Beck Gratitude

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78864-881-3
Verlag: Cinnamon Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 278 Seiten

At 44, New York divorcee, Mel, is not ready to give up on God or the possibility of motherhood. Between running an actors' agency in Hammersmith and rehearsing her role in a rock musical, she agrees to take care of her stepdaughter, Jess's challenging four-year-old son, Billy, two afternoons a week. Writing: Playing Billy's Mom on a strip of paper to place in her Gratitude jar, she prays that her good deed will have a pay off: her own fertility. Meanwhile, prepped with hormone tablets and injection at the ready, she awaits the return of charismatic Royce, who has been filming in Hollywood. But all is not well with Royce. A strange incident on Venice Beach after dark has shifted his world. Can he really be cursed? Desperate, Mel reaches out to her friend, Anto. He's gay but wants to be a parent. Thwarted again, will surrogacy be the answer? Will Mel be locked into taking on more responsibility for Billy as Jess spirals into depression following the loss of her father? Or can Mel make a life with the new man in her life, refugee Hassan, suffering from PTSD and raising his disabled eight-year-old son alone? Or will life take an unexpected turn? As Mel's faith moves towards Buddhism under Anto's influence and a friend steps in to help with a problem deeper than infertility that is gripping her life, will she be able to answer the call when an unlooked for opportunity presents itself? A deeply empathic, humane debut, Gratitude asks how we live now and how we make meaning in lives that rarely work to plan.

Chris realised a long-held ambition to write when, owing to health problems, he was forced to give up a career as a medical practitioner. In 2007 he won a regional play-writing competition with The Lesson and had it performed at The Little Theatre, Wells. In 2010 he obtained an MA in Creative Writing at Southampton University. He had two short plays performed at the café, Nuffield Theatre, Southampton. He self-published a novel The Summertime Blues in 2015. Throughout his writing career there has been a steady output of poetry, some of which has been published. In 2021 his poem 'Still some way to go, Mother Rosa' was short-listed for the Wells Literary Festival Poetry Competition. Other interests include music, playing classical guitar and sailing.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Beck, Christopher

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The northbound Jubilee line was its calm Sunday morning self, the cars rattling along in that hollow, empty manner that seemed to beg the question: where was everybody? It always came with a subtle change of mood when the train hit broad daylight—part of the ritual and excitement Mel felt when visiting her English family. Only this time it had cost her some sleep. Today, a decision had to be made about who was to care for Billy after preschool when Jess was at work. Mel was armed with a sticker book full of different scenes and a wealth of adhesive characters and animals. She’d also brought her small guitar to sing to him.

As soon as he saw her enter the soft play café he waved and shouted. His mum, on all fours, turned and beamed at Mel. Jess had attractive almond eyes and good bone structure, her blond hair now short and stylish. Even before they kissed, Mel knew something was wrong. She hoisted Billy up, cuddled him then kissed his head. He too had had his hair cut short—much to her disappointment.

‘Can I play too?’ Mel asked.

‘He wants you to play with him outside. Don’t you, darling—the pirate ship, or maybe the fort. Wow! You look super relaxed, Mel. You must so love that job of yours.’

‘Matter of fact I’ve had a short vacation.’ Mel instinctively touched her face and tried not to guess the cause of Jess’s anxiety. This on top of the nerves she’d been nursing about whether she’d be offered ‘the job’.

‘Go anywhere?’

‘Only walked the river and read.’

‘I’d be like that if I could just design.’

‘Oh, had a facial too.’

Jess worked three days a week in a West End clothes shop that had once sold a dress she herself had designed and made.

‘Come on little big man, let’s go play,’ Mel said, handing Jess her phone, the book and the guitar, then leading her young charge out through the open café door where he gave her the slip and scampered off towards the blue and white pirate ship. As ever, he was wearing his striped soccer shirt.

They’d done the swings, the ropewalk, the revolving saucer as well as playing pirates—good and bad. Now all he wanted was to play in the fort that stood in the older kids’ section.

‘Okay, pirate man, but we’ll have to lift you over the ramparts. Then you be careful.’ The steps and ladders were higher and steeper here and once he was installed, she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second. At least it was quiet and not teeming with older ones. Billy suffered from a degree of clumsiness that Jess preferred to call dyspraxia.

He was issuing urgent instructions to his imaginary minions. Together they fought off two waves of enemy attacks in quick succession when a plane banked overhead, the sun flashing off its wings. Mel looked up and was about to say something when the air suddenly reverberated with noise. Billy covered his ears, his little face contorting with distress. She leant over the fort, plucked him up as if from the jaws of a fiend then rushed him back to the café. Jess was already at the door.

‘Alright my baby. Alright now,’ she soothed in his ears. Billy had a problem with sudden, loud noises, Jess explained, and wherever they went she carried a supply of cotton wool to protect his ears. As soon as he was pacified, he turned his attention to the book and began attaching figures with unconscious surrealism to the various scenes. Mel’s phone had chirped only once. She and Jess cradled large cups of coffee.

‘It’s about Dad,’ Jess began.

‘Oh?’

‘The consultant says he’s showing signs of dementia.’

‘Surely he’s much too young,’ Mel said with conviction.

