Mum's List

by St. John Greene

  “It wasn’t really normal, was it, Singe?” Kate asked accusingly when we were safely inside the terminal.

  “Er, not quite.” I smiled guiltily. “I’ve never experienced such a bad flight in my life before. It’ll be worth it, though. I can’t wait to teach you to ski, you’ll be a natural.”

  She whacked me on the back playfully.

  “Just as well you’re worth it,” she said.

  Katie wasn’t afraid of anything, not really. As I anticipated, she picked up skiing incredibly quickly and loved it. I couldn’t believe I was with someone who was not only gorgeous-looking, but shared my appetite for sport and adventure. Just like me, Kate wanted to pack as much as possible into every single day, and she wanted every moment to be as exciting as possible.

  * * *

  I put the Austria pictures down and picked up a heavy, expensive-looking photo album. There was a wedding picture on the first page showing Kate and me emerging from the church, smiling under a shower of confetti. Nobody thought we were the marrying type, and it took us years and years to get round to tying the knot after our engagement, because we always had another holiday booked, another memory to make.

  We were married for almost fourteen years of our twenty-two years together, and I had no regrets about not doing it sooner. It didn’t really matter whether we were married or not. Katie and I did everything together, before and after she became my wife. We were as besotted with each other on our wedding day as we were as love-struck youngsters, and we stayed that way until death parted us.

  We took photos wherever we went and I’m so glad we did. I knew the boys would love looking back at these one day, and I felt close to Kate as I let my mind slip back in time over and over again.

  I found a picture of Kate snorkeling that made me laugh out loud. In it she’s nose to nose with an irate clownfish, which is puffing and blowing angrily at her. Kate is laughing her head off. The picture says so much about Kate. She always had this very funny personality, always finding something to laugh at. She knew clownfish get quite upset if you hover over their anemone. They swim out and can come within an inch of your face, and when they see their own reflection in your mask they go absolutely mad and give you a right old telling off.

  That day Kate tormented lots of these little fish. She folded herself up into a seated position to get her buoyancy just perfect before cruising over loads of anemones. One tiny little clownfish was so furious with her it bit her hair and gave it a pull. Kate found it absolutely hilarious. The interaction between Kate and creatures of all kinds was amazing, and I enjoyed watching her in action as much as I loved diving and snorkeling myself.

  Tucked inside another photo album I found an itinerary Kate had typed up, detailing where we went and what we did on a month-long holiday to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji in 1998.

  Tuesday 3rd November: Drove into Cairns to book next boat trip and accommodation. Placed bet on the Melbourne Cup, chose Champagne who came in 2nd! Went to Crystal Cascades, saw butterflies and snakes then had a McDonald’s for dinner. Went to Wild World, met an aborigine from Yeovil and a koala named Hamilton. Went to Port Douglas for tea.

  Every day was action-packed. I couldn’t help grinning when I read it. We were both in heaven together on that trip. We’d flown via Europe and Dubai to reach Australia, and after visiting New Zealand and Fiji we flew home after a stopover in America, so we could say we had circumnavigated the world. I read on, enjoying the memories.

  Wednesday 4th November: Did 4 dives today, all very good. Smoothed a Potato Cod and rescued Singe.

  “I don’t remember needing rescuing, Kate,” I said wryly, twisting my head in the direction of the wardrobe in the boys’ room. I really didn’t, and I wished I could ask Kate to remind me of the story.

  Saturday 21st November: Got early plane to Auckland then on to Fiji. Saw the Sky Tower. Had helicopter ride to island, went snorkeling. Great stars and chased ghost crabs. Shark feed and night dive.

  “We have to walk all the way around this island,” I said to Kate.

  We were on Matamanoa Island in Fiji, very close to where Tom Hanks filmed Cast Away. It was absolutely idyllic, but Kate looked at me with a horrified expression on her face.

  “Singe, we’ve been told to avoid the far side of the island,” she complained.

