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‘You’re still a young woman, Jess.’
I attempt a laugh. ‘Not that young any more.’
‘You have a life to lead. Don’t waste it; don’t wither on the vine. Anna would never forgive you. Your beautiful girl would hate that.’ Her tears have traced thin parallel lines down her cheeks. She reaches forward, pulls some toilet paper from the roll and wipes her face.
‘I can’t cry,’ I say. ‘Not properly; not since the day I heard the news.’
She shrugs. ‘I do enough of that for two,’ she says, straightening out her clothes.
‘I blame Dad.’ I blurt it out.
The look of horror on her face says it all.
‘He took us on that first snow holiday. He made her love it.’
‘Oh, Jess …’ She takes my hand.
‘I know it’s wrong. I know it.’
‘Is that why you don’t come up?’ she asks simply.
I raise my hand to my mouth, exhale loudly through spread fingers. It comes out in uneven, ragged breaths. The question doesn’t need an answer so she pulls me from the room. As we walk, I focus on the love I have for my mother and the love I know Anna has for me. I close my eyes and will her home, as Mum and I walk arm in arm to the dining table, and together, all five of us eat roast beef with seven different vegetables.
Leah’s quiet on the way home. Pug is asleep in the carrier by my side.
‘How do you think your mum and dad were?’ Gus asks.
My eyes flit to Leah’s who turns around to face me. ‘What did you think?’ she says.
‘You first.’
‘Mum’s going to kill herself running around after him, way before he goes.’
‘I don’t know. He seems … He just seems to have disappeared inside himself. He seems lost.’ I pause a moment before finishing. ‘I didn’t like the look of him.’
‘They did tell us that things would worsen over time, the risk of tinier strokes happening regularly.’
I suppress a sigh; stare out of the window; try not to think of the man I’ve just left as my once vibrant, athletic father; try not to think of the once glamorous woman who takes care of his every need now having piccalilli hair.
‘Do you agree we need to get Mum some help?’ Leah asks.
‘You tried, didn’t you?’ Gus says. ‘Last time you and I were here, you said it to her. She said she didn’t want any strangers in the house, that it would upset your dad.’
‘That was then,’ Leah said. ‘I think it’s probably time. She can’t keep doing what she’s doing. Can she?’ She turns around again to look at me.
‘Mum will do what Mum wants. If she says no strangers, then that means no strangers.’
Leah tuts. ‘She needs help,’ she repeated. ‘The GP has recommended him for a care package. All we have to do is put the wheels in motion and, even then, it could take time.’
‘Look, you’ve tried. Let me talk to her?’
‘Tell her we’ll find someone who looks like Daniel Craig,’ Leah says, removing her laptop from her bag and putting her glasses on.
I smile, despite myself. My mother has a thing for Daniel Craig, though I’m certain care workers who look like him are probably quite rare.
Gus grins at me in the rear-view mirror. Leah has snapped into work mode. There’ll be no talking to her now until we arrive home. Her work is her life. I remember when Anna became pregnant with Rose, together they had cried. Leah with a rare frustration; sadness that since she had willingly decided never to have children with Gus, already a father, it brought it home that she would never have ‘her own’ child. Anna because she, having slept with Sean only once, found herself with an unplanned and very inconvenient pregnancy.
By the time Gus drops me and Pug off, my watch says seven forty and I feel like it’s much later. I am planning a cup of tea, an hour of recorded Downton Abbey, a chat with Anna and then sleep – lots of it. With Rose away still with Sean, I take any opportunity to sleep longer and later. There’s a pile of mail lying on the hallway floor. I open the cupboard under the stairs and, anything with Anna’s name on it, I throw into the black refuse sack full of her post. The only thing bearing my name that I choose to open is a small brown padded package with my address in Doug’s handwriting. Pug is yapping to escape the travel carrier as I rip it open. Inside, there’s an item in a clear plastic bag, the sort I use for Rose’s school lunch. A yellow Post-it is attached.
‘You said you wanted this when we got it back. The police sent it through this week. I charged it but Anna has a lock on it and I haven’t been able to open it with any code that I thought she’d use … Let me know you get it okay? Doug’.
I let Pug out and she immediately wants out in the back garden for a wee. Opening the door, I look at it through the plastic cover. Anna’s phone.
Just as I’m staring at it, as Pug runs back in and I shut the back door, the front doorbell rings. I head towards it, removing the bag, feeling her phone in my palm. It’s as if I’ve been plugged into her once again.
When I open the door, I’m startled by the shape of a man in my porch.
