Little Big Man Read online

  I had too: a banana for the smile, grapes for the eyes and the nose, and tangerine segments for the eyebrows.

  Zac just stares at it.

  ‘Hey, it looks a bit like Raymond,’ I say, trying to lift the wall of doom that’s descended with the appearance of fruit at the breakfast table. Raymond is the delivery man at work. Zac loves him, because if he’s got time, he lets him help carry the boxes of sandwich supplies from the van to the kitchen, then unpack them, Zac imagining all the different filling combinations, completely in his element.

  ‘No offence, Mum, but the thought of eating Raymond’s face for breakfast …’ Zac shakes his head then pretends to gag (so that went well). ‘I think I’ll just have the usual, please.’

  The usual is cereal and toast, which I’ve always thought was a perfectly healthy breakfast but since the Letter of Condemnation, almost two weeks ago now, I’ve begun to wonder. I must be doing something wrong, after all. I sit down opposite him.

  ‘Zac, sweetheart,’ I say, looking straight into his lovely light blue eyes. ‘I’d really like you to eat the fruit, please.’

  ‘But why?’ he says, folding his arms sulkily. ‘I hate fruit.’

  ‘You do not.’

  ‘I do, it’s disgusting.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll never make it as a chef if you discard a whole food group, and you love strawberry jam, don’t you? And that’s just strawberries, Zac, that’s all it is.’

  ‘But why do I have to eat it?’

  ‘Because it’s good for you and also, it’s delicious.’ I pick up one of the tangerine eyebrows and put it in my mouth just to demonstrate how delicious it really is. It’s a bit tart, so I have to try not to wince. This is the problem with fruit for breakfast if you ask me: your mouth’s just not ready for it.

  Zac leans his cheeks on his fists and looks down at my smiley fruit face forlornly.

  ‘But I’ll be starving in five minutes. That’s not going to fill me up. I’ll only eat it if I can have toast too. Or pancakes! Hey, I could make Uncle Jamie’s pancakes but put fruit on them!’ He’s asked to make pancakes every morning since the morning after the doomed date with Dom, and on most of them, I’ve been too knackered to argue. (Plus, Zac makes the best pancakes.) I’m too tired to argue now, too, and he has to start getting ready for school, and me for work.

  The ‘fruity pancake’ seems like a good compromise.

  For the week after it arrived, the Letter of Condemnation sat on top of the microwave staring at me. I couldn’t bring myself to read it again. I found the whole thing totally overwhelming. That letter was a can of worms as far as I was concerned and I felt like I had enough on my plate, if you’ll excuse the pun. But then I was called into a follow-up meeting with the school nurse and Brenda about easy changes Zac could make – things like having porridge and fruit for breakfast, rather than Honey Cheerios and butter with toast (that way around), and I had to admit, they were nice, they were human. Most of all, like me, all they wanted was to help Zac. I thought I should at least show willing.

  I felt the same could not be said of the tone of the letter:

  Your child, it said, is above a healthy weight for his height, with a BMI of 30 which places him medically in the ‘obese’ category.

  Along with the letter, there were leaflets for things like ‘weight management classes’ and ‘walking clubs’ where he’d meet other chubby kids to walk around People’s Park with, or do hula-hooping with. As if they didn’t feel bad enough about themselves already to then have to hula-hoop en masse in public. It felt like throwing him to the wolves. Since getting the letter, I’ve swung from anger at how a stranger has the right to brand my son ‘too fat’, to frustration because, to be honest, I can’t understand why he is the ‘F’ word – if he even is. He doesn’t eat anything different from other kids – I mean, they’ll all go for a burger over a salad, won’t they? I guess he’s on the chubby side, but I’ve always thought kids were sort of self-regulating like babies, that they only ate what they needed to grow. ‘Too fat’ seems like such a damning label to give a ten-year-old and I’m terrified of harming his self-esteem, which has already taken a colossal blow, let’s face it, since as far as he’s concerned, his father doesn’t want him. You want to know what hurts the most about getting that letter, though? The feeling that something beautiful and sacred has been soiled. Because to me, Zac has always been perfect – the only thing in my life that is – and yet here’s this letter telling me in black and white that he isn’t; that the only thing I’m proud of in my life isn’t even good enough.

