There was a red, silk dressing gown hanging on the back of my door. Kaye had brought it back for me from her trip to Hong Kong in February. As Joe’s breath quickened and he moved inside me, I fixed my eyes on it. It was something from the here and now. It couldn’t be from my past because I didn’t have it then. I was telling myself that this wasn’t a real experience and I wouldn’t let it be. This wasn’t happening now and I wouldn’t believe it was. This was a flashback, a defective memory; like toxic sediment being dragged up from my mind and, yet, every time I opened my eyes, for a second, before I was assailed by unwanted awful images and clamped them shut again, it wasn’t Joe’s hazel doe eyes looking back at me, it was his watery blue ones. It wasn’t Joe’s beautiful firm skin I could feel, but that fat, white belly slapping against mine like dough, and me, my head turned to the side, the beady eye of that chicken staring at me; the only witness.
I slowed and buried my face in Joe’s chest, determined not to cry in front of him … ‘Robbie?’ Joe said, gently.
‘It’s okay, carry on.’ I stopped moving completely.
‘Robyn, what’s wrong?’
I kind of shifted my body, so annoyed at myself, and looked up into his face; as suddenly as that awful vision had started, it stopped. ‘Nothing,’ I said, kissing him, fully, as if for compensation, I suppose. But we both knew it was no use.
We lay there, cuddling for a bit, in a silence we both knew was loaded, but still neither of us said a word. I felt so guilty, like I’d let him down, that I’d failed. But most of all I was angry with myself and my body because I wanted nothing more than to just have sex with the man I was in love with, and it wasn’t letting me. ‘Are you all right?’ Joe asked again. He’d turned on his back now, I had moved, so my body wasn’t touching his and he was brushing the hair from my forehead, tenderly. ‘You’re not worrying about anything, are you?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.
‘Good, because you know what Dr Love said about not thinking the worst, trying to relax. You would tell me if there was something?’
I felt a momentary flicker of annoyance. Wasn’t losing a baby enough to put you off sex when you got pregnant again? Wasn’t that the ‘something’? But I didn’t want to get into one. Best just to move on, and not make a big deal of it.
‘No, I’m fine, honestly,’ I said, as breezily as I could, kissing him on the forehead and getting up to go to the bathroom.
‘Maybe you just don’t fancy me any more, then?’ said Joe. ‘Now I’ve got nostril hair and a pot belly …’ (He didn’t have either; not that it would matter if he did. I fancied him even more than I did at sixteen.)
‘
Joe
,’ I said. I knew he was teasing but my sense of humour had escaped me and, also, I couldn’t bear for him to think that. ‘Please, I’m so sorry.’
‘I’m only kidding,’ he said, puffing up his pillows and sitting up. ‘I guess it must be weird, when you’re pregnant, hey?’
‘What?’ I said, searching around for my knickers.
‘Sex.’
‘Yes, a bit,’ I said. I was in the bathroom now, having a go at my eyebrows, which had gone so bushy with pregnancy, astonished, as I always was, by the sight of my changing body, my twenty-three-week bump. The S shape I made from the side. It always felt like it was someone else’s body.
‘Are you kind of worried it’ll …?’ He stopped. I walked to the door of the bedroom, still holding the tweezers.
He was lying, his arms behind his head. Two dark tufts of underarm hair.
‘Worried it’ll what?’ I said.
‘Sort of … poke the baby’s head?’
I shook my head and sighed. ‘Well, Joe, if I didn’t have problems already, I do now!’ I said, feeling the hot spring of tears threaten, the smile fade from my face. Joe’s face fell too. We both knew this was getting to be a bit of a charade.
‘Robyn, this has happened every time.’
‘I know’, I said. I couldn’t even look at him.
‘And, honestly, besides the fact that I would like to ravish you day and night. That I want to have you, constantly, because you’re so frigging sexy with that bump and those magnificent breasts and that face, I’m worried there’s something deeper going on.’
I didn’t say anything. I felt completely exposed, just standing there in my knickers. I unhooked the dressing gown off the back of the door and put it on, almost like a barrier, a defence.
‘You don’t get the Tube any more, do you?’ said Joe.
‘It’s hot and cramped and I don’t always get a seat’
‘You’ve been scaring yourself with stuff on the Internet, too, haven’t you?’
