Out of My Depth (2 page)

I would sit her on a wall. I got up, carefully put my halfdrunk coffee on the table, and started sketching her in. There was a low wall in the foreground. She could perch on it, knees up by her chin, or legs crossed, and gaze wistfully out of the frame. I would let some of her hair curl around her face. Her eyes would be almond shaped, her head tilted slightly to one side. It was working. I knew I had to concentrate on this, and not allow myself to drift off into memories of my Cardiff schooldays.

I would write to Amanda at the most recent address I had for her, in south London. I could get my parents to find out where Izzy lived, from her parents, who still lived in Dinas Powys. I was fairly sure Izzy was still in London, because she worked in publishing and publishing was probably all in London. As for Tamsin, I would send her letter to Penarth, to her father’s address, and write a note on the envelope asking him to forward it.

There. It was settled. I turned my attentions back to the woman. I wondered whether she would be surprised to receive an oil painting of herself on holiday for her wedding anniversary. I wondered why Neil hadn’t wanted himself in it too. He could have had his arm draped over her shoulders. That would have been a more romantic anniversary present. Would anyone really want a portrait of themselves, painted by someone they had never met?

And would Roman ever go to lengths like this on my behalf?

Clapham, London

February

The school run was bugging Amanda. It was really, seriously bugging her. If the roads weren’t so full of bloody mothers, each carrying one tiny child in an enormous SUV, then she might actually be able to get Jake and Freya to school without having to allow forty-five minutes to drive less than two bloody miles. She let out a small scream of frustration and knocked her head against the steering wheel.

'Are you all right, Mummy?’ Freya sounded nervous. Amanda raised her head and shook it.

‘Fine,’ she said sharply.

‘Mum,’ said Jake. ‘We could get out here and walk. It’ll probably be quicker.’

Amanda looked at the road ahead of her. The traffic was inching along. It was moving quite quickly in the other direction. She could see those drivers laughing at her. She knew they were enjoying her misfortune. She did her best to glare at them all, as they sailed by in their Mitsubish Shoguns and their jeeps but she kept missing eye contact.

‘Of course you can’t walk,’ she snapped. ‘It looks like rain, and besides that, anything could happen to you.’

‘We’d be fine,’ Freya said. She sounded almost wistful. ‘We could actually walk all the way. Every day. You could walk with us. It would be . . .’ She tailed off as Amanda turned in her seat and silenced her with a look.

'. . . quicker,’ finished Jake, bravely.

‘Fun,’ added Freya, almost in a whisper.

The two blond children looked at each other, counting down the seconds. On cue, Amanda exploded.

‘Do you think I do this for fun?' she demanded. ‘Do you? Do you think I sit here in this bloody car, eating up our money on petrol, polluting the planet, sitting in this bloody traffic, twice a day, crawling through bloody south London,
for
fun? No, children, you cannot walk to school. The streets are full of all sorts of perverts and drunks. Freya, you are seven years old. Jake, you are eight. In the car you’re safe. My job is to keep you safe. I am your mother and I am in charge, and please, both of you, stop showering me with bloody stupid ungrateful suggestions and sit there quietly. You must have some homework to be getting on with or something.’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Freya.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Jake. Neither of them responded to the part about the homework, because they knew, from experience, that it was a trick.

Luckily, the boys’ school and the girls’ school were within two blocks of each other. First Jake was out, swinging his bag onto his shoulder with a cheery, ‘Bye, Mum! Bye, Frey!’ Then Amanda double-parked in a side street and took Freya to the school door, to be sure she was not abducted or otherwise interfered with during her twenty-second walk. She kissed her, and raced a traffic warden back to the Range Rover. As Amanda clicked the doors open with her key, the warden looked at her and raised his finger above his electronic keypad. She forced herself to smile. He moved to where he could see her number plate. She ran over to him. He stroked his digital camera.

‘Sorry,’ she said, brightly. ‘Just taking my daughter to the classroom. You can’t be too careful, can you, these days?’

