Losing Me

by Sue Margolis

Genres: Family Life; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The “compulsively readable” (Susie Essman, actress, Curb Your Enthusiasm) author of Best Supporting Role delivers a new novel of one woman who’s stretched so thin, she almost disappears...

Knocking on sixty, Barbara Stirling is too busy to find herself, while caring for her mother, husband, children, and grandchildren. But when she loses her job, everything changes. Exhausted, lonely, and unemployed, Barbara is forced to face her feelings and doubts. Then a troubled, vulnerable little boy walks into her life and changes it forever.

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

Prologue

“Barbara, before you go, could I have a word?”

“Actually, now’s not great. Could it possibly wait until lunchtime?” After everything that had happened that morning, Barbara was feeling the strain. Plus she was due to teach a class in a few minutes. What she needed was a quick breather to clear her head. What she suspected she was about to get—since these days Sandra banged on about little else—was another sermon on the unacceptable levels of swearing in year four. In Barbara’s view, it had improved—sort of—and she’d told Sandra so. “At least now when kids call me a cunt, they say, ‘You’re a cunt, miss.’” Sandra flinched. Then she went all head teachery and looked at Barbara over her spectacles. “Barbara, we’re talking about ten-year-olds. This is no laughing matter.”

She wasn’t really laughing. Swearing was an issue. But Jubilee was a school in an impoverished neighborhood. Everybody swore. Kids only copied what they heard. Barbara—along with most of the staff—believed there were more important problems to be tackled, like the four – and five-year-olds starting school not toilet trained.

“I’d rather do it now,” Sandra was saying. “If you don’t mind.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“Maybe you should sit down.” Sandra gestured to the chair on the other side of her desk.

“OK, now you’re making me nervous.” Barbara remained standing. She wasn’t the leg-buckling type.

“I thought I should tell you before you received the official letter.”

“Official letter? I don’t understand. Have I don’t something wrong? Am I about to get a telling off?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. The thing is, earlier this morning I got an e-mail from the Education Department. I want you to know that I’ve been fighting this for months.”

“Fighting what?”

“I do wish you’d sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down. Sandra, what’s going on?”

“At the beginning of last term, the Education Department wrote to me. I was informed that because of budget cuts, I needed to lose a teacher.”

It took her a moment to work out what Sandra was saying. “What?. . . And you’re saying that teacher is me? You’re sack – ing me?”

“Of course not. You’re being made redundant.”

“Oh, and you think semantics sweetens the pill? You think that being told I’m of no use—surplus to requirements—is an improvement on ‘you’re sacked’?”

“Barbara, I know you’re angry, but please don’t take it out on me. This isn’t my fault. I sang your praises to the department, told them what a huge asset you are to the school. But a post had to go, and they insisted it should be the person closest to retirement. They thought it seemed fairer that way.”

“Retirement? I wasn’t remotely thinking about retirement. I’ve got years left. You know as well as I do that this job is everything to me. It’s my life. It’s who I am.”

“I’m so sorry, Barbara. But there was nothing I could do. In the end, my hands were tied.”

Chapter 1

As she sipped her coffee in the early-morning calm, there were no augurs or omens to suggest that before lunchtime, her life would be in the toilet. Her breakfast egg was boiling on the stove. Through the kitchen window the sky was streaked optimistic orange. The elderly heating boiler was roaring away. In a moment the pipes would start their reassuring ticking and knocking. She relished this time to herself—before the day kicked off, before everybody began demanding bits of her. She would have relished it even more if it hadn’t been for Mark Zuckerberg.