  ‘So remember.’ Zac stands on the doorstep, his school rucksack on, while I make him look at me. We’ve been through this rigmarole every day since the arrival of the Letter. ‘You are beautiful as you are and anyone who thinks otherwise, well …’

  ‘That is their failing as a human being,’ parrots Zac. ‘Mum, you’re hurting my cheeks.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Me too,’ he says. I watch as my boy and his Man U rucksack become a smudge in the distance, and then I go inside to make myself a bacon sarnie and have a little sob.

  There’s no denying it – although obviously I’m having a good go at doing just that – worrying about Zac at school is making me eat more. Which is perverse, I know, even while I’m stuffing down my sixth chocolate Hobnob, like taking up smoking when your kid’s been diagnosed with asthma. But it’s the only thing that eases the gnawing anxiety I have from the moment he leaves in the morning to the moment he comes home. Is he all right? Is he being picked on? As a single parent, there’s always that niggle in your head, after all: no matter that I do my best, is my best good enough?

  I have about half an hour before I have to leave for work, so I make the bacon sandwich, but then find myself wandering from room to room. This happens a lot these days. When Zac was really little, I used to crave time on my own. As much as I adored him, I used to live for the moment he went to bed so I could watch something other than Mr Tumble and trough my way through several rounds of cheese on toast – my equivalent of cracking open the wine, I suppose, which I’d never have afforded even if I’d wanted it. Now, though, I hate it when Zac’s not here. It makes me feel edgy. I feel safer when he’s around, basically, which worries me, because what sort of parent does that make me? Sometimes it feels like he’s the man of the house and my child, all rolled into one: my little big man.

  I go into his room and sit on the bed to eat my sandwich. It’s Man U-tastic in here; has been since we moved here when he was six, and as he had his own room (and bed) for the first time in his life, I let him choose the theme. Obviously Mum and Dad helped with the cost but we went the whole hog: Man U duvet cover, lampshade and curtains. We could have got Man U wallpaper too but it’s nice he has the walls blank, so you can actually see the pictures he has up there without them being lost in a sea of red. I like looking at them. They’re thumbprints of Zac and who he is. There’s a poster about Arctic animals – the orca being his favourite animal ‘of all time’; a map of the world, which makes me feel like crying, since besides that one day in London, he’s barely been out of Grimsby; and a framed photo of my brother. He’s in his chef whites on his graduation day from catering college, looking mighty chuffed with himself: Look at me, I’ve achieved something off my own back, not just followed Dad into fishing. He was the first to break the chain in four generations.

  I wander over to the picture. I like to get right up close to it, look into Jamie’s eyes and see if I can reach my brother somehow, whichever universe he’s in; meet him at a time and place before everything happened. I’ve always thought it was so lovely how Zac looks up to his uncle Jamie even though he never knew him. I just wish I could tell him more about him, like I wish I could tell him about his dad. I fantasize about us being a normal family with stories, rather than secrets. You know, the ‘how Mum and Dad met’ story and the ‘what it was like when I was born’ story. But for us, for Zac, those conversations are off-limi
ts, like a boarded-up house with ‘Danger’ plastered across it, because you never know what questions they’re going to lead to.

  It doesn’t stop me imagining what I’d say if things were different, though, and I like to lie, when he’s asleep next to me sometimes, and pretend I’m telling him the story of our first kiss: So, when your daddy and I kissed for the first time, it was outside The Fiddler in Cleethorpes – classy – and a dodgy local band was playing ‘Living on a Prayer’ inside but I could hardly hear it, because I was too busy concentrating on the feel of your dad’s lips on mine – because he had the softest lips in the world, just like yours. And the sky was pink with clouds that looked like they were racing away from us, and the seagulls that criss-crossed between the buildings above us were in silhouette. It was a beautiful night and your dad stopped kissing me for a moment. ‘Look, it’s a mackerel sky,’ he said. ‘Which means we’re about four hundred kilometres ahead of the rain …’ And even though I’d heard stuff like that a hundred times before, being a skipper’s daughter (and even though it was only our first kiss and your daddy was just a deckhand), it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. I was already praying I’d become a fisherman’s wife …

  Yeah, that’s what I’d tell him. But the problem is, when I think about them, those stories don’t seem real to me anymore. They seem like ghosts of stories that once existed. They feel dead because they feature another man, a different hero – a man who’d never dream of abandoning his son.

