The School Gate Survival Guide (26 page)

I fumbled for my mobile and switched it on. One serious-sounding message from Mr Peters left at midnight: ‘Your withdrawal letter for the children appeared on my desk about five minutes before assembly. It made me think I’d got you all wrong but we should at least talk.’ And a text sent at 6 a.m.
‘Maia, please call me
.’

Got me wrong? What about leaving Stirling Hall without breathing a word? And forgetting to mention that he’d been up close and personal with Serena’s underwear? I already had Colin lying his arse off to me, I didn’t need to find his twin. Mr Peters was intelligent. He’d be much better at it. If I spoke to him, he’d out-clever me and talk me round. I struggled into a semi-sitting position and texted back, ‘
No point. Nothing to say
.’ The phone rang immediately. ‘Mary’ flashed up. I watched it ring. My fingers twitched to pick it up, to hear his voice, to let him say what I wanted to believe. He didn’t leave a message. Not that bothered then.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, wondering if I should have a quick cry in the shower and get it over with. The mobile rang again. My heart lifted and crashed back down. Colin.

‘Mai, Mai, it’s me, Colin. You all right? Did you come back home yesterday? Yeah? What time did you come by? Ten-thirty? I must’ve missed you. Prob’ly down the betting shop. Painting, that is, not betting. I’ve given up that lark. Not completely, of course, never know when you might get the big one, but sensible, like.’

Colin always talked too much when he was guilty of something. I was restricting my comments to ‘Mmm’. Men were such lying shits.

‘Are you coming back, darl?’ I’d give him ‘darl’. ‘Did you like me painting? Looks good, don’t it? I tried to surprise you. Thing is, I really need you, darl. I don’t want you living over there and me here on me own. I want us to be a family again.’

I sat up. There was something in his voice. It wasn’t love, desire or even loneliness. I’d had lots of practice at spotting Colin up to no good. I’d play along, even though a picture of his balls and a pair of pinking shears was flashing through my mind. I couldn’t bear the thought that he’d be sitting there, rolling a spliff, perhaps even winking at Sandy, thinking he’d got away with it.

I flicked the ‘V’s’ at the phone but contented myself with ‘I’ll be back a week on Monday. Can you get Harley’s room painted as well? I don’t want him to feel left out. And tidy up the kitchen.’ Now wasn’t the time to confront him about Sandy. If I was going to stand any chance of booting Colin out and getting the house back for myself, I’d need an element of surprise on my side.

Relief made Colin generous. ‘See what I can do. I think there’s some blue down at the betting shop. I’ll try and get me hands on some of that. And the kitchen. Sorry about that.’

I rang off. He’d got what he wanted. Now it was my turn.

Stirling Hall was on holiday for nineteen weeks a year but the teachers still couldn’t find the time to have a spot of training without a flaming inset day. Jen1, who probably had her diary mapped out for the next five years, had spotted a gap between Hugo’s drama and clarinet lessons and filled it with a tank party for his birthday. Harley and Orion spent the whole journey there pretending to be SAS commandos in Afghanistan. Noise never bothered Clover but by the time the Land Rover bounced up the muddy farm track, my nerves were shot. As we rounded the corner to the barn, a silver limousine decorated with ‘Happy Eleventh Birthday, Hugo’ balloons greeted us. A silver limousine stuck in the mud, wheels spinning, sending great splatters of gungy slime over the four men trying to push it out of its soggy pit. Jen1 was running up and down, shouting orders to the driver and the pushers.

Harley leapt out of the Land Rover. ‘Wicked! Come on, Orion, let’s go and help.’

Before I managed to yell at them to stay away from the car, a huge spray of brown sludge shot over them both. They started slinging globs of mud at each other, slamming each other over and killing themselves laughing. Hugo and Marlon rushed to join in. Venetia’s son, Theo, shouted at them to stop, standing with his arms folded, looking just like his fussy father when a big splat landed square on his chest. Suddenly all the violin lessons, all the Mandarin tuition, all the Kumon maths rolled off him as he hurled himself at Harley, joining in with more spirit than I’d ever seen in him.

One of the men suddenly stopped pushing the car and came running over to them. I steeled myself for them getting banned from the tank driving. Instead, the man pulled Orion into his arms.

Clover’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘That’s Lawrence. Fucking hell. I haven’t seen him in six weeks and here I am in his old jumper. Not even lipstick.’

‘Go and say hello.’

