by Natasha West
‘I’m just glad to get a chance to meet you finally, whatever the circumstances’ my mum finally finished.
‘I agree, Mrs Stone’ Julia said.
‘Oh, it’s Karen, I should have said.’
‘I’m sure you’ve been caught a bit on the hop today.’
‘You could say that, yes.’
I watched this back and forth and if I’d been watching it on TV, if it had been fiction, I might have enjoyed the way Julia had turned the tables on my mother. It would have been entertaining to watch her get the stick pulled out of her arse. But the stakes were a tad high to feel anything but varying levels of terror.
‘Tea’s ready’ came the call from the kitchen. We all trooped in.
Sat in the living room with Julia and my parents, drinking out of the good cups (reserved for the vicar usually), was a surreal experience. Watching my mother asking about Julia’s job, watching Julia ask about the shop, it wasn’t something I’d ever really pictured. Thinking about it now, my parents and my girlfriend had seemed so different, belonging on different planes of existence, it was no wonder I couldn’t mentally place them in the same room. But here they were and they were all doing OK.
If anyone was a problem, it was me. I wanted to scream.
There was an elephant in the room. As well as several baby elephants holding onto her tail. And although my formative years had been spent in this place, taught to allow the pachyderms their space and taught well, I realised how different I was now. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it.
‘How do you get your roses to come up like that?’ Julia was asking my dad.
‘They do come up lovely, don’t they? It’s lucky we have several horses that pass through regularly or…’
‘For god’s sakes’ I heard myself almost shout. ‘Can we stop this now?’ Can we talk properly?’
Everyone looked at me in utter astonishment.
‘Penny!’ my mother said. ‘What on earth has gotten into you?’
‘What’s gotten into me? Dad’s literally talking horseshit while we all pretend not to notice that I’m a lesbian!’
The room went quiet for a moment and I realised I’d never actually said that word before, not in reference to myself. Lesbian. I’d been wavering on a label for a while, but I supposed it was true. My interest in boys had completely dried up over the last few years.
And now the word was out, sitting on the table with the good china. I looked at my parents to see how they were responding. My mother had put her cup down and was pressing her hand to her temple, as though she’d just been struck down with a headache. My dad was staring into the fireplace, probably wondering if he could escape up the chimney. They were looking anywhere but at me, the bringer of uncomfortable news. It made me want to shout even louder, maybe run out of the house.
But then I looked to Julia, wondering how she was feeling. I’d just created an atmosphere roughly the density of butter and now she was forced to sit in it.
But she didn’t look annoyed or uncomfortable. She was smiling at me. It wasn’t exactly a joyful expression. It was small, subtle. But it was there. And I knew what it meant.
She was letting me know that she’d follow me wherever I wanted to go with this. And that was something right then, it really was. It made me understand how I really wanted this to be, and how it still could be if I could stop acting like a child having a tantrum.
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
My mother looked up.
‘Sorry for acting like a child. Not sorry for being gay.’
She sighed and shook her head, exasperated.
‘Oh, dear me, Penny. I’ve known you were a… lesbian for a few years now.’
I nearly fell out of my chair.
‘You… you knew?’ I said, looking back and forth between my parents.
My dad gently nodded. ‘We did, yes.’
‘How?!’
mum tutted. ‘It was Will. Don’t be angry with him, but when you broke up, I couldn’t understand what had happened and you weren’t telling me. So I asked him round and we had a little chat. He didn’t want to tell me anything, but I can be quite persistent when I get my teeth into something. He told me about your relationship with Julia.’
Julia took a big sip of her tea then and whatever cool she’d maintained up till now was obviously a little dented. My parents knew everything.
‘But that was three years ago! Why didn’t you say anything?’ I asked, still trying to pull myself together from the shock.
My dad interrupted then. ‘We were waiting for you tell us.’
My mother nodded. ‘That’s what the websites told us to do.’
I slumped in my chair, the strength had completely gone out of me. All this time and they’d known.
‘But why were you so angry when we came in?’
My mother answered quickly, pleased at the chance to grind her own axe. ‘Because I’ve been waiting all this time, patiently, hoping you’d tell us the truth. And then I overhear it from some girls you went to school with, for crying out loud! You told everyone but me, Penny. Of course I was angry! Can you really blame me?’
Of course I couldn’t. She was right.
‘I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know… I wasn’t sure if you’d be alright with it.’
mum became quite haughty then. ‘I’m not living in the dark ages! I’ll admit, when I first heard, it was… an adjustment. But what did you think I’d do? Disown you?’
I started to cry then. Because that thought had indeed crossed my mind. mum jumped up and ran across the room, grabbing hold of me in a hug. Dad wasn’t far behind. I let them hold me, tears running down my face.
Everything was out. And it was alright.
Chapter Thirteen
I could barely see Penny through the arms of her parents. She was completely enveloped. I wondered if I should creep out, leave them to this private moment. But the hugging group were directly between me and the exit. I’d have to wait it out.
As the hug broke, a wet faced Penny finally appeared. She looked incandescently happy through her tears. It was wonderful.
