‘Having a laugh about not wanting us to come for Christmas?’
Hmm. I should have thought that through better.
‘She’s not going to change her mind, Angela. She says she doesn’t want to come now.’
There was nothing like guilt piled on top of guilt to make you feel like complete and utter shite.
‘It’s just been so mad, Dad.’ I knew I was whining but sometimes, with dads, whining worked. ‘Work has been horrible and moving house is so hard.’
‘What’s the house like?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got a special tap just for drinking water,’ I said, turning my head towards the kitchen. ‘It’s mental.’
‘What does she say?’ I heard my mum screech over the James Bond theme tune.
‘They’ve got a tap just for drinking water,’ he called back. ‘In the new house.’
‘Well, la-di-da,’ she replied.
‘Dad!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t tell her that! Tell her I feel awful and that I’m sorry and between work and the house and Louisa and Grace turning up on the doorstep …’
‘What do you mean, Louisa turning up on your doorstep?’ he interrupted. ‘Louisa, our Louisa?’
Oh fucklesticks.
‘Another one?’ I offered, throwing some shit at the wall, hoping it might stick.
‘Another Louisa and Grace?’
‘Yes?’
‘Angela Clark.’
Eeep, both names. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘So let me get this straight, Louisa and Grace are in New York with you?’ Dad sounded as confused as I felt. ‘Without Tim?’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was worth a try.
‘Angela …’ Dad put on his best stern voice. It wasn’t very good. ‘I’m not on the wacky baccy now, tell me the truth. What’s going on?’
‘What’s going on?’ I heard Mum’s voice coming closer and prayed that my dad would have the sense to keep this to himself.
‘Apparently Louisa and Grace are over there,’ he said, not doing a very good job of holding his hand over the phone. ‘Did you know?’
‘Give me that phone,’ Mum demanded. I winced and gave bludgeoning myself to death further consideration. ‘Angela Clark, what’s going on over there? Why is Louisa there? Why don’t I know about this? Was she the one who called me?’
‘No, Mum, calm down—’
‘Angela, I don’t like being lied to. Shall I hang up the phone and call Louisa’s mother?’ she threatened.
I couldn’t believe something that had worked when I was fifteen still held water. Next she’d be threatening to take my TV out of my room and stop my pocket money. Oh God, TV. I hadn’t asked whether or not Alex had had the cable transferred yet. I bit my lip and pulled my knees up, knocking them together. One crisis at a time, Angela, one crisis at a time.
‘Right, I’ll just give her a call then. I have been meaning to pop over with a present for Grace.’
‘Fine. She’s here.’ I really hoped I never found myself in an interrogation situation. They’d only have to wave an orange jumpsuit at me and I’d roll over on anyone. Hopefully they would be after my mum. ‘She’s here. And you can’t say anything to anyone.’
‘Why would I say anything to anyone?’
‘Because you’re going to be mincing around the supermarket and you’ll see her mum or you’ll see Tim and you’ll be all “ooh, is Louisa having a nice time in New York?” and they won’t know what you’re talking about and then I’ll be in loads of shit and then you won’t have anywhere to stay when you get here because Louisa will have actually killed me. Actually killed me.’
There was quiet on the line for a moment. Well, quiet and the opening song to Live and Let Die. Some things never changed.
‘Why would I be in the supermarket?’ Mum asked.
‘Getting my pickled onions and Jaffa Cakes?’ I was a bit surprised that was the part of my rambling nonsense she wanted to focus on but still, I was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, however unlikely it was to come galloping into my life.
‘Well, that won’t matter now we’re not coming anymore, will it?’
‘It’s a long story, Mum, and we’re really busy with the move.’ Another kick at the boxes beside me. I hoped they didn’t have anything breakable in them. They did have fragile stickers on them but I’d been a bit free and easy with those. I liked stickers. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. She’ll probably be home by then anyway, but if you see anyone, don’t say anything. You don’t know anything.’
