Same Time Next Week

Chapter 10

Mel pulled the clothes out of the washbasket and pushed them into the machine and caught a strong whiff of alien scent, which she traced to the shirt Steve had on last night. Chloe , she could tell it a mile off because her sister wore it. Or rather it wore her sister because a bottle lasted her about a week; she sprayed it on her skin with the same ferocity she’d use with a fire extinguisher. It was to be expected, though, even with Steve who wasn’t a kissy-kissy sort of person. They’ll have all been so pleased to see each other last night, there would have been transfers of perfumes and aftershaves and lipstick marks going on all over the place. And that was totally fine.

She’d never been a jealous type because she’d had no cause to be jealous and she didn’t envy anyone who had that complication in their lives. She was just joshing when she was teasing him about Saran Sykes. People had pasts and those people were bricks on the path to where they were now, who they were now, even if they were unrequited loves like Saran. She had the male ‘brick’ equivalent in her own life in David McAvity, whom she’d fancied for over a year and then when he finally asked her out, he never showed up, totally ghosted her. She was smarting from that when she met Steve in a bar. His first night on the job being a part-time barman, her twenty-second birthday. He’d asked her what she wanted and she’d said, ‘You’ because she’d been pissed on Diamond White and black. She couldn’t remember giving him her number so it was a proper shock the next day, when her mother woke her calling up the stairs:

‘Melinda, there’s someone called Steve on the line for you.’

She couldn’t remember what he looked like either.

Still, she took a chance and went out with him and liked it so much she went out a second time, and a third. Her first real boyfriend, his first real girlfriend. They married when he’d finished his apprenticeship and she was in her third year working at a local bank. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, she wanted to be a rock star but everyone laughed when she said that: her sister Zoe thought that was especially hilarious. To her mum and dad it was just a daft phase, but they didn’t have a bohemian bone in their bodies and wanted her to be settled and stable in a good ‘proper’ job. So she got a job in the South Riding bank and instead strummed away on her Fender in the back bedroom. And when she and Steve got together, he’d laughed at her once-lofty ambitions too. He said that he’d always wanted to be an astronaut, and he had more chance of being one of them than she had of lighting up Glastonbury. But, at least, he did give his approval to her teaching a few kids how to play for some pin money.

She swallowed her dream and watched someone else live out theirs because she’d taught young Ron Chopra who was rhythm guitarist in The Metrodomes. She’d followed their rise over the past seven years from doing the local clubs to appearing on posters supporting much bigger groups at festivals and last year at Reading. She’d never expected Ron to give her a public shout out, which was lucky because to her knowledge he never had or she might have had a rush of hopeful pupils to her door, but she was quietly proud of her achievement via him, that she’d made someone catch their star. That she’d showed it was possible, even if not for her.

‘Ah, but he’s a lad, it’s different for lads,’ Steve said when she’d showed him an article in the Yorkshire Standard . Female rock bands weren’t that thick on the ground, were they?

‘Heart, Suzi Quatro, The Bangles?’ she’d thrown back at him and he’d made that face that said, give over, they weren’t in the same league as Quo.

It would have been nice to teach her own child the guitar, but they’d never been lucky like that. It hadn’t worked naturally and two rounds of IVF had only brought her heartbreak. Steve said that enough was enough, he didn’t want to adopt and he wouldn’t be talked round from that, so they’d accepted a childless life and it had been a comfortable one. Steve had an excellent reputation and always had as much work on as he wanted and her job was steady in the bank; and the cheap mortgage had allowed them to pay it off early on their nice semi and extend it at the back. They were financially secure, they both had nice cars. They went out for nice meals, they had a nice fortnight’s holiday in the sun every summer and a nice week’s holiday in the sun every autumn.

Everything was nice, no worries. So why was Mel constantly having to ignore that big gaping well of unfulfillment that sat inside her?

When they got back to Ingrid’s, Amanda put the kettle on and then noticed the crumbs around the toaster as she was waiting for it to boil. When she nudged it a motherlode fell out of the crumb tray. Amanda moved it to scoop them all up and saw the build-up of grime on the tiles behind it. She felt ashamed of herself that she hadn’t spotted it before: that her mother must be struggling to keep up with her housework and was too proud or stubborn to admit it and had just been cleaning up the areas that showed.

She settled her mother with a coffee and put the TV on and nipped upstairs on the pretext of going to use the loo. She checked around, saw the build-up of dust on the skirting boards, the bits on the carpet. Then she wondered how long it had been since her mum had changed the bedsheets, because if she couldn’t flick a bit of dust away, she was hardly going to be able to wrestle with a double duvet cover. Maybe she should have a word with Bradley when he came back and let Kerry come in and clean the house ‘for a price’. Her mother liked Kerry, as an extension of beloved Bradley, and it would be company for her while she was here.

Amanda walked back down the stairs she had walked up and down for decades and yet now, they felt a sharper angle than her stairs at home. This house had served her mother well for many years, but it was no longer the most ideal one for an old lady to be in, especially one that lived alone.

Her mum was nodding off in the armchair, her drink untouched. Studying her face, she looked older somehow than she had even a little while ago. Old and tired, like an antique clock winding down. She hadn’t thought of her mum as particularly vulnerable until recently; she was a constant, someone who would always be there, just getting a tad stiffer and slower every year, but never to the point where she’d ‘stop’. It hit Amanda like a slap that that there would be a day when she was gone and there was no way of telling if it would be a long or short journey to that end. Ingrid was showing the odd sign of getting muddled, like in the pub when her mind wandered off to her long-dead husband hiding gold inside a tin; she was taking longer to get out of a chair, struggling more on steps and that’s why Amanda made sure she stayed a little longer every visit, took her mum out more often, checked on her bowel movements, told Bradley he needed to up his ante because Amanda knew that one visit from him equalled twenty from her. It had always been the case, she had lived with it, but still occasionally it was a wasp sting in a sweet spot.

She lifted up her coat and her bag to go home.

‘Mum, I’m off. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘I’m going to have a little sleep. That fresh air has knocked me out.’

‘Okay.’ Amanda kissed her on her still-powdery cheek.

But at the door, the thought of the grime in the kitchen and the dust upstairs pulled her backwards. She took off her coat again, rolled up her sleeves, bent down to the undersink cupboard and reached for the Mr Muscle and a cloth.