‘I think I’ll leave you all to it for a while,’ I said to the group.
Her mother nodded and Penny mouthed ‘I love you.’
And I left.
I wandered through the village of Pilldale, looking for somewhere I could have a cup of tea. But it was night now, everywhere was shut. And then I spotted a pub, the Crow’s Nest. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into a local pub, but I didn’t have a lot of options. So in I went.
It was quiet, mainly old men nursing pints. I ordered a vodka and sat down in the corner.
I thought about the scene I’d just witnessed. Penny and her parents. They had their problems. But they were a real family. Not like me and my father. Penny’s parents had been there through every step of Penny’s development into a woman. Because they’d wanted to be. Even if they weren’t a hundred percent comfortable with Penny’s sexuality (I had a feeling that the hug wasn’t a fix all for that), they were trying. They’d attempted to go about all this in the best way they could think of for Penny, even though they’d been hurt. They’d been here all along, waiting for her.
And my father? He’d never waited. He’d simply gone. And soon, he’d be even more gone, probably. And I’d never get to tell him what he’d done, how he’d ruined everything, how he’d broken a part of me that I could never fix.
I realised that in the back of my mind, I’d always thought that day would come, when I’d tell him how much I hated him. But now it never would. Because I was going to let it slip away. If he really was dying, I would let the chance die with him. I’d let him go, like he had let me go.
It was all he deserved.
Later, a summons came, via a call from Penny.
‘Mum’s cooking dinner, she wants you to come and eat with us.’
‘And everything’s…’
‘Yeah, it’s fine. We talked a bit after you left, I cried a b
it more, and then we talked again. I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation that long about anything emotional. I’m exhausted!’
I laughed gently and then I realised what the next thing to worry about would be. ‘But your mum… She mentioned that Will had told her about… Did he tell her everything?’
There was a slight pause. ‘Yeah, sorry, she knows it all, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh god’ I said, closing my eyes. There was officially no way to make a good impression on Penny’s mum today. Ship sailed. All I could hope for now was to keep a low profile until enough time had passed that she might accept me as her daughter’s girlfriend, someone who loved and cared about Penny as much as she did.
‘I explained about how things are now and I think she sort of gets it’ Penny tried to reassure me. ‘I think it would help if she got to know you. That’s why you have to come to dinner.’
‘Alright then, I’ll come. We’d better just pray she doesn’t google me.’
‘What difference would that make? If she knows, she knows.’
‘Because it’s one thing to get the low down from your ex-boyfriend’ I explained. ‘It’s quite another to read all the lurid details.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it like that’ Penny said, a little worry creeping into her voice. ‘Fingers crossed she doesn’t think to do it.’
‘Yeah. Fingers crossed.’
I’ve never been one for meeting parents, I could never see the appeal. And now I knew I was right. It was hideously awkward. Because the entire time I was sitting in their presence, my only concrete thought was that they knew I’d seen their daughter naked.
That’s why I ate quietly for the first ten minutes of the meal, keeping my head down. I didn’t want to rub it in their faces any further than I had to. Especially Karen. She was the one who’d be gunning for me, if anyone was. The dad, Jim, seemed simpler. All you had to do was smile and laugh at his jokes and things would keep ticking over. He wasn’t a trouble maker. Karen though, she had the potential to cause a ruck. She knew that I’d been Penny’s teacher and that I’d ‘defiled’ her little girl. However hard she was working to repair things with her daughter, I would have to be on my best behaviour if I wanted to avoid pissing her off.
I took a bite of my pork chop and looked over the table at Penny. She was taking the smallest bites of food possible. There were two conceivable explanations for that. The first was that she wasn’t very hungry, the stress of the day going straight to her stomach. The second, and I don’t even know why I thought about this, was that she was keeping her mouth empty in case she needed to jump to my defence at a moment’s notice. It seemed unlikely, but still, I couldn’t shake the notion.
‘So, Julia… This book of yours, Penny says it’s very good. Perhaps I should read it?’
Not a great start.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s for you mum’ Penny said quickly.
‘No? Why’s that?’ Karen asked innocently.
‘It’s a bit… Err… Racy?’ Penny said with a glance to me. I stifled the urge to laugh. Racy. That was certainly one way to put it.
‘Yes’ I agreed. ‘It is a touch… Racy. Not exactly Fifty Shades of Grey, but still…’
Penny’s eyes widened.
‘Ha, Mum’s never read that, have you?’ she said desperately to Karen. ‘She prefers Marian Keyes.’
Karen looked at her daughter. ‘Actually, I have read that one. For my book club. I didn’t care for it. But everyone wanted to read it so I had to trudge through it. Quite boring. I skipped through most of it. I’m not very interested to hear about people smacking other people’s bottoms with horse equipment, it turns out. But I think I can handle Julia’s book, if it’s all the same to you.’
Penny had absolutely nothing to say to that. I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have touched that one with a barge pole. But I had to hand it to Karen, she wasn’t letting anyone pigeon-hole her. She’d read the same porn as everyone else and she wouldn’t let anyone say otherwise, thank you very much.
