Niamh has an unusually loud voice, and the two girls on our bench all shot her a look, but Niamh carried on, oblivious: ‘It’s just painful, Robyn, honestly. We were all having a barbie on Sunday and Dad was going, “You two will never get yourselves a husband if you don’t stop spending all your time together; people will think you like women.”’
I cringed. ‘Oh, Jesus. What did Denise say?’
‘Nothing, it wasn’t Denise,’ said Niamh, and I felt the familiar pang of guilt that I was bitchy-fishing about the woman who had basically been Niamh’s mum since she was seven. ‘She isn’t homophobic. I don’t think Dad is either, deep down, but that’s different to
me
being gay, isn’t it? What if they, you know … reject me?’
Just the thought made me feel murderous. ‘Well, if they dare,’ I said, ‘I’ll reject them.’
Our noodles came.
‘How was Joe, anyway?’ said Niamh, slurping her chicken ramen. She’d brightened after our little pep talk. ‘Lovely Joe Sawyer. He’s such a good ’un that boy.’
I nearly choked on mine.
‘Hey, do you think now you’ve finished with Andy, you could get back together with Joe?’
That noodle seemed to be winding its way around my windpipe.
‘Then Ethan would be my brother-in-law, which would be so unbelievably epic!’
Niamh loves Ethan. She and he spent a lot of time together that year after Mum died and I was with Joe. They’re similar ages – Niamh would have been seven and Ethan eight – and Niamh, with no concept of him being different, used to lead him everywhere by the hand like her pet; Ethan gladly following, exploring bits of the vicarage garden, making up games – ‘
Right, you be the burglar and I’ll be the policeman.
’
I can see her now, with that mermaid hair and her bossy little face.
I steered the subject away from Joe, swiftly. I couldn’t trust myself not to just spill. ‘It was really good to see Ethan, actually. He’s got a little job up at the garden centre where Joe used to work, remember? It’s such a shame this has happened with his mum because he seemed really happy.’
‘That’s fantastic. I’m so glad he’s happy,’ said Niamh, geniuinely.
Did that mean
she
wasn’t?
After the meal, we wandered around Soho for a bit, Niamh telling me about her new contract (going around schools with the police service, doing role play about crime and punishment – it wasn’t Hollywood, but it was a start) and the million different reasons why she was in love with Mary – or ‘Mary Crane’ as she calls her, because she always gives her girlfriend her full title, in the way that lovers do. She pointed out all the gay bars they’d been to together – a kind of impromptu and personal tour charting their love affair. How sad that out of our entire family, she only had me she could talk to about this stuff, I thought. The important stuff, that really matters.
Around 10 p.m., I walked her to the Tube. My little sister going back to
her
house, that she shared with
her
girlfriend. It all seemed so terribly grown up. When did that happen?
‘You’re not getting on the Tube?’ she said.
‘Um, no, I think I’ll take the bus.’
‘Okay, weirdo,’ she said, nudging me jokingly. Niamh lived in Nottingham, where she went to university, until five months ago. The Tube – like noodles in Soho – is also a novelty.
I took a moment to look at her, illuminated by the city lights, outside Leicester Square Tube, and felt a lump in my throat (the hormones were making me hyper-emotional; must get a grip). Her face had changed, become edgier somehow; but no less beautiful: she had a new, blunt fringe and together with the steel-grey eyes, the ivory skin, the slightly prominent jawline, there was an air of toughness to her that belied the childlikeness behind the eyes. Or maybe it was just that, to me, she’ll always be seven years old.
‘I’m glad I got to see you,’ I said, hugging her. I hadn’t told her my secret and in the same way a mother might worry about telling her first-born there was a baby on the way, I felt this was a betrayal.
‘You, too, Rob. You sorted my head out as usual.’ She pulled back and wrapped her arms around her leather jacket. ‘Although I don’t feel like I asked you how you are.’
I could have laughed. ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I said. Now was neither the time nor the place. ‘But I do have one question: You don’t happen to know anything about Mum’s ashes, do you?’
‘What about Mum’s ashes? That’s a strange question.’
‘Well, don’t panic, but we can’t find them. They haven’t been where they usually are on the mantelpiece up at Dad’s any more. I’ve asked Leah, but she didn’t know, and, also, she was all funny about it, and I thought you might know where they are, or why she was being odd?’
