Kiss My Name (22 page)

WILL –August 2006

             
Simon Strong is my Dad. When I was nine, my Mum broke my heart by telling me that my biological father had been a boy at school that she had briefly dated. The boy, Jason McLaren had apparently had some involvement in my life whilst I was a baby, but had gone to Loughborough University and Mum had lost touch with him after he graduated. She heard on the grapevine that he had married a girl that he had met in his final undergraduate year. Apparently, my biological father’s parents still live in the Chorley area, but Mum says they were not keen on me being brought into this world and have long since wiped their hands of me. Funny to think though that I may be buying some frozen chips at Tesco and my grandparents might walk past and I wouldn’t even know! I’m not bothered. They are obviously unpleasant people, so at least I don’t have to devote any of my time to visiting them.

             
The fact that my name was Will McLaren rather than ‘Strong’ or ‘Moyes’ had aroused suspicions about who my father was, even before Mum sat me down and told me. Once I knew my background though, rather than it putting distance between Simon and me, it brought us closer than ever. The first thing I did when I found out he wasn’t my Dad, was run to him and cry in his arms, whilst giving him an almighty hug. This was a man who had chosen to bring me up, teach me right from wrong, cheer me on from the side of every sports field I was on and help finance my upbringing, not because of a genetic obligation, but purely because he loved me and my mother. There is not a better man alive and it annoyed me that I had the surname of a man I don’t even remember meeting, rather than that of a man who shared my life.

             
My Mum and Dad had been childhood friends and started dating soon after Jason McLaren abandoned my Mum. When I was three, my Mum moved out of my Grandad’s house and moved in with my Dad. They didn’t have a deposit for their mortgage, so took out a 100% mortgage deal. As soon as we all moved in, Mum tells me that Dad and I would spend every dry moment in the garden! It was during one dry summer evening, when I was three or four, that Dad brought out a bat, ball, wickets and bails and my love for cricket was born. Dad spotted I had a natural eye for the ball, so when I was six he took me to the junior cricket coaching at Chorley Cricket Club. By the following summer I was playing for the Under10s! By thirteen, I was playing for the Under13s, Under 15s, Under17s, Chorley District and the Chorley Men’s 3
rd
Team! Dad went to every game, every season. He would often complete the score book or keep the score board up to date. If I batted or bowled poorly, he wouldn’t be afraid to criticise my action or shot selection, but I always knew it was because he was desperate for me to do well. When I batted well or took a few wickets, he almost glowed with pride. Dad had been a schoolboy cricketer himself and once I started playing for the 3
rd
Team, he bought himself a new set of whites, a new bat, pads and box and brought himself out of retirement. He just wanted the opportunity to bat with me, which didn’t happen too often, as I batted four or five and he tended to bat eleven, but on the rare occasion we did, he absolutely loved it. I made him take a few quick singles too, in an attempt to get him to shed a few pounds! It was during one of our car journeys to a cricketing away day, in Simon’s battered Toyota, that I decided it was time to re-ignite a previously discussed desire to change my surname.

Dad was giving me some pre-match instructions, as per usual!

“Today, Will, if you get to bat, remember what I told you on Tuesday night, the first two balls are about survival.”

“Dad, I’m a better cricketer than you!”

“I know you are, but I know my limitations and I know how to maximise my potential. I was never bowled out slog sweeping second ball of my innings like you were on Tuesday night.”

“It was a daft shot, a moment of madness!”

“Just don’t do it again!”

“I’ve already told you, Dad, I won’t! What’s my target today then?”

Every game Dad would set me a target for the amount of runs he expected me to score as a minimum and the number of wickets he wanted me to take. If I achieved his target, there would be some kind of reward, such as a can and a chocolate bar or ice cream from Fredericks on the way home.

“Ten runs and one wicket.”

“Only ten runs, I’ll do that easily!”

“You won’t if you slog sweep second ball!”

“Dad, I won’t!”

“Good.”

“Dad, do you think you and Mum will ever get married?”

“Whoa, where did that come from? I thought we were talking about cricket.”

“Don’t change the subject, Dad!”

“You just did.”

