Other People’s Diaries (18 page)

A
lice threw her bag down beside the door.

The children ran into the house and up the stairs, still full of energy despite the two hours of after-school activity they'd just finished. Alice had dropped Ellen at her music lesson, the boys to football training, then retraced her steps collecting Ellen and returning to the park to wait for football to finish. She was exhausted even if they weren't.

‘Five minutes, okay,' she yelled at their departing backs. ‘Unpack your bags and change and then come back downstairs, we're meeting Dad at five-thirty.'

Alice considered the possibility of a shower and a change of clothes and quickly discarded it. Instead she walked into the kitchen. The old walkman was sitting where she'd left it on the kitchen bench, partly submerged in general family debris.

She slipped the headphones on and again, her grandmother's voice filled her head.

‘I actually had ten children you know, not nine. My first baby was a girl called Anna. She had more hair than any of my other babies …'

Alice heard her grandmother's voice trail off and there was a small silence before she resumed.

‘They didn't have those sticks that change colour in those days. You figured out you were pregnant when you started vomiting or putting on
weight. If you were unlucky, you did both. And then you pretty much waited until you went into labour.'

The tape ran, faint crackles the only sound for several seconds.

‘I knew she was dead as soon as she came out. It was the silence. Hours and hours of pain and then just … silence.'

There was the sudden sound of the tape recording being stopped. Alice remembered the moment. Remembered how she had quickly pushed the stop button, shocked by her grandmother's grief, despite almost fifty years and nine other children.

The tape recorder clicked a few times.

Edith's voice resumed. She'd recovered her composure, the old pain had been submerged once again.

‘The only person who knew what to do was your grandfather. He didn't tell me we'd have more children or that it would be all right. He just held me and let me cry – night after night.'

Alice flicked off the tape and stared out the window.

She was hearing something different in the tapes this time. Something she hadn't focused on when she'd written
Her Life, My Life
. It was the love between her grandparents – the deep, uncomplicated love that rode all challenges life threw at them and surpassed everything else. Last time, Alice had been distracted by her grandmother's journey, the children, the drudgery, her incredible spirit. Maybe because she'd never really known her grandfather, she hadn't focused on him. But now, every time Alice turned the tape recorder on, all she heard was a huge, pulsing love between the two of them which had carried them for decades.

After a moment, Alice looked down at her watch.

They were late and she stood up abruptly.

‘All right you lot, where are you?' She walked back into the hallway, looking up the stairs. ‘We'll be late, let's go.'

Alice accelerated quickly and turned across the oncoming lane of traffic. The narrow road she was turning into was partially blocked by another car. She braked and stopped quickly, but without any real danger.

Looking out her window, she saw the driver of the other car, a middle-aged woman, shaking her head disapprovingly.

Alice rested her arm on the open window and smiled sweetly, obviously waiting.

Reluctantly the older woman rolled down the window, clearly not having intended any interaction outside her protective bubble.

‘Hello?' Alice said questioningly, trying, not entirely successfully, to keep the note of sarcasm out of her voice.

‘You could see that this car was parked here, so I was in the middle of the road. Really, you should be more careful. And you with children in the car.'

The woman shook her head in a disappointed manner that made Alice's blood boil.

‘Thank you for that. I'll be going now.'

Alice was proud of her self-restraint. Road rage with three impressionable children was not a good look. Her views about young children being exposed to appalling behaviour by sporting stars would be somewhat blighted by their mother screaming like a fishwife.

She drove slowly over the edge of the gutter and back onto the road. Despite herself she felt unsettled and unhappy.

‘Why did the lady say that, Mummy?' Alex piped up.

‘She was just a bit grumpy, sweetheart,' Alice answered. ‘She thought that I had done the wrong thing.'

‘Why did she say that about having kids in the back seat?' John asked.

‘Well, you should really drive more carefully when you have children with you,' Alice answered.

‘Why?' Ellen asked. ‘Shouldn't you be just as careful if you're driving with grown-ups?'

‘Well, yes, you should I guess,' Alice said, waiting for the traffic light to turn green.

‘She thought you were a bad driver, didn't she, Mummy?' John asked.

Alice closed her eyes briefly, willing herself to be patient. Children had an unerring instinct to pick away at things you
wanted to forget. She couldn't get a word out of them when she asked about what they'd done at school. But her traffic incident was worth hours of discussion.

‘Oh not really, John,' she lied. ‘Now, who can see Dad?' she asked in her best Mary Poppins voice, trying to change the subject.

The children craned their heads toward the office block.

Andrew had been surprised when she'd suggested an early dinner with the children. There was a time when they'd gone out together every Friday night. It had been a ritual they'd all enjoyed, but somehow it had fallen away.

Alice had been thinking about Rebecca and Bianca that afternoon. She'd suddenly been struck by how she should follow her own advice and do something enjoyable with her family. Enthused with the idea, she had called Andrew and arranged to meet this evening.

Now, sitting in the car with the boys thumping each other in the back seat and the memory of the woman's disapproving look, the happiness disappeared, leaving her feeling only weary.

‘There he is, Mum!' Ellen yelled.

‘Daddy!' the three screamed in unison. Alice laughed. Maybe this had been a good idea after all.

Andrew swung open the car door and dropped into the passenger seat. He kissed Alice on the cheek and turned to the back seat. Unusually he was wearing a suit and he wrenched at the knotted tie around his neck.

