This was all I could do eighteen months ago. Neither Zane nor Phoebe wanted to sleep in the big bed with me, and I couldn’t split myself in two to be with them, so I’d sit here, in the space between their rooms, whisper ‘I love you’ to each of them, then listen powerlessly as they cried themselves to sleep.
It’s all I can do for Phoebe now, because at the moment she really does need to be on her own, and to feel whatever it is she’s going to feel next.
*
‘Saff? What’s up? What’s happened?’ The familiarity of Fynn’s voice immediately trickles ease through my tense, troubled body and frantic, fretting mind.
‘I’m sorry, I know it’s late and I didn’t want to wake you, but I didn’t know who else to call.’
‘I’m on my way,’ he says, followed by the rustle of bedclothes being thrown back, of someone sitting up, preparing to slide out of bed.
‘No, no, you don’t need to. I just need to tell someone this before my head explodes.’
‘Right,’ he says cautiously, bracing himself for the worst. But what is the worst? He’s heard it, is he preparing himself for that? Is he bracing himself to hear that another person he dearly loves is lost to him?
‘You need to come,’ I’d said. ‘Something’s happened. To Joel. Something’s happened to Joel. I need you to come here. I have to go to the hospital.’ He didn’t respond straight away that time. He’d been silent for many, many seconds that felt like hours, and then he snapped out of it and said he was on his way. I called him before I called Joel’s parents, before I called my parents or my sister, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to speak again after I’d said it once. I needed him to come and I needed him to tell other people, because I had other things to do. I had to go and identify him, I had to go and get the children then tell them. I had to pretend I believed any of it was happening. I could only cope with that if Fynn was there, too.
In the present, he exhales quietly but at length and I imagine his navy blue eyes slipping shut, his broad shoulders moving downwards as they’re forced to relax, his torso contracting as he holds himself ready. You can do this, Fynn, he’s telling himself, you can cope with whatever it is.
‘Phoebe’s pregnant,’ I say. I was going to gently lead him into it, explain about being called to the school, the headmaster, that The Mr Bromsgrove fella, how I realised what was going on right before I was told – but doing it like that would have been cruel. Revelations this huge should be delivered straight away – you can comfort and cosset the blow afterwards, the preamble takes the listener to all sorts of places they don’t need to visit before fully receiving the news.
Fynn’s inaudible reply is obviously shock. Incomprehension at what I’ve said. ‘Phoebe who?’ he eventually says. Not shock: confusion; he’s been trying to work out who I could be talking about because it’s that ludicrous an idea it could be the only Phoebe he knows.
‘Your goddaughter, Zane’s sister, my and Joel’s daughter.’
Silence returns to his side of the phone. Eventually he speaks again: ‘But she’s fourteen,’ he states. ‘You need to … You know what you need to do to get pregnant and she’s only fourteen.’
‘I know,’ I reply.
‘Are you sure about this, Saff?’ He thinks I’ve lost it, that I am out of my mind.
‘Yes. She told a teacher at school and they called me in. She’s about four weeks pregnant. Or whatever it is in real terms of last period etc.’
Silence. This time it is shock. ‘Bloody hell,’ Fynn breathes. ‘Bloody hell.’ He understands, he knows why I am panicking: there is no easy way out of this; whatever happens next, Phoebe, my baby, will be changed for ever.
‘She won’t tell me who the father is,’ I explain before he asks. ‘She pretty much won’t talk to me at all. If I ask a question I get a shrug or a handful of words, but nothing that makes me understand why and how this happened. I mean, I don’t know if she was forced or pressurised or manipulated. If she wanted to. If it was all planned or a hideous mistake. I don’t know, so I don’t know how to help her. Or what I’m supposed to be doing. I wish she would talk to me. I wish I could think properly. I wish I could stop wanting to scream at her.’
‘Do you want me to talk to her?’
