I Hope You Dance (5 page)

He would be in Maggie's school year. I felt a prickle of anxiety at the prospect of this gorgeous, dangerous-looking boy becoming another wound in my precious daughter's heart.

“Ruth!” Lois gave me a hug, the round ball of baby strapped to her front making it impossible for her to reach properly. “You're the answer to my prayers. You've no idea what it would do to me running this zone alone. That sign is a mistake. I made a more accurate one.”

She pointed to the back of the “creative zone” sign, where it hung down below the gazebo edge. Written in thick black marker pen, this side read “clothes wrecking chaos I don't know what I'm doing migraine zone”.

“I think I might have suddenly remembered an urgent appointment somewhere else. Far, far away…” I turned, ready to bolt.

Lois grabbed onto my arm with her tiny, impossibly strong hands. “I don't think so.” She grinned. “Look.” She waved at a painting that some primary-aged child must have drawn. “Which one of the Harris family do you think
created
that?”

“Um. Freya?” I guessed it was probably the eight-year-old, but I couldn't remember his name.

“What? Not even Connor?” That was it – Connor. “Me, Ruth. I did it.”

I tried to hide my smile.

“And with EIoise ill, I'm left in charge. The kids saw through me in about ten seconds. They kept asking me to demonstrate art techniques and help them out and then pretended to be upset when I ruined their craft. Yesterday they waited until both my hands were stuck to an egg carton and then had a paint fight. No wonder Eloise's stomach couldn't take it.”

“I'm not sure what you expect me to do, Lois. I find one child a handful.”

“I expect you to wow the kids with your legendary art skills into respecting the creative zone again. I'll do the rest.”

The next two hours passed in a gluey, paint-splattered, clay-encrusted whirlwind. I sketched tigers, fashioned elephants from milk cartons, butterflies from pipe-cleaners, caterpillars from clay, and ended up wearing so much paint I felt like a walking, talking canvas. The sign was true. My clothes were wrecked, I had no idea what I was doing and yes, I did feel a migraine pecking at the back of my eyeballs. But, boy. For two hours I forgot about poverty, homelessness, irritating parents, estranged parents, Vanessa Jacobs' dress shop, grief, deep, dark loneliness and crawling back to Southwell with my tail between my legs. I had a ball.

When was the last time I had done that?

For the final section of the afternoon we had a short talk by the perky woman about how Jesus loves to help us out with all our problems. She asked the kids if they had any problems they wanted Jesus to help them with.

One little girl was worried about her hamster, which had been flushed down the toilet by her elder brother. Another one felt anxious she might not get a pink and purple sparkly princess fairy ballerina mermaid castle cake for her birthday next week. A boy put his hand up. He needed some help finding worms to put in Casey Jones's lunchbox. Someone else wanted Jesus to make her ill on
Saturday so she didn't have to wear that stupid bridesmaid's dress to her auntie's wedding. A tiny, frail little girl asked if Jesus could help her mummy not die from her really bad cough because she would miss her mummy if she couldn't see her ever again. A hush fell on the crowd as every person in that room thought about the sweet, small girl never seeing her mummy again. The woman at the front looked at her. “Would it be okay if we asked Jesus to help your mummy get better?”

Yes, that would be okay.

They asked Jesus. The little girl said thank you very much and the band leader tried three times before he managed to choke out the going home song.

By the time the kids left, the zones were dismantled, and four hundred chairs were being set out ready for the church service on Sunday, it was nearly six. Matt had arrived earlier to help clear up before taking his younger children home, leaving Lois and Seth to finish off. I watched Maggie try to surreptitiously work her way closer to Seth's section as they moved back and forth putting chairs out. Seth had his earphones on, head down and frown in place as he quickly and mechanically filled up the rows.

Oh, Maggie. Be careful.

Lois came over to congratulate me for the hundredth time on saving the creative zone. “You're a natural. Those kids loved you. You should come and help us out on Sundays.”

I concentrated on lining up the chair in my hands with the rest of the row.

“Thanks.”

“Will you at least think about it?”

“Okay.”
There, I've thought about it. Sundays? Church days? My answer is no.

“So, first Friday of the month is girls' night. This month I'm celebrating surviving a whole six weeks with no school. Don't get me wrong – I love having the kids around all day, and lazing in our pyjamas until lunchtime if we want to – but I am so tired, my
eyeballs feel as though they're filled with sand. We're meeting at mine at eight for a Chinese. You're coming, aren't you?”

