Chapter 13
In the car home from the police station, Olivia recounts to Nick the details of her day with the same breezy nonchalance that she might describe a trip to get her nails done, or the shopping.
‘They arrested me for antisocial behaviour,’ she explains, as she clicks in the seat belt of the passenger seat, ‘when in actual fact I was performing an act of public service, given that the man was a dirty old pervert who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
It might not have helped when I told the officer that as a member of the British Transport Police, he had all the authority of a policeman in Toytown, but if these guys actually did their jobs and arrested all the weirdos who use the country’s railways like Youporn, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to empty the contents of my coffee in his general direction.
It’s not as if I wanted to waste the rest of my really quite expensive Gail’s cappuccino on that twat’s woolly jumper. ’
‘Can you slow down a bit? I’m trying to take this all in.’
‘Shan’t,’ snaps Olivia. ‘It’s not my fault you can’t fucking multitask.’
‘Hey,’ says Nick, pulling out into traffic. ‘I’m not the prick who just felt you up on the train.’
‘Turns out that prick is “an upstanding Tory councillor from Worthing who also volunteers with the Scouts”.’ She puts on her poshest, most pompous accent for this.
‘I mean come on, he’s an obvious wrong ’un!
Both of those things are clear red flags.
Also, he said that the coffee I threw was scalding hot, when it was lukewarm at best.’
‘I don’t understand how this has led to you being possibly taken to court with the threat of a Community Protection Notice. You wouldn’t normally say boo to a goose. What’s got into you?’
She suddenly feels like it’s 1985 and she’s being told off for throwing a tantrum over Lily breaking her Barbie doll.
Olivia spent so much of her childhood being chastised for displaying distress about things that really ‘weren’t that bad’ in the grand scheme of things – forgetting her homework at school, the button falling off her cardigan, her mum leaving early to go to work and not waking her up to say goodbye.
Nobody was beaten. Nobody was molested. Nobody died tragically.
So what has she ever had to complain about?
‘Are you saying I shouldn’t have reacted to it?’
He slaps the steering wheel in frustration. ‘No, Olivia, of course not. I just want to know what’s going on. I want to know how I can help. You’ve been distant as fuck for the last few months and now you’re being lairy as fuck. Are you having an affair or something?’
Olivia rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘Where the hell would I find the time to have an affair, Nick?’
‘That sounds like exactly the kind of thing someone who is having an affair would say!’
‘I’m not the one spending all my free time at CrossFit.’ She stares at the rain that has started to splatter the windscreen.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that I might be trying to improve myself for you? For us? I feel like we’ve completely drifted away from each other since your dad moved in. I know it must be weird that they’ve split up, but you can talk to me, you know. You don’t have to close shut.’
‘Maybe it’s got nothing to do with my parents splitting up.
Maybe I’m feeling closed off from you now that you’ve got your new career, new friends, new hobby.
Now that you’re out there doing something that matters, while I’m being paid to draw up guest lists for a fucking birthday party.
You had the guts to get out of the wanky world of media, and I’m stuck in it, too cowardly to get out. We’ve got nothing in common any more.’
‘That’s bollocks, we’ve got loads in common, like …’ Nick prods at the radio to turn off a traffic bulletin.
‘Like we both seem to spend a lot of our time wanking, instead of having sex with each other,’ huffs Olivia, cutting her husband off.
‘Don’t think I didn’t notice you beneath the duvet when I came back from my shower the other day.
You used to be all over me first thing in the morning, but now you treat me like you’ve woken up next to a pile of crinkly dead leaves. ’
‘You’ve hardly been giving off sex vibes recently.’ He switches gear.
‘Perhaps I don’t give off sex vibes because I don’t sense they’d be much appreciated. It’s pretty hard to compete with a rowing machine.’
‘It’s perfectly normal to have a hobby, Olivia, something that interests you outside of work. Maybe if you got one you might be a bit happier.’
She searches for something pithy and cutting to say, finds nothing.
She must have used up her allotted sass quota today, what with all the events at work and on the train.
They pull on to their driveway and Nick parks up in front of their 1970s semi, where through the living-room window they can see a cosy display of domesticity Olivia has rarely witnessed in her life: her dad sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea as Saskia and Jack stand in front of him laughing uproariously, making hand gestures that suggest they are playing charades.
