Best Supporting Role Read online

  When Mike and I first met, I’d just set myself up in business designing and making rockabilly party frocks—halter-necks, huge petticoats under polka-dot skirts. I rented a grotty, airless cellar beneath a bagel bakery in the East End and worked on my hipster image—cropped, sexually ambiguous red hair, Rosie the Riveter head scarves and vintage twinsets.

  After Mike and I got married, the business took off. My ancient Singer sewing machine and I were making a living. It was then that I started schlepping dress samples around the trendy boutiques and West End stores, begging for a few moments’ face time with one of their buyers. Mostly they showed me the door. Buyers were either in meetings, on conference calls, off sick or at lunch—at four in the afternoon. I would ask if I could leave my card and a couple of samples. People tended to say yes, just to get rid of me. When I heard nothing after a few weeks, I would go back to the shop to retrieve the samples. Occasionally they had been kept. More often than not, they’d been trashed.

  One day, I’d been about to go back to Threads, a boutique on Carnaby Street, to collect my samples, when I got a call from the owner to say he was prepared to offer me a contract. I almost blew it because I assumed it was Mike on the phone, camping it up, and told him to bugger off. It took the guy a full five minutes to convince me that he was genuine, after which I spent another five minutes apologizing.

  The order from Threads wasn’t huge—just a dozen dresses—but it was a start, and each dress would carry the Sarah Green label.

  There was a second and a third order, each slightly bigger than the last. By now I’d hired two seamstresses to help manage the workload. I was high on the thrill of it.

  Then I got pregnant with Dan. I realized that if the dressmaking business was to carry on growing, I needed to go straight back to work after he was born. I convinced myself that I could hand him over to a nanny, but in the end I couldn’t. Just the thought of being parted from him reduced me to tears. When Evie Sparrow, the Shoreditch hipster fashionista, invited me in for a meeting to discuss a possible contract to supply her shop, I explained that I was on maternity leave. She said that I should get in touch when I was back at work, but soon I was pregnant with Ella.

  The Singer lived hidden behind my shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe—abandoned along with my hipster image. Occasionally I would get it out because a girlfriend had begged me to make her a dress for a party or a wedding. Then I would be reminded of all the hope and excitement I’d felt setting up my own business and later getting that order from Threads in Carnaby Street. Life had been about possibilities. Those memories always made me feel sad and homesick. I spent a lot of time lost in my thoughts, imagining what might have been. I was disappointed in myself. I should have grappled harder with my emotions, found a way to combine being a good mother with pursuing my dream.

  Now that I needed money, my first thought was to go back to dressmaking. With the children at school, I could easily work from home, but these days I had no reputation. It took years to build one.

  I traipsed round town handing my scant CV to every restaurant, bar and shop. When I wasn’t traipsing, I wrote application letters and e-mails. I made follow-up phone calls and spent hours on hold listening to Vivaldi’s Spring. The message was always the same: no experience.

  In the end, the police came to my rescue. A nonemergency crime helpline was being set up at the local police station and they were looking for people to man it. The only requirements were good communication skills and lack of a criminal record.

  I applied and got an interview. The first question the sergeant asked me was: “So how would you respond in a hostage situation?”

  What? They were expecting terrorists to burst in and take control of the nonemergency crime helpline?

  “Oh, I’d definitely call Jack Bauer.”

  The sergeant, stony faced, looked at me and wrote something on his notepad. I’m guessing it was “candidate displays inappropriate use of humor.” I’d clearly blown it.

  “So, if you had to list your strengths, what would they be?” He was just going through the motions now.

  “Well … for eleven years I was married to a gambling addict. Coping with that as well as raising two children took a huge strength. A few months ago my husband was killed in an accident. He left me with massive debts, so things haven’t been easy, but I’m working hard to get my finances back on track as well as give my children the care and emotional support they need.”

  I thought I detected a flicker of approval.

  Ten days later I received a letter telling me that I had the job, subject to police checks. I also had to attend a race, disability and gender awareness course. Three weeks later, I started work at the police station. The kids were convinced I’d be given a uniform and handcuffs. They were seriously put out when I wasn’t.

  The nonemergency crimes the public were encouraged to report included car theft, damage to property and drug dealing. The nonemergency crimes they actually reported were very different.

  “Hello, is that the police? I’m at Burger King and they’ve run out of Diet Coke.” Or: “Can you tell me how to defrost a turkey—do I take the giblets out?” Or: “I’ve don’t have any bus fare, can the police give me a lift home?” Or: “My boyfriend wants me to do anal. That’s a crime, right?”

  There were four of us manning the helpline. Everybody except me was retired. Don, our team leader, had owned a hardware store. Maureen and Glenys had been nurses at the local hospital. Tony had sold cars for fifty years and thought all immigrants should be repatriated—not that he was racist, mind you. Don called him Tony the Fascist to his face. He said it was the first time in his life he’d been given a nickname and seemed to rather relish it, so we all joined in. Every Friday, Maureen brought in one of her homemade cakes. Don was always highly complimentary about her baking. In fact he was highly complimentary about Maureen in general. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t just her Victoria sponge he was after. When the phones were quiet, we drank tea and joked about the stupid callers. “IQs lower than their shoe size,” was Tony’s favorite line. He put their lack of intelligence down to too much cross-pollinating with undesirables.

