The Story of You (40 page)

Denise coughed, like this might be hard for her but she was going to do it anyway. She was going to do it because she knew it to be the right thing.

‘No, lovey, you’re all right,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the Doll Factory in Hendon, it’s not far … They do brilliant collectors’ items. I’ve heard they’ve got some single-edition dolls on swings.’

Dad and I exchanged a smile.

‘Oh, lovely, well, maybe Dad and I can go to the park then, and meet you back here when it’s time to go?’ I said.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘you don’t understand. I’m not coming back with you for a couple of days. I’m staying with a friend. We’re going to see the
Jersey Boys
tonight, then I’m stopping over …’ She looked at Dad and he smiled at her. ‘I thought I’d give you and your dad some time together.’

‘Thank you, Denise,’ I said. ‘I really appreciate that.’ And I did.

Dad and I decided to skip the park bit; I was looking forward to getting out of London. We took the last bits to the car, and Dad went back in to use the loo, so it was just Denise and me standing on the pavement, her in her tight jeans and her knee-length boots and her hair that didn’t move, even though there was quite a breeze.

‘I’m so glad everything was okay, love,’ she said, giving me a hug. ‘We can look forward now, eh? Not long now. And we’ll have a new member of the family.’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘A new member of our family.’

So, here I am in the back of my dad’s car on our way back to Kilterdale – to home. I can’t remember it ever being the two of us on a long journey like this, let alone after Mum died. I don’t think we’ve ever done this, in fact. It feels like such a treat, such a privilege.

The car is pristine, of course; it smells of pine freshener and leather and the latest Monday’s valet clean. There’s Dire Straits playing on the radio – we’ve already agreed this is quite funny – and Dad got me a blanket out of the boot, which I’ve got over my legs like some convalescing old lady, which is kind of how I feel. I sleep most of the way, my head resting on a cushion Dad also gave me out of the boot, but tells me not to mention that to Denise because, in retrospect, she wouldn’t be very happy about bringing new cushions from their brand-new house into the car.

I doze, happily, in and out of consciousness for the first hour or so. When I open my eyes, I can see city lights, telegraph wires against a slate-grey sky, distant towns, housing estates, the M6 Toll and then, eventually, the countryside, the North of England, growing greener and hillier and craggy brown. Becoming more dramatic. Dad makes a point of turning off the music, to start talking to me, and it still takes me aback, like the drive through Friars Lanes all those weeks ago, when he’d asked me suddenly why I was going to Marion’s funeral. He asks me what work have said and I tell him that, actually, I think they’re glad to see the back of me for a bit, glad to grant me early maternity leave, since I’ve not been firing on all cylinders for quite some time now. I accept I need a break. Grace got a place in the recovery centre – it wasn’t perfect – but it was a start, it was an improvement on hospital and she’d informed me by text that there were ‘no bloody jigsaws.’ There is silence, then he clears his throat and he says:

‘I think a long break is just what you need, love,’ said Dad, but then his voice actually cracks. ‘It’s very damaging, you know, to keep things to yourself for so long.’

I don’t know what to say, so I just rest my chin on the back of his seat and smile at him through the mirror so that he knows how much that means to me, how grateful and relieved I am that this is out in the open. Also, I realize suddenly, that this is my moment, this is my time (in the car, where he can’t walk off or announce he’s going to the toilet or to read the paper) to tell him about Niamh, so I say:

‘Actually, there’s not just me who’s been keeping secrets, Dad.’

‘Mm? Why’s that?’ he says, changing lanes, momentarily distracted. ‘Who else has been keeping secrets then?’

‘Well, there’s Neevy, too.’

‘What
about
Niamh?’

Oh God, Oh God! ‘Well, Dad, well …’ My heart’s thumping wildly – I didn’t expect this. What if he freaks out? What if our newly formed closeness is smashed to pieces by his homophobia? His small-mindedness? I realize it wouldn’t just be Niamh who would be crushed, but me too. I wouldn’t be able to forgive him. Still, it’s too late now. I’ve opened my mouth so I must carry on. ‘She’s gay,’ I say simply, turning my head to the window, closing my eyes, as if ready for the blow of disappointment, the withdrawing, the stony silence. ‘She and Mary are partners, they’re lovers.’

