The Great Christmas Breakup (4 page)

I loved him
– of course I did – but doubts were beginning to gnaw at me.
The blond foppish clown was slowly morphing into a
serious, boring
adult, whilst I was content to be young and carefree for
a while
longer.

‘You have free will Scarlet,’ my mother told me sternly on the phone. ‘Just tell him what you want.’

Mum and Dad couldn’t m
ake the wedding because of Mum’s blood pressure making it impossible for them to fly
.
They
’d
promised to
visit as soon as the doctor gave the go ahead.

‘I love him,’ I’d told Mum stubbornly. ‘It will be fine, as long as I love him.’

I looked at him now. My snuggly, clever teacher. He wasn’t being unkind. Just careful with our money. But that didn’t change the fact that everyone needed to know how to drive, did it?

‘One day we’ll have a car,’ I said to Carson, ’
and then it might be too late for me to learn.
Lolly says she can get me a deal because she’s learning, too. It will be almost half-price.
’

‘Baby,’ Carson
murmured, nibbling my ear,
as we waited for yet another light to turn green,
‘it’s never to
o late to learn anything, but we can’t afford it right now
. I’m only a
poor
teacher, remember?
’

We were still in love. Still courting: t
hat’s the excruciating word Cecily used – courting. My future mother-in-law also used the most eye-watering swear words I’d ever heard, so I couldn’t quite account for the change in tone
, and the use of words such as ‘courting’,
when it came to Carson.

Anything he did was spoken of with
the reverence afforded a British royal.

Meanwhile, the rest of Cecily’s life
took on the resonance of a
late-night
re-run of a
Jerry Springer unplugged
episode.

‘It isn’t all about you, Carson. I have to have a life too, don’t I?’

He ran
a hand over my
still
slim tummy. ‘We discussed this.
Being a w
ife and mother –
that
’s what you want, isn’t it?
’

‘Yes, no, maybe.
’

’
Maybe? You’ve been telling me for months
how you hate w
orking with Lolly on that stall and that going to college is a waste of time.
’

‘Standing out in the cold selling clothes to people wh
o don’t want to pay more than five dollars isn’t
exactly what I wanted to do with my life.’

‘But what do you want to do, then?’

‘I don’t know, study something else
?’

‘W
hat? Law?’

He’d laughed at the thought.

Loudly.

‘No,
of course not,
but I do want to do something
with my life
.’
 

‘You will. Y
ou’ll need to work
if we’re to
live in New York
and
have kids.
’

‘Maybe we need to move
– somewhere where we can af
ford
.
I
’ll need to
learn to dri
ve then.
’

Carson grinned. ‘Sure. Find me a job with another p
rivate school that pays a decent wage
and we’ll go.’

It
would be impossible to do that and he knew it.
Private schools were closing. Jobs were sc
arc
e.

‘Now, how about one of those amazing pretzels from
Rimnies
?’
Deftly c
hanging the subject, Carson wrapped an arm around me and directed me across the road.

He wasn’t telling me no, I realized later.

He never told
me no.

He just never said
yes.

Cecily and Cecily 2 were waiting by the door.

‘Gosh, you are so late,’ said the former.

‘Late,’ e
choed Howie, suddenly appearing, holding
a packet of crisps in one hand
and a
new
Nintendo in the other.

‘We have to come further than you,’ J told him.

Cecily 2 l
ived in a nearby static caravan a short stroll from her mother’s.

‘Do not,’ Howie said.

‘Do.’

Not.’

‘Do.’

‘Not.’

‘Do.’

‘Not.’

I gave up.

‘You look nice,’ I said
t
o the mother-in-law. She didn’t – she was
wearing something that was shiny and had the texture and appearance
of rubber. The hair was
a helmet of red
mixed with the usu
al peroxide streaks
.

‘Is that what
you’re wearing,’ barked
the daughter
,
prodding me roughly.

‘No,’ I said sweetly, ‘I’ve got a nice little Calvin Klein in the car.’

‘Really? That’s what I’m wearing
. Did you get yours from
Harry
the Crook
?’ Cecily 2 was clueless; a
nd was wearing something so tight and short that it was defamatory to accuse Calvin Klein of having anything to do with it.

‘That’ll make a bruise,’ Jessie whispered to me, patting my hip in sympathy.

Cecily 2
was a
complete
moron.
An oaf of a women
,
with a face t
hat the any natural history museum sh
ould be interested in acquiring
for it
s missing link section
, she
also, and
inexplicably
,
had
the body of a supermodel.

In fact, Cecily 2
had once
be
en employed as a leg model for some Japa
n
e
se company
that sold
depilatory cream, which meant she now called herself an ‘ex-model’.

