Annie Christie's Family Fictions:
Episode Six
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Family frictions.
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So there we were. Out in the boat. Rowing for all we were worth. Right into the centre of the loch and the swell was pretty rough. But we felt free for the first time in a long time. And we forgot all about Alasdair and our parents and Edinburgh and Marco… we just existed in the moment. We certainly weren’t playing ‘Hornblower’.
However, there’s only so much time you can spend rowing up and down a loch in a fibre glass dinghy when you’re a teenager and the best part of the plan had been getting away with it. Having done that, we needed a new plan. Ellie shouted that she could see Daisy Cheape’s monument and so we decided to row towards it.
We beached the boat and gave in to Ellie who wanted us to have a ‘picnic’ up at Castle Dare. I don’t remember ever before all three of us just kicking back, together, without adult intervention. It was cool. But nothing lasts for long when you’re a teenager, the attention span is pretty weak and the desire for something else outstrips the pleasure of what you have. So pretty soon Ollie was wanting back in the boat. And Ellie didn’t want to go back in the boat. And I’d rather have stayed with Ellie than Ollie, but she told me she wanted to be alone.
‘She’s looking out for her boyfriend,’ Ollie said – which surprised me because I didn’t think he’d been paying attention to that conversation.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said and blushed again.
‘Come on Ads, don’t cramp her style,’ Ollie said.
So I went with him. This time I remembered not to say ‘Will you be okay?’ to her. But we did agree that we’d all meet up down the lane at five o’clock and go back home en masse. To keep mum under the illusion that we could be trusted to be left in charge of each other. Which obviously we couldn’t.
Ollie and I got back to the boat, and when we looked up, the sun was right in our eyes but I swore that I saw two shadows where we’d left Ellie. I pointed them out to Ollie and he agreed – ‘It’s her boyfriend,’ he said. And we left her to it.
We decided to try and row the length of the loch, but gave up after about an hour. Boats are really nothing like as much fun as people say they are – nothing like as fun as cars in my opinion – and it was beginning to feel a lot like hard work.
Ollie and I didn’t generally have a lot to say to each other but the boat was so boring that I kind of felt obliged to start a conversation.
‘Why do you think Marco turned up?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘Do you like Marco?’ I asked. It seems strange but it’s a question I’d never asked before. Marco was just Marco and always there. We’d never had a choice to like him or not. But now he’d followed us away from our Edinburgh life, it felt like I had the right to ask the question at least.
‘I don’t know,’ Ollie said. ‘He’s less stressed out than dad.’
And why I felt that was both a strange reply and somehow unfair to dad, I don’t know, but it riled me up.
‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I think he’s a creep.’
‘A creep with a boat,’ Ollie said.
‘Not if you keep rowing like that,’ I replied as Ollie scraped an oar along a boulder. The water was shallow because we were getting close to our landing place.
At which point we put all our efforts into getting out of the boat without getting totally soaked and pulling it far enough up the shore that we’d not find it bobbing around in the middle of the loch the next time we came to use it.
‘We’d best go look for Ellie,’ I said.
Ollie snorted. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘You go fetch her.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but remember we all go home together, right?’
He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
And off I set. Looking back I remember feeling quite uneasy, and I thought it was because of having to find Ellie and get back before Ollie went off acting random. But maybe I didn’t feel that uneasy then, maybe it’s what happened next that made me place the whole experience into a sense of unease which I’m retro-fitting. Memory isn’t always reliable, is it? But let’s just say that I was happy when I saw Ellie coming down the track, and not just because she was of a sunnier disposition than the grunting Ollie I’d just left.
‘Have a good time?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she smiled – enigmatically.
‘Was your pal there?’ I asked, trying not to pry.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
I wasn’t being nosey, I just wanted to talk. Ellie and I did talk to each other, not like me and Ollie. And she looked at me a bit strangely.
‘Don’t know?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I know,’ she replied.
‘So what’s the big secret?’ I asked.
‘Don’t tell mum,’ she said.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, ‘He didn’t try anything…’
She cut me off. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
‘Well, what is it?’ I said, ‘you’re the one acting all weird about it.’
‘His name’s Alasdair,’ she said.
And I got her point. At least I thought I did. It was not a name we wanted to mention during the holiday. Or ever.
‘Well, they don’t need to know that,’ I said.
‘Shake on it,’ she said, and we shook and agreed.
By that time we were back to where Ollie was still lounging around like a wet week.
