“How are you feeling?” I ask Caitlin.
“You mean, aside from tired?” Caitlin says. “Sort of better, now that it’s all out. Relieved, I suppose.”
“Gran’s making you appointments,” I tell her, even though I am fairly sure she knows it already. I tell people things more than once, so that I can also remind myself. Load and reload my short-term memory, like constantly filling up a bucket with holes in it. The opposite of bailing out my brain. “GP tomorrow, hospital, and then…”
I stop talking, and Caitlin keeps her eyes straight ahead as she pulls into the shopping center car park. She doesn’t want to talk about the pregnancy; even though she’s decided to keep the baby, she doesn’t want to discuss it. Perhaps it’s because she thinks it’s insensitive to talk about the future, when that word has so little meaning for me. Or perhaps it is because she is so uncertain about what the future will mean to her. We have never talked about it, about the possibility that this affliction might be lying in wait for her and her children. That alone would be enough to make anyone hesitant about what may come.
“Where shall we start?” I ask her, determined to be cheerful, as we head into the first store. “Dreary Black Goth Clothes ‘R’ Us? Or maybe something with a bit of color?”
Caitlin looks around us, at rail after rail of garments, all of which I could have worn and probably did in the late 1980s—me and Rosie Simpkins, who was my best friend back then. Every Saturday we would try to buy an outfit for under a fiver. We did it nearly every week, as well, going out that night feeling like the bee’s knees, with our bits of lace tied round our wrists, trying to look like Madonna, circa “Like a Prayer.” Everything in this shop could have come from that era.
Funny how things change, and yet nothing changes. I look around for Rosie, wanting to show her a leopard-print shoulder-pad dress I’ve found in the sale, when I remember that Rosie Simpkins is married now, and fat and round and happy as a clam, with about a hundred kids. Caitlin looks up at me, over her arm a seemingly endless array of leggings and large T-shirts, all of them black, everything almost identical to what is already in her wardrobe, except slightly bigger and made with Lycra.
“I know what it’s like,” I say to her, as she adds another T-shirt to the bundle. “I have been there, remember, with you? Maybe this is the time, you know? To give up the Goth rock-chick look and just be what you are naturally, which is exceptionally pretty. You know, as you are about to become a mother?” She stops and looks at me for a moment, and then, taking a deep breath, walks on.
“Okay, then, fine. I’ll go there. Please, buy a nice dress for your mother, who is seriously ill. You made me say that, and you’re making me say I just want to see you in something pretty just once before I die. It’s your fault!”
I expect Caitlin to laugh, or at least smile in that way she does when I crack a joke that she knows is funny but doesn’t want to admit it. Nothing.
“I’m not you,” she says, pausing by a rack of peach ra-ra skirts. “Or then again, maybe I am you, and that makes it worse. Not because I don’t want to be you, just because…”
I follow her as she stops in front of a mirror and looks her reflection in the eye, refusing to dwell on her abdomen. Her breasts look a little bigger, but her stomach is still pretty flat; perhaps there might be a little bump there, but if so, it’s barely visible, and yet she doesn’t want to look at it.
“Are you afraid of coping, on your own?” I ask her. I had my mum, of course. Most of the time, I didn’t want her—most of the time, I thought she fussed too much and was controlling or cross, or sometimes just crazy—but she was always there, and I was always grateful. My mum has always been my constant fallback position, and she has never once shirked from that. Not even now, when it’s costing my mum her happy little life, her operatic society, her bridge club, that nice chap who plays piano at the am dram and takes her out every Wednesday when it’s two-for-one at the cinema. The films they’ve seen this last year, Mum and her gentleman friend. She’s become quite an expert on Tarantino. I’m sure they don’t care what they see: it’s just an excuse to hold hands in the dark. Now, though, all of that, all of the life she has built for herself away from me, is on hold, perhaps forever. And yet still she came.
“I’m afraid of everything,” Caitlin says suddenly. “This…” She gestures at her middle. “This has happened at the worst time, hasn’t it? It feels like I shouldn’t be happy about this now, but I am. I know I am, but it’s like my heart won’t tell my head that I am. My head is still freaking out about it.”
