You didn’t say, please, I want to point out to her. I spent years teaching you to always say please and thank you. ‘What contraception were you both using?’ I ask to stall her. I suspect the second I hand over the little silver and black box of circuits and buttons I have in my apron pocket, I will not get anything else out of her.
She shrugs briefly and dismissively with both shoulders.
In Phoebe-shrug speak, this reply causes my stomach to turn over right before my heart does the same. I rotate on the spot and look at her. When she continues to stare downwards, I take her shoulders and force her to look at me. ‘You did use contraception, didn’t you?’ I ask.
‘You don’t need to the first time because if you’re a virgin then you can’t get pregnant.’ She shrugs me off.
Nervously, I unscrew the bubble wand from its bottle. Then screw it on again. Then unscrew it. I promised myself I wouldn’t let this happen. That I wouldn’t let my daughter become like me: too scared to talk to my mother; too terrified to tell my mother my periods had started (and only did in the end because I needed money from her to buy towels); too ashamed of my body and what was happening to it to ask for help when I needed it most. I promised myself that I would always be there for my daughter, and I’ve let this happen. I’ve managed to blink, to close my eyes over the period of losing Joel, and open them again to find I have missed the most important time of my daughter’s life. And I’ve missed the chance to not turn into my mother.
‘Did he tell you that?’ I ask her, still anxiously unscrewing and screwing on the lid of my bubbles bottle.
She nods. Her eyes, mouth, forehead, chin are set with pure defiance as she challenges me, dares me to tell her he was wrong. Even though her body has proved that all by itself, she would still believe anything he said.
‘Well, it’s not true.’ There should be some comfort, I suppose, that it was her first time. That the ‘hooking up’ talk was all for show.
‘But he said—’
‘Sweetheart, come on now, you’re a clever girl, you know where babies come from and how they’re made. You know that every time you have sex you take the chance of getting pregnant except if a person has had a tubal ligation, or a vasectomy.’
‘But—’
‘Pheebs, you’re pregnant. Your own body has told you it’s not true.’
She scrunches up her face in rage, like a six-year-old told there’ll be no Christmas this year because Father Christmas isn’t real.
Something occurs to me as I face her silent wrath: ‘If you really believed what he told you, why did you use the test so early? Surely you would have waited until two periods had passed.’
She sighs. ‘Cos I thought I’d better be doubly sure so I got the morning-after pill.’
‘And when you were late you knew it might not have worked?’
She nods. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not true,’ she adds, quickly.
‘Erm, obviously it does.’
‘I need my phone back.’
I need my Joel back. He’d know what to say, what to do, how best to navigate this unknown rocky road our lives have veered onto.
‘Are you going to tell him you’re pregnant?’ I ask.
‘I need my phone,’ she insists.
The slug-damaged plants all need to go in the bin. The earth needs to be turned over, aerated, then left to rest before I replant things. I could make her do it. I could make her dig up all this stuff and dig over my land before I hand back her phone. Or, I could accept that right now, when I’m still blindsided by the situation, I need to pick my battles.
I place my gloved hand into my front pocket and take out the phone. ‘You’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,’ I say before I return her secrets, her line to the boy who helped to get her into this situation. ‘Nine o’clock.’
‘What for?’
‘You’re pregnant. You need to see a doctor about that.’
‘Fine. Whatever. You obviously know everything about everything.’
My lip hurts when I clamp down on it, like my tongue did yesterday. Giving in, picking my battles, is not something I’m good at. I like to win. I like to do things the proper way. Talking to her much longer could involve me attempting to win this battle by any means necessary. I hold out her phone. She snatches it out of my hand, scowls at me before storming towards the house.
‘You didn’t say thank you,’ I call at her retreating back.
I drop to my knees and start to dismantle the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah as played out in my vegetable patch.
12 years before That Day (February, 1999)
‘She’s a girl,’ Joel said. His face was a mess of tears, his eyes a bright red after he scrubbed at them with the heels of his hands. ‘We got a girl one.’
