They all seem to agree and nod thoughtfully.
‘Next, I am instigating a rule of no mobiles or electronic devices at the kitchen table.’
Uproar. I wait for the protests from my son and daughter to fade away before I continue: ‘That used to be the rule and then for some reason it’s been lost by the wayside. I want us to enjoy our food, concentrate on what we’re eating and take time to enjoy each other’s company at mealtimes. Those are the only times of the day we’re all together so I don’t want you off in CyberLand, Phoebe, and you off in NintendoLand, Zane.’
‘Nobody calls it CyberLand,’ Phoebe mumbles.
‘Wherever it is you go, I want you both to enjoy being with each other and Aunty Betty and me at mealtimes, OK?’
Reluctantly, they nod.
‘And one final rule: no smoking in the house.’
Aunty Betty, who has been smugly nodding along to my rules while dragging on her e-cigarette, freezes mid-nod. Zane immediately curls his lips into his mouth to hide the laugh that has built up behind his face, and Phoebe murmurs, ‘Ohhhhh, buuurrrnnnneddd’ before a loud smirk.
‘I don’t smoke in the house,’ Aunty Betty eventually says. She waves her chrome and ebony holder in my general direction. ‘This isn’t smoking, it’s what we call vaping. No smoke, just vapours. I could get different flavours of vapes if you want.’
‘No thank you,’ I say. ‘Because there’s no smoking of any kind in this house. And that includes vapouring or whatever it is you want to call it.’
‘But why?’ Aunty Betty wails.
‘I do not want cigarettes in the house. Or cigars or cigarillos or pipes, before you try to get around it that way. I do not want my children to think that smoking is something I condone because it isn’t, OK? If you want to smoke or vapr? Vape? Vaporise? Whatever you call it, then you can inconvenience yourself by taking a trip to the garden.’
‘That is so unfair, you know,’ Aunty Betty grumbles.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘What rules will impact upon you, Mum?’ Phoebe asks.
‘Yes, Mummery,’ Zane says, using a nickname for me he hasn’t used in at least two years, ‘what aren’t you allowed to do any more?’
I inhale to the bottom of my lungs, exhale for so long that I’m sure my breath touches the wall on the other side of the room. This is the only way to keep them safe. They won’t like what I’m about to tell them, but it’s necessary. The woman who killed Joel is seriously stalking me and I have no idea what she is going to do next. I felt intimately violated when I pulled the cords to shut the bedroom blinds when keeping them open was another way I connected to Joel, but she is watching. It’s not enough for her to write letters, she has to watch, too. She has to get near enough to notice that I still wear Joel’s clothes to sleep in.
I can’t have Phoebe or Zane out on the streets until I know what Phoebe is going to do about the pregnancy. Once that is settled, I can talk to her, explain to her that we have to go to the police about what we know and take the wrath of not telling them sooner. Until then, I can’t have them exposed, easy pickings for her to harm in any way. This is the real reason for the meeting. The other stuff I could have told them about whenever they cropped up, for this I need their undivided attention, I have to underline the seriousness of needing to stick together and doing as I say.
‘Lots of things will impact upon me,’ I say. ‘Like, not coming straight home from work because I have to collect Phoebe from afterschool library homework club and then Zane from whichever afterschool club he’s got on or from Imogen’s house.’
‘I don’t need to go to library homework club,’ she protests. ‘I’m old enough to come home on my own.’
‘I know you are, but you’re still going to start homework club. I’ve already signed you up.’
‘But—’ Phoebe begins.
‘Yes, Phoebe?’ I reply. She has no leg to stand on, of course. Not when there is a giant elephant currently sitting in the middle of the room with ‘PREGNANT’ tattooed in giant letters onto its side, that none of us have forgotten about.
‘Nothing!’ she snarls and picks up her mobile from the armrest of the sofa and starts to press buttons.
‘Ohhhhh, buuurrrrnnnneddd,’ Aunty Betty murmurs. She moves to take a drag from the e-cigarette in her hand when she spots my questioning, arched left eyebrow, and stops.
‘Child, you really are the fun police, aren’t you?’ she says.
‘And proud,’ I say, through the sudden pain that has pleated itself across my chest.
In our house if an adult was going to say no at some point, it would be me. Joel would actually call me the fun police when my foot would hit the ground in relation to him as well as the kids (usually about him buying some unnecessary gadget for the kitchen – who seriously needs a bean cutter?).
Without a word or look to each other, even though they’ve both been catapulted back to a time before that day, Phoebe and Zane stare at the photo over my shoulder. It’s obvious that the memories of how we used to be are swirling around their hearts, too.
Monday, 22 April
(For Tuesday, 23rd)
Saffron.
Are you OK?
You seemed so sad on your way to work this morning. Or are you feeling a bit jumpy? I saw you looking around before you got into your car with the children. Were you possibly trying to see if you could spot me? There’s no point trying because you can’t.
Please don’t worry about me being around. Think of me as your guardian angel or something – I’m always there, but you can’t see me.
Don’t worry, OK? It’ll all be fine. Really it will.