“I don't know. I wasn't really… Mum has probably already cooked something. Maybe next time?”

Lois began to say something, then a light popped on in her head. She leaned in closer. “Please come. You really helped me out today. Please let me buy you a take-away as a thank you. I owe you big time.”

“No you don't. I enjoyed myself, honestly. But I'm really tired. I don't think so.”

Seth sauntered across. “The chairs are done. Are you nearly finished, or shall I walk back?”

“One minute, honey.” Lois furrowed her brow. “The girls are really friendly. They'd love to meet you. Can't you come just for a bit?”

Friendly women? That was precisely the problem.
What brings you to Southwell, Ruth? Where are you staying? What do you do?

I couldn't bear pity, or trying to bridge those awkward moments when I told people my partner had died and no one knew what to say. The attempts at optimism:
I'm sure something will turn up!
Or encouragement:
Wow, you are so brave!
So I would be left either dodging questions all night, or committing social suicide by talking about the taboo “girls' night” topics of death, debt and desperation. I was, quite frankly, too exhausted to deal with it.

“I'll come another time, I promise.”

Lois conceded defeat. “Well, have a nice evening. I'll see you soon. And thanks again.”

So how come, two hours later, I found myself once again loitering on Lois's cluttered front path, clutching a bottle of flavoured spring water and trying to work myself up to ringing her doorbell?

My mother. How else? I was only a thirty-three-year-old woman. I couldn't possibly be left alone to control my own social life, could I? Or any other part of my life, it would seem…

I should have sussed that Lois had given in too easily. That sneaky pastor's wife had phoned Mum.

I had been standing wrapped in a towel following a long shower when my bedroom door crashed open.

“Seriously, Mum?”

“Sorry, Ruth. But I am too exasperated for formalities like privacy. I am reaching near dangerous levels of frustration and bewilderment. How can someone so impressively intelligent make such consistently stupid decisions?”

I sighed. “Lois called.”

“YES, LOIS CALLED!”

“I can run my own life, Mum. Please back off before I flip out and stab you in your sleep one night with your Harrods letter opener. I'm somewhat unstable at the moment.”

“Precisely. You are all inside out and twisted up and out of time. You need help. Get dressed in your least hideous outfit, brush your hair and go and make some friends.”

“Just stop it! Didn't you hear me? I spent all afternoon doing
what you wanted, making friends with Lois, talking to people. I am really tired. I'm having something to eat and then reading a book in bed.”

Mum pointed her elegant finger at me. “You are not tired, my darling. You are bored, and lonely, and lost. No one can live without friends. You in particular need them to heal, and to grow, and to find yourself again. These women are good women. They will be those kinds of friends.”

“I have friends.”

“No, you do not. You know what a true friend is, and that zero plus zero equals no friends.”

“That is rubbish! You have no idea who my friends were in Liverpool.” I grabbed another towel and started rubbing at my hair with it.

“Name one.”

“Louisa.” I threw the towel on my bed and instead turned on my hairdryer to maximum power.

“Work colleague.” Mum, refusing to take the hint, shouted over the noise.

“So? I can be friends with my colleagues. What about Susanna?” I gestured the appliance wildly.

“How often did you see them out of the office?”

“At least once a month.”
So there
, I muttered in my head.

“At a non-work-related do?” She reached down and flicked the dryer off at the socket. Silence.

“How many times have they texted since you left work? Phoned? Offered to help pack, dropped by with flowers or a box of chocolates to cheer you up, politely hinted that you need a haircut or given you a hug?” She banged her fist into my bedroom door, her point well and truly proven. “It is a horrible, heart-wrenching fact, but is still a true one. You have no friends, Ruth. And by golly how you need some!”

One day, someday, hopefully before my hair is completely grey and I have lost the majority of my marbles, I will finally surrender
to the truth that my strange mother is always –
one hundred per cent of the time –
right. I hate it. But I love her. I got dressed in my least embarrassing clothes, brushed my hair and went.

 

Lois opened the front door. “Stop lingering on the doorstep, Ruth. I'm paranoid you're judging the state of my garden.” She gestured behind her. “Come through – we're in the back.”

Lois led me through the house, past discarded transformer toys, piles of folded laundry and the reams of paraphernalia that affix themselves like barnacles to large families. The dining room contained a formal oak table barely visible underneath piles of papers, books, a dismantled computer and more clothes. At the far end a pair of French doors opened up onto a flagstone patio. Here stood another wooden table, this time laden with a Chinese take-away feast set around two silver candelabras. The rest of the garden consisted of a huge lawn, with a football goal at one end, an enormous tree with a tree house, a trampoline and a swing. Nearer to the patio was a sand pit, a saggy looking paddling pool and more of life's clutter.

