‘He was saying – this young shrink – that some kids do more or less what you tell ’em to do, and others do the exact opposite. And the trick is working out what kind of child you’re dealing with.’
‘Pretty clear, that one!’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ Mum said. ‘And he was saying the ones like Lucy, the rebellious ones, sometimesnottrying to control them actually works better. Cos they’re left with nothing to rebel against.’
The idea struck me initially as a daft one, but as time went by, and as Lucy continued to do the opposite of everything we said, it came to sound less ridiculous. So eventually, after discussion with Rob ,we decided to give it a try.
For a few months, we let Lucy do pretty much anything she wanted and we did our best to pretend we didn’t care. We were running out of other options, after all.
But sadly – Supernanny take note – it actually made things worse. Within a month we had a woman police officer on the doorstep asking us why we weren’t controlling our daughter. Lucy, it appeared, hadn’t been merely opposing us after all. She was following her own personal roadmap to hell.
Lucy used to get Rob worked up too – I know she did – but it was never quite the same for him, for the simple reason that he had an excuse to get out of the house. He even admitted to me once that even the worst days at work, even the worst of employees in their very worst moments, were nothing compared to dealing with our Lucy.
In 2010 in the middle of one of her many crises (she was dating a guy who’d started to hit her), I looked Billy up on the internet.
Initially, I was looking for proof that it was down to him, and, when I learned he’d been arrested on drugs charges in LA, it seemed to confirm my fears.
So I wrote to tell him so.
I couldn’t really say what I was hoping for because I wasn’t necessarily thinking that clearly. I’d dealt with nothing other than Lucy’s various crises for the previous few months, and I hadn’t slept properly for years.
But I do remember having thought,Maybe he’ll want to meet her.Maybe he’ll tell us to put her on a plane.
And I remember thinking,Maybe he’ll say, ‘Send her to boarding school. It worked wonders for me. I’ll pay.’
And also – and this is the hardest one to admit –Maybe he’ll say, ‘Run away and leave them. Come live with me in LA.’
And that maybe, just maybe, I would. I was feeling pretty fed up with my life.
Billy did write back this time. He replied about two weeks later by email, including a photo of his wife, Candice Rayner (she was the spitting image of Naomi Watts) alongside his dimpled newborn son.
The text of the email wasn’t long or even particularly interesting – he mainly talked about his career. But he finished with, ‘I’m really sorry you’re having trouble with one of your kids. We’re hoping that Gandhi is going to be cool. So far so good, he sleeps like a log.’
I looked on AltaVista to see if they’d really called the kid Gandhi and it seemed, from what I could find, that they had.Gandhi Ruddle, I remember thinking.The poor thing! What chance does he have with a name like that?
Other than all the Lucy stuff – and as I say, Lucy took up so much space there was very littleotherthan Lucy stuff – life in Joss Bay was fine.
The house was new and functional and you could see the sea from nearly every window. I passed my driving test early on and Rob bought me a little red Micra I used to bomb around in, though mainly I provided a taxi service for kids.
For rainy days there was a sunroom that didn’t feel too claustrophobic, a room I used mainly to read in, and on sunny days (when the sun, ironically, made the sunroom unusable) you could cross the road and scramble down to the beach.
We got a cat – a gorgeous cuddly tabby Lou for some reason named Cedric, and when Cedric got tragically run over, five years later, we got a mean bitey kitten Lucy christened Blanche.
Rob had a vague belief that the house was somehow jinxed, but I never believed that to be true. The house was just a box really – a plain, reliable, weather-proof box. It was up to the owners to fill that box with love and fun, or alternatively with misery and hatred. Our jinx was quite simple: one family member consistently chose the latter.
But there were little joys and triumphs along the way that helped to make life bearable. No matter how bad things are, there are always those, in every family.
We had nice holidays where Lucy behaved herself, alternating with horrid holidays where Lucy did not. We even had – and Lou liked these best of all – holidays where Lucy didn’t come at all, generally because she was in custody, or rehab, or in a squat.
There were lovely dinners without the kids where we got drunk and laughed until we wept, specifically when Mum and/or Wayne came to stay, and benefit fundraisers for Home From Home and parties and dancing and picnics. A couple of times, because Mum had invited one of her asylum seeker friends, we had beautiful, tear-jerking Christmas dinners, too.
And in the middle of the mayhem of family life there were moments when I’d unexpectedly fall back in love with Rob.
Sometimes there would be a trigger to cause this sudden shift – a gift, or a meal out, or some touching, thoughtful act. But other times it just seemed to come from nowhere, taking me by surprise.
One time, it happened while driving back from a weekend in the Lake District. We’d left Mum at ours looking after the kids so we could attempt to recharge our emotionally exhausted batteries, but the weekend had been an utter flop.
To start with, it had rained non-stop from the moment we arrived until we left. The heating in our Airbnb had been inadequate, meaning we’d felt cold and cheated all weekend, and the Michelin-starred local restaurant had been closed. The bed had been lumpy too, meaning we hadn’t been able to catch up on lost sleep, either. By the time it came to go home we were both feeling more weary than when we’d left.