‘Hello team,' he smiled. ‘Nice to feel appreciated, I must say.'

Alice looked at him sharply, wondering if the comment was meant for her.

He turned back to the front and reached for his seatbelt and she decided she was being oversensitive.

Alice indicated and pulled into the traffic.

‘I thought we'd go to Giuseppe's. Is that okay?'

‘Sounds excellent,' he smiled.

‘Daddy?' Alex piped up from the back seat.

‘Yes, mate.'

‘A lady told Mummy she was a bad driver.'

Alice cringed. Andrew's lack of regard for her driving had always been pretty clear. He had never bought her argument that the law of averages meant that given the number of times she was in supermarket carparks it was inevitable she'd scrape the occasional pole.

‘No she didn't, Alex,' Ellen corrected him pedantically. ‘She said she should have been more careful because she had all of us in the car.'

Andrew looked across at Alice. ‘Did something happen?'

Alice cursed the woman and her children simultaneously. ‘It was nothing. Some woman was stopped halfway across the road and tried to tell me it was my fault.'

‘Right.' Andrew was clearly unconvinced.

The children settled into a level of bickering just below the level which would require intervention.

‘How was your day?' Andrew asked.

‘Fine thanks.' Alice had been at home all day and could never bring herself to talk about the chores which filled her time between dropping the children at school and picking them up.

The core problem with being a housewife, she'd decided long ago, was that no one job was distinct from another. To put a load of washing on she'd have to first scrub the T-shirts stained from yesterday's activities. To be able to stand at the sink to scrub the T-shirts, she'd have to put away the bike which Alex had parked in the laundry. To put away the bike, she'd have to pick up the items that were strewn across the living room which led onto the garage. Each one job led into an endless spiral of jobs which, if you were really lucky, culminated in a reasonably tidy house for about ten minutes after the children came home.

She'd tried once to explain it to Andrew, but he'd clearly not understood.

‘Just leave it all,' he'd answered. ‘It doesn't matter if the dishes don't get washed up straight after breakfast.'

Which was right. But what he didn't understand was that his theory only worked if someone else eventually sorted it out. Otherwise the next lot of dishes would be piled upon the first lot and then the next and the next. And the whole lot would sit
there festering and making her feel tense whenever she passed the kitchen.

It was so clichéd, she even bored herself. Frustrated housewife, sick to death of the endless list of menial jobs and the fact that no one ever appreciated any of her efforts to make the family happy.

Alice would trundle a trolley around the supermarket, piling in favourite cereals and muesli bars while fighting a recalcitrant wheel and wonder whether she should just stop. Let them see how the milk cartons didn't automatically refill and the fresh bread didn't miraculously arrive on the kitchen bench each morning.

She'd asked herself what it was she wanted and she wasn't even sure.

If Andrew was to come home and say, ‘My God, the kitchen window looks fabulously clean,' she'd think he was having an affair. And nobody, not even a cheating husband, was ever going to notice that what had been a basket full of dirty washing that morning was stacked back in the children's closets before dinner.

The only answer was to accept it and get over it. Which she could when she felt she was part of the whole family unit – moving them all forward to a goal that was good for everyone. But lately she felt as though she was nothing more than a fondly regarded housekeeper.

‘And how was your day?' she asked Andrew.

He sighed and loosened his tie even further. ‘I met up with some guys from a new supermarket chain today. They're interested in stocking our Home and Well range. I'm just not convinced that they're going to be up to the competition with the big supermarkets. If they are, though, it could be an amazing opportunity. It could be worth millions.'

Alice was unmoved. Millions … It would be great obviously, but she'd never wanted to be rich. They were now, she guessed, and she had no desire to have more money. Most of her book royalties had gone into the business. They'd started pouring in just when the business needed to expand and there'd been no thought of keeping them for herself. Just as the royalty cheques
had started to dry up, Andrew's business had started to make a profit and they'd been very comfortable financially ever since.

She stopped at a set of lights and looked across at Andrew. His face was expressionless and remote. Alice tried to picture the Andrew she'd fallen in love with in England. He didn't actually look that different – more lines around his eyes and a closed look to his face. Was he happy? Probably not. She tried to think of something else to ask and couldn't.

Alice thought of Kerry. He wasn't happy, but he still had an enthusiasm for life. Not like this grey-faced man sitting beside her.

Kerry treated her as though she was some sort of sexy wise woman, capable of guiding others.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
, he'd emailed her yesterday, quoting Spider-Man's motto. She'd written back telling him to check his source, that the quote was in fact Peter Parker, Spider-Man's alter ego. He'd been impressed by her knowledge and she had chosen not to tell him that she'd learned it during John's obsession with Spider-Man several years ago.

The betrayal of her thoughts shocked her and she braked too hard at an intersection.

‘Sorry,' she murmured to no one in particular.

This was something they hadn't done for ages. A simple thing – just what she preached to everyone else. And she was going to enjoy a nice calm dinner with her family, with nothing else to distract them.

As if evidence of divine blessing for her thoughts, Alice spotted a park on the street opposite the restaurant. She pulled up beside the car in front.

Andrew blew through his lips. ‘That's pretty tight, sure you can fit?'

She wasn't sure at all, but nodded decisively and put the big car into reverse. Pivoting neatly, she slid into the space and turned off the engine.