Barbara had issues with Mark Zuckerberg. Granted, she was fifty-eight, going on fifty-nine, and walking in the valley of the shadow of her seventh decade. But did the boy mogul with practically his whole life ahead of him have to ram the point home quite so often? This morning—as usual—Barbara’s Facebook sidebar contained another “fifty-nine next birthday?” ad for a “cheap, no-fuss” funeral plan. Underneath was an invitation to take part in a medical trial aimed at detecting early-onset Alzheimer’s. Then there were the plus-size clothing outlets pushing New Year’s discounts. Zuckerberg knew she was a size fourteen because he had elves—thousands of invisible Web stalkers—who were forever peering over her shoulder as she shopped. She imagined them sniggering and nudging one another each time she clicked on a pair of big knickers or an XL “leisure pant.”

But the advertisement that really got to her was the one for a Norwegian river cruise. In Barbara’s book, a cruise ship was God’s waiting room. A touring hotel that practically did the sightseeing for you. Effortless—like Velcro, Crocs, or elasticized waistbands—cruises were catnip to people her age. Of course, some of Barbara’s friends took cruises not so much to take it easy, but to show off. When couples of a certain age treated themselves to around-the-world cruises, it was a chance for them to bask on the sun loungers of their success. Good luck to them. But it disturbed her that so many people her age had stopped striving and seemed to be happy to talk of their successes in the past tense.

Cruises, no matter why they were taken, were the first sign of the dying of the light and to be fought at all costs. (Elasticized waistbands, on the other hand, had, since the arrival of her ample postmenopausal belly, become her secret pleasure.)

Barbara topped up her Queen of Fucking Everything coffee mug that her best friend, Jean, had given her for Christmas and checked the time on the kitchen clock. Just past six. She always got up early on school days. After thirty-odd years as a teacher, she still panicked about being late and even more so on the first day of a new term, which it was today. Her anxiety stemmed from her miserable childhood.

She spooled down the page of status updates. Her sister-in-law, Pam, had posted another selection of kitten pictures. She and her husband, Si, had recently moved to the Costa del Sol—somewhere near Málaga. For months she had posted nothing but beach snaps: “Me on the beach,” “Si on the beach,” “Me and Si on the beach.”

If they weren’t lazing on the sand, they were to be seen basking by the pool knocking back sangria. “This is the life,” Pam would proclaim with a line of exclamation marks. For the first few weeks she got twenty or thirty “likes” every time she posted a picture. But the thumbs-ups and “lucky old you” comments gradually waned as people got fed up with hearing about Pam and Si’s sun-and-sangria life. Pam appeared to take the hint—which was unusual for her. From then on the beach and poolside photographs stopped and she went back to her pre-Spain habit of posting syrupy animal snaps.

Today there were kittens poking their doe-eyed faces out of saucepans and toilet bowls. There were kittens cuddling puppies, kittens lapping from dinky bone-china teacups. Farther down, she had added one of her bumper-sticker affirmations. The fancy lettering wafted out of a sun-dappled bluebell wood: Life isn’t measured by the breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away. “So true,” Pam’s old school friend Heather Babcock had commented, adding a line of hearts and smiley faces.

Barbara couldn’t understand why, the moment they hit fifty, so many previously cool, fun women turned into syrupy sentimentalists. Take Heather Babcock for example. In 1983, at Pam’s hen night at a pub in Camden Town, Heather had stood on a tabletop and sung a “feminist” song she’d penned. The chorus went: Oh . . . don’t go jogging in a white tracksuit when you’ve got a heavy flow. Even the blokes had joined in.

Now Heather, Pam and their ilk were cooing over infant animals on Facebook and buying tapestry cushions and bookmarks embroidered “To my dearest hubby.” Their living room shelves were rammed with snow globes, faux Fabergé eggs and porcelain babies dressed as angels. It seemed to Barbara that as soon as women ran out of estrogen and could no longer reproduce, they became driven by a new biological imperative—to fill their houses with kitsch crap. Old Mrs. Brownstein from down the road called them her tchotchkes. Barbara had once made the mistake of agreeing to a cup of tea with Mrs. B. What had followed was an hour-long guided tour of all her china ballerinas and harlequins. It upset the old lady no end to think of her children disposing of them after she’d gone.