‘I can’t be responsible for the things I do and don’t say, Angela,’ she replied, all feigned innocence and breeziness. ‘It’s hardly going to be my fault if I see Louisa’s mother when I’ve gone out specially to buy you pickled onions and her daughter’s whereabouts happens to come up, is it?’
‘So you are bringing me pickled onions?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘we’re not. Call back when you’re ready to apologise properly.’
I couldn’t believe it. I had been transatlantically sent to my room.
Louisa was not going to be happy. At all. I pulled up a new text message and tried to work out what to say.
‘I may have dropped the tiniest of bollocks. Call me?’ I tapped, debating whether or not to include kisses. I went with two.
Three seemed like overdoing it, considering.
Lou hadn’t replied to my text by the time Alex got back from the old place so I decided she must be in the middle of a very intense deep and meaningful with her husband, and probably booking her flights back home at that very second. That or she and Jenny had fucked off out shopping and she hadn’t taken her phone. Not taking her phone would be very un-Louisa-like behaviour, but then again just about everything everyone was doing seemed like very un-them behaviour at the moment. Except for me, obviously. Cock-ups as standard.
When the last boxes were safely installed in the spare bedroom and our moving buddies had been sent on their way, I had hoped that Alex would take pity on me and let me have a little lie down. It was Saturday after all. Traditionally, that involved a lot of lying down, and the metaphorical boat had been rocked enough already. But no. Alex wasn’t through. Moving almost the entire contents of our apartment inside five hours on a Saturday morning wasn’t enough. I had not suffered enough. Alex wanted to go to Ikea.
Now, I was a girl who had braved the Next summer sale not once, not twice, but thrice in my pre-USA days so I was no stranger to a questionable shopping decision, but this? This was mental. I thought it was adorable that he would risk getting puked on when he picked me up and fireman’s lifted me out to the van and I sold myself on a lovely little story about a sorry-looking English girl scarfing seventy-five-cent hot dogs and bottomless paper cups full of pop while her wonderful husband pushed two trolleys around, single-handedly for so big and strong was he. But once we pulled into the car park and rode the Gladiators-style travelator up to the showroom, I was ready to kill myself. Literally launch myself over the balcony and spear myself on a reasonably priced coat rack. Ikea at two thirty on a Saturday afternoon, four days before Christmas. It truly was the seventh circle of Hell.
Moving to the States had taught me a lot about the world but few lessons had been more unsettling than the fact that Ikea is exactly the same all over the world. A Klippan is a Klippan is a Klippan. At first I’d been quite charmed by the fact. Knowing that you can go and sit on an identical version of your first ever settee when you’re three thousand miles and seven years away from it can be quite comforting, but after a while it just gets creepy. But my horror didn’t stop at the slightly shonky furniture and bargainous snacks. It wasn’t just the Stepford horse-meatballs and the bags of one hundred tea lights that were identical in this flat-packed social experiment. Oh no, it was the people. And the people were fucking horrible.
After giving him a brief update on my parental situation, Alex turned to look at me with wide, symp
athetic eyes.
‘Can you grab a couple of those extension cables?’ He pointed to a huge wire bin beside me while studying his shopping list, tiny pencil in hand. ‘You can never have too many, right?’
That was it. His entire response.
‘I think I’m going to cry,’ I replied quietly, grabbing three plastic-wrapped plugs and dropping them into the huge yellow bag hanging from my shoulder.
‘Huh?’ Alex looked up, a smudge of moving-day dust above his left eyebrow, almost hidden by his hair. I pasted on as big and bright a shiny smile as I could muster.
‘I think I’m going to cry,’ I repeated with as positive an attitude as possible.
Alex looked back at his list, nodding. ‘Yeah.’ He held up the dangling tag from a small, shitty coffee table. ‘We’ll get a drink on the way out.’
All the way here, Alex had been merrily explaining his theory that Ikea would be empty, that everyone would have already left the city or they would be on Christmas pre-visits but he couldn’t have been more wrong. I hadn’t seen this many people crammed into one shop since the Bloomingdales Black Friday sale.
