All the Little Things Sarah Lawton (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

the house. She told herself she was setting her a good example, showing her a strong and independent woman who provided for her family. It wasn’t like Vivian’s father ever would. Even the thought of him in their lives made her feel dizzy with burgeoning panic. They were better off like this, they were safe.

Back in the kitchen Carol was dishing out steaming mash and topping it with sausages and gravy. It really was a time warp. She felt sixteen again, caught out misbehaving as she sat down and began to eat, her mum not looking at her as she did the same; wondering if they would ever move past the parent-child dynamic. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

The prickly atmosphere continued past dinner and the washing up, but was alleviated somewhat by the appearance of a large bar of Galaxy chocolate from Rachel’s handbag, presented along with a gin and tonic.

‘I am sorry, Mum,’ she ventured. ‘I know I’ve been taking the piss recently, but I have to be there, or it looks bad. I can’t just leg it at five.’

Her mum sniffed and took the chocolate, taking the paper off and peeling back the foil. ‘I’m not the one you need to apologise to. I get to see you now, but Vivian hasn’t seen you since breakfast yesterday.’ Carol swept the piece of fine auburn hair that always fell into her face back past her ear, and tried to straighten the frown off her face, the deep lines that appeared between her eyebrows above her glasses.

‘I know, I know. I changed my meetings around tomorrow so I can take her to breakfast club. And it’s Friday, so I’ll have the weekend with her. I’ll take her to the Leisure Lagoon, and ice cream after.’

‘She’ll like that,’ said Carol, snapping off a line of chocolate and passing it to Rachel, who was settling in with her own drink and unsuccessfully trying to smother a yawn. ‘I know it’s important to you, after everything with that man, but you won’t get these years with her back. She’ll be grown up before you know it.’

‘Mum, I know. It’ll be fine, I promise.’

As Rachel let the gin and sugar do their work, the stresses of the day slipped away. They tuned into a reality TV show and as Rachel’s mind drifted to the next day’s work, she gave no further thought to Carol’s warning. After all, Vivian was just a little girl. School was far more exciting than spending time with her mum. Weren’t friends everything at that age?

Rachel

I left Steve with another one of his friends who had turned up, setting the world to rights and slurring every third word at about ten o’clock so I could get home while there was still some light. I was too lazy to go round the long, lit-street way and would always rather cut across the field, which I did, inhaling with pleasure the grassy scents of summer evenings.

I hadn’t had anything to drink, so I managed to navigate keys-in-door with ease. I wasn’t expecting the girls to be back but there were two pairs of shoes at the bottom of the stairs and all the lights were on, so I thought they must have come back early. I wondered if I would be dealing with the midnight puking club if they’d had a bit too much – it wouldn’t have been the first time one of her friends had been ill. I sometimes thought I should be more firm with the drinking, but I was doing exactly the same at her age and would have felt like such a hypocrite. And after all the trouble we had to get away from in London, the awful time she had at primary school, I was just glad she had some lovely friends and I didn’t want to rock the boat. And to be fair, Vivian never seemed to be drunk; she always wanted to be in control. If anyone in our house was drinking too much, it was me, as a salve to my self-enforced penance here in the middle of nowhere and the guilt I felt over letting her down so badly when she was young.

I decided to have a midnight feast of cheese and pickle on the last of the bread, and a pint of squash, and mock myself for the rebel life I was living. I couldn’t help but think about Steve teasing me earlier about my sex life. I pretended I was just being coy, when in fact I was just too embarrassed to confess that the last time I had had sex was around the time Viv was conceived.

It’s not a period of my life I like to think about, but sometimes I can’t help but poke at it, like it’s a badly healing scab that pulls and itches. Bleeds.

I met Vi’s father at art college in Manchester and fell in love – or lust, probably – at first sight. He was perfect: acid green eyes against dark hair and creamy skin, my absolute favourite colour combination. He seemed to feel the same way about me and we fell into an intense relationship that revolved around skipping lectures in favour of long mornings in bed followed by long afternoons in the scuzziest dives we could find in Moss Side. Ciaran was an observational artist – he could catch someone in just a few quick strokes of a pencil, and favoured people who had been ground down by their lives. Drunks in bars and the women who paraded for their attention.

I didn’t like his fixation with people who he looked down on; I didn’t like that he thought he was so much better than them, when we weren’t – who is? But Ciaran thought he was the next great social commentator, Lowry for the twenty-first century, dredging through life for specimens to make people ‘think’. Part of me hated him for dehumanising people, but that was smothered by the part