It was Tuesday, my ‘official’ day to see Grace. On this particular Tuesday, I arrived a little earlier than usual. Her door was ajar when I got there. I knocked, softly, before popping my head inside.
‘Hi, Grace, it’s just Robyn …’
She didn’t reply but I could hear her chatting to someone on the phone. She sounded upset. ‘I’m sorry, darlin’ …’ she was saying. ‘I’m sorry, Cec, I’d hate me, too, but please don’t go.’ I hovered in the entrance, feeling bad for listening. ‘I’ve been an awful mother. I’ve let you down.’
Oh, Grace
, I thought,
don’t get back on that again
.
I could see through to the kitchen. Sunlight flooded in through the big window and Grace was standing with her back to me, on the phone, her tiny frame silhouetted. She was wearing a blue Chinese silk dressing gown and had her hair up. A plume of bluish smoke rose up from her right hand. She could have been a rather decadent, elegant star, if you ignored the mould growing on the corners of her kitchen walls, the yellow film of tobacco that covered everything, and the fact that the hand holding a lit cigarette up in the air was trembling violently.
‘Will you ever forgive me?’ I heard her say. I stood there, not knowing whether I should make my presence known or not. Then, a crack in her voice: ‘Oh, darlin’, don’t say that.’
I went into the lounge, to make myself busy, but could still hear her through the flimsy walls: ‘Did I ruin you, sweetheart? Are you happy? It’s my fault. Do you hate me, darlin’?’
I was looking at the Cecily shrine – all those pictures she’d arranged with a precision you didn’t see anywhere else in the flat – and cringed at how exposed she was making herself. How vulnerable she sounded. If I were a teenage Cecily and all my mother did was to tell me how awful she was, would I want to speak to her or visit her? I think not. There was one picture I’d not noticed before. I picked it up. It was Grace – can’t have been more than twenty – sitting at a pub table with a pint and some friends, wearing a maroon leather jacket with her dark hair in a topknot. She looked so level, so normal, it was heartbreaking. She was looking straight into the camera with those eyes with the fiery amber centre. That fire was still there, it just needed reigniting.
‘I was a looker, weren’t I?’ Grace was standing at the living-room door. ‘I used to win beauty pageants when I was a girl. My Cec still could.’
‘It’s a lovely pic,’ I said. ‘Were you a student there?’
‘Yeah, Brighton Art College, darlin’. Best years of my life.’
She hovered in the open doorway. I put the photo, in its heart-shaped frame, down again.
‘Nice to talk to Cecily?’ I said. I wanted to give her a way in.
She paused, as if deciding which way she was going to play this. Then she said, ‘I’m going to make myself a coffee,’ and wandered into the kitchen. ‘Fancy one?’
‘That’d be lovely, Grace.’
I followed her into the tiny, cluttered kitchen. Two ashtrays, overflowing with fag ends, sat on the table, with a half-f bottle of Dr Pepper and the remains of a fish pie.
Grace took the kettle off the stand and filled it up at the tap.
‘That was my Cec on the phone,’ she said. ‘My Cecily, my beautiful girl.’ Her voice had changed. It was high and tense. ‘She was telling me all about this boyfriend she’s got – ’cause she’s very grown up now, fifteen last week! She was just talking and talking, I couldn’t get her off there. She’s so like me, you know. We’re peas in a pod, me and Cec. She says we could meet next week, maybe go shoppin’, up at the Elephant, maybe even Oxford Street, Selfridges – you know, a nice girly shopping trip …’ She stopped talking. The tap was still on and the kettle was overflowing. Her hand was shaking so much I could hear the silver bangles she wore, jangling like prison chains. She eventually turned the tap off, but her head was still bowed.
‘Grace,’ I said, softly. ‘I heard you – on the phone. Do you want to …?’
‘I lied,’ she said, turning to me, nervously biting her fingers, like a child who thinks they’re about to be told off. ‘About Cecily. I lied, darlin’. I haven’t seen her for years. She don’t even wanna talk to me.’
I took a step towards her, and put my hand on her shoulder.
‘I know,’ I said, gently, and I can’t imagine how hard that must be. But I’m going to try and help you.’
