I was at the back of the meeting room. Kaye was standing with Parv and Leon near the window at the front.
‘As I’ve said before,’ Jeremy was saying, ‘it is not advisable to cross professional boundaries because, to be completely and honestly frank’ (he was a fan of tautology was Jezza; what you could say in ten words, he could string out to fifty) ‘with some people, especially people not exactly hot on boundaries themselves, you give them an inch and they take a mile.’
There was a long pause, during which I considered just how much of a tossy comment that was. When I looked over at Kaye, to see if she was thinking the same thing, she was shaking her head at me, doing that thing with her fingers that says,
I’m watching you
.
‘What?’ I mouthed back to her.
‘Right, Kingy?’ But then I had to look at Jeremy because he was talking straight at me. ‘You have to remember you can be friendly, but you are not their
friends
, okay?’
So who were their friends? I wondered. Because I knew for a fact that Grace, that John Urwin, that Levi and Sam – just to name a few off the top of my head – saw nobody else except me, sometimes for as long as a week. And what could be worse for their mental health? Us buying them the odd magazine, at risk of ‘crossing boundaries’, or loneliness and isolation (which so far seemed to me to be the biggest contributor to people losing the plot)?
Kaye demanded a kitchen debrief as soon as we left the meeting.
‘So what’s going on?’ she said. ‘Because you look totally and utterly pleased with yourself!’
When I’d caught sight of myself in the reflection of the bus window that morning, it was true, I was actually grinning. ‘Well, me and Joe,’ I said, ‘we sort of got it together this weekend.’
‘“Sort of” got it together?’ asked Kaye, her ice-blue eyes narrowing. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, we decided to make a go of it. Me, him, the baby. To be a couple.’
Kaye gasped with delight. ‘What, like a normal couple?’
‘Yes, I guess so. So far as Joe and I are ever able to be a normal couple.’
She gave me one of her rib-cracking hugs.
‘Well thank God for that,’ she said. ‘Thank God, you’ve stopped being so, well,
odd
. I mean, clearly, you adore him, the rate you go on about him, and you’re having his baby – so, you have to agree it does sort of make sense for you to go out with him as opposed to someone else?’
‘Well yes, yes, I suppose it does,’ I said sheepishly.
She hugged me again. ‘I’m so pleased for you.’
She did look inordinately pleased, it had to be said, and again it occurred to me: oh, this is how it’s supposed to go. You meet someone, you fall in love with them, you have their baby. Everyone’s happy. Sometimes I had to remind myself of that.
Kaye handed me a mug of tea and offered me the biscuit tin. I took a chocolate digestive. ‘I’m taking three Oreos in celebration and commiseration,’ she said.
‘Why commiseration?’ I said.
‘Well, because I’m going to have to find a new partner to move into the hippy commune with now, aren’t I? You’re going to abandon me for a country pile and dinner parties in the Home Counties. Boden catalogue. Suburbia. Normality?’
I snorted then.
‘Er, no, this is Joe we’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Joe doesn’t do country pile in the Home Counties. Or suburbia. Or normal. Joe is a lot of things, but I wouldn’t say “normal” figures particularly highly. I’ll introduce you soon. You’ll see what I mean.’
Later that day, Jeremy sidled up to me in the corridor: ‘Hi, Kingy,’ he said, all friendly like he’d just thought of this as he was passing rather than the fact he’d been gagging to get me all day. ‘Look, I, er … I know you’re a fantastic nurse, Robyn, and I’d never question that, but I just think it would be an idea not to get overly emotionally involved with clients, especially Grace.’
‘If you’re talking about the photography magazine or our plans to go out and take some pictures,’ (I’d mentioned this to Jezza briefly, before) ‘I’m confident it’ll help her. Photography is what Grace is passionate about. It makes her happy. I think it could be really good.’
Jeremy sucked air in between his teeth, as if to say,
Right love, whatever you say
,
but actually said, ‘It’s just that camera of hers, I worry it’s what gets her into trouble. I worry it makes her worse, because she gets overexcited, she starts annoying the staff and the patients.’
‘Yes, when she’s psychotic and ill and in hospital,’ I said, trying not to get irate. ‘But what if she wasn’t admitted in the first place? What if she could get to some point of recovery, of being settled enough, where she wasn’t admitted every few months?’
