The Do-Over

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Do you ever stop to ponder what pivotal events in your life shaped you? I don’t. For me, everything changed on the day Dad left. Although it’s much less regular than it used to be when I was younger, it still haunts my dreams occasionally, playing out the same way every time. It opens on one of those crisp autumn days, where the sky is bright but the wind is cold. I’m eight years old, and I’m walking home from school. Mum is holding my right hand, and my sister Saffy is on the other side of Mum. She’s three years older than me and resists holding hands with Mum because it’s ‘babyish’.

‘Before we get home, there’s something I need to tell you, girls,’ Mum says in a quiet voice. ‘It’s about your father.’

I glance at Saffy, meeting her eye briefly. News about Dad is never good.

‘What’s he done now? Is it the money thing again?’ Saffy asks with the world-weary tone of a pre-teen desperately trying to act older than her years.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Mum says gently.

Saffy rolls her eyes. ‘What did they take?’ None of us are strangers to visits from the bailiffs. It’s been a constant pattern of our childhood so far. Every time it happens, Dad promises to turn over a new leaf, showers us with tatty gifts and things improve for a while. Then, just when we think that he might finally mean it, the bailiffs turn up again to repossess the TV and anything else they can squeeze a bit of value out of, and we go back to square one.

‘It’s a bit more serious this time, love,’ Mum tells her, sighing deeply. ‘It seems that your father hasn’t been paying the rent on our house, which he didn’t tell me about until this morning when the man from the council turned up. I’m not sure how to tell you this, girls, so I’m just going to say it. They’ve thrown us out of our home.’

‘But where are we going to live?’ Saffy asks in horror.

‘I’ve spoken to Nan, and she’s agreed to let us stay with her until we get back on our feet. She’s waiting for us at home. The important thing you need to hear is that none of this is your fault, and it’s not your job to try to fix it.’

‘Dad will fix it, though, won’t he?’ I ask.

‘Not this time, Thea love. Your dad’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

Another deep sigh. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. There comes a time when you just can’t wait any longer for someone to make the right choice. He’s had chance after chance and I can’t do this any more. It’s not fair on me and it’s not fair on the pair of you. From now on, he’s no longer part of our life. It’s us three against the world.’

I can still remember the burning sense of humiliation as we loaded the bin bags containing our meagre possessions into the back of Nan’s car, under the watchful gaze of our neighbours. People we’d counted as friends suddenly wanted nothing to do with us, as if we had some infectious disease they were frightened of catching. The only place I felt safe was school, where the teachers watched carefully to make sure we weren’t bullied. We never saw Dad again; Mum got a letter a few years later to say that he’d died and did she want to organise a funeral for him. By then, our lives were already radically different. As soon as Saffy and I were safely ensconced in secondary school, Mum had swapped her part-time job at the shop for a full-time role as receptionist for a firm of accountants. There, she met Phil, who couldn’t be more different from Dad if he tried. However, after wrestling with it for a while, she decided that closure would be good for all of us, so she paid the fees and we went to Dad’s funeral. It was a perfunctory service and we were the only mourners. We didn’t cry; I don’t think any of us really knew what to feel. Afterwards, Phil bought us all ice creams to break the sombre mood, and I’m not sure we thought about Dad at all after that. We certainly didn’t talk about him.

Given that our story has, generally speaking, a happy ending, I sometimes wonder why the dream still haunts me. I know the answer, of course: it’s to remind me of the seed that was planted that day as I looked out of the back of Nan’s car at our securely padlocked house. I’d always been a happy, slightly lackadaisical child, content to potter along in the middle ranks. That day changed my outlook completely; I studied harder than anyone else, achieving top grades across the board in every set of exams. Nobody was ever going to take my home from me again. I was never going to feel that humiliation again. I was going to defy the odds and be the best I possibly could be. At everything.