Around the table sat four other women. I recognized one, Ana Luisa, the Brazilian housekeeper from the Big House. She jumped up and kissed me on both cheeks, engulfing me in tropical perfume that wafted out from the folds of her bright maxi dress. The others Lois introduced and they smiled and said hi. Lois then said grace.

“Hi God. Thanks for tonight. Thanks for great food and the chance to eat it with women who chew with their mouths closed, don't empty their bowl onto their own – or anybody else's – head, and break wind discreetly, not with a prior announcement. It is wonderfully refreshing, and I am already blessed. Thanks especially that Ruth was able to join us. Please help her to find this evening restorative and fun. Amen.”

The other women said Amen and started to pass around the plates and load them up with food. One of the women, Emily, lifted every container that Lois passed her up close to her nose and
examined it, before either scooping some onto her plate or passing it straight on to me. She used careful, deft movements and it was only when she spoke to me I realized why.

“Is this chicken or pork?”

“Um…” I leaned in. The light was beginning to fade and we were in the shadow of the cottage wall. “I think it's chicken.”

“Is the pepper red or green?”

“There's both. Red and green.”

“Could you pick me out some red, and some meat?”

I lifted some onto her plate.

“Thanks, Ruth. I hate green peppers. I don't understand why anyone eats them. Aren't they just unripe red peppers? We don't eat green bananas or green strawberries. Or green tomatoes. Except for in that film. Which was a great film, don't get me wrong, I sobbed like a pregnant woman, but it was wrong about the green tomatoes. Don't you think green peppers are just a big con? I reckon it's a whole emperor's new clothes situation and the supermarkets are laughing their heads off at us while banking on nobody ever saying anything. Well, I'm not fooled. I'm not playing their game. Only ripe vegetables pass these lips.”

Ellie, a forty-ish woman with a man's haircut and dressed as though she expected to be riding a bucking bronco before the night was over, hollered across the table, “Is she going on about peppers again? Let it go, woman! Give it a rest! Ruth does not need to spend her first evening with us being hit over the head with your pepper speech. You need to find yourself a life.”

“I have a life!”

“Well, you need to look for a better one.”

“That's offensive.” Emily folded her arms in mock outrage. “You just told a partially sighted woman she has a poor quality of life, and then taunted her about how she can remedy her miserable situation. What are you going to do next? Pass me nasty notes I can't read? Maybe Ruth would rather discuss peppers with me than listen to a cowgirl bullying a person about their disability.” Emily pointed
her fork in Ellie's direction. “I need to get a life? And that from a woman whose best friend is a horse.”

“I love you, Em,” Ellie shouted back.

“Love you too, sister. If you were a pepper you'd be totally scarlet.”

As the light faded and the shadows crept further across the lawn, bringing with them the evening insects, the guests continued to shout, laugh, mock each other, throw advice across the table – welcome and unwelcome – eat more than a fireman after a double shift, tell stories and share the honest ups and downs of their up-and-down lives.

I listened to Emily tell us about how she had barged in on a strange man in a restaurant toilet cubicle when her kids sent her into the men's for a joke, laughing so hard she choked on a prawn cracker. I watched Ellie and Ana Luisa hold their friend Rupa's hands as she cried because another round of IVF had failed and she was broke, and felt broken, and was trying so hard not to grow bitter. Lois told us how between Connor's nightmares, Poppy's medical needs, an eight-month-old baby and a teenager who sometimes stayed out past two doing who knows what, she and Matt were surviving on three hours of sleep a night, and still an ungainly hunk of the four hundred Oak Hill members thought that Pastor Matt and his unpaid wife should be there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to sort out their problems, dry their tears, pick up the pieces of their bad decisions and listen to them harp on about how tough their lives were.

“Don't get me wrong – some of them do have genuine problems, and need our help. And we love to help them. But less than one per cent of those problems are emergencies needing to be dealt with during our off-time, half of them should and are being dealt with by the pastoral team, and the rest are nothing that with a bit of common sense and effort these flabby-bottomed people couldn't solve themselves. A tiny, yet misguided, proportion call us at idiotic times of the day because they want to feel important. They think their problem is worse than everybody else's and quite frankly they're
too selfish to care that we are so, so tired we haven't had a decent romantic evening together in four months and thirteen days. Yes, I am counting. And yes the word ‘romantic' is a euphemism. I'm on the brink of yelling it out in the middle of Sunday's service. Ruth, I'm presuming you've worked out these evenings are confidential.”

