After the one, p.2
After the One, page 2
Four years ago today, had been Josh’s last birthday. It had fallen on a Saturday and she’d taken him breakfast in bed – eggs, bacon, toast, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, the full works. He’d sat up in bed all tousled-haired, and as excited as a big kid.
‘I do not deserve you, Mrs Taylor!’
Charley had clambered onto the bed and sat cross-legged next to him, and they’d shared the plateful, taking it in turns to eat off Josh’s fork. When they’d finished, he’d dumped the tray on the floor and pulled Charley towards him. They hadn’t got up all day…
‘Well?’ prompted Tara, ‘Any ideas?’
Charley forced herself back to the present. ‘No, not really.’ Then, catching the exasperated look on her mate’s face, she went on, ‘Sorry, I’ve just had a really rubbish day.’ She took a breath before adding, ‘It’s Josh’s birthday.’
Tara’s face softened, her eyes flooding with empathy as she leant over to embrace Charley. ‘Oh, my lovely, why didn’t you say?’
Charley let herself sink into the comfort of Tara’s hug, trying hard not to fall apart completely.
Birthdays. They both knew about birthdays, those agonising reminders that someone was missing, when opening a pile of cards which carelessly, thoughtlessly, wished you a ‘Happy Birthday’ was like rubbing salt into an open wound. As if you could have a happy day. As if everything was normal.
Bereavement had forged Tara and Charley’s friendship. A few months after Josh’s death, Tara’s mum had also died, throwing the two friends into a closeness that was intensified by a barrier that somehow divided them from the rest of their friendship group. None of their other friends had suffered loss and they were unable to understand what Tara and Charley were going through. They were all too young to have lost a partner or a sibling or even a parent, but then so were Charley and Tara. Way too young.
Tara’s mum, Kim, had died of breast cancer. ‘After a bloody hard battle and an even harder life,’ as Tara put it. Raising her daughter single-handed on a low income eked out by benefits had worn Kim down. She’d been easy pickings for cancer and was only fifty-six when she died. Everyone had given Tara hugs and sympathy cards and said how sorry they were… what a dreadful loss it must be… and to let them know if there was anything they could do to help. But only Charley had given practical help rather than platitudes: filling Tara’s freezer with meals, picking little Monnie up from school, running the hoover round and doing the laundry. It was Charley who’d helped arrange the funeral, the flowers and the wake, and who’d helped Tara write the eulogy they were both too choked to read at the funeral, and it was Charley who, with her arm firmly around Tara’s waist, had helped her friend stumble across the grass to the soft mud by the newly dug grave, their heels sinking into the ground, so that Tara could throw a sunflower down onto her mum’s coffin. And afterwards, Charley, and only Charley, had known how to help Tara cope with the juggernaut of loss bearing down on her, and the harrowing, hollowing pain of the wound it left behind. Not just for the first few weeks, but in the months afterwards when people either assumed you’d be over it or seemed to have forgotten about it altogether.
There were two kinds of people, Charley had learned: the bereaved, who understood what you were going through, and the rest – the ones who were emotionally naive about grief, who couldn’t understand, who weren’t in the fellowship of the bereaved.
Lucky them.
* * *
What you really want, when you’ve got to grovel around in the gutter looking at the underbelly of your car to see if the exhaust is actually going to fall off before you can make it to the garage, is a nice dry day. So, naturally, it was drizzling when Charley headed out into the street the next morning in a tatty old tracksuit to check it out. Oh, deep joy, she thought, zipping up her top against the damp. She knelt on the pavement, her trackies instantly soaking through at the knees, and gave the exhaust pipe a tentative nudge. She was satisfied, if not exactly thrilled, when a clunking rattle confirmed her diagnosis was correct. Peering underneath, the exhaust didn’t look like it was about to part company from the car, well, not immediately, and Charley decided she could risk driving to the garage. She wasn’t going to waste money calling out a pick-up truck if she didn’t have to.
