What a Way to Go

Julia Forster

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782397533
• Print ISBN:
  9781782397540

1988. 12-year-old Harper Richardson's parents are divorced. Her mum got custody of her, the Mini, and five hundred tins of baked beans. Her dad got a mouldering cottage in a Midlands backwater village and default membership of the Lone Rangers single parents' club. Harper got questionable dress sense, a zest for life, two gerbils, and her Chambers dictionary, and the responsibility of fixing her parents' broken hearts... Set against a backdrop of high hairdos and higher interest rates, pop music and puberty, divorce and death, What a Way to Go is a warm, wise and witty tale of one girl tackling the business of growing up while those around her try not to fall apart.

PART ONE

one

I’m sitting at the top of the stairs with my legs dangling through the banister railings when Dad comes to pick me up one Friday after school. My copy of Chambers, the fat red dictionary, is by my side. I’ve been looking up the meaning of the word ‘sheath’: a case for a sword; a tubular dress; a contraceptive device …

At Lone Rangers parties I’ve heard tales of every kind of family break-up. From the ones where you can only visit your separated parent under supervision at Access Centres in cold church halls where the chess sets are missing pawns and the only cassette tape played is by The Beatles, to the ones where the ex-parents still go on family holidays together without a single argument. I’ve also compared notes on how to try to get your parents back together; I know kids of failed marriages who have faked everything from Valentine’s cards to selective mutism.

On the whole, my folks can manage my fortnightly handovers without throwing cutlery or crying. Success is them having a conversation that lasts longer than two minutes.

At the front door, Mum says to Dad, ‘Have you got time for a quick cuppa?’

I don’t need a dictionary to understand that Mum inviting Dad in means one of two things. Either she wants a rise in her maintenance payments or an extra weekend off looking after me. Dad coughs then wipes his feet several times on the itchy doormat which says WELCOME TO THE MAD HOUSE!

They head into the kitchen where the kettle’s filled. I think of going down to say hello, but would rather find out what Mum is after by earwigging their conversation. I grab my rucksack and creep downstairs, treading on the steps in the special way so that I don’t make them squeak. Then, I dart across the hall into the lounge like a gerbil in headlights. I wedge myself between the radiator and the back of Mum’s never-never sofa which is wrapped in plastic. Luckily the heating’s off.

‘Have a pew,’ Mum says.

Dad sits on the sofa. The plastic cover crackles. I breathe as quietly as I can.

‘How’s things at British Steel?’ Mum asks.

‘Been better,’ Dad says, then changes the subject. ‘I guess this is about Harper? Is she up to her anti-capitalist tricks again?’

‘She seems to be heralding free enterprise now, actually. She’s setting up her own shop. Wants to contribute towards the fund.’

‘What “fund”?’ Dad asks, very slowly, as if he’s selecting letters with which to make up a word from the dregs of a Scrabble bag when the game is nearly up.

‘The house fund,’ Mum says.

Seems Dad’s Scrabble bag’s empty.

‘Interest rates are only going one way, Pete.’

‘You’re nowhere near having enough for a deposit, are you?’ he asks.

‘How would you know what I manage to save?’

‘By your shoe collection?’

‘Do you have any idea how expensive it is to bring a kid up alone?’

‘You’re not doing it alone.’

Although the radiator isn’t on, I’m starting to feel toasty. Someone on our Kendal Road dead end is practising scales on the piano as if playing with their big toe. Far off, an ice-cream van tinkles its metallic lullaby.

Mum says, ‘The landlord has been dropping hints that he wants to sell. If we don’t buy this place then we’ll have to move. Again. Harper’ll have to go to a different middle school if I can’t find another rental nearby.’

We’ve already moved three times in as many years. We struggle to find places to rent because most landlords in Blackbrake either don’t believe a single mum could earn enough to pay the rent, electric and water, or they don’t approve of divorce. I’m the only outcast in my class and on my street with separated parents. As far as school goes, my best mate Cassie reckons year eight will be crap whatever school you’re in because the National Curriculum is starting under the GERBIL this September. I don’t know what this means, but I think it has something to do with a flagpole and the school pet.

‘So …’ Dad says.

Mum says, ‘I’m asking for a rise.’

‘Another one?’

Mum’s voice is an octave lower: ‘You got Ivy Cottage, after all.’

Dad: ‘You got the Mini!’

Mum: ‘That rust bucket full of out-of-date baked beans? Which do you think is worth more?’

Dad: ‘That’s not the point. You got Harper.’

‘But you didn’t want her,’ Mum says.

‘Now, Mary…’

I block up my listening chimneys by pushing a thumb hard into each of my ears. My parents often sort through their scrap­yard of arguments. They never find anything shiny or new, just the usual unwanted, broken, battery-flat crap which they pick over like a car scrap merchant looking to take something worthless and make it valuable again.

There’s a car-breaker round the back of Louise’s house in ­Coventry – she’s one of the Lone Rangers parents. Excavators scrape through the heaps of totalled cars, their bumpers bent awk­wardly after head-on collisions. Men in orange overalls salvage what they can from the write-offs then squash the wrecks into massive cubes to be liquidized. I imagine all the things the car metal could be made into: hospital beds; drip stands; wheelchairs; a record stylus; clasps on a jewellery box; cartridge pens; cheap wedding rings …

When I poke my head around the side of the sofa, both Mum and Dad have gone.

I sit on the pebbledash doorstep to wait for their return. Next door at number eleven, Edna’s Rottweiler barks blue murder.

The Lone Rangers logo is a paper-chain family of three; there’s a kid in the middle with arms which stretch out in both directions to keep hold of the mum in one hand and the dad ...

Table of contents

• Atlantic Books
• To my mum and dad
• Prologue
• PART ONE
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• seven
• eight
• nine
• ten
• eleven
• twelve
• thirteen
• fourteen
• fifteen
• sixteen
• seventeen
• eighteen
• nineteen
• twenty
• twenty-one
• twenty-two
• twenty-three
• twenty-four
• PART TWO
• twenty-five
• twenty-six
• twenty-seven
• twenty-eight
• twenty-nine
• thirty
• thirty-one
• thirty-two
• thirty-three
• thirty-four
• thirty-five
• thirty-six
• thirty-seven
• thirty-eight
• thirty-nine
• forty
• forty-one
• forty-two
• forty-three
• forty-four
• forty-five
• forty-six
• forty-seven
• forty-eight
• forty-nine
• fifty
• fifty-one
• fifty-two
• What a Way to Go
• Acknowledgements
• About the author