Stepping up, p.1
Stepping Up, page 1
Sarah Turner
* * *
STEPPING UP
Contents
MARCH Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
APRIL Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
MAY Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
JUNE Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
JULY Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
AUGUST Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
SEPTEMBER Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
NOVEMBER Chapter 30
Chapter 31
DECEMBER Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Sarah Turner lives in Devon with her husband and three sons. After graduating with first-class honours in Philosophy from the University of Exeter, she dabbled in careers in finance then higher education before a ‘warts and all’ parenting blog she’d started to let off steam gathered unexpected momentum and writing became her full-time job. She has since written three Sunday Times bestsellers: The Unmumsy Mum, The Unmumsy Mum Diary and The Unmumsy Mum A-Z. The Unmumsy Mum was voted number 4 in Amazon’s Top 10 books of 2016 (as voted for by Amazon customers) and was also shortlisted for Book of the Year (non-fiction, lifestyle) at the 2017 British Book Awards. Stepping Up is Sarah’s first novel, the spark of an idea coming from a conversation about will-writing and more specifically guardianship, should the unthinkable happen. Sarah likes bookshops, walks on Dartmoor (when the kids aren’t whingeing) and pretends to like running, though she’s started Couch to 5k three times and keeps ending up back on the couch. She doesn’t like coffee, films with sharks in or writing about herself in the third person. You can follow Sarah’s reading, writing and parenting adventures on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (@theunmumsymum).
Also by Sarah Turner
NON-FICTION
The Unmumsy Mum
The Unmumsy Mum Diary
The Unmumsy Mum A–Z
For my dad, who always said I could.
And for James, who reminded me I could until I did.
‘Be comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds.’
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
MARCH
1
The key clicks in the ignition and I groan. Come on. At least yesterday’s clicking gave way to a more hopeful stuttering. This morning there is no such stuttering, which is just brilliant on the day I’m supposed to be having my first Personal Development Review of the new job. The new new job. Dad says I suffer from a ten-week itch on the job front. I haven’t braved telling him that I’m already itching at the end of week four because I know he’ll tell Mum, who will wheel out the reliability and commitments lecture again. You need to stick at these things for longer, Beth. Prove yourself a bit.
The radio springs to life with a local travel update – a spot of slow-moving traffic on the A39 between Kilkhampton and Stratton following an earlier breakdown of a livestock container. I roll my eyes. People in my village are always remarking how lucky we are to live in this part of the world and how dreadful the daily commute in a big city would be but at least in a big city I wouldn’t have to stop for farm animals. I get it, the underground on a hot day smells like armpits and socks, but muck-spreading season in north Cornwall isn’t exactly a treat for the senses either.
I try the key again. Click, click, click, nothing.
There’s a bottle of water in my bag and I unscrew the cap and glug all of it, cursing myself for not rehydrating before I got into bed. My sister swears by drinking a pint of water as soon as she gets in from a night out (though, as I have to keep reminding her, a meal with her husband and another couple talking about sleep training and primary-school applications does not a ‘night out’ make). She’s big on mantras, our Emmy, and Do your future self a favour is her latest. I have mocked her relentlessly for this, of course, but secretly I think she’s on to something. I can only imagine that Future Emmy is permanently delighted with Past Emmy’s forward planning. Future Beth, on the other hand, feels perpetually let down by Past Beth, who brings nothing but a world of good-idea-at-the-time regret to the table. I imagine that’s what’s going to end up on my headstone: Here lies Beth. Beloved daughter, sister, aunty and friend. Full of good ideas at the time.
The fifth glass of wine was a mistake. I think about messaging Jory to tell him about my car woes and find out if he has a hangover, but he’ll already have started his day of teaching by now. He’s not a fun best friend during the work day and rarely engages with my bored-in-the-office WhatsApp advances. I raised this with him as a grievance once, but he just laughed and said, ‘But I’m working. You’ll understand one day, when you grow up.’
I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and weigh up what to do. Mum and Dad aren’t home, so I can’t ask them for a lift, or plead to borrow their car again until I get mine sorted (or until Dad gets it sorted; I’m trying not to think about how much I still owe him for the last garage bill). They left for grandchildren-babysitting duties before I was even awake, which means my sister isn’t around to rescue me either. Emmy would obviously have done her future self a favour and not bought a rusty, decade-old Vauxhall Astra with patchy service history to start with. ‘You know what they say, Beth. You buy cheap, you buy twice.’ As I keep telling her, I buy cheap because I am skint.
