Make or Break

At 6 p.m. that Friday evening I arrived at Annabelle’s to go over the final points for the party the next day.

‘Now what?’ I said as I entered the living room and found Mum on the sofa quietly sobbing.

‘We’re not sure,’ Annabelle said from the armchair on the other side of the room. Marcus was perched on the edge of the armchair next to her, an uncomfortable expression on his pale face. ‘We’ve been through all the usual stuff it could be.’

‘Mum, is it Dad?’ I dropped my bag on the floor and crouched beside her. ‘Has something happened with Dad?’

Mum stopped to blow her nose then continued sobbing.

‘She won’t answer,’ Annabelle said.

‘Did David Attenborough like another one of your tweets?’

Still nothing except sniffs and sobs.

‘Is it the catering?’ I said, putting my hand on her arm. ‘Because if you really want to have some mono-mealing options, I’ll put them back in, but I honestly think nobody’s going to be interested in a bowl of spiralised carrot.’

Mum carried on snivelling, her face buried in her handkerchief.

‘Is . . . is it . . .’ Marcus looked tentatively from Mum to me to Annabelle. ‘Could it be . . . the menopause?’

Mum’s head shot up.

‘Christ,’ I said.

Marcus reddened. Annabelle patted his arm.

‘Menopause?!’ Mum gave Marcus a contemptuous glare. ‘That was years ago!’

‘Well then, perhaps it’s . . .’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘What comes after the menopause?’

‘Nothing!’ Mum spat. ‘I’m a hormonally depleted husk. I’m barely a woman!’ She dissolved into shuddering sobs.

I rubbed Mum’s shoulder and made soothing noises while giving Marcus a death stare.

Marcus’s blush deepened.

‘Where are the kids?’ I mouthed to Annabelle.

‘Movie in my room,’ she mouthed back.

Eventually Mum stopped blubbing long enough to utter a few stilted words.

‘I’m . . . losing . . . him,’ she said between sobs.

Annabelle and I looked at each other. With the party happening the next day, Dad’s decision was upon us. Mum would potentially lose her best friend and the love of her life. But until the decision was made it was still a big fat question mark, and it was turning Mum into a basket case. She’d recently checked out seventeen self-help books from the library yet spent the entire week engrossed in Fifty Shades of Grey.

‘But Mum,’ I said in a gentle voice. ‘He wasn’t ever yours to lose.’

Mum lifted her wretched face from her hanky and Annabelle gave me a look that said I was being harsh. I turned back to Mum and grabbed hold of her hand. With Dad not having yet made a decision and Mum rapidly spiralling into (further) lunacy I needed to appeal to her to do the right thing.

‘Mum,’ I said.

She continued to sob into her hanky.

‘Mum, look at me.’

She looked up, sniffing and hiccuping.

‘You need to do the right thing,’ I said. Mum continued to sniff. Under the watchful gaze of Marcus and Annabelle I continued. ‘You need to step back and let his wife decide if she wants to forgive him. Girl Code, Mum.’

She studied me through her giant glasses, looking like a lost little girl. Then she nodded and dissolved into sobs.

‘He’s the only man I’ve ever loved,’ she said through sniffs and hiccups. ‘I don’t suppose either of you know what that’s like. To be with only one man.’ She looked at Annabelle. ‘Especially you, dear.’

Annabelle rolled her eyes. Marcus shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

‘What am I going to do?!’ she whimpered into her handkerchief.

‘Why don’t you take up a new hobby?’ Annabelle said.

‘I already do all the hobbies I like.’

‘You could become one of those people who help the elderly?’ I offered.

‘I am the elderly! Aren’t I, Marcus?!’ Mum said with an accusatory glare.

Poor Marcus shrank into the armchair.

‘What about doing extra radio slots?’ I said. ‘Or you could do a course? Or there’s always—’

‘No, no, no!’ Mum flapped her hands at us. ‘What I need is some guidance and there’s no self-help book to help the mistress of the second family!’ Mum stopped flapping her hands mid-air and her eyes widened. ‘I could write one!’