I’d known before I’d even met Grace, that’s the truth. Jezza had told me and, anyway, it was written in her notes. I suppose I could have come clean straightaway, not humoured her stories about the visits, her phone conversations with Cec, but when I saw how her face lit up when she talked about her, I couldn’t bring myself to. Also, I understood her need to talk about her as if everything she were saying were real. Her need to talk to Cec in her head. To somehow be close to her. That’s what I’d always done with Lily, after all. It had just been in letter form.
I also knew it was important for Grace to tell me in her own words what really happened and, working her way through several Vogues, she did.
After she’d had her breakdown, she’d been so ill, spent so much time in hospital, that Cecily had had to go and live with her grandma, Grace’s mum. There’d then been a court order taken out, meaning she could only see Cecily, supervised, for an hour a week but, over the years, she didn’t even get that, because Cecily didn’t want to see her, and when Grace rang her, she rarely wanted to speak to her.
‘I wasn’t fit to be a mum. I was living in a fantasy world. I was taking her to see priests, because I thought I’d contaminated her,’ Grace told me.
‘With what?’
‘With that nasty business he did to me,’ she said. ‘My stepfather. I thought that badness must have got through to her, because she was mine, you know …?’
Poor Grace. Here she was, only forty-one, with yellow teeth and yellow fingers, with the only person in the world she loves rejecting her. Life could have been so different, if perhaps she’d had more support. If the abuse she’d suffered had been a one off, not sustained over so many years. I was beginning to realise, I was one of the lucky ones, that so many people go through trauma in their lives, and it’s down to luck, really, and the people around you, as to how you come out the other side.
I shuffled right up to her, because she was crying. A solitary tear was rolling down her face.
‘You know none of this is your fault, Grace?’ I said. ‘I know we’ve been through this but it’s important you understand.’
‘Oh, it was, I was a terrible mother.’
‘No,’ I said, emphatically. ‘You weren’t. You got pushed to the limits, you had a breakdown. You were very poorly.’
She took my hand. ‘Lovely girl,’ she said, and squeezed it, then very gently brought it to my belly – eighteen weeks and swollen now – and put hers over it. ‘You look after that baby of yours. You need to be as healthy as you can be.’ I wondered whether passive smoking was really the way to go. ‘Not lose your marbles like me. End up in the nuthouse with mental-mind disease. Rattling when you walk, you’re on so many pills.’
‘Oh, Grace,’ I said. ‘Now come on, there’s lots more to you than your illness and I’m going to try and help you get back in touch with Cecily. It’s going to take some time, but we’re going to build up that relationship, that trust again and, do you know what the first step is towards that?’
‘Electric-shock therapy,’ she said.
‘No,
not
electric-shock therapy, Grace Bird. Happiness,’ I said. ‘We need to find what makes you happy, what you enjoy doing, because then you can talk to Cecily about new things you’ve done and not go over the past all the time.’
She gave me this very unconvinced look that made me laugh.
‘So, apart from Cecily, what
do
you enjoy?’
‘Photography,’ she said, quickly. ‘Taking photos, my camera. But I haven’t done it properly for so long.’
‘Then we shall take you out with your camera,’ I said.
‘Oh, I dunno.’
‘It’ll cheer you up,’ I said. ‘Relax you. Things will improve Grace, okay? Perhaps not get better completely, but things will improve.’
‘Thanks but … I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,’ she said, eventually. ‘Some people just don’t, darlin’.’
A few days after the meeting with Dr Love, Joe called me to ask if I would accompany him and Ethan to London Zoo the following week. Ethan still loved animals and Joe wanted to do something to cheer him up after losing his mum. I was more than happy to do anything that would help cheer up Ethan but, as the day approached, I became
more
excited about seeing Joe, at the same time as worrying what seeing him again might do to me, of what my heart might feel, no matter what my head was telling me.
And what was my head telling me? That it would be madness to try to make it work with Joe (properly, as a couple). That all that had to be kept in the past, where I had kept it the last sixteen years. (And I had survived perfectly well, hadn’t I? Even if my emotional wellbeing was measured against the clinically insane and I hadn’t had a successful relationship with a man since.) It was telling me that to revive that side of things would also revive so many painful memories. Just having him back in my life seemed to have brought on panic attacks. I couldn’t go out with him, even if I wanted to. It would tip me over the edge. And yet, I was becoming aware that Joe was the last person I thought of before I went to sleep and the first person I thought of when I woke up and that that feeling had only ever happened with one person in my life before, and what this meant.