‘I’d love it if you could, and if it meant she’d open up, but not yet. I think she would completely lose the plot if she knew I’d told someone. But I had to because my brain was about to explode. There are so many things going on in my head and I had to get a little bit of it out. It was either you or go dig a hole in the garden and shout into it and I don’t think our garden is big enough for the hole I’d need.’
‘This isn’t your fault,’ he says, reading my mind as Joel used to.
‘Oh, really? How did you figure that one out?’
‘This isn’t your fault,’ he repeats, his voice taking a firmer tone.
‘Fynn, I know I’ve said this to you before, but when you have children and something bad – or even something not very good – happens to them you try as hard as you can to work out what you could have done differently to get a different result.’ To not have a terrified fourteen-year-old crying herself to sleep because adulthood, which was meant to come to her as drips of experience over the coming years, has submerged her with a flood of the real world in one go. Again.
‘What could you have done differently?’ Behind his reasonable question, his attempt to soothe my guilt, is a man who is quietly but definitely freaking out. I can hear it in the timbre of his voice, in the spacing of his words. ‘Bloody hell’ is probably on loop in his mind and he’s anxiously rubbing the area above his right eyebrow.
‘I don’t know,’ I admit.
‘Exactly, there is nothing you could have done differently, none of this is your fault. Do you want me to come over?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’m so grateful, though, that you don’t blame me.’
‘Of course I don’t. Joel wouldn’t have, either. Please listen, Saff, this isn’t your fault, and you know yourself that there’s nothing you could have done to change it.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. Night, Fynn.’
‘Night.’
I must have sounded convincing to him because he didn’t keep me on the phone, insisting we talk, he didn’t insist on coming over to reassure me in person. It was almost believable that I don’t know how I could have stopped this happening.
It’s obvious, though. No matter which way I try to spin it, look at it, take an alternative view – this wouldn’t be happening if Joel was around. Phoebe’s slow decline into this wouldn’t have occurred if I hadn’t got her father killed.
IV
Slugs have been nibbling at my plants.
It goes through phases when it’s fine and there’s no sign of them, and then I’ll go out to water my ‘crop’ of vegetables first thing in the morning before work and the silvery, slimy evidence of something unwelcome will glisten up at me. This morning, it seems the slugs have had an orgy on the vegetable plot, despite the carefully laid border of broken eggshells. Maybe I wasn’t diligent enough, maybe there was one that had been a Trojan horse, hiding under the spinach leaves, which then made plans to admit the others once my back was turned, because they have decimated the area. Where the spinach grows is obviously where they partied the most – I’m sure if I look hard enough I’ll find tiny discarded beer bottles, Rizla papers and condom wrappers.
It’s after nine, Phoebe hasn’t surfaced and I didn’t bother to wake her. I had to organise things for the day, take another day off work – even though my compassionate leave from all that time ago somehow segued into being part of my annual leave over two business years and it’s still frowned upon if I take any time off. Kevin, my boss, who is Director of Operations, paused a long time earlier when I told him I had a medical emergency and had to take today off as well. With icicles hanging off his every syllable, he asked if I’d definitely be in tomorrow. In reply, I’d wanted to sing a couple of lines about no one
knowing what tomorrow would bring from ‘Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong’, and a better man would have appreciated it, would have laughed. Instead, I’d crossed my fingers behind my back, even though he couldn’t actually see me, and said, ‘Yes, of course.’
Then I’d made an appointment for Phoebe with the doctor. Despite me calling at one minute past eight (when the appointment lines opened at eight), I’d ended up with six people ahead of me in the queue, and the doctor she normally saw was booked up.
I couldn’t take any more judgement from semi-strangers, at least I knew Phoebe’s doctor well enough to withstand her scorn, so I’d made her an appointment for the next day, and then I’d called Zane before he left for school. We live one street away from the school, literally around the corner, so I’d been tempted to go and wait for him outside school so I could hug him, hold him, remind myself that he was all right. I’d failed with the older one, but the younger one was all right. I couldn’t, though, because that would mortify him, me acting the crazy mother in front of his friends. Instead, I’d settled for speaking to him on the phone, checking he was behaving, checking he’d done his homework, checking he knew how much I loved him. Irritation ran like a throbbing vein through every ‘Yes, Mum’ he’d uttered. I smiled after each one, that irritation told me he was indeed all right.
