Staunch Read online

  Stepdad has brought me up since the age of eleven. He and my mum have been together for over twenty years. Their wedding was in the top-five happiest days of my life, maybe even top-three. He taught me to drive. He helped me with my maths homework. He introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock films, and to doomy Eighties goth music like Joy Division and The Cure. He is my skiing and cycling partner and basically my favourite person to hang out with. He always refers to me as his daughter and we would both fight anyone who dared to question the logistics of this.

  My mum is beautiful and wonderful, the most fun and generous person I know. She and I are very close but if anything, sometimes we are too similar; he is the buffer that makes our family work. If my mum is the person I love the most in the world, he is the one I idolise. He and I are best friends, always have been; my mum would jokingly accuse us of ganging up on her, and I secretly enjoyed it.

  It’s not like I needed a dad when he came along – I have a dad and he’s lovely. But my stepdad and I had a relationship outside of that – he was always a reliable and loving parent to me, but also we had loads in common and just got on really well. I suppose because he was slightly outside of being my actual parent, I found him easier to talk to and he came along at an age when I really needed that.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ my mum says. ‘I’m hoping he’ll change his mind and I won’t have to tell anyone. It’ll be fine. I’m glad you’re with your friend, you need someone to look after you.’

  Have I mentioned my mum is a fucking hero? I’m still repeatedly telling her I love her when she hangs up the phone. I keep saying it, even after the line has gone dead.

  I walk to Café Boheme very slowly, like my bones are made of glass. I’m early but I don’t know where else to go. I don’t cry, I don’t react. I feel nothing. I guess the pins and needles numbness might be what they call ‘shock’ but who knows or actually cares?

  I need a fucking drink. I get a cosy table for two and ask the handsome French waiter for a massive glass of white wine. I then sit there for an hour and don’t touch it. I sit very, very still and stare at the wall for an hour, while that full massive glass of wine gathers condensation in front of me.

  Alice walks in wearing a faux fur coat, enormous heels and bright, bright lipstick. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  ‘Ells!’

  She hugs me into a cloud of fake fur and I could collapse into her arms but I do not. It occurs to me this might be the last normal night I can have for a long time, maybe forever. I don’t want to make this real.

  ‘How did your book meetings go?’

  ‘Great. Brilliant. I think someone might actually buy my book! We should hear soon …’

  ‘Well, that definitely calls for champagne!’

  We have a lovely evening. We eat French food and flirt with the waiter and chat about boys. We smoke cigarettes sitting out on the pavement like we are actually in Paris (and not just a French restaurant), snuggled together arm-in-arm against the cold, blankets over our knees. We drink two bottles of champagne, joyously.

  As soon as I leave and Alice goes out of sight, my bones stiffen up with sadness. I’m not sure this night is real but I suspect it might be. I sit on the train home and stare dead ahead at the seat in front of me.

  I drag myself home, up the flights of stairs to our third-floor garret, which is already half packed up for the big move on Friday. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed that K is out. Mostly relieved, I suppose.

  I don’t switch on the lights. That would make it real. I don’t take off my coat. That would make it real. I sit down on the nasty rental flat carpet in our mostly empty bedroom. I call Stepdad. He answers this time.

  ‘Ells … Hang on, the reception here is terrible. I’ll call you back from a landline.’

  The reception where is terrible? I don’t even know where he is. My phone starts ringing and the screen flashes up ‘number withheld’ and the sight of that makes me truly wish I were dead.

  He made me mixtapes and took me to Camden Market for the first time. We would have horror film marathons just the two of us because my mum and my sister didn’t like them. When I was older we would get drunk together and smoke cigars and do air drums to Aerosmith. He’s not my real dad. If he’s not married to my mum then what are we to each other?

  That’s when, for the first time, it really hits me. I start crying. I won’t stop for about four months.

  This should be an important, deep conversation – but nobody is talking. We are both crying so hard that neither of us can speak. We stay like that on the phone for, if not hours, what feels like it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says eventually. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I reply, even though I have no idea what that means.