‘No, no idea, I’m afraid. Who knows the inner workings of that woman’s mind.’
‘Well, yeah, quite.’
‘Anyway, bye,’ she said, pecking me on the cheek. Mary’s watching
Strictly
re-runs and wants us to watch it together.’
‘Look at you two with your rock-and-roll life. Bye then, darling,’ I said. ‘Behave yourself.’
She pulled a silly face at me as she went down the steps to the Tube. Funny: should she perhaps have been more worried about the fact that we can’t find our mother’s ashes? But then as I walked to the bus stop, I considered that perhaps our mother is a collection of retold memories to Niamh. She was only seven when she died. She doesn’t have many of her own memories. And it’s good she’s not too upset. It means she got off lightly.
I can’t help but think, though, that Mum would have been cool, more than cool, she’d have been pleased, knowing that one of her girls was gay. She always did like to stick two fingers up to convention. This is the woman who held funerals for goldfish, after all.
I spoke to Joe another couple of times in the week before the scan appointment. He wanted to talk about the big picture: What the hell we were going to do? How was this co-parenting thing going to pan out? (I hadn’t thought that far; it was all I could do to deal with the present.) But mainly about me and how I was feeling. He was tremendously keen that I look after myself and take it easy, that I sit on my expanding backside as much as possible and eat cake. I told him that shouldn’t be a problem. Only at the end of the second conversation did he bring up the scan: ‘But it’s all right, I
know
you don’t want me to come. I know when I’m not wanted.’
‘Joe, it’s not like that.’
‘I know, I’m teasing.’
‘I want you to be involved, I’d love for you to come to the scan with me, I just … at the moment. What if there’s something wrong? I’m worried if … It’s not long since you lost your Mum.’
‘Hey, hey, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Shuddup going on.’
We both laughed. I felt better.
On the morning of the scan, I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up. I bumped into Eva on the way out – literally. She had her vast bottom in the air, rummaging in one of the five hundred bin bags she has piled up on the corridor outside our flats, wearing one of her psychedelic tent dresses. I wondered if she wore this stuff so she could be located in an emergency among her hoards of stuff.
She blocked my way with fake concern when she saw me.
‘Mrs King. Where
you
goin’ so early?’
‘I’ve got a hospital appointment’ I said. I really wasn’t in a position to come up with anything cleverer on the spot.
You should have seen her eyes – wide as saucers.
‘Nothin serious, I ’ope?’
Eva doesn’t just hoard stuff, but information. She probably has files on everyone in this block, stacked high with the Polish newspapers going back several decades.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a checkup. Anyway, Eva, about these bags. I need you to tell me at least when they might be moved … Is that reasonable …?’ Was it? I’d lost track.
Eva put her hands on my shoulders then and looked at me through those eyes that widened and narrowed, like she was trying to hypnotise you.
‘I bin sick,’ she said, shaking her head gravely … ‘These last few weeks. I bin teerrrible, terrrible, sickness, Mrs King. I bin to the doctor and is not good news …’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said with a sigh. The woman was a pathological liar, what can you do? I was going to have to chuck the bin bags out myself. ‘Maybe we’ll have a chat about this later,’ I said, as I made my way down the stairwell.
‘I like that,’ she shouted after me. ‘I make you cabbage Polish-style and tea!’
I made the short walk to the hospital, trying not to think too much about where I was going. Since I’d got the appointment in a long brown envelope marked NHS, this is how I’d dealt with it. One day at a time, trying not to think about it too much. I couldn’t believe I’d made it to thirteen weeks without anyone at work guessing (except Kaye, of course).
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve made excuses at work these past five weeks. It’s hard to keep your breakfast down at the best of times, many of the clients not exactly being big on hygiene. But John Urwin’s flat was really getting to me: my morning gag reflex wasn’t holding up to the skiddy pants left all over the flat, or the mugs of fag ends or (his new trick) the little piles of thick yellow nail clippings, sitting like mounds of tiny bones on the coffee table. In the end, I had to get Parv to go and do my visits to John for a few weeks, citing a sudden dust-mite allergy (like dust even figures on John’s radar …). Then there’s the recurrent stomach upset. I’ve had to avoid Friday beers.
‘Are you getting sickly on us, Kingy?’ Parv said the other day. ‘I thought you were from the North?’
