Losing Me (3 page)

“I’m always careful. You’re not going to lose me. And you know as well as I do that I can’t cut back on work. We need the money.”

He was right again. They did need the money. Contrary to popular opinion, TV documentary makers—even award-winning ones like Frank who were always in demand—didn’t make a great deal of money. Over the years they’d remortgaged the house twice to help pay for the kids’ education. Among their friends, they were the only couple that didn’t own their house outright. They were also the only ones who hadn’t come into a substantial inheritance. When Frank’s parents died a few years back, there had been no property to pass on because they’d rented their flat. Their only hope was Rose. But if the time came when she needed to go into a care home, her place would have to be sold. Private care cost a fortune, so all the equity would be swallowed up in fees. That would leave them with nothing. They’d be forced to sell their home to finance their old age and be left eking out their days paying rent on some rabbit hutch of a rented flat.

“I know we need the money,” Barbara said, “but I hate seeing you under so much stress. If third-world thugs don’t kill you, then stress will.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but whether you like it or not, I plan to carry on working and earn enough money to pay for our old age. In other words, I fully intend to have my cake and eat it. So, unless you have another solution . . .”

“That’s not fair. Don’t make this my problem. It’s our problem. We need to work it out together.”

“Look, I can’t have this conversation now. I’ve got a stack of e-mails to reply to. Then I need to get in the shower.”

It seemed to her that he always found some excuse or other not to have
this
conversation.

“Oh, by the way,” he said. “My sister’s been posting more pictures of kittens on Facebook.”

“I know. I saw. And some affirmation about life being less about breaths you take and more about the moments that take your breath away.”

“I don’t get it,” Frank said. “Pam’s always liked to show off and flaunt her money, but she’s never been a flake.”

“That’s what menopause does to you,” Barbara said. “Lack of estrogen makes women crave all things saccharine and schmaltzy.”

“Really?”

“Well, that’s my theory, for what it’s worth. I’m not sure it would stand up to rigorous scientific analysis. . . . With me it’s
The Golden Girls.
”

“Huh . . . I hadn’t noticed.”

Of course he hadn’t. He was never here.

“I don’t know how you can watch that rubbish,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I’d rather have my brain go a bit syrupy than succumb to the male meno-Porsche.”

“Male meno-Porsche? Me? What are you on about? You and I share a crappy old Saab.”

“Yeah, but that’s only because you can’t afford a Porsche. If you had money, you’d be so in there. . . .”

“Actually, I wouldn’t get a Porsche. I’d get a Harley.” He started making vrooming noises. “Come on . . . be honest. How much would it turn you on to see my paunch encased in skintight black leather?”

“You have no idea,” she said, grinning.

•   •   •

Since Frank would probably be at his desk for another few minutes, Barbara decided to grab the first shower. On her way to the bathroom, she stopped to listen at Ben’s door for signs of him stirring. Some hopes. The TV was on quietly, which meant he’d probably been up most of the night and had dozed off in front of it. She opened the door a crack. Her son was asleep on his back, arms splayed, mouth slightly open. His laptop, along with the stinky remains of a plate of bacon, eggs, beans and ketchup, was on his nightstand. Dirty socks, pants and towels were scattered over the floor. She could only guess what time he’d fallen asleep. Ben—eighteen months out of uni—was trying to make it as a music journalist. He wrote at night, claiming that he worked better in the quiet. “Stop worrying,” he’d say, whenever his mother registered concern about his unhealthy sleeping pattern. “I was the same at university. My whole life was spent pulling all-nighters.”

What Barbara knew for certain was that her son would remain unconscious for most of the day—probably emerging from his adolescent pit about the time she got home from work. She closed the door as quietly as she could.

The point was, of course, that Ben wasn’t an adolescent. He was twenty-three. But in many ways he was still her baby. A couple of years after having Jess, they’d tried to get pregnant again, but each month had ended in disappointment. There was no obvious physical reason. Just bad luck, the doctors said. Then, almost a decade later, when they’d given up hope, along came Ben: their little miracle.

