The Memory Book (16 page)

‘Don’t you care at all?’ I sobbed, so stupidly. Like I wasn’t even me, I grabbed hold of him, grabbed his T-shirt in my fists, wailing, hoping that he’d fold me in his arms and kiss my snot-soaked face. Like that was ever going to happen.

The reason I’d gone to see him – the other reason apart from hoping he did still love me – was to tell him that I didn’t go through with the termination: the termination that he hadn’t come along to with me, because he’d had an important university rugby match. Which, by the way, I’d said I was fine about, when what I should have said was, ‘You are an unbelievable dick, Sebastian.’ But I couldn’t make myself, because I still thought that maybe, maybe, he might change his mind and want me back again. I make myself sick. If I were a guest on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
, or something, I’d throw a shoe at my head.

When the day came, I just couldn’t do it. I got up, had a shower, got dressed, picked up my bag and then … I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, this is the dress that you will have worn to the termination of your pregnancy. And just knowing that meant I couldn’t go through with it. Which surprised me. I believe in the right for women to choose, but it never occurred to me that if I were in that situation, I would choose life – even though, actually, when you think about it, it’s completely obvious: Mum chose me. Instead, I curled up into a small ball in my bed, folding myself up as tightly as possible. I closed my eyes and stayed very still, as though somehow I might be able to wish myself out of time and stay just like that for ever, with the tiny essence of life inside me, and pretend I hadn’t just found out that Mum was desperately ill, or that there was a fifty per cent chance I might have a gene that would make me more likely to develop early-onset Alzheimer’s too, and that if I did, there was also a fifty per cent chance of passing it on to my child. I did my best to un-know those things, because facing the future was hard enough, and I wanted my choice to be made by the person I am now, and not the person I might be one day. It wasn’t that simple, though, and I just wanted one other person to tell me I was doing the right thing.

I was going to tell Sebastian all of that, thinking he might suddenly feel the same, and we might have this baby together. When I looked at his face, though, I knew that the last thing he wanted to know was that I was still pregnant. Was that the
look Mum had seen on my father’s face when she broke up with him?

‘What does it matter if I care or not?’ Seb said, glancing back over his shoulder again, towards where the fun was. ‘What point is there going over and over it? Really, Cat, pull yourself together. You’re not doing yourself any favours.’

And that last look he gave me … It was such a cold look; it was the look of a boy who was entirely detached from me and us, and everything we might have been. I couldn’t stop crying, the tears rolling down my face while he just stood there and looked at me.

‘Christ.’ Seb shook his head, closing the door two inches. ‘You are too much, don’t you see that? I did like you, at first, but you … you killed it. And I’m sorry about everything else, but that’s not my fault, Cat. You’re the one who didn’t revise … I passed my exams.’

He slammed the door shut.

I stood there for a moment or two more, until I’d stopped crying and the bitter wind had dried the tears on my face, and I thought, right, that’s it, then, I am not going to waste another single second on him – even though I knew I would do, but thinking it was a start. And then I went to work, back to my job behind the bar at a strip club, the job I had got just before the end of the spring term, and the job I got back easily when I dropped in to see my boss with my new, slightly improved, bigger bust. He’s a total pervert, but I can handle him.

I look at my watch again. The next shift should be here any minute now, and then it’s back to Becky’s where she will stay in her bedroom all evening with her boyfriend, and I’ll sit in the living room alone, wondering why I’m not at home, why I haven’t told my mum any of this, and why I always mess everything up.

I look up as the beaded curtain at the entrance jangles, expecting to see Mandy lumber her way into view. But it’s not Mandy, in her faux fur coat and thick fake eyelashes, that tumbles into the room so dramatically and noticeably that even the dancer on the stage turns to look. It’s my mother, and right behind her is Gran.

I turn around and head for the office behind the bar, hoping that somehow I might be able to hide from them, maybe even squeeze out of the tiny window in the truly grim unisex staff toilet. But they follow me into the small dingy office a few moments later, and find me standing in the corner, just standing there like an idiot.

Gran looks me up and down, sees the Venus logo on my too-tight T-shirt, and breathes a sigh of relief. ‘Well, at least she’s got her top on,’ she says.

