The Great Christmas Breakup (6 page)

Carson didn’t like Hammertro
,
but
he
didn’t have the guts to make his feelings known.

‘Why bother?’ he’d say, after complaining for hours over the thumping music coming from the flat above. ‘I’ll probably end up knifed in the back alley.’

‘Hammertro
wo
uldn’t do that,’ I
had
told Carson. ‘A
nd there isn’t any back alley nearby to end up in.’

Hammertro was
now
staring out
of
the living room window. ‘You get a good view from here. Perfect for a sniper attack.’

Thinking about Cecily 2’s pending visit, I told him that we were a more close-range type of family.

‘Really? You wanna buy a silencer to go with your gear?’

The handsome face winked at me, telling me he was joking, but Carson took umbrage.

‘We don’t have weapons in this house, y
oung man.
’

‘Sex can be a weapon, you know,’ Hammertro replied illogically.

That shut Carson up – I mean, how
do
you reply to that? – so the two of them trundled back into the hall to try t
o shore up the door permanently, using nothing more than their wits.

Eventually, they worked out that wasn’t going to work, either.

‘Y
ou might need a carpenter dude
for this,’ Hammertro
told my husband.

‘Can’t afford it, especially not this week. We have another mouth to feed.’

Intrigued, Hammertro asked
if
the mouth came attached to a
‘fit
, you know,
body
’
.

Unable to resist winding Hammertro up, I said that Cecily 2, Carson’s sister, had a
job nearby, modeling for a catalogue.

‘Reeelay
, a model? . . . Y
ou gonna put in a good word for old
Hammertro, then?’ The grey
eyes sparkled
in anticipation of yet another shag.

‘Of course.’
I almost added that he’d need his ‘gear’, o
r other appropriate weaponry, if he was going to engage with Cecily 2.

‘My sister is married,’ Carson hissed
through
gritted teeth, more
at me
than Hammertro.

Unperturbed, the younger man pressed
the point,
‘But is she hot?’

Carson was flummoxed.
‘I suppose . . . we’re related, I don’t think of her that way.’

Awkward.
I beginning to giggle at Carson’s obvious discomfort.

‘She’s attractive, yes.’

‘Being married
hasn’t stopped he
r yet,’ I told Hammertro, trying n
ot to laugh at Carson implying
that
Cecily 2 was good looking.

If she was a looker then Genghis Khan was a pacifist.

The thought of Cecily 2 with Hammertro wou
ld give Carson
a few
sleepless nights, so it was worth encouraging it.

Something had to keep
me going through the next week!

‘Let’s do it like this,’ the rapper said, after
considering the issue for a moment.
‘You get me a date with your hot sista, I’ll get you a better carpenter than me to help with the door.’

‘You’re not a carpenter at all,’ Carson said, but I nudged
him to keep quiet.

Insinuating
that Cecily 2 was ‘hot’ had to be a
breach of some sort of legal mi
s
descriptions
’
legislation, hadn’t
it?
 

‘It’s a deal, Hammertro, now where is this carpenter?’

‘My Uncle. Bob Cotton. We call him Uncle Rabbit
, get it?’

‘Very droll,’ Carson said.

‘Not a troll, man. A rabbit. ‘Cause they are cottin’ tails.’

‘Oh, we get it now,’ I said
quickly
, to stop Carson throttling our neighbor.

‘
I’ll call him.’ Hammertro whipped out hi
s brand new iPhone and pressed it to his ear.
A brief conversation later and our door was guaranteed to be fixed by
the
day’s end.

‘Don’t you for
get your part
of the bargain though,
’ Hammertro warned Carson.

Knowing that Cecily 2 would, in all
probabil
ity, leap on the gorgeous Hammertro
the moment she saw him, I felt confident in assuring
Hammertro we wouldn’t
back out
.

‘She arrives
Monday, why not take her out Monday night?’ I suggested.

That way, we’d save on d
inner – for one night at least.

‘Niiiice,’ Hammertro said, licking his lips in anticipation.

Carson turned on his heel, saying
he had to collect his stuff so that he could
head off to school to prepare reports or something.

Hammertro slid out of the door with the aid of an impressive and in ten minutes I was left alone.

I went into the kitchen and found a left over, half-eaten chocolate from the previous evening that Jessie had discarded on the worktop.

As I ate, I ruminated over t
he fact that the Teesons expected us to feed and board Cecily 2 while she earned
good
money really irked me – but I knew that the moment I said something, the small matter of my sofa debt would be raised.

Again.

-
Cu
e embarrassing tale of debt
to the Teesons
:

‘It’s a bargain,’ I told Lolly, as we stood in the
iconic
Manhattan
furniture
store
Bri
e
t
ar
.