While Mum got out her paisley notebook and furiously wrote notes on her new ‘Mistress Self Help Book’, I made dinner (rang the curry house and cut up Mum’s avocado) in the kitchen. Marcus had taken Annabelle and the kids out for a quick supper before going to Matilda in Covent Garden. They’d piled into Marcus’s Prius in their theatre-going best, smiles stretched wide on their faces and excitement dancing in their eyes. It was weird to have Annabelle acting so sorted while the rest of us seemed to be falling apart. Now that their relationship was out in the open Marcus had been taking Annabelle to all kinds of plays, galleries and restaurants. At the weekends they took the children for picnics and walks and to museums. They were like a miniature romance movie from the 1990s that probably should have starred a middle-aged Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and a couple of kid actors that would grow up to have drug dependencies and bankruptcies and ‘took-home-a-hooker’ scandals.

Dinner arrived and I assembled my curry, laid Mum’s sliced avocado as appetisingly as I could across a plate and headed into the living room to eat in front of the television. After we’d eaten, Mum continued to scribble in her notebook, her passions ignited by the thought of writing the first self-help book of its kind, and I watched a documentary Mum had put on about the evils of dairy farming. I looked away from a cow’s swollen teats to the laundry basket in the corner. In the past it had held a mountain of clean clothes that only ever got sorted when Mum or I tended to it, but now it contained a neat pile of ironed and folded clothes ready to be distributed. I knew the fridge was stocked with healthy food, that Hunter had done his homework and that Katie’s therapies were all booked in for the coming month and had been recorded on the calendar on the fridge. Why were we here? Annabelle was out. The kids were out. And when they came back it would be to a tidy, well-run, warm, happy little home. Annabelle didn’t need us any more. It was Mum and I who turned up every day, like we had done for the past three and a half years. It was Mum and I who were unwilling to let go of what used to be.

The idea that Annabelle might not need my help any more made me feel sad and a bit . . . redundant. Dispensable. And it dawned on me in that moment that Pete had been right. You do need to feel needed in a relationship. It’s just that I’d obviously made my primary relationship with my sister.

‘Mum,’ I said, turning the TV down with a remote. ‘We need to move on.’

‘Yes,’ she said, still scribbling. ‘Good idea, Plum.’

‘Mum?’

She continued her outpouring of ‘mistress’ advice.

‘MUM!’

‘Yes, Plum?’ She looked up, confused.

‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m having dinner with you,’ she said, mystified.

‘Well then, why aren’t we having dinner at your place? Or at my flat? Why are we here?’

‘We always come here, because Annabelle needs . . .’ she trailed off, looking around the tidy living room that had been vacuumed that morning.

I watched her thoughts work their way across her features. Her eyes, behind her giant glasses, darted to and fro. The corners of her mouth fell and she turned to me, bewildered.

‘Annabelle is fine,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that great? Annabelle is finally fine.’

Mum blinked for a moment then dropped her gaze to her lap.

‘Annabelle needs to be allowed to move on,’ I said. ‘Which means we do too.’

‘Yes,’ Mum said quietly.

We sat there with the TV on silent, pictures of cows and milking machines and earnest-looking enviro-journalists on the screen.

‘We’re at a crossroads, aren’t we, Mum?’

‘We are, Plum,’ she nodded, her gaze now somewhere in the middle distance. ‘We are.’

I could sense the plates of my emotional universe shifting and producing a feeling of lightness. I could feel the pride at having come up with that analogy and vowed to start recording my incredible insights. My brief feeling of redundancy shifted and another feeling took its place.

1. Was. Free.

A buzz of delight played in my chest. But Mum looked bereft. Her hands sat unmoving in her lap, her note-scribbling abandoned. Life was changing too quickly for her. I shuffled along the sofa, moved Mum’s notes and laid my head on her lap.

‘Let’s watch something funny,’ I said, turning off the cow documentary with the remote and searching for a comedy that Mum would appreciate.

A little while later, my head still on Mum’s bony little lap, I pulled a cushion close and hugged myself around it. I missed cuddling Lucy on Jimmy’s sofa. And, towards the end, when Flora and I had come to our understanding, I’d been permitted to sit cuddling her too. I looked up at Mum.

‘How come we never had a dog growing up?’

‘Oh, we didn’t think it would be fair on an animal with your father away a lot of the time. It might have got attached. It would have broken its little heart.’

I stared at Mum. It took her a few minutes to take her eyes off Jim Carrey in a tutu to look down at me. She raised her eyebrows in question.

‘Not fair on an animal, Mum?’ I said. ‘What about us?’

‘Well,’ Mum said, trying to tread carefully but failing dismally. ‘We could lie to you. An animal feels.’