Do I like you at all, let alone ‘that much’? It’s nothing personal to her, I am questioning everything.
‘I only have to pick up a few bits,’ she says to my ‘not engaging’ silence, ‘do you fancy accompanying me and then we can go for a coffee or something?’
‘I can’t, I really do need to get some work done.’
‘OK, spoilsport, walk around with me then. It won’t take long.’
‘Fine,’ I say.
Apples
Milk
Eggs
50-50 bread
Cucumber
Butter
Sausages
Imogen’s handwriting is completely different to the one of the letter writer. Hers is over-the-top curly, her ‘e’s look like they are trying to have a nice little rest, her ‘l’s look like they are stretching out their tips to the letters above, the bellies of the ‘b’s are filled with an additional ink swirl.
‘I think you’ll make a fantastic grandmother!’ she says, chancing her arm again. ‘You’ll be young enough to enjoy your grandchild! That’s such a bonus!’
I want her to stop acting as if there is only one choice in this. She did it outside my work yesterday and now twice in less than ten minutes. I want her to stop it. ‘Phoebe hasn’t decided what she’s going to do yet,’ I say, simply. My voice is now kinder on my ears, the falseness has been replaced by a monotone.
Imogen, my friend from the school gates, who was friendlier than the other mothers right from the off, stops in the middle of the meat aisle, in front of the rows of chicken, and regards me at length. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows are knitted together like the seam of a cardigan, her lips are pursed like a closed-up zip but open to ask: ‘What do you mean?’ before instantly zipping themselves up again.
‘I mean … I mean my daughter is fourteen years old and nothing has been decided yet.’
She parts her tightened mouth to speak again: ‘What is there to decide?’
When I don’t say anything, she speaks again: ‘Are you really going to make her do that?’
I don’t like you, I decide. Even though you were there and you helped to keep me going when the world fell apart, I don’t like you. I’m not sure I’m allowed to think like that, that I’m allowed to ‘not like’ anyone who has helped me after I was bereaved, but I can’t help this. I simply don’t like you.
Aunty Betty was right, Imogen is an emotional vampire.
‘I’m not going to make her do anything,’ I say. When you stand in front of the fridges for a while you realise how loud they are as they pump out cold air.
‘She’ll regret it for the rest of her life,’ Imogen says, her voice pitched somewhere between hysterical and foreboding, as if she has unique insight into how my daughter will feel for however long she lives.
‘How do you know that then?’ I ask.
Ignoring my question, she says, ‘It’s bad enough she didn’t keep her legs shut, but doing that? She’ll never feel the same about herself. She can’t right a wrong by doing more wrong. And what if she can’t have another baby because of scarring? I can’t believe you’d do this to your daughter.’
‘What about the alternative?’ I reply. I can feel the thrum of the fridges in my veins, they move through me in calming waves. ‘What if my fourteen-year-old daughter has a baby? How will I pay for it? Because, let’s be honest, I will be paying for it. How will I be able to work and take care of a baby because Phoebe will legally have to go back to school? I’ll either have to find childcare or give up my job. How will we survive financially? Even with the mortgage paid off by Joel’s life insurance, it is still a struggle to make ends meet. So, what am I supposed to do? Try to get benefits? Even if we managed to get any, your husband made it perfectly clear what he – and I suspect you – think of people who live on benefits. That’s how people all over the place will look at us. Then there’s Zane, why does his life have to be turned upside-down because of someone else’s choices? And what about me? I only wanted two children, I’ve done the newborn and baby and toddler and young child years, I don’t need or want them again. Is that all unimportant because I’m supposed to subscribe to some principle that you have?’
Imogen’s mouth remains creased in on itself, a severe line of scrunched-up disapproval.
‘But as I said, nothing has been settled upon. If Phoebe decides she wants to continue with the pregnancy, I will do my damnedest to support her and to find a way to make it work. But only if that’s what she decides. And before you say anything, no, I haven’t said all that to her about how it will devastate our lives if she goes ahead with the pregnancy because I want her to make up her own mind and make her own choice.’
