The autumn had recently kicked in properly, and it had become cold. I was pleased. It was odd to be living here through a season that Matt had never seen, but I was glad I was doing it. I was glad it was not summer any more. The grass was green again now. The plants were stronger, getting ready for winter. Even the figs on the fig tree had all rotted away. The garden was carpeted with brown leaves. One day I was going to rake them all into a pile and burn them. Or perhaps I would build a leaf mulch bin. Or maybe I would simply leave them where they fell.
It was still dark outside, but I opened my bedroom shutters anyway, so we would see the sun rise. I left Alice muttering about presents and went downstairs to fetch her milk and my tea. These were the mechanical tasks that lent structure to my day. I had, as part of Plan B, been to see the doctor. I took my antidepressants when I was meant to. I wasn’t even sure whether they had kicked in yet. I didn’t particularly feel that they had, but, on the other hand, I was generally making it through the day, and that often felt like a big achievement.
‘Here you are,’ I said, handing Alice her milk, and retrieving a large parcel from under the bed. Alice nodded and concentrated all her energies on opening it. I leaned back and gulped my tea. I felt as if I were made from lead. Every action cost me a mammoth effort. I did not want Alice to have any idea how I was feeling. Beyond the window, I watched the sky turning pink and pale blue. It would, I thought, be a good day for our outing.
‘Oh wow.’ Alice was staring in wonder at her Playmobil airport. ‘Oh wow, Mummy. You help me make it.’
‘Please,’ I said wearily.
‘You please help me make it.’
‘OK. And then you can bring it in the car, because we’re going to the real airport today.’
Before we went out, I allowed myself to rummage through the bin bags in the barn. I even let Rosie film me doing it.
‘Do you think it’s all getting too damp out here?’ I asked, looking at the camera. ‘Sorry. But do you? Should I take it back inside? I only threw it all out here because Bella made me. Otherwise she was going to take it to the dump.’
‘What are you looking for?’ Rosie asked, in the sepulchral voice that meant she thought her comments might feature in the finished product.
‘A jumper. That’s all. Just a sodding jumper. Matt had some great jumpers. I want to wear one to the mountains. I don’t care if that’s an unhealthy impulse. I’m cold and all my clothes are crap.’ I found a green one, slightly bobbly and knitted through with ambiguous associations. I smelt it. It was just on the right side of musty. ‘That’s the one,’ I said, holding it up for the camera.
I stood on the lawn for a moment. The maize had been harvested several weeks earlier, and I liked the fact that I had a view again. I liked the fact that I had watched it grow. All we could see was an expanse of wintry looking fields which extended to the horizon, but it felt good not to be enclosed any more. It felt good that things were changing.
Greg sauntered through arrivals, looking like someone arriving in Bangkok. He was wearing baggy cotton trousers that were too flimsy for Europe, and a long sleeved T-shirt that needed a wash. His light brown hair was long and he had a bit of a beard.
I had known Greg for ever, had lived with him since he was a baby, and he was the cousin who felt most like my sibling. Bella and Charlotte could both remember my mother. As far as Greg was concerned, I had always been his sister. I had seen him progress from dirty-faced toddler to dishevelled schoolboy, to withdrawn teenager. After taking a history degree, he had become a perpetual traveller. Greg had never had a career, nor professed any interest in one. He just worked to fund his travels. As a schoolboy he had told his careers adviser that he wanted to be a quantity surveyor. That had been specific enough to stop them bothering him, though he had never had any idea what kind of quantities a quantity surveyor was expected to survey, and had always held his breath and hoped for no follow-up questions. He had never had any ambitions with regard to status. All his ambitions concerned his lifestyle.
I had not seen Greg very often since he left home, but he had always kept in touch with postcards and emails. When Alice was born he had been teaching English in China, and he had surprised me by flying home a month early, just to see her.
Greg had flown to Pau airport, on the edge of the Pyrenees, rather than to Bordeaux, which was much closer, because he had managed to book a ticket that was almost free. I had been delighted. Bordeaux airport was the last place I wanted to visit, since it would forever be associated with Matt. Greg’s arrival in Pau, on Alice’s birthday, had neatly excused me from party duties. We were combining his arrival with a day out in the Pyrenees. I wanted to take Alice up in a cable car and see how she liked being up a mountain. Rosie was excited about the change of scene. She said it would be ‘brilliant to bung in a bit of landscape’.
