by Dani Atkins
I dropped down on to a nearby wicker armchair and shrugged out of my jacket. ‘I just wanted to see you again, Gran. Because, you know, we didn’t really get to finish our chat properly yesterday.’
Gran’s eyes might be slowly glazing with incipient cataracts, but they still saw so much more than I would ever be able to hide from her. Yesterday, just after she’d told me about Josie, our visit had been cut short by the ringing of the bell announcing the evening meal. If I’m honest, I’d been quite glad that it had given me a legitimate excuse to leave. I’d needed that time to fully take on board what she’d told me. But my head was straight now, and – more than anything – I needed to let her know how much I was on her side here.
‘I’m just going to toddle off and leave you both to have a nice little chat,’ announced Josie, her smile encompassing both Gran and me.
‘Josie, you don’t have to leave,’ I insisted.
Using her walking stick for support, she took a few unsteady steps towards me, stopping beside my chair. ‘Your gran is still your gran, sweetheart. I would never want to get in the way of your time with her.’ Before either Gran or I could protest, she added, ‘Besides, the mobile library is here, and I’m hoping they’ve got that new wartime saga I ordered.’ She smiled down at her friend. ‘You know how I love them.’
‘Feisty heroines with pin-curled hair and bright red lipstick,’ Gran said, nodding fondly at her companion. ‘You were born in the wrong era, Josie.’
A fleeting wistfulness passed across Josie’s wrinkled face, to be replaced by a sweet, self-deprecating smile. ‘I’d never have been bold enough to pull off that look,’ she said with a sigh. Her admission showed a glimpse of a woman who’d lived far more in the shadows than anyone ever should. But she was gone in an instant, dispelled by a little-old-lady chortle. ‘My days of pillar-box-red lippy have been and gone, for sure.’
I waited until Josie had left the room before moving into the seat she’d just vacated. The afternoon sunlight slanting through the window caught the diamond in Gran’s engagement ring, making it blaze like a miniature comet as I reached for her hand. ‘It’ll be yours one day,’ she’d always told me, but even as a little girl I’d known there’d never be enough diamonds in the world to make up for losing this woman.
‘So, Gran,’ I began, lacing my unlined fingers between her gnarled ones. ‘How are you today?’
She looked at me for a long moment, understanding that I wasn’t enquiring about her physical health or making polite conversation.
‘Very well,’ she said at last, with just the hint of a curl to her lips. ‘Relieved, actually, not only because I told you, but also that you’ve come back to see me again so soon.’
‘Did you honestly think that I wouldn’t?’ My voice sounded genuinely horrified. ‘You must have known that nothing could ever make the slightest difference between you and me.’
For the first time, Gran looked unsure and suddenly older. ‘Well, I hoped it wouldn’t, but it was a huge bombshell to drop. I couldn’t be entirely sure how you’d take it.’
I squeezed her hand gently, mindful of the ever present pain in her arthritic fingers.
‘You should know better than that, Gran. If you told me you’d murdered someone, my only question would be: Where should we hide the body?’
Gran chuckled softly and it felt incredibly good to hear that, as though a thousand-ton weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Beyond the window the robins were still pecking hopefully at the bird table, and the afternoon sun was bathing the grounds in an artist’s palette of golds and bronze.
‘Do you feel like going for a stroll in the gardens?’ I asked on impulse. ‘We can talk as we walk if you like.’ Gran did like, so I raced back to her room to grab the thick cardigan that was draped over the back of her armchair. As I plucked it up, I caught a glimpse of my grandfather staring down at me from the shelf of photographs. It was a more recent portrait, and in it I could see both the man I remembered and the man my dad would one day become. I stared into his eyes, before impulsively kissing my fingertips and pressing them against the face trapped behind the glass. ‘I love you too, Grandad, but Gran deserves to be happy now that you’re gone. I hope you feel that way too.’