  For the first few months after Liam left, it was the night Jamie died I used to obsess over; and how if Liam hadn’t behaved as he did, my brother would still be here. I was worried sick about Mum and could not get out of my head the memory of her climbing onto the hospital bed with Jamie after they’d taken out all of his tubes, to cuddle him for one last time. She was broken – she still is – and that was the worst night of my life. But in some ways, where my feelings towards Liam were concerned, it was easier back then. While my grief was so raw, I couldn’t feel anything more complicated than anger towards him. I only needed to look at the state of my parents to know there was no way I could be with him.

  But then, as time went on, my feelings changed. It wasn’t like I actually ever blamed Liam for ‘killing’ my brother but whereas my anger had initially been directed towards his recklessness and I’d joined Mum and Dad in shunning him from Grimsby, now my anger was directed at the fact he hadn’t come back. Wasn’t he going to fight for us? Couldn’t he see that it was up to him to seek us out, because for me to do that would be to betray my parents? Especially Mum. Her grief was like a burning lump of coal. Too hot to handle; it had to be passed on. Blame was the thing holding her together. How could I trample on that?

  Even before Jamie died, Mum always said Liam was no good. ‘He’ll go the same way as his dad,’ she used to say. ‘Drinking, fighting, prison …’ And I always blew up in anger, always defended him, because all I cared about was the heart inside this man, which I knew was as big as the ocean. And then Jamie died, and that changed everything. For a while, I thought he’d proved Mum right. I still do sometimes. The difference is that now it’s not because of what happened to Jamie, it’s because he never bothered to come back for me and his son.

  Zac’s pyjamas and dressing gown (Man U, naturally) lie in a red heap in the middle of his bedroom floor where he obviously stepped out of them in a rush this morning. I lean down and pick up the dressing gown, thinking how there can’t possibly be a more football-mad kid who never plays football, and hold it to my face. It smells of Zac: washing powder, cooking from this morning’s pancakes and his hair, his skin, and I inhale deeply, almost as if to bottle up inside of me this essence of my ten-year-old forever, so that later, when he falls in love with a woman and leaves me, I can open it up and remember how we were.

  For so long it’s been Zac and me, and he’s taken my word for everything. But in less than three months he’ll be eleven; his innocence won’t last forever. Then there’ll be the questions, the sadness and rejection … I resent Liam for leaving me to deal with all this – all this worry and fear, all this terrifying love – on my own.

  It’s possibly ironic that I work in the food industry, since that was always our Jamie’s calling – I had no interest in food other than eating it. But Gino, my boss at Sandwich King, knows my dad (everyone in this town knows my dad), so he lets me work cash in hand so I can still claim benefits, and I can do extra hours at evening catering events if I need, which I always do. And I know some people might judge me for leaving my kid to let himself in and put himself to bed once a week but to those people I say this: try living off £110 a week all in. Because it’s doable – just – when nothing goes wrong and there’s nothing extra to pay for, save for surviving. But if you want to live at all – and I’m not talking restaurants and holidays here, I mean the odd ice cream, putting a bit by for birthdays – you have to work extra.

  Sometimes, like today when I’m walking into town to work and I pass the shiny high-rise offices near Victoria Wharf, I fantasize about having a proper job. I wonder where I’d be working if I hadn’t reached the dizzy heights of Sandwich King but then, generally, draw a blank. Grimsby isn’t famed for being a ‘going places’ sort of town. ‘There’s one road in and one road out of this town,’ my nan used to say, like this was a good thing. ‘Which means everyone here is Grimsby pedigree.’ Famous bands? People? Famous anything from Grimsby? Nope, me neither. When you drive into Grim the welcome sign says, Welcome to Grimsby, home to Young’s Fish. Manchester gets Oasis and we get frozen prawns. But, despite this handicap, I did have ambitions when I was a teenager; I did intend getting out and getting a good job – maybe even going to university. I used to think I’d like to be a teacher, because I’ve always loved kids and people say I’m patient. Or maybe I’d have worked in an office doing one of those exciting-sounding glossy jobs I don’t even fully understand: events organizer, copywriter … The point is, I never got to explore any of these things, since in the space of nearly three weeks, in that June of 2005, I had a baby, lost my brother, my boyfriend, and life went on a whole different path to the one I’d imagined; one that led to the Harlequin Estate.

