What a Way to Go E-Book

Julia Förster

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

1988. 12-year-old Harper Richardson's parents are divorced. Her mum got custody of her, the Mini, and five hundred tins of baked beans. Her dad got a mouldering cottage in a Midlands backwater village and default membership of the Lone Rangers single parents' club. Harper got questionable dress sense, a zest for life, two gerbils, and her Chambers dictionary, and the responsibility of fixing her parents' broken hearts... Set against a backdrop of high hairdos and higher interest rates, pop music and puberty, divorce and death, What a Way to Go is a warm, wise and witty tale of one girl tackling the business of growing up while those around her try not to fall apart.

Leseprobe

Atlantic Books

London

To my mum and dad

Prologue

Soon after my parents split up when I was five and I became one of the Lone Rangers, I asked Mum to record the credits of television programmes for me. I used to play back the videos, pressing my face close to the screen so that my nose was almost against it. My hair would stand on end with the static. I’d pause the rolling list of actors, producers, executives and directors, and in those frozen moments I’d search for my name – Harper – and those of my parents, Mary and Pete. I’d only just learnt how to spell them. If I ever spotted those three names together, it would be a special sign. A sign that one day, my parents would get back together. Here’s the story of how they never did.

PART ONE

one

I’m sitting at the top of the stairs with my legs dangling through the banister railings when Dad comes to pick me up one Friday after school. My copy of Chambers, the fat red dictionary, is by my side. I’ve been looking up the meaning of the word ‘sheath’: a case for a sword; a tubular dress; a contraceptive device …

At Lone Rangers parties I’ve heard tales of every kind of family break-up. From the ones where you can only visit your separated parent under supervision at Access Centres in cold church halls where the chess sets are missing pawns and the only cassette tape played is by The Beatles, to the ones where the ex-parents still go on family holidays together without a single argument. I’ve also compared notes on how to try to get your parents back together; I know kids of failed marriages who have faked everything from Valentine’s cards to selective mutism.

On the whole, my folks can manage my fortnightly handovers without throwing cutlery or crying. Success is them having a conversation that lasts longer than two minutes.

At the front door, Mum says to Dad, ‘Have you got time for a quick cuppa?’

I don’t need a dictionary to understand that Mum inviting Dad in means one of two things. Either she wants a rise in her maintenance payments or an extra weekend off looking after me. Dad coughs then wipes his feet several times on the itchy doormat which says WELCOME TO THE MAD HOUSE!

They head into the kitchen where the kettle’s filled. I think of going down to say hello, but would rather find out what Mum is after by earwigging their conversation. I grab my rucksack and creep downstairs, treading on the steps in the special way so that I don’t make them squeak. Then, I dart across the hall into the lounge like a gerbil in headlights. I wedge myself between the radiator and the back of Mum’s never-never sofa which is wrapped in plastic. Luckily the heating’s off.

‘Have a pew,’ Mum says.

Dad sits on the sofa. The plastic cover crackles. I breathe as quietly as I can.

‘How’s things at British Steel?’ Mum asks.

‘Been better,’ Dad says, then changes the subject. ‘I guess this is about Harper? Is she up to her anti-capitalist tricks again?’

‘She seems to be heralding free enterprise now, actually. She’s setting up her own shop. Wants to contribute towards the fund.’

‘What “fund”?’ Dad asks, very slowly, as if he’s selecting letters with which to make up a word from the dregs of a Scrabble bag when the game is nearly up.

‘The house fund,’ Mum says.

Seems Dad’s Scrabble bag’s empty.

‘Interest rates are only going one way, Pete.’

‘You’re nowhere near having enough for a deposit, are you?’ he asks.

‘How would you know what I manage to save?’

‘By your shoe collection?’

‘Do you have any idea how expensive it is to bring a kid up alone?’

‘You’re not doing it alone.’

Although the radiator isn’t on, I’m starting to feel toasty. Someone on our Kendal Road dead end is practising scales on the piano as if playing with their big toe. Far off, an ice-cream van tinkles its metallic lullaby.

Mum says, ‘The landlord has been dropping hints that he wants to sell. If we don’t buy this place then we’ll have to move. Again. Harper’ll have to go to a different middle school if I can’t find another rental nearby.’