I knew better than to offer any assistance as Gran’s stiff fingers fumbled with the intricacies of the buttons on her thick cardigan. So I stood patiently waiting as she completed the task, understanding better than anyone that fierce streak of independence. It wasn’t a long or hard search to see where my determined and headstrong nature had come from.
We slipped through the patio doors, scattering the robins who eyed us resentfully as we stepped from the path and on to the neatly manicured lawns. The gardens were well designed and ringed with wide concrete paths to accommodate the walkers and wheelchairs of the residents, but Gran always liked to go ‘off-roading’ on our walks through the grounds.
‘I spent a long time last night thinking about what you told me yesterday,’ I admitted, slipping my hand companionably into the crook of her arm. Gran patted it affectionately.
‘I never meant to keep you from your beauty sleep, darling girl.’
‘You didn’t. Well, you did – but in a good way.’ I snuggled a little closer to her arm, inhaling the familiar fragrance of the perfume she always wore. My grandfather used to give her an enormous bottle of it every Christmas. Did it make her think of him, I wondered, as she dabbed it on each day?
‘I’m sorry, Gran.’
Gran turned to me, genuinely mystified. ‘Whatever for?’
‘For not knowing that you weren’t living the life you wanted.’
At first I thought the expression on her face was shock, but I quickly realised it was actually much closer to anger. And Gran hardly ever got cross with me. There was a bench nearby and she led us to it, sitting at an angle so that she could look me in the eyes as she spoke.
‘I haven’t lived an unhappy life, Mandy. Far from it. But I have lived long enough to know that very few people are deliriously happy all of the time. Your grandfather was a fine man, a good husband and a wonderful provider, but more than that he was an exceptional father to your dad. Whatever might have been… deficient… in our lives together was more than made up for by all of those things.’
‘Did you… did you always realise that you… that you were…’ Oh God. What was wrong with me? Who in their right mind chooses to ask their seventy-six-year-old grandmother about her sex life?
Gran’s smile rescued me from the pit I was about to fall into. ‘That I might be… gay? That’s the word people use these days, isn’t it? So much nicer than the terms they used back in my day. To me, the word “gay” has always meant happy and joyful. And that’s exactly how Josie makes me feel – so how clever of your generation to have found just the right word to describe it.’
I nodded, as though I had personally chosen the term.
‘For a very long time I did wonder what was wrong with me. I had everything that was meant to make me happy, and yet there was always the feeling that something was missing.’
‘There is nothing “wrong” with you,’ I declared hotly. ‘You love who you love. That’s how it’s supposed to be, anyway.’
Gran reached up and tenderly cupped my cheek. ‘So wise for one so young,’ she said softly.
‘Was Josie ever married?’ I asked curiously, realising I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever seen a ring on her finger. Gran shook her head gently. ‘No. Josie said she knew when she was a young woman that she didn’t have those sort of feelings about any of her would-be suitors. But in those days people hid that kind of admission. Josie has never had anyone special in her life, not in almost eighty years. Not until now.’
‘Well, she hit the jackpot with you after all this time.’
‘Bless you, sweetheart,’ Gran said, her cheeks growing a little pink.
There was a question I’d been wanting to ask for the last twenty-four hours, and even now, as I voiced it, I was
n’t sure if it was entirely appropriate.
‘Did… did Grandad ever know?’
For the first time, my grandmother looked truly shocked.
‘Oh my goodness, no. It would have broken his heart. You must remember what he was like? He was such a manly man; he’d have taken it as a personal slight. He was a fishing and football-loving and going-down-to-the-pub sort of man. He’d have been crushed to know I wasn’t comfortable with that side of our relationship.’
I shook my head, realising with a kind of wonder how very far society had come in the span of her lifetime.
‘I’m really sorry, Gran, that you weren’t able to be with someone who made you truly happy years ago. I’m sorry you never found Josie until now.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Gran firmly, getting to her feet with a sprightliness that belied her age. ‘If I hadn’t met your grandad and married him, then there would have been no son for us to have, and ultimately no you either.’