‘They’re calling it pre-senile dementia.’

‘Shit!’ Mel gasped, then checked that Billy hadn’t heard. Her mind was struggling to come to terms with the diagnosis, its ugliness, and then thinking about the implications for Jess and for Billy. Weren’t some cases hereditary?

‘There’s something else one of the doctors keeps asking about: the time you two met. They seem to be saying that on that particular day the air was so full of toxic stuff, the gases, the dust, there might be long-term effects. Dad never talked about it. Now I think…’ Jess reached for a paper napkin on the table, ‘he can’t…’

‘Remember?’

‘He can… but he needs a lot of prompting. Then we—I mean Davina and me—aren’t the best prompts. We don’t know the right questions to ask. I’d hate to ask something that’d upset him.’ Jess’s face was taut, her lovely eyes grave and a little evasive. Mel caught her stepdaughter’s drift and took refuge in Billy.

‘Love that dinosaur on the farm, babe. He’s really gonna give those other animals a hard time. Unless he’s vegetarian.’

‘T-rex only eats meat,’ Billy said with enormous conviction.

‘Too bad for the farm then,’ Mel replied looking at Jess and coaxing a brief smile. ‘Okay, whaddya want?’

‘Could you meet and talk? Just once.’

‘About what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. If you could just see him I’d be… it would be so right. Even if nothing… I’d feel a lot better getting your input. A big ask, I know.’

‘Just your dad and me, right? No Davina.’

Jess nodded enthusiastically and was about to launch into unconstrained gratitude when Mel felt a sudden urge to bring up the past, then wished she’d kept quiet. ‘Don’t know if there’s any connection. Suppose that doctor ought to know we used to do stuff. But then so did the rest of New York for heaven’s sakes.’ A change of expression spread over Jess’s face. ‘Nothing way out, just the usual suspects. God! Why did I open my big mouth?’

‘And why did the happy couple need drugs?’ Both women glanced towards Billy as if the topic might affect him but he was fully absorbed with his sticky figures.

‘Because, you know, it makes you feel… you can do anything. You’re rich and beautiful.’

‘And now?’ Jess enquired, looking serious, hostile even.

‘I’m much more responsible now,’ Mel said.

‘So it’s only now and then, is it?’ Jess’s sarcasms were getting louder and Billy’s concentration had at last been broken.

‘Mummy sad.’

‘No, no, babe. Just grown-up talk,’ adding, ‘well, some of us think they’re grown-up.’

‘Ouch! Don’t do any of that stuff these days. It has zero relevance to your dad. It’s just there was something back awhile in the press. Fizzled out pretty quick I recall.’

‘What about booze?’ Jess probed.

‘Negative, leastways we were only occasional users.’

‘Dad drank after the divorce. Now Davina’s quite hard on him. What about you?’

‘Hey, what is this?’

‘Mel, you look fantastic, you’ve got this amazing job that you alone created. But I know there’s a back story.’

‘Uh-huh, there’s ups and downs. But I can be hard on me too. Can we change the tape, my dear stepdaughter?’

On the way back the train was busier—ideal for Mel to cut off into daydreams of Billy, having him all to herself in Chiswick, playing mom. She almost shivered at the thought of bathing his perfectly proportioned body, putting him to bed, reading him stories and singing to him. When the train went underground, she was confronted by her reflection in the opposite window, hugging her guitar and smiling stupidly. She hastily adopted a more neutral expression but the bubble of joy inside her refused to burst. It didn’t matter that Jess had never so much as mentioned Billy sleeping over in Chiswick. It was pure speculation, of course, but might caring for Billy lead to certain changes in her own chemistry? She prayed it would.

Mel was to pick up every Tuesday and Wednesday lunchtime, maybe sometimes staying over. The current child-minding arrangements—never satisfactory—had been eating into her stepdaughter’s meagre earnings. Her own mother lived in Sussex and rarely came to London.

The ‘interview’ had turned into something like a poker game, Jess keeping her weak cards close to her chest while Mel put down her invincible ace—the promise to see her ex-husband. Even then Jess had taken a final swipe at Mel’s chemical past.

‘And I always thought how brave you two were after 9/11, how well you’d coped. Now I know—you were in La La Land.’

‘Never said I was brave. We were in love. It was just parties and concerts. Molly and coke.’

‘Who? What?

After a tedious explanation about MDMA, e and amphetamines, Jess calmed down but not before Billy, once again distracted, asked, ‘What’s e, Mum?’ With great emphasis Jess replied, ‘A baddy’ and then followed this with, ‘e’s a baddy’ and everyone laughed. With that, Jess became serious, even melodramatic.

‘Not made a will—yet. But if shit ever happens, Mel, you rank above my mum, right?’ It was as if Jess had just pinned a medal on her. She was choked.

But Mel would need some basic instruction—what exactly were pull-ups? And only when the part-time mom checked all the right boxes to Jess’s satisfaction would she begin her scariest job.

At Green Park, she’d almost made it to the Piccadilly Line when she heard a familiar voice.

‘Do you busk?’

There was no way anyone carrying a ¾ guitar could be mistaken for a busker. Mel was too taken aback to reply. In any...