Always and Forever

The front door of Number 2 was a glossy green, flanked by two dwarf conifers in matching green wooden containers on the step. When they had moved in, Mel and Adrian had spent two months’ worth of weekends sorting out the front garden so that it was maintenance-free and would fit in with their neighbours’ beautifully cared-for gardens. The tiny sliver of grass had been replaced by beige gravel with various ornamental grasses and plants grouped in the two planting areas at either end. It all looked well cared for but this was a clever illusion.

Once Mel opened the front door, reality prevailed. The hall looked tired, the peeling paintwork and battered wooden floor badly in need of a month of DIY enthusiasm. Everything in their house needed work – don’t we all? Mel thought grimly. There was never enough time. Adrian worked in IT in an industrial estate thirty minutes’ drive from their home and since he’d been doing a Masters degree at night, he never had a moment for anything as mundane as Destroy It Yourself.

‘Hi,’ yelled Mel as she dumped her load onto the hall floor and kissed Carrie on the forehead before putting her gently down on her chubby little legs.

No reply, but the kitchen door was closed. With yells of delight, Sarah and Carrie erupted into their playroom. Mel felt that you needed somewhere to keep all the kids’ stuff or it just took over the house, so the dining room was now the playroom, with the table shoved up against the wall and toys spilling out of all the big pink and purple plastic storage boxes. In the rigid tradition of children’s colours, everything for little girls was lurid pink and purple. Mel longed for some subtle colours to take over.

‘The dishwasher’s broken,’ announced Adrian as soon as she walked into the kitchen with the gym bags of dirty clothes from Little Tigers.

Sitting with his course books spread out over the kitchen table, he looked up at his wife and gave her a weary smile. Adrian had Scandinavian colouring, with short blond hair, pale blue eyes, and skin that reacted to a hint of sun so that he always looked golden, unlike Mel, with her Celtic complexion. Sarah and Carrie both had his fair hair and skin, but their mother’s fine bones and lovely eyes. When Mel had first met Adrian, he’d had the build of a marathon runner, despite living off Chinese takeaways and pizzas. But over the years, lack of exercise and a fondness for the wrong sort of foods had made him more solid. Cuddly, she said.

‘Needing to go to the gym,’ Adrian would remark good-humouredly.

If they could afford the gym, that was.

Mel patted him affectionately on the arm on her way to the utility room to get a wash going.

‘Are you sure the dishwasher’s really broken?’ she asked.

Broken appliances meant organising someone to come and fix them at a time when someone would be in, a task on a par with choreographing Swan Lake on ice.

‘The dishes are dirtier now than when they went in,’ Adrian said. He gestured to the worktop, where a white mug speckled with food particles sat.

‘Sure there isn’t a spoon stuck in the rotor?’ asked Mel hopefully.

‘’Fraid not.’

She set the washing machine going, emptied out Carrie’s juice cup and snack box, then tackled Sarah’s spotty bag of equipment, her mind whizzing through all the tasks she had to complete before bed. Then she stuck the mushroom and pepper chicken for the girls’ dinner in the microwave, put a pan of pasta on and got out a new wiping-up cloth, flinging the old one into the utility-room washing basket like a basketball pro.

‘Will you keep an eye on the girls while I change?’ Mel was halfway out the door as she spoke.

‘Yeah,’ replied Adrian absently.

Upstairs, Mel ripped off her work clothes and pulled on her grey sweatpants and red fleece. She removed her earrings quickly – Carrie loved pulling earrings and Mel had lost a really nice silver one already this week – and was back downstairs to finish the children’s dinner within three minutes.

The girls were already on their father’s lap, his college books shoved out of the way as they told him all about their day.

‘I did a picture for you, Daddy,’ said Sarah gravely. She was a daddy’s girl and could cope with any childish trauma as long as her father’s arms were around her.

‘You’re so clever,’ said Adrian lovingly, and kissed her blonde head. ‘Show me. Oh, that’s wonderful. Is that me?’

Sarah nodded proudly. ‘That’s Carrie and that’s Granny Karen and that’s me.’ From beside the cooker where she was stirring pasta, Mel looked over. Like all Sarah’s pictures, it was in the crayon triad of pink, orange and purple, with Adrian, Mel’s mother, Karen, and Sarah all big and smiling. Carrie, whom Sarah had never quite forgiven for being born, was a quarter the size, like a dwarf stick-person. There was no sign of Mel.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ asked Adrian.

Mel, who’d read plenty on separation anxiety, wouldn’t have asked, but her breathing stilled to listen to the answer.