And now I am here, kneeling in front of the vegetables in the shady part of the garden, against the back, whitewashed wall, surveying, like a parent who has returned from holiday without two teenage children, the damage done by the slugs to my vegetables.
*
That’s a big one. Perfectly spherical, its clear skin glistening and swirling as it spins away. I dunk the long, purple bubble wand again and take it out, wave it through the air to release different size bubbles into the bright sunlight of this clear April morning. Today’s weather is perfect for making bubbles. Joel and I would, much to the mortification of our children, stand in the garden, one of us with the wand, the other giggling and laughing as we chased around after what looked like large, fragile crystal balls. Then we’d swap and carry on for as long as we had enough mixture. ‘You’re behaving like you’re three,’ Zane would say after fifteen minutes of watching us. ‘What he said,’ Phoebe would add. And we’d laugh even louder because we were their parents and embarrassing them was our job.
I still buy bubble mixture refill, but this is the first time since that day I’ve glugged the yellow liquid into an empty bubble wand container, stood in the centre of the lawned section of our garden and done this. It’s another of those things I haven’t been able to do because it doesn’t work without my partner in crime. Except today, I need to feel close to him, I need to do something that reminds me of him and how we used to be, how I used to be, how I was once able to feel something other than numb. I am constantly numb, as though I am surrounded by swathes of cotton wool and gauze, as though life is filtered through those thick layers and I’m not actually allowed to fully experience anything. Maybe it’s too much for me, maybe, like the glimpse I got with yesterday’s news, engaging fully with the world, actually touching it by living in it properly would completely overwhelm me. If I do this, though, maybe I’ll connect with Joel. Maybe I’ll get some feeling back and I’ll know what I need to do next.
I could do that with cooking something, but right now I need to be outside, I need to have the air on my skin, the sun in my eyes. I need to watch the bubbles rise effortlessly into the air, catch the light, and settle themselves on the wind to be carried away. I need to do all this and see if it can bring a smile to my face and feelings into my body.
‘What are you doing?’ Phoebe asks. She steps out of the kitchen door, which I left propped open, still in her silky blue pyjamas, her fluffy pink dressing gown tied firmly over the top.
I dunk my wand, then slice it through the air to free the flawless spheres. ‘I’m making bubbles.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s Tuesday. Because I’m not at work. And because a bunch of slugs have trashed my vegetable patch.’ I’ve got my green and white striped gardener’s apron on, and my gardening gloves, so I probably look either strange or eccentric depending on how you viewed these things. ‘It’s surprisingly calming,’ I add. I hold out the bottle to her. ‘Want a go?’
She rolls her eyes and curls her lip in disgust. If I’d ever looked at my parents like that, I think they’d have slapped my face clean off my head.
‘Can I have my phone back?’ she asks and shoves her hands into the neat square pockets of her dressing gown.
I lower the bubble wand. ‘Not until we’ve talked a bit,’ I say.
The eye roll and lip curl turn into a full-body sigh.
‘Come and have a look at what the slugs have done,’ I say to her. ‘It’s really quite impressive, if you’re not the person whose plants they’ve destroyed.’
She has her trainers on, so drags herself across the patio, across the lawn, across the other part of the patio to the vegetable patch in the corner. It’s shaded a little by the overhang from the large oak tree that grows in next door’s garden. We stand side by side, looking at the leaves of my spinach plants, which look like badly crocheted doilies; the slimy trail that is all over the rocket leaves, which have huge chunks taken out of them but not as artistically as the spinach; and the glistening trail that links the near-black earth between the rocket, spinach, watercress and cabbages.
