‘Was not something that I did to you, the world does not revolve around you,’ although this was said kindly.
I explained, ‘You would have taken more care.’ I wanted to complain, Do women go around driving into tankers?
‘Well, anyway,’ he smiled, hopefully, ‘I’m here now.’
And this struck me as irrevocably male: the mindless expectation of forgiveness. And it was untrue: ‘Are you?’ I taunted, and swiped my hand through him.
He shrank from me, a spasm of fear.
I walked away.
‘Next week?’ he called.
‘Maybe.’
‘Miranda …’
Turning briefly, I reminded him, ‘Maybe, but how do I know? Remember: the world doesn’t revolve around you.’
But, of course, I worried all week: would he be there, when I went back? I had learned that my love for him had not stopped when he had died, nor when he had come back and we had had a row: the love would have to die. And my love for him was alive and kicking. When I returned to the park, after a very long week, he was there. But we did not stroll, we stayed beneath some trees and paced fitfully, circling each other.
I worked my way through a bar of Fry’s Chocolate Cream, with which I had come prepared. This is something which I do, very occasionally, when I am nervous. A habit which has something to do with the tidy snap of the black chocolate and the sticky burn of the fondant on the roof of my mouth.
I barely looked at him whilst he spoke. His statement took the usual format. He began, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ and continued with the expected, ‘this is not going to work.’
I shrugged, snapped, bit into a solid corner, and smoothed the crumpled silver wrapper. I knew that this was the truth, I would allow this; but I did not want to have to say it or to take any part in it.
He said, ‘You have your own life.’
I had no argument with this. I frowned down into the tiny sheet of silver foil.
He continued, ‘I love you, but we live in different worlds.’
Tingling with the love you, I could suffer the different worlds.
‘This is an unnatural state of affairs for a young woman.’
I was suddenly bitter, ‘Oh, and you’d know, would you? You’d know all about natural states of affairs for young women?’
Was I still too young to know that anger has life, but bitterness kills? I looked up to see that he was giving me what is termed, for some reason, a long look, which became the longest look that I had ever seen until I realized that I had lost sight of him altogether. Too late: he was gone.
I went nowhere for a long time. And when I eased up and moved off, the chocolate bar had become a marbled silver ball in the palm of my hand. I knew, simply knew, that he had gone for good. (Why gone for good? Is there no equivalent for dire situations?) Yet, the following week, I went along – same time, same place – to check.
I waited for forty minutes, standing my ground but sitting on a bench, before I gave up, walked up into town. In Leicester Square, passing the cinemas, I saw that Peter Pan was having a revival. My favourite film when I was a child. But why? Peter? Or Wendy? The flying, or the pirates? Neverland? Odd how, to children, the everyday world is not the normal world, how the make-believe world is more real. Or perhaps not odd, because how normal, really, is the everyday world, to a child? I remembered that the pirates had been very important to me. Why? The violent expropriation? The life at sea? I had never had much regard for land, for landing, for being grounded, for proper grounds. And then I remembered the lost boys, and wondered why there were no lost girls? And knew why: because everyone loves little boys, innocent little bunglers, but girls are never wholly children, they are old before their years. In the days of Peter Pan, in the real, everyday days, lost girls would have worked the streets, would have been pregnant.
Pregnant. This was when I realized: I realized that I had lost track of time; that I was late, that I had missed a period. I had been thinking of nothing but Wednesdays, I had been living for Wednesdays. Pregnancy was possible: my previous relationship had come to an amicable end, and, possibly, during one of our inevitable goodbye sessions, frivolous with the prospect of imminent freedom, I had worn my cap rather too jauntily. A mistake, a miscalculation. Then and there, I walked to the Boots in Piccadilly and bought a pregnancy testing kit.