‘Took your time,’ he grunted and headed off in front of us at a pace that meant we almost had to jog to keep up with him.
Looking back on it, I guess we all wished we’d walked a lot slower on that journey, because that was the moment before everything changed. Well, of course that’s not true. It was just the moment before we knew everything had changed. Yes, Casey, I know things have to change. But this is a change I wish had never happened.
Dad’s car wasn’t there. At first I thought nothing of it. Maybe he’d gone for milk or something. Mum and Marco were sitting out on the patio, taking in the early evening sun. She had sunglasses on, which seemed a bit of a pose to me, because it wasn’t that sunny. And Marco looked less than happy.
‘What’s up?’ Ellie asked. She was more sensitive than me.
‘Where’s dad?’ I asked at more or less the same time.
Marco began… ‘Your mum and I…’
And she butted in, ‘Marco…’ and took off her sunglasses. She had been crying. ‘They’re my children,’ she said to him, ‘I’ll tell them.’
Then I felt sick. Something was obviously very badly wrong. And the first thing I thought was that dad had been in a car crash. I don’t know why, I couldn’t think of anything worse, I suppose.
‘Is it dad?’ I asked.
‘Your mum and I…’ Marco started again.
‘Is he hurt?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the car?’
I was starting to panic. Ollie just stood there but Ellie rushed over to mum and ran into her arms.
‘Mum,’ she cried, ‘tell us what it is.’
Marco looked like he was about to start again and Ollie turned to him and said, ‘We don’t need you here’ and Marco went into the house looking like a dog that had been whipped.
‘What the hell is it, mum?’ I asked.
‘Your dad and I have decided to call it a day,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got more than another week booked here.’
‘I mean we’re getting divorced,’ she said.
‘You what?!’
I was stunned. I mean, I told you my parents never argued in front of us, always kept it civilised but I was sure that if your parents were about to get divorced you’d get something of a clue. And going together on a family holiday didn’t seem like the obvious precursor to an announcement of divorce. I just couldn’t believe it.
‘I know it’s a shock,’ mum said. ‘But we’ve all talked it over and…’
I didn’t hear the significance of the ‘all’ at first. I was still in turmoil. On the one hand at least dad wasn’t dead or lying injured in a car somewhere, but on the other hand, I realised that my life was never going to be the same again.
‘Is it because of…’ Ellie choked and I was sure she was about to say ‘Alasdair’ but she finished the sentence with ‘Marco.’ And suddenly, everything fell into place.
Bloody Marco, I thought, but didn’t say. Ollie, however, did. ‘Bloody Marco,’ he said and went off into the house after him. I waited for mum to say, ‘It’s nothing to do with Marco. But she didn’t.’
‘How long’s it been going on?’ Ellie asked. I couldn’t believe it. There was my twelve year old sister, who had half an hour ago probably been kissing some local boy with all the naïve passion of proto-puberty, asking my mum how long she’d been having an affair with the builder. She was streets ahead of me. Had everyone else known about this but me?
‘That’s not a useful thing to know,’ mum said. ‘At the moment the most important thing to know is that dad and I are splitting up, he’s gone back to work and Marco and I are going to stay here and work things out with you all.’
‘I don’t want to…’ I started. But I realised I had no power. I couldn’t row my way out of this one. Dad had already gone. Why? Why hadn’t he waited to ask us if we wanted to go with him? Why had he left us with mum and... and Marco? I was gutted and I didn’t know who I was more angry with. Most of all I was angry with myself for never seeing this coming.
‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do,’ I said, and as the words came out of my mouth I noticed the irony – this line was usually delivered the other way – from parent to child.
Mum didn’t even notice I’d spoken. She was busy comforting Ellie who was crying on her lap like a baby.
‘Why, mum, why?’ she kept saying.
‘Look,’ said mum, ‘it’ll really be all right. You kids’ll never really notice the difference – dad’s always out working and…’
And Marco more or less lives with us. How convenient! I thought. Of course it’s not easy to put all this jumble into a sensible order, and I may not remember it exactly as it was, but around then, Marco and Ollie came back out. I noticed that neither of them had a black eye, but they didn’t exactly have their arms around each other either. But what I did notice… well, I’m not going to tell you that just yet. First things first.
‘What’s happening to Marco’s kids?’ Ellie asked. Trust Ellie to think of other people. Though I was a bit peeved she wasn’t thinking of dad – which I was.
‘They’re staying with their mother,’ mum said.
‘So it’s just like a kid’s swap then?’ I said, my tone every bit as sour as I hoped.