But the stony silence doesn’t come; what comes is laughter. My dad is actually laughing! And so I sit up to look and stare at him. And he says:

‘I know.’ He’s shaking his head, coughing and laughing at the same time. ‘Bloody hell, we may be old farts, Denise and I, but we’re not
blind
!’

‘So why didn’t you say anything to me?!’, I say in disbelief.

‘Because we didn’t know you knew, did we? We were waiting for you to say something!’

A few miles before we reach home, I feel I’ve slept as much as is humanly possible, and so I sit up on the back seat and get out the letter with the small, spidery handwriting; the same handwriting he had when he was sixteen. It had arrived at my flat while I was in hospital. I’d been imagining its soft thud on the doormat, whilst all hell was breaking loose.

Dear Robbie,

Before you start reading (I’m hoping you’ve at least read this far, that you haven’t screwed this up and put it in the bin. Please don’t. Please hear me out), this isn’t one of those letters where I beg you to be with me.

I know you can’t be with me, darling and, no matter how much it hurts, I understand. And I don’t want you to feel bad. In fact, I only want you to feel free and calm, and to know that I will be okay – I know you may find that hard to believe, but I will! You are about to give me a daughter, our daughter. Of course I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be brilliant. I am the luckiest man alive.

So, there will be no begging from me. I just wanted to write this letter because I wanted to talk to you, because I still have things to say. Things I want you to know:

I guessed about Saul – as you know. I put two and two together from things you’d said and certain looks and that time in bed when I’d mentioned his name and also I remembered about that night, Tony Middleton’s party, all those years ago, about how you arrived and how you wanted immediately to leave. Why did I not ask you more questions then? Why did I not ask Butler if he knew what was wrong with you?

I won’t lie to you – at first I DID want to kill him. I wanted to ram his stupid, thick ugly head against a wall. I wanted to break into his house and tie him up and terrorize him, and see how he liked it, to feel that scared; that violated and invaded.

It ate away at me. I couldn’t stand that someone had done this to you, the only girl I have ever been in love with in this world and, more than that, I couldn’t stand the fact that I had let this happen when I should have protected you.

So, Robyn, I went round there. I wasn’t going to hurt him – I’d decided fairly early on this wasn’t a good idea – but I just wanted to face him, head on. I wanted to have it out with him. I planned, maybe, I’d just give his car a good kicking.

I got there, though, and I couldn’t do it, I didn’t do it. I stood in front of his shit little house (where FYI, he doesn’t live any more, because he’s divorced now) and, I realized, there was no point having it out with him, that that wouldn’t help you. That what you needed – as you said – was to move on from it, and me dragging it up from the past wouldn’t help. So I walked away; but I can tell you that he has had his comeuppance, Robbie. His life is shit. He has criminal offences, his marriage broke up, he doesn’t see his kids, he has had to move away somewhere far from Kilterdale, and live in a shitty little flat. Saul Butler isn’t there any more, Robbie – he can’t hurt you.

The other thing I know: I know that Lily might not have been mine. I worked that out, too. I hate to think how keeping that secret all these years must have torn you apart and I wish, God, I wish you’d have just told me, because I don’t care, Robyn. I couldn’t care less if she came from a stork or outer space or the moon. She WAS mine, is mine, because I loved her when she was a life inside you and I loved you. She was half you, so how could I not?

It absolutely kills me to think that for even a second in the past sixteen years you have thought that what happened to us – any of it – would change one molecule of the way I feel about you, that if and when I found out, I wouldn’t want you. I love you, Robyn, and that means all of you – whatever happened, or may happen in the future.

That’s all I wanted to say, that’s all I wanted you to know. Now just relax, that’s all I want you to do. You aren’t just going to be the most amazing mother in the world, you already are.

Joe x

I clutched the letter to my chest and I cried then, because I realised it wasn’t Joe – it had never been Joe who caused me to get ill, to trigger the panic attacks, to fall apart – that, actually, of everyone in my life, Joe had been the one person who had always been there for me. He’d been the one constant person in my life. And I’d pushed him away. I’d sabotaged it. I’d
made myself
ill.Was it too late?

