The Rose Petal Beach (53 page)

‘I know I’m the last person you want to do this,’ he says, ‘and I know this wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for me, and I know it doesn’t change anything between us, but come here.’ He pulls me into his arms. I don’t resist or try to push him away, I disintegrate. I come undone on the outside just as I’ve felt all this time on the inside. ‘Pretend I’m someone else,’ he whispers against my hair, drawing me closer. ‘Pretend I’m someone else and let me look after you for now.’

I hardly notice I’m crying until his arms tighten around me and he hushes me while carefully and gently stroking my hair. ‘I thought I’d done it,’ I hear myself sob. ‘All this time I thought I’d killed her.’

A long time ago

‘How did you end up in Brighton?’ Mirabelle asked me.

We were cooling down after a run, stretching against the wall outside her house. I pressed my toes against the wall while stretching my heel down to extend my hamstrings. ‘Same old story,’ I said.

‘You followed him down here?’ she asked.

‘No, I was offered a job down here. The branch of the multinational company that TLITI was a part of back in the day needed someone who had worked in London to go there. They offered it to me, but I was going to say no because of Scott. And Scott couldn’t let me do that so he transferred his MBA down here.’

‘He followed you? Wow, I can’t imagine him doing that.’

‘You’re not the first person to say that. When he started working at TLITI most people couldn’t believe it; by the time I left, the story had kind of got changed to he was looking to do his MBA down here so I asked for a transfer and we came together.’

‘Doesn’t that piss you off?’

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Why not? It would me.’

‘Because he knows the truth, and I know the truth. He was feeling insecure, worrying that following me down here made him look weak and love-addled to junior employees – which is all bullshit, by the way – so he started to fudge the facts of the story. I’m not bothered, like I say, we both know the truth as do the people who employed me. But, you know what, just because someone says something doesn’t make it true. And they can say it as many times as they want and it still doesn’t make it true.’

‘I suppose that’s the best way to look at it.’

‘How did you end up in Brighton?’ I asked her. She stopped stretching and instead hopped up onto the wall that ringed her driveway. I did the same, sensing I was in for a long story. I loved Mirabelle’s stories. She had a way of talking that made me escape into what she was saying, disappear into her tale.

‘I was at a point in my life when nothing seemed to be going well. I’d been married for a while and … I suppose I’d lost myself. Lost who I was, really. Then I heard about a friend of mine who had moved to Brighton and who had vanished. I came down on the train to look for her. Mad, huh? I had no real idea of what Brighton was like, how big it was, where anything was, I just had to come here to find her. I think I thought that the beach would be like the one in the story. She was the one who told it to me, by the way.

‘I had to leave at the end of the day and I hadn’t found her. So I did it again the following week. I kept coming down here on day trips to try to find her. This went on for months, until there was a delay on the trains one day and I couldn’t get back to London in time to be where I needed to be. My husband went crazy, and quite rightly so. I hadn’t told him what I was doing. That’s what I meant, that time you asked if I’d cheated on my husband. I hadn’t exactly, I simply kept a huge secret from him, which was like cheating, really. In my case it wasn’t with a person as such, more the search for my friend and with this place. I fell in love with Brighton a little more every time I came here.

‘He was so angry that I’d been doing this behind his back so I stopped for a while, I promised him I would behave and would put all those stupid thoughts of finding my friend out of my head. I asked my husband if we could move down here, make a fresh start. I was sure things would be better, easier, if we moved here, but he said no. His life, his family, his work were in London and he was suspicious, of course, about why I wanted to move.’

She turned her head and looked at me, tendrils of hair she’d
tied back in a ponytail hung down beside her face as she smiled at me.

‘It was in my veins, you know. Brighton. The salt-tainted air, the sound of the gulls, the boom and crash of the sea on the shore. It was like a heartbeat, like my heartbeat.’ She paused as her eyes glazed over. ‘So I left. I told him it was only for a little while, it was until I found my friend, cleared my head, found a bit of who I was again. Because I was lost, Tami. I’d spent so long trying to fit in, trying to be someone I wasn’t, that I had no idea who I was any more. I think you can relate to that, being a mother, can’t you? Do you sometimes want to escape from everything and get to a place where you sit and be who you used to be? Or even try to be who you used to be without all the expectations of daily life?’

