by Claire Allan
Thankfully the cheesecake didn’t disappoint nor did the champagne. Although given Paddy’s general reluctance to drink very much I ended up drinking more than my fair share and tottering precariously out of the restaurant, fighting off a pretty serious dose of sugar-and-alcohol-induced giggles.
They didn’t ease up in the taxi on the way home and thankfully Paddy was such a lightweight these days he caught a dose of giddiness himself and we laughed all the way home until we walked to our front door and I fumbled for my keys. Even though I was carrying the smallest clutch bag imaginable I still struggled to find them and, as Paddy bent his head to look into the bag and help me, our heads collided and pulling apart we both stopped laughing and started staring.
I recognised that look on his face – even though it had been a while since I had seen it. I didn’t dare hope and then he leant towards me, taking my face in his hands and kissing me gently but fully on the lips. I barely wanted to move, apart from allowing my body to respond, kissing him back – holding back – allowing him to set the pace. This was not my move to make any more. This was where it got hazy. This is where I was unsure of myself. There was a time it wouldn’t have been an issue. I’d have been in like Flynn. He’d have kissed me in that way only he could kiss me and I wouldn’t need asking twice. We worked together. We fitted.We had good sex and we weren’t one of those couples who had to make an effort to make it happen. We wanted each other and it was really, truly wonderful. (Not to boast or anything.) But then, of course, there was the cancer. And the surgery and bits were taken away. And he was sore. And while we didn’t really discuss it that much, because I believed it was worth giving him as much time as he needed to come to terms with an altered body and what it meant, or didn’t mean for him, I kind of thought that of course he must feel self-conscious. I was a little scared too, if the truth be told. He hadn’t had his prosthesis fitted. I was afraid, I suppose, of how it would look down there. Would I hurt him? Would he be able to do things the way he had done things? Would we do more damage? He was broken enough and I didn’t really want to break him anymore. So I never pushed him. I didn’t show my frustration. I settled for cuddles and kisses and kept my hands to myself where appropriate. All the while I missed him – I missed the intimacy. Here we were planning our wedding, sending out invitations and choosing vows and living like brother and sister afraid to look at each other the wrong way.
So when he kissed me on the doorstep, when I felt the difference in how his lips touched mine, how his hand moved from my face, down my neck, down my arms until he was holding my hands and pulling me closer to him – I knew. When he took the keys from my hand and opened the door, pushing it aside before taking my hand again and leading me through the door, I knew. When he closed the door and kissed me again, deeper this time, with that urgency I had needed so much, I knew. When he pressed me against the door, pressing his body close to mine, I felt my heart soar.
It had been a long time – a time where I had been patient but desperate. Where I had understood but where I missed the physical intimacy which had been such a big part of our relationship. Where I had felt him want me. Where I had felt loved on a whole other, amazing level. And that night, after we had our photo shoot and a drink or two and a lovely day in each other’s company, I felt loved on that level.
We fell into bed, moving gently, carefully, taking our time and taking care of each other. I cried. I’m not afraid to admit that and after, although everything was brilliant, we lay in silence. I could hear Paddy breathing, I could feel that his hand was shaking a little as I threaded my fingers into his. I was scared to talk, scared to ask him if he was okay. Scared to break the moment. I’d let him take the lead.
We lay for a while, in silence – until he kissed me on the top of the head.
“Erin Brannigan,” he said, “I cannot wait to marry you. I will love you every day of my life. I promise you this.”
It was then that I cried again – and when he was sleeping I got up, crept to the sofa, opened my laptop and started writing my first article for Northern People – about the man who had taught me to love again.
Chapter seventeen
Kitty
Rose was cleaning even though the kitchen didn’t need to be cleaned. She was doing a great job of smiling brightly – perhaps too brightly – as she rubbed the same circular patch of worktop over and over again. I lost count at the thirtieth circular motion. Daddy was sipping from a mug of tea which had to be cold by then. He had been nursing it for half an hour and I had counted him ladling four spoonfuls of sugar into it when two was his usual limit. He had a fixed grimace on his face which occasionally morphed into a vaguely twisted smile when Rose looked in his direction. My daddy didn’t still love my mother. He didn’t feel anything much for her anymore, bar some strange feelings tied in with the fact she was the mother of his children. I know he had taken time to trust again and even when he had met Rose and they had fallen in love and married, it had been a good while before he could feel secure that she wasn’t going to suddenly announce she was bored, needed space and disappear leaving him on his own with little or no warning.
Even though a long time had passed, even though we had all moved on, to have my mother walk back into our lives, to walk into my shop as if things were just fine and dandy and announce she was getting married and she wanted to buy a wedding dress from me – well, that was always going to put the cat among the pigeons. And we knew, as we sat in uncomfortable silence in Rose’s floral kitchen, that there was one pigeon in particular who was due to arrive at any minute and whose feathers were completely ruffled.
Rose had called her. After I had a small session of hyperventilation in the shop wondering how on earth I would break this news to Ivy, Rose had said there was no point in working myself into a state about how I was going to tell my sister and sure wouldn’t it be better just to get it over and done with so that I wouldn’t make myself sick with the worry of it.
