by Julie Cohen
She couldn’t cry in the park. Everyone would see her. They would talk about her. That’s the woman whose husband ran off with the twenty-one-year-old au pair. Yes, apparently they were carrying on the entire time right under her nose. They live in one of those big new builds, so there was plenty of room for them to do it in. And her first husband, he was that man – you remember, don’t you remember how he died?
The tears had poured out of her, endless, refusing to wait until night-time when it was safe to cry, after the children had gone to sleep. Jo tried to blot them with Iris’s blanket, but it was difficult to do without waking the baby. And she didn’t want to wake the baby. A baby shouldn’t spend the first months of her life surrounded by sadness and anger.
A tear fell on Iris’s face and Jo wiped it off, as gently as she could with her shaking hands. She bowed her head and felt a bead of mucus hovering at the tip of her nose. She swiped at it with her hand, but it kept on coming, more and more of it like the tears. She had tissues in her bag, but she couldn’t reach them without disturbing Iris. Annoyance poked at her despair and anger. Why didn’t anyone say something to her? If she saw someone crying in the park, anyone, she’d go up to them and offer them a tissue at least. She’d ask if they were all right.
But no one came. It was the same as after Stephen’s death, when the phone stopped ringing.
It was a confirmation that from now on, Jo was on her own. Everything was down to her, only to her. The thought made her cry even harder.
‘Whoever he is, he’s a bastard,’ said a voice in front of her. Jo had wiped her nose, though it was useless, and looked up to see a woman standing with a baby on her hip. Her curly hair was like a black halo around her head. ‘Or is it post-natal depression? I had that with my first one, it sucks.’
‘Do you – don’t you know?’
Sara peered at her. ‘No. Should I? Are you famous or something? Here, have a tissue.’
Jo took it gratefully. ‘I thought everyone would be talking about me.’
‘Mate, haven’t you noticed? Everyone in this park is too busy taking selfies with darling Hugo or Eugenie to spare a glance for anyone else. Rich people, they drive me crazy. People are much nicer over at Palmer Park. Last time I had a crying fit over there a nice little old lady came over and offered me some homemade curry in a plastic container. I only come to this park for the sandpit. You want a wet wipe?’
Now, a year later, months of coffee and confidences behind them, Jo said, ‘I don’t mean to be negative. I think it’s seeing Honor like that. I thought she was a force of nature, Sara. I thought nothing could ever happen to her.’
‘Well, I only met her that one time, and she was terrifying. How old is she?’
‘In her mid-seventies, at least. And she looked every year of it in that hospital bed. She didn’t wake up once.’
‘It’s going to happen to all of us eventually, no matter how scary we are.’
‘She’s a very intelligent woman,’ said Jo. ‘She raised Stephen all by herself, you know, while she was working as a university lecturer, and this was in the seventies and eighties. She’s very admirable. She’s just … outspoken. And she likes having her own way.’
Sara shook her head. ‘It’s amazing about you, Jo. You never say anything bad about anyone.’
‘Well, there’s nothing bad to say. We’ve had our difficult moments in the past, but I feel sorry for Honor. She’s so alone. Imagine putting me down as next of kin. It just shows how few people she has to help her.’
‘She has money though, right? Wasn’t she some sort of doctor?’
‘Not a medical doctor; she’s got a PhD. She’s an academic.’
‘So she should be able to afford to get someone in. She’s probably saved up for something like this.’
‘I don’t know. Academics aren’t rich. I think she’s living on her pension. I don’t like to ask, of course. I’d offer to hire a nurse for her, but …’ Jo trailed off. Sara knew her financial situation already: how she was more or less completely dependent on her ex-husband for support while the children were small. ‘It’s not the sort of thing I can ask Richard to do.’
‘Well, the local authority will get someone for her, to help her out.’
‘The house is completely impractical, though. The kitchen’s in the basement. That wouldn’t be such a problem if she had someone bringing her meals, but even if she put a bed in her lounge, the ground floor doesn’t have a bathroom. You have to go downstairs to the little toilet off the kitchen, or upstairs to the proper bathroom on the first floor.’
