by Roxie Cooper
‘About what?’ she asks.
‘I’d just like to understand you a little more and this is the one part I have no knowledge of,’ I explain. I remember the pain I saw on her face that day at the National Portrait Gallery last year in London when she was looking at the winning piece.
‘But … there are parts of it that you might not like,’ she says. ‘About me …’
‘Impossible. There’s nothing you could tell me about you which could alter my opinion of you,’ I tell her. And it’s true. ‘I know it’s scary, telling me stuff,’ I say, looking out towards the darkness outside, stroking her hair with my right hand. ‘But I want to know everything about you.’
‘She was so, so wonderful, my mum,’ she starts. ‘She had an infectious presence about her that everyone loved. You noticed her when she walked into a room. When I was little, I thought she was the prettiest woman in the world and I wanted to be just like her.’
‘I bet she looked just like you when she was younger.’
‘Yes, I’m the spitting image of her. That’s what Dad always says.’
‘Sorry, go on …’
‘She was the mum everyone loved. The one who always invited our friends around after school, made them yummy dinners and they always wanted to come back. She loved giggles, fun, singing, cuddles, kindness. She never said a bad word about anybody.’
‘She sounds like a lovely woman.’
‘And she was really creative. When Dad bought the house when they got married, Mum made it her own. She loved interior design and was always at junk yards and second-hand shops. She’d drag knackered old coffee tables and wardrobes home and spend hours in the garden painting them and making them look fabulous. “You can’t buy class or style” she used to say.’
‘And she was absolutely right! My friend Cal lives by that!’
‘She and Ebony and I used to pick flowers and put them in vases all over the house in summer and, in the winter, the whole house was dressed in fairy lights. She was the heart of the house, the soul – she breathed life into it,’ Steph tells me, excitedly.
‘Dad had an art studio built in the garden for her thirtieth birthday, just after Ebony was born. It was a brick outbuilding with huge sash windows all around to let lots of natural light in, stacked with easels, paints and art supplies. She’d stay in there for hours, listening to her music and creating art. She was really good, selling some of it at the gallery in town. She became a pretty famous artist locally. Ebony and I used to go in there and paint sometimes. She’d set up a station for us with that really thick kids’ paint you get and we’d always paint her: two green blobs for eyes, a big cherry-red smile and loads of yellow hair.’
‘Ms Bywater, I can’t believe you hid the fact you’re actually an experienced artist!’
‘Hardly! After all these years my skills have not improved!’ she laughs. ‘The studio always had an acrylic, plastic smell to it. Whenever I smell it now, I’m immediately transported back to that room.’
‘You’ve just described the sort of place I spend 80 per cent of my time – though it’s not nearly as posh. And I love that smell. It’s home to me.’
Hearing her open up and talk about her mum is so wonderful. We lie in the darkness, laughing and getting to know each other more.
It’s bittersweet. Because although it’s beautiful to hear about Stephanie’s mum and the relationship they had, I know what’s coming because this story doesn’t end well. When she gets to this part her voice cracks; it takes her a while to get the words out and she breaks down. She was nestled into my neck and I had to struggle at times to hold it together because I’ve never heard anyone speak so honestly and tragically about losing someone.
By the time she falls asleep in my arms, she’s bared her soul to me. She’s showed me the true side of her, the honest side, the beautiful side … and the ugly. And I don’t think I’ve loved her more.
Everything now makes so much sense: why she married Matt, why she needs this – me – in her life, why she is the way she is. This girl just needs to be loved.
By the time the sun comes up, I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep. The good thing about sleeping with the curtains open is that the natural light shines straight on to the bed.
The morning feels as though we are in a time lapse video, everything going far too quickly, and before we know it it’s time to check out and leave. We try to be upbeat, but there’s no getting around the fact we won’t see each other for another 364 days. This situation gets more messed-up every year.
Stephanie seems a little on edge after last night. She’s talking ten to the dozen about work, winding herself up like one of those mechanical toys.
‘Yeah, so I’ve got to go to work and deal with the art award and the One More Chance charity intake …’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Oh, six people who basically need a break in life – drug addicts or alcoholics or people like that, you know? They work on basic wage for six months to get a good reference and virtually all go on to jobs afterwards. Some stay on with us and it’s really great for them. God, I’m going to be busy this week. Are you?’
Walking over to her, I scoop her up into a cuddle.
‘I’m so sorry for last night,’ she says.
‘Why? I don’t mind you speaking to me like that,’ I tell her honestly.
‘It was a bit – a bit much though, wasn’t it?’ she says, visibly cringing.
‘Don’t be silly. I loved that you felt you could open up to me.’
‘I don’t really talk to anybody about that kind of stuff.’
‘I know.’
‘And I don’t want to leave,’ she says sticking her bottom lip out.
‘Me neither. But we have to. There’s no other way around it.’
She goes to say something, then stops herself. Probably for the best.
It only takes me forty minutes to drive home. It’s not long enough. Switching from Stephanie-mode to Family-mode requires more time, but it’s time I don’t have. I’m making things harder for myself, seeing her like this. It’s becoming more difficult to wrench myself away. Not to mention how much of an utter bastard I feel for doing this to Helen and Seb. Something has to give eventually.