We’ve already moved three times in as many years. We struggle to find places to rent because most landlords in Blackbrake either don’t believe a single mum could earn enough to pay the rent, electric and water, or they don’t approve of divorce. I’m the only outcast in my class and on my street with separated parents. As far as school goes, my best mate Cassie reckons year eight will be crap whatever school you’re in because the National Curriculum is starting under the GERBIL this September. I don’t know what this means, but I think it has something to do with a flagpole and the school pet.

‘So …’ Dad says.

Mum says, ‘I’m asking for a rise.’

‘Another one?’

Mum’s voice is an octave lower: ‘You got Ivy Cottage, after all.’

Dad: ‘You got the Mini!’

Mum: ‘That rust bucket full of out-of-date baked beans? Which do you think is worth more?’

Dad: ‘That’s not the point. You got Harper.’

‘But you didn’t want her,’ Mum says.

‘Now, Mary…’

I block up my listening chimneys by pushing a thumb hard into each of my ears. My parents often sort through their scrap­yard of arguments. They never find anything shiny or new, just the usual unwanted, broken, battery-flat crap which they pick over like a car scrap merchant looking to take something worthless and make it valuable again.

There’s a car-breaker round the back of Louise’s house in ­Coventry – she’s one of the Lone Rangers parents. Excavators scrape through the heaps of totalled cars, their bumpers bent awk­wardly after head-on collisions. Men in orange overalls salvage what they can from the write-offs then squash the wrecks into massive cubes to be liquidized. I imagine all the things the car metal could be made into: hospital beds; drip stands; wheelchairs; a record stylus; clasps on a jewellery box; cartridge pens; cheap wedding rings …

When I poke my head around the side of the sofa, both Mum and Dad have gone.

I sit on the pebbledash doorstep to wait for their return. Next door at number eleven, Edna’s Rottweiler barks blue murder.

The Lone Rangers logo is a paper-chain family of three; there’s a kid in the middle with arms which stretch out in both directions to keep hold of the mum in one hand and the dad in the other. You can tell that no child helped to design that logo because this is not how it feels when your parents separate.

Us kids left behind in the wreckage of a broken home cope by creating two cut-out versions of ourselves: one for each parent. At Mum’s, I watch four hours of telly a day, read trashy novels and speak my mind. At Dad’s, I watch my Ps and Qs, digest facts and toe the line.

After twenty minutes or so, Dad drives down Kendal Road, pretending that he’s come straight from work when he hugs me, though I catch the malty smell of Blackbrake lager on his breath. Mum plays the same game and fakes meeting Dad for the first time that evening. I bet she went to check the bank balance.

While I’m putting my rucksack into the boot of Dad’s car, Mum dumps five large boxes of baked-bean tins on to the pavement just outside our front door and disappears upstairs again without even saying goodbye.

Mum and Dad won a car full of a thousand tins of baked beans in a competition before the divorce. When they split up, Dad got custody of the cottage. Mum took me plus the X-reg Mini. The tins were split fifty-fifty. They’re beyond their use-by date now but, Dad says, as he loads the car boot with the boxes, tinned food never goes off.

two

On the outskirts of Blackbrake, Dad and I hit a traffic jam on the ring road. Some people cheat by driving along the wide pavement with their hazard lights flashing. Dad leans across my lap, winds down my window, then sticks two fingers up in a V-sign at each of the cars as they pass.

‘I can do that for you, if you like?’ I say.

Dad sinks back into his bead-covered car seat and sighs, ‘It’s all right.’ This is the sum-total of our conversation on our journey to Ivy Cottage.

If you tried to spot the difference between life in a village like Hardingstone compared with a town like Blackbrake, you’d notice that in the countryside, people don’t lock front doors, cars or even bother putting on handbrakes. No one drinks lager in the streets in Hardingstone and nor are there arson attacks down the playground.

Before Mum and I left the cottage in Hardingstone, I used to play with the village kids all the time. But when I started seeing them just two days out of fourteen – on the weekends I was visiting Dad – they began to leave me out of their games. I made a real effort to join in, but within a few weeks they stopped talking to me altogether. It’s like I have some kind of jinx.

My only friends now in Hardingstone, apart from Mrs Curtis, are down the graveyard. At least they don’t answer back. Or call me a weirdo.

