‘Do me a favour,’ Mum says. ‘Go get Auntie Rose with your dad. She’s at the pub with her ladies. I’ll get the tea on and then I’ve got to be to work for seven.’ When she leans down to kiss my dad, the curtain of thick straight ginger hair that she wears in a long bob covers their faces.
‘Right, to the pub, Dad?’
‘Ready when you are.’ He awkwardly pats his pockets. ‘I’ve got me money. Off we go.’
‘One pint, Jack, and then come back. I mean it. Otherwise the tea’ll burn. Half an hour.’
He waves over his shoulder as I grasp the handles of his wheelchair and carefully manoeuvre out the front door and down the ramp.
We had the ramp installed on my twentieth birthday. I remember because Kell joked that it was for when I came home pissed from the pub. We all made out like it was the greatest invention in the world. Now Dad could come and go as he pleased, we said. He put on a brave face, but everybody knew he’d have preferred not to need it in the first place.
If he wasn’t a taxi driver, he would probably have realised a lot sooner that he was ill. But, like he said, sitting on your arse all day is bound to cause some pins and needles. It was when his vision started going funny that he finally admitted his symptoms to Mum. She had him down to Helen at the GP’s surgery almost before he’d finished telling her.
The doctors did loads of tests that Dad got pretty sick of by the time they told him he’s got multiple sclerosis. That was over ten years ago. It’s the kind that comes and goes and gets worse over time, which is why we had to get the ramps fitted on my twentieth birthday. He’d had to stop work a few years before that, though. He can walk with crutches if he has to, but he doesn’t usually have to with the wheelchair and all of us to push him around when he gets bad. Their bedroom’s on the ground floor now, in the old dining room, and we had an en suite added so he doesn’t need to worry about going upstairs at all.
Of course, Kell was worried about me when it all first happened. At fourteen everything is a huge deal anyway, so when it really is a big deal it seems catastrophic. But she didn’t really need to worry because my dad is still my dad; he’s still with us and he’s still himself. He can’t drive the cab anymore and it’s pretty bad when he relapses, and Mum’s gone down to part-time work, what with looking after Dad and Auntie Rose, but that’s why I’m working. It’s lucky I’m here.
But once I get married I’ll have to move out. Imagine the row if I try to keep giving them money then. You’ve seen how Dad reacts when Daniel offers for his parents to pay for our wedding. I’ll have to hide tenners down the sofa cushions or something.
Auntie Rose is doing a victory lap around the pub when we get there, shouting, ‘Persimone! Get IN!’
‘She’s winning, I take it?’ says Dad to Uncle Colin once he’s finished nodding his hellos to the half-dozen men sitting round the battered tables.
‘Insufferable!’ Auntie Rose’s friend, June, shouts from the big square booth by the door. ‘Take her home, Emma, she’ll only be a dreadful winner again.’
‘Sour grapes,’ sings Auntie Rose as she throws her ample frame back down in the booth, jostling the Scrabble board on her landing.
‘Mind the game!’ Doreen adjusts the tiles. ‘Don’t spoil it for the rest of us. Next week we’re playing cribbage.’
Auntie Rose takes a sip of her lime and soda. ‘Where’s your fighting spirit?’
‘I’m about to fight,’ Doreen grumbles. She will too if they let her have too much sherry. She might look like a sweet old lady, but you’d do well not to cross her. There was once a husband, but he disappeared after getting caught playing away once too often. Maybe he’s living with his mistress out of town, maybe he isn’t. That’s all I’m saying.
So all’s well at the Cock and Crown. Nobody’s surprised to see a seventy-five-year-old woman fist-pumping her way round the bar. Technically she’s my great auntie, my Gran’s younger sister. She’s been meeting her best friends here every week for about the past forty years for a game of cribbage or cards or, when Auntie Rose gets to choose, Scrabble. No matter what else happens in their lives, they wouldn’t miss a week unless they’re in the hospital, like when June broke her hip, or one of them dies, like my Gran did seven or eight years ago. That’s when Auntie Rose came to live with us. She’s not so good at being on her own.
‘We’ve got to be home in half an hour for tea,’ I tell my auntie, who’s gone back to studying her tiles. Her lips move as she considers her next play. She’s got an impressive vocabulary considering she left school so young. She credits that to my great grandad being a newsvendor. He let her do the crossword from The Telegraph every day, as long as she never creased the page and ruined it for sale. She used to trace out the crossword onto a sheet of paper and fill it in.
‘You all right?’ June asks me in her twenty-a-day voice as everyone shifts round to make room for me and Dad. I catch a waft of June’s Mentos. ‘How are the wedding plans coming along?’ Her pale blue eyes are lined with life and worry.
‘We’re really just getting started.’ June and Doreen nod their bright blonde heads. Auntie Rose does their hair too. She’s got a very limited colour palette. She figures if it looks good on her, it’ll do for everyone else. ‘But it’s less than three months away so we really need to make a start.’
‘That’s plenty of time,’ June says, rolling up the sleeves on her knock-off hoodie. She always dresses in a range of nearly-Nike and almost-Adidas, like she’s on her way to aerobics. ‘Your parents did it in less time than that.’
Looks shoot between the older women as Doreen fidgets with the little gold cross nestled in her cleavage. You wouldn’t catch her out of the house in trackies. She’s always in a wrap dress. The wrapping job’s a bit hit and miss, though, given the shape of the package inside.
‘In those days things weren’t so formal,’ Auntie Rose says. ‘Nowadays everything is so fancy. I saw in the news about couples who spend a million quid on flowers! I bet the Queen doesn’t spend a million quid on flowers.’
When Auntie Rose says the news, she means The Sun. The Telegraph is good for the crosswords, but she gets all her information from the tabloid.
‘Oh, I know!’ says June. ‘My Karen’s youngest had two hundred people at her wedding. They had to get a second mortgage to pay for the whole palaver. Those payments’ll probably last longer than the marriage.’
‘We’re not taking out any loans,’ Dad says. ‘We’ve got a bit of dosh saved. We’ll do right by you, Emma.’
‘I just wish you’d let Daniel’s parents give us money,’ I say, even though I know I’m pushing my luck. ‘They won’t even miss it.’
His fist slams on the table, making Auntie Rose’s lime and soda jump. ‘Goddammit, Emma, why can’t you get it through your head that I don’t need your in-laws’ charity! Isn’t it bad enough–?’ He shakes his head. ‘Don’t be fooled by the wheelchair, girl. I might not be able to do most things anymore, but I can look after my own family. Now that’s the end of it, Emma. I mean it, this topic is closed. We’re doing this for you, and that’s the end of it.’
His pride will never let him accept help from Daniel’s parents. ‘All right, Dad,’ I sigh, ‘and I’m really grateful for everything you and Mum are doing. Incredibly grateful. We’ll keep it very low-key, like you suggested.’
I don’t want to cry here in the pub. The very