they’re going to “review” it in a month. S’pose seventy quid a week is better than nothing – least it gets us through Christmas,’ he said, ripping open a packet of biscuits.
Even though there’d been a drop in unemployment, Colin carried on tutting away, sucking air through his teeth, convinced that the painting and decorating trades would suffer for much longer. ‘Getting your bathroom painted ain’t a priority, is it? No, you mark my words, there ain’t gonna be business for me for a long while yet.’
Just to be sure that he wouldn’t bump into a job offer, he slumped onto a kitchen chair and dedicated himself to eating custard creams like a hamster stockpiling for famine. Unlike me, he was tall so he could get away with it for a while, but the six-pack of manual labour was slowly disappearing into an avalanche of blancmange.
I wanted to tell him about Rose. Just for a moment I wanted to rely on him. I wanted to put my head on his shoulder, have him stroke my hair and cry great big shuddery old sobs until my eyes were like golf balls. I tried to remember if, in nearly nineteen years, I’d ever relied on him. I had to tell him that we had even less cash now. It wasn’t like I was expecting him to make up the shortfall. Even if he could, I wouldn’t have been able to spend it on the Open University degree. Colin thought education was a waste of TV watching time. Why reach for the sky when you could just tune into it?
I counted to three. ‘Rose Stainton died on Friday.’
‘What, that posh old cow at the manor? Jesus, Maia, what we going to do for money now? Her timing stinks. She’s been ill for years and has to pick right now to snuff it. Will they pay you to clean up the old girl’s stuff at least? You’d better get yourself out there and start looking for another job.’
He scraped his chair back and started rummaging in the cupboard like his life depended on finding a tin of ravioli. I tried hard to remember the reason he’d held such a fascination for me. Why I’d loved him enough to have two children with him. Maybe his rebellious streak seemed romantic to me then, the naughtiness that had me skipping school and tearing off to Brighton for the day to eat fish and chips at the beach, shivering under the bandstand, sharing my scarf for warmth. He’d seemed so glamorous and grown-up to me, a twenty-one-year-old with a motorbike and strawberry blond charm. To my teachers’ horror, I dumped my A-levels and any notion of university, then hopped, skipped and stamped on my mother’s dreams and set off on a career on the tills at Tesco. A promotion to head of the deli serving up Scotch eggs followed. I then climbed to the dizzying heights of deputy fish fryer at the chippy and had now reached my peak as a cleaner to those who would rather die than say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘lavatory’ but still managed to piss on the floor.
Now, finally, I had grown up. In that moment, I wanted to rant about responsibility, smash his skull open with the wooden chopping board and cackle wildly. Instead, I made him a cup of tea and talked to him in the voice I used for Harley and Bronte when they were little and didn’t want to go to bed.
‘I’ll put a notice in the post office window. Did you phone that bloke from the builder’s yard who thought they might be looking for someone to help out painting the school?’
‘Bloody marvellous. You lose your job and straightaway you’re on at me. Get it into your thick head, Maia, there’s still a credit crunch, you know. People aren’t paying out to have their spare rooms decorated.’
‘I know, but this is a school, I just thought—’
Mercury FM came blaring on, blocking out what I just thought.
The prof’s death brought out the worrier in me. Unlike loads of people round our way who only seemed to remember they had kids when they turned up on the front doorstep next to a man in blue, I liked to know where mine were and what they were up to. Colin didn’t like me ‘bloody mollycoddling’ them by meeting them out of school, but that day I was desperate to shake off the dead by hugging the living. I wanted to suck in their just out of school smell, the clammy scent that clung to their clothes, somewhere between lunchtime chicken nuggets, stuffy classrooms and the pong of other people’s kids. They liked the prof and had often played in her huge garden while I worked. I wanted to tell them she’d died without Colin making snidey comments in the background.
I stood in the playground on the faded hopscotch squares, craning my neck. Bronte was often out first, walking through the pushing and shoving with what Colin and I secretly laughed about as her ‘piece of shit’ face, or POS for short. Today was no exception. While girls around her came blundering out with rucksacks half open, socks around their ankles and scarves hanging off, Bronte threaded her way through with the poise of a ballerina, her dark curly hair still clipped off her face, her coat zipped up, not even glancing at the bunfight going on around her. She had more togetherness in her nine-year-old little finger than I had managed in three decades. She smiled when she saw me, but enthusiasm wasn’t really part of her make-up.
‘Mum! What are you doing here?’ she said in a tone that could offend a thin-skinned person.
‘I had to go to the post office, so I thought I’d walk home with you. I had some bad news today so I felt like getting some fresh air.’
Bronte eyed me warily. I could see her closing down, ready to reject any neediness on my part. ‘What?’
‘You remember Rose Stainton, the professor of English, at the big white house? She died last week.’
Bronte looked down at the ground. ‘I liked her. She was nice.’ I waited for her to ask me something, anything. I suppose I’d thought she might cry. But she’d folded in on herself, shutting me out.
I broke the silence. ‘Do you want a hand with your bag?’ I ached to pull her into a big hug but resisted. No one did ironing board as well as Bronte.
‘Okay,’ she said, with a small shrug of one shoulder. She swung her bag towards me. ‘Are we waiting for Harley?’
She’d barely finished the question when he came bowling out of school, parka tucked under his arm, white polo shirt nearly as grey as his trousers. With a ten-year-old’s lack of understanding of weight, speed and energy, he charged into me. I staggered backwards into the straggle-haired woman next to me whose ‘Watch where yer going’ did nothing to put him off. He threw himself round me, unselfconscious, grey eyes shining up at me. I allowed my face to fall down onto his head, breathing him in and threading my freezing fingers into that warm space where his hair curled down over his collar. His shoulders went up as he registered the cold but he didn’t push me off. Harley never hid his feelings; they walked two-by-two across his face, sat in the angles of his body, burst out in his words.
‘What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were coming today. Brill. Can we go down the bakery and get cakes?’
I needed to say no. Chocolate éclairs weren’t going to help the pile of red bills. I could feel some pound coins, fat and solid, in my pocket. Bronte walked next to me, while Harley squashed his nose against car windows, looking at steering wheels, shouting about hubcaps and guff about engine sizes that I’d stopped pretending to understand. I waited until he’d finished peering through the blacked-out windows of a BMW before telling him the news about the prof.
‘She was all right, wasn’t she? Are you sad?’ Harley stopped and gave me a hug. ‘What did she die of?’
That question was the start of a whole discussion about what’s left of a body after twenty years, if worms eat eyeballs, if teeth disintegrate in a cremation, if people are buried naked and whether I knew anyone who’d been put in a coffin alive. I almost preferred Bronte’s indifference. I managed to distract Harley by pointing out a Mercedes SLK, no doubt belonging to a local drug dealer.
I turned my attention back to Bronte. ‘So, who did you play with today?’
‘No one.’
‘You must