Over sharing, p.1
Over Sharing, page 1
About the Author
Jane Fallon is the multi-award-winning television producer behind shows such as This Life, Teachers and 20 Things to Do Before You’re 30. Her Sunday Times bestselling books – Getting Rid of Matthew, Got You Back, Foursome, The Ugly Sister, Skeletons, Strictly Between Us, My Sweet Revenge, Faking Friends, Tell Me a Secret, Queen Bee, Worst Idea Ever and Just Got Real – have sold over a million copies in the UK.
Jane Fallon
* * *
OVER SHARING
Contents
PART ONE Chapter 1. Iris
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART TWO Chapter 15. Maddy
Chapter 16. Maddy
Chapter 17. Iris
Chapter 18. Maddy
Chapter 19. Maddy
Chapter 20. Iris
Chapter 21. Iris
Chapter 22. Iris
Chapter 23. Maddy
Chapter 24. Iris
Chapter 25. Iris
Chapter 26. Maddy
Chapter 27. Lee
Chapter 28. Iris
Chapter 29. Maddy
Chapter 30. Iris
Chapter 31. Maddy
Chapter 32. Iris
Chapter 33. Lee
Chapter 34. Iris
Chapter 35. Lee
Chapter 36. Iris
Chapter 37. Lee
Chapter 38. Iris
Chapter 39. Iris
Chapter 40. Maddy
Chapter 41. Iris
Chapter 42. Iris
Chapter 43. Iris
Chapter 44. Iris
Chapter 45. Maddy
Chapter 46. Iris
Chapter 47. Iris
Chapter 48. Maddy
Chapter 49. Iris
Chapter 50. Maddy
Chapter 51. Iris
Chapter 52. Iris
Chapter 53. Lee
Chapter 54. Iris
Chapter 55. Maddy
Chapter 56. Iris
Chapter 57. Lee
Chapter 58. Maddy
Chapter 59. Iris
Chapter 60. Maddy
Chapter 61. Iris
Chapter 62. Maddy
Chapter 63. Iris
Chapter 64. Maddy
Chapter 65. Iris
Chapter 66. Maddy
Chapter 67. Iris
Chapter 68. Iris
Chapter 69. Maddy
Chapter 70. Iris
Chapter 71. Iris
Acknowledgements
Dedicated to the wonderful dogsonthestreets.org for their work with the homeless and their pets in London
Part One
1.
Iris
I’m happy.
I am.
I know it’s possibly not very convincing if I have to announce that fact rather than it be apparent in my smile, my laugh, my sunny demeanour, but I’ve always had a bit of a resting bitch face, so you’ll just have to trust me on it.
I have it all, on paper. Almost. Friends (who I increasingly see less frequently as their lives are consumed by mumhood. That’s not me being sneery by the way, that’s me being envious), a good (but not exactly challenging) job, my own flat (well, owned by me and HSBC but mainly full of my lodger, Carol). All my own teeth. That last one’s a joke. I mean, I do have all my own teeth but it’s something my dad always used to say when he was teasing my mum about what a good catch he was. I never really got it, but I used to laugh. My dad told terrible jokes, but he told them so hopefully it was impossible not to give him the response he was looking for.
It’s just that I thought there would be more. Four years ago I also had a husband, a house. We were trying for a baby. Really trying, like it was going out of fashion. With an app and a thermometer in place of lust and lingerie. With phone calls in the middle of the day that said ‘We need to do it now. Can you meet me at work, we can nip into the loos for a quickie.’ It hadn’t totally taken over our lives, though. At least, I didn’t think so then. It felt as if we still had time, we just wanted to complete our little family. Although I was starting to get more nervous with every month that passed. I’d even brought up IVF. Casually, as if it was just a conversation topic and not an actual possibility in our lives. I threw it in in between asking what he fancied for dinner and what he felt like watching on TV that night. Oh, I was talking to my mum and her friend’s daughter had IVF and it worked second time. Maybe we should think about it? And Tom hadn’t baulked. He hadn’t rushed straight in saying Over my dead body or Are you out of your fucking mind? which I’d taken as a positive sign. We were in it together. That’s how I saw it, anyway. Maybe Tom thought differently. Maybe he thought all the spontaneity had gone and he just wanted sex to be sex again, not an appointment in the calendar whether you felt like it or not. He never said. It turned out there was a lot he didn’t say.
