‘Tipped me a hundred quid,’ he answered, giving my buttock a quick squeeze, ‘… and I’m planning on spending the lot on new underwear for you.’
‘You mean for you.’ I yawned. ‘I need a new exhaust.’
For the past eight years I’ve bought new underwear for Joe’s birthday – underwear for me. Every year I question him – ‘What do you want?’ – and every year he stares at me, like,
Do you really need to ask?
Once he said he wanted to shop for it himself. But we did away with that arrangement when he came home with
red
everything. Including red fishnets. ‘Best if I get it from now on, Joe,’ I’d said to him, and he’d said, ‘Okay,’ kind of crestfallen. Though I think he knew deep down I was never going to go for that trashy get-up.
The dogs finish eating and trot to the back door as a pack. My favourite is Ruthie. She’s a Staffy crossed with either a Red Setter or a Hungarian Vizsla. She’s got the brindle coat of a Staffy, but instead of the usual chocolate, autumn browns, she’s had her colour turned up in a mad show of russet and henna, copper and bronze. And she has these long, long legs, which make her look as if she’s swapped bodies with another dog.
Ruthie came to the shelter five years ago in a batch of unwanted puppies. A bitch kept for breeding got loose for the day and had a litter of seven. Ruthie was the one we couldn’t home, so, as is often the way, she ended up at ours.
Luckily, Joe is kind of a natural. He’s got that calm authority dogs seem to gravitate towards. He understands dogs in the same way some people understand numbers, or circuit boards. Even if we have a problem case and I bring it home, Joe’s zen effect usually means the dog is settled in by bedtime.
I open up the back door and the dogs rush out, just as the cold and the cats rush in. Winter’s here early. Snow had been predicted and there’s been a heavy fall overnight. The chill seeps into my bones in an instant. I hear the cry of an animal carry across the valley on the thin air and shut the door quickly.
The coffee’s ready and I pour myself what the coffee houses call an Americano – espresso topped up with hot water; my cup holds almost a pint. I hear movement coming from upstairs, small feet on floorboards, the toilet flushing, a nose blowing, and I rally myself. I read somewhere that children measure their self-worth directly from the look on your face and was horrified to realize I’d been greeting my children looking kind of vague. This is because I have a hundred and one things going through my head at any given moment – but they don’t know that. I’m sure they must have spent the first few years of their lives wondering if I actually recognized them at all. I feel dreadful about it now, so often I go a bit too much the other way. My youngest son laps up the attention. But my older two, particularly Sally, who’s thirteen, have taken to eyeing me suspiciously.
She sits at the kitchen table now, full lips swollen from sleep, hair pulled up high in a ponytail to be dealt with later. Next to her is her iPod Touch.
She spoons Rice Krispies into her mouth while at the same time shooing a cat away with her elbow. I watch her from over by the kettle. She’s dark like Joe. They all are. Ask Joe where he’s from and he’ll tell you Ambleside. Most people assume he’s Italian. He’s not. Kallisto is a South American
name – Brazilian – though we reckon Joe’s of Argentinian descent. He has dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. As do the kids. Their hair is shiny-black and straight, and they have Joe’s absurdly long eyelashes. Naturally, Sally thinks she’s ugly. She thinks all her friends are beautiful and she is not. This is something we’re working on, but of course she distrusts everything I say, because I’m her mother. And what the hell would I know about anything?
‘PE today?’ I ask.
‘No. Tech.’
‘What are you making?’
I’m never really sure what Tech is. It seems to encompass woodwork, sewing, design, pretty much everything—
Sally puts her spoon down. Looks at me as if to say,
You are joking?
‘We’re doing food tech,’ she says, keeping her eyes fixed on mine.
‘Food
tech, as in cooking. Don’t say you forgot to get the ingredients. The list,’ she says, pointing towards the fridge, ‘is right there.’
‘Shit,’ I reply quietly. ‘I completely forgot. What do you need?’
Sally gets up, scrapes her chair across the flagstone floor. All the while I’m thinking,
Please be flapjacks, please be flapjacks
. I have oats and can cobble together the rest. Or crumble. Fruit crumble would be good. She can use those apples up, throw in a bit of something else from the bottom of the fruit bowl. It’ll be fine.
