The Story of You (4 page)

‘Take care of yourself, honey.’

Then we’d turned and gone our separate ways. Two minutes later, I was gliding up the escalator when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming down the other way.

‘Sorry, I went the wrong way,’ he said, and I laughed to myself all the way home because, was there ever the end of a relationship that so exactly replicated the relationship itself? Hit-and-miss, half-baked, stop-start. Just a little bit of a shambles, basically, with some farce thrown in.

No, finishing with Andy Cullen was the right thing to do, I decided, lying there until the bath water grew cool. I didn’t want to see him, I was just scared and putting off getting back to Joe.

I decided to ring my sister, Leah, instead. It’s practically impossible to have a normal conversation on the phone with her these days because she’s always so busy with the kids, so it’s a numbers game: if you ring her ten times, you might just get lucky once. Jack, my five-year-old nephew answered. We had a short discussion about peregrine falcons – I totally dig the conversations I have with my nephew – then I said, ‘Is Mummy there?’

There was some high-pitched squealing in the background, which could have been Leah or Eden, my three-year-old niece – it was difficult to tell.

‘She’s cleaning up Eden’s poo,’ said Jack.

‘Oh,’ I said, darkly.

‘She needed the toilet but didn’t make it. A poo fell out of her skirt in the kitchen.’

I laughed. Then stopped. Jack wasn’t laughing. This is because Jack knew that a poo in the kitchen was on a par with the apocalypse for his mother.

‘Okay, well, don’t worry. Tell Mummy—’ I was about to tell him I’d call back later when Jack shouted:

‘Mummy! Aunty Robyn’s on the phone!’

I could hear Leah’s sigh, literally metres away in the kitchen.

‘Well, tell Aunty Robyn that I am knee-deep in your sister’s crap at the moment and that her beautiful, adorable, butter-wouldn’t-melt niece’s bum has exploded all over my new kitchen floor.’

‘Oh.’ Jack came back on the phone. ‘Mummy said the C word.’

‘Mm,’ I said, ‘she did. That must mean she is very stressed. Tell her I’ll call her later, okay?’

‘She’ll call you later, Mummy!’

‘Ha! Well, she can try, but I’ll be doing bedtime then …’

I reasoned that I may not have got to speak to my sister, but at least any yearnings for Andy, and/or a boyfriend or family life had been very successfully abated.

That evening, I sat on the sofa, nursing a bottle of wine, writing fantasy replies to Joe, hoping that, the drunker I got, the more likely I’d be just to press ‘Send’.

Dear Joe,

I’m so sorry to hear about your mum and ordinarily I’d love to come to the funeral, but unfortunately I am on holiday …

Dear Joe,

I can hardly believe it’s taken me three days … the reason is, I was trying to think of a way of telling you …

Dear Joe,

Oh, my God, what must you think of me?! I rarely log onto Facebook so …

In the end, three days, in fact, after Joe sent me the message, and mainly because I ran out of different ways to apologize, I wrote:

Dear Joe,

I’ll be there. See you at 3 p.m.

Robyn x

Dear Lily

I was thinking today that of all the things I’ve told you so far, I haven’t told you how I got together with your father. He says it’s typical of me, that the day we should get together is the day I save him, when what he doesn’t know is that he saved me.

The date was 18 May 1997 – almost sixteen years ago! It was the end of the summer term, of high school, and we were signing one another’s shirts: SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMOND! Although, personally, I was doing nothing of the sort …

Picture your mother: I am sixteen, I have thick dark hair with a fringe, and very recently I’ve committed trichological suicide by trying to dye it peroxide blonde. Your granddad didn’t notice for a fortnight, which gives a very good indication of how he was at that time. The barnet is an atrocity; every time I get it wet, it goes green for some reason, and so my sister Leah gives me a ‘body perm’ in the kitchen one Saturday, in the hope this will distract the eye (it doesn’t).

It’s been six months since we lost Mum and I’m blown apart. There seem to be bits of me everywhere; some shrapnel is still inside. I don’t know who I am, or who to be, and so I try different guises: ‘arty’, ‘rebel’, ‘one of the crowd’. Mostly, I am just all over the shop. But you have to at least believe it’s going to be okay, don’t you? And even though Mum is gone, I still believe in life. I think, if I can get past this bit, it will get better. Your grandma always said I was the strong one, and I’m determined to prove her right.

