Marmite, Diamantés and Fuzzy Carpets

Clare had asked if she wanted them to stay the night; rent a room at the hotel across town. Isabelle had laughed as she unpacked pots and pans, picking up the sandwich toaster in the shape of a cow that friends from home gave as a leaving present, bending over to put it in a kitchen cupboard.

“Mum, I’ll be fine. Look, I even have an egg whisk!”

Now Clare looked over at Kev, who was driving. He smiled at her, reaching over the gear stick to put a hand on her thigh.

“She’ll be fine, don’t you worry love.”

Isabelle was waving from the college green, all smiles and contained excitement.

Clare waved back, shifting in her seat to keep her in sight until the last possible moment, watching the flash of yellow that was Isabelle’s jumper disappear as they rounded the bend. She turned her head, leaned against the passenger seat and looked at the towns speeding past them. She flattened her hand against the cold glass, leaving a star-shaped print that quickly faded.

Clare hated September, a month that brought with it the end of summer and all holiday feeling. This year especially, when she and Isabelle had spent two weeks together on a beach in the Costa del Sol - no men, no friends, just them lying in the sun, eyeballed by tanned Spaniards who took them for sisters. Even today, when they had been dressed in almost identical jeans and skinny-fit tops, a student had asked Clare what room she was moving into.

It always seemed to unnerve Kev, this physical similarity between mother and daughter. He sometimes couldn’t tell them apart when their backs were to him. Once, to the great amusement of all their friends, he had slapped Isabelle on the arse while she was washing up in the kitchen after a dinner party, thinking it was Clare. She sighed. It had just been them both, for so long, keeping each other warm in the little council flat in Luton. No man. No family. Some friends stayed over from time to time but nobody permanent, nobody fixed except each other – until Kev.

Everything had changed for the better when they met, but Isabelle never again crept into her bed in the middle of the night at their big new house which boasted central heating and warm, fuzzy carpets.

“Cup of tea love?” asked Kev when they stepped in the door.

It had been a long day. With a three-hour drive there and back, they had stayed a scarce two hours at Isabelle’s halls of residence to help unload the car of duvets, pillows and box files.

“Would love one.”

They sat on the sofa and watched Emmerdale. Clare made cheese on toast with sliced tomatoes and Worcester sauce. She could picture Isabelle in her new, unfamiliar kitchen doing the same.

Maybe she wouldn’t want to cook on her first night, despite the food they had bought her at the campus shop. Maybe she’d be out with her new hall buddies, would go into town for take-away and to sample the exciting new bars, their fingers still greasy from forbidden food, a first taste of their new lives. Clare wasn’t sure. She only knew what she had read, typed in good English on leaflets, detailing the “university experience”. Prospectuses had littered their living room in the last two months of Isabelle’s A-levels and they had read them together, drawing up lists of pros and cons. The local college hadn’t been on the shortlist.

* * *

Kev left for work at the usual time on Monday. She went to cut sandwiches while he took a shower and caught herself taking an extra four slices of bread out of the bag. Isabelle had liked cheese and marmite. Clare had made them for her using wholemeal all the time she was working at Halfords before first term started. Nobody else in the house ate it. Clare binned the jar so that it wouldn’t go mouldy.

Kev kissed her on the doorstep. She was still in her dressing gown and he slipped a hand in under the sash to touch her breasts.

“See you tonight love. Give me a call at the office if you fancy a chat.”

“Thanks, I will.”

By eleven she had done all the ironing and vacuumed the entire house twice. She called Isabelle’s room extension. She let the phone ring ten times before hanging up. She sat down at her desk to start her day transcribing medical records.

It had been the perfect job when Isabelle had been a baby and they hadn’t been able to afford day-care. Clare had paid enough attention in IT classes to remember how to type. A friend of her father’s who worked in a hospital had started her on the minor transcripts. Later, when Isabelle had started school and she found herself alone in the house, it was a good way to stay flexible so she could pick her up herself. They played together most afternoons and Clare finished her work by staying up long after Isabelle had gone to bed.

Clare typed page after page without looking at her fingers skimming the keys, transcribing the text next to her without actually reading it, thinking of the months to go before the Christmas holidays. Maybe they could go abroad this year, ignore her mother’s dutiful phone call inviting them over for Christmas lunch and wrapped ankle-socks. God knows, neither Kev nor Isabelle would mind.

She called Isabelle again at midday and the phone was picked up almost immediately.

“Hello.” Isabelle’s voice was full of laughter, sounded slightly breathless.

“Hello darling, it’s me.”

