The School Gate Survival Guide (16 page)

Colin winked at me. ‘Result!’

I looked round to see who I knew. Jen1 was on the other side of the room with her usual bunch of witches, looking angular and tense. I had no doubt that Colin would be a hot topic. I saw Frederica come in, chin up, red carpet poise as though she was about to get papped. She made a beeline for us.

‘Isn’t Harley amazing? Has he had training? No? He’s a natural. You should encourage that. I see very, very few children who have that sort of stage presence, even the ones who’ve been at Italia Conti since they could walk.’

I introduced her to Colin, leading him into the conversation by pointing out that Frederica’s son, Marlon, was playing Oliver. Thankfully, even Colin’s gnat-sized social skills ran to congratulating her on how good Marlon was. ‘Haven’t I seen you on telly? Weren’t you in
Lewis
? That lecturer who got suspended for copping off with a student?’ he said.

‘I can never get away from my shady past.’ Frederica flicked her hair back over her shoulder.

‘You look much slimmer in real life. And younger.’

Frederica grabbed Colin’s arm and snuggled up to him. ‘They did make me up to look older but all compliments welcome.’ She turned to me. ‘Such a charmer. Maia, you didn’t tell me you had such a gorgeous husband at home. Where have you been hiding him?’

To be honest, I wished he’d stayed hidden but I could’ve hugged Frederica for making the effort. Colin was all flirtatious, asking Frederica for backstage gossip. I wanted to hear it too, but hadn’t asked because I didn’t want to look like some desperate groupie. I kept waiting for Frederica to make a ‘must get another drink’ excuse but she stood there for ages, happily dishing the dirt on her co-stars. ‘Gordon? Looks like someone’s jolly uncle on screen, but he’s got a nasty temper. The one that plays the blonde sidekick? Not as sexy as she looks. I would say that, wouldn’t I? Just jealous, you know. Once she gets that make-up off, skin’s terrible. Good boobs though, if you’re a boob man.’

Frederica was flannelling away about Harley getting his good looks from Colin when Clover joined us. I tapped Colin on the arm and he quickly nodded an ‘All right?’ in Clover’s direction without bothering to shake her hand before drooling back to Frederica. Actresses in clingy red dresses were higher up Colin’s pecking order than housewives in linen sacks. I consoled myself that Lawrence wasn’t Mr Manners either.

‘How are you doing?’ I said.

‘I never come to school functions without Lawrence. I feel as though everyone’s looking at me.’

‘I’m sure they’re not. They’re probably too busy looking at who’s got the latest handbag. If only we knew what the latest handbag was, we could join in.’

Clover managed a little smile. ‘It’s not fair on the kids, though. He told Orion that he was going to be in New York so he couldn’t come but I bet he’s in some hotel in Hackney licking chocolate sauce off a twenty-year-old’s nipples.’

‘Ssshhh.’ I looked round but no one seemed to be listening.

‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? I mean, not necessarily a twenty-year-old and maybe not chocolate sauce. Maybe he’s having dinner with someone my age who only eats tofu and alfalfa sprouts and drinks camomile tea and has an arse half the size of mine. Or someone who licks the bloody skirting boards clean every day and irons underpants and always has things like cocktail nuts and petits fours in the cupboard and a spare pair of tights in her handbag.’ She looked like she was about to burst into tears.

I would have loved to have joined in with a hundred other ideas of the sort of scuzzy old – or young – women Lawrence might have taken up with in the hope of making Clover laugh, but I couldn’t risk it in case I didn’t hit the spot and made her cry. Instead I grabbed a glass of wine from a passing sixth former and thrust it in her direction.

‘Come on, we’ll get him back for you. We’ll make your house into such a palace that he won’t want to live in some scummy bedsit. All men have a mid-life crisis.’ I glanced over my shoulder. ‘I think Frederica is Colin’s.’

‘Do you mind?’ Clover asked.

‘Couldn’t give a shit.’ The truth of that depressed me. I was glad when the bell rang for us all to go back in. I tapped Colin who said, ‘You go, I’ll be along in a minute, just finish my drink.’ I looked back to see him necking his wine and having a quick minesweep of a couple of glasses nearby. Clover and I left him to it.

Jen1 reached the door at the same time as me. ‘Harley makes a fantastic Artful Dodger. You should be really proud of him.’

‘Thank you.’ I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t sure how to handle praise.

‘Then again, I suppose the accent comes easier to him than to the others.’

She was gone before my brain caught up with what she meant. I would get her back. One of these days I would wipe that smile off her mean little Botoxed mouth.