If she was honest, Barbara had felt twinges of the condition herself. These had resulted in her dispatching more than one birthday e-card depicting penguins cutting a rug to the “Minute Waltz.” And although she had watched Breaking Bad and appreciated its genius, another of her secret pleasures, along with the elasticized waistbands, was an evening in with reruns of Roseanne or The Golden Girls.

Pam, on the other hand, combined her syrupyitis with a fervent desire to bring back hanging. What was more, she had no qualms about expressing this on Facebook. Her posts on the subject—invariably accompanied by a picture of a giant noose—appeared every time a black person was convicted of killing a white one. Barbara had thought about unfriending Pam—but in the end she decided against it. Pam would find out. There would be an argument, which would result in a family rift. Best to leave well alone.

Out of politeness, Barbara “liked” both the kittens and the affirmation. Pam almost never returned the compliment. She steadfastly refused to “like” or comment on Barbara’s links to newspaper articles on child hunger or first-world poverty. Maybe she thought the way to deal with it was to hang the poor—or give them a kitten.

She dunked Marmite soldiers into her boiled egg. The yolk wasn’t as runny as she liked it, but it was her own fault. She’d got so wound up about Facebook that she’d left it on the stove for too long. She wondered if it was possible to e-mail Mark Zuckerberg—not to complain about Pam et al., but about his ageist advertisements. She knew she’d never get around to it, but she hoped others might. He should be taken to task—left in no doubt that people of a certain age didn’t care to be reminded of their mortality over their morning boiled egg. They were perfectly capable of doing that for themselves, thank you very much. Maybe he was like the Apple chap. People had been able to e-mail him and apparently he even replied to a few. What was his name? Always wore black polo-necks. The one who died. For crying out loud, he’d been one of the most famous people on the planet. But his name escaped her. These days Barbara had a real problem remembering names—and not just people’s names. It was the same with objects.

Last week it had been “colander.” She’d been simmering chicken joints and vegetables on the stove to make stock and needed to drain off the liquid. She’d taken the saucepan to the sink and asked her husband, Frank, if he would go to the cupboard and fetch her “the whatsit . . . you know . . . the strainy thing.”

“That would be the colander,” Frank had said, getting up from behind his newspaper. He duly located it, handed it to his wife and went back to his newspaper. Meanwhile, Barbara poured the golden chicken stock into the colander. Then, for what must have been a full five seconds she stared into the sink, convinced that some kind of magic was about to reverse the calamity. But it didn’t. The last drops of stock flowed into the plughole. All she had left was a colander full of overcooked meat, bones and veg. Frank thought it was hilarious, but Barbara was close to tears. “I never forget to put a bowl under the colander. Never.”

“Well, this time you did.”

“Yes, because I’m going bloody senile.”

“Oh, stop it. We’re all going bloody senile. The other day I found myself on the landing and I couldn’t remember if I’d just come upstairs or was heading down.”

After the chicken stock debacle, they’d gotten changed for Jean’s party. It was her sixtieth birthday, and she’d got caterers in to do posh bangers and mustard mash, along with a trio of puddings. Frank put on his navy Paul Smith suit that they’d bought at an outlet mall last year. Barbara could never get over the effects good tailoring could have on the chunky male figure. He’d teamed the suit with a white button-down collared shirt, open at the neck, and trendy black suede brogues. When he sat down there was a glimpse of bright pink sock.

“You know,” he said, looking at himself in the full-length mirror, “for a paunchy middle-aged git, I still scrub up OK.”

She had to admit that he did. When he was at home he shuffled around the house in the baggy old jeans and jumpers with elbow holes that she threw out when he wasn’t looking, but when he went out he liked to look a bit sharp.

“So, what about me? How do I look?” She was wearing a knee-length black tunic with a dramatic asymmetrical hem, over leggings and high-heeled boots.

“Great. But you always do. Have I seen that top thing before?”

“Only about a dozen times.”