I listened, and laughed, and cried a little bit, and did not feel for one second pitied, or a loser, or anything less than a normal human being who gets up every morning and lives and breathes and simply tries to do the best she can to take the muck life throws at her and build a nest with it.

Somewhere around eleven, Lois went inside to make coffee. I cleared my throat, snuck a glance back inside the house and spoke.

“Could we maybe do something for Lois?”

Everybody leaned forward and listened.

“I was thinking. Between us, maybe we could take care of the kids for a night so she could go away with Matt?”

Rupa shook her head. “I don't think it's that simple. They're foster kids, so aren't allowed to be left with just anyone.”

“Surely we could find some way round that. Have them go away, without actually going away?”

We considered this. “I wouldn't mind coming over and sleeping on the sofa, getting up in the night to see to the children,” Ana Luisa said. “But I don't think this is very romantic to hear Connor's nightmares through the wall, and listen to someone else try to comfort him.”

Ellie tapped her fork against her glass. “They need to be near enough to make it legal and appropriate, but far enough away to pretend they aren't.” She looked around. “What about the tree house?”

“Or a caravan?” Rupa asked. “Is that romantic? I've never stayed in one.”

“What about one of those VW camper vans? They're cute. I bet you can hire them. We could park it in the garden.” Ellie mimed driving a camper van.

“No, no, no!” Ana Luisa waved her hands about to emphasize her point. “Too small. And can you imagine what the bed is like? Not good for romance! You might as well bring your horse box, Ellie.”

“A tent would be bigger.” Ellie looked at Ana Luisa. “But it would be freezing at night now that we're heading into autumn. And air beds are definite passion killers. Almost as bad as a water bed.”

“Ouch, Ellie.” Emily winced. “I do not want to know how you acquired that information.”

“Ignore her!” Ana Luisa purred. “Tell us everything!”

I was still thinking about other ways to sleep in the garden in relative comfort.

“What about a yurt? I've seen pictures of them. You can get them with four-poster beds, rugs and things to make them really luxurious. We could put a coffee table and cushions in there; leave them a lovely meal and some chocolates.”

“Oooh.” Ana Luisa's eyes shone. “Like an Arab prince and his beautiful bride. This is a wonderful idea, Ruth! I can picture this… it looks good!”

Emily clutched my hand. “Yes. With millions of flowers in there. And candles.”

“Candles in a tent? Isn't that a fire hazard? They could get all excited and knock one over, and then that would be the end of that.” Ellie mimed getting excited and knocking over a candle.

“Stop miming; I can't see you in the dark. It's rude,” Emily huffed.

“I'm getting excited and knocking a candle over. You can imagine it in your head. Now I'm putting out the flames with the sheet.” Ellie pretended to choke on the smoke.

“If candles are no good, we could string up loads of fairy lights.”

“And we would need some sort of heater, and a little cool box filled with treats like strawberries and cream.” I considered what else. “They'd have to use the bathroom in the house – that's the only thing.”

“Sorry, Ruth. Has no one told you where the bathroom is?” Lois had crept up behind me with a tray of drinks. “Rupa, can you grab those mints you brought while I show Ruth to the loo?”

I followed Lois inside to the downstairs bathroom, which also contained a shower cubicle. Problem solved. We would just make that area of the house off limits to the children for the night.

By unspoken agreement, we said nothing about our yurt plans to Lois. I sat back in my chair and sipped my coffee, watching the easy conversation between these possible new friends and feeling a tiny spark of something strange and wonderful mixed up in my belly among the noodles and black bean chicken. I named it hope.

 

Saturday was a sharp jolt back into reality. I took Maggie school uniform shopping in Nottingham, trying not to let her see how much it cost me, mentally and in pounds and pence, to kit her out for the new term. I wanted her to fit in, to feel confident and look good, but that came at a price. It was a whole extra type of grief, having to scour shops for sale items, say no to a thirty pound school bag, try to balance shoes that would last the year with the scant pennies in my purse. Two years ago all this had been of little or no consideration. I tried to push down the anger I felt towards Fraser for leaving his daughter in this situation. Tried to hide from Maggie how much it hurt to have to say no. Thought about the cheque from Dad, hidden in a shoe-box at the back of my wardrobe.