Jeremy looked at me. I could tell he was thinking:
Here she goes again, idealistic, naive, wants to save the world
. But truly, I didn’t believe it was that hard to make a difference to someone’s life. He could be so defeatist sometimes.
‘Also, I’m hoping that encouraging her with the photography will go some way to helping her with her relationship with her daughter,’ I said, ‘Cecily.’
‘Ah, yes, Cecily,’ he said. ‘That
is
very sad.’
I explained to him what Grace and I had discussed when we did our care plan: that one way for her to re-engage with Cecily was to chat to her about photography, something new that she was also interested in – hopefully working up to going to an exhibition together; something Mum and daughter could do together that would help their relationship to move forward. Jeremy touched me on the arm. I could tell I’d lost him.
‘You’re doing a fine job,’ he said. ‘Just … just be clear about your boundaries. And don’t expect too much from Grace. Oh, and Robyn?’ he added, as I was about to walk off. ‘Is everything okay with the baby?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘And you?’ he said. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Couldn’t be much better really,’ I said; and it couldn’t, not where Joe and I were concerned. All I had to do now was to stay perfectly sane. Keep my wits about me, not let my demons get the better of me. I needed to stay perfectly sane.
It’s Christmas Day and Kilterdale beach is empty, but for a man walking his dog, wearing a Russian hat. I am here with Mum. We are wearing swimming costumes – mine red, Mum’s pink – and we are clambering over the rocks of the stone jetty, which curves sharp as a rhino horn towards the water. The sea is leaden grey; there is just a band of golden wintry sun, pushing itself out, like light under a door, turning the salt marsh at either side of us into a golden tapestry. It’s December but I can’t feel the cold; all I can feel is the smooth certainty of the stone beneath my bare feet and the secret thrill of doing this annual ritual with just Mum. The King Christmas Day Swim. Arms outstretched for balance, we quicken our pace now. There is the songful, soulful call of curlews and, every now and again, a little yelp from Mum in front as she negotiates the rocks with the litheness of a dancer. And now our bare feet are slapping the sand as we run towards the silver sea dancing with shards of light; Mum in front in her pink bathing suit, her hair fanning behind her. She turns around, her mouth open, smiling. She’s wearing huge white sunglasses; she looks like a film star. I smile back and run to catch her up, but although I have my hands stretched out and my lungs are screaming with the effort, I still can’t reach her. Suddenly, she enters the sea and then, she’s gone, just disappears beneath the water like a mermaid, and I am standing in the middle of a vast, empty beach, as if there was never anyone else there in the first place.
When I wake up, I am crying. My pillow is wet with tears.
Joe was coming down pretty much every weekend. We had a routine: on the Friday, I’d meet him at King’s Cross Station. We’d go to the gilded, high-ceilinged bar at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. He’d have a cocktail and I’d have a virgin cocktail, and we’d make a plan about which of the AA list we were tackling that weekend. Of course, after about five minutes of that, we’d just end up talking about our lives: work, our families … and, sometimes, we’d talk about Lily, what happened.
It was a huge relief, like someone lifting a great slab of concrete that had been sitting on my chest for years. For sixteen years, I’d barely said a word about my baby, for fear of raking up the pain, or making people feel uncomfortable, and now I was able to and, better still, with the only other person in the world who had known her. One Friday, however, we were sitting on the high stools at the Renaissance bar, me saying how I felt when we did this, like Juliette Binoche, in some French film about a torrid affair, when Joe stirred his Old Fashioned, took a sip and said to me: ‘Why did you just run away all those years ago?’
I’d known it was coming but I still felt in no way prepared.
‘Was it because I asked you to marry me? Was that it? Did I just scare you off?’
I felt sure I’d gone very pale.
‘I’m not having a go or anything. I just want to know, because you never really told me.’
Disappointingly, and because I was caught completely off guard, I found myself on the defensive. ‘Well, asking someone to get engaged at sixteen
is
quite scary,’ I said, even though I knew fine well that in other circumstances I would have been ecstatic to get engaged to Joe. ‘But especially because of everything that happened. Losing Mum, then losing Lily. I was sixteen, Joe, I couldn’t cope …’
And what about me? Don’t you think I lost all that too?
I imagined he was thinking.
‘We were so young,’ I stuttered on. The echoey clattering of china and chatter seemed to be drowned out by the sudden silence between us.
