When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

spray-tanned and highlighted to perfection. They sit on white sofas, drenched in expensive jewelry, as they recount hurt feelings and betrayals and watch the most emotional clips of the show. Amber is questioned about her husband, Jim, and his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. She says, “I don’t piss him off at home, we don’t hurt one another and he really is truly amazing as long as you don’t fuck with him.” Oh, Amber, sweetheart, that doesn’t sound good. That sounds like something my husband would say about me.

Another email:

I’ve been looking for you. I thought I might find you walking somewhere on the common. Where are you? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know things were this bad. I’m so worried. Please can we talk? We’ll fix it, I promise, we’ll fix all of it. We’ll get you some more help for the house, give Stefka more hours, we’ll get someone for the kids, we can even get someone to do the nights for a few weeks, a night nanny? Whatever help you need, I’ll sort it, I promise…

I breathe deeper than I have all day. I exhale slowly, my eyelids suddenly so heavy. This is why I haven’t said it, why I haven’t asked. Help. This is where I go left and he goes right. Because my skull is broken open and he offers me a roll of duct tape—gold-plated, finest-quality, first-class duct tape, but duct tape nonetheless. I love him, I love him. But he doesn’t know how to help. He doesn’t know what help I need.

Ma was a cleaning lady. She cleaned offices at night for a few years when we were kids. Depending what shifts she got, if they clashed with Dad driving the bus at night, then after school me and Frankie would catch the ferry with Ma and go to work with her in the City. On the way to Manhattan we’d sit facing the Staten Island side, watching it get smaller and smaller, leaving the views of the City for the tourists who crowded the front of the boat. Within minutes we’d do something to annoy Ma, she’d yell at us and then we’d go out on deck and shout at the seagulls, barely able to hear ourselves over the roar of the engine and the water.

It sounds hard, going to work with your mother, but we liked it. There were always musicians busking, Jehovah’s Witnesses walking around with the Watchtower. In the ladies’ room someone always had a velvet display board with big, fabulous earrings for sale. There were clusters of Russian and Polish ladies commuting to their night cleaning shifts and tourists from everywhere. Deep South church groups in matching T-shirts or French high-school kids with cool Euro sneakers or groups of Korean and Japanese families. There were cops patrolling the boat, walking slow. Deckhands, tattooed and burly. The pigeons hitching a ride to Manhattan. On the old boats with the wooden benches there were hundreds of messages carved into the wood. GM luvs KO. JJ gives good head. Graffiti tags on the emergency fire hose. The ancient shoeshine men with their worn shining kits, their thick hands permanently stained with polish. Me and Frankie loved the ferry.

We’d bring sleeping bags and sleep under a desk while Ma worked a building through the night. We’d go in through the service entrance, then hide in a bathroom until Ma checked that no office workers were working late, and when the coast was clear she’d set us up somewhere until her shift was over. Sometimes she’d have a key for some boss’s office and then we’d get to sleep on a sofa or in some big executive armchair while she vacuumed and dusted and mopped.

Harry kept saying we needed to get someone to help with the house and he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t hire a cleaning lady. He couldn’t know what it meant to me. And then one night he came home late and found me sobbing in the kitchen, standing at the sink with the water running, overwhelmed by dirty plates and pots I had to put on the floor because the counters were too full of groceries to put away and laundry to fold. He sent me to the shower and cleaned the kitchen. Then he sat with me, pushed my hair behind my ear and said, “We can’t go on like this, Pukes. Your mother isn’t here, my mother isn’t here, Stacy and Danielle and Sharon aren’t here. You just cannot do everything on your own. You’re not supposed to do this all alone.”

I didn’t answer him, I just listened to the echo of the names of all the people who weren’t here but should’ve been. Like a bruise you forget about until you press it. I had a picture in my head of Ma, all the times she brought us into a fancy office at midnight to find they’d had a celebration lunch, leaving the catering boxes overturned; sticky soda spills still wet on the carpets; trash cans overflowing with half-eaten sandwiches; full coffee filters spilling grounds all over the floor. Or in the bathrooms, if a roll of toilet paper fell to the floor and unwound itself, they left it there, didn’t even kick it to the corner of the bathroom; left it to soak up the water from the washing of hands and splatter from the sinks. When I got my first office job I always took my coffee cups to the kitchen and washed them instead of leaving them on my desk; just a small sign of respect for the person who cleaned in the middle of the night, whose kids might be sleeping in the office next door.

I didn’t know how to explain to Harry that I didn’t want a cleaning lady because the house was too much of a mess. That it was disrespectful to bring some hard-working woman into this chaos and pay her £10 an hour for backbreaking work that was worth much more