‘She’s on another page. At work,’ Sarah said, as if it were perfectly obvious. She produced another picture, this time of a bigger house with her mother outside with her briefcase in her hand. The briefcase was nearly as big as Mel herself, but she had to admit that Sarah had got her hair right: half brown, half blonde and frizzy.

‘Oh,’ Adrian said.

Mel could feel him looking at her sympathetically over Sarah’s blonde head, and she flashed him a comforting look that said that she was fine. And she was, if the definition was Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.

‘But Mummy is only at work sometimes. The rest of the time she’s here, looking after all of us. She’s a super mum,’ Adrian insisted. ‘She should be the star of the family picture, shouldn’t she?’

Sarah nodded and snuggled up to her father, one delicate finger tracing her granny’s lurid yellow hair. Granny was in the family picture but not Mummy. Mel felt another stab of bitterness, this time directed at her mother.

An energetic sixty-one-year-old, Karen Hogan was both Mel’s secret weapon and the source of enormous resentment.

Karen was ready to leap into the breach if the girls were sick so Mel didn’t have to take time off work, and unwittingly ready with remarks about how they’d sobbed for their mummy – or hadn’t.

It wasn’t that Karen didn’t support her daughter’s decision to work. She did. But without her, the whole show would have fallen apart, and somewhere in Mel’s head was the notion that this wasn’t quite the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be ultimately responsible for Carrie and Sarah – not their grandmother. Take Carrie’s tonsillitis a month ago. Mel had taken her to the emergency surgery at the weekend, but when she hadn’t improved by Monday, Granny Karen had taken her to their regular GP.

‘The doctor says you might have to consider getting her tonsils out,’ Mel’s mother had reported on the phone that morning, as an anxious Mel stood outside the health forum conference that she just hadn’t been able to miss. ‘He says he needs to see you if you have the time.’

Mel bridled at the tone. If she had the time. Who’d sat up with Carrie all Friday night? Who’d driven to the emergency surgery and sat in anxiety, singing Bob the Builder tunes for two solid hours on Saturday until they saw a doctor?

‘How dare he?’ she snarled. ‘I bet he never thinks how he can go out to work because he has a wife at home doing everything for him.’

‘Mel, love, he didn’t say it that way.’ Her mother was defensive. ‘You’re a great mum; we all know it.’

Do we? thought Mel. And who’s ‘we’?

‘He just meant that you should have a chat about the possibility of getting Carrie’s tonsils out while she’s still so young. Now that she’s over two, they can do it and you wouldn’t want to leave it too long. The older they are, the harder the recovery is.’ Her mother knew everything. Where does this maternal wisdom come from? thought Mel. And when was she going to get it?

‘That’s a lovely picture, Sarah,’ Mel said evenly. ‘Will we pin it up on the fridge?’

Sarah nodded happily and Adrian smiled up at his wife.

Another difficult moment over, Mel thought. Everyone thought she was managing everything so well. What would they say if she revealed that sometimes she felt she barely coped?

The bathtime routine took for ever that evening. Carrie loved her bath and always played with her plastic duck as if she’d never set eyes on it before, gleefully pouring water into the head so that it poured out of the bottom, making the plastic wings flap.

‘Mama!’ she squealed delightedly as the wings worked faster and faster. ‘Mama!’

Mel laughed too, feeling some of the tension of the day subside. How wonderful toddlers were – always excited, always ready to be happy. In contrast, Sarah was miserable and sat amid the lavender-scented bubbles looking like an abandoned child, her big blue eyes filled with sorrow.

‘Will you come to the zoo tomorrow, Mummy?’ she asked as Carrie splashed in frantic excitement.

Mel felt her heart constrict. Poor Sarah.

‘You know I can’t,’ said Mel brightly. ‘Mummy has to work but she wishes she could be at the zoo with you.’

‘I want you to come.’ Sarah aimed one of Carrie’s floating fish at the duck and threw it. The fish missed the duck but landed on Sarah’s foot, making her squeak with surprise and hurt. Her bottom lip wobbled precariously.

‘Would you like to go to the farm with Mummy and Daddy at the weekend?’ wheedled Mel, in desperation. The farm, complete with goats, sheep and a couple of Shetland ponies you could pet and feed, was a few miles away on the slopes of Mount Carraig, and both children loved it. Needless to say, going to the farm wasn’t part of Mel’s plan for the weekend, but they could manage it if she did the grocery shopping late on Friday instead of Saturday.

‘Don’t want the farm.’ Sarah’s damp head shook obstinately. ‘Want Mummy and zoo.’ She reverted to more babyish speech patterns when she was tired and fed up.