The School Gate Survival Guide (18 page)

I wanted to change the subject. We were never going to see eye-to-eye about Stirling Hall. I stirred her coffee, trying to remember the name of her bloke. ‘How are you getting on with your new man?’

‘Who? Sean? I mean, Shane.’

‘Well, is it Sean or Shane? How many men have you got?’

‘You know me, don’t like to put all me eggs in one basket. Sean today, Shane tomorrow.’ Sandy grimaced as she took a sip of her drink. ‘Here, you got any sugar?’

‘Sorry. You haven’t been round for so long, I’ve forgotten how you take it,’ I said, digging the bag out the cupboard.

‘Yeah, I’m normally at work on Friday nights now, down the factory, so I don’t get so much time any more to be lazing about. You still got plenty of jobs going?’

‘Still a couple of women I clean for, and the dentists and them offices over by the chippy.’ I just avoided correcting myself to ‘those offices’ in time. ‘I need more. We’re absolutely skint. I’ve just got a job at that new gym, it’s near the school. They pay good money for three hours a day, four shifts a week. I have to get up at the crack of sparrow’s fart, mind, but it gives me free gym membership, so I could get fit too if I find the time to go.’

‘Sounds all right to me. Cor, you a gym babe. Colin won’t know what’s hit him, all them pelvic floor muscles giving him what for.’

‘Don’t know about that. After today’s handiwork, it’ll be a long time before he gets me in bed again. He hasn’t seemed that interested lately anyway, though the other night he couldn’t get enough of me but I think that was cos he was fantasising about Frederica, you know, the one off
Casualty
– she was flirting with him at the school play and I think it turned his head.’

Sandy pursed her lips. ‘He’s a vain one, your Colin. Like a TV star would be interested in him.’

Sandy was beginning to hack me off. As if all her men were such lookers. Most of them wouldn’t be able to touch their toes for their guts in the way.

‘He’s not that bad. You should see some of the dads at school. Half of them look like their children’s grandfathers. Colin hasn’t got a six pack but he’s a lot better than some of the fatso City boys with their great expense account bellies.’

Sandy shrugged. She picked up her fake Gucci handbag. ‘Look, I gotta go to work. You take care of yourself. You put something on that face?’

‘Yeah, some antiseptic. And some arnica.’

‘Arnie whatsit?’

‘Arnica. It’s supposed to stop the bruising, it’s some sort of herbal remedy thing.’

‘TCP too common for you now, is it?’ Sandy’s face had gone all narrow-eyed and hard.

I remembered why I hadn’t seen much of her lately. ‘No. One of the teachers at school gave it to me. He just happened to have some.’

‘He? Ooooh, got a little friend, have we? Knight in shining armour come to the rescue? Not the bloke in the swanky car?’

‘Don’t be stupid. He happened to see me in reception when I took the children in.’ I could feel my face going red. I turned to pick up the mugs off the table. ‘Anyway, I’m sending the kids back to Morlands. We can’t afford to keep them at Stirling Hall.’ I couldn’t believe I’d blurted that out. I hadn’t even discussed it with Colin. Pathetic little me, hoping she’d like me a bit more if I was as hopeless and directionless as she was. ‘Don’t say anything to the kids yet though, cos they don’t know. In fact, don’t mention it to anyone. I haven’t sent the letter yet. I only decided today.’

‘That’s a shame. All that cash you’ve wasted on new uniforms. Never mind. They didn’t fit in that good there anyway, did they?’ Sandy said. She looked as though her bonus ball had come up.

I was back where I belonged.

Clover threw the door open with great gusto when I arrived for my two hours of hard labour the following day. Cleaning was still a novelty to her. I would have liked the chance for a trust fund to be a novelty for me. The big grin on her face soon faded.

‘Fucking hell, Maia. What happened to you?’

‘Colin. Discussion over money. Long story. I’m not going up to school at the moment.’

‘Jesus Christ. Have you had it looked at? What happened?’

‘It’s okay, looks worse than it is. Right, where do you want to start today?’

Clover couldn’t take her eyes off me, so I ignored her and said, ‘How about we start in your bedroom?’