She hears the satisfying thud of Nick’s car door closing, unbuckles her seat belt and follows his lead into the house, the beep-beep of the vehicle locking heralding their arrival.
‘Mum!’ squeals Jack, rushing into the hallway and flinging himself at her as she starts to remove her jacket.
‘My sweet Jack-in-the-box!’
‘Hello, chaps!’ trills her dad, as he stands up and moves to the frame of the living-room door, clutching his cup of tea. ‘We were just playing some games while we waited for you to come home.’ He is bright, breezy, a complete stranger to his daughter.
‘That’s nice,’ Olivia grins, finding she genuinely means it. ‘And you managed to make yourself a cup of tea.’
‘Oh no, Saskia did!’
Saskia shrugs, then slumps back on to the sofa.
‘She made it with some of her funny pea milk,’ continues Peter. ‘And while at first I wasn’t too sure, I have to say I’ve developed somewhat of a taste for it.’
‘Oat milk, Grandad.’ Saskia smiles.
‘Whatever it is, it’s a long way from the milk we had when I was a child,’ Peter says.
‘I’m going to start making dinner,’ interrupts Nick, picking up the post from the doormat. ‘I’ll throw some sort of stir-fry together, shall I?’
Olivia spins a hundred and eighty degrees so she is facing Nick. ‘Absolutely not,’ she announces. ‘After the day I’ve had, I want something comfortingly unhealthy.’
‘Pizza!’ shouts Jack.
‘Not just any pizza,’ nods Olivia. ‘Takeaway pizza, with the really gooey plastic cheese, and garlic bread, and also those chicken wings that only the unhealthiest takeaway places always sell. Plus lots of garlic dip. And vats of ice cream to finish.’
Saskia makes a face. ‘Mum, that sounds disgusting.’
‘It does sound rather out of character for a Monday,’ nods Nick, who is sitting on the stairs taking off his shoes.
‘Yeah, it’s definitely got more of the feel of the first Friday of a school holiday,’ says Saskia, who plonks herself down next to her dad.
‘Well, usually kids don’t complain when their mum comes home and announces she wants to splurge on takeaway.’
‘It’s not that I’m complaining,’ says Saskia, shrugging off her father as he attempts to put an arm around her.
‘It’s more that it’s Meat Free Monday and I think it’s important that we stick to this routine for the sake of our health but also the environment.
Consistency is really important, Mum, you always say that. ’
‘I don’t mean with your diet,’ says Olivia, appalled that her words have been misconstrued. ‘I mean with schoolwork and bedtime and other boring things like that. You’re allowed to have pizza on a Monday occasionally, babes.’
‘I know I’m allowed to,’ sighs Saskia, ‘but maybe I don’t want to. Not all of us crave nutritionally bankrupt food.’
‘No food is nutritionally bankrupt,’ says Olivia, feeling a sudden panic. ‘It’s just food that we are allowed to enjoy!’
‘Well, I like the sound of Meat Free Monday,’ chimes in Peter, being uncharacteristically diplomatic in his old age.
‘You can have meat-free pizza,’ points out Olivia. ‘Anyway, fuck Meat Free Monday!’ She drops her bag on the floor.
‘Olivia!’ Nick stands up in horror.
‘Permission to say fuck!’ Jack jumps up and down.
‘Jack, that is enough.’ Nick is doing his best serious voice.
‘Jack, that is enough,’ Jack parrots back.
‘Well, I’m going to get a takeaway for me and Jack while you guys have a dreary old stir-fry.
We can have a pizza party, can’t we, darling?
’ Jack dances around in excitement. Olivia skips to the kitchen, grabs a flyer that has been attached to the front of the fridge by a magnet shaped like a flip-flop that was bought many years ago in Alicante airport, and watches dispassionately as a flurry of school certificates and old save-the-dates fall to the floor.
‘Oops!’ she says, sitting down at the kitchen table and punching the number of the takeaway into her iPhone.
‘Hello! I want two extra-large pepperonis. With EXTRA pepperoni. You have a buy-one-get-one-free deal on medium Meat Feasts? I’ll take one of those too. Well, two of them, I suppose.’
‘Olivia,’ mouths Nick, who is now standing in front of her, his face crumpled in submission.
