One Thing Led to Another (30 page)

New Year’s Eve, Five Months Later.

‘We went to Memphis when I was six months pregnant. Everybody said it was a girl: the hotel receptionist, an old blues singer called Razor who still busked on Beale Street. An Elvis impersonator outside Sun Studios. There was no competition for a name when he finally arrived, would you believe it, on January 8
^th
. The King is reborn!’

Sarah-Jane, 41, Cardiff.

‘Let’s hear it for Victoria Peddlar – woo hoo!’ Our lounge erupts. The MERRY CHRISTMAS banner above the hearth flutters with the man-made breeze.

Jim curls his fist, pulls his elbow tight to his chest. ‘Come
ON
!!’ he shouts, his jaw clenched, so serious is he in his support. I watch him, wedged in between Awful and Rich and involuntarily snort into a giggle. He’s been ‘wetting the baby’s head’ for six weeks now.

Vicky hoists herself up from her chair, takes her place on the makeshift stage in front of our bay window and rests the
mike on her bump. It protrudes, perfectly spherical from her gold, sequinned dress like a religious relic, crying out to be touched.

The dress is short, girlishly mini and her hair – the result of four hours in Aveda this afternoon, a Christmas present from Rich, is newly highlighted and pinned up at the back of her head. The Christmas tree lights flicker behind her, making her dress twinkle like there’s a magic spell in progress, like she’s about to disappear in a puff of smoke.

She pulls her broad smile into a comical grimace – it’s the nerves – and tidies a tendril of hair behind her ear. She looks vulnerable and beautiful, you can almost hear the pride smoke from Rich’s face. The backing track starts and then, she starts to sing – ‘Mack the Knife’ – by Frank Sinatra. And yeah, she’s definitely still got it.

Mum and dad are first to the floor. They don’t have to say anything or look at each other’s feet, they just take their positions, as naturally and automatically as getting on a bike. Mum stretches one dumpy arm so she can reach dad’s shoulder. Dad’s hand – rough, suntanned, lived in – goes to rest on the small of her back. I wonder how many times they’ve performed that ritual, and how many times they will in the future. Somehow, just knowing they will, makes me feel good. Whatever happens, whatever shit hits the fan, the wheel keeps turning after all. Life carries on.

Everyone’s up and dancing now, our tiny lounge, hotting up with the heat of bodies. Rich – resplendent in a gold sequinned blazer is dancing with Rachel, relaxed in a tasteful, moss-green dress. She and Matilda have been a regular fixture in our house since she finally did it, she finally left Alan and moved in with her mum. The first time Matilda had a full-on meltdown (at our house on Boxing Day as it happens) I detected delight on Rachel’s face. Turns out she wasn’t an unusually good baby at all. If I’d have seen my mum have
three shades kicked out of her every time I made a sound, I might learn to shut up too.

I am sitting on the arm of the bobbly green armchair now (Jim says some things are staying, end of story) watching the scene unfold. It’s funny how it takes a party to bring people truly together. As if for those few hours, we have a pass out from life and the things that separate us. Even Joyless has cracked a smile, being flung about by my brother whose rather erratic dance moves are more like those of a ten-year-old page boy at a wedding reception than a grown man. Gina, spilling out of a midnight blue prom dress is engaged in a semi-choreographed routine with Awful, all kicks and jazzy hands. Awful’s taken his shoes off and his feet stink, but Gina doesn’t care because Awful’s not her boyfriend. That guy with the freckles mixing cocktails in our kitchen is. Turns out I was right about her and Simon. It’s been six months now – the longest Gina’s ever had a boyfriend – and she’s finally got herself a bed, in his house, they moved in together back in October.

Vicky belts out the last few verses. She doesn’t dance or sway when she sings, she just closes her eyes and this sound, from somewhere in her guts pours out, rests on your skin like warm candle wax. The cocktails make their way around the room on a tray held high above Simon’s head, Gina takes one then snogs him full on the mouth in full view of my mother who stares then looks away as if she didn’t see in the first place. Outside, a gaggle of rowdy party goers bang on the window, ‘Happy New Year!’ They shout before running away. Awful pulls a moonie and my mum makes this sound like she just sat on a whoopee cushion. And then I see Jim, eyes shining, face flushed pink from dancing, hair slightly sweaty at the sides, making a beeline for me, parting the crowds. He takes me by the shoulders, ‘Would Madam care to dance ce soir?’ he says. And I laugh, because that’s what
he used to say to me when we used to go to Frankie’s. But he’s not talking to me, he’s talking to the little dark haired thing curled up in a sling on my chest. He’s talking to our daughter.