  Don would react by calling Tony a fascist prat. Tony would call Don a commie and then we’d all have another cup of tea. Nobody could get really angry with Tony. He was knocking on seventy. His wife had just died and he had no family. Deep down we all felt sorry for him.

  Sometimes Glenys and Maureen would tell us grisly hospital stories … corpses that sat up, the man who came into the ER and announced he had gentile warts, the surgeon who shouted at Maureen, “Here, nurse, catch,” and threw her a leg he’d just amputated—which she of course dropped.

  Being a nonemergency helpline operator was an OK job, but it was hardly a career.

  Mum said that with a million people out of work, I should be grateful for a job, even if it did mean talking on the phone all day to idiots.

  “I am grateful. But I need more. The thought of doing this for the next thirty years fills me with absolute dread. I mean … suppose this is it… .”

  “Sarah, God knows you have been through hell, but you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself and stay positive. You’re thirty-six—a young woman. You will turn your life around. I mean … look at Erin Brockovich.”

  So, according to my mother, in order to give my life new meaning, I had to start wearing boob tubes and skirts up to my navel, find a gas company dumping toxic waste and sue them. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  Chapter 3

  Spring the Following Year

  “… So, after the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed and blew the little pigs’ house down, the little pigs decided to make a house of bricks, but there were problems at the brick factory and they had to wait weeks and weeks for the bricks to arrive… .”

  “That’s not how the story goes,” Dan declared. “Plus the way you’re telling it is boring.”

  “I know,” I said. “Bedtime stories are meant to be boring
so that they’ll send you to sleep.”

  “And I’m too old for the ‘three pigs’ story. It’s for babies.”

  “I like it,” Ella shot back. “And I’m not a baby.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I … am … not. You’re a baby.”

  “No. You are.”

  “OK—enough,” I said. “Nobody’s a baby. Now can I please carry on with the story?”

  At this point, Dan threw back his duvet and began jumping on the bed.

  “Dan, stop that! You’re going to damage the springs. Come on … settle down, both of you. It’s way past bedtime.”

  Dan carried on jumping. “So, Mum … is Dad a skeleton yet?”

  “What?”

  Judy, the grief therapist, had warned me that one of the ways children cope with death and try to make sense of it is to gather information. As the months passed, I should be prepared for more rather than fewer questions on the subject. “And don’t be surprised if they become a bit obsessed—particularly with the more macabre aspects. Ghosts, the devil and hell might well become hot topics.”

  We’d had the occasional discussion about ghosts and whether Mike might come back as one. Dan pretended to be intrigued by the idea, but I could tell that it scared him. My response was unequivocal. There were no such things as ghosts.

  Dan wondered if there was TV in heaven. If there was, did Dad get to watch football? And did they get earth news or heaven news? He decided they probably got both.

  Neither of the kids had mentioned cadavers. Until now. “So, is Dad a skeleton?” Dan repeated the words slowly—in case I hadn’t heard the first time.

  “I don’t know… . Dan, will you please stop jumping.”

  “Mum, tell Dan to shut up. My daddy’s not a skeleton.”

  “Maybe not yet,” Dan came back, landing hard on his rear. “But he will be once his body has rotted. That takes ages. He’s most likely still got worms and maggots crawling inside him, eating his flesh.”

  Ella burst into tears and started howling. I got up from Dan’s bed, moved across to hers and pulled her onto my lap.

  “Dan, that’s enough. If you want to talk about this, come to me. But I will not have you upsetting your sister, and especially not at bedtime.”

  “I want my own room,” Ella sobbed. “I hate Dan. I hate him. I had my own room in the old house.”

  “I know, hon, but for the time being you two are going to have to get used to sharing.”

  “But why do we have to share? Why did we have to leave the old house?”

  “You know why. Now that Daddy isn’t here anymore, there isn’t as much money coming in as there used to be.” The children still knew nothing about Mike’s gambling or all the debt he’d left, and while they were young, I intended for it to stay that way.

  “So we’re poor and we’re going to starve like Bob Cratchit and all the people in Africa… .”

  “What? No. Dad’s been gone for months—have we starved so far? I’ve got my job, so we’re going to be absolutely fine. I don’t want either of you worrying.”

  This was our second night in the new rented house. It had taken over a year to sell the old one. It wasn’t that there had been no interest. There had been plenty. I must have had a dozen offers, but these days the mortgage companies weren’t lending the huge amounts that London buyers required, so people pulled out. The couple who finally bought it were in the music business. She had a sleeve of tattoos. He had a Hitler Youth haircut and said the house had a real Velvet Underground vibe. They paid cash.

  I’d driven past a couple of times since they moved in and seen their Mercedes Sport in the drive. Meanwhile, the kids and I had moved into a two-bedroom Victorian terrace on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally. The Reading-to-Waterloo line was a couple of hundred yards beyond the back garden. At the end of the street was the level crossing, the border post between our new scruffy neighborhood and our old swanky one.