“This can’t go on,” Frank had said last night when Ben was out. “Us bankrolling him while he sleeps all day. We’re too bloody soft on him. Have you any idea how much his December phone bill was—the one that I just paid? Two hundred quid. And that’s on top of the ton of money you spent on Christmas presents and Jean’s birthday.”

“It was bloody Christmas, for crying out loud. And Jean was sixty. What was I supposed to do?”

“Spend less.”

“OK, next year you can be in charge of all the present buying. . . . Look, I know Ben’s costing us a fortune, but it’s hard for kids these days. They come out of university with decent degrees only to discover that nobody wants to employ them. This is the worst job market in decades. Lots of his friends are in the same boat. According to the Office for National Statistics, one in three men aged twenty to thirty-four still lives with his parents. I read it in the
Guardian
.”

“Sod the Office for bloody Statistics and sod the
Guardian
. It’s indulgent
Guardian
-reading parents like us who’ve mollycoddled our kids since they were born who are responsible for all this. We’ve infantilized them, turned them into these delicate flowers who are too scared to go out into the world and get their hands dirty. Ben needs to find a job. Any job. That’s all there is to it.”

Barbara reminded him that Ben volunteered twice a week at the food bank, distributing groceries. “He’s a good kid. His heart’s in the right place. He takes after you.”

In the seventies, Frank had spent some time volunteering at a soup kitchen.

“I also had a paid job.”

“Yes, but right now there are no jobs.”

“There are if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty.”

Then Frank went on about how, during his gap year—when the economic situation was so bad that the population was working only a three-day week—he’d found work as a porter in a hospital mortuary. “In my day kids had initiative.”

“And you enjoyed that job, did you?”

“It was OK, and anyway, it wasn’t about enjoyment. Coming face-to-face with death toughened me up—made a man of me.”

“Really? Because according to your mum, you lasted less than a day. She said a leg on one of the corpses shot up and you ran out, screaming like a girl.”

“Rubbish. I didn’t scream like a girl. I screamed like a man.”

•   •   •

Barbara turned on the shower and got undressed. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for Ben, but Frank had a point. They were being too soft on him. From the moment Ben moved back in they should have laid down some rules. Rule one: if he wanted to make it as a music journalist he needed to meet the world halfway and start typing stuff out.

Granted, he was doing a bit, writing blogs for online music magazines, but it wasn’t enough. And mostly he wrote for free. A few magazines paid, but rarely more than fifty quid.

She’d read some of his stuff. Most of the time she hadn’t the foggiest what he was going on about. He tended to write about obscure bands with “fearless sonic curiosity” or whose latest “tensely coiled” offering had “an alchemical knack of deriving inspiration from limitation.”

Ben’s knowledge didn’t surprise her. He’d been immersed in music since he was a teenager. He’d taught himself to play guitar at age fourteen, and in his first year at university he formed a punk band called Grandma and the Junkies. They were pretty good by all accounts. By the time the boys left university, they were gigging all over the country—mostly in crappy clubs in godforsaken towns, but that was the way it worked. You slogged away for years, and if you were any good, you might get a break. But after a year or so they realized that none of them had the stomach for the long haul. What’s more, the lack of any A&R interest—despite them posting endless videos on YouTube—prompted a reality check. Grandma and the Junkies were good, but they weren’t great. They were just another standard uni band.

They broke up. It was the first time in his life that Ben had failed at something, and for a while he was pretty miserable. It didn’t help that despite the recession, the other boys landed on their feet and found jobs.

Ben wasn’t saying anything, but Barbara suspected that even now, months later, he was still reeling from his failure. He’d been denied his dream. She imagined how angry he felt. He was clearly sleeping to hide from his emotions. Despite his bits of writing, she suspected that deep down his passion for music had faded. His heart wasn’t in it. Barbara had tried talking to him about how he was feeling.

“I know you’re miserable, but you did your best to make a go of the band. And people in the music industry are always going on about how success is so often down to luck more than talent. Plus you admitted that none of you really had the commitment to keep going.”

