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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Single Mother on the Verge

  Single Mother on the Verge

  MARIA ROBERTS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  Copyright © Maria Roberts, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-191903-4

  For

  Scratch T

  (a.k.a. my son)

  Prologue

  Manchester, 29 December

  It is snowing very lightly. Damien and I sit by the window in a bar watching snowflakes fall from the sky and disappear into the dark water of the canal. Outside, crowds hurry along Great Bridgewater Street, past the Bridgewater Hall, perhaps on their way to meet friends or heading home from the sales. I sense something might happen. There are subtle signs that no one else notices. Damien is cunning like that. He is able to control my fear like the conductor of an orchestra: one look, a grip of my wrist that feels menacing rather than loving.

  We leave the bar at closing time and head towards Oxford Road in search of a cab. I step inside a phone box just outside the Ritz nightclub. Damien’s friends are in a takeaway across the road, ordering kebabs and fries. They are laughing. Look over this way. Please look over this way: tell me I can go home with you, not him. Damien glares at me, then takes a step back and runs at the phone box. He kicks the door fiercely, and as his foot hits the glass pane I am willing it not to break.

  ‘It’s my birthday, Damien,’ I mouth to him through the window. ‘Don’t.’

  Twenty-four today.

  ‘Taxi,’ I say into the receiver. ‘I’m outside the Ritz, Whitworth Street, Manchester. How long?’

  The operator says ten minutes. I replace the receiver on the cradle and look towards the queue of people snaking along the pavement waiting for black cabs. They can see what Damien is doing – they’re watching. Don’t just watch – intervene. They must think him mad. Me, I’m just lost in all of this.

  ‘When we get home,’ he hisses through the glass, ‘I’m going to carve your fucking eyes out.’

  I can’t understand why Damien wants to harm me. I haven’t done anything wrong.

  Stop shouting at me, Damien. Stop shouting.

  Hours ago, I dropped my son Jack off at my mother’s house. ‘Look after yourself this evening,’ Mum said gravely. She stood on the garden path for a long time, waving me off. I should have stayed with her. If I had, I wouldn’t be stuck here with him.

  I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday with Damien. Now I want to be somewhere else, somewhere warm, with someone kind. But where can I go? Nowhere. It’s past midnight. My friends and family will all be in bed. Not that they would welcome me in. They’re worn down by my trouble with Damien. I should just stroll out of the phone box and walk over to the takeaway. If I pretend that none of this is happening, then maybe it won’t.

  After I dropped Jack off I collected Damien from the pub. He swaggered drunkenly out onto the road and towards the car. Our drive home was spiked with nasty remarks, so when we arrived at Sunnyside I walked ahead of him through the communal gardens and down our path. Then I unlocked the front door, gesturing for Damien to pass ahead of me so I could bolt back to the car.

  I should have been quicker because Damien darted out of the house, grabbed me roughly by the arm and pulled me indoors. ‘Get in the fucking house,’ he said, squaring up to me against the wall, his nose touching mine, so close his beery breath warmed my lips. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  While I soaked in the bath, he ironed the skirt I’m wearing now. He ironed the hem nicely and everything. He poured me a glass of wine before we left the house. And he kissed me. Damien isn’t always a monster.

  Please stop kicking the phone box, Damien. Stop yelling. People are watching and I’m ashamed to be here, such a silly young girl, a caged spectacle.

  The taxi driver drops us off at the edge of the communal gardens just by our front door. I want to ask him to take me away from Damien, but he drives off too quickly. Back in the house, I make my way upstairs.

  If I lie very still on the bed in my nightdress, curled up into a ball against the wall, and pretend to be asleep, when Damien comes to bed he may slide in next to me. If he does that, I can pretend to forget about his rants outside the phone box. I hold my breath listening to him stamp up the stairs. He thumps through the bedroom door making me jolt with fear. Then the room bursts bright with white light so I blink and groan as if he’s woken me. ‘Are you getting into bed?’ I ask.

  ‘You’re not going to sleep,’ Damien snaps from the doorway.

  If I can make it out of the house I could hide behind a fence at the end of our street, but I’m not strong enough to get past him – I know I’m not – so I curl back into a ball and cover my head with the duvet.

  Damien grips a tight fistful of my hair.

  ‘That hurts.’ I wince.

  He drags me upright. ‘Get out of fucking bed,’ he shouts hoarsely.

  ‘Let go, Damien.’ I stagger across the bedroom trying to keep step with him, fearful that he will rip my hair from my scalp. He draws me across the landing and throws me to the floor. I tense waiting for the kick. Damien stands above me with a murderous look in his eyes. He places his hands around my neck and squeezes until my skin stings.

  ‘Get off the fucking floor and walk downstairs,’ he says.