“Really? Well, I like it. Suits you.”

As soon as they arrived at Jean’s, Frank disappeared to the loo. His prostate didn’t care for the cold weather.

Barbara helped herself to a glass of seasonal mulled wine and went in search of the birthday girl. She spotted Jean’s sister, Val, on the other side of the packed room. They shouted “hi” and exchanged waves but couldn’t get close enough for a proper hello. From what Barbara could tell, the only other family members in attendance were Jean and Ken’s boys, Oliver and Adam—along with Adam’s fiancée, Emma. Mostly the gathering was made up of the usual crowd—Ken’s colleagues from the gastroenterology department at King George’s.

Years ago, when Barbara and Frank were first introduced to them, they were skinny junior doctors in flares and mullets who told drunken stories about digital rectal exams and—famously—the guy who came into the ER insisting that his penis was dead. Now they were tubby senior consultants with ear hair and unruly eyebrows.

“I don’t get it,” Frank had said on the way over. “Ken’s still a good laugh. But his mates seem to have become so bloody dull as they’ve got older. Not one of them has got any real conversation. If they’re not talking shop, they bore on about wine and all the posh restaurants they’ve been to. Then they get on to hitting things with sticks.” Frank referred to any sport that wasn’t football as “hitting things with sticks.” It was partly a class thing. He loved the grassrootsness of football. Everything else was for posh boys or just plain pointless—although he did make a notable exception for cricket. He thought golf was especially preposterous and had no qualms about offending golfers he met.

“Ah, Jeff, I hear you play golf. So, do you own your own bag of bats?”

•   •   •

Eventually Barbara spied Jean, who was wearing a pair of big sparkly antlers, handing out nibbles on the other side of the room. “Suburban snacks, anybody?”

Try as she might to reach her, Barbara kept getting waylaid by doctors’ wives—whose names she couldn’t bring to mind—eager for a natter and a catch-up.

“Barbara! Long time no see. Come over here and say hello to my new knee.”

But before she could reach the knee and its owner, another familiar face she couldn’t put a name to was smiling a greeting.

“Barbara, how are you? Frank still working?”

“Actually, we both are.”

“Good Lord. You’re real suckers for punishment. Graham took retirement a couple of years ago. Couldn’t wait. It’s bliss. I cannot tell you. He’s busy working on his autobiography, which he’s planning to bring out as an e-book later in the year. I walk the dogs, potter in the garden. My asters did awfully well last year. Oh, and I’ve just started this brilliant antique-collecting course.”

Barbara couldn’t imagine a life being reduced to asters and antiques. She knew she was being snotty and contemptuous, not characteristics that she admired in herself, but she couldn’t see the point of carrying on if you didn’t have a proper, people-are-depending-on-you reason to get up in the morning. On the other hand, she was envious. These people could afford to give up work. She and Frank couldn’t, even if they wanted to.

Barbara finally caught up with Jean at the bar. This was actually Jean’s dining room table covered in a white cloth and bottles of supermarket fizz.

“Hey, birthday girl,” Barbara said, giving her friend a hug. “You’re looking gorgeous . . . and I’m lovin’ the antlers.”

“Ken thought I should wear a tiara, but since it’s still Christmas, I thought these were more seasonal.”

“Quite right. So have you had a good day?”

“Fabulous—and thanks again for the pressie. You really shouldn’t have. Issey Miyake perfume and body lotion. You must have spent a fortune. That said, it is my fave.”

Barbara had been worried about sending a parcel full of glass in the post, but she’d wanted to make sure it arrived that morning. Jean was a big kid when it came to her birthday. Every year she opened her presents in bed with Ken while they ate warm buttered croissants and drank champagne with floating strawberries.

“Oh, who cares about money?” Barbara said. “You’re only sixty once.” Since her credit cards were maxed out, she’d put the Issey Miyake on the charge card she’d used to pay for all the family Christmas presents. She dreaded to think how much she’d spent. Since Boxing Day, she’d been fretting about the bill landing on the mat.

