A Part of Me

by Anouska Knight

  Phil looked to the stage. ‘Shh. Moan after.’ I looked around the crowd for another stockpiled waitress.

  ‘Ladies and gents, please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to one of The Attic’s most loyal talents … The Troubadour With The Tache, The Messy-Haired Minstrel … Isaac Carter!’

  CHAPTER 29

  I WOKE IN a surrealist landscape of geometric terry towelling. The patchwork of towels draped protectively over my surroundings told me I was in my mother’s home. A stabbing, shooting through my head made me shut my eyes quickly again, battening down the hatches before any more daylight could infiltrate my tender brain.

  I had the strangest taste in my mouth, salty and oceanic. I flopped a hand around on the bedside table next to me, stumbling across two little capsules. I squinted at them. Mum had a good bedside manner, to a point. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Nurofen were for my benefit, but Viv liked a person good and lucid before she delivered her ‘I have no sympathy, it’s self-inflicted’ speech. I slipped the tablets into my parched briny mouth and sunk the entire contents of the tumbler of water she’d also left there.

  Next to my face, PAID had faded to a pale blue inscription on my hand where I’d been stamped by The Attic’s doorman. A broken memory of standing centre stage holding somebody’s guitar crooning ‘I Will Survive’ sent my brain back into spasm.

  Lying there, I conducted a quick mental rundown of my bodily functions. The headache was a given, but I’d had worse hangovers. Just making it into a new day brought some comfort, at least I wasn’t still stuck in yesterday.

  The only reason Phil had even talked me into going to The Attic was because she’d turned up at my place just as I was making my way through the bottle of 1988 Krug James had been saving. Phil had only missed James by the time it had taken me to sink a few glasses of his vintage champagne and toast the changes I’d begun making to his favourite crappy artworks with my lipstick. It was childish but I was tipsy and on an adrenalin comedown, so hey ho.

  Phil hadn’t been there to see James slither home, a look on his face not of someone who felt regret or remorse, for me or our familes – or for Sadie, even – but the look of a tactician, of someone who thought there might still be a deal to be bartered with a weaker opponent.

  I’d been mostly sat there on the sofa since Anna had left, the sweet cup of tea she’d made for me cold on the coffee table. I’d been watching the way the sun moved across the garden, how it only just caught the edges of the sandpit in the far corner, waiting for something to suddenly shift and bend the light and finally bathe that area in warmth.

  James had moved silently across the lounge to press his shoulder against the French doors. He’d followed my gaze for a moment before clearing his throat, because he would lead this exchange.

  ‘This is such a mess,’ he’d quietly said to himself. He’d cleared his throat again as I’d waited for something more substantial. ‘She said she’d gone back on the pill, Amy. It might not even be mine.’

  When I’d looked at him then, I’d only seen Sadie – remembered the look on her face, the way her eyes had betrayed how James had abandoned her; how he had abandoned us both.

  I’d moved Jacob’s firebox from my lap then, before the shaking in my chest moved through to my arms and I couldn’t be trusted to hold it safely any more.

  ‘And if it is, James?’ I’d managed.

  His eyes had darted around the room before settling somewhere near my middle. ‘Then I’ll deal with it. It doesn’t need to mean anything for us, Amy. I can talk her around.’

  I’d almost heard the last thread binding me to James break then. That last fibre holding us together, giving up.

  ‘What? What did you just say?’

  James had looked as though it tired him to go through it all again. ‘She knows there’s no future between us, Amy. If she has that baby, she’ll be going it alone.’

  I’d moved a cushion over the firebox, burying it behind me. The shaking had advanced to my voice. ‘How can you, of all people, be so flippant? So selfish?’

  James’s silhouette had darkened as the sun outside intensified. ‘Flippant? Amy, I’ve messed up, I get it, and I’m sorry. I should’ve told you before Sadie did, but I thought—’

  ‘You thought you could contain your own mess, James. Bundle Sadie off for a quick fix before I was any the wiser.’ A new growling quality had laced my voice.

  ‘I never said I liked it, Amy. I’m doing this for us, so the panel doesn’t retract their approval.’

