Page 21 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

‘Mum! You should’ve phoned me when it happened. You know I would’ve come over,’ I say, rifling through my drawer for matching socks. How on earth can I have an empty laundry basket and not a single bloody matching pair of socks to be found anywhere?

‘I didn’t want to be a burden. You’ve enough on your plate what with work, and the boys and then Mrs O’Hagan’s funeral and…’

‘You’re never a burden!’ I scold her and I feel tears prick at my eyes as yet another Unexpected Wave of Sadness assaults me – made worse by the hangover horrors. ‘I just need to put my trainers on and I’ll be round as soon as I can. I’ll bring milk and bread so you get a nice warm cup of tea and then I’ll nip out and get gas for Mrs Bishop and I’ll put the code in her meter for her. Now, is there anything else you need? Painkillers? Arnica cream?’

‘No,’ my mother replies and her voice sounds small. ‘You’re very good to me, Rebecca.’

‘I’ll see you soon, Mum. Fifteen minutes or so,’ I tell her and end the call before I sob down the line. What right have I to cry over my mother falling when she says she’s fine? Maybe it’s that I don’t quite believe her or I know that she’s hurtling towards eighty and a time might just come sooner rather than later when she isn’t fine.

I abandon Lizzo and my dreams of headlining at Glastonbury and set out once again into the stormy day to rescue my mother and her neighbour.

Stopping at the shop, I pick up the essentials my mother asked for, and a Victoria Sponge which a good daughter would probably bake from scratch. Guilt makes me add a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives to my basket as well. And some spuds, carrots, broccoli and chicken. I’ll make sure to prepare dinner for Mum and Mrs Bishop before I leave again. Knowing my mother, she will argue that there is no need, and we might even end up giving each other all sorts of bad looks but reach a compromise that I’ve peeled and chopped everything and she will do the actual cooking part.

‘Are you all right, love?’ the woman behind the counter asks me. ‘You look a bit pale.’

For the briefest of moments, I consider telling her exactly how I’m not all right. That I’m only just forty-six and swinging into the menopause at a rate of knots. That I’m divorced and haven’t had so much as a snog in years. That my children have abandoned me and at least one of them seems to take me completely for granted and I only hear from him when he wants something. My mother is ageing and I’m terrified that she’s not immortal and that chances are I’m going to lose her in the next ten to fifteen years and that’s only if I’m lucky and she doesn’t insist on offering to go to the shops for her elderly neighbour when it is icy and hailing outside. And to top all that, I’m absolutely hanging out of my arse for the first time in about three years and I’m pretty sure I’m now sweating 12 per cent alcohol Sauvignon Blanc.

‘Tired and Needy?’ she says before I’ve a chance to reply.

‘Is it that obvious?’ I ask, fighting with a plastic carrier bag to open it as a queue forms behind me.

‘Your top,’ the woman says, nodding to where my hoodie is partially exposed beneath my gilet.

‘Well, if the hoodie fits,’ I mutter with a half-smile that hides my urge to throw the damned plastic bag across the shop and throw a hissy fit that wouldn’t look out of place on a two-year-old.

‘Here,’ the woman behind the counter says, gently putting her hand on top of mine before taking the bag from me. ‘There’s a knack to it,’ she says. ‘I’m always telling them they need to get better quality bags. Especially now people have to pay for them.’ Her voice is soft and kind and I’m not sure why but once again I feel tears prick at my eyes and I will myself not to start sobbing in the middle of Eurospar. I give her a watery smile, not trusting myself to say anything in response to her kindness.

‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper, ‘but you look around my age and… well… I’ve gone on HRT and it has helped me no end. I’m not quite so… well… tired and needy as I was before.’

I nod and mouth ‘thank you’, revelling in a moment of kinship with another woman. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s time I got proper, medically provided, help. Grabbing my shopping, I leave and make my way to my mum’s, where I find two very contented women watching an old episode of Magnum PI as if they hadn’t a worry in the world.

‘You’re a great girl, Rebecca,’ Mrs Bishop tells me twenty minutes later when I have been out and topped up her gas meter before making them both a cup of tea, served with a slice of cake of course.

‘She is, you know,’ my mother says proudly. ‘I’m very lucky to have her.’ I feel just as self-conscious while also as warm and fuzzy inside as I did when I was a child and my mother would boast about me to her friends. ‘She has the reading age of a fourteen-year-old! Can you imagine that?’ She’d beamed with pride as ten-year-old me coloured beside her.

Leaving them to their tea and their chatter over the noise of the TV, I start preparing enough dinner for both of them in the kitchen. Now, maybe my hearing is a bit off, but I’m as sure as sure can be that I hear Mrs Bishop tell my mother she would ‘climb that Magnum fellah like a tree’ given half the chance.

‘Ah now, he wouldn’t be my type,’ I hear my mother tell her. ‘But that Harrison Ford? Now, he’s a quare fellah! I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating toast!’ The loud peals of laughter that erupt between them warm my heart so much that I immediately burst into tears, and have to do my best to stifle my sobs so that I don’t give my mother anything to worry about.

It’s just been a long few days, I think. With a lot of emotions to process, not least the metaphorical face-to-face I’d had with my teenage self. I’ll probably feel less emotional once I get a shower, something to eat and a long sleep. Surely that will make a huge difference to how I feel?

15

CHOOSE LIFE

It’s almost seven by the time I get home. I use what little reserves of energy I have left to take Daniel out for a quick wee, feed him, and drag myself upstairs and into the shower. I’m too tired for the performance of a lifetime and Lizzo dance routines, so I simply switch my audiobook on and shower while the softy spoken narrator regales me with a tale of reinvention and true love. The now very tired and definitely very needy cynic in me mocks the romantic prose and the author’s assertions that everyone can find the missing piece of them that makes them feel whole again.

I believed it once, I suppose, but now I wonder if anyone on this earth ever feels completely happy and content? The nature of life is such that things always change. It’s foolish to get too comfortable or to assert you’re finally happy.

People die. Children grow up. Pets die. Jobs are lost. Husbands have affairs. Friends make choices that have catastrophic consequences for the trust you had in them and we, us adults, get complacent about just about everything. We stop looking at the world in the same way we did when we were sixteen and full of hope and expectation.

God, I remember how excited we were just to grow up, my friends and I. As if we thought the process of ageing was all that was required to give us everything we ever wanted. We had it all mapped out – and by ‘it all’ I mean our twenties and thirties because we didn’t really think too far beyond that. Very few teenagers lose hours fantasising about turning fifty and going for their first mammogram or joining the NHS bowel screening programme.

We’d go to ‘uni’, as the characters in Neighbours called it. It was only known as university before we all became virtual residents of Ramsey Street and picked up the Aussie slang.

After graduation we’d live in fancy apartments together like the characters in Friends – not flats, flats weren’t considered glam – and life would be one big sleepover with big cups and purple walls. I was the Monica of the group, Laura the Rachel and Niamh was Phoebe, of course.

We imagined we’d spend our free time hanging out in chic cocktail bars and coffee shops. Booking girly holidays to Spain and Greece and getting our nipples sunburned under azure blue skies before plunging into crystal clear waters. We’d work hard and play hard – and let our hair down going clubbing. Choosing life as the Trainspotting soundtrack encouraged us to do, without really taking in the fact that the lyrics to that particular song are actually really bloody depressing and, it seems, prescient.

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