I want to laugh out loud. They’ve come down here to find me – my mum and gran, working together as a team, like some grizzly old cop about to retire for good when she’s paired up against her will with a maverick upstart to work one last case together. Seeing my mum and my gran, both
looking worried and cross, but here together, is somehow sort of wonderful and funny.

Mum is looking at me, and she looks just like Mum. Like she knows me. I want to hug her, but I don’t want to break this moment.

‘Nice place,’ Mum says, looking around. There is no window in the office, just an extractor fan filmed with thick dust. An ashtray full of cigarette butts sits on the desk, because laws on smoking in the workplace don’t count for very much here.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say uneasily. ‘I know I should have told you what happened, where I was, and everything. I know I should have told you about failing my exams and … and that I am pregnant by this boy I’m not going out with any more, and who … who doesn’t know that I am keeping the baby.’

I say it like a challenge. I say it like it should be followed by the phrase: ‘And what are you going to do about it?’

‘Oh God, you silly goose,’ Mum says. ‘And me spilling the beans about what a stupid cow I was over your parentage, that just tipped you over the edge, didn’t it? I’m so sorry, darling, come here …’

She holds out her arms and I go into them without hesitation. Twenty years old and I still need a hug from my mum. I expect I’ll be hugging my own baby and still need a hug from my mum.

‘You don’t have to explain,’ Mum says. I close my eyes and
rest my head on her chest. ‘I’m guessing it hasn’t ever quite seemed like the right time to tell your increasingly senile mother that you were up the duff and had no prospects.’

I smile at her blunt assessment of the situation, but I don’t say anything; I don’t feel like I need to.

Gran is still standing in the doorway, staring up the corridor as though she’s expecting a raid. ‘Hey, Caitlin,’ she says. ‘Your bosses – are they Mafia? Armenians?’

‘No, he’s Greek, I think,’ I tell her. ‘His mum owns a taverna up the road.’

‘It must have been so hard for you,’ Mum says into my hair. ‘I do understand. You have no idea what the future is going to hold, not mine or yours, not the baby’s. And then realising that your dad didn’t ever know about you … I don’t blame you for wanting to run away.’

‘You’re being too nice,’ I say. ‘I left you. I didn’t have to. I didn’t have anywhere to go, just … here.’

‘Yes.’ Mum looks around her. ‘I must say that the fact you ran away to here is a bit insulting. And I was so worried about you, Caitlin. For you to not let us know you were OK … it was too hard. I think I get it but … every day I’ve wondered if I’ve lost you for ever. I know I’m not really the best mother material, at the moment, but come home, Caitlin. Please. Let me look after you.’

‘Shhh,’ Gran hisses urgently from the doorway, flattening herself against the fake-wood-effect wallpaper. ‘I think someone is coming!’

I find laughter gurgling in my stomach.

‘What’s so funny?’ Mum asks me, grinning.

‘You two,’ I say. ‘It’s like some decrepit Scooby Doo adventure.’

‘Oh no,’ Mum says. ‘This isn’t Scooby Doo. In your gran’s head this is
The Untouchables
, and we are Elliot Ness.’

I’ve missed Mum.

‘Remember when you were little, how you used to sit on my knee to read a book or watch a film? We were always together, weren’t we? I miss that, Caitlin. Come home. I’ll probably be a burden, and Gran will most likely attempt to smother you with carbohydrates as a substitute for love, but the fact remains that we do love you.’

‘I finish my shift soon,’ I say, winking at Mum. ‘If my boss catches you two here, he won’t like it. There’s a chance you might end up wearing concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes. There’s a café over the road. Wait for me there. I’ll be five minutes.’

But Mum doesn’t move; she just stands there, looking at me. ‘You were a lovely queen,’ she says. ‘So regal, it was like you were born to royalty.’

Just at that second my boss, Pete, arrives, unwittingly barging my gran out of the way so that she clatters against a filing cabinet – not because he is a thug, but because he didn’t expect to find an old lady casing his office. He looks at my mother, who is clutching her hand to her chest and doing a passable impression of being frail, and then at me.

‘What the bloody hell is going on in here?’ Pete says, looking at me. ‘What is this, some kind of raid? Listen, I’ve dealt with you religious types before. No one round here needs saving, thanks very much, except from bitter old spinsters who don’t like anyone having fun.’