  ‘You’re not doing anything for us, you selfish shit.’

  ‘So what? You’d actually rather she had the kid? That’s what you want?’

  It might have been different had Anna still have been there. I might still have been the wimp I’d somehow become over those lost years with James and grabbed onto anything he had offered, before Anna had walked out of my house taking my chance of that little boy with her. But that had all gone now, and all there was left was the anger, punching through my chest.

  ‘What I want, James, is to share my life with people who are willing to give as much love as I am! Not flick me a few crumbs from the table and expect me to be grateful for them. Now get out!’

  James had dug his heels in. ‘Are you serious? I’m not going anywhere, I live here.’

  ‘Get out!’ I’d screamed. At some point I’d gotten to my feet, and before I knew what was happening a mug of cold tea had bounced off James’s head and exploded against the glazing behind him. There had been large sticky tan droplets slipping off his lying face when he’d brought his hands away again, an angry purple curve over his eye where the rim of the mug had left a smile there for me.

  He’d called me a few interesting names as he’d wiped at the tea dripping from his muddy blond hair, bursting into another fit of yelling as he’d ranted his way out of the lounge. He’d shouted something about me stupidly thinking I could do better – control-junkie that I was – with anyone else, as if anyone else would have me. But none of his words had their intended impact. Instead I’d basked in the rosy satisfaction that, for a change, James Coffrey hadn’t seen me coming.

  I had still been enjoying the aftertaste of my uncharacteristically good aim when James had revisited the lounge doorway, a bag of something frozen held against his eye. He’d hovered there just long enough to suggest I shack up with the disabled idiot, seeing as I was such a sucker for a bleeding heart.

  ‘Why don’t you go and adopt him? You bloody nutter!’

  It had hit me then, like a mug between the eyes, the last line of thought that I was probably ever going to share with this man before we parted forever.

  ‘We’re all disabled by something, James.’ The real trick was not allowing yourself to be disabled by another person.

  But that was yesterday.

  Even through the haze of this morning’s hangover, through the layers of crap the last few days had heaped on me, I knew that some of the decisions I’d made had been the right ones. It was almost bracing enough to get me out of bed.

  ‘You’re up, then?’ My mother’s disapproving form was looming in the doorway. The weight of my hangover suddenly tipped the balance again. The details of last night were a bit sketchy, not usually a good sign. I didn’t even know how I’d got here, and Mum could smell a hangover at a hundred paces. Groan. She was like a scary female prison warden about to ransack my cell for emotional contraband. Dignity, self-respect – the stuff she hoped she’d find in here but, after a night out on the lash with Phil, had absolutely zero chance of discovering.

  ‘Morning, Mum. Don’t suppose there’s any coffee going?’ I croaked, rolling my head over the end of the bed. The sick bowl on the floor didn’t look as if it had been entirely redundant through the night. The look on Mum’s face told me who’d been swilling it out between deposits for me.

  ‘Yes. There’s coffee downstairs, Amy. And I’ve made you a fried breakfast too.’ My stomach baulked. Don’t think about scram
bled egg. DON’T THINK ABOUT SCRAMBLED EGG!

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten thirty. Come on, the fete starts in two hours and after keeping me up half the night, the least you can do is come and support.’ My body went into a fit of cold shivers. ‘Come on,’ she demanded. ‘Downstairs. Or I’m coming back up to take photos on my new mobile phone.’

  ‘Ma, I’m sick,’ I said pathetically. She was already gliding down the staircase.

  ‘I have no sympathy, Amy,’ she called back up to the landing. ‘Self-inflicted.’

  *

  I was still wearing last night’s clothes. As if I didn’t feel gross enough. My skin wasn’t ready for a shower yet, even the gentle pattering of lukewarm water had a very fair chance of sending my fragile body into spasmodic shock. Steadily, I moved down stairs towards the aroma of the freshly brewed coffee.

  ‘Fifty pence a pod, these are,’ Mum said, plonking a mug onto the island unit in front of me. ‘Make sure you drink it.’ She moved over to the oven where something plated and foiled lay in wait.

