Chapter 5
‘Do you think we can get a kitten? Josie has a kitten. Could I get a kitten for my birthday? Pleeeeeeeease,’ Mel made a last bid to further the conversation and keep her mother in the bedroom for just a tiny bit longer.
Jo had done suppertime and bath-time with her girls, then stories, snuggles and now it really was bedtime.
And the kitten conversation – it was one she didn’t want to have. Not again.
Her children really should have a pet. Of course they should, that was how children were supposed to learn about love, care, sex and death, wasn’t it? From pets. Not from the TV.
And other friends had reported the transforming power of pets.
Suddenly their tinies had forgotten all about the collected set of Thomas the Tank Engine and his overpriced plastic friends, the latest Disney release and all sorts of previously pressing requirements and they had played – yes, just played – for hours on end, with their new pet.
So why was it she couldn’t commit to a cat?
She didn’t have good cat experiences. She recalled animals that landed heavily on your lap, were soft and purring until they dug their claws in, sinking them in even further when you yelped.
Then there was cat litter, cat food, the all-pervasive cat hair, the inconvenience of not being able to go away whenever they wanted to…
but then, how often did they do that? Was it just that she couldn’t bear to take on responsibility for one more thing?
That a kitten was too much? One tiny cat life was going to tip the load?
Or was she just being too control-freaky?
A cat could look after itself more or less, couldn’t it?
It would just come to them for food or company when it wanted to, wasn’t that the point with cats?
‘A kitten… I wish for a kitten,’ Annette said with a great, theatrically deep sigh from her pink pillow.
‘Poor Nettie,’ Mel sympathised. ‘She doesn’t even have a school guinea pig to cuddle like me.’
That was so typically sweet of Mel. It never failed to move Jo how close her daughters were. Mel was protective and caring of Nettie and really didn’t take too much advantage of the fact that Nettie worshipped her and would gladly be slave to her every whim.
Jo had expected all sorts of bad reactions to the marital split: tantrums, bed-wetting and bad behaviour.
But so far, the girls seemed to be taking it as well as could be expected.
Mel was maybe quieter; Nettie was clingy and hated to say goodbye when Jo left them with Simon.
But she hoped it would settle down. The children had had to move house and they now spent every week in two new homes and two new bedrooms. Understandably, they were disrupted, a little bit at sea with it all.
‘I’ll think about the kitten, OK?’ Jo hovered at the door of their bedroom. A pink paradise, a tribute to Princess Barbie and her many cloned minions. ‘You’re always thinking about it,’ Mel groaned. ‘That’s just what Daddy says as well.’
Little stab in the side at the mention of Daddy.
She was slightly surprised Daddy hadn’t caved and bought the kitten to win popularity points.
She went over and kissed her girls again, burying her nose in their warm skin.
Annette’s fat fold of cheek, it was hard to resist giving it a gentle nibble… Mel’s silk-soft, creamy face.
‘Night, night,’ she told them.
She would go and watch the news… no, she would just do a few things around the house.
Then she’d watch the news – oh and she’d phone her mother.
Her mother was worrying her. Whenever Jo went to her parents’ little house, it seemed to be more and more empty.
Her mother had discovered Facebook marketplace and instead of buying more household goodies, the way she would once have done, she was selling everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Anything that wasn’t sold was stored away in those bizarre, shrunken packages – Vacu-sacks.
‘I’m clearing out, getting rid of my clutter,’ was her mother’s explanation. ‘I’m having a good old spring clean.’
But really, it had gone way beyond that. The sofa cushions had gone, Jo had noticed on the last visit and the rug that had once been underneath the coffee table.
‘Where are the cushions?’ she’d asked.
‘Oh, I sold them. Didn’t need them any more. Just got in the way, and the rug too.’
‘Where did you sell them, Facebook?’ Jo had asked, incredulously.
Her mother had nodded.
‘What did you get for them? Was it worth it, you know, by the time you’d paid for postage?’ Jo couldn’t help asking.