“Of course it is,” I say. “And it will take you a while to adjust to that little person. But you can be a great mum and still do whatever you want to. This isn’t the end of your life, Caitlin, it’s just the beginning….”
“Or maybe the middle, if I get sick like you.” Caitlin looks at me, and for a moment she is Rosie Simpkins again, and I have to look very hard at the little mole on her left earlobe, the one she’s had since she was born, and pull myself back into the present moment. It’s like hauling myself through mud, but I make it.
“Mum, you are ill. You are so ill and…Esther will need me. She will need looking after, and so will Greg. And Gran can’t do it all on her own—she can’t bring up a three-year-old—she’s too old for that now. They will need me to be someone that I’m not. I’m just not. I can’t even take an exam, or get dumped by a boy, without cocking up my entire life. How can I do anything for them, or for you, or this baby? How will I ever be good enough in time?”
A sob catches in her throat, and she turns away from me, walking quickly out of the shop, still carrying the clothes, setting off peals of alarms. I go after her, and get to her just as the security guard catches up with her.
“Sorry,” I say, and take the bundle of clothes from Caitlin’s arms, standing between her and the guard. “My fault. I’ve got early-onset Alzheimer’s. It means I make so many stupid mistakes, but we’re not shoplifters. We are going to buy all of this, so if we can just go back to the…thingy where the money goes, and I’ll pay for all of them.”
The security guard looks at me, certain that I am lying. And who can blame him? First of all, it was clearly Caitlin holding the clothes when she went out of the door; secondly, I am hardly a little old lady in a nightie. At least, I don’t think I’m wearing a nightie. I look down to check. No, I am fully dressed and not looking the least bit like a mentalist.
“I know,” I say. “It’s really tragic, isn’t it?”
“And I’m pregnant.” Caitlin sobs out of the blue, tears rolling down her cheeks. “And I don’t even like any of these clothes. I don’t want to wear leggings. Leggings are for people who’ve given up on life!”
I stifle a giggle as the poor baffled young man takes the bundle of clothes from my arms. “Just be more careful,” he says. “Okay? Maybe don’t go out without a…”
“Grown-up?” I nod solemnly, and Caitlin sobs onto my shoulder in gratitude.
“So you don’t want this, no?” I look at Caitlin, who mutely shakes her head against my shoulder, and watch the guard go back into the store, scratching his head.
“We should take up shoplifting for a living. There’s never been a better combination of hustlers in the history of retail fraud,” I say to Caitlin, who lifts her head from my shoulder, suddenly dry-eyed and smiling.
My little Red Queen has still got it.
We walk through the shops, arm in arm, without talking. I look at the people going past. They seem to be walking, talking, breathing, thinking, much faster than me, as if the world has speeded up around me, leaving me half a frame behind. We stop at a coffee shop in the middle of the floor, and Caitlin orders us drinks while I sit at a table. She glances over at me from time to time, probably to make sure I haven’t wandered off, and I try not to think about Rosie Simpkins—because every time I do, I’m tempted to find a phone box and dial her old number, which I suddenly know off by heart, and ask her if she’s coming down the rec
to look for boys to hang out with. I know where I am, and whom I am with, but I have to work hard to pin myself into this moment of time—to cling on, and make sure I stay here. I have an idea that this concentration works, but it’s probably a lie I’m telling myself. I don’t have any control, no idea where the fog will reach next, or when it will next blow in, always obliterating something forever.
Caitlin puts a milky coffee down in front of me, and I sip it gratefully. I don’t like milky coffees, but every coffee I seem to get these days is exactly that. When I was younger, I only drank Mellow Birds. I wonder where you can get Mellow Birds from now? I drank it until I went to university and met Paul, and he drank espresso in tiny cups the way he liked it, and that’s when I changed, to seem more grown up. But now I just get endless pints of warm coffee-flavored milk, which I find pointless.
