Chapter 1
ONE
JANE
Stratford-upon-Avon
‘This is the worst holiday ever,’ Beth tells me, her voice dripping with disdain. Possibly boredom. Maybe even a little sprinkling of hatred? She’s a complicated girl, it could easily be all three.
‘Ever!’ she adds, for emphasis. In case I’d missed the point.
The point, of course, is that she is unhappy, and it would be pretty hard to miss. My darling daughter is sixteen, and the love of my life. But sometimes I think – never speak aloud – that she can also be a ginormous pain in the arse.
I sigh, and sink back into my chair. I look out of the window of our Airbnb, at the exceptionally pretty streets of Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s all Tudor gorgeousness out there, black and white buildings and olde worlde charm. In here, it’s more of a medieval torture chamber.
No matter how hard I try, everything I do seems to annoy her.
The other night, she had a go at me for breathing too loudly, the subtext being that I should consider not doing it at all.
She then spent the entirety of dinner sulking because I asked her not to use her phone, and went on to tell me how her friend Lily’s mum had taken her to a luxury wellness hotel in St Lucia.
‘Right,’ I’d said, nodding as we enjoyed the delicate and intoxicating night-sounds of a Travelodge on the M1 services, ‘and you’d like that, would you? Me and you, a spa break, together all day in our white robes and slippers having heart-to-hearts?’
A pause. A snort of laughter. ‘No. But I wouldn’t mind doing it with Lily’s mum. She’s cool. She took Lily to the BTS comeback tour, and has loads of My Chemical Romance on her Spotify playlist.’
I’d wanted to kill Lily’s mum right then.
For being someone Beth would want to hang around with.
For having something other than Abba and Take That on her Spotify playlist. For being the kind of mum that goes to gigs and has fun and is married to a man who looks like Henry Cavill.
I made the last bit up – I’ve no idea who she’s married to – but sometimes…
sometimes, doesn’t it just feel like everyone in the whole world has a better life than you?
‘I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it,’ I reply calmly, sounding way less bothered than I actually am. ‘I know it’s not what you were hoping for.’
I am not just a mother, I am a were-duck: serene on the surface, paddling like mad down below. Right now my poor webbed feet are exhausted after three solid days as Beth’s punching bag. I’m trying very hard not to blow a fuse.
I know it’s not really me she’s angry with anyway.
I’m just here. I’m just the available scapegoat, a dumping ground for her discontent.
God, I am so tired – I could sleep for a million years, and feel like crying right now.
I don’t, because this is what we do, us mums. We are the great pretenders, the consummate actors, hiding away our own wants and hurts lest they creep into the sun and spread like weeds.
Beth is on the opposite side of the room, halfway through a tube of Pringles, glaring at me.
My daughter is already taller than me, much slimmer than me, and at that ironic stage of life where she is utterly gorgeous yet seems to hate everything about her own appearance.
I’m forty-four, starting to sag and needing a miracle of engineering to keep my boobs pointing the right way, but I still don’t look at myself in the mirror with the same self-critique that she does.
I look in the mirror as little as possible, actually, and the fact that nobody else has seen me naked for years helps.
I have so many worries that the effects of gravity barely get a look in.
Mainly I worry about Beth, and how sad she sometimes is.
Her fingernails are bitten down to the quick, she came back from her last trip to town with a surprise nose piercing, and she spends a lot of time lost in the secret world of her phone and her mum-cancelling headphones.
She talks about Lily as though she’s a friend, but I think the more accurate term would be ‘frenemy’ – their relationship feels more like a war of attrition, and it’s one more thing wearing my daughter down.
I hate that she’s suffering, and I hate that I don’t seem able to help her, no matter how hard I try.
Like now – she’s just thrown the cardboard tube across the table, obviously frustrated with how many she’s eaten.
She’s staring daggers at me, and snaps: ‘Why did you let me eat all of those? I should be eating a salad or some chia seeds or a… I don’t know, a protein smoothie or something! ’
I nod, and bite my lip slightly. More deep breaths, more paddling beneath the surface.
If I’d banned the crisps and made her eat a poached salmon fillet with rocket instead, she’d have hated me for that.