  Suddenly I feel very cold. A chill sweeps across the landing as if a window has swung open. Damien yells and curses at me as I rub my hands over the goose-bumps on my arms to generate heat. Standing up, I tug my nightdress over my knees, then walk down the stairs and into the living room.

  Damien leaves the room for a moment, but there isn’t time to escape so, hurriedly, I dial 999 and, in a hushed voice, ask for the police. I have barely begun to speak when he walks back in. I shield the phone with my body and secretly put it down. Then it rings. He picks it up. I can’t hear what is said exactly but I know that the police are asking if everything is okay because Damien replies very calmly, ‘Everything’s fine – the call was a mistake, Officer. Sorry to bother you.’

  Slowly he turns to me and, exaggerating, replaces the receiver before ripping t
he cable from the socket. I watch as he crashes his foot down hard on the phone until it smashes into little pieces. ‘Did you call the police?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘You called the police, didn’t you?’

  What counts as provocation in a court of law? Have I provoked Damien in some way? The police will come soon. We’ll hear sirens. They’ll bang on the front door and cart him away. Just as they have many times before.

  ‘Sit there. Sit still.’

  I sit on the sofa.

  Damien takes the chair opposite. ‘I am going to kill you,’ he says coolly. ‘In a moment I am going to go into the kitchen and get a knife.’

  Shivering, I pull my legs up to my chest in an attempt to keep warm. I mustn’t let him see that I’m scared. Same old script, Damien, same old –

  He lurches up and kicks my leg. ‘I said SIT STILL.’

  I feel faint. Why haven’t the police arrived? Josie next door must have heard his shouts. Please, I beg silently, if you can hear, then call for help. Damien leaps up to throttle me again but this time he strangles me for longer than before. His fingers push hard against my throat, and when I look into his eyes, he seems so very sad.

  His grip loosens. I rasp for air. My only chance is to wait until he tires of his terrorism. I must mentally disconnect myself from him and do my best not to antagonize him further. I swing my legs down over the sofa, then sit as upright as I can. I will try not to flinch when he kicks me. I cannot retaliate: if I do, he may well go and grab a knife. If he stabs me, who will care for Jack? I wish I could fight back.

  Damien leaps up to strangle me again, so tightly that this must surely be the end of me. I don’t care if I die, truly I don’t, because I’m exhausted with my life. Jack will be better off without me. He’s so young – not yet four – he’ll forget me quickly.

  Damien, if you want to take my life, then get on with it. Don’t let’s make this last all night. I’m tired. I have a better place to be.

  Then the mood changes. He slumps into a chair opposite me. ‘I can’t do it,’ he sobs. ‘I’m sorry… I love you.’

  It’s all over.

  Thank God for that.

  PART ONE

  1

  ‘It needs another coat of paint,’ I say to Rhodri. ‘Look.’ I point to the streaks where the matt blue emulsion has dried in uneven stripes across the wallpaper. Each time the clouds move, sunbeams hit the walls, showing up the patchy paint job. It is mid-October and we’re sitting cross-legged on bits of cardboard in my son’s bedroom. All around us, strewn over the bare floorboards, are empty tins of Tardis-blue paint. I am dunking Digestives into my tea and fishing out lost chunks with paint-stained fingers.

  ‘But I’ve given it four coats already,’ says Rhodri. ‘Not another – please.’

  We’re dappled with blue and white paint, like a pair of strange-looking cheetahs. It’s such a beautiful autumn day, too nice to be stuck indoors. Jack is away for the weekend with his grandparents. He has recently turned eight, an age worthy of a more grown-up bedroom with Daleks and Gorillaz posters, not A Bug’s Life characters and matchstick men scrawlings from when he was a tot.

  Rhodri and I paint through the night then fall into bed happily. Now it is Saturday morning and we have two whole days of decorating ahead of us. At some point I must go out to deal with the girlie part of the job: soft furnishings.

  ‘I shall go to get more paint, and pick up some bedding and curtains,’ I tell Rhodri. ‘We need to measure the windows.’

  He scowls at me affectionately: ‘Shopping?’

  ‘Yes, shopping.’ I laugh.

  We lean into one another across our mugs of tea and kiss. Perfect. This is all so perfect. I search in his pockets for the tape measure and, before I know it, he’s undressing me again.

  I’m picking up cushions from the shelves in the department store, plumping them, setting them down again, winding through the aisles until I arrive in the bedding section where I find the perfect duvet cover for Jack’s bed: navy, printed with orange and gold planets and much cheaper than official Doctor Who merchandise. It definitely has an outer-space feel to it. I head off to the reduced section at the back of the store for some curtains and – what d’you know? – find the exact size I want in the exact colour. From the reduced trolley I pull out navy ones with tie-backs, all for the wonderful price of six pounds. It’s my lucky day. Lucky year. Lucky two years?