‘I can’t. I feel sick.’

We watched as he hugged Orion and Orion hugged him back, not giving a monkey that all his friends were there. Lawrence waved at Clover.

‘I’ll just go and pop the presents in the barn,’ I said.

Clover’s hand shot out. ‘No, stay, don’t leave me.’

Lawrence looked like a clay figure plastered from head to toe in gunge as he squelched up to us.

‘Hello love.’

Clover had emotions bubbling up to her eyeballs. She gasped a hello. I couldn’t bear it. There were some things a wife had to do without a friend in tow. Sex and tricky conversations about relationships were in that category. Especially as last time I’d met Lawrence, I’d threatened to poke his brains out with a wooden giraffe. I waved a hello and raced off. The other men had taken a break from trying to budge the limousine, so I went over to Jen1. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a baby photo of Hugo and eleventh birthday nonsense all over it.

I didn’t want to sound like I was crowing so I didn’t mention the car. ‘You’re very brave hosting a party the day before the ball. You must be so organised. Harley was really excited about it.’

‘We booked it as soon as we knew about the teachers’ training day. I wasn’t about to tell Hugo he couldn’t have a party because mummy was too busy with the school ball. He’s only going to be eleven once – my little baby is eleven! He can’t help that it’s his birthday today. I’ve been baking all week and freezing the food, so I only had to pull it all out this morning.’

‘Jeepers. When my kids were little, I used to move their birthday to a day more convenient to me,’ I said.

‘What? If Harley’s birthday was on a Tuesday, you’d move it to a Thursday if that suited you better?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you gave them presents on their real birthday, right?’ Jen1 stared at me as though I’d told her that I’d put whisky in their bottles when they were babies so they’d sleep while I went down the pub.

‘Wrong. I just moved the whole thing to two or three days later. They didn’t even know.’ I smiled and handed her the presents. I’d have liked to see her face when Hugo opened them. She’d asked me for some vouchers for the Royal Opera House – ‘He’s dying to go and see
Così Fan Tutte
’ – which didn’t really fit into my £5 a present allocation. She’d suggested a bird table to Clover – ‘Hugo loves watching the birds in the garden. We spotted a green woodpecker this morning.’

Clover had snorted and said, ‘Poor little bugger, I bet he hates birds and dreads being dragged along to some vile opera when he’d rather go and watch some computer-generated rubbish at the cinema. I’m going to buy him a huge bucket of sweets and a catapult to frighten the birds.’ I totally ignored Jen1 and trotted off to Oxfam, thrilled to find
Mockingjay
, the third book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy for 75p. I knew from Harley that Hugo was reading the second one so I decided that I would look thoughtful, if not generous. Anyway, ignoring what she’d asked for didn’t seem any ruder to me than dictating what people should buy in the first place.

I looked over at Clover and Lawrence. Orion was still standing with his arms round his dad. He’d forgotten any ten-year-old cool.

‘What’s Lawrence doing here?’ I said to Jen1.

‘He and Leo are terrifically good friends and Lawrence has always wanted to drive a tank apparently, so Leo told him to come along. I meant to warn Clover, but I got waylaid making Hugo’s cake. It’s a chameleon. I had to use about six different colours of icing. It’s not as hard as it looks. A bit fiddly cutting out every little scale separately but it’s turned out fabulously well.’

‘I’m sure Clover will be delighted that Hugo has got a wonderful cake.’

Jen1 stared at me as though she was trying to work out whether I was serious or not. I wondered whether Leo had ever had a good laugh with her in his life.

Lawrence stepped away from Orion as Leo shouted to everyone to push the car again. Clover came over to me looking as though she needed to get out of there quickly before she made a show of herself. I raised my eyebrows. She shrugged. ‘We couldn’t talk because Orrie was there. Lawrence said he’d done a lot of thinking. And that he’d missed the children terribly. I couldn’t tell whether he’d missed me though. I made him agree to come round next week, so we can make some decisions. I managed to whisper that I loved him.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No. He just gave me a tiny wink. I do really, really love him.’ Tears were leaking down her face.

I took her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go. I’m not helping Jen1 get her stupid limousine out of the mud. Silly cow.’ And to prove that good things come to those who hang about long enough, Jen1 chose that moment to fall flat on her face in a mud bath, her blonde mane hanging round her shoulders like a muddy octopus. I waved a very cheery goodbye to Harley and leapt in the Land Rover, shoulders shaking.