I did not want a baby, there was no room in my life for a baby, my life was already a tight fit. In Boots, when the woman asked me if I wanted a bag, I had to stop myself from replying, Yes, plastic, please, for my face. Cradling my purchase, I took a bus to the station and followed the sign for Ladies. Paid my twenty pence and used the facilities to the full. Because I had to know, I could not do anything, or go anywhere, even to my own home, until I knew: if I was pregnant, then the world was a different place and I was a different person. Time stopped still, although hundreds of women came and went. And then, seemingly in no time at all, the kit held the answer: blue, Madonna blue, to tell me that if everything went well, I was going to have a baby.
If everything went well? I stood amongst all those women, most of whom must have had this same result at some time or other during their lives, but they came and went on their journeys and I was utterly alone. With a baby. My baby. Another life that I was going to have to do on my own. Had Uncle Robbie known? When I leaned onto a basin and looked into the mirror, I could see: I was puffy, shiny, and buxom; I had grown. He had known, I was sure. And had I known? I think that I had been about to know, when I bumped into Uncle Robbie: because why else, utterly out of character, had I decided to buy pastilles rather than aspirin? My body had known, but Uncle Robbie had distracted me. He had given me time. Made me happy. Given me time to be happy. Then I knew that I had to hold onto this baby: I had had enough loss, there was no time for more.
When I left the Ladies, I crossed the concourse to buy a drink, and the boy behind the counter said to me, ‘Coffee, large, with a small cream.’
I said, ‘Who asked you?’
‘Well,’ he became flustered, his hand went to rake his hair but hit his chef’s hat, ‘you usually do, around this time on Wednesdays.’
I had never seen him before, or not that I knew. I scanned the menu above him, and then pronounced, frostily, ‘Mineral water, please.’
He obeyed, but, opening the bottle, checked with me, ‘You okay?’
I said, ‘Ice, please.’
He looked up from the ice bucket, but said nothing.
‘And a salad sandwich, please. No egg, no cheese,’ nothing to run poison into my taken-over body, down the cord into my baby.
He placed a package of sandwich next to the bottle on the Perspex counter. ‘Bag?’
I flinched. ‘Yes, plastic, please, for my face.’ Had I spoken aloud? Startled, I glanced into his eyes to check. They were the colour of Fry’s Chocolate Cream, the chocolate and the fondant.
He leaned over the counter and said, ‘Let me tell you something: this is my summer job, I’m serving here and trying to read the odd textbook on International Relations, I don’t know which is more boring but both have to be done, and every Wednesday afternoon you come along for your large coffee and small cream and you’re the happiest person that I’ve seen for seven days. But today, no. So, has something happened?’
I had always wondered, ‘What is International Relations?’
He wondered, ‘Are?’ but then decided, ‘never mind.’
So I told him, ‘Someone has left me, but someone else has joined me. It’s the old, sad story: I’m pregnant. Without a paddle.’ As I spoke, I slid a straw from the box.
‘Pregnant,’ he enthused. ‘Oh, wow.’
Wow? This was not quite what I had expected. I looked up, sharply, straw drawn, to see that he was looking at me as if pregnancy had never happened to anyone before; and I was going to say so, to say, It’s not as if this has never happened to anyone before, you know. But then I was struck that perhaps this had never happened to him before, and certainly had never h
appened to me. This was new for both of us.
Reader, I had his children. Not for a few years, of course: I had my own child, and then his, two of them. Not that anyone has ever made the distinction: we all know, but we live our lives regardless. This evening, Christmas Eve, I was driving home with all three of them from Helen’s house in London. I had taken the girls with me to fetch my eldest, who had been staying there for a few days, which seems to be his new hobby. Of course, he had wanted to come home on his own, in his own time; but I had wanted to drop in on Helen, who, in the Christmas chaos, I had not seen for nearly three weeks.