Freya Kate Ashcroft decided to begin her journey to the outside world whilst her father was on a school trip with his mobile turned off. So whilst Jim was having a jolly old time, laughing at a matinee performance of
The History Boys
with a bunch of sixth formers, I was puking into a bucket with every contraction, then leaving obscene messages on his answer phone. (I know, he played them back to me).

Gina was the only person I could get hold of (something my mother will never forgive herself for. She was in Matalan buying a blow-up-bed.) I admit, I did have my reservations, you never can tell if Gina will be sober on a Saturday afternoon for one thing. But she was brilliant. She mopped up when my waters broke and fixed up the Tens machine. She walked around the block with me and didn’t bat an eyelid whilst I gripped lampposts and made a noise like two sumo wrestlers having sex, as people walked past. When the midwife claimed my contractions still weren’t close enough together for me to come into hospital Gina got feisty, accused her of never having had a baby (she’d had five. That wasn’t such a good move). But apart from that, she was fantastic. I could never have got that far without her.

So much for the ‘Home from Home’ room at the birthing unit. If this was home, I dread to think what hell is like. My Knickerbox nightie and aromatic candle from Mamas and Papas, never saw the light of day. My bare arse did, hanging out from a backless hospital gown as I wandered like a lost farm animal around the birthing unit, stopping to have contractions on the stairwell.

By the time Jim got there, bursting through the delivery
suite doors, the fear of God streaked across his face like fresh blood, I was off my head on gas and air begging for someone to finish me off. But eventually she arrived, our girl, as coneheaded and wise as Gandalf. She was like a soul slipping from one world to the next like an arm through a sleeve. And then well, nothing else mattered.

I’m in the kitchen now, boiling the kettle for the bottle of expressed milk I spent forty minutes attached to an electric breast pump for, so I could drink tonight. Jim says I look like I’m employed by Willy Wonka when I’m expressing, like I should be in a sterilized room in the Chocolate Factory with other mums, making The Super Sonic Mummy Milkybar.

My mum comes shimmying out of the crowd. She’s tipsy and all glammed up in velvet and I think how much I love her. She stands next to me and peers into the sling at her sleeping grand-daughter and puts her hand to her heart, as if to say, ‘will you just
look
at her.’

Mum’s chilled out so much in the last few months. Where as before dad’s ‘funny turn’, the hazards of having her grand-daughter at a party would have been too much to bear (epilepsy from the lights, burst ear drums from the noise.) Nowadays, she’s much more relaxed. It’s like she’s spent the past thirty years since dad’s first ‘funny turn’ worrying about the very worst that could happen. Then the very worst
did
happen and she saw, we all survived.

We watch as dad twirls Julia around the room. She’s back to her size 8 self, looking sensational in a monochrome mini.

‘He’s alright now, isn’t he, your dad?’ says mum.

‘Yeah mum,’ I say, ‘course he’s alright’.

Alright, not
just
right, not perfect, but who is? He still has to go down the ‘barmy army HQ’ for therapy, but he’s off the drugs and more importantly, now that his secret’s
out, we talk about it – The Black Cloud – it’s become part of us.

Vicky finishes to rapturous applause and waddles off to sit down again. She’s singing again. She got her first couple of gigs at office Christmas parties and has more lined up for next year. Rich sent his script out to twenty agents: got no reply from eight, a thanks but no thanks from eleven and a ‘Shows great promise’ plus a page’s worth of suggestions from one. But ‘one is all you need’ he says, and he and Vicky are revising it, who knows, maybe they’ll play the leads when it’s finally on TV! It probably won’t mean they hit the big time, but boy, it would be great if they did. They’re going to be a family of five, come May, after all. Yep, there’s two Moons under that sequinned dress.

I go upstairs with Freya and sit down on the feeding chair, next to the window. It’s strange, now that this room is finally decorated – lilac walls, white floorboards, flower fairies, the lot, it’s like it was never my room, that that part of my life never even happened.

She sucking sweetly now, outside, there’s a fine wintery drizzle falling like gossamer beneath the glow of the street lamp. I look at the red neon clock on top of the drawers: 11.26 p.m., half an hour left until next year. I wonder what this year will bring: great days, shit days, shocks and surprises; moments of joy, The Black Cloud…If there’s a guarantee of anything, it’s that life won’t leave a thing out and yet this year, it’s like I’m ready for it. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel scared.

