A Tiny Bit Marvellous Read online

  Contra omnia discrimina

  A Tiny Bit Marvellous

  DAWN FRENCH

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Published in 2010

  Copyright © Dawn French, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Pages 337–8 constitute an extension of this copyright page

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194801-0

  Contents

  ONE: Dora (17 yrs)

  TWO: Mo (49 yrs)

  THREE: Oscar (16 yrs)

  FOUR: Mo

  FIVE: Dora

  SIX: Oscar

  SEVEN: Dora

  EIGHT: Mo

  NINE: Oscar

  TEN: Dora

  ELEVEN: Oscar

  TWELVE: Mo

  THIRTEEN: Dora

  FOURTEEN: Oscar

  FIFTEEN: Dora

  SIXTEEN: Mo

  SEVENTEEN: Dora

  EIGHTEEN: Mo

  NINETEEN: Oscar

  TWENTY: Mo

  TWENTY-ONE: Dora

  TWENTY-TWO: Oscar

  TWENTY-THREE: Mo

  TWENTY-FOUR: Dora

  TWENTY-FIVE: Oscar

  TWENTY-SIX: Mo

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Dora

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Oscar

  TWENTY-NINE: Dora

  THIRTY: Mo

  THIRTY-ONE: Dora

  THIRTY-TWO: Mo

  THIRTY-THREE: Oscar

  THIRTY-FOUR: Dora

  THIRTY-FIVE: Mo

  THIRTY-SIX: Oscar

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Dora

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Mo

  THIRTY-NINE: Oscar

  FORTY: Dora

  FORTY-ONE: Mo

  FORTY-TWO: Dora

  FORTY-THREE: Oscar

  FORTY-FOUR: Mo

  FORTY-FIVE: Dora

  FORTY-SIX: Mo

  FORTY-SEVEN: Oscar

  FORTY-EIGHT: Dora

  FORTY-NINE: Mo

  FIFTY: Oscar

  FIFTY-ONE: Dora

  FIFTY-TWO: Mo

  FIFTY-THREE: Dora

  FIFTY-FOUR: Oscar

  FIFTY-FIVE: Mo

  FIFTY-SIX: Dora

  FIFTY-SEVEN: Oscar

  FIFTY-EIGHT: Dora

  FIFTY-NINE: Mo

  SIXTY: Oscar

  SIXTY-ONE: Dora

  SIXTY-TWO: Mo

  SIXTY-THREE: Dora

  SIXTY-FOUR: Oscar

  SIXTY-FIVE: Mo

  SIXTY-SIX: Dora

  SIXTY-SEVEN: Mo

  SIXTY-EIGHT: Dora

  SIXTY-NINE: Oscar

  SEVENTY: Mo

  SEVENTY-ONE: Dora

  SEVENTY-TWO: Oscar

  SEVENTY-THREE: Mo

  SEVENTY-FOUR: Dad

  SEVENTY-FIVE: Dora

  SEVENTY-SIX: Mo

  SEVENTY-SEVEN: Oscar

  SEVENTY-EIGHT: Dora

  SEVENTY-NINE: Mo

  EIGHTY: Mo

  EPILOGUE

  From Nana P’s recipe book

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For the best mum. My mum. Roma.

  Between yesterday and tomorrow

  There is more, there is more than a day.

  Between day and night, between black and white

  There is more, there is more than grey.

  ONE

  Dora (17 yrs)

  My mother is, like, a totally confirmed A-list bloody cocking minging arsehole cretin cockhead of the highest order. Fact. In fact, I, of this moment, officially declare my entire doubt of the fact that she is in fact my actual real mother. She can’t be. I can’t have come from that wonk. Nothing in any tiny atom of my entire body bears any likeness to an iota of any bit of her. It’s so, like, entirely unfair when people say we look alike because like, excuse me, but we properly DON’T thank you. And I should know. Because I look at her disgusting face 20/7 and excuse me, I do actually have a mirror thank you. Which I’ve looked in and so NOT seen her face, younger or otherwise, staring back at me. If I do ever see that hideousness, please drown me immediately in the nearest large collection of deep water. I would honestly be grateful for that act of random mercy.

  At 5.45pm today she had the actual nerve to inform me that I will not apparently be having my belly button pierced after all, until my eighteenth birthday. She knows I booked it for this Saturday. She knows Lottie is having hers done. It was going to be our like together forever thing. Fuck my mother and all who sail in her. I hate her. She’s fired.

  TWO

  Mo (49 yrs)

  All things considered, that went rather well. Big pat on own back, Mo. I am definitely getting better at not letting her appalling language upset me. No one likes to be referred to as an ‘evil slag’, or ‘hell whore’, let’s be honest, but I’ve suffered worse at the sharp end of her tongue, so ironically I’m grateful for these comparatively lesser lashings.

  I am reminded of the trusty old David Walsh mantra I often recommend to my clients, ‘When, in argument, you feel like taking the wind out of her sails, it is a better idea to take your sails out of her wind.’ It certainly was no breezy zephyr I felt battering my aft as I purposely walked away, it was a Force 10 brute, but I am broad in the beam and made of suitably stern-ish stuff. As yet, unscuppered. If lilting a tad.