We had hijacked his trip, and he was suitably resentful: on the way home, in the darkness of the passenger seat, he was all slumped shoulders, brows, and lower lip. Whenever I glanced over, I had to resist an urge to push the hair away from his eyes, the non-verbal version of Sit up straight. He is fifteen, and spends most of his time in his black-painted bedroom which is hung with Catholic iconography (he tells me, You underestimate the importance of ritual). Glancing over to my shadowy son, I lapsed back into my worry that I was losing him. Wondered when I had last seen a smile from him. He has a crush on Helen, though. Not that he would call – or even think of – his fascination as a crush. Because, after all, Helen is fifty-three: a kittenish fifty-three, but fifty-three nevertheless. And not that he smiles at her. But crush depicts the way that his eyes follow her, unblinkingly, although whenever she turns to him, he can do nothing but blink. And why else did he refer to her kaftan as a gown? But fair enough: he stays with Helen because she lives in London, and for the company of her boys, too.
We were a few streets away from home when I glanced over again and checked the mirror to discover that the only one of them who was awake was the dog: our eyes met on the mirror in a frank exchange of boredom. I was driving slowly, struggling to keep the speed limit, because the only cars that I had seen for a while were police cars. Because people leave here for Christmas, to slot back into normal families: our town has a big population of young people, with some retired people who made the mistaken assumption that this town is the same as others on the South Coast. Here, almost everyone lives singly or in couples, in the flats which have annexed the Victorian downtown and the thirties rim, both of which were built by fresh-air fanatics who overlooked the fact that half of the space, and thus half of the air, is taken by the sea. When I explained this to my son, once, to help him with his geography homework, with catchment areas and distribution of industry, he looked at my diagram, a semicircle, and laughed, ‘Oh, yes: now that I see, it’s obvious.’
Which made me laugh: ‘Ah, yes, but isn’t everything obvious when you see? Isn’t that what seeing is?’
Some families do live here, in houses, and, all year round, we put on a brave show: we do the usual things, patronize a particular school and a piano teacher. I began to drive the circumference of the park, and had a vision of summer, memories of strolls in shorts, of flower-fluffy shrubberies, of trays of teacups borne from the café onto the vine-canopied terrace: a different world, but one which will come again and again and again. Even if nowadays the days seem dark despite sunrise, and the world is wringing wet whether or not there has been rain. Whoever decided that Hell was hot?
Suddenly, my elder daughter said, ‘Mrs Sims –’ her teacher ‘– told us that the most important bit of last century was the man on the moon.’
And the little one, apparently woken, exclaimed, ‘I can see him. Look.’
I heard her sister mutter, ‘Stupid.’
Switching my eyes from the full moon to the mirror, I explained, ‘No, that’s the man in the moon,’ adding hurriedly, ‘well, not really,’ before continuing, ‘the man on the moon was a real man, some real men who went into space in a rocket and landed on the moon.’
The question piped behind me: ‘Why?’
I had to admit, ‘I don’t know,’ but tried, ‘just to see, I suppose.’
‘To see what?’
True, ‘I don’t know.’
My elder daughter wanted to know, ‘Do you remember the man on the moon?’
An opportunity for a little test: ‘Date?’
My son growled, ‘Fifties. Had to be.’
In a sense, he was right: in a sense, the moon landing had to have been in the fifties; if I had had to go for an intelligent guess, I would have said the fifties. But I had to correct him.
‘1969,’ and then, ‘yes, I remember.’
Now she wanted to know, ‘So, was the man on the moon the most important thing in your life, Mum?’
From our previous conversations, I know that, in her view, the twentieth century means my life. I tried to explain, ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t say so; not really; that’s not really how life is.’
‘So, what was the most important thing?’
I was thinking, hard. ‘In my life?’ Then I knew: ‘When my Uncle Robbie died.’ This was when I remembered him. I had not thought of him for years.
One of the girls asked, ‘Who was your Uncle Robbie?’
‘Auntie Helen’s first husband.’
A shriek: ‘She had a husband before Uncle Graham?’
Apparently amused, my son exclaimed in a whisper, ‘Jesus.’ Then asked me, ‘Was he as bad as Graham?’
I laughed, ‘Oh no,’ checked, ‘but did you not know?’
An indignant voice from behind me: ‘You never said.’
‘I didn’t?’ I could hardly believe that. ‘I did. But you didn’t listen; you kids never listen.’
‘Before we were born?’
‘Yes.’
The little one said, ‘Grandma says.’