It’s dusk when Dad and I arrive at Ivy Cottage, the street’s so quiet I swear I can hear crocus bulbs cracking the soil, desperate for sunlight. A new blue Lada estate is parked right outside the cottage. It puts me in mind of a hearse with its polished bonnet and many large windows. I peer through one of them; instead of carrying a coffin, the car is littered with crumpled papers, empty takeaway cartons and cardboard boxes, as well as large plastic bottles of chemicals marked ‘hazardous’. It must be Patrick’s car; Mum’s always said that Dad’s best mate should come with a health warning.

I walk up the moss-covered garden path, trying not to get stung by the waist-high nettles growing at either side of the narrow pavement. The sharp smell of lemon juice wafts out of the gaps in the rotting window frames next door where Mrs Curtis lives. She’ll be at her jam pans of lemon curd. Inside, an Italian LP is stuck on her gramophone. It’s the only song I’ve ever known her play:

Ma l’amore no,

Ma l’amore no,

Ma l’amore no,

Ma l’amore no …

Inside Ivy Cottage, we find Patrick crouching in the kitchen next to the open door of the electric oven which he has switched on to the highest temperature setting. He’s still wearing his raincoat, scarf and woolly hat. When he stands up to his full height to explain, the red bobble on the top of the hat scrunches up against the ceiling. ‘I couldn’t find the coal scuttle,’ he says.

Grey mould shapes creep up the once-beige wallpaper in the cottage. The rising damp has left orange stains, too, as if tracking its plan of attack towards the ceiling. O\utside, the ivy, which used to crawl up just one side of the house, chokes the whole cottage. It’s so thick now that before I can open the window in my bedroom, I have to take a pair of scissors to the new growth and give it a good trim.

If I had to find an A-side to my dad having so many history books lining the walls it would be that they offer extra padding for the sounds and smells from next door, and soak up the dampness in the air like a yellow car sponge.

At the hearth, Dad ties sheets of newspaper into figures of eight, stacks the twists in the grate then places kindling on top; the fire has never drawn well, so next a large piece of newspaper is put over the fireplace to trap the oxygen, which makes it catch eventually. Once it has begun to roar, Dad tongs single lumps of coal on to it.

I nurse the fire while Patrick helps Dad to carry in the boxes of beans from the boot of the car. Dad unpacks them, stacking the tins in pyramid shapes in the puzzle cupboard under the stairs. Then the three of us sit by the fire and Patrick shares out the sherry trifle he brought with him. He makes sure I get the most glacé cherries.

‘You still not got a new telly?’ Patrick asks Dad. ‘How d’you survive, Harper?’

‘With difficulty,’ I reply.

‘She reads,’ Dad says, without looking up from the fireplace.

Dad hasn’t replaced the television since the cathode ray tube blew up. I can still picture the black and white telly we had: it was the size of a small cupboard, with a wooden frame and a screen that bulged outwards. Like when I wake up in the mornings, the telly took several minutes to come to its senses. While you were waiting for a picture to appear, a fuzzy mess of hissing white lines crossed the black screen.

‘Why don’t we get a new television?’ I ask.

‘Bubblegum for the eyes,’ Dad replies. ‘When I was teaching history, you could tell the kids who watched too much of it – they had fewer brain cells. It was depressing.’

‘You up to anything exciting tomorrow?’ Patrick asks.

‘Village fête,’ Dad says, prodding the fire with the brass poker.

‘Sounds fascinating,’ Patrick says, winking at me.

I leave the two of them by the fire to finish off the last of the trifle and I go to boil the kettle with enough water for my three hot-water bottles.

In my bedroom I draw the crushed-velvet curtains closed. The hems are two feet too long; when I was seven I tried to shorten them with a stapler, but the green velvet was much too thick. I could just cut off the extra material, but deep down I still imagine that Mum might come back to fix them.

Weekends in Hardingstone are low voltage, thanks to Maggie Thatcher. Dad explained to me recently that Hardingstone is becoming ‘dormitory’ because of her policies. I discovered when I looked up ‘dormitory’ in Chambers that this means ­Hardingstone is becoming ‘a large room in which people sleep’. It’s true that Hardingstone’s sleepy; people walk, without aim, as if the footpaths are covered in treacle; they speak as if their mouths are stuffed with caramel and their heads with feathers. Even the large bomb from the First World War which stands lopsided in the graveyard hasn’t bothered to explode yet. The house where the bakery once was has long since had its oven sealed and the school closed its doors to pupils in 1982; last year it was converted into a house. There’s nothing much to do here but carve up your quiet life into quarter hours each time the church bells toll.

