Haven't They Grown(2)

‘Fuck off!’ Ben says to his phone.

‘Ben. What have we—’

‘Sorry.’ He makes that sound like a swear word too. ‘Do you have a list of everything Dad’s ever done wrong?’

‘What? No, of course not.’

‘So it’s not normal, then? Most people in relationships don’t do it?’

‘A written list? Definitely not.’

‘Lauren’s got a list on her phone of everything I’ve done wrong since we’ve been a thing.’

Lauren, a model-level-beautiful girl who is excessively polite to me and eats nothing apart from noodles according to both my children, describes herself as Ben’s girlfriend. He objects to this terminology and insists that they are merely ‘a thing’.

‘But you’ve never done anything wrong to Lauren, have you? Or have you?’ They’ve only been together – if that’s the right way to put it – for three weeks.

‘I put two “x”s in my last message instead of three. That’s the latest thing.’

‘Did you do it deliberately?’

‘No. I didn’t even know I’d done it. Didn’t think about it.’

I indicate to turn onto the main road, wishing I had a choice and could stay a bit longer on Wyddial Lane. Why? I did what I wanted to do, saw what there was to see from the outside. That ought to feel like enough.

‘Who the fu— Who counts kisses in a message?’ Ben says.

‘Girls do. Some girls, anyway. Lauren’s obviously one of them.’

‘First the problem was me not doing it – she’d always put a line of “x”s at the bottom of her messages and I never would, and she thought that meant I don’t care about her – so I started putting them in, and now she’s counting how many, and thinking it means something if I do one less than in the last message. That’s crazy, right?’

‘Ask Zannah if she counts how many kisses Murad puts in each message.’ Murad, to my knowledge, has only once done something wrong in the year and a half that he and Zannah have been whatever-they-call-it, and he turned up looking tearful the following morning, clutching a dozen red roses. Zannah was delighted, both by the roses and by the news of the sleepless night he’d suffered after ‘criticising me when I’d done fuck all wrong. Mum, I literally don’t care what you think about me swearing right now. Sometimes I need to swear, or I’d throw myself off a bridge.’

I would be very surprised if my daughter did not keep on top of the kisses-per-message statistics.

Ben groans. ‘And now, because I didn’t instantly reply and say “Oh, sorry, sorry”, and send a long line of “x”s, she’s going to accuse me of blanking her.’

‘So why not reply and send more kisses?’

‘No! Why should I?’

‘You’re right. You shouldn’t.’ Poor boy. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake – too young to be engaged in fraught relationship negotiations.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Ask Zannah, Mum. Lauren’s a high-maintenance, needy—’

‘Ben!’

‘Person. I was going to say “person”.’

‘Yeah. Course you were.’ I’m glad his instinct is to stand up for himself, and that he’s not planning to cry all night and take roses round to Lauren’s house tomorrow morning.

Ten minutes later we’re parked in the right place. Ben climbs out of the car. ‘You coming to watch?’ he asks, tossing his phone onto the passenger seat. I usually do. I’m not remotely interested in football, but I love to see Ben doing something healthy and worthwhile, something other than being the slave of an electronic device.

‘In a bit,’ I say. ‘First I want to find a supermarket and get something for dinner tonight.’

I watch him run off. Soon he and other red-and-white-clad boys are pushing each other around happily – trying to trip each other up, grabbing each other’s rucksacks.

On the passenger seat, Ben’s phone starts to ring. ‘Zannah’ flashes up on the screen. I pick it up. ‘Hi, darling. Everything okay?’ Zannah isn’t normally awake before noon on a Saturday.

‘Where’s Ben?’ The clipped precision of her words doesn’t bode well.

‘Football.’

‘Really? According to Snap Maps, he was on a street called Widdle Lane or something ten minutes ago. What the hell was he doing there?’

‘Wyddial Lane. Yeah, that’s nearby. Now we’re at football.’

‘Right. When you next see him, can you please ask him to deal with his high-maintenance nightmare of a girlfriend? Thanks. She’s just called me and woken me up to tell me that Ben blanked her in the middle of an important conversation, and can I ask him to message her? Their pathetic relationship is not my problem, Mum, and I’m not getting dragged into it.’

‘I—’

‘Thanks, Mum. See you later. I’m going back to sleep. Ugh, it’s nine thirty – grim.’

She’s gone. ‘Girlfriend’, she said. So using that word in a teenage context is not entirely disallowed. I add this important clue to my ongoing study of teenage behaviour, glad that my investigative interest in every aspect of my children’s lives is not reciprocated. Zannah and Ben aren’t remotely concerned about the details of my day-to-day life. Neither of them asked me why I drove to Wyddial Lane before going to the St Ives football ground; neither of them ever will.