“So,” Barbara said, “what did Ken get you for your birthday?”

“A fancy-schmancy spa day, and he’s whisking me off to the South of France for a week in July.”

“Wow. Lucky old you. Your old man’s still nuts about you. You know that, don’t you?”

Jean laughed. “I do . . . and you’re right. I am a very lucky girl.”

Just then Ken appeared, glass in hand.

“So what do you think of the wife? Isn’t she gorgeous? I keep telling her she doesn’t look a day over thirty-five.”

“Idiot,” Jean said, bashing him on the arm.

“Right, I suppose I should go and mingle,” he said. “Barbara, where’s that husband of yours? Talking to him makes such a change from all these boring old farts. You know they’re all retiring, don’t you? Bloody idiots. Mark my words, they’ll be dead in ten years. It’s what boredom and lack of purpose do to you.”

“Ken fully intends to keel over at ninety, shoving a tube up some poor sod’s rectum—don’t you, Ken?”

“Too bloody right. . . . OK, I’m off to find Frank.”

As he turned, he started to sway. Barbara and Jean exchanged glances.

“Ken, just look at you. You know you can’t hold your booze like you used to. Now do as I say and switch to water.”

“You know I really love it when you’re bossy.” He squeezed Jean’s waist.

“Believe me, if you don’t do as you’re told, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

“I can’t wait.” He winked at his wife and left.

“I do envy you two,” Barbara said to Jean. “So loved up after all these years.”

•   •   •

It wasn’t long before everybody was merry on mulled wine and Tesco Finest bubbly and Jean was organizing party games. After “Gargle That Tune,” there was “Murder in the Dark” and “Pin the Lips on Mick Jagger.” This was followed by dancing. Funny, Barbara thought as she dragged a protesting Frank into the melee—how the middle-aged women could still get their groove on, whereas most of the men—Frank included—could manage only the kind of jerky-limbed abandon that would have had their children and grandchildren squirming and covering their eyes . . . before sharing the video on Facebook.

At midnight, Barbara, Jean and Jean’s sister, Val, who by now were all pretty worse for wear, found themselves sitting on the sofa, getting maudlin.

“So Ken thinks we should buy a futon,” Jean said, adjusting her antlers, which kept slipping down over her eyes. “He reckons it’ll be good for our backs, but I’ve told him there is no way that my deathbed is going to be a bloody futon.”

“Too right,” Val said as she flicked cigarette ash into her empty champagne glass. “You tell him. Oh, and talking of deathbeds, Steve and I have found the most incredible burial plots.”

Jean looked at her sister. “Bloody hell, Val. You’re not even fifty-five.”

“I know, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime offer. The plots are in this glorious little glade. It’s like this dinky fairy glen. . . .”

“But when the time comes,” Barbara said, “won’t you and Steve be too dead to notice?”

“That’s not the point. . . .”

“I wanna be stuffed,” Jean declared. “And have the boys and Ken bring me out every Christmas. They can sit me at the top of the table and stick these antlers on my head.”

“I’d like to die having an orgasm,” Val said.

Jean laughed. “Good for you, hon. I’ll drink to that.”

“OK, I think we should stop all this talk about death,” Barbara said. “It’s depressing. I don’t know about you two, but I’ve still got plenty of living left to do. Everybody says sixty is the new forty.”

“Then that would make thirty the new ten,” Jean said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes, necessarily,” Val came back. “It’s simple arithmetic.”

“I don’t care,” Jean said. “It’s legacy that counts. You need to leave a legacy. You know . . . like Einstein. Or Cher.”

•   •   •

“We really ought to do it,” Frank said to Barbara as they got into bed. “It’s been ages. I’m worrying that we’re getting out of the habit. And I really fancied you tonight.”

“Ditto. You looked incredibly handsome.”