Mornings, I usually wake up around ten and watch the white aeroplane writing of my breath as I call out for Dad to make sure he’s still there. Once I’m up, I stand in front of the fridge in the kitchen, willing breakfast to suggest itself: difficult, given that the contents are often just a large bottle of mayonnaise, a block of butter and a couple of bowls of leftovers hidden under a layer of what I can only describe as cuckoo spit. Luckily, the village two miles down the road is big enough to have a convenience shop. While we’re in civilization, Dad also buys us both a magazine to read during the weekend – his about history, mine about pop stars – two potatoes to bake and eat with out-of-date beans, a box of cereal and, if the mood strikes, a Viennetta.

Sundays, I do homework, piano practice and wish I could watch The Waltons. We walk around the dead village so that bang on one o’clock we’re at the Spread Eagle – now up for sale with permission to convert – where Dad orders a roast dinner with all the trimmings for us both. We always sit on the same red velvet stools in the snug and Dad does the Sunday crossword while I make a list on the back of a beer mat: my fortnightly guess at who’ll be in the top ten later that evening.

Every so often, Dad and I go on trips to places of historical interest – the kind of visits he used to go on with his students when he was a history teacher, I suppose. Last autumn we went to Flag Fen in Peterborough to see how Neolithic people lived in their roundhouses back in the Bronze Age. I bought a tiny piece of ancient wood, over three thousand years old, which I keep in its plastic box by my bed. And last summer we went on a day trip to Portsmouth to see the carcass of the Mary Rose which sank in 1545.

Dad may be able to remember the names of all the kings and queens of England going back centuries and important dates from the past thousand years like when the Magna Carta was signed, but he draws a blank whenever I ask him about our recent history and what my life was really like before the divorce.

three

That Saturday morning I go on my every-other-weekend graveyard inspection. Hardingstone church is sandwiched between several towering trees. Underneath their evergreen branches, hundreds of gravestones are sinking crookedly into the soil. They’re in a state of what’s known as ‘benign neglect’ – something Mum says is only a good thing if it’s to do with either graveyards or being a single parent.

Many of the gravestones are so old that you can’t read the writing any more: years of hard rain and sad hands have rubbed the letters away. One grave has had the same plastic windmill next to it for years, whipping round in the breeze. The colours of the sails have faded to a pale, murky yellow. Scattered around the graves there are candles, damp and warped crucifixes, mouldy teddy bears and photos bleached by the sun in rusting frames.

My inspection always includes visiting my friends: Harry James Curtis (1915–1949), who was Mrs Curtis’s husband, and Heaven Called a Little Child (March 16–30, 1888). I didn’t know either of them, but as Heaven Called a Little Child died exactly a hundred years ago, her parents must be dead now too, so I always clear Heaven Called’s grave of weeds and wind-fallen wellingtonia branches.

As I’m piling up the debris, the church bells toll like a waterfall; the bell-pullers must be practising for a wedding. I run up to the holly hedge surrounding the cemetery just in time to see a white Rolls-Royce driving right down the middle of the lane as if the chauffeur doesn’t want to even think about scratching the sides. There are two thick, white ribbons tied on to the wing mirrors; they meet at the tip of the bonnet in a V-shape where a silver lady looks set to fly away. The back seats in the car are empty; I guess he’s on his way to collect the bride.

I imagine Mum on her wedding day, breezing up the path to the church. Dad, as he waited at the altar with sweaty palms and armpits. I have a hazy memory of a framed photo from their wedding day, a close-up of them by the gates of Hardingstone church. It used to sit on the mantelpiece in Ivy Cottage; it disappeared as soon as Mum and I quit the village. If I concentrate, I can still picture the tiny white flowers that Mum wore in her hair.

When I arrive back at the cottage, I find Dad in the kitchen sniffing under the lid of a bulging carton of coleslaw.

‘How do you fancy chips for lunch?’ he says, chucking the coleslaw in the bin.

‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ I say, joining him in front of the fridge. Inside, what was once an onion bhaji now looks more like fossilized wood.

‘There’s the village fête first, though. Let’s get something for breakfast there, shall we?’ he says.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘But only if it’s cake.’

At the fête, I head straight for the squash and cake hatch once Dad has paid the entry fee and given me a quid to ‘spend wisely’ – which, in my dictionary, means to spend it all on home-baked triple chocolate fudge cake.