‘That shouldn’t even be an option, though, can’t you see that, Saffron? It’s just wrong.’
I am getting nowhere here. Nowhere. And why am I even having this argument? What is it to her, anyway? ‘You really believe that abortion is wrong, Imogen?’ I say.
‘Yes, yes I do,’ she says.
‘Well don’t have one then,’ I reply.
I drop my wire basket with my ingredients, and leave her standing in the cold food aisle. Reasoning with her is like trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon: frustrating, impossible and ultimately pointless.
Every step should rip at my already ravaged heart, because I thought I loved Imogen. I thought we were good friends and even if we disagreed, we cared enough about each other to take a step back, to let the other make their own mistakes and catch them if they fell.
Obviously, I’ve been blinkered, ignorant, numbed to the reality of this friendship so I feel nothing at all. In the reawakening process, it’s one of the first things to go.
XXXVI
6 months before That Day (April, 2011)
‘Did you know she’d been bunking off school?’ Joel was enraged. Pacing the bedroom, trying and failing to keep his voice down.
‘Yes, Joel, I did. In fact, I went out with her a few times myself.’
‘This isn’t funny,’ he snapped.
‘Oh, OK. “Not funny when I’m being sarcastic.” I shall note that down on my CV.’
‘Ffrony …’
‘I’m not the one who bunked off school so I don’t see why I should be getting into trouble. But if you insist on acting as if I am, I will continue to be unfunnily sarcastic. So, can you calm down … and sit down so we can talk about this properly?’
‘Her and a couple of other girls have been bunking off and getting the train up to Worthing. Anything could have happened and we’d have never known what she was doing there.’
My head nodded as though that hadn’t occurred to me, that I hadn’t already played through several scenarios that would have ended badly. ‘The problem is, Joel, me and you were two of those children who wouldn’t even think to bunk off. We don’t know her mindset.’
‘I’ll give her mindset,’ he said.
‘Yeah, right. You think it was just your bad luck that the school called you? Your twelve-year-old daughter knows what we all know – she has you wrapped around her little finger. A quick flash of the big eyes and a downturned mouth and “Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry” and you’ll be helping her plan the next excursion.’
‘I’m not that bad.’
‘You are.’
‘All right, I am. What do we do?’
‘We hit her where it hurts. No phone and the pleasure of us accompanying her to and from school every morning for an unspecified amount of time.’
‘Can I at least shout at her?’ he said.
‘You can try. But when you start crying instead of her because of the look on her face, don’t come running to me.’
‘I really am pathetic, aren’t I?’
‘Only when it comes to your children, Sweetheart. Which is why you’ve got me. I have no worries about shouting at her for things like this.’
‘I’ll be there when you do it, to show I back you up. I’ll ask for the phone, too.’
‘Fantastic. Once we’re fi
nished with her, she’ll never even think about bunking off school again.’
XXXVII
The photo is still there.
I shut and lock the bedroom door, drop to my knees and feel for it, inside a clear plastic A4 wallet taped to the underside of my bedside table. My whole body relaxes and then tenses when my fingers brush over the cool plastic, feeling the outline of the shape and bulk of the envelopes.
Rap-rap-rap! at the door makes me jump. I snatch my fingers away and stumble back from my hiding place.
‘Yes?’ I call.
‘Saff-aron,’ Aunty Betty says. ‘Can I talk to you?’
She is holding onto the wall when I step out of my bedroom. Today she has on a blonde chin-length wig and big pearl earrings. She is wearing her long, black silk kimono and her pink slippers with feathery balls at the front. No make-up, but she doesn’t need it because she has an enduring beauty that is underpinned and fuelled, I think, by her ‘I can do whatever I want’ attitude to life.