“Your dad is called Paul Sumner,” I say. “He’s forty-two, he’s married, has been for about ten years, he’s got two daughters, you have two half sisters. He lectures in English literature and philosophy at University of Manchester, which isn’t quite the world-changing poet that he said he wanted to be, but it’s not bad. The university page on the word book says when and where his lectures are. He’d be really easy to stalk.”
“When did you find all that out?” she asks me.
“When you were missing,” I said. “Greg did it, actually.” I’ve forgotten how to use the word book thingy. “He found it all out and wrote it down for me. He’s got a file of info for you at home. You need to go and see Paul Sumner.”
“No,” she says adamantly. “I thought about it a lot, after I stormed off. I thought to myself, is it really worth putting all of us, including him, through some forced reunion? I’m nonexistent to him, and what will I get if I turn up on his doorstep and crowbar my way into his life? He won’t want me there, and I’ve got enough on my plate. I don’t need to see him.”
“You do,” I say, determined. “He’s waited long enough, even if he doesn’t know it. And so have you. You are so young, Caitlin. You need someone.”
“I don’t,” she insists, a flash of defiance in her eyes. “You never had anyone.”
“Oh, that is such a lie,” I say. “I had your gran, and I had you. You might have been the little one, but I relied on you as much as anyone.”
“Until Greg.” She looks at me carefully. “When I first met Greg, I thought he was a dick, but then I watched you two together, and it was so…happy. The way you just cared for each other. It was almost like you must have always been looking for each other, right up until the moment you met, because you were just so pleased when you got together that it was like a…a reunion. Sickening, but in a sweet way.”
I dip my head and stare into the pallid white coffee. I want to remember how that felt, the things she describes. I can see them, I can picture them as though they are on a screen, but I don’t understand them anymore.
“Can’t you be nicer to him, Mum?” she asks me. “He loves you so much. I hate to see him so sad.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, looking back up at her. “I feel like I don’t know him. It frightens me, having this stranger in our house.”
“But we all know him,” Caitlin says. “He’s Greg.”
“Is he, though?” I ask her. “Is that who he is?”
I see her face change, and I suppose she is puzzled and frightened by something that seems completely real and rational to me. This is the essence of the disease and what it does—the widening gulf between my reality and that of the people in my life. I try, every day, to reach back across it, but there comes a point when I can’t, and they can’t either, and then they don’t even try, because my world is the one that is wrong.
“You need to go and see Paul,” I say again. “You’ll need him, a parent, another grandparent for the baby. A bigger family. Don’t make me play the Alzheimer’s card twice in one day.”
“I can’t think about it like that,” she says. “I do better if I just think about one day at a time.”
“You know how you need to live your life?” I tell her. “As though everything is completely fine. Make your choices that way. That’s the way I want you to live your life, Caitlin. The way you want to, not the way that circumstances dictate.”
“But you are ill,” she says. “And maybe I am too. And maybe I could pass the gene on to my child. And it could do the same. It’s not the same as you, aged twenty, deciding to keep a baby, Mum. You had no idea about the hereditary gene; you were making a decision just based on one thing. But I do know, and I have to think about more than just will I be able to cope or get a job or get an education. I know that I can do all of those things, because I’ve seen you do all of those things and still be a brilliant, brilliant mum. It’s not that. It’s will I be leaving my child alone before it’s properly grown up? Will I be turning him or her into a carer? Will I be giving them this disease that is…I’ve decided what I’m doing, and it feels right. But it’s still so…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence—she doesn’t need to. If I had known then, on the day I discovered I was pregnant with Caitlin, if I had known, on the periphery of that sunny day, that the fog was already gathering, and slowly, slowly beginning to roll in to claim me and perhaps my unborn child too, would I have gone through with the pregnancy? Would I still be sitting here opposite this wonderful young woman? I look at her now, her black lashes sweeping her cheeks, the cupid’s bow of her lip, that mole on her ear, and of course I say with my whole heart: yes, yes. I’d never miss a second of my life with her, or her life with me, because I know how golden and how shining it has been. But then, at that moment, when the line on the stick turned pink, if I had known then? And I realize I don’t know the answer.
