Mothers & Daughters (6 page)

My stomach flipped over when I heard that. Not just because I was annoyed with Ian for not waiting, for ignoring what I'd told him –
Don't confront her, don't corner her
, I'd said – but because of the implications. And I knew, before Jaz finished the story, exactly how she would have reacted. My throat got tighter and tighter as she told me what she'd said to him, there in the café while the other patrons sat and watched, while Matty played with his chips. All the words she'd been holding back, brooding over for the last few days, flooding out. Matty hearing it, breathing it in like poisonous smoke.

‘What did Ian do?' I said at last.

‘I didn't give him a chance to do anything. I picked up Matty and left.'

I saw in my mind's eye a howling toddler dragged from his chair and bundled into the car, Ian dashing outside, watching them drive off while Matty sobbed and kicked in his booster seat. It was unbearable.

‘I was going to tell you, he came to the shop today.'

‘That was bloody sneaky of him.'

‘I don't think he knew what else to do. He was desperate to see you.'

‘You sound like you feel sorry for him,' said Jaz, dangerously.

‘I don't—'

There was a clattering noise in the background. ‘Fucking hell,' Jaz said under her breath. ‘Matty? Matty! Leave it. Come here.
Come here
.'

I said, ‘Bring him round to mine, give yourself a bit of peace. Have a nice bath. Or I'll pop over now and pick him up. I can be with you in ten minutes. Yeah?'

Silence. I was picking up my keys again, ready.

‘No,' she said. ‘He's staying with me. From now on, I'm not letting him out of my sight.'

‘Make the most of it while she's small,' people used to say to me when Jaz was young. ‘The time goes by in a flash.' It's one of those mantras parents pass between themselves. I remember saying it to Laverne when her Josh was at primary school. I've come out with it in supermarket queues, to young mums waiting in the nursery foyer, to Mrs Wynne-on-the-other-side's granddaughter, to friends and acquaintances and strangers. I said it to Jaz and Ian six months in when they were beside themselves with lack of sleep. ‘None of it lasts long,' I told them, ‘none of these stages you're convinced will go on for ever. In the blink of an eye they're gone.' You get to my age, you suddenly feel the urge to warn everyone, to explain that you were there once, and you were left gaping at how quickly your children passed through. Even now I'll sometimes be clearing out a cupboard, or moving a piece of furniture, and I'll discover an object belonging to girl-Jaz. This can be an unexpected treasure, or an irritant, like the time a Kinder dragon got into the hoover and broke the roller mechanism. But other days such finds are a blade through the heart, and I could lie down and weep that this tiny sock no longer has an owner; that the milk teeth which made the marks on this discarded plastic spoon now live in my china cabinet inside a pot with a fairy on the lid. That moment when you go to take your child's hand, as you've done for years, and she shakes you off because she's too old: that's a killer.

Thank goodness for grandchildren, our second chances.

It was easier in the mornings without Matty, I had to admit. It wasn't just the dressing, the feeding, the clearing up – procedures which often had to be repeated, from scratch. It was the run to
nursery that really stretched me. To get him there, settle him, unpack his stuff, come back, pick up Josh from next door, drop him outside the high school and be at the shop on time, I had to be out of the house by 7.45 at the latest. Any accidents, any tantrums or fevers or suspicious rashes, and we were all scuppered.

So although I missed him, it was certainly less complicated to have only myself to get ready. I got half an hour's lie-in, ate my breakfast at one sitting, listened to the news and managed a proper job with my make-up and curling tongs. Josh would be relieved too, I thought, to avoid all that last-minute rush. Or be forced to listen to Matty-anecdotes the whole journey.

He was sitting on the wall when I got outside.

‘You should have rung the bell,' I said.

‘Needed some fresh air.' He got to his feet and shouldered his sports bag.

Needed to get away from his mother, I guessed. Laverne was fine as a neighbour, but I shouldn't have liked to share a house with her. Small, stringy, artistic, over-attentive, she buzzed round her son's lumbering frame like a mosquito. Where was Josh's dad? I used to wonder. Not that I ever dared ask her. There was a brittleness there I didn't want to test.