Clover made me jump on the morning of the ball. It was 6.30 a.m. and nothing usually disturbed my porridge eating, apart from Weirdo who would roll onto his back for a tummy tickle. She came clattering in, rustling about in the cupboards for something less healthy than a bran muffin. It was probably a bit rich for me to feel grumpy that she’d come into her own kitchen but I’d never been a morning person.

We’d already discussed five hundred – or possibly five thousand – Lawrence scenarios the night before, ranging from him suddenly fancying men to sleeping with prostitutes to falling in love with a school friend he’d found on Facebook. Clover kept wanting reassurances from me that she was, above anyone else we could think of, the perfect match for Lawrence. The problem was I didn’t know enough about him to have a clue. If what you wanted from marriage was a huge-hearted, generous and funny human being then Clover was your girl, but if you were in the market for shiny skirting boards, polished shoes and an ability never to run out of kitchen roll, then she probably wasn’t.

At the crack of dawn I didn’t want to discuss Lawrence any more. I don’t think there was ever a moment in Clover’s life when her jaw wasn’t in constant jabbering motion. It normally didn’t bother me because she made me laugh, but I was having my own Mr Peters trauma. I’d ignored so many texts and phone calls from him now, there was no going back. I needed a bit of quiet time to work out what face to put on if he did show up at the ball. I didn’t really think he would – busman’s holiday and all that, at eighty-five quid a ticket to boot – but I needed to be ready on the off chance. I couldn’t do that while Clover needed an answer every two minutes. I did an ‘Oh my God, is that the time?’ and made a break for the van before she started debating whether the woman who changed the bin liners where Lawrence worked might have stolen his heart.

My cleaning shifts passed in a blur. My customers would have nothing to complain about. Wherever I could, I took rugs outside and beat the shit out of them. I plumped pillows until feathers threatened to fly everywhere. I polished tables until my angry little face glowed back. It was nearly twenty years since I’d first been stupid enough to fall in love with Colin, but I couldn’t remember him ever getting such a reaction from me. Even though I was furious with Mr Peters, my belly kept doing that flapping fish thing every time I thought about him. I was going to have to take up boxing as a second career to stop myself going mad.

When I got home, Clover was standing on her head against the wall. She’d covered her face in black mud.

‘I read somewhere that standing on your head boosts the circulation to your face. Thought it might help my wrinkles. This mud stuff is from the Dead Sea. Not sure that’s a selling point but it’s supposed to rejuvenate. Do I look eighteen yet?’ She was scissoring her legs while she balanced.

I didn’t want to offend her by laughing, but I didn’t think Lawrence would be making similar preparations. ‘You haven’t got any wrinkles.’ I wasn’t being kind. Despite Clover’s beauty regime of a splash of water and a dab of patchouli oil, she had great skin. And her high cheekbones were beginning to stand out again.

‘I still look a bit chipmunky though. Still, can’t do anything about it now. I daren’t eat any more of that rabbit food. Popping lethal farts in his face isn’t going to win him back.’ Amen to that.

I carried a huge bundle of ironing into the kitchen, leaving Clover to head off upstairs to ladle on the Immac. I needed to get the shirts out of the way so I could spend a bit of time getting ready. I wasn’t going to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but with the dress Clover was lending me, if Peters did turn up, there was half a chance that he wouldn’t be shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ on his lucky escape.

Seventeen shirts and many mad conversations in my mind with both Colin and Mr Peters later, I headed upstairs. I’d expected Clover to be twirling around dancing to Hot Chocolate like she normally did when she was getting ready to go out. But no ‘You Sexy Thing’, no ‘It Started with a Kiss’. ‘Clover? Clover?’ I knocked on her door.

She appeared in a fluffy dressing gown, hair wrapped in a towel, her cheerful face all upside-down clown. I didn’t even have to ask what was wrong.

‘What if he doesn’t want me?’

I hustled her into the bedroom. ‘There is absolutely no way he is not going to want you. Look at you, you’re gorgeous. Come on, let me blow dry your hair.’

Time was ticking away. Six o’clock and we had to leave in an hour. I’d just have to look like shit. It wouldn’t change the outcome of my life. I tamed Clover’s blonde mane until it hung smooth and relatively frizz-free. She kept telling me to leave her and get ready but by now, the rebel in me had gained the upper hand and I felt like showing up in my tracksuit to prove to everyone they could chant ‘Chavarama’ at me and I wouldn’t care.