The Year of Taking Chances (36 page)

Caitlin laughed, her cheeks turning hotter than ever.
‘Oh, stop it, you two,’ she said.
‘I don’t know why you’re both looking at me like that.’
But she did
know, and her tummy was turning somersaults at the prospect.
Harry Sykes back on the eligible-bachelor list?
Well, well, well.
She crossed her fingers under the table and sent up a little prayer to
Cupid himself.

Lovely as it had been to escape with her friends for a night down at The Partridge, by the following day Gemma couldn’t avoid the feeling that she was one small crisis
away from a nervous breakdown.
She had tried her hardest to cement a strong new mother–daughter relationship with Karen, but was starting to wonder if it was just too late.
After twenty-five
years of barely seeing each other, they had little common ground to build on, and Karen was not an easy person to get close to.
It was like having a stranger in the house: an opinionated, lazy
stranger, constantly passing judgement on her and her family in a passive-aggressive
I was only joking!
Don’t take it so seriously!
sort of way.

‘I don’t like Grandma Karen,’ Darcey confessed in a whisper that evening at bedtime.
‘Why can’t she go away again, and Daddy come back?’

Out of the mouths of babes
, Gemma thought, gazing unseeingly at the kitten and pony posters stuck haphazardly on the wall.
‘It’s nice to have Grandma here for a visit –
we hardly ever see her,’ she said in the end, stroking her daughter’s soft hair.
‘And she
is
my mummy, remember.’

‘She’s not a very nice mummy,’ Darcey said reprovingly.
‘Mummies shouldn’t say mean things to people.’

Gemma sighed.
Tell me about it, Darce.
‘I know, love, but .
.
.
’ She straightened up the row of her daughter’s teddies, trying to think of a diplomatic response.
She’d always told the children,
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!
–
a lesson Karen could have done with learning herself.
‘That’s
just Grandma,’ she said, weakly, in the end.

‘What about Daddy?
Why doesn’t he come home?
Doesn’t he love us any more?’

Ouch.
Tough question after tough question tonight.

‘Of course he loves us,’ Gemma said, pulling the cherry-print duvet cover up to Darcey’s chin and tucking it round her.
‘He’s just having a little holiday.
He’ll be home as soon as he feels better.’

She had to kiss her daughter and leave the bedroom then, as she had a lump in her throat and knew she was about to dissolve.
Her feelings about Spencer had moved from shock and fear, to hurt
(
Why wouldn’t he speak to her?
), to anger (
Sod him, then
) and now despair.
What was going through his mind that he still couldn’t pick up the phone and speak to his own
wife and children?
What was so bad that it stopped him coming back to them?
It had been almost two weeks now since he’d left, the longest they’d ever been apart.
The bed was so empty
without him, the house so different.

Come home, Spencer,
she thought for the millionth time, padding downstairs to where Karen was cackling in front of the television.
Please come home.

The next morning Gemma was in the kitchen with Darcey when Karen sauntered in barefoot, already lighting up her first fag of the day.

‘Morning,’ she said huskily, before her eyes fell on her granddaughter, who was sprinkling sugar over her hot Weetabix.
‘Mercy me, Darce, how much sugar are you putting on
there?
You don’t want to end up a chubster, do you?’

Gemma froze.
That’s
it,
she thought flatly.
That is
it.
The last straw, a line crossed.
‘Don’t say things like that to her,’ she snapped, rounding on Karen.
‘Don’t be so cruel.’

Karen put her hands in the air, her face still puffy from sleep.
‘What have I done now?’
she said waspishly.
‘Pardon me for breathing.
Pardon me for giving a shit about my
granddaughter’s
health.
’

Gemma had been making packed lunches at the worktop, but at this, she nearly threw Darcey’s Moshi Monsters sandwich box at her mother’s head.
She marched over, grabbed Karen’s
arm and dragged her into the utility room, not wanting Darcey to hear what she was about to say.
‘You?
Give a shit?
That would be a first,’ she hissed.
‘Do you remember what you
used to call me when I was little?
Do you?
Cos I do.
Chubs.
Chubs!
That’s what you called me, and boy, did it stick.
It stuck like glue, I couldn’t shake it off, it followed me
everywhere.
All the way until I was a teenager and ramming my fingers down my throat to try and vomit, because I felt so hideous and
fat.
’

Karen blinked, taken aback at the savagery of Gemma’s voice, but Gemma wasn’t done yet.

‘That was all you left me with,’ she went on, still gripping her mother’s pudgy forearm.
‘A horrible nickname and the guilt that I might have driven you away.
Can you
imagine what that felt like?
Feeling so unhappy, at the age of
eight
, that I thought me being chubby was what caused you to leave?
Talk about a recipe for self-loathing.
Talk about a good
way to ruin your daughter’s self-esteem.’

‘I didn’t realize .
.
.
’ Karen said faintly.

‘No.
You didn’t, did you?
And you didn’t care, either.
But I care about my daughter.
Oh yes.
I love my daughter a lot more than you’ve ever loved me.
So I’ll thank
you not to speak to her like that again.
To never
ever
try and make her feel bad about herself or use nasty, emotive words to her face.
Because she’s lovely.
She’s done nothing
wrong.
And I won’t let you knock her confidence, not for one second.’
Her lungs felt tight, she was breathing hard.
She had always been so desperate for Karen to love her that
she’d never dared stand up to her with such vehemence before.
There was so much anger boiling in her, she realized.
So much unspoken rage.
‘Do you understand me?
Have I made myself
clear?’

