The Yeovil Short Story Prize 2009 was judged by Rachel Billington.
There was no theme, but at the time I had been reading a lot about Henry VIII's wives and wondering about what life would be like for the child of a much-married father.
Daddy's fourth wife was, looking back, not a bad mother. She was never nasty, often funny and absolutely did not pretend that we were going to be the best, best friends two people ever could be. Also, she made faces behind Daddy's back when he was 'going off on one' and asked him, please, not to bring his acting home with him.
I agreed with her on that. Especially when it was Iago or Dr Faustus he was bringing home, or one of those flouncy men who just have to speak the truth until everybody else ends up sobbing.
Yes she was fine, and certainly better than number 3, who even my father admitted was crazed. We found out just how crazed one Sunday when Daddy, I and Eloise (our housekeeper), had to lock ourselves in the big pantry while she smashed everything her little grabby hands could reach. Luckily she wasn't very tall and she didn't like heights, so pretty soon she ranout of ammunition. Except for her words. As they exploded against the pantry door, Eloise placed her hands over my ears and Daddy loosened the lid on a jar of plums in brandy and methodically started to eat them.They looked swollen and bruised as he popped them in his mouth, which seemed apt somehow.
When the noise finally stopped on Number 3's side of the door, it erupted on ours as my father's plummy voice launched a scalpel-like counter-attack. It becames less sharp as the brandy kicked in.
He peaked and stumbled finally on a misjudged, 'You bore me to death. In and out of bed.'
At this Eloise sighed in her particularly French way and said, 'Plus ca change,' a statement she was well qualified to make having worked for Daddy since Wife number 1 (my real mother) and my father's embarrassing flirtation with French films.
Before I could recite Number 3's catalogue of persecutions to fire Daddy up again, (a catalogue that included slapping and dark threats about cellars), we heard a grating noise and watched as bits of the things previously shattered were posted under the pantry door. She managed to send us half a gravy boat and the Christmas turkey plate, its little holly berries coming through separately, before my father's agent and his publicist cornered her in a theathrical pincer movement.
She did not go quietly.
'No more actresses,' Daddy declaimed later as we crunched our way over the kitchen floor, and then he left Eloise and I to sweep up the mess as he went to speed dial his lawyer.
So, all in all, number 4 was a cool drink after fire. Particularly as she left Eloise to do what Eloise had been doing forever - mothering me and lifting me gently back on to my feet when I wobbled (or, rather, when Daddy wobbled), and sending me off to school in the right clothes with the right books and my journal signed in all the right places.
When I fell over she cuddled me; when I was hungry she fed me. At night she read me a story and tucked my duvet in around my neck.
The complex, simplicity of love.
Number 4 understood this and left well alone, choosing instead to focus on massaging Daddy's ego; something she did very well for a number of years judging by the noises that reverberated around the house at night.
My days were filled with different sounds. When Eloise could step away from her duties, we would screech and shriek through made up games; dance with determination; escape along the lanes, singing. But what I liked best was sitting sideways on her lap and teasing out the strandsof her fat, brown plait while she told me about France. Together we walked among sunflowers and felt the waters of a blue, blue sea run between our toes.
I hankered to go there with her when she returned each summer, but instead played at happy families with Daddy and his current wife in a succession of fashionable Italian resorts. Smiling waxenly for the cameras, I would drag my hot little sandalled feet about and count the days until we could go home.
And there would be Eloise when we got there, although God knows Daddy paid her little enough to tempt her back from those sunflowers. Browner, a bit plumper, she brought me new stories of her family and I listened, little shards of jealousy mixing with my pleasure.
When I was ill, or needed cheering, Eloise would talk about my own mother. How beautiful and talented she was; how much she loved me. And although I knew the story did not end well, that an icy road and a drunken driver had whisked Maman away, I would melt into Eloise's assurance that my mother was, without doubt, watching over me. Dozing as I listened, I would feel her drop little kisses on my hair to make up for the fact that black ice was slippery, men were slippier and Daddy was one of the slippiest.
She knew as assuredly as I did that if Daddy's wives wanted to mother anyone, it had to be him.
Somehow Wife number 1 had slipped me through the net.
As I got older, Eloise would flesh out my knowledge of the roll-call of wives. Number 2 was the most fleeting; arriving a few months after I was weaned and leaving just after I had taken my first steps. She filled the house with a flotsam and jetsam of artists and trailed a large spotted pig around ona lead. She led Daddy a pretty dance too, bewitching him with her green, almond shaped eyes and with the gap between her front teeth that made him think of the lusty Wife of Bath.
Chaucer had been right about the gap-toothed thing. One night she disappeared with two men from the village leaving Daddy with a house full of bohemians and pig shit.