The last time I came to the village hall was two Christmases ago for the fundraiser to straighten the wonky church spire. I won a jar of pickled beetroot on the tombola, and also marked X in the exact spot on a map of a desert island where the treasure was buried and won first prize: my Chambers dictionary.

‘Is there a treasure hunt?’ I ask Mrs White, with hair to match her name. She’s pouring weak orange squash into turquoise cups and saucers.

‘Not today.’

I pay 20p for a slice of cake and a cup of juice and take them to an empty table covered in chequered cheesecloth. Dad’s up the other end of the hall talking to the man who runs the Spread Eagle. Seems he’s selling off his brass items – pokers, coal shovels and scuttles. Dad appears to be in the market for a horseshoe.

It’s on account of watching Dad that I don’t notice Richard until he’s pulling up a chair next to mine. Perhaps he’s no longer allergic to me.

‘When’s your birthday?’ Richard asks.

‘September twenty-eighth.’

‘I’m thirteen next weekend. I’m having a disco in town …’ Richard pulls apart a jammy dodger, and licks off the jam filling before eating the biscuit halves in one go.

Richard’s sixth was the last village birthday party I was invited to. There was a clown, who made animals out of long, blue balloons. I chose two birds kissing in a heart. Richard chose a gun.

‘… It’s going to be radical,’ he says.

‘I’m at my mum’s next weekend,’ I say.

‘Oh, you’re not invited. Only my friends are coming,’ Richard says as he gets up to leave.

My eyes are pincushions, but I will not let Richard see my tears fall. I turn my head, and make out the swimmy figure of my antique friend, Mrs Curtis, at her stall.

Mrs Curtis is selling jars of 1987 gooseberry jam, pot-pourri and rusted things like can openers, creaking whisks and empty tins of dried milk powder. Veins pump blue blood beneath her skin which is as thin as the airmail paper Mum uses to write to my grandma in New Zealand. Mrs Curtis’s fingernails are long and cracked, and her hands are like claws, but come July they’ll still be nimble enough to sort metal colanders of gooseberries into two bowls: tart and ripe. Thing is, Mrs Curtis’s brain is dissolving slowly like sugar in one of her pans of bubbling jam. Plus she dribbles. But I don’t mind. I love her: we’re the village misfits.

I place 10p in a plastic pot for a sandwich bag of pot-pourri and go round behind her stall to stand right next to one of her face-long ears so she can hear me when I speak.

‘How’s school?’ she shouts.

‘I’m doing well in history!’ I’m glad she’s having one of her good days and that she can recognize me, though it probably won’t be long before she gets confused. ‘Last term we did the Romans and archaeology! This term we’re studying energy and where food comes from! We’re visiting a farm at the end of term for our school trip!’

She nods. ‘How’s your mother?’ As well as being the only village person not to blank me, Mrs Curtis is the only one who ever mentions Mum.

‘She’s fine!’

‘Any boyfriends?’ she asks, her eyes searching my face like the beam of a lighthouse.

‘No,’ I say.

‘What happened to the bank manager?’

‘Didn’t like him!’ I say.

‘The artist?’

‘Flew home!’ I remind her. The water of her broken memories is starting to pour through her colander brain.

‘You deserve to be happy, Harper! You make sure she looks after you. She’s a witch, your mum!’ She looks at me with her cooked-fish eyes, and sighs. ‘Care for a gooseberry, Gregory?’

‘Thanks, Mum!’ I shout.

When Mrs Curtis’s colander brain overflows, she not only gets dead bitchy but she also calls anyone within gooseberry-spitting distance Gregory. I just ignore it and play along, especially since nobody else in the village tends to talk to Mrs Curtis, especially about her long-lost son; I guess we share the same Hardingstone jinx.

I have a fuzzy picture in my mind of Gregory as well. I remember his corrugated beige cricket pads that were strapped to his legs. I suppose he must have left for London when I was as tall as his kneecaps. He never visits Mrs Curtis, and village gossip goes that he got a divorce too when he moved to the capital. I suppose that’s why he doesn’t come back; nobody here approves of the D word.

