The Family Gift Page 2

  At that point, I was at the basically-throwing-things- into-the-cardbox-box stage of moving. Even my beloved shoes, which I had planned to pack like Michelangelo artefacts in tissue paper, were being jammed into boxes willy-nilly.

  You should have planned this.

  Yeah, well, the Oprah people should have called by now, Mildred, but that isn’t happening, either.

  I argue with Mildred. In my head. Doing it out loud is just plain weird.

  Now, I hear a rustle in Teddy’s bedroom and peek in. Teddy sleeps like a small bear who has found a duvet in a cave and decided to wrap itself up. One small arm pokes out at the top, clutching Bunny – formerly white, now grey, much darned by myself, and Teddy’s favourite thing in the whole world. Her other favourite cuddlies, all twenty-two of them, are scattered around the small bear shape. I want to curl myself round her just to smell her scent, that little girl shampoo, yogurt and perfume-made-from-rose-petals scent.

  Asleep, she is a cherub with the blonde curls that come from my family. All my family are white blonde, including me, and she is going to be tall, too, also like me. I am determined that she won’t slouch and wish she were smaller, the way I used to do during my hideous teenage years. I have grown into my body, a confident woman of nearly six foot who is described as a Viking Chef.

  Note: if you are tall, blonde, wear a plait and are called Freya, you get called a Viking in the press. People really have no imagination, is all I’m saying.

  Dan is tall too. Deliciously, much taller than me. Because he’s dark, together we look like a black and white photo.

  Next, I peek into Lexi’s room. Lexi is fourteen and is ballerina tiny with long dark hair. Asleep, her face looks so much younger than it does when she’s awake and practising being fifteen. I want to stroke her but she’d wake up and on a Saturday during term time, she’d be grumpy.

  In the third bedroom – wallpapered an unhappy green, but he did choose the room himself, even though he knows that it will be ages before we can redecorate – eleven-year-old Liam lies star-fished on the bed with his duvet on the floor and a pillow under his feet.

  Gently, I put the duvet back on my gorgeous boy with limbs that are confusing him because they are growing too much. Liam is still a hugging sort of child, which makes me want to cry because I know that one day, he’ll fight off all affection. But not today, for which I am grateful.

  For a long time, I thought gratitude was an overrated, corporate invention dreamed up to keep stationery addicts buying more little notebooks.

  But for the past year, since, well . . . everything, I have been working hard on gratitude. Also: a spiritual connection; mindfulness; thinking about booking a yoga class; getting round to answering my Emails of Shame and actually finishing The Power of Now.

  ‘Thank you for this,’ I murmur into the ether, to God/the goddess/whichever deity is in charge.

  At that precise moment, Teddy appears on the landing, a small, exquisite sight in a forest of packing boxes.

  Her cheeks are rosy with sleep. Her blonde curls are tousled adorably. She looks perfect. Apart from her frowny face.

  Waking up in a new bedroom in a new house would send anyone over the edge.

  It’s done it to me at forty-two and my poor Teddy is only just four.

  ‘How is Mummy’s little pet?’ I say, scooping her up, covering her face with kisses and getting that special ticklish place under her ear, which makes her giggle.

  ‘Stop!’ she commands, all suddenly right with her world again.

  Mummy is here, kissing her.

  She is adored. Back to normality. Teddy is in charge of our household and she knows it. I instinctively feel that when Teddy is older, there will be no critical inner voice torturing her.

  ‘Peppa Pig,’ she says now with an imperious duchess wave. Teddy came out of the womb waving imperiously. She was my hardest birthing experience.

  Liam had been a blissful birth and I swear, if we’d had whale music, candles and a birth plan, Liam would have gone along with it and come out at high speed during the most operatic whale-singing bit.

  With Teddy, I got the full works – screaming pain that went on for hours, and no sign of a person to give me the promised epidural, even though I’d have consumed a bag of Class A narcotics during the worst of the pain.

