An afternoon sacrificed for Family. The two of us for once the three of us, and my face turned away to hide my bitten lip. I only turned back when I was sure I could smile at you both, and clap my hands, and say how pleased I was, what a good idea it was, and what fun we'd all have. But I think you knew, and you promised an evening alone very soon. Maybe even a whole night in our special place, just the two of us.
And so we sat or stood or squatted by the river, trailing nets through the icy gush, and I watched as my lover and our child held hands and whispered together. She frowned as she stared down into the wet, so desperate to catch something she could take home to her grandmother, and I saw you in that puzzled concentration. I laid out the rolls and the cake, passed around the thick glass bottles of forbidden fizz, scolded you both for dirtying your clothes and glowed as you exchanged glances and nudges. So this was what it would be like to be your only family, your proper family. The ones you came home to.
You were bending over her when the chain slipped from your neck, slithered across her arm and caught in her net. You hadn't seen it fall. I was at her side before she could speak and I scooped it out and held it in my fist, placed a hand on her shoulder and pressed lightly. She stared up at me with wide eyes, opened her mouth to speak, but then I pressed harder and she was silent.
I tucked the chain into the pocket of my dress and returned to the picnic blanket, continued with my exclamations, my fond commentary, playing wife and mother, reddened from the sun and the deceit. Our child had lost some of her glow but I put it down to too much sweetness and you agreed with me.
It was only much later, when she'd been put to bed and we were sat in your car in the lane outside the house, that you noticed the loss. It had been a gift, that chain, though from whom you'd never said and I'd never asked, but you were distraught. I stroked your arm and promised to return to the river to look, and when we kissed goodbye I licked its pattern from your throat and knew you'd miss me.
After you'd gone I went straight to my room and checked on our sleeping child. I opened my wooden keepsake box to make sure your chain was still there. I imagined the smell from that hollow between your collarbones trapped in its links.
I didn't dare clasp it around my own neck in case I forgot to take it off again, but it was enough just to have it.
8
I was nineteen when my mother finally realised that I wasn't going to contact her and began phoning me at university. It took her longer than I'd anticipated to get the hint.
I was studying in my room when the first call came through, eyelids heavy with glitter and Goethe. Two of my friends lay wrapped together on the bed, sleeping. I remember the knock on the door, the joyful leap up and away from my desk, the sudden dizzy tilt as last night's cider squeezed my brain a little harder.
I was still wearing my fancy dress costume, in love with the cobweb of chiffon around my legs and the stiff barrier of paint masking my face. No longer Fern. The boy, when I opened the door to him, leaned away for a moment, staring. I smiled at his confusion, at his eyes the rich brown of roasted almonds, and felt the paint crackling across my cheekbones. I hoped it wasn't starting to flake.
Okay, let me guess ⦠Hell?
I shook my head and spun in a slow circle. The chiffon swooped and bristled around my calves, tiny threads sparking in the light. My wrist, as I raised it to lean against the doorframe, flamed with silk ribbon. Orange criss-crossed over red criss-crossed over purple. I bent my knee and twisted slightly at the waist so that the swell of hip would create a deeper curve and draw the eye.
Give up? I'm fire.
He nodded then, as if he'd been about to guess just that.
Well, Fire, there's a phone call for you. Your mother. She says it's urgent.
He didn't move away from the door. Behind me one of the sleepers snuffled and whimpered. I waited for him to ask what I was doing that evening, to suggest a drink at the union bar. In a green glass pot on my desk I stored my broken promises to unwritten essays and I willed him to speak so that I could add another. Soon the pot would be too small to contain them all and I'd have to get a bigger one.
When he did ask I pretended to think about it for a minute, watching him through a veil of thick, plum lashes. Then I laughed and twirled and he grinned his relief. Turned away and then, remembering, snapped his fingers and turned back.
Aren't you going to take that call? She sounded upset.
