Chapter 7

7

A little way east, Shelley is also having bathroom-related issues. Having just come in from work, she was eager to jump into the shower and sluice off the horribleness of the day. They are making cutbacks at the care home and two of her friends’ jobs are definitely going. Beth and Anja were in tears at coffee break, and Shelley wonders how long her own position as a receptionist will be safe. She’d only taken the job as a tiding-over thing, but has grown extremely close to the tight-knit team, as well as many of the long-term residents and their families. They’ve almost become like family to her too.

Peony Lodge isn’t one of those dismal homes where the residents are parked in a huge semi-circle around the TV. There are art, yoga and music sessions and frequent trips out. It’s a proper home , bright and cheery and buzzing with activity, and Shelley is proud to be a part of it.

She can’t shower yet, because Joel is languishing in the bath. However, the flurry of messages this morning has triggered a little hum of excitement in her, and Shelley manages to shake off her irritation. She pulls out her ponytail band in the kitchen and runs her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. Once a natural light brown, it’s been highlighted for so many years she has no idea what her natural colour might be now. It’s the only money she spends on herself really, and those two and half hours spent with James every couple of months represents a certain kind of bliss. James enjoys hearing about her travails with Joel and the kids and they have a laugh together. Shelley always emerges from his salon feeling restored, not just hair-wise but all -ways-wise.

Now she remembers that she left a bowl of home-made chilli defrosting in the fridge for tonight. So at least she won’t have to make dinner from scratch.

She opens the fridge. Her gaze lands on the bowl which had indeed contained chilli, but now looks as if it has been lapped at by a dog. Joel must have scoffed it while she was at work. And maybe the kids had some too? Martha and Fin’s secondary school is at the end of their road and they often pop home at lunchtime.

The logic of dumping the bowl back in the fridge, with the smeared equivalent of a teaspoon of chilli left it in, is beyond her. But Shelley isn’t feeling logical now, on this drizzly Wednesday afternoon, with Christmas hurtling towards her. These past few years, her mum and stepdad have spent their Christmases at home in Cornwall. But as is the custom, Joel’s parents will be here for the big day. A glum couple, fixated on terrible happenings in the news, Brian and Babs will ensure that war, murders and soaring crime rates are hot topics for discussion at the festive table.

Shelley’s thoughts switch back to the excitable message exchange between her, Lena and Pearl this morning. She’s hasn’t had time to process whether it really might be possible to run away to the Highlands this coming weekend. Of course she wants to very much. But she can only imagine how her family would react.

The front door opens. Shelley hears a schoolbag being thrown down on the hall floor before her daughter flounces into the kitchen. At seventeen, Martha is a tall, gangly beauty; all long, slender limbs and a mass of glossy dark hair that’s rarely combed, but always looks fantastic. With her earbuds jammed in, she avoids eye contact as if she has better things to do than interact with her mother.

‘ Hi , love,’ Shelley says pointedly.

‘Hi.’ Martha opens the fridge. ‘Oh,’ she mutters, as if unimpressed by the options available to her.

‘Did you eat the chilli, Marth? It was meant to be for dinner?—’

‘That wasn’t me,’ she snaps.

‘Okay,’ Shelley starts. ‘I only asked?—’

‘I didn’t touch it!’ Martha slams the fridge door shut and immediately stabs at her phone, perhaps to alert her lawyer over the wrongful accusal. Then she swans out of the kitchen and a few moments later Fin mooches in, making straight for the enamel bread bin.

‘Hi, honey.’ Shelley smiles.

‘Hey, Mum.’ At fifteen, Fin is less outwardly hostile than his sister but tends to keep himself to himself. He is also ravenous every second of the day, as if harbouring a tapeworm. He yanks the lid off the bread bin and glares into it.

‘There’s no bread.’

‘No, I forgot to pick some up,’ Shelley says mildly. ‘Did you eat that chilli, Fin?’

‘What chilli?’

‘The chilli that was there in the fridge, for…’ She starts to tell the back of his head as he leaves the room. ‘Fin!’ she calls after him. ‘You will remember to tidy your room, won’t you? Remember Gran and Granddad will be staying in Marth’s room on Christmas night. So there’ll need to be space in yours for the airbed—’ She breaks off, realising that she may as well be shouting into outer space.

She stands alone in the middle of the kitchen of their terraced house, wondering what to make for dinner now.

I know, she decides. I know what I’ll make.

Shelley opens the fridge and takes out the chilli bowl that no longer contains chilli and dumps it on top of the dirty plates and mugs and glasses that have accumulated in the sink while she’s been out at work. Then she returns to the fridge and lifts out the unopened bottle of sauvignon.

