Make or Break

We paused the most shocking, life-flipping conversation I’d ever been involved in while we went through the process of getting Hunter and Katie fed, bathed and into bed. Annabelle seemed to have perfected the routine in the two weeks we’d been gone, and the kids had helped to set the dinner table and then eaten their meal agreeably. Hunter had organised himself in and out of the shower and even remembered to hang up the bath mat. Something my flatmate Dave didn’t even bother to put down in the first place, and he was twenty-eight. Once the kids were in bed we got stuck into the wine (and by ‘we’, I mean I drank enough for the three of us) and I asked Mum question after question with her getting more and more defensive while Annabelle listened quietly. Mum attempted to raise various diverting topics, asking about the South African weather, if I was going to cure my own biltong, if I’d seen a shark, the South African’s stance on plastic bag usage, if I’d ever consider mono-mealing, seeing as I couldn’t cook to save myself; but I disregarded her off-theme enquiries and continued to demand more information. Mum, it turned out, had gone back to Patrick at some point during her forty-year ‘affair’ with Dad.

‘So you had an affair on your affair?’ I said, stunned. ‘Who are you?’

‘Mum, you’re worse than me,’ Annabelle said, and we all fell apart with inappropriate giggles. I blamed the bottle and a half of wine I’d mainlined, the ‘tea’ with a cannabis tinge to it that Annabelle had had in place of dinner and the fact that Mum was delirious from her mono-mealing.

‘Well, I guess technically that is what it was,’ Mum said. ‘But again, my heart wasn’t in it and again I had to push Patrick away.’ She shook her head. ‘I was not fair to him. I did help him companion-sow his allotment, though.’

I sat at the dining table picking the label off the second wine bottle. As the facts became solid truths in my head, my feelings, which before had been stunned into immobility, started to mould around them. I felt shame, fear, anger, loss, sadness, grief and betrayal. But also in there was a tiny, teeny, almost undetectable sense of relief. I’d always wondered why I was such an anxious child, and now adult. We’d all put it down to Annabelle being so unruly but perhaps my subconscious knew something was up. It made me feel like there was a reason for my anxiety and I wasn’t just ‘a bit mental’ as Pete had called me a handful of times. Usually with fondness.

‘Didn’t you feel hurt that Dad kept going back to his wife?’ I said, as Mum sat at the other end of the table polishing glasses that didn’t need polishing because they were from Asda. ‘Weren’t you mad he never properly broke up with you in the first place?’

Mum frowned but kept her eyes on the stubby tumbler.

‘I can’t believe he married someone else . . .’ I said, picking at the wine label with intensity. ‘Dad’s been so . . . so . . .’ I searched for the right word. ‘So unfair!’

‘Plum, calm down,’ Mum said, still polishing. ‘I knew what I was getting into. This is no more your father’s fault than mine.’

I looked over to Annabelle. She gave a small yet sad smile that said ‘I know, this sucks’ while she prepared carrot sticks and other kid-healthy snack stuff at the kitchen bench. I turned back to my wine bottle.

‘My childhood is a lie,’ I said, picking at the label. ‘All my memories, my ideas about who I was, who I am . . .’I picked some more, realising, with shame, who Annabelle and I were in this new arrangement. ‘My dad was never even really mine.’

‘Oh would you just . . . be quiet, Plum,’ Mum said, looking flustered. ‘Do you have to make it all about you all of the time?’

I frowned. ‘I just found out my dad has a whole second family, Mum. That I’m a product of an affair. That my life is a complete lie.’ I shot Annabelle a look of incredulity.

‘Listen to you,’ Mum said, abandoning her polishing and moving across the room to the ironing pile but looking oddly redundant upon finding out the ironing pile was already ironed. ‘ “My dad, my life”.’ She patted the top of the crisp sheets. ‘Now, where’s Pete?’

‘We broke up and I slept with a piano-playing bartender,’ I said, waving my hand nonchalantly at her and moving towards another bottle of wine.

‘What do you mean—’

Annabelle shook her head at Mum and, despite her attempts at trying to talk about Pete, or Katie, or climate change, or to try and go home and get the self-help book that was evidently going to make everything all right, Annabelle and I continued to ask Mum uncomfortable but necessary questions until we all went to bed, emotionally spent.

‘Aunty Jess . . .’ Hunter’s heavy whisper came to me through a fug of deep sleep. ‘Aunty Jess. Aunty Jeeeeeeee-eeeeeessssss.’

I opened one eye, the merlot-flavoured ‘medication’ I’d administered last night making itself very much known. ‘Shhhhh,’ I whispered, trying to smile but probably looking like a one-eyed, slack-jawed pirate. ‘It’s still night time.’

‘Aunty Jess . . .’ He breathed a little louder. ‘You fart in your sleep.’ His upside-down face grinned at me from the top bunk. ‘It smells like sausages.’