“We didn’t have the commitment. . . . But you’ve got this all wrong. I’m over what happened to the band. Honest.”

But she wasn’t buying it.

Sad as she felt for him, it didn’t alter the fact that Ben needed to earn some money. It wasn’t simply that they couldn’t afford to keep financing him. It wasn’t good for him to be in his twenties and so dependent on his parents. She dreaded to think what effect it was having on his self-esteem. He needed to get a part-time job with a paper hat and start paying something towards his upkeep. She resolved that she and Frank would sit down and have a serious talk with him. And sooner rather than later.

After her shower, Barbara dried her hair, checked her chin in the mirror for whiskers and replaced her HRT patch. She’d tried coming off the hormones, but within a few days the hot flashes returned and she turned into Crazy Psycho Woman. Frank said it was like living with Mrs. Satan with PMS. Her doctor said she would probably need to be on HRT for life.

Getting dressed was easy—thanks to her stomach bulge. Barbara’s tight tops and jeans were long gone. She slipped on a navy tunic and a pair of matching palazzo pants. These days her wardrobe was full of dark palazzos, leggings and long A-line tunics that skimmed her upper body and vaguely hinted at a waist. According to the magazines, tunics, long scarves and heels lengthened the torso and drew the eye away from a thickened midsection. Today she accessorized her uniform with chunky earrings, a couple of thick bangles and the obligatory long, jazzy scarf.

•   •   •

Her mother, Rose, is getting ready to go out. She and Stan—Barbara’s dad—have been invited to something called a “function.” This is a sort of party. Her parents go to lots of functions. As usual, Mrs. T is coming to babysit. Mrs. T is old and seems to like Barbara. She’s teaching her how to knit.

Barbara goes upstairs to watch her mother dress. Rose’s wardrobe is full of beautiful clothes. Barbara likes the evening gowns best. She sits on the big bed studying how her mother applies her eye shadow, the way she dots her face with Pan Stik and then with swift, skillful strokes, smudges it over her face so that it’s perfectly even. She watches her adjust her breasts in her low-cut, floaty chiffon dress covered in twinkly beads. “You look like a princess,” Barbara tells her mother. She stands up on the bed, reaches over and throws her arms around Rose’s shoulders. She gives her a big kiss on the cheek.

“What’s that for?” It’s her mother’s usual response when her daughter attempts to show her affection. Barbara is confused. Is it wrong to kiss your mum for no reason?

“Barbara, please let go. You’re spoiling my makeup.”

•   •   •

Barbara missed clothes shopping. Even in her forties she’d still been slim and able to find the odd thing in Topshop that she could get away with. That seemed light-years away now.

Jean was one of the lucky ones who hadn’t put on weight in her fifties. “Look at you in your tight jeans. You still look amazing.”

“No, I don’t. I look like Andy Warhol.” She was referring to her flyaway bleached-blond hair.

Being overweight in middle age did have one compensation, for which Barbara couldn’t help being grateful. Fat was a natural filler, and even if she did say so herself, her face was holding up rather well. That said, it hadn’t stopped her being pissed off about her thirty-nine-inch waist. A few weeks ago, Pam had posted on Facebook that when she felt old and unattractive, she thought about the young women she’d known who had died.
Thinking about those beautiful women who didn’t make it always makes me feel grateful for what I’ve got—even if these days Father Time and Mr. Gravity are taking their toll. For me it’s a privilege just to be alive.

Sanctimonious cow.

Barbara closed the front door behind her. Steve Jobs! That was the name of the Apple bloke. She felt a bit less senile now that she’d remembered.

Chapter 2

O
n a good day it was no more than a ten-minute drive to Jubilee Primary. The school was over the road from Orchard Farm. It went without saying that this was neither an orchard nor a farm, but a public-housing estate. It was also one of the worst in London. Orchard Farm: a mean joke of a name, Barbara thought. The
Daily Mail
referred to the place as the “Hammer Housing Estate of Horror.” As soon as they turned five, all the Orchard Farm kids started at Jubilee.

