‘Did you do it deliberately?’
‘No. I didn’t even know I’d done it. Didn’t think about it.’
I indicate to turn onto the main road, wishing I had a choice and could stay a bit longer on Wyddial Lane. Why? I did what I wanted to do, saw what there was to see from the outside. That ought to feel like enough.
‘Who the fu— Whocounts kissesin a message?’ Ben says.
‘Girls do. Some girls, anyway. Lauren’s obviously one of them.’
‘First the problem was me not doing it – she’d always put a line of “x”s at the bottom of her messages and I never would, and she thought that meant I don’t care about her – so I started putting them in, and now she’s counting how many, and thinking itmeanssomething if I do one less than in the last message. That’s crazy, right?’
‘Ask Zannah if she counts how many kisses Murad puts in each message.’ Murad, to my knowledge, has only once done something wrong in the year and a half that he and Zannah have been whatever-they-call-it, and he turned up looking tearful the following morning, clutching a dozen red roses. Zannah was delighted, both by the roses and by the news of the sleepless night he’d suffered after ‘criticising me when I’d done fuck all wrong. Mum, I literally don’t care what you think about me swearing right now. Sometimes Ineedto swear, or I’d throw myself off a bridge.’
I would be very surprised if my daughter did not keep on top of the kisses-per-message statistics.
Ben groans. ‘And now, because I didn’t instantly reply and say “Oh, sorry, sorry”, and send a long line of “x”s, she’s going to accuse me of blanking her.’
‘So why not reply and send more kisses?’
‘No! Why should I?’
‘You’re right. You shouldn’t.’ Poor boy. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake – too young to be engaged in fraught relationship negotiations.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Ask Zannah, Mum. Lauren’s a high-maintenance, needy—’
‘Ben!’
‘Person. I was going to say “person”.’
‘Yeah. Course you were.’ I’m glad his instinct is to stand up for himself, and that he’s not planning to cry all night and take roses round to Lauren’s house tomorrow morning.
Ten minutes later we’re parked in the right place. Ben climbs out of the car. ‘You coming to watch?’ he asks, tossing his phone onto the passenger seat. I usually do. I’m not remotely interested in football, but I love to see Ben doing something healthy and worthwhile, something other than being the slave of an electronic device.
‘In a bit,’ I say. ‘First I want to find a supermarket and get something for dinner tonight.’
I watch him run off. Soon he and other red-and-white-clad boys are pushing each other around happily – trying to trip each other up, grabbing each other’s rucksacks.
On the passenger seat, Ben’s phone starts to ring. ‘Zannah’ flashes up on the screen. I pick it up. ‘Hi, darling. Everything okay?’ Zannah isn’t normally awake before noon on a Saturday.
‘Where’s Ben?’ The clipped precision of her words doesn’t bode well.
‘Football.’
‘Really? According to Snap Maps, he was on a street called Widdle Lane or something ten minutes ago. What the hell was he doing there?’
‘Wyddial Lane. Yeah, that’s nearby. Now we’re at football.’
‘Right. When you next see him, can you please ask him to deal with his high-maintenance nightmare of a girlfriend? Thanks. She’s just called me andwoken me upto tell me that Ben blanked her in the middle of an important conversation, and can I ask him to message her? Their pathetic relationship is not my problem, Mum, and I’m not getting dragged into it.’
‘I—’
‘Thanks, Mum. See you later. I’m going back to sleep. Ugh, it’snine thirty –grim.’
She’s gone. ‘Girlfriend’, she said. So using that word in a teenage context is not entirely disallowed. I add this important clue to my ongoing study of teenage behaviour, glad that my investigative interest in every aspect of my children’s lives is not reciprocated. Zannah and Ben aren’t remotely concerned about the details of my day-to-day life. Neither of them asked me why I drove to Wyddial Lane before going to the St Ives football ground; neither of them ever will.
There’s something comforting about living with two people who never think about or question your behaviour. I tried to explain this to Dominic once, when he complained that the kids never ask how our days have been. ‘They’re teenagers,’ I said. ‘Anything happening outside of the teenage arena, they couldn’t care less. Be thankful – remember the time Ben found cigarettes and a lighter in your jacket pocket, and you told him you gave up ages ago, and they must have been there for at least ten years? You didn’t mind then that he didn’t pounce on that and say, “But wait, you only bought that jacket last month.”’
I don’t have any bad habits that I’m concealing from the children. I’ve only ever had one near-miss on a par with Dominic’s cigarettes-and-lighter scare, and that was when Zannah was four and still interested enough in people outside her immediate peer group to notice strange things her mother did. She walked into the kitchen and found me with a pair of scissors in one hand and a photograph in the other. I must have looked upset and guilty, because she asked me if I was okay. ‘Of course, darling,’ I said in a bright voice.
