by Kate Le Vann
So you may not have been planned, little baby, but I can promise you that you are loved. Beloved. I have to stop writing now, because I can’t stand holding a pen and paper when I could be holding you.
Love Mummy
Chapter 17
Rain’s diary
7 September
I never saw Rome and Africa and Brazil and Hawaii with my mum and I may never see them with my dad. But who can say what’ll happen? I didn’t expect my dad to fall in love again in Norway, for instance, but he did. I approve; her name is Tibby, and she came to stay last week. I didn’t know how I was going to feel. I spent the week before she came on the edge of crying all the time. I couldn’t understand why: I couldn’t trace back the tears to any one emotion I felt outright, so maybe it was a mix of a lot of ‘predictable’ feelings – that it somehow closed the book on his love for my mum – that it was the end of our life together with just us, me and my dad – that I knew that life had to end sooner or later anyway – that I was afraid of someone new who I haven’t chosen coming all this way into my life – and that I was really, really happy for my dad. And then I met Tibby, and she was just like him, all absent-minded science-boffiny, but with nice hair, and all those abstract feelings went away, because she was real and there, and she’s lovely. I love how light Dad seems around her: for so long before her he seemed to want to fast forward every day.
When Harry met Georgy … we were actually still in London. Georgy was allowed to escape from her family holiday a few days early and took the train (and the ferry, and maybe a little rowing boat rowed by a kindly highlander) straight down to see me. She spent the whole time shouting about her Scottish relatives and how she’d had to spend half the summer walking around lochs fighting off ‘the midgies’. She pulled her hair back to show us both the bites. Harry didn’t get a word in for the entire first day. But Georgy loved Harry, and Harry … was very entertained by Georgy. She was also quite impatient when she heard about our wobbly getting together and seemed to think she would have done away with all the insanity if she’d been around.
But coming home again felt like more of a culture shock than going to London had been. I went to a few parties with Georgy as soon as I got back and realised I’d sort of lost the knack of being me. Everyone seemed older, weirdly – I mean, they were, obviously, but older than me all of a sudden. I think I missed a really good summer, but I wouldn’t have lost a minute of London, if I’d had the chance to choose again.
Now we’re all back at school, it doesn’t feel anything like going back used to. Instead of feeling like the year’s going to go on for ever, it’s more like we’ve got no time left at all. It’s as though the shift to everyone thinking about university and their own lives has already happened, and the months ahead are nothing more than preparation for that. The people who are going out with each other are talking about how they’ll cope. We’re talking about where we’ll live! I don’t think I’ve changed, but at the same time I feel like my focus isn’t on school any more. I don’t worry about the things that used to obsess me, like making a fool of myself or keeping up with who’s supposed to have fallen out with who this week. Like everyone else, I’m counting the days.
Gran and Harry are both coming up for my dad’s birthday party. My dad has already bought himself a present: a guitar. He says he wants to show me how good he used to be and play me ‘some old Strands licks’, but when I hear him practising, it doesn’t sound much like anything. He claims he’s a bit rusty.
Harry’s been up here quite a lot, at least every other weekend. He’s also helping Gran move all her furniture downstairs into the rooms he – and Madrigal! – redecorated. Gran’s not moving now: she’s selling the upper floors, and staying in the ground floor and basement. A property developer came round and told her how much she could get for half the house if she split the place into two flats, and that was the end of her debt worries. I’m really pleased because I knew she didn’t want to move; she likes it round there. She likes the market and the park, and the new shop that sells cupcakes just round the corner from her place.
So everyone’s more together than ever, and it turns out my heart works fine after all because it gets very worked up when Harry’s around. But it’s just about when I’m happiest that I start aching all through my bones and thinking about my mother – Sarah – who has been around this summer more than at any other time since she died. Those things I remember about her, and the girl whose diaries I read, don’t really fit together, because little girls never think of their mums that way. And older girls still have trouble getting their heads around it – the idea that their mother was once as unsure and silly and romantic and normal as them. If they’re very, very lucky, she still is.
Also by Kate le Vann
Tessa In Love
Tessa has always been the quiet one, but when she falls in love for the first time with Wolfie, a committed green activist, everything changes.
ISBN: 978 1 84812 000 6
Two Friends, One Summer
Samantha and Rachel are spending a turbulent summer with two families in France, where new experiences threaten their lifelong friendship.
ISBN: 978 1 84812 001 3
Things I Know About Love
After years of illness, Livia’s off to visit her brother in America, where she meets Adam. Can Livia put the past behind her and risk falling in love again?
ISBN: 978 1 85340 874 8
The Worst of Me
When Cassidy hears disturbing news about Jonah, she feels torn. If you love someone, how far should you go to overlook their faults?
ISBN: 978 1 84812 045 7