“You can take the test,” I say. “You can find out for sure about the gene, if you think it will help. And it doesn’t have to follow that you have it. Aunt Hattie had all her marbles, right up until she dropped dead of a heart attack. You don’t have to wonder; you can find out.”
“I don’t know if I want to know,” she says. “And knowing that I can know makes it so much harder to put it out of my head. So, what’s better, for me to know for sure, or not know for sure?”
“I know the answer,” I say. “I know what you have to do.”
Caitlin looks skeptical.
“You have to decide as if it’s not even a possibility, you have to decide to live your life the way you would, whatever else is happening. And do you know how I know that?”
She raises a brow.
“I know because that’s what I did. I gave birth to you, and brought you up and turned down a million lovers, and married the very last one because I believed that I had all the time in the world. And I’m glad I’ve lived my life that way; I wouldn’t have changed anything. Not a thing.”
“Not even Greg?” she asks me. “Would you have waited all of those years for the love of your life if you’d known that almost as soon as you had him, you’d lose all the feelings you had for him?”
“Let me buy you that dress,” I say, nodding at a little floral frock in the nearby shop window, cream cotton covered in pink roses. “It’s so pretty, and if you team it with some nice red shoes, and nails and lipstick, imagine what a delight you will be!”
“I hate colors,” Caitlin says, “but as you’ve played the AD card…”
She lets me pull her up from the table and into the shop to try on the dress, which suits her so perfectly and allows for some bump room too. Happily, I take her to the money counter and get out my card. It’s then I realize that I’ve forgotten my PIN. It seems I can forget the year I was born after all.
thursday, october 25, 2007
caitlin
This is the cover of the CD that Greg brought me on the first day I met him as Mum’s official boyfriend. I’d met him before, of course: he’d been around the house for a while. But then he was just the builder, listening to Radio One like he thought it was cool. I hadn’t really noticed him. T
hen, after he’d finished the loft, that was when Mum started seeing him, and I thought, how could she be so stupid? I mean, he’s a lot younger than her, a lot. And although Mum is sexy and funny and pretty, I couldn’t see why a man would ever seriously want a woman so much older than him. I thought he was taking advantage of her, playing her. And Mum said she thought that might be the case too, except she’d already given him all of her money when he converted the loft into her writing room. And anyway, she said, if it was just a fling, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a fling, though. We both knew that when she invited him to have dinner with us. And he brought me this CD of the Black Eyed Peas, because he thought they were cool. But I hate the Black Eyed Peas, and it was a CD, and no one had a CD player by then, not even Gran.
He gave it to me and I looked at it and chucked it on the side, which I knew was really bad-mannered. I knew I was being a textbook-rude potential stepkid, but for me it didn’t seem like a cliché. What did this man want with my mother? I mean, I was fifteen—if he was going to take an interest in either of us, it should have been me. Even though that was wrong in a different way! Not that I was jealous—don’t get me wrong. If I think of Greg in that way, I feel a bit like I want to puke. No, I never fancied him, even before he was my stepdad, and now…well, now he’s just my stepdad. But I didn’t want him to like me and not Mum. It was just that I couldn’t make sense of it. Which shows that I was pretty small-minded back then, all of five years ago.
Greg sat at the table. Mum had gone to town making a paella. Seriously, she’d seen it on some cookery program and went out and bought a special pan, and saffron, and all these prawns with legs and heads, which made me want to vomit, and she spent all day on it, without bothering to inquire if the builder ate seafood. Well, I thought that he certainly wouldn’t: he would eat bacon sandwiches and maybe hunks of cheese. And I was right—about the not eating seafood part, at least. Greg is actually severely allergic to seafood, and it took him ages to say anything. He just sat there, staring at the prawns, which were staring right back at him, seriously considering risking anaphylactic shock just so he wouldn’t let my mum down or look stupid in front of me. I asked him, quite rudely, what his problem was with the food that Mum had made. Which was when he went bright red and confessed he might die if he ate it. Mum was mortified. She tipped the whole thing in the outside bin, like somehow even a prawn eyeballing Greg might set him off, and that pissed me off because I’d only just decided to like paella.
The Day We Met Page 14
