The Great Christmas Breakup (5 page)

I guessed she didn’t mean the Wall Street kind of stock.

Carson was practically hyperventilating in an attempt not to laugh out loud again, and
I was finding it hard to keep it together too
.

There were two possibilities
regarding
Cecily’s employment
–
one:
they’d just recruited their worst nightmare as a call girl; or
two:
there are some rea
lly kinky people buying
mail order
films
in the USA.

So it was all terribly funny
, u
ntil, Cecily 2 revealed where the job was.

‘Brooklyn.
’

Oh no. Don’t say it.

She said it. ‘
So I
thought I could stay with you.’

It wasn’t a question. She was telling us.

I looked at Carson and mouthed
,
‘
No way.’

My darling husband began fidgeting, rolling his hands together as he did when he was nervous.

God, he was going to cave, wasn’t he?

‘Look, C2, we’ve got the tiniest flat and–‘

‘Cecily doesn’t mind sleeping on one of the kid’s beds, does she?’ Carson’s moth
er, fresh from finding some ten-year-
old
Kit
Kats in the back of the bread bin that doubled as her larder, squ
eezed onto the sofa next to me.
‘Jessie or
J can sleep on the couch.’

‘No they can’t!’ I proteste
d. ‘It is far too uncomfortable
and they have
to be fresh for
school.’

Rufus mumbled something about a hotel room but the Cecilys shouted him down.

‘I suppose it is only for a week,’ Carson said, avoiding my eyes.
‘We can make it work.’

Can we?

I wanted to shout and scream but there was no point.

Bitter experience had taught me that.

- Cue horribly vivid memory birt
h story:

‘It’s a g
irl!’ The doctor on call, a lady
called, implausibly, Dr Happy, handed me J.

Carson and I smiled at each other, still in love and utterly
bewitched by our ability to produce a perfect human being
.

‘Whatcha gonna call him?’ Cecily 2 cried, barging past the exiting doctor and pushing the midwife aside to get a look.

‘We thought Hugo
, or Oliver. Nice English names.
’
Carson smil
ed at me, rubbing my arm,
besotted by
our new
born.

Cecily made her entrance. ‘Where is little
Josiah
?’

Coming up
quickly,
she squinted as she took in the tiny features. ‘Ugly
brute
, isn’
t he? Then again, so was Carson, and look how wonderful he turned out.
’

‘His name is not
Josiah
, Cecily.’
I gave a little chuckle, because I assumed my mother-in-law was making a joke.

‘Ye
s it is,’ said Cecily determinedly, ‘a
fter
my
late
husband.’

‘His name was Carl,’ I protested, before realizing that Carl was almost as bad as Josiah.

‘But he always wanted to be called Josiah, so I promised that his first grandchild would be called Josiah.’

‘But Howie is his first grandchild,’
I said, confused
.

‘Speaking of which, where
is Howie?’ Cecily 2
asked.

The child was
a baby;
only two months older than J.

Cecily 2 looked around
,
put a finger to her lip to contemplate matters,
then said, ‘That’s right, he’s with Rufus.’

‘Howie was named after my
own
father, dear. So Cecily 2 has done the right thing, now it’s your turn.’

Carson was strangely silent.
It was the first time in our marriage that he hadn’t immediately stood up for me. Surely he wasn’t cont
emplating this?

Josiah?

No way.

His puppy dog
eyes, red rimmed from lack of sleep and emotion, pleaded with me.
‘What can it hurt, Scar? If it makes Mom happy?’

‘What about our child? How can someone with a
ridiculous
,
old fashioned
biblical name be happy
in a sch
ool full of kids named after R&B
artists
and pieces of fruit
?’

Placating me with a kiss on the lips, Carson insisted that I would see things differently when I’d had some sleep. ‘It isn’t such a big deal. We don’t even have to call him Josiah.’

‘But your family will – the kid will develop
schizophrenia
!’

‘We don’t have any diseases,’ Cecily 2 said, overhearing. ‘Not since Mom got rid of that rash behind her
left butt
cheek.’

‘I am not calling my first born Josiah,’ I told Carson. ‘End of discussion.’

But it wasn’t the end of the discussion, because somehow, Carson made a deal with me. We
’d
call the next child after my mother or father, and we
’d
call the new baby Josiah, but J for short.

‘We can spell it Jay for school – Mom won’t be any wiser.’

‘That’s for bloody su
re,’ I said, but stupidly, I
agreed to it.

It was s
omething so important – and I
had given
up without a proper fight.

Because I loved my husband.

No wonder Carson though
t I was a pushover.

No wonder he treated me like one.

