Seeing Other People (31 page)

‘Joe, I want you to meet Thomas and Vicky: my kids. Kids, this is Joe, one of my best mates.’

As I said hello I couldn’t help but think back to the day at the studio when I’d first met Stewart. Who would’ve believed that all this time later Stewart and I would be not just acquaintances, but good friends? The older I got the more unpredictable life seemed to become. There was never any telling what might happen from day to day let alone from minute to minute. There was always something unexpected lurking around the corner.

That night I reached home long after it had gone dark. I opened the mail as I kicked off my shoes. A gas bill, a dentist’s appointment card, two bank statements, the new issue of
Men’s Health
and then, finally, my decree absolute. I sat down heavily on the bottom of the stairs. It was official: I was no longer married to Penny and in that instant I missed her more than ever.

31

It was early evening and the last embers of April sun were shining through the kitchen window casting shadows across the cupboards. I was in the middle of making a bowl of pasta when the phone rang. I’d been waiting for a call from Penny all day. Today was the single most important day of our daughter’s life so far: today was the day she would find out which secondary school she would go to in September.

Since the previous September this had practically been the sole topic of conversation amongst parents at the school gates. Some had already made up their minds to move into the right catchment areas or out of London altogether, others were cashing in nest eggs and sending their kids to private schools and still others – like Penny and me – had chosen to simply cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Much like every other parent in the borough of Lewisham we wanted Rosie to go to Watermill Lane Comprehensive, a school that was so oversubscribed it had a waiting list to get on to its waiting list. Watermill Lane’s Ofsted report was outstanding, its pupils regularly attained the kind of exam results any elite private school would be proud of and it had an incredible reputation not only for sport but also the arts. Parents had been known to rent houses in the catchment area months in advance for exorbitant fees and move their whole families there just to secure a place and others who had lied or cheated their way to the front of the queue were regularly caught out and splashed across the front of the local free paper. Back in October when Penny and I had filled in the online application form we’d convinced ourselves that even though we lived three miles away from the school, just outside last year’s catchment, it was madness to up sticks and sell just to get a much more expensive house a mere 0.6 miles closer to the school and so we reasoned – or rather, hoped – that somehow we’d be OK. And with everything that had happened over the past few months, it was fair to say that we had taken our eye off that particular ball. But now that the day was here when we’d finally find out Rosie’s fate it was a lot harder to be quite so easy-going, especially since West Gate Community College, the undersubscribed, fresh-out-of-special-measures secondary school was just minutes down the road.

Unfortunately however the call wasn’t from Penny but Van trying to sell me on the virtues of going out with his sister Makayla, who had just arrived in London fresh from Auckland.

‘She’s amazing, mate! Gorgeous face, great personality and legs to die for!’

‘Let me stop you right there, Van,’ I protested before the conversation could get any more uncomfortable. ‘You do realise this is your sister you’re talking about?’

‘Of course I do, but that doesn’t stop her from being hot does it? Obviously she’s not hot to me. To me she’s still the little squirt who used to sneak into my room and nick my AC/DC tapes but take it from me, to regular guys who aren’t related to her she is definitely one hot chick! I’ll send you a photo if you don’t believe me.’

The line went silent and I winced with embarrassment as I pictured Van talking his sister into the indignity of posing for a photograph: ‘Don’t worry, it’s for a mate so he can see if you’re all right-looking,’ I could imagine him saying. ‘I won’t use a flash and I’ll make sure to get your best side!’

My phone pinged just at the moment the boiling pot of pasta spat scorching water in the direction of my shirt. I lowered the heat under the pan then returned my attention to the phone as, with eyes half closed, I opened the picture attachment. The pretty brunette in the picture looked nothing at all like the blond-wigged Van in drag I’d imagined. She had a kind face, deep green eyes and looked exactly like the sort of woman I could fall for given the right circumstances. It was hard to believe that Van had been in the same room as this women let alone the same womb. There had to be something more to it. I called him back.

‘And this is actually your sister?’

‘Ha! Same mother, same father. I’m guessing she got a better pick from the gene pool though! Anyway, I told you she was hot and it looks like you think so too so let’s do this. She’s single, she’s here for a month and I’ve talked you up a storm. All you need to do is say the word, and – pre-booked sightseeing trips notwithstanding – I’ll sort out a date.’

‘Honestly, I’m really touched,’ I said, and I meant it. I couldn’t imagine any of my friends outside the Divorced Dads’ Club taking this much of an interest in my life. ‘But I’m just not in the right place at the moment.’

‘And you never will be if you don’t get out of the rut you’re stuck in,’ said Van. ‘I know it’s hard to hear but it’s time to move on, mate. If me and the guys can do it then so can you.’

It had been over a month since I’d received my decree absolute and while all I wanted to do was curl into a ball and die Van had been determined to keep me in the land of the living to the extent that in this past week alone I had been to one of his gigs, out bowling with him and even to the cinema. ‘You’ve got to keep putting yourself out there,’ he’d told me as we’d left the cinema having sat though ninety minutes of a by-numbers action movie, ‘otherwise you’ll shrivel up and die.’

Telling Van I’d get back to him I returned to my meal preparations. I stuck a fork in the pasta and took a bite of a twirl. It was overcooked and waterlogged but nevertheless I drained the pan, tipped on the half-bottle of pasta sauce I’d found in the fridge and grated most of a block of cheese over it. I dumped the whole lot unceremoniously on to a plate and then my phone rang again. This time it was Penny. There was only one question on my mind.

‘Did she get in? Did she get Watermill Lane?’

‘No,’ said Penny. ‘They want to send her to West Gate.’

‘I’ll be with you in ten minutes,’ I said and then I scraped the contents of my plate into a bin bag on the floor and grabbed my coat.