At 6.11 a.m. I pulled on a pair of Annabelle’s woolly socks and an oversized jumper and dragged myself downstairs, where Annabelle and the kids were in full Monday-morning mode. Hunter had whispered non-stop from the top bunk from 5.37 a.m. until 6 a.m. on the dot. He wasn’t allowed to be up before six but whispering loudly in my face with hot, spittled morning breath about how Thor and his adopted brother Loki didn’t get on and that the Avengers were trying to send Loki back to his planet and Thor was trying to get Loki to stop being a baddie and go to Avenger’s subsidised family counselling (or something . . . I couldn’t quite keep track of the whispered plot), wasn’t considered ‘being up’.

‘Smoothie?’ Annabelle said.

‘Not one of your kind, thanks,’ I said, choosing the seat closest to the radiator. The 25-degree drop in temperature was proving hard to adjust to.

I pulled Katie onto my lap and relished her uninhibited hug and kiss combo. The joy she could spread was boundless and I squeezed her and told her I loved her. She cupped her pudgy hand to my face and told me, in garbled speak and sign language, that she loved me ‘too too too much’, then sang and signed ‘You are My Sunshine’.

Mum pattered in, fresh from the shower and the pain and emotion from the night before washed over me again. This woman who had been the tiny yet tough, loving yet strict, fair yet unconventional backbone of our family was a big fat (actually small and bony, like a featherless baby bird, but you know what I mean) liar. And I couldn’t seem to correlate my feelings. I felt sorry for her; she’d loved and lost and decided playing second fiddle to Dad’s real wife was better than not having him at all – and yet I was angry. She’d lied to Annabelle and me for our entire lives and made us unwitting accomplices in an unforgivable act. I was also scared; what would happen to us all now that this was out in the open? Were we still a family? What were our family friends going to think of us? Of her?

Strangely, and unexpectedly, I also felt in awe of my mother. I’d had a loving, happy childhood. Each time Dad left, Mum would comfort us, distracting us with fun games or outings. Not once did I witness her crying herself to sleep, as she’d admitted last night to doing every time he’d gone back to his wife.

‘Morning, girls,’ Mum said. She kissed her grandchildren and then, with a wary glance in my direction, headed towards the kitchen counter. ‘Are you back to work today, Plum?’

My flurry of feelings dissipated and was replaced with hung-over apprehension. In just under three hours I had to go back to work and be nice and sociable. ‘My boyfriend left me, my father has a second family and my Mum has been his mistress for forty-odd years’ is not something a colleague needs to hear after enquiring politely about your holiday while in transit past your desk.

‘Yes, unfortunately,’ I said, helping Katie spoon in a mouthful of scrambled egg.

‘Shall I make up Hunter’s snacks?’ Mum said, looking around for something to do.

‘I did it last night,’ Annabelle said, taking almond milk out of the fridge.

‘Oh, good,’ Mum said, heading towards the kettle. ‘Shall I make you girls a coffee?’

Annabelle pointed to the full plunger, wafting steam on the bench. ‘Done,’ she said.

Mum looked at Annabelle, moving about the kitchen with effortless efficiency and appeared to be feeling both impressed and superfluous.

Annabelle pottered through her morning routine while Mum and I tried to assist, but each time we went to start a job Annabelle had got there first. We were left standing in the middle of the kitchen with an unneeded plastic Moana bowl, or in the hall with one of Hunter’s creased school shirts when he was on the sofa tying his shoes wearing a nicely ironed one. I thought Annabelle would be an exhausted wreck after two weeks without us but if anything, she seemed more in control.

The lack of having anything to do, plus Mum’s defensiveness in the face of our questions, was making her irritable. I kept looking at her thinking, ‘Mistress’ and not being able to marry the thought of my Oxfam-frequenting, composting, save-the-bees, apple-cider-vinegar-fermenting mother with the ‘bit-on-the-side’ image that came along with that word. Or that Annabelle and I were the product of a very well-concealed, long-term affair.

‘Where’s Hunter’s drink bottle?’ I asked while looking through a drawer that had previously been a mess of Tupperware, lids to long-since-disappeared thermoses and other assorted travelling food and drink containers, but was now a neatly organised tea towel drawer.

‘We keep it here now,’ Hunter said as he walked behind me with his hair combed. He opened an orderly cupboard, pulled out his drink bottle then filled it from the water jug.

As I watched Hunter diligently pack his school bag, checking against a list of contents stuck to the fridge that hadn’t been there two weeks ago, I contemplated whether Mum and I being there constantly for the past few years had stopped Annabelle having to do it all herself. Had we stifled her? And now, with the space to find her own feet, she’d stepped up and her little family unit was ticking along nicely, cannabis smoothies and all?

‘So your father will be back on Saturday morning,’ Mum said, once the door had shut on one of Annabelle’s friends who was taking Hunter to school.

When did Annabelle have time to make friends at the school? Most of the mothers looked at her hyper son and her wrist tattoos and steered well clear. God, we’d only been gone two weeks, yet Annabelle’s life seemed so different. She seemed so different.

‘What?’ I said, stopping mid-fridge-rummage. Saturday was five days away. ‘Doesn’t he want to come and explain himself?’

Annabelle stopped wiping Katie’s face and looked at Mum. The night before we’d decided not to call or text Dad; that it was better to wait until he got here. It felt so unnatural not to call him but it made sense to be physically in the same room when he told us his side of the story. But I’d assumed he’d be on a plane immediately; wanting, if it was at all possible, to allay his daughters’ hurt.