  I picked up my coffee and hovered around the island unit where a montage of faces littered the worktop.

  ‘What are all these?’ I asked, picking through the portraits. They were mostly middle-aged, some blond, others brunette, all men. All posing. All posing men.

  Mum kept her back to me. ‘They’re men, sweetheart. Nothing to be alarmed about.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said weakly. ‘Why are they all over your kitchen?’

  ‘They’re profiles. In between ferrying the contents of your stomach back and forth to the bathroom last night, I printed off the best of the bunch. I thought you’d like to take a look.’

  ‘Best of what bunch?’ I realised my tights were missing. I fought off the panic that someone may have taken me to the loo last night.

  ‘Would you like this now?’ she asked, wielding the foiled plate like an assault weapon.

  ‘Best of what bunch, Mum?’ I repeated, a growing concern fruiting like a malnourished plant somewhere in the parched landscape of my mind.

  ‘I don’t think going out and getting yourself blind drunk is the answer to any of your problems, Amy.’

  It was the answer to being sober. I took a deep long breath and waited for the lecture. ‘I know. I hardly make a habit of it.’

  ‘I know your circumstances are slightly more … complex, than those between your father and me, but I understand how isolated you must be feeling, sweetheart.’

  She said isolated like it would be a bad thing. Isolation sounded ace right now.

  ‘What bunch, Mum?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be lonely, sweetheart. It can become, well, habitual if you let it. That was my mistake and I don’t want you to make the same one. So …’ She began faffing with the spotless sink. When she spoke again, she rushed it all out in one go, squashing her words together into one incoherent sound. She didn’t need to do that, they were flummoxing enough. ‘I’ve signed you up to Cupid’s Cohorts. These are some of them,’ she said, holding up a picture of a man I could only deduce had been photoshopped from a knitwear catalogue.

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘It’s highly recommended, Amy. I’ve done my homework. They’re all young professionals, like you. Looking for fun and companionship and,’ she held up another of the pictures, ‘something more serious,’ she read, turning the picture to reveal a short skinhead, a large fish dangling forlornly by its jaw from the end of his finger.

  ‘I don’t believe this. If it’s not Phil, it’s you!’ I tried to run my fingers exasperatedly through my hair, unusually voluminous this morning likely thanks to a good splashback of sambuca and a few head-shaky power-ballads.

  ‘Actually, Phil advised against it, if you must know. But then I shouldn’t imagine she’s ever had to go looking online. She had that lovely Isaac with her last night. They didn’t want to leave you alone so they very kindly brought you here for me.’

  ‘Carter was here? With Phil?’

  ‘Of course! Who do you think carried you upstairs? He’s very fit, you know. He didn’t even drop you when you were sick all over his T-shirt.’ I found myself hoping a hangover could be fatal. ‘Since when did you eat pickled cockles, Amy?’ Mum continued.

  I vaguely recalled having a little dance with the cockle man, and slurring something to Phil about trying something new. Then it hit.

  Luckily, my hand clamped over my mouth buying me enough time to get to the loo under the stairs.

  ‘I’ll pop this back in the oven then?’ she called after me.

  I was too old for this. Too old to behave this way. I needed to grow up, sort my life out. Where to start was a thought almost as nauseating as the sketchy flashbacks of my seafood odyssey.

  Content that there wasn’t anything else to rid myself of, I flushed the loo and washed my face and hands. Where I’d slept on my arm, several mirrored prints of the word PAID sat in various depths of blue over my cheeks. When the sounds of the flushing died down, I could hear Mum talking to someone at the door. I wiped the streaks of mascara from under my eyes and pleaded with the heavens that it wasn’t any of the WI she was showing in.

  ‘No, she’s been talking to Ralph on the big white phone. Haven’t you, sweetheart?’

  I glanced up at the kitchen doorway. It was always open on account of a sticky door frame, as Mum called it. Another job Dad had never done.

  A little girl was standing in front of the island, little legs peeking out beneath her pedal pushers and stray curls twisting free of her cycle helmet. The expression on her face made me wish I’d stayed in the loo and spared her the trauma. Rohan had his hand around Lily’s shoulder, relaxed and fresh-faced in his open pale blue shirt and battered khaki combats.