“Oh hey Mum, how’s it going?”

Clare blinked at the unfamiliar greeting. She heard smothered giggles on the other side of the line.

“Oh Mum, we had such a blast last night! Sheena, Abigail and me went to the union bar and met these guys and then there was this streaker and… what? Oh yeah, Abby says hi. Mum, you still there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I’m glad you had a good first night. Is there anything you need, anything I can send you?”

“Nope, I’m good Mum, I’m fine. Look, I gotta go. Talk to you later, ok?”

“Ok.”

“Bye Mum!”

Clare waited for the dial tone before putting the phone back in its cradle. She couldn’t remember ever having so short a phone conversation with Isabelle. For the four weeks Isabelle spent at holiday camp in France she’d used her euros to call Clare every day from the payphone in the camp office.

Clare decided to keep her typing for later and get on with the housework. Once she’d put out the laundry, cleaned the cat litter and paid the bills that came through the morning post, she went into Isabelle’s room to check if anything had been left in the laundry basket or in the bottom of wardrobes. But Isabelle had done what she’d been told and put all her things away before leaving, not that there had been much left to put away. Her collection of Russian dolls was still on the windowsill, her pegboard held her A-level results as well as the local pool opening hours, but most of her posters and clothes had gone with her. They had never been much for hoarding in the family.

Clare sat down on the bed and smoothed the lilac covers which matched the mauve stripes of the pillowcases. The room’s décor had only recently been changed from the pink fairies Isabelle had chosen when they first moved in to stylish new bedding and curtains.

The stuffed toys were exiled to the downstairs cupboard along with clay prints of her hands and pottery previously exhibited on the fireplace. The last conversation they’d had, just the two of them, had been on Isabelle’s bed. Clare had known it was one she needed to have with her daughter before she left her among strangers the next day. Isabelle had been upstairs, checking lists of things she would need that the university had sent with her acceptance pack. Clare had sat on the bed next to her and given a nervous smile.

“Izzy, you know you’re going to meet a whole lot of boys at university.”

“I certainly hope so! Sally said her sister bagged four different guys in her first year.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun, and I know I’m not one to talk to you about not having sex too young and all that stuff, but you know how important contraception is, don’t you baby? Just because you’re on the pill doesn’t mean you mustn’t use condoms, especially at uni. Ok?”

Isabelle shrugged and rolled her eyes, but she had been smiling.

“Of course Mum. Only idiots don’t use condoms.”

There had been an embarrassed silence. Clare looked out of the window at the leaves on the trees outside, hanging to the branches by the slimmest threads. She would get Kev to rake up the fallen ones after tea.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Isabelle had said, flicking her long blonde hair behind her shoulder. It was the same colour as Clare’s had been at her age, turning a light shade of brown at the roots. “But it was different in your day, you know. You didn’t get taught these things at school, right?”

A tight smile and reassuring stroke of the cheek had been Clare’s only answer. They hadn’t talked about it again, but she slipped a box of Durex extra strength in a clothes bag the next morning, just before Kev put everything in the back of the Passat. Condoms had never been an issue with Isabelle’s father. They hadn’t stopped to think long enough between mad scrambles in mate’s cars and sofas. They hadn’t had time to think about reasons or consequences, too wrapped up in each other to want to.

She had afterwards, though. When he had enlisted and she had found herself pregnant with a mother yelling at her morning till night, asking her how she could have been so stupid, slapping her in the face, throwing condoms at her in front of her friends.

It was easy to look back at thirty-three and be glad she never heard from Paul, rejoice at how well Isabelle had turned out, pretend to be relieved she hadn’t had time to go to university herself and waste her money on three years of no strings attached sex. Having more children had never been an option until she met Kev. One night, about a year after they moved in, he asked her about it.

“But I have Izzy,” she had said, not catching her words in time.

Isabelle, the centre of her world. The child that looked so much like her that at fifteen, she had held her breath until her sixteenth birthday, waiting every day for her to come home and tell her she was pregnant, that she was leaving home.

She still remembered how she had smelt that first month. Such a strong odour - a mixture of talcum powder, breast milk, soft burps and farts, clammy skin. She hadn’t had a clue, not a clue, but that hadn’t stopped her from watching Isabelle’s every breath, the bat of every eyelid, memorising every inch of skin before going to sleep at night to make sure, just to make sure everything was as it should be.

He mentioned it at the most unusual moments - that she wasn’t too old, she still had time. She’d thought about it, turned it over in her head like you do a polo mint, examining the angles, the probabilities she could share her love away from Isabelle.