A
XXI
My phone beeps with a text and
•
is the message that comes up under Fynn’s name.
It’s one o’clock Tuesday morning. I’m not even close to going to sleep, but do I want this? It’s been a year, things have moved on, and after the conversation in the kitchen on Saturday and his ignoring my ‘how are you?’ texts, I thought he didn’t want to see me at all, let alone be up for this.
I stare at my phone. I want to see him, talk to him, to make things right. But if he thinks … Surely he can’t believe we’d do it again after all this time?
In one move, I throw back the covers and climb out of bed. I struggle into Joel’s large, V-neck Arran jumper, take the purple silk sleep scarf off my head. My heart is back to fluttering out its wild staccato beat, compressing my lungs as it does so. I inhale and exhale in regular bursts, trying to placate myself as I quietly descend the stairs and head to the front door, mobile phone in hand.
He grins at me when I open the door to him, relieved that I’ve answered, I think, but makes no move to come in. ‘Hi,’ he says simply.
‘Hi,’ I reply, confused and wary.
‘I know it’s late, but I was hoping you’d come for a walk with me. We don’t have to go far, I know the kids are asleep, but I’d really like to talk to you away from the house, if that’s all right?’
My answer is a hesitant silence. Well, at least he doesn’t want sex, is my first thought. Swiftly followed by: Maybe that’d be easier because when we had sex we didn’t talk, and when we talked it ruined things.
I’m not sure I should leave the house in case that woman is out there. But she wouldn’t be. Not at this time. When would she have the chance to sleep?
‘If anything happens I’m sure Aunty Betty will cope until we come back,’ Fynn reasons. ‘I promise, we won’t go far.’
I reach into my coat pocket hanging on the row of hooks by the door and retrieve my bunch of house keys, before sliding my feet into my trainers. I have to wriggle my feet about before they’ll go in and the backs pop up over my heels.
The air is cool, there are no clouds in the dark sky, and the light pollution isn’t as potent tonight so I can see the halo of stars that circle the Earth. I probably should have put on my coat, I’m not that warm, but I don’t want to go back f
or it and prolong this any longer.
On the pavement side of the gate, he holds out his hand, and cautiously, I slip mine into his. Again, he grins in relief as we start to walk down the road. Our hands feel comfortable together, they fit, like our bodies had fitted. He runs his thumb gently and affectionately over the back of my hand. Our bodies had fitted like that, too: gently, affectionately.
The road I live on is narrow, hard to navigate when there are cars parked on both sides, and it seems smaller, more compact being out here at night. A fox darts out from a house across the road and disappears down the narrow walkway along the side of the house next to ours. I’ll have to tell Zane about that, he’ll be very excited: we thought that all the foxes had gone from this road because in all the nights we’d sat up waiting to see them, we’d been disappointed. We’d guessed they’d moved on, had got on with their lives as we’re all supposed to, but they haven’t. Or maybe they did, maybe they tried to move on and found that where they landed wasn’t right for them and they had to run as fast as they could back to where they had come from.
‘I had a sister,’ Fynn says when we are six houses down from mine.
‘Do you mean “had” like I had a husband?’
‘Yes, I mean, “had” like that.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I never knew that. Joel never mentioned her.’
‘Joel didn’t mention her because he didn’t know. She died before I met him. We don’t really talk about her in my family. It’s too painful.’
‘God, I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks, it was a long time ago now.’ That was Fynn’s sadness, what he used to carry around with him like a heavy burden. That was why he knew the pain didn’t go away, it simply got easier to live with, to slot in beside the rest of your life, allowing you to continue around it. ‘I don’t talk about her at all,’ he says, ‘but I think about her every day. When Joel … A lot of those feelings came flooding back.’
‘How … I mean, was she killed, too?’
‘I sometimes think so. She was nineteen and she died of heart failure. That’s what the death certificate said and that’s what we say if we ever talk about it. But, you know, we never talk about it in our family. It’s the subject that dare not say its name because Nell actually died of anorexia.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘She was anorexic from about thirteen, I think … I can’t be sure because I was a bit younger than her – but the constant not eating and over-exercising, as well as everything else she was doing because she was in the grip of it was too much for her heart.’
My fingers come closer to his, holding him secure like he used to hold me a year ago when we fell asleep tangled up with each other. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Yeah, it is. It was and it still is. I blame myself because I could see what was going on, but I didn’t say anything. I literally let her waste away.’
‘What could you have done? You were, what—?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Fifteen. How could you have helped?’
‘I could have told her that I was there. That I understood, even though I didn’t. That would have been better than following my parents’ lead and ignoring it. I sometimes wonder if what she was doing was a way of screaming at us for attention, for us to notice her.’
‘Sometimes it’s hard to confront the things that are right in front of you. Like Phoebe and me and what I suspect was her desperate need to be loved which has resulted in her being pregnant at fourteen.’ The fear of that rushes up through my body, making me light-headed as the memory hits my brain. My daughter is fourteen and she is pregnant.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ He tugs me nearer by taking our linked hands and pressing them to his chest. He changes his mind and takes me in his arms, holds me near enough for me to feel the rhythm of his heart against my chest. ‘I’m awake half the night thinking about what to do for the best, so I’m guessing you don’t sleep at all with the worry.’