Clover squeezed my arm as she left me to squash into her row at the back. ‘Bloody bitch. Don’t take any notice.’

Colin squeaked into the seat next to me a couple of seconds before the curtain went up causing great huffing and puffing from the other parents in our row. Colin jigged away in his seat to the music, making loud, though mostly complimentary, comments. I just wanted the show to be over so I could scoop up Harley and shut the door on this weird world, where nothing I did was right. I tried to focus on the story, but the fake Cockney accents didn’t seem so funny to me any more. The huge cheer that Harley got at the end, the sheer joy shining out of his face took the edge off my grump, but I was still the first one out of my seat when the curtain went down for the last time.

‘Hang on, hang on, where’s the fire?’ Colin said, struggling to pull out his jacket from under the chair. He always took his shoes off wherever he sat down, so he still had to put his trainers back on.

‘I’m really hot. I’ll wait for you outside.’ I marched out of the hall and headed towards the exit. Mr Peters was standing there with a couple of teaching assistants I recognised from Bronte’s year. I said goodbye without making eye contact and burst out into the cold spring air, scurrying across the lawn to wait on a low wall for Colin and Harley, tucked away in the shadows. By the time I looked up, Mr Peters was walking towards me.

‘Are you okay?’ he said, when he got within talking distance.

‘Fine, thanks. Just a bit hot.’

‘I told you Harley was brilliant. You should be really proud of him.’

‘I am proud of him. Just as he is.’ Mr Peters must have caught the curtness in my voice. A puzzled look crossed his face. He raised his eyebrows as though he was expecting me to say something else. I stared up, wanting to pick a fight. He didn’t look away and I felt myself unknotting under his gaze, all my wrinkles and crinkles straightening out. I could even feel the beginnings of a tiny smile. He sat down next to me.

‘Are you always this self-contained?’ he said. I was aware, in a distant way, of two people of different sexes sitting a smidge too close. If I leaned a bit to the left I would have been touching him.

I turned to look at him. ‘I’m not self-contained with people who know me, but it’s hard to be myself when everyone’s judging me the whole time.’

‘I hope you don’t put me in that category?’

‘Well, aren’t you?’

Mr Peters shook his head slowly. ‘No, I’m not, Maia.’

The noisy chatter of parents pouring out of the school floated across the lawn. I blocked it out. Our eyes were doing that dance, mirroring each other, flicking about but never releasing each other. It felt as intimate as tracing his lips with my fingers. Mr Peters broke free first. ‘Okay. If you’re all right, I’d better go and do my bit of PR for the evening. Don’t forget you can always give me a ring if there’s anything you want to discuss.’

I had to hand it to him. He did professional well. And personal, very well indeed.

I stared after him, watching him stride across the lawn. Harley and Colin appeared at the exit as Mr Peters took up his position by the door. They shook hands and Mr Peters pointed Colin in my direction. ‘All right, love?’ Colin said, as he ambled over, shoelaces undone and something a bit unsteady about his walk. We walked back to the van, Harley nattering on, asking whether I noticed he sang the wrong line, if I thought he’d been as good as Marlon, if any of the teachers had said anything about him. For once, Colin’s compliments were genuine, with no advice about how to improve things.

Colin took my hand as we got to the van. ‘That school ain’t as bad as I thought. Few toffee-nosed parents but Harley’s doing good there. I liked that Peters bloke. I told him that I thought the place would be full of wankers but that it had been a nice surprise, like.’ He leant into my ear and I could smell the wine on him. ‘Let’s get Harley into bed quick when we get home. I feel like giving you a bit of a seeing-to.’

Mr Peters was going to have to come to the rescue again, in mind, if not in body.

Policemen have a different knock from friends. Or postmen. Or meter readers. And bailiffs have a different knock from them all. It was the first day back after half-term and I was in that last stressy five minutes before leaving for school. Bronte was complaining that I hadn’t done her plaits properly, there was the usual faff to find a pen for me to sign the homework book, plus the discovery that nothing in our cupboard could pass for a ‘plain’ biscuit. A thump on the front door told me I was about to see a meaty fist poking through some splintered wood. I hoped it was one of Colin’s grebbo friends come for the repayment of a gambling debt. Harley rushed to open the door, but I shoved in front of him.

I put the chain on and shouted at Bronte to go and get Colin out of bed. One bloody hurdle after another. I opened the door and smiled through the gap. ‘Hello. Can I help you?’