  It’s funny that I ended up on the Quin, as it’s known round here, because Mum used to be snotty about the estate when we were growing up; she still is. It’s one of the key points of conflict between her and Dad, because Dad was born and bred on the Harlequin; pretty much all the fishing families were. ‘They’re my people, Jules, the salt of the earth,’ he’d say. There were only actually two roads that separated where we lived on Queens Road, which boasted pebble-dashed semis and which was where many skippers like Dad lived, and the Quin, where deckhands (and now me and Zac) roughed it out in the high-rises and blocks of maisonettes. But those two roads were everything in my mother’s mind, who, as much as she loves Dad, has always felt she ‘married down’. Mum wanted bigger, better things for us, and I suppose I’m a disappointment.

  I’m on the nine till five shift at work and Laura and I are doing the first job of the day, which is to make the sandwich mixes to go in the trays at the front. It’s an art form, no doubt about it. You’ve got to get the sizes of the egg or the chicken pieces even and just the right amount of mayo or else people get very upset – especially Gino. He’s protective over his sandwich fillings, which are gourmet, don’t you know? Hawaiian mix, coronation chicken mix, coming to you in a subway roll, a seeded bagel, a Danish bloomer … We’ve had the same ones for four years now. Try and suggest change at your peril. If it were just Gino and I, there would probably have been a murder by now, but there’s also Laura, and it’s her and my regulars that make this job bearable. Laura’s dad’s an ex-fisherman too. I’ve known her since I was knee-high and we used to go down the docks and wave off our daddies on sailing day, competing as to who could do the most dramatic show of emotion. (I always won.)

  ‘So what’s up with you?’ says Laura, as we stand side by side, her chopping chi
cken, me the eggs. That’s one of the drawbacks of working with your best friend: you can’t go to work as an escape from the crap happening in your daily life. Especially if your BFF has got Russell-Grant-level skills of perception and you’ve got a face like mine, that wears it all.

  ‘Me? There’s nothing wrong with me,’ I say, but actually, I’m worrying about Zac. It’s nearly 10 a.m. – he’ll have break time soon, but will he have a friend to play with? Is he OK?

  ‘Why the face like a dropped pie, then?’ says Laura.

  I sigh. Nothing gets past her. ‘I’m just a bit worried about Zac,’ I say, trying to sound breezy, for me as much as her. ‘He’s being picked on.’

  ‘Picked on?’ Laura stops, wielding her butter knife. ‘Who by? Who’s picking on my Zac?’ Laura is Zac’s godmother, not that I’m remotely a God-type person, but since he didn’t have his father or his uncle on the scene I felt he needed as many guardians as possible so I had him christened. Just the two of us never seemed safe; what if something happened to me like it all just got too much one day and I threw myself off the roof of Garibaldi House, the grim high-rise where we used to live? I’d be lying if I hadn’t thought about it – especially in the early days, after everything happened.

  ‘Come on, who’s bullying him? I want to know,’ says Laura again. ‘Because I’m from the East Marsh Estate, I’ll have you know, and I’m hard as nails – much harder than you Harlequin pussies – and whoever’s bullying my Zac will need to answer to me.’

  ‘Right you are, Laurs …’ She knows as well as I do how well vigilantism would go down round here. I go back to my chopping.

  ‘What’s he being picked on for anyway?’ she says, when I still don’t say anything. ‘His weird mother?’

  ‘Funny, but no. His size,’ I say, chopping just ever so slightly harder. ‘I mean, can you believe it? He’s ten and I know he’s a bit chubby but no more than other kids and it’s just puppy fat, anyone can see that. To make out he’s actually fat … I mean, “obese” was the word they used. Obese! Can you believe it?’ Why isn’t Laura saying anything? ‘It’s ridiculous, don’t you think?’