Little Big Love

by Katy Regan

  The toast pops up, making me jump, and I smear it with so much butter that it gathers in a pool on top like a flooded field. I eat both slices quickly, the butter deliciously salty, running down my chin; the toast soggy and golden just as I like it. But the anxiety is still there, making it stick in my throat. Zac’s sleeping upstairs; I know that tomorrow I’m probably going to have to answer more questions about his father and I don’t know what I’ll say. Was he a waste of space? I didn’t used to think so—I used to think he was fucking magnificent! I couldn’t believe he was mine. But what am I supposed to think, Liam Jones, when you’re not here to answer for yourself? To answer the millions of questions I have carried around with me for a decade: What really happened that night—why did you start a fight? Were you always like your father and I was just too blind with love to see it? Why did you never contact us or fight for us? Did you ever really love me? Most of all, did you not wonder how your son was? You spent two loved-up weeks with him. Has there not been a gaping hole in your life without him—like there has for me, without you?

  It’s nine thirty. I put the telly on to distract me, but nothing holds my attention; there’s still this horrible clenched-stomach feeling and I know resistance is futile. This is what worry, heartache, whatever you want to call it, does to me—it tricks me into believing that I’ll die from it if I don’t extinguish it, like a blanket over a fire; numb it with food. So I go into the kitchen intending to make one more slice of toast, only to emerge, half an hour or so later, having eaten three more, and almost a whole garlic baguette that I cannot, for the life of me, even remember putting in the oven. I’ve really gone and done it now, so I may as well go all the way, is my thinking. So then it’s a massive piece of Viennetta with truffles on top and it’s like I’ve eaten that in a trance too, because by the time I’m licking the bowl clean with my finger, I’m so appalled with myself, I consider making myself sick. The thought passes, however; clearly I’m not quite appalled enough with myself. So I switch the telly back on to try to distract myself again. But there’s nothing on, and there’s at least an hour before I can really call it bedtime, and I feel this chasm of misery and loneliness open up inside of me, like some huge realization has taken place, a devastating one, that I can’t pinpoint and don’t really understand—perhaps like the first few seconds you wake up the morning after someone you love has died: it hasn’t hit you yet, but you know it’s coming.

  I remember there are two cans of lager in the fridge, and so I drink them, sitting by the table, by the glow of the fridge, not even bothering to put the kitchen light on. So then I suppose I’m a tiny bit drunk, which may be why I do what I do next, which is go upstairs. I’ve no full-lengths in the house, but I’ve got a medium-sized mirror that shows you up to your middle, and another similar-sized one in the bathroom. And so I lean one against the radiator in my bedroom and the other so that it balances on top, leaning against the woodchip. If I stand back far enough, I can just about see the whole of me. I want a fat-shaming party, all on my own. So I take off my sweatshirt first and stand in my bra. It’s not too bad from the front, and I still go in and out where I’m meant to, I suppose. I still look like a woman, albeit a soft and rounded one, wider than the picture I’d had in my mind but nothing worse than I suspected. But then I take off my jeans so I’m standing just in my underwear and I turn to the side and take off my bra. I gaze at my reflection, forcing myself to really look. It goes in and out all right, but those are the rolls of back fat, two or three of them hanging over the back of my ribs, like extra fabric I’ve slung over my shoulder. My stomach is blue-white, not having seen the sun for several years, and hangs over my knickers like an apron. I try pulling it in with my so-called stomach muscles, but still it hangs, like a big, fat apology, and I lean forward, just to offend myself more, really, letting it all hang out, like a giant udder that doesn’t even look like it belongs to me. If I gather it with my hands, I have enough skin and fat to cover a small child.

  Sometimes I wonder whether Liam has ever looked me up on Facebook, like I have him (he’s not on there; he obviously does not want to be found), seen the size I am now, and thought he’s the one to have had the lucky escape, not me. Then again, I was never slim and I wonder if all that time he was going out with me he never fancied me anyway. All that time he said I looked beautiful pregnant and even before then, when he always said he loved my curves, was he bullshitting me? It would make sense. He left with so much ease.

