The Marriage Mender

by Linda Green

  So I turned to him and said, ‘No, they won’t do. They won’t do at all.’

  2

  I should have realised that Matilda would say something. She lulled me into a false sense of security by chatting away about a random selection of innocuous subjects on Sunday morning without so much as a passing reference to the present.

  But as soon as Josh appeared in the kitchen she chirped up, ‘A lady came to the house yesterday with a massive present for you.’

  Chris put his mug down heavily on the table.

  Josh looked at him. ‘What lady?’ he asked.

  ‘The pretty lady with long dark hair,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Oh yeah, I know loads of those,’ replied Josh.

  ‘You do know her. Mummy said you and Daddy knew her years ago.’

  Josh turned to look at me. There was no way we were going to hold this conversation back until the evening.

  ‘Right, Matilda,’ I said, deciding a diversionary tactic was needed, ‘hadn’t you better go and get ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘Swimming. Daddy’s taking you to the family fun session.’

  ‘Yay!’ said Matilda, throwing her arms around Chris.

  He looked up at me, no doubt ruing the loss of his Sunday-paper-reading time but also realising what I was trying to do.

  ‘Yep,’ he said, taking a last slurp of coffee, ‘and if you get a move on, we might even have time to go to the scooter park beforehand.’

  Matilda disappeared to her bedroom and returned with her swimming bag and scooter helmet in record time.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Chris, bending to give me a kiss, ‘I’ll see you later.’

  I could hear the tightness in his voice as he said it. He looked at Josh – a slow, regretful look – and patted him on the shoulder before he left. A forlorn gesture, but a gesture all the same.

  Quiet descended on the house.

  Josh sat down at the table. ‘So who’s the woman?’

  I sat down next to him.

  He knew about his mother. Chris had answered the inevitable questions when he was growing up. He had photos of her somewhere that Chris had given him when he was younger, feeling the need to make her tangible, so she wasn’t up there with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy as someone you couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain existed, because no one had ever actually seen them.

  I had no idea if he still looked at the photographs. If he thought about her, wondered about trying to find her one day. I’d done my best to fill the gap but I’d never tried to replace her. I’d always been Alison to him, not ‘Mum’. And here I was, about to bring the past crashing rudely and unrequested into his present.

  ‘It was your mum.’

  I said it as gently as possible, but sometimes words weigh so heavily that it doesn’t matter if you breathe them out, the impact is still the same.

  Josh stared at me, his mouth gaping open. ‘My mum? She came here? Why?’

  ‘To see you, Josh. She wanted to give you a present.’

  ‘But she hasn’t wanted to see me for like virtually my entire life. Why is she bothered now?’

  The hurt was seeping out of him. Collecting in a pool under his chair. I wanted to hug him to me, as I had done when he was younger, but I wasn’t sure if I could do that any more.

  I squeezed his arm instead. ‘It doesn’t mean she wasn’t bothered, Josh. Maybe she had problems to sort out.’

  ‘Must have been bloody big problems to take nearly sixteen years to sort …’ He sat quietly for a bit before curiosity got the better of him. ‘What did she say? Did you see her?’

  ‘Yeah, I answered the door. She seemed fine. A bit nervous, but that’s hardly surprising. She said there’s a note inside the card with the present. She asked that you read it.’

  He said nothing for a few moments. His brow was furrowed, his hands clenched. ‘Where is it? The present, I mean.’

  ‘It’s in the hall cupboard. Would you like me to get it for you?’

  He nodded. Like Edmund being offered Turkish delight by the White Witch and knowing he shouldn’t take it, but being unable to resist.

  I brought the present in and laid it on the kitchen table. Josh didn’t open it first, though. He took the envelope off the front and tore across the top. The card had an arty, graffiti-style ‘Happy Birthday’ on the front. He opened it; the letter fell out on to his lap.

  He sat there for a minute looking at it, picked it up and put it down again before passing it to me. ‘Can you read it, please?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded. I opened the pieces of paper. I was struck instantly by the writing. She wrote in what appeared to be a black fountain pen. The letters were tall and beautifully formed with flourishes on the loops. It looked like a work of art, not a hastily scrawled note.

  ‘ “Dear Josh,” ’ I began, ‘ “you probably hate me – if you know I even exist, that is. I understand that. I wish I could explain why I did what I did, but I’m not sure I can. I’m not going to try to justify it and I don’t want to make excuses. All I’ll say is that I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. I was pretty messed up. And the trouble with being messed up is that you do things you should never have done and then afterwards, when you’re not so messed up, you wish you could take them back. But you can’t, and nor can you explain to the person you hurt why you did it.” ’

  I glanced over at Josh. He was sitting staring at his hands. He nodded for me to continue.

  ‘ “What I want you to know is that I didn’t get in touch because I thought it would be best for you, not because I didn’t want to. I’d already screwed up big time and I was worried that, if I came back, I’d do the same thing again. And I knew that your dad would be doing a brilliant job of looking after you.

  ‘“But I don’t want you to think that I didn’t get in touch because I wasn’t thinking about you. I’ve thought about you every single day since I left. That’s why I wanted to give you this present now, on your sixteenth birthday. Because I always vowed that I would and that it might help you to see that I was thinking about you all the time, even when I wasn’t there.