I felt I was at the precipice of a slippery slope that once, the first time around, I had freewheeled down and now I was too scared to even stand close to the edge.
The other thing that had struck me, during the hours and hours I had spent pondering
Joe, Me and the Future
during the past weeks, was that even if we were to make a go of it, it would be nothing like getting together the first time around, would it (before the pregnancy and Lily, of course), when life was so carefree and fluid? Back then, Joe and I were professional romantics. Our favourite thing to do, especially on a grey, drizzly day, was to go to Brucciano’s ice-cream parlour on Morecambe prom, slip into one of the red leather booths, feed one another Knickerbocker Glories and snog. How shameless we were with our public displays of affection! How louche! Joe would regularly slip a hand up my back, or kiss me full on the lips in front of my dad, even his dad (who occasionally would still give Joe his ‘friendly’ sermon on temptation), his mates, the poor waitresses at Brucciano’s. He really couldn’t have cared less. I loved that about him. He was so unashamed, so proud of me, of us.
I imagined how it would be this time: we’d be a family (all being well) and part of me yearned for that – we could be so happy! – while the other part felt it was a risk I couldn’t take – for me, but most of all for Joe – because, what if I got so far and then had to pull back?
What if it was already too late?
In the days leading up to seeing him again, I’d got myself into quite a state and so, on the morning of the zoo visit, I literally sat myself in front of the mirror and gave myself a talking-to.
He’s asked you to the zoo, with his brother, not to marry him or to move in with him: nobody needs panic.
Once I’d done that, I felt a bit better. This was a chance to see Joe, my old friend, father of my child (minor detail), on neutral ground. And I knew he’d hinted that it wasn’t just Ethan who needed cheering up. Even if I couldn’t ‘be’ with Joe, I wanted to ‘be there’ for him. Whether we liked it or not, this baby would mean that we would be forever linked, so it made sense for us to spend time together.
‘Robbieeeee!’ I could hear someone calling my name as soon as I walked into the café at London Zoo where we’d arranged to meet, because Ethan needs to eat regularly and wanted breakfast there before we started. The café was called The Oasis – a joke if ever I’d heard one, since it more resembled the orang-utan enclosure than any kind of refuge (talk about feeding time at the zoo), with a gazillion under-fives running around, steam rising from their damp coats, chucking food, screaming from their highchairs.
‘Blake!’ one woman was shouting at a child – aged three? four? I’ve no idea – but he was standing on a chair, doing an impression of a gorilla. ‘I’m giving you five seconds to get down from that chair.’
Blake, quit while you’re ahead
, I thought.
My sister only gives her kids three
.
‘Robbieeee …!’ I looked around again, trying to identify where the voice was coming from and then spotted Ethan: he was standing at the back of the café, looking at everyone through a pair of binoculars. ‘I’m over here!’ he shouted.
I gave him a very small wave, not that there was really any point in trying to be inconspicuous now, and weaved my way towards him through the crowds.
‘Hi, Eth. What’s going on?’
‘I’m bird-watching,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Awesome. Well don’t get us arrested, will you?’ I said, putting my bag down on the table next to him. ‘Perhaps save the binoculars till we see some actual birds. I think the flamingos are around here somewhere. Where’s your brother?’
‘Gone to the toilet.’
About three seconds later, I felt a hand on my back. I turned around to find Joe grinning, inanely. I felt sure my face was doing similar things.
He threw an arm around my shoulder. ‘Hello. How are you doing since I last saw you?’ he said.
‘Good,’ I said, aware of his hand, golden-brown and slender fingered with just the right amount of dark hair at the wrist, hovering, just above my left breast. ‘Looking forward to this.’
Joe stood there, apparently unaware of his fingers near my breast. While I could be gauche in the wrong environment, Joe was so natural, so at ease with anyone and in any situation. You could sit Joe next to Bob Geldof or the Queen at a dinner party and he wouldn’t necessarily know the right thing to say, he’d just say what he wanted and they’d love him anyway. My grandma used to adore him. ‘No Joseph?’ she’d say, whenever I went to visit her (no effort made at all to hide the crushing disappointment in her voice).