by Sophie Duffy
We don’t have to wait long.
‘Just coming.’ I hear a voice that I haven’t heard in a while. Jackie. So she lives here still. Rachel has done well. Unless... but I don’t want to think about ‘unless’. I won’t. They will be here. They will be here.
As she battles with the lock and then pulls back the door, we can see her face, slightly older, but still definitely Jackie, though she’s lost her brassy blonde hair and appears altogether more conservative than I remember.
‘I was expecting Bob, not you Vicky. And Martin, isn’t it? You’d best come in.’
We say nothing, but go in the door, straight into her living room and there in front of Friends are Jessica and Jeremy, side by side on a wicker sofa, the remains of a fish and chip supper on their laps. They blink up at us, guiltily, but say nothing, waiting for the telling off that must be coming their way any second now. But Martin surprises us all and swoops over to his son and does something I have wanted to see him do for months. He kneels down in front of Jeremy and clutches hold of him in a hug that might possibly go on forever.
Jessica looks up at me and says simply: ‘Don’t be cross with him. I wanted to find my mum and he helped me.’
Her mum, Jackie, is fighting back the tears, saying how sorry she is, that she was going to call us as soon as they’d finished their tea and gone to sleep. She just wanted Jessica to herself for a short time, before she was taken back to London.
‘But you can come too, Mum,’ says Jessica, with a child’s simplicity.
I have to be the grown-up. I have to be hard. ‘We’d better call Bob. He’s out of his mind.’ I don’t tell them he didn’t come because he was so distraught, blaming Jackie, blaming himself, and unfit to drive or come with us, that we’d persuaded him to sit tight at home with Tamarine.
And so I make a phone call that I know will give a father the best news of his life, but knowing there is no such thing as a simple, uncomplicated happy ending, whatever Steve might say.
March 23rd 1978
Martin is being a pig. A bigger pig than normal. He shouts at me all the time and tells me I’m a stupid little girl whenever I open my mouth.
Mum came to see me in my bedroom. She said gosh it’s tidy in here and I said thank you. She said that Martin was upset because Heidi was moving away. I asked her where and she said to boarding school so she wouldn’t be able to see Martin anymore. Martin had said they could write to each other and see each other in the holidays but she had said don’t bother. She said it was easier if they finished. So they are finished and I am sad because I liked Heidi. But I can’t tell Martin that because he will say I am a stupid little girl.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sunday 23rd March Easter Sunday
Very early in the morning and I am in the garden. In my nightie. I am Vicky, the Easter Bunny.
And why am I hiding cheap chocolate eggs behind drain pipes and under bushes? Because there’s an egg hunt this afternoon. In honour of the prodigals’ return. We will kill the fatted calf (pre-killed actually, from Waitrose courtesy of Claudia) and we will hang out the bunting (a packet of balloons from the corner shop).
Dad appears suddenly beside me in his dazzling white dressing gown. My dad, the gardener. Seeing him there, his knobbly knees, his frailty, I start to weep. Big, fat, snot-bubbling-out-of-nostrils, wet-faced, beyond-embarrassing sobbing. He opens his arms to me and I go to them, like a child, a little girl. I let him wrap me up and hold me until, much later, I am still and quiet and relieved.
He offers me a hanky from his pocket and, after a quick inspection, I give my nose a good blow. ‘I often think that relief is the best feeling in the world.’
‘You could be right, Vicky-Love.’ He’s managed to extricate himself from me and is passing a critical eye over my beds.
‘I’ll give you a hand later. Get them dug over for those runner beans.’
‘With one hand?’
‘It’s surprising what you can do with one hand.’
‘Dad, please.’
‘I’m famished. You got any bacon? Pat’s doing a fry-up and she can’t find any.’
