Page 6 of Be More Octopus

'You look like you've been out all night too.' He sounded concerned.

'Lucy was here till 2 am. Then I didn't sleep well. I was going to go for a run to wake myself up, but I'm not keen on running in the rain.'

Roger busied himself with making tea. 'I remembered last night - I've still got a load of things that you left here when you moved out.'

'I thought Mum had ditched all that because it didn't “spark joy”.’ Her mother's zealous decluttering had upset Em. She'd even consigned Em's beloved childhood teddy to the bin without giving Em an opportunity to rescue him.

But her mother had been unrepentant. 'You should have taken it with you if you were that bothered. I'm not running a free storage service.'

She seemed to have conveniently forgotten that Em's rented room in London would have made a phone box look spacious. The next time Em came home, she was relegated to sleeping in the smallest bedroom, her old room entirely devoted to her mother's hobbies as if Em had never existed.

'Your mother instructed me to take it all to the tip, but I hid it in the loft when she was out. She never went up there. 'It's a filthy, spider-infested hole, Roger.''

Em laughed at her dad's uncannily accurate impression of her mother's high-pitched, rant-mode voice. Bless him for rescuing her stuff.

'I guess I should investigate the filthy, spider-infested hole, then,' she said.

The loft turned out to be an Aladdin's cave of items that had earned Em's mother's disapproval. It appeared to be empty when Em first opened the hatch, but once she got to the top of the ladder and her eyes adjusted to the dim light from the old 40 watt bulb, she could see various containers stashed away in the dark corners.

An old cricket bat handle stuck out of a battered sports bag, presumably put there after her mother had banned her father from playing for the local club because he 'looked too appreciatively' at the woman who made the teas. 'But her baps were delicious,' he'd said, in a desperate attempt to defend himself from his wife's accusations of adultery.

A guitar case lurked behind the water tank. She didn't recognise that at all. Something to ask her dad about later.

Then, in the far right corner, Em spotted an easel and an art portfolio leaning against a pile of cardboard boxes with TIP handwritten on them in thick, black marker pen. She walked over to investigate, crouching under the eaves to reach the smaller boxes. Books, games, ornaments, and even her beloved teddy. She felt tears welling up. Her dad really had rescued everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

'Shall I bring the rest down? There are still five boxes left.' Em's dad was standing next to her in the bedroom after helping her bring the easel and the rest of her art stuff down from the loft.

'No, let's leave it for now.' Em had been wondering when to tell him that she wasn't planning on stopping at home for long. This was an ideal opportunity.

'I am looking for somewhere else to stay. I think you need your own space now. But if you wouldn't mind keeping a few things until I'm settled, that would be great.'

'Of course I don't mind. It's doing no harm up there. I love having you living here again, but I understand. I'm not going to fake falling down the stairs to persuade you to stay,' he laughed.

Oh god, the stairs incident. Em remembered it so well. It had happened on the morning she was leaving for uni. Her mother had made her opposition to Em “wasting her time and MY money”on a fine art degree very clear from the moment Em had first floated the idea years earlier. She'd tried various ways to dissuade Em, starting with dire predictions of permanent poverty and working her way up to Em's early death from drug addiction. When that didn't work, she tried to make Em feel guilty about her selfishness in leaving her to cope with her “challenging” husband alone. 'He's an incompetent fool. How am I supposed to look after him all by myself with my high blood pressure?' An incompetent fool who had managed to work his way up to chief accountant at a large car parts manufacturer, earning enough to keep his wife in the manner which she demanded. Em's mother failed to give her dad any credit for that, of course.

But Em had dug her heels in. She'd always been good at painting, she got an A in her Art 'A' level, and she'd worked hard at the local college in her art foundation year. She wasn't going to give up the opportunity to do something she loved.

Em's mother was not the sort of person who gave up easily when she'd made her mind up about how things were going to be. While Em and her dad were packing the car ready for the drive to London, they heard a shriek and found her mother lying awkwardly at the foot of the stairs.

'I can't feel my legs, Roger,' she screamed as he went to help her get up. 'Call an ambulance.'

While they were waiting for it to arrive, her mother appeared to be extremely calm for someone with potentially life-changing injuries. Presumably, the pleasure of watching Roger unpack the car was taking her mind off the possibility of having to adjust to being in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Em wondered how this would pan out. Her mother usually managed to pull some stunt to get her own way but this was the most extreme one so far. Then, as always, Em felt guilty about not being more sympathetic, just in case this time it was genuine.

Puzzled by her mother's paralysis, the paramedics took her to A&E, Em accompanying them in the ambulance and her dad following in the car. After various tests, her mother's mediocre acting abilities failed her when the doctor started checking for numbness by prodding her legs with a needle. Even her blood pressure appeared to be normal. The medical staff pronounced her fighting fit. The atmosphere in the car on the way home was tense.

'I'm glad you're ok, Mum. Nothing stopping me from going to London now.' Em couldn't resist rubbing it in after such a blatant attempt at scuppering her escape plans.

'Yes, we've still got time to get there today, Em,' her dad had added chirpily, leaving her mother to make her own way indoors sulkily.

Em's dad was cooking Sunday lunch in the kitchen. Em offered to help him prepare the veg, glad of anything that might stop her thoughts wandering back to Connor.

She was struggling to remember why she'd ever agreed to marry him. It wasn't as if the wedding proposal had swept her off her feet. The drunken 'I suppose we should get married as well' while they were in the taxi on the way home from his brother's wedding had been underwhelming. Not that Em was hoping for an extravagant public proposal. She'd have died of embarrassment if he'd turned up at work with a choir of singers performing 'It Had To Be You', which was how Flynn had proposed to Aimee.

The more she thought about it, the more she realised she'd sleepwalked into a long-term relationship. Connor's infidelity had saved her from a lifetime of making do. Perhaps Lucy's approach of working her way through Tinder was a better one. Right now, a long-term relationship wasn't on Em's wish list. Was a loving long term relationship even possible?

'Dad, why did you put up with Mum for so long?' she asked as she scraped the carrot peelings into the compost bin.