She lifted both hands and cupped my face within them. ‘And a world without Mandy Preston in it is far too gloomy and colourless to even think about.’ She leant closer and kissed my forehead tenderly. ‘You and your dad have been the greatest loves of my life. More than your grandfather, and more even than Josie. I regret nothing in my past, because it’s given me both of you, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.’
23
The music was loud. It was reverberating through the bricks of the house, making the windows rattle in their frames. Unless they were deaf or away on holiday, complaints from the neighbours were surely imminent.
‘They’ve gone away with my parents for the weekend,’ said Alex, whose house it was. He gave a cheeky shrug as though to say, what else is a seventeen-year-old boy meant to do in these circumstances except have a party. It would be practically unconstitutional not to.
We’d arrived late, and the party was already at the sticky-kitchen-floor stage by the time we eventually joined what alarmingly appeared to be my entire year group, crammed into one modest three-bedroom semi. I’d followed in Jamie’s wake as he cut a swathe through the heaving throng of gyrating bodies as we headed for the kitchen, aware of the many admiring glances arrowing our way. Despite my new skinny jeans and black top, I knew perfectly well that none of them were directed at me.
There’s a unique realisation that comes to you when you know you’re dating someone out of your league. I was batting. I knew it. My friends knew it. But curiously, Jamie continued to act as if it was the other way around entirely. My dad – if he knew we were still seeing each other – was the only other person on the planet likely to agree with him. Either Jamie’s home held no mirrors, or he truly didn’t understand the effect he had on pretty much every female who crossed his path.
Every school has one. That rock-star student with the brooding bad-boy good looks. The boy whose name is written inside hearts on the pencil cases of girls he’s never even spoken to. Two years older than me, I was far beyond Jamie’s radar range; I was just another girl who’d admired him from a distance. Until the day a carelessly tied shoelace changed all that.
As falls go, it had been pretty spectacular. People had been throwing themselves at Jamie McDonald for years, but I was the only one who’d done it literally. He’d caught hold of me as I careened past him on the Music Block staircase, my legs pinwheeling like crazy as I tried to gain purchase. If he hadn’t caught me as he did, bones would surely have been broken. As it was, the only body part that risked breakage was my seriously infatuated fourteen-year-old heart.
To this day, Jamie claims to have been oblivious to the major crush I’d developed on him from the minute he’d steadied me on to my feet and stooped to pick up my scattered books, which had ended up all over the corridor.
‘A musician,’ he’d said with a smile, handing me back a book of piano concertos.
I’d blushed scarlet and mumbled something inarticulate, but from that day on, whenever we’d passed in the corridor, he’d always acknowledge me, jokingly calling me by the name of a different composer each time: Hi Mozart; Hey Beethoven; How you doing, Handel. Those random ‘hellos’ had earned me an elevated status among practically all the girls in my year. Of course, that all happened years before he ever asked me out, dropped out of school two weeks into the sixth form to work in a garage, and in consequence acquired a rebel status that was totally undeserved and yet somehow seemed only to add to his allure.
Jamie headed straight for the sink, which was already overflowing with empty cider bottles and beer cans. I hoped Alex had a good clean-up crew on standby, or he was likely to be grounded for the rest of his teenage years. I stood to one side as Jamie scrubbed away the fresh oil stains from his hands and forearms and pretended not to notice that half the girls in the kitchen were openly staring as he rolled up his shirt sleeves to reveal his not inconsiderable biceps.
‘Sorry,’ he murmured after several minutes of enthusiastic scrubbing, sliding his citrus-smelling arms around my waist. ‘Now I can finally do this without getting you dirty.’ I would happily have run the risk of the smudgy fingerprints, especially as I knew how he’d got them.
I hadn’t even noticed the stranded woman motorist on the side of the road. To be honest, I was far too preoccupied with what my parents had casually mentioned right after Have a good time and before Be sure you’re home by midnight. It had left me in a decidedly reluctant-to-party mood.
