Mum shuts the door, and turns to me with a grin. ‘Right then, young man,’ she says. ‘I think it’s high time I thrashed you at Monopoly.’
The ultra-competitive Christmas Eve Monopoly marathon was always a tradition in this house. I can’t even remember when it started, but it dated back a long way – to when Dad was still around. I was always the dog, Mum was always the ship and he was always the top hat. Those were the unwritten rules. No idea why, but we stuck to them rigidly. And as a result, the top hat in our Monopoly set hasn’t left the box since Christmas 1995.
Mum fetches another bottle of wine and stokes the fire while I get the game out of the cupboard behind the sofa. And as I do, I spot something else nestled there – something I’d completely forgotten about.
‘Oh my God,’ I laugh. ‘Is this the full collection?’
I pull out a little wooden rack stacked with cassettes, each one wrapped in its own carefully hand-written track list.
‘Of course,’ Mum says proudly. ‘Now That’s What I Call Long-Distance Car Trips. I’ve still got every one we ever made.’
I stare down at them, feeling a lump start to work its way into my throat. These tapes were another family tradition, although this one began after Dad left, when I was about twelve. Before every long car journey – whether it was a summer holiday or a weekend visit to see Nan in Sheffield – Mum and I would compile a tape for the trip. The track list would alternate back and forth: one song for her, one song for me. As a result, they are perhaps the only compilation albums on earth in which gentle folk rock weaves consistently in and out of hardcore gangsta rap.
We’d spend hours making these tapes, sitting cross-legged in front of the hi-fi together, scribbling the lists, doodling designs on the covers, taking the mick out of each other’s song choices. It’s weird: sometimes I almost enjoyed those afternoons more than the holidays themselves.
I spot the one from August 2000 – the trip to Whitley Bay where that photo in the hall was taken. The lump in my throat doubles in size, but I manage to swallow it. ‘Can I put this on?’ I ask.
Mum’s sitting on the carpet, dealing out Monopoly money like a Vegas card shark. ‘Well, we’re not technically on a long-distance car trip,’ she says. ‘But it is Christmas. So go on.’
I slide the tape into the stereo and the opening strains of her first selection – ‘California’ by Joni Mitchell – begin to rise softly out of it.
‘Right, come on then, let’s have you,’ Mum says, patting the carpet. I sit down across from her, and she rolls the dice onto the board.
She taps her ship onto Pentonville Road and starts peeling off banknotes. ‘So …’ she says. ‘Daphne seems utterly fantastic.’
I pick up the dice and roll. ‘Yeah. She is.’
‘I was a bit worried, you know,’ Mum says. ‘I mean, you do realise she’s the first girl you’ve brought home since The Ghastly Tish?’
That really makes me laugh. Leticia Middleton – aka The Ghastly Tish – was the closest thing I’d had to a proper girlfriend before Daphne. She went to the incredibly posh girls’ school near my sixth-form college, although she did everything she could to disguise her immense poshness by swearing like a trooper and dressing like Gwen Stefani from No Doubt. We went out for about three months when I was seventeen, and towards the end of it, I got so sick of Mum nagging me to invite her over that I finally caved.
‘I don’t think The Ghastly Tish even made eye contact with me once,’ Mum chuckles.
‘Mum, she was probably shy!’
‘Shy! The girl dropped the F-bomb about ten times during dinner!’ She rolls the dice, and then starts laughing again. ‘Oh God, d’you remember when she got that bit of pasta stuck in her lip ring? Poor girl, mustn’t laugh …’
But neither of us can help it. The memory is just way too absurd: Mum bombarding Tish with jolly politeness while Tish swore at the clump of spaghetti trapped in her piercing.
Suffice it to say, she didn’t come back again.
When we’ve both stopped laughing, Mum says, ‘So. I’d say today was a little more successful than that.’ She taps her counter round the board again. ‘You and Daphne are wonderful together.’
‘Yeah …’ This comment touches so sharply – so precisely – on everything I’ve been worrying about over the past twenty-four hours that I can’t help picking at it. ‘Do you really think so?’ I ask her.
‘Of course.’ She looks up at me. ‘Don’t you?’
I shrug. ‘I feel like we’re good together now. But I mean … how do I really know that we’re right for each other? In the long run?’
She shakes her head and laughs. ‘For God’s sake, Ben. You’re only twenty years old. All that matters right now is: do you make each other happy?’
‘Right now we do, yeah.’
‘Well, there you go, then.’ She nudges the dice back across to me. ‘You can think about the long run later. But the truth is: if you want a relationship to work, you have to work at it. And to me, you and Daphne seem to have a relationship that’s worth working at. I don’t know why, but I’ve got a feeling about you two …’
I roll the dice, and out of nowhere, I hear myself say: ‘But you must have had a feeling about you and Dad too, at some point.’
She’s halfway through counting out a wad of banknotes, but that stops her in her tracks. I’ve never said anything like that to her. Ever. I don’t really know anything about her relationship with my dad, except for the way it ended: with him running off with another woman. We never talked about it beyond that. I don’t know why. Maybe I was waiting for her to start the conversation, and she never did. But I suddenly, desperately, want to find out more about it. For some reason, I’ve been given this insane chance to see her again, and I’m burning with the desire to actually talk to her. To ask her the things I always wanted to, but never got the chance.
I can tell she’s taken aback. There’s a beat of awkward silence, which, helpfully, our car tape steps in to shatter, as Joni Mitchell’s mournful guitar is rudely smothered by the clatter of NWA’s ‘Fuck tha Police’. We lock eyes and start laughing.
‘A perfect edit from us there,’ she murmurs.
I reach over to turn Ice Cube down slightly, and Mum rolls the dice and starts moving her counter. For a second, I think she’s going to pretend she didn’t hear what I said. But then she rubs the bridge of her nose slowly with her thumb and forefinger, and says: ‘The truth is, Ben, I don’t know if I ever did have that feeling about your father and me. Even after we got married. Even after we had you.’
My heart starts pounding like a kick drum. She looks up at me, her mouth crinkling softly at the sides as she smiles. ‘I know I was … taken with him,’ she says, rolling her eyes at the idea of it. ‘He was very charming and talented and all that. But we hadn’t known each other long before we got married. Six months, something like that. And I suppose in the back of my mind, I did always worry that he was more interested in himself than he was in me. That his ambitions and his career meant more to him than anything else.’ She exhales slowly through her nose. ‘And he proved me right there, in the end.’