I Think I Love You (35 page)

“Not the old days again,” Molly sighs if Petra dares to suggest that, once upon a time, there were mothers even stricter and more annoying than she is.

“That was like twenty-five years ago,” says Molly.

Not for Petra. I am approaching the middle of my life, she thinks. I am a grown woman. A mother. I have a home in a pleasant suburb of London with a south-facing suntrap patio where I grow surprisingly good tomatoes and basil, which I tear with my hands to release the fragrance and then strew over the chopped tomatoes with a little balsamic vinegar. I have come to like the word
strew
. Strewth. I have a job that I love and that may even do some small good in the world, I am supposed to be a mature person anchored by all the trappings of a decent, slightly dull life, yet increasingly I feel like a child who suspects that the past is sweeping round in a big circle to ambush her.

She has only the faintest grasp of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but she knows that something strange has happened to time since she found the letter from the David Cassidy magazine in her mother’s wardrobe. Her brain, which generally spins through a Rolodex of worries, has started making dramatic leaps between the years and decades,
as if some invisible director were putting together a package of Petra highlights for an awards ceremony. While she was reading in the bath the other night, it was Steven Williams’s penis that surfaced. She saw it for the first time when she was babysitting, for her Geography teacher and his wife, and Steven dropped round unannounced. (Petra and he had just started seeing each other, after Gillian grew tired of Steven. She had never wanted him; she had wanted others not to have him.) Petra remembers, for example, how, when she opened the door, he was standing there on the porch with a bottle of Woodpecker Cider and a hopeful grin. How he took off his leather jacket and threw it over the banister as if it were a saddle and the buckles jangled like stirrups. The way they both padded upstairs to check that the two little girls were asleep, and how it felt as though they were trying on adulthood for the first time. How she found herself scrutinizing Steven’s face in the glow of the toadstool night light and realized, to her mild astonishment, that she was looking to see what kind of dad he might be. She could only have been fifteen.

She startles herself by recalling things she didn’t know she’d noticed. How, when they’d been kissing on the settee, he lifted himself onto one elbow to keep his weight from crushing her. The way she liked being crushed by his weight. Her heart pounding like she’d run a hundred miles. When his mouth found her breast, it sent an electrical signal Down There, a spasm of longing that created a new pathway as it convulsed. He undid the button on his jeans, adjusted himself with a single movement and there it was. Huge and unmanageably alive. No Chinese whisper in the needlework room, no Biology lesson, not even Carol’s mime with a
saucisson
on the fifth-form trip to Paris could have prepared her for the thing itself.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or faint, though neither would have been right because it was unmistakably a solemn moment. Knowing that something had to be done about the erection—done with it, to be exact—and finding out what that was just at the moment the Geography teacher put his key in the front door. Steven leaped to his feet, tucked himself back in and scooped her bra up and into her bag with a single movement, years of training on the rugby field paying off.

Petra said the girls had been no bother. No bother at all. The
teacher knew, and they both knew that he knew, but they were saved by mutual embarrassment.

Steven gave her a lift home on the back of his bike, along the seafront. Petra felt happy simply to be alive. The salty wind on her raw, kissed lips, her hands laced round his middle, her body and his leaning together to take each corner. Her first brush with sex left her feeling drugged, hugging the secrets of womanhood to herself.

One whole wall of Molly’s room is wallpapered in boy. The same boy, in picture after picture. A boy on the prow of a ship, a boy on a beach. A boy with cool, blue eyes and a prominent, dimpled chin. A boy whose floppy, too-long fringe is parted to the side and threaded with blond streaks. Petra doesn’t think much of him, this boy. With his button nose and round eyes, he looks like a child’s drawing, not entirely real. She dislikes the fact that her daughter’s bedroom looks like some kind of Renaissance chapel dedicated to the cult of this youth, but she doesn’t say so. Instead, in a pleading voice she dislikes, she says: “Mol, I’ve told you before, if you use Sellotape to stick posters up, it’ll bring the paint off when you take them down.”

Molly doesn’t respond. She is in bed, listening to her Discman and writhing with the duvet as if it were a sea monster.

