‘And then, of course, there’s all that guilt,’ Aunty Betty says.
Is it that obvious? I wonder. I must be wearing the guilt like a cloak for Aunty Betty to mention it after Lewis did yesterday, too. Or is it simply Aunty Betty guessing at what I might be feeling? ‘What about the guilt?’
‘Don’t you feel more of that than anger?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know.’ All I know is that I have a knot inside, twisted, convoluted, complicated, that I can’t untie. Every chance I get, every time I think I’ve got a reason to smile, a reason to relax and simply be me, another strand will be added to the knot – woven through and tugged tight, cementing itself over the original knot.
Aunty Betty closes her eyes, then immediately forces them open.
‘Time for me to get to work, I think.’
‘Thank you for the talk,’ she says.
‘You, too.’
‘Joel wouldn’t mind if you found someone else,’ Aunty Betty adds. ‘As long as he was good to you and the children, Joel wouldn’t mind if you found someone else, even for a little while.’
‘You’re probably right. But I’d mind. Quite a lot, actually.’
*
I’d love for us to be friends? Joel’s killer wrote. For some reason that upsets me. I suspect she means it. I suspect she really believes anyone could be friendly with someone who killed the person they love. And that upsets me in ways I’m still not able to articulate.
XXXVIII
‘How was school?’
One-shoulder shrug.
‘Did you see any of your friends?’
Two-shouldered shrug.
‘Did you see Curtis?’
‘Yep.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Yep.’
‘About the pregnancy?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to talk to me in proper sentences any time soon?’
Two-shouldered shrug.
Maybe sending her to school was a bad idea, it seems to have set her communication abilities back a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder.
‘Considering how much you said you liked him, and how you ended up in this situation in the first place, I’ve got to wonder why you aren’t talking to him more about the pregnancy and what you plan to do next.’
‘You’re going to tell me what to do, so what’s the point of talking to him about it?’
‘I’m really not, Phoebe,’ I say. I hope she doesn’t notice how my hands clench at the steering wheel, and how I delay changing gear a second too long because I fear I’ll wrench the gearstick out of its socket if I touch it. Few people can frustrate me like her, I’ve realised. Few people know, with only a few words, how to get me going. ‘If you want advice, if you want to sound me out about anything, or if you want me to find people for you to talk to, then I will, but I am not going to tell you what to do. I thought I made it clear that while I will support whatever you choose to do, this is your decision.’
I don’t even need to see her thin, oval face to know she’s cut her eyes at me, then rolled them.
‘What did you and Curtis talk about then?’
‘He told me that you and his dad were talking for hours on the phone last night and that you were going out with each other again and you were planning when you could hook up. That’s what we were talking about.’
‘I’m really surprised you can love a boy who lies so much. And so badly, too. First it was about not getting pregnant the first time you do it, now it’s about hooking up with his dad after spending hours on the phone. What’s he going to make up next? That the Loch Ness Monster lives in his attic?’
‘No, that’d be our attic,’ she mumbles.
I stop myself from smirking. ‘Aunty Betty is a lovely woman, never let her hear you say that.’
‘She’d laugh louder than all of us,’ she retorts. ‘And be gutted she didn’t think of it herself.’
True. ‘Don’t change the subject. How do you feel about your boyfriend lying all the time? Because I’m not planning when I can “hook up” with his father and since you’re pregnant …’
‘He didn’t lie to me actually, I misunderstood. He meant it was unlikely you’d get pregnant the first time, but if you’ve used tampons and stuff it can stop—’
‘What, stop the woo-woo magic from working? My goodness, I think it’s time I had a proper chat with this boy because he has got some really strange ideas about reproduction. Or maybe I’ll just get his dad to explain it to him again. For some reason Mr Bromsgrove told me that he’d had the “always use a condom” chat with his son several times. Maybe he’s lying, too? Maybe I should sit them both down and call them out. See what happens.’ Theatrically, I look at the car clock. ‘I reckon they should be home soon. Mr Bromsgrove gave me his address, maybe we can drop round now.’ With as much theatre as the clock-checking, I peer into my rear-view mirror and hit my left indicator to pull into the next left. ‘I’ll turn the car around, and go back to his house and we can all sit down and get—’
‘No, Mum, don’t,’ she says, alarm in her voice, in the way her whole body has tensed. ‘He didn’t say that exactly, I’m probably remembering it wrong.’
‘Right.’ I turn off my indicator and carry on past the road, ignoring the angry beep from the car behind me.
‘You’re not going to tell him or his dad off, are you?’ she says after we’ve driven in silence for a minute or two.
‘Not right now, no, but I might do.’
‘If you do, I’ll never speak to you again,’ she states with the certainty of a teen.
No real change there, then, I’m tempted to say. ‘If that’s what you feel you have to do then I can’t stop you, just like you can’t stop me talking to Mr Bromsgrove and his son if I feel they are both lying to my daughter and thereby lying to me.’