‘How do
you
know? Have you been snooping?’
‘I didn’t have to, you’d printed loads of stuff out. It was just sitting there on the side when I was checking my emails.’
‘
Shit
,’ I said under my breath. I couldn’t believe I’d left them out, that he’d had to read that stuff, besides anything else.
He didn’t look cross with me, he just looked sad – that was the worst thing.
‘Look, it was only one night,’ I said, as lightly as I could, going back into the bathroom so he couldn’t see my face. ‘I won’t make a habit of it, I promise, don’t worry.’
‘Good, ’cause you’ll be in trouble with Dr Love and me if you do. You heard what he said about stress and the birth and labour.’ I began washing my face, as if a quick splash of cold water might make me feel better.
‘Also, anyway, I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ he said. I could hear him getting up and getting dressed in the other room.
‘What, another one?’ I teased, turning off the taps and reaching for the towel.
‘Yeah, you know that conversation we were having the other day, when we were talking about all the people back in Kilterdale that we’d ever had a thing with?’
‘A thing with?’
‘Yeah, a snog, or gone out with, or even just a crafty fumble down Hobbit’s Cave.’ ‘Hobbit’s Cave’ being a cave on Kilterdale beach where many a crafty fumble had taken place in our youth.
‘What, and you confessed to me about having it off with half of my year, feeling up Tania Richardson, you hussy,’ I said, feeling better we were at least having a joke now that the atmosphere had lightened.
‘I was fifteen!’ Joe said. I could hear him giggling. ‘And anyway, never mind about her, what about Saul Butler, eh?’ I froze. Ice crept up my neck, my mouth filled immediately with water. ‘Apparently, you had a thing with him, too?’
I immediately started to tremble; it was a reflex I couldn’t control.
‘Who told you that?’ I said, desperately trying to make my voice sound normal. I tried to dry my face but my hands were shaking so much, I dropped the towel from the towel rail. I bent to pick it up.
‘Bomber said Saul told him a couple of years ago,’ said Joe. I could hear the jangle of his belt as he did up his jeans. ‘When I was staying with him a few weeks ago, you crafty little minx.’
I was forming an answer in my mouth, when a shrill noise started up in the lounge: my phone ringing. When I walked to answer it, it took every cell of strength I possessed to remain upstanding, for my legs not to give way.
‘Robyn?’ It was Niamh. ‘Have you got a few minutes to chat?’
Dear Lily
Sometimes I wonder if your father is still hyperactive or has some sort of problem that would explain his behaviour last night. Sadly, I just think he’s turned into a common-or-garden moron! I’ve just been to Tania Richardson’s wedding in Kilterdale. It was beautiful – the sun shone and Tania was so happy (even if she looked like she was having a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding; I would ONLY say that to you). I took Brendan with me, who I’ve now been seeing for two years, so it’s not like he’s ‘a phase’, but it’s the first time I have dared take him up North to meet my dad and it went well – Dad loved him. He can see that Brendan is a proper grown-up, although offering him a whisky on arrival (Denise had put some in a decanter – who does that?!) was embarrassing to say the least.
I don’t know what got into Joe. One minute he seemed to be having a perfectly friendly chat with Brendan, the next he was threatening to punch him. Then, ten minutes later, he was sick on Bren’s shoes! What made it worse was that on the way to the wedding, I’d been telling Bren how much he’d love Joe – because ‘everyone loves Joe’. I’ve never seen Joe behave like that – like he had not just a chip but a jacket potato on his shoulder. I’m torn now, because I’m worried about him at the same time as being annoyed he could show me up like that … At the same time (and I would only ever disclose this to you, too), I felt stuff when I saw him, Lily. I actually wonder if I don’t still love him.
‘I just don’t feel like I know her, Robyn.’
Like I’ve said, it was not unusual for my little sister to begin whole conversations like this, at the eye of her personal storm. However, at first, what I actually heard was, ‘I just don’t feel like I know Robyn.’ (An insight into just how self-absorbed this ‘mental-mind disorder’ was making me.) I stopped, stood there in the middle of my lounge in the red silk dressing gown, disoriented from what Joe had said; about to say,
You, too? So I’m not imagining then? I really have gone fucking AWOL?
In the nick of time, I realized she meant Mum.