West Gate Community College. Even hearing the name was enough to send a shiver down my spine. Sometimes if I was off work I’d see kids in what passed for West Gate’s school uniform hanging out by the station. More often than not however it was the smell of weed I noticed before I saw them. At first I thought I was imagining it but then one day when they were obviously feeling extra confident I spotted one of them lighting up a joint as openly as if it were a cigarette. Then of course there was the local newspaper, the
Lewisham Gazette
, which seemed to alternate articles about muggings with stories about school pupils raising money for local charities. Without fail the muggings involved kids from West Gate and the stories about philanthropy featured kids from Watermill Lane. As liberal as my politics were and as disadvantaged as I knew some of the kids at West Gate to be, I knew that there was no way any child of mine was ever going to go to West Gate Community College. This wasn’t just a middle-class parents’ nightmare. It was every parent’s nightmare.

‘We have to appeal,’ I told Penny as we sat in the kitchen while the kids watched TV.

‘On what grounds?’ she asked. ‘Rosie doesn’t have any special needs, we’re well outside the catchment area and as much as I’d love for things not being fair to be considered a legitimate argument I don’t think that will cut it.’

‘So you’re just going to give up?’

‘I don’t know what else there is we can do, Joe. We haven’t got the money to go private so other than moving out of the area altogether – and who knows how long that will take let alone whether we’ll even get into a school that we like somewhere else – I don’t see a way out of this.’ A tear slid down her cheek. Instinctively I leaned across the table and put my hands on hers. ‘Whatever it takes to make this right we’ll do it, OK?’

Penny nodded and withdrew her hands guiltily. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just wish it wasn’t like this. I wish something would go right for a change. I mean how could they even think it was acceptable to send our little baby to that horrible place?’

Penny left the room in search of a tissue leaving me to think not just about the problem at hand but also my relationship with Penny. Even for the sake of our daughter it was hard being around her knowing that she was with someone else. Every time she got upset I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her and yet I knew I couldn’t trust myself to be so close to her and not do or say something that would drive an even bigger wedge between us than the one that already existed. This was one of the key things that films, books and TV fail to tell you about life after the end of a marriage: that the job of being a parent is no respecter of personal circumstances. It doesn’t give a toss if as an ex-couple you’re in one of those phases when you’re not speaking to each other; it is frankly indifferent to how uncomfortable you might find the process of having to sit down across from each other while your kid’s teacher informs you of how well your child is doing at finger-painting and it certainly doesn’t give a crap if your ego’s still bruised following the news that your other half has found someone new. Being a parent wants what it wants, it needs what it needs and right now, in the middle of the chaos of our fractured family life, it needed us to be the best parents we could be.

Penny returned to the kitchen. Her eyes were still red and puffy. I stood up and without a word put my arms around her and held her close. I could feel her heart beating against my chest. I was never going to recover from being in love with Penny, I could see that now, but as odd as it sounded, the truth was that I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Penny would haunt me forever, but, unlike Fiona, I would be glad of the ghost of her in my life if that was all I could have.

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ I said, as we finally let go of each other. ‘I know it all looks dark right now but hand on heart I promise you we’ll get through this. We just need to stay strong. And rather than listening to all the rumours about West Gate I think our next move should be to take a look at the school for ourselves.’

It was raining as I arrived at the main entrance of West Gate Community College a few days later to meet Penny for our tour of the school. As we walked up the path towards reception it occurred to me that from the outside at least it looked no more threatening than the average British comprehensive and certainly less run-down than the school I had attended in my youth. Yes, there was the odd bit of graffiti scrawled across the school sign and certainly there was more than the average amount of discarded cigarette butts and chip wrappers on the floor than one might have hoped but on the whole it seemed not bad. And then we went inside.

It wasn’t so much the exhausted and demoralised teaching staff we encountered or the cramped classrooms containing far too many kids or even the fact that an entire wing of the school was labelled ‘The Detention Unit’. The real problem with the school was its atmosphere: housing fifteen hundred pupils at a time it was far too big to offer even the slightest impression of being a community. As Penny and I wandered the empty corridors taking in the pupils’ dirty, damaged and in many cases long out-of-date work displayed on the walls I could easily imagine the kids who came here getting lost not only in the building itself but in the system too. The general air of despair that hung about the place, along with the aroma of cannabis in the toilets, made this a school I wouldn’t be happy to send any child to, let alone my beautiful baby girl.

At the end of the tour we thanked Mrs Nardini, the school’s harried-looking head teacher, for her time and shook hands. ‘As a parent myself I completely understand the need to come and find out more about the school your child will be attending, especially one that’s previously had – how shall we put it? – such a colourful reputation,’ she said, smiling. ‘But as I said earlier I can assure you as one parent to another that the West Gate Community College of the present is a completely different creature to the West Gate of the past. Thanks to new management structures, the hard work of its many dedicated members of staff and hopefully the presence of children like your daughter Rosie, we here at West Gate are all looking forward to a bright new future.’

Mrs Nardini pressed the green exit button on the wall and the huge glass entrance doors slid open. Penny and I thanked her once again for her time and started walking down the drive towards the main school gates in silence. It was only when the doors had fully closed behind us and we had put sufficient distance between ourselves and anyone who might be able to overhear our conversation that I finally spoke.

‘Rosie goes there over my dead body. I mean it Penny, someone will literally have to kill me stone dead before I will let her set foot in this school.’

‘I’m with you all the way,’ said Penny. ‘All the time she was talking about the changes they’ve made and how they’re hoping to attract kids like Rosie to “inspire” the less able pupils I kept thinking: You are not going to use my kid like that! That was awful, I don’t want anyone’s kid to go there let alone mine. I’m scared Joe, I really don’t know what we’re going to do.’