“Do you think you will get married, one day?”

“I hope we will one day. Right now, Will, we already owe a small fortune, so adding to the debt by having an extravagant wedding just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Could you not just go to a registry office?”

“We could, but I think if we are going to bother, we might as well do it in style.”

“How much do weddings cost then? Fancy ones?”

“I’ve never really looked into it, Will, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t get any change from ten grand.”

“Ten grand! When will you and Mum ever get a spare ten grand?”

“We might win the lottery.”

“You won’t though.”

“Will, why are you so keen for us to get married? Your Mum and I are very happy together. We don’t need a marriage license to secure our relationship, it’s already very secure.”

“I know that.”

“Then why mention it?”

“I just wondered.”

“Will, don’t give me that! I know you too well, you didn’t just happen to mention it, there was a reason for mentioning it. What was it?”

“The ‘surname’ thing.”

“That old chestnut!”

“If Mum became a ‘Strong’ then I’d be the only one out of you, Mum, Chloe and me that wasn’t a ‘Strong’. I’d have more chance of getting Mum to change my name, if Mum’s name was Strong too.”

“Have you asked your Mum?”

“She just brushes me off. She says I can change it by deed poll to whatever I want when I’m sixteen. She says if I want to be ‘Will Strong’ or ‘Elvis Presley’ or ‘Engelbert Humpadrunk’, then I can be.”

“Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“Dad, was there any reason to correct me? It’s not as if I’m going to change my name to ‘Engelbert whatsisnamey’ anyway! The point is, I don’t want to change my name when I’m sixteen. I want to change it now, to Will Strong.”

“Do you know what that involves?”

“No.”

“Neither do I, Will, but presumably it would involve your biological father agreeing to it and for me to be seen as your legal guardian in some way.”

“Would that be a problem?”

“No idea. God knows where Jason McLaren is these days. As for me being your legal guardian and you changing your name, nothing would give me greater pleasure, but...”

“But if it is going to cost a lot of money, you won’t be able to do it because you’re skint.”

“Exactly.”

“Is everything in your life dictated to by money?”

“Most things. My health isn’t and my love for you and your Mum isn’t. Pretty much everything else is though.”

“That’s crap.”

Crap was probably the only swear word that my Mum and Dad permitted me to use.

“I know it is, but that’s adult life for you. They don’t say ‘schooldays are the happiest days of your life’ because they are particularly fantastic or fun, they say it because it gets even worse once you have a mortgage, loans, credit cards, bills to pay, mouths to feed and no ambition left.”

“Sounds great, Dad! Thanks for selling adult life to me in such a positive way.”

“Pleasure, son.”

“At least you can get drunk to forget about it all.”

“True but then you wake up with a hangover and even less money.”

“So what do you reckon then?”

“About what?”

“My surname. I don’t want it, I want yours, Dad. I want us to be a proper family. Can you not make that happen?”

“We are already a proper family. It’s very trendy to have a family with three different surnames. It’s all the rage, very twenty first century.”

“Well, I’d rather we just had one.”

“Will, let me look into it and if I can, I will, I promise.”

“Thanks Dad and I promise you that I won’t slog sweep my second ball.”

“Good lad.”

“I might slog sweep the first one though!”

SIMON – May 2010

             
I’ve never read any Shakespeare but I wish I had as I’ve had his advice on money mentioned to me a million times since I’ve been skint. In a nutshell, if you hadn’t borrowed the money in the first place, you wouldn’t be in the mess you are in now. There are plenty of people and institutions who deserve their share of the blame about the financial mess we got into. For starters, there’s the government, who were happy to make credit easily available so relatively poor people like me would keep on spending borrowed money, giving the false impression that everything was tickety boo. Then there are the credit companies themselves, who kept sending us letters in the post every day congratulating us on being pre-approved for an extra few grand, all we had to do was sign and return a simple form. Ultimately though, when the blame is dished out, most of it has to be taken by Nicky and especially me, for living in cloud cuckoo land for years and not realising our spending was getting out of control.

