going to be as happy about this as Geoff and me, but it was too late now, we were just going to have to deal with the fallout. So, abandoning my prepared speech, I just spat it out in a rush, hoping that jumbling the words together in one long line would make the idea more palatable.

‘We are going to sell the house and buy a boat to live on.' Silence and lots of staring eyes. Hmm ... OK that wasn't the best reaction I could have hoped for. I tried to raise some enthusiasm.

‘Come on, think about the fun, out in the country, no hassle, no neighbours – what do you think?' Silence, accompanied by deepening frowns. I didn't really have anything else to add so decided to wait it out. The silence was finally broken by a stifled yelp from Charlie as Sam's spoon fell off his head and into his breakfast, effectively splattering her in cereal.

‘Where's this boat going to be kept?' Amelia, for all her teenage vagueness, could see a flaw in a plan when she wanted to. She sniffed and wiped some of Sam's errant Weetabix from her sleeve, ‘The river here's too shallow for boats.'

I turned to Geoff hoping for some backup. No such luck; he was studiously buttering toast, keeping his eyes firmly on his knife.

‘Cambridge,' I held my breath, waiting for the inevitable explosion, ‘we are going to live down by Arwen and Carl.'

Kaboom! ‘Cambridge!' Amelia stood up. ‘I'm not going to Cambridge. What about my course?'

Yes, OK, I should have seen that coming. Adlibbing desperately: ‘You've just finished your first year, you could do your second year at another college, a better college. Good grief, it's Cambridge for pity's sake, there must be hundreds of colleges there.'

Trying to avert a screaming match, I walked around the table toward her, and decided to make a direct appeal to her common sense.

‘We don't have a choice, Milly. We can't stay here, there's no work; whatever we do, the house has got to go and we have to move. We're just trying to find the best way out from all this rubbish that's hit us.'

Surprisingly, common sense worked and, robbed of her righteous indignation, Amelia sat back down and switched tack.

‘What about Huw? Don't say you want me to dump him as well.'

OK, that was one potential problem I had missed. No chance of a common-sense compromise on this issue.

‘He can visit ...' I took refuge in worn-out platitudes, ‘If a relationship can't stand a bit of distance, it's no relationship at all.'

‘What about me?' Charlie butted in, ‘won't I see you any more?'

Oh poo! This wasn't going as well as it had in my head, that was for sure.

‘Of course you'll still see us,' I soothed and turned away from Amelia who was rapidly going red in the face and welling up, ‘nothing will change; you will just come and see us in Cambridge, that's all.' About to explain further to Charlie, I was interrupted by Amelia leaping up again.