“You’ve had enough to be worrying about these days. Ivy is a big girl. She’s a grown-up. How bad could it be?”
Rose generally knew what she was talking about. She generally didn’t get things wrong but on this occasion she was spectacularly wrong. Ivy swore, slammed the phone down, and we went home where we waited for her to arrive. With Rose’s over-exuberant cleaning of the worktops and Dad’s sipping of his cold tea, I felt as if we were on the edge of anIvy-shaped earthquake.
The door opened with a thud and Ivy, her cheeks flushed, walked into the kitchen. She looked at all three of us and said, loudly and not so calmly: “What. The. Feck?”
“Language,” Rose said absently, without thinking.
“English,” Ivy said petulantly.
“Watch how you speak to Rose,” Daddy said.
If I had closed my eyes I would have been back in my teenage years and this would have been a typical evening in our house.
“I can’t believe she’s back,” Ivy said. “And she’s getting married. And we’re supposed to be happy about it? Or you’re supposed to be happy about it? Because I wasn’t even important enough to be told in person.”
“It’s not like that,” I started, wanting to tell her that Mum had wanted in some ways to protect her feelings (not caring too much about mine, it seemed).
But she wasn’t for listening.
“No, it’s not like that, is it?” Ivy asked. “I don’t own a bridal shop. I can’t offer a discount on a meringue of her choosing!”
“Ivy!” Daddy said as I felt her words hit me square in the face.
“It’s not like that,” I said again, trying to find the words which would say exactly how I felt. Words that would make it sound like I was neither covering for my mother nor sticking up for her. I felt a knot in my stomach. I didn’t know what to say, or how to react. It was like this every time Violet reared her ugly head. I would feel torn between the fact she was my mother and despite my best judgement there would always be a bond between us that I couldn’t deny, and the
fact that she was perhaps the most selfish person in the entire universe and I actually disliked her greatly.
Ivy sat down – well, to be more precise, she threw herself down on a chair – and snarled in our direction: “Well, if she thinks I’m having anything to do with her and with this wedding, she is sorely mistaken.”
“I think she wants to make amends,” Rose said, trying to keep her voice bright and measured.
“She can want what she wants, but she sure as heck isn’t going to get it,” said Ivy. “Not from me. She can’t just sail back in and expect to play happy families – not after what she has done.”
“It was a long time ago,” Daddy said.
“No,” Ivy said, matter of factly. “It wasn’t. That first thing – that big old leave-your-family-and-clear-off thing – thatwas a long time ago. I could get over that.” Her voice was firm and quieter. “But not everything since. The lies. The disappointment. The not going to weddings. The excuses. The not caring. The refusing to acknowledge us beyond the odd card or reluctant phone call. The not wanting to be a part of our lives. The way everything she has ever done in relation to us has always, and every time, been on her say-so, when it suits her, never mind when it suits us, or we need her.”
“I haven’t needed my mother for a long time,” I offered and I saw Daddy flinch a little and Rose rub the worktop a little harder. I’d thought what I was saying would make them happy. I’d thought I was getting it right. I felt a migraine building and I couldn’t see how spending any more time in that kitchen, where everyone was glaring at someone who wasn’t even there and who was off planning her wedding and wondering just what kind of a discount I would give her on a designer dress, was going to resolve anything.
“I need to go home,” I said, standing up. “In case you aren’t aware, I have enough shit going on in my life right now without sitting here and rehearsing the whole ‘mother is a bad person’ argument again and I just can’t face it at this very moment, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Kitty,” Rose started, “look, stay. Don’t leave like this.”
“Let her leave,” Ivy barked, crossing her arms firmly in front of her chest.
Daddy didn’t speak.
“I’m not leaving ‘like this’,” I said, in his general direction. “I’m just leaving because I don’t want to think about it anymore and my head hurts.”
“I’ll get Cara to call over to you,” Rose said.
“I don’t need Cara. I don’t need anyone,” I said, as softly as I could. “I just need a couple of paracetamol, a dark room and some oblivion for a while.”
“Just run off then,” Ivy said.
I couldn’t help but bite back with a “Grow up, Ivy!”
Rose sighed and Daddy looked atthe floor and my headache threatened to make the small vein in my temple actually erupt.
I got into my car, swore as I crunched the gears and put the car in reverse and pulled out of driveway, only narrowly missing ramming right into the car parked opposite. Clutching the steering wheel while trying not to think too much about just how close I had been to a mighty big insurance claim, I took a deep breath and realised how my mother had done what she always did best – yet again. She dropped bombs into our lives and waltzed off – on this occasion to plan a wedding which she somehow expected us to happily be a part of.I needed a lie-down, and quickly, and I needed to keep it all together until I could get that lie-down because things were tough enough without a car crash adding to my woes.
