Page 7 of Not Moving Out
‘We’re going to tell Dolly tonight.’
‘How do you think she’ll take it?’ said Mum, a look of concern on her face because she adored Dolly. She was her only grandchild. Marmalade had been married before but had no children of his own.
‘Not sure. She knows things between us aren’t great, obviously, she isn’t stupid, but separating is something else. I hope she’s okay, and it isn’t like someone has cheated or that Joe and I hate each other. We’ve just fallen out of love. Hopefully it makes things easier.’
‘Hopefully,’ said Mum. ‘But then again, when your father and I broke up, under similar circumstances, I remember you were angry at us for years.’
‘I don’t think it was years, Mum.’
‘Trust me. It was years!’
I ended up staying at Mum’s for lunch. She had some leftover pizza, which she heated up with a small salad, before I had to head home. I said goodbye to Mum on her doorstep with hugs, but before I left I had one last question for her.
‘Whatever happened to your friend, Gloria Parker? The one with the cocker spaniels. Was she okay in the end?’
‘Eventually, yes. After “trousers-around-ankles gate”, it took her a little while to get herself together, but now she’s living in Broadstairs with a woman.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘So, you see, darling, there’s always the chance for a second bite of the apple, or in Gloria’s case, a change of fruit completely!’
We said goodbye, and I started walking. The rain had eased off, and I always loved the smell of the air after rain, and the way everything seemed fresh and new. Maybe I would get my second bite of the apple like Gloria, and who knew, perhaps it would be even sweeter than the first. Although, as I put my earbuds in and listened to some music, all of that felt like years away.
I took my time and slowly weaved across Brighton back towards Seven Dials, where our house was. I was listening to a Spotify playlist and ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol came on, and I was instantly transported back in time.
The year was 2006, and the second series ofThe Morningswas on, and doing better than the first. Joe and I were living in our flat in Archway, I was pregnant with Dolly, and Snow Patrol released ‘Chasing Cars’. It became the song of that part of our lives, and seemed to always be on no matter where we were. Whenever I heard it now, I was back in our old flat with its crap furniture, and the view of the church out of the bedroom window. Joe and I had been so happy, still in our twenties, and living the London dream. We had only just begun talking about the possibility of moving to Brighton once Dolly was born. As I was walking home, listening to ‘Chasing Cars’, I couldn’t help but cry, the weight of tears behind my eyes desperate to escape, because the song that had been so much of us when we were happy now felt like the death knell of our marriage.
Chapter Four
Joe
Our house was a three-bed terraced property in the Seven Dials area of Brighton. We bought it in 2008 before the house prices in Brighton shot through the roof and doubled in value over the following years. The house had been in the same family for over fifty years before us, so it needed a lot of work, some good old-fashioned TLC, which we were happy to do, and so after just one showing we put in an offer, which was accepted, and our move from London to Brighton was rubber-stamped. After the flat in Archway, it felt enormous and ever so grown-up, but we were excited by the opportunity to renovate a house and make it exactly how we wanted it.
Set over three floors, it boasted a number of original Victorian features, wooden sash windows, ornate cornicing, cast-iron fireplaces and a large walled garden with mature trees and shrubs. Over the next ten years, we added the downstairs extension, which meant we had the fashionable kitchen diner, plus bifold doors to the back garden. We added a new modern bathroom upstairs, and a utility room off the kitchen. Freya kitted the whole house out with some lovely decor, furniture and soft furnishings from various upscale retailers as well as some upcycled antique gems. It truly was our dream home, but it seemed that once we had made it perfect, every square inch full of everything we had ever wanted, my career tanked, our marriage started to gradually fall apart piece by piece, and now we faced the prospect of having to sell it. It was almost as heartbreaking as the break-up of the marriage itself. It felt like we had spent so many years curating the perfect life to then wake up and realise that, actually, it wasn’t as perfect as we had thought all along.
Freya ordered the takeaway from our usual Indian restaurant, which was utterly delicious, and because they knew us so well, they always popped in a few extra bits and pieces. Freya laid everything out on the kitchen island, and we were helping ourselves to the little containers which were full of rice, curries, and then the poppadoms with various dips, which were Dolly’s favourite. Dolly was still in her pyjamas, as she hadn’t been outside all day. She said she had been studying in her room, which I believed because, unlike me, she was a diligent student, who had ambitions of getting straight As in her A levels and going to Durham University to read English. At her age, I was more concerned with drinking, comedy and girls, and not necessarily in that order. I performed well enough at sixth form, and went to a decent enough university, where I got a perfectly reasonable 2:2 – a drinker’s degree – but I was always just doing enough to get by, while my real passions were outside of education. So many evenings when I should have been studying or writing essays, I was at comedy clubs or watching sitcoms, studying for the career I knew I wanted.
Dolly was somehow a perfect mixture of Freya and me. She had my dark hair, dark eyes, and Freya’s pale skin. She was reasonably tall, slim, and had her mother’s dogged determination and drive, but somehow my creativity and love of the English language. Today she was in baggy checked pyjama bottoms, a grey hoodie, and her scraggly hair was loosely tied back in a ponytail with one of the many scrunchies I would often find lying around the house. The family bathroom often felt like a graveyard for used scrunchies. She had on the same glasses she’d had since secondary school, that were slightly broken, probably with the wrong prescription, but which she refused to replace – they were good luck, apparently. She was filling her plate full of chicken korma, pilau rice, garlic naan, saag paneer, onion raita, mango chutney, mint yogurt and a whole extra plate of poppadoms. She grabbed a can of full-fat Coke from the fridge and sat at the table.
‘Thanks. This is the first proper meal I’ve had today,’ said Dolly eagerly.
‘I know you want to do well at college, love, but you need to keep your strength up,’ replied Freya, with a sort of 1980s advice vibe because Dolly had always been successful, whether her strength was kept up or not. During her GCSEs, we often had to bring food to her room, or she would forget to eat altogether. I feared that when she finally got to university, she would live off cereal, snacks and endless cups of coffee, which would actually be better than my diet at university, which had been largely alcohol-based. At least Dolly had the occasional smoothie with fruit and sometimes vegetables and she drank water, while my choice of a quick snack back in the day was more likely a Pot Noodle, and water was only ever consumed as tea or coffee.
‘I’m fine. I had two coffees this morning, a Snickers for lunch, and they’re always claiming they give you lots of energy. Plus an apple, so one of my five a day!’
‘Still, love, you need to do better. We can’t have you fainting mid-exam,’ said Freya.
‘It would reflect very badly on us,’ I said.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Freya pointedly.
‘I’ll try and do better,’ said Dolly. ‘I wouldn’t want to bring shame upon the family name.’
‘Good family name,’ I added with a smile.
‘Sorry, good family name,’ said Dolly, and she looked at me and smiled back.
Dolly and I had always been close, and we shared the same sense of humour, which I think frustrated Freya somewhat. They were close but in a different way. They were mother-and-daughter close, while we shared something slightly more cerebral. We connected on a deeper level that often didn’t need words and included lots of silly in-jokes and repeated banter. Dolly and I had always laughed a lot, and she had made comments about wanting to write comedy, or maybe even perform, which made me incredibly proud.