“On the other hand, it’s one in the morning and it’s such a bloody rigmarole. It means I’ve got to get up and take a tablet. Then we have to wait for it to work.”

“I could put the kettle on.”

“Oh, very erotic . . . sitting in bed drinking a mug of Yorkshire Gold while I wait to get a hard-on.”

If she was honest, she wasn’t that bothered about sex these days. There had been a time when she liked Frank to tie her up. When had that waned? Around the time her hot flashes and vaginal dryness had waxed. HRT patches had helped improve her libido a bit, but it wasn’t what it was, and like Frank said, these days it was such a rigmarole.

“Let’s just have a cuddle?” she said.

Barbara snuggled into him. After a couple of minutes, Frank said his nostrils itched. He got out of bed to find his nose hair trimmer.

•   •   •

Back in the kitchen, Barbara fancied another slice of toast, but she was watching her carbs. Post-menopause fat cells—particularly the ones around her middle—seemed to swell up if they got even the faintest sniff of a scone or hot buttered crumpet. She’d just put the loaf back in the bread bin when her cell rang. She padded over to the kitchen table and picked it up. When she saw the number, she let out a groan. Even for her mother, this was early.

“Hi, Mum. How are you?”

Rose would have been up since five, had her up-and-down wash, eaten her muesli and banana, and now she was bored and looking for some action.

“I’m fine. I was just calling because I’ve forgotten what time you said you’d be over today.”

“I told you last night. I’ll be there straight after school. If the weather’s not too bad, maybe we could go for a walk in the park. It’ll do you good.”

“Lovely. I’ll make sure I’m in.”

Barbara found it both sad and amusing that her mother, who these days left her flat only to go shopping or to the hairdresser, always spoke as if her social calendar were packed with engagements. Right now she would be staring out of her living room window, waiting for it to get light and for the postman to arrive. Frank said she was becoming agoraphobic like Stan—Barbara’s late father. Barbara didn’t agree. Rose went out every day to shop and run errands. When necessary, she even took the bus. Barbara put her mother’s behavior down to nothing more than inertia. In the last few years so many of her friends had died. On the one hand, Rose was lonely. On the other, she couldn’t see the point of going out and making new friends who would only die on her.

“But you need to do something to keep yourself occupied,” Barbara had said repeatedly. “What about joining a seniors club?”

Rose could think of nothing worse. “What, and spend my days being patronized by idiots who assume that as soon as a person turns seventy, their brain seizes up and all they’re interested in is playing bingo and doing the ‘Hokey Pokey’? No. I’m better off on my own.”

So she spent her days standing at the window or sitting in front of the TV.

Barbara still wanted more toast. Instead of reaching for the bread, she forced herself in the direction of the fruit bowl and helped herself to a handful of blueberries. Above her the floorboards creaked. Frank was up. She would take him a cup of coffee.

She found him in his study, staring into his laptop. When he made no effort to relieve her of the mug, she made some space among his mess of papers and put it down.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“Oh, right, cheers,” he said, eyes still fixed on his screen. Then: “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

“The exec producer at Channel Four is saying they want an entire re-fucking-edit of the Bolivia film. That’s going to take forever.”

“Frank, calm down. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened. So you’ll negotiate more time, and it’ll work out like it always does. But getting het up isn’t going to help. Come on . . . drink some coffee.”

“I don’t think I can manage it.” He grimaced and let out a long belch. “Bloody stomach acid. And I can’t find my pills.”

Frank made TV documentaries—the kind that came with a warning: “The images you are about to see may cause distress.” Did they ever. Audiences wept watching them. Frank got acid reflux making them.

Informing the world about torture, human trafficking, war crimes—essentially any kind of human rights abuse—was Frank’s passion, if “passion” was the right word. Maybe “calling” was more apt. His work frequently involved him putting himself in danger. To make his award-winning film Inside North Korea, he’d got himself into Pyongyang on an official tourist trip. But each day he’d managed to give the tour guides t