‘He’s with a client,’ Mum said, measuring out exactly seven grams of her cleansing mushroom tea that smelt like mould covered in evil. ‘It can’t be helped.’

‘A client or a second mistress?’ I asked, pulling an apple from the fridge and shutting the door.

‘Now stop that, Jess,’ Mum said, getting back to her fungus with force. ‘I’ve told him it’s best to not call. Things can get so . . . miscommunicated without the benefit of facial expression.’

I left Mum in the kitchen, followed Annabelle to Katie’s room and flumped on the pink princess duvet.

‘Shall we call him?’ I said while Katie picked out what she wanted to wear and Annabelle crouched on her knees on the floor approving or discouraging innumerable pink glittery items. ‘Don’t you think he should call us? Don’t you think he ought to want to?’

‘I think Mum might be right,’ she said, nodding to a pair of pink, purple and cream stripy woollen tights that I wished came in adult size because the mere sight of them made me want to bounce around the room singing songs from the shows.

‘How can not talking to Dad be right? I just don’t get it! How can he not be on a plane right now? He’s our dad!’ He was the one I ran to when I was upset as a child, or called when I was upset as a teenager, or emailed when I was upset now, because Mum’s advice might be to ‘replicate the tide with your breathing’ or ‘try thinking about the sad thing and looking left’. I’d learnt my lesson when I was eleven; after saying I had a headache that wouldn’t go away she had me hitting my head with a stick with a metal ball-bearing on the end of it, quoting some kind of ancient Chinese treatment. I ended up with a headache and tiny ball-bearing shaped bruises all over my scalp.

‘I know, but Mum’s right,’ Annabelle said. ‘In this instance,’ she added off the back of my look. ‘Let’s leave it till he’s back. Then we’ll have had time to process everything and can talk about it calmly. He may be having to deal with his other family at the moment.’

While Katie signed that she wanted pigtails and her strawberry hair ties and Annabelle set about locating them, I sat on the bed, stunned. His other family. I hadn’t put much thought into how this would be affecting them. I hadn’t put much thought into ‘them’ at all. I was only thinking about how it affected my family: Annabelle, Mum and me. How dreadful must it be for the other family? What would they think of us? Would they hate Annabelle and me just for existing? My stomach flipped. I hated being hated.

After showering and going through Annabelle’s nearly all-black clothing trying to find something work-appropriate that would stretch across my bust, I headed into the kitchen, sliding my phone into my bag. Jimmy had texted the night before to see if I’d got home OK but I hadn’t replied yet. Life had gone a bit . . . mental. I grabbed my coat and scarf from the back of a dining chair and turned to Mum, who, for lack of anything else to do, was putting the magnetic letters on the fridge back in alphabetical order after I’d made a passive-aggressive drunken limerick about adultery the night before.

‘So, before I go to work, do you have anything else you’d like to confess to?’ I asked, sliding my arms into my coat. ‘You helped stage the moon landings, perhaps? You’re a hacker for Anonymous and need to leave the country because you’ve pissed off Sony and now the American government are coming for you? You’re Banksy, and you keep your spray cans at Patrick’s allotment?’

Mum pursed her lips and frowned like I was being unjustifiably dramatic. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘That is it.’

‘That’s it, is it?’ I said. ‘Are you sure? Are you sure there’s absolutely nothing else?’

Mum looked uncomfortable as I pulled my sleeves down from inside my jacket. ‘Well, yes, actually, now that you mention it. Just one.’

I stopped mid-toggle-fastening. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

With a confessionary expression, Mum stepped forward and put a chilly hand on mine. ‘Jess . . . Plum. Your birthday isn’t November the twenty-first.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s November the twenty-second.’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘Your birthday. It’s not—’

‘I heard you, Mum! I just can’t quite understand . . . how can my birthday be wrong?!’

Annabelle stepped into the kitchen, Katie on her hip with her hair in adorable pigtails that sprang out of the sides of her head like little chocolate fountains, and watched us.

‘Well, Plum,’ Mum said, taking on a placatory tone. ‘It was a very busy time for me. Annabelle was such a difficult child,’ she glanced at Annabelle, whose only reaction was a ‘fair point’ kind of head tilt. ‘And your father was away when I had to go to the registry building and fill in the birth certificate and . . . I guess I was just a bit forgetful.’

‘ABOUT THE DAY YOU GAVE BIRTH?!’

Mum pursed her lips and glanced at Katie, who laughed and clapped her hands. ‘Now Jess, no need to yell.’

‘There is a need, Mum! I think there is a very big need. I can’t believe it! I feel . . . I feel like nothing in my life is real!’

‘Oh, pfft,’ Mum said with a stern look. ‘Pull yourself together.’

‘Pull myself together.’ I strode out of the kitchen and down the hall with Mum at my heels muttering in German. I took my phone out of my bag and did a Google search, a feeling of dread creeping over me. I stopped as I reached the front door. ‘God dammit Mum!’ I spun to face her. ‘Now I’m a different star sign!’