I can hear them. It sounds like a god-awful racket to me, but that might be the poor phone reception. Or the lack of Guinness.
‘That sounds like a most excellent adventure – what are you doing there?’
And why aren’t I with you, I think but don’t say, instead of slowly vegetating in a village where watching two sheep-dogs try and hump each other in a field is considered entertainment?
‘Oh … I’m with Gareth. You remember, I told you about him? From New Year?’
‘I remember you said you’d met someone, which wasn’t very specific – I assume you met a lot of people while you were out at a do in Liverpool city centre. Last time I was there, I met about 7,000 people, including several who wanted to open a bar in Tenerife with me. It’s that kind of place. So who’s Gareth?’
I’m trying not to sound annoyed, but I am. I’m bored and lonely and my whole life feels like some big loose end. And it’s my birthday – which Rose seems to have forgotten.
‘He’s … God, Pops, I don’t want to sound like something out of a Meg Ryan film, but he’s amazing. I mean, getting off with someone at a New Year’s party is no big deal, right? You probably snogged loads of people that night, didn’t you?’
‘Erm … no. I was at the Farmer’s with Mum, remember? I would’ve been snogging pissed-up granddads wearing their best cords.’
‘Oh yeah! I’d forgotten that’s where you went … Anyway. New Year was when we met, and we’ve been seeing each other ever since. I’m sure I told you … well, I don’t suppose I’ve called that much recently, have I?
‘So, it’s all been going ace, and then yesterday, he surprised me with this trip. He has family here, and he knows all the best pubs and clubs, and he took me to this brilliant coffee shop, and we saw this brilliant live band at a venue about as big as Mum’s kitchen, and we’re staying with his friend who has this brilliant flat near St Stephen’s Green.’
‘Wow,’ I say, wondering if I sound as sarcastic as I intend to, ‘that sounds … brilliant? So, what does he do, this Gareth? Apart from whisk you away on romantic breaks?’
‘He works in banking, on a graduate trainee scheme. It’s just a stepping stone, he says – what he wants to do is move into investment. I know it sounds really boring, but you’d have to meet him – he can even make finance sound interesting, honest!’
My interest in finance extends as far as rooting round in the sides of the sofas to see if I can scrape together enough spare change for a packet of fags, so I seriously doubt this.
‘Well, I hope I do meet him then,’ I say, actually thinking, ‘I hope you dump him before I have to.’
There is still no sign of Rose wishing me a happy birthday, or talking about our plans for the weekend, and I suddenly feel very aware of the fact that it’s already Thursday.
‘How long are you in Dublin for?’ I ask.
‘Until Monday night,’ Rose answers, sounding distracted. There is a scuffling sound and then the noise of glasses tinkling. Sounds as if somebody has just bought another round in. Probably the financial whizz-kid, who is undoubtedly absolutely brilliant at getting served at a crowded bar. Tosser.
‘I wish we could stay longer,’ Rose adds, after a slurpy pause, ‘but I have to be back at work by Tuesday. Anyway, look, I’d better go. Gareth’s back. Poppy, I can’t wait for you to meet him, and he’s really excited about it too – aren’t you, Gareth?’
‘Yes! Hi Poppy! Cheers!’ shouts a man’s voice down the line. I immediately hate the sound of him, and wish a severe case of Guinness arse in his direction. He deserves the Curse of the Black Poo for ruining my birthday weekend, even if he did know nothing about it.
I mean, it’s not that I don’t want Rose to be happy. Of course I do. But … well, couldn’t she have held off on being quite so happy until after the weekend? And even if she’s not coming home, couldn’t she have at least remembered it was my birthday at all?
‘Anyway, gotta go, sis – see you soon. Love to Mum!’
The line goes dead, and the phone goes even deader as I throw it across the room. The battery case comes off, and it all falls apart as it hits the floor.
‘This,’ I say to Jim Morrison, ‘is the crappiest birthday ever.’
Chapter 22
Rose: The Present Day
The drive has been hellish, and the air con in my car is practically non-existent. That’s what happens when you drive a 1998 Ford Fiesta held together with duct tape and prayers.
