MRS MARGARET EVANS

There wasn't a precise moment when you could have said that Margaret Evans began to dislike her family. It just grew inside her and became a habit. She had a distorted view of her own ability which clouded her view of the family. They frustrated her with their plodding, bumbling attempts at life. If only she were them, she'd grab hold of and do absolute wonders with their time and opportunities.

Margaret, her husband Robert and the two children, Sarah and Michael, lived in a sanitary, middle England town, somewhere on a latitude with Watford. Margaret was bored. She couldn't get her own life going because of the mundane demands of her pathetic family. It has to be said that most of the demands were perfectly normal, but, exaggerated by Margaret’s self interest, they became a barrier to her dreams. So she dangled. She dangled for eight hours each day - between 8.30am when the kids left for school and 4.30pm when they returned home. She found dangling boring, but dangle she did, just for them.

Sarah, in her seventeenth year, embarked on her first, deeply carnal relationship and took an academic nose dive. She'd been an average student with an average attitude, something Margaret couldn't abide and of course an academic nose dive from a starting point of average, spelt factory rather than law firm. Margaret was incandescent and for a month, inwardly raged throughout dangle time.

Michael at nineteen was a bloke. Well, that's how Margaret saw him. He'd taken blokes and blokey things seriously ever since his voice broke and now he wanted to be an architect which horrified Margaret because as far as she could tell he'd never shown an ounce of artistic sympathy and didn't have a molecule of creative talent. He believed in progress. Or to put it more in Michael's terms he believed in 'mans' progress. He admired the four bed, mock Tudor on an estate near his school, but thought the Lloyds building had gone too far. He would; she thought, end up designing bungalows for the mass market and talking funny. Margaret descended into the habit, several times a day, of letting out little yelps of frustration into the bathroom mirror.

Husband Robert was steady. He did accounts for a local engineering firm and every Thursday night he went to the local for a beer with his mates. He always spoke fondly of his family and would waft in late with a nice beery demeanour and ramble happily about things in general but nothing in particular. She thought the pub lot where beneath him. Beneath them. She couldn’t understand why he even bothered.

The house was full of eggshells. She suspected that none of them ever told the truth about what they felt or wanted, she certainly didn't. The cosy decent life they'd cast for themselves had set solid and now, it seemed to her, they were powerless to fight their descent into the suburban morass of half truths and marketing myths. Yelping in the bathroom was unlikely to help.

Then, to top it all off, Michael got a girlfriend who drove Margaret completely mad. Margaret could see straight through the lacquered, small town, superficiality, and shuddered at the way she said, wiv instead of with and fings instead of things and hated the ‘Save The Rhino's’, T-shirt she wore stretched over her idiotically large breasts. How could this gauche, glandular, girl, so blatantly patronised such a mighty beast of the jungle. The Rhinos problems, Margaret thought, were fairly immediate and pretty dam major, yet here was this lacquered, suburban girl, looking smug about her role in saving the species, when all she'd done was buy a freak'n T-shirt.

At times frustration with her family had become almost unbearable and twice in the last three years she had gone to a local wine bar during the afternoon in a half hearted attempt to claim her life back. She was tall and walked with a lazy swing to her hips which seduced men as they drove past in their cars. Her easy, fluid movements made them imagine she'd just got out of bed and would just easily get back in. On both occasions at the wine bar, sales reps had tried to schmooze her. One of them had been quite interesting. But then, rather quickly, she decided he was just as drab as the rest of the mediocre, middle aged penguins that sidled in there during the day. How had this all started? Was it six months after the marriage when she lied and told Robert she had to much work to do to go to the Saturday game? Or was it the other much more insidious lie, which was her habit of pretending to be asleep when Robert was restless with his hormones.

Margaret was suffocating under the weight of living with such under achievers. She would contemplate the calendar during dangling time and look for a suitable date to leave. But, she didn’t think any of them would cope without her so made a pact with herself that she wouldn't leave until the kids had finished school.

Late in September, soon after Sarah turned eighteen, the Evans house, momentarily burst into life. Sarah brought a new friend home, the beautiful Justine. Michael became hormonally agitated and temporarily lost interest in the Rhino queen. The Rhino queen fought back with everything she had and so within a couple of weeks of Justine’s appearance, Michael, shakily but manfully announced that he and the Rhino queen were now doing it and would everyone, especially Sarah, please remember to knock before entering his room.

Justine didn't even blink and they all assumed, quite wrongly as it happens, that Justine had been there and done that. Justine became a friend of the whole family. She appeared worldly and mature and so one day when Margaret and she were alone, Margaret spilled the beans about leaving Robert.

'He's so boring, he just doesn't do anything. I can't remember the last time he laughed.'

Justine didn't do gossip and diplomatically suggested that he wasn't all that bad and that perhaps he just needed a little stimulation.

'You don't have to be diplomatic with me.'

