The Marriage Mender

by Linda Green

‘Nothing can upset me,’ Jayne said. ‘Not today.’

  Chris smiled at her. ‘Ali says your daughter’s expecting.’

  ‘Yes. In February. Everyone was saying it would be my first grandchild, yet all the time I knew that might not be true. Then, when I saw the photo of you and Matilda …’

  Jayne’s voice broke off again. I looked at Chris. We’d agreed we would tell her about Josh today. We didn’t want to hide anything from her any longer.

  ‘Matilda wasn’t your first grandchild, actually,’ said Chris.

  Jayne looked across at him, the frown momentarily back on her face. I realised that she might be thinking we’d lost a baby or something.

  ‘Chris has a son from a previous relationship,’ I said quickly. ‘His name’s Josh.’

  ‘Oh. How old is he?’

  ‘He’s sixteen.’

  ‘So does he live with you or his mum?’

  ‘He lives with us,’ said Chris, ‘only not at the moment.’

  Jayne was still looking at him. As was Bob.

  Chris fiddled with his watch strap before continuing. ‘He ran away from home,’ he said. ‘About six months ago. His mum walked out on him when he was a baby and I brought him up on my own, but she came back last year and that led to a lot of problems. And then she told him I wasn’t his father.’

  ‘What an awful thing to say,’ said Jayne.

  ‘Yeah. He was gone the next morning. We’ve since found out that she was lying but, well, the damage had already been done.’

  ‘So you’ve no idea where he is?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Chris. ‘He could be anywhere.’

  ‘And he hasn’t been in touch at all?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He took his phone and his iPad with him. His girlfriend and I have been emailing and texting, but we’ve heard nothing back.’

  ‘Does he know that it was a lie?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, his mum even emailed him to apologise,’ I said. ‘Although, of course, we don’t know if he’s actually reading his emails.’

  ‘Have you emailed him?’ she said, turning to Chris. ‘To tell him that he is your son, I mean.’

  ‘No, not directly, everyone else got in first.’

  ‘Well, I think you should,’ said Jayne.

  Chris raised his eyebrows, clearly taken aback by her directness.

  ‘He needs to hear it from his father. He thought he wasn’t yours. He’s lost, you need to reclaim him.’

  Chris looked down at his hands. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I do.’

  * * *

  We stayed longer than I thought we would. Long enough for two rounds of tea and biscuits. Jayne had a biscuit barrel like Barbara’s. It was strange, two people who were so different, who’d had such different lives, but who still shared the same taste in biscuit barrels.

  When it was time to say our goodbyes – or rather, our ‘au revoirs’, as Jayne put it – she held Chris for a long time before she let him go.

  She turned to me afterwards. ‘The last time I said goodbye to him –’ she began, before her voice broke.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But that’s not going to happen again. We’ll see you very soon. You can come to ours next. Meet Matilda, if you want.’

  Jayne nodded. ‘I’d like that,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you. And I hope you get Josh back soon.’

  I nodded and kissed her softly on the cheek.

  Bob shook my hand and then patted it gently. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for everything. You’ve made her one very happy lady.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘She deserves to be. And thank you for standing by her.’

  ‘It’s what you do, isn’t it?’ shrugged Bob.

  ‘No, it’s what you did,’ I said. ‘And not everyone would have done that.’

  We got into the car, waved the obligatory number of times as we reversed down the drive, turned round and finally pulled away. I imagined Jayne standing there, tears rolling down her face. Bob holding her, patting her hand and seeing her safely back inside where he’d no doubt put the kettle on.

  I glanced at Chris. He was staring straight ahead. His eyes still moist.

  ‘You needn’t have