Coming Home (16 page)

‘Cheers,’ said Mum.

‘To Dad.’

We clinked glasses and watched the seagulls circling over the sea as we waited for our food. Afterwards, we wandered into The Lanes, where, in a quaint little jewellery shop, I chose us each a thin gold band decorated with three tiny diamonds. Mum protested, told me not to waste my money.

‘I don’t expect you to wear it every day, but I think it’s
nice to have a memento,’ I said, as I handed over my credit card.

Mum sighed. ‘Thank you, darling, it’s lovely.’ As the transaction went through, I admired my ring on the fourth finger of my right hand, turning it this way and that so the diamonds caught the light. Mum put her ring, inside its velvet box, carefully into her handbag, her lips a thin line. ‘I shall treasure it,’ she said.

‘S
o…’Miss Dawson said once we’d settled into our seats. Now I was in senior school, we used a private interview room, not the staffroom. Somehow, the small room with just the two of us in it felt more intense and I shifted a little on my chair; wished I’d brought my knitting. ‘How are things?’

I hadn’t seen Miss Dawson since before the summer. Our meetings were now just once a term
.

‘It’s good. School’s good,’ I said
.

‘You’ve settled in well? Made some new friends?’

‘Yes. A few of my old class moved up with me, so it’s fine. Really.’

‘You sound unsure?’

I sighed. ‘School’s fine. I’m enjoying it. It’s just …’

Miss Dawson waited. Was I being pathetic? I wondered. I knew why it was that Mum insisted on picking me up from school even though I was eleven years old; I knew why she wouldn’t let me walk or cycle home with my friends. But it was so embarrassing after school when everyone would walk out in a big gang, heading off towards shops, and I’d see Mum standing there at the gate waiting for me
.

Now that I was in a new school, the majority of my year didn’t know my history; they didn’t know why it was that Mum picked me up and they didn’t stop to think there might be a reason. The taunts were cruel
.

‘Evie needs her mummy to take her home. Off you go now, Evie,’ they’d tease. ‘Don’t forget to hold Mummy’s hand, now, out in the big, wide world!’ I’d taken to hanging around in the loos after school, waiting for everyone to leave before I headed out
.

‘It’s just Mum,’ I said to Miss Dawson. ‘I don’t know what to do about Mum. She won’t let me walk home from school without her.’

‘I see. Have you tried talking to her?’

I closed my eyes and nodded. Of course I’d tried talking to her. When I’d suggested I walk home from school alone, Mum had fallen silent. She’d sunk into a chair at the kitchen table, her head in her hands
.

‘Mum?’ I’d asked. ‘I’ll make sure I cross the roads safely.’ I knew not to mention the word ‘crossing’. ‘I’ll always walk with someone. I’ll be OK. I will!’

Mum said nothing, just rocked with her head in her hands
.

‘It’ll be OK, just let me try? Once … Mum?’ I’d put my hand on her arm, trying to pull her hands off her eyes, but she’d shrugged my hand off
.

Then she’d snapped her head up. ‘So this is it, is it, Evie?’ she’d barked, and I’d flinched away, instantly on alert for one of her outbursts. ‘This is how I lose you, too? Is it not enough for me to lose my son? I have to lose my daughter too? You of all people, Evie! I thought you would know why
this is so important. How life can turn in a second!’ Her voice caught and I realised she was crying. ‘It doesn’t have to be you who makes a mistake!’ she sobbed. ‘It doesn’t have to be your fault, just you in the wrong place at the wrong time and that’s it! Gone!’

We’d stared at each other. I’d been too scared of her reaction to push it further. These days, I treated Mum with kid gloves. ‘OK,’ I’d said, backing away. ‘It’s OK, Mum. It’s fine. I’ll see you at the gate.’

‘It’s because she loves you, ‘Miss Dawson said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I sighed. ‘Yeah. I get it. She’s scared she’s going to lose me, too. But she’s making my life a misery. You don’t do that to people you love!’

‘Would you like me to try to talk to her? ‘Miss Dawson asked. ‘I mean, I could try?’

I sighed. ‘I don’t think there’s much point. She’s never going to let me go. Not unless I move to Timbuktu.’

