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‘You’re not going to, are you?’
Bruce’s jaw dropped and he pushed up his hair at the front. ‘Shay, do I have dick written on my head? If business is so good for him why is he mortgaged up to the hilt with debts up to his nostrils?’
‘You don’t know that for sure, Bruce.’
‘Yes, I do. I did my homework on Chris Houston the last time he asked me to jump in on one of his surefire deals.’ He tapped his nose. ‘I know people in the know.’
And Shay wanted to say then that he hadn’t known people in the know when she’d wanted help with her mum’s neighbours.
That thought came again, the one she couldn’t pin down when she’d last asked him about the building work at her mum’s house, dipping into her mind and straight back out again. Like it mattered now anyway, whatever it was.
Shay was tired, dog-tired. She’d barely slept the previous night, though adrenaline had kept her propped up for most of the day while she orchestrated the funeral as best she could, made sure it went as seamlessly as possible. But once people started drifting off home, it left her system with a whoosh and there was nothing to replenish it but weariness and worry: her indecipherable son, her unfathomable daughter, anxiety about meeting with Paula the next day and outshining everything with its nuclearbrightness was the cold, hard certainty that she would never see her mum again. She was on her second large glass of red wine and it was doing nothing to cauterise her frayed, ragged nerves.
‘Sunny looked slick in his suit today, I thought.’ Bruce came over to the table carrying a bowl of pasta. He hadn’t stirred it properly or added enough water because the sauce looked clotted. ‘He’ll be laughing when Karoline inherits all her parents’ money. I bet Chris can’t wait to sidle up to them at the wedding and dangle his worm for an investment, the slimy—’
‘Money isn’t everything, is it?’ Shay interrupted him. ‘And Sunny doesn’t look like himself or act like himself at the moment. He’s like a shadow of what he was when he lived here and—’
Bruce dropped his fork, by design or accident Shay wasn’t sure.
‘Oh, please don’t start with that again. He’s not a little smiley boy any more, colouring-in pictures. He’s a grown man with responsibilities. If he’s unhappy then that’s for him to sort out. What he does is nothing to do with you.’
‘What?’ Shay shook her head as if to rattle all those words into a sentence that made sense.
‘You’re imagining things. Sunny’s fine, how can he not be? Karoline’s gorgeous, she’s got her head screwed on and she’s got a few bob to her name. Now she might not be your choice but she’s his. And Courtney’s… well, Courtney. You can’t even try and sort her out because she’ll do what she wants to.’
‘So that’s fine in your book, is it then?’ said Shay, suddenly irritated. ‘Because they’re grown up, I have to cut myself off from worrying about them?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Bruce, as if that was obvious.
Shay reared internally.
‘Bruce, I would be delighted to cut the apron strings. I would gladly stand on the doorstep and wave goodbye to my two chicks flying confidently off in the direction of the sun, so if you think I’m just fretting because I’m bored, trust me I am not. Neither have I any intention of clipping their wings just so they’ll stick around us so I can keep a beady eye on them, but don’t expect me to watch them falling out of the sky and stand by doing absolutely… fuck all, while they crash and burn.’
Bruce stopped chewing for a second as the shock of hearing his wife use the F-word disabled his jaw.
‘What are you talking about – birds? They’re not bloody birds. They’re people and they don’t need us any more, Shay, and the sooner you get that into your skull, the better it will be for everyone.’
‘They’reyoungpeople and of course they still need us. Don’t you see what’s going on with them, Bruce? Have you ever?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Somewhere in Shay an alarm bell went off, informing her that she was about to overstep a mark. She pressed on the snooze button to silence it and let rip.
‘You’ve never put the effort into them. It’s as if once my egg was fertilised, your job was done. When Courtney was playing up at school, who went to see her teachers? Who sat up with her all night when she’d taken that pill and was gurning like a lunatic and which one of us went to bed? When Sunny was being bullied, who went to talk to the parents? Who queued up hours to see Santa with them, who went to watch them in their school concerts, who was therein the audience when they were picking up their awards… and who wasn’t?’
‘I was bloody working,’ replied Bruce, stabbing himself in the chest with an affronted finger.
‘So was I,’ yelled Shay. ‘I was workingandwashingandcooking and raisingourchildrenandputting your drunken father to bedandlooking after your mum, juggling, keeping all the balls in the air however bloody worn-out I was. Being a parent means a little bit more than slapping a wage down on the table every week and then putting your feet up because in your eyes, that’s the whole father duty thing taken care of. You chose to hide behind your work and leave everything to me without a second thought. The only way you’d have ever noticed how much I did, Bruce, is if I stopped doing it and I wish I had, just for a week so you’d see. You don’t know the half of it because you left your mum and moved straight into another house where another woman was expected to do everything except twist wires together and drive a van. What I do is just shove clothes in a washing machine and flick a duster at things and put new sheets on beds and faff about a bit on a laptop booking hotels. How have I the brass neck to get tired?’
‘If you’re tired then you’ve been doing too much, haven’t you?’ Bruce matched her for volume. ‘Far more than you needed to because there’s something inside you, Shay, that is terrified your kids will fall off the end of the earth if they make a mistake. Okay, you had a friend who topped himself and that’s probably why you’ve hovered over your kids like a—’
Shay was straight on the word. ‘Your?’
‘Okay,ourthen. You know what I meant.’
‘Do not accuse me of being a helicopter parent, if that’swhere this is heading. I’m just being an ordinary, caring parent. And if I did such a crap job of it, if you were any sort of father you’d have jumped in and done something a bit more constructive than stop your children’s pocket money for a week.’
Bruce prepared for a full-on volley. ‘Maybe that’s why our marriage is the way it is, because being a parent is so much more important to you than being a wife.’
