Tiffany shrugged and stirred a third spoonful of sugar into her coffee.
“I’m going to take my exams in September.” She glanced up at Natalie, the first look she had given her all morning that wasn’t a glare, and even smiled. “Natalie came round to my mom’s with me the other day. I thought it was a washout, a total waste of time—Mom didn’t want to know. But yesterday she came round while Dad was out at work. We had a cup of tea, talked about things, what’s on TV, gossiped about Mom’s neighbors. Not anything real or important. She didn’t mention the reasons why she hadn’t been before or why Dad didn’t know she had come now. But she came and we sat and talked and she even held Jordan on her lap for a little while and kissed her before she went. It wasn’t a big reunion or anything, she never said she was in the wrong—but at least she came.” Tiffany smiled tentatively. “It might be a start, you know? It’ll be hard and there will be more shouting, but it’s like Meg says, things that are worth having don’t come easily.”
After that everyone seemed more relaxed. The baby group members settled back into discussing their babies, what new clubs they might join, which ones they wouldn’t go back to in a million years, and although Natalie was as resolutely chatty as the rest of the group, she couldn’t stop thinking about what Tiffany had said. Because it was the teenager and not Meg who had clarified the notion in her mind.
Things that were worth having didn’t come easily, that was what she’d said.
Just as it would seemingly be so easy to have Gary in her life, it felt nearly impossible to bring her and Freddie to a point where they could have Jack in theirs: where Freddie, no matter what had happened between Natalie and Jack, could have his father.
At some point during their last meeting, Natalie wasn’t sure why, she had become utterly furious with him, consumed with a rage that had incinerated all her common sense in one solar-strength flare. It was when he told her that he wasn’t dying, she remembered. Was she angry with him for not dying? she wondered anxiously. And then she realized it was not that. For the short time she had thought she was going to lose him without ever really having him, she had been devastated. And it was such a terrible and horrific prospect to face that when he had laughed at her and told her everything was going to be fine, she had snapped.
What had exactly followed then was muddy and confusing, but Natalie knew she hadn’t prepared him at all for the news about Freddie. She had literally flung it in his face; it was a selfish, vengeful act, designed to shock and scare him as much as he had shocked and scared her.
She had promised Freddie she would do the right thing by him, but she had already failed. There was only one thing she could do now to try to rectify the situation.
She had to go back and see Jack again.
And this time she’d take Freddie with her.
Twenty-four
Frances was the last to leave. Steve had gone first, leaving Meg the solicitor’s number on a piece of paper he attached to the fridge door by a Teletubby magnet.
“Just in case,” he said. “Jill says you should be prepared for everything.” He thought for a moment and dropped a hand on Meg’s shoulder. “And I say you’re a bloody marvelous woman and you shouldn’t accept anything but the best. Promise me you won’t, Meg.”
Meg smiled up at him. “I won’t, Steve,” she said. “That’s the last thing I want.”
Jess had gone soon after, when Jacob woke from his nap and wouldn’t stop crying.
“See you all at Tiff’s,” she had to say quite loudly to be heard over his yells.
They had been discussing when to hold the next meeting, and Frances had put into words what the rest of them were reluctant to say.
“Well, it’s my turn, of course, but I hardly think considering my current guest that it is an appropriate venue.”
“And it’s not fair to keep turning up at Meg’s all the time,” Steve said. “I bet she’s sick of the sight of us.”
“Well, Jess and Steve have already held a group and we know Natalie currently has workmen in, so that leaves…” Frances stared pointedly at Tiffany, who instantly retreated back to the shy and awkward girl she often was around the other members. Her cheeks flushed pink and she sank her head between her shoulders.
“Oh well,” Natalie said, keen to take the spotlight off her friend. “Come to mine, the work’s all but done anyway, so…”
“No,” Tiffany said, at first so quietly that no one heard. “No,” she repeated. This time the others looked at her. “I can do it.”
“What’s that, love?” Steve asked her.