‘Is she OK?’ I sobbed. I couldn’t hear her crying, I hadn’t seen her in the seconds after she was born and I was scared after nine months of taking care of her that I hadn’t done it right at the last minute. That once again I’d let everyone down and there was something wrong.
‘She’s perfect,’ Joel said.
‘Are you sure she’s OK?’ I sobbed. ‘Why isn’t she crying?’
‘Not all babies cry,’ the midwife said. ‘Some are really chilled.’ The midwife laid the squirming bundle on my bare chest for skin-to-skin contact.
I was sobbing so much I could barely move my arms to hold her. I hurt so much I didn’t know what part of me was sinew, blood and bone and what was pain. My heart felt as if it had expanded to fill my entire chest cavity, which was why I could only inhale and exhale in gasping, sobbing breaths.
My gaze focused on her, and I could see I’d done it. She was here. She was a wrinkled milk chocolate brown smeared with white; her right arm was extended towards my face, her mouth was wide open, showing us the two parallel ridges of her gums.
I stared at my chilled daughter. ‘We did it, Joel. We did it.’
‘You did it, Babes,’ he said, scrubbing at his eyes again. ‘You did it and you were amazing.’
‘“Phoebe” is right for her,’ I said. This was the name he’d chosen. He’d had a reason for it, but I couldn’t remember right then what it was. But it was right for her, it was who she looked like. Phoebe.
‘You sure?’ he asked.
‘Yes, absolutely. She absolutely looks like Phoebe.’
‘She does. And she is absolutely amazing.’
*
My mobile vibrates in my jeans pocket. I tug the thick gardening glove off my right hand before I retrieve the phone. I vaguely recognise the number flashing up but it’s not stored so I almost don’t answer it. After my recent history, though, I know that would be folly. That would be like convincing yourself that you believe you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex.
‘Hello?’ I say into the phone, half-expecting a pause then a recorded message claiming I need some sort of financial advice.
‘Mrs Mackleroy?’ the person on the other end asks, politely.
‘Yes?’ I reply cautiously because although I recognise the voice, I can’t quite place it.
‘This is Felicia Laureau from the retirement village where your aunt, Betty Mackleroy, is living?’
‘Oh, hello,’ I say, pleased that I don’t have to play the ‘pretend I know who you are’ game. Then it strikes me: this is Felicia Laureau from where Joel’s Aunty Betty is staying. I close my eyes and ground myself, like I would if I was about to be battered by a hurricane.
‘We were wondering if you could come in and see us tomorrow? Nothing to worry about, we’d simply like to discuss a few things with you.’
‘It has to be tomorrow, does it?’ I ask, trying to gauge how bad it is this time.
‘Yes, it has to be tomorrow.’ It’s really bad.
‘Right, fine. I’ll see you about midday.’
‘Perfect.’
I sit back on the grass, not bothered that the damp from the lawn seeps into my jeans and slowly soaks through to my knickers.
/> I’m not bothered because I know without question that tomorrow is going to be a repeat of yesterday.
II
V
15 years before That Day (February, 1996)
‘Saffron, meet Aunty Betty,’ Joel said proudly.
Aunty Betty reclined on the red velvet chaise longue in the living room of her Ealing mansion flat, her gold and silver cigarillo holder installed between the fore and middle fingers of her right hand. Her shiny black hair was piled up on top of her head in an elegant bun, at its front an ornate silver bun clasp. Her large eyes, heavily made up with gold and plum eyeshadow and what I suspected were false eyelashes, inspected me carefully. She lingered over my chin-length straightened black hair, she noted my lack of jewellery, she debated with herself over my knee-length blue silk skirt, and cream jumper secured at the middle with a blue patent belt. She openly disapproved of my blue and white shoes. Once she was done checking me over like a farmer might do a new pig at an animal auction, she took a long, theatrical drag on her holder. (You could tell it was all for show as little smoke came out when she exhaled.) Slowly, her rouged lips parted and she grinned. She was watching me like a predator watched the walking takeaway meal that was an injured, bleeding deer – it wouldn’t take much to devour her prey, but there’d still be enough fight in the creature to give her some fun.