We
return
ed
to Brooklyn
,
carrying with us the dismal knowledge that in three days
’
time,
the putrid
Cecily 2 would arrive on a bus
to take up residence for a week.

When we got to our apartment, we found t
h
e front door on the floor again – kicked inwards this
time.

There was a note on the fridge indicating
that
burglars had been and were
, it seemed
,
disgusted at what was on offer.

‘
Waist of are time
’ read the note.

Carson ripped it off and rolled it up.
‘The nerve.’

‘Won’t the police want that?’ I asked.

‘Is that how you spell time?’ Jessie asked, which sent Carson off on a rant about the standard of education
in New York State schools.

I walked around the flat looking for missing items, but the only thing that had been taken was Jessie’s MP3 player – which was last year’s Chri
stmas gift from the Teesons
. It wasn’t a great loss, given
that would only play the first song, over and over.

How
utterly depressing that we had nothing worth stealing.

To think that my mother had been so proud when I moved to America.

Well, originally, she’d been petrified
that
I would get shot, but once she’d established there were less shootings in New Y
ork than in some cities
in England
, she’d conceded it was a good idea.

- Cue fond memory of
conversation with
Mum:

‘You’re going where?’ Mum rubbed her hands on her apron. It was one of those flowery ones with cute cats in a basket. Dad said that Mum was born without taste in everything but men, and mostly, this was correct. Mum had horrible taste. Our house pa
id homage to worst of Seventies
style
:
brown lampshades, orange tiles in the bathroom, strange psychedelic wallpapers in the kitchen that put you right off your food.

It was little wond
er I was s
lim during childhood.

‘New York City. I’ve been accepted on a fashion course. A scholarship!’

Mum’s slim, vein-riddled hands shot to her mouth. Those hands were at odds with the rest of her appearance. Even though I was twenty-one, her appearance was of someone in their late thirties. Her hands, however, were those of a retiree’s.

‘No, you can’t possibly, Scarlet. You’ll be gun
ned down in the crossfire of a M
afia shootout!’

‘That’s ridiculous, Mum.’

‘Look at John Lennon.’

‘John Lennon was famous and killed by a nutter who was stalking him. If I get famous, I’ll come back to England, okay?’

A few hours of persuasion later, and after the provision of reams
of
statistics about gun crime, Mum finally realized what a wonderful opportunity had befallen her only daughter.

‘I am so proud,’ she declared. ‘But how will you afford to live?’

‘I’ll get a job.’

I spun, around and around, in the small, vomit-inducing kitchen.
‘I’ll design clothes, and then I’ll work with the big shots, get my own label – and fly you and Dad out first class!’

‘Just concentrate on the job so that you
have somewhere to live,’ Mum
said.
‘That will be enough for us.’

But her eyes were gleaming, and I was glad that
,
for once, I had made her proud.

The fact that New York
turned out to be su
ch a vile disappointment was a fact I
had
hid
den from my parents for years.

And thanks
Mum’s
health making it impossib
le
for her
to fly, it was a ruse I had easily ke
p
t
up.

‘This is all I need,’ Carson said, as he stood looking at the door
lying horizontally on the ground
.
‘The hinges are totally ruined.
How the hell
am
I
supposed to put this back together
now?’

How do we put things back together?

That’s the
eternal
question
,
isn’t it? Perhaps Jocelyn
Priestly had
the answer?
I might find her email and ask how
you reassemble a marriage t
hat has crumbled into millions of pieces.

But I wouldn’t
have to wait for a response to guess the answer.

I knew it already.

You don’t.

CHAPTER THREE

Black Friday November 24

‘
It’s important to give and take in a marriage. Occasionally, you may feel that you are giving more than your partner, but remember that it isn’t a competition.
It’s love.
’

Jocelyn Priestly.

‘IT’S BOLLOCKS,’ I SAID
to the calendar, as I read the
day’s ramblings of a love lunatic.
Not that I could actually concentrate properly on the words.
Out in the hall,
Hammertro was trying to hel
p Carson with the new door.

The task seemed to necessitate
them going into the living room to h
unt
loudly
for tools.

Hammertro didn’t
usually come further than the kitchen, which is at the front of the flat, so he now looked around in astonishment.

‘Fuckin’ H
, they cleared you out, man,’
he said, wide-eyed at the mess.

Carso
n scowled. ‘No, this is
just
how it looks, Hammer Throw.’

Fair eno
ugh, the living room was a pit. Jessie and J
had been looking for the Wii
attachment
I’d picked up at a charity shop to take
to
Cecily’s
mobile home
and the result was catastrophic.