‘Not really, no.’ If only he knew what else I had to worry about.
‘It’s going to be OK, Saff. You’re going to sort it all out. I know you will.’ We haven’t hugged, or even touched like this, since before that time. We’d got back on track, had been able to pretend none of it had happened, except in how we were with each other, physically. Physically, there was an unspoken but acknowledged barrier between us that neither of us would breach. Now that it has been, my body relaxes, almost falls completely into the familiarity of being held by him.
He lets me go, hanging onto my shoulders for a second longer than necessary before he takes my hand again and we start to walk. Once we fall into our pace again, our footsteps like a double-beating heart in the quiet of the night, he barely waits a second before he says, ‘Saff, I’ve fallen in love with you.’
I snatch in a sharp breath, and my step falters but he keeps walking and because our hands are linked, I have to keep moving with him.
‘I don’t want you to say anything,’ he adds quickly. ‘I know it’s onesided and I’m going to have to deal with it. I just can’t deal with it and be around you. Especially not if I have to see you and that Lewis character together.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Yes, you are. OK? Whether you want to admit it or not, you are. There’s something between the two of you and I don’t want to watch it. Not when I’m so … I didn’t even realise that’s how I felt until I saw you with him and it was like all these feelings were suddenly unlocked. And I had no idea until now, really, that I’ve been hoping that maybe we’d, I don’t know, get together properly, settle down, maybe even have a baby – even though we’re both getting on. I don’t know … I’ve really shocked myself.’
‘Fynn—’
‘No, don’t speak. All that’s irrelevant at this moment. Look, the main reason I wanted to talk tonight was to apologise because I’ve not been a very good friend to you.’
My feet stop, I stop, refusing to move, forcing him to halt, too. ‘What are you talking about? You’ve been the best friend anyone could ask for.’
‘No, I haven’t and I’m really sorry that I can’t make up for that by sticking around.’
‘Fynn, you’re my best friend. I couldn’t have made it through the last eighteen months without you.’
‘No, a good friend – a true friend – would have confronted you by now about your eating disorder.’
I try to rip my hand away from his, but he won’t let me. He clings onto me and faces me full on for the first time since I opened the door.
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask when it’s clear he won’t let me unlink from him.
‘I don’t think it’s purely anorexia, I suspect it’s more bulimia. Or even a combination of the two, but it doesn’t matter. I haven’t been upfront with you about it. I’ve suspected for a long time. It wasn’t until you said that what happened with us was just sex that I realised what it was really about. You were trying to deal with the pain in that way, weren’t you? You used to do it with food and then you started to do it with sex. That’s why you stopped it when I was getting emotional rather than keeping it purely physical.’
I manage to tear my hand away from him, finally. Freeing myself from being joined to such nonsense. I stand back a little distance, glaring.
‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ he goads.
‘You’re wrong. You’re absolutely wrong. Look at me.’ I hold out my arms – my body is large and lumpy, misshapen and decidedly flabby even without the jumper. ‘If I had an eating disorder wouldn’t I be thin?’
‘You are thin.’
‘I am not thin. You’ve seen me naked, you know I’m not thin.’
‘You are thin. And you don’t eat.’
‘I do eat. I eat all the time.’
‘No, you don’t, Saff. You cook, but you never taste any of it. The times I’ve been there for dinner you give me your portion, or you say you’ll eat later. If and when you eat, it’s alone away from people. And I doubt very much you keep it
down.’
‘Well excuse me if I’ve lost my appetite a little since my husband died.’
‘Look at your hands, Saff. They’re beautiful apart from the scars on the backs of your knuckles from—’
My hands. The one part of me that always lets me down. That’s why he held my hand, why he stroked across my knuckles – not out of affection but to check up on me, to see if there were remnants from what he thought I did. I tuck my hands out of sight, under the crooks of my elbows when I fold my arms across my chest. ‘Please stop this. It’s nonsense, you know it is.’
Fynn pauses, regards me for several, uneasy seconds. ‘I’m doing this all wrong. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m sorry. I should have said I’m your friend. I love you. I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I want to help, I want to understand and be there for you. I should have said that it’s all going to be OK. That you will be all right if you get help and it’ll all work out if you’re honest with yourself, honest with someone else, if you find someone you can talk to freely. I should have said there are lots of places that you can—’
‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ I interrupt, ‘and I know what that sort of thing can do to someone and that you start to see the same thing everywhere, in everyone that you meet, but I do not have an eating disorder.’
‘There are lots of places that you can go to for help,’ he continues as if I haven’t spoken. ‘I should have said, please get help. Go to your doctor, look online, call a helpline. Reach out to someone, Saff. No one can take that first step for you but they can help you with every other step after that. I should have said, please, please get some help before … Your children don’t need to lose another parent, all right?’