The Day We Met (22 page)

The man takes my phone. “Tell me a name,” he says.

“Mum.” I sob the word as I look around for any sign of her. “Esther, Esther.”

“Hello?” The man speaks. “I think I have your daughter with me. She is very upset. She says she has lost her little girl? Okay, okay. Yes. One moment, please. Madam?” I cling on to the counter. “It's okay, your little girl is safe. She is at home with her grandmother. Here, here. Talk to her.”

“Mum?” I press it against my ear. “What have I done? I've lost Esther! I took her out, even though I knew that I mustn't, and now she's gone, Mum. She's gone.”

“She's not.” I hear Mum's voice. “Esther is here with me, darling. Mrs. Harrison from three doors up found her in her garden talking to the cat. She's here, and she's safe. Esther said
you were going to the shop, but that she stopped to talk to the cat and you didn't. Mrs. Harrison went to the shop to look, but you weren't there. Do you know where you are?”

“No,” I say. “No.”

“Let me talk to that man again.”

Numb, frightened, and still shaking, I hand the thing back to the shopkeeper.

“I told your mum where we are,” he says. “So no need to worry. She's coming to get you. Would you like a cup of tea?”

I nod, and seeing a magazine covered in cellophane with some bright-yellow-and-pink plastic toy behind it, I pick it up. But as I pat my coat pockets, I realize that I don't have any way of paying for it.

“For your daughter?” he asks me. I nod, mutely.

“It's okay, you can keep it,” he says. “On me. Now, you sit down here on this stool, and I'll bring you a cup of tea. You'll be home soon, no need to be afraid.”

“It's okay.” Mum helps me into the warm water in the bath, and holds my hand as I sit down. “It's okay.”

I ask her to leave the door open, because downstairs I can hear Esther singing and talking with Greg.

“It's not,” I say. “It's not okay anymore. I'm not her mummy anymore. I've stopped knowing how to read to her, how to keep her safe. I had no idea where I was, Mum, or how I even got there. I can't be trusted anymore, not even with my own little girl.”

“It was my fault,” Mum says. “I just nipped to the loo, and when I came back…”

“I'm not a toddler,” I say. “And you are in your sixties. You shouldn't have to be checking whether or not I've drowned myself
in a puddle. You shouldn't have to go through this, Mum. I need to go back to see the doctor. We need a better plan. A care plan.”

“Lean forward.”

I hug my knees and Mum squeezes hot water from the sponge over my back, gently rubbing it.

“Lie back.”

I lie very still and let her wash me—my arms, my breasts, my stomach, my legs.

“We can manage,” she says after a while. The steam from the bath is making her cheeks damp.

“I don't want you to manage,” I say to her. “I don't want you to. This is your life, and you were happy, with your friends and the singing and the
Daily Mail
. You were happy, Mum. You'd done the hard stuff, and now you were getting to have contentment. I don't want you here, wondering what terrible, dreadful, stupid thing I'm going to do next. I want you to be free of me. Not washing me like I am a baby.”

Mum bows her head as she kneels by the side of the bath. “Don't you see?” she says, without looking up. “I could no more go back to the house and the things I do back there than I could cut off my arm. You
are
my baby, my daughter, my little girl. No matter how big or old you get, you are mine, my precious child. I won't ever leave you, Claire. Not while there is a breath in my body.”

“Mum.” I reach out and touch her cheek, and she covers her face with her hands. I lean over the edge of the bath and put my arms around her.

“You are the best mum,” I say. “The most amazingly wonderful mum that there is.”

“I'm not,” she says. “You are, and I'm going to help you to keep being that for as long as I possibly can. We're not there yet,
Claire. We are not at the end yet. There's so much more to do—psychotherapy maybe. Your counselor—you've not really taken her seriously yet, except for keeping up with your book. And we'll go back to that Mr. Rajapaske and talk about drugs. And I won't try to keep you in so much. We'll arrange things for you to do, safe things. It's my fault. I want to wrap you up, and protect you. I want to stop this awful thing from happening to you. I think…I think maybe I thought I could keep you in the house like Sleeping Beauty, then nothing would ever change.”