‘I know what we’ll have for dinner,’ Shelley announces out loud. She reaches for a wine glass from the cupboard, fills it to the brim and takes a fortifying gulp.

‘That you back, Shell?’ Joel calls out from upstairs. ‘I was gonna say. The tree’s still wonky. Looks drunk!’ He guffaws, and as Shelley tips more wine down her throat, she wonders how this has happened to her.

How she’s become the one in charge of Christmas – indeed of everything here – when no one else in her family seems to care that it’s happening. As if she is in fact Mother Christmas, insisting on putting up decorations and fairy lights and having a tree, when clearly, her husband and offspring couldn’t give a stuff.

Is she silly for trying to make it jolly and fun? For buying chocolate tree decorations even though the kids are nearly grown up? And for rushing out for mince pies for Joel’s mates, and making mulled wine, which he refused to do, saying he didn’t know how? ‘You just throw spices in and heat it in a pan, Joel. An infant could do it.’ Aw, couldn’t you do it, babe? I’m juggling so much stuff right now… What, precisely, was he ‘juggling’? Phone poking and enjoying languid baths?

Maybe it was also silly of her to ‘drag’ Joel around the shops, as he put it, when it would have been so much easier to order everything online. And perhaps, instead of pulling out all the stops to produce her usual all-the-trimmings Christmas dinner, with the home-made cranberry sauce her mother-in-law guzzles by the spoonful, she should just bang a ready-roasted chicken on the table and be done with it?

Rubbing at her tired eyes, Shelley installs herself at the kitchen table. It’s cluttered with papers and the kids’ school stuff, and jars of peanut butter and Branston Pickle with the lids left off. She glares at it all, then goes onto the group chat.

Several new messages have appeared since this morning.

Lena

Tommy’s parents are saying they always have beef as well as turkey. Keep telling T we can’t fit all that into my little oven but he says we’ll manage somehow. Why does he agree to everything they say?

Pearl

He’s just trying to keep the peace.

Lena

It feels like a terrible test they’ve set us to prove he’s marrying the wrong woman. You know they’d love him to get back with Catherine?

Pearl

Ignore them and stuff the beef! No pun intended…

Lena

I’ve never dreaded Christmas before. I want to run away.

Pearl

Let’s do it. Let’s run away together.

Shelley is poised to add her message when Joel appears in the doorway, a vision of still-wet hairy legs in a Muji waffle dressing gown. No, not a dressing gown. He’s told her off about calling it that. ‘Makes me sound like I live at your care home,’ he’d retorted. ‘It’s a robe .’

‘What’s for dinner?’ he asks now.

Shelley blinks at him, still clutching her wine glass. ‘I don’t know,’ she replies.

Joel looks at her expectantly, as if she doesn’t know now , but at any moment will come up with several options. Shelley just sits there, drinking wine.

‘Well, is there anything?’ he prompts her.

She places her almost empty glass on the table. No, how was your day? No, any news about the redundancies? He knows she’s been worried, that it’s all been bubbling away these past few weeks, the staff room humming with rumours and huddled conversations. At least, she’s been telling him. Sometimes it feels like talking to a brick.

‘I don’t know, Joel,’ she replies.

This seems to confuse him. ‘You don’t know?’ Then, as if he’s only just noticed: ‘Drinking already?’

She looks at him; this tall, good-looking and confident man, on whom she’d nurtured a crush from the moment she started working at the magazine. He’d already been out with Petra and Charlotte, and probably some others in the office that she and her friends didn’t know about. Then finally, one evening, he and Shelley had ended up sitting together on the coach back to London after an office day out in Margate. There’d been a lot of drinking that day.

‘I’ve always fancied you,’ he told her. ‘I think you’re amazing.’ Ridiculously, she’d assumed she was too low down in the food chain to warrant attention from the loud and glamorous art director. She wasn’t in the fashion, features or art departments. Not one of the creative team who came up with the brilliant ideas that made the magazine such a success. She didn’t interview pop stars or choose cover models or direct fashion shoots. She was just the editor’s PA, and Joel had never paid much attention to her before.

‘Yes, I am drinking,’ she announces now, necking the rest of her wine before adding, ‘And no, I have no idea what we’re eating tonight.’ Then she turns away from him, blocking his waffle-swathed form from her vision as she types:

Shelley

Girls I’m definitely up for this trip. Friday through to Christmas Eve. No one’ll miss us will they? I know I could drop dead right here and Joel and kids would step over my rotting corpse. So let’s book flights.