In June 1982, I was thirteen. Pre-internet. Pre-Facebook. Pre-Twitter. We were oblivious to the #proudparents of four-year-olds who’d swum five metres for a duckling certificate. We had no idea how many people were eating perfect poached eggs for breakfast. We certainly didn’t know that our neighbour down the road ‘loved her husband to the moon and back – twice’. And we didn’t have the pressure of capturing the one nanosecond that the whole family was happy against a sunny backdrop of turquoise sea, so that everyone else could feel a grumbling sense of dissatisfaction with their own lives.
1982 didn’t seem different to any other year. At weekends, I’d disappear off on my bike with a couple of jam sandwiches, a bottle of squash and a warning from my mother to ‘Mind what you’re up to’ before reappearing at teatime hours later. When it was rainy, I’d lie on my bed taping Kool & The Gang off the radio with the microphone jammed up against the speaker, desperately trying to get a version of Get Down On It that didn’t have the DJ talking over the beginning or someone shouting ‘Dinnertime!’ in the middle. When it was hot, I’d sunbathe on the Norfolk dunes slathered in baby oil, flicking through Smash Hits and plotting how to buy and wear a mini skirt without my mother finding out. The perennial arguments still raged on: why I couldn’t have my ears pierced, why we couldn’t have a video recorder, why I still had to go to church every Sunday.
The one thing my mother and I weren’t at loggerheads about was how often I needed to cycle to the library after school to find new reference books for a particularly onerous history project.
Or at least, that’s what I told her.
And that little lie made the big difference. It led to the ten minutes I could never get back, never undo. Like smashing your iPhone, leaving your bag on the bus, driving into a bollard in a car park – but with consequences that money couldn’t fix. That sick feeling of self-loathing that all of this could have been avoided if you’d just slowed down, taken your time, thought things through. Or as my sixteen-year-old son would say now, ‘Not been such a dickhead’.
But in those glorious ten minutes, I didn’t even realise I was making a mistake.
Let alone one I could never leave behind.
If the internet had existed back then, I’d have dreaded logging onto Facebook. No doubt my classmates would have been retweeting and WTFing until their fingers fell off.
But in 1982, the only thing that went viral in my little Norfolk village was glandular fever. I wouldn’t have expected to get away completely unscathed, of course. I would have braced myself for shocked disapproval from the milkman, an abrupt halt to conversation in the greengrocer’s or some knowing looks from the neighbours. Worst case scenario, I’d have skulked past the bus shelter, ignoring the jeers from the boys sharing stolen Benson & Hedges and swigging Bacardi filched from their parents’ cocktail cabinets.
No, for a mistake to go viral in the ’80s, you needed a deputy headmaster for a dad. A dad who adored his daughter and ended up in prison. To make sure it haunted you forever, you needed a Catholic mother to fall on her rosary beads and declare that ‘all that business’ should never be spoken about again.
Ever.
Chapter 1
Birthday presents terrify me. Nothing shows up the chasm between who you are and who everyone else would like you to be more than what they ‘saw and thought of you’. And what anyone thought of me never quite matched what I thought of myself.
By far the most dread-inducing present was the flourish of a gift from my mother, delivered in recycled paper carefully smoothed out and reused. Nothing screamed ‘this is the person I wish you were’ more than the parade of diaries, drawer dividers and polo-necked sweaters delivered to me over the decades. But this year, on my forty-third birthday, she’d surpassed herself. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, expectation scaffolding her face. She nodded at the box on the table. ‘Go on then. Open it.’
I picked at the Sellotape, taking care not to tear the paper. A gold cross necklace. I only wore silver. And I never wore crosses. Never. Of all the ways I’d tried to make amends over the last thirty years, giving in to my mother’s rampant Catholicism had remained a glittering exception. No conversation was complete without a variation on ‘God knows what’s in your heart’ – which was really my mother’s shorthand for ‘God will get you back’.
A great bubble of resentment surged up. An image of flinging the necklace into the patch of nettles at the bottom of the garden rushed through my mind.
‘That’s lovely, thank you.’
‘Put it on, darling. Come here, I’ll do it up for you.’
I sat down with my back towards her – a straight back in order not to cop the ‘You’re becoming so round-shouldered’ speech. As she clicked the necklace around my neck with a satisfied ‘Perfect’, I resisted the urge to leap up, throw open my kitchen cupboards and fling out the Wedgwood tea service she’d bought me ‘for best’. To sweep my Christmas present of fussy cut glass tumblers to the floor. To hurl around the collection of jugs she’d infiltrated into my home over the years in the hope that my children would stop their ‘uncouth’ dumping of plastic milk cartons on the table.
‘Go and look in the mirror.’
I walked out to the downstairs cloakroom and peered at myself in the mirror, amazed that my face looked smooth and neutral rather than like a ball of dough in the proving stage. I touched the cross. Not quite as hideous as the Pope Francis thimble, Pope John Paul II commemorative plate or the absolute pièce de résistance, the china Popemobile complete with waving pontiff. I could have made a fortune if I’d allowed the kids to put it all on eBay, but I kept it as an insurance against the day when she’d ask, ‘Now what happened to…?’
I knew Mark would tease me and say, ‘Why didn’t she have done with it and buy you a hairshirt?’ All our married life, he’d kept out of the tangled dynamics that passed for a relationship between my mother and me. He’d reluctantly agreed to have Jamie and Izzy baptised, but put his foot down about a full-blown Catholic upbringing. ‘I’m not having the kids indoctrinated with guilt, blame and shame in the name of religion.’
It was the one time I’d been forced to stand up to my mother when she got her needle stuck on when they were going to be confirmed. I’d fudged it by saying we’d let them decide when they were old enough. Now they were teenagers and refusing even to go to church, my mother was on a mission. But so far, neither of them appeared the slightest bit worried about going to hell.
I walked back in, concentrating on a light, sunny step.