‘Double-parked, madam,’ he said, avoiding eye contact. ‘Oh, just bugger off and I’ll turn a blind eye.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, tersely. She pulled up the collar of her pale pink fleece, and drove off. This bloody city, she thought, as she drove home in a quarter of the time it had taken her to get there. Every single day. There is no let-up.

And there wasn’t. Every weekday morning she drove the children to school. Every afternoon she went through the same purgatory to pick them up, but in the afternoons it was generally worse because, depending on the day, there was ballet, orchestra, judo, or drama to accommodate. On Thursdays they both had after-school activities and she was able to pick them up, in one go, at five. That was her best day. On Monday she had to take Freya to ballet straight after school, drive back to Jake’s school, wait in the car for half an hour, pick him up from his trombone lesson, drive back as fast as she could, which was not as fast as she would have liked, to fetch Freya from ballet, and then drop Jake at judo on the way home, except that it wasn’t on the way at all, take Freya home and make her do her piano practice and homework, then take her back out in the car to collect Jake at half six. That was her worst day. It was Monday today. Weekends were just as bad, because Patrick was home, the children still had activities, and there were a thousand other things to factor in.

When she got in, Amanda punched the code into the burglar alarm and paused for a moment, as the nasty beeping stopped, to savour the silence. There was always something special about her first minute home alone. She picked up the post from the doormat and unlaced her trainers. She kicked them off and skidded along the parquet floor to the kitchen in her socked feet. She caught herself looking critically at the kitchen again. She had redone it last year but now she was beginning to hate it. What had seemed like a perfect, subtle, dusty pink now looked, frankly, peach. Every time she thought about this, she became furious. She should have gone for the wood and chrome. Patrick had been no bloody use. He had made it plain that nothing could have interested him less.

‘You choose,’ he had said, ruffling her hair. ‘It’s the kind of thing you do best. Not me.’ He still managed to forget that he was not allowed to ruffle her hair, that every strand was where it was for a reason. It drove her insane.

The kitchen was big and it had French windows leading out to the back garden. It was quite a triumph to own a back garden in this part of London but she didn’t care any more. All it meant was a hefty monthly cheque to some boy of a gardener who wasn’t even nice to look at. The kitchen, including brand-new French windows, had cost Patrick a fortune. It had cost her several weeks of five o’clock starts, when she woke up tossing, turning and stressing about everything. When this happened, Amanda had learned, she was not going back to sleep. She needed to get up, have a shower in the downstairs bathroom to avoid waking Patrick, and make herself a cup of tea. She needed to take a marker pen and Freya’s whiteboard, and she needed to write it all down. Sometimes when she saw her problems in front of her, they melted away. At other times, her subconscious ambushed her, and she was horrified at what came out. She would scrub the board clean again and again, paranoid that Freya would decipher what had been there.

She put the kettle on and thought about biscuits. She made her tea and thought about biscuits. She opened her Visa bill, and a bill from the gardening service, and three Caribbean holiday brochures, and decided that she was allowed one biscuit. She sat on a high bar stool with her tea and ate a chocolate digestive. She opened the hand-written letter from France, which she had been saving for last, and read it in astonishment.

Dear Amanda,

An invitation!

Remember how we always said we’d have a reunion when we were 32? Well, that day has arrived, as you know. And I am taking the liberty of changing the venue.

You, Isabelle and Tamsin, plus husbands, partners and children, are invited for a long weekend, and a huge amount of catching up. I can offer food, wine, champagne (even Southern Comfort if that’s still your tipple of choice!), plus a big garden, and a swimming pool. I’m suggesting the first weekend in August, maybe making it Friday till Monday, but if anyone can’t make it then we can rearrange.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Masses of love,

Susie

Amanda found herself smiling, which was a rare event these days. The four of them had been inseparable at school, a tight-knit clique which had disintegrated abruptly before they left. She had never imagined rekindling those friendships. Too much had happened.