‘Don’t be daft,’ mum said. ‘Marco isn’t trying to take your dad’s place.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Then why’s dad not here and Marco not on holiday with his own family?’
‘I think we all just need to calm down here,’ said Marco.
‘I think you need to butt out,’ I said.
Like I said, it was all in danger of turning quite ugly.
‘Don’t speak to Marco like that,’ mum said. And I think that was the moment I disowned her. I lost all sympathy for her and decided that if we had to pick sides, I was on dad’s. And I stopped talking but I didn’t calm down.
It was like some kind of a nightmare for the rest of the evening. We ate dinner. We sat in front of the TV but didn’t watch it. We got ready for bed. As I recall, I went to bed without talking to anyone further, not even Ellie. I couldn’t handle that Ellie had run onto my mum’s lap. It felt like betrayal. And I couldn’t stand to see Marco and my mum. Ollie had taken himself off into his own room straight after dinner and I went to sulk in mine.
I had a night to think about it and mostly I thought about my dad. I decided I was going, somehow, to make my way back to Edinburgh to be with him. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised ‘running away’ from Mull to Edinburgh was not a realistic option. And by around 3 am I’d decided that maybe I had mis-interpreted all of this and it wasn’t quite what it seemed. I guess I went from grief pretty quickly into denial.
I entered the anger phase the next morning. The first person I saw was Ollie. And I had one question to ask him.
‘Where did Marco sleep last night?’ I asked him.
‘Not with me,’ he replied.
The world crashed. How could they do this to us? One minute we were a normally happy family with just one dead son as a cloud in our sky and the next my dad had been ousted and Marco jumped into my mum’s bed quicker than Claudius in the play Hamlet. Which we had been studying at school in the summer term. But this wasn’t a Shakespearean tragedy. It wasn’t drama. It was our life.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked Ollie.
He shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.
‘Don’t you care?’ I asked.
‘What can we do?’ he said. ‘They’re all adults, they’ll do what they want anyway.’
‘It’s a bit bloody sudden though, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘You think so?’ he answered, and yet another part of the fantasy that had been my life came crashing down.
‘How long? How long has it been going on?’ That was the only question I wanted answered now. But when I got the answer it was not one I ever wanted to hear.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Family frictions.
_____________________________________________________________________
So there we were. Out in the boat. Rowing for all we were worth. Right into the centre of the loch and the swell was pretty rough. But we felt free for the first time in a long time. And we forgot all about Alasdair and our parents and Edinburgh and Marco… we just existed in the moment. We certainly weren’t playing ‘Hornblower’.
However, there’s only so much time you can spend rowing up and down a loch in a fibre glass dinghy when you’re a teenager and the best part of the plan had been getting away with it. Having done that, we needed a new plan. Ellie shouted that she could see Daisy Cheape’s monument and so we decided to row towards it.
We beached the boat and gave in to Ellie who wanted us to have a ‘picnic’ up at Castle Dare. I don’t remember ever before all three of us just kicking back, together, without adult intervention. It was cool. But nothing lasts for long when you’re a teenager, the attention span is pretty weak and the desire for something else outstrips the pleasure of what you have. So pretty soon Ollie was wanting back in the boat. And Ellie didn’t want to go back in the boat. And I’d rather have stayed with Ellie than Ollie, but she told me she wanted to be alone.
‘She’s looking out for her boyfriend,’ Ollie said – which surprised me because I didn’t think he’d been paying attention to that conversation.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said and blushed again.
‘Come on Ads, don’t cramp her style,’ Ollie said.
So I went with him. This time I remembered not to say ‘Will you be okay?’ to her. But we did agree that we’d all meet up down the lane at five o’clock and go back home en masse. To keep mum under the illusion that we could be trusted to be left in charge of each other. Which obviously we couldn’t.
Ollie and I got back to the boat, and when we looked up, the sun was right in our eyes but I swore that I saw two shadows where we’d left Ellie. I pointed them out to Ollie and he agreed – ‘It’s her boyfriend,’ he said. And we left her to it.
We decided to try and row the length of the loch, but gave up after about an hour. Boats are really nothing like as much fun as people say they are – nothing like as fun as cars in my opinion – and it was beginning to feel a lot like hard work.
Ollie and I didn’t generally have a lot to say to each other but the boat was so boring that I kind of felt obliged to start a conversation.