I surprised myself by making it home in one piece, in spite of another near-miss at the newly installed traffic lights on the roundabout. I was never so glad to see my own front door and to open it to that lovely familiar scent of home and the sound of silence. Kicking my shoes off I walked up the hall and into the kitchen where I poured myself a tall glass of water and rifled in the corner cupboard of my shiny white kitchen for a packet of paracetamol. Holding the cool glass to my forehead I took several deep breaths before taking the two tablets and assuring myself I had every right, if I so wished, to take to my bed and not get out of there until the following morning at the very earliest.
And that is what I should have done. I should have ignored the blinking of my answer machine, knowing that nothing good could come of it. I should have known, given how things had gone up to that point, that it was one of those days which would have been better to write off as a non-starter. The thumping in my head should have been one of those kinds of karmic warning-signs that I should go to bed, directly to bed, and not interact with another human being until the fug of the day and its ill winds had passed. But I was nosy. It was unheard of for me to leave an email or text unread, a call unanswered or a message unlistened to. As it happened, there were two messages. The first was from James which sort of warned me about the second message. Which was from Mark.
He could have phoned the shop. He would have got me there, until five anyway. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t do it because that would have been the one way he would have had to say what he had to say to my face. He could have texted me, even, but again the response time would have been fairly immediate as Mark knew my phone was an integral part of my being. No, true to form, Mark left a message where he knew I wouldn’t get it immediately, where I couldn’t confront him immediately, where he wouldn’t have to take my raw anger and hurt without giving me time to digest all that he said.
It was his way. Any time we had any kind of disagreement he would do something similar, leave a message or a note and disappear off the scene for an hour or two to allow me to process where he was coming from. He knew I was a soft touch, a romantic at heart. He knew I didn’t like to argue – that I didn’t like tension. It was in a strange way kind of comforting that he returned to that same form, leaving the message on our machine. Our old habits hadn’t been completely annihilated. But it was strange – and uncomfortable – to hear his voice. The cheeriness was gone – that “I’m out on my own in a bar without the missus” joviality which I got from him that time he had answered the phone not knowing it was me on the other end. He sounded, well, kind of lost and my heart thumped. Every part of me – every part of me that loved him – every part of me that had felt he was the most important person in my life for the best part of the last decade – the part of me which knew our secrets, those thingsthat were just ours and no one else’s, just wanted to reach through the phone and pull him close to me. Without hearing the words he was speaking, the tone of his voice – the neediness from him – just made me want to let him know it was all okay. It would be okay. I thought of him – the him I knew and loved – the man who showed me his vulnerability – his loss and his weakness – and I wanted to bolster him up. I wanted to do all those things I had promised for him on our wedding day and in the years since. I felt my head throb, along with my heart, as my mind raced so loudly there was no way I could take in what he was saying. Beyond that one word – the one word which I needed to hear – I could not have told you a single word uttered from his mouth. “Sorry,” he started and a part of me started, rightly or wrongly, and probably very wrongly, to consider letting him back into my life again without even knowing if he wanted back in. He had the upper hand – I realised – and that scared me.
My head was now spinning as well as throbbing and my breathing was rushed. I wished Cara was with me. Or Rose. Or even Ivy, though I hated her at that very moment. I just wanted someone there to hold me up because without them I felt myself sliding to the floor and looking at the phone accusingly as if it had just opened some big Pandora’s Box of emotions I couldn’t deal with. Not on the day the woman who claimed to be my mother had shown up at my shop looking for a dress fitting, and not after I had spent a week in a stinking festering depressive coma in my father’s house.
My mind tried to piece it together. I thought of the message James had left me. He had been almost apologetic that he was calling me. It was strange, I supposed, given that he was Mark’s best friend and the pair of them had been
thick as thieves since the age of twelve, but I didn’t question it too much.
“I promised if I heard anything I would call you,” he said. “Well, I did hear something. He’s back. He called me earlier and he said he would be calling you too. I told him he was an arsehole. Just so you know. That he didn’t deserve you . . .” His voice had trailed off briefly at that point. I could almost hear the cogs in his mind turning. “He doesn’t deserve you, you know,” he said and then he had hung up and I had looked at the message indicator on the machine – the blinking light which let me know there was a second message.
Sitting on the floor, listening again, I smiled at James’ voice – at his concern. But I bristled at him calling Mark an arsehole even though the world and his mother could tell you that – Mark had indeed been a major arsehole. I pressed the button to listen to Mark’s message again – determined that this time I would actually listen to what he had to say. I would try and adopt my sensible head – and leave the reaction of my heart aside. I would force myself to listen to it rationally – to not think about how we had met, how we shared that first kiss on a moonlit beach in front of a fire he had built without the help of a lighter or a box of matches. I would not think about how he cried when he saw me walk towards him on our wedding day or how his smile would cause the corners of his eyes to crinkle. I wouldn’t think about the fact that even though he was eleven years older than he had been on the day I had met him, he looked as young and as handsome to me as he ever had done. More than that, though, to listen to him without my heart breaking entirely, I wouldn’t think about the fact he had left me, that he had walked away and that there had been someone else. I would just think about the man – the voice on the other end of the phone – and see if my gut told me what way to think and more importantly what way to feel.