There was a reason apart from her punctuality neurosis that Barbara liked to get in early. Each morning, the school provided breakfast for the pupils, and she thought that it was important to be there. It was a chance for her to sit down and chat with the most underprivileged, vulnerable youngsters and check how they were doing. She knew these kids well, as they tended to be the ones who left their classes for a few hours each week to come to her cubbyhole of an office for extra tutoring. Barbara was one of the school’s remedial teachers, although the staff were careful never to use the word in front of pupils. But even the little ones had her sussed. “Oy, miss, is it true that people only come to your classes ’cos they is retards?” Her charges were often bullied and taunted in the playground. “Tyler is special nee-eeds. . . . Tyler is special nee-eeds.” Despite frequent lectures from the principal in school assembly, the harassment didn’t stop.

In Barbara’s opinion, many of the children who came to her were perfectly able. It was their emotional problems, which resulted in them acting out or throwing violent temper tantrums, that affected their ability to learn. She’d spent years trying to get the local education authority to fund a permanent on-site counselor, but there was never any money. Class teachers tended to be at their wits’ end with these children. How did you even begin to teach a class of thirty when some kid with attention deficit disorder was throwing books and chairs about? Barbara provided the teachers with a break.

Since university, all Barbara had ever wanted to do was try to make a difference—to help kids like the ones at Jubilee—kids whose lives were threadbare and godforsaken. And she’d always known she would be good at it because in some ways she could identify with neglected kids. Granted, she’d never been cold or gone hungry. She hadn’t grown up with useless, drug-addled parents, but she knew how it felt to be neglected emotionally. She’d also read enough pop psychology books to realize that by trying to rescue other children, she was trying to rescue the abandoned child in her. That was one of the reasons that her work was so addictive and why she couldn’t contemplate parting with it.

Over the years, several head teachers at schools where she’d worked had suggested—always with a nod and a wink—that she apply for this or that senior post or headship, but she’d always refused. She was a teacher, not a manager.

A few hundred yards down the road, Barbara pulled over and ducked into Bean and Gone to pick up a double-shot latte. The hit from her early-morning mug of coffee was starting to wear off.

Barbara and Frank had moved to the East End soon after they got married—because it was cheap. Back in the midseventies, the first wave of gentrification was just beginning to hit. They’d bought their tiny flat for less than ten grand, when the only place approaching a coffee shop was Jim’s, the greasy spoon on Mare Street. It was always full workmen and blokes in flat caps reading the
Racing Post
while they downed bacon, eggs and beans—and maybe a slice of Jim’s fried bread. Jim didn’t serve poncy, frothy coffee. That was for poofters. It was either thick orange builder’s tea or instant coffee. By the eighties they had moved around the corner, into the Victorian terraced house where they still lived. Today there were two independent coffee shops, a whole-food deli, a Reiki healer and an organic butcher within two hundred yards of Barbara’s front door.

Bean and Gone used to be an ironmonger’s. The owner had been a bloke called Derrick. In the warm weather, his old mum used to sit outside on a kitchen chair, resting her bulk on one of those three-pronged metal walking sticks. The entire neighborhood called her Grandma. Presumably Derrick knew her actual name, but nobody thought to ask. You couldn’t pass the shop without being collared by Grandma. Barbara had one memorable encounter: “Aw right, darlin’? ’Ere, jew know everybody can see your arse in that skirt?”

A workman on some scaffolding had heard her and yelled: “No, Grandma—you sing it and I’ll hum along.”

Grandma burst into a bronchial cackle. “Still you’ve got the legs for it. Good luck to yer, darlin’.”

Barbara missed the old characters. She wondered what Grandma would have made of all the hipster newcomers. “Oy, mate . . . yeah, you in the woolly hat. You do realize it’s bleedin’ August, don’t you?”

