Flight (24 page)

In all but name, Laura Self was Phoebe’s mother. It was Laura who took her to buy her first pair of shiny school shoes from Russell and Bromley, who hovered at the end of the path waiting to catch her when Dad launched her, pedalling like fury, on her brand new big-girl bicycle; Laura who showed her how to brush her teeth properly, who patched up her grazed elbows, her playground tiffs, her infrequently broken heart. When Phoebe needed a starter bra, when she was doubled over with those first monthly cramps that seemed to knock the life from her, it was Laura she turned to: her supporter, her guardian, her voice of reason.
And what’s in a name, anyway?
That was what Dad
said, when as a teenager Phoebe asked why they had decided against Laura becoming ‘Mum’. She had, Phoebe argued, been there from the start, had taken on the mother role – so why not take on the title?

It was the summer holidays, shortly before Phoebe returned to school for her final year and GCSEs. Dad was reading a book in the garden, stretched out on a sun lounger, and Laura – where was Laura? Perhaps she was doing the food shopping. Or volunteering at the youth centre in town; she did that for several years, Phoebe recalls, helping out with teenage kids who weren’t as lucky as her, who didn’t have a secure home and family. Kids who were there to
escape
home and family. The older she got, the more it struck her as a terrifying and alien concept; Phoebe couldn’t imagine the fear and isolation of needing to escape from home. Home was her haven, a warm and worry-free zone, where nobody judged her, where she was at liberty and cushioned all at once. It was the world outside her home where fear lived, in the wide spaces inhabited by other people; in the media, in the too-cool kids who draped themselves over the leatherette booths of the Youth Club, in the lager-swilling, cigarette-smoking clusters that flanked the entrances of pubs and clubs of town. Fear lived in what to wear, how to speak, how to dress your hair – in walking into a classroom, late, suspecting you didn’t belong, feeling like a fraud. Fear was hating yourself for feeling fear at all, when you had no right to it, when you had parents who loved and protected you, and a home that was a place of safety. Safety was the holidays, in the comfort of home.

Phoebe dragged the second recliner across the grass and positioned it beside her dad in the sunshine. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a sleeveless vest, her skin having deepened
to a warm honey over the past weeks of freedom. During the holidays she had managed to do just about nothing of note: no job, no homework, no revision, no demands. It had been the perfect summer, spent lounging around the house and garden, baking cakes with Laura, listening to music in her room or chatting with friends on the phone. Life felt good. As she stretched out on the sunbed next to Dad, the heat of the sun in the breezeless sky felt like warm silk on her skin.

Seeing that he was paying no attention to her arrival, she tapped the metal frame of his lounger, two little raps with her fingernail.

‘You know my friend Melissa? She has a stepdad, and, even though he only moved in with them when she was ten, they call him Dad, not John.’

‘Uh-huh,’ her dad replied, turning the page of his book. It was a dog-eared copy of
High Fidelity
, a book she’d seen him read several times before.

‘And Bethan was adopted when she was four, and she calls her parents Mum and Dad.’

Her dad lifted his sunglasses and peered beneath them. ‘What’s your point, Phoebs?’

‘Well, I just wondered why it’s different with us. With Laura. She’s been here since I was a baby – longer than Mel or Bethan’s parents – well, you know what I mean.’

‘You’re asking why Laura never became “Mum”?’ He shifted position so that he was facing her up on the lounger beside him.

She nodded.

‘But she is a mum to you, isn’t she? She’s your mum in everything but the word. That’s what counts, isn’t it?’

Phoebe knew it shouldn’t matter, but it did. The absence of that label had always, would always keep them one small,
inarticulable step apart from being mother and daughter. Phoebe wished that she didn’t feel it so keenly, but she couldn’t shake it off.

‘I would have liked it, though. When my friends all talk about their mums and dads, I talk about “Dad and Laura”. It’s not the same.’ She felt a pang of guilt for putting him on the spot. ‘I know it’s too late to change it now – I just got thinking about it, I suppose. That’s all.’

