Page 6 of Just for the Season

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, ignoring the rudeness and its accompanying eyeroll. ‘I went to Simon’s to get your favourite cake.’ I see her smile and think bugger, I’m so stupid, now I’m about to disappoint her again. ‘And unfortunately a very annoying woman got to the counter in front of me and asked for the cake and wouldn’t let me buy it even when I offered to buy every other cake in the shop for her instead.’

Ruby’s lips twitch very slightly, which raises my hopes.

And then she says, ‘Dad, that’s so embarrassing. Throwing cash round like that.’

‘For your birthday, though,’ I say.

‘Yeah, no,’ she tells me, with another eyeroll.

‘Right. Sorry. Anyway, I bought you some other cakes that I thought you might like and…’

‘What are you going to do with them if I don’t like them?’

‘Freeze them and then make sure someone else eats them,’ I say promptly. Very rightly, Ruby is extremely against food waste. ‘Also, back to the carrot cake, I do have one half of a squashed one. Very squashed. And without most of the icing.’

Ruby slightly raises an eyebrow and in a rare display of (vague) interest asks, ‘Squashed? Half?’

‘I, um, took the cake, and the woman who wanted it spun round very fast and her bag knocked it and it ended up upside down on the floor.’

‘Both of you wanted only one cake?’ Ruby frowns. ‘Didn’t you just say the woman got there first?’

‘Um, yes.’ Bugger. I should not have explained this. I should have just said I dropped it. ‘Basically, I obviously want to give you the best birthday I can. And that’s your favourite cake. The woman did get to the front of the queue a little before me…’

‘So you took it from her?’

‘Kind of. I mean, not really. A bit. I obviously explained that I very much needed it. I told her it was an emergency and she said that she needed it and I couldn’t have it, so, yes, I did then reach round her and take the cake. Because in that moment I turned into one of those parents who have to have the perfect birthday cake for their child.’

Now I think about it, I might have behaved a little unreasonably. At the time, though, it seemed fully rational.

Ruby is just staring at me. If there was one way I was going to fuck up today, I would not have predicted this.

She shakes her head. ‘Stupid,’ she says.

‘Yup. Sorry.’

I wait, breath bated, and then… she smiles. And I smile too. And then I dare to hug her, and she actually returns the hug. And in this moment, I couldn’t be happier.

Ruby is fourteen and I love her more than life itself. I do my best but I have absolutely no idea how to deal with her other than to try to spend as much time with her as possible, listen on the occasions she actually wants to talk properly to me, even though those occasions are only ever at midnight or when I really need to get some work done, and try to do my best to prove to her by my actions that I really do love her and that I can be both a father and mother to her. Her mother has demonstrated very comprehensively by her actions that she is not going to be there for her.

A friend of mine with older daughters once told me a story about how he’d knocked on his fifteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom door and asked her what takeaway she’d like and she’d replied Fuck off. That – my friend told me – summed up his teenage daughters in a nutshell. At the time – Ruby was eleven – I thought that my beautiful, easy-going, adorable little girl would never become like that. Wrong. Obviously not all teenage girls are difficult. But Ruby, while a wonderful young woman, and, I’m proud to say, lovely at school and with her friends’ parents, is also, at times, very difficult at home. Almost certainly not helped by her mother’s desertion. So I do spend a fair amount of time walking on eggshells.

Today, she genuinely thinks her mother’s going to phone to wish her a happy birthday. I don’t think she will, like she hasn’t on any of the ten other birthdays Ruby’s had since she left. And then Ruby will be devastated yet again. And that might involve her confiding her feelings in me, or going and sitting in her bedroom by herself, or lashing out at me.

‘When’s Sam back?’ she asks.

Sam, my son, is eleven and was only a few months old when their mum left, so he has no memory of her whatsoever. I’m never sure which of them – him or Ruby – is better off in that regard. Ruby was nearly four and does have a few memories of her.

‘He’s been doing after-school football,’ I tell Ruby. ‘He’s getting dropped back by Miranda.’

Miranda and her husband Rob also live in the village, and – very handily – amongst their four children have a girl the same age as Ruby and a boy the same age as Sam, who Ruby and Sam are very good friends with, so we share lifts a lot.

‘Cool.’ Ruby starts rooting around in the café bag and pulls out all the cakes. ‘These other ones look okay.’ She opens the carrot cake box and her eyes widen. ‘Dad. This is grim.’

I take another look. Yeah, I don’t think many people would eat that. I’m not really sure why I took my half.

‘The woman who has the other half was definitely going to eat hers,’ I say. ‘She was genuinely going to eat it off the floor, but Simon stopped her and scooped the bit that hadn’t touched the floor into boxes.’

‘She must have really wanted it.’