Joe makes it tolerable, and we sing along to Adele songs together, sweating away until he forces me to accept that we need to wind the windows down.
‘We’re going to dehydrate and die if we don’t, Mum,’ he says, as a welcome gust of cool air rushes in.
‘I know. But I hate having the windows open …’
‘Don’t worry,’ he answers, brandishing a copy of a road atlas that has all the country’s Little Chefs marked on it in case of pancake emergencies, ‘I’ll be on wasp patrol.’
I nod, and we sing some more Adele. We even hit some of the right notes.
‘It’s just like she’s here in the car with us, isn’t it?’ he says, as he skips forward to his favourite track.
‘It is. Maybe she’d come to a Little Chef with us, what do you think?’
‘Yeah. She’d be cool with that. I think maybe she’d be happy I’ve wound the windows down as well. How much further?’
I glance through the windscreen, squinting into the sunlight through glass smeared by sat-nav suckers – my window-fluid-squirter thingies aren’t too brilliant either.
‘Not far,’ I say, quietly. The landscape is achingly familiar now, and I am driving around these twisting roads and narrow lanes purely from muscle memory.
I see all the familiar landmarks – the twisted tree stump at the crossroads just before you get to Goldfinch Lane; the metal gate to Hawthorne Farm that once got crushed by the farmer’s tractor when he was drunk in charge of an agricultural vehicle; the old-fashioned bright-red postbox on the corner that is almost completely covered in ivy.
Familiar territory, but also a strange land. Strange because I made it so. All these years, I’ve stayed away – at first because Poppy was still living here, then because of the state of my life with Gareth and a baby, and then, later, purely to avoid being in contact with anything that reminded me of my sister.
Joe is staring out of his window, taking it all in, logging the landscape and the pretty cottages and the scarecrows left over from the annual festival earlier in the summer.
‘They look weird,’ he says, as we pass one that is sitting on a child’s swing, his tattered jean-clad legs swaying in the breeze. ‘And scary. This is starting to feel like the start of a horror film. Are we heading to place that is inhabited entirely by demonic children or devil-worshipping farmers who sacrifice passing tourists to ancient fertility gods?’
‘Have you been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer again?’ I ask.
‘No. I’ve been watching Supernatural. It’s about two demon-slaying brothers who drive round small-town America defeating evil. And I think they’d be starting to get worried right about now.’
I laugh, and keep a lookout for the sharp turning that I know will soon be coming up on the right. I’ll probably take it by instinct, but I’m not feeling 100 per cent at my most chipper this morning. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘fine and dandy’, and 10 being ‘absolutely shit’, I’m heading for a definite 27.
It has been a busy couple of days, getting Joe ready for his trip to his dad’s, sorting the house out, and having a nervous breakdown. That last one especially was pretty time-consuming, and kept getting in the way of the others.
I’d try and distract myself by ironing Joe’s boxers – for the first time ever in the history of me and Joe’s boxers – and find myself staring into space, crying into a cloud of steam. Or I’d be rooting through the back of my drawers, having a clear-out and throwing away knickers that were seven years too old an
d several sizes too small to be of any use, and suddenly realise I was sitting on the floor, using the knickers to blow my nose with.
I’d had the urge to call my mother every single night, and on several occasions actually did. She’s still there, listed in my contacts, under the imaginative name of Mum. Three little letters, looking so innocent, but carrying so much weight. The most taken-for-granted three letters in the entire world.
I know now how much I relied on her. How much I … used her, I suppose. I mean, that’s normal – and I am a mum, so I get that. It’s not like you want your kids to be going round feeling grateful all the time. But now, I have so many regrets.
Like the fact that I only called her when I either needed her, or felt like so much time had passed that it was my duty to call her. That sometimes I call-screened, doing 1471 to see who it was, and didn’t always bother to call back. That other times, when I heard her chirpy voice at the other end, my heart sank – because I knew I’d be stuck on the phone for ages.