‘Of course,’ I say to her. ‘Let’s talk in your room.’ It’ll give her a chance to stay upstairs after our chat. Aunty Betty sometimes walks as if she is being carried by angels and makes no sound, and then at other times, like today, she is slow, stiff, agonised. I’ve never asked her what is wrong, if it’s the previously broken hip playing up or something else, because I suspect she’d curse me out for trying to turn her into someone she’s not – i.e. an older person who talks about their ailments. I haven’t even thought about registering her with a doctor. I need to add that to the list.
‘It’s nothing urgent,’ she says. She uses the flat of her hand against the wall leading up to the loft to move her body, hefting herself from step to step. Maybe I should have put Zane up here. I didn’t even think about that. The old Saffron, the one I was before I was the woman who dropped the blackberries, would have. She would have given Zane or Phoebe the upstairs room even though it runs the whole length of the house and has its own walk-in wardrobe in the eaves and shower-room with loo. The old Saffron would have booked Aunty Betty in to a doctor and dentist, she would have made sure Aunty Betty had access to everything she needed.
She drops heavily onto the bed, kicks off her slippers and rubs the hip she broke. ‘If you were male, ten years younger and not related to me, I’d have you stripped to the waist and rubbing my feet by now,’ she says and adds a dignified cackle.
‘I really don’t need to hear things like that,’ I say.
In two weeks she has made this room her own: every flat raised surface is covered in photo frames – snapshots of the people she’s loved, the places she’s visited, the ‘other celebrities’ she’s allowed to be photographed with her. The bed has been adorned with her shiny, chocolate-brown diamante-studded quilt. She has a chocolate-brown, ruched, heart-shaped rug on either side of the bed. In the belly of and around the fireplace she has piled up some of her books, probably her most precious ones. She has hundreds of them in storage. This is what her bedroom looked like in her old mansion flat, this is what her bedroom looked like in each of her ‘apartments’ in the various complexes she’d moved into. In the bathroom I know she has lined up all her wigs on black, faceless mannequin heads.
‘My brother called me earlier,’ she says, quickly, decisively like delivering unsettling news should be delivered. ‘He wanted to know if I’d spoken to you because he said Elizabeth’s been calling you for a while.’
‘Yeah, she has.’
‘Didn’t want to speak to her?’
‘Not especially.’
‘They want to come and visit.’
‘I know.’
‘I told them the guest room is occupied by me – he was a bit surprised by that – so they’ve agreed to either come for the day or find a hotel.’
‘Right. Did they say when?’
‘This weekend, I think, because of the bank holiday. But you’ll have to call them to check.’
‘Yes, I suppose I will.’
‘Do you want me to go and live with them?’ she asks as quickly and decisively as she told me Joel’s dad had called.
‘What?’ I reply. ‘No! Why would you even think that? Have I made you feel unwanted or unwelcome? Because I’m sorry if I have.’
‘No, no, Child, it’s not that, there’s so much going on here right now. You don’t need me and my stuff cluttering up your life.’
‘You’re a part of what’s going on, Aunty Betty. For better or worse, unfortunately for you. And do you know why we went through the deep, deep agony of having the attic converted? Joel always planned to have you living with us. Before you went into your different “villages” he knew you’d need to live with other people at some point. And then when you did move into your “homes” he knew you’d be chucked out of one place too many eventually and he wanted you to live here when you were. I thought I was the control freak, but turns out it was my husband. I wish you’d given me more notice, like, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is your home now.’
Aunty Betty smiles her trademark grin of mischievousness. ‘You’re a good girl, Saffaron. I like you.’
‘Even though I won’t let you smoke in the house.’
‘Even then.’
‘I should get on with work,’ I say, despite it being the last thing I want to do right now. My mind keeps going to Phoebe, the brave look on her face as she marched in through the school gates, waving away any suggestion I come with her to see the headmaster and Mr Bromsgrove. My head goes to Zane, who is slipping back to being quieter than normal these days. Since Joel he has been quiet anyway, his exuberant nature whisked away almost overnight. He talks to Aunty Betty and for a while he was almost himself again, but now he’s struggling. I’ve even rescinded the ban on telly because he seems so damaged, insular. My thoughts go to Fynn and how much I hurt him. My guilt goes to Lewis, who is at school unaware that I’ve decided I can’t see him – not right now. My heart goes to the photo and letters downstairs and it begins to race, stirring the sickness within faster and faster.