  She was right. We’d been warned there were dangerously jagged rocks and coral forming the coast on the opposite side of the island to where we were staying, but I couldn’t resist the challenge of circumnavigating Matamanoa too.

  “I know it’s a bit jagged in parts,” I conceded. “But it’s only a few old rocks and bits of coral. We can do it.” Kate looked doubtful and a bit cross. “Remember our saying? ‘If you’re not living on the edge you’re a waste of space.’”

  She sighed and shrugged and reluctantly nodded.

  “I can’t argue with that. Come on, then.”

  “That’s my Kate!”

  I took her hand, and she gave me a smile. I felt her dainty little fingers tighten around mine. There was no way I would put Kate in danger, never in a million years. She was safe with me, and I would always look after her and protect her from harm.

  It was a breathtaking walk. The sand was white beneath our feet, the sky was turquoise and silver, and the hot sun felt like it was shining just for me and Kate. We were the only people in the world, that’s how it felt.

  “I love you, Singe,” Kate said. “Even if you are a total nutter sometimes.”

  We were picking our way across the ragged bit of the coast now, and waves had started to rise up behind us. Kate didn’t like it when they smashed on the rocks, growling and threatening to bite our heels like angry dogs. She shrieked every time and clung on to me for dear life.

  “You’re doing really well,” I said. “Keep going!”

  She did, but I was gutted when I realized that Kate was so worried she had started to cry a bit. That hadn’t been the plan at all.

  “Come on, keep going,” I encouraged. “I’m not letting go of you. Hold me tight and keep walking.”

  Gamely, Kate tackled the last craggy rock that finally led us back to where we’d started a couple of hours earlier.

  “I need a medal for that,” she said, puffing with relief as she jumped down to the dry, flat sand of the beach.

  “You certainly do. We’ll find something to remember it.”

  As I spoke a wave swept up the beach, leaving a perfect, shiny nautilus shell at Kate’s feet. I couldn’t believe the timing, and I grabbed my camera and got a photo of her picking it up.

  “There’s your medal,” I laughed. “For Kate, always a winner!”

  I remembered the look of delight and satisfaction on Kate’s face. In true style her fear was quickly forgotten, and finding the nautilus shell became her abiding memory of Fiji.

  * * *

  I felt overwhelmed by my memories. They were all so happy, yet now that made them seem so tragic too. The reason we took so many photos and videos was so that we could enjoy the memories again together when we were old and gray, and too old to travel anymore.

  Now I couldn’t revisit any of those places with Kate, either physically or mentally. They were just a part of our history, consigned to memory boxes. Our journey together was over, and I was gutted it had ended way too soon. I had to “do a Kate,” though. I had to hold on to the happy memories. We had the most wonderful life together, and nothing could change that.

  My eyes fell on a picture of our clever old cairn terrier, Frazzle, who died a few years before Kate. He was very much my dog, and every morning he never failed to jump up on my side of the bed, completely ignoring Kate. When Reef was born we placed his crib on Kate’s side of the bed, and when Frazzle came in the next morning he looked around cautiously before ignoring me and padding round to have a good look and a sniff at newborn
Reef. Then Frazzle jumped up on Kate and licked her approvingly.

  “I swear Frazzle’s smiling,” Kate laughed. “Look at his face!”

  It was a lovely moment; a good omen, we thought. We were a happy little family, firmly bonded together by love, and even the dog was content.

  Next, I opened a faded yellow packet of photographs, complete with negatives, and saw me and Kate in a restaurant in Minorca with her parents. For a starter Kate and I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—giant prawns in garlic. We got horribly ill afterward, and Kate’s mum and dad, who’d played it safe with the minestrone soup, couldn’t help taking the mickey out of us. I remembered Kate wore a T-shirt I’d bought with “front” and “back” printed on, my cheeky reference to the fact she was quite flat-chested.

  “You can’t have everything,” I said when she sulked about it. “You’ve got the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the stunning figure—don’t be greedy now!”