  After I had Zac, even though I loved him from the word go, physically things were hard, especially in that first week. I got mastitis, and Zac wouldn’t feed, then my stitches (from the second-degree tear—Zac was a ten-pound baby) got infected. But Liam was so tender to me, so loving. I’ve never felt as secure as I did during that time. I thought nobody could ever love me that much. But now I wonder, when he laid warm flannels on my sore, hard breasts, when he held me as I cried and half laughed, with that awful dragging pain below, and said, “So, Liam Jones, do you still fancy me now?” and he answered, “More. I fancy you more,” did he out-and-out lie to me? Did he go off that night they were meant to be just “wetting the baby’s head,” get so drunk and start a fight because he felt trapped and frustrated all of a sudden? A dad, at twenty-one, when all his mates were still free and single.

  He had a wobble when I found out I was pregnant. We were so young—me twenty, him twenty-one—and it was such a shock that we didn’t see each other for a week and Mum said, “I told you, Juliet, that he wasn’t up to the job. If you want to know the measure of a man, just look at his father. Liam’s the same as Vaughan.” Liam was always so honest, though, and when we met up again he admitted he was scared he wouldn’t do a good job as a father—he never lied about that fear. But he said he loved me, and he was standing by me, and that he’d do everything in his power not to repeat history. And we hugged and I was reassured rather than put off by his honesty, because that was Liam—he never put on a front. He wore his heart on his sleeve. But now I wonder if Mum was right: he was simply never up to the job. Or, more to the point, it was a job he didn’t want.

  “Jules, don’t you think we better take the washing in before we light the barbecue?”

  It still, ten years on, makes me smile when I think of Liam saying that. It was hardly a memorable line—it wasn’t a declaration of undying love, or particularly funny—but it’s the line I play over and over, that rolls around my mind, flooding it with long-lost love, because it epitomizes Liam at that time, in those weeks. It encapsulates the man and the father he’d become immediately when Zac was born.

  He was standing in my parents’ kitchen when he said it, Zac in a sling on his chest, chopping cabbage for his homemade coleslaw. Zac was ten days old, and friends and family were coming round for a barbecue.

  I laughed at him. “Who are you?” I said, wedging myself between the worktop and Zac, putting my arms around the both of them. “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle?” He drew back to look at me, pushing my hair from my face, like he always used to, with his big, soft hands. His dark hair hung over one eye, and the sun that bounced off the shiny metal of the barbecue we’d bought that morning from B&Q—a gift to Mum and Dad and a show of our official adult status—was shining straight into his eyes, showcasing the yellow around his pupils, and I remember thinking how happy I felt. And how handsome he looked. Even more so with our baby strapped to his chest.

  “What?” he said, half laughing, half affronted I was taking the piss out of his show of domesticity. “I don’t want his onesies to get smoky. I’m just being sensible. Someone’s got to be.” And he was right, that’s the thing. He had become the sensible one, the homebody who seemed to have taken to this parenting lark like a duck to water, while I was still finding my feet. At that time, it felt like Liam had waited his whole life to say lines like “we’d better take the washing in.” That he’d grown up not knowing that sort of cozy domesticity, ever, and that he was reveling in it.

  But now, even ten years on, I just
can’t marry these two men: the one that talked about bringing in his baby’s clothes in case they got smoky, and who stood chopping cabbage on a Saturday afternoon, and the one that started a fight so bad it ended with my brother dead and him disappearing off the face of the earth—never to see his son again.

  Feeling masochistic now, I take the mirror on top and turn around and hold it in front of me so I can get a view of my back, the whole of the back of me, massive arse and all, in the mirror that remains on top of the radiator. That’s when the tears come, because it isn’t necessarily the size of me or even the spare flesh. It’s the condition of everything: the cellulite that puckers my buttocks so that they look like two sacks of porridge; the sagging and the dimples and the fact that I look like I’ve tucked this body into trousers and bras and under clothes for years, without considering it or caring for it or even looking at it properly for a decade. I am thirty-one years old with the figure of a woman twice her age. My mother has a better body than me. And I begin to sob my heart out then, but not just because of this body. In another time in my life, say, in those few elated days after I had Zac and I was also big, I was only too happy to have an apron hanging over my jeans because of what it meant. But this, it means something different.