‘Saff-aron.’ Her beam grew wider. ‘I like that name, you know.’ She had a Jamaican lilt so slight I wondered if I imagined it. ‘She’ll do. In fact, I think she’s perfect.’
Aunty Betty turned her slender, slightly wrinkled neck towards Joel, her smile growing by the second. ‘Ashtray.’ She indicated the blue and white porcelain ashtray on the teak sideboard with a wave of her hand. ‘Your parents are going to hate her,’ she informed him. ‘That makes me like her even more.’
‘Aunty Betty!’ Joel laughed as he handed her the ashtray then returned to my side, casually taking my hand. ‘Ignore her. She loves to cause controversy.’
‘Don’t I just?’ she said, the grin now taking up most of her face.
‘It was Aunty Betty who bought me my first cookbook and apron when I was seven,’ Joel said. ‘She unleashed my love of cooking.’
‘Yes, and his parents think that’s the reason why he didn’t go to Cambridge,’ she said, laughing. ‘They still hate me for it.’
‘Aunty Betty!’
‘It’s true. I don’t care, though. And that’s why it doesn’t matter that Ma and Pa Mackleroy are going to hate you, darling Saff-aron – I like you. And in the Mackleroy family, what I say is the law.’
‘Ignore her,’ Joel said. He was smiling indulgently at his aunt but not denying what she was saying: in his family, Aunty Betty was the law. And his parents were going to hate me.
*
Another office, another person who is uncomfortable, tense, shuffling papers and repeatedly clearing their throat in front of me.
What’s going to happen now? Is this woman going to tell me that Joel’s sixty-six-year-old Aunty Betty is pregnant, too?
Felicia Laureau finally sits back in her big black leather armchair, and faces me properly with a strained smile. Her bobbed hair is like a silver-white curtain across and around her face, she is small, round and distinctly curvy, but dressed well in a form-flattering pale grey suit.
Like the headteacher, she’s nervous about talking to me, not only because of what she’s got to tell me, but because she doesn’t know how to talk to someone like me, the woman whose husband was murdered. I’d imagine this nursing home is filled with widows, women whose husbands died and left them alone, but how many of them were bereaved in the same way as I was? Were any of them forever saddled with the image of a large kitchen knife entering their husband’s stomach, and him bleeding to death an hour or so later on the side of a road they’d never been down before? If any of them were like me, then this woman would be awful to be around. She’d be uncomfortable, unnerving and most of all, fake.
‘Mrs Mackleroy, it’s good to see you,’ she says brightly.
I sigh. ‘It probably isn’t, is it?’ I sigh again, a deep exasperated sigh. I’ve spent the morning stopping Zane from winding up Phoebe, sitting in the doctor’s office while Phoebe told her GP nothing and then intervening when Phoebe began freaking out at the idea of taking folic acid and going for an early scan. This was followed by driving around the M25, something I avoid wherever possible, to get here. ‘Sorry, but I can’t think of a single, realistic reason why you’d call me to come in at such short notice if it was going to involve good news.’
Mrs Laureau’s features twitch, fluttering as if out of control, especially around the mouth area. With horror, I realise she’s trying to arrange her face into a sympathetic, gentle smile – something that clearly doesn’t come easily to her. ‘You’re right, of course,’ she replies. ‘This isn’t going to be an easy meeting.’
‘Where is she, anyway?’ I ask. I had genuinely expected to find Aunty Betty sitting in a chair in the same position as Phoebe had adopted in the headteacher’s office, waiting to have someone tell me what she’d done. ‘I thought she’d be here.’
‘We thought it best we talk first without her,’ Mrs Laureau says.
‘Why, what did she do?’
