He feels like Humpty Dumpty, and has no idea how he is going to find the strength to do what he needs to do.
Call Rosehip and Popcorn, and tell them that their mother is dead.
Chapter 5
It’s almost 11 p.m., and Joe is in bed. Rose is under no illusion that he’s actually asleep. He’ll be on Instagram, or playing Xbox Live, or doing whatever else it is that 16-year-old boys do when their mum isn’t around. She decides she’s probably better off not pondering that one, and walks into the kitchen.
She sees a blurred reflection of herself in the stainless-steel fridge door, and hastily pulls it open. Nobody needs to see that, especially her. She’s wearing a baggy old dressing gown and stripy bed socks, and her hair desperately needs washing. Or possibly shaving off entirely so it can have a fresh start, and stop impersonating a neglected badger – her mass of curls is now pure frizz, the dark brown streaked with premature grey.
She stares into the fridge, bathed in the yellow glow of its light. She inspects the shelves, already knowing what is there, and knowing that she wants to eat none of it.
She went to Tesco on the way home from work, and there is practically a whole farm crammed on to the shelves. Fresh rocket and carrot batons and a cucumber big enough to qualify as a deadly weapon on an episode ofCSI. Salmon fillets and a quinoa salad and green juices in trendy glass bottles. Her fridge is leaner than the entire British Olympic cycling team in pre-camp training. Surely some of that vitality will be absorbed into her just by looking at it, through some kind of environmental osmosis?
She roots around, sighing. She’s bought all of this for her new health kick, walking round the supermarket full of hope and resolve as she packed the trolley with overpriced super-foods. She’d been shamed into it by Joe, who pointed out that him being forced to eat a broccoli stir-fry in one room while she stuffed her face with cream cakes in another wasn’t exactly setting a good example. Plus there were never any cream cakes left for him, which wasn’t fair.
Rose didn’t really need him to point this out to her at all. She was already painfully aware of it, and he didn’t even know the full extent of the problem. At 16, he was out a lot. He had friends to see and parties to go to and parks to hang round in. And while he was out, she didn’t even need to hide – she could binge to her heart’s content.
Except, of course, her heart probably wasn’t all that happy with it. Multipacks of Wotsits and microwave sticky-toffee pudding in pots are never, ever to be seen on those healthy food pyramid charts they have pinned up in the school where she works. They are the renegades, the outcasts, the bandits of the nutritional world.
They are also, Rose thinks, shutting the fridge door a lot harder than she probably should, the only things that make her feel even marginally better about life.
She walks over to the cupboard under the stairs. The one Joe never goes in because it is the place where she keeps a strange combination of the Hoover, printer cartridges, empty cardboard boxes that once contained long-gone appliances, and random presents for other people.
It’s known as the Present Cupboard, a throwback to a time when Joe was much younger. When he was at primary school, and there seemed to be a party every weekend. When life was dominated by the local soft-play centre, and coming up with some £5 toy to stick in a gift bag. When teachers needed novelty mugs for Christmas, and toiletry sets for the end of term.
It used to contain a cornucopia of delights. Cheap games and craft jars and wrapping paper and boxes full of cards with pictures of cuddly bears for the girls and pirate bears for the boys.
All of that faded out as Joe got older, when the tenner-in-the-envelope replaced the tat on birthdays. Now, his mates don’t have the kinds of parties that involve climbing frames and ball pools – they have the kind that involve deliveries from Domino’s Pizza and illicit booze smuggled into the garden in Coke bottles and someone plugging their phone playlist into speakers.
But for some reason, after all these years, they still both call it the Present Cupboard. And Rose does in fact still keep some presents in there – for colleagues, for neighbours, for those odd occasions when she just needs to say ‘thank you’ via the medium of chocolates or wine.
That’s what she has in mind now, as she rummages through the empty backpacks and the battery tin and the cardboard box brimming with mysterious chargers for equally mysterious items.
She eventually emerges victorious, brandishing one of those big, round, plastic tubs full of Cadbury’s Heroes. She bought it in the run-up to Christmas, along with about five others. This is the sole survivor. The rest have taken up permanent residence on her thighs.
Rose checks the sell-by date, sees that all is good, and retreats back to the living room. She slumps down on the sofa, and sighs when she sees she’s left the remote control by the telly. Heaving her too-big body up again, she retrieves it, and flicks through the channels until she finds something bearable.
This takes longer than it should considering the fact that they have about 8 million channels. She settles on a repeat ofPoldark, which is pretty much the equivalent of a big box of chocolates in visual form, and leans back into the cushions.
Just one episode, she tells herself. And just a few chocolates. It’s Friday, after all. She’s had a busy working week, and she deserves it. She’ll start her health kick tomorrow, and soon she’ll be all spry and limber, like Demelza, skinny enough to frolic through the waves on a Cornish beach in summer instead of hiding her despicable calves in leggings and encasing her bingo wings in cardigans.
She hears a bumping sound from upstairs, and deduces that Joe is on his Xbox. His game chair is rocking around, and he’ll probably be getting over-excited as he shoots things. At least it’s the start of the school holidays, so it doesn’t matter how late he stays up. Or her, for that matter. Six weeks stretch ahead of them – six weeks of fun for him, and six weeks of boredom for her. School holidays feel different when you’re 42 than when you’re 16.
At least she’ll be able to catch up on all those jobs she’s had piling up around her. Clean the car out. Unblock the drain in the shower. Many other exciting tasks.
She makes a mental note to call her mum in the morning – that needs to be top of the list. Her mum sent Joe a gift voucher to celebrate the end of his GCSEs, which of course he’s already spent. It turned up weeks ago and they both keep forgetting to phone and thank her.
Now she comes to think of it, she’s not spoken to her mum much recently at all. She usually called a lot – or at least what feels like a lot, when it’s your mum.
She shrugs, deciding her mum must just be busy, and uses her untidy fingernails to tear off the tape around the lid of the box. Why do they always make these things so difficult to get into? Why is it that the carrot batons are just there, all washed and ready to go and simple, and the good stuff like the chocolate takes an engineering degree and a blowtorch to break into? Life just isn’t fair sometimes.
Rose shoves a handful of miniature Caramels into her mouth, and hides the wrappers in the tub. If they’re right at the bottom, it’s like they don’t count. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.
She looks on as Poldark takes his top off again – quality television – and wonders if this is all she has to look forward to now. Quiet nights in with a box of chocolate and Aidan Turner. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it was the actual Aidan Turner, here in person and scything her back garden for her, but it’s not. It’s a teeny-tiny-TV version, which is nowhere near as satisfying.
She also wonders what Simon next door is up to. She saw him doing his own gardening earlier, also with his top off. Not quite Poldark, but enough to make her blush. He’s probably asleep, she thinks, or chatting to supermodels online. And I’m turning into a horny old woman who needs to get her own life, instead of living through other people’s.
Joe is starting sixth-form college in September, doing his A-levels. He’s excited, and hopeful, and bright enough to do well. The world is at his size-10 feet, which is where it belongs – because he really is a great lad. He’s not had it especially easy, between his dad and his dad’s new family and what she suspects has been her increasingly morose presence, but he’s always stayed upbeat. Confident. Secure.