  You see, even though I’d never admit this, I’ve always thought I was slightly better than the people on this estate; that this phase of my life was just that, a phase, and that I was destined for better things and belonged somewhere else, that Zac and I would find our way back. That I would even one day find my way back to college—do that teacher training course; be a role model for my son. I’ve always thought, I love my boy so much and that’s enough, but it’s not, is it? It’s not enough just to love them; you have to guide them too, and be strong. And I’m not strong, I’m weak—that’s what I see when I look in the mirror. I’m no better than lots of people on this estate. I’m in the same bloody mess as they are.

  There’s only so long you can emote, I suppose, before you’re just exhausted, and I finally flop into bed about eleven, allowing the dark to cocoon me and the thoughts to flow.

  Growing up, our lives revolved around food. We commiserated, celebrated, and, yes, comforted ourselves with food. Dad never went to sea on a Monday because it’s considered bad luck (don’t ask me why—fisherman folklore), which meant that sailing day was often a Tuesday, which in turn meant that on a Monday night there’d be a feast: toad-in-the-hole, Mum’s meat loaf, egg and bacon pie … There’d always be a fat pudding—a trifle or a tiramisu. Mum even said it was to fatten Dad up before he set off for his three weeks in the deep waters of Iceland or Greenland, where he sustained himself on rum and cigarettes—but it was doubtless to comfort herself too, for the fact that she’d be once again on her own, worried that this time he might not come home.

  Once he’d gone, the baking as a means of distraction would start: pies and flans and cakes and crumbles … Mum says my brother was never happier than when his hands were in a bowl of flour, but I’d say the same of her. Mum would know beforehand if it was to be a good landing, and, if so, she could get a loan partway through from the dock office and she’d inevitably bring home some food-based treat to celebrate after our poverty the week before. Then of course there was the homecoming meal, for which Dad would invariably turn up late, stinking of beer, bringing packages of cod or scampi from the catch as a peace offering. Money may have been tight, but food never was, in the fishing community. If Dad was out of work or had made a few bad trips, then other skippers and deckhands, not to mention lumpers, filleters, anyone who knew him, would leave anonymous fishy packages on our doorstep: haddock, pollock, even lobster.

  So there was always food, and I was probably always a glutton waiting to happen; it’s just that vanity saved me from getting too fat. That, and love. But when I feel sad or lonely and it’s late at night, I decide I might as well be temporarily happy with half a packet of biscuits—a coping mechanism that started when Jamie died and Liam left. I did it to fill the empty, gaping hole in my heart, but of course it was never enough. Nothing could fill it, and instead it’s like the more I eat, the more life eats me up.

  Have I comfort-fed Zac? I’ve certainly wanted to comfort him. But mainly I’ve eaten to comfort myself and he’s just come along for the ride.

  This is the first time I’ve thought about it like that. And now, I commit it to paper. Zac’s fat because I’m fat. And I realize I owe him, big time. I’ve not been the best mother. I’ve already disappointed him with the news I didn’t love his father, after all. Don’t I owe it to him to at least give him more to go on in terms of who his dad was? Aren’t I, as his mother, the best and only person to do that for him?

  11

  Mick

  It’s Tuesday—a Zac day, a favorite day—and he and I are sitting watching telly together. We like nature programs the best: The Blue Planet, The Life of Mammals, Planet Earth … And this is “Planet Zac and I.” It’s our thing we do. It has its rituals, our telly watching: We both have a cup of tea and usually a slice of cake that Zac bakes with Lynda when he gets home from school—and I always sit in my armchair. Zac sits on the side of the couch nearest to my chair, so it’s almost like we’re sitting together. Up until he was about seven, he used to sit on my knee, or wedge himself between my thigh and the arm of the chair, and twiddle my earlobe—his equivalent of a comfort blanket. Now he’s much too big to sit on his grandad’s lap, and I miss those times terribly—the physical closeness, his pudgy skin, my nose in his hair that’s just like our Jamie’s used to be: straw colored and coarse as a bog brush. Still, sometimes he’ll reach over—as he did just now—and just hold my hand. Often I’ll get a hug for no reason. And it’s in those moments that I think how nobody tells you, not just that you love your grandchildren as much as you loved your own, but that they love you back—so much, so intensely—at least mine does. And in those first, wonderful seconds of a hug, I think how this is the greatest pleasure, the loveliest surprise of my life. And then I remember all I’ve done, my reality, and it becomes the greatest pain. Always so bittersweet. So when I say, cheerfully, “Hey, what have I done to deserve this?” I’m really asking myself that question—and falling short.