So here I am, this mad, sad, determined girl with green hair on the day I save your dad’s life at Black Horse Quarry. On the day he saves mine.

In those days, the quarry was a glittering lagoon to us; our little piece of paradise. Now, I realize, it’s a death trap, surrounded with dog-turd-laden scrubland (funny how what you remember and what actually
was
are often two different things). The wayward among us would bunk off and go down there in those last weeks of term. That day, I was there with my best friend, Beth, as usual. Your father was there with Voz and other members of ‘The Farmers’. There were also some ‘Townies’ (named because they went to school in the town, rather than in Kilterdale – the back of beyond – like us ‘Farmers’); all that strange, male, tribal rivalry. Saul Butler was ringleader of the Townies. Your dad had a love – hate friendship with him (i.e., he knew he was an idiot but that it was wise to keep on the right side of him too).

So there was I, sucking my stomach in, in my new tie-dyed bikini. Beth and I were discussing losing our virginity. Beth had lost hers the week before to Gary Trott. It had been quite the spiritual experience and, apparently, she’d ‘cried uncontrollably’.

I said to myself then: Robyn, you are not ‘crying uncontrollably’ with any old person. You will wait for the right person – for Joe.

The quarry had almost mythical status in the area back then. There were cars and old shopping trolleys down there for us to get our legs tangled in and our parents had forbidden us to go anywhere near it – which obviously heightened its appeal.

It was surrounded by cliffs of varying heights that we called the ‘forty-footer’, ‘sixty-footer’ and ‘hundred-footer’. (Only those with a death wish attempted that.) It was a scorching day, this 18 May 1997. My skin was sizzling away in Factor zilch coconut oil. Beth was jabbering about Gary Trott. I was looking at your father, admiring his muscular legs in his Speedo swimming trunks. All the boys were running to and from the edge of the hundred-footer now; your dad was pretty wild back then – all this energy and none of it channelled, trying to be the big man in front of the Townies. There were several big splashes as the Farmer lot jumped in. Then there was just Saul Butler and your dad, standing on the edge, sizing each other up.

‘Come on!’ Voz was shouting from the water. ‘Sawyer, jump!’

Butler looked at Joe, then took a few steps back as if to run in – which is why I think Joe jumped the way he did, suddenly and awkwardly and not far enough out. But Butler didn’t jump, just Joe.

Beth was still talking. Your father hit the water. There was a lot of screeching, but the sun was blinding my vision. I got onto my knees to get a proper look. Then I realized that it wasn’t your dad who was screeching, because he was still under water.

There was a huge commotion and I felt this monumental surge of determination. I’d seen someone die (Mum) before my very eyes, and I wasn’t seeing it again. I ran round to that side of the quarry; your dad was surfacing on and off now, gasping for breath. Voz was trying to keep him afloat but he was struggling, shouting out. ‘He’s got his foot stuck!’ I didn’t even think this would be the first and last time I would jump off the hundred-footer, I just did it. It seemed to take forever to hit the water. I remember feeling overcome with gratitude that it was at least the water, rather than a crane or a trolley. I swam with all my might to Joe. All those years swimming for Kilterdale paid off, because I was a demon out there! Your dad was trying to keep his head up. There was wild terror in his eyes – it reminded me of a panicked horse. I dived down below. I could see his foot flailing in the murky water. He had it wrapped round some tubing – it looked like the inner of a tyre, but I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t take me long to set his foot free, then I pushed him up, me following, until we got to the sun.

It was ages till he could breathe properly again, once Voz and I had pulled him onto the rocks. He must have belly-flopped because he’d really winded himself. When I looked up, Butler was still standing at the top of the cliff, white as a sheet.

Everyone was hugging me, calling me a hero, but all I could think was: Great, the first time I get to have skin-to-skin contact with Joe Sawyer, I look like this. Do you know the first thing your father said to me, after, ‘I think you just saved my life’?

It was, ‘Did you know your hair was green?’

So, that was how I met your father. That was the start of the summer that changed everything.

As soon as I’d heard that whooshing sound that told me my message telling Joe I was coming to the funeral had gone, I’d wanted to reach inside the computer and take it back again. Now there was the four-hour journey up to Kilterdale to worry about. So much time to sit and mull.