Sometimes, these days, I feel as if I’m going backwards. Losing accomplishments rather than gaining them. So I try to count my blessings. Write them in the ridiculous ‘Gratitude Journal’ Daisy gave me, every night. They’re always the same: Health, Mum, friends, job, flat, teeth. Imagine if that had been all Samuel Pepys had to say, I don’t think we’d still be poring over his diaries four hundred years later. It’s not that I’m complaining. I just sometimes think there should be more to show for forty-four years on this planet, that’s all.
Daisy also gave me some healing crystals, some cleansing sage and a copy of Owning Your Own Pain by some wiry old yogic guru, when Tom left. Daisy is – to be brutally honest – batshit crazy, but she’s my only sister and I love her. In increasingly small doses.
I snuggle back under the covers, trying for a Saturday morning lie-in. My weekends are always a masterclass in avoidance. Not of doing anything, but of bumping into Carol the lodger. One of the other downsides of finding myself suddenly single at forty was the need to share my home with a stranger to make ends meet. Tom and I sold our little two-up two-down terrace for way more than we paid for it, due to the area we lived in surprising us all by gentrifying around us. Where there had been an old key and shoe repair shop was now a GAIL’s. Itsu had moved into the run-down greasy spoon. The life and soul had gone out of the place and in its stead the prices had gone up. We still had a sizeable mortgage to pay off, but I ploughed my share of the profit into buying the most expensive property I could afford, in an OK part of Kingston that had still not quite up-and-come, but was threatening to, in the hope that it would be an investment for the future. An area randomly chosen because there was an opening in a branch of Marlborough Kitchens there that I could apply for a transfer to. And because I wanted to get as far away from Tom and our history as I possibly could. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still only a bog standard two-bedroom. Tiny. But it’s in a smart new build with an easy walk into the centre of the town. It should earn me some kind of decent return when I decide where I really want to put down roots. I don’t want to end up living out my days in a place chosen only by circumstances. I have no ties here beyond the financial. But then I don’t really have any ties anywhere. Not any more.
I knew the mortgage would be a stretch on my own, but I resisted the idea of a lodger for as long as I could, hoping my life would suddenly take a turn for the better. After a year or so I knew I was defeated. I’d spent any savings I had left just on getting by. I had two alternatives: sell my flat and buy something smaller in a much worse neighbourhood, or rent out my spare room. I was too old for any of my friends to be unsettled enough to need to share a flat. They all had lives, families, mortgages of their own. So I advertised. I lucked out first time. Quiet, unassuming, only-in-London-from-Sunday-to-Thursday Joanne, who scarcely left her room and then, when the pandemic started, worked from her family home in Manchester and still paid the rent, until she realised she never needed to return to the office and could save herself a fortune. Carol is her replacement. From the sublime to the ridiculous.
So now I fill up my social calendar just to get out of the house – brunch with Cally, a long walk with Fay, drinks in the evening with whichever thinks they can stay awake later than nine that night. They both have babies, Fay’s Kieran is almost one and Cally’s Frankie just eight months. Spur-of-the-moment plans have long gone. Now their lives are one long negotiation with their partners about whose turn it is to do childcare while the other goes out and pretends they wouldn’t rather be at home. Our thirties were all about partying. So far, our forties seem to be mainly scheduling-based. Sometimes I feel like the oldest teenager in town next to my friends, but it’s not through choice. My life just hasn’t quite turned out like I planned, like it was supposed to. They have moved on, checking off the grown-up milestones, while I’ve stagnated. I’m stuck in quicksand. But most of the time that’s fine. I’m luckier than many. My problems are firmly first world. No one has ever died because their friend cancelled their plans to see The Book of Mormon three times when their baby wasn’t sleeping. Like I said, I’m not pissed off, I’m jealous. I would love to have a baby who kept me awake all night. I wouldn’t care if I never slept again.