Dad closed his book and placed it on the grass between them. ‘It wasn’t so straightforward with Laura, love. When your real mum left, we honestly had no idea how long she would be gone for. She wrote a letter saying she wasn’t returning, but I suppose we didn’t want to believe it. We never really talked about it, but I think we both felt that we couldn’t just give her name – her
role
away – not without knowing what the future held. There was every chance that she’d change her mind and come back.’

‘But she didn’t come back.’

‘No, she didn’t.’

Phoebe thinks of the photograph of her mother holding her in the hospital bed, just hours after her birth. ‘How soon after she went did you and Laura get together?’

A ripple of defensiveness registered between Dad’s eyebrows. ‘What do you mean, how long?’

‘Well, was it weeks, months – years?’

He linked his hands behind his head on the recliner, retreating behind his sunglasses, his face turned towards the sun. ‘Let’s see. It was November when your real mum left – ’

‘
Wren
. Just call her Wren, Dad.’

Her father frowned, surprised by her adult tone. ‘OK – when Wren left. I remember it was November because it was desperately cold, a hard frost on the windscreen
every morning, ice hanging from the holly tree at the front. Anyway, Laura came straight away – as a friend – and she must have stayed… maybe a fortnight? While I got back on my feet.’

‘Then what?’ Phoebe glanced towards the back of the house, hoping that Laura wouldn’t arrive home yet. Dad would never talk as openly if she was there; although she wouldn’t speak of it, Phoebe knew that Laura still harboured some misplaced guilt about stepping into Wren’s shoes.

‘Then she went off travelling for a year, and we didn’t see her again until the following Christmas – which was when we got together as a proper couple.’

‘What did people think?’

‘People?’

‘Your friends – Auntie Lily – Granny and Gramps? They must have thought it was all a bit weird, what with you and Laura being best friends since you were little.’

Dad smiled, rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckle. ‘I was
petrified
of telling them. It was bad enough the year before, having to break it to them that Wren had left me, and I knew there’d be raised eyebrows over me and Laura. You know, Lily actually asked me if that was why Wren had left in the first place – if Laura and I had been having an affair behind her back.’

‘Were you?’

‘No! Of course not!’ He lifted his glasses again, reached out with his other hand to turn her chin. ‘I adored your mother, Phoebs. Don’t ever be in any doubt about that. She was a wonderful woman – a kind, funny, beautiful person. I would never have done anything to jeopardise our life together.’

‘So why did she leave, then?’

For a while, he didn’t speak at all. Dropping his head back against the recliner, he let his eyes scan the borders of the leafy garden, rising and falling over shrubs and trees, over ancient rose bushes and withered alliums, making a full sweep of their surroundings.

‘Sometimes, for whatever reason, these things just fall out of balance. I guess in the end, Phoebs, she didn’t love me as much as I loved her.’

The kitchen is small, basic, the single decorative thing being a little Russian doll that’s perched on the edge of the worktop. Other than that it’s spartan, with neither frill nor comfort beyond the table, chair and stool at the centre of the room. Laura said the journalist mentioned a Lottery win but he must have got it wrong – this tiny cottage didn’t look anything like the home of a jackpot millionaire.

Phoebe waits uncertainly at the back door, watching her mother as she stirs a large pan of soup, adding a pinch of salt, a grind of pepper, dipping in a teaspoon to check it for flavour. She must be almost exactly the same build as Phoebe, but leaner, more efficient-looking. Phoebe lowers Badger to the floor and he pads across the tiles to stand beside Wren, raising his muzzle hopefully, before patting her boot with one of his oversized paws.

‘Are you hungry?’ Wren asks, without turning round. Phoebe assumes she’s talking to the dog, until she raises her wooden spoon like a conductor’s baton. ‘I’ve made soup. Do you want some?’

‘Oh,’ Phoebe replies, feeling foolish, feeling useless. ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I’ll pretty much eat anything, any time!’ She laughs a little forcedly, brushes her hands down the front of her
jacket and looks around the kitchen, desperately searching for prompts with which to start a conversation. ‘Can I help at all?’

Wren takes a sideways glance, still not facing her full on, and indicates with her wooden spoon towards the wall cupboards. ‘Bowls and plates,’ then down towards the drawers, ‘knives and spoons. There’s bread on the table. You could slice the bread.’