“I don't want to go out anymore,” I say, and I mean it. For weeks, the outside world has been the place I've longed to escape to, a place where I can be me. I always thought that when the time came to give up, to stay indoors, I would already have fallen off the precipice, or be lost in the fog. I thought I wouldn't know when the time came to admit defeat, but I do know. The time is now. “I never want to go anywhere again. I never want to feel that frightened again. I never ever want to put Esther in any sort of danger again. I'm sorry, Mum. Please, just lock me up and throw away the key, now.”

There's a cough outside the door: it's Greg. “Caitlin is on my phone. She wants to talk to you, Claire.”

Mum reaches through a gap in the door for the thing, the phone, as Greg calls it, and I take it. “Caitlin,” I say. “Where are you?” Because for a second I cannot remember, and I'm frightened that she is lost too.

“I'm in Manchester, Mum,” she says. Her voice seems so small and far away. I look around, trying to see her, and then remember that she is not here. “I spoke to Paul today.”

Paul, Paul, my Paul, her father Paul. She went to Manchester to see her father. “How was it?” I ask her.

“Not good.” I strain to listen for clues in her voice. She sounds oddly calm; her voice seems light, peaceful. Is that how
it really is, or how I want to hear it? “Paul says that he isn't my father. He said…” She draws in a deep breath. “He says that maybe it's all in your head, because of the AD, and that. I mean, I know that it's not. I just have to look at him and I know that he's contributed to my gene pool—and he's not blind, he must see that too. But he doesn't want to face up to it, and I don't really blame him. Shall I come home?”

I find myself standing up, water pouring off me, running down my body in rivulets. Mum grabs a large soft wrap, still warm from the radiator, and winds it around me.

“Paul Sumner says you are not his?” I ask. Of all the things I'd expected, it wasn't that. I didn't expect him to deny what is written all over Caitlin's face.

“He says that he isn't my father, and that maybe you got muddled up, because you were ill? He was so sure, Mum. And he was so sure that I stopped being sure. And now I don't know what to do, and I'm not sure I even care. Shall I just come home? It seems pointless being this far away from you now. Greg told me about today. It sounded so horrible. I want to be at home with you all.”

“No,” I say. Stepping out of the bath, I walk into the hallway and find Greg standing there, looking uncertain and wary. He sees me and averts his eyes. “No. You stay there. I'm coming. I'll talk to Paul Bloody Sumner.”

“But Mum, are you sure? After today?”

“I'm coming,” I say, meeting Greg's eyes, and he nods.

“Claire.” Mum is leaning in the bathroom doorway. “A few moments ago you said you didn't want to ever leave home again, and now Manchester? Are you sure?”

“I am not leaving things like this,” I say, determined. “This isn't about me: it's about Caitlin. I need to fix this. I have to go.
You will come with me, and we'll take Esther. It will be a girls' road trip. You'll make sure that nothing bad happens….”

“Will Greg come too?” Caitlin asks hopefully, listening in to our conversation. It's touching that she wants him there as part of the family, but he's part of her family now, and not mine.

“Greg's got work to do,” I say.

He stands on the landing for a second longer, his arms wrapped protectively around his body, and then he walks into Esther's room and closes the door.

“We'll come up first thing,” I say, looking at Mum, who simply nods. “Caitlin, are you okay? Are you very sad?”

There is a pause on the end of the line.

“Actually, funnily enough, I am not sad at all,” Caitlin says, sounding rather bewildered. “I think I might be sort of happy.”

A little while later, after Mum has dried and brushed my hair and the house is full of sleep, I get up to go to the bathroom. Hearing a noise, I pause outside Esther's room, and I worry that she might be having a nightmare about being left in a street by a woman who forgot she existed. I stand there, and listen, and very slowly I realize it's not Esther, but Greg—and he's crying. My hand goes to the doorknob and floats over it for a moment or two, and then I turn around and go back to bed.

I don't know what I would say to him.

This is a postcard from St Ives, my first ever holiday with Claire on our own after her father died. And it was also the place that I lost her.

