no need to shout. I’m not deaf. My daughter’s staying for a few days. Pain in the arse. Wants to paint my bathroom. I bet she makes me have it done in pink.’
‘You can choose what colour you want. It’s your bathroom.’
‘With Alice in charge? You’re joking. Help me along to the paint area, then we can choose.’
With that, she sprinted down the aisle, holding her stick out in front of her, and was stretching up towards the tins of black and purple paint before I caught up with her.
‘Take me to the checkout,’she said, linking her arm in mine.
Alice eventually caught up with us after her mother had bought the purple and black paint.
‘Mother, my goodness. I see you’ve already purchased your paint. Marvellous.’
Alice’s mother winked at me.
‘Thank you, Lizzie,’ Alice said. ‘I had a feeling you and I would end up very good friends.’
I stopped myself from wincing and made a dash for the car before Alice noticed her mother’s choice of paint and blamed me. With the paint in the boot, I just made it to the rehearsal rooms in time to pick up Eliza, congratulating myself on coordinating my afternoon so successfully. But as we approached the driveway, Eliza asked, ‘What’s for supper, Mum?’
…So I prepared her a farmhouse stew full of goodness and vitamins, went out into the yard to milk the cow and prepared to invite the neighbours round for a game of charades…
Actually, I’d somehow forgotten about the small matter of eating, and Eliza deserved a treat, I told myself. So we phoned for a takeaway pizza, slumped onto the settee and glued ourselves to her favourite film, Chicago. It should have been boring by this, our twentieth viewing, but I never tired of taking sideways glances to watch Eliza watch her two heroines.
If I looked right into Eliza’s eyes, I could almost see her mind turning herself into Catherine Zeta Jones or Renee Zellweger. This time her focus was on Zeta Jones and Eliza was there in the film, tapping out every dance step in her mind, reaching for every note, feeling every emotion. Melted cheese and tomato dripped down her chin as she fed herself by touch, her eyes fixed firmly on the oblong screen in front of her. My vision as a perfect mother did not include slobbing in front of the telly with a pizza. Still, I told myself, it was a special occasion. Was that what it was? A special occasion because we did not have the adolescent tension of Jo in the air? I felt I had failed in some way but I quickly replaced that thought with a vision of Eliza and me singing a duet in a Hollywood musical. In Eliza’s world, everyone would create a song and dance about everything.
Monday morning came and I had to put Jo’s room on hold while I went to work.
I put on my black executive suit, threw some extremely important papers into my executive briefcase and made a quick phone call to ensure my executive car was on its way to pick me up and take me to the city where I would be handling investments of millions of pounds.
I arrived at the sandwich bar and put my vision on hold for later—I did still have that idea of running my own café. I rushed in, late as usual, washed my hands and got stuck into scraping butter across bread and spooning in the fillings for workers picking up their lunch sandwiches on the way in. Trish busied herself by dispensing caffeine to a hundred lethargic businessmen and we kept up this frantic pace for nearly an hour.
It was only later, when Trish went out in the delivery van, that I could no longer ignore my screaming thoughts about what Roger had said. Of course I had noticed that Jo was looking a bit thinner and of course I had been a bit worried. But Jo losing weight? That didn’t fit. She had always been active and healthy, not one of those children who pick up every little cough and cold going round, always with a runny nose and alarmingly pale skin. In fact, I had rarely been to the doctor with Jo, for she had never suffered from anything more than the usual childhood ailments, which she always shook off very quickly, and she had barely missed a day of school. As I chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers, the word ‘cancer’ floated into my mind uninvited, but I soon pushed it out again. I clung to more logical explanations and somehow managed to keep my anxiety in check.
I reminded myself that Jo was pretty good for a teenager. She had largely conformed, and had kept her mood swings firmly locked in her bedroom, never opting for the throwing-crockery-at-your-mother option. I had had many a long chat with Scarlet’s mother, who had torn clumps of her own hair out in the frustration of trying to control her daughter.
‘If I tell Scarlet to be home by half past eleven, she’ll turn up at a quarter to twelve just to prove a point. If I ask her to clear the coffee-cups out of her bedroom, she’ll bring down just the one and then take up a new cup of coffee and a plate.’
Not much to complain about but I had noticed that Scarlet’s mother had started to chew her fingernails lately. Scarlet had a belly piercing, one dolphin tattoo on her shoulder and another on her arm which nobody has dared ask the meaning of, and she had brought home at least three inarticulate, nicotine-stained boyfriends. A tame rebellion compared with many, but more than Jo had succumbed to. Jo didn’t seem to have this drive to battle with authority, she had other priorities. It was much later that I realised she was rebelling in her own way, and I would gladly have swapped what happened next with any number of body piercings.
‘I’m not sure I want this,’ muttered one of my regular customers.
I looked at his sandwich. It did look rather thin and lank. He lifted up the top layer of bread to reveal a very thick spreading of butter but no filling whatsoever. He then lifted up the lid of his coffee-cup where, like a magician, he slowly revealed the whereabouts of the missing filling, which was floating on the coffee like seaweed in the ocean.
‘Sorry, Reg, I was miles away.’
‘Last week you were imagining yourself serving food in a beach bar on Mars. Where were you today?’
‘I was solving the mystery of adolescence, but I think serving coffee on Mars is more realistic.’
That night it was fish and chips in front of a quiz, justified by my plan to make a start on the decorating. After supper, I creaked up the stairs to Jo’s room, looked around, and decided I could muster up enough energy to shift the furniture to the centre of the room, pull back the carpet and get all my decorating gear ready.
I stood for a while and stared at the room. Beginning any-thing was always hard and I imagined Michelangelo must have felt the same as he stood inside the Sistine Chapel. Before I allowed my imagination to let me plan something rather too ambitious for Jo’s ceiling, I went back to the kitchen and found a couple of cardboard boxes. I carted them upstairs and filled them up with books and ornaments.
Once I had begun the task, my earlier enthusiasm returned and I began to enjoy myself as I stripped the bed and lifted the notice-board off the wall. There was something very sat-isfying about this sort of job. It reminded me of taking down Christmas decorations, hoovering up the pine needles and starting a fresh new year with the old one wiped clean away along with its stale habits, overdone arguments, regrets and remorse.
I began to hum and whistle like a jovial morning milkman as I went about the business of dismantling Jo’s room. It was as if I was taking her life apart to spring clean it, give it a lick of paint and then put it back together again—as if I was certain that that was what was needed.
It didn’t take long to pack the loose items away and I set about the task of hauling the bed and chest into the middle of
