A sound starts up next door. Eva, ferreting around like a cat, or a trapped pigeon, rearranging boxes, no doubt, so she can sleep lying down. I remember the AA list of last night, Joe’s face as he wrote it, the way he sent a hand across the stubble on his cheekbones, so thoughtfully, conscientiously. I really must get tough about those bags.
I look at the clock. It’s 3.26 a.m. At 3.30 a.m., the record player goes on: ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, which is seven minutes, thirty-four seconds long; I know, because I’ve timed it. Usually, I am cursing her. This time, however, I am glad of the company because my mind is racing. The dream has disturbed things, brought up more scenes from the past that play, as clearly as film clips, in my mind. Hormones probably heightening things, making them sharper.
Right now, it’s 22 August, the day my life changed forever. It’s odd, but when
I think back to what happened that late summer’s evening down Friars Lanes, it’s like I’ve got peripheral vision: I remember in vivid detail what happened before and immediately after, but when it comes to the central event itself, it’s a blurred black spot, a sensory
wasteland
.
I’d been to Bubbles Waterpark with Beth that afternoon. She’d been getting it on all summer with a twenty-year-old lifeguard called Sean, and he’d let us in for free – Beth had been so proud. My penance was, she then talked to him all day or pranced about in the wave machine, losing her bikini top on purpose. I didn’t mind. I was too busy sunbathing, keeping one eye on the entrance, hoping Joe’s lovely face might appear at the door. We’d only been seeing one another for three months – since that day at the Blackhorse Quarry – and were still in that stage of wanting to spend every minute of every day with one another. I miss those times of longing and missing and hoping; those times before mobile phones.
We’d gone to the slot machines after Bubbles and won some money. The plan was, we’d buy a bottle of Taboo for the party that night. The party was at one of the Farmer’s houses – a boy called Tony Middleton – and everyone was going to be there, all my friends, the Farmers, the Townies and, of course, Joe. Tony’s parents were away somewhere exotic; it was to be the party of the summer. I couldn’t wait.
The plan was, Joe would pick me up and we’d walk together to the party about a mile away. But when I got home from being out with Beth, he rang to say he’d been out on a boat with his mates all day near the party, so would it be okay if he met me there? I said that was fine – Dad could give me a lift.
But Dad wouldn’t give me a lift.
‘You’re not going to a bloody party in the middle of nowhere and that is final.’
Everything was ‘final’ in those days with Dad, mainly because he just didn’t have the energy or motivation to argue or negotiate about anything.
I left it till late – 8.30 p.m.-ish – then spun him some tale that Beth wasn’t allowed to go either and that I was going over to hers for a sleepover instead. He was several pints of Boddingtons down then, so he didn’t argue.
I put on my new flippy frock with the pink roses all over it, nicked some booze from the drinks cabinet and set off. And that’s where I was, now, in the movie of my mind, sauntering down Friars Lanes in the balmy dusk, the sun diminishing like melting butter behind the hedges, the sandpipers and the flycatchers, in their V formation overhead, heading for warmer climes, and, at my side, the odd roaming chicken from the nearby farm.
I’d maybe walked for fifteen minutes, sipping on the vile concoction I’d put in a Tupperware beaker, when Butler pulled up. He had his window wound down, one chunky, freckled arm sticking out. I bent down to talk to him, saw his small, pale eyes flit to my cleavage and up again.
I made a joke about his choice of music: ‘Is that INXS you’re playing, Saul? Shame on you,’ or something like that. It was only a joke but he turned it off.
‘I presume you’re off to this party then?’ I said.
‘Yeah, are you?’ he mumbled. ‘Do you wanna lift?’
I was desperate to see Joe. It had been a full twenty-four hours, after all, so I said, ‘Yes, please. If you don’t mind?’
‘I wouldn’t have offered if I minded, would I?’ he said.
I got in the front. The car stank – not unpleasant, just strong. A bit like paint and petrol put together. It got you right between the eyes.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ said Saul. ‘It’s the rags in the back, they’re covered in turps.’