For a bailiff, he wasn’t as brick shithousey as some. I didn’t think I’d beat him at an arm wrestle, though. I glanced down at his hands to see if he had any pliers in them, but he just had an ID card which he held close to the door with a gruff ‘Bailiffs. Need to auction some stuff to pay your council tax debts. You get the letter saying we was coming?’

‘I haven’t seen a letter.’ I didn’t tell him I’d stopped opening anything that looked like a bill and Colin wasn’t much of a secretary.

‘By our reckonings, you owe £375 of council tax and we’ve been ordered to take some stuff. Could you open up for me, love? There isn’t any point resisting cos we’ll just come back again.’ He moved a step closer to the door. I backed away. Colin came thumping past me, bare-chested and doing up his jeans. He bellowed something at me as he rushed into the kitchen, but I didn’t catch it.

I adopted my most reasonable voice. ‘You can’t come in just like that. We haven’t got anything worth anything anyway.’

‘All right, love. No need to panic. Why don’t you let me in so I can be sure that’s the case, then I can report back to them and maybe they’ll leave you alone?’

I hesitated. He looked like the sort of bloke who would steal a handbag off the back of a baby’s pram.

‘Come on, love, open up. The sooner you let me in, the sooner we can both get going.’

Colin came flying out of the kitchen. He pushed me out of the way and stuck his face in the gap. ‘Oy, fuck off, do you hear? You ain’t coming in here stealing my stuff. Now bugger off.’ I could see the spit flying out of his mouth and landing on the door. The guy outside started to argue that we needed to sign something so he could leave but Colin didn’t give him a chance. He slammed the door shut, then turned on me.

‘You stupid cow. You were about to let him in, weren’t you? Don’t you know fucking anything? The bloody back door was open. He could’ve just walked in. You’ve got to keep everything locked, otherwise they’ll just come in, climb in through the bloody windows. I promise you, once he’s in here, he’ll be taking everything – TV, DVD, CD, microwave. They’re always telling you to sign stuff but it’s to say they can come back and take it. Bloody hell, Mai, you can be one stupid woman.’

Shock gave me courage. ‘Well, let me tell you something. You aren’t so clever yourself. If you got off your lazy arse and got a bloody job instead of pissing all my money up a wall, because let’s face it, you don’t bloody well earn any, we wouldn’t be in a position where we had some great lummox turning up to take our stuff. So before you start having a go at me, maybe you should take a look at yourself.’

There was more I wanted to say but a shooting pain across my left cheek stopped me dead. That and the force of Colin’s fist knocking me into the banister, plus a follow-up slap that made my ear ring.

‘You fucking bitch.’ He marched off into the kitchen where I heard him rattle the jar I kept pound coins in for milk and bread. Then the back door slammed.

I put my hand up. My cheek was wet where his eternity ring had caught me under the eye. I bought him that ring when I was twenty, when he just had to say ‘Mai?’ and I’d run to him like a dog promised a Bonio. Colin had never hit me properly before. A few pushes. The odd unfriendly shove. Loads of threats about me getting a bit of ‘backhand’. But he’d never ever hit me. I sat down on the stairs, too shocked to cry, feeling my face to check the swelling. I didn’t want to look in the mirror.

I’d always despised women who let men get away with thumping them, thought they were pathetic for putting up with it. But where was I going to go? Absolutely nowhere. Just this week, the local paper had said our council would take fourteen years to clear its waiting list. I’d be bloody fifty. What was I going to do? Take the kids to Stirling Hall from a caravan on the pikey site down by the railway tracks? Could I make him leave? Bronte would want to go with him. She’d turn against me for sure. I had no choice but to keep buggering on, telling myself that I wouldn’t always live like this.

I heard footsteps behind me. Harley handed me a damp tea towel. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ He was trying not to cry. I hugged him, told him that Dad had made a mistake, he didn’t mean to hit me and asked him to fetch my sunglasses from the drawer upstairs.

We were seriously late for school but I daren’t step foot outside the house without checking that the bailiff wasn’t lurking, ready to spring through the door the second I took the chain off. I checked the back garden and sent Harley round to the front. He banged on the door to say all was clear and Bronte and I scuttled out like a couple of battery hens making a bid for freedom. I was shouting at the kids to hurry up when I suddenly realised there was no van to hurry to. A dry spot further up the road outlined where the van had stood until probably half an hour ago when we’d been so busy making sure all the downstairs windows were shut, it had completely escaped our notice that they’d towed the van away. I cursed myself for not parking it in the next street. My cheek throbbed and the tears I’d been hanging on to refused to cooperate and poured down my face, stinging the cut under my eye.