Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [118]
Ever the optimist.
This is the point in a story where you would expect disaster to strike. Right on cue, it did.
Everyone at the estate agent’s was doing well; it wasn’t just me. But the owner decided he wanted to do better. Over a period of a couple of months, he altered just about every aspect of our pay structure. The ones on wages were okay. But if you were on commission only, like me, your income tumbled. My take-home pay went from £600 to £400 and then dropped even further, until in the end I was lucky to make £250.
At first I thought it would be okay. I’d put some aside; I’d be all right for a while. But when the money kept going down, I began to be really concerned. Daniel’s weekly fees were £110, rent was that again and then I had to pay for a car and petrol and everything else we needed to live. My measly £250 wasn’t covering it.
I responded to the situation in the only way I knew how. I just worked harder. The problem was, sixty-hour weeks had been my average for months. That’s how I’d made the wages in the first place. Now I found myself doing sixty-five, seventy, eighty, just to keep my head above the water. And it was killing me.
The worst thing was, I was farming out Daniel left, right and centre to squeeze in a few more minutes of profit. When I was with him, I was too knackered to enjoy it. It was always bedtime for one of us.
Tiredness was the least of my worries though. Once I’d covered the essentials, there was virtually nothing left for food or power. One by one, the tea, sugar and coffee ran out, not to be replaced. I was buying a loaf of bread and a few tins of beans on a Saturday and praying they’d see us through the week. Just because we had food, though, it didn’t mean we could cook it. Our gas and electricity ran off meters and my store of fifty pences gradually diminished – the modern meters weren’t fooled by anything as simple as coins made of ice. I’d come home in darkness, put Daniel to bed by candlelight and sit shivering in my own bed, crying at the mess I found myself in. It was barbaric, Victorian. It was just like living with Mum.
That was the point I knew I’d failed my son. After everything I’d done to protect him over the years, all the beatings I’d taken when his safety had been threatened, I’d let him down. I’d sworn on my mother’s grave that I would give him a better start than the one I’d had and all I’d done was match it, error for error, darkness for darkness, baked-bean tin for baked-bean tin.
I felt sick. I hated myself. Worst of all, I was still trapped in the cycle of work, work, work. Daniel still went to nursery and I still put on my business suits and smiled at rich customers, but the second I was alone, the tears were never far away. Nothing was going right. The harder I worked, the worse I felt.
I was almost a broken woman when I swallowed my pride and called on Grandpa one Friday lunchtime. He was surprised to see me, even more surprised when I asked him for a loan. Forcing the words out was the hardest thing I’d done in ages. He would never ask for help and, trust me, if there had been someone else I could have gone to . . . I felt a failure for bothering him. But I was a failure.
My nerves probably made me sound a bit glib when I finally spat the words out. Grandpa considered it for a while, then shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, Cathy, I don’t think that will be possible.’
I couldn’t blame him. I hadn’t revealed anything like the extent of my problems and I suppose, as I was standing there, hair immaculate, in make-up and an expensive suit, he wouldn’t have guessed. I should have begged, or at least told the truth about how serious it was, but after all the heartache he’d been through bailing Mum out and then worrying about me, I just didn’t have the heart.
Grandpa could never have known, but that was my last throw of the dice. In fact, his rejection just about confirmed my own opinion of myself at that moment. I didn