I hear the familiar whistle and two-steps-at-a-time of Jim coming up the stairs. He sticks his head around the door.

‘Everything alright?’ he says. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Course.’ I smile and Jim sits down on the tiny pink stool we bought from Ikea and draws it close to us, his legs up by his shoulders like a gnome.

‘Wow, she’s going at it like Lisa from
The Simpsons
, isn’t she?’ he laughs, watching her suck like she’s not been fed for a week.

‘She got your hair,’ I say, stroking it. ‘It’s all growing in different directions.’

‘She got my gorgeous feet too, though. And her mother’s eyes.’

The floorboards reverberate with the thump, thump of the music. We hear the familiar delighted shriek of my mother and laugh with recognition.

Jim strokes Freya’s head.

‘I can’t believe how much I love her,’ he says.

‘Jim Ashcroft,’ I say, ‘you’re so bloody soft.’

11.40. Twenty minutes until 2008. We can hear the intro to The Killers, ‘Mr Brightside’ and Gina shout, ‘Oh my God, I
love
this one!’

Jim smiles at me, then leans over and kisses me on the mouth. ‘I’ve got something to ask you,’ he says, ‘something I need to clear up.’

I kiss him back. ‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’

He gets off the stool and onto his knees and I laugh, nervously, because I’ve got an idea what he’s about to do and I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about it. We’re alright as we are, aren’t we? And I don’t know if I want that – not just yet! The big white wedding doesn’t quite appeal anymore and I don’t know if I fancy the house on a cul-de-sac and our wedding anniversary picture on the mantelpiece, and the Center Parks holidays. I don’t know if I want to be like everyone else and to have the ‘normal family’, what the hell does that mean, anyway? Everyone’s a weirdo if you look closely enough.

But he’s on his knees now and he’s got a glint in his eye and he’s taking my hand and I’m wracking my brains for the right thing to say and then he says, ‘Tess?’

‘Yes?’ I say, as if I’m on the precipice of a cliff, about to fall over.

‘Will you go out with me?’

And then I burst out laughing and Freya startles and Jim laughs too and searches my face. And then I lean over, careful not to squash her, cup Jim’s face in my left hand, snog him within an inch of his life then say, ‘Yeah, why not?’

11.51p.m.

‘Come on Jim.’ He hastily zips up his jeans. I pull on my skirt then look at myself in the mirror and gasp at the messy hair and tell-tale flush all over my chest.

‘It’s nine minutes till New Year, we’d better put her down and get downstairs,
pronto
!’

‘Let’s take her,’ says Jim, turning to me suddenly. ‘It’s her first New Year, let’s see it in with her, it won’t do her any harm.’

I look at our daughter, that hilarious, permanently alarmed look on her face, cooing up at the disco ball still, not even the promise of sleep.

‘Alright,’ I say, ‘as long as you understand, you’re putting her down tonight.’

‘Fine,’ says Jim, ‘but you can drive your brother to the station.’

I pick her up out of her cot, an exquisite nocturnal creature, and pass her to her father who kisses her soft head.

‘Come on then, you one hot mamma,’ Jim says, slapping me on the arse as I switch off the light.

I turn to him, ‘Shit, do you reckon my mum’ll be able to tell?’ I say.

‘Na,’ says Jim ‘She’s half cut.’

11.56p.m.

We’re all holding hands now, sweaty from dancing, eyes shining with pleasure and booze and the knowledge that this is one of those golden moments.

11.58p.m.

Two minutes to go…

11.59p.m.

Till what? The next chapter of our lives I suppose. And what will become of us then?

12.00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! The party poppers go, the music goes off as we hug and cheer in our lounge, our family’s lounge and enjoy this moment like it’s the last on this earth.

As if watching from above, I see us now, kissing, cheering, jumping up and down. We are canny and stupid, blessed and doomed. But right now, in this room, we are just
here.

Outside, fireworks zoom, then bloom in the sky with a crackle and a pop. The music starts up again, mum and dad take their position. I look at Freya, her eyes wide open over Jim’s shoulder, then I catch my dad’s eye, over my mum’s. I think back to that day in the greenhouse, it seems like a lifetime ago now. But I think, no, I
know
now, how right he was.