  ‘I love you,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  As he hangs up the phone and I wonder where he even is, I’m not sure if it will be.

  K gets home at 2 a.m. to find me hunched in a corner in the dark, like the girl from The Ring. I still have my coat and my winter boots on. I refuse to go to bed, so we both lie down on the sitting room floor until it begins to get light.

  At 6 a.m., the universe delivers another unexpected fuck-you. My dad calls me to tell me that my grandpa (‘Parpie’) has died. Despite K asking me not to, I get up and go to work, because what the fuck else am I supposed to do?

  April 2003

  When I first met K, I was twenty-two. I was low-level bulimic and used to cut myself. I also took quite a lot of drugs and didn’t think any of these things were particularly unusual, because everyone I knew did at least some of them too. I lived in a shared house where we saw a ghost, and a boy we didn’t know once pissed on the sofa. I went out clubbing wearing 1970s evening dresses and I spent every Sunday so hungover I wanted to kill myself.

  You don’t need me to go into detail about these years, as you can read similar stories in numerous ‘my lost twenties’ memoirs. You know the drill. However, I will say that my lost years were much worse than any of these, guaranteed. Those books always depress me because the writers’ rock-bottom moments always sounds exactly like a normal Tuesday night for me in the early Noughties.

  Anyway, amid all the sad shagging, cocaine and throwing up – when I was twenty-two, my cool older friend Lauren asked me to be in a band. I couldn’t play anything but I looked like I should be in a band, which was apparently good enough. She said her boyfriend Richie could teach me to play bass. Easy.

  One Saturday afternoon, we drove to an obscure music shop in High Wycombe, where Richie knew someone who could ‘get us a good deal’ on a bass guitar. That turned out to be K, who looked like the lovechild of Keith Moon and Kurt Cobain in a brown cardigan – he had a mop of black hair, vast green eyes, incredible cheekbones and a slight air of oddness about him that I instantly liked. We got chatting about music and he told me about his band. He sold me a Fender Squier jazz bass, sunburst finish, and I gave him my number.

  I chose him in the same way that I had chosen most of my boyfriends up to this point: because he looked cool and was in a band. Thus far, this strategy had not worked out particularly well. I had been dumped a lot by boys who just wanted to ‘focus on their music’, or ‘not be tied down’. I’d had a lot of casual on-and-off things with guys who had thought I was ‘really cool’, while I had been secretly hoping they might fall in love with me and maybe want to marry me. Spoiler alert: they never, ever did. I had never met a boyfriend’s parents or been on a romantic minibreak.

  Amazingly, with K, things turned out differently. He called me the next day and asked me if I wanted to go out on a proper date. He took me for a picnic by the river. It turned out that he had been to art college and wanted to illustrate children’s books. He loved Sherlock Holmes and French films and obscure Japanese cartoons I had never heard of. He wasn’t quite as cool as I thought; he was much, much nicer.

  He was twenty-seven and he lived in a house b
y himself. He cooked me pasta and didn’t like drugs. He was slightly disapproving of my friends. I gradually stopped going out so much. I gave up smoking. He made me realize that some of the things I thought were normal were not.

  We went on holiday to Devon together and the following year we moved to Brighton. He was the first boyfriend I had ever loved who loved me. He told me he didn’t ever want to get married and I said that was fine. At last, I had something that was real. I could let go of the misguided dream of wanting to marry cool unattainable boys. This was a great compromise. We could forget convention and have a life together that suited us.

  We had interesting people round for dinner, and London friends coming to visit all the time. A graffiti artist friend once slept on our sofa for a year. I helped K write lyrics for his band, and he painted a portrait of me in a hotel room in Paris that my mum still has on the wall in her house. I sat at the kitchen table every night in our top-floor Brighton flat, and for the first time I wrote a whole novel.