Thankfully, everyone’s been mad busy recently. Jeremy’s on the warpath about assessment forms, professionalism, ‘boundaries’ – honestly, you’d think patients were a different species, the way he carries on. Work has been a great distraction, but also it’s been scary, sometimes, how adept I’ve been at pushing all this to the back of my mind. How I’ve been able, sometimes, to convince myself it’s not happening at all.
I spotted him as soon as I turned the corner into Magdala Avenue. He was sitting on the steps of the hospital, feet wide, head in a newspaper, innocent as anything! And I thought, ‘You bugger, Joe. You total bugger for turning up when I specifically told you not to.’ And yet, I was smiling. Joe has one of those annoying faces you can’t help smiling at: it’s in his mobile eyebrows, the way his mouth twitches when he’s lying or the way his nostrils flare slightly when he’s excited, or concentrating, like he was now. I hung back and watched him. He was reading his paper, but every time someone walked up the steps, he said hello. It astounded me still, how friendly Joe was – far more friendly than me, who posed as an extrovert, but led a secret life, avoiding the phone and cursing uninvited guests. Joe would never
not
answer a phone-call, ever. He’d not just open the door gladly to any uninvited guest, but invite them in for a cup of tea and a chat. He stopped, looked around, and when he couldn’t see me, put his newspaper down and lay back, arms behind his head.
I strode right over and stood, straddling him, blocking the light. ‘Joseph,’ I said.
He bolted upright. ‘
Shit!
What are you doing?’ I was laughing, served him right. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me!’
‘I feel maybe I should be saying that to you. What the hell are you
doing
here? I told you not to come.’
He grimaced, sheepishly. It was no use – I couldn’t be cross with him.
‘Well, I weighed it up, and I decided, whatever happens, I’d have to know some time.’
I sat down next to him. ‘Know what?’ I said, even though I knew what.
He put his arm around me. ‘That you’re gonna be fine, silly,’ he said, pulling me into him in a way you might do to encourage a flagging kid on the football pitch. ‘You and that baby are going to be absolutely fine.’
We sat there for a minute or two, in the sun, just watching people come and go – the odd hardcore smoker, in their pyjamas, the colour of tobacco themselves; relatives holding flowers and overnight bags; a heavily pregnant woman.
It was lovely to be sitting there with Joe’s arm around me, the familiarity of it. Then I’d remember what we were there for. ‘What if there’s nothing there, Joe?’ I said, resting my head on his shoulder. I felt his chest do a little puff. He thought I was being ridiculous. This was good.
‘Then how’s about we just make one anyway?’ he said.
Dear Lily
I write to you from a purple chair, fixed to the floor of the dating-scans waiting room of the maternity department of the Whittington Hospital. I’m not good at hospitals at the best of times, but maybe that’s because I have only ever been in them at the worst of times. (I’m determined to work on this.) As soon as that gravy-mixed-with-chemicals smell hits me, I’m back in the chemo ward at Cumberland Hospital, with my bald, yellow Mum, doing puzzles with her, crossword after crossword.
I dreamt about her the other night – your grandma, that is. It was the most gorgeous dream – one of those you wake up from and want desperately to go back into, but never can. They always make me cry, those ones. In this dream, Mum and I were cycling along a promenade (Dreams never quite translate when you tell them in real time, do they?). But it was glorious, this prom, and the sea was sparkling, like it had silver sequins scattered all over it. Mum was wearing the terry-towelling short-suit she used to wear from May to October. She looked strong and beautiful and we were pedalling into this huge red sun. It was SO good to see her! I was pedalling really hard, trying to catch up, to touch her; but it didn’t matter how fast I pedalled, I never could. Then, of course, I woke up.
Why am I telling you this? I think I’m more telling myself this, in the hope that by recounting that feeling the dream stirred in me last night, some of that Lillian King optimism might rub off on me, because I could really do with it today.
I’m scared, Lily. REALLY scared. Your father is sitting in the hospital canteen downstairs – because obviously he was going to turn up – and I didn’t tell him this, but I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. The worst thing is, I used to be the ‘sunny’ child. I was the one your grandmother trusted to have her cup half full. Now, I don’t know if it’s even true of me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve let my mum down. Like that person she thought I was … Am I actually that person still? Or did what happen change me forever? I really hope not …