Second Chances (2 page)
‘Sometimes you have to wonder, don’t you?’ she muses, smoothing the breaking wave of her fringe. ‘You have to wonder
why
these things have to go and happen.’
Clattering feet, the rumble of a trolley. A baby’s fretful wail.
‘Got to go,’ she sighs, giving my shoulder one last pat. ‘No rest for the wicked.’
Ah, I think, as I watch her twitch back the curtain and hurry duck-footed to the latest emergency. There’s the question. Not how.
Why.
I’m haunted by that question as the night wears on.
Why, why, and why.
If I had to stick a pin in the map of space and time, marking the start of our journey, I’d choose a Bedfordshire village on a Friday in June. Our village. Our house.
I remember driving home from work through a brief summer downpour. For ten minutes I skulked in the car by our garden pond, while the cooling engine tick-tick-ticked, summoning the will to go into the house. Finally I dug out my phone. Delaying tactics.
How did physics go? xx
Immediately, the screen flashed and buzzed.
dunno xxx
Very informative, I thought resignedly as I hauled myself out and up the path. My daughter was coming to the last of her fifth-form exams, and I had no idea how she’d done. I stood for a long moment in the porch, steeling myself. Then I opened our front door.
The change struck me as soon as I stepped into the hall. That morning, I’d escaped a house pervaded by the cold draught of Kit’s despair. Now I caught the cheerful whiff of toasting crumpets and his mellow voice, accompanied by the twins’ merry discordancy.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
I followed these sounds of revelry to the kitchen. Kit stood ironing a shirt while his sons lumbered on the tabletop among the plates. Charlie paused to give me smacky crumpety kisses, but Finn was reaching an earsplitting crescendo, shaking matted dark locks:
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling af-ter! Hello, Mummee!
Inevitably, he stood in the butter dish.
‘Yuck!’ he squawked, hopping on one narrow foot while holding the buttery one up in front of him.
‘Butter toes,’ said Kit, and flashed me a vivid smile.
Charlie pointed a chubby forefinger, delight on the cartoon-round cheeks. Fair-curled and sturdy, he was the elder by half an hour. ‘Butter toes, butter toes.’
I gave Finn a piggyback to the sink, dumped him on the draining board and doused his foot. Then I stood close behind Kit, running my hands around his waist and basking in his buoyancy. When he was on top of life, we could cope with anything at all. Sacha’s dog slithered out of her basket to headbutt my knees. Muffin has a lot of Old English sheepdog in her and a touch of something smaller, and wanders through life with an air of genial absent-mindedness, like a professorial teddy bear.
‘Hey, Muffin,’ called Finn from the sink. ‘D’you want to lick some lovely butter?’
‘You’re ironing a shirt,’ I said, watching Kit turn a crumpled rag into something crisp and immaculate. ‘Why are you ironing a shirt?’
‘Think I’ve had a bit of a break.’ Steam hissed from the iron. I could smell washing powder. ‘I’ll be taking the train to London in an hour. I called Stella Black today—remember, from way back? Graphic designer, I’ve worked with her on a couple of projects—she reckons her boss might have some consultancy work for me.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ I breathed, rubbing my cheek into the warmth of his shoulder. Consultancy work would be more than wonderful. It might even be a lifeline.
Kit was taut with hope and nerves; I could feel them jangling through his skin. He always had a deceptively lazy, understated way of moving— never seemed to pick up his feet—yet I sensed a frantic excitement that day. He finished the shirt, kissed me enthusiastically and strode off to the shower. Our house was one of the oldest in the village, the stairs steep and uneven. I sat halfway up, fretting, while the boys plotted mischief in the kitchen. My chest seemed to be squeezed in a vice, as though it was I who had the vital meeting. There was so much at stake. I had to force myself to exhale.
That’s where Sacha found me. She paused in the hall, grinning, schoolbag swinging from one shoulder. ‘Mum! You on the naughty stair?’
My daughter inherited the syrup-and-caramel ringlets from me. I can’t seem to grow my hair beyond shoulder length and it sticks out like a string floor mop, but hers is glorious, rippling exuberantly down her back and around her face. She has the Norris family hooked nose, too. I’ve always thought—as her adoring mother—that her high forehead and imperfect nose are what make Sacha truly beautiful.
‘I put myself here,’ I said. ‘It’s my place in life. Now gimme the lowdown on that exam, and if you say “dunno”, I’ll tan your hide.’
