The Family Gift Page 4

  I hugged her for a full minute, feeling her lovely ballerina-style bones against mine and I marvelled at how quickly she’s growing up.

  She has small breasts now, although they embarrass her. She gets regular periods: ‘Every month?’ she said when I explained menstruation when she was younger.

  She wants privacy too, now. My eldest child is moving further away from me and it hurts so much.

  ‘Love you, Squirt,’ I said, using Dan’s pet name for her because she’s such a pixie of a thing.

  ‘You too, Mum,’ she says, as I leave, but her reply’s automatic. My anxiety impulse kicks in. What if she would like to see Adele Markham, who is genetically her grandmother? What if she wanted to see Elisa too? And what if they became more important to her than me?

  That might well happen.

  ‘Thank you, Mildred,’ I say, with added sarcasm.

  It will not happen.

  I have been through enough.

  I could not cope with that.

  Dan, who is angry with me for getting angry with him, had taken two hours off in order to get his precious coffee machine fixed, because obviously, in the middle of a house move, having perfect coffee is of vital importance. I ache all over and I’m pretty sure I’ve ruptured something internal shoving bits of furniture around the place. I’ve also made a big scratch on the walnut flooring in the big living room, which will, no doubt, cost a fortune to repair.

  Still, things are improving; boxes are more or less in the rooms I wanted them in. Now everyone is shattered and has gone to bed quietly, without any screaming matches from the older kids. Teddy had loved her bath in the giant old-fashioned bath in the peachy bath in our en suite.

  ‘Pretty, princess pretty,’ she’d said, admiring it.

  ‘Yes, princess pretty,’ I’d agreed.

  Now I could walk around and look at the place with more of our stuff spread out and less boxes to clutter it up. Exhaustingly though, there is so much work to do. This room definitely needs to be painted, even inexpertly by Dan, who is a bit of a speed racer at painting.

  It would probably be better to paint it sooner rather than later before the wall gets hidden by books and pictures and the endless supply of photos of the children that lined the walls in our old home. Still, shabby decor or not, it’s ours.

  I wander back into the kitchen, looking out through the dark windows into the dark of the garden and tell myself that I am safe because nobody could scale those walls and broach the murderous pointy bushes all around them. Opening the fridge, I pour myself a second glass of wine.

  Earlier, Dan and I had toasted our new home, but now he’s gone to bed. It’s odd to be in this new house feeling so alone.

  Once he’d have stayed up with me and we’d have danced around the house, as well as christening every room. In our first flat, we’d even christened the dodgy old kitchen table, whereupon Dan had half-fallen off it onto the floor and the people from the flat downstairs had banged on the ceiling because it was after midnight.

  Not that many years later, we are in the house of our dreams (give or take a coat of paint and some serious work by a handyman) and Dan is in bed saying he’s a bit headachey.

  Headachey. Somewhere inside me a snort erupts. Women are supposed to get headaches, not men.

  It’s the Markhams’ fault for doing this, I think, enraged.

  Since the announcement, we’ve been doing couple- avoidance, which we almost never do.

  Is that the way all marriages go, I think gloomily? You start off really close, joined at the hip, doing everything together. Phone calls full of ‘I love you.’

  ‘No, I love you,’ and then it transforms weirdly into, ‘have you remembered to buy bin liners /milk/bread.’

  The mundane creeps in. Loving other beautiful, precious little people explodes into the mix and suddenly the tiny unit of two is gone to be replaced by a family.

  And families mean things change.

  You’ve been neglecting him . . .

  I have not!

  ‘I love you, Dan Conroy,’ I say into the silent rooms, sorry I hadn’t hugged him earlier and agreed that it was not his fault his ex-mother-in-law was creating trouble by changing the rules.

  A cute thing I’d seen on Instagram spins into my head.

  It Never Gets Easier: You Just Learn How To Be Stronger.

  Maybe this was true. Stronger. I have to learn to be stronger.

  But how? If I wanted stronger abs, I’d lay off the carbs and do actual sit-ups instead of talking about doing them with Maura, who says her waistline has left the building and is unlikely to return.

  How do you get stronger inside and why do you have to learn? Why does life test us?

  Why does it give us annoying inner voices telling us we’re too tall, too solid-looking, an imposter in our careers, a bad mother for leaving the children in order to drive places at weekends to do cookery demonstrations? Why did I get mugged? Why do I have The Fear? Why can’t I fix myself?

  I should have tried harder with the Eckart Tolle book.

  Sighing, I lock the front doors and the back doors, check all the windows, pull shut the curtains on any window that still has curtains on it and with my small glass of wine in one hand, go upstairs to bed. The stairs creak about a quarter of the way up. I’d have to learn all the creaks of this new home. All houses make random noises and now noises scare me.

  I peek in on the children. Teddy is back to being a little bear in her cave. Liam already has half the bedclothes draping the edge of the bed and Lexi is once again doll-like in sleep, with that amazing dark hair fanned out over the pillow. I kiss them all goodnight, and murmur thank you, thank you. Gratitude. I am thankful. If you’re thankful, nothing bad can ever happen again, right?

  In our room, only my own tiny bedside light left on the floor is still on. I find my sleeping tablets hidden away in my handbag. I need to find a good place to stash them here. Its too dangerous to have kids and sleeping tablets in the same house without a careful hiding place.

  I take my tablet, lie down, close my eyes and wait for it to kick in, because when it kicks in, it is wonderful. When I sleep the sleep of the tablet, I do not have The Fear.

  The broken collarbone should no longer hurt. But oddly, it does. When I panic, the panic seizes control of my chest and lodges there, like something malevolent. My chest hurts. My collarbone almost hums with aching.

  I breathe deeply. It’s much harder now than it used to be.

  People say breathing comes naturally but it doesn’t always.

  I close my eyes.

  They never caught him – why should he escape justice for what he did to me?

  Shut up, I murmur. He wasn’t caught. End of story. It’s not going to happen now. Get on with it.

  Shit happens. Your sister’s IVF fails continually. Your beloved father has a life-altering stroke. You have to learn to live with it.

  Why doesn’t anybody ever put that on Pinterest?

  I wake on Sunday morning to the wonderful scent of coffee and the bounce of Teddy launching herself at me in the bed.

  ‘Wake up, Mummy,’ she shrieks.

  My head feels as if it’s been removed and put back on the wrong way round: Teddy opens my eyelids herself.

  ‘No, Teddy,’ I moan, ‘that hurts. Mummy told you that hurts.’

  The pulling-eyelid method used to be her favourite way of waking both of us up when she was smaller. Certainly beats an alarm clock for efficiency. I pull myself into a seated position to find Dan, Lexi and Liam all beaming at me, while Teddy, her waking duties over, dances on the bed as if testing its suitability for gymnastics.

  ‘Because you worked so hard yesterday, Mummy, we brought you breakfast in bed,’ says Dan, giving me the sexy smile I fell in love with. He hasn’t shaved yet and his scratchy designer stubble and the dishevelle
d hair, a hint of grey at his dark temples, make him look entirely do-able.

  Relief floods me. Yesterday’s froideur is over. I love this man. Fancy this man, with one of his dark eyebrows raised slightly, giving me hints of what he can do to me when we are in bed alone. He can do this raunchy eyebrow thing because Lexi and Liam are behind him and can’t see it, and because Teddy is now bouncing around the big bed, fascinated only by how high she can go.

  ‘Careful, Teddy,’ I say automatically. I pull her down to me and give her a hug.

  Dan is carrying a tray and from the look of it, it has my favourite things in all the world on it. Croissants, coffee, unsalted butter and a jar of what looks like home-made jam. The jam must have come from a shop, I think, because my mother, who is an amazing jam maker, hasn’t made any since Dad’s stroke.

  ‘Thank you, thank you all. This is a beautiful treat, but the jam, where did we get that?’ I say to Dan.

  ‘A lovely lady in the coffee shop had left it for us,’ says Lexi quickly. ‘It’s so pretty. I had a pink lemonade from Italy! The man said I look totally different from you, but I was beautiful too.’ This is what she is most pleased about and I smile.

