MAKE ME UP

PHONE CALLS AND FLASHBACKS

“Yes mum, I’m eating well…of course I’m following the gluten-free diet…” I reassure my mum, while I’m finishing off my three egg omelette, with cheese topping.

“Darling, how are you doing for money? If you let us know where you are, we could transfer you some.” My dad’s voice is full of concern.

The fact is that I love my parents, and I know that they love me, but they idolise Tim. I can’t trust them not to tell him where I am, especially my mother.

“I’m doing great for money, I’ve just got a better job, and I’m doing really well there.” I answer, purposefully avoiding the question about accepting a transfer, or pointing out that they don’t need my address to do that.

My parents belong to a slightly older generation, and haven’t felt the need to modernise. I envy them for this. Ignorance is bliss could be their life motto, and I won’t be popping their bubble of bafflement. Unaware of the pressures of social media, or the endless cycle of trying to have what other people brag about. My parents do what makes them happy for nobody’s benefit but their own.

There’s silence on the line, and I can imagine my mum and dad halfway through a game of charades trying to think of a different way to ask me where I am.

“Your friends were asking about you…” Mum begins, but I cut her off, that subject is too painful to talk about.

“No they didn’t, mum, I don’t have any friends”. I don’t bother putting ‘there’ at the end of my comment, because, if truth be told, I don’t have any friends anywhere.

“Well, Tim was asking how you were, he still wants to be your friend, despite the way you left things. It’s been a long break, and he really misses you. You were so good together”. Mum’s comment is saturated in judgment, and it reminds me why I shouldn’t call them in the morning.

I take a deep breath, not wanting my anger to come through. After all, they only know one version of events, and unfortunately, it does sound like it is Tim’s adaptation of our life, which is very heavy on the creative license that they have memorised.

“Mum, Tim and I aren’t on a break. It is over, and he isn’t a friend. I can’t tell you where I am, because I know you will tell him, and I want to start afresh,” I explain.

“But…he’s such a nice man…he has his own thriving business…and you’ve been together since…” I stop her, she’s not listening to a word I’m saying.

“I’ve got to go, I can’t be late for work. I’ll call you soon.” I cut her off, and hang up the phone.

Once again, the car Gods have blessed me, and with only a minor coughing fit my trusty shed on wheels manages to get me from A to B for the second day running.

Inevitably, after every phone call I have with my parents, I think about Tim. We had met when I had been looking for student accommodation for university. I was desperate to fly the nest, and Cumbria University offered that opportunity, but I’d missed the deadline date for student accommodations. My plan had been to complete a three-year course in business management, then use that knowledge to sell my own brand of make-up. The dream had been the same since I had put on my mother’s lipstick, badly, at the age of six. Tim owned an estate agent business, and he took an interest in my course, explaining he had done the same one. He even offered to organise work experience for me at his office should I ever need it. I was twenty, and he was twenty-eight. We'd arranged some flat viewings, and I remember that rather than shake my hand he cupped it in both of his own, like he was the oyster, and I was the pearl. Needless to say, between the three-piece suits, flirting and swapping of phone numbers, I was instantly bedazzled by him.

The flat hunting was an epic fail. Everything was either too expensive or too run down to be a good educational, nurturing environment. I decided to stay at home, but I’d often receive messages from Tim asking how my course was going, and I’d ask his opinion on certain concepts. We all know how the story goes. Texting turned into a date, a date turned into dates, and six months later I changed my status to ‘In a relationship with Tim Murphy’.

Eager to meet my parents, Tim was invited for Sunday dinner. I laughed at the time, pointing out that it was usually the parents wanting to meet the new boyfriend, not the other way round. He simply shrugged and said ‘he knew I was his family, so it was only natural that he would want to thank my parents for bringing me to him’. When I think about those comments now, I cringe at his words, but at the time I took delight in hearing them. I was too naïve. By the time my mother had served her infamous gluten-free trifle, both my parents were as equally enthralled by Tim as I was. He seemed perfect in every way. His dating profile would have read something like this: a self-made businessman, with a degree in business management, making a small fortune, would love to find a warm family to accept him, and a young woman to hang on his every word.

Harsh, but true.

The real turning point came when Tim confessed that both his parents had died in a car crash when he was fourteen, and it was the money that he had inherited that he put into his business. My mother was sobbing by the end of the story, and by the time I had walked him to his car that night, my parents had practically adopted him. On reflection, I think I was happy that they liked him so much, he was my boyfriend, so it had to be a good thing. Who wanted arguments in the family? I’m not sure when I felt the shift that they gave him more support than they gave me. I suspect it was gradual, but by the end of the ten years we spent together, Tim could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. Hindsight is both a cruel and an educational perspective. When I think of Tim’s relationship with my parents, the common cuckoo instantly comes to mind. The mother cuckoo will lay her eggs in another bird’s nest, and when her egg hatches the baby cuckoo kicks all the other eggs out of the nest. In case we are in need of a more graphic explanation, I was the shattered egg on the ground, and it seems I still am. This is the legacy of our love.

I could spend weeks listing the regrets that I have, but the greatest one of all is that I only completed the first year of my university course that I had worked so hard to be enrolled on. By the time my friends were starting their second year, I was living with Tim, who convinced me and my parents that he would always look after me, so a degree would be a waste of time and money.