‘Why do you think Marco turned up?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘Do you like Marco?’ I asked. It seems strange but it’s a question I’d never asked before. Marco was just Marco and always there. We’d never had a choice to like him or not. But now he’d followed us away from our Edinburgh life, it felt like I had the right to ask the question at least.
‘I don’t know,’ Ollie said. ‘He’s less stressed out than dad.’
And why I felt that was both a strange reply and somehow unfair to dad, I don’t know, but it riled me up.
‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I think he’s a creep.’
‘A creep with a boat,’ Ollie said.
‘Not if you keep rowing like that,’ I replied as Ollie scraped an oar along a boulder. The water was shallow because we were getting close to our landing place.
At which point we put all our efforts into getting out of the boat without getting totally soaked and pulling it far enough up the shore that we’d not find it bobbing around in the middle of the loch the next time we came to use it.
‘We’d best go look for Ellie,’ I said.
Ollie snorted. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘You go fetch her.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but remember we all go home together, right?’
He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
And off I set. Looking back I remember feeling quite uneasy, and I thought it was because of having to find Ellie and get back before Ollie went off acting random. But maybe I didn’t feel that uneasy then, maybe it’s what happened next that made me place the whole experience into a sense of unease which I’m retro-fitting. Memory isn’t always reliable, is it? But let’s just say that I was happy when I saw Ellie coming down the track, and not just because she was of a sunnier disposition than the grunting Ollie I’d just left.
‘Have a good time?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she smiled – enigmatically.
‘Was your pal there?’ I asked, trying not to pry.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
I wasn’t being nosey, I just wanted to talk. Ellie and I did talk to each other, not like me and Ollie. And she looked at me a bit strangely.
‘Don’t know?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I know,’ she replied.
‘So what’s the big secret?’ I asked.
‘Don’t tell mum,’ she said.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, ‘He didn’t try anything…’
She cut me off. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
‘Well, what is it?’ I said, ‘you’re the one acting all weird about it.’
‘His name’s Alasdair,’ she said.
And I got her point. At least I thought I did. It was not a name we wanted to mention during the holiday. Or ever.
‘Well, they don’t need to know that,’ I said.
‘Shake on it,’ she said, and we shook and agreed.
By that time we were back to where Ollie was still lounging around like a wet week.
‘Took your time,’ he grunted and headed off in front of us at a pace that meant we almost had to jog to keep up with him.
Looking back on it, I guess we all wished we’d walked a lot slower on that journey, because that was the moment before everything changed. Well, of course that’s not true. It was just the moment before we knew everything had changed. Yes, Casey, I know things have to change. But this is a change I wish had never happened.
Dad’s car wasn’t there. At first I thought nothing of it. Maybe he’d gone for milk or something. Mum and Marco were sitting out on the patio, taking in the early evening sun. She had sunglasses on, which seemed a bit of a pose to me, because it wasn’t that sunny. And Marco looked less than happy.
‘What’s up?’ Ellie asked. She was more sensitive than me.
‘Where’s dad?’ I asked at more or less the same time.
Marco began… ‘Your mum and I…’
And she butted in, ‘Marco…’ and took off her sunglasses. She had been crying. ‘They’re my children,’ she said to him, ‘I’ll tell them.’
Then I felt sick. Something was obviously very badly wrong. And the first thing I thought was that dad had been in a car crash. I don’t know why, I couldn’t think of anything worse, I suppose.
‘Is it dad?’ I asked.
‘Your mum and I…’ Marco started again.
‘Is he hurt?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the car?’
I was starting to panic. Ollie just stood there but Ellie rushed over to mum and ran into her arms.
‘Mum,’ she cried, ‘tell us what it is.’
Marco looked like he was about to start again and Ollie turned to him and said, ‘We don’t need you here’ and Marco went into the house looking like a dog that had been whipped.
‘What the hell is it, mum?’ I asked.
‘Your dad and I have decided to call it a day,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got more than another week booked here.’
‘I mean we’re getting divorced,’ she said.
‘You what?!’
I was stunned. I mean, I told you my parents never argued in front of us, always kept it civilised but I was sure that if your parents were about to get divorced you’d get something of a clue. And going together on a family holiday didn’t seem like the obvious precursor to an announcement of divorce. I just couldn’t believe it.
‘I know it’s a shock,’ mum said. ‘But we’ve all talked it over and…’
I didn’t hear the significance of the ‘all’ at first. I was still in turmoil. On the one hand at least dad wasn’t dead or lying injured in a car somewhere, but on the other hand, I realised that my life was never going to be the same again.
