It’s a lecturer, not a teacher, Laura thinks, enjoying the daydream of this conversation as if it were real. As if Kitty really were sitting beside her, the smell of her Chanel No5 perfume hanging in the air. Laura would lean her head onto her mum’s shoulder and feel the soft touch of Kitty’s lips on the top of her head. ‘Lecturer, teacher, sure it’s all the same,’ Kitty would say. ‘Anyway, just speak up and speak clearly and remember you are just as good as anyone in that room, teacher and all included. You earned your place and you’re going to fly, my wee pet.’
Laura closes her eyes and swears she can really hear her mother’s voice, and feel the warmth of her body. She stays that way for a moment or two, revelling in the perfect illusion before it is interrupted abruptly by the sound of Robyn at the bedroom door.
‘MUM! Did you see my geography text book? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it. Mrs Keenan will kill me if I don’t have it.’
Eyes springing open, Laura looks at her daughter, who is already looking much too like a grown woman for her comfort, and shakes her head.
‘No, love. I’ve not. Would it be on the kitchen table? Did you do your homework there before?’
Robyn shakes her head. ‘No!’ she says mournfully. ‘I looked and all but it’s not there. I bet I left it in Mia’s house. Or she swiped it out of my school bag on Friday. She’s always up to something. I’ll text her…’
With that, and without Laura having to say another word, her daughter skips off down the hall into her own room already humming along to some tune by some band no one outside Generation Z or whatever they’re called seems to have heard of.
Peace returns and Laura is back in her room, hoping to conjure her mum back for just another moment, but it’s too late. The spell is broken. And she’s on her nerves waiting for the inevitable meltdown when Mia claims to have no knowledge of the missing book and Robyn goes into full-blown teenage panic – the strongest force on this earth.
‘I suppose we’ll talk later, Mum,’ Laura whispers. ‘Love you.’ Then she gets up and braces herself for what lies ahead in her daughter’s room.
At least, she thinks, it is a distraction from the back-to-school panic. The last time she felt terrified that she didn’t or wouldn’t fit in was a very, very long time ago – and it’s a source of shame to her till this day. She had let that fear join ranks with her increasingly bolshy teenager attitude and had decided A Levels weren’t important anyway. And so she had bombed out of them with style.
She has gone on to do her own thing and be successful, enough, in the time since. She knows that. She’s worked her way up the ladder in a variety of retail jobs. She knows her worth is not tied to academia. She knows that A levels and university degrees are not a measure of a person’s worth, but she also knows that secretly she felt she had let herself, and her mum,down by not storming her exams and going on to enjoy three years of student life hedonism.
Lifting her phone, she scrolls to the group chat she has with her closest friends, Becca and Niamh. Despite some pretty spectacular bumps in the road, they are as close as they ever were: BFFL (Best Friends For Life). She types:
Having all the feelings tonight, girls. Am I mad? What would Kitty think? I wish she was here. Why can’t you two come back to school with me and we can all be together like the old days?
She adds a winky face before she hits send, to make it look as though she is just joking around. She hopes that her girls can intuit that her fears are real and offer the reassurance she needs.
Maybe she should voice her concerns to her husband, Aidan. Again. Even though she is getting slightly fed-up vibes from him. During her last wobble he told her he no longer knew what to say to settle her nerves. He said all he could do was what he had been doing all along and remind her that she wouldn’t have got the place on the Women’s Studies course if she wasn’t considered more than able for it by the admissions folk.
She’d smiled and thanked him at the time, but wanted a little more than a rational, logical response. She wanted a ‘I know this is scaring the absolute skitters out of you, but look it, you are made of strong stuff and you can absolutely kick this in the dick’ – which is exactly what Niamh replies in her message two minutes later.
A second message comes in from Becca – this time in the form of a voice note of her singing ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry, followed by a short pep talk on how she is, again, going to ‘kick it in the dick’ – and it makes her feel infinitely better. She is so glad to have these ladies back in her life. It’s hard to imagine they wentthe guts of a decade not speaking to one another after Becca’s marriage to Aidan’s best friend, Simon, broke down. As she had tried to balance her loyalties between her best friend and her husband, things had become fraught all round until their friendship broke down altogether.
It had been Kitty’s death that had brought them back together and old wounds had been healed. Now she can’t imagine her life without them. They have both so easily slipped back into their old ways, with the exception of one pretty big change. Becca is now about ten months into a relationship with Laura’s big brother, Conal. It’s a source of both delight and worry – she loves seeing them so happy, but she also knows how fragile friendships can be when it all goes wrong. For now, however, it’s going right and she has her girls by her side to offer reassurance on tap.
And that’s exactly what they do now. After fifteen minutes of a back and forth, she feels a little a little better.
Not better enough to actually get a good night’s sleep, but better enough to allow her to smile as she pulls the duvet up to her chin and closes her eyes to rest. Her girls, it seems, will always have her back, which is a good thing because she really, really thinks she’s going to need them.
4
DEATH BY CARAMEL SQUARE
Becca
I would like to say I felt sad at handing Miss Clara back to her slightly hungover parents this morning, but the truth is, I didn’t. I still don’t. I love her with every part of my being but I am already finding that one of the best things about being a grandparent is that you get to hand the child back.
I’d managed to get a quick hour’s nap before getting up, showered, dressed and ready to switch from my grandparent duties to my daughter duties. I wrote a piece forNorthern Peopleabout this. How these are our ‘sandwich years’. Here we are, stuck in the middle of two very different generations, trying to care for both and sometimes neglecting ourselves in the process.
It is a pretty powerful piece, if I say so myself. It created quite the buzz on theNorthern PeopleFacebook page. It’s seven months since my first article appeared in the magazine and my nerves were in shreds at being so open and honest about some pretty personal matters on life as a ‘woman of a certain age’.
We’ve had every kind of response – from women agreeingand sharing their own experiences, to anonymous trolls with flags in their profile pictures calling me horrendous names and saying I didn’t deserve to be a mother, or a daughter, or a granny for that matter. A few of them were even so lovely as to comment on my appearance, my weight, and my slightly wonky smile in none-too-kind a fashion, and I can admit I had a bit of a ‘menty b’ as the younger generation would call it.
I was just about to book an all-expenses trip to Turkey for a total body transformation when Conal – the man who is, I suppose, my boyfriend even though we are both too old for that term to sound appropriate – reminded me of all the parts of me he thinks are just bloody perfect. It’s hard to exist in a place of self-loathing while in the afterglow of some of the finest sex I have ever known.
So I had shut out the trolls and concentrated on the voices of the many women who related. And now, as I tell Daniel to be a good boy and mind the house while I go and take his granny to Asda, I wonder how many of those women are doing the same. How many helped get their grandchildren to school that morning, or spent hours counselling their children through their latest crisis. How many have become chauffeur to their parents, or carer in the harder times that inevitably come with ageing. I think of how so many of them – of us – are also trying to hold down careers and I am very grateful that I have been able to carve out some time for myself in this past year because I fully realise how easy it is to become completely caught up in responsibility and forget about fun.
And I am so determined that there is still fun to be had in this life. I am still intent on proving my teenage self – sixteen-year-old Becki (with an ‘i') – wrong, or right… or something and becoming the person she hoped we would be as our fifties start to loom large.