  We went on holidays with my parents. K played music and did a lot of painting and set up a pop-up art gallery – way before these things were known as ‘pop-ups’ – back when having a friend with an empty shop in the centre of Brighton you could use was a normal occurrence.

  When Amy Winehouse was at her skinniest and most drug-addled, and for some reason in those days we all thought it was OK to gawp, Stepdad once said to me, ‘Imagine, if you hadn’t met K, that would be you. Only without the talent.’ How we all laughed.

  Then ten years later – on that freezing cold Monday in January – the world I thought I knew fell apart and K had to watch me regress before his eyes.

  Turns out, it’s acceptable(ish) to be a total fuck-up when you’re twenty-two. At thirty-two, it’s quite embarrassing. Especially when it’s about something as prosaic as a parental divorce. I’d already been through one once, at the age of eleven, and handled it with a lot more grace as a child than I managed to do as an adult. The acute humiliation of this knowledge did not help.

  I didn’t know that stilted phone conversation on the floor of my rental flat would be the last conversation we would ever have. Stepdad never spoke to any of us again. He very quickly began to communicate solely through solicitors’ letters. That was when I wrote him an email saying I didn’t want to speak to him again, not that he’d tried particularly hard. When he told me that he loved me and it would be OK, I had no idea I would never hear his voice ever again. I might have tried to say more if I’d known that.

  The only way I could get through this was by telling myself he had been kidnapped and someone – possibly Liam Neeson or Jason Statham – was holding a gun to his head and making him do these things against his will.

  It’s hard to explain how much I loved Stepdad and how much it fucked me up to lose him. There is something profoundly unsettling about having the rug ripped out from under your feet just as you think you’re living like a real adult and you’ve got everything under control for the first time in your life. I was so proud of myself for how far I’d come from that sad, bulimic, chain-smoking, falling-drunk-off-the-table twenty-two-year-old. Turns out she’d been waiting in the wings the whole time, through all those grown-up minibreaks on the Eurostar and trips to Ikea and all the other things I wrongly thought made me a functional adult.

  But mostly, I was just unbearably sad because I loved him so much. My heart was broken in a way that it could never have been by a mere boyfriend. It was the worst break-up imaginable. It taught me that I’d been wrong during those years of painstakingly building up my self-esteem. You can’t trust anyone. People will leave you and they will disappear. Love is not unconditional. You will not be enough. Ever. The person who I thought loved me the most, literally, disappeared.

  I got very thin. I started smoking again. I got a huge tattoo and told myself it would stop me from cutting myself, a habit so old it was almost forgotten, but somehow crept back in, under the American Apparel thigh-high socks I started insisting on wearing to bed every night. Quite embarrassing in someone over thirty, really. I lived in fear of K or anybody else finding out. I hid razorblades in strange places. I took two scalding hot baths a day with the doors locked.

  I cried constantly. Walking down the street, at work, in bed every night. I didn’t want to be touched because I would fall to pieces. I didn’t want anyone to be kind to me.

  I became obsessed with fake tan, a product I had only ever sneered at previously. My skin turned darker and darker, as it collected in my clavicles and between my fingers like nicotine stains. I think I just wanted to be in a different skin.

  I stopped sleeping altogether. I was so manic, I kept having what I thought were brilliant ideas, which made no sense. I started writing a ‘brilliant’ new novel, and then when I read it back, it barely even contained real words.

  Stranger and stranger superstitions started to take up more and more of my day. I once nearly choked in the house by myself, as I had taken to walking around with a piece of rose quartz in my mouth at all times. Just carrying it with me wasn’t enough.

  I started seeing cats everywhere I went, convinced it was ‘a sign’. I started a spreadsheet of every cat I saw, with columns entitled ‘location/colour/character/what they were trying to tell me’. The spreadsheet went so far as to include such entries as ‘Thought I saw a cat under a seat on the train. Followed it. There was no cat’.

  A couple of months passed and things did not get better. To the outside world, it didn’t look so bad. I managed to go to work and even to see friends occasionally, but I was just trying to get through the days. Nobody realized quite how bad it was, but I had a force field around me that made other people nervous.

