I wanted that time, the preparation time, to go on forever. I didn’t want the play to ever come, and I started to hope that maybe Caitlin would get a cold, or lose her voice. That something would happen to save her.
I turned up half an hour before the play was due to start so that I could claim a seat at the front, and be there for her when she rushed into my arms. I still had to fight for my front row seat, mind you. The other mothers—the real ones that had husbands, and parkas, and who baked cakes for the fairs—had already put cardigans on chairs, claiming all of the front row seats in advance. Most of them disliked me anyway. I was an unknown quantity, turning up at the school gate in high heels and lipstick; with no obvious husband on the scene, I was viewed as a threat. I would stand there on my own at chucking-out time, pretending to be reading a book while we waited for the bell to go, the other mums all standing around in little huddles, and—in my head, at least—bitching about me. So it took quite a lot of nerve for me to pick up one of the reservation cardigans and put it on the second row behind me, but all I could think about was being there for Caitlin, right in front of her eyes when she needed me, ready to scoop her up in my arms and protect her.
“You can’t sit there,” one of the mums told me, a cake-baking PTA mafia mum—the sort that organizes tombolas and sells raffle tickets door-to-door to old ladies who really need the money for food.
“I think you’ll find that I can,” I told her, crossing my arms, settling my large bottom onto the tiny chair and giving her a look that said: “You can try and mess with me, bitch, but if you do, I’m taking both your arms and that bloody stupid bob hairdo with me.”
Scandalized, she marched away and left me in my prime seat. I could hear her shrilling to the other mums about what a terrible monster I was, and that it just “wasn’t the done thing,” right up until the lights went down and Miss Grayson struck up a tune on the piano. I clenched my fists, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands.
My poor Caitlin.
For the first few scenes, she wasn’t on stage. In any case, these were dominated by coughs and shuffles in the audience, and small children whispering to each other, or waving to their mothers, when they should have been delivering lines. I tried to relax, to tell myself that this was what school plays were all about, but I couldn’t. I knew Caitlin and I knew how bitterly disappointed she would be, and how crushed, and how much it would take for her to come back from this failure.
And then she walked on stage, in her little red shift dress and her cardboard crown, and she was…brilliant.
I sat open-mouthed while she delivered her lines with such imperious queenliness, making the crowd laugh at every punch-line, and boo when she demanded someone’s head must come off. She outshone every other child on the stage, which I know I would think, because she was my Caitlin, but it was true. My little girl had found her element, and she was completely at ease in it. Yes, when she came to sing her solo, her voice trembled; and instead of the loud, booming, queenlike voice she’d been using to deliver her lines, out came the small melodic voice of an eight-year-old girl. But nevertheless she sang, without faltering once. And when, as she finished, the audience burst into spontaneous applause, she beamed with such pride, right at me in the front row, and I knew then that Miss Grayson had been right, and I had been wrong.
I learned something about both Caitlin and myself that night. I learned that she was and is a work in progress—a human being evolving in the world—and that no one, least of all me, should try to guess what her limits are. Being a mother is about protecting your children from every conceivable thing that might cause them hurt, but it’s also about trusting them to live the best way for them, the best way they can; and trusting that even when you are not there to hold their hand, they can succeed.
8
caitlin
The girl spins slowly, languorously, around the pole, sliding down it so that she hangs upside down; her acrylic nails graze the grimy stage as she performs inverted arabesques, her thighs holding her in place until somehow she’s folded back on herself. Her arms wrapped around the pole, she kicks her legs out behind her, scissoring through the air as she circumnavigates the stage. At her feet, three or four men watch her slight frame contort and stretch. All eyes are fixed on her, on her meager breasts, barely there at all, her ribs straining against her taut, pale skin, her flat, boyish behind and her bored, vacant expression. At least this girl keeps her thong on.
I am glad I don’t work in a club where everything comes off, although I know that does happen in the private room. A lot goes on in there that I’m not supposed to know about, and so I do my best not to notice the other money-making opportunities available for the dancers if they want them, which most of them do now and then, treating it as casually as they might an extra nightshift stacking shelves at Tesco. I suppose that was what shocked me the most when I first took this job in the spring: the way that selling yourself for sex, one way or another, is so…doable for the dancers. In this club there are none of those well-bred, educated girls that you read about in Sunday supplements who decided to strip to be postmodern or pay their way through university. Here, every single dancer is a woman without choices, without a future that extends beyond the next dance. I saw them, saw their faces, and I got that. I feel the same: a girl without a future. No college degree, no boyfriend, and a fifty percent chance of carrying the gene that could give me a degenerative brain disease before I’ve even really worked out what I want from life. Mum did not know she had the gene, and neither do I yet. But now I know that I could find out whether or not I do have it, I don’t know if I want to. Because there is one choice I don’t want to make based on what might happen; there’s one choice I know I need to make based on the kind of person I am now.
And that’s the choice I made: to keep the baby.