I walked with him down to the lobby and he pointed out his room, told me he'd meet me by the main entrance at seven. I stayed by the phone until he'd gone and then I picked the receiver up and floated it next to my ear for a moment, breath held, listening to the squawked confusion at the other end of the line. Then I pressed it gently into its cradle, waited for a moment to see if it would ring again, and danced back along the length of the lobby.
The warm, heavy bundle on the bed hadn't moved. I climbed onto the mattress and wedged myself into the soft dreams of my friends. Curled between the sweet damp of their breath, limbs flickering their descent into sleep, I sighed pleasure through crimson lips, trailing grease paint across the pillows. I hadn't realised that university would be this much fun.
By the next weekend she'd called five more times.
Fern, it's your mother again. She said it's important â¦
Hey, Fire, your mum's on the phone, what do you want me to tell her?
Phone call for you. I couldn't hear her properly, she sounded drunk, but I think it's your mum â¦
Your mother's on the phone again. Do you know what time it is? I've got an exam first thing tomorrow and she won't stop calling â¦
I wrote an instruction on a piece of card and impaled it into the wall above the phone, where nobody could miss it.
If Fern Gilbert's (Room 81) mother calls, please tell her that Fern is out. Thanks.
And when it began to feather at the edges, swinging crookedly from its pin, I wrote another. And then another.
Was that unnecessarily harsh of me? The young dress cruelty up as independence and excuse themselves for breaking their parents' hearts over and over, but for me it wasn't casual enough to be that. Because I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to know that I'd rejected her and the life she led. I'd made it off the island and I was never going back. I was young enough to believe it would be as easy as that.
Once or twice a month I'd scribble a few words on the back of a postcard.
All fine here. I'm studying hard. Hope you're well. Love F
Sometimes I'd even remember to pick it up from my desk on my way out to a lecture, drop it into my bag ready to take to the post box. And sometimes I remembered to dig it out of my bag before it became slimy with lip-gloss and sticky from humbug wrappers. But I rarely remembered to buy stamps from the student shop.
The not remembering became easier in the second year. Six of us sharing a house built for four. The garden our living room, blue tarpaulin stretched above the mossed patio slabs and mildewed armchairs. Bumblebees busy ransacking the buddleia that grew under the kitchen window. That was my happiest year. Not just of university, but ever. I loved to sit outside when it rained, curled in one of the armchairs, watching the sag of the tarp as it strained above me. The entire neighbourhood was given over to students, terrace after terrace fragrant with incense, my world a papier-mâché cocoon of lecture notes and dissertation deadlines.
There must have been times when it was cold, and we argued, and I was sick of people stealing my socks. I don't remember any of that, though. Like my mother with my father, and Granny Ivy with Sorel, my memory has skewed itself to fit my longings, and so I suppose it doesn't really matter whether any of it was actually true. It was the best year of my life because I remember it as the best year of my life.
The almond-eyed boy shared my bedroom for a while and then moved into the house next door. Essays were written on laps, ink stains glossing the cushions. Hair dye was applied at the kitchen table, tea towels muddy with henna. Childhood horror stories were swapped by candlelight when there weren't any spare coins to feed the meter. I was adopted. I was raised by an aunt who used to drink all day and beat me every evening. My father had died in a fire. He was a member of a rock band, I never found out which one, and my mother was a groupie who still dressed in leather and fishnets and hauled herself out, to god knows where, every Saturday night. I was a changeling, found wandering one morning by the woman I called mother, sparkling with dew and wearing nothing but two fern leaves in my hair.
I could be anybody I wanted to be.
It never occurred to me to tell the truth. Not once. I don't think I was ashamed so much as excited at the prospect of having a blank canvas spread before me, something that I could draw on, scribble over and embellish the corners of whenever I wanted. When you've lived your whole life on an island you have no concept of anonymity. Even with my family's unsociable tendencies I was known. My mother's unfortunate choice in lover was known. Her penchant for gin was known. But here I was Anybody. I even toyed with the idea of changing my name.