‘No one tells you, do they, that the biggest loss when someone you love dies is the loss of who you are,’ Aunty Betty says.
I lower myself onto my seat and refocus myself on Aunty Betty.
‘You get to my stage of life and you lose so many people. I remember when the first man I had sex … Now take that look off your face, Saffaron. I had sex, get over it. Where was I? I remember when the first man I was intimate with died. He was the first person I was close to who passed. He wasn’t that nice in the end, and it wasn’t some big love, but when he was gone, I cried. I sat in my house and cried because he was the first. He was the first of the people my age to go, and I knew I was going to be losing people, they were all going to leave me until it was my turn. And there was nothing I could do about it.
‘I was crying for myself because of all the loss to come, or so I thought. In time I came to see that I was crying, also, because the Betty I was when he was alive was gone. He was a part of me whether I liked it or not and he was suddenly gone. Who I was, how my role in the world was defined by him, was over. The closer you are to someone, the bigger that loss of part of who you are is, I think.’
For the first time, ever, I see Aunty Betty beneath the mask. She is incredibly human, suddenly, her face streaked with pain, her eyes, that unusual liquid-mahogany brown colour that Joel, Phoebe and Zane shared, are swimming in tears. I’ve never seen her cry. I don’t think she’s seen me cry, either. Despite everything, we have not cried together. Even without the tears, I’ve known how sad she was. Sad she is.
‘I would have moved the moon for Joel,’ she says while blinking away her tears. ‘I’m lucky, I think, because I still have you, I still have the children, you’re all a little part of him and you sort of play the same role in my life. I am still Aunty Betty. It’s not the same, though, I’ll never be the woman who did all those things his parents never knew about. You know, I bought him his first packet of condoms.
‘Oh take th
at look off your face! I didn’t want to be Great Aunty Betty before my time and my boy was so handsome. Lots of girls were after him. That’s why I knew you were special when he brought you to meet me. You were the only one he willingly brought – with everyone else I had to engineer meetings.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
‘Do you feel angry sometimes that you’re not the woman you were with him any more?’ she asks. ‘That sounds off-key, but you understand me, don’t you?’
I nod. ‘I don’t feel angry sometimes, no,’ I reply. ‘To be honest, to be more honest than I’ve been for a long time, when I’m not numb and unable to feel anything, all I feel is angry. Really angry. With the world, with myself, with Joel. Everything. I can’t talk about it, of course, because you’re not supposed to feel that, are you? Especially if you’re a woman because being angry will make you seem cold and unlikeable. I’m supposed to be all whimsical and fragile, and searching for someone to help heal my heart and really, all I want to do is scream at whoever’s in charge for letting this happen. Or smash things to get all this rage out.
‘I can’t, but that’s what’s there all the time. I thought by now it’d be over with because that’s what I was kind of promised by all these things that I read on bereavement. They said I’d feel angry and then I’d move on to something else, another “stage” like depression or acceptance or something else. Anything else. I think even despair would do. Unfortunately, it’s still this deep, relentless anger.’ I think sometimes that I live in my sleepwalking state because I do not want to deal with the anger that brews inside. I don’t want to be the woman who gets angry. I don’t want to be unfeminine, unpretty because I feel such a non-feminine emotion. I’m expected to be depressed, or quiet, or a sobbing wreck; it’s easier to be the woman who wistfully stares into space while taking a demotion, while being patronised by teachers and friends, while being terrorised by a killer than to be the woman who feels so much rage at the injustice of everything. To be the person who fucked her husband’s best friend because she needed sex and she needed physical release and she needed to feel what another person’s skin felt like. I am the Angry Widow, but I can’t be that on the outside because that’s not what the world expects to see. Tears, yes; sticking up two fingers at everything because the world screwed me over, no.