She ate two more digestives as she thought about Susie’s offer. She had missed Susie and Isabelle, and she knew she would go. She would take Patrick and the kids. It would be a family mini break and it would do them all good. She would be able to show off her model family.

She crammed another biscuit into her mouth and wondered what Susie was like these days. Rich, obviously, and keen to show it off. Horribly successful with her cute little pictures.

Susie and Amanda had once made a formidable pairing. Suzii (as she had then styled herself) had been small, dark and curvaceous. She looked Italian though she was a Londoner by birth and lived in Wales. Amanda had always been tall and blonde, and they had both been paranoid about their weight, their hips, their thighs. They had encouraged each other in crash diets. They had competed to see who could eat the least for the longest, and then, together, they would slip out of school in the afternoon, buy a carrier bag full of chocolate, and sit on a bench in Roath Park and eat it methodically. Amanda was sure Suzii had made herself sick afterwards. She knew that she had, without fail.

She remembered a couple of times when the school had ill-advisedly encouraged pupils to do a sponsored famine for Oxfam. They were all supposed to fast for twenty-four hours and to collect sponsor money for doing it. Amanda remembered how they had laughed and called it sponsored anorexia; remembered that they could not believe their luck.

She tried to convince herself that her attitude to food was healthier now than it had been then. She pictured Suzii, in the sixth form, when they had no uniform. Her black hair was always spiked up on top, and longer at the back, touching her shoulders. She usually wore skin-tight jeans to school, with a paisley shirt which signified non-conformism. Amanda had stuck to Benetton. She used to like big blocks of navy, yellow, pink. Occasionally she would wear jeans and a rugby shirt. Back then, her blonde hair had been much longer, and she had forced a side parting as close to her ear as possible, so she could flick her hair across her face, and brush it back with her fingers.

Lodwell’s was a private girls’ school. To an outsider, it seemed like a ‘nice’ place to get a privileged education. Parents looked around and agreed that it would be a lovely environment for their daughters. The headmistress, Miss Higgins, had lived within the school building, with her dog Amber, and had (wilfully, Amanda assumed) overlooked the ferocious reality of her empire in favour of pretending to live in a fifties girls’ school. The parameters that defined ‘a nice school for girls’ were all there. There was a morning assembly (in Welsh on Fridays), which was called ‘Prayers’. Hymns were sung, prayers were said (the Lord’s prayer, the Blessing, even the School Prayer). Notices were read about sports matches and drama clubs. Each morning a prefect prepared the assembly hall by opening the high windows, checking that the flowers on the desk were fresh, and pouring Miss Higgins a glass of water. The girls would troop in, in alphabetical order within their forms, and would stand in neat rows, the younger ones in pleated grey tunics and green and white striped shirts. In summer they had actually been forced to wear boaters.

Amanda could scarcely believe it, looking back. She tried to imagine Freya’s reaction if she were told she was going to have to wear a boater to school. She smiled.

Lodwell’s had provided school plays, two orchestras, hockey teams, an annual prize-giving. It ticked all the boxes. There was even a dreary school song which, Amanda was pleased to discover, she had forgotten. And the prim and proper façade had masked what really went on. Lodwell’s School had been a hotbed of underage smoking, drinking and sex. Amanda could think of six girls in their year who had had abortions, and that was just the ones she knew about. Fiona Bignold — Fiona Bignose — had had a nose job, and the school happily accepted the note, allegedly from her mother, which explained that she had fallen downstairs and suffered some bruising. Everybody smoked. Fag ends floated in the sixth-form loos. Girls went to lessons reeking of stale smoke, filling classrooms with the stench, and their teachers pretended not to notice. Peer pressure had forced Amanda to start smoking at the age of fifteen, and it had been a bugger to give up when she got pregnant with Jakey.

She, Amanda Castleton, as she had then been, had had her first sexual experience with a builder who had been working on the new junior block. It had involved lager, crisps, a van, and a level of passion and abandon, undiminished eighteen months later, that she had never experienced since, and would never know again.