Looking back, I had quite a hard childhood. I grew up in a provincial town in the Midlands, the sort of place that periodically appears on TV in one of those property programmes where a middle-class couple from London briefly consider moving there for the 'quality of life' and 'open spaces' but ultimately decide that the crap train service and 'easy access to Stoke-on-Trent' aren't actually what they wanted at all. Otherwise, very little ever seemed to happen.
My mum and I lived in a two up, two down terrace house just outside the town centre, which she absolutely adored. Her parents, my gran and grandpa, were well-off and lived in a large detached house in the countryside, but they'd more or less cut her off when she got unexpectedly pregnant with me and abandoned her with her boyfriend and a deposit for a house. Whether this assuaged their guilt at kicking their daughter out of the house, I have no idea. But Mum loved the house she'd bought; her boyfriend (my dad) spent three months doing it up, using favours from mates and bits of scrap timber he 'found' in skips, before jumping into bed with a barmaid from the pub up the road and disappearing out of her life. But she kept the house in perfect condition, scrubbing it every Sunday from top to bottom. Once a year, usually over a sunny weekend in March, she had a huge spring-cleaning event and turned everything upside down. She was the definition of house-proud. Once I started going to secondary school, she made the little garden my responsibility, and woe betide me if I didn't cut the grass to her exact specifications.
We didn't have lots of furniture or things in the house, just the essentials. Mum loved watching soaps, so we had a decent TV and a second-hand leather DFS sofa, but those were really her only indulgences. She worked flat out as a sort of typist and receptionist at a local factory, which frequently meant staying late, yet somehow she always had the energy to put me first. When I was eleven, I was desperate for a pair of really expensive Nike football boots which everyone (in my mind) was wearing at school. They cost so much, it would have been like two birthdays and Christmas rolled into one. Somehow, she must have found a second-hand pair in my size at a weekend car boot sale or through someone at work, and she stayed up late on a Sunday evening polishing and cleaning these old boots until they shone, almost as good as new. Then she presented them to me on Monday morning to take to school, before setting off herself for a long day. I was grateful, of course, but it wasn't until I was older that I could really appreciate what she was doing for me.
There were always two sides to Mum. At work, and when she was in a good mood at home, she was cheerful and friendly, loved wearing makeup and doing her hair, which was a gorgeous dark auburn. It was easy to see how she'd been popular with the boys at her school, and equally easy to see how dad had got her pregnant at eighteen. On the other hand, if she was tired or stressed, this dark side came out, where she'd sit on the sofa, chomping her way through packets of cheap biscuits from the supermarket, screeching at me or at the TV for any perceived slight. If she'd had a bad day at work, I'd skulk all afternoon in my bedroom, enduring half an hour of frosty silence or constant nagging over tea before retreating back up there until bedtime. It got easier when I was older and could spend time out of the house, kicking a football in the park or hanging around the town, as she seemed to relax more when she didn't have me to fuss over. But when she got into one of her really black moods, she'd go for an entire weekend without showering, hardly eat anything except tea and biscuits, and get more and more irritable until she found some way to relax and vent all the stress away.
Which brings me to the most special and unique thing about my mum. Apart from me, the one thing she absolutely lived for was swimming. At her slightly-posh school, she'd been able to have free swimming lessons and she'd quickly become one of the top swimmers in the county. Her figure wasn't exactly the classic tall, thin type you'd expect for a swimmer; she was only average height and more hourglass than willowy, but nonetheless, she was the best. On her dressing table were two medals, which she loved to show off to me: first place in the county seniors, second place at the national trials. At sixteen, she'd been on a national longlist for potential Olympic or World Championship swimmers, but her times were a few tenths of a second too slow. And then, in her own words, "I grew boobs and got more interested in boys than swimming". But she never gave it up, and if I was the most precious thing in the world to her, then her leisure centre membership card was probably the second-most.
She'd taught me to swim when I was only four or five, and then it became an Armstrong family tradition on a Saturday morning to get up bright and early and go for a swim. When I was an awkward teenager, I occasionally complained about having to get up early, but I could see how much it meant to her and the complaints quickly stopped. However hard I tried, I was never anywhere near as fast as she was, and even when I was getting personal best times, she could blow past me and disappear up the lane if I ever got cocky. After the swim, we'd dry off and she'd buy me a can of something fizzy from the corner shop on the way home. I loved hanging out with her like that, when she was in her element and didn't have to think about work or bills or money. She would relax and laugh and play around, and I'd get a little window into what eighteen-year-old Mum had been like, before she'd had to grow up and get responsible.
But, enough boring stuff about my mum. The story actually begins with me, and weirdly enough, my dad.
* * *
"Hiya Cathy, Dave up yet?"
His fake-friendly tones travelled up the stairs and through the open door of my bedroom.
"Hi Ian, yes, he's upstairs packing. Dave!" Mum yelled, before dropping her voice to talk to my dad again. "Come in for a few minutes, he's probably just finishing something off."
I looked around my bedroom. I had actually finished packing quarter of an hour ago, but I was frantically trying to clean a dark smudge off the painted wall where I'd accidentally swung my sports bag and left a scuff. Mum would freak out if she saw it.
"Dave! Your dad's here!"
"I'll come down in a second, Mum!"
My best efforts with a slightly-damp towel seemed to bear fruit, and now it was more of a dull patch of paint instead of an outright scuff. I threw the towel onto my bed and bounded downstairs, two at a time, almost clattering into my dad at the bottom as he peered up to see where I was.
"Hiya Dave, you're looking fit," he said, punching my shoulder softly. "All set to go?"
My dad had announced to me when I was about thirteen that he'd slept with over thirty women and expected to break fifty before he got too old. He clearly thought of me as an unintended consequence of one of his conquests, someone to drop in on twice a year, stuff some twenty pound notes into my hand, and then go off to live his own life. He actually had a really good job working on an offshore rig, and during his time off he went on motorbike tours of Italy, Spain and Portugal. Not that mum or me ever really saw any of that money, except for the sixty quid he'd give me in lieu of birthday and Christmas presents.
I nodded. "Yeah, everything's packed upstairs. I'll bring it down, that way nothing gets forgotten."
"Tea, Ian?" my mum called through from the kitchen.
"No, you're alright, love. Keen to get off," he said back, looking at me and rolling his eyes. "Mums, eh?"
I shrugged. "Let me get the bags."
Today was Sunday, and tomorrow was a big day - my first day at a real university. My hard work and Mum's constant nagging about schoolwork had paid off, and a few weeks ago, I'd received confirmation of my place at a proper university, studying History. I don't want to sound like a snob, but this wasn't some local-college-turned university where anyone could get in. I'd grafted to get an A and had accepted my place at the University of Sheffield. Mum had been in floods of tears when I got my results, going on about 'social mobility' and 'a better future', but Grandpa had got a teaching degree way back when so it wasn't exactly what she made it out to be. Regardless, I'd spent weeks poring over the admissions material, reading words like 'tutorial' and 'undergraduate' and feeling like I was about to join the real world, in a real city. Yes, I wasn't one of the cool crowd who hung out behind the fire station smoking weed, and, full disclosure, I'd never even had a proper girlfriend, beyond a couple of drunken snogs at house parties. One time, I was making out with this girl, Lucy, and she asked me to get her a drink. When I came back, she was snogging some older guy I'd never even met who had his hand up her shirt. That pretty much summed up my love life.
Unfortunately, Mum didn't have a car, and I needed to take far too much stuff to realistically carry on a train with three changes. So Mum had made a surreptitious call to Dad and here he was, parked on the double-yellows outside the house in a white van he'd borrowed from a pal.
