‘Sure.’
Sam trudged up the stairs and ten minutes later sank down into warm water laced with her favourite Diptyque bath oil. She didn’t care that it was summer and already warm inside; she needed this, and she soon shut her eyes to let the aroma of the oil take away her heavy thoughts. The hardest thing about being a single parent had to be this: having the whole weight of responsibility resting on your shoulders and nobody else’s. Simon was off on the other side of the world doing whatever he was doing, he had brief flurries of contact with his daughter and when he did, his stories were full of excitement; tantalising tales of a foreign land Audrey had never been to, a lifestyle she wasn’t a part of. Whereas Sam… Well, she got the day-to-day grind, the pushing her daughter to get out of bed on a school morning, the nagging over homework, the snippy attitude and mood swings, the constant attempt to find a window into her child’s life.
Sam lay in the bath so long she’d begun to drift off when she heard the front door bang. She hoped it wasn’t anyone to see her; not only wasn’t she dressed, she didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. She understood why some people didn’t let it slip about losing their job. There were people who continued to put on a suit every day and look as though they were driving to the office when really they were hiding out in a coffee shop until they could return home as usual. She got it. Admitting to failure wasn’t something she liked to do and it definitely wasn’t something she wanted to share.
She hurried to get out of the bath, wrapping herself in a towel while she waited for Audrey’s holler up the stairs to tell her who was waiting. She hoped it wasn’t Sharon, her neighbour; she’d been over three times last week trying to get Sam to sign up for the bloody park run. The whole street was in on it, going en masse down to the local park in their Lycra and brightly coloured trainers. Sharon saw it as a good way to get to know your neighbours. Sam saw it as her idea of hell. She wasn’t a runner and she definitely wasn’t one to mingle with the neighbours. She had her friends and at home she liked a bit of anonymity. She wanted to be able to come and go and have an escape in her own space without interruptions.
Maybe she wasn’t all that different to her mother.
‘Audrey,’ she called out from the bathroom door. If it was Sharon, she’d go down in her towel and pretend she was rushing to get ready to go out.
When there was no answer, she went downstairs and called her daughter’s name a second time, went into the lounge, the dining room, back up to Audrey’s bedroom and then downstairs again. And when she realised the bang of the door had been Audrey leaving, she picked up her phone from the kitchen bench and bashed out a message to her daughter demanding to know where she was.
When she got no response, she lost her temper and typed an angry, ‘You’re grounded!’ The get-home-now implication was in those words without even trying.
She slammed her phone down again and when she saw her bag open on the floor by the stairs where she’d left it, her heart sank. She pulled out her purse and sure enough the twenty-pound note from the back section had gone.
Sam called Audrey this time and left an irate message. Audrey didn’t call back but Sam’s phone pinged with a text message moments later: Gone to the cinema with Sid. Won’t be late.
Just like that, as though she hadn’t stolen money, as if their earlier conversation hadn’t even taken place, as if she hadn’t been suspended from school. And never mind the rule that Audrey didn’t go out after seven on a school night. She spent most of her evenings on her damn phone scrolling through Instagram posts so it wasn’t a real hardship, but it was a rule that had been broken tonight on top of everything else.
Sam had been the complete opposite of Audrey at the same age. Holed up in her bedroom every night, partly because her father was always drumming it into her that she needed an education if she wanted a good life, Sam had studied hard to make him proud. Even after he died, his approval followed her everywhere she went. When she passed her driving test only months after he passed away, she pictured his smile; when she graduated, she imagined him in the audience watching her dressed in her robes and being presented with her degree certificate. When she got her job as a customer services manager, she could hear his congratulations and pride; when she got divorced, she felt his disapproval. But as well as wanting to please her father, Sam had realised very quickly that the harder she worked and the more secure job she landed, the better chance she had to escape the prison of the home her mother had made unbearable to live in. And after she met Simon it became even easier. They got together, married in a whirlwind and moved to a different part of the country to start over.
Thinking of how her relationship was with Audrey, Sam knew she’d messed up just as much as her own mother had. Maybe for different reasons, but the end result was the same. They’d both ended up with a daughter who didn’t want to spend time with them, a daughter who wanted to get away. The Veronica Bentley Sam knew from her late teens, and for every year since, wasn’t the mum Sam remembered