‘Time to install a stairlift?’
‘I don’t think Honor would hear of that; they’re so ugly and slow. And anyway, the entire house is up a flight of stairs from the road. If she stays there, even if she can get around inside, she’d be housebound most of the time. I think it would drive her crazy. She rides her bicycle everywhere normally. At her age. – can you imagine?’
‘So, what you do then, is find a big, burly hunk of a carer who can look after her and carry her in his lovely muscular arms down the stairs and then push her in a wheelchair around the park every morning. Honor can have her fresh air, and a hot man to look at. Simples.’
Jo laughed. ‘And where should we find this hunky male carer? Hunky Male Carers R Us?’
‘There must be some somewhere. There are millions of little old ladies who would welcome a scheme like this. In fact, I’m tempted to break my leg myself.’
‘The thing is, Honor is so independent. She’s always done everything for herself. I can’t see her being happy about being looked after by strangers.’
‘Well, nobody’s a stranger once you’ve—’
‘Mummy! Billy took my car!’
‘There it goes,’ said Sara, getting up from her chair. ‘I’ll sort it.’
While she squatted down between the boys and tried the delicate art of convincing preschoolers to share, Jo wiped down the table, rinsed out her mug, and put the kettle on again.
The house in Stoke Newington, crowded with books and memories, was far too big for Honor on her own. In Jo’s mind, it was difficult to separate Honor from her house. They were both tall and thin, crammed with knowledge and obscure references to a religion Jo didn’t know much about; they shared a scent of paper and old wool. Whereas Jo didn’t think that this big airy house here in suburban Woodley reflected her at all. A house that reflected Jo would be crooked, full of cushions and textiles, pretty teacups and an antique dresser in the kitchen, painted floorboards and pastel walls. Roaring fireplace, worn leather sofas, windows of old glass that distorted the view outside and made it magical.
This house was too new, a cube of brick with faux white pillars in the front. Inside, the angles were all perfect, the windows draught-proof. Richard had insisted on choosing most of the furniture, and though it was tasteful and comfortable, it was too modern. When they’d moved in, Jo had tried displaying her collection of flowery teacups on an open shelf in the kitchen, but they didn’t look right amongst all the stainless steel and granite. She’d put them back in their tissue wrappers, meaning to find another place for them, but then she’d had Oscar and she was too busy, and then Iris, and then it wasn’t wise to have teacups around when you had two toddlers. The cups were at the back of a cabinet, in a box.
Jo had lived here for nearly four years, since Richard had bought the house and they’d married, and aside from the clutter, she’d left hardly any trace on it. She’d meant to paint the walls, hang pictures, but the walls were still their original white – aside from the little handprints, the flecks of flung Weetabix.
Maybe that was what Jo was made of, after all: smeary fingerprints and old cereal.
Stephen and she had been saving up for an old cottage where her teacups would have looked perfect. Where every object was precious and full of happy memories. But then Stephen had died, and that was the end of that dream.
She reached for the biscuit tin to refresh the plate and saw movement
outside the window. The hedge on the side facing the kitchen was low; Richard had planned to put up a fence to block the view of the cluster of chocolate-box faux Victorian brick houses built there after they’d moved in. He’d been furious when they’d started building. ‘Too many people,’ he’d said. ‘It crowds the schools, and puts more traffic on the roads.’ But what he’d meant was that the houses weren’t expensive enough. That they brought down the tone of the neighbourhood. Every time Richard had looked out of the kitchen window and seen the builders at work, he’d flushed with anger and ranted about the council, building permissions, a fence.
But then he’d never put the fence up. Knowing what she knew now, Jo supposed he’d been too distracted by Tatiana.
There was someone on the other side of the hedge. From here, Jo could see him from the waist up. It looked like he was raking leaves that had fallen from the horse chestnut tree: a young man, in his twenties maybe. He had sunglasses pushed up into brown curly hair, and an unshaven face.