I’d never seen Clover approaching silent before but my very brief explanation about Colin’s role in turning my face into a plum punnet seemed to shock all the words out of her. She looked as though she had a lot of questions she wanted to ask but I didn’t want to think about the answers. Instead, I followed her up the sort of staircase you imagine floating down in a long dress with a train while someone in a bow tie announces your name. She led me into a huge room with open beams and a vaulted ceiling. An enormous four-poster bed stood against the far wall. Even though Lawrence had been gone for over a fortnight, his jeans and T-shirts were still draped over the end of the bed.

My eyes flicked over the mass of clothes littered around the room. Coats and jackets were hanging on chairs. Lone shoes dotted the carpet. Carrier bags sprouted in every corner. But it was a life-size nude portrait in charcoal that caught my attention. It was Clover, but thin. Clover with high cheekbones and eyes that dominated her face. I did a double take.

‘It’s me. Lawrence commissioned it with his first bonus when he was twenty-one. I’m nineteen there. I keep it up there to torture myself into losing weight but it’s not working.’

‘Actually, you do look as though you’ve lost weight.’ Her face was definitely thinner. It was difficult to judge her body, which she’d chosen to cover in a CND T-shirt and crimson Ali Baba harem pants.

‘Maybe a bit. It’s the husband-buggered-off-and-is-probably-shagging-a-twenty-year-old diet.’

We got to work. It took some time, but we did manage to find an emerald green chaise longue – the sort you’d see in the fancy mansions of celebrities in
Hello!
magazine – under pairs of tights, old jeans, jumpers and even a long sequinned evening gown.

‘Oh my giddy aunt, I’d forgotten about that dress. I wore it to Lawrence’s Christmas work do. Not last year though. The year before,’ she said.

I pulled open her wardrobe to hang it up and found a great whirl of sleeves, legs and belts hanging down from the shelves. No wonder she always looked like she’d put on something she’d screwed up and left at the bottom of the ironing pile for six months. I sighed. ‘Come on, let’s pull it all out.’

We piled it into the middle of the floor, an exotic bonfire of designer labels in sizes Clover would be lucky to get one leg into now. I was trying to work out a way to suggest dumping some of the stuff without actually saying, ‘Now you’re so fat’ when she laughed, one of those bristly, not funny laughs.

‘There’s no point in putting any of this away. It’ll never fit me again. Poor old Lawrence. I was a size eight when we met and now look at me. He’ll be divorcing me under the Trade Descriptions Act.’

‘Come on, he didn’t marry you because you were thin.’

‘It’s part of the package though, isn’t it? A dolly bird wife you can roll out at corporate events. God knows, he can’t stand going as it is. I guess it’s much worse to have everyone pointing at him and saying, “I don’t fancy yours much” behind his back.’ Clover held up a tie-dye T-shirt, stretched it across her boobs and chucked it on the charity pile.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Think of the stick women we know, like Jen1. You’re not telling me he’d be happier married to her.’

‘Maybe not Jennifer but not a female sumo wrestler either.’ She blew out her cheeks.

‘Why don’t you come to the gym with me? I get free membership now I’ve started cleaning at Browns. We could get fit together.’

Clover looked about to dismiss the idea, then she shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s worth a try. The children will find it highly amusing, the idea of me getting my fat backside into a tracksuit. How much could I lose in a month? I’d love to unveil the new me at the ball and shock them all.’

We filled bin bags full of clothes, lots still with labels on, folding and sorting until my back was screaming for mercy. Her wardrobe looked like one of those posh clothes shops where you have to ring a bell to get in. There were just a couple of things folded neatly in the middle of the shelves. Clover pulled out a long red fishtail dress. ‘You’d look amazing in this. Try it on. You could wear it to the ball.’

‘I’m not going to the ball.’

‘You have to. You won tickets at the fete, remember?’

‘I know, but I’m not going.’

‘Please go, Maia. Lawrence is playing in the band. It might be my only chance to see him. He’s not answering my calls and if I pick up the phone on the rare occasions he rings to speak to the children, he just says he can’t talk to me at the moment. I can’t face going on my own with everyone gossiping about me. You know what the jungle drums are like, I bet everyone knows by now. They’ll all be whispering about “Poor old Clover, did you know her husband’s dumped her? Well, she had rather let herself go …” It’ll send the gym memberships soaring round Sandbury. I should charge a commission. Roll up, roll up, get your lard arses through the door or you’ll be left high and dry like Fatty here.’ She stopped shaking out the red dress and flumped down onto the floor.

‘Please come with me,’ she said.