Penny tried to shrug nonchalantly. ‘It’s on Amazon’ she almost whispered, turning a delicate shade of pink. Her mortification was unbearable. I had to do something.
‘Have you told your parents your news?’ I asked.
Karen and Jim’s heads swivelled instantly.
‘News?’ Jim asked.
Penny looked at me in equal bafflement. ‘News?
‘About the movie.’
She smiled in relief. I couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. The pressure of today had been even worse than I’d thought if she could overlook something as huge as that.
‘Yeah, you know my book? Someone’s going to make a film of it’ she said to her parents.
It had been a good diversionary tactic. They were thrilled.
‘What?’ Jim asked, his fork forgotten halfway to his mouth. ‘A film! That comes out at the cinema? Your book?’
‘Yeah. Well, it’s still a way off from that. The director, Zara, was saying it could be a couple of years away yet. And they still need to secure all the funding…’
‘Don’t be so modest’ I interrupted. ‘It’s going to happen. And she’s helping to adapt it too’ I said to Jim and Karen.
‘Oh my!’ Karen said, impressed. And then added. ‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘I’ll be helping write the screenplay’ Penny explained.
‘Goodness!’ Karen said, still obviously having no idea what that meant. ‘That’s incredible, darling! Why haven’t you said!?’
‘I only decided to do it this morning.’
Jim jumped up and ran out of the room. We all watched him go, wondering what he was doing. He came back in a minute later, with a tray holding champagne and flutes. ‘I’ve had this for ages but there hasn’t really been anything big enough to celebrate. But I think this calls for a cork popping!’
He put the tray down and grabbed the bottle, squeezing the cork out with a ‘Whoa!’ as the liquid spilled a little. He quickly began to pour into the flutes and everyone grabbed one.
‘To Penny!’ Jim cried, lifting the glass and we all clinked. ‘And all who sail in her!’
Karen shook her head at her husband but laughed anyway and said ‘To Penny’. Penny smiled humbly as I added my own tribute and we all drank. It was a nice moment.
Pity it couldn’t last.
After everyone had eaten and drunk, I thought we’d be heading home to Medford. But Karen pointed out that it was late and anyway, I’d had alcohol. Penny said we could get a taxi, but Karen said that was silly and insisted we stay in Penny’s bedroom for the night. I wasn’t keen on that idea, obviously. But I didn’t have another option, so I agreed.
‘It’s been a long day; I think we’ll head up now’ Penny said. I checked my watch. It was just gone ten.
‘Yes’ I agreed. ‘Long day.’
‘Night then’ Jim said.
‘There’s towels in the airing cupboard and I think there’s probably plenty of pyjamas for you both in Penny’s drawers.’
I usually sleep naked. But I was not about to mention that so I simply thanked her and we headed up.
Seeing Penny’s room was the only real treat of the day. It was still pretty much as she’d left it at eighteen and I was surprised by how pink it was.
‘God in heaven, so much fuchsia’ I said.
‘Shut up’ she said as she threw a dusky pink pillow at me. ‘It was my dad’s choice. He did it when I was twelve without telling me. He thought I’d love it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated pink with a passion.’
‘What would you have picked?’
‘I don’t know, but definitely something a bit more neutral. It was like sleeping inside a brain every night.’
I inspected her walls. ‘Well, no one could say you didn’t try to counterbalance it’ I said, looking at the black and white prints tacked up, all authors, all dead.
She shook her head as she looked around the space. ‘I hate the fact that you’r
e here.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
She cocked her head and said ‘You know what I mean. It’s just a bit… I don’t know, embarrassing, I guess.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s a child’s bedroom. And I was in it not that long ago.’
I sighed. ‘I know you’re younger than me, Penny. But I don’t see you as less of an adult than I am. In fact, sometimes I feel like you’re the older one.’
‘What, even today? When I was throwing a tantrum in the living room?’
‘If you can’t lose your shit today, of all days, when can you lose it?’ I laughed.
Penny sat down next to me and put her hand on mine. ‘You’ve really been perfect today.’
‘Perfect? Getting your mother to talk about spanking?’
Penny snorted with laughter. ‘I thought I was going to have an aneurism when she said that.’
‘Lucky I had your news in my back pocket. They were so proud of you. I’m proud of you too, as it happens.’
‘For the movie?’
‘Well, yes. But what I actually mean is that I’m proud of you for taking the bull by the horns today.’
But she wouldn’t take the compliment.
‘I shouldn’t have waited so long. I could have saved myself and them a lot of worry if I’d said something at the time.’
‘You’re being way too hard on yourself. It was tough to do what you did today. But you did it when you needed to. And it seems like it’s all turned out OK.’
She nodded but I knew she wasn’t going to let herself off so easily. She wouldn’t be Penny if she did.
‘Maybe.’
We squeezed into her single bed, a tight fit. I’d assumed we’d go straight to sleep but then I felt Penny’s hand creeping up my inner thigh. I was a little shocked.
‘Penny!’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing?’