Stop it, filthy middle-aged lady, she thought, and smiled to herself. But she kept on looking, just for a moment, with the top of the biscuit tin in her hand in case she needed to look away and appear busy suddenly. Because a tug of attraction, no matter how inappropriate and one-sided, was better than thinking about the house she’d never had and the husbands she’d lost.
Focus on the positive, focus on the future. Her mother had always told her that, and set Jo a good example. The MS that had eventually killed her had crippled her first. But despite her pain, she’d always kept cheerful. Her advice was what had kept Jo going after Stephen had died, in those colourless days that stretched on and on and felt as if they would never end. It was what had helped her over the past year since Richard had left. She had three beautiful children, and a comfortable house, and a good friend, and a body that wasn’t so worn out that it couldn’t respond to the sight of a good-looking man.
‘Whoa, who is that?’
Sara had come up behind her and was staring out of the window, close enough to brush against Jo. Jo’s cheeks heated. ‘Don’t – he’ll see us.’
‘But who is it?’
‘He must be one of the people in the new houses.’
Sara sighed. ‘Do you remember what it was like, sleeping with a bloke in his twenties? Bob could do it all night.’
The wistful, lustful expression on Sara’s face made Jo laugh, despite her embarrassment. ‘Stephen used to—’
She stopped herself. She turned back to the biscuit tin and loaded up the plate again, with the last of her homemade shortbread. Dusted with sugar, cut into squares, crumbling at the edges. This was reality, this was now. Too many calories in the kitchen with the children playing nearby. It was a good life. It should be enough.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I think that Honor should move in here with us for a little while.’
Chapter Seven
Lydia
I DON’T HAVE to write about the first time I met Avril. I’ll never forget it. But it makes me feel good to think about it. It’s hard to believe it was only a bit more than five years ago.
Mum married Richard in August and I was the only bridesmaid. I probably should have put up more of a fuss, but I couldn’t really believe it was happening. Mum made it into this whole bonding opportunity for us: trying on dresses, choosing music and flowers. We went for coffee a lot, and we spent a lot of time talking about Dad – not in a heavy way, just in a nice way, remembering him. We talked about the things we’d done together as a family, just the three of us. We looked at pictures of when I was a baby, and our holidays on the beach in Lowestoft. She reminded me of how he used to read me a story every single night, and how he named my favourite teddy bear Galileo. I think she wanted to reassure me that she wouldn’t forget about him, even though she was getting remarried.
Looking back at it, she was trying to reassure me, too, that I was still important to her. She let me choose almost all the music for the ceremony, and she let me choose her dress. Which in retrospect, looking back at the photos, was a mistake, because at eleven, I had this thing for big fluffy princess skirts and lots and lots of sequins. I’d never been to a wedding before and it was all pretty exciting for me. I got to invite all my friends to the reception and we all drank litres of Coke and stayed up ridiculously late. Then I went on honeymoon with them to Thailand, which was brilliant in a way, but in another way it was awful, because Richard wasn’t happy that I had come along. He tried to hide it, and he bought me lots of things to make up for it, but I got the impression that all of this had been Mum’s idea, and he’d have rather been alone with her. Every morning I got up early and I saw how many lengths of the pool I could swim before they emerged from their room. I tried not to think about what they were doing in there, but I knew anyway.
One night in one of those fancy outdoor restaurants by the sea, where there were all these candles and fairy lights and impossibly beautiful people serving you your dinner, I tried to bring up one of the memories we’d talked about. ‘Remember how Dad always wanted to build the highest tower made out of sand? All those different techniques he’d try to stop it from crumbling?’
I expected my mother to laugh, like she usually did, and counter with the story of the one time he’d used the beach umbrella and it had opened up and flown away, but she didn’t. She glanced at Richard, whose mouth had narrowed, and who was reaching for his wine. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful sunset?’ she’d said instead. ‘What is it, do you think, that makes them so much more colourful here than in England? It’s the same sun, isn’t it?’