Suddenly I was curious: ‘Says what?’
‘Says about him, sometimes.’
The older one insisted, ‘She does not, I’ve never heard her.’
‘Says what about him?’
She pondered. ‘Says that he cut a dash.’
I smiled, nowhere, towards the moon. ‘Well, yes, he did.’
Then she asked. ‘What does that mean?’
And I could not explain.
So I simply continued, ‘When I lost my Uncle Robbie, I realized …’
But now, typically, my son wanted to know, ‘How did he die?’
‘Car crash.’ Tactlessly, I added, ‘He taught me to drive, you know.’
The slumped shadow swelled and made a show of feeling for the door handle. ‘I’ll walk, I could do with the exercise.’
‘Oh ha ha.’ But then I thought to whisper, ‘Don’t panic your sisters.’
One of whom was asking, ‘Was no one else important when they died, then?’
Good question. I tried to think, explain: ‘Well, he was the first; the first is the most important.’
I swear that I saw my son smirk; and he refolded his arms. But then, suddenly serious, he asked, ‘What did you realize?’
‘What did I realize?’
‘You said that when you lost him, you realized …’
‘Oh.’ But what had I realized? ‘I realized …’ Then I found that I was saying, ‘There was a lot of talk from the men on the moon about how, when they had looked back down to earth, they realized … oh, you know, our world is so small but it’s all that we have, that kind of stuff, the obvious kind of stuff.’ I glanced over to him. As ever, he was looking out of the window. No response, but his silence was different from before, was dense with his expectation. So, I had to continue. ‘Once, on telly, I heard Neil Armstrong say that when they were coming back down, there was so much to do, but that if he could have the time again, he would want to spend it simply looking out of the window.’
The silence wanted to know, Yes, and, so?
‘When Uncle Robbie …’ came back? ‘Well, I was not quite here, and I was taking time to look out of the window.’
Nothing, for a moment, before a growl, which came sliding on sarcasm: ‘Yeah, right.’ Too much brandy in your brandy butter, Mother.
I was certain that I had lost him. But then he smiled, slowly, br
iefly. And I knew that I was wrong about losing him, because however solitary or secretive or broken, his smile has always spelled, Yeah, right, I’m with you.
8
A GOOD AIRING
‘Get dressed,’ Mum whines at me, on her way through the kitchen.
‘It’s too hot.’ Ten o’clock in the morning and too hot for clothes. And, anyway, I am dressed, in a sense: I am wearing a big old shirt, which I bought at a jumble sale, whose label says Savile Row.
I pick a handful of cornflakes from the top of the packet.
‘Don’t do that, pour yourself a bowl.’ She hurries into the hallway.
I slam the crackly wrapping back into the box.
‘Eat something.’ Do something, anything.
I sigh as loudly as possible. ‘It’s too hot.’
Her scowl has transferred to the mirror in the hallway. Her eyelids are furry with dark brown powder; hardly the natural look: they look like bruises. She dabs the tip of her little finger into her mouth and then brushes the spittle into the corner of one eye, replacing one smudge with another: a dark brown streak drifts towards the eyebrow. She mutters something and shuffles closer to the mirror, sliding forward on the wooden base of her Scholls.
‘Are you coming?’ she barks via the mirror.
‘No. Where?’
‘Church.’
‘You must be joking.’
The chocolate-button pupils slide towards me. ‘Am I laughing?’
Church: the School Leavers’ Service, presumably; Georgia’s leaving service. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and the gift of a dictionary from the Governors. It was the same for me; and, presumably, a couple of years later, it was the same for Vinnie, who has never shown much interest in his dictionary. And now Georgia’s turn: poor Georgie-porgie, swapping Play-doh for PE, utterly unsuspecting.
‘No,’ I clarify, ‘I’m not coming.’
Mum pouts into the mirror. She produces, apparently from nowhere, a nub of lipstick, and drags this around her lips. The nub is frosty pink; she is icing her lips. At school we coat our lips with chalk when we want to pretend that we have been sick so that we can be excused from PE.
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