Mrs Curtis presses a rusty cog into my palm as if it’s an emerald. I wonder how long it’ll be before she loses all her marbles and becomes a patient down the Hopkin Wynne Mental Hospital. Then I’ll be able to go on the hospital treadmill without trespassing.

four

I can invent dead clever tricks to exterminate those potential stepdads who don’t pass my quality control; the latest one to head into the boyfriend bin was the bank manager, Mike Hyde. For Mum’s third date he took the three of us out for tea down the Harvester; I nearly fell asleep in my salad with thousand-island dressing and bacon bits. He kept boomeranging what we were talking about back to asset strips, fat profits and bottom lines. When the waitress brought over the bill, he magicked a calculator out of his pin-stripe jacket pocket and worked out what his third of the bill came to. So, when he called one Friday evening to speak to Mum, I lied point blank and said she was on another date down the Shang High.

Mum thanked me afterwards.

Only thing I regret is that his car had electric windows.

Then, there was Alfonso. Alfonso Hope Follanger. I had a soft spot for Alfie because he could make thick pancakes in the shape of gerbils. But Alfie was Canadian. He was also a vegetarian and an animal rights activist. And he said that the only gerbils in the house would be made out of butter, eggs, buttermilk and flour. A few weeks after I asked him fifty times in a row to buy me a gerbil, he flew back to Manitoba. But I like the sound of Kit. I won’t throw a poppadum on his lap when he comes round for tea.

I learn about Kit that Sunday evening after coming back from my Dad. Mum doesn’t hear me come in on account of Dolly Parton crooning D-I-V-O-R-C-E in the lounge. I perch on the bottom step of the stairs with my duffle coat still on. The needle lifts from the LP, and I can make out what Mum’s saying to Avon’s-calling Oona.

‘What’s he do then?’ Oona asks.

‘Sells chocolate.’

A chocolate salesman? That has to be the best potential stepdad job yet.

‘How old?’

‘Forty-one next month.’

‘Divorced?’

‘Twice. No kids. How do I look?’ Mum says.

‘Fan-bloody-tastic.’

‘Hope I can manage to do the same on Saturday,’ Mum says. ‘Kit’s taking me out.’

‘That can’t be his real name.’

‘It’s short for KitKat. Cheque OK?’

‘KitKat? Well, I’m sure Derek’ll babysit. He needs the money. Spent his piggybank on a pair of winklepickers last weekend.’

I tiptoe to the front door, open it, then slam it closed so the letterbox rattles. ‘Hi, Mum!’ I yell.

‘We’re in the lounge! Stay for another glass?’ Mum asks Oona as I go through.

‘Best get back, check Derek’s uniform’s dry,’ Oona says.

‘Hell’s teeth. Harper, did you put your uniform in the laundrette pile?’

I shake my head.

‘You’ll have to go in mufti again,’ Mum says.

Two strips of gas fire are burning red and orange in the lounge, in the middle of which Mum is sitting on a dining chair. Her eyes are like two calm, blue lakes in a thunderstorm of colour. Her eyelids are painted purple fading into yellow then white; her eyelashes drip with electric-blue mascara and two red stripes storm up her cheeks to find the tops of her ears beneath her bobbed hair. Mum has the perfect face to practise colouring in, Oona says, because it’s beautiful.

Oona loves layering make-up over her own face too. She calls it ‘war paint’; I’ve never seen her without it on. Oona undoes her white cloak which she wears over beige culottes and a shocking-pink tubular top with a zip that goes up the middle at the front; it puts me in mind of my pencil case when I fill it full to bursting. Being careful not to break her ballerina-pink nails, she screws lids back on small pots of coloured powders, tiny bottles of varnish and the chemical-smelling bottle of nail-varnish remover which makes my eyes water. I take two chocolate bourbons from a plate on the coffee table and post them in my mouth like Mum does pegs when she’s hanging out a hand wash.

‘I’ll let you know if Derek’s free,’ Oona says, as she waddles towards the front door, her heavy briefcase of Avon tricks at her side. ‘Thanks for being my crash-test dummy!’

‘We’ll have spag bol once my nails are dry,’ Mum says, wafting her hands through the air like she’s trying to take off.

How nice Mum’s food will be depends on what the hole-in-the-wall says. If she comes back from checking the bank balance in a good mood, it’ll be spaghetti with bolognese sauce which she’ll make a vat of, then store the rest of it in Tupperware in the deep freeze. But if she comes home in a sulk it’ll be old baked beans on anything that she can squeeze into the toaster like crumpets, stale Scotch pancakes or frozen potato waffles.