From an anthropological point of view, it was fascinating. This one store featured a complete cross section of New York life. Only, I wasn’t an anthropologist, I was a tired, grumpy cow who wanted to eat pizza and go to bed. No matter where we went, we kept bumping into a young Hasidic couple and I walked into a wall trying to work out if the woman was wearing a wig. Then I tripped over the sari of a gorgeous Indian woman. There were dozens of little Hispanic children running around, all seemingly committed to knocking me down, and my heart softened for a moment when I spotted a truly beautiful multi-ethnic gay couple wandering around holding hands. At least it did until the white guy slipped his hands down the front of the black guy’s jeans and they disappeared into a fire escape. Slightly less romantic. And despite our differences, we all had one thing in common. Not a single one of us wanted to be there. Truly, the multi-lingual shouting and screaming was a beautiful thing. Sort of.
‘What are we actually looking for?’ I asked, dragging my feet along the floor and having flashbacks to trailing my mum around BHS in the summer holidays. ‘Don’t we have everything?’
‘I need a couple of things for the studio.’ He waved a hand around in a non-committal way. ‘I figured we should get everything fixed up before we never get round to it.’
It was a fair point. We were pretty bad at putting off today what could be taken care of never, but I really didn’t think we needed to take a tour of a fake family’s 350-square-foot studio apartment at that exact second. Who wanted to fight with angry college couples over a twenty-dollar coffee table that was always going to be wonky no matter how much care you put into building it when you could be snuggled up on the sofa, watching telly and having a little nap?
‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ Alex called from inside one of the pretend bedrooms. ‘Maybe we should get this for Grace?’
Snapping out of my fluorescent lighting-induced trance, I shuffled around two teenage boys, shoving each other into a test mattress, and followed Alex’s voice until I found him stood in the middle of a romantically decorated powder pink bedroom, complete with country modern furnishings and lots and lots of florals. It was the anti-Alex room. And it turned out the ‘this’ he was referring to was a cot.
‘Don’t you think she’s a bit big for it?’ I said, scratching my head. I really should have found the energy to wash my hair. Or at least put it in a ponytail. I really was disgusting. ‘I mean, she’s nearly two. Do two-year-olds sleep in cots?’
‘This is one of those convertible things,’ Alex explained. ‘Look, you just pull the sides off and it turns into a bed.’
I felt as though I had walked into a parallel universe. My muso boyfriend in his dark and dusty denim finery, standing in the middle of a bedroom so pink and pretty it was making me want to play some Joy Division and cut myself.
‘Yeah, I’m just not sure she really needs it.’ The yellow bag rustled as I moved, the sound of a thousand crisp packets accompanying my general discomfort. ‘They’re going to be going home soon and then what will we do with it?’
‘Then we’ll have it,’ he replied, struggling to ram the removable bars back into their slot. Great piece of craftsmanship, totally solid. ‘For when we need it.’
Totally devoid of a better response, I let my face fall into a completely emotionless expression and used my last ounce of energy to throw myself on the bed behind my husband. It was not a comfortable bed but horizontal was my default setting and, you know, any port in a storm.
‘We’re not buying a fucking cot, Alex.’ I thought it was best to be direct. And maybe shout a little bit. ‘We don’t need a cot because we’re not having a baby.’
‘We’re not having a baby today, sure, but what harm could it do to get this now and then put it in the basement until we need it?’
He did not sound terribly charmed by my reaction.
‘From the looks of it, it could do a lot of harm,’ I said, not moving. I wasn’t even sure if I could move. ‘It’s a piece of shit. But if you want to buy a non-existent baby a crappy deathtrap of a cot, don’t let me stop you. In fact, why don’t I just go and wait in the van?’
‘Because I would fucking love it if you could try to show a hint of excitement about the life I’m attempting to build for us.’ Alex didn’t raise his voice, he didn’t shout but he was not a happy man. ‘You don’t give a shit, do you? You haven’t even tried today. Or ever actually since I told you about the new apartment.’
‘Yes, I have,’ I whispered. ‘I do give a shit.’
