Can't Live Without by Joanne Phillips Read Free Book Online Page A

bedroom door closes softly and I smile to myself for a moment.
    A very brief moment. Something about that picture was wrong and it takes a few more seconds before it sinks in.
    That wasn’t a boy going into my sixteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Not some pimply youth interested in Playstation games and football. That – that person – was most definitely a man. A fully grown, red-blooded man, probably about to molest my little girl.
    I stream across the corridor and burst into her room, knocking both of them flying as I do – serves them right for leaning against the door in a clinch. How dare he? He stands in front of Lipsy as if protecting her from some mad woman, not as tall as I thought and certainly no oil painting. Oh yes, I bet he thought all his Christmases had come at once when he found this nubile teenager in his arms.
    ‘Mum!’ Lipsy pushes him out of the way and steps up to bar my progress. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is my room, get out.’
    I’m gobsmacked. Lately, my daughter has been difficult to say the least but this is the first time she’s actually sworn to my face. I take a step back and reach behind me for the door handle. I need support.
    Letting the swearing go in the face of other, more pressing matters, I say, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing, madam? Who the hell is this MAN?’ I say the word with feeling. ‘And what is he doing in your bedroom?’
    ‘This,’ says Lipsy, a look of total unconcern on her face, ‘is Robert. Rob to his friends, so you can call him Robert. He’s my boyfriend. And now, if you don’t mind, we’re busy.’
    With that she gives me a hearty shove and shuts – and locks! – the door in my face.
    For a moment or two I can’t breathe. I really think I might just suffocate here on the landing while my daughter fornicates in her room with a man twice her age. Then, recovering enough to raise a fist, I begin to bang ferociously on her door.
    ‘Get. Out. Here. Now.’
    ‘What’s all the noise?’ My mother has come to join in the fun and I round on her, remembering that she knew all about this and did nothing.
    ‘Do you know how old this boyfriend is?’ I demand.
    She looks slightly perturbed, as if she’s being asked to remember the name of an actor from a show in the seventies.
    ‘He’s OLD,’ I tell her. ‘At least twice her age. And he’s in there with her now. In her bedroom, Mum.’
    ‘Well, now, I don’t think he is actually twice her age. I seem to remember Lipsy saying he was thirty.’
    She actually says this as though it’s helpful.
    ‘Oh well, as long as he’s two years short of being a pervert that’s OK, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I was worried. I’ll go back to my own room shall I and forget all about it? ARE YOU INSANE?’
    Just then Lipsy’s door swings open again and she steps out onto the landing, calmly closing the door behind her.
    ‘Get out here, you pervert!’ I shout over her shoulder.
    ‘Mum. MUM!’ My daughter is looking at me with an expression of such disgust it stops my hollering and demands my full attention. ‘Will you just listen to yourself? Do you really think standing here making a fool out of yourself is going to make any difference to what I do? Rob and I have been seeing each other for months and there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing!’ she shouts over me as I try to protest. ‘Anyway, Grandma is happy for me to have him here and it’s her house and not yours.’
    There is a “so there” element to her voice that is so young and innocent I am tempted to start my protesting anew. But, as ever, I can see the futility of the task. I could shout and scream and create. I could maybe drag the man out of her room by his scrawny neck and throw him bodily down the stairs. I could (try to) lock her in her room in an attempt to teach her a lesson. But with Lipsy these things just never seem to work. Believe me, I’ve tried them. I guess it’s my failing as