He told me he’d been doing some decorating job up at the new estate in Kilterdale. The new houses ‘for people with more money than sense’, he said. ‘Swimming pools and fucking kitchen gadgets nobody’s going to use in a million years.’
He sounded a bit cross. Saul’s family lived on the council estate in town. I wondered if he was actually jealous of those people in their plush new houses. They weren’t a far cry from the sort of house my sister Leah would eventually live in, years later, in Berkhamsted, where, as far as I can tell, she now spends most of her time going to barbeques, book clubs and dinner parties. The sort of place parents come ‘for the schools’ and with what must be one of the highest concentrations of pregnant women and trampolines-in-back-gardens in Britain, if not the world. Her house has pillars, like the ones on the estate Saul was working on at that time. He’d probably hate my sister if he knew her now.
I turned to Saul, then, in the car. ‘Who knows, eh? One day, you might live in one,’ I said. ‘Saul Butler in his executive five-bed!’
He just looked at me. He didn’t seem interested in banter.
We were driving quite slowly, for some reason, something to do with the tyres, he said, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence but, like I say, I’d had more than a few sips of my lethal cocktail and was well on my way to being drunk.
‘So where’s Joe then? How come he’s not going with you? I wouldn’t be letting any girlfriend of mine walk down a lane like this on her own.’
‘Oh, it’s complicated, he was already near Tony’s house, so there was no point him coming all the way back to pick me up. I said my dad would give me a lift, then my dad wouldn’t give me a lift.’
Saul Butler gave a disapproving grunt.
‘Some dad,’ he said. ‘Some boyfriend.’
I shrugged. It felt like he was trying to make a competition out of something but I didn’t really know why.
‘Well, you look very nice, anyway,’ he said. ‘Nice dress. I haven’t seen you in a dress before.’
‘No. They’re not usually my thing.’
‘Well, you should wear them more often.’ He smiled. ‘It looks really nice on you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling flattered.
He changed gear, his hand on the gear-stick thick and freckled and looking like it would be really dry to the touch. In the distance, you could hear the trains racing through the fields, with their ghostly cries, like the last, long exhalation before someone dies. Like their last breath.
I must have lain awake for an hour or more, enough to hear the music and Eva’s clattering reach a crescendo, as it often does, and to see the slither of sky, through the gap in the curtains, turn from impenetrable velvet black to the denim blue of dawn.
The scenes from the past kept coming: sometimes they were just fragments, sometimes the whole thing. I felt that now, at thirty-two, I should feel so different to how frightened I was back then, and yet, too much about how it had all happened so far – the recklessness in getting pregnant in the first place, the death of our mothers, the basic fact that this baby was Joe’s – was so similar; it was like 1997 all over again. Losing Lily, losing Mum … and the other thing. My secret. My huge, terrible secret. The real reason I couldn’t be with Joe because I knew, if I were, I’d have to tell him.
I told myself everything always seemed so much worse at this hour of the night, turned on my side, forced my brain to shut down and myself to go back to sleep.
For the next two or three weeks, Joe and I spoke to one another almost every day. I tried at first to keep some distance – to speak, say, every few days – but it was clear Joe wasn’t interested whatsoever in approaching his new role as Joe, Antenatal Guru, in a part-time fashion. The excuses he came up with to call or email me became hilarious in themselves.
‘What do you think of the name Oswald?’ he asked one day. ‘Oswald Sawyer-King. One of life’s winners, right there …’
‘Joe,’ I said, walking into another room, politely away from the patient who was standing, pants down, ready for me to inject him. ‘I’m about to administer anti-psychotics into someone’s bottom; can we talk about this later?’
They got less baby-focused, more just random, such as: ‘How do you cook artichoke?’ Or: ‘I’m in Blockbuster’s, what do you recommend?’
I was wary at first. I don’t want to sound presumptuous – after all, I am pretty easy to resist at the moment, with hormonal spots and not so much a bump as a thickening waist – but I didn’t want Joe to get too close. It’s perhaps excusable to be reckless once, and for the fallout to be so monumental, but
twice
? I could just about cope with me getting hurt, but not Joe. I couldn’t do that to him again. I felt sometimes like I wasn’t carrying a baby but a bomb. So I tried not calling or answering his calls every time, but it’d get to 10 p.m. and I could almost feel him, up there, pacing his little bachelor pad in Manchester, trying to resist. He always cracked. I remembered this about Joe: if he wanted to ring you, he rang, no game-playing; and I always took his calls in the end, because they were becoming the best part of my day.