“You know we can’t afford to redecorate.”

As so often with her daughter, Petra finds her tongue keeps talking when silence would be the wiser course. That’s not what I meant to say, she thinks. This is not who I am.

“But I’m not going to take the posters down, am I? Duh,” says the shape under the duvet.

“Don’t say
duh
.”

“What’s wrong with
duh
? Honest, Mum, I don’t get you sometimes.”

“There’s no need to get me. I’m your mother.”

Petra bends to scoop up an armful of tights and underpants.

“Is that the boy from
Titanic
?”

Molly sits up, incredulous with disdain. “Leonardo DiCaprio, Mum. He’s world fay-mous.”

“How did he end up with a name like that?”

“His mum was pregnant with him and she was in Italy and she was looking at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“Because I read it in a magazine.”

Petra sighs, exasperated. “You can’t believe everything you read in magazines, darling.”

“It happens to be a true fact. Ac-tchew-ull-ee.”

Petra bends forward slightly to allow this falsehood to go over her head. “You know, when I was your age I wasn’t allowed posters on—”

Molly doesn’t wait for her to finish. “And your point is?”

The awful, hand-on-the-hip sarcasm she has learned from those American TV shows she watches.

“Molly, please don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

Along with the rest of her generation, Molly is bored by foreign languages, but somehow manages to speak fluent Beverly Hills brat. “It’s sooo gross,” she will say, wrinkling her nose. Petra, who still thinks of gross as a pay packet before deductions, feels old and weary.

“Always try to remember you’re the adult.” That’s what a neighbor with older children told her when Molly started nursery. It seemed such a strange thing to say—who was the adult, if not the mother? Now her baby girl is a teenager, Petra knows exactly how hard it is not to be provoked into childish retaliation.
Well, how do you think I feel?
is what she finds herself wondering.

Molly doesn’t care how Petra feels. Petra’s job is to absorb whatever Molly feels.

“Mol?”

“Okay, I’ll use Blu-Tack.”

“Good.”

“Fine.”

“It’s so late. I hoped you’d be asleep by now, my love.”

Petra perches on the edge of the bed and strokes her daughter’s forehead with her index finger. Over the past few months, the child’s features have been going about their urgent task of morphing into a woman’s; right now, they are slightly too big for her face—eyes, nose
and pillowy lips, all slightly out of scale. Molly complains that she is not even pretty, but one day she will be beautiful, her mother thinks. The prettiest girl in class seldom grows up to be the beauty.

A sudden image of Gillian at their school reunion, four years ago. A Home Counties wife and mother now, living in one of the shires—Berks or Bucks—pleasant features under a neat bob with expensive caramel highlights, just a millimeter too wide. Gillian Edwards as a grown woman, talking about their place in Portugal, the palms of her hands stained a telltale Darjeeling by self-tan. Gillian. All her fearful magic gone.

“Can’t sleep. I keep telling you,” Molly says. The bags under her eyes are a livid plum. Her lids, fluttering as if a moth were trapped beneath.

Petra bends to kiss them. “Is everything okay at school?”

“Fine.”

“Hannah okay?”

Said casually. Tricky Hannah, the volatile one in Molly’s group. Hannah, whom Petra long ago spied as a threat to her daughter’s happiness, though she keeps that thought to herself lest she make Hannah more attractive to her daughter. Tricky Hannah, the queen who moves the other girls around the board. Every group has one. Hannah, who regularly demands to be Molly’s bestest friend, hers alone and no other. More demanding than any lover.

It’s just teenage girls, Petra tells herself, but she knows the other things that teenage girls can do, so she stays alert. Petra counsels Molly to maintain a wide circle of friends. She doesn’t say that the more friends you have in different groups the less chance there is of being abandoned. Adolescence is a worrying time for mothers, but Petra knows she worries more than is strictly reasonable. Her antennae for rejection are overdeveloped; even though she seems to have produced a popular, well-adjusted kid, she can’t switch them off.

“Mu-um, it’s no big deal, okay?”