The story according to Olivia: I am Olivia. I am three-years-old. I live in Penge with my mummy, my daddy, my big sister, Rachel, and my baby sister, Imogen. I go to pre-school and soon I will go to big school when I am four. When I am at big school Rachel will be at a more bigger school. We have a cousin called Jeremy. He lives with us sometimes but mummy says ‘it will all blow over’. She says Uncle Martin should grow up. A long time ago, before I was born and came out of my mummy’s tummy, I had a brother called Thomas. He died. That makes me sad. He is in heaven. So is Grandma. I don’t remember her neither. She looks after Thomas. She takes him for walks on the clouds in a shiny silver pram. I wish he was here with us in our house. I would like a brother I could talk to. It would be like having Jeremy all the time. He might play the guitar or the drums or the recorder. When I am five I want to play the organ like Mrs Filler. Mum said I’d probably be as good as Mrs Filler. I think she was making a joke but she wasn’t smiling when she said it. She’d had a busy day. She’s always having a busy day. She says ‘hang on’, ‘in a minute,’ ‘give me a chance’. When I am growed up I don’t want babies. Unless Mary Poppins comes to help out. But Mary Poppins isn’t real, she’s made up in your imagination like the bogey man. I think Father Christmas might be made up too but when I asked Jessica last Christmas, she said I better watch it or I won’t get as many presents. So I didn’t say nothing. Jesus isn’t made up. I know he is real because I just do. I said a prayer for Jessica and Jeremy to be found, all safe, and they were. Uncle Martin will be cross with Jeremy. But they might buy him a present. They said he can have a new cello but I know he wants a tent so he can go camping with Jessica. Jessica is his girlfriend. Uncle Martin had a girlfriend but that was very naughty because he has a wife as well. That’s my Auntie Claudia who is the prettiest lady in the whole world and she has lots of shoes...
Olivia is sitting at the kitchen table, doing a sticky picture, chattering away to the police officer while I clear up after a mammoth breakfast session. Martin and Claudia and Jeremy are due round any second and Jeremy will have to be interviewed to find out why they went, as well as everything else, but the police officer says she won’t keep us long. I tell her she’s welcome at the Easter service that Desmond, is taking – his last one as he’s just announced his impending retirement.
The officer looks doubtful, says she needs to get home as her shift is over. Then she says: ‘I’ve often wondered about doing one of them Alpha courses.’
I manage to smile and it doesn’t hurt.
I leave them to it for a moment, to check up on Imo who has managed to roll over onto her stomach. She is huffing and puffing, trying to keep her head up, like she’s Private Benjamin. I grab her up off the floor and tell her what a clever girl she is, though life will be quite different from now on, now she is beginning to catch up with her sisters.
‘For you,’ Olivia says, as I lug Imo back into the kitchen for her bottle. She hands over the picture. PC Wilson blushes, gushing a thank you, that’s really kind.
I can make out the cast of The Bill, hacked out of Pat’s TV Times, drowning under a deluge of PVA.
‘And talking of families, what about your mummy?’ PC Wilson whispers conspiratorially, winking at me in a way that would make me want to brain her with my iron had she not been so helpful over the last twenty-four hours. ‘What’s special about her?’
‘Well,’ says Olivia as I wait for the longest time. But I should fear not. She is an angel. ‘She’s the best mummy in the whole world of course.’ She folds her arms, her angel wings, in an amazingly patronisingly way for a three-year-old, as if she pities PC Wilson, whose mother, if she has one, must be of an inferior quality.
But I can’t stay smug for long. I have a feast to prepare. The fast is over. And the fatted calf – a sumptuous-looking sirloin of British beef – must go in the oven if we are to eat before sundown.<
br />
I have a family. It isn’t perfect but it is mine. I will cherish them all – those that are here, and those that stay quiet in my heart and memory – and be thankful that it never got as bad for me as it got for poor old Job.
But then, as Steve likes to say, look what happened to Job in the end. So I did. It’s all written down, helpfully in the Book of Job, in the Old Testament, nestled between Esther and the Psalms.
But that’s Job’s story. What about Steve’s?
The story according to Steve: It was the call-out to Dartford that did it. I didn’t really want to go, it was quite a way but it sounded like a genuine emergency and Vick was keen for me to get back to work so I got in the van and I went, a tortuous journey, Saturday morning. But I never got there. Had to ask Craig to get that one in the end.