She held up innocent palms. ‘Well I
don’t
know, do I? I think I did okay. Bastards never asked about electromagnetism though, after all the swotting I did. That was scummy.’
‘Kit might have some work,’ I blurted, and she promptly dumped her bag and sat on the stair beneath mine, resting her forearm on my lap while I told her about his trip to London.
‘How bad
are
things, Mum?’ she asked seriously. ‘You can come clean, now GCSEs are almost over. I know you two have been trying to cover up.’
She was right, of course. We’d been shielding her from the worst. I reached down to plait her hair, comforted by the heavy skein of it under my fingers.
‘Our lifestyle—this house, everything—it all came from Kit’s income, from the heyday of his agency before the economy melted down. My salary isn’t nearly enough. I don’t earn much more than his PA did! Pretty galling, but there we are.’
‘So we’ll have to sell this house if he doesn’t get another job?’
‘Maybe,’ I agreed cautiously.
‘And I’ll have to shift schools, won’t I?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘That means yes.’
I shrugged, wishing I could deny it.
‘Um . . .’ She began tapping a syncopated rhythm on my knee with her palm. ‘I know Kit’s drinking again.’
‘You do?’
‘I have eyes, Mum, and I have ears. Last Friday the twins told me they locked themselves out in the rain and got soaking wet while he was asleep on the sofa. Charlie said he’d “gone funny again”. Poor little beanies! No prizes for guessing what went on there. And I heard on the grapevine that you had to collect him from the pub.’
‘They don’t want him back,’ I confessed.
That call was excruciating. Our local landlord, concerned and embarrassed:
I’ve had to take his car keys off him again . . . might be best if he doesn’t
come here for a while.
‘Losing the agency was his worst nightmare,’ I said now, needing to defend Kit. ‘Letting people down, when they had mortgages and school fees too. The past few months have been really rough and—well, endless knockbacks and money worries have finally worn him down. Alcohol’s a sort of self-medication.’
‘Poor Kit.’ Sacha wrinkled her nose. ‘Banned from the local? That’s pretty screwball.’
Charlie appeared in the kitchen doorway, lighting up at the sight of his sister. ‘Come and see,’ he squeaked, beckoning. ‘We’ve made a slide on the kitchen floor.’
‘A slide? How?’ Sacha sounded suspicious.
‘With loads and loads of butter. It’s
really
slippy.’
Sacha’s jaw dropped, but I flapped a hand in defeat. ‘Leave it for now. There are worse messes than butter.’
I found Kit in our bedroom, shrugging into a jacket and looking every inch the successful advertising guru. He had a way of wearing clothes as though they didn’t matter; it was peculiarly stylish.
‘You still scrub up good,’ I murmured, taking his arm in my hands and watching us both in the wardrobe mirror. When the man in the mirror smiled back at me, I saw the old spark dancing in his eyes. After eight years of marriage, and all our troubles, Kit’s smile still made me feel happy. I turned him to face me, took hold of his lapel and began to fuss with it. ‘The picture of civilised man,’ I said, brushing my knuckles along the firm line of his jaw. ‘Good luck.’
He caught my hand and pressed it to his mouth. I felt a small tremor in his fingers, and ached for him. ‘I’ve run out of doors to knock on, Martha. If this doesn’t come off, I’ll have failed you.’
Sacha hurried in, pretending to do a double take. ‘Wow, Kit! You look like James Bond. Well, except for that zany black mane, which is more Mumbai street urchin.’ While her stepfather made a dutiful attempt to tame his hair, she plonked newly shined shoes at his feet. ‘I gave these a quick polish for you. Found them by the back door. They’re the right ones, aren’t they?’
‘You’re a princess,’ said Kit fervently. ‘How was the exam?’
‘Murder.’
‘Oh, bugger. Really?’
‘Nah, not too bad. Only one left—and then it’s party time!’
‘I’ll bet you’ve sailed through,’ predicted Kit, sitting on the bed to tie his laces. ‘Jesus! Look at the time.’
Minutes later he’d hopped into his car and was roaring away towards Bedford. Sacha and I stood at our gate, watching that bright green blur threading between the traffic. It seemed terribly significant somehow, the only coloured dot on a sombre landscape.
‘I really hope he gets it,’ said Sacha.
I held up two sets of crossed fingers, blinking hard, overwhelmed by the strain of the past weeks. I felt Sacha’s arm around my neck.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she whispered, kissing my cheek. ‘Whatever happens, it’ll all come out in the wash.’
