I stared at my mum in shock. I don’t think I had ever heard her swear before. And to hear that she’d been wanting to leave us… My mum? It couldn’t be true.
“What do you mean you’d been planning to leave all along?” I asked, quietly, unsure I wanted to hear the response. “How long have you and Jack been…?”
My mum sighed heavily and rubbed her eyes. “I didn’t mean… I just meant I’d had it in my head for a while—”
“No, you said all along. What does that mean? How long have you been—” I searched for a word that didn’t make me feel too disgusted, “—with him?”
My mum rubbed at her eyes. “Our history,” she said quietly, “goes way back.”
I already knew that Jack had been my mum’s boyfriend in her college days. They’d kept in touch and, over the years, he’d call in for a visit now and then. I didn’t know what he did for a living and didn’t much care, but I knew he travelled a lot. He wore battered leather jackets and smelled of cigarettes, and he tried to make conversation with me in a way that showed he had no kids of his own. I’d extricate myself from these situations at the earliest opportunity and go hang out with my dad in his workshop. My dad, for his part, always greeted Jack with polite detachment and then left my mum to entertain him. I would sometimes hear the two of them talking about their college days, the places they’d travelled, the memories they shared. My mum seemed giddy around him, laughing loudly and talking too much, but I also had memories of harsh whispers, hushed disagreements and sudden, unexpected exits. Had he been trying to lure her away from our family all along?
“My feelings for him never really went away,” my mum continued, quietly. “I resisted them for a long, long time, but…” She looked up at me imploringly and I glared angrily at her, willing her to get to the point. “We’ve only been together these past six months or so,” she conceded, “but I think it’s always been heading—”
“Six months! You’ve been having an affair for six months?!”
“I was going through a tough time, Jamie! I needed someone to talk to, he was here and—”
“Dad was here!”
“But your dad’s part of it, Jamie! He’s in it! He’s been under just as much stress as me. I just needed to talk to someone outside of it all and then…” she trailed off with a long sigh.
Six months ago. So around the time I “lost my way”, as my dad referred to it. My mum referred to it as me becoming a “complete bloody nightmare”. It started after that night at the fairground, gradually at first and then building momentum, until I didn’t know what to do with all my stress and anger other than stay out all night drinking until I forgot about everything, shouted at the people around me, turned every disagreement into a fight, and finally got myself suspended from the school my mum had so desperately wanted me to go to. Then, just as I was coming through it, the final blow; there was a girl, something had happened, she was pregnant, it was mine. My mum had cried and ranted and raged for most of a month – I’d ruined my life, wasted my opportunities. I was only a term into my A levels – how on earth was I planning on finishing those? In the moments when my dad had managed to calm her down, she had been the mum I wanted – putting her arms around me, telling me it would be okay. But her stress and disappointment would soon get the better of her again. I was the one she’d pinned her hopes on.
And so it was me, was it? I’d been the one to finally push her into the arms of another man. Not Laura, who had been a constant, steady source of concern and frustration for years, but me, the good boy only recently – but quite spectacularly – fallen from grace. I was the reason our family had disintegrated.
“You don’t get to pin this on me,” I said defensively, standing up so abruptly that my chair fell backwards and clattered against the kitchen floor.
My mum frowned and looked exasperated. “I wasn’t… Where are you going?”
“What else is there to say?!” I snapped.
My mum, her face pale and exhausted, opened her mouth, searching for the words to make things better, but nothing came out.
“Just go then,” I said, storming out of the kitchen.
“Jamie, come back!” I heard her shout, as I ran up the stairs. “I’m sorry!”
Chapter 7
Struggles
I’m concerned and bemused by the amount of time my son spends glued to his phone. Concerned because surely it can’t be healthy, and bemused because I can’t understand why anyone would want to be connected to other human beings twenty-four hours a day. I can count the number of people I care about on one hand, easily, and I know what they’re up to because they talk to me about it all the time, whether I want them to or not. I love them, but they exhaust me, all of them. One day, once Josh has left home and my dad’s no longer around, I plan on moving to the Peak District, renovating my great-great-grandad’s crumbling two-bed cottage and living in splendid isolation, working by myself, hiking and biking by myself. I could be happy like that. I really think I could.
But Josh isn’t like me. He’s sociable and outgoing, the centre of his friendship group. I suppose I was more like