  This is the big secret of childbirth. Not the stitches which require you to sit on an inflatable rubber ring for two weeks. No, it’s the fact that one child can slip out like a dolphin, while another comes screaming into the world practically sideways (this is possible, I am telling you), having made their mother howl with pain during an eighteen-hour labour.

  Lexi, my eldest, is not my birth child but I am her mother.

  Totally her mother.

  I have been her mother since she was just over two and Dan, her birth father, brought her round in desperation on a weekend he wasn’t due to have her because her mother, his ex, had left her in a restaurant by mistake. Yes, I am serious.

  Keys, handbag, yes – oh gosh, I forgot the toddler. Silly me.

  Lexi was the only child of his first wife, Elisa, a woman who was physically twenty-six when she gave birth but emotionally, still a wild, party-loving nineteen-year-old. As someone who was never a wild, party-loving nineteen-year-old because my sense of responsibility has always been in overdrive, I cannot grasp this concept at all.

  ‘She was indulged as a kid,’ Dan says now that his rage is gone over the child-abandonment issue, which is basically standing up for the stupid cow in my book.

  My rage is not gone, I can tell you that.

  ‘Her brothers were the smart ones,’ Dan always continues.

  It’s well-remembered speech catalogued in his brain: he tries to make excuses for Elisa because he has somehow forgiven her and he feels that Lexi must have an unbiased version of her birth mother.

  Intellectually, I agree with him.

  Emotionally, it’s a different story.

  I had already fallen in love with Dan, but when Lexi came to live with us full-time, that was the fiercest love affair ever.

  She had not emerged from my body but she was mine. I became her mother; and everybody knows, mothers are feral when it comes to their children.

  Have you ever watched those nature programmes where females with their young will kill animals much larger in their defence . . .? Yup, that’s me.

  ‘Nobody knew what to do with Elisa,’ goes the rest of Dan’s spiel. ‘She was always a bit immature . . .’

  Immature? That’s the best he can do?

  And standing up for the woman who left our darling Lexi, innocent and defenceless, in a restaurant . . .?

  Imminent high blood pressure moment, Mildred mutters, pretending to be a health robot from the future.

  She’s right.

  I can’t think about Elisa or I will start having arguments with her in my head – ‘You left Lexi in a restaurant! What is wrong with you? Immature and indulged do not cover this level of stupidity!’

  ‘And you, you, Dan Conroy, do not give me any old crapology about how she wasn’t clever and her brothers got all the attention. Selfish and spoilt are the words you are looking for!’

  Almost twelve years after Elisa abandoned Lexi, the very thought of the woman can still ignite fierce rage in me.

  Instead I give thanks that Lexi is mine and Elisa is out of all our lives, what with her busy ‘modelling’ career and her exotic lifestyle financed by her current husband and possibly, her father, who appears to be remarkably wealthy.

  Which suits me just fine.

  My beloved Lexi is our child. After Dan and I got married I adopted her as soon as I legally could.

  I love Dan more for his trying to make it all right for Lexi, but it’s the one area we’ve always disagreed on.

  Still, Elisa has been out of our lives for years
, so I guess we’re safe.

  2

  Think about what you want in life and you will draw it to you, magically

  My phone pings with my daily ‘affirmation’ – an app I downloaded one miserable evening and keep forgetting to delete. Every morning, I receive a daily quote designed to help me find my inner energy and release all negativity. Puh-lease says Mildred every time a quote pings in. Wearing perfume in summer will draw mosquitoes to you: is that what they mean? Mildred has not yet got with the whole laws of attraction schtick. Mind you, I’m not sure I have, either. My mind never stops running despite entreaties to the Universe to slow it down and as yet, I have failed to materialize inner peace or solutions to any of my other problems. But I’m keeping going with the programme. I mean, the app cost 4.99. I can’t waste it, can I?

  ‘Peppa Pig,’ says Teddy.

  There is a definite element of one of the fiercer warrior queens in her voice. In my abstraction, I have been ignoring her and this is not allowed in Teddy’s world.

  She will wake the whole house. Dan was up late with me shoving boxes around and trying to unpack the children’s things. He’s earned a lie-in.