“I can hold a meeting at my flat. You might as well know I live on the thirteenth floor of a high rise and I’ve got hardly any furniture and no cups that match—” she glanced at Meg’s table—“or a milk jug. But I can make tea, so if you don’t mind the odd chip in your cup, you can all come to mine.”
It seemed more like a challenge than an invitation, but Natalie was pleased that Tiffany had issued it.
“Brilliant idea!” she said. “Of course it’s Tiff’s turn. Thank God, I say, that means I have a few more days to evict my mother before you come round—what a relief!”
Tiffany had carefully written out the address and her telephone number for everyone but Natalie, who had been there before. “Eleven o’clock next Tuesday then?” she said.
Everybody agreed to be there, and Tiffany was able to smile again, with a mixture of pleasure and anxiety. After all, the only other thing she’d hosted in her entire life was a sleepover.
Tiffany had been upstairs changing Jordan as Natalie collected her things, instructed to wait for Tiff so they could leave together. Frances went to the loo (or possibly to surreptitiously clean it), leaving Meg and Natalie alone for a few minutes.
“Are you okay, Natalie?” Meg asked out of the blue.
“Who, me?” Natalie sat up straight, as if she’d just been caught napping in class. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You look a bit…preoccupied,” Meg said, with concern. “Like you had a bit of a sleepless night, too.”
Natalie hoped to God that she didn’t look as guilty as she felt.
“Look,” Meg went on, “you know that just because I’m in the middle of all of this, it doesn’t mean you can’t still talk to me if you need to. Has something happened with Gary?”
Natalie looked at Meg, dear sweet Meg with her tear-bruised eyes and red raw nose, and with all the pain that was weighing so heavily on her shoulders, and for a second she wanted to tell her everything. But how could she? It would be so unfair to expect Meg to deal with her problems. And besides that, Meg was offering to help a woman who didn’t really exist. Maybe she wouldn’t like the real Natalie at all, whoever that was.
“No, there’s no problem,” she said. “Gary and I are fine.”
“Which one?” Tiffany said as she walked into the kitchen.
Natalie looked at her. “Pardon?”
“I mean, which Gary? It must be confusing having two Garys in your life.”
After that Natalie left in rather a hurry with Tiffany close behind.
“I know, you know,” Tiffany said almost as soon as they’d left Meg’s house.
Natalie hurried on as if she could somehow outstrip the slender teenager with her speed and strength. But of course she couldn’t, Tiffany was more than a match for her. She’d just have to get the whole conversation over with as quickly as possible. She took a deep breath.
“What do you know?” she said.
“I know that you had sex with Gary last night.”
“How can you know?” Natalie asked her, scandalized. “Did he tell you?”
“He didn’t have to,” Tiffany said quite smugly. “You just did. It was written all over his face when he came to pick up Anthony this morning. I asked him why he was so pleased with himself and he said he couldn’t tell me. I just made an educated guess that it had to be something to do with you—and I was right.”
“Curses! Foi
led again.” Natalie couldn’t help but find Tiffany’s satisfaction in being right quite amusing.
“It’s not funny, Natalie!” Tiffany exclaimed. “You’re totally out of order, you do know that, don’t you?”
Natalie walked on briskly; as fond as she was of Tiffany she had, in her opinion at least, far more pressing matters to think about and do just now than receive a dressing down from a surprisingly prudish sixteen-year-old.
“Tiffany,” she said, with more than a hint of condescension. “You are a lovely girl, a girl who has had more than her fair share of life experiences at a young age. But you are still only sixteen. Gary is a consenting adult and so am I. It was what we both wanted and we both knew where we stood, so really it’s not as big a deal as you think it is.”
“It is a big deal!” Tiffany protested. “Gary really likes you and you still love this Jack bloke. Don’t use him, Natalie. You’re better than that.”
Natalie stopped dead in her tracks.