That said, Barbara loved the energy, the cosmopolitan-ness, the twenty-four-seven, artisan macaroonness of the new East End. What she loathed were the dirt, the bag people, the smell of exhaust, the sirens, the gangs, the knife crime. As she returned to her car with her latte, a dispatch rider with a wobbly exhaust roared off, leaving a toxic cloud of black in his wake. There were times when she found herself craving a life in the country. She yearned for fields, woods to wander in, babbling brooks, birdsong that wasn’t drowned out by traffic noise, a rolling hill or two. But the desire didn’t last long. She couldn’t imagine living in one of those twee hang-’em-and-flog-’em Tory stronghold villages where you never saw a black or brown face from one fox-hunt ball to the next. The countryside was also where people her age went to retire—to play bowls on the village green, to exchange gossip about the latest parish council meeting or church bazaar . . . to embrace the dying of the light. Barbara leaned forward and turned on the CD player . . .
Like a bat outta hell I’ll be gone when the morning
comes . . .
As she pulled away, she turned up the volume and sang along while beating out a rhythm on the steering wheel.

A few minutes later, as she pulled up at a red light, she was still singing and thinking that she must tell the kids she wanted them to play Meat Loaf at her funeral. She was paying almost no attention to the Porsche in front of her and would have carried on paying it no attention had the driver not rolled down his window and dropped a paper cup onto the road. She waited for a couple of moments to see if it had been accidental. Surely the driver was about to open his door and get out to retrieve the cup. But he didn’t.

Aware that the light could change any second, Barbara was out of her car. She was always saying that one of the best things about being a stout middle-aged woman was that you looked harmless. Barbara had learned that she could confront people in public about their rudeness or blatant disregard for civic duty and mostly they didn’t pull a knife.

She tapped on the driver’s window. Inside, the thirtysomething chap in a Mr. Toad check jacket and flat cap looked taken aback. The window slid down.

“Er, excuse me, sir . . .” She always began by being superpolite in these situations. Not that she’d been that polite to the antiabortion protesters she’d come across last week, camped outside the offices of British Pregnancy Advisory Service. She’d shouted and hectored them about how banning abortion would force women to return to the days when they bled to death on the kitchen tables of backstreet abortionists. Today, faced only with a litter lout, she was feeling far less combative.

“Sorry to trouble you, but I think that somehow this cup found its way out of your car and onto the road.” By now she had picked it up and was dangling it in front of the driver.

“Oh, right. Gosh. Most awfully sorry. My mistake.” He took the cup.

If she’d been younger, he would have continued to behave like the asshole he was and ignored her or told her to fuck off. But she probably reminded him of his nanny. Posh, well-brought-up assholes didn’t dare tell Nanny to fuck off.

“No worries.” Barbara smiled. “You have a nice day.”

The light had changed, but she hadn’t quite made it back to her car. She expected the traffic to be honking like crazy, but the woman behind her was beaming and giving her a thumbs-up. “You’re a braver woman than me,” she called out through her window. “I wouldn’t have dared to challenge him. You never know what they’ll do.”

One of the many things that pissed Barbara off about the world was people seeing wrongdoing and refusing to get involved or speak up. Why was everybody so feeble? She blamed the
Daily Mail
. If you believed their hype and scaremongering, half the population was armed with knives.

As she pulled away, she checked the time on the dashboard clock.

•   •   •

Her mother is standing in front of the hall mirror, spending what seems like hours doing her hair and makeup. The wrought iron and frosted-glass telephone table is littered with lipsticks, pots of eye shadow and rouge—a giant can of Aqua Net extra hold. Barbara is standing beside her in her green gymslip and crested blazer, checking the minute hand on her Timex watch. Barbara enjoys watching Rose get ready to go out, but not when school starts in less than fifteen minutes.

“Mummy, hurry up. I’m going to be late again. . . . Mummy, please. You always make me late. . . .”

“Will you stop nagging?” In as ladylike a fashion as she can muster, Rose spits onto the solid block of mascara and scrubs at it with her brush. “So what if you’re a few minutes late?”

“I’ll get kept in at playtime.” Barbara is close to tears.