Steve tells this to PC Wilson who is still hanging around our kitchen, unable to drag herself away. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘What happened next?’
I get to the A2. Past Bexley. There’s a lot of traffic and the rain’s coming down. I’m in the fast lane, behind a pick-up, piled up with all sorts of gardening junk, like they’re on their way to the tip. It looks a bit dicey, the way it’s shoved on, a wheelbarrow at the back of it all. I keep half an eye on the wheelbarrow, wondering if we should get one and then I get annoyed at myself for thinking such a thing. How can I be considering a new wheelbarrow? How can I be getting on with life? So soon? It’s only been a few weeks.
The rain comes down faster, there’s splash-back from the pick-up, and I put the wipers on full whack.
Then I hear a voice. Clear as if someone’s in the van behind me. I check the mirror but there’s no-one there, course there’s no-one there. The voice says: Move over. I reckon I must’ve imagined it, the wind whirling through a gap in the van, tools shifting in the back. But it doesn’t sound like any of those things. And it can’t account for this feeling I’m getting. Then the voice says it again, louder, more insistent: Move over. And this time I don’t think. There’s no time for thinking. Instead I feel my hand move to the indicator, my eyes flick to the mirror, and I am moving over, to the middle lane but I don’t drop back like I should, my foot stays down on the pedal and I keep even with the driver of the truck, the rain pouring so I can’t hardly see out the window.
Then there’s this loud bang.
I look from wing mirror to rear view. The wheelbarrow has flown off the pick-up. It’s taken off, rising above the road, bouncing backwards through the space where I was, just a moment’s breath before. My heart’s like a frightened budgie trapped in my ribcage, beating about, trying to escape. Where the hell is it going now? But I can’t think these things. I can’t speak them. There’s no time. The wheelbarrow, a huge metal bird, carries on bouncing, skidding and sliding sideways, backwards, dodging a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier, a red Micra, obstacles in a bizarre It’s a Knockout race. It skids all the way across the lanes and ends up like a twisted sculpture by the side of the road. All these thoughts, all these movements pass in a matter of seconds. The traffic carries on as if nothing’s happened, as if it were a dream but the clang of metal, the sight of the flying wheelbarrow, the voice, all repeat over and over until I can get off the road at the next exit.
I find a pay phone, by a row of shops, the rain easing up by now. I call the police. Tell them about the pick-up, the wheelbarrow, giving descriptions and locations and my address. Then I sit back in the van. I sit still, the window open to help me breathe, and I wonder at what just happened. My heart’s settled down but all my senses are fired up. I notice the drops of rain on my windscreen, no longer falling but sliding down. Each one stands out, unique and clear. I hear the sound of a man and woman passing by, her heels on the pavement, his deep voice asking her something. I smell the newly-cleaned pavements, the heat washed off. The washing powder waft out of the launderette. I touch my face with my hands, to check I’m still here. The heat of my cheeks. The stubble poking through my skin. The taste of blood in my mouth, where I must’ve bitten my lip. And this other feeling. A sixth sense maybe. A gut feeling. That something has happened. Something I can’t define. Something supernatural. But I shake off the feeling, switch on the radio, try to pull myself together, wonder what I’m doing here when I have a job to get to.
Then.
I look up, out of the open car window and see a young woman coming out of the launderette pushing a toddler, maybe eighteen-months-old, in one of those umbrella buggies. She’s carrying a big bag of washing, a stripy plastic zip-up bag you get in the pound shop and the boy is clutching a rubber ball. She stops outside and murmurs something, more to herself than the child. She swipes at her hair, which has come loose from a pony tail and puts down the bag. Then she leaves the toddler in the pushchair while she darts back inside to get whatever it is she’s forgotten.
But the toddler isn’t buckled up properly. I watch him shrug his arms out of the shoulder straps. He looks surprised, like he didn’t expect that to happen so easily. Then he inches forward on his bottom and sits on the edge of the pushchair, swinging his legs, looking behind him for a glimpse of his mother. But she hasn’t re-emerged from the shop. I will her to hurry up. Hurry up. I know I’ll have to do something if he gets himself out the buggy.