  For the first time in ages I feel happy and optimistic. It’s been almost five years since Damien left after that awful night when he tried to strangle me. And now my Welsh boyfriend of two years, Rhodri, has joined me, my two white rabbits and my son Jack in our (not very) delightful house on a council estate in Manchester.

  Rhodri looks like James Dean. From the day our eyes locked across a film set in Blackburn, he showed amazing potential to match my perfect-boyfriend specification beautifully (see Figure 1).

  Figure 1:

  My Perfect-boyfriend Specification

  Within weeks, Rhodri had surpassed my perfect-boyfriend specification. No more so than when, on one of our early dates, he spoke enthusiastically of his ambition To Buy a Van. A Man with a Van is invaluable to a single mother like me and I visualized a new world of home improvements, furniture removals and trips out to the local waste-disposal site. That was until Rhodri said, ‘I’m giving up work. I don’t want to work in the media. I want to live on the dole. Work is ugly and capitalist. I don’t believe in it.’ Which was miles away from what he’d said three months previously: ‘In five years’ time I could be earning eighty thousand pounds a year.’ After much begging on my part, he came off the dole and recently found employment as a part-time home help.

  A few months after we met he said, ‘I don’t want a monogamous relationship. We should be free to sleep with who we like.’ So I took up with a former lover called Toga. It wasn’t long after this that Rhodri changed from vegetarian to vegan, stopped eating wheat and wouldn’t consume any additives, especially aspartame or preservatives. Then he ate only organic food.

  Low air-miles food came next, quickly followed by a declaration that he would never fly abroad and that bio-diesel was the only ethical fuel after vegetable oil. Now I can’t use those fun petroleum-based lubricants to bring on magnificent orgasms that you can buy at Ann Summers. It was about a year into our relationship that he started to make my life difficult in a thoughtful let’s-save-the-world kind of way.

  But it was too late. I’d already fallen completely in love with him. I’d thought he was going through a funny phase, but now that he’s moved in with us I’m starting to think – Actually, forget that. The worst thing I can do is think.

  ‘Hello,’ I call, going into the house.

  Rhodri pops his head around the door, then strolls over to greet me with a passionate and full-on tonsil-tickling kiss. ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ I say.

  This has got to be the major bonus of cohabiting: someone else to make cups of tea for you. I fling myself onto the sofa, throw my legs up over the arm, and puff out my chest so that my breasts look bigger.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ I say to Rhodri, as he hands me a mug. ‘How’s the decorating going?’

  ‘Just having a rest.’

  I can see that.

  ‘Small accident,’ continues Rhodri.

  I don’t like that word, ‘accident’. Accidents cost money. The last ‘accident’ was when Rhodri destroyed Jack’s bedroom ceiling. Then there was the other ‘accident’ when he pulled, rather than carefully removed, the radiator from the wall, leaving a well-like hole that cost me hundreds of pounds to repair. I don’t have hundreds of spare pounds. I work as a low-paid freelance journalist, PR girl, website administrator, and more. My executive title is ‘Dog’s Body’ – I’ll do anything to bring the money in. I don’t even have a study. I run my own little empire from our poky kitchen-diner, except two days a week when I use a desk at an office in Manchester, where I kind of have a boss, Athens.

&nbs
p; We’re broke, but I can usually fit my working life around caring for Jack, which is the sole perk of being selfemployed.

  ‘When I was moving Jack’s bed…’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘When I was moving Jack’s bed…’

  ‘Yes…’

  We’re not getting far here are we?

  ‘What’s happened to Jack’s bed, Rhodri?’

  ‘When I was moving Jack’s bed the leg snapped off it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I pushed it and it snapped.’

  ‘Did you not think to lift it and shuffle?’

  ‘I was in a rush. I wasn’t thinking.’

  Jack’s bed was an expensive gift from my mother and her husband Rufus. It’s one of those cabin beds with a ladder and a desk, and a chest of drawers. It is not a cheap melamine job from a catalogue. It is solid wood.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say cheerfully, because after the earlier home-improvement disasters I’ve only just managed to get Rhodri back into DIY and don’t want to discourage him so soon. ‘We can solve this.’

  We trudge upstairs. The bed looks wonky to me.

  ‘Here,’ says Rhodri, showing me the fracture on the bed leg.

  Nasty, and it doesn’t look repairable either. There’s nothing for it: all the legs on the bed will have to be amputated. ‘Jack wanted a low bed. We’ll just saw the legs off. No problem.’

  By ‘we’ I mean ‘he’. Rhodri will have to saw the legs off because I have no idea what to do with a saw – except put it back into its case. Though I’m impressed by my project-management skills: I identified the problem and found the solution. ‘While you do that, I’ll put the dinner on,’ I say, as I back out of the bedroom.

  Rhodri glowers at me. ‘You’re bowing out of this, aren’t you?’

  ‘We need to eat,’ I explain.

  ‘What are you making?’