Mothers & Daughters (39 page)

‘Don't let her catch cold,' Carol shouts
.

What is this strange, unpleasant sensation in the pit of her stomach? Surely it should be
her
job to dance with her daughter in the moonlight
?

My instinct would have been to phone David, but after what he'd said, I couldn't bring myself to dial. I was too frightened.

I paced around for a couple of minutes, then I tried Phil. He was, after all, Jaz's dad, and I needed someone with me. When I got no response, I tried again. Eventually he answered, groggily.

‘It's me,' I gushed. ‘I know where Jaz is. She's sent me her address. Can you drive me there?'

There was a long silence. ‘Carol?'

I said, ‘Can you drive me to Harrogate?'

‘When?'

‘Now.'

‘Jesus.'

I waited, listening for sounds to show he might be with someone, but there was nothing. No female voice asking what was going on.

‘It's half past four in the morning,' he said. ‘Can you give me time to have a coffee and some breakfast? If she's sent you her address, she's not going to be skipping off, is she? We can wait till it gets light, at least.' Probably he was twitching the curtain aside to look out, because there was a pause and I heard him swear under his breath. ‘I need to look at an atlas, anyway.'

He turned up later than he said he would, by which time I was climbing the walls.

‘You said six-thirty at the latest.'

‘And it's six forty-three, Carol. Now tell me what's up.'

‘In the car,' I said, pushing him out of the front door and slamming it behind us. How lucky, in the end, that I wasn't tied any more to taking Josh into school. Moira I could call on the way, ask her to open the shop. All that mattered was getting to my daughter.

Once we were on the road I read out the text. Just Jaz's name, and an address. No message.

‘You tried to ring back?'

‘Of course I bloody did.'

‘No luck?'

‘What do you think?'

‘And it was her number?'

‘Yes.'

The streetlamps flicked past as we sped down the dual carriageway.

I said, ‘You don't think she's being held prisoner, do you?'

Phil snorted with laughter, which was annoying as hell and reassuring at the same time. ‘Don't be daft.'

‘We could ring the police, ask them to be on stand-by.'

‘No, Carol.'

I glanced across, took in his grey-streaked hair, his sagging jawline, the creases round his eyes and mouth. Then I pulled down the sunshade mirror and studied my own tired face. I felt old and stupid and not up to the job. I wanted it to be David in the driving seat.

‘You're shivering,' he said. ‘There's a coat in the back if you want.'

‘One of Pen's?'

His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. ‘For the last
time, she isn't around any more. How many times do I have to keep saying it?'

I scowled, and reached round for the overcoat.

‘And there's a flask in the glove compartment. Help yourself,' he muttered.

‘Tea? Coffee?'

‘Brandy.'

We drove on under a grey, uncertain sky. All I could feel, as the miles clocked up, was terror: of Jaz not being there, or her being there but still not letting me see Matty, of her changing her mind and fleeing again, of her being in some terrible trouble. It seemed as though I'd spent all my life as a mother in a state of churning fear. Labour pain's nothing to what comes after. From the first moment you're pregnant, everyone seems to have a horror story to tell you.
They did a scan and found there was no head
, I remember overhearing someone in the shop say, and I had to go home early that day and had weeks of terrible nightmares. And the potential for pain starts even before you're pregnant, from the second you admit that you want a child. Moira tried for years, had miscarriage after miscarriage and all sorts of tests and humiliating procedures, and in the end had to learn to live without. I can't imagine what that must have been like. All I ever wanted was a baby.

And yet, when I got home from hospital with newborn Jaz, I remember looking at her and thinking, Dear God, I don't know what to do with her. That awful lurch when the idea that you truly have got an actual baby sinks in, and that what you've done, in having a child, is open yourself up forever to the worst hurt imaginable (and I saw again Jaz hauling Matty out of the water, his drenched clothes streaming and his face streaked with weed). There's no magic age where you can stop worrying, either, because after falling in
ponds and meningitis and choking there's paedophiles and bullying and drugs and car crashes. Teenage boys getting knifed and shot, girls getting raped. I thought of Alice's little baby, pictured him lying in an incubator with a name tag round his tender ankle, and wondered how on earth she would bear it.

Having a child was like building a house on an unexploded bomb. At any moment, the possibility for devastation was part of your life. In some ways, Eileen had been clever to steer clear of it all.

‘I'm not sure I can cope with this,' I said. We were coming onto the motorway, and Phil was looking away from me, over his shoulder.

‘Course you can,' he said, flicking the indicator.

‘I daren't let myself think Matty might be there, because if he's not, if it's like last time when I went down to Bristol—'

Lorries roared into line beside us, and behind us, and ahead. Danger was everywhere.

‘Tell you who I was dreaming about when I got your call. You remember that chemistry teacher, the one with the lisp? God knows why she made an appearance after all these years.'

‘I know what you're trying to do,' I said.

‘In the dream she was really friendly, not like she was when we were at school. Mary bloody Whitehouse in a lab coat. God, she went ballistic over that chlorine gas business, didn't she? Absolutely livid. I got the cane for that.'

‘You deserved it.'

‘It wasn't me who didn't close the fume cupboard properly. That was her.'

‘Yes, but you didn't have to fall off your stool and pretend you were choking to death, did you? Dribbling everywhere, jerking around. Even I thought you were a gonner.'

Phil grinned. ‘Hey, do you remember that assembly when we
had that ex-pupil come to talk to us about how he'd won the war?'

‘You got the cane for that as well,' I said. I could see him now, tie askew, making a dash across the playground to where the tall man with the military bearing stood conversing with the Headmaster. Phil had tagged the man on the arm, for all the world as though they were playing a game of chase, then run off shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I'm cured! It's a miracle! I was blind and now I can see!'

‘Grand days, eh?'

‘If you say so.'

‘They never did find out who added Hitler moustaches to all the photos in the entrance hall.'

‘It's nothing to be proud of.'

‘I seem to recall you finding it pretty funny at the time. In fact, didn't you and Eileen get a bit creative yourselves with the speech-day programmes at one point?' Phil raised an eyebrow at me, and my lips twitched, in spite of myself. It was nerves, though, that was all.

There were hold-ups on the M62. As the car slowed down, then halted, I gripped the handle of my bag so tight I left fingernail marks in the leather.

‘I saw Edith Hilton last week,' said Phil. ‘Coming out of Aldi.'

‘Is she still alive?'

‘Unless what I saw was a zombie.'

‘Very amusing. I meant she must be getting on.'

He reached into the pocket between the seats, hooked out an elderly Polo and stuck it in his mouth. ‘How long's Laverne been living next door? It's only about twelve years, and Edith would have been, what, sixty when she moved out? So she'll be in her seventies, that's all. Still a way to go before she's a contender for Britain's Oldest Woman.'

‘Britain's Oldest Bag, more like.'

‘You weren't fond of her, were you?' Clicky-click went the mint against his teeth.

‘No. She was horrible to Jaz. Horrible full stop.'

‘Do you remember that time you swapped all her flower bulbs for pickling onions?'

‘You told me to.'

‘Yeah. Good, wasn't it?'

The traffic started to move again. I thought of Edith Hilton peering suspiciously over the new green shoots in her border, bending to pinch the leaves and then sniffing her fingers, while Phil and I hooted with laughter from behind the front-room curtain. She'd had a son, a nasty piece of work, who complained about Jaz more or less constantly. Didn't like her climbing the tree in our garden because he thought she was spying on his mother; objected to the noise they made when Nat came round; claimed they were poking fun, when they were just giggling like young girls do. I always tried to be polite, but it wasn't easy. One time he banged on the door to moan they were playing their music with the window open and his mother didn't like it. I'd stood there on the step for five minutes, explaining it was a new birthday CD-player, and reassuring him it wouldn't happen again, and apologising for any disturbance. Then Phil had come up behind me and said to him, ‘Tell you what, Norman: why don't you just fuck off?' and shut the door in his face. And that, astonishingly, was the last we'd heard of him. For all his failings as a husband, Phil sometimes hit the nail on the head.

‘Poor woman, such trouble she had with her lawn,' he said now as we came onto the M60.

I looked sideways at him. ‘Was that you?'

‘Yup.'

‘How?'

‘Coca Cola. Kills the grass. Takes it ages to grow back properly. She went bonkers trying to work out what caused those lines. I saw her putting down fertilizer, extra turf, all sorts. Always those lines came back, though. What a mystery, eh?'

‘Why didn't you tell me at the time?'

‘I thought it would be more convincing if you were mystified too.'

At last he'd made me smile properly. ‘Do you think there's any chance you'll ever grow up?'

‘God, no.'

When we came off the motorway, there was another hold-up: some roadworks with a complicated three-way lights system and traffic backing up for miles.

‘Keep calm,' he said. ‘Have a Polo.'

‘You know I hate them.'

‘We used to play that car game with Murray mints, do you remember? Who could make their sweet last the longest. And we always let Jaz win because that way you got the maximum amount of peace. It chipped away another twenty minutes or so off a long journey.'

‘What if that text's a wind-up, Phil?'

‘It won't be. Try not to think about it. There's no mileage in getting yourself upset before we've even got there. Is there?'

‘No,' I said reluctantly.

He switched the radio on, and twiddled the dial till he found ‘Stuck in the Middle With You'. ‘Hey, what about that time Natalie sat on the dolls'-house roof and the whole thing collapsed? All those bloody miniature spindles for the banisters; I was months putting them right. And I got Superglue on your mother's tablecloth, do you remember?'

I let him prattle on because it was easier than trying to shut him up. How he used to wind Jaz up by singing
Take my paw, I'm a hamster in paradise
whenever she cleaned Mojo out; how
once, when we were courting, my mother had invited him to Sunday lunch and he'd choked spectacularly on a string of beef fat; that time he'd been changing on the beach in Fowey, larking about, and had overbalanced and given everyone a flash.

But as we came into the outskirts of Harrogate finally, even he went quiet. Only when Neil Young's ‘Heart of Gold' came on the radio did he break the silence. ‘Hey, do you remember when Jaz cooked up that massive temperature out of nowhere, and we had to do a midnight dash to hospital?'

‘I do,' I said. I could recall the scene so clearly. ‘The minute we walked through the door she was right as rain. Then, on the way home, you stopped the car and I took her out into the park and whirled her round. I was that relieved.'

Phil opened his mouth as if to speak, but then shook his head and stayed silent.

We were driving between rows of tall stone houses. In one of these, or something like it, Jaz and Matty were waiting for us.

‘It wasn't all bad, was it?' said Phil, after a while.

‘No.'

‘I mean, we've history, haven't we?'

‘Too much,' I said.

After that, neither of us spoke till we saw Soulton Street.

I'd printed out the directions from the computer, but now I came to look at the detail, one side had been cut off and some of it we were having to guess. The stone houses gave way to a modern estate, then to rows of semis like Sunnybank, then a council estate. Then we seemed to be passing through the edge of Harrogate and out into the countryside again. I was about to say I thought we must have gone wrong when I recognised a road number, and understood where we were. A couple more turnings, one, two, and the next one was us.

We found ourselves in a cul-de-sac flanked by terraced grey cottages, all with little porches and square front gardens, fields and moorland behind. Phil slowed the car to a crawl so I could peer at house numbers.

‘It's on your side,' I said, swinging round in my seat to face him.

He was leaning forward, frowning, his lips drawn into a kind of snarl. It was the first evidence I'd seen that he might be under stress. ‘Over there. That's Jaz's car,' he said.

I started to shake.

Within the next second my focus shifted to something moving just beyond the car in one of the gardens: a small white figure behind black railings. ‘Matty', I tried to say, but only a whisper came out. Blindly I felt for the handle and pushed the door open even though the car was still moving, but my seat belt locked and held me back. I scrabbled for the release clip.