They arrive at the school gates to find the bell has gone and the playground empty. Once again, Barbara is made to stay in at break and do hard division sums.

When Rose collects her from school, Barbara grizzles and whines about the sums and how she missed playing with her friends. “It was horrible. I was all on my own. Please can we get to school earlier?”

“Oh, stop making such a fuss,” her mother says, handing her a packet of cheese and onion potato chips. “At least you didn’t have to carry three bags of shopping home in the teeming rain. Missing playtime is hardly the end of the world. You’ll play with your friends tomorrow.”

Whenever Barbara moans to her mother—which isn’t often—Rose makes her feel as if she’s being selfish and naughty.

•   •   •

Barbara had just parked her car in her usual spot around the corner from the school when her cell rang. Jess.

“Mum, I know it’s short notice, but I was wondering if you could pick the kids up from school and look after them for a few hours. I wouldn’t ask, but I’m desperate. We’re doing this outside catering job, and I’m in the middle of making two hundred vegan canapés. The babysitter’s got this stomach thing that’s been doing the rounds, and I’m not sure I’ll be finished by school pickup time.”

Jess and her husband, Matt, had just opened their own organic deli-cum-grocery-cum-eatery a mile or so down the road from Barbara and Frank. Since it was early days, the only help they could afford were a couple of part-time assistants-slash-waitresses. Jess, who always said her culinary talent came about as a reaction to her mother’s lack of interest in cooking, prepared all the ready meals and did the baking. Matt worked behind the counter, took care of the ordering and did the books.

“Sweetheart, you sound really stressed. You sure you OK? You know, I do worry that you and Matt have taken on too much. I mean, what with the kids . . .”

“Mum, don’t do this now . . . please. I’m too busy. I just need to know if you can get Atticus and Cleo.”

“Of course. No probs, but they’ll have to come to Nana’s with me.”

“Fine. Get her to show them her photographs from the
olden days
. They love that.”

•   •   •

Jubilee School was a dirty, yellow brick, churchlike edifice surrounded by asphalt and tall railings. It still had its original stone plaque in the shape of a shield over the main entrance:
JUBILEE MIXED INFANTS AND JUNIORS. 1887
. It also had the original two entrances—one for boys and one for girls, which had been preserved purely for historical interest.

Barbara opened the school gate and made her way across the playground. A group of year-six lads—white, Asian, black, Eastern European—were kicking a ball around and yelling at one another in half a dozen languages. Some of their mates were leaning against the wall trying to look cool as they played games on their phones. Phones weren’t allowed in school, but the oldest kids in particular—not to mention their parents—weren’t about to be told. Whenever a phone was confiscated, an irate mother or father—who had never shown up to a single parents’ evening—came marching into school insisting that they knew their rights and accusing the school of abuse. In the end Sandra had decided it was a battle she couldn’t win. She relented and let the top years bring in their phones. “What I don’t understand,” she had said to Barbara the other day when they were chatting in the staff room, “is why families who are struggling always make such bad choices. I mean, if you or I were hard up, we’d buy food, gas and electricity—not big-screen TVs and smartphones for our kids. And they wonder why they’re always in debt.”

Sandra—Mrs. Nichols to the kids—had worked at Jubilee for five years. Before that she’d spent two decades teaching at a small private school just outside Oxford. By the time she’d left, she was deputy head. She was married to a wine merchant named Charles. There were no children. Whether that was down to bad luck or lack of desire, Barbara had never been able to establish. Since Sandra never raised the subject, she suspected it was bad luck.

Barbara—along with most of the staff—had always considered her an odd fit for a school like Jubilee.

“I needed a challenge,” she’d said when Barbara had asked her why she’d given up such a comfortable, stress-free job. “In the end, comfortable becomes tedious, and superbright, privileged children can be so dull. They’re like automatons, a lot of them. The boys know they will go into the law or banking. The girls end up in PR or working in art galleries. As a teacher, you start to think, what’s the point? What do I have to offer?”