‘They’re not lying,’ she eventually says. ‘It was a misunderstanding.’ Every time she lies to me/defends the lies of the father to me, I know Curtis isn’t the father. These are the manipulations of an older, more experienced man. Damien, possibly, but I suspect someone older who is used to subtly manoeuvring people to get what they want.
Outside our house, I turn off the engine and place my hand on Phoebe’s arm to stop her leaving the car. ‘Your dad’s parents are coming to visit sometime this weekend,’ I say to her as a warning.
Engraved into her eyes is a haunted, hunted look that has been there, prominent and evident, since Joel died. I should have known something was going on, that she was falling in love, because for those weeks before all this came crashing down around us, that expression had been erased. Replaced by a sun of joy that radiated throughout her body. She was happy, fizzing with excitement. I noticed but I said nothing because I thought she was starting to move on, that she was the first of us to reach that state of ‘acceptance’ I’d read so much about. I’d been pleased that for someone the pain was easing, and I’d been jealous that for someone the pain was easing.
‘Great, I suppose you’re going to tell them, too?’ she says.
‘No, it’s your news, you tell them if you want and I won’t tell them if you’d rather they didn’t know.’
‘Thanks,’ she mumbles.
‘The other thing is, Phoebe, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, that’s the absolute last thing I want to do, but you’re going to have to make a decision quite soon. Whichever it is, the sooner we know the easier it’ll be. You can change your mind, of course, but I want you to remember that, like the doctor said, every option has its time limits. And we need to make another appointment soon.’
‘But no pressure, eh, Mum?’ she snarks, pops open the door and gets out. She shuts the door normally, when I’d expected a slam. That simply goes to underline another thing I’ve been taught recently: I really don’t know my daughter. At all.
Thursday, 2 May
(For Friday, 3rd)
Saffron.
How did you like the photo? Did it make you s
mile to remember how beautiful he was?
I am so angry with you.
I’m sorry about your car, but I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you off out again with another man. If this was what you were like, and you must have been because no one gets over the love of their life so quickly, then why did you try so hard to keep him? Why did you make him say all those things to me?
Is it because you knew you weren’t good enough for him so you let other men use you however they want?
The more I see of your life, the more I know it should have been you.
It was never meant to be him, but if it had to have been anyone, it should have been you. You were always there with us, uninvited and unwelcome.
We were fighting over the knife. It wasn’t him I was going to use it on but myself. I wanted him to see that if I was hurt, I would bleed. And what he was saying, how he was repeating all those things that you’d made him say on the phone, was hurting me, so it was making me bleed.
Do you deserve to live, do you think?
When he’s not here, do you deserve to carry on breathing like nothing has happened? Like you didn’t cause all of this by not letting him go?
You’re going to find what goes around, comes around. It’s a really hard lesson to learn.
A
XXXIX
13 years before That Day (September, 1998)
‘I think that went as well as can be expected, don’t you?’
Joel sat in the driver’s seat of his car, his eyes wide and unfocused, his breathing fast and shallow as though he had just sprinted in the Olympic Men’s 100m final. He couldn’t answer me straight away.
I was probably the calmer of the two of us, and I feared my fiercely hammering heart was going to crack the wall of my chest any second now and leap free.
‘I suppose,’ Joel said.
‘I mean, if you look beyond the absolute horror and disgust on both their faces, and your mum taking you about three feet away to ask you in the loudest stage whisper I’ve ever heard if you were sure you were the father …’
‘And me screaming my head off at her that if she repeated that I’d never speak to her again …’
‘Yes, and of course your dad getting up to defend your mum by saying it was fair comment because no one really knew much about me and it was possible I’d tried to trap you …’
‘And me screaming at him that the pair of them were seconds away from me walking out and never seeing them again.’
‘Oh, yes, there was that, but if you look beyond all that, I think it went as well as can be expected. Your mum did hug me, after they both calmed down.’
‘And Dad did shake my hand.’
‘See? And they both managed to say they were looking forward to being grandparents, it was simply a shock because we aren’t married yet. I mean, as I say, we’ve got off quite lightly.’
The nausea in my stomach rose and fell, rose and fell, as though my organs were surfing during a thunderstorm in the middle of the North Sea.
‘We did,’ Joel conceded. I’d never seen him like that; it was like the rage he’d been repressing about how his parents treated me had spewed out of him in one huge go. It felt like the walls of their house were shaking when he shouted. I never thought I’d see him yell at his parents.
‘Right, so how long do you think it’ll take us to get to my parents’ house from here?’ I said to him.
Appalled, Joel turned his head to me. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I am not going through another day of this, mate. The build-up beforehand, the drive there, the telling them … I can’t do it again. We go to my parents’ place now and we tell ’em and then we go home, get into bed and never get out again. Cos your parents are amateurs compared to mine in this sort of situation. In my twenties, not married, other half not a doctor, lawyer or the prime minister – you haven’t seen real dysfunctional parenting in action until you’ve told a Nzemi you’re going to be a knocked-up, unmarried mother. It’s no coincidence that my sister lives so far away – she moved to Japan because it was less guilt-inducing than going no-contact.’