Mum raised me on Austen and Brontë, and the notion of romantic love and sex as one—a pure, sacred thing. I grew up believing in true love, and that improbable coincidences would always save the day. Even in our little, uniquely female world, where there was no father or grandfather, no brothers or uncles, I still thought that when my hero came, he would be infallible: he would be my key to being happy. Like when Greg came into Mum’s life, and she just…relaxed. Like he was her missing piece, which she didn’t even know she was constantly searching for, but had now found.
Until Greg, though, Mum had always been careful to keep her private life private. There had never been any boyfriends sleeping over, or staying for tea—not that I knew of, anyway. No parade of men making halfhearted attempts to get to know me as I grew up. I wonder if it might have been better if she’d let me see that relationships come and go, that people can use you and hurt you, tell you one thing and then just change their minds in the blink of an eye. Maybe, maybe it would have helped if I didn’t believe so much in the idea of falling in love. For years as a little girl, I used to dream that the reason Mum chose to be alone was because she was still so in love with my father—that ultimate shadowy hero—who I felt certain would come back one day and reclaim us both. But he didn’t come back, and, if he’s thought about Mum at all during the last twenty years, I know now that not for a single moment of his life has he ever been preoccupied by me—because, for him, I don’t exist. All this time I’ve been worried I might somehow bump into him; but even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would only have mattered if, for all of these years, he’d been worried about somehow bumping into me too.
Of course I was hurt and angry when Mum told me the truth, but I don’t know why the news was quite so hard to take. I don’t know why it drove me out of the house, away from Mum and Esther, when they both really need me, and back here to this place that I had hoped I’d seen the last of. But I couldn’t stay there. Knowing that he’d never once worried about bumping into me, knowing that I didn’t exist for him, I couldn’t be at home and not be angry with her. And I can’t be angry with her.
Not when I have also care
lessly lost the father of my own baby.
I look at my watch. It’s just after three in the afternoon. The club is dead at this time of day during the week, except for the regulars or the occasional table of suited business guys—maybe a stray all-day-drinking stag or birthday do. Another twenty minutes and I’ll be ejected once again into the real world of car fumes, bus lanes, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the very real and pressing need to work out what to do…I want to go to Mum—I want to ask her for help—but I can’t. I can’t let her know what a mess I’m in.
The old man who comes in every pension day arrives at the bar, and I pump cheap imitation draft Coke into a shot of watered-down whisky for him, just the way he likes it. He turns on his bar stool and licks his lips as he watches the girl finish her act. It comes to something when being in here is a better prospect than being out there.
The dancer finishes, scoops up the scrap of material that constitutes her bikini off the floor, and walks off stage, tottering awkwardly in her high platforms. There is a lull between performances, and briefly the room is filled with coughs and sniffs. Even the smell of sweat and stale beer seems more acute in the silence. Ten more minutes and my shift will be over, and then what? Is today going to be the day I call home and tell them what I’ve done? Tell them not to worry, that I’m fine?
I know they will be worried sick, but I don’t know if I’m ready to see them yet. Especially not Mum. Mum always thinks I can do anything at all I set my mind to, and be brilliant at it, and I know she won’t judge me for what’s happened, but I also know she will be disappointed. And I don’t want the last thing she remembers feeling about me to be disappointment.
—
The first morning after I arrived back in London, I went to see Sebastian, just to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind about us. I know that is pathetic; I know how it sounds. If it were Becky saying the words to me, I’d be handing her a giant bar of Dairy Milk and a bottle of wine and telling her to forget about the loser. Easier said than done, though, isn’t it? To be grown up and rational. To know when something is really over—especially if it’s not really over for you. It seemed to me that someone couldn’t just appear to feel so much for you one minute, and then for that all to be gone the next. That just didn’t seem possible, or even proper. Love isn’t something that comes and goes, is it? Isn’t it something that, when you boil it right down to its essence, always has to be true? That’s what I always thought falling in love would be like, and then I went and did it and it was crap.
It had been easy enough to find Sebastian’s new house-share. All I’d had to do was to wander onto campus, ask around a bit. The same people I’d sat in lectures with until recently all smiled, nodded, and stopped to catch up, never guessing that I wasn’t meant to be there. My departure obviously wasn’t news. No one knew yet that I’d failed my exams—no one knew I’d dropped out—and although they all knew that Seb and I weren’t together anymore, none of them knew I was pregnant. Not even Seb, to be fair. Which was another reason I couldn’t stay at home and be angry with Mum. I couldn’t be angry with her for having done something I was thinking about doing myself right now. Her choice back then made me furious and hurt me, and it had certainly been the wrong thing to do, but it was a choice I now understood, all the better after seeing Seb again.
The thing I had most wanted from him was a hug, but from the moment he opened the door, he was pissed off that I was there.
“What do you want, Caitlin?” he asked wearily, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said. I tried not to cry, but I did, just like that. Stupid, red-faced, noisy snotty sobs that went from naught to hysterical in under six seconds. “I wanted to see you. I miss you.”
“Don’t miss me,” Seb said irritably. “I’m not worth missing.”