I take one more chocolate bourbon before Mum clears the plate from the coffee table. She holds it by the rim so as not to smudge her nails.

‘How was your weekend?’ she asks.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Just fine?’ Mum asks, frowning. ‘Was your dad OK?’

‘He was fine,’ I say. Bet what Mum really wants to ask is whether Dad mentioned anything about their row – or a rise in her allowance.

‘I’m banning that word from now on,’ Mum says, heading out to the kitchen. ‘Everything’s just fine these days …’

I zap the telly with the doofer and flick through the four channels. Nothing interesting’s on, so I call Cassie to find out what she got up to at the weekend. Not only did she go down Our Price to see The Primitives gig, she’s totally trumped my bag of pot-pourri by buying their new single and getting it signed by the band.

‘Come round mine next weekend, H. I’m free on Sunday. We’ll do something just as fun,’ Cassie says.

‘Thanks,’ I say, but I feel like a charity case.

‘Balls,’ Cassie says. ‘Mum’s coming to check my teeth and homework. Better go.’

‘Sounds like the sort of thing they’d do in a boarding school,’ I say.

‘Tell me about it,’ Cassie says. ‘See you tomorrow.’

I go through to the dining room to ink in my visit to Cassie’s on the family calendar. The dining-room table doubles as an office desk and a place to eat. It’s this table that we clear for takeaway meals with potential stepdads. I’m the firing squad. Anything can be used as a weapon and look like the innocent accident of a twelve-and-a-half-year-old. A poppadum, dripping in mango chutney; a well-aimed fork in the potential new stepdad’s lap; questions about what they earn (which Mum blushes at and tries to stop me asking, but secretly wants to know); how many women they’ve proposed to before (ditto); and, of course, if they eat meat or object to gerbils as pets on ‘grounds of animal violation’. For these greasy meals, Mum gets the special red tablemats from the top of the bookshelf, dusts them down then wraps them in plastic shopping bags.

The rest of the time, the dining-room table is where Mum works on her Open University English Literature degree after I’ve gone to bed. At one end of it, a tower of papers is stacked; it’ll avalanche if one more essay is asked for. Half-drunk cups of coffee are balanced on second-hand books, and on the floor beneath there’s a large hardback thesaurus which Mum uses as a footstool.

Above the table hangs the 1988 calendar. On it, Mum writes in different coloured ink each weekly event – Open University deadlines, benefits and allowance payments, piano lessons, repeat prescriptions, paydays – plus, the weekends are colour coded with orange highlighter for a Dad weekend, and blue for a Mum weekend with capital Ds and Ms depending on where I’m supposed to be.

D M D M D M D M

D M D M D M D

M D M D M

D M D

M D

M

D

M D

M D M

D M D M D

M D M D M D M

D M D M D M D M

Fifty-two capital letters that dictate my life.

I scrawl in the square of Sunday 27 March that Harper will be at Cassie’s. Mum has already inked in her activity for that day. It says ‘Mary is SLEEPING’.

five

The town I live in now, Blackbrake, is famous for lager, lifts and loonies. Mum says they should print that on the ‘Welcome to Blackbrake’ sign. I’ve never seen a drunken mental hospital patient travelling in an elevator, but I do glimpse the patients sometimes when Cassie and I go trespassing on the grounds of the private Hopkin Wynne Mental Hospital; it’s named after a famous poet who went potty there. The facilities are amazing compared to Blackbrake General Hospital. At the Hopkin Wynne, there’s a gym with an electronic bike machine, rowing machine and a treadmill. Cassie and I use the rowing machine and pretend we’re on the river Brake. There’s no lock on the gym door, so even if we were caught by a mental nurse, we’d say it was fair game.

If Cassie’s not with me, I don’t have the guts to trespass down the private facilities alone, so I go down the public General Hospital instead. You go in the main entrance through two sliding doors that lead to a long sloping corridor. It smells of disinfectant, cancelling out all the smells you’re certain to find lurking underneath, like boiled potatoes and dried blood. Brown and white signs announce each ward. Beds on wheels are parked by the flapping doors, waiting for an ill person to come out of Theatre, the Serious Injury Unit or Oncology. You pass patients snailing forward on wheelchairs or shuffling on flattened slippers. Some lean on thin metal drip stands from which bags of water dangle. The water is being injected into them, and you wonder if that’s what is making them look so yellow.