  My sister and my nan seemed to get over the shock relatively quickly, but my mum and I did not. My mum kept telling me she was ‘fine’ but was very evidently not fine. I did the same thing back. Every time my phone rang, I braced myself for the news that my mother had committed suicide. I could not see a way that she or I would get out of this alive.

  This was perhaps more understandable for my mum than for me. But I just couldn’t get over it. Everything was ruined. Life felt not only futile but fucking impossible. I just couldn’t seem to function like a normal human being. I could not stop crying. But I had K, which seemed to make people think I must be fine. He would look after me, just like he always had.

  We started sleeping further apart. We stopped talking. Neither of us was capable of it. K tried to call Stepdad to tell him he thought I was going to kill myself. Stepdad didn’t answer and never called him back.

  I went to the doctor and received a letter saying I would be put on a waiting list for psychiatric assessment. A few weeks later I went for the assessment and received another letter saying I would be treated as priority and then nothing happened.

  When it became apparent that Stepdad was not going to come back or start behaving like a decent human any time soon, my mum and I went to Hatton Garden to sell her jewellery, then went and spent some of our pirate spoils on a decadent lunch. The guy in the dodgy pawn shop liked us, gave us an extra £50 note from the wedge in his breast pocket, to buy a bottle of champagne on him. If nothing else, we always do our best to make bad times glamorous.

  I am not as pragmatic as my mother, even though I could do with the money. My prize possession was a Swiss Army watch that Stepdad gave me, that used to be his. I used to wear it every day, with inordinate pride. Either selling it or throwing it away seemed wrong, somehow. For weeks I kept it in my desk drawer at work, as I didn’t want it in the house.

  One morning, after drinking a lot of coffee, I had a flash of inspiration. I pissed on it and posted it to him in a Jiffy bag (to his work address, I still don’t know where he lives) that developed a film of condensation on the inside before I’d even sealed it up. I guess it was the combination of fury, betrayal and shame that made this seem like a perfectly rational course of action. I told people about this calmly, like it was quite a normal thing to do.r />
  Just over six months after Stepdad left, in July, we were supposed to be going on holiday. It had been booked in advance as a family occasion, to celebrate Stepdad’s birthday and my mum’s and his wedding anniversary. It was non-refundable, so we decided to go anyway. It was a very strange week.

  My mum would say she was ‘going for a walk’ (aka disappearing down the beach to cry like her heart was broken, which was logical because it was), and everyone else would politely pretend not to notice, while I followed her even though she didn’t want me to. So she and I ended up going for long walks every day, holding hands, in near silence. I couldn’t tell her things like ‘it’s going to be OK’ because that would be a lie, so mostly I just said ‘yeah, I know, me too’. I’m not sure it helped.

  My mum and I drank a litre of cheap white wine with our lunch each day and then kept going. K couldn’t deal with it and took to bed for two days, refusing to talk to any of us. My poor sister and her boyfriend were left to try to jolly things up. I guess I shouldn’t blame K – it was stressful for everyone – but I couldn’t help thinking this wasn’t exactly helpful of him.

  K and I had already nearly broken up, only a year earlier. Another terrible crisis point – my stepmum Sue had died, suddenly, at the age of fifty-one. Like Stepdad, she had been in my life since I was eleven and had a huge hand in bringing me up. She was the most full-of-life woman I can picture, and she left behind two sons – both much younger than me – whom she adored fiercely. She shouldn’t have died, that’s all I can still think about it.

  At Sue’s funeral, I said ‘I want to have a baby’, the first time I had ever really had this thought, let alone spoken it out loud. It did not go away.

  K did not react to this as I’d hoped. He simply refused to discuss it. This was not what we had agreed; as he saw it, I was reneging on our deal, which was to be non-conformist and not care about such things. I was letting the side down. He was furious with me. I was so sad and so shocked, I agreed to shut up and hope it would go away.