He drops his ball. We watch it bounce across the pavement. He jumps down onto the pavement and I get myself out of the car. But he’s quick. He toddles with surprising speed and determination after his ball. Towards the road. Not a busy road but there’s this sharp bend. I have to be faster. I’m running towards him and right then I hear a shattering scream. A mother’s scream. That sound I never wanted to hear again. I’ve nearly reached him, watching his little body bent forward in concentration. The scream makes him stop and turn round, balanced on the edge of the kerb. He wobbles, like in a cartoon, teetering on the brink of a cliff. Which way will he go? He falls towards the road. I lurch forward like I have super human strength and speed.
I can do this.
I can save him.
His coat is in my hand. I pull and he falls backwards onto me, just as a car speeds round the corner. The driver has no idea, carrying on as if nothing has happened. But my life will never be the same again.
The mother cries and thanks me and the relief in her eyes makes me cry too, like I’ve not cried since Thomas’ death. She looks at me as if I am unhinged and asks if she can do anything to help, all the while clasping her son to her like she’ll never ever let him go.
I get back in the car and call Craig. Tell him he’ll have to take the job. I’m going home. I drive away, Dartford behind me, back onto the A2, and then ahead –
– a rainbow...
I let the car take me back to Penge. But when I reach the high street, the car doesn’t take me home – that sounds stupid, I know – but I have switched off, gone on automatic. I end up in the car park of St Hilda’s, my hand taking the keys out of the ignition, my feet getting me out of the car and across the car park and into the church which happens to be open so that one of the ladies can do the flowers. She’s sticking long yellow crysanths into a huge vase, lots of tangled greenery and the smell is the most beautiful thing I have ever breathed in. Like I’ve entered heaven on earth.
And there’s the vicar. There’s Desmond turning to welcome me.
This is what I will come to know as my mountain top experience, though it happened in the London Basin. Desmond knows me from the funeral, from our children’s christenings. He sits me down as he can see I am shaking. He tells me I’ve had an epiphany. I say that sounds painful. He says, with a simple lack of humour, such moments can be painful but they can lead to great peace and a wonderful joy.
Revelation: If I hadn’t survived the wheelbarrow flying off the back of the pick-up, then I wouldn’t have been there to save the boy. It is not all random – a pack of cards thrown into the air to fall where they will. A load of timber washed ashore. This was planned so I would be in that place at that time. I moved over when I was told to move over. And I su
rvived. So did the occupants of the Vauxhall Cavalier and the Micra. So did the little boy. Another set of parents didn’t have to go through what we’ve been through. If Thomas hadn’t died it is quite possible that I wouldn’t have gone off to Dartford that Saturday morning. We would have spent the day together. The park, shopping, a day out to Worthing. Other people would have died in his place. Other sons. He didn’t die in vain.
I didn’t change immediately but there was a shift. I came to realise that God doesn’t want bad things to happen. God listens when we cry out. Even Jesus cried out. Why have you forsaken me? God knows what it is like to lose a son. My pain is His pain. The cross is His way of saying: I know how you feel. People say it’s all part of God’s plan but that’s not exactly a great comfort when you’re in the deep dark pit of depression. But I began to see there was something beyond me and bigger than me. I began to think of all the things that have happened in my life that might not have happened. All the disasters in the world that have been divinely averted. And I began to feel that peace seep into my bones and spread throughout me. And peace was followed, surprisingly, unexpectedly, by joy.
PC Wilson shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Steve remembers he has an audience. For a while he was back in the van, driving across his mountain top. Now he’s back in our kitchen. ‘I’m sorry, Vick,’ he says, out the blue.
‘Sorry? What’ve you done now?’
‘I’m sorry my experience changed your life. I don’t think I took you into consideration in this, not like I should have done. I mean I thought this would be a better life, for all of us. I still do. Only I haven’t thought enough about you... You know, you don’t have to do this curate’s wife thing. I’ll stop it all now. Go back to plumbing. I can be a lay preacher. There’s all sorts of voluntary work I can do in the church. I want you to be happy. And I want to honour you.’