In some ways, it felt like we’d never been apart, and yet, in others, it was like I was getting to know someone new. But then, it had been sixteen years since we were last together. We’d seen each other on various occasions over the years – a few times in the pub in Kilterdale over Christmas; Tania Richardson’s wedding; the fated night of the puke-on-my-boyfriend’s-shoes; and an unannounced visit while I was in my third year at university (less said about that the better) – but there had been no sustained time spent together over those sixteen years so, yes, I was getting to know someone new, and yet, parts of Joe had not changed one bit, either.
He was so light, so confident about everything. It was good for me. And those phone calls were a good opportunity to piece together the last sixteen years. He kept tabs on my progress with the AA list and it focused my mind, took me away from the dark thoughts that would come at me without warning; the panic attacks that were happening far more regularly than I cared to admit, especially when I was with Grace. Not that I would ever have told her that, because, after all, I was the one supposed to be helping her. And I really wanted to help her. I wanted to help all my patients, but Grace, I felt I had a connection with, I don’t know why. Maybe because we’d been through similar things or that when I looked at her, I got a flash of, ‘There but for the grace of God …’
I suppose we’d become quite friendly in the last few weeks, too. Tuesdays were our day for seeing one another, but sometimes I’d pop round, if I was in her neck of the woods, with a photography magazine I thought she’d like, or just for a cup of tea.
I’d told work and Grace (only because she said I looked like I’d put on a few pounds!) about the baby a week after the scan. There were a few embarrassing ‘Who’s the father?’ questions to contend with at work, and Jeremy was as tactful as ever but, to be honest, none of it had touched the sides due to the emotional rollercoaster going on. This had been the second time I’d told the world I was pregnant and people were more shocked than congratulatory, so I was kind of used to it. Of all the people I’d told, aside from Kaye, Grace was probably the sweetest about it. She wanted a day-by-day commentary of how I was feeling, what side the baby was lying, when my due date was. She’d then forget everything and ask me all over again the next time I saw her, but I didn’t care. It was just nice to have someone being so positive and asking questions – wasn’t that supposed to be what happened?
Grace had a soft spot for Selim, the owner of the Turkish café on East Street Market, and so sometimes we’d go there on a Tuesday, and Grace would flirt with Selim, who would slip us a couple of free
bourekas
and we’d chat about all sorts: her old life; her twenties when she was in love with Cecily’s father; the years she spent as a working photographer.
She’d also chat to me often about the photographs in her flat: the technique she’d used, the composition. I loved how animated she became when she talked about her photography and her daughter and her twenties – they seemed like the happiest days of her life. The more she trusted me, the more she would tell me about this life – the one before her breakdown, aged thirty-one, triggered by the death of her stepfather and the realization she could never bring him to justice – but also, about her other life – the horrendous details of her childhood. She’d throw them into conversation and they’d pierce me, like tiny shards of glass, when I wasn’t expecting it. Like last week, when she took off her Yankees baseball cap for the first time and showed me the scar across her forehead, where her stepfather had struck her with a broken Heineken bottle, and the time we were in the launderette, and she’d casually dropped into the conversation how her stepfather would rape her in one of the guest bedrooms of the hotel they lived in, then make her take the sheets for a service wash.
It was difficult, when she got onto this line of thought, to bring her back from the darkness of the past to her present. It was like she wanted to wallow there, berating herself about how she’d been a bad mother – there was a lot of that. ‘I’m a mad, bad mother, darlin’,’ she’d say. ‘I’ve let my Cec down.’
It didn’t matter how much I told her that it wasn’t her fault or that there was no point going over things that couldn’t be changed, she’d get stuck, like a broken record. In order to help Grace achieve some sort of recovery, I needed to help her find a way to her future. And maybe it was that I, too, had lost a daughter, but I decided that Cecily was the key.
Dear Lily