A child with Kev would be so different, so easy. He’d fawn over her like women’s magazines say men do, especially those already in their thirties. Men got broody. You read about it in the paper everyday - how a middle-aged desk clerk called Stan had left his wife of five years who didn’t want kids to build a family. She’d have money to go shopping for baby clothes, wouldn’t have to rely on Oxfam cast-offs, would be able to stay home all day and watch it sleep for as long as she liked without having to work or look for a place for them to live.

Clare paced the house, wiping a cloth on surfaces with imaginary dust, pushing Kev’s shoes under the bed, musing over the contents of the fridge and opening recipe books in the vague hope she would find something easy to make. Five o’clock came and went. The front door didn’t bang. Isabelle didn’t walk in the kitchen with her tie askew, hair like a bonfire, demanding what was for dinner. She waited for Justin Timberlake to start bouncing off walls, clothes to fall about the house in heaps, her best earrings, the small diamante ones circled in gold, to go missing. She went to her jewellery box and took them out, rolled the perfect ovals in her hands, held them up to her ears. She should be wearing pearls anyway. She took an envelope from the study desk and addressed it to Isabelle’s porters lodge. She walked down to the post office and sent it recorded delivery so she was sure to get it the next day.

When she got home Clare emptied what was left of the bottles of flat pop, making room for her soymilk in the fridge. Food she’d been saving for dinner hadn’t disappeared, her make-up was still on the shelf meant for the eggs where she left it. No groups of beautiful, lazy girls lounged on her sofa brushing each other’s hair, calling her by her first name as if she were one of them - a sixth former. A girl who had left home at fifteen because she couldn’t stand the idea of giving birth surrounded by so much hate.

Clare sat down to watch Richard and Judy for the first time in fifteen years.

Kev came home at six thirty. He found her with her feet on the couch eating crisps with her mouth open, letting crumbs fall in between the cushions and get trod into the carpet.

“Don’t you tell Isabelle off for doing that?”

“Hmm.”

“Okay. Why don’t you stay right there, I’ll make dinner.”

They made love very gently that night. Kev stroked her bare skin like that time when she was so ill she stayed in bed for three days and he was taking her temperature, just before they rushed her off to hospital because it had gone up to 110. She held on to him, curled up in a ball with his arms around her, rubbed her nose against his cheek.

“Kev?”

“Mmm.”

“I was thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Shall I not take my pill for a while?”

He moved his head back on the pillow and looked at her.

“You mean …”

“Yeah.”

His mouth fell open slightly, a hand edged over hers.

“Yeah baby, that would be… that would be great. You want to? You really want to? I mean, I know you’re lonely what with Isabelle moving out and everything, but, do you think this is the right time?”

He was smiling now, a stupid grin spreading over his face. Clare looked at him, saw the way he couldn’t help from being excited. He’d start bouncing up and down on the bed in a minute, like Isabelle had at five in the morning on Christmas day, those Christmases spent alone together, before her mother decided she was forgiven and could come home to the council house to be bored once a year.

“So what if it isn’t? I don’t mind.”

* * *

Clare didn’t feel Kev kiss her the next morning, didn’t hear him leave the house. She stayed in bed past ten, waking up when she heard the post come through the door. She rolled over and reached for her pills on the bedside table, like she did every morning. She paused, looked at them, small and round and perfect wrapped in their individual plastic, put a hand to her stomach.

Clare popped one out of its casing and swallowed it quickly, without water.

She had some breakfast in front of Trisha. At three in the afternoon, when all she had done was pad around the kitchen in her slippers, the phone rang.

“Mum?”

“Oh baby, hi! How nice of you to call. How are you? Did you have your first lecture today?”

“Mum I … I want to come home. The kitchen’s already disgusting and someone’s had all my milk. ”

Clare stood in front of the phone by the kitchen table, the cold tiles against her bare feet. The laugh and the tears came out at the same time.

“I’m sorry darling,” she laughed, wiping them away, “I’ve let your room out. But there’s something coming through the post this morning that should cheer you up.”

“Mum?”

“Yes Izzy?”

“Mum, I love you.”

“I love you too sweetheart.”

Copyright Emilie Connes

Emilie Connes is French by birth and learnt English in Africa. She also writes in French and Spanish. She completed a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, experimenting with short stories and poetry. It was followed by a Masters in Creative Writing at the same institution, her final portfolio being a collection of short stories entitles Loose Ends. She is currently living in Romania, working for a publishing company in Bucharest and working on a novel.

To buy a copy of Loose Ends click here.