Free The Generation Game by Sophie Duffy

have this niggling feeling that shakes the sparkle off the excitement
and turns it to dust.
    Will I ever live in an ideal home?
    What is an ideal home?
    I thought it was Sheila and Bernie’s but it turns out that their supposedly stable foundations have been built on nothing but sand.
    I am old enough to walk home from school on my own now. Sometimes I imagine Lucas beside me as I trudge the familiar route, laden with my satchel and shoe-bag. But mostly I
simply relish the freedom after a day cooped up with my new teacher Miss Turnbull. The shop bell always rings in the same half-hearted way as I fall in the door, looking like an unmade bed in my
rucked-up uniform. And there is Mother, as smart as a smoothed counterpane. An expression of surprise on her face as if she’s forgotten she ever had a daughter.
    Today Mother isn’t there. Bob is assisted by Auntie Sheila who says she has rolled her sleeves up to lend a helping hand – which is two clichés packed into one sentence which
would impress Miss Mothball, who is keen on clichés and encourages us to use one at every given opportunity as they are a great time saver. (She is not a fan of imagination.)
    ‘Where’s Mother?’ I ask.
    Sheila does a shifty double-take to Bob who turns and fiddles with the boxes of Panini stickers.
    ‘She’s nipped out, sweetheart,’ Sheila says, cheerily.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Down the town.’
    ‘Who with?’ (But I already know who with. I just know.)
    ‘A gentleman,’ she says.
    ‘A gentleman?’
    ‘A man from Canada. He’s on his holidays.’
    Canada. I know about Canada. It is a big splodge of pink in Lucas’ Atlas that Auntie Nina left me, along with his Book of Flags. So I also know that the Canadian flag is red and white with
a big leaf on it. And I know that the Canadian policemen ride horses and wear comedy trousers. There are also grizzly bears and racoons and Red Indians and maple syrup and lots of mountains and
gigantic lakes and the biggest waterfall that makes a roar so mighty you can’t hear yourself think. Why would someone leave a country like that to come on their holidays to Torbay? (Even if
we do have palm trees and Agatha Christie.)
    ‘Is it the very tall man?’ I ask, to be sure. ‘The one who smokes the French cigarettes?’
    ‘I suppose he is quite tall,’ says Bob, turning back and straightening up to his full five foot nine and a half inches. ‘And yes, he seems to think he’s Sacha Distel.
He’s not even a French Canadian. His family come from Torbay, he reckons.’
    As I thought. I know this Canadian. I saw him for the first time a few days ago, coming into the shop to buy a postcard to send the folks back home in Labrador. Tall and dark and handsome, he
gave my mother a smile that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Bob has been trying for two years to give her a smile like that but they come out all wrong. Mother has no idea that Bob is in love
with her. Or at least she pretends she has no idea. Bob would walk to the ends of the earth and back again for Mother, but she won’t even let him walk her along the seafront in case people
get the wrong idea. That is exactly the idea Bob has in mind but Mother can’t see it. Even though he took us in when we were homeless yet again, even though he looks after me and teaches me
football, even though he loves Mother with every single thrown-together part of him, she can’t see it. All she can see is his bald patch and baggy cardigans. All she can see is that Bob is
Bob and that is that. Their partnership will never be any more than a shop dance.
    And now there is the Canadian. And Auntie Sheila.
    ‘Cheer up, Philippa,’ Auntie Sheila says now. ‘Have an Orange Maid on me. You look all hot and bothered.’
    She plunges her arm into the freezer and produces my favourite lolly so that I am glad she and Mother are friends again. But my hopes for Bob being my new dad have gone down the Swanney (one of
Wink’s favourite phrases – maybe I