“I know,” she said. “Tiffany, look…it was a stupid and wrong thing to do. It’s not going to happen again. Neither of us wants it to.”
“Gary would, I can tell,” Tiffany said. “Look, you have to realize he’s not just some distraction to take your mind off things or some other stupid complication to get yourself caught up in. He’s been really good to me and Anthony, really good. If he gets hurt…” Tiffany trailed off before adding with a hint of menace, “I don’t want that to happen.”
“It won’t,” Natalie reassured her. “We made a mistake and that’s all. Look, please will you just pretend you don’t know? For my sake and Gary’s?”
Tiffany’s scowl was still quite fierce.
“I like you, Natalie,” she said, even though she looked as if the very opposite were true. “But you really should think before you act. You rush in too fast. Actions have consequences, you know.”
Natalie looked from Freddie’s buggy to Jordan’s.
“I think you and I know that better than most people, don’t we?” she said, with a wry smile.
“I just don’t know what you want from him,” Tiffany said, beginning to walk on. “Look at you, you’ve got a lovely baby, a ton of money, a big job, a nice house, and you’re still not happy!”
“How do you know I’m not happy?” Natalie asked her huffily. “I’ve never told you that!”
“You don’t have to,” Tiffany said. “It’s written all over your face.”
Twenty-five
Natalie stood outside her house with Freddie and wondered.
Now that she had decided to go and see Jack, perhaps she should just go and see him before she decided to do something equally decisive but entirely different, like joining an order of silent nuns in the Outer Hebrides.
Nobody knew Natalie better than she knew herself, and she was well aware that she was prone to backing out of things that were likely to be difficult and require effort.
She had improved a lot since Freddie had come along, that was for sure. Because there was no way you could tell your midwife eight hours into labor, “Actually, I don’t really like this very much anymore. Can I change my mind and have a cup of tea instead?”
And tempting though it might be to leave your caterwauling baby on the neighbor’s doorstep in a basket with a note pinned to his romper suit saying, “Sorry, have discovered I prefer sleeping to motherhood,” the evolutionary impulse to protect your child, even if he or she is breaching the rules of the Geneva Conventions by keeping you up for twenty hours straight, always outweighs the desire to give them away.
Freddie had been fed and changed at Meg’s. He was happily asleep in his buggy and it was quite a warm afternoon. She could go now.
But for some reason, as she looked up at the dark windows of her house, she felt she ought to go in and say hello to her mother. It was a similar sort of evolutionary impulse, Natalie supposed, as she let herself in and parked the buggy in the hallway, to the one that kept her loving Freddie no matter how difficult he was being. As much as she wanted to pretend she was not related to her mother and that the woman had not single-handedly messed her up almost completely, she still couldn’t quite stop worrying about her. But unlike her maternal instinct, her daughterly one had no practical application at all and it was also most inconvenient.
The house was silent.
“Mother!” Natalie called out. “Mother, are you out?”
She looked around the hallway. This time her mother’s heeled boots were at the foot of the stairs. Her bag was on the telephone table and her coat on the end of the banister, despite Natalie telling her repeatedly that she should hang it in the closet in the hall.
So if Sandy had gone out, she’d done so without any proper footwear, money, or her coat. But then again if she had been drinking, anything was possible.
Natalie looked at Freddie, sleeping so peacefully in his buggy, and decided to leave him there for a moment rather than risk waking him.
Her mother was not in the kitchen, although there were two cigarette butts ground hard into the patio outside the kitchen window and another stubbed out in her window box. There was a full cold cup of tea, slick with that gooey lipgloss she insisted on wearing, and—surprise, surprise—an empty tumbler, still reeking of whisky.
Natalie sighed and sat down for a moment on a stool to consider the evidence. Her mom had always been a bit of a lush. She had always been fond of a drink, always had a gin and tonic in hand when Natalie got home from school, telling her she just need a little something to “take the edge off.”