Pulling up on our road, I stay there for a few minutes, getting my head into place before I go in and see my wife and son. Compartmentalise. That’s the key. So I’ll do this first and then go in.
I’m going all out with this song. It’s dramatic and epic. I don’t know if it’s too much, but it seems so apt for how I feel right now, at this moment, and I want her to know. No message, the song says enough.
Press send and that’s it for another year. I hope she loves it. It conveys absolutely everything I want and need to say right now about this girl. When I listen to it, I think about her face, her skin, her hair, how I feel when I’m with her, how nothing has ever made me feel like that before.
There’s something so old school about the whole production of this song. The singer’s voice sounds like velvet and it’s astonishing how good it is, sung in front of a live audience,.
‘Unchained Melody’ by The Righteous Brothers says everything I need to.
Turning my phone off, I get out of the car and go into the house.
CHAPTER 17
Tuesday 25 September 2012
Stephanie
‘“She’s dead, isn’t she?” That’s the bit I always wake up on. The sequence is always the same. It never changes,’ I say, staring at Jane’s high-heeled ankle boots. ‘What scares me most is how accurate it is to what actually happened. It’s as if my brain recorded every single detail of what occurred in those twenty minutes and recorded them.’
‘Recurring nightmares are unpleasant, but common.’
‘This was real, though,’ I tell her. ‘It happened. I relive it all the time. Finding out your mum is dead in the headmaster’s office after being dragged out of French on a Friday afternoon. Just … well, there aren’t any wo
rds for that.’
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘There aren’t.’
You’re just not equipped to deal with losing your mum at the age of thirteen. When it happens on the cusp of puberty you’re asking for all kinds of bother.
Drinking, smoking, boys – I indulged in them all over the next few years. And I didn’t care, nor did I listen to Dad who tried talking sense into me. ‘What would your mum think of this behaviour?’ he’d say, which just made me even worse.
‘Do you think you’d have coped better if you’d had a better relationship with your dad?’ Jane asks.
‘Yes, I caused such a wedge between us.’
‘Go easy on yourself there,’ she says, frowning. ‘You were a child. You had no idea how to cope.’
‘I didn’t make it easy for him, though. Ebony dealt with things way better than I did.’
‘Everyone has their own ways of dealing with trauma, and that belongs to them,’ she states.
‘I guess I just feel bad for putting him through that. Now I have my own child, I see things differently, I suppose.’
It’s hard to properly grasp that perspective before you have children; the worry, anxiety and concern you cause your parents. You know you’re doing it, but you can’t stop. On my eighteenth birthday, I was presented with a letter my mum had written for me just before she died. It was so full of love and hope for my future and the overwhelming sentiment of it only served to remind me how much I’d fucked everything up.
I lived for hovering my finger over the self-destruct button and I had enough self-awareness to know what was happening. I expected it to last maybe a year, but one year bled into another. The drinking continued; in fact, it just got heavier, a serious emotional crutch. I was the party girl, always the one wanting to go out, always the girl with a drink in her hand.
The girl who’s always up for a good time. She’s up for anything, Steph.
The parties became wilder and the destruction became more heightened and dangerous. I don’t know how I managed to survive university, let alone scrape a 2:1. It was inevitable I’d stay in London after I graduated, ignoring Dad and Ebony’s pleas that I move back home to ‘calm down a bit’. Why would I do that when I could spiral a bit more out of control? And that’s exactly what I did.
I remember so vividly the moment I knew I needed help. It wasn’t when I got sacked from my marketing job for turning up at work, drunk. Nor was it when I was doing lines of cocaine in the toilets on my breaks, just because that was the only way I could get through the rest of the day (Ebony was more horrified that I did it off the toilet seat without cleaning it first with an antibacterial wipe, than the actual act).
No.
It was one cold night in April when I was twenty-five, in a pub with Matt in central London. Something inside me just snapped and I had a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like something was squeezing every bit of life and breath out of me at a rapid pace and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was going to die.
I somehow staggered out of the pub and collapsed on the street outside while Matt called my dad. He came to pick me up and I moved back home. There were lots of stern talks after that.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ he’d say. ‘Matt wants to look after you, let him.’
How do you repay someone who has put up with you being so troublesome for so many years? When they look at you with so much despair in their eyes, willing you to just … stop. After everything he’d been through with Mum, and over ten years of me carrying on. What do you do? Well, I suppose you marry the guy he wants you to. Which is asking for trouble. But, then again, life is full of bad decisions, isn’t it? Like Mum said, none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes.
I agreed to go and see a therapist and stop all the drinking and drugs and everything that wasn’t good for me. Essentially, it was time to grow up and start facing everything which had been following me around all these years.
‘How do you see things now you’re a mother yourself?’ Jane asks now.
‘I feel like I’m grieving for her all over again,’ I admit, quietly. ‘Having Evie has made me appreciate what she did for us, the sacrifices she made, the responsibilities she had in making sure we grew up well-rounded, making us feel so very loved.’