‘All right, all right,’ Karen said, not meeting her eye.
‘Message received.
Can I have my cigarette in peace now?’

Gemma gestured to the door, not caring any more.
‘Go for it,’ she said.
Go and smoke yourself to death, she thought.
We won’t miss you.

That day, when Gemma and Darcey arrived home from school, they found the place was empty.
All that was left to show Karen had been there at all was the ashtray of fag-butts
outside the back door, a stray pink silk scarf down the side of the sofa and a black lacy G-string in the laundry basket.
She’d taken off again, just like that, without a word of warning or
explanation.
Gone who knew where – a bar in Greece, back to Carlos, up a bloody gum tree.

If this had happened a year ago, Gemma might have dissolved into tears of disappointment, but there was a new hardness inside her now: a tough new shield that protected her.
There was also
Darcey flinging her little arms around her and saying, ‘I’m glad
you’re
my mum.
I’m glad you’re not like Grandma.’

Gemma hugged her back, comforted by the truth in her daughter’s words.
No, she wasn’t like Karen.
No way.
She was a grafter and a sticker-outer; she was loyal to the ones she loved.
She’d never do a bunk, dirty knickers and fag-ends in her wake – never.
‘Well,
I’m
glad I’ve got
you
,’ she said chokily.
‘I’m so, so
glad.
Having you and Will definitely makes me the luckiest mummy in the whole wide world.’

Karen was never going to change, she realized, as she toasted crumpets for Darcey and listened to her excited description of the tadpoles her teacher had brought into school and what had
happened at playtime.
Karen couldn’t magically transform into the mother Gemma had always wished for, because being a mother and grandmother simply didn’t interest her.
It wasn’t
Gemma’s fault, or her brothers’, or her dad’s, that Karen had upped and left them all, swapping domestic life for one of sunshine and cocktails.
It had just happened, and the way
back was now closed.
Next time, she’d know not to get her hopes up.
If there ever was a next time, that was.

The doorbell rang as she put Darcey’s crumpets on the table, and Gemma crossed her fingers that it wouldn’t be Karen back for the last word.
She couldn’t cope with any further
tumult today.

Instead she did a double-take when she opened the door, to see Will standing there with a black eye and a torn shirt .
.
.
alongside Judy, of all people.

Gemma gaped.
‘What’s happened?
Oh my God, Will.
Who did this?’

Will barged past her.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he muttered, slinging his school bag down in the hall with a thump.

‘I was driving through town on my way back from the hospital,’ Judy said, ‘when I saw him wandering around the shops on his own.
Been fighting, he said.’

Gemma leaned against the door jamb, wishing the universe would just give her a frigging break for five minutes.
Would it never end?
If it wasn’t her husband, it was her mum; and if it
wasn’t her mum, it was her son.
And now here was Judy, having witnessed yet another family failure, by the sound of things.
‘Fighting,’ she repeated dismally.

‘I’m afraid so.’
Judy hesitated.
‘Oh, love, you look done in,’ she said.
‘Is everything all right?’

The genuine kindness of her voice caught Gemma off-guard.
Before she could hoist up the barriers and brush Judy off with a polite, forced ‘We’re fine, thanks’, she found
herself bursting into tears of defeat and exhaustion, her defences well and truly down.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Judy stepped over the threshold and caught her firmly in an embrace.

‘There, there, pet, you have a good cry,’ she soothed.
‘It’s all right.
Don’t worry.’

It was not all right, not by a long shot.
Family life was so far from being ‘all right’ that just thinking about how awful everything was made Gemma cry even harder.
And what a
luxury it was to simply sob and be held, even if it was by someone she’d previously considered a threat.
It was only the thought of leaving snot all over Judy’s fleece that finally
helped her choke back her sobs.

‘You’ve had a time of it lately, haven’t you?’
Judy said, opening her bum-bag and pulling out a handypack of tissues.
‘Here – have a hanky.’
She stood
there uncertainly while Gemma blew her nose.
‘Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?
Don’t worry if you’re in the middle of something, but I’m not in any rush, if you want
to talk.’

Again it was on the tip of Gemma’s tongue to say no and shoo her away, to keep her at arm’s length, but she could no longer remember why she’d disapproved of Judy in the first
place.
‘That would be great,’ she said weakly.
‘Thank you.’

Later that evening Gemma managed to prise the truth out of Will.
It sounded as if a group of boys had been teasing him for a while, first about not having any money, and then
more recently ‘about Dad going mental’, as he glumly put it.
Things had come to a head when Will lost his cool, got into a fistfight and walked out of school.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ he mumbled, once she’d dragged it all out of him.
‘I just couldn’t stand it any more.
I hate Dad for bailing out and being so crap.
And Grandma was
doing my head in, too.
Sorry,’ he said again, glancing at her guiltily.
‘I know she’s your mum and all that, but .
.
.
’

‘It’s okay,’ she told him.
‘I’m the first to admit she’s not the easiest person to get along with.’
She put an arm around him, unable to be cross.
‘You know that she walked out on Grandad, me and your uncles, don’t you?
Just like your dad has done now.
So I do understand how you feel – confused and angry and hurting.
It took
me a long time to stop blaming myself that she’d gone.
I thought it all had to be my fault, when of course it absolutely wasn’t.’