Strictly Love. Julia Williams
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‘Callum, I've had a long day, I've got an early start, and I need my beauty sleep,’ protested Emily.
‘Too right you do,’ sniggered Jez, who was immediately stopped dead with an icy look.
‘Just go, will you,’ said Emily tiredly. ‘All of you. I need to go to bed.’
‘Me too,’ said Callum.
‘Alone,’ said Emily. ‘Call a cab and you can just piss off home. I've warned you, Callum. I cannot have you smoking dope in my flat.’
‘You know your problem, babe,’ said Callum, as he eventually swaggered out of the door. ‘You take things too seriously.’
‘And you don't take them seriously enough,’ said Emily. ‘Now go, before –’
‘Before what? You change your mind and say I can stay?’ He was like a puppy begging for a treat. But for once Emily wasn't in the mood for giving in.
‘No, before I say something I might regret. Now go on, get out of here,’ she said, practically pushing him out of the door before she weakened.
She slammed it behind her and leaned back against it, sighing deeply.
Damn it! She blinked away angry tears. She was not going to go on like this with Callum taking advantage of her. She was going to take control of her life and start making some changes.
Emily walked slowly into the lounge and stared in dismay at the chaos in front of her. She was too tired to deal with it now, she'd sort it out in the morning.
Take control of her life? She couldn't even take control of her lounge.
‘Mark, you have to take the girls in for me.’
Mark had been shaving on Monday morning when the doorbell rang, and he found Sam and the kids at the front door.
‘But I'll be late for work,’ Mark protested. Why the hell did Sam always do this to him?
‘And so will I. My boss has called an urgent meeting and I have to get up to town.’ Sam worked for an American-based cosmetic-surgery company called Smile, Please!. It was a far cry from her humble beginnings as a dental nurse, but presumably the pay and perks were what she'd been after all along. The downside, as far as Mark was concerned, was that as he worked locally, she felt the school run was now his God-given duty.
‘Besides,’ as she frequently told him, ‘you owe me. I stayed at home all those years with the kids. Now it's my turn.’
Quite why it being ‘my turn’ meant Mark had to drop everything every time Sam asked him to, he hadn't yet worked out, but knowing she could get arsy about access if he made too much fuss, he went along with it.
‘Remind me again why Gemma needs a lift?’ Mark asked. ‘I used to cycle to school at her age.’ Gemma, at thirteen, was more than capable of getting to school under her own steam. Her school was at the other end of town from Beth's, which meant a round trip of half an hour. There was no way he was going to make it to work on time.
‘We're not in the Dark Ages now, Dad,’ muttered Gemma from underneath her dark spiky fringe.
Sam gave him a withering look.
‘Gemma's right,’ she said. ‘You do live in the past. Things are different now. It's not safe for kids to cycle. Or walk. There are all sorts of weirdos about. She just wouldn't be safe on her own.’
And it's nothing to do with you worrying that Gemma can't be trusted to actually go to school, is it? Mark thought to himself. Sam would never admit it, but though Gemma had never actually bunked off school to their knowledge, she was probably the most likely candidate to. Taking her in every day meant Sam knew Gemma had actually got there. Mark blamed the influence of Gemma's new best friend Shelly. Shelly was the reason Gemma had adopted her goth-like stance, eschewing all other colours in favour of black, and listening to bloody miserable music, which Mark had discovered was known as ‘emo’, whatever that was.
Sam had been quite frantic about it for a time, claiming that all kids who were into emo either committed suicide young or self-harmed. So far there was no evidence of either, but Gemma was displaying a singular reluctance to go to school. And while Mark was all in favour of his daughter getting a decent education, there were days when he hoped Sam would finally trust Gemma to make it to school on her own. The thought of Sam going to prison for Gemma's non-compliance in matters educational was one of the few things that had made him smile in recent months.
Sam dashed off in a flurry of self-importance while Mark went to finish shaving and ring Diana, his wonderfully efficient area manager, to say he'd be late. Then he bundled the kids in the car and drove as quickly as possible to Gemma's school.
He watched Gemma going in (if she did bunk off, he didn't want Sam accusing him of negligence), shoulders hunched, head down, bag slung loosely over her shoulder, presenting a glowering presence, and wondered with dismay what had happened to his cute little girl. Gemma was definitely not cute now, with her punky hairstyle, dyed a different colour every week – Mark frequently pointed out to her that what she thought was groundbreaking was in fact only the style his girlfriends had adopted twenty years previously, but he was always silenced with a, ‘Whatever, Dad. It's just different now. You wouldn't understand.’
No, of course not. To Gemma, he'd never been young.
Once Gemma had been dispatched it was on to school with Beth. An entirely different proposition. Though she was ten, Beth was still cuddly enough to remind him what he enjoyed about fatherhood, not yet too embarrassed to kiss him goodbye. He felt vaguely guilty about comparing his children, but it was restful to be with Beth, whose sunny disposition made a nice contrast to Gemma's spikiness.
Then he drove like a maniac to the surgery. Despite the phone call to Diana, Mark still felt stressed. He hated being late and he hoped that anyone waiting wouldn't be too grumpy – some of his patients had a tendency to think that, as their dentist, his sole function in life was to be ready and waiting for them at all times. The fact that he might have an existence, a family, a life even, outside the narrow confines of his surgery seemed to be beyond them.
Mark squeezed his ageing Volvo into the one remaining parking space outside the surgery and got out to the distinctive wail of the alarm going off. That was all he needed.
He ran into the surgery and found Maya standing looking helpless, while three patients sat around looking pained.
‘I'm so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was here first and there were patients waiting so I opened the door, but I had forgotten about the alarm and I don't know the code.’
Mark keyed in the right number and thankfully the alarm fell silent. It wasn't Maya's fault, she'd only started working at the practice two weeks ago, and as a newly qualified dentist it shouldn't be her job to make sure the surgery was open on time. That's why they had a practice manageress. Talking of which –
‘Where the bloody hell is Kerry?’ asked Mark.
Maya