Phoebe is relieved to have something to do, to fill the great gaping silences that push out against the walls and windows of this claustrophobic cottage. What must Wren do all day, in this small space? The garden is a fair size, much of which is taken up with the vegetable patch, and gardening tools lean up against the bench, suggesting she’s been out there digging recently. Does she have friends? A partner, even? Somehow that seems unlikely. What is she interested in? What does she do in the evenings – where does she go on holiday? Phoebe knows nothing about her – not this new version of her mother, so unlike the Wren of Laura’s photo albums. That Wren looked directly into the camera lens, and, even when her mouth wasn’t smiling, her eyes were. Except in the birth photo, she realises now; in that picture, it seems there’s nothing behind her eyes at all.

She lays out a bowl and a plate on either side of the small table, and saws at the bread to produce two slightly wonky slices, placing one on each plate. ‘Sorry. I’m not very good at cutting bread. Dad says I’m cack-handed.’

Switching off the gas, Wren transfers the pan to the table and ladles out the soup, returning it to the hob before pulling out her chair. Phoebe sits on the stool opposite and waits for Wren to start before picking up her spoon and following her lead. She hopes conversation will follow naturally enough,
but, after several moments filled with nothing but the sound of spoons against china, Wren has still said nothing, still not looked Phoebe full in the face.

Phoebe lays down her spoon and runs her hands over her jeans, gathering courage. Despite the chill of the cottage, there’s a film of perspiration building in the creases of her palms and a hot flush has crept up over her neck. She thinks of asking about the dogs, about living in Cornwall, of enquiring whether Wren has a job or not; they might be good conversation starters. Or maybe she should tell her a bit about herself, about her plans to study gardening at college – ask her about her own garden? Quite unexpectedly, Wren looks up, now square-on, her eyes traversing the contours of Phoebe’s face. Her expression is not harsh; there’s kindness behind it, a curiosity of sorts.

‘Laura tells me you’re expecting a child.’ Releasing her gaze, Wren picks up her bread and tears off an edge. She dunks the crust into her soup and brings it to her mouth, glancing at Phoebe’s startled face as she does so. ‘How far gone are you?’

Phoebe is frozen in her seat, unable to look away.

She knew she was expecting from almost the moment of conception. The changes showed themselves so starkly – the metallic taste in her mouth, the fierce aversion to fish and tea, the swelling tenderness of her breasts. The lightheaded otherness of walking beneath the spotlights in Top Shop or H&M, where she stole furtive glances at the mother-to-be ranges, hoping that soon she might buy things from those rails. Taking the pregnancy test was really nothing more than a formality, proof that she wasn’t imagining the whole thing.
In part she supposed she was attuned to the alterations of her body, since the pregnancy had been carefully planned. She had spent a considerable number of hours online, searching the parenting forums for advice on conception and healthy living in the run-up to pregnancy. She’d been taking folic acid for a couple of months beforehand, as well as exercising regularly and living cleanly, until really the last remaining obstacle had been to find a suitable man to provide her with the necessary fifty per cent required for fertilisation to take place.

Esteban had seemed perfect. He was handsome, funny and intelligent – and, better still, he had had no intention of staying in the UK after his summer working holiday. When Phoebe met him on their first day of tomato-picking at Vale Farm, she knew she had found her man, and by the end of just one week toiling side by side in the sweltering heat of the greenhouse they were a firm item. Every evening after work, they would stop off at the Barleymow for a pint of orange juice and lemonade (Esteban had a small beer), leaning their bicycles against the garden bench while they drank in the sunshine, before continuing on to his digs at the edge of town, where they would work out the last of their energies beneath the musky haven of his bright cotton sheets.

Phoebe had told him she was on the pill, that he had nothing to worry about on that count, and she surprised herself at the easiness of the lie, how unabashed she felt about the whole deceit. He was only there for the summer months, to experience London (though he rarely ventured beyond the suburbs), to make a bit of money on the farm, and to practise his English – and his reluctance to talk in any depth about matters of home left Phoebe more than certain that he had a girlfriend back in Spain. Why wouldn’t he have? He was
gorgeous. He made love with a studied seriousness, and even now she thrilled at the memory of his lean torso rising and falling above her, gleaming with exertion.