  Yet again, no sign of Husband at the eye of the storm. He scuttled off to a safe port in the study to spend time with his ever-ready, ever-understanding lover, MAC. His endless muttered bleatings about female politics being a mystery are weak and wobbly to the point of jelly. Why does he constantly refuse to back me up at these critical moments? I have repeatedly explained the importance of consistency and continuity as far as the kids are concerned. We must present a united front. We should share my opinion at all times. I am, after all, the qualified child psychologist in this family. Other than fathering two children (total of six minutes’ commitment to the project), I’m not aware of his training. However, have to give it to him, he is certainly a supremely skilled slinker-off-er when voices are raised, no one
can better his retreating technique. He certainly gets the gold in that backwards race. Oh yes.

  Then, he had the audacity to sit in Dora’s bedroom with her for an hour whilst she apparently ‘emptied out’ and explained to him that she feels she and I are enemies and have been for years. I am not her enemy, I am her mother. Sometimes it’s probably the same thing. It needs to be. I am not here to be her friend.

  What am I here for actually? To be a guide, a judge, an inquisitor maybe? At the moment I am purely transport, bank and occasional punch bag.

  Everso recently, it would have been me sitting next to her on that bed getting a wet shoulder complete with smeared mascara splats.

  What a huge difference between fifteen and seventeen years of age. An entire personality flip has happened. Where has my sweet little goth gone? She of the smudgy eyes and red nylon dreadlocks and Tank Girl industrial boots and clamp-on nose-rings? It was so easy to love that one. That one was endearingly injured and tragic. Why have I been sent this Tango-skinned bleached-hair designer slave? I own a human Cindy. Her insufferable rudeness grows with every waking moment. And quite a few sleeping moments I suspect. I’m sure she doesn’t waste any dream time NOT hating me. Does hate have a cumulative effect? If so, Dora will be earning buckets of interest on her massive deposits of mum-hate. I just have to accept it, she loathes me.

  Today’s particular loathing is about refusing to let her have her belly button pierced. In this particular respect, I feel entirely vindicated. Was there ever an uglier mutilation? The very thought of it makes my unpierced and considerably larger stomach turn. Her choice of ‘parlour’ is that nasty dirty little dungeon opposite the carpet shop in the high street, ‘Pangbourne Ink’. Obviously I’ve never ventured in, but I know the sister of the troll who owns it and she had chronic impetigo last year, so if Dora thinks I am sanctioning such a dreadful thing and in such a dirty place, she can think again.

  Of course, soon she will be eighteen and if she chooses to maim herself then, she can pay for the privilege. I am not a medical doctor, but if something terrible were to happen to her belly button, an infection of some sort, wouldn’t that seal her umbilical tubes? How would any potential grandchild of mine get its nourishment? She is risking any future child-bearing possibilities. Is there no end to her selfishness?

  THREE

  Oscar (16 yrs)

  The suffering of the last hour has been unutterably awful. Both of the Battle harridans, the monstrous mater and the dreadful daughter, have been shrieking sufficiently enough to wake as yet undiscovered molluscs at the pit-bottom of the ocean’s silty depths. I have mastered the art of ear-fugging – the application of twisted curls of wet kitchen paper administered to the inner ears. One would imagine this would provide a merciful relief. Yet still, their damnable harpy squawking prevails.

  What unlovely wretches they prove themselves to be, abandoning all vestiges of class and style, allowing the vulgarity of their lower-middle-class shackles to triumph. How very very very disappointed I am in both of them. It is so extremely tiresome. I am exhausted from the disappointment. I must needs take to my bed. The confines of my room offer the succour and solitude I sorely need. Increasingly, I discover that the delights of the Nintendo III Dance Mat Challenge are my only worthy companion. There, at least, the red fires of my passion are sated. Farewell, dear diary, ’til anon.

  FOUR

  Mo

  New Year’s Day. I vow it every year, but this year I mean it, everything is going to change. Radically. Last night was ample evidence that all sentient and valuable life in my home world has evaporated. Who have I become? Who is this? Who is Mo Battle?

  I am, apparently, a person who goes to a scruffy pub like the Miller’s Arms on New Year’s Eve, to meet up with neighbours my community-minded husband has fostered. I have nothing in common with them, and hardly even like them. We meet in order to kill what seems like aeons of dull time until the final countdown of doom, heralding the flip into another potentially stagnant year. For God’s sake, I spent two whole hours in that pub separated from the husbands, being forced to listen to the merits of turkey-turning with the wives. Yes, for easily the first three minutes, I was genuinely engaged in the science of it all – of course the juices of the bird would move about during the cooking, into the fattier parts of the corpse, especially the breast, and yes I acknowledge that rotating the beast might be advantageous and possibly tastier. Frankly that was the extent of my interest. But no, there were another 117 minutes of fowl-cooking minutiae to endure. As Karen blathered on incessantly about basters and thermometers and convection cookers and marinating and stuffing and blah and blah, my mind wandered, but for the sake of neighbourly relations I skilfully fixed my gaze on her yappy, overactive mouth and kept a convincing stream of responsive listening noises coming.