  “I’ll have a boob job one day,” she always said. “I’d love to have a boob job.”

  “You’re perfect as you are,” I always replied, and I meant it.

  Thank God we didn’t have a crystal ball.

  In another album I saw the pair of us riding camels in a Bedouin encampment in Israel. We’re at the front of the trek, as usual. Kate and I always made sure we got the best seats in the house, whatever we did. She looks so young, still in her teens I guessed. Once we’d been on that first trip to Austria nothing could stop us and we packed in as many holidays as we could possibly afford.

  Once we won a £500 holiday voucher after entering a close-up picture of a puffer fish wearing Ray-Bans into a photography competition. We immediately agreed to put the money toward a trip to Antigua. I closed my eyes and thought about sailing round that beautiful island in the Caribbean. We’d gone on a boat trip, and Kate, not being used to drinking much, got very drunk on the free rum on board.

  “Come and dance!” she called out to whoever was listening, and the owner of the boat joined her for a few high-energy rumbas and mambos. He thought Kate was fantastic and had such a whale of a time dancing with her he let me sail his £1 million catamaran, the Kokomo Cat, three-quarters of the way round Antigua, much to the annoyance of some German tourists whom he’d refused to give a turn to. That was a typical Kate moment. Good things happened when you were with Kate; at least they did back then.

  We learned that Antigua has 365 beaches, one for every day of the year. I lost count of how many we walked along hand in hand, eating mangos, pineapples and coconuts we picked up from where they had fallen on the ground.

  “Wouldn’t it be amazing to spend a whole year here, a day on each beach?” Kate said.

  We both thought about that for a minute and then shared a knowing look.

  “Naah,” I laughed. “Too many other places to see!”

  “I agree,” Kate smiled. “Where to next?”

  Africa was the next album I picked out. Kate loved animals of all types, and I can see her now, hand-feeding bits of banana to a bush baby one minute, wrapping a giant python round her neck at our hotel in Kenya the next. I watched in admiration as she expertly stroked its scales while others shrieked and recoiled in horror. She wrote on Mum’s List that she loved snakes, and how true that was.

  We visited the Tsavo East and Tsavo West game reserves. Bumping along in a safari jeep, eating dust and baking in the heat, we saw zebras, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, black rhino and lions. One night we watched in awe as a herd of about fifty elephants, led by a gigantic matriarch, came silently to the watering hole outside our lodge. Despite their huge size, they didn’t make a sound as the adults performed a well-practiced routine of peeling off two by two, creating a safe passageway for the baby elephants to walk through and take a drink. It was breathtaking.

  Another night we got a knock on our bedroom door at 1 a.m. The hotel had put fresh meat as bait on a platform that was visible from our window, and we had asked them to let us know if there was any action.

  “There are two leopards outside,” the night porter whispered. “Try to be very quiet, and stay inside. One of our waiters was killed last year.”

  I was half asleep but very excited, and in my rush to get dressed I accidentally put both legs down one leg of my trousers, which sent me crashing into the window. Kate gasped, then fell about laughing when she saw what I’d done. “You could have ended up as bait yourself,” she said. “I hope you haven’t scared them off!”

  We peered outside together and were absolutely thrilled to see two magnificent leopards on the prowl. We stared at them in wonderment, completely absorbed by their majesty and stealth. It was a male and a female, and after they had cautiously polished off the meat and licked their lips, they slunk into the distance, where we saw them mate.

  “We’ll have to come back and see their cubs,” Kate whispered.

  We were older now, Kate in her late twenties, me in my thirties. We also talked about going to America and we both agreed it was on our “must do” list.

  “We should wait until we have children and go to Florida and Disney World,” Kate said.

  I agreed wholeheartedly. I knew Kate’s biological clock had started to tick. There was very little she said or did that I didn’t agree with, and that seemed like a plan. We always wanted children together one day, and if and when we were lucky enough to have kids it was taken for granted we’d continue to travel and live life to the full. Our children would dive, jet-ski and bungee-jump their way round the world, just like we did. That’s what we both hoped for.