Shared suppers of pasta and peas. Coloured stickers guarding the milk cartons. Protest marches and movie hero posters. I was never alone. Friends of friends dropping round, talking until dawn, curled like kittens at the bottom of my mattress.
You don't mind if I get in with you, do you? I'm so cold, and your bed's the cleanest.
So many friends. They spilled over the garden wall, crawled out from under the kitchen table, leapt from cupboards. So many friends that I would trip over them in the morning, wading towards my first coffee through a carpet of flesh and blankets.
Sometimes I'd stop speaking mid-sentence, just to look around me at all the faces looking back. Sometimes I couldn't contain my love and I'd rush from person to person, fling fierce arms around them, whisper gratitude into their ear. And sometimes I'd tip my head back and search the sky for signs of a god, silently beg him to end the world right now. Because that moment, with the sun browning my feet and my friends layered around me so tightly packed that I couldn't see the ground, was as perfect a moment as I could wish for.
There were times when a drift of cherry blossom petals on a spring breeze would make me cry, though I couldn't explain why. The shout of the nesting rooks in the back garden would make me shudder and rush indoors. The smell of gin on someone's laughter would make me gag. At those times, just for a second, I'd forget who I was now. I'd stare into the sink and see amongst the dirty plates a mouth twisted with despair, swollen with tears. But then I'd turn the radio up and start to dance, and my friends would watch and clap, cheer me on until I spun myself into a heap across their laps and clung to them. The press of their bodies against mine grounding me once more. I'd left that other Fern behind on the day I left home, and I was never going back.
*
Standing in the garden in my new cherry red Doc Marten boots. My suitcase and two bin bags spilling from the boot of Tommy's car, my ferry ticket clenched between my teeth. I held her as she sobbed and squirmed, as she begged me not to go. All I wanted to do was spit the thin cardboard onto the ground and stamp it into the dirt, drag my things out of Tommy's car and shut myself into the echoing, empty space that used to be my room. Couldn't she see how scared I was? Why did she have to make it so much worse for both of us?
The hot trickle of her tears against my collarbone, the frantic scratch of her nails on my arms, the vibration of her sobs deep inside my rib cage, and behind her the look of pity and anguish on Tommy's face. He nodded at me, tried to pull her away, and she flailed against him, smearing her grief across his shirt in shining trails. She turned and ran inside the house.
I got into the car. Still time for her to splash her face with water, to blow her nose and come back outside to wave me off. Still time for her to make this right. Tommy lit a cigarette and fiddled with the radio. Switched the engine on and eased the car into gear, back into neutral. He adjusted the rear view mirror, sighed and shook his head.
What do you want to do, love?
The window in the living room slapped shut. The yellowed curtain glided across to fill the pane. My mother had made her decision.
I tugged the ferry ticket from my mouth, tearing the skin from my lip, tasting blood.
Let's go.
And as the car bumped down the lane to join the main road, the sudden breath I released was thick and dark with relief. I had a ferry to catch.
I didn't look back.
*
We watch each other as we sit around the table and eat dinner. Every time I catch mum's eye she smiles and nods at me.
Didn't I do well?
She's taking gleeful advantage of Rick's presence and her own sense of achievement, gulping gin between mouthfuls of chilli, nudging the glass back to me for refills.
The conversation stutters and stalls, stumbles on. I insert garlic bread into the silences, keep my hands clenched around the desire to reach across and throttle my mother. The meddling bitch has managed to screw up my life without even having left her own front room. I just can't work out how she did it. My heart has been spurting acid and adrenaline since I got home and the muscles in my calves keep twitching. He was probably on the mainland ferry that passed me this morning, the one time I didn't use my binoculars to check for him, and now he's here, in this house, and he knows my secret. I stare at him when his gaze is fastened to his plate, glance quickly away when his chin tips back up. Mum chuckles fondly as I revolve around the room yet again and points with her spoon.