In response, he dabbled in a prolonged period of free-love. I learned to smile at every new arrival and not notice when they went. Some were just blurs on the panelled staircase; others stayed for months. All bored him eventually.
One memorable week Daddy even brought a man down to breakfast.
Justin was kind and pulled a boiled egg from my ear to make me laugh, but as he did, I saw my father's mouth twitch. Daddy did not do second billing.
Two weeks later he was staunchly heterosexual again and an exotic dancer was buttering his breakfast rolls.
When I started to call these passing fancies 'Mummy', Eloise took me out into the garden.
'It is like these flagstones,' she said, her French accent unusually marked, 'They are his wives and,' she poked at some moss between the stones with her foot, 'these are the others.'
Daddy soon knuckled down to marriage again, and by the time I was twelve wife number 3 had gone and wife number 4 was also on her way out, only making a short detour through the kitchen to drop her best pearls into my hands.'To make up for being a crap mother,' she said with an apologetic shrug. She headed down the drive, swinging her shoulder bag from one hand.
Barely six months later, the worst wife of them all arrived. A perm-a-blonde, perm-a-tanned pile of permafrost whose body had been surgically enhanced whilst evidently leaving her mind in its original, feral state.
'Hello,' I said that first afternoon.
'Hello back,' she said and tucked her ratty dog further up into her armpit.
They were the only nice words I ever got from her. Nothing was right about me. My weight. My attitude. My clothes. My breathing. She particularly didn't like my breathing. To be specific, that I did it at all.
Whilst Daddy was away filming for months, we waged a totally uncivil war that neither of us could win. She had his sexual organs firmly on her side; I had a teenager's ability to stonewall. Careful not to openly antagonise "The Mahogany One", Eloise secretly reinforced me with lemon gateau and whispered kindnesses. But the skirmishes came to a head when Daddy's groin and then his brain were persuaded to send me away to school.
He couldn't look me in the eye when he told me, but he was word perfect. I knew it was a pre-agreed script.
That day something in our relationship curdled. I'd always seen him as a bit dashing, a bit daft, a bit feckless. Childlike in his tantrums and demands. Now he was just mean; too in love with himself to have anything left over for me.
Daddy had left the building.
I turned, of course, to Eloise. She patted my hand and smiled enigmatically. Later I heard her singing 'La Marseilles' in her bathroom.
Lying on my bed that night, I knew that should I be separated from her, I would simply drift and drown without anybody noticing. I could already smell the foul seawater sucking at my legs as I fell asleep.
On waking I found myself enveloped in an even more putrid smell. My nose led me to the kitchen, past little piles of steaming evidence that someone or something was not well.
The pole-axed rat dog lay cradled in mahogany arms.
'Upset stomach,' the vet pronounced, somewhat unnecessarily, 'Eaten something tricky. Get this down its throat every four hours.' He shook a bottle of white liquid in my father's direction.
Twitch went my father's mouth.
Swaddled, carried and coo, coo-ed over, the sick dog was like a newborn baby, sleeping between my father and his wife and waking in the night for medicine.
Two days in, my father was rancid. By Friday he snapped, 'Dog. Or. Me.'
After Wife number 5's taxi had gone, my father U-turned about school and skulked, sulkily, up to town. Eloise and I sat in my room and she produced a bar of glossy, French chocolate. I observed that two squares were missing.
'Small dog,' she said, her head slightly tilted, 'Two was plenty.'
We ate the evidence.
For a while after that my father was fallow, and when Wife number 6 did arrive, I was too busy experimenting with my own romances to take much notice. There was a wedding, I remember, but I cannot pull out its individual strands to separate it from the many others I had attended. Although I do remember Eloise and I laid bets about how long this new wife would last.
'Eight months,' I said, confidently cruel in my precision.
Eloise shook her head. 'She has those large breasts. She will be here until Christmas.'
She was, but slipped through my life without marking it. She finally left in a screech of tyres sliding on snow. I thought of the black ice under my mother's car and looked at my father and knew there would be no more wives. While the whole world had grown tired of his weddings, my father had just grown tired. Too many low-budget films to pay off too many high maintenance wives. He had a look of sucked paper.
'Even Henry the Eighth stopped at six,' he joked and shortly after dropped dead during a matinee.
Two days after the funeral and some weeks before the memorial service, Eloise and I sat at the kitchen table and drank sweet tea as we read the entrails of my father's life. The papers were not kind. Particularly to the neurotic, drunken, drug addict who had been my mother.
She was her own killer it transpired; the ice was innocent.
'You kept mum all these years,' I managed.
Eloise nodded and continued to sip her tea.
Later though, with the light in the kitchen fading, I heard her say, 'Too old to sit on my lap now, I suppose?'
'Too heavy,' I replied, but got up and did it anyway.