a lesson learned.

Sometimes your life unravels and you know how it happens but you don’t. The phone rings. I check the number. It’s Doreen. I let it ring out. It starts ringing again immediately. I turn my phone off.

            I work as a proof-reader. Perhaps I should use the past tense here. Doreen likes to make out to our friends, well, her friends, that what I do is glamorous. That, in effect, I edit the latest Stephen King novel. The real horror is my work is like endlessly chewing strips of cardboard and how little I get paid. I recently spent fifteen and a quarter hours, almost the whole day, punctuated with cluster headaches, blurred vision and a mouse that worked better than my cramped fingers, reading and re-writing some else’s botched grammar and syntax on the proper procedure to be used when exiting a multi-storey building when the fire alarm sounded. My pay amounted to £27.32. It’s one of life’s lessons in being fucked over and not knowing how or what to do about it.

            In between that morbid excitement I take the kids to school and pick them up and give them something to eat. Sophia is eight. Jake is six. They act like they hate each other, can’t be in the same room together, even though they share a bedroom. That’s my fault too. We need a bigger house.

            I listen to them from downstairs, computer screen on the laptop flipped opened up in front of me on the kitchen table. The debris of spaghetti rings smeared blood-red on two plates worming its way across the table waits to be cleaned up and the sweet smell of fast food clogs my nostrils. I feel the desperate need for a cigarette, but remember, just as quickly, I don’t smoke.

            ‘Stop annoying me!’ Sophia shrieks. ‘That’s it I’m going to tell.’

            I hear the sound of stamping feet and that’s it started. ‘Play nice!’ I holler, looking at the screen and knowing my comment will be as much use as flinging a bath sponge into the film set of the Towering Inferno. Solomon in his pomp couldn’t separate these two.

            Doreen likes to think Sophia takes after her. I’m biased and I don’t want to go on about how beautiful my daughter actually is. Jake takes after me. He looks like a Tonka toy. He’s got no stop button. Even as a baby he never slept. He combined vomiting with a constant need to be picked up and carried about. Bonding the popular magazines call it.

            ‘You fuckin’ cunt,’ I hear him roar. He’s taken to swearing now for added effect.

Doreen thinks it’s just a phase and he picked up all those bad words from me. It’s true, but for the interest of veracity I’d like to add that when we argue she literally lets rip and not just with the Jane Austen prose.

I hear Sophia screaming, stomping feet and I know it’s started again. There’s silence. I turn my head look through the angle of the door and she’s got him by the hair and is bumping him down the stairs, one by one. It must hurt, but he doesn’t struggle and looks unphased by it.  They get to the bottom of the stairs and she lets go of his hair and he stands up.

‘That’s it.’ I get up, pushing the other chair out of the road and stand in the hall waving my arms about. ‘No television. No games. Get to your room.’

‘He started it.’ Sophia pouts.

Jake’s eyelids flutter, his eyes blink rapidly and a grin consumes his face as he looks up at me. ‘It wasn’t my fault. It was hers. Hers! Hers!’ His foot lift and drifts across as he kicks out at her.

‘Dad!’ Sophia screams.

I warn Sophia, ‘I’m trying to work. You get up those stairs madame and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.’  

I guide Jake by the elbow into the living room and turn on the telly, flicking through the channels until the noise and bright colours tell me I’ve hit on the right ones. ‘What do you want to watch?’

He shrugs one shoulder higher than the other. The telly blares out. I lean over as he lifts his hands up to be lifted. He pats me on the side of the face, his fingers tracing the growth on my chin. We both turn our heads, hear the front door opening at the same time. Sophia rattles down the steps, two at a time, to meet their mother. And he’s squirming out of my arms and scooting out into the hall leaving me with a bubble of ballistic noise and a Power Avenger’s attack.    

They stand obediently in the hallway, Doreen with a hand on each of their shoulders, peering in at me with the remote in my hand. ‘So that’s what you’ve been doing all day.’ Doreen flicks her hair and laughs, turning her head as if there is an audience over her shoulder, hiding in the hall cupboard, waiting to applaud.