  ‘I had a doughnut,’ pipes up Liam.

  ‘Two doughnuts, actually,’ says Dan apologetically. ‘The lovely lady was a Miss Primrose. You met her yesterday with Teddy? The Italian guy in the café said she’d brought in some of her home-made strawberry jam as she thought you’d like it. I’ve got to say, they’re friendly round here.’

  The tears well up in my eyes: it’s a combination of the tiredness and seeing my beautiful family doing something so lovely for me. Not to mention the kindness of Miss Primrose, a lady I only met yesterday.

  It all ripples into a ball in my heart and makes me want to sob with happiness, gratitude and love. I really am becoming the most emotional woman on earth. What is wrong with me?

  ‘Isn’t she lovely,’ I say tearfully. Dan notices this.

  He puts the tray on the floor and wrangles Teddy into calm. It’s like watching a TV vet dealing with an unruly calf.

  ‘Want that,’ says Teddy, pointing a finger at one of my croissants.

  ‘How much sugar did she eat?’ I ask Dan, my eyes grateful to him for distracting the children from my tears.

  ‘More than she should have,’ he says after a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what, Teddy, why don’t you play with . . .’

  ‘The telly,’ says Lexi delightedly.

  The television in our bedroom, not an enormous thing jammed to a wall but rather an old set put up on a chest, has also been connected. I do not see it getting a lot of action from me or Dan, because normally we fall into bed too shattered to watch anything. These days even the Netflix binges on Dan’s laptop are over.

  I will never catch up with my once-favourite shows because I have missed whole seasons.

  I reach out to hug Lexi, who hugs back. Then Liam wriggles into my arms and I hold him tight, with the tears threatening to come up again.

  This is ridiculous. I know moving house is supposed to be stressful but either my hormones are running amok or I am losing all my marbles.

  ‘Right,’ I say, ‘I have to kiss Daddy and have some coffee. What time is it?’

  ‘Half ten,’ answers Dan. ‘You deserved to sleep. I woke up in the night and you weren’t here.’

  ‘Yeah, I couldn’t sleep for a while,’ I tell him, as he lifts the tray off the ground and puts it onto my lap in bed. I grab the takeaway coffee first and take a deep drink.

  ‘Beautiful. The machine still isn’t working?’ I ask him.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘but you know what, with that coffee shop around the corner and people leaving us pots of jam and . . .’

  ‘I got two doughnuts for free,’ adds Liam.

  I laugh.

  ‘Maybe we don’t need to make so much coffee at home.’

  ‘Coffee at home is cheaper,’ I add, thinking of both the mortgage and the latest unwritten Simplicity 5: Freya’s Kitchen Jewels cookbook.

  Dan sits on the edge of the bed, puts an arm around me and kisses me on the temple. I love this man. I think I have loved him since the first time I met him, which was thirteen years ago.

  It was at a party, the time when I actually still went to parties, in other words: pre-children. PC. And we’d stared at each other over the heads of so many of the other people. I was wearing my coral velvet heels and Dan, who was six-four in his socks, big of shoulders and with an intense, hot gaze that burned right into me and made me want to yell ‘He’s mine, girls, back off!’, stared right back at me. We’d sat in a corner for the rest of the night talking and I felt as if I’d known him for ever, corny though it sounds. In the same way as you have children and instantly can’t imagine life without them, I felt that my life pre-Dan was not quite right. With him, I was where I was supposed to be.

  He’s not just sexy: he’s clever, thoughtful, brilliant with our children and I still fancy him rotten. Even better, he’s a kind man, which should be on every woman’s ‘must have’ list for prospective men and sadly often isn’t.

  He held my hair when I was hunched over the toilet bowl with morning sickness; clutched my hand during the first showing of my first ever cookery show episode when I thought I’d explode with a mixture of (faint) pride and embarrassment. In short, Dan always has my back. That fierce loyalty and love is immeasurable.

  This morning, our children arguing over what channel to watch on the hopeless bedroom TV, Dan’s eyes glint at me and I glint back. He mouths the words ‘later’, and I nod. We are on a promise.