The vending machine that gives you back more change than you are supposed to receive is next to Oncology. I have this week’s 30p pocket money in my pink sparkly purse and I know exactly what it’s going to be spent on: three packets of bacon-flavoured fries. While I press the pad and watch the metal hand corkscrew, the thought pops into my head that Mum’s new boyfriend might be a vegetarian. And that would spell D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R. I pocket the 10p profit and hoover up the fries.

Mum spends every Saturday in town window-shopping. Once a month on paydays, she purchases as well: mostly clothes, shoes and Sainsbury’s beef mince. Saturdays are also release days for mentalists down the Hopkin Wynne. They sway in their seats on the bottom deck of the Number 14 bus, talking to their reflections in the window. Mum and I sit on the top deck so that she can see into strangers’ lounges, and comment on their choice of three-piece suites. That Saturday, I go in with her.

Blackbrake bus station isn’t that different from the General Hospital: pale people sit in plastic bucket seats, waiting; it smells of disinfectant and the vending machine (which adds up properly) sells bacon-flavoured fries. The only difference is that I feel a sense of dread in the bus station: it means spending two hours of my life in the Black Knight shopping centre.

Mum announces as we walk along the glass gangplank between the bus station and the Black Knight that we’re shopping for a new pair of shoes for her meal out with Kit later that same evening. First, though, it’s Boots the Chemist for pink anti-wrinkle cream and hairspray. I stay upstairs to browse in the music department while Mum takes the down escalator towards Health and Beauty.

I spot the Pet Shop Boys’ new release, ‘Heart’, in the seven-inch single section. On Top of the Pops on Thursday it was tipped for Number One. In the music video there’s a bride dressed in a white, lacy balloon of a gown who ends up kissing a vampire and driving off with him instead of Neil Tennant which just goes to show what I already know: weddings aren’t worth the bother.

At least I can tell Cassie that I’ve seen the sleeve for next week’s Number One, even if I can’t afford to buy it. Like me, Cassie’s religious about the charts, and Five Star. The Top Forty is like a holy rosary. You need to tune into it every Sunday evening; it’s the key to being cool, especially on a Monday morning when you’re in assembly and you should be singing about Jesus being nailed to death on a wooden cross and coming back to life, but instead you whisper Bananarama lyrics.

Once Mum has got her Oil of Ulay and Elnett, we stroll across Blackbrake market towards the shoe shop. Plus-size Union Jack underpants dangle from hangers; grapefruit, apples and oranges are stacked on top of sheets of fake plastic grass. Underneath the stalls, crates of bruised fruit and reject goods gather.

The done thing at Blackbrake market is for stallholders to rock up in their white vans at dawn, unload their bulk-bought stock then write the day’s hot bargains on neon-yellow stars. They shout them out at top-decibel level to anyone who happens to pass:

‘GET YA MADONNA, KYLIE AND WACKO JACKO PIN BADGES ’ERE ! ’

‘SHELL SUITS ! ONLY FIVE NINETY-NINE ! ’

‘NEON TROUSERS: TWO FOR A TENNER ! ’

Blackbrake is also where you should go if you need a new pair of shoes, as there is an ancient tradition in this town of shoemaking. Depending on the occasion, you can go to different types of shoe shops. If it’s nearly a new term and I need black PE plimsolls, for example, it would be SpeedyShu – shopping there is a cross between buying a fast-food burger and going swimming down Blackbrake pool. You go through a metal turnstile, choose from two styles of plimsoll – black or white – which are stapled together at the heel. They all look the same and cost £1.49. Within five roly-polys in the school hall, they’ll start to unstick at the seam.

Kit’s date, however, calls for none less than Gordon Benét’s. Mum is perched on the edge of a green velvet chair, twisting her ankle to inspect the pair she spotted in the window and is now trying for size: silver heels so shiny I can see my face in them, and so high I bet my ears would pop if I wore them.

‘Don’t they look lovely?’ asks the sales assistant – Simon, according to his badge – who crouches at Mum’s feet. He looks ready to kiss them.

‘They’re very silver,’ I say.

‘Do you have an outfit in mind?’ Simon asks Mum’s ten-denier legs.

Mum nods. ‘They’ll go perfectly with my C&A polka-dot number.’

‘Do you like dressing up in Mum’s high heels, m’duck?’ Simon asks, dragging his eyes towards me now.

‘I like trainers.’