‘I was just turning it down a bit.’ I flick the telly off and put the remote on glass table the telly perches on.

‘Oh, I was watching that,’ says Sophia.  

‘Have they had their bath yet?’ Doreen asks.

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll do it.’  She sighs, smooths her palms down over her grey skirt. ‘And I’ve such a headache. Had it all day at work. But you know me I never give into these things.’ She flounces away in her heels the two children clamouring in her wake.  

It’s fuzzy after that. I’m in the kitchen still working. Doreen has eaten dinner, some lettuce leaf with a dollop of cream cheese, called something fancy to make the price less eye-watering and opened a bottle of wine to help her unwind.  Sophia and Jake are sitting on the floor in the living room watching telly in their pyjamas, the door slightly ajar, their hair slick and wet and they smell so clean you’d want to snuggle up close forever and never let them go.  

‘Dirty bastards. All they care about is the money. They moved him next door,’ Doreen says. ‘You know, the paedophile.’

‘Yeh.’ I stare at the screen.

The bottle clinks against the glass as she pours herself a re-fill. ‘We can’t let the kids out of our sight. Not for a minute. Until we do something.’

I’m drinking tea, but it’s gone cold. I touch the mug to my mouth and sip at it and nod my head.

‘Not for a minute.’ The chair scrapes and she leans on the table as she stands up. ‘I’m going to check on them.’

She comes back and flops down again across from me. ‘They’re ok.’

‘That’s good.’ The telly’s too noisy and the kids are too quiet for my liking, but I say nothing more.

‘It’s disgusting.’ Doreen’s face screws up like a bottle top and she lifts her glass to her lips.

‘What is?’ I whisper.

‘Oh my god, we’ve got pervert next door and you don’t even care.’

I lean across the table. ‘Shshhh, the kids are next door. You don’t want them to hear you.’ I pat her wrist as she reaches for the bottle. ‘And anyway Doreen, he had sex with one of the fifth-form girls at his school. He’s hardly likely to break in and rape our kids.’

‘Oh, my God,’ she shrieks, knocking over the glass of wine. ‘You know him.’

I put my finger to my lips, but it’s too late. Sophia stands in the doorway looking in at us. ‘What’s the matter mum?’ she asks.

‘It’s late darling. Time for your bed.’ I smile weakly at Sophia.

‘Your father knows a pervert darling,’ says Doreen.

‘This is silly,’ I say. ‘I don’t know him, know him, but we did go to the same school and hang out for a while.’

‘What’s a pre-vert?’ asks Jake who’s pushed into the kitchen in front of Sophia.

I use my serious voice when explaining things to Jake. ‘A pervert is somebody that does very bad things to children.’

He sniggers through his nose and turns towards Sophia and pushes her in the shoulder.

‘Are you a pervert?’ asks Sophia in her high childish voice, her lips puckered together.

Doreen scrambles in behind me and pulls open the drawer. Then she’s swaying in front of me waving a steak knife about in front of my face. ‘OUT! OUT!’ Her cobalt-blue eyeliner is running as she cries, waving the kids with one hand backwards.

Sophia begins crying too and Jake looks from mine to his mum’s face to mine again and scrapes one foot on top of the other.

I shut down the file I’m working on and stand up. She has taken up a position in the hallway, my children ushered away towards the living room.  The knife is pointed upwards at my face and she holds it with two hands shifting from foot to foot.

‘If you don’t leave right now I’m phoning the police.’

Her phone is on the table where she left it. I pick it up and hand it to her in the hall. Jake waves at me as I shut the front door over and I’m standing outside when I hear him shouting ‘Bye, Bye Daddy.’

It’s raining and I look through the living room window and the telly’s still on and everything seems just fine. I don’t know where to go. Then I do. It’s not far. I slap along in my slippers.  I turn my phone on. Eighteen missed calls. It falls from my fingers. Stupid really.  I don’t hear the splash.

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole