The Flavours of Love (6 page)

‘Can I have my phone back?’ she asks and shoves her hands into the neat square pockets of her dressing gown.

I lower the bubble wand. ‘Not until we’ve talked a bit,’ I say.

The eye roll and lip curl turn into a full-body sigh.

‘Come and have a look at what the slugs have done,’ I say to her. ‘It’s really quite impressive, if you’re not the person whose plants they’ve destroyed.’

She has her trainers on, so drags herself across the patio, across the lawn, across the other part of the patio to the vegetable patch in the corner. It’s shaded a little by the overhang from the large oak tree that grows in next door’s garden. We stand side by side, looking at the leaves of my spinach plants, which look like badly crocheted doilies; the slimy trail that is all over the rocket leaves, which have huge chunks taken out of them but not as artistically as the spinach; and the glistening trail that links the near-black earth between the rocket, spinach, watercress and cabbages.

‘Wow,’ Phoebe breathes. ‘They did this all in one night?’

‘One day and one night,’ I say.

‘
Wow
.’ She’s impressed, probably imagining what it’d be like to go to the human equivalent of such a party. ‘Wow.’

‘Do you have any idea what you want to do?’ I ask her now that I’ve impressed her and we’re on a neutral subject.

The shutters around her immediately come down, whatever positive emotion she had towards me is whisked away in an instant. ‘Whatever you say,’ she mumbles.

‘This isn’t my decision,’ I reply.

Phoebe starts to prod at the edge of the earth around the plundered tomato plant with the toe of her trainer, openly unsettled by what I’ve said. I watch her as she avoids touching the areas of dirt that glisten with slug goo. ‘I knew you wouldn’t care,’ she eventually says. ‘That’s why I didn’t bother telling you first.’

I’m not going to bite at that. I’m not going to let her goad me into
shouting at her. ‘Do you know what I wish?’ I say. I extend my foot and prod at the earth, too. It’s pointless, but enjoyable. ‘I wish you’d come to talk to me before you did anything like that. I really thought we could talk about anything, Pheebs. Admittedly, I probably would have gone off at the deep end
at first
because I would have thought you were too young to have sex. Not your body, I’m sure you think your body is ready, and I’m sure you thought your mind was ready, but really, I would have liked to have discussed it with you. I didn’t even think this sort of thing was on your radar.’

She bunches her lips up and continues to poke at the soil in front of her, but doesn’t interrupt what I’m saying so maybe she’s listening.

‘I would have loved to have found out what you felt about it. Who he was. If he was nice to you.’ I stop what I’m doing and focus on my daughter. She is so young. In my head she’ll always be that bigcheeked bundle of screams that was handed to me minutes after she was born. In my mind, she’ll always be the little girl who managed to lose her black shoe with the red bow on the way home from school and still to this day doesn’t remember how. She’ll always be the little girl sitting on the bed beside me crying because it’s finally hit her that her dad isn’t coming back. Phoebe will probably always be young to me, I don’t think she’ll ever be old enough to have sex in the nostalgia of my mind. ‘Was he? Was he nice to you?’

She also stops jabbing at the dirt. She doesn’t move as she considers my question. With her lips twisted thoughtfully to the left she starts to chew on her inner cheek. Then: shrug. ‘I suppose.’

‘Did he pressure you into it? Or did you want to?’
Or was it ‘hooking up’?

‘I wanted to feel close to him, Mum,’ she says.

‘And you didn’t feel close to him before?’

‘Kind of, I suppose. I just wanted him …’

‘To like you.’

‘Yeah. I like him. I like him so much, and he makes me feel really funny in my stomach, and it feels really awful when I’m not with
him and sometimes even the texts aren’t enough. I just wanted him to feel the same way. Is that bad?’

Bad? It’s
horrific
She’s having sex to make someone like her. Not because her body’s telling her it’s ready, not because she wants pleasure from it, not even because she’s curious what the fuss is all about, but because it’s currency. It’s to get something. ‘No,’ I reassure her. ‘It’s not bad. I completely understand, although it’s probably not the best reason to do it? I mean, it might have been better to do it because you felt he was as close to you as you feel to him, and with the both of you feeling so close, that was the natural next step.’
Is this the right time for this?
I wonder as I speak. It seems a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has not only bolted but has made it to the other end of the country in a clear, unhindered run. ‘I can’t tell you what to do in any way that will stop you having sex, but I think it’d be great for you if you could promise yourself that you’re only ever going to do it because you want to enjoy it. Not because everyone else is doing it, not because you want someone to like you, not because you think you have to after someone’s nice to you, but because you want to feel the pleasure from it. OK?’

‘But …’ she begins.

‘But?’ I ask.

‘Nothing,’ she says, shaking her head. She buries her hands deeper in her pockets, hunches her shoulders over as she resumes digging at the slug earth with the toe of her shoe. ‘Can I have my phone back?’

You didn’t say, please
, I want to point out to her.
I spent years teaching you to always say please and thank you
. ‘What contraception were you both using?’ I ask to stall her. I suspect the second I hand over the little silver and black box of circuits and buttons I have in my apron pocket, I will not get anything else out of her.

She shrugs briefly and dismissively with both shoulders.

In Phoebe-shrug speak, this reply causes my stomach to turn over right before my heart does the same. I rotate on the spot and look at her. When she continues to stare downwards, I take her shoulders
and force her to look at me. ‘You did use contraception, didn’t you?’ I ask.

‘You don’t need to the first time because if you’re a virgin then you can’t get pregnant.’ She shrugs me off.

Nervously, I unscrew the bubble wand from its bottle. Then screw it on again. Then unscrew it. I promised myself I wouldn’t let this happen. That I wouldn’t let my daughter become like me: too scared to talk to my mother; too terrified to tell my mother my periods had started (and only did in the end because I needed money from her to buy towels); too ashamed of my body and what was happening to it to ask for help when I needed it most. I promised myself that I would always be there for my daughter, and I’ve let this happen. I’ve managed to blink, to close my eyes over the period of losing Joel, and open them again to find I have missed the most important time of my daughter’s life. And I’ve missed the chance to not turn into my mother.

‘Did he tell you that?’ I ask her, still anxiously unscrewing and screwing on the lid of my bubbles bottle.

She nods. Her eyes, mouth, forehead, chin are set with pure defiance as she challenges me,
dares
me to tell her he was wrong. Even though her body has proved that all by itself, she would still believe anything he said.

‘Well, it’s not true.’ There should be some comfort, I suppose, that it was her first time. That the ‘hooking up’ talk was all for show.

‘But he said—’

‘Sweetheart, come on now, you’re a clever girl, you know where babies come from and how they’re made. You know that every time you have sex you take the chance of getting pregnant except if a person has had a tubal ligation, or a vasectomy.’

‘But—’

‘Pheebs, you’re pregnant. Your own body has told you it’s not true.’

She scrunches up her face in rage, like a six-year-old told there’ll be no Christmas this year because Father Christmas isn’t real.

Something occurs to me as I face her silent wrath: ‘If you really
believed what he told you, why did you use the test so early? Surely you would have waited until two periods had passed.’

She sighs. ‘Cos I thought I’d better be doubly sure so I got the morning-after pill.’

‘And when you were late you knew it might not have worked?’

She nods. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not true,’ she adds, quickly.

‘Erm, obviously it does.’

‘I need my phone back.’

I need my Joel back
. He’d know what to say, what to do, how best to navigate this unknown rocky road our lives have veered onto.

‘Are you going to tell him you’re pregnant?’ I ask.

‘I need my phone,’ she insists.

The slug-damaged plants all need to go in the bin. The earth needs to be turned over, aerated, then left to rest before I replant things. I could make her do it. I could make her dig up all this stuff and dig over my land before I hand back her phone. Or, I could accept that right now, when I’m still blindsided by the situation, I need to pick my battles.

I place my gloved hand into my front pocket and take out the phone. ‘You’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,’ I say before I return her secrets, her line to the boy who helped to get her into this situation. ‘Nine o’clock.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re pregnant. You need to see a doctor about that.’

‘Fine. Whatever. You obviously know everything about everything.’

My lip hurts when I clamp down on it, like my tongue did yesterday. Giving in, picking my battles, is not something I’m good at. I like to win. I like to do things the proper way. Talking to her much longer could involve me attempting to win this battle by any means necessary. I hold out her phone. She snatches it out of my hand, scowls at me before storming towards the house.

‘You didn’t say thank you,’ I call at her retreating back.

I drop to my knees and start to dismantle the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah as played out in my vegetable patch.

12 years before
That Day
(February, 1999)

‘She’s a girl,’ Joel said. His face was a mess of tears, his eyes a bright red after he scrubbed at them with the heels of his hands. ‘We got a girl one.’

‘Is she OK?’ I sobbed. I couldn’t hear her crying, I hadn’t seen her in the seconds after she was born and I was scared after nine months of taking care of her that I hadn’t done it right at the last minute. That once again I’d let everyone down and there was something wrong.

‘She’s perfect,’ Joel said.

‘Are you sure she’s OK?’ I sobbed. ‘Why isn’t she crying?’

‘Not all babies cry,’ the midwife said. ‘Some are really chilled.’ The midwife laid the squirming bundle on my bare chest for skin-to-skin contact.

I was sobbing so much I could barely move my arms to hold her. I hurt so much I didn’t know what part of me was sinew, blood and bone and what was pain. My heart felt as if it had expanded to fill my entire chest cavity, which was why I could only inhale and exhale in gasping, sobbing breaths.

My gaze focused on her, and I could see I’d done it. She was here. She was a wrinkled milk chocolate brown smeared with white; her right arm was extended towards my face, her mouth was wide open, showing us the two parallel ridges of her gums.

I stared at my chilled daughter. ‘We did it, Joel. We did it.’

‘You did it, Babes,’ he said, scrubbing at his eyes again. ‘You did it and you were amazing.’

‘“Phoebe” is right for her,’ I said. This was the name he’d chosen. He’d had a reason for it, but I couldn’t remember right then what it was. But it was right for her, it was who she looked like. Phoebe.

‘You sure?’ he asked.

‘Yes, absolutely. She absolutely looks like Phoebe.’

‘She does. And she is absolutely amazing.’

*

My mobile vibrates in my jeans pocket. I tug the thick gardening glove off my right hand before I retrieve the phone. I vaguely recognise the number flashing up but it’s not stored so I almost don’t answer it. After my recent history, though, I know that would be folly. That would be like convincing yourself that you believe you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex.

‘Hello?’ I say into the phone, half-expecting a pause then a recorded message claiming I need some sort of financial advice.

‘Mrs Mackleroy?’ the person on the other end asks, politely.

‘Yes?’ I reply cautiously because although I recognise the voice, I can’t quite place it.

‘This is Felicia Laureau from the retirement village where your aunt, Betty Mackleroy, is living?’

‘Oh, hello,’ I say, pleased that I don’t have to play the ‘pretend I know who you are’ game. Then it strikes me: this is Felicia Laureau from where Joel’s Aunty Betty is staying. I close my eyes and ground myself, like I would if I was about to be battered by a hurricane.

‘We were wondering if you could come in and see us tomorrow? Nothing to worry about, we’d simply like to discuss a few things with you.’

‘It has to be tomorrow, does it?’ I ask, trying to gauge how bad it is this time.

‘Yes, it has to be tomorrow.’ It’s really bad.

‘Right, fine. I’ll see you about midday.’

‘Perfect.’

I sit back on the grass, not bothered that the damp from the lawn seeps into my jeans and slowly soaks through to my knickers.

I’m not bothered because I know without question that tomorrow is going to be a repeat of yesterday.

II

V

15 years before
That Day
(February, 1996)

‘Saffron, meet Aunty Betty,’ Joel said proudly.

Aunty Betty reclined on the red velvet chaise longue in the living room of her Ealing mansion flat, her gold and silver cigarillo holder installed between the fore and middle fingers of her right hand. Her shiny black hair was piled up on top of her head in an elegant bun, at its front an ornate silver bun clasp. Her large eyes, heavily made up with gold and plum eyeshadow and what I suspected were false eyelashes, inspected me carefully. She lingered over my chin-length straightened black hair, she noted my lack of jewellery, she debated with herself over my knee-length blue silk skirt, and cream jumper secured at the middle with a blue patent belt. She openly disapproved of my blue and white shoes. Once she was done checking me over like a farmer might do a new pig at an animal auction, she took a long, theatrical drag on her holder. (You could tell it was all for show as little smoke came out when she exhaled.) Slowly, her rouged lips parted and she grinned. She was watching me like a predator watched the walking takeaway meal that was an injured, bleeding deer – it wouldn’t take much to devour her prey, but there’d still be enough fight in the creature to give her some fun.