‘Mrs Powers?’ He approaches, a shy hand outstretched. He’s dark blond, with tanned skin, blue eyes and trimmed facial hair. I don’t correct the title he uses for me and he retrieves his hand when he senses my reticence.
‘My name’s Max. I’m a friend of Anna’s.’
Hearing her name aloud makes me catch my breath. Hearing him say ‘I’m a friend’ makes me hold it. He is saying ‘I am’, not ‘I was’. Whoever this guy is, I decide immediately that I like him.
‘Come in,’ I say, kicking Pug’s travel carrier to one side. ‘We haven’t met before, Max, have we?’ I know he’s not one of Anna’s local friends. ‘How far have you come?’
‘Hertfordshire,’ he says. ‘And no, we’ve never met.’
Max. I’m racking my brain to try and remember him. ‘Do you work with her?’
He stares at me a moment as I roll Anna’s phone over and over in my hand.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘We worked together.’
Past tense. ‘Were you … were you?’
We’re standing in the hallway. I point him to the back of the house, to the kitchen-diner that would fit in my parents’ larder. ‘Were you …?’ I try again. My heart thumps a rapid clip-clop beat in my ribcage. My lips are dry.
‘I was on the ski-trip,’ he says, meeting my eyes.
8. Anna (#ulink_12eaad57-5c95-57cf-a84f-f937cfb6fd8e)
Raw Honey Blogspot 15/10/2014
Mama’s just been screaming at me to ‘move my shit from the front door’. It’s her standard rant and I’ll do it – I’ll move them but can’t promise the pile of shoes won’t build again. I’m a messy cow. One moment Mama tells me I get it from my father, and the next she’s shouting, telling me that laziness is not genetic.
She’s mad! She’s the best mother in the world and I adore her, but, she’s a tough act to follow; sees things in a very black-and-white way, whereas I seem to live in grey. In my world, nothing is crystal clear and I don’t believe in spending too much time figuring shit out. She’d say that if my world is muddy, it’s because of choices I’ve made. And (tough act to follow?) she’s right, of course.
But there’s still something about mothers and daughters – sounds crappy happy – but it is a special bond. Mama and I have it and I have it with DD. It’s there and nothing can ever break it. (Keep telling yourself that, Honey.)
When I was little, before Dad left, I remember Mama and Dad as if they were one, inseparable. If I have a memory, they’re both there: rock pooling in France on a camping holiday, peering up at me from the audience at the nativity play. He left when I was twelve and apparently I should be damaged by that but, honestly? How bad can it have been when all I can remember is good stuff. At least, that’s how I recall it, but maybe, maybe when we look back, we just make people seem better than they actually were?
Anyway, suddenly, there was just the two of us, Mama and me. Sure, she’s had lovers over the years, but she never introduced any to me. She kept our home a sanctuary and I loved that. If Dad had to be gone, then I loved growing up with just her and me.
But I don’t seem to have inherited her selfless gene. I don’t seem to have inherited the tidy gene and I certainly have no ability to see things clearly! Perhaps I am more like my father (though he has always said that leaving Mama was absolutely the right thing to do for him. Crystal. Clear. Carpe diem and all that). What I do have is a nagging conscience. It pokes me more often than friends on Facebook but I force myself to ignore it (and then, afterwards, worry I’ll go to hell in a rusty wheelbarrow).
Comment: Solarbomb
You said your dad left when you were twelve. Were you really not angry at him?
Reply: Honey-girl
I remember being upset. I remember knowing everything would be different, but no, strangely, I don’t think I was angry. I still saw a lot of him, and Mama and I, we worked well together. I missed him but … it was okay. I think I was meant to feel different, devastated, but I didn’t. I still had a mother and father who adored me and somehow we worked it out.
Comment: Anonymous
REMOVED BY USER
9. Theo (#ulink_dba1326d-323a-5037-a633-4920c32e3b18)
He wasn’t imagining it, the woman was flirting with him. He tried to remember her name – Jane, Janet; something beginning with a ‘J’. She offered him a slim hand. Long tapered fingers with short but manicured nails grasped his in a firm handshake. ‘Jacqueline,’ she said. ‘You’d forgotten, hadn’t you?’ She smiled, though Theo had to look down to Finn’s height to see it. She was tiny next to his own six-four frame. But that handshake had been strong and, as she stood next to Finn, all kitted out in Lycra and cleats, there was something very self-assured about her.
‘No, of course I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said.
‘Yes, he did. He forgot.’ Finn snorted. ‘Dad forgets everyone’s name.’
‘Jacqueline,’ she repeated. ‘Think French. Think you have to make it sound French even though I’m not. That will give you something to hook onto if you forget again.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I definitely won’t forget again. French.’ He nodded.