It’s exactly the sort of inane thing Mum says when she wants everyone to be happy. And I got the message loud and clear. Of course a man on honeymoon wouldn’t want to talk about his wife’s first husband. Of course not. But the real message I got was that everything had changed now, and everything that had been, was over. And within a week of us returning from Thailand we’d moved out of our own house in the centre of Brickham near my primary school, to this new house, and then Mum was pregnant with Oscar, and everything had changed.
On top of starting secondary school, I was totally new in town as well. My new summer uniform was too big and it was scratchy, and I was scared. The summer was over and I had to stop pretending I was special and start to think about coping with how I was different.
I already knew I was different; I’d known for a long time, as long as I can remember, maybe even before Dad died. But I never really figured it out properly, never really thought it through, until that autumn, when everything was new.
Sometimes I used to pretend that I had a superpower that nobody had noticed yet except for me. For example, that I had eyes that saw too much, that could see beyond the visible spectrum, beyond ultraviolet and infrared. I used tell myself that I had to wear sunglasses in order to fit in with normal human beings.
But that wasn’t it. The sunglasses were just pretend. I didn’t have superpowers; I don’t. I have to hide in a much more obvious way than wearing sunglasses. At age eleven, about to start secondary school, I was learning about it.
Mum walked me to school on my first day. She wore a blue dress that was nearly the same colour as my new scratchy school uniform, and though that was naff beyond words, I was sort of grateful for it. I suppose it was meant to be a sign of solidarity. After a few weeks of feeling increasingly like I was in the way in Richard’s house, I felt that I needed all the help I could get.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ said Mum. She is always saying things like that. She is proud of every little thing that I do, which is nice and I know it’s meant to build self-esteem, but when you get to a certain age, you begin to realize that tying your own shoe-laces or starting secondary school or even getting top marks in your year isn’t really such a big thing to be proud of. We were getting near the school gates now, and I was looking for someone I knew, anyone, maybe someone who’d miraculously also moved here from my old primary school. I wanted someone to shield me. If I walked into the playgro
und by myself, I would be too open, too visible.
But all of the kids walking in were strangers. I couldn’t even see anyone else new, like me, with their parents. They all looked hopelessly grown up, tall and confident, knowing exactly where they were going.
‘I’ve got this for you,’ Mum said. She’d stopped, so I stopped too to see what she was talking about. She took something out of the pocket of her dress. It was a man’s wristwatch: gold, with a brown leather strap.
I knew this watch. Mum kept it in her jewellery box, right at the back. I got it out and looked at it sometimes. It was engraved on the back: From J to S, with love forever. It was the watch my mother had bought my father for their wedding. She had saved up her earnings at the café for nearly a year to afford it.
The gold plating was a little scratched, but the glass was uncracked.
‘I can’t wear it,’ I told her. ‘It’s not part of the uniform.’
‘Put it in your pocket. No one will know.’
I slipped it into my own pocket, feeling the weight of it. ‘Thank you.’
‘Daddy would be proud of you, too,’ Mum said. ‘So proud to see his little girl grown up.’
And that was not what I needed to hear, not right now, not with my dead father’s watch in my pocket, and a whole ocean of children I didn’t know waiting to look at me. I bit the inside of my lip hard enough to hurt, so that I wouldn’t cry. I turned away from Mum and her soft green eyes, and it was that exact minute that I saw a girl walking towards us. She had a summer uniform on too, but it looked less stiff than mine, as if she’d been wearing it for longer. Her dark hair was brushed back into a neat ponytail, she had brown eyes and a small mole by the side of her mouth, and she had a blue X-Men backpack slung over one shoulder.
She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
She was a total stranger, but she walked right up to me and Mum and she said, with a smile, ‘Hi, my name is Avril. I’m new and I don’t have anyone to walk in with and I wondered if you would walk in with me?’