I give up trying to go back to sleep and get my phone and a coffee from the kitchen instead, checking first that the flat is quiet. I turn up the thermostat on the way back to bed. Fay always tells me that one way in whi ch she envies my life is that I am mistress of my own heating system. No passive aggressive battle over the controls for me. They are firmly my domain. Fay is always cold. Always. It started as a running joke that she would turn up the radiators whenever her husband Steve left the room, and he would turn them back down whenever he came back in, but now it seems to be a metaphor for everything that is wrong in their relationship. Fay and Steve have been struggling since little Kieran was born eleven months ago. Steve is – and I don’t say this lightly – a complete and utter cock. I didn’t like him much before they got married, to be fair. He’s one of those eternal lads. Responsibility averse, Cally calls it. Her partner, Jim, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect. Kind, funny, a fabulous dad. He can’t stand Steve, literally can’t bear to be in the same room as him, so nights out with the five of us are out of the question. Quite often, though, me, Fay and Kieran will go round to Cally and Jim’s for the evening and Jim will cook for us all and entertain the kids, and Cally has to listen to me and Fay ramble on about how we’d trample over her cold dead body in a heartbeat to snap him up if she keeled over prematurely. I don’t think either of us mean it, by the way. At least I don’t, Fay is anybody’s guess. But I do adore him.
I scroll through Twitter reading odd bits of news, check out Instagram where I never post anything, I just like to lurk judgementally. I love this time of the morning. No phone calls, no texts, the world slowly waking up. I can hear birds outside where usually there’s only traffic. The day feels full of potential. Hopeful. Before life steamrollers in and crushes all our dreams. I check my emails, something I usually avoid at the weekends in case I see an overlooked message concerning work and that ends up hijacking my attention. I like my job, but I like the two days a week when I don’t have to think about it more. I deliberately chose a clock-on/clock-off career, one with no homework or extra-curricular reading, for that very reason. I wanted to make sure I had time to have a life.
I spot an email message from Fay. It’s unusual for her to email. We have a WhatsApp group – she, Cally and me – and that tends to be our preferred means of interaction. If two of us are conspiring against the other one – to decide a birthday present, say, or express a secret concern about Steve’s latest behaviour – we’ll text or, more likely, phone. Emails are for work or things that are never good news like gas bills. This one though is just titled OK, there’s no good way to show you this, but isn’t this HER?
There’s no message, just a link. I hesitate for a second, wondering if Fay has been hacked and I’m about to unleash a fatal virus on my computer. Not for the first time. I have a complete inability to ignore even the most potentially threatening-looking attachments ‘just in case’. The message could be headed ‘This is a virus’ and I’d still feel compelled to look. Even so I force myself to text her – ‘did you just email me?’ She replies immediately: Yes! Open it! I’m here if you need to chat. I know she’ll be giving Kieran his breakfast, choo-choo training spoonfuls of cereal into his open mouth while Steve has a lie-in. The link is to a YouTube video entitled ‘PJ Day’. It’s a family: mother, father and two identical little girls all dressed in matching leopard print pyjamas performing a choreographed dance to ‘Tiger Feet’ in a verdant child-friendly garden. It’s slickly edited, with wacky shots of swinging backsides and OTT expressions – all wide eyes, raised brows and open mouths. There’s a thick veil of smugness, of ‘aren’t we cute?’ slathered over the whole thing.
It’s nauseating.
And yes. It’s her.
It’s Maddy.
The woman who ruined my life.
2.
I watch it eighty-seven more times. A mere blip in the apparent five hundred thousand views it’s already had. It’s definitely Maddy, but I don’t recognise the man. He’s tall, dark and not particularly handsome in my humble opinion. What he isn’t is my ex-husband.
I’ve spent the past four years imagining Tom and Maddy in their new, perfect, post-me world, but it seems that maybe I’ve got it all wrong. We cut ties fairly dramatically once he told me about her, communicating only about the sale of our house – our home – and the division of the spoils. I had been tempted to refuse to move out, or to go out of my way to spook any potential buyers, but after a while I thought, what’s the point? Once I realised my marriage was definitely over, I needed to move on. Or try to, at least. So it all happened very quickly, very smoothly. Ten years of my life swept away in a couple of months and a handful of solicitors’ letters.