‘I suppose I do. Well, I did until I started running.’

‘He told me if I left it was forever, that I could never come back. I said that was a chance I had to take and he relented, said if I wasn’t gone for too long he would give me, the time I needed. I’d been asking for support, and space to be me for so long and he hadn’t been able to understand or give it to me until I said I was leaving no matter what. There’s irony for you.’

She stopped looking at me then, focused on the mid-distance, in the direction of the other red-brick houses that sat on the opposite side of the road.

‘Leaving was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I cried so much and panicked that what I was doing was the wrong thing. But I had to. I reminded myself of that every day: if I had stayed I would have disappeared because I wouldn’t have been true to myself. As time has gone on, I’ve realised how selfish that was. That decision … It was all about me and that’s fine when there aren’t other people involved, but when there are …’

‘Did you find your friend?’

‘Yes and no. I found out what other people thought happened to her, but no one knew for sure. So I sort of kept looking. Then,
I don’t know when but I stopped searching. I think sometimes I see her, but it’s always the her who was the age the last time I saw her, if that makes sense? I keep seeing young her, not the her she would be now.’

‘Did you ever decide to go home?’

‘Yes. I kept in touch, called almost every other day. I wrote letters, I sent postcards, I went to visit. But I left it too late. When I tried to go back it was too late, too much time had passed even though it was only a year at most. He didn’t want me back, he’d managed perfectly well without me.’

‘How did that make you feel?’

Her agony consumes her face for a moment, then it is gone, whipped away to be replaced by the Mirabelle face I’d come to know. ‘I made a mistake. I can say that now. For a long time I blamed everyone and everything for not understanding, for not being patient, for not putting their lives on hold so I could “find myself”. I shouldn’t have stayed away for so long. I got caught up in the new life I had, in myself. And that’s the thing I’ve never been able to figure out. Should I have stayed and died every day in tiny increments until I woke up one morning and there was nothing left of me, or should I have done what I did and left so I could live again?’

‘I guess you’ll never really know because you made a choice.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘Me? I don’t know. I can’t imagine leaving if Cora and Anansy were in the equation, but I can’t imagine leaving just Scott, either. He’s too tied up in the fabric of who I am, I suppose.’

‘That’s what I was looking for down here. That person who was tied up in the fabric of who I am. I’ll never forget the moment my husband shut the door in my face. It nearly broke me. It did break me when I saw—When I saw the devastation I’d caused. It was always so easy to convince myself of what I was doing when I didn’t have to experience the fallout up close.’

She rubbed her hands together as if trying to warm herself. I was getting cold, too, despite the heat of the day – the sweat on
our bodies was drying and we’d hadn’t stretched properly as part of our cool-down.

She continued, ‘It was the making of me, though. I tried so hard to come back for a long time, but he refused to even let me through the door. So, I took a good hard look at myself, and decided to change myself. I had to get a proper job and smarten myself up and make myself a person who could cope and was worthy. So I enrolled in college down here, I did a degree, I did an MBA, all the while doing as much work experience as I could get. I worked bloody hard to get where I am.’

‘Yes, it really paid off.’

‘No it didn’t,’ she said with the most heart-tearing smile. ‘I’m still alone, Tami. I’m still apart from the person I love most in the world. I came here looking for someone who was part of the fabric of who I am, I stayed here chasing love and fulfilment when I had it all along at home, I just didn’t know it. I try not to let it get to me, but you know, sometimes it does.’

‘He still won’t have you back?’

‘“Coming back is not an option,” as he once told me. “We have to find a way to move forward.”’