  ‘“If you’d like to meet up, or speak on the phone, that would be fantastic. But don’t feel you have to. I understand if you don’t want to see me, but always know that I am thinking of you and that I love you.” ’

  My voice caught as I read the last line. I’d never hated her. How could I, when I hadn’t known her? I’d hated what she’d done. Hadn’t been able to understand how she could have done it. But at that moment I simply felt sorry for the woman who had poured her heart out to the son she had never known. Although not as sorry as I felt for the son who was sitting before me, crumpled and contorted with emotion.

  ‘Come here,’ I said, pulling him to me. Stroking his hair, kissing him gently on the top of his head as his shoulders shook beneath me.

  ‘She’s not my mum,’ he sobbed. ‘I mean, how could she do that to a baby? It’s not right. Not right at all.’

  ‘Sometimes, love, people do the most awful things. Things you can’t begin to get your head around. I hear about them all the time. People who come to see me who’ve behaved in such a bad way to the very people they say they love the most.’

  ‘And do the people they say they love hate them?’

  ‘Sometimes they do,’ I said. ‘But often they love them too. There’s a thin line, as they say.’

  ‘Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders,’ said Josh.

  I managed a smile. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d know that one. My era, really.’

  ‘She’s class,’ said Josh.

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘Your mum looks a bit like her. Dark hair and eyes, dead slim.’

  Josh nodded. I let go of him.

  He sat and thought for a bit. ‘Dad doesn’t want me to see her, does he? That’s why he got you to talk to me.’

  ‘Your father wants what’s best for you. He’s a bit shaken up, that�
�s all. He wasn’t expecting her to turn up like that.’

  ‘And what about you?’ asked Josh. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it should be up to you. And I’ll understand if you do want to see her and I’ll understand if you don’t. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you. We both will.’

  Josh put his head down and sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All these years it’s been like she never really existed. It’s so weird to think I could get to know her. I’m not sure if I want to, though.’

  ‘Take some time, then. You don’t have to make your mind up straight away. See how you feel in a few days.’

  Josh nodded.

  I got up to put the kettle on. ‘Are you going to open it, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, turning back to the present on the table. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  He picked it up and unpicked the tape from one end, sliding the paper off the large cardboard box beneath. It was a widescreen television box. For a moment I thought that’s what she’d got him. I was wondering where the hell we were going to put it. And then he opened the box and took something out and I saw that it wasn’t a TV at all. It was a red guitar. An electric one. Like the one we’d got him, only better.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Josh. ‘Look at this.’

  He pointed to a scrawled signature in black marker pen on the front. Above it, I could just make out ‘To Josh, London’s Calling!’ followed by a signature.

  ‘It’s Joe Strummer’s guitar,’ said Josh, his mouth gaping open. ‘She’s given me Joe Strummer’s fucking Fender Telecaster.’

  For once I ignored the language. In the circumstances it was probably justified. She’d managed to give him the one thing which would now make it very hard for Josh not to want to meet her.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘How could she have got this?’

  ‘Your dad said she used to work in music promotion. One of the big record labels, I think.’

  I could almost hear the cogs going round in Josh’s head.

  ‘She got him to sign it for me,’ he said. ‘Even though she hadn’t seen me since she left. She still got him to sign it for me.’

  I nodded and smiled. Realising at that point that Josh was lost to her. And there was nothing we could do about it.

  * * *

  Josh was upstairs in his room playing the guitar when Chris and Matilda came home. Tom was up there with him. Josh must have texted him. He’d come round pretty sharpish.

  It was Matilda who realised first. She never missed a thing. Her brow furrowed as she looked at Josh’s guitar from us, which was lying on the sofa.

  Her head spun round, the ends of her still-wet hair flicking water as she did so. ‘What’s he playing?’ she asked. ‘That’s not his guitar.’

  ‘No. It’s a different one. He’s playing it with Tom.’

  ‘So did Tom bring it? Has he got one too?’

  I hesitated. Chris looked at me. He twigged before I said anything. I could see it in the way his eyes darkened.

  ‘Er, no. It’s his. It was the present the lady brought round yesterday.’

  ‘So he’s got two guitars? Can I have one, then? Or just borrow his when he’s playing the new one?’

  ‘Maybe ask him nicely, later, if you can have a quick turn.’

  ‘I want to ask him now.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Grandma’s coming round soon. Why don’t you put on a DVD while I finish cooking?’

  She ran over to the TV without another word. Chris followed me into the kitchen, shutting the door behind us.

  ‘Great,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I suppose she thinks giving him a guitar will make everything OK.’

  ‘Look, I need to tell you something,’ I said. ‘It’s not just any guitar. It’s signed by Joe Strummer.’

  He stared at me as if he thought I was having him on for a moment. His jaw set with the realization that I wasn’t.

  ‘It’s signed “To Josh”,’ I continued, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  He frowned again. It clearly didn’t fit with the scenario he had in his head.

  ‘It must have been within a few years of her leaving, then,’ he said. ‘He’s been dead a good ten years or so.’

