The Memory Book by Rowan Coleman

Author:Rowan Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ebury Press (Fiction)

Thursday, 25 October 2007

Caitlin

This is the cover of the CD that Greg brought me on the first day I met him as Mum’s official boyfriend. I’d met him before, of course: he’d been around the house for a while. But then he was just the builder, listening to Radio One like he thought it was cool. I hadn’t really noticed him. Then, after he’d finished the loft, that was when Mum started seeing him, and I thought, how could she be so stupid? I mean, he’s a lot younger than her, a lot. And although Mum is sexy and funny and pretty, I couldn’t see why a man would ever seriously want a woman so much older than him. I thought he was taking advantage of her, playing her. And Mum said she thought that might be the case too, except she’d already given him all of her money when he converted the loft into her writing room. And anyway, she said, if it was just a fling, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a fling, though. We both knew that when she invited him to have dinner with us. And he brought me this CD of The Black Eyed Peas, because he thought they were cool. But I hate The Black Eyed Peas, and it was a CD, and no one had a CD player by then, not even Gran.

He gave it to me and I looked at it and chucked it on the side, which I knew was really bad mannered. I knew I was being a textbook rude potential step-kid, but for me it didn’t seem like a cliché. What did this man want with my mother? I mean, I was fifteen – if he was going to take an interest in either of us, it should have been me. Even though that was wrong in a different way! Not that I was jealous – don’t get me wrong. If I think of Greg in that way, I feel a bit like I want to puke. No, I never fancied him, even before he was my stepdad, and now … well, now he’s just my stepdad. But I didn’t want him to like me and not Mum. It was just that I couldn’t make sense of it. Which shows that I was pretty small-minded back then, all of five years ago.

Greg sat at the table. Mum had gone to town making a paella. Seriously, she’d seen it on some cookery programme and went out and bought a special pan, and saffron, and all these prawns with legs and heads, which made me want to vomit, and she spent all day on it, without bothering to enquire if the builder ate seafood. Well, I thought that he certainly wouldn’t: he would eat bacon sandwiches and maybe hunks of cheese. And I was right – about the not eating seafood part, at least. Greg is actually severely allergic to seafood, and it took him ages to say anything. He just

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