Alex never swore at me, ever. I sat up on the bed and wished I hadn’t. He looked so angry. It was an expression I didn’t recognise on him. He wasn’t even this mad when we found out Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl.
‘When?’ he asked, throwing his arms out and letting them slap against his sides. ‘Because all I’ve heard about is your magazine and your friend and your mom and dad coming over and your Christmas plans. I haven’t heard shit about me. I haven’t heard anything about us. I’ve been working my ass off trying to create this life for us, for our family, and all you care about is yourself.’
We were not going to have our first big, proper row in a pretend bedroom in Ikea. There wasn’t even a real door to slam. There was, however, a growing crowd outside our set.
‘You don’t think you’re overreacting a little bit?’ I asked with wide, warning eyes. ‘Where’s this coming from?’
‘I’m not really surprised that you’re surprised. I haven’t really been top of your agenda lately, have I?’ He kicked the leg of the bed and the whole thing wobbled. Really, Ikea did need to reinforce their furniture better. We couldn’t possibly have been the first couple to go at it on a Saturday afternoon inside these four walls.
‘You’re always top of my agenda, the whole Christmas thing was about putting you at the top of my agenda,’ I said, immediately feeling horribly guilty. ‘OK, so yes, there’s a chance I haven’t been able to give the move as much attention as I would have liked but it has been a busy couple of bloody weeks. And you did sort of surprise me with it.’
‘It’s not just the move.’ He looked like he was ready to explode. ‘It’s everything, Angela. I’m never your priority.’
‘Can we not talk about this now?’ Aside from my inherent fear of ‘making a scene’, I really wanted a time-out. I needed two minutes to work out what to say – my brain still wasn’t firing on all cylinders, if it was firing at all. ‘Can we do this at home?’
‘No, we can’t,’ Alex replied. He did not share my fear of public embarrassment. He was a musician after all. ‘I’m sick of waiting to talk about everything on your schedule. I’m sick of waiting for you to get home from work. I’m sick of waiting for you to finish up with Jenny. I’m sick of waiting for you to decide when you want to start being a grown-up.’
I felt my feet getting stompy. Fine. If we were going
to do it, we were going to do it.
‘What are you talking about?’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re the one who sods off on tour. You’re the one who vanishes into his studio for days on end. You’re the one who doesn’t know what bloody day it is.’
‘That happened one time,’ he thundered. ‘And I had been working non-stop for three days.’
‘But you’re sick of waiting for me to come home from work?’ I was more upset than angry but I didn’t know how to tell him. So, obviously, I attacked. ‘And you’re the one accusing me of not being a grown-up? Tell me, what grown-up thing is it that I’m not doing?’
‘Maybe not getting wasted the night before we move?’ Alex was out and out yelling and every time he shouted, I could feel my temper rising higher and higher. Who knew I could be this angry and this hungover at the same time? ‘Maybe enabling your friend’s dumbass runaway behaviour? Maybe a bunch of other things?’
‘Whatever it is, just say it,’ I snapped, jumping up off the bed until we were face to face, on either side of the world’s shittest cot. ‘For fuck’s sake, Alex, just say it.’
He stared down at me, his breathing hard and heavy, two red spots glowing in his pale cheeks. I had never, ever been scared of him before but I literally had no idea what he was going to do. And so, of course, he did the last thing I imagined he would.
‘I want to have a baby,’ he said, covering my hands with his own.
It was a good job the bed was right behind me because that cot was not strong enough to hold me up. I pulled my hands away and sank backwards, waiting to catch my breath. Alex stayed exactly where he was, his eyes still wild. I could almost hear his heart pounding over the tinny music playing over the loudspeakers. How had we got into this?
‘And you thought the best way to go about that was to start screaming at me in Ikea?’ I asked. ‘Really?’
‘No, I thought the best way would be to marry you,’ he said, still not moving. ‘And love you and be happy and wait and that it would just happen. But it didn’t and you won’t even talk to me about it. So then I figured maybe I’d buy us an apartment that would feel like a home but you didn’t even seem to notice that had happened. So tell me, Angela, what am I supposed to do now?’