‘Is it because you wanted him to be the father of your children and your pregnancy didn’t work out? Is that why you love him so much? I remember when it happened to Scott and me, I felt so empty afterwards and I wanted to be filled up with another baby almost immediately, but then I didn’t ever want to take that risk in case it happened again. But it made me cling like crazy to Scott. I’m not sure where we’d be if that hadn’t happened, but I couldn’t imagine life without him after that. I needed him so much because he was the only other person who could come close to understanding what I felt. No one knows this, but it was Scott that suggested we have the baby’s due date engraved inside our wedding rings so I know he thought about our baby, too. I can understand why you were so bonded to him if that’s it. Is it?’

‘In a way,’ she said quietly.

‘You lost your baby?’ I asked, reaching out to rub her back.

She exhaled in a deep, pain-filled way. ‘I can’t talk about it.’ She started to hyperventilate. ‘What I did … How I let her down.’ Her inhalations and exhalations increased in speed and strength. ‘I see her face every day … I think about her all the time … Everything I do is for her, about her … Oh God, oh God.’ She threw her hands up and covered her face. Her breathing becoming a series of short, sharp in-breaths and short out-breaths, until one huge in-breath and then a longer, calmer out-breath. ‘I can’t think about it. I lost her because I wasn’t where I should have been. And I can’t think about it.’

I took her hand and forced my fingers between hers, then curled my hand around hers, linking us and bonding us, telling her I was there for her.

‘I know I act like I’m not bothered about most things, that I’m strong and life is for the taking and I can do anything, go anywhere but … on the inside I feel frozen. Without her, I feel frozen.’

My arms went around her, pulling her to me. She rested her head on my chest, and I felt her relax a little so I pulled her closer still, tightened my grip around her. Without thinking, I kissed the top of her head, like I would Cora and Anansy if they were hurting.

When I think about the baby we lost, I hurt, but to lose a child who I got to know, whose face I learned every line of, whose breathing I’d become accustomed to as I heard her go to sleep at night, whose smile could lift me from the deepest pit I was in … It doesn’t bear thinking about.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling away. ‘I’m OK now. I’m OK.’

‘You don’t have to be all brave, you know? It’s OK to fall apart sometimes.’

‘Yes, Tami the perfect, of course it is.’

‘Me? Perfect? I wish! I strive for perfection, that is true, I achieve “meh” if I’m lucky.’

‘Yeah, right. I’ve seen you with your children, I know what you’re really like.’

‘No, you’ve seen me with my children when they are co-operating.
You haven’t seen me standing in their bedroom screaming like a banshee because they won’t stop making noise and get ready for bed. You haven’t seen me hiding in the downstairs loo, crying because I can’t cope. It’s a bit easier now that they’re older in some ways and I haven’t had the feeling of wanting to walk out and never come back for oohhhh, two hours, thirty-seven minutes.’

The smile that rose on her face was like the sun coming up over Brighton – warming and beautiful. ‘Have you really wanted to walk out and leave it all behind?’

‘Yes. I think all mothers do. No one tells you about the hard bits, do they? You hear about the sleepless nights and the no time for your relationship, but you don’t hear about the no time for you to think about what you want in life. You don’t hear about the being scared you’re doing it all wrong and harming your child. You don’t hear about how it physically hurts when your child hurts and you’d do anything to stop their pain. You don’t hear about the absolute terror of looking in the mirror one day and realising the person looking back at you is not the person you thought you’d see and you have no clue what happened to the woman you thought you were.’

‘You get it,’ Mirabelle said as her smile became wider. ‘You really do.’

She reached out, stroked her thumb gently across my cheek, a little like Scott used to do in the days before we became an established couple and we used to find any excuse to touch each other. ‘You remind me of my friend who I came to Brighton to find,’ Mirabelle said, removing her hand from me but not her steady gaze. ‘I sometimes wonder if you’re a reincarnation of her.’

‘Nope, one of a kind, me. Didn’t you hear, they broke the mould when they made me.’

Her laugh was like that first taste of buttered hot toast, so perfect and fulfilling you had to restrain yourself from eating it all up in one go. I wanted her to keep laughing, to keep filling my ears with that divine sound. ‘Can you hear that?’ she said to me.

‘What?’

‘The water, the sound of the tide coming in.’