Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [9]
Clare wanted a website to help sell her stuff. It shouldn’t have been a big job, but she needed help to photograph the stuff, help to write the captions, help to choose the artwork and lettering.
‘I hope she’s paying for all this extra work,’ Mum sniffed, after Dad spent a whole Saturday styling and photographing a bunch of speckled soaps that looked like they were made of cooking fat and boiled-up twigs. ‘She’s taking advantage of you.’
Dad just laughed and said that Clare was a nice woman, and that she deserved a bit of help.
‘Why can’t she help herself?’ Mum had snapped.
I thought Mum was being a bit mean, but that’s just what Clare did. She helped herself – to my dad. I didn’t even see it coming.
‘It’s not that I don’t love you any more,’ Dad said to me before he left. ‘I do. I always will, Scarlett. It’s just that things aren’t working out with your mum. They haven’t been for a while.’
I tried to believe him, even as I watched him pack. ‘Can’t you try a bit harder then?’ I wanted to know. ‘It might just be a bad patch. Gill’s parents had one of those, and they’re all right. You just have to bring home flowers and chocolates and hold Mum’s hand a bit more.’
‘Scarlett, love, it’s too late for all that,’ he said.
‘Well, you don’t have to leave,’ I argued. ‘You can still live here, can’t you? We’re your family, you should be here, with us. Tell that stupid Clare woman to go away’
Like that was ever going to happen.
‘Scarlett, love, I can’t,’ he told me. ‘I don’t want to. I’m sorry’
Sorry? That didn’t really cut it, for me. He moved out of our house and into Clare’s, and Mum and I were history. I got to see him every Sunday, and we’d trudge around the British Museum or sit in McDonald’s, picking at our Happy Meals and wondering how it got to this.
‘Clare’s nice,’ he said to me one week. ‘You’d like her. Why not come over next week, get to know her a bit?’
‘She’s a witch,’ I huffed. ‘I hate her.’
‘Scarlett, you don’t even know her.’ He sighed. ‘Give her a chance. She’s a good woman. She has a little girl – Holly, she’s seven. Nice kid. I’m sure you’d get on…’
A little girl? My world crumbled.
I cried so hard when he dropped me home that night that Mum said we should cut the meetings to every other week. It was too upsetting, too disruptive. Pretty soon, we were down to once a month.
It doesn’t have to be the end of the world when your parents split up, I know, but it was for me. It felt like my whole life was sliding away from me. I didn’t go to karate and keyboards and drama and ballet any more, because Dad wasn’t there to take me. I stopped dreaming of ponies and I went to after-school club till Mum finished work and could pick me up. There were no more sleepovers, no more embarrassing moments with farting cars or spoons balanced on noses.
I sat in my room and watched the grass grow on the lawn, the weeds sprout through the cracks in the garden path. When Mum told me we were selling the house so she and Dad could split the profits, I didn’t even care.
I cleared away four bin bags of old clothes and toys, books about ponies, bits and pieces of my childhood. Dad called round late one night and loaded them up in the Morris Traveller to take to the charity shop.
Mum made me give Coco and Fudge to the kids next door, because you can’t keep rabbits in a flat, and I still wonder if those kids remember that Coco hates apples, or that Fudge loves it when you scratch her behind her ears. Probably not.
We packed up our stuff and moved to the flat, and then the divorce came through and Dad and Clare got married in a registry office in Camden. Soon after, they all moved to Ireland, to some dump called Kilimoor, in Connemara where Clare grew up, and the very last shreds of hope died inside me.
That was that. It wasn’t enough just to leave us, replace us, he had to move a million miles away and