It was Denise in the end who masterminded the whole ‘Going Through Mum’s Things’ afternoon. Dad was the one to actually tell us (only took him sixteen years) that there were six boxes filled with Mum’s things that he’d kept in the loft of our old house and that we might like to go through them. But it was Denise whose idea it was to get us all together in Kilterdale and to make it an event of sorts.

None of us could believe, quite frankly, that Dad had had this stuff in the attic for so long and not thought to get it down for us. But then maybe he thought it would be too painful for us. Maybe he thought we weren’t ready, or he wasn’t ready. Maybe he just didn’t think much at all, which is a far more likely scenario.

Leah said cynically at first that Denise probably got the ball rolling because she couldn’t tolerate the mess Mum’s boxes were making, cluttering up their spare room. (Dad and Denise have downsized fairly dramatically and their new place is more of a chalet than a house.) But
I
think it was a nice idea, an olive branch to Leah in a way. Denise knew she’d come to Kilterdale if it was going to be about Mum, but that at the same time she’d get to spend time with her, to make a start on mending bridges. And that is what she wants to do, I think. I’ve watched Denise over the last few months and I think she wants nothing more than to be accepted by all three of us. I think she wants to be a grandmother to our children and I, for one, am going to let her, because as Leah said, they come as one anyway, so if you get one, you get the other. You get Dad, too!

So, on the weekend after I arrived in Kilterdale to convalesce, Leah and Niamh arrived by train to join me in going through our mother’s things. I was feeling relaxed when I went to pick them up at the station, the kind of relaxed I used to feel as a fourteen/fifteen-year-old when I had nothing more important to worry about than what I was going to wear to the U16s Saturday disco.

I’d had a lovely week. Dad had waited on me hand and foot. The first night I was there, we went to Mr Fry’s together, just me and him, and had fish and chips outside, with a can of Dr Pepper. We didn’t talk much, but that to me meant more than any words he could have said.

Denise made tea and biscuits for us all on arrival. Leah and her had the first proper conversation they had had in sixteen years, about how biscuits definitely go soft if you put them in the tin without their original wrapper and how annoying people are who insist on doing that (and then they wonder why their Rich Tea last only a few days … unbelievable). After tea, all three of us went into the spare room, took the boxes down from their pile up against the wall and began to open them.

And that smell. Our mother. Released immediately into the room like a dove. She was there with us! Obsession by Calvin Klein mixed with Vosene shampoo, a heady, indescribable, inexplicable
eau-de-our-mother
and, underneath, just a faint whiff – it was only on certain items, like her old fake fur and one or two handbags – of Rothman’s cigarettes.

One by one, we opened the boxes as if they were treasure-troves. Niamh and Leah
sat on the floor and I perched on the single bed that sagged in the middle.

Denise mainly kept out of the way, intermittently offering us tea and bringing us snacks in ramekins. Dad put his head around the door now and again. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not staying, this is your thing,’ he’d say each time. But then, inevitably, he’d get drawn in – when we brought out this and that item that triggered a memory – into telling us tales, filling in stories, providing more pieces of the jigsaw, so that we could make the whole.

There was a collection of tacky plates from foreign climes, with things like,
HOT HOT HOTTIE IN LANZAROTE
! on them. Mum and Dad had loved their beach holidays. There was a particularly tacky one from Crete, featuring a Greek tavern and a donkey. ‘Yeah, that holiday was bloody brilliant.’ Dad laughed when he saw it, hovering in the doorway. ‘Your mother crashed the car on day one by driving on the wrong side of the road, meaning we had no other option than to daytime drink by the pool for ten whole days – no visiting ancient ruins, no wandering around shops.’

And of course, there were so many things we’d forgotten that came back to us when surrounded by her possessions; memories that had been tucked away in each of our heads but never shared until now. It made me feel rooted.

I brought out a plastic bag from one of the boxes; even that looked from another era, another time. It was a green ‘St Michael’s’ bag. Nobody says St Michael’s any more. Only M&S or Marks and Spencer’s. In this bag were various items of clothing, among them the pink towelling playsuit that she wore to do the gardening from the very first ray of March sunshine to the last of October.