‘I feel like she never got a chance to know me.’
Since that evening at Leah’s house, Niamh has called me and come over, wanting to talk about Mum. It was almost as if the possibility that we might have lost Mum’s ashes had panicked her, kick-started a desire to find out about Mum and to tell her things before she ‘let her go’ (in whichever way Niamh decided she would do this).
Since we couldn’t make any joint decision on what to do with our mother’s ashes, we’d decided to split them three ways so that people could do whatever they wanted to do with their share: scatter them, keep them in the airing cupboard – the glove compartment, if they so desired. That was what Mum always used to do with anything when we fought over stuff: split it up and let us work it out.
I got how Niamh felt. Whatever I decided to do with Mum’s ashes, I needed to tell her my secrets first, too, but Niamh felt this more acutely. This was because Niamh’s memory of Mum was patchy, at best. Sometimes completely imagined. It broke my heart, really, how she’d come up with this and that story and I’d have to nod my head and say I didn’t remember. Sometimes I just pretended I did. I figured this was probably why Niamh was such a good actress, why she had such a wild and free imagination: she’d had to make up an entire parent in her head.
Selfishly at first, I was worried that exhuming memories of my mother with Niamh might make things worse for me. But, actually, it made me feel better.
I suppose I’ve always seen my life as pre-1997 and post-1997 and never given much thought to the first part, due to the energy it took to survive the latter. I was changed and that was good, because I had to be changed to survive it.
And yet on the few occasions lately when Niamh has come over and we’ve looked at the few photos I have of Mum (just a small, raffia boxful, kept next to the box of my letters to the granddaughter she never knew), I’d suddenly unearth a lovely memory from that pre-1997 time, that sacred time, that had been buried for years beneath all the dark stuff, and it was like finding something precious beneath the devastation of a landslide, the retelling of the story, better than being there first time around.
Niamh loved the story of getting lost in Asda when she was five and how Mum had had a stand-up row with the manager about his total lack of procedure for this sort of thing (when really it was Mum’s fault; she’d been gassing with someone and Niamh had wandered off); how, when Niamh’s goldfish died and she was out at a sleepover, Mum put the goldfish in the freezer, so that they could give him a proper burial the next day (Mum insisted on proper funerals, complete with songs and readings, for all our pets). Her favourite story was how when Mum brought Niamh home from hospital and took her to show her off, round to every Tom, Dick and Harry’s house in the village. (She was never one for false modesty, was Mum. If she had something to show off about, she showed off, and trusted that people would be generous enough to be happy for her, like she was for them.) I’d gone with Mum, and to every single person who said to the nine-year-old me, ‘And you must be such a proud big sister?’, I’d beamed, and said, ‘She’s
my
baby,’ and they’d all laughed.
I told Niamh how I’d loved her so much from day one, and so had Mum, how she was a much-wanted third baby (not the late accident she suspected she might be), a final girl to complete the set of three Mum had always wanted. Had Dad? Sod Dad! She’d always said, ‘God knows how he survived in that house full of hormones.’ Because he loved Mum and us, I suppose; because he loved their life together.
After our little chats, Niamh would sigh like she’d been satiated and now could sleep easy, but now there was this other matter.
‘It’s not just that I feel like I don’t know her enough. It’s the other way round, too. I know it sounds silly, but I need Mum to know I’m gay,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t sound silly at all.’ I could hear Joe moving about, drawers going, doors going, and I hoped I didn’t sound as distracted as I felt. The flashback had been horrific. I couldn’t risk that happening again. And if I couldn’t have sex with my boyfriend because I couldn’t risk that happening again, where did that leave us?
There are things I want Mum to know, too, before I scatter her ashes
. I almost said it aloud to myself, to Mum.
That’s if I
was
to scatter them. It depended on how strong I was feeling. Right now, I just wanted her with me, close to me.
‘I can’t let Mum go until I’ve come out, Robyn,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided, I need her blessing. It’s important to me.’
I came fully to now. ‘Oh, Niamh, now listen. She wouldn’t have cared if you were straight, gay, bi or anything else; all she ever wanted for any of us was for us to be happy, and be true to ourselves. She probably would have bloody loved it, anyway. She was always against convention. This is the woman who conducted actual funerals for goldfish … Who made us go swimming in the sea on Christmas Day.’