W
e drank a little brandy at home that night before retiring upstairs for the evening—Mum to her bath, and me to check and delete Dad’s second email account. Having scattered the ashes, everything seemed so very final. Now it really was just Mum and me. I couldn’t bear to imagine how she would feel once I left. Just her alone, in this big, old house, filled with ghosts and memories. The sooner she moved, the better.

As I sat at the desk in the office waiting for the computer to boot up, my phone pinged. It was Emily on WhatsApp.

Imagining Emily messaging me from a crowded carriage on Dubai Metro as she commuted home after work, I breathed in and tried to feel the warmth of the sun, to remember the scent of the frangipani, feel the texture of the sand under my feet. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss Dubai, but I was keen to stay just a little longer to help Mum move house. The fact that I needed to protect my mother had been tattooed on my soul since Graham’s death; I didn’t want her to go through such a momentous thing alone, especially when she was so vulnerable. The estate agent had said the sale would go through quickly
and I really hoped I could stay in Woodside for a few more weeks, even if it meant taking unpaid leave. Besides, a little voice in my head said, it would give me an opportunity to see Luca again.

As soon as I replied and put my phone down, it pinged again. This time it was Luca.
‘Hey, Evie. I just wondered how you got on today. Was it ok?’

I smiled at my phone and typed my reply at once.

‘Yeah. Got through it ok, thx. At least it’s done and Mum can move on. How are you?’

‘All good here, thanks.’

‘Great.’

‘Do you fancy meeting up in the next day or two? If you’re still around?’

‘Yeah, that’d be great.’

‘Cool. I’ll call you.’

At last I turned my attention to the computer. I opened up my email and retrieved Dad’s username and password. ‘Zeepee93’. I said it out loud as I typed it in—it was unlike Dad to choose rhyming passwords. His were usually a functional, code-based mix of random letters and numbers. But before I had time to think about it further, the inbox opened and I saw that there were only four emails: all from Zoe Peters. ZeePee.

So who was this mysterious Zoe? I racked my brains. Was she a colleague? A cousin? I couldn’t think of any Zoes ever being mentioned at home. Why did she warrant a separate email account?

I opened the top email, dated the week before Dad had
died. It was short, but to the point:
‘Why £22,000? Call me when you can.’

‘Oh marvellous!’ I huffed. Even ‘Zoe’ didn’t know what the money was for.

Dad didn’t seem to have replied to the email, so I opened the next one. It was dated the Friday a week before Dad died:
‘Are you coming tonight?’

Why would he meet her on a Friday night? Hunched over the computer, rubbing my temples with my left hand, I opened the second-from-bottom email. Its title was ‘Photo-sharing: Tom’ and it was dated over a year ago. I read it three times, squinting at the screen as I tried to make sense of it. My brain was unwilling to accept what my eyes were telling it; I must have misunderstood, left out a crucial word.

‘Rob, I just wanted to let you know I’ve finally managed to set up an account on a photo-sharing website so I can post whatever pictures your son deigns to share from uni. I added a few baby ones, too, just to remind you. Wasn’t he cute? Don’t laugh at my clothes—it
was
nearly 20 years ago! Here’s the link. Z x’

Maybe ‘Zoe’ had made a typo. I read it another time. ‘Your son’? Surely not. Graham was dead. Wasn’t he? For a minute I questioned myself, but I went to his funeral! Graham wasn’t at university. And why would this Zoe woman have pictures of him anyway? I stared at the email, massaging my temples as my brain tried to compute something a deeper part of me didn’t want to understand. What was she saying? Was Graham still alive?

My head swam—and then the mist cleared and then, slowly, like a monster emerging from a swamp in a D-rate horror movie, the truth dawned. ‘Your son,’ she’d written. The email was about photos of someone called Tom. Zoe wasn’t talking about Graham at all. There was another child. Another son of Dad’s who was alive, well and at university. The payments? Maintenance.

I got to the toilet just in time, and vomited until there was nothing left in my stomach. After wiping my mouth, I flushed, put down the seat and slumped back against the cistern, my hands over my face, trying to block out the sight of the words I’d just read.

‘Are you all right?’ Mum called from the bathroom. She must have heard me retching. On autopilot, I dashed into the study, logged off the email and closed down the computer. I couldn’t risk her stumbling on it. Did she know?

O
n my bed, I hugged my knees to my chest as I ran through the email in my head.