‘It’s two thousand dollars,’ Lolly said, shaking her head. ‘How can you afford that? Carson is a teacher, remember?’

‘We can pay it off, over two years, interest free. And I do love it.’

‘Interest free, you sure?’

‘That’s what the salesman said.’

Lolly frowned and said I was mad, but I wanted something decent to sit on – and we’d have it for years, wouldn’t we?

My parents had always had a
p
athetic Victorian hardback contraption
that made watching TV for any length of time impossible because your backside froze up thanks to the hardwood and sagging upholstery.

Carson, on discovering
I’d purchased something
so large without his in
put, was placated by
the interest free option, and we
enjoyed a happy twelve
months of TV watching and the occasional bonk o
n the lovely deep leather three-
seater.

And then the red letter
had
landed on our doormat.

‘What’s this?’ Carson threw a sheet down in front of me. It said that because we hadn’t been paying the right interest rate for six months, we now owed a whole heap more
money
,
thanks to the interest being
compounded.

It turned out that the
Bri
e
tar
sofa was only interest free if you paid the whole thing off over six months. The interest rate if you paid it off over two years rose to a stonking 25%, and included interest from the first six months too.

We had
to pay up or
Brietar
threatened to take us
to court.

Immediately.

‘400 dollars. Where are we going to find that?’

Looking
around
desperately for the original contract I signed, I was beside myself.
‘We can’t owe that – that salesman must have lied to me.’

‘Try proving it now, Scar.’

I began trembling. ‘But what are we going to do? Can’t we just give back the sofa?’

‘Sure, but
a used sofa is almost worthless. It wouldn’t cover the debt, would it? Plus
our credit rating will be shot. We can kiss any chance of buying a house goodbye.’

After squeezing ever
y
cent out of every credit card we had between us, we were still short.

So Carson t
ook the only other option
– ask
ing
his family for the money.

Luckily, Cecily had just sold a load of fake Tiffa
ny necklaces and
Carson begged
her to part with some of the cash.

He tried not to involve me, but Cecily wouldn’t budge without full details and proof of debt.

‘Tell your posh wif
i
e that she’s no
t in Bath now,’ Cecily had told
Carson to relay to me.

And, stupidly, he had.

O
nce the interest was paid off, we sold the sofa to pay the rest of the debt, and what was left – about
eight hundred dollars
, we slowly paid off over a year.

I still remember
ed
Cecily’s face as she handed over the cash. ‘It’s what we do, for family,’ she said. The implication was that she was doing it for Carson, not me.

And there was no doubt that she thought I owed her.

Because
she told me.

‘You owe
me, Miss High and Mighty Scarface
,’ she
’d whispered
when Carson was out of earshot. ‘Don’t forget it.’

Given the circumstances, I didn’t bother telling my husband about how rotten his mother was to me.

All things
considered, I suppose I figured I deserved it.

Carson turned to me. ‘Listen,
are
you okay waiting here for the
rabid
uncle? I have some work to do at school.’

‘
He’s called Uncle Rabbit. And i
t’s a holiday, isn’t it?
Wh
at are you doing going to work
?
’

‘
There’s always marking, you know how it is?
’

No, I didn’t.

Carson worked every hour as it was – last week he’d been h
ome at 2 a.m. two nights in a row.

‘But this sort of stuff isn’t exactly my forte, is it?’

‘You think carpentry is
mine?
’

‘A
in’t mine, either,’ Hammertro
offered. ‘But my uncle, he’s a genius with wood.’

Then he laughed at
his own
crude
joke.

Jessie and J crept past.

‘And where are you two going?’
I said sternly.

‘Out of here,’ J murmured.

‘The
café next to the
park
,’ Jessie said. A sweet kid;
she knows I worry.

‘Be careful,’ I told them. Over by the bookcase, Carson was gathering his briefcase and some papers. He was still planning to leave me with the door issue – and I decided that I had put up with enough from the Teesons.

Thanksgiving indeed!

When
did someone give t
hanks for the effort
s
I made?

Carson must be lying
about why he was going to work
– he could mark papers anywhere, couldn’t he.

He could do them
at home
– and guard our
doorless
flat at the same time.

‘Dad will be here if
you need him,’ I told the kids, looking for my purse.

Carson sprang to attention.
‘Scarlet, I just said–‘

And grabbin
g my coat – leaving Carson
gobsmacke
d in my wake –
I followed the kids into the chilly autumn morning. 

Outside, I saw another inmate of our building, elderly Mrs Carlisle, struggling with a
n absurdly
large p
arc
el.

Telling the kids to be careful
and be back before dark, I raced
over to ask if the seventy-something, former fellow employee of
Flindes
,
needed help.