'Oh come on Margaret we've all got a little spark somewhere.'

'We'll if you can find it you can have it.'

Justine just wrinkled her nose in disbelief.

Justine had appeared amongst them and stirred them up. Michael felt, that without Justine he wouldn't be doing it with the rhino queen. Sarah had become the centre of attention for a while. Margaret, from whatever part of the Justine stimulus, had her hair toned and bought erotic knickers and was closer than ever to having a fling. Robert alone seemed impervious to the Justine effect, even coming home from the pub early one Thursday night complaining that Sarah and Justine had been down there, and had upset the cosy balance between him and his mates.

Margaret was annoyed that Justine and Sarah hadn't invited her and that was the beginning of the end of the Evan's family’s intense relationship with Justine. Things cooled on both sides after that. The Evans contingency, in a negative take, thought Justine was probably bored and although they occasionally saw her she gradually disappeared from their horizon

Margaret went back to yelping in the mirror, but the ripples Justine had started kept on. The rhino queen got sick of lying on her back in Michael's stuffy room all weekend while he sweated and grunted over her, so she terminated the relationship. Sarah slid into an almost complete disconnection from the family and began spending weekends with friends they'd never heard of. She would come home looking washed out. She left school soon after discovering that essential colour black. Not in dress, but in boy friend.

'If she's taking drugs,' thought Margaret, 'I'll throw her out.'

But within a month Sarah had left anyway. She took an office job in London, got a flat in Camden and a tattoo of a humming bird on her shoulder. She never took drugs. She just partied a lot.

Five years went by. Justine was a distant memory. The Rhino queen got a degree in veterinary science and moved out to Africa. Margaret was shaken by that. She'd always considered the Rhino Queen to be a non starter.

Michael became an architect and starting living with a nurse who wore a thong and liked vinyl. Robert plodded away. He got a bigger company car and was made a director. He bought Margaret a small, economical run-a-bout and moved permanently into the spare room.

When Sarah got pregnant with her Caribbean partner, Margaret went to see her, but afterwards, all she could say was, he had a lovely smile and spoke good English. Robert liked him straight away and occasionally went to the Saturday game with him.

It was early one spring morning that it all fell apart. Robert came down in his crisp white shirt, placed his briefcase by the door, poured himself a black coffee and made a bald statement

“I'm leaving you this weekend. We haven't slept together for five years, haven't had a proper marriage for twenty. I've arranged for you to receive a substantial allowance and I've made the house and chattels over to you. It's freehold so you can do what you like with it.”

“So where do you think you're going to live?” She was shaken

“Paris, I'm setting up a new branch. In the meantime the company will put me up in a local hotel.”

“But what am I supposed to do.”

"Well you can stop looking at the calendar and yelping into the mirror for a start. I think you're a bit of a fake actually. The only major thing you've ever accomplished is to completely waste your life. You could have got involved with the family but for what ever reasons you decided not to. Now you can do what you like. Good luck."

She hadn't realised he was quite so astute. “Is there another woman?"

"I've been seeing someone yes, but to be honest, that’s none of your business?"

She had three whole weeks to stew and dangle or to get on with it. She felt free at last, yet terrified. What would she do? She tried to think of available men in town. She knew quite a few but none that she'd let put their hands near her. She thought long and hard about Robert sneaking up in the company without telling her. A typical little shit she thought. She went to see Sarah but Sarah wasn’t in the mood. She was eight and a half months pregnant and the air temperature was a stifling 32 degrees.

Michael, now prematurely stooped, said predictable things like, “have you been to relate.”

“Relate is for pre the event you dope. He's leaving for Paris on Saturday.”

On Saturday Margaret found herself at London airport, wearing a head scarf and dark glasses. And then suddenly, there he was, arm in arm with his new woman, smiling and chatting amongst a group of colleagues and old friends of theirs she hadn't seen for years. They all looked very buoyant and happy and he was the centre of their attention. She'd never seen him like that.

When she arrived home that day she went straight to the bathroom mirror. Not to yelp but to look at herself. ‘It's all over for you girl’, she whispered to her pale reflection. She wandered about aimlessly through the house but ended back in the bathroom. She found the mirror again. She couldn't cry, she felt blank and empty. But then, slowly, an all consuming anger began to build up inside her. Before her, swam the whole scene at the airport. Robert, happy and smiling for Gods sake, walking out to the waiting aircraft with his young lover, and his young lover waving to her, Margarets, old friends as if she'd known them all her life and completely unselfconscious of the subtle swelling under her beautifully flowing, pale lemon maternity dress.

It wasn't the fact that Margaret’s replacement was pregnant that caused the sudden surge of anger, or the fact that most of their old friends obviously knew her well and admired her. No, what caused the bitterness, the absolute outrage, was remembering every detail of that happy summer’s day five years ago; when she told the now pregnant Justine that she would always look exquisite in pale lemon.