  “What a difference a mile makes,” Mum had said when I took her with me to view the house. I watched her shudder as she took in the greasy pavement covered in gray disks of gum, the corner shop with sheets of security mesh protecting its windows.

  “Mum, this is all I can afford. And anyway, I quite like it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What can you possibly like about it? The dirt? The homeless? The fact that you’re practically living on the railway line?” Then she got upset because she and Dad didn’t have the money to help me buy a house in our old neighborhood.

  I insisted that the trains weren’t a problem. “You can hardly hear them—particularly if the wind’s in the right direction.” Then I launched into my spiel about how good it would be for Dan and Ella to be raised in a neighborhood where the kids weren’t ferried to school in the nanny’s Jeep Cherokee. “Plus there’s real cultural diversity here. They need to know that the world isn’t made up of rich white people.”

  “Fine. Let them watch Roots or Gandhi.”

  “Oh, so it’s OK for them to learn about ethnic minorities, but not to live among them.”

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a racist.”

  “No. Just a snob.”

  “Sarah, you and my grandchildren are living in a poor, deprived, crime-ridden neighborhood. Are you telling me I shouldn’t be worried?”

  I informed her that I had done my research and discovered that the crime figures were a fraction of what they used to be. “This is an up-and-coming neighborhood.”

  “Who told you that? The estate agent?”

  “No. I know for a fact that several of the kids’ teachers lived here. There’s an Italian deli just opened, a great new coffee shop, and the church hall holds judo and gymnastics classes for the kids. There’s even a gospel choir that invites people to join them for a sing-along once a week.”

  Mum threw up her hands. “A gospel choir! I take it all back. What more could a Jewish girl want?”

  The estate agent’s blurb had described the house as bijou. Mum said “bijou” was code for “suitable for contortionist with growth hormone deficiency.” “Compact” was even worse. That meant you could wash the dishes, watch TV and answer the front door without getting up from the toilet.

  Despite Mum’s misgivings about the area, she agreed that the house had a lot going for it. The young couple letting it (while they went traveling) had spent the last two years renovating the place. They’d restored the cast-iron fireplaces, stripped the floors, put in a new kitchen and bathroom. There was only one downside. It was rather more bijou than I had imagined. The entire ground floor was about the size of the kitchen in the old house. I’d looked at umpteen bigger places, but they were shabby student houses. This house was a little gem. It would be perfect—for the time being at least.

  Back in the kids’ bedroom, I turned to my son. “So are we agreed? There’s to be no more talk of skeletons and maggots in front of your sister.”

  Dan shrugged. “I’m only giving her the facts. Tom in my class told me how bodies rot. He found out from his cousin who’s twelve. He looked it up on the Internet.”

  Clearly playdates chez Tom—Dan’s best friend—weren’t the innocent affairs they’d once been. “That’s a mean, cruel thing to do. He knows your dad died and he’s trying to scare you.”

  “He didn’t scare me.”

  The child was eight. Of course he was scared. Petrified, probably. And now he was paying it forward, bullying his sister the way this older child had bullied him.

  “But Ella is scared,” I said. “You have to stop. I don’t want any more arguments.”

  Dan shrugged. “OK.”

  “My daddy’s not a skeleton,” Ella was saying now. “He’s in heaven. He’s with his mummy and daddy and all the angels.” She looked at me. “Do you think he’s still making TV ads in heaven?”

  “Oh, I would think so.”

  “And what about if he meets the devil? The devil could take him to hell, where it�
�s really hot like in Majorca.”

  I decided it was time for some light relief. I reached for the scruffy copy of The Twits, which was lying on the floor. The description of Mr. Twit’s beard and the bits of old breakfasts, lunches and dinners that clung to it always had them shrieking with laughter. “OK, Twits time,” I said. “But only if you both get back into bed and lie down.”

  They did as I asked. I thought Ella might get upset again when we got to the bit where Mrs. Twit serves Mr. Twit worm spaghetti, but she laughed as usual. Twenty minutes later I kissed them both good night, turned off the light. As I headed downstairs, I could hear them giggling.

  “Night-night, Mummy Twit,” Ella called out.

  “Night-night, Daughter Twit.”

  More giggles.

  • • •

  Mum was in the kitchen getting up off her hands and knees. She made an oo-phing sound as she went. “Right, that’s the floor done. It took three goes, but it’s finally come up OK.”

  “Three goes? It looked pretty clean to me.”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t. I had to get between the floorboards with Q-tips. You should have seen the muck that came up.”

  Mum and Dad had insisted on helping me move in. Yesterday and today, Dad and I had arranged furniture and unpacked boxes. Mum had scrubbed, scoured and dusted. The place reeked of ammonia and bleach.

  “You know,” Mum said, rinsing her cloth under the tap, “that sofa’s far too big for the living room.”

  “I know, but it reminds the kids of the old house.” I’d been forced to sell all our old furniture because there wasn’t space for it here. I couldn’t face parting with the sofa.

  Just then Dad walked in carrying a bag of Chinese food.

  “Did you tip the delivery guy?” Mum said.

  “No.”