Alice barely remembered Greg, but when I pointed him out, she jumped up and down, shouting ‘Greg! Greg! Here!’ then ran towards him at full pelt. Surprise flickered across his face, then a smile. He gathered her into his arms and kissed her.
‘Is that him?’ asked Rosie. ‘Mmm. Very Ewan McGregor.’ She twiddled a stray blonde lock around her index finger.
‘Happy birthday,’ Greg said, very seriously, to Alice, and he handed her a small bag. She reached inside, beaming, and took out a little bronze Buddha. It was sitting down and had a fat tummy. Alice smiled at it, confused, and looked back at Greg.
‘It’s a lucky Buddha,’ he explained. ‘You rub his tummy and make a wish, and he looks after you. You need to keep him by your bed. He’s been travelling with me and he’s very lucky, so I thought he might help your mummy look after you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and rubbed the Buddha’s stomach with great concentration. I unexpectedly found tears pricking my eyes at Greg’s gesture. I quickly blinked them away.
‘What are you wishing for?’ I asked gently, certain that the answer would be ‘Daddy’.
‘A pink bicycle,’ she replied, rapt.
‘Thanks, Greg,’ I said, and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thanks for coming. This is Rosie.’
A smile spread across his face as they shook hands politely. ‘Delighted to meet you, Rosie. I wasn’t so keen on the idea of Ems doing this telly thing, but now that we meet, I can imagine you’re very persuasive.’
‘I certainly can be.’
Greg tore his eyes away from her and turned back to me. ‘Hey. Thanks for asking me out. Thanks for letting me be part of this Plan B business. And for coming all this way to get me, on the boss lady here’s birthday as well. I can’t believe the size of her. I was still expecting a baby.’ He turned to Alice. ‘Hey, guess what, I’ve got some more presents for you in here.’ He tapped his rucksack. ‘Christa and Greg have sent you shitloads of stuff. Sorry, shedloads. And Bella and Jon and the boys. Even scatty old Charlotte’s managed to come up with the goods.’
Alice looked at me urgently. ‘Mummy, can I open them? Can I open them
just right now
?’
‘In the car,’ I told her. ‘Greg can’t open his bag here.’
‘Now!’ she said. ‘I said, now.’
‘
And I said in the car
.’ I said it too loudly. I found it hard to judge. Everything was a bit too hazy. The edge had been taken off my life, and while I was grateful for that, it saddened me, too.
To get to the mountains we needed to bypass the town of Lourdes. I had never been there, and neither had Greg. He was fascinated by the idea.
‘A miracle place,’ he said, several times. ‘A miracle place that belongs to Catholics. I just know it’s going to be wild. Can we go?’
‘On the way back,’ I said firmly. ‘We don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get up into the mountains. On the way back we’ll know. So we can pace ourselves.’
Greg looked across at me and smiled. ‘Sensible as ever, Ems. Nice to know some things haven’t changed.’
I sensed that Greg was ill at ease with my emotional issues, and was particularly keen not to talk about them in front of Alice. He asked Rosie not to film him until he felt more comfortable. Instead, he told us all about his travels while Alice filled the back seat, and Rosie’s lap, with paper as she ripped open her numerous presents and exclaimed loudly about each one.
‘ . . . I finally got off to sleep,’ he concluded as I took a wrong turning and drove towards Lourdes town centre, ‘despite having five of us wedged into a seat for two, and even though the bus was speeding over potholes as if they weren’t there at all. A little while later I woke up because someone was in my lap. It must have been three in the morning, and at first I thought someone had gone to sleep with their head on my legs. So I reached out to shove them off and it started bloody bleating at me.’
‘Bleating?’
‘A goat had climbed onto my lap, curled up, and gone to sleep, and I hadn’t even noticed. Can you believe that? I couldn’t. So I shouted at it and the woman next to me woke up, snatched her goat away, and slapped me. An actual slap across the bloody face! I think she thought I had no business being so rude to her animal. In spite of the fact that it was obviously on the bus to certain death at the market.’
Despite myself, I laughed. ‘So you really got her goat,’ I remarked.
‘I did indeed.’
‘Mummy!’ came a shout from the back. ‘A Barbie doll!’