‘Is it because of…’ Ellie choked and I was sure she was about to say ‘Alasdair’ but she finished the sentence with ‘Marco.’ And suddenly, everything fell into place.
Bloody Marco, I thought, but didn’t say. Ollie, however, did. ‘Bloody Marco,’ he said and went off into the house after him. I waited for mum to say, ‘It’s nothing to do with Marco. But she didn’t.’
‘How long’s it been going on?’ Ellie asked. I couldn’t believe it. There was my twelve year old sister, who had half an hour ago probably been kissing some local boy with all the naïve passion of proto-puberty, asking my mum how long she’d been having an affair with the builder. She was streets ahead of me. Had everyone else known about this but me?
‘That’s not a useful thing to know,’ mum said. ‘At the moment the most important thing to know is that dad and I are splitting up, he’s gone back to work and Marco and I are going to stay here and work things out with you all.’
‘I don’t want to…’ I started. But I realised I had no power. I couldn’t row my way out of this one. Dad had already gone. Why? Why hadn’t he waited to ask us if we wanted to go with him? Why had he left us with mum and... and Marco? I was gutted and I didn’t know who I was more angry with. Most of all I was angry with myself for never seeing this coming.
‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do,’ I said, and as the words came out of my mouth I noticed the irony – this line was usually delivered the other way – from parent to child.
Mum didn’t even notice I’d spoken. She was busy comforting Ellie who was crying on her lap like a baby.
‘Why, mum, why?’ she kept saying.
‘Look,’ said mum, ‘it’ll really be all right. You kids’ll never really notice the difference – dad’s always out working and…’
And Marco more or less lives with us. How convenient! I thought. Of course it’s not easy to put all this jumble into a sensible order, and I may not remember it exactly as it was, but around then, Marco and Ollie came back out. I noticed that neither of them had a black eye, but they didn’t exactly have their arms around each other either. But what I did notice… well, I’m not going to tell you that just yet. First things first.
‘What’s happening to Marco’s kids?’ Ellie asked. Trust Ellie to think of other people. Though I was a bit peeved she wasn’t thinking of dad – which I was.
‘They’re staying with their mother,’ mum said.
‘So it’s just like a kid’s swap then?’ I said, my tone every bit as sour as I hoped.
‘Don’t be daft,’ mum said. ‘Marco isn’t trying to take your dad’s place.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Then why’s dad not here and Marco not on holiday with his own family?’
‘I think we all just need to calm down here,’ said Marco.
‘I think you need to butt out,’ I said.
Like I said, it was all in danger of turning quite ugly.
‘Don’t speak to Marco like that,’ mum said. And I think that was the moment I disowned her. I lost all sympathy for her and decided that if we had to pick sides, I was on dad’s. And I stopped talking but I didn’t calm down.
It was like some kind of a nightmare for the rest of the evening. We ate dinner. We sat in front of the TV but didn’t watch it. We got ready for bed. As I recall, I went to bed without talking to anyone further, not even Ellie. I couldn’t handle that Ellie had run onto my mum’s lap. It felt like betrayal. And I couldn’t stand to see Marco and my mum. Ollie had taken himself off into his own room straight after dinner and I went to sulk in mine.
I had a night to think about it and mostly I thought about my dad. I decided I was going, somehow, to make my way back to Edinburgh to be with him. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised ‘running away’ from Mull to Edinburgh was not a realistic option. And by around 3 am I’d decided that maybe I had mis-interpreted all of this and it wasn’t quite what it seemed. I guess I went from grief pretty quickly into denial.
I entered the anger phase the next morning. The first person I saw was Ollie. And I had one question to ask him.
‘Where did Marco sleep last night?’ I asked him.
‘Not with me,’ he replied.
The world crashed. How could they do this to us? One minute we were a normally happy family with just one dead son as a cloud in our sky and the next my dad had been ousted and Marco jumped into my mum’s bed quicker than Claudius in the play Hamlet. Which we had been studying at school in the summer term. But this wasn’t a Shakespearean tragedy. It wasn’t drama. It was our life.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked Ollie.
He shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.
‘Don’t you care?’ I asked.
‘What can we do?’ he said. ‘They’re all adults, they’ll do what they want anyway.’
‘It’s a bit bloody sudden though, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘You think so?’ he answered, and yet another part of the fantasy that had been my life came crashing down.
‘How long? How long has it been going on?’ That was the only question I wanted answered now. But when I got the answer it was not one I ever wanted to hear.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.