The basic car mechanic course wasn’t a total waste of time then, she told herself wryly, although she was probably the only woman who’d done the course to think so. But then the others, mostly single women or divorcees, had signed up hoping to ‘meet someone’. Charley had only enrolled to fill one of her endless, empty evenings following Josh’s death, along with a dozen other evening classes – DIY, Fusion Cookery, Picture Framing, Drawing for All, Knitting, Beginners’ Spanish… They’d filled her diary and the hours, but the evenings were still empty, just like the flat, when she got home. Still, the course had paid off today.
Going inside to grab a quick shower and some dry clothes before heading to the garage, Charley was halfway down the outside steps to her flat when she heard the landline ringing indoors.
‘Bugger!’ She leapt down the last few stairs, burst through the front door, charged into the living room and breathlessly snatched up the phone.
‘Hello?’ she gasped.
‘Sorry, darling. Have I called at a bad time?’ It was her mother-in-law.
‘Pam, hi! No, not at all.’ Charley sank cheerfully onto the sofa, then realising her soaking clothes would make it damp, perched on the coffee table instead. A chat with Pam was always a welcome distraction.
‘I’m popping into Bristol this morning and wondered if you might like to meet up for a coffee?’
Ordinarily, Charley would have happily gone, but not today. If she went she’d inevitably have to tell Pam about her redundancy, and for some reason she didn’t feel ready to do that, not yet. So she lied. ‘I can’t do today, sorry! In fact, I’m busy all weekend.’
‘Never mind. Another time, darling.’
‘Yes! Absolutely!’
Putting the phone down Charley was instantly flooded with guilt and confusion. Why had she felt compelled to lie to Pam? To Pam of all people? She told herself it was because she hadn’t wanted to worry her. I’ll tell her when I get a new job, she decided.
She showered and changed, then drove into town to get the car repaired, very much against the advice of the garage of course, and then she bought a new phone. All told, she shelled out the best part of three hundred quid.
Bloody hell, she winced, the redundancy money isn’t going to last five minutes at this rate.
Back home she made herself a strong, fortifying coffee, and then took a forensic look at her monthly bills and outgoings, to work out precisely how long she could live on what she’d got left in the bank. Apparently, not very long. Mentally rolling up her sleeves, she opened her laptop and started to look for a job, a task that would have been a lot simpler if she’d known what she actually wanted to do. There were, literally, hundreds of jobs advertised, some of which she’d never even heard of. But whilst the vast array of opportunities seemed initially exciting, it rapidly became overwhelming, and, after getting bogged down in a maze of recruitment websites, Charley soon realised she needed to be ruthlessly methodical in her approach.
She drew up a spreadsheet headed Jobs I Want to Apply For, with columns logging: the name of company; the location; job title; experience and qualifications and so on. Optimistically, she added columns for: date of interview; salary; and starting date.
Rather too optimistically, as it turned out.
It seemed she either needed qualifications she didn’t have – like a degree, or a BTEC diploma – or experience in a bewildering list of things she hadn’t even heard of.
What even is ‘operations resource co-ordination’ or ‘people services administration’ for crying out loud? And what the hell are ‘procurement systems management’ and ‘supply chain operations’? She frowned. I swear they’re making these up.
There was only one person she knew who could interpret this impenetrable gobbledegook – her friend Nisha. But she hesitated to pick up the phone. Nisha was the most successful of Charley’s friendship group and she’d always found her slightly intimidating – actually, more than slightly. Cool, elegant and a little older than the rest of her mates, the woman worked twenty-four-seven, running her own marketing company. So, where Charley had decided not to tell Pam about being made redundant until she’d got another job, she didn’t want to admit it to Nisha at all – she’d feel such a failure in comparison to her. She sighed, told herself to bite the bullet and picked up the phone.
‘Hi Nishe, is it an okay time to call?’ she asked, deploying her usual opening line with Nisha.
‘Yes, of course. In fact, I was going to call you.’
‘Oh?’ said Charley warily, immediately assuming Tara had let the cat out of the bag about her redundancy, since she couldn’t imagine why else Nisha would be calling her.
‘I need cheering up,’ announced Nisha, flooring Charley completely. Nisha was intensely private, an emotionally closed book who rarely confided in anyone.
