I had a lump in my throat and tears were welling up. I smiled at her and I saw her see the emotion and respond in kind.
‘Oh, Rob!’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘You silly sausage! Come here.’
I laid my cards on the table and moved from my seat to kneel before her, laying my head in her lap. ‘I love you so much,’ I mumbled into her shorts. ‘I know I don’t say it enough, but I do.’
‘Me too, Rob,’ she said, sighing and caressing my hair. ‘And if you pick those cards up and let me thrash you, I’ll love you even more.’
By the time the kids came back she’d beaten me seven times and we were tipsy. The conversation had all but been forgotten.
But some vestige of it must have been lingering in the air because Lou frowned at us and asked what was going on.
‘Nothing!’ we both said at once, and I laughed because it was as if we’d been caught in the act – the act of loving each other. Every adolescent’s nightmare.
* * *
On both weekends, twenty or thirty youngsters rolled up on a collection of noisy scooters. The owners turned the music up and everyone got drunk, and smiled and danced together in the sand.
We grooved with our kids, that summer – the first time we’d ever done so – and for the first time ever, I suspect they saw us as something other than ‘old’. When Dawn and I taught them the big box/little box dance, I think they might even have thought that we were cool.
One of the cats gave birth to six kittens, right in front of our children’s eyes, and when finally we had to leave, and even though the owner promised to feed them, both Lou and Lucy cried about leaving them behind. Dawn and I got misty-eyed as the taxi drove us away, too, though in our case it was more about leaving that house in Tinos than the cats.
It’s hard, really, to explain just how magical that holiday was, or why. Suffice to say that, by the time we left, we’d become a proper family again.
Our kids had become swimming, snorkelling children again, instead of snooty wannabe adults, and Dawn and I were briefly proper husband and wife. We’d even had sex, twice.
None of that lasted once we got home, but it did leave a sort of memory imprint that helped hold things together for a while. It enabled us to remember who we’d once been.
* * *
Back home in Joss Bay, it was prematurely dark, and raining.
‘I hate this house,’ I said, as I parked the car. ‘I didn’t think I would when we bought it, but I really really hate it.’
‘Dad!’ Lucy said. ‘I love this house.’
‘It’s better than the old house,’ Lou agreed.
‘I know what you mean, though,’ Dawn said, once the kids had climbed out. ‘After Greece, coming home is depressing.’
Should we have moved homes back in 2004?Very possibly, is the most honest answer I can come up with, and I’ve thought about that one a lot.
But sometimes life just gets in its own way to the point that even the most important decisions don’t get taken.
Early 2005 my business gained a new investor and we opened outlets in Bournemouth, Brighton, Maidstone and Redhill. As an aside, Maidstone was dreadful, taking up more of my time than the other three put together. But you get the picture: I was as busy as I’ve ever been.
Any time left over was taken up with Lucy, who, frankly, had become an absolute nightmare.
* * *
I’d be hard put to say when the problems with Lucy started; I’d struggle to name an exact date, or even a specific year. It was more of a slow slide into horror.
Until about ten, Lucy was mostly gorgeous. She was funny and pretty and loved. From when she was four to about eight years old, I was extra close to her. She’d follow me around the house and ‘help me’ with my DIY projects by sticking a screwdriver in my ear. Perhaps she was trying to kill me even then.
With hindsight, the signs had been there even when she was a toddler. Lucy had always been prone to inexplicable fits of rage and from the earliest age she’d had the ability to scream until she went blue, refusing any kind of solace and effectively cutting off her nose to spite her adversary’s face. She soon learned to throw a few pointed insults into the mix, too, and quickly learned which ones hurt the most. When this happened – when she shrieked that shehatedyou or that you were anastyMummy or Daddy, or later, when she said she ‘wished she’d just been adopted or something’ – Dawn would say shehad the Devil in her, a phrase that always made me uncomfortable.
Because of my own upbringing, I believed pretty firmly that some people reallydidhave the Devil in them – and I don’t mean that in an abstract way. So when Dawn said that about our daughter, I worried I’d somehow passed the worst of my inheritance on to Lucy, like some terrible regressive gene.
By twelve, Lucy was getting snarky and skipping school – being generally difficult to control. When she was fourteen, Dawn showed me a documentary about a boot-camp for problem teenagers in America and, horrific as it was, and without a word being spoken between us, I think we both wondered if something like that would help. Another time Dawn suggested an exorcism and we both had to pretend that she’d been joking.