  ‘She wrote a letter,’ I said. ‘It was in with the card. Josh asked me to read it to him.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘That she never stopped thinking about him. That she screwed up and wants the chance to put things right but that she’d understand if it’s too late.’

  Chris blew out and sat down next to me. ‘Has he said what he wants to do?’

  ‘He’s pretty mixed up. I suggested he take a few days to think about it. I suspect the guitar’s probably swung it, mind.’

  Chris nodded. Put his head in his hands.

  ‘They might only meet up once,’ I said, rubbing his shoulder. ‘Maybe she simply needs to get it out of her system.’

  ‘No,’ said Chris, ‘that’s not Lydia’s style. All or nothing. That’s how it is with her.’

  ‘I still don’t think we can say no,’ I said. ‘He’s sixteen. We couldn’t stop him. And I’d rather not try if it’s going to push him away. We need to be here for him. Need to let him deal with it in his own way.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say.’

  I looked down at my hands. He was right, of course. I’d never met the woman until yesterday. I hadn’t been the one she walked out on. The one who’d brought Josh up single-handedly. Who’d made so many sacrifices that I didn’t know where to start.

  ‘No one’s taking him away from you,’ I said. ‘She can never compete with what you did for him. But at the end of the day she’s his mother. It’s natural that he’d want to meet her, even if it’s just out of curiosity.’

  Chris shut his eyes and bowed his head. I put my arms around him. Pulled him in to me.

  ‘OK. I guess we’ve got no choice,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, knowing that although he was doing his best to sound reasonable and rational, inside he must be feeling anything but. ‘Right. Well, I’d better get on with dinner,’ I said, squeezing his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll give Mum a ring,’ said Chris. ‘See what time she wants picking up.’

  ‘She said she’d come by bus.’

  ‘I know. But it’s started to rain. You know how slippery the cobbles get.’

  * * *

  By the time Chris arrived back with Barbara, Tom had gone home but Josh was still up in his room. Matilda had built some kind of set for The Muppets movie in the hallway and was busy perfecting her Miss Piggy voice.

  ‘Grandma!’ Matilda yelled as soon as she heard the key in the door.

  I hurried out from the kitchen as she leapt at Barbara, almost knocking her off her feet.

  ‘Steady, please,’ I said, wiping my hands on my apron before taking my turn to give Barbara a hug.

  Her cheeks were soft and downy. She looked like a grandmother should. She smelt like a grandmother should. She was everything a grandmother should be, to be honest. I wished I’d had one like her. Or a mother like her, for that matter.

  ‘Hello, love. Summat smells good. Just what I need to warm me up, turned a bit nippy out there, it has. Autumn’s proper on its way. I always say it starts on Josh’s birthday. We’ve hardly ever had his party in the garden. Once when he were a wee lad, I think. One of those Indian summers we don’t get any more.’

  ‘Well, the kitchen’s nice and toasty. You come and warm yourself up. Matilda, will you pop and tell Josh Grandma’s here, please?’

  Barbara slipped off her sensible lace-ups and went through. I glanced at Chris. The darkness hung heavily over his eyes. I realised he still hadn’t seen Josh since he’d been told.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I whispered. ‘Remember, nothing’s changed. Not really.’

  He nodded, although he didn’t appear convinced.

  I followed Barbara into the kitchen. She was warming her bottom against the A
ga. She had a jumper and a cardigan on. In the summer she swapped the jumper for a blouse but she never went without the cardigan.

  ‘Chris was quiet on way over,’ she said.

  I busied myself stirring the gravy while I worked out how to reply. Barbara wouldn’t eat anything without gravy on it.

  ‘It’s a big thing, your son turning sixteen. A whole new set of stuff to worry about.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry about Josh, though, is there? He’s a good lad.’

  I smiled at her and nodded. I heard Josh come down the stairs two at a time and run into a Kermit and Miss Piggy ambush. Chris was now hovering in the doorway, seemingly unsure which side was safer.

  ‘Let me see the birthday boy, then,’ called out Barbara.

  Josh came through, squeezing past Chris without making eye contact, and gave Barbara a hug.

  ‘Eeh, you definitely look older. It’s downhill from here, you know. You’ll have wrinkles like mine before you know it.’

  Josh kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Happy birthday anyway, love,’ she said, her eyes sparkling as they always did in his presence. ‘And I’m told you haven’t opened my present yet. Must be getting old, then, if you can contain yourself.’

  Josh smiled.

  ‘It’s in the other room,’ Matilda piped up. ‘I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll all come through. Just for a few minutes, and then lunch will be ready.’

  We followed Matilda through to the lounge. The present was on the coffee table. I knew exactly what it was, because we’d bought it. Barbara always gave us the money and asked us to get something Josh really wanted.

  He peeled off the wrapping paper. His face lit up.

  ‘It’s an iPad!’ squealed Matilda.

  ‘I have no idea what you do with it but I were told you really wanted one,’ said Barbara.

  Josh gave her a big hug. ‘I did. Thank you. You can go on the internet and use it to take photos and all sorts. I’ll show you, if you like.’

  ‘It’ll have to be after lunch now,’ I said.