‘And talking of hooks, let’s get you set up, young man.’ Jacqueline play-punched Finn. ‘We’re doing timed races to the top tonight.’
‘I’ll be in the gym.’ Theo jerked his head towards the next-door building.
‘Great, enjoy,’ Jacqueline said, before steering Finn towards the wall.
Forty minutes later he was rowing hard. He stretched his long body forward on the machine, straightened his arms, then angled them at the elbows, pulling his body weight forward. The digital monitor at eye level told him he had already rowed 3.9 kilometres, which meant just over one more to go. He closed his eyes and, as his body moved, he thought of the woman next door with his son. He thought of her small, rounded body, nothing like Harriet’s, who was tall and lean and angular. He thought of the breasts he had tried to avoid looking at. He thought of the way the suspension belt had wrapped around her thighs. Shit. He rowed harder, ignoring the sudden image of a naked Jacqueline as it imprinted itself in his brain.
When the alarm sounded and Theo slowed down, he opened his eyes to find Eddie, his gym buddy and a friend since school, staring at him, a wide smile on his face.
‘Share, now,’ he said. ‘I want some of whatever you were thinking about.’
Theo lifted a small towel from the front of the machine and wiped his face. ‘Wasn’t thinking anything in particular.’ His breath came in short pants.
‘Liar. You’re talking to someone who knows you.’
Standing slowly, he reset the machine to start again and headed to the men’s showers in Phil’s Gym.
‘What’s up with you anyway?’ Eddie asked as he followed. ‘You’ve had a face like a slapped bum since you arrived.’
‘I’m not sure, if I’m honest.’ Theo was surprised at his frank reply. He looked back at Eddie. ‘I have an incredible urge to go out and get completely shitfaced.’
Theo could almost hear the whirring in Eddie’s brain, trying to work out if there was any way he would get away with joining him; what excuse he could give his wife.
‘Stop, Ed. Jules would have you sliced and diced. Both of us have to get up for work in the morning and I have to go home with Finn.’ He rested his hand on his friend’s arm. ‘Another time …’
When he stood under the pressured hot water, in the shower stall next to Eddie, he called in to him. ‘Stop thinking about it,’ he said, before switching the control to cold, gasping out loud with the shock.
‘What if I tell her you’re having a bad night and need my company?’ Eddie yelled. ‘The au pair, what’s-her-name-again, can look after Finn?’
Theo laughed. ‘I’m going home, Ed. We’ll do it soon.’
He listened to Ed groan. ‘Honestly, you wave it at me, like waving a lollipop at a child, then take it away. Seriously. Not. Fair.’
Theo left Eddie drying his hair, slung his gym bag over his shoulder and exited through a series of doors and corridors to the climbing centre where Finn was already waiting.
‘You’re late.’ His son pointed to his digital watch.
‘By one minute.’
‘Late is late,’ he said, stepping into side by Theo. Looking up at the night sky – clear and star-laden, he added, ‘I don’t reckon aliens are ever late.’
‘Right.’
‘Think about it,’ Finn said. ‘More than likely they’re a highly evolved species. More than likely they’ve sorted out the annoying things in humans. Like being late.’
‘Right,’ Theo repeated. ‘Spag bol or chicken tonight?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Tough.’ Theo pointed the remote at his four-year-old Volvo. ‘Get in. Decide on the way home. You’re eating supper.’ Theo had seen too many young people – and not just girls – through the surgery with either the start of, or a fully developed, eating disorder. It was his natural instinct to want to make his son eat. He bit his lip. ‘You really not hungry?’
Finn didn’t reply.
‘You understand you have to eat to give you energy to do things like your climbing … You need to eat the calories in order to have them to spend.’
‘So you tell me all the time.’
Theo took in Finn’s profile as he stared through the windscreen putting his seatbelt on.
‘What would you like?’ he asked.
‘Just some tea and toast,’ Finn shrugged.
‘Tea and toast it is.’ He was in no mood for a spat.
In his son’s room, Theo picked two books up from the floor and placed them on his bedside table. The top one was a young person’s guide to computer technology, his last year’s fixation. The second, a thick tome on the whole question of whether we’re alone in the universe. The laptop, closed on his bedside table, would, Theo knew, be open up to Minecraft, his digital obsession and something he often played with his school friends online.
Theo leaned over Finn’s sleeping form, smoothed his son’s fringe away from his forehead, bent down and kissed his head. He noted the determined line of his chin, even in sleep. He got that from him. Next, the colour of that forelock he had just touched. That was exactly the same shade as his mother’s. He also smelled the faint hue of tobacco from it.