I sighed. ‘Oh, great. Who from?’
Rosie looked at the card. ‘Charlotte.’
‘She couldn’t help herself,’ Greg added.
Greg was outgoing, but also strangely self-contained. As a little boy he had lived under the thumb of three older sisters and a mother who ruled the household, while his father padded around the house, and stayed late at work, and lurked in his study. Until the age of about four, he had submitted to what had appeared to be his destiny: to be dressed up elaborately by Bella and inserted into any imaginative game she was foisting upon us all. He played the baby Jesus, a fairy, a posh lady, a chimney sweep, and several trees. He had taken the place of the Girls’ World that Christa had refused to let us have, and had borne the brunt of make-up experimentation. Then, one day, he had refused. He had not been dramatic about it. Greg had never had tantrums. He simply declined, went to his room, and shut the door. Eventually, Bella had given up.
‘OK,’ I announced. ‘Not quite sure which way to go here.’ I was idling at a red light, behind an old-fashioned blue bus with a red cross in the back window and the words ‘
Transport des Malades
’. ‘Hey, look,’ I said, pointing. ‘That’s a huge ambulance.’
Greg sat up. ‘Taking people to get cured. Cool.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘So we’re not taking the bypass?’
‘Not through choice. I’ve buggered it up.’
‘You shouldn’t have taken that right back there.’
‘Thanks, Rosie.’ I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror and she smiled and shrugged. She was the cornerstone of my life. I knew I might regret the total access I had granted her, but at the same time I did not give a fuck.
The streets were busy with pedestrians, and I was tense about driving through this place. The street signs were too local, and they all pointed to places, like the caves and the town centre, that I would have preferred not to visit. I followed the road straight on, at random. The ambulance turned right. The street seemed to close in on me. People were walking on the road, paying no attention to the traffic. I knew that this was not a pedestrian street, because there were cars in front of me and behind me, but nobody on foot seemed aware of the fact that normal highway rules should have applied. As I inched the car along, an elderly man stopped by the kerb, looked me in the eye, and stepped straight out in front of my car. I gasped and performed an emergency stop. He frowned, shouted something at me, and waved the stump of an arm aggressively at me. I fought back the urge to yell back at him, to tell him that I was driving at no more than ten kilometres per hour, on a road.
I am not doing anything wrong
, I screamed internally. Leave me alone. My fingers gripped the steering wheel so hard that my skin went white and papery. I was breathing too quickly. I waited for the man and the woman with him, who looked embarrassed, to reach the other pavement. He glared back over his shoulder.
‘Nice place,’ I said as lightly as I could. I was holding myself together because Greg was next to me. He laughed, but I was scared. One cantankerous old man, who was suffering and on a pilgrimage to seek some sort of respite, had brought me to the brink of furious tears. That did not fill me with confidence about my future.
I looked back at Alice. Rosie was pointing her camera at me.
‘Sorry,’ she said, not looking sorry. ‘Caught it all. This place on a Sunday is just irresistible.’
I followed a Slovakian coach around the town centre, driving at a snail’s pace and frequently stopping altogether to let serious-faced pilgrims amble across the road.
‘Interesting,’ said Greg, staring out of the window. ‘It’s just like all pilgrimage sites. They all fill up like this, and they all have shops selling religious paraphernalia.’ He peered at a shop window as we passed. ‘Jesus Christ, some of this stuff is amazing. Look at that:
Approved by the Vatican
. Five years ago I’d have nicked that sign.’
‘You still would if there weren’t so many witnesses.’
‘True. Might even try it now if I wasn’t on celluloid.’
‘Have you been to Mecca?’ I asked, to take my mind off the fact that we seemed fated to spend Alice’s third birthday driving around Lourdes, trapped in some sort of twilight zone of aggressive Catholic pilgrims.
He snorted. ‘No. Saudi Arabia hasn’t enormously appealed. I don’t think a tourist visa would be easy to come by. And I’m sure they wouldn’t let me near Mecca at hajj time unless I pretended to be a Muslim, and frankly, although I’ve got nothing against a good adventure, going to Mecca as a fake Muslim would be a tad
too
adventurous.’
‘Even for you.’
‘Even for me. But I’ve been to less glamorous pilgrimage spots in India and south-east Asia, and the atmosphere is just like this. The roads here are better, though.’