That I’d make excuses, come up with a fake knock at the door or say I had something on the stove, when in reality I probably had an urgent TV show to watch, or Hello! magazine to read – heaven forbid I should talk to my own mother rather than catching up on the latest news from the Swedish royal family.
Or like the knowledge that our last, final-for-ever conversation was about Nigel Farage. I mean, for God’s sake – what a low to leave it all on.
I’d tried not to sink into an alcoholic misery for Joe’s sake, but had ever-so-slightly cracked last night, when my neighbour Simon called round with a six-pack of Carlsberg and two Pot Noodles. He’s old-fashioned like that.
Joe had told him about my mum, and he was checking up on me. He’d lost his own parents years earlier, and it was good to talk to him. Good to be told that one day, eventually, it would start to feel better. That, in the end, I might actually wake up and not be paralysed by guilt and grief.
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but at least he tried. And I am not one to turn my nose up at a man who comes bearing Pot Noodles and beer.
Truth be told, I have a pathetic little crush on Simon. He’s a builder, and has hair cut so short he looks like he’s in the Navy SEALS, and he often walks round without his shirt, wearing cargo pants and those big belts with tools in them and steel-capped boots. Maybe there’s something hard-wired into women to always go a little bit ga-ga about that, I don’t know – some kind of primal biological response to being in close proximity to a seasoned hunter-gatherer. Or maybe I just think too much.
Anyhow, he’s a nice bloke, and would undoubtedly be horrified that I’d even entertained such thoughts. Not that I was thinking them last night. Last night, I was just panicking. About Joe leaving. About coming here. About seeing Poppy again. About not being able to call my mum and tell her I was panicking about all those things. It wasn’t pretty, and the beer and the company helped, especially as Joe was out having one last hurrah with his mates.
I’d even told him a little bit about Poppy, or at least explained that I hadn’t seen her for years.
‘Why?’ he asked, predictably, frowning at me over the lager we were drinking straight from the can.
‘Long story, best left untold,’ I replied, simply.
‘Fair enough. Families, eh? Who’d have ’em?’
And with that, we’d clinked cans, and left the subject alone. Which was genuinely the best place for it.
Sadly, we didn’t leave the lagers alone, and they’d taken their toll on my spirits this morning. As well as my head, which is banging and throbbing and doing all kinds of things I wish it would stop doing.
The turn comes up, and I take it a tiny bit too late, tyres screeching as we go, ending up on completely the wrong side of the narrow road. Luckily, there is rarely anybody else on this particular narrow road, as the only place it leads to is my mother’s home – Greenfinch Cottage, the place where I grew up.
It’s close enough to the village that you can walk to the pub, and close enough to the main road that you can occasionally hear traffic at busy spells, but other than that it is totally secluded. The nearest neighbour is a farmhouse two miles away, and all you hear from there is the noise of cows and industrial-sized ride-on lawnmowers.
The cottage isn’t quite chocolate-box pretty – the whitewashed stone and thatched roof are offset by quite an ugly extension that got built on to the side before we moved in, and which Mum always vowed to get rid of for ‘committing crimes against my aesthetic sensibilities’. She never did, though, and over the years I suppose we just grew into it – using it to store our bikes and winter boots and boxes of books we never read any more but couldn’t bear to get rid of.
The cottage is surrounded by really very, very pretty gardens, and I suck in a quick breath as we approach, bumping down the driveway that becomes less of a road and more of a track as you go. In winter, it fills up with muddy water, and in summers like this one, it becomes so rutted it feels like you’re driving over speed bumps.
I had no idea how I was going to react when I finally came back here, back to this place where I spent so many years. Happy years, on the whole, barring the usual dollop of teenaged angst. Years filled with my small, cosy life; with my delightfully eccentric mother and my little sister and tiny local school, and my village friends. I’d even brought Gareth here, all those years ago, in another lifetime.
Now I’m here, I feel like I am having some kind of out-of-body experience, seeing it all again through alien eyes. I’d expected tears, or that familiar raw, panicky sensation I’ve been living with for days now, like acid burning away at my insides, but I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’ve come … home.