‘Eurggghhh,’ Joel groaned. ‘All right, give me a minute to get myself together. Don’t think I can drive yet. Don’t think I can breathe properly, actually.’ After a couple of thumps to his chest to get his lungs working, he turned to me with an indulgent smile. ‘We’re a right pair, aren’t we?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘The tragic thing is that I always thought I got on with my parents until the Cambridge thing. I’ve been one disappointment after another. Even then they’ve always been all right, manageable. I actually thought they’d be happy about this, though.’
‘They will be. In their own way. Just like my parents will be. And once there’s an actual baby, they’ll want to get involved. They may not be happy about who the mother is, but they’ll be happy about the baby.’
Joel’s large fingers were reaching for the ignition but did not connect. Instead he threaded them through my fingers. ‘I meant it, you know, Ffrony? If my parents ever made me choose between you and them, you’d win without me even thinking about it.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I absolutely know that. Same with you about pretty much everyone.’
‘Let’s never be like them, Ffrony. Either of them. I know it’s an awful thing to think let alone say, but I never want to put our kids through this. We’ve got to do our best to let them make their own mistakes and help to pick up the pieces afterwards.’
‘I’ll remind you of this conversation when you’re punishing this one for something in the future.’
‘Do. You have to promise me that you will. I never want to forget how awful this feels and I never want to inflict that on our children.’
‘It’s a deal. Right then, are we off to our next appointment?’
‘Yes. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.’
‘Once more.’
XL
Zane is the first to appear after he and the other two sloped off after breakfast to prepare for today’s visitation. My little boy, although he hates me calling him that, is wearing beige chinos and a dark denim shirt with the top button done up. He’s had another shower, and has been rather restrained with the body spray to give him his dues. He throws himself onto the sofa and picks up his DS, which he’d left on the floor on the other side of the armrest. He’s so handsome. A better-looking version of Joel, if that’s possible, with his pouty lips, rounded cheeks, and huge eyes. Last week I clipped his hair to a grade two all over and it’d made Aunty Betty gasp while her line of sight flew wildly between Zane and me. I saw her inhale a few times, deeply, slowly, trying to catch her breath, trying to remind herself that he wasn’t Joel at ten, he was an entirely different person.
Phoebe is next, it’s a shock to see her in normal clothes – in other words not in her school uniform and not in her pyjamas because since I’ve been collecting her and taking her to school, she rarely wears anything else, even at weekends. I haven’t challenged her because, frankly, there are better things to fall out with her about at this stage. She has on a short-sleeved summer dress covered in dozens and dozens of tiny blue and pink flowers, and she has styled her hair into two babyish pigtails – instead of her grown-up afro puffs – each one plaited to the bottom and secured into place with ribbons. No earrings, no ring on every finger, she’s even found ankle socks with a flowery ruffle to complete the look. She throws herself onto the other sofa in the living room and flicks on the television, puts the remote on the seat beside her before immersing herself in the world on her phone.
The final person who is apparently going to brunch with the Queen or some other such dignitary is Aunty Betty, The Wimp as I rename her. The children I can understand because I spent years dressing them smartly to look the part for a visit to both sets of grandparents, but Aunty Betty? The rebel? The OAP who got slung out of a home for shagging in public? She has dressed the part of a Great Aunt in Residence with a navy blue cashmere tw
inset, a navy blue knee-length skirt, thick American tan tights and her grey, suede sheep-skin-lined slippers. By the outline of her breasts, I’m guessing she’s got out one of those old-fashioned bras that hoists and shapes your chest into two comical rocket shapes. She’s even worn her black wig – chin-length, layered and styled on big rollers – which looks most how I’d always imagined her real hair did. I expected better of her, I really did.
‘What time did they say they’d be here?’ Aunty Betty asks, causing us all to glance at her and then to look again in sheer disbelief. Alarmed, more than a little unnerved, both Zane and Phoebe immediately frown at me. What’s wrong with her? they’re asking.
The same as is wrong with you, I silently reply. ‘They didn’t say a specific time, around ten-thirty to eleven,’ I say to Aunty Betty.
‘Didn’t say a specific time? Is Norman sick, do you think? That’s not at all like him. Or her.’
‘I’m sure they’re both fine,’ I reassure. ‘You look nice,’ I add to Aunty Betty diplomatically.
All of them – including the lady herself – glare at me like I am mad. ‘Fine,’ I state to their collective incredulity. ‘You look like a different person, is that what you want to hear?’
‘It’s closer to the truth,’ she says. Her hand, the one that fought me for her cigarette holder, reaches up and adjusts her wig, then tugs at the back of her bra to force it into place. She must be really uncomfortable because I’ve never seen her do something like that – far too classless. The only time I’ve ever seen her with such a demure, monotone outfit was for the ‘official’ bit of Joel’s funeral. When it came to the wake she reappeared in a crimson trouser outfit that had earned a smile from me and instant disapproval from her brother and sister-in-law. Maybe she’s trying to make up for that outfit with this one.