She’s right though, as usual. I should invest in a more reliable car but I’m supposed to be saving up to move out, or move away, or just do something that isn’t living with my parents which, since turning thirty last year, has become a rather tragic state of affairs. It never seemed quite so bad when I was still in my twenties but waking up in the room I grew up in on my thirtieth birthday was not a proud moment. I went out and bought a Swiss cheese plant and a mustard velvet armchair to try to make my childhood bedroom feel more sophisticated, but when Jory helped me redecorate, we forgot to freshen up the ceiling and now when I’m lying in bed I can still see the old Blu Tack marks where I stuck a picture of J from Five. J nearly gave me a heart attack a couple of times when he fell down from the ceiling on to my face in the night but I always stuck him back up and he stayed there for years, looking down at me with his edgy eyebrow piercing. A quick google tells me Jason Paul ‘J’ Brown is now forty-two. Even Bradley from S Club 7 is nearly forty. I need to move out.
The cheery local radio presenter announces the time between songs, reminding me that I am now running very late. The only feasible option I have left is to walk. It would show willing, perhaps even impress my new boss. Beth’s car broke down but she still made it in. Way to go, Beth! The trouble is, I’ve been sitting here for almost half an hour now and another idea has been percolating. I could just not go. Bend the truth a little. Replace ‘car problems’ with ‘under the weather’. It’s not an ideal solution, I know, but if I go with honesty, my boss might drive over to get me and I can’t face Malcolm on a hangover. It’s bad enough sitting opposite him all day doing the donkey work for his finance deals.
I think that settles it. Given that I already lied and took a day off for fictitious ‘women’s problems’ less than a fortnight ago, I can’t use that as an excuse even though I am genuinely now due on. There must be a lesson there somewhere. The Woman Who Cried Period. I’ll tell Emmy that one later.
I press send on my apologetic email to Malcolm and skip back indoors, the glorious promise of a whole day doing nothing stretching out in front of me. I wonder if there are any pizzas in the freezer. Mum sometimes picks up the takeaway-style ones I like when they’re on offer (‘daylight robbery’ at full price, apparently). I ought to switch my phone off in case work try to call but first I’m going to delete the Instagram Stories of me and Jory in the pub last night. I don’t think anyone from the office follows me on social media – I haven’t really been there long enough to make friends – but my profile isn’t private and it would be embarrassing if they hear about my migraine then stumble across a clip of me dancing suggestively with a pool cue. I cringe as I watch it. Why do I always gyrate like that when I’ve been drinking? I must have thought I looked good in the moment and, what’s worse, I must have asked a not-quite-as-drunk-as-me Jory to film it. I smile when I hear his laughter at the end of the clip then I delete it, hoping the 237 views it’s clocked up haven’t included anyone at Hexworthy Finance.
The second I turn my phone off, I remember that I was supposed to text Emmy to wish her and Doug luck with their mortgage appointment. Bugger. That’s why Mum and Dad aren’t here. They are at hers, looking after Ted and making sure Polly gets on the bus OK (even though, at fourteen, Polly is plenty old enough to get on the bus OK). I really need to show an interest in their quest to own their home after fifteen years of renting it. I am interested, it’s a huge moment for them, I’ve just heard rather a lot about it from Mum already this week. They’ve worked hard and done so well. Hasn’t your sister done well, Beth?
The house is silent. I make a cup of tea and take it through to the lounge, picking up my laptop from the coffee table. The home phone rings but I ignore it, settling myself on the sofa
Purely out of habit I look at jobs for a bit, which is always a tricky exercise, noting I can neither decide what I want to do nor where I want to live (other than not what I’m doing now, and not here in St Newth, where the annual highlight is maypole dancing). By the time This Morning starts, I have run out of things to look at so resort to a Facebook scroll on the laptop, which always feels a bit 2006. My niece’s generation, those at secondary school now, will never understand the hours of dedication it took to upload entire albums of night-out photos on a laptop, sometimes multiple albums from the same night (why?), nor will they appreciate the race we had to de-tag ourselves from the unflattering ones.
To my great surprise, Jory has sent me a message on Messenger. I click on it and am disappointed to find not a single hangover GIF or meme. His tone is very direct and a bit bossy, if I’m honest.
Beth, where are you? Please turn on your phone.
He’s a fine one to talk. It’s dicey but I decide to risk a call from the boss. Within moments of my phone screen illuminating to life, the vibrating pings of dread start. Oh god. Malcolm must have left a voicemail. I check the messages. Voicemail, unknown number (probably work). Voicemail, Dad. Voicemail, Jory. Jory? He never leaves voicemails – why is he phoning from school?
I’m just about to listen to the voicemails when I get a flurry of text messages. Dad has attempted to phone me seven times in the last half an hour. He’s also texted twice, once to ask me where I am and the second to tell me to phone him back as soon as possible. No ‘How are you?’ or kisses. Maybe he phoned the office for some reason and got told I had a migraine. It’s good of him to check in on me but seven missed calls seems like slight overkill on the worry front. It also wouldn’t be very helpful to someone who genuinely did have a migraine, I don’t expect. I hit return call and walk into the hallway to reach the best of the signal. He picks up after two rings.
‘Is that you, Beth?’ His voice sounds smaller than normal. I feel bad now that he’s worrying.