I was trying to harden my heart but she’d been such a good friend to me. I held out my hand for the dress. It seemed prudish to go into the en-suite to change. I turned my back on Clover, feeling self-conscious about the polka dot underwear I got in the Primark sale for 95p. It probably looked tarty to her. I consoled myself that I’d seen her fling a load of grey bras and baggy knickers into her charity sack.

I was gobsmacked when I saw myself in the mirror. I’d never owned anything of such good quality. Looking gorgeous owed a lot to time and money, though good genes helped.

‘You look fantastic. You’ll have every man at the ball drooling over you. Colin better shape up or you’ll be whisked away from under his nose.’ Clover added, ‘Bastard,’ under her breath but I pretended I didn’t hear. Clover couldn’t possibly understand my circumstances when she was looking at life through a trust fund telescope. But it seemed a bit sour grapey to point that out.

So I made out I was examining my rear view in the mirror. Even though I wasn’t vain, I didn’t want to take the dress off. I’d spent so many years fading into the furniture in other people’s homes that I’d stopped seeing myself at all. It wasn’t the sort of dress that you put on to cover your underwear. If I was going to wear it, I needed to develop some attitude. I wondered if I had the nerve to carry it off. I wasn’t used to putting my cleavage on display.

‘It would be criminal not to come to the ball. You look absolutely amazing.’

‘Colin won’t let me go without him.’ It was one of those sentences that clunked into a silence.

Clover stopped pairing the mountain of rainbow-coloured socks that sat in front of her. ‘Can I ask a question?’

‘You’re going to ask why I don’t leave, right?’ I said.

‘Because you’ve got nowhere to go. I don’t need to ask that question. I see how hard you’re working, how much strain the whole Stirling Hall thing is putting on you. If you could be doing it differently, I’m sure you would be.’

Something about Clover’s unexpected understanding reminded me of the professor. Rose Stainton used to cotter on about how Waitrose no longer made those little chocolate wafers she really liked or how her Glenfiddich whisky wasn’t as good as it used to be while I was worrying about how I was going to pay that week’s rent. Just when I’d be thinking she hadn’t got a bloody clue what a real worry was, she’d insist I brought the children with me when I was working in the school holidays. They’d loved racing around her enormous garden and eating her expensive cookies. She used to read Shakespeare with them, make Harley read the part of Bottom in
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, get Bronte swirling about as Titania. I couldn’t think about the prof. She’d have been so disappointed that I was about to give up on Stirling Hall.

‘No, my question is, if you had somewhere to go, would you?’ Clover asked.

I shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to answer that because I don’t.’

‘I don’t want you to go back to Colin. Jesus, Maia, he was lucky not to smash your cheekbone. You can’t stay with someone who thinks it’s okay to beat you.’

I started to argue that it was just a one-off but I knew I’d never feel totally safe again. Clover knew it too. The second I’d heard his key in the lock the night before, my belly had tensed and I’d felt a drag of fear as I jumped to my feet to grab something I could fight back with. He’d come in, stinking of beer, barely capable of standing up, let alone planting a right hook. He’d slurred apologies and love for me, but he’d moved into a different place in my mind. Colin was now an enemy to defend myself against rather than an unreliable partner. I’d concentrated on looking calm, picked up my copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
– at last I was on to Dickens – and told him to go to bed. There was nothing more to say.

Clover passed me a pair of gold Louboutins to go with the dress. ‘What I’m trying to say is, why don’t you come and stay here with the kiddies for a bit? It would give you a chance to think about the future. At the very least, it will give him a fright, even if you do decide to go back. I can take the children to school and pick them up while your face heals. In return, you can stop me hitting the gin every night. Go on, the kids will love it.’

I meant to argue. But Colin going for me had changed everything. I was so tired. Tired of struggling, tired of worrying, tired of going round in circles. I still hadn’t posted the letter to the school because I couldn’t work out what to tell Harley and Bronte. So I nodded and said, ‘We’ll come for a few days. Thank you. Thank you so much.’ Then I did a little twirl in the unfamiliar high heels.

‘One condition though,’ Clover said, with a wink. ‘You come to the ball with me.’

I hadn’t really spoken to Colin since he hit me. When I got back from Clover’s that day, he breezed in, all chatty and full of some scam he thought he could pull to get more benefits from the dole office. I nodded and shrugged a bit.