Sally grabs the piece of paper. ‘Pizza.’
‘No,’ I reply, gutted. ‘Really?’
‘We need ready-made tomato sauce, mozzarella, something for the base, like a baguette or pitta bread, and our own choice of toppings. I thought I’d have spicy chicken and green pepper. But I don’t mind having tuna, if that’s all we’ve got.’
We have none of those ingredients. Not one.
I close my eyes. ‘Why didn’t you remind me about this? I
specifically told you to remind me. Why didn’t you remind me when I told—’
‘I did.’
‘When?’
‘After school on Friday,’ she says. ‘You were on the laptop.’
That’s right, I remember. I was trying to order a delivery of logs and the website wouldn’t accept my credit-card details. And I lost my temper.
Sally’s face now changes from the satisfaction of being in the right to that of mild panic. ‘Tech is third period,’ she says, her voice rising. ‘How am I supposed to get the stuff by third period?’
‘Can you tell the teacher your mother forgot?’
‘I told her that last time, and she said, “No more chances.” She said it was just as much my responsibility. She said I could go to the shop myself for the ingredients if I needed to.’
‘Did you explain to her that we live in Troutbeck?’
‘No, because that would have been argumentative.’
We stand there looking at one another, me hoping an answer will magic itself into my head and Sally wishing that I was better at all of this.
‘Leave it with me. I’ll sort it,’ I say.
I’m thinking about the day ahead, pouring apple juice into glasses, as the two boys sit down at the kitchen table. We’ve got fourteen dogs in the shelter at present and eleven cats. The dogs I’ve got space for, but one of my most dependable cat fosterers is going in for a hysterectomy tomorrow, so I need to take delivery of an extra four cats this morning. And there are two dogs arriving from Northern Ireland as well that I’d clean forgotten about.
The boys are arguing over who is having the last of the Rice Krispies because neither of them wants the stale Fruit & Fibre
that’s been at the back of the cupboard since summer. James is eleven and Sam is seven. They’re both skinny with big brown eyes and no common sense. They’re the type of boys Italian mothers slap across the head a lot. Kind boys, but silly, and I love them fiercely.
I’m resigning myself to the fact that I’ll have to wake up Joe and send him out for the pizza ingredients when the phone rings. It’s seven twenty, so whoever it is does not have good news. Nobody rings me at seven twenty with good news.
‘Lisa, it’s Kate.’
‘Kate,’ I say. ‘What’s happened? Is something wrong?’
‘Yes – no – well, sort of. Listen, sorry to ring so early but I wanted to catch you while you still had the boys at home.’
Kate Riverty is my friend of around five years. She has two children, who are similar in age to both Sally, my eldest, and Sam, my youngest.
‘It’s nothing major. I just thought you’d want to know so that you can address it before it gets out of hand.’ I stay silent, let her go on. ‘It’s just that Fergus came home last week saying that he would need money for school, and I didn’t really think much of it at the time. You know how it is … they always need money for something. So I gave it to him, and it was only when I was chatting to Guy about it last night and he said that Fergus had asked
him
for money also that we thought to question him.’
I have no idea where this is going, but that’s not unusual when speaking to Kate, so I try to sound interested. ‘So what do you think he wants it for?’
I’m guessing she’s going to tell me the teachers have set up a tuck shop. Something she’s not in agreement with. Something she’s against
on principle
.
‘It’s Sam,’ Kate says bluntly. ‘He’s been charging children to play with him.’
‘He’s what?’
‘Children are paying him money to play with him. I’m not sure exactly how much because … he seems to have a type of sliding scale in operation. Fergus is a little upset about the whole thing, actually. He’s found out he’s been paying substantially more than some of the other boys.’
I turn around and look at Sam. He is wearing Mario Kart pyjamas and is feeding milk directly from his cereal spoon to our old ginger tom.
I exhale.
‘You’re not cross that I rang, are you, Lisa?’
I wince. Kate’s trying to sound nice, but her voice has taken on a shrill quality.
‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘I’m glad you did.’
‘It’s just that if it were me … if it were one of
mine
doing this – well, I’d want to know.’