Jamie had commented that I seemed distracted when we’d met at our usual street corner venue, just far enough away from my home that we wouldn’t be spotted. I knew it must still sting that I wouldn’t let him call for me, but there are only so many ways to dress up ‘My dad doesn’t think you’re good enough for me’ without causing offence.
Sensing my need for quiet, Jamie had taken my hand in his and pulled me against his side, giving us the appearance of conjoined twins as we walked through the darkened streets, slipping in and out of pockets of developing mist. I hadn’t seen what he had as he drew us both to an abrupt halt. I squinted in the darkness, and could just about make out the shape of a car tilted at an odd angle on the other side of the road, almost lost in swirling clouds of mist coming off the common beside it. A woman suddenly emerged into a pool of light thrown by a solitary street lamp. She had something in her hand that she appeared to be swearing at.
‘Hang on a second, babe. Let me just check that woman is okay.’
He released my hand and jogged lithely across the road to her, calling out as he did. Even so, I heard her instinctive gasp as he emerged from the shadows. Girls often gasped when they saw Jamie, although admittedly most of them didn’t sound quite as fearful as this woman did.
‘Are you okay? Do you need some help?’
‘I’ve been trying to phone a garage, but I can’t get any signal.’
Jamie dropped down to a crouch and examined the back of the woman’s car.
‘Flat tyre?’
‘No thanks, I’ve already got one,’ the woman fired back with the timing of a stand-up comedienne. She jumped slightly on hearing my footsteps, but relaxed visibly as I emerged from the darkness and stood beside Jamie, resting one hand on his shoulder.
‘You can borrow one of our phones,’ Jamie offered. ‘Or I’m happy to change the tyre if you’ve got a spare and a jack.’
The woman hesitated for a moment. ‘He’s a really good mechanic. He knows what he’s doing,’ I said loyally, which earned me one of Jamie’s heart-melting smiles that totally excused the small exaggeration. Well, he was on his way to being a qualified mechanic.
It wasn’t quite pit-stop speed, but Jamie did make changing the tyre look remarkably easy. In a slick manoeuvre that comes when you’re comfortable with tipping, the woman tried to get Jamie to accept a crisp twenty-pound note for his labour. He wouldn’t even consider it.
‘Make sure you get the puncture fixed,’ he told the unknown woman as she slipped back into the driver’s seat. She looked up at us with an expression of gratitude
on her face. ‘Thank you both for stopping to help me. Plenty of people wouldn’t. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just let me know.’ She pressed a small rectangular card into my hand. I glanced down at it in the dim sodium lighting as she pulled away.
‘What did she give you?’
‘A business card, I think,’ I said, stuffing it into the back pocket of my jeans with only half a glance. I think it was for some place called ‘Crazy Daisy’.
*
With two plastic cups of cider in hand, Jamie led me away from the main crowd of party-goers in the lounge and kitchen and into the hallway. The front door was wide open, which could well explain the extraordinary number of people I didn’t recognise at the party. I wondered how many of the gatecrashers Alex actually knew. Despite the cool air gusting into the hallway, the heat from that many bodies was making the house uncommonly warm. We climbed the staircase, stopping by mutual consent halfway up the flight and sitting down. Jamie put a welcome arm around my shoulder and drew me against him.
‘So what’s up?’
‘What makes you think anything is?’
Jamie’s eyebrows rose into his hairline, giving him a momentary villainous look. It didn’t mar his attractiveness. I’d yet to find anything that did. There was a scar bisecting his right eyebrow where the hair refused to grow. The school rumour mill claimed it was from a knife fight. He’d laughed hard enough to bring tears to his eyes when I’d told him that. ‘It was from a fight… between me and a swing that I walked into when I was three years old,’ he’d told me. It had taught me an early lesson that, with Jamie, what you saw wasn’t always what you got. He continually surprised me, and the worried look on his face was doing exactly that right now.
‘It’s not… it’s not about you and me, is it?’ It was the first time I’d ever heard a note of vulnerability in his voice, and it made me want to either cry or cover his face with kisses. Possibly both. ‘You’re not about to say something that’s going to break my heart, are you?’