‘Yes, Dad, it is I. Did you phone my office? Sorry, bit of a misunderstanding on the headache front—’
He cuts me off by saying my name. He says it three times. There’s something about his tone that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
My heart is beating faster now. ‘Dad, what is it? Where’s Mum?’
He pauses. The dread in my chest tightens as he begins to speak very slowly. ‘Your mum’s here with me. Are you with someone? You’re not driving, are you?’
‘No, I’m not driving. I’m at home. God, Dad – what is it?’ I am trembling.
He’s talking away from the phone. I can hear a muffled conversation with Mum, who sounds upset. Peppa Pig is on in the background, so I know they’re still at Emmy’s but there’s another voice talking, too. A man. I don’t recognize it. It’s not Doug, my brother-in-law.
‘Stay there, love, just hold tight and I’ll be over as soon as I can.’ Dad is crying.
Now I am crying, too, without knowing why we’re crying. ‘No. Whatever it is, just tell me now, Dad. Please.’
He isn’t phoning about my headache. He has tried to phone seven times about something else, something he feels it would be best to tell me in person, something that is making him cry. It has to be something really fucking bad.
And then he says it.
‘I’m so sorry, love. It’s your sister and Doug. There’s been an accident.’
2
I don’t remember Jory arriving or picking me up off the floor, but he must have done because I am sitting in the front of his van, his hands on either side of my face. He is speaking to me but there is no sound. I watch his mouth moving slowly, the same exaggerated miming he used to do when we were kids attempting to talk underwater in the swimming pool. We would laugh as we surfaced for air, treading water as we reported back what we each thought the other had said. In over twenty years of friendship, I have never seen him look so worried.
‘Beth?’ Sound returns to my ears and I remember with a jolt why I was curled in a ball on the hallway floor. My entire body begins to shake.
‘Doug is dead.’ I state this as fact but look pleadingly at Jory, willing him to correct me or at least provide an updated, less devastating scenario, but he does neither. ‘Emmy is going to die, too, isn’t she?’ I want so desperately for there to have been a mistake, a mix-up. Improbable, I know, but not impossible. I begin bargaining. With God or anyone who can hear me. Make this not true and I will do anything. Bring back my brother-in-law, don’t let my sister die, undo the accident and I will never complain about my life again. My teeth chatter.
‘We don’t know that. Emmy’s made of strong stuff.’ Jory’s hands leave my face and he takes his suit jacket off, draping it around my shoulders. I remember him doing the same the night my first boyfriend finished with me following a drunken row. Jory arrived to find me shivering from shock, or adrenaline, or perhaps both. We sat on the kerb outside the nightclub with burgers from the burger van and he told me that everything was going to be all right. I want him to tell me that everything is going to be all right now but he isn’t going to. He starts the engine. ‘We really need to get to the hospital. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t having a panic attack first.’
‘Please just drive. I need to get there. How long—’
‘One hour twenty-five,’ he says, handing me a bag. ‘There’s a fresh bottle of water and a plastic bag in there in case you need to be sick. You said you felt like you might. I picked up your glasses, too. I thought your contact lenses might get sore. I didn’t know what to pack and you were just screaming …’ His voice trails off. It looks as though he has been crying. I have only ever seen Jory cry once, when I was at his house in Year 9 and Bramble the springer spaniel had just died.
I hold the things he has passed over in my lap, swallowing the lump that keeps burning the back of my throat. ‘I can’t lose her, Jor. Polly and Ted need her. I need her.’
He glances sideways at me but doesn’t answer.
I gnaw at my nails. Doug is dead. This keeps repeating on a loop in my head. I saw Doug two days ago. I went to their house, gate-crashing dinner after I heard they were having lasagne. My sister makes the best lasagne. She lets the top go a bit crispy, which is how I like it. I had spent the evening taking the piss out of Doug’s dad jeans and Emmy’s garden shoes. Now, there are police in their kitchen, saying things we don’t want to hear. How can he be gone, just like that?
Jory turns the radio on but swiftly turns it off again when the news reports a fatal accident on the M5. We sit in silence for the rest of the journey, the lump still burning in my throat.
The hospital is a maze of corridors and waiting areas. We walk as fast as we can without running. At one stage, a jog creeps in but Jory slows me down when I almost collide with a patient who is being wheeled out of the lift on a trolley.
‘Level 2, Area K.’ He repeats the directions we were given at reception for the Intensive Care Unit. ‘We’re nearly there.’
Mum and Dad are half an hour behind us. They’ve had to collect Polly from school and break the news before setting off. Ted doesn’t know about his dad yet but is coming with them to see his mum. We don’t yet know what the situation is with Emmy, other than it being serious, and it’s a long way to go back if it turns out he needs to be here. I can’t think about the kids right now because doing so makes my heart feel quite literally broken. I am stunned at just how physical the pain of this news has been, as though my chest is in a vice.