I remind myself that the person she really wants to scream at – her father – isn’t around. He’s on the other side of the world.
She should be there right now. She should be with him, his wife, Valerie, and their new baby, Oliver, in their home in Brooklyn.
The trip had been planned for months, the whole summer built around it.
He actually cancelled – or ‘postponed’ as he phrased it – the day before she was due to set off, telling her he simply ‘had too much going on’ to make time for her.
It left us both in a pickle – I’d been intending to spend the next three weeks working fifteen-hour days, watching TV quiz shows, and feeling a tiny bit sorry for myself and my temporarily empty nest.
She’d been so excited about spending time with her dad and meeting her baby brother, and she’s not been right since he cancelled.
Peter was always a selfish man, even by man standards.
After being an absentee dad for much of Beth’s life, travelling and being his ‘best self’, he finally settled down with another woman – and I hoped that newfound maturity of lifestyle might allow for a better relationship with his daughter.
The one who adores him with all her heart.
It was a forlorn hope, it turned out, and now she is silently consumed by a sense of rejection that no mother wants for her child.
Disappointing her like this is frankly unforgivable.
I hope karma exists, and I hope she’s an absolute bitch with a vengeful streak.
I hope she makes all his hair drop out overnight, or gives him chronic erectile dysfunction.
He was always far prouder of his hair and his penis than much else, including his own kid.
I keep all of these thoughts inside, where they can cause no further harm to Beth. She remains fiercely determined not to see her father as a bad guy, and if it comforts her, I’ll go along.
‘Well, we could go out for dinner if you like?’ I ask, watching the Pringles tube roll off the edge of the table. ‘There was a vegan health food restaurant I spotted earlier…’
I’m calling her bluff on this. I didn’t spot any such place, and even if I did, that’s her idea of hell. She narrows her eyes at me, lips scrunched up suspiciously. She has her father’s big blue eyes, and my fair hair – a complete English rose vibe that she predictably enough absolutely hates.
‘It’s got to be better than staying here in this pit,’ she says, gesturing around at the perfectly nice apartment I’ve rented.
It had been quite the scramble at the height of summer, arranging last-minute time off work and finding a place to stay, but I wanted to do something to distract her, take her mind off her dad.
For me, it’s terrible timing. I’m a project manager for an investment company, which is about as interesting as it sounds.
I had a million and one things I needed to do while Beth was away, and I’d built schedules around having the extra time.
It’s why I couldn’t book us a holiday abroad.
Even though I’m technically on leave, I need to be around to deal with the emails and constant phone calls.
I’m trying to balance firefighting at the office with firefighting in my personal life, and I’m worried I might just go up in smoke.
‘I thought you’d like it here,’ I reply wearily. I was up late last night dealing with crises back in the office, and Beth’s surliness has been wearing me down. ‘You know. Shakespeare and all that.’
She rolls her eyes at me, the gesture clearly stating: you are the most useless and annoying human being on the face of this entire planet.
It’s not my first time on the receiving end of the Eye Roll, and I can usually ignore it.
But sometimes, like now, it really hurts.
It hurts because I find myself thinking she might just be right.
My world isn’t exactly a rich landscape of love, laughter and wonder.
I mean, I have friends, mainly other mums I’ve stayed in touch with from the school gate days and occasionally drink wine with. I have work colleagues I’m friendly with. I have a sister I see a few times a year. I have… well, that’s it, really. My life is work, and Beth.
How did this happen? I wonder. I vaguely remember being young, carefree.
Having hopes and dreams, loving art and books and sunrises and long walks beneath wide blue skies.
I was once full of enthusiasms and passions, seeing my life as one big adventure.
Now, that feels like something that happened to another person.
Like a dream sequence in a film, all hazy and unreal.
Now, I’m a frumpy middle-aged mum who is barely tolerated by her own daughter, and has a career that is a crippling combination of demanding and dull.
What happened to that bright young girl I used to be?
Is she still buried somewhere inside me, still seeing the world through the lens of paintings and poems?
Does she still believe that love could conquer all?
I did used to think that. Before someone showed me that love didn’t just conquer, it trampled and destroyed.