‘Wow,’ Phoebe breathes. ‘They did this all in one night?’
‘One day and one night,’ I say.
‘Wow.’ She’s impressed, probably imagining what it’d be like to go to the human equivalent of such a party. ‘Wow.’
‘Do you have any idea what you want to do?’ I ask her now that I’ve impressed her and we’re on a neutral subject.
The shutters around her immediately come down, whatever positive emotion she had towards me is whisked away in an instant. ‘Whatever you say,’ she mumbles.
‘This isn’t my decision,’ I reply.
Phoebe starts to prod at the edge of the earth around the plundered tomato plant with the toe of her trainer, openly unsettled by what I’ve said. I watch her as she avoids touching the areas of dirt that glisten with slug goo. ‘I knew you wouldn’t care,’ she eventually says. ‘That’s why I didn’t bother telling you first.’
I’m not going to bite at that. I’m not going to let her goad me into shouting at her. ‘Do you know what I wish?’ I say. I extend my foot and prod at the earth, too. It’s pointless, but enjoyable. ‘I wish you’d come to talk to me before you did anything like that. I really thought we could talk about anything, Pheebs. Admittedly, I probably would have gone off at the deep end at first because I would have thought you were too young to have sex. Not your body, I’m sure you think your body is ready, and I’m sure you thought your mind was ready, but really, I would have liked to have discussed it with you. I didn’t even think this sort of thing was on your radar.’
She bunches her lips up and continues to poke at the soil in front of her, but doesn’t interrupt what I’m saying so maybe she’s listening.
‘I would have loved to have found out what you felt about it. Who he was. If he was nice to you.’ I stop what I’m doing and focus on my daughter. She is so young. In my head she’ll always be that bigcheeked bundle of screams that was handed to me minutes after she was born. In my mind, she’ll always be the little girl who managed to lose her black shoe with the red bow on the way home from school and still to this day doesn’t remember how. She’ll always be the little girl sitting on the bed beside me crying because it’s finally hit her that her dad isn’t coming back. Phoebe will probably always be young to me, I don’t think she’ll ever be old enough to have sex in the nostalgia of my mind. ‘Was he? Was he nice to you?’
She also stops jabbing at the dirt. She doesn’t move as she considers my question. With her lips twisted thoughtfully to the left she starts to chew on her inner cheek. Then: shrug. ‘I suppose.’
?
??Did he pressure you into it? Or did you want to?’ Or was it ‘hooking up’?
‘I wanted to feel close to him, Mum,’ she says.
‘And you didn’t feel close to him before?’
‘Kind of, I suppose. I just wanted him …’
‘To like you.’
‘Yeah. I like him. I like him so much, and he makes me feel really funny in my stomach, and it feels really awful when I’m not with him and sometimes even the texts aren’t enough. I just wanted him to feel the same way. Is that bad?’
Bad? It’s horrific She’s having sex to make someone like her. Not because her body’s telling her it’s ready, not because she wants pleasure from it, not even because she’s curious what the fuss is all about, but because it’s currency. It’s to get something. ‘No,’ I reassure her. ‘It’s not bad. I completely understand, although it’s probably not the best reason to do it? I mean, it might have been better to do it because you felt he was as close to you as you feel to him, and with the both of you feeling so close, that was the natural next step.’ Is this the right time for this? I wonder as I speak. It seems a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has not only bolted but has made it to the other end of the country in a clear, unhindered run. ‘I can’t tell you what to do in any way that will stop you having sex, but I think it’d be great for you if you could promise yourself that you’re only ever going to do it because you want to enjoy it. Not because everyone else is doing it, not because you want someone to like you, not because you think you have to after someone’s nice to you, but because you want to feel the pleasure from it. OK?’
‘But …’ she begins.
‘But?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ she says, shaking her head. She buries her hands deeper in her pockets, hunches her shoulders over as she resumes digging at the slug earth with the toe of her shoe. ‘Can I have my phone back?’