‘Four pounds apiece. That’s probably more than I paid for them.
There’s no telling what will do well on Marketplace.
There’s lots of lonely old souls sitting up at night spending too much money on things they don’t really need.
’ This said with a mixture of sympathy and disapproval.
The bed linen, duvets, towels, pretty well everything left in the house after the Facebook clearances had been shrink-wrapped and put into the cupboards.
‘I think your mum would like to Vacu-sack me,’ her dad had joked.
‘Put me in a big plastic bag, shrink me down with the vacuum cleaner then put me out of sight at the top of the wardrobe for a season or two.’
It was as if her mother was moving house, tying up loose ends, preparing for some sort of change, but nothing was on the cards.
This was their retirement home. They’d taken the bold decision five years ago to uproot from the small town in Lancashire where they’d lived all their lives, where Jo and her younger brother, Matt, had grown up, and move to a quiet London suburb, so they could be close to her and the girls.
No further moves were planned – so what was all the selling off and the shrink-wrapping about?
Jo’s attention went back to the news: more whooping cough cases, and among them, children who had been vaccinated.
She would get Nettie vaccinated. Surely that was the sensible thing to do?
But it was just so new this injection… why did her child have to be in the first wave?
And was it working? What was the drug company saying about children who’d been vaccinated who were still catching whooping cough?
She would have to chase that line up in the morning.
Jo poured out another third of a glass of wine.
How many ‘thirds of a glass’ was it that she’d drunk this evening?
Oh dear… somehow, two-thirds of the bottle seemed to have disappeared.
Her mobile rang from behind the wine bottle.
‘Jo Randall,’ she said when she picked up, without looking at the screen because she was certain it was Declan wanting to share his thoughts on the News at Ten bulletin.
Poor old Declan. Going home to a lonely flat…
wife finally fed up with the fact that every single night of her husband’s working week was taken up with the paper.
‘Jo, are you organising the new whooping cough vaccine for the girls, or am I?’
Oh… it wasn’t Declan, it was Simon sounding all clipped and brisk.
‘Do you think Mel should have it too? She’s all up-to-date. It’s only Nettie who is due—’ Jo began.
‘New strains need the latest vaccines,’ Simon said. ‘It’s perfectly safe for both girls to have it. Extra protection against this nasty outbreak.’
Her head knew this. It really did. The part that made her hesitate was that she had interviewed parents with tears in their eyes, with utter conviction in their hearts that their children had been fine, had been totally well, totally normal, until they’d had a vaccination.
‘Anyone in your family have thrombophilia?’ she asked him now, changing tack.
‘Why?’ She heard the hostility in his voice.
‘Anyone with the thrombophilia gene shouldn’t have a combination vaccination because they run a greater risk of the complications associated with this type of immunisation.’
‘Oh, they do, do they? And on which internet scare site did you unearth that little nugget?’ he spat.
She told him exactly where the information came from.
Facts, glorious facts: even Simon could be stopped in his tracks with enough confidently delivered information.
She just wished she had a barrage of statistics at her fingertips that she could dump it all over him right now, prove to him that he did not know everything there was to know about health, just because he was a hospital consultant.
Especially because he was an arrogant, narrow-minded hospital consultant.
It was ridiculous, having to prepare for a conversation with the father of your children as if you were preparing for a debate.
But the tail end of their marriage had been like one long session in the House of Commons.
‘With all due respect, would the right honourable wanker stop giving the girls so many snacks in between meals?’
‘Would my nagging colleague kindly refrain from criticising every aspect of the profession I work for, especially in her weekly rag?’
‘As my pompous partner has explained, he is a being far superior to any other that has ever walked the face of the earth…’
‘Moving the debate on, shall we hear the evidence from the opposition as to who does most of the housework in the Randall–Dundas home?’
‘Are we ready to vote now? Which way will our friends go in the aftermath of the divorce? Gwen obviously through the Simon door on the left, Bella votes for Jo—.’