That’s what Molly says whenever Petra inquires why she isn’t part of a shopping trip the other girls are going on or has, inexplicably, been left off the guest list for some disco. Petra experiences every snub to her child, both real and imagined, with a lurch in her belly. She can’t help
it. Even Molly hates it if they’re running late for a sleepover, yells at Petra when they’re stuck in traffic; hates the other girls to get started without her. Fear of missing out is married to the twin dread of not being missed at all. Some things never change.

Petra adjusts her position on the bed so she is lying alongside Molly, their two heads next to each other on the pillow. The cushion between them is Molly’s breasts, a recent addition and swelling fast. She is glad about her daughter’s breasts, proud even. Is that normal? Recently, Molly has become very private, banning Petra from the bathroom when she is in the bath. Not long ago, they used to chat about their day, with Petra perched on the loo and Molly lying back in the water like the girl in that Millais painting, hair a skein of seaweed floating behind her head.

She wonders now if she will ever see her daughter’s naked body again, the body she grew inside her own—probably not. The next person to see it will be a boy, a real one, not the Leonardo kid in the posters on the wall.

As she puts her arm around her, she feels all the fight leave Molly. When she was a toddler, Molly would go quite rigid during a tantrum, until the demon departed and she allowed herself to be cuddled and soothed by a warm drink from her bottle. She liked to have the bottle held for her so she could twirl her hair with one hand and clutch her blanket with the other. How easy it was back then, Petra thinks. You could comfort her, smooth it all away, tell her everything was going to be all right. And it was. Because you could control the world. You
were
the world, pretty much.

Drifting now, Molly burrows closer. If she’s honest with herself, this is what Petra misses most about Marcus. It’s not the sex. It’s another body that can, as if by osmosis, drain all the tension out of your cells. She has to hand it to him, Marcus was good at massage, his cellist’s fingers powerful and nimble, finding the knots.

“I
knead
you,” he said, turning her over and pressing his way down the rungs of her spine, springing each vertebra like a catch. He always was terrific at vibrato.

By the end, she couldn’t bear for him to touch her. Tried to get the sex over with as quickly as possible, hating herself for even letting him
near, still thinking maybe he’d stay, and hating herself for that also. She’d read somewhere that the higher the pitch of the woman’s cries the faster the man climaxes. Well, well, well, it turns out that, sometimes, you
can
trust what you read in magazines. It was that easy, and that hard.

“When you and Sharon are in America, you can go and see Leo,” Molly murmurs.

“Who’s Leo?”

“Leo DiCaprio.”

“Oh. The most famous boy in the world.”

“Such a cool name. I love him so much, Mum.”

“Yes, my darling, I know.”

Downstairs once more, she needs to get back to the computer, but the air in the living room is hot and sullen, so she lets herself out through the patio doors. The dark garden twitches with scents. Earlier, eager for distractions from writing up Ashley’s case history, she’d wasted at least an hour out here watering her plants, picking her favorite sweet peas and some tomatoes, which she put on the kitchen windowsill to ripen. She likes the dusty green smell they leave on her palms. Absentmindedly, she starts to deadhead the nicotiana in the terra-cotta urn by the back door. The withered blooms feel like parachute silk to the touch. Fingers poised to pinch, Petra suddenly feels the terrible power of life and death. She hesitates over one collapsed flower. No, let’s give the poor thing one more day in the sun.

The cream trumpets open only in the late afternoon and release their musky, throat-constricting fragrance throughout the evening. How strange to think that nicotiana, pretty and blameless as a Victorian nightdress, is a little sister of the tobacco plant that kills millions. Helped to kill her father, took what was left of his lungs after pneumoconiosis, and his glorious voice. If Petra kneels down next to the container, she thinks she can smell Dad’s pipe and hear him tapping it on the top step in the garden at home to loosen the thick tarry molasses that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.

Several times, Petra has tried to tell Molly about her grandfather.
Ei tad-cu hi
. By the time Molly was old enough to be aware of him, Dad was half the size of the man who toiled in the steelworks, a whiskery husk under a trembling sheet, scarcely able to shave and struggling for breath, though still holding out his arms to his granddaughter.

“Come by y’ere, lovely, and have a
cwtch
with your grandad.”