  Whilst I was trapped in turkey hell with the heifers of our local, Husband was, of course, at the bar with the bullocks, lowing and chewing on their smutty Christmas anecdotes. As if there is anything remotely saucy about Christmas. There isn’t, but they managed to make disgusting grunting noises all evening as if they were at Spearmint Rhino where discussing women in salacious terms is expected. Husband isn’t ordinarily as blokeish as this, but when the herd convenes, the rules and codes are strictly adhered to. He assures me that their conversations are nothing of the sort and that they never refer detrimentally to the various wives.

  Could this be an abandonment issue for me? For some reason his desire to be in their male gang, separate and away from me, always feels like a betrayal of some sort. I don’t really want to be there at all, never mind being left with ‘the girls’. I don’t have anything against the other wives per se. It’s just that they wouldn’t be my choice of friends; they have been thrust upon me because Husband regularly drinks with ‘the G-team’ as he calls them. He doesn’t worry whether or not they are suitable as his friends. They are there, so they will do. How curious. The idea that people you chance upon in a pub become a cohesive, supportive group of compadres, united in the pursuit of a nightly pint of Guinness (hence the G-team). The king of all tipples according to him, complete with its frothy crown.

  As we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and saluted the midnight moment with loud cheers and I was forced to clamp hands with a particularly limp, waxen chap with unfeasibly long fingers, who had just emerged from the Gents and who I knew perfectly well hadn’t washed his hands, it dawned on me that I will not allow this to happen again next year. No. Next year will somehow, please God somehow, be different. I am determined to make it so.

  There are important issues I must address this year.

  I must be thinner.

  I must be in a better relationship with Dora and she must respect me more.

  I must tackle Peter’s constant insistence that he is in some way channelling Oscar Wilde. It was an amusing family joke two years ago, but now I am finding it worrisome.

  I must be further along with my book, and I must have a title for it. What would be a good title for a self-help book for parents of teenagers? Two possible ideas at the moment under consideration: 1. Whatever! and 2. Teenagers: The Manual. Hmm. Think the exclamation mark on the first suggestion might preclude it from being a serious contender.

  Finally, I must give some serious thought to my fiftieth birthday in October. Can’t decide whether to celebrate or hide in a deep cave. Not denial exactly, but maybe I could just ignore it … ?

  My resolution is: by this time next year I want to know what the hell I’m doing and how I feel … about … everything …

  I honestly have no sense of anchorage at the moment. I feel frumpy and unbeautiful, and cross, all the time. Could be the menopause. Mind you, I think there is still a bit of Southern Comfort coursing through my veins from last night. And from the large glass of it I just drank ten mins ago. Hair of the dog. Shame that there was actually some hair of our actual dog in the disgustingly dirty glass which Dora hadn’t even bothered to wash out before she put it back on the
shelf. Oh, and that reminds me, the other member of the family I must pay attention to this year is … Poo. Absolutely must get her spayed. This is the eighth year I’ve forgotten. Wonder if the vet would agree to do Dora at the same time … ?

  Happy New Year.

  NB: Must arrest gradual sclerosis of hope for future.

  FIVE

  Dora

  Fact. Sam Tyler is a cockheaded gitshit, a twatwanker, a coward and a gay. I can’t believe I actually went actually out with him, how embarrassing. On top of it all, he is so rank, like, a total minger. Lottie always said he’s like well below me and she’s like so right. Why didn’t I listen to her? I thought she was jealous! Of what? Of me going out with the biggest mong in Berkshire? – doubt it.

  What I really can’t believe is that I was thinking of finishing with him anyway and he just like beat me to it. At one minute to midnight. On New Year’s Eve. In front of everyone – for max humiliation no doubt. And he had his next girlfriend all lined up and ready, so he’d obviously been like planning it or something? And she’s like the second biggest mong in Berkshire after him. Good – well I hope they are happy together in mongtown where they can like live with all their mong friends and family and have mong babies who will grow up to be like more mongish than them.

  Now at least I can admit how much his little twig legs always freaked me out and how disgusting his teeth are because he hasn’t properly brushed them since he was two or something and how his stubbly little moustache which he so believes makes him look like Zac Efron, so doesn’t. It looks like a girl’s moustache, like his next girlfriend’s moustache. Which she got from her mother. And how useless he is at kissing. Like someone should tell him, ‘Hello! You can move your mouth around you know and not keep like completely still like a dead corpse or something?’

  Anyway it doesn’t matter except all his friends were laughing at me and calling me BB New Year. I didn’t know what that was until Lottie told me it means ‘best before New Year’ like I am past my sell by date like a packet of ham or something. Thanks Sam, you scrote. Can’t believe I ever let him touch me. Thank God it didn’t go too far, although I bet he’s like told his mates it did. Liar. It didn’t. He doesn’t even know how many holes a girl has got – he said eight!! Good luck new girlfriend, you lie back while he stupidly humps away at every hole but the right one and all the holes of every other girl he like sets his eyes on. Hole- shagging freak.