I still think of her every single day.
It stings when my friends talk about meeting their mum for coffee and it makes me want to cry when I see proud grandmas pushing their grandchildren in prams. I wish I could just call her and ask her to nip round sometimes. I want to ask her all the silly things: ‘Is this how you give them a bath?’ ‘Which is the best way to make them burp?’ ‘Am I doing any of this fucking right?’
‘And how are you feeling about motherhood?’
‘I love it. I love Evie more than I could ever say, but … it’s hard,’ I confess. ‘There’s so much pressure, isn’t there? Matt wants me to go to work so she goes to nursery three days a week and I feel so guilty about it. But you’re fucked whatever you do as a woman, aren’t you? If you work, you’re neglecting your kid. If you stay at home, you’re letting yourself and your career down. You can’t win either way.’
‘It’s hard to be a woman, Stephanie,’ she says, dryly. I wonder what sacrifices and hurdles Jane has had to overcome to get to where she is. ‘You have to do what ultimately feels right.’
I’ve now been promoted to Marketing Director at work. In reality, all it means is that I have a new title and get a bit more money for doing the same job. Dad dragged me in his office one day and said I deserved it because of all my hard work. And I do work hard, but I’ve just come back from maternity leave so I think it was more about boosting my self-esteem to ensure I don’t fall down some kind of post-pregnancy depression rabbit hole than anything else.
I’m not actually sure I want to work at all. I’d much rather stay at home with Evie, watching her grow and learn. My mind wanders back to that conversation I had with Ebony years ago, when she told me she was leaving law to look after Jude. I couldn’t believe she wanted to give that up to look after her baby. But I get it now. Because I want to see Evie do everything for the first time, cuddle her, watch her little face change. She’s just started to walk. Grabbing on to the sofa to steady herself, she sets off at speed across the room, with only the momentum to carry her through. I whoop, holler and clap, watching her run. We both squeal and clap and she falls into my lap. I cry every time. My little girl. She’s so proud of herself.
‘I just feel like I can’t please anyone at the moment – I’m either a bad mother who isn’t at home with her child, or a bad wife who isn’t contributing financially. Not actually excelling at anything.’
‘Well, what a load of absolute rubbish!’ Jane says, abruptly. ‘Now, I really am going to get cross with you if you carry on like that.’
‘It’s true!’
‘No, it isn’t. You’re spinning many plates at the moment and doing a brilliant job. Stop giving yourself a hard time. Now, we don’t have long left out of this session and I want to ask about Jamie. Are you seeing him next month?’
I’m quite unprepared for such a direct question about him. It’s exposing and makes me feel guilty and bad. Shameful. But what I’m doing is wrong, so I suppose I deserve to feel like that.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘Excited.’ I say and smile. Jane knows this smile, she’s seen me do it so many times. I know she’s clocked it so I get in there first to point it out.
‘I literally can’t help but smile when I think about him. Even after all these years. That never goes away. That’s what he does to me,’ I burst out, feeling I have to justify myself.
‘You have a special relationship, that’s the effect you have on each other. I’m sure he is the same,’ she offers, clasping her hands together.
‘Yes, well, I hope so. But you know what I mean. I feel bad for saying that, obviously,’ I mumble.
‘I know you do.’
‘But, yes, I am seeing him next month. Same place. I’m just looking forward to feeling …’ I look around the room, searching for the right word which might even come close to describing how a night with Jamie feels ‘… special,’ I finally settle on.
‘The whole basis of your relationship with Jamie relies upon you seeing each other once a year. You say that he makes you incredibly happy for various reasons, but for other reasons, you can’t be together – and I understand that.’
I watch her as she explains this, not giving anything away in my face. My body tenses as she talks about it, though. Having someone analyse our relationship feels wrong, and I suddenly feel as if I’ve betrayed Jamie by telling her about him.
‘But I’d like to know why you settle for only being that happy once a year?’
‘What?’ I look at her blankly. ‘I thought you had a question about my relationship with Jamie?’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she says.
‘I’m not sure I understand the question, Jane …’
‘How long has this been going on now, Stephanie? Six years?’
I nod.
‘Why have you settled for not feeling loved for so many years?’ she asks, carefully.
I don’t say anything.
‘Why do you settle for being so blissfully happy only one weekend out of fifty-two in a year? Because you should be that happy every weekend, Stephanie.’
I’m silent for a good minute. I don’t have an answer. Not one. She knows the answer, of course. She won’t tell me, though. Any second now she’ll pull the bloody triangle diagrams out and get me to talk through what I think the answer is. I’m flummoxed with this one.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply, finally.
‘Yes, you do,’ she says. ‘Deep down, you know. You always do.’
‘Yes, OK, I’m not blissfully happy with Matt, but that’s the choice I’ve made,’ I reply like a sulky teenager.
‘You know it runs deeper than that,’ she says. ‘You could leave Matt tomorrow if you really wanted, find somebody else who appreciates you and makes you feel as special as Jamie does. Except you’d feel like that all the time, not just one weekend a year.’