‘What’s up?’
Charley could sense, rather than hear, Nisha taking a deep breath before announcing, ‘La Bimbo is pregnant.’
‘Oh, Nishe,’ said Charley, her heart going out to her mate.
‘Can I come round?’ asked Nisha hesitantly.
‘Yes! Come now!’
Officially, Nisha’s status was ‘Happily Divorced’, but Charley wondered if her friend’s status was possibly better described as ‘Stoically Divorced’.
Twenty minutes later Nisha arrived, the height of elegance in a pair of blue-and-white striped culottes, a navy shirt and heels, which made Charley feel like a grunge-queen in her old joggers and even older T-shirt.
Charley found herself apologising for the coffee. ‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’
‘I much prefer instant,’ Nisha assured her politely, and Charley didn’t know if she was being truthful or diplomatic. Either way, Nisha sat opposite her at the kitchen table, nursing her coffee and venting spleen.
‘He spent ten years telling me he didn’t want bloody kids. Utterly refused to have any. So I kept taking the pill, and now… and now La Fucking Bimbo is up the duff, and I’m knocking forty and—’ She didn’t even bother to finish her sentence.
…and it’s probably too late, finished Charley silently.
‘I’m sorry, Nishe,’ she said gently. With her other friends she’d have pulled them into a hug, but instinctively she felt Nisha wouldn’t be comfortable with that.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Nisha. ‘Sorry, to dump on you like this, but I can’t talk to the others – they’ve got kids. They won’t understand.’
‘You’re not dumping on me,’ Charley assured her. ‘I’m glad you shared it with me. It’s huge. Devastating news.’
Nisha gave a faint nod and then said, ‘Maybe I should have just stopped taking the pill and got pregnant, like La Bimbo. Huh! Maybe she’s not such a bimbo after all,’ she finished bitterly.
Desperately wanting to find something, anything, that might make Nisha feel better, Charley said, ‘If you’d had kids do you think you and Jay would still be married?’
‘Probably,’ replied Nisha. Then, after processing that notion, she visibly cheered up and added, ‘Ghastly thought! Imagine being lumbered with him for rest of my life!’ and Charley adjusted her friend’s status back to ‘Happily Divorced’.
Then, since she still needed Nisha’s help with her job-hunting, Charley reluctantly fessed up about her redundancy. To her relief, her mate didn’t seem to think it reflected badly on Charley at all, and after commiserating with her and assuring her she would be bound to get another job soon, Nisha turned her attention to the list of the job titles and duties Charley had found so confusing. She dealt with them easily, contemptuously even.
‘Don’t be put off by job titles. They’re all just admin jobs, which you’re eminently capable of doing. The job spec will tell you what the job really is. It’s just title inflation. People bigging jobs up.’
‘To attract more applicants?’ asked Charley, thinking that if this was the case, it wasn’t a tactic that was working for her.
‘No, because the pay’s crap. It’s cheaper to give a job a fancy title than a decent wage. If I were you, I’d look at the salary first, then the job title.’
Chapter Three
Despite Nisha’s advice, after two solid weeks of filling in applications and uploading her CV to countless websites, Charley had nothing to show for her efforts except several pages of a meticulously completed spreadsheet and an inbox full of rejections. Slowly but surely, Charley’s self-esteem began to ebb away, and the fact that most of the rejections weren’t even addressed to her personally, but to ‘Dear Applicant’, eroded her confidence even further. Worse still, dozens of the companies – dozens – didn’t even think she was worth replying to at all. Despondency and a low-level persistent feeling of depression crept in as Charley altered the heading on her spreadsheet from Jobs I Want to Apply For to the more sobering title, Jobs I Can Apply For, and then, finally, to the more desperate-sounding Jobs I Haven’t Already Applied For. The shortness of the last list alarmed her, raising the frightening prospect that she might perhaps not be able to get a job at all.
The screen on her laptop had gone to sleep and Charley realised she had been sitting staring at it blankly for a long time. A glance at the kitchen clock informed her it was, somehow, way past lunchtime and she hadn’t eaten.