It was impossible to
express how much I hated her, expect to say that
if I there was a choice between her and joining a fundamentalist group with a feti
sh for s
emtex, I’d probably plump for
the lat
t
er because it was safer.

Before she was eighteen,
Cecily 2 had been
twice arrested
for GBH, and once for assault with a deadly weapon. ‘It’s a fuckin’ stiletto,’ she’d insisted in court, in mitigation, and the judge, deciding she was insane and that prison wardens had enough
to deal with,
let her go.
Admittedly, s
ince she
’d had Howie
she’d given up
violent
assaults for
petty theft and shoplifting.
Considering
the designer gear she got about in, she was bloody good at it.

She was called Cecily 2 because Carson’s father had decided that the tradition of naming a son after the father was sexist.

‘It’s a triumph for feminism,’
he’d
apparently
famously
declared, signing off the birth certificate with a flourish.

‘It’s a sign of insanity,’ I had told Lolly when I’d heard, but Carson didn’t seem to find anything unusual about having a sister known
throughout her school years as ‘Number Twos’.

Cecily 2’s husband
was
a meek little man who was
the nicest of the whole Teeson bunch. His name was Rufus and he was
a distant relative
, originally from Canada.
By his pained expression at family gatherings, I guessed that most days he wi
shed that he was back there
.

I’d once asked where he’d met Cecily 2, because they seemed like such an unlikely couple. ‘Internet,’ had been the abrupt answer.

‘She was the only one who looked like her photo.
Plus, we had the same surname. I was curious.
’

And despite
all
that
, he
had still
wanted to meet her.

The voice I detested more than root canal without anesthetic barked
out
an order:
‘Well, come
in, come in.
The turkey isn’t getting
any warmer, are
you Rufus?’

Cecily
2 guffawed unattractively
at her
mother’s
pathetic joke, and Cecily clapped her petite hands in glee. ‘What fun, eh? All the family together on Thanksgiving.’

My kids were shuffled in
to
the hall and out into what was called the sun porch. It was a poorly insulated lean-to that
was impossible to heat, bu
t Cecily lured the children
back
there with a
Wii
from the back of a truck,
and
bottomless glasses of
sugarless coke.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told me, running her beady eyes over my girth. ‘It’s fat free.’

Once the children were out of way, the serious business of drinking began.

‘
Make
mine a double,’ Cecily 2 called, without bothering to see what was on offer.

‘Triple,’ her husband echoed, clearly desperate
to blot out the horror of being married to her
.

Given that they were drinking
wine that was,
to all intents and purposes
,
lighter fluid, I couldn’t see ho
w they remained
alive.

I declined a glass.
Carson went for the diet soda.

‘So, guess what, Mom?’ Cecily 2 yelled at her mother.

‘Do you have to yell?’ Carson asked politely.

‘Do you fuckin’ well have to live, Carson?’

I sniggered at that, but soon set my mouth straight a
fter Cecily shot me a withering glare.

‘So guess what?’ Cecily
2
yelled again.
It was one of the woman’s
unfortunate
quirks – ye
lling. Carson said she’d had an
ear infection a few years back and since then her hearing came in and out.

A bit like her mental acuity.

‘What
darlin’?’ Cecily said.

‘I
’m gonna do some more leg model
in’!’

This was shocking news. S
ince Cecily 2 had last modeled, ten years previously, her legs (and lanky body) had been subjected to so many sessions at the
Tanning Joint in a nearby static home
that her knee wrinkles could be seen from the moon. Even her mother couldn’t maintain a straight face.

Howie appeared, on the prowl for something a little more substantial that zero calorie cola for his Thanksgiving dinner,
and
hear
d the
momentous news.

‘Is it some hospital show? You gonna be
like the decimated limb?
’

I had to give it to the kid, t
hat was actually hilarious, and even Carson gave a little chuckle.

Cecily 2, however
, didn’t see the funny side. ‘I’m gonna kill you, Howie, I swear it!’ She
didn’t mean it – if there was one
overindulged child
living on that mobile home site,
it was Howie Teeson.

Knowing this, Howie just laughed and asked his grandmother for some proper food – like chips or chocolate.

Tottering into
the well-appointed
kitchen of the
caravan, Cecily began opening and shutting cupboards while Cecily 2 provided
important
information regarding her latest ‘assignment’.

‘There’s this guy, works down near the Blue Bruiser. Well, his sister’s boyfriend’s uncle had some sort of mail order business
and they are moving into films
and they said I was just what they were looking for.
I’m gonn
a
work for a
week. Pays well. A couple of thousand
and some stock
to resell
. Cash in hand.
’