‘No!’ I said every time I got to ‘your son’, my head shaking from side to side as if the movement could wipe out the words. ‘No. No. No!’ Dad wouldn’t have a secret like that. It went against everything I knew about him. He was an upstanding person; people respected him. What he had was a strong moral compass, not a secret son. I knew we weren’t perfect, but things like this didn’t happen to families like ours. They just didn’t.

I couldn’t even begin to think about the circumstances that had led up to the birth of this ‘Tom’. True, you come to learn, as an adult, that your parents have a life that you don’t see, but Dad just wasn’t the sort to cheat on Mum.

I stared unseeingly at the curtains. All I’d come home to do was help Mum bury my father—I hadn’t come home expecting to have the story of my life rewritten. Since I’d been back, I’d stumbled on so many secrets that I no longer knew what was real and what was illusion. Had my parents hidden anything else from me? Curled up in the foetal
position, I barely dared to move for fear of what else might come crashing down. Was there anything else?

And then, as I lay there, it hit me almost physically that, if Dad had a son—
if
Dad had another son—what I had, after twenty years, was a brother. A half-brother. I moaned into the pillow. A child who’s lost both her parents is called an orphan. The world acknowledges her pain and bows to it. But there’s no word in English for a child who’s lost her only sibling. Like an amputee who still feels tickles and itches in a lost limb, I’d felt the absence of Graham, physically, every day for the past twenty years. And the thought that there’d been someone out there—someone who could never be Graham but who, purely by dint of his genetic make-up, might have been able to dip even just a toe into the brother-shaped gap that had yawned in my life for two decades—was almost too painful to bear. I hugged myself, staring unseeingly at the curtains. My mind ran in circles. Was it true? How could it be true? How could Dad not have told me?

Sleep, unsurprisingly, eluded me. I didn’t even try. Galaxies away from the unconsciousness I craved, I sat up with my knitting, thoughts exploding like fireworks. What circumstances could have led to Dad having another son? Without any facts, all I could do was speculate. As my needles clicked, I came up with my own scenario. Given Tom was, according to the email, nearly twenty, he must have been born a year or so after Graham died. Maybe
Dad, eaten up with guilt and sadness, had turned to this Zoe for support. But who was she? Someone Dad had worked with? A television producer? An editor? I thought back. Twenty years ago, Dad had had a book out, but he’d worked mainly at the university. His media career hadn’t yet taken off. Maybe ‘Zoe’ was a fellow lecturer. A student. The thought made a shudder run through me: Dad, about forty at the time, and a teenager? Please, God, no.

But, somehow, he must have ended up having a one-night stand, and Tom was the product. Being a decent man, Dad had offered to take financial responsibility for his son—hence the debits—while not being able to leave the wife and daughter that he loved. Happens all the time—right?

Even coming up with that scenario failed to bring me peace of mind. What was Tom like? Was he like Graham? Like me? Or something completely different? Would I like him? What if I didn’t? I couldn’t bear the thought of having a brother who was alive but not liking him. But, again, I couldn’t imagine having a brother who wasn’t Graham. And then my blood ran cold as another thought struck me: had I ever met him? Tossing my knitting aside, I picked up the spare pillow and hugged it to me as I remembered a film I’d seen in which a dad with children from two different mums arranged for them to play together unknowingly in the park. Oh my goodness, had Dad ever done that? I racked my brains for any encounters with a boy called Tom: nothing. Then: why
hadn’t
Dad done that?

And what about Mum? This was hard enough for me, but did she know? I couldn’t imagine that she would have kept
something this big from me, so I could only deduce that she didn’t know. Which then begged another question: not
should
I tell her, but
could
I tell her? There was no doubt that she should know, but was she strong enough to hear that my father had betrayed her? That he’d had another son? A replacement? Complicated grief disorder, Miss Dawson had said—a long-term dysfunction. How could I possibly tell her this? It would send her over the edge.

My thoughts went back to Zoe—the mysterious Zoe—and I remembered the faxed agreement downstairs. With them had been a photo of a small boy. I’d thought it was Graham, but what if it wasn’t? Why would there be a photo of my dead brother in with her fax? I jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs, the carpet quietening the sound of my feet. In the dining room, I ripped open the box file and dug under the newspaper for the yellow manila folder and the photo. Putting everything back in place, I sped back up to my room, where I got into bed and looked properly at the picture.