I didn't want to go on holiday without him. Even though we had only ever been on one family holiday before, it felt wrong to carry on. Looking back, I think I felt that it shouldn't be allowed—Claire and I carrying on living our lives almost exactly as we had before. I thought that we should mourn his passing forever. But that wasn't fair. Claire loved him, but she never knew him the way I did, he never let her. For her, his death was sad, but understandable. For me, it was losing the love of my life: the one person in the world I respected and adored above all others. I didn't want life to ever get back to normal.

Claire needed a break, though. My mum said so, and for once I listened to her. It's funny, now I think about the way we
went about having that holiday. Even then, in the eighties, you only flew abroad if you were rich, and I hadn't learned to drive. I was to pass my driving test later that year. So we got a coach from Victoria, like a package holiday. Me and Claire and a lot of much older people, pensioners, wondering what on earth we were doing there—and the truth was, I didn't really know, except I knew I had to take Claire on a holiday, and I didn't want to have to think about it.

It must have been hard for her. I'm not even sure I told her we were going until the day I packed the bags. We sat on the coach for six hours, and we barely spoke to each other. She sat in the aisle and read
Jane Eyre
. I stared out of the window and thought about him, about how sweet and gentle he could be when no one was looking. How he'd loved me, and I'd loved him. How I'd lost him, the man who made my knees wobble when he kissed me; and he'd lost me, toward the end thinking I was his mother. We hadn't lost our love, though, not at all. It was there, still there between us. The love was still there.

Our hotel was a pretty awful one. I don't remember much about it, except that it was barely clean. None of it mattered to me really, although I do remember Claire being disappointed because she thought she'd be able to see the sea out of the window, and all she could see was the air conditioning unit screwed onto the brick wall opposite.

We were there for a week, come rain or shine, and I hardly remember any of it. It was before St Ives became packed with trendy shops and cafés, I know that much. It was sunny, but not warm, and a lot of our time was spent at the beach, me sitting in a deck chair behind sunglasses, while Claire paddled in the water, kicking listlessly at the waves. She got sunburned because I forgot to put sun cream on her. I was miserable. So sad. So lonely. I didn't want to be there, and I didn't want to be at home.
The only place I wanted to be was three or four years earlier, before we knew about the dementia. I could never imagine being happy again.

One evening, we walked through the town, because Claire was so sick of the hotel food that she nagged and nagged me to take her out for dinner. There was a fish and chips place in the town, where you could eat in. So we walked through the town, and it was very busy, full of people, all with the same idea, it seemed, and then suddenly I caught a glimpse of the back of a head, and I was sure it was him. I was just sure it was. I thought somehow he had followed us here. Who else would it be wearing a gray suit jacket on this summer's evening, his red hair shining? I followed him, my eyes glued to that glimpse of red, ducking down streets, pushing through the crowds, until I was almost running, desperate to catch up with him, right up until I turned a corner and bumped into the red-headed gentleman in the gray suit. I grasped at his shoulders, flung my arms around him and wept with relief, until the gentleman in question pushed me off him and told me to sober up. I looked into his face—a face that meant nothing to me. He wasn't a ghost and he wasn't a miracle: it was my mind playing tricks on me. I even got the hair color wrong. He wasn't a redhead—he was blond.

It was then I realized that Claire wasn't with me, and it took seconds, several of them, for the arrowhead of fear to pierce through the muffled miasma of grief; and then it struck me in the heart, which suddenly began to beat fast and I was alive again. They were a terrible, terrifying ten minutes, maybe even less, as I ran back the way I came, shouting out her name, people looking at me, the mad woman in the street screaming. But in those few minutes, however many of them there were, the blood rushed in my veins, life shot through me: longing, fear, anxiety
like I have never known since, not until recently, spreading through every vein, with every beat of my heart.

Then there she was, looking in a shop window, like she hadn't even noticed I was gone. I picked her up—much to her horror—and held her tightly, until she began to fight me.

I'd lost her, and then I found her again, and I found myself at the same time.