‘Ask Zannah if she counts how many kisses Murad puts in each message.’ Murad, to my knowledge, has only once done something wrong in the year and a half that he and Zannah have been whatever-they-call-it, and he turned up looking tearful the following morning, clutching a dozen red roses. Zannah was delighted, both by the roses and by the news of the sleepless night he’d suffered after ‘criticising me when I’d done fuck all wrong. Mum, I literally don’t care what you think about me swearing right now. Sometimes I need to swear, or I’d throw myself off a bridge.’
I would be very surprised if my daughter did not keep on top of the kisses-per-message statistics.
Ben groans. ‘And now, because I didn’t instantly reply and say “Oh, sorry, sorry”, and send a long line of “x”s, she’s going to accuse me of blanking her.’
‘So why not reply and send more kisses?’
‘No! Why should I?’
‘You’re right. You shouldn’t.’ Poor boy. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake – too young to be engaged in fraught relationship negotiations.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Ask Zannah, Mum. Lauren’s a high-maintenance, needy—’
‘Ben!’
‘Person. I was going to say “person”.’
‘Yeah. Course you were.’ I’m glad his instinct is to stand up for himself, and that he’s not planning to cry all night and take roses round to Lauren’s house tomorrow morning.
Ten minutes later we’re parked in the right place. Ben climbs out of the car. ‘You coming to watch?’ he asks, tossing his phone onto the passenger seat. I usually do. I’m not remotely interested in football, but I love to see Ben doing something healthy and worthwhile, something other than being the slave of an electronic device.
‘In a bit,’ I say. ‘First I want to find a supermarket and get something for dinner tonight.’
I watch him run off. Soon he and other red-and-white-clad boys are pushing each other around happily – trying to trip each other up, grabbing each other’s rucksacks.
On the passenger seat, Ben’s phone starts to ring. ‘Zannah’ flashes up on the screen. I pick it up. ‘Hi, darling. Everything okay?’ Zannah isn’t normally awake before noon on a Saturday.
‘Where’s Ben?’ The clipped precision of her words doesn’t bode well.
‘Football.’
‘Really? According to Snap Maps, he was on a street called Widdle Lane or something ten minutes ago. What the hell was he doing there?’
‘Wyddial Lane. Yeah, that’s nearby. Now we’re at football.’
‘Right. When you next see him, can you please ask him to deal with his high-maintenance nightmare of a girlfriend? Thanks. She’s just called me and woken me up to tell me that Ben blanked her in the middle of an important conversation, and can I ask him to message her? Their pathetic relationship is not my problem, Mum, and I’m not getting dragged into it.’
‘I—’
‘Thanks, Mum. See you later. I’m going back to sleep. Ugh, it’s nine thirty – grim.’
She’s gone. ‘Girlfriend’, she said. So using that word in a teenage context is not entirely disallowed. I add this important clue to my ongoing study of teenage behaviour, glad that my investigative interest in every aspect of my children’s lives is not reciprocated. Zannah and Ben aren’t remotely concerned about the details of my day-to-day life. Neither of them asked me why I drove to Wyddial Lane before going to the St Ives football ground; neither of them ever will.
There’s something comforting about living with two people who never think about or question your behaviour. I tried to explain this to Dominic once, when he complained that the kids never ask how our days have been. ‘They’re teenagers,’ I said. ‘Anything happening outside of the teenage arena, they couldn’t care less. Be thankful – remember the time Ben found cigarettes and a lighter in your jacket pocket, and you told him you gave up ages ago, and they must have been there for at least ten years? You didn’t mind then that he didn’t pounce on that and say, “But wait, you only bought that jacket last month.”’
I don’t have any bad habits that I’m concealing from the children. I’ve only ever had one near-miss on a par with Dominic’s cigarettes-and-lighter scare, and that was when Zannah was four and still interested enough in people outside her immediate peer group to notice strange things her mother did. She walked into the kitchen and found me with a pair of scissors in one hand and a photograph in the other. I must have looked upset and guilty, because she asked me if I was okay. ‘Of course, darling,’ I said in a bright voice.
How could I have explained to a four-year-old what I was doing – or to anyone? Dominic was working in the lounge, which was next to the kitchen in our old house. He’d have been horrified. I remember holding my breath, praying that my unnaturally high-pitched ‘Of course’ hadn’t aroused his suspicions. Four-year-old Zannah looked doubtful, but she didn’t ask any more questions.
The photograph she’d caught me holding was of the Braid family: Lewis and Flora and their three children – Thomas, Emily and Georgina. A happy family portrait, taken in the back garden. Flora had included it with their Christmas card. She always sent a photo, just as she always signed the card ‘Lewis, Flora …’ His name had to come first because it was traditional, and the Braids cared about things like that. Dominic and I discussed it once. He said, ‘There’s no way Lewis has ever said to Flora, “Make sure to put my name first”. He’d totally leave the Christmas card sending to her, wouldn’t he? I can’t see him giving it a single second’s thought.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘But he also would never have ended up married to the kind of woman who wouldn’t automatically put his name first on all correspondence.’
So often over the past twelve years, I’ve wanted to tell Dominic what I did to that photograph and ask him which he thinks is worse: that, or what Flora did to me.
If I did, he’d probably laugh and say, ‘You’re mad, Beth,’ in an affectionate way. He’d say the same – that I must be insane – about what I’m going to do next, which isn’t what I’ve just told Ben.
I’m not going to the supermarket to buy tonight’s dinner.
I’m going back to Wyddial Lane.
I’m amazed by how much more I notice now that I’m alone and there’s no pressure from an imminent football match to distract me: the black metal postbox attached to a gatepost, with ‘16’ on it in white, the burglar alarm, the row of what might be tiny security cameras or some kind of motion sensors lining the top of the house just under the guttering, like a string of paranoid fairy lights.
As I drove back here, the grey sky gave way to a hazy blue and the sun appeared. Now it’s properly warm for the first time this year. Even with the window down, it’s already too hot in the car. I don’t want to put on the air conditioning – that would involve starting up the engine, and the last thing I need is for Flora to look out and wonder about the stationary car with its engine running.
That’s funny: I’m assuming that, if anyone’s home, it’s going to be Flora. Twelve years ago, when I still knew the Braids, Lewis’s job on Saturdays was to ferry Thomas and Emily around by car to their various hobby-duties: swimming lessons, drama club, tennis coaching. Five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily had an absurd number of unmissable appointments. Lewis drove them to and fro while Flora caught up on the housework. He often used to say, ‘When I sell my company for a trillion dollars, we’ll have a fleet of chauffeurs and I’ll be able to spend weekends watching telly with my feet up.’ In those days, he was always making jokes about how he would one day be rich. If we went to a crowded bar or café where we had to raise our voices to be heard, Lewis would announce, ‘When I’m rich I’ll have four chefs living in the annexe of my mansion – Indian, Italian, French and English – so that I don’t have to put up with other people’s noise in order to get great food.’ Flora would tut at his imaginary extravagance and say, ‘Lew-is,’ in the same voice she used to subdue her small children when they were making a spectacle of themselves in public.