‘I’m losing track of time,’ she said. Then, realising she’d spoken out loud to a completely empty flat, told herself, It’s losing your mind you need to worry about.
Charley was a people person who needed the camaraderie and conversation of others to bounce off and bring her to life. She hadn’t spoken to anyone for days – no wonder she was talking to herself. Suddenly craving company, she picked up her phone. There was no point calling Tara or Nisha since they’d be working, but what about Angie? She had three kids, and only one of them was at school. She was almost bound to be home and up for a visit.
It was really, really tempting to go round to Angie’s and muck about with the kids. Or she could go round to Pam’s? The mere thought suddenly flooded her with a need for the reassuring presence, comfort calories and good old-fashioned mothering Pam always generously lavished on her. She would take herself off to Pam’s, she decided, until she remembered that she hadn’t been straight with Pam the last time her mother-in-law had called, and still hadn’t told her about her redundancy. A visit now would entail an uncomfortable confession, plus the admission that she didn’t actually have a job at the moment. She sighed heavily and put the phone back on the table. Bunking off to visit either Pam or Angie wasn’t going to help her get a job, was it?
A grumble from her stomach reminded her she really ought to eat something. She scanned the contents of the fridge; its pathetically empty shelves depressed her even more. She should go shopping, but she just couldn’t be arsed, and instead she forced herself to sit down in front of the computer again. There was a dull ping, and yet another job rejection joined the long list in her inbox, at which point she gave up and sat listening to the silence filling the empty flat. It was deafening.
In pure self-defence, she took herself round to Angie’s.
* * *
‘Come in, if you can get in!’ laughed Angie, opening the door.
‘I’ll give it a go!’ Charley grinned, trying to wade past Buster, the outsize chocolate Labrador who was bouncing around her dementedly, thumping his tail against her thigh, and the two small boys who had hurled themselves at her legs.
‘Charleeeeey!’
‘Hi, horrors!’ She laughed and ruffled the boys’ hair.
‘It’s chaos!’ Angie informed her cheerfully. ‘I’m painting the boys’ room.’
‘Again?’ Angie had only painted it two years ago just before Finn was born. Did the woman ever stop nesting?
‘Make some tea and come up.’ Angie turned to head up the stairs.
‘Tea?’ queried Charley. ‘Not coffee?’
‘Tea,’ Angie repeated casually. Too casually.
Charley hadn’t seen Angie go through two of her three pregnancies without knowing exactly what that meant.
Trying very hard to conceal the pang of jealousy threatening to contort her face, Charley rushed over to hug her. ‘Congratulations!’
Smiling blissfully, Angie turned and headed upstairs, the dog and the kids clambering after her.
It was hard not to envy Angie, who, quite simply, had the life Charley wanted. Where Charley had an empty flat and an emptying bank account, Angie had a house full of kids and animals. Piles of laundry, toys and games littered every surface, the smell of home baking permanently hung in the air and the whole place was a riot of colour, courtesy of Angie’s artistic talents. Giant hand-painted sunflowers burst into bloom on the kitchen walls while an enormous beanstalk meandered along the hall and up the side of the stairs. Upstairs her eldest child, Beth, went to sleep under a seascape, her deep blue bedroom walls teeming with yellow starfish, mermaids and a giant purple octopus. In Finn and Eliot’s room, adorably cute teddies drifted by on white fluffy clouds trailing rainbow bunting. Or rather, they had done – Charley wondered what was replacing them.
She made two mugs of tea, poured some milk into Eliot’s Spiderman beaker and into a smiley face tippy cup for Finn, and raided the cake tin on the kitchen table. A waft of syrup from a pile of crumbly, homemade flapjacks promised to more than make up for missing lunch. Putting everything on a tray, Charley went up to the boys’ room, where the furniture had been pushed into the middle and covered with a paint-splattered dust sheet.
‘We’re having pirates!’ yelled four-year-old Eliot.
‘Piwats!’ His little brother leaped up and down ecstatically.
‘Wow!’ Charley breathed, gazing at the scene Angie was finishing painting on the wall.