‘We’ve tried to make allowances,’ she says gently, ‘since, since the events of … Since your husband … Since …’
I am meant to leap into this sea of discomfort she’s in to rescue her, stop her floundering by supplying Since my husband died, but I’m not going to. I’m going to stay where I am, nice and dry, and wait for her to wreak havoc on me as she’s about to do. People like Mrs Laureau never need to see you unless they want more money, or they’re about to screw you over, or sometimes, even, both.
7 years before That Day (March, 2004)
Aunty Betty’s face slowly became an intricate picture of disdain and horror when she had fully digested what Joel had said to her.
‘Live with you?’ she spat in disgust. ‘Live with you? You don’t smoke, you barely drink, I’m still not certain if you actually ever do the do, even though you have two children. Always wondered if that was turkey-baster-assisted. If I live with you, I might as well get down to the nearest cemetery and start digging my own hole.’ She frowned sternly at Joel, then cast her expression at me. ‘You don’t want me living in your house. I’m selfish, rude and messier than that pink squiggle thing in those children’s books. I wouldn’t wish me on my worst enemy.’
Joel seemed deflated, the worry of the situation rested heavily on his shoulders. He’d thought the best thing would be for Aunty Betty to live with us after her accident. A few days ago she’d slipped in the shower, fallen and knocked herself out. She’d woken up with a hairline fracture to her left hip and, because she’d always lived on her own, had screamed her way through the blinding pain she was in to drag herself out of the bathroom, along the carpeted corridor to the bedroom to get to her phone. She couldn’t live on her own any more. We all knew and accepted that. Joel’s solution was to ask her to live with us.
‘Admit it, you don’t want me living with you, do you, Saff-aron?’ Aunty Betty was appealing to me because she knew I’d be able to convince Joel it was a bad idea.
‘Of course we want you to live with us,’ I replied, because we did. We loved her and wanted her to be safe. Joel and I had both been shaken and tearful at the thought of her being alone and in pain.
She laughed bitterly. Shook her head. ‘You two are out of your tiny minds, you know. I want to get into one of those nursing homes with my own flat, see if I can meet some nice widowers who’ll spend their weekly allowance showing me a good time.’
‘You really want to go to a nursing home?’ I asked.
She grinned and nodded mischievously. I wasn’t sure if Joel could see that despite the smile, despite her rejection of our offer, she was terrified. Of the encroaching years, of having to drag herself naked to get help because of the choices she’d made in her life. The flames
of pride burned in her eyes, though. She made no apologies about the way she’d lived her life, you only had to spend a few minutes in her company to realise she’d enjoyed every single second of it, and she wanted that independence for as long as possible. Living with us would be a slow, lingering death by boredom. I could understand that. When you’ve travelled all over the world, when you’ve been one of the first black women to have a starring role in a West End play, when you remind anyone who’ll listen that you’re better-looking than Eartha Kitt ever was, when you’ve told the world every day for sixty-odd years that you’ll do things your way, thank you very much, the last thing you want to do is live in a four-bedroom house in Brighton with Mr and Mrs Boring and their two children. Independent living when there was someone around to help if she needed it let us all pretend that she could still be whoever she wanted to be no matter how old she was.
Over five weekends, Joel and I took it in turns to pack up her flat. We put most of it into storage, and she moved into Rose Bay Manor three months later.
*
‘As I said, Mrs Mackleroy, we’ve tried to be understanding, but we feel it’s time for your aunt to move on,’ Felicia Laureau says. Sandy Fields is the third home she’s been in. The others didn’t ‘work out’.
‘What did she do?’ I ask again as I wonder how much it would cost to make the ‘moving on’ go away. In the last home, she’d got into a fist-fight with another resident because she didn’t like the way the woman had looked at her. Aunty Betty neglected to mention that she’d flouted every single piece of dating etiquette when she moved in. The poor woman who’d punched Aunty Betty had been quietly and carefully working long-term on a widower with cups of tea, afternoon walks, listening to Radio 4 together. Within days of Aunty Betty moving in, she’d asked him whether he was going to buy her a drink, and had basically been dating him ever since. That had cost us quite a lot of money to make it go away and to suppress potential assault charges even though Aunty Betty was technically only defending herself.