‘Mum OK to pick you up tonight?'

‘Uh-huh.'

Laverne didn't want him going on the bus in case of what she called ‘rough elements'. And since I drove past the school gates every morning, at exactly the right time, it was no bother to take him. He was a nice lad. Meanwhile Laverne would don a leotard and sweatpants and head in the opposite direction to teach dance at the Opel-Warner Studios. So I saw a fair bit of Josh, holed up as we were in my Micra every weekday morning, and I guessed he talked to me far more than he talked to his mum.

When he was twelve or thirteen he went through a phase of coming round a lot. He'd say he wanted to watch a particular
programme but his mother had the TV on another station. Or he'd appear as I was cooking tea and cadge half a meal. At first I thought she wasn't feeding him properly – Laverne has a great horror of fat and fat people – but it wasn't always food he was after. Often he'd just sit in the living room with a drink of squash. ‘You want to watch out,' Phil said when I told him. ‘He's obviously got a crush on you.' ‘Oh, obviously,' I remember saying. ‘Because it's so normal for a twelve-year-old to fancy someone of forty-nine.'

It wasn't anything like that. The lad just wanted some peace. Which was fine by me, but I could tell Laverne wasn't suited, so in the end I knocked the visits on the head. He was all right about it; he knows his mother.

‘What are you up to today, then?' I asked, as the car pulled out of the Close.

He pulled at his shirt where it had bunched under the seat belt. ‘OK morning, triple-bad afternoon.'

‘Not the Hungarian chemist?'

‘Yup.'

‘Is he really from Hungary?'

‘Dunno. Round there. Transylvania, could be.'

‘How are his teeth?'

‘I try not to look.'

‘Does he avoid mirrors?'

‘I would if I had a face as ugly as his.'

‘You really don't like him, do you?'

‘Nope.'

We waited at the roundabout while a lorry carrying sheep crossed onto the Shrewsbury road.

‘When I was at school,' I said, ‘the teachers used to hit us over the knuckles with a ruler.'

‘Oh, he'd use a ruler if he could get away with it.' Josh mimed a slashing action. ‘He's bad enough as it is.'

We moved onto the bypass.

‘Right, there was this one time, yeah, when he was showing us how we had to be careful with phosphorous. He had these tongs and gloves and he was making a big deal about how it burns your skin if you just touch it, like it's really corrosive. He got this kid he really hates to come up and pass him stuff, yeah, and then he asks him to hold his hand out and sticks this lump of phosphorous right in the middle of his palm.'

‘Oh good God.'

‘Except it wasn't phosphorous, it was something else, something that it didn't matter if you touched it, dunno what, but this boy didn't know. He just freaked: he was leaping about and screaming, shaking his hand, running to the sink, and the Hungarian was peeing himself laughing. He made all the other kids join in too.'

‘That's appalling.'

‘He said it was to make sure we remembered never to touch chemicals with our bare hands.'

‘Well, I think that's disgraceful behaviour from a teacher. That boy's parents should complain.'

‘It's not that easy, though. He'd just be even more of a git, I reckon.'

‘Someone should say something.'

The traffic was getting heavier as we came into the middle of town. Knots of children in school blazers could be seen at intervals, crowding the footpath, calling to each other.

‘We had to go in once and complain about a teacher,' I said. ‘When Jaz was in Year Nine.'

‘Yeah?'

‘He tried to wriggle out of it, put the blame on her. But I knew.'

I clicked my indicator on and pulled into the side of the road, between two other parked cars. All Josh had to do from here was walk 400 yards and he'd be at the school gate.

‘Never mind, hey.' He undid his seat belt and turned to reach for his bag. ‘Come the revolution, they'll all be up against the wall.'

‘Have a nice day,' I said to him as he climbed out.

‘I won't.'

Which is how we always part. I watched him slouch away, then I stuck my indicator on, checked my mirror, and pulled out into the stream of traffic.

‘I was thinking about Jasmine and Mr Woodhall,' I said to Dad. The room was so quiet that I could hear the ticking of the starburst clock above the door. Dad sat in a high-backed armchair, looking like a man who might be listening. Perhaps he'd noticed Matty wasn't there, perhaps he hadn't. ‘Do you remember,' I said to him, ‘that teacher who made her cry?'