Thankfully, the train was so packed that I spent most of the journey sitting on my bag by the Ladies’, too busy moving every time someone needed the loo to think about where I was going. I eventually got a seat at Crewe; halfway, I always think, between London and Kilterdale. The tall sash-windowed houses of London are far behind, we’ve passed the Midlands plains, and now the wet mist of the North has descended; there’s the red-brick steeples, the people with their nasal, stretchy vowels. Soon, there will be the hard towns with their hard names – Wigan Warrington – before the factories thin out into fields and sheep, and then that crescent of water, surrounded by cliffs and mossy caves. The grey-stone houses stretching back, higgledy-piggledy. The whole thing looking as if it’s about to crumble into the North Sea at any moment. Kilterdale: my home town. It’s the place I used to love like nowhere else, and now it was the place, save for the odd guilt-provoked trip, I avoided at all costs; where life for me began, and life, as I knew it, had ended, too.

I closed my eyes. At least there was one benefit of going back: I’d get to ask Dad about Mum’s ashes. Since the day we’d got them back from the crematorium, delivered to our door and so much heavier than I’d ever imagined, we’d kept them on the mantelpiece in a blue urn. Denise (evil stepmother, although not so much evil, perhaps, as hugely insecure) had gradually colonized the area: replaced the photos of us with ones of her own daughter, but the ashes had never moved. Last time I’d been home, however, they hadn’t been there. I’d asked Dad about it then and several times since but he’d always shirked an answer. This time, I decided, I couldn’t let it go.

An old man got on at Lancaster and sat next to me. He was eating his homemade sandwiches out of tin foil. I secretly watched him as he munched away, then as he brought something rustling out of the plastic bag beside him. It was a DVD. When I craned my neck, I saw it was
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

‘I love horror films,’ he said, when he caught me looking – a really naughty glint in his eyes he had, too.

‘Me too,’ I told him. ‘And
Texas
is definitely in my top five, although I’d argue that
Halloween
is your ultimate classic horror. Have you seen that?’

Stan and I chatted the rest of the way home. He told me he was eighty-three and used to be a cinema usher. He’d lost his wife four months ago and slasher-horror got him through the long, lonely nights (Stan seemed completely unaware of the irony of this). He also told me he’d been a bit depressed since she’d died and was just coming back from a hospital appointment about the blackouts he’d been having.

‘I think it’s when I’ve had enough,’ he said, ‘when I miss her too much. Part of my brain just shuts down.’

Stan had a squiffy eye, so you weren’t quite sure which way he was looking, but as I looked at his good one, I said, ‘I think you put that beautifully.’

Stan was also a blessing: since I was enjoying our conversation so much, I didn’t even notice we were pulling into Kilterdale.

There was the familiar tug of guilt when I saw my dad at the end of the platform. I know he wonders why I don’t come home more. Last Christmas was special, however. Denise’s sister invited her to spend it with her in France, and so just Dad and Niamh came down to London. Niamh and I hatched this plan to go swimming in the Serpentine on Christmas morning, just as we used to go in the sea at home on Christmas Day when Mum was alive, all and sundry looking on:
There they go, the nutty Kings!
Amazingly, Dad said, yes – must have been still drunk from the night before – and I saw a little of my old dad that day, the hairy hulk emerging from the water, his teeth yellow against the icy blue hue of everything else, and yet the best sight ever: Bruce King and his big, wonky, yellow teeth. My dad laughing.

He wasn’t laughing now, however, standing at the other end of the platform. He looked sheepish. He often looked sheepish these days, as if he was perpetually in the doghouse, which he probably was, for leaving Denise home alone for half an hour. I’d asked him specifically to come on his own, though. There were things I wanted to talk to him about that I didn’t want to discuss once we’d set foot in Deniseville (a twisted world on a par with some of my patients’ psychotic delusions) and we were going to Mildred’s Café, like old times, for some ‘Dad and Daughter’ time.

As I walked towards him, I could see that his thick, strawberry-blond hair was combed neatly in a way he never had it when Mum was alive; when he would regularly pick us up from Brownies wearing leathers and smelling of beer. Now he was wearing red chinos, pulled slightly too high, and a linen blazer. He looked like Boris Johnson.