  *

  • • •

  WHEN YOU’RE A recovering alcoholic, you live your life according to two coexisting timelines. There’s the one on the surface, the one most ordinary people (that is, nonaddicts) live their lives by: what I did today; what I’ll do tomorrow; what I did last week … Then there’s the other timeline. It’s tucked behind your heart, deep, deep inside yourself, all coiled up in angst, and it’s all about right now: right now I’m not drinking; right now I’m doing okay. If I can just put one foot right now in front of the other and go on like that, then I’ll continue to be okay.

  I’ll be nine years sober this summer and still, I can’t see a time when I won’t need to live my life by that latter timeline. If you were to unwind it from its coil and stretch it out, it would be the tightrope that I walk every day, so easy to fall off, and yet so far to go. Will I ever have another drink? I believe that I won’t. But I don’t know I won’t. And that, for me, is the scariest thing in the world—except losing Zac, and my family, but I should have thought of that before.

  *

  • • •

  ZAC GASPS SUDDENLY and moves to the edge of his seat. “Oh my God, Grandad—look how big the baby elephant is! How can that have come out of …”

  I’m chuckling. “What? The mum elephant?”

  We’re watching Zoo Babies—another of our favorites. Lynda rolls her eyes as she fusses around us, plumping cushions, tidying away plates. She’s constantly busy. It’s how she copes. “You two, honestly,” she says. “I’ve never known a pair so soft.”

  “Well, it’s only the same way you came out of your mum,” I say. “We’re all just mammals at the end of the day, Zac. We enter this world in the same way.”

  He looks at me—eyebrows raised—as if to say, Too mu
ch information, then goes back to the program, but I know what’s coming.

  “Grandad, tell me again. The story of when I was born.”

  “Oh no, not that again.” (I’m only teasing; I like it as much as he does.)

  “Yes! That again.”

  And so I tell him how I burst out crying when I first saw him (he loves that bit—the little egomaniac) and how the first day he was home from hospital, he started screaming blue murder and nobody could soothe him. But how I picked him up and he stopped, just like that.

  “And what did Nan say?” he says, grinning, even though he knows the answer; he’s heard it a hundred times before.

  “She said, ‘Honestly, will you look at that! Pity you weren’t so good with your own kids.’” And Zac giggles, as he always does.

  I don’t tell him how Lynda had added, “I was going to say that’ll be the brandy on your breath, but I can’t even say that anymore.” Zac knows nothing of my alcoholism. He doesn’t know how five months prior to his birth, I’d gone cold turkey after a lifetime of drinking.

  Things had reached a head that Christmas—2004, when after I’d been down the boozer for ten hours straight, Lynda dragged me out of there and delivered her final ultimatum: It’s the booze or us. Juliet was about halfway through her pregnancy then, and I remember Christmas Day, as I sat sloshed at the table, watching her go to and from the kitchen, helping her mum, my little girl about to become a mum herself, and I thought, Enough, I can’t do this anymore. Aside from initially coming off the booze (that first time around, I managed to do it without AA), which was torturous, I can’t deny it, those few months that followed were probably the best of my life. I’d always believed so much happens in the pub, when you drink, but so much more happens when you stop. Everything was illuminated, as if a dimmer switch had been turned up on my world. Colors were brighter, smells more vivid; thoughts were so clear I could almost watch them. Small miracles, all of a sudden, turned up everywhere I went and the simple pleasures were mine for the taking again: the way the sun passed beneath the clouds, lighting up the old dilapidated buildings by the dock, restoring them to their former glory; the way it lay down on Blundell Park pitch, making Grimsby Town players look like megastars; the sea air; the cry of gulls. I’d missed it all for so long.