‘I would have stayed with you,’ he said, looking up at me. He said it so quietly, I barely caught what he said. ‘We could have worked things through together. The only person who understood how I felt was you, and you weren’t there. Sometimes I feel like we wasted, we missed out on sixteen years, all those years, we could have been together.’
I tried to say something but the breath caught in my throat.
‘You see, I’ve always known,’ he said. I was looking into his eyes – those soulful, hazel eyes he has, thinking,
Me too. ME TOO! But things happened, awful things that I couldn’t cope with, I couldn’t tell you. ‘
I’ve always known you were the girl for me. When I saw you at that stupid wedding with Brendan fucking Yeomans, whatever he’s called, I literally couldn’t stand it and that was
nine years ago
and, I realize, nothing’s changed, Robbie. Nothing. I look back on all those years, all the girlfriends I’ve had, Kate, who I even lived with, they’ve never come even close, and I realize I …’
I put my drink on the bar and my hand on the side of his face. ‘Sssh,’ I said. My heart was beating wildly. ‘Let’s not go back over all that. We got each other back again, that’s all that matters. We have to concentrate on the here and now.’ And even as the words left my mouth, I felt like a fraud, because I knew how much I wasn’t able to do that; how, essentially, I wasn’t practising what I preached, because no matter how much I wanted this, this future with Joe, there was still our past, those fossils between the layers and layers of us. It would always be there, I just didn’t know if I could ever get over it.
We had a kiss, a hug and nothing more was said. We went back to talking about the AA list – safe ground – but I was still reeling. What he’d said had thrown me off the balance I’d found during the past two and a half months. A feeling of promise – despite the turmoil going on in my head, despite my demons of the past coming back to haunt me – that I felt was worth fighting for. The list was helping me focus and Joe was so good for me. In the four years since noticing the damp in the hallway of my flat, I’d got as far as getting several workmen over, all of whom gave me a different diagnosis, only succeeding in confusing me further. In six weeks, Joe had got his mate over (Joe being one of those people who has useful mates in all corners of the globe), who’d sussed it was a leak in the bathroom and fixed it. So now I was in the process of getting a new bathroom, courtesy of the insurance pay-out I’d been promised from the council, but had to wait for the walls to dry out, so the new, gleaming white toilet was sitting in my hallway and I was having to flush the loo with a bucket.
Joe wanted to put me in a hotel: ‘No mother carrying a child of mine,’ he said, ‘will be flushing her poo down the bog with a bucket.’
‘When you’re used to clearing away people’s skiddy pants all day,’ I assured him, ‘believe me, my flat is five-star luxury.’ It seemed that the groundwork we’d put down all those years ago meant that we’d reached a kind of bodily function intimacy very quickly, Joe and I. And the toilet in the kitchen didn’t bother me one bit. Even Eva’s bags weren’t bothering me as much as usual, because – try as I might to stop it happening – I was in love with Joe all over again. I wondered whether I’d ever
not
been in love with him, in fact, and it thrilled and terrified me in equal measure. My logical mind was telling me
don’t do it
,
because
I knew if I were to lose him again – twice – I’d have lost him forever
.
I knew there was a good chance I would lose him, too, when he knew everything, because he would
have
to know everything. I’d have to tell him, I knew that now. I knew that the minute I kissed him on my bed when we’d got back from the zoo. I’d made that choice. But then I’d see him walking, so poised, with that half-smile, in the evening sunshine, down platform five; I’d watch his face as he talked; how animated he was, the way his chest kind of puffed out when he got excited – Joe actually needed to take in more oxygen, he was so excited by life – and I knew it was worth the risk.
We’d had the twenty-week scan at twenty-one weeks and we knew it was a girl. We both cried, although hopefully this time the sonographer didn’t think we were quite so overemotional. Dr Love said everything was as it should be. ‘Nine weeks,’ we’d say to one another, then, ‘Eight weeks,’ ‘Seven weeks,’ … that’s all we needed to get through. That’s all we needed to get to twenty-eight weeks, when the chances of survival, Dr Love had said, were ninety per cent. Normal if we got past thirty. Thirty weeks pregnant! Imagine that. When Joe and I lay cocooned in bed together and I could see the silhouette of his face in the half-light, the rise and fall of his chest as he slept, I doubted I’d ever felt happier, or more certain about the fact that he was the right person. And yet, the panic attacks were getting worse. It felt like the truth, the past, was running towards me like lava and I couldn’t run away fast enough. Everything was going to be subsumed.