‘What is it about me that makes me look so pious?’ Mum asks me. ‘Honestly, I’m going to have to review my wardrobe. I’m clearly losing my scarlet woman status.’

‘Who the bloody hell are you?’ Pete asks, before looking at me again. ‘And what are
you
doing? The bar’s not manned, and there’s a bloody queue.’

‘There are only two people out there,’ Mum says. ‘And one of them is asleep.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’ He spits the words at her, and I watch open-mouthed as Mum draws herself up to her full height and grabs Pete by his grubby T-shirt, slamming him into the side of the filing cabinet – where Gran was standing a moment ago – with a metallic thud. He is stunned. I want to laugh, but I’m too surprised.

‘You do not speak to me like that,’ she says. ‘Now, I am taking my daughter, and we are leaving. And you, you vile little stain on humanity, if you don’t want me to rip the last remaining hairs off your head and stuff them up your arse, you can shut it.’

She lets go of him and marches out of the office. I grab Gran by the arm, my bag and coat off the peg, and I follow her through the bar, past the dancer, the bouncer, the girl on
the door and out into the chill of the dark afternoon.

Mum stands on the street, her face tipped up to the rain, letting it drench her face. She is laughing, her hands upstretched towards the sky, her fingers playing with the droplets of water.

‘Mum!’ I put my arms around her, laughing. ‘You were going to stuff his hair up his arse – that is the most hilarious threat of menace I have ever heard.’

‘Well, it worked, didn’t it? He was menaced, wasn’t he?’ She grins at Gran and me, and I feel a rush of relief that they are here, almost like my heart just started beating again. I remember that I am part of a family, and I always was. I am such an idiot.

‘Are you coming home now?’ she asks me, pressing her cold wet cheek against mine.

‘Aren’t you angry with me?’ I ask her.

‘Aren’t you angry with
me
?’ she replies.

‘How can I be?’ I say.

‘Because of the AD?’ she asks me.

‘I understand now why you did what you did,’ I say. ‘And I know that I’m going to do things differently. Maybe not just yet, because I’m still at the stage where I’m not sure if I want to kiss Sebastian all over or beat him to death with a blunt instrument, but at some point I will tell him about my baby, because then, whatever else happens after that, at least he will know.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mum says again.

‘Mum,’ I ask her. ‘Was my dad a terrible dickhead?’

She laughs, and takes my hand. ‘No darling, he was just very, very young and not half as clever as me.’

‘I never liked him,’ Gran says. ‘I only met him once, but he brought me a box of chocolates when I was on a diet.’

‘Come home, Caitlin,’ Mum says, placing her hand gently over my tummy. ‘And come home, baby, and you and I will figure this out together, just like the old days when you used to sit on my knee for a story.’

I tuck my arm under hers and, as we start back towards the bus stop, I realise it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so certain.

‘What story would you like?’ Mum asks me. ‘How about Pippi Longstocking? She’s always been your favourite.’

As we walk into the rain, Mum asks me if I want a hot chocolate before bed, just this once, as long as I promise to brush my teeth – and I know that, for now at least, I am around ten years old to her, and it doesn’t matter, not now. Because I feel safe.

This is the scan photo of Esther in the womb, at just six weeks. It’s the photo Claire gave me on the day she told me we were having a baby, and until now I’ve always kept it in my wallet.

We hadn’t been together for very long when Esther was conceived – less than a year. But I already knew that I loved Claire more than I’d ever expected to love anyone. Even though, most of the time, she didn’t believe it. She still thought the age difference was too big, or that I wasn’t serious about her. Nothing I could do or say would change that. That’s why I think she was so scared to tell me about Esther.

It was a very warm day. I had been working on-site, out in the sun all day, and I should have gone back to my flat to get a shower before seeing Claire, but there was just something pulling me to her. I’d been thinking about her all day, about the way she’d looked when I woke up that morning, so pissed off that I’d woken her up at 6 a.m. and the sun was fully up, which meant she couldn’t get
back to sleep. There was last night’s make-up around her eyes, her hair was tangled and she’d scowled at me when I went to kiss her goodbye.