“Can I come in?” I pleaded, like some bloody girl. “After everything that’s happened, I just need to talk, and you are the only one I can talk to about it.”
Seb sighed heavily, looking back over his shoulder toward where the pounding sound of some shoot ’em up video game was coming from.
“There’s nothing else really to talk about, is there?” he said, allowing me into the hallway. He did not shut the front door. “We had a thing, and it’s over now.” He pursed his lips, unable to look directly at me. “I’m sorry about the…you know. It must have been shit for you. But…it’s time to let it go, babe, okay? We’ve both got to get on with our lives now.”
“Don’t you care at all?” I sobbed, so stupidly. Like I wasn’t even me, I grabbed hold of him, grabbed his T-shirt in my fists, wailing, hoping that he’d fold me in his arms and kiss my snot-soaked face. Like that was ever going to happen.
The reason I’d gone to see him—the other reason apart from hoping he did still love me—was to tell him that I didn’t go through with the termination: the termination that he hadn’t come along to with me, because he’d had an important university rugby match. Which, by the way, I’d said I was fine about, when what I should have said was, “You are an unbelievable dick, Sebastian.” But I couldn’t make myself, because I still thought that maybe, maybe, he might change his mind and want me back again. I make myself sick. If I were a guest on The Jeremy Kyle Show, or something, I’d throw a shoe at my head.
When the day came, I just couldn’t do it. I got up, had a shower, got dressed, picked up my bag, and then…I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, this is the dress that you will have worn to the termination of your pregnancy. And just knowing that meant I couldn’t go through with it. Which surprised me. I believe in the right for women to choose, but it never occurred to me that if I were in that situation, I would choose life—even though, actually, when you think about it, it’s completely obvious: Mum chose me. Instead, I curled up into a small ball in my bed, folding myself up as tightly as possible. I closed my eyes and stayed very still, as though somehow I might be able to wish myself out of time and stay just like that forever, with the tiny essence of life inside me, and pretend I hadn’t just found out that Mum was desperately ill, or that there was a fifty percent chance I might have a gene that would make me more likely to develop early-onset Alzheimer’s too, and that if I did, there was also a fifty percent chance of passing it on to my child. I did my best to un-know those things, because facing the future was hard enough, and I wanted my choice to be made by the person I am now, and not the person I might be one day. It wasn’t that simple, though, and I just wanted one other person to tell me I was doing the right thing.
I was going to tell Sebastian all of that, thinking he might suddenly feel the same, and we might have this baby together. When I looked at his face, though, I knew that the last thing he wanted to know was that I was still pregnant. Was that the look Mum had seen on my father’s face when she broke up with him?
“What does it matter if I care or not?” Seb said, glancing back over his shoulder again, toward where the fun was. “What point is there going over and over it? Really, Cat, pull yourself together. You’re not doing yourself any favors.”
And that last look he gave me…It was such a cold look; it was the look of a boy who was entirely detached from me and us, and everything we might have been. I couldn’t stop crying, the tears rolling down my face while he just stood there and looked at me.
“Christ.” Seb shook his head, closing the door two inches. “You are too much, don’t you see that? I did like you, at first, but you…you killed it. And I’m sorry about everything else, but that’s not my fault, Cat. You’re the one who didn’t revise…. I passed my exams.”
He slammed the door shut.
I stood there for a moment or two more, until I’d stopped crying and the bitter wind had dried the tears on my face, and I thought, right, that’s it, then, I am not going to waste another single second on him—even though I knew I would do, but thinking it was a start. And then I went to work, back to my job behind the bar at a strip club, the job I had got just before the end of the spring term,
and the job I got back easily when I dropped in to see my boss with my new, slightly improved, bigger bust. He’s a total pervert, but I can handle him.
—
I look at my watch again. The next shift should be here any minute now, and then it’s back to Becky’s, where she will stay in her bedroom all evening with her boyfriend, and I’ll sit in the living room alone, wondering why I’m not at home, why I haven’t told my mum any of this, and why I always mess everything up.
I look up as the beaded curtain at the entrance jangles, expecting to see Mandy lumber her way into view. But it’s not Mandy, in her faux-fur coat and thick fake eyelashes, who tumbles into the room so dramatically and noticeably that even the dancer on the stage turns to look. It’s my mother, and right behind her is Gran.
I turn around and head for the office behind the bar, hoping that somehow I might be able to hide from them, maybe even squeeze out of the tiny window in the truly grim unisex staff toilet. But they follow me into the small dingy office a few moments later, and find me standing in the corner, just standing there like an idiot.
Gran looks me up and down, sees the Venus logo on my too-tight T-shirt, and breathes a sigh of relief. “Well, at least she’s got her top on,” she says.
I want to laugh out loud. They’ve come down here to find me—my mum and gran, working together as a team, like some grizzly old cop about to retire for good when she’s paired up against her will with a maverick upstart to work one last case together. Seeing my mum and my gran, both looking worried and cross, but here together, is somehow sort of wonderful and funny.
The Day We Met Page 12