  We always had a boat parked on the drive or out in the backyard. The last one we had together, Singe 1, was a bright-yellow 4.8-meter rib craft that we’d fitted with a 90 hp engine to change it from a ski boat into something supersonic. We had it for about ten years and took it out at every opportunity, towing it to our favorite spots in Torquay, Lyme Regis and down on the Bristol Channel, complete with windsurfing and scuba-diving kit, or our silver jet-ski.

  In the early days we didn’t have much money and often broke down in our old Skoda or Cavalier, having to call for help get us home. It was always worth the hassle. We both adored being out at sea. Kate and I even slept on a waterbed for more than fifteen years, and we joked that we spent more time on the water than anyone else we knew. When the boys came along we took them with us, teaching them to steer the boat almost before they could walk.

  Singe 1 was old now, and Kate had told me to use some of the money from her estate to buy a shiny new boat. Always thinking of the boys’ safety, she instructed me to buy one with seats. “Buy a boat with seats so Reef and Finn can sit and watch the sea in it.”

  “Please be careful, Singe,” she said, dwelling on this wish for quite some time as she wrote the words on her list. “Diddy is a daredevil, like you,” she added, giving me a knowing look, one that was filled with a mixture of pride and worry. “Be careful, that’s all I ask.” Diddy is a pet name we gave to Finn after he was born prematurely and was a tiny little speck. “And Reef has to be so careful with his balance, because of his leg. I don’t want them riding on the tubes. Please buy a really good boat and make sure they have comfortable seats so they can hold on in safety.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and I imagined she was picturing the three of us whizzing through the sea in a beautiful new boat. She looked calm and peaceful, I thought, but when she opened her eyes they were wet.

  “I promise,” I said. “I will take good care of the boys, and I’ll teach them to love the water, like Mummy.”

  We cried in each other’s arms, Kate dragging on the oxygen pipe as she broke down.

  I cried again now as I closed the photo albums one by one, slowly bringing myself back to the present, back to sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed.

  * * *

  On March 22 it was Kate’s birthday. She would
have been thirty-nine years old, and I was not looking forward to the day at all. Since her death I’d already had to navigate Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

  Valentine’s Day was dreadful. I think it was the first time since I was about ten that I hadn’t received a card. Kate and I always had a meal out. I bought her flowers, we drank champagne, and then she always let me take advantage of her, very willingly I might add. This year I had just tried to ignore it. The date was blank in my diary, and I told myself it didn’t mean a thing to me, and it didn’t matter. I remembered how, when the boys were in bed on Valentine’s night, I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea and flicked through the TV channels to find something to escape into. In quick succession I saw three images of couples smooching and kissing; one on a real-life documentary, one in a soap opera and another in a soppy film. I switched the TV off and went back to the kitchen, where I looked at the steam evaporating on the tiles and started to cry. I watched the droplets trickle down the wall for a while before remembering I was making a cup of tea. Then I couldn’t find any teabags, so I sat on the floor and bawled my eyes out instead.

  On Mother’s Day I tried to focus on all of my “mothers —my mum, my stepmum and Kate’s mum. I bought them each a card and made a point of talking to them, and Martin and Christine took Reef and Finn up to Kate’s grave to lay a rose each. The teachers at school were brilliant, making sure the boys still got to make cards, addressing them to “Nanny” instead of “Mummy.” Like Valentine’s Day, I was glad when it was over. Reef and Finn didn’t have a mummy anymore, and the day only served to remind me of that.

  Kate’s birthday was different, though. She had expressly told me to “Celebrate birthdays big time,” and I decided to include hers in that plan, whether that’s what she meant or not. I’d been shopping for boats for a couple of weeks already and was thrilled to discover the one I had finally chosen would be ready for collection on Kate’s birthday, which fell on a Monday. As luck would have it, that was the day funds from Kate’s estate would be released too, and I would be able to pay the mortgage off as well as buy the boat.