  4

  When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

  The sound of Sunday bells from the nearby church are filling the air when the hordes begin to arrive. My mother, grandparents, two sisters, and three brothers-in-law; Dan’s brother, Zed, without his current girlfriend. My brother Con is away and I know we’ll miss him and his current girlfriend, Louise, who is unlike his usual flash-in-the-pan dates and we have all been begging him to marry her and stop fooling around.

  Dan’s mother, Betty, had been devastated she couldn’t come, as she’s such an eager grandmother. She’s a complete sweetie and was probably too anxious to come after having been set upon by Elisa’s bloody mother.

  ‘She has a church thing,’ says Dan.

  When they all get here, that’ll be eight extra people in a house where only five mugs are clean and the couches need to be vacuumed to get the house-moving dust off them. I forsee chaos.

  I had pleaded a day to get the first of the boxes sorted before my family turned up and they had taken me at my word. We have been in Kellinch less than two days and when I make it downstairs, it looks far more chaotic than I had felt it was the night before.

  ‘I don’t know where people will sit,’ I’d told my mother on the phone.

  ‘We’ll all pitch in,’ she’d said.

  We are wildly loyal, my family. Loyal, enthusiastic, determined to make a joke out of everything.

  And, apart from my mother, nosy. Nosiest of all is Granny Bridget.

  Despite being a fragile wisp of a thing in her late eighties with osteoporosis, a walker and hair like candyfloss fluff in palest yellow, Granny Bridget toppled three rungs off a ladder a mere two years ago while trying to see into the garden behind ours when she was ‘just cutting some roses’.

  ‘I always see her at bingo and she never talks to me. I just wanted to see what the house was like because she’d taken the net curtains down to wash them,’ Granny sobbed as we got her into the car to take her to the hospital to see if her ankle was broken or just badly sprained.

  ‘So it’s entirely someone else’s fault,’ agreed my mother, not a word of reproach. ‘Could happen to a bishop.’

  ‘Bishops have their roses cut for them,’ Granny said tearfully, a stickler for the truth.


  ‘We need one of those bishops’ housekeepers,’ Mum went on, stroking her own elderly mother as if touch could cure every pain.

  My mother is one of life’s Golden People – these are people who emit a golden glow of kindness and decency and they wear themselves out looking after others. In my mother’s case, it is three people she cares for.

  Before she became a Carer – big C in there because Carers should be up there with presidents, prime ministers and people who win Nobel Prizes – my mother ran a department in the office of Social Welfare, and yes, this concept is riddled with irony.

  Once, she tried to fairly distribute money and analyse the needs of people who needed help from the government.

  Now, she is a carer who had to angle for voluntary redundancy from her beloved job in order to become one and as a carer, she earns less than a fast-food worker on three shifts a week. Meanwhile, she has to do the work of at least four very energetic people. All at the age of sixty-three.

  I’ve seen her energy and life force slipping away from her over this past year but – and this is the hardest thing to bear – there seems to be so little I can do.

  First up in her triad of charges is her mother, Granny Bridget Ryan, who lives in the back bedroom in the house in Summer Street along with a very old cat named Delilah who is tricky about food and clearly thinks she is in the kitchens of a Michelin two-starred restaurant. She is the kind of cat who gives decent cats a bad name and likes to sick up her dinner on inappropriate surfaces, like the clean washing in the basket or the kitchen table when a guest is just arriving for tea and cake, which is neatly laid out on said table.

  Granny Bridget herself is sweet and no trouble at all, except when she is climbing ladders. Granny Bridget is Mum’s mother and insists newcomers call her Granny Ryan lest anyone think she was ever married to the house’s other elderly inhabitant, Granddad Eddie Abalone, my father’s father. The reason for this is that Granny Bridget is a sweetheart and Granddad Eddie is a rogue of the highest order, who frightens postmen, carers and people coming to read the electricity meter. Granddad Eddie is ninety and says what he thinks. Or is wildly rude, whichever way you want to look at it.