She and I spent the rest of the evening eyeing the clock, begging fate to give Kit this break. The phone rang twice. We jumped both times, but it wasn’t him. The first call was from Sacha’s boyfriend, Ivan, wondering how she’d done in physics. The next was male too, with a Dublin accent.
‘Gerry Kerr,’ he said, and instantly I remembered. One of Kit’s art college cronies, Gerry had become a dealer and swanned around the States for a few years before buying a gallery in Dublin. I had a mental image of the man at our wedding reception—an urbane figure, cornering me to swear that Kit McNamara was a fucking genius and I had to get him painting again, he didn’t care how much filthy lucre he could make in advertising.
Kit’s career was rocketing when we were married, and then the twins arrived and took up every spare second. There was never enough time to indulge his passion, unless you counted the enchantment he’d created for his family. In the boys’ bedroom it was Palaeolithic cave paintings: exquisite stags and bison chased one another all around the walls and over the ceiling, to the envy of visiting children. For Sacha he’d conjured a bewitching mural of mermaids.
‘Gerry!’ I cried now. ‘How are you? Kit’s out at the moment.’
Just touching base, Gerry said, wondering how we were doing. He’d heard about the agency going under.
‘Ad agencies are falling like ninepins,’ I explained. ‘Kit hung on for grim death but . . . well. Advertising budgets are the first thing to be slashed.’
Gerry sounded genuinely concerned. ‘Poor old McNamara. Still, look on the bright side. That man of yours is wasting his talent. This is a wake-up call.’
I looked at the sitting-room walls, where I’d hung a trio of Kit’s paintings from college days. They were strange portraits: mud-brown, impish people with angular faces. I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. I much preferred the mermaids and bison.
‘He hasn’t really painted for years,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Bloody crime. The man’s got something, Martha, and he knows it.’
‘Yes,’ I retorted, laughing. ‘You’re right. He’s got a family to support. And he knows it.’
I tried calling Kit after that. His phone promptly trilled from under a box of cereal in the kitchen. Forgetting his phone was a habit of Kit’s.
By eight the boys were fast asleep, tangled among mounds of soft toys. At nine, I persuaded Sacha to turn in too. I could tell she was shattered. Much, much later, the house phone rang.
‘Martha,’ said Kit, and my hopes plunged. His voice was flat.
He was calling from Euston station. Stella’s company had lost a crucial contract that very day and was reeling. Kit had spent the evening in a bar in Soho, consoling Stella and the boss who were now battling to stay afloat themselves. They wanted to help, he’d be top of their list if something came up, but they had nothing for him now. Sorry, mate.
‘So that’s that,’ said Kit. I could hear the alcohol clouding his voice and his thoughts. ‘I’m bloody useless.’
‘Are you coming straight home?’ I wanted us to face this together. ‘Please don’t . . . you know. Just come home. Take a taxi from the station.’
‘Soon,’ he said quietly, and rang off.
Bed was out of the question. I’d lie there rigidly awake, anxiety ricocheting around my head like a stray bullet. Instead I grabbed the in-tray— hair-raising bills screamed from its papery depths—and sat in front of the computer. I’d have to juggle everything somehow, and buy us time to get the house on the market.
Sacha had been messing about online. She must have been distracted by Ivan’s call, and forgotten to log off. There were several websites left open: YouTube, eBay. Ah, and here was her Facebook page; never anything sinister on that. I was about to close it when a warning siren blared, somewhere between my ears.
Looking for my real father!! Name is Simon apparently, passed thru
Bedford 16–17 years ago. Brwn hair brwn eyes, tall. Wld be 35–40 by now?
Mum swears that’s all she knows but I’m not so sure. Anyone—any ideas???
Wld really lve to trace my dad.
I sat stunned, a rabbit gaping into the harsh glare of the screen. Her Facebook friends had plenty of ideas, of course.
Have u checked ur birth certificate?
Hi sash, ask everyone in your family and all your mum’s old friends, someone
knows something, lock them in a room until they spill
My dads called simon LOL we might be sisters!!! I will ask him did he shag
yor mum
cld try private detective
It’s an icy shower, the moment you realise your child is an independent being who questions family mythology. Whenever she asked about her father I told Sacha the story of Simon, a pleasant young man who couldn’t be traced. Now, it seemed, she’d started digging. One day her spade would hit a landmine, and we’d all lose limbs in the explosion.