  ‘Amy? I said your friend has stopped by to see that you’re all right this morning. Isn’t that kind?’ Mum said. Rohan seemed to be considering the dishevelled mess in front of him. Lily looked like I’d just beamed down from the planet Zog.

  I watched Mum walk up to Lily. ‘Amy’s been a naughty girl,’ she said, chewing back a smile. ‘She’s been out playing and didn’t go to bed when she was supposed to.’ Rohan seemed particularly impressed by my bed-hair.

  ‘I’ll bet you go to bed when you’re supposed to, don’t you, poppet? So you’re nice and fresh for the next day?’ Lily began nodding at my mother, responding as all children did to Mrs Alwood. ‘Can she have a biscuit, Daddy?’ Mum asked Rohan. Lily was chewing her finger, hoping for a yes. Rohan nodded.

  ‘Hey,’ I managed feebly, maintaining a safe breath distance. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘He could ask you the same thing, but we won’t go into that,’ my mother chimed in as Lily fished in the biscuit jar.

  ‘Lils wanted to say thanks. For the other night.’ He turned to check Lily over the other side of the island with Mum. ‘Sorry, I’m Rohan. I don’t think I said that, at the door.’ He smiled, holding out a hand for my mother. The brilliance of Rohan’s smile affected her instantly, a blush rising in her cheeks.

  ‘I thought so. I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr Bywater. And who’s this?’ she asked, smuggling Lily another biscuit.

  ‘This is my daughter, Lily,’ he said, pride rising in him.

  I caught sight of the stack of creepy profile pictures between them. Mum’s eyes followed mine. She was about as subtle as an ocean liner, clumsily gathering them together as Rohan watched. He turned back to catch me bulging eyes at my mother.

  I smiled meekly. ‘How did you know I was—’

  ‘Carter and Phil.’ He smiled cautiously.

  ‘You saw them last night?’ I asked.

  ‘This morning. Phil stayed over in the boathouse.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yeah, they’ve been … getting along.’

  ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, still trying to get my head around it.

  ‘Like a moth to a flame.’ Rohan smiled.

  ‘Poor Carter,’ I acknowledged.

 
‘I was talking about Phil. Carter’s got skills, you know.’

  ‘Well, I think he’s a splendid chap,’ Mum added.

  Rohan idly ran his hand through his choppy dark layers. ‘We have something for you,’ he said, turning for the box behind him. ‘Well, Lils picked it out. To say thanks … for coming to our rescue the other night.’ He smiled crookedly and let his hand run over to the back of his neck. ‘I know it’s not what you might have chosen, but when we went for Lil’s car seat, we grabbed a few other things and she said you’d like this one.’

  Lily, her understandable caution of me allayed with a chocolate bourbon, toddled round to take the box from her father. She lifted the flaps and pulled out a shiny pink bike helmet.

  ‘Oh! How lovely!’ Mum said, stuffing the dating profiles into one of the drawers.

  ‘Do you want to come for a ride with us today, Amy?’ Lily asked, holding up the helmet for me.

  I tucked clumps of matted hair behind my ears. ‘Wow, Lily. Is this for me?’ She bobbed her head, her own helmet falling forward on her. ‘Thank you, Lily. This is really kind of you.’

  ‘Daddy said you might come if you have a hat for your bike,’ she said.

  Rohan laughed uneasily. ‘It’s a beautiful day out there. We were wondering if you’d like to take a ride with us along the footpaths around Briddleton?’

  ‘You’ve cycled here? With Lily?’

  ‘I bought her a kid seat. It’s fixed to Cart’s mountain bike. It’s pretty good, actually, but er … I’m a bit nervy in case I fall off or something.’

  Small electrical impulses were shorting across my body. Maybe my systems were slowly rebooting. ‘I’ve seen what you do on a bike upside down mid-air. I think you’ll be okay on a cycle path.’ I smiled.

  His eyes narrowed a little. ‘Thought maybe you could be our wing man?’