I park the car up, and look around. Some things are the same. The grave-markers for Patch, and the goldfish, and the pets that died before them, at the end of the garden. The jasmine, growing wild on its trellis, and the honeysuckle in glorious shades of pink and white and yellow.
The garden gnome collection has grown even bigger, which makes me smile. She did always love her garden gnomes, my mum; insisted she used to be one in a previous life – ‘I was the glamorous garden gnome, darling, wearing diamond earrings and a mink coat.’
Some things, though, are different. I see the barrels she’d told me about, rescued from a nearby farm, and planted with bright-blue trailing lobelia. I see a new bird table, complete with nuts and a little bath, now completely dry in the midday sun. I see a really very lovely carved pinewood bench, and a small matching table, where I can perfectly easily imagine my mother – perhaps with Lewis – enjoying a glass of wine as they gaze out over the hills on a day just like this one.
And, tucked away by the side of the cottage, I see a small black Audi A1. I don’t need a million guesses to figure out who it belongs to.
‘Damn,’ I say, slapping the steering wheel with my hand so hard I accidentally honk the horn and scare up a small flurry of starlings. ‘She’s already here. I should’ve known she’d turn up early.’
‘To be fair, Mum,’ says Joe, grinning at me, ‘she’s not early. We’re late. To be fair.’
‘Will you please stop saying the word “fair”, Joe?’ I reply. ‘If life was fair, do you think someone as lovely as Adele would ever have had her heart broken?’
‘I think,’ he says, winding the car windows back up so wasps don’t get in, ‘that Adele probably consoles herself by counting her millions, polishing her Grammies and kissing both her baby and her Oscar goodnight, don’t you?’
Darn him and his logic. He has a point.
‘So,’ he adds, looking at me expectantly. ‘Shall we get out of the car? I mean, we’ve come a long way to just stay in it.’
I nod, but know I don’t want to. While I’m in the car, I’m still on my own territory. While I’m in the car, I can do ugly crying and nobody will see. While I’m in the car, I don’t have to walk into that cottage, which will destroy me. And while I’m in the car, I won’t have to deal with Poppy, who is now stri
ding towards us, looking annoyed.
She’s perfectly turned out in posh skinny jeans and a fitted blouse, wearing high-heel wedges that I could never drive in, and has a black leather jacket slung over her shoulder. She has her phone in her hand, and is doing her best to keep a murderous look on her face.
The only thing that’s spoiling it is her eyes. They’re red, and raw, and her mascara is clumping in jagged spikes.
My little sister has been crying, and a part of my heart that I didn’t even know still existed begins to bleed for her.
Chapter 23
Poppy
When she finally does park up, Rose doesn’t seem to want to get out of the car. Joe is at her side, so tall his head is almost scraping the roof of the battered old Fiesta, and he is looking at me through the window with a great deal of curiosity.
It’s only natural, I know – I don’t even have a clue what she’s told him about us. She’s probably fobbed him off with one of those ‘it’s complicated’ comments that grown-ups use on teenagers when they’re too embarrassed to talk about something.
The way Mum always did with us when we were young and asked about our dad; before we were mature enough to realise the subject stressed her out so much that we gave up and left it alone. Our mum rarely got stressed – at least on the surface – and it was too painful to see her flustered.
She’s switched off the engine and Adele isn’t singing any more, so I decide to approach them. Apart from anything else, I am desperate for a wee, and she has the bloody cottage keys – I still can’t figure out why Lewis gave them to her and not me. I suspect he was just being bitchy – I recognise the signs. I practically invented them.
The doors to the car finally open, and Joe climbs out, immediately stretching his legs and arms and jumping up and down on the spot. God, he’s so tall. I mean, I know he’s 16 – and Mum has showed me photos of him over the years – but knowing it and seeing it are two different things. Whatever has happened between me and Rose, I hope I at least get a chance to get to know my nephew. Even just a little bit.
The A-Z of Everything Page 10