But Natalie was fairly sure Sandy had never drunk quite this much. She hadn’t been drunk all the time she had been here, admittedly. She had been totally sober when Natalie left her with Freddie, Natalie was sure of it, because apart from anything else she was a different person then. A person who listened and seemed to care.
It was true, though, that almost as soon as Natalie got back, Sandy cracked open another bottle. Didn’t real alcoholics drink constantly? They didn’t stop for a few hours to be responsible, did they? So she couldn’t be a real alcoholic, could she?
Natalie didn’t like the direction her thoughts were going.
Should she worry about it? she wondered. Making an active decision to worry about her mother was difficult. She knew Sandy would not be remotely grateful that Natalie was worrying about her, and if anything she would behave even worse just to irritate her. Whenever Natalie had tried to intervene in the past, Sandy had always accused her daughter of being ashamed of her, of thinking she was better than her mother and of trying to bully her into being a person she was not.
Of course, all these things were true, but that didn’t mean Natalie wanted to invite the endless hassle that was inevitable if she tried once again to sort Sandy out. Sandy always told her she didn’t need sorting out. It would be so much easier just to believe her. After all, it wasn’t as if Natalie didn’t have a few tricky situations of her own to sort out right now.
She looked up at the ceiling. Her mother was probably sleeping off her afternoon session in the guest bedroom. She decided that she’d better go and check on her and then think about going to see Jack. Or possibly vacuuming the stairs. The stairs really needed vacuuming. She hadn’t done it since 2004.
Sandy was not in her bedroom. There was evidence that she had been there, though. A whisky bottle with the cap off sat on the dressing table, and the bed was crumpled, the pillows stained with makeup. With a huff of irritation Natalie went to check her own bedroom, sure that her mother, like an aged Goldilocks, had decided to try all of the beds for size.
But Sandy was not in there either.
And then Natalie thought of the one place she had yet to look.
She pushed open the bathroom door. Sandy was lying awkwardly, twisted like a broken doll, by the toilet.
Natalie stood for a second, frozen, as she stared at her mother’s pale face in the gathering twilight. She caught her breath and for a heartbeat she thought that Sandy was dead. And then
the body on the floor groaned.
“Oh, Natalie, good. Need water, feel sick. Tummy bug.”
Carefully, Natalie hopped over her mother’s haunches and emptied out the toothbrush mug to fill it with water from the tap. Crouching, she hauled Sandy up into a sitting position and propping her against the wall, handed her the mug. Sandy took a sip of water and pulled a face, like a child drinking alcohol for the first time.
“Ohhhh,” she groaned, rubbing at her eyes with her knuckles. “I must have eaten something bad.”
She looked so frail, old and small. Natalie wanted to hate her because it was so much easier than caring, but for now at least, her sense of anxiety was greater than her anger.
“You didn’t eat anything,” she chided her mother. “That was part of the problem. That and the almost half-bottle of whisky that you drank.”
“Eggs,” Sandy said, holding her head as tenderly as if it were one. “I ate eggs, I think. Oh God, I feel bad.”
Natalie got up and sat on the edge of the bath.
“Drink that water,” she said. “If it stays down, I’ll put you to bed.”
“Thanks for looking after me, darling,” Sandy said, belching out the last word on a whisky-sour breath.
“Mom…” Natalie hesitated. Saying something would make her get involved. Did she really want to be involved? Then again, did she really have any choice? She couldn’t pretend that this wasn’t happening, because it wasn’t as if Sandy was safely tucked away in Spain, out of sight and mostly out of mind. She was here paralyzed on Natalie’s bathroom floor, leaving her no option but to get involved.
“What, love?” Sandy replied, keeping her eyes tightly shut.
“You’ve been drinking a lot since you got here.” Natalie tried to sound casual, as if she was merely passing comment. “A bit more than normal. Do you drink this much in Spain?”
Sandy opened one eye and directed it at Natalie.
“I like drinking,” she said. “It takes the edge off.”
Mommy By Mistake Page 27