             
The problem with life is that none of us are guaranteed a tomorrow. In theory, if you knew for certain you were going to live until you were eighty or ninety, you would squirrel some cash away for the future. With what happened to Nicky’s Mum though and what happened to my brother, Nicky and I went through about ten years of living each day as if it were our last. We bought the kids great toys, ate out as a family every weekend in Wacky Warehouses and the likes, visited shedloads of kids amusement parks and even holidayed abroad. I had never done all that as a kid because my parents couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t afford it either but we did it anyway. The world went mad for a while and we were amongst the maddest. We enjoyed it whilst it lasted, but it sure as hell did some damage to our credit card balances.

             
Originally, we ignored the sound of alarm bells ringing. If one credit card was nearing its balance limit, it didn’t matter so much as we’d soon have another one, then six months later another and a year after that another one for good luck. For some reason, it never occurred to us to stop spending so much. Nicky was working as a ‘Nursery Nurse’ and I was still doing the window cleaning with my Dad, so despite living a lifestyle beyond what our wages warranted, we didn’t contemplate the future consequences. We just kept spending until we finally got to a stage that the credit card companies cried ‘enough’. By the time we were finally turned down for a new credit card we had accumulated £30 000 worth of debt and needed to pay around £7500 a year just to keep it from going any higher. We both had our hands in shit creek trying to move us along but found we were just going around in circles.

             
By the time Will was fourteen and Chloe seven, our ability to pay the minimum payments on our credit cards, as well as the mortgage, the council tax and a whole host of other household expenses was becoming near on impossible. I started losing sleep worrying about how we were going to manage and then the sleep deprivation was followed by chest pains. Initially, I put the chest pains down to indigestion, I was overweight and enjoyed my food and drink, but other than a weekly game of cricket, I was avoiding exercise. In an attempt to lose weight, I was trying to stick to three meals a day, but found myself gorging at meal times, creating, I believed, issues with heartburn. My financial and physical health had begun to spiral out of control and as a child of my generation, I attempted to remedy the situation in the only way I knew how, by going to the Bank Of Mum and Dad. Unfortunately for me, it transpired that the Bank of Mum and Dad had its own liquidity issues, so after thinking things through, I felt I had three options left.

             
The first option was to soldier on and hope things improved. How exactly they were going to improve, I did not know. Neither Nicky nor I were likely to be getting a brand new job paying extra money, so this option just felt like us sticking our head in the sand and was not going to improve the situation.

             
The second option was to make some sort of arrangement with my creditors. This was probably a sensible option, but the thought of dealing with these types of people scared me. If I was ever a few days late making a payment on a credit card, the phone would ring and a polite pest would demand to know when I would be catching up. At one stage I tried ignoring the phone calls, but they would then just ring incessantly. I had visions of bailiffs creeping through an unlocked door and emptying our house of all its contents. Through a lack of trust, a lack of understanding and a sense of shame I avoided this option too.

             
The third and final option, which logic told me was the correct way to go, was also the option I was most wary of. This option involved going cap in hand to Nicky’s Dad. Nicky had once mentioned that Arthur had told her that he had a six figure sum in a Building Society account and if she was ever struggling financially, all she had to do was ask. I hadn’t let on to Nicky exactly how bad the situation was, as I handled the finances and knew she would get into a right state worrying about it, if she knew the full picture. After several days of deliberating, indigestion pains that continued to worsen and mounting trepidation, I phoned Arthur and said I urgently needed to see him. Arthur being Arthur, he was less than accommodating. I rang at nine o’clock one Saturday morning, after another sleepless night and was keen to see him straight away to get the initial stage of the ordeal over with. Arthur preferred to make me sweat, said he had already made plans to go down to his allotment for the morning and would have to see me at lunchtime.

             
I spent the morning snapping at Nicky and the kids and popping indigestion tablets, before jumping in the car at quarter to twelve, telling Nicky I had to nip into Chorley to get a new pair of cricket gloves from JJB. I nervously rang the bell at Arthur’s, but when he didn’t come to the door, I decided rather than just sitting outside in the car, anxiously awaiting his return, I’d head over to the allotment and get things over with. Arthur already hated me. He’d hate me even more after this.