‘And I’ll have one of every side,’ continues Olivia. ‘Yep, every single side you have on the menu. Yep. I’ll pay by card now over the phone, thanks ever so much.’
When the pizzas arrive, Olivia and Jack vacate the kitchen to make way for the stir-fry crew. ‘We’re going to eat on the sofa,’ explains Olivia, to the delight of her son.
‘Mind you don’t drop sauce on the cushions!’ stresses Nick, tearing at a roll of kitchen towel which he insists they take with them.
‘Sure sure,’ says Olivia, whisking it away.
She walks across to the living room, which is actually just the other half of the kitchen until they can afford to get an extension like everyone else on the road, and plonks herself on the floor, the boxes of pizza placed on the coffee table to appease her husband.
‘So, my darling,’ she says, getting on to her knees and pushing open the lid of the box, ‘tell me about school today.’
‘It was …’ Jack bites down forlornly on a mozzarella stick. ‘It wash shine,’ he finally replies, with his mouth full.
‘You’re not being very convincing, Jack. Or is that just the gob full of takeaway?’
He points at his mouth and chews until he can swallow. ‘I dunno,’ he shrugs. ‘I’m having some problems with the football boys.’
‘Urghh, not the football boys,’ says Olivia, conspiratorially.
‘They don’t include me in anything. I keep trying to swap Match Attax cards with them, but they just take all my good ones and then tell me to go away.’
Olivia feels her stomach twist at the awfulness of this.
She wants to immediately march into the houses of each and every one of the football boys and tell them exactly what she thinks of them.
Instead, she takes a deep breath. Sometimes, even she has to concede that there are more important things than giving entitled boys a piece of her mind.
‘I bet you nobody swapped Match Attax cards with Erling Haaland when he was at school,’ she says, taking one of the mozzarella sticks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Erling Haaland was probably a bit of an outsider when he was younger, because he had so many special things about him, like you. Like you, he was really good at football. Like you, he was probably clever and funny and maybe he even knew how to do a Rubik’s Cube in thirty seconds, although I doubt it because I think only you are special enough to be able to do that.
Anyway, like you, he could probably make people laugh with cracking roasts of his family members.
Comedian as well as a footballer.’ She doesn’t say anything about Haaland looking like a character from a J.
R. R. Tolkien book. ‘And when you have loads of special things about you, like you or Erling, then people who don’t feel special, or who don’t understand what it feels like to be special, they tend to leave you out.
I mean, you can’t blame them, right? Like, it’s not really their fault that they haven’t been taught what it’s like to feel on the outside of things.
And special people do feel on the outside of things.
’ Olivia picks up another piece of pizza, chews for a bit.
‘When I was your age, I felt like such an outsider, like I reacted in the wrong way to everything. I couldn’t understand why everything felt so hard, while everyone else seemed to find things easy.
Auntie Lily, for example. She was always smiling, but I felt sad the whole time.
And instead of being able to talk about the sadness and explain it, I just sort of hid it and covered it up, because back then it wasn’t the done thing to talk about sadness or any feeling, really, other than happiness.
I thought there was something wrong with me.
But there wasn’t anything wrong with me.
I was just a bit different, like you’re a bit different, and Erling Haaland was a bit different.
And as Erling Haaland proves, being a bit different isn’t a bad thing, not if you’re allowed to embrace it.
He shows that there’s just reams of people, and some of them like to be unapologetically themselves, while others feel they have to go along with the crowd and try to fit in.
We all end up taking the first route, eventually, I promise you.
You can only ignore yourself for so long before you come bursting out.
So forget about the football boys ignoring you.
The most important thing is you don’t ignore yourself, believe me. ’
She shoves a slice of pizza in her mouth.
‘Can I tell you something, Mum?’
‘Of course you can, honey,’ she smiles.
‘You’ve got tomato sauce all over your chin.’
‘Oh, I am glad,’ she says, picking up another slice, and smearing it over the rest of her face.
Jack begins to cackle. In the kitchen, Nick and Saskia turn to see what is going on, and the laughter proves contagious.
Olivia happily munches on the remainders of the slice that aren’t now in her eyebrows, lashes and hair.
She may not be sure if she still wants to be a journalist, but she knows this moment is exactly what she needs.
There is nowhere she’d rather be than here.