‘Absolutely,’ I tell her. Then I give her my standard line, the line that I seem to be giving out to anyone and everyone regardless of the situation I’m faced with: ‘Leave it with me,’ I say firmly. ‘I’ll sort it.’
Just before she hangs up I hear Kate say, ‘The girls okay?’, and I reply, ‘What? Yes, fine,’ because I’m flustered, and I’m embarrassed, and I’m not really thinking straight. I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle the problem of Sam’s new enterprise.
But when I put the phone down, I think,
Girls?
What does she mean by that? Then I dismiss it, because Kate often gets me on the back foot. Confuses me with what she’s really trying to say. It’s something I’ve had to get used to.
2
W
E LIVE IN A
draughty rented house in Troutbeck.
Troutbeck sits to the east of Lake Windermere and is the kind of place you find in books entitled ‘Quaint English Villages’. There are supposed to be two hundred and sixty houses in Troutbeck, but I don’t know where all those people are hiding because I hardly see any of them.
Of course, a lot are holiday lets. And many of the cottages are home to people who’ve retired here – so they’re not always part of the usual day-to-day goings-on, I suppose because they don’t have children living in the village. Or grandchildren they pick up from school a couple of days a week. Or take to swimming lessons, or to the park.
I used to think it bordered on tragedy the way families lose touch, the way people sever ties, putting a pretty place to live above being together. But now I realize that’s just how people like it. They don’t always want to be together.
My mother has a flat in Windermere village. She and my father never married – we were his second family, his
other
family – and because of something shitty that happened when I was a kid, something that we don’t ever talk about, we never see him. I’d ring my mother to pick up the ingredients Sally needs for cookery, but she doesn’t drive, so I’ve asked Joe to do it. Poor thing, he’s exhausted. He’s only had a few hours’ sleep, too.
I back the car out with Sam in the front seat next to me and wave to the older two as they wait for the minibus.
I don’t know if this is a national thing, or if it’s just local to Cumbria, but if you live more than three miles away from the nearest school, or if there’s not a suitable pavement to walk upon, your kids are eligible for free transport. And since no proper buses run up here in Troutbeck, this takes the form of a taxi – well, a minibus. (Not Joe. Joe’s a one-man band. He generally just carts old ladies to hospital appointments, or garden centres, or to bridge club.)
I could send Sam in a taxi as well if I wanted to, but I have this fear that a rogue driver would steal him away, be on a ferry bound for Zeebrugge before I realized he hadn’t made it into school (I’ve enquired, and the drivers are not CRB-checked). So I drop Sam on my way to the shelter, and it’s useful because it’s one of the only moments during a normal working day that we get some time together.
We discuss all sorts. Sam’s still of an age when he believes in Father Christmas and he thinks of Jesus as having superhero status. To Sam, Jesus has quite obviously got superhero powers, because ‘How else could he do all that stuff?’
Sam went through a big Jesus phase last year and kept banging on and on about him. Which I didn’t see the harm in. But then I had Joe at the dinner table, hopping mad, slamming his fork down, saying, ‘That school is
corrupting
him.’
I negotiate our way down the lane. It’s a narrow, badly pot-holed stretch of track with no passing places. I have to time my departure just right or else I meet the minibus coming the other way. And it’s always me that has to reverse, because the driver has a bad neck and can only use his mirrors. In fairness, his vehicle is a lot wider than mine.
Sam has his hat on and his hood pulled up over it because of the car’s frigid interior, so he can’t hear a word I’m saying. And
my exhaust is blowing. It needed replacing a month ago and is getting worse by the day. I sound like a boy racer every time I press on the gas. I ask Sam about school and if there’s anything he wants to tell me.
‘What?’ he says.
‘ “Pardon,” ’ I correct.
‘Pardon? What?’
‘Is there anything going on at school you want to tell me about?’
He shrugs. Looks out the window. Then he turns and tells me excitedly about a child who brought in a lava lamp for Show and Tell. And one, when can we get a lava lamp?, and two, why can he never bring anything in for Show and Tell?
Inwardly, I’m cursing this mother, whoever she is, for giving me something else to do. Show and Tell. Brilliant.
‘Show and Tell,’ I explain patiently, ‘is an American thing. It’s like Trick or Treat. English people just don’t really do it.’
‘Everybody does Trick or Treat except us.’