  This arrangement also means that tomorrow, I can be the one to sleep in: parental bargaining 101.

  ‘Here.’ I hand her my phone – yes, I do some bad mothering myself but in my defence, I have never left any of my kids behind when I am out.

  Still, it is a rare treat for Teddy to get her hands on any electronics. I do not want her to be able to make and upload her own vlogs before she can write all her numbers and do ‘A is for apple’, etc.

  I make a cosy nest for her in one corner of mine and Dan’s bedroom, find Peppa Pig on my phone’s Netflix and, with the sound at a reasonable level – it is six a.m. on a Saturday after all – I tell her I am going to find clean clothes.

  Teddy ignores me.

  Peppa’s mesmerising theme tune is already playing and I am surplus to requirements.

  Technology and children are a knotty area of parenting. I have seen two-year-olds swipe iPhones with an expertise I do not have. Liam is getting a phone for his twelfth birthday. Although plenty of kids his age already have phones – and, no doubt, bookies’ accounts and a string of girlfriends/boyfriends on WhatsApp – Liam is not one of them.

  Lexi, who got hers on her twelfth birthday, has it surgically attached to her person at all times, except at night because I take it at eight o’clock.

  Teddy giggles at something Peppa has just done and the large lump in our bed that is Dan stirs.

  Speed up, I tell myself.

  In the bathroom, I ignore the basic state of the place and also ignore the sight of myself in the mirror. When people – randomers in the supermarket – evince utter astonishment that I, Freya Abalone, am on the telly on the grounds that I look ‘. . . normal!’, I agree.

  After all, I see my face before the telly make-up goes on. I am a good chef known for simple nutritious food but my appeal – well, this is what Scarlett calls it – lies in my enthusiasm and passion for cooking. This is what the TV people saw when they plucked me from obscurity years ago and gave me a fledgling television series.

  Dan tells me I’m beautiful. In fact, he never stops saying it.

  But in real-world, non-Dan situations, I know I am not a stunning woman like my sister, Scarlett, or even classically handsome like my other sister, Maura. I am a tall, pale-skinned blonde, with an open, warm face (this is what my mother says), deep-set eyes, freckles, and generally, have a bit of lip balm still left on my lips and a wonky bit of eyeliner.

  ‘Yes, I agree. I don’t know why I’m on the telly, either,’ I say to the randomers, who then sometimes helpfully tell me that they hate my cooking show and add that I’m not even a real chef because I never ran my own restaurant, which is true. Unless you are a Type A personality, running a restaurant leads normal people to nervous breakdowns or expensive wine addictions.

  Mildred generally agrees with the randomers, by the way.

  Looking normal is nothing: what if they find out that you are making this up as you go along? she likes to say.

  Today, I shut the bathroom door quietly and begin ripping boxes open with a metal nail file that Dan – who has already unpacked his shaving gear, aftershave, and toothbrush paraphernalia – has laid out.

  Several boxes labelled ‘bathroom’ have kitchen things in them.

  I was so careful.

  You weren’t careful. You were rushing.

  Belt up, Mildred.

  I do, eventually, find my knickers, some clean T-shirts and yoga leggings that have not seen yoga since long before Teddy was born. This is immaterial – T-shirts and old yoga leggings are the casual clothes of the working woman.

  I rinse my face, slather on the moisturiser I once bought Dan which he never uses but which still lives in his washbag, and finish off with both his toothbrush and aftershave.

  Yesterday’s hair elastic lies on my side of the sink so I use my fingers to corral my Arctic blonde hank into my trademark long plait.

  I then apply a slick of eyeliner from my handbag make-up kit and a hasty pinkie-finger-swoosh of lip balm, and I’m ready to face the day.

  Kellinch House is silent but the floorboards creak as Teddy and I make our way out of the room.

  The stairs creak as we go downstairs and into the kitchen where I know the coffee awaits. Dan has unpacked all the things central to our well being. Pride of place is his coffee machine, which we call the Barista Baby because it’s so complicated it looks as if it needs a trained barista to manage it. One double espresso and I will feel human. Meanwhile I get some cereal and milk for Teddy and install her in a chair at the table.