I pictured a corridor on a darkening afternoon, harvest displays, a cleaner pulling a vac out from a cupboard, some of the classrooms unlit.
I have to ask
, Mr Woodhall had said,
is there anything going on at home we should know about? She seems like a very angry little girl at the moment
. And I went,
Well, of course she's angry! You made her share something you'd told her would be private
. He shook his head and pressed his lips together, slid Jaz's book across for me to read.

Dad gave a little cough, and at the same moment one of the care assistants appeared at the door to ask if I owned a V reg Astra. ‘No,' I said. She went away.

I said to him, ‘I feel as though I'm walking a tightrope. Ian's got every right to see his son, but it's saying that to Jaz. She's still beside herself, she can't think straight. I'm worried she'll set up a situation—'

Dad's fingers flexed briefly under mine.

‘And you see, if I didn't work, I could have Matty for her all the time; she'd like that. She's always telling me about
other people's parents who provide round-the-clock free childcare.'

I pictured the shop, and Moira. I loved driving into town every day, chatting to customers, Friday lunches at Healey's, going through the reps' catalogues. Then Mr Woodhall's face loomed across my memory again, triumphant:
‘I take it you didn't really stab your husband to death and then take Jasmine to Disneyland afterwards?
'

I stood up quickly, still holding Dad's hand. He looked in my direction for a moment, as if to ask what I was doing.

‘Breaking a dream,' I told him.

But the film played on. Mr Woodhall pushing the book across to me, the house point chart on the wall behind him a column of red stars, a jar of teasel heads on his desk.

‘How could you have made her read something like this out in front of everyone?
'

‘Oh, I can't
make
Jasmine do anything, Mrs Morgan. You should know that. No, she volunteered to share this
.'

I looked down at my father's scalp, the marked and uneven skin, the sparse grey hairs. If he would only talk to me, I'd not find myself falling into these thoughts. Don't pick up my gloom, I told him silently.

‘Hey,' I said, sitting myself closer to him, ‘remember how good our Jaz was that time I broke my arm? Wasn't she a love? Did all the shopping for me, came in from school every night and got straight on with tea. It brought out the best in her, being in charge like that. For that month she was smashing. It makes me wonder—'

‘What?
' another person would have said.
‘What does it make you wonder?
'

And I'd have gone,
‘Oh, nothing
.'

The clock ticked; Dad sighed. Jaz's childhood ran away before my eyes.

CHAPTER 6

Photograph 329, Album Three

Location: a fairground, Pwllheli

Taken by: Carol

Subject: a teenage Jaz swooping down in the seat of a ferris wheel, with Nat next to her, both mid-scream. Nat is leaning into Jaz and looks to be properly frightened; Carol guessed she didn't want to go on this ride but didn't dare back out. Jaz, on the other hand, knows no fear
.

At the edge of the picture is the claw end of the giant inflatable hammer that Phil's been forced to carry all afternoon. Carol thinks she might wrench it from his grasp and club him with it, any minute now. Except that would be a comic gesture, and it is not a comic situation
.

The whole holiday, they have been sniping at each other. The caravan they rented has acted like a microscope, hugely magnifying all that's wrong with their marriage. There somehow isn't the space to argue, and anyway, they can't in front of Nat
.

Today has been the worst. Every time the wheel carries the two girls upwards, Carol and Phil start to row. By the time Jaz is at the zenith, they are all but spitting at each other. As she's lowered into view again, it's smiles all round
.

As if their daughter's blind and stupid
.

One day, Jaz thinks, she's going to meet someone to whom she can confide all this, someone she can totally trust. Someone who will never let her down
.

I was going to dress up to see David: my blue skirt from Autograph and a cream blouse, heels. But then I thought, I can't be bothered with all that. I'm not being intimidated. Let him see me as I am.

Typically, the place he'd chosen turned out to be a hotel restaurant, not a pub. The waitress put us in a sort of conservatory, blond wood and sage fittings.