I scroll through the comments underneath the video. Over six hundred of them.
Your family are so adorable!!!
I just love you all!!!
You brighten my day!!!!!
And on. And on and on. It’s like exclamation marks were going cheap and they all decided to bulk-buy.
WTF??? I send Fay.
I examine the page again. The channel is called ‘Fun with the Fulfords’ and has over a hundred thousand subscribers. There’s a link to a TikTok account and another to Instagram with the same name, which boasts a staggering six hundred and eighty-three thousand followers. There are reams of videos. Scores of them. The YouTube channel has been open since 2020 and Insta the same. TikTok seems to have been added later. I start to watch them, jumping back and forth in time with no apparent logic. Singing, dancing, Maddy addressing the camera teary-eyed about a Mother’s Day card, painting, baking, family life ad nauseam. In the early days Maddy and The Man wave the two babies in the air like a pair of foam hands at a football match. These are definitely Maddy’s children. This is definitely her family.
There is definitely no sign of Tom.
My phone pings and I see that Fay has sent me a vomiting emoji. It makes me laugh, but nothing can distract me from my viewing for long. I decide to take a more systematic approach and trawl back until I find the very first video. The babies are wearing matching sunflower hats. They’re tiny, a couple of months old maybe. Maddy introduces herself and her husband, Lee, both dressed in bright yellow sweatshirts and bright white smiles. Their twins, Ruby and Rose. It’s amateurish, none of the polish of the more recent efforts, but they sing an idiotic song swaying the babies back and forth like they’re blowing in the wind. There’s a lot of self-conscious laughing and Lee looks as if he wants to murder someone, his grin pasted to his face like clown make-up. This is definitely Maddy’s rodeo. ‘Follow our journey with these two little munchkins,’ she trills. ‘Subscribe today or join us on Instagram!’ She points downwards and the account name pops up on the screen. But all I can fixate on is the date.
Tom told me it was over between us on 5th February 2019. I remember the date without trying because it was my fortieth birthday. The middle of my birthday dinner, to be precise. Between the hamachi starter and the black cod main. I had organised it. We never really did birthdays. I mean, we bought each other nice presents and made a fuss, but we didn’t tend to go out specially. Not for years, anyway, preferring the sofa and Netflix and maybe cake if we were pushing the boat out. But everyone kept asking me what I was doing for my ‘big one’ and I’d got fed up of making excuses. Fay and Cally were threatening to kidnap me and make me go clubbing if I didn’t mark it in some special way. And besides, I felt as if something was wrong between Tom and me. Something was slipping away. A night out with no talk of babies and ovulation and which position might give us the best chance of success would do us the world of good. Help us to reconnect as people, partners, lovers, rather than two would-be parents who had made trying to get pregnant their full-time occupation. So, I’d booked a table and surprised him with it, first checking his schedule that he’d pinned to the fridge with a magnet. He was working away four or five nights a week at that point, installing a new computer system in an office block in Birmingham. Or, at least, I’d thought he was. I can’t do this any more he’d said, his hand on top of mine, pinning it to the table. I love you, but I can’t. My first reaction had been to hope the people at the next table couldn’t hear, that there wasn’t going to be a scene. And then the full force of what he’d said had crashed down on me, leaving me gasping for breath. Is there someone else? I’d asked. It was such a cliché but I had to know. No. Of course not. It’s us. It’s me. I just … I don’t want this any more. And a couple of days later, while I cried and begged him not to give up on us, I’d got him to admit it. He’d met a woman through work. Nothing had happened but he wanted to be free to pursue it. I knew he was lying. People need an impetus to break up even the most basically functioning marriage, a cast-iron guarantee of something else on the horizon. Something free of baggage and disappointment and resentments. A blank slate they can project a new, improved version of themselves on to. They don’t leave to pursue something; they leave because that pursuit has already been successful.