  ‘Yasss,’ she says joyfully at the sight of the cereal, which is for emergency use only and contains too many E-numbers and plenty of sugar.

  ‘Just for today,’ I say.

  ‘Every day!’ she chants, delighted.

  ‘Are you going to run the country when you’re older?’ I add, lovingly. You have to be impressed at her negotiating skills.

  Teddy beams. ‘Yassss.’

  I refuse to feel guilty at giving her cereal because nearly every single day, I cook for breakfast.

  Because we are now broke, the only change we have made in the house is to install the seven-burner double oven from our last house, so I stick bread under the grill. Slowly I become aware that the genius coffee machine is not working. It is making a noise, but the wrong one. I try to brew an espresso and realise it is banjaxed.

  Dan will be distraught. He loses his temper very rarely. Still, if his precious Barista Baby has been broken by the movers, he will go nuts.

  Big Brian will be getting a phone call, for sure.

  ‘No coffee, Teddy,’ I say, pulling a horrified face at her. ‘Mummy goes crazy without coffee . . .’ And I launch myself at her with outstretched zombie-tickling arms.

  She giggles, then says, ‘Mummy tea?’

  ‘Tea is only for evening,’ I sigh, and we eat our breakfasts together and watch Peppa and George laugh at Daddy Pig.

  ‘I wonder if Daddy Pig could fix our Daddy’s coffee machine?’ I ask her.

  Teddy picks up her bowl to slurp/spill the sweet milk and shakes her head at the same time.

  Breakfast over, we wander hand in hand through the moving-box-strewn downstairs.

  ‘Very messy, Mummy, very messy,’ says Teddy, shaking her head.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy will make it lovely,’ I say with determination, ignoring Mildred telling me we have made a huge mistake buying this place and how will we ever pay for it?

  ‘Do you like your new house?’

  Teddy nods happily. She has the easy adaptability of the very young.

  ‘Me too,’ I say, watching the way the May morning sun shines in through the windows and how our new garden is alive wi
th butterflies and bees, with a starling poking at the grass as if it knows a worm is hiding just a hint out of reach.

  The house belonged to a widowed lady who had lived here for years but her husband was ill for a long time, the estate agent told us. I assume there was no money left because the place, though spotlessly kept, boasts decor from the late seventies and early eighties.

  It’s still big and detached, so we had to push ourselves to afford it, which is why Dan and I will need to do complicated curtseys to the bank manager, or even go full-Buddhist on the floor and bow our heads, for the next twenty years. I, personally, will need to work flat out with minimal childcare to pay for it all, which is going to be tricky, but once I saw this house, I knew this was it.

  ‘It needs a lot of work,’ said Dan, looking at rooms papered with wallpaper that even Laura Ashley stopped selling years ago.

  ‘But look at the kitchen!’ I said, as we admired the one modernised part of the house, that will suit for filming of my TV series in September.

  The owner had it done up to help her sell the house, the estate agent added, and it has worked. This place is perfect.

  Chefs who can cook in their own kitchens definitely have the edge in TV world and the redone kitchen here is gorgeous: creamy wood, a stainless steel splashback and a huge island unit.

  What I don’t mention, never mention, is that my actual favourite part of the new house is the high wall around it all.

  A wall and a big wooden, electric gate that nobody can see under or over. Unless they are seven foot tall.

  Although I have said a lot about how I’d love more space and a garden for the children, what I really like most about Kellinch House is that it’s safe. And since that cold January night, just over five months ago, safety comes very high on my list of priorities.

  I was . . . I hate even saying it.

  OK, mugged.

  I was mugged.

  What a hopelessly gentle word for a vicious, shattering and terrifying experience. I was in a city centre garage late at night after doing a demonstration and Lorraine, who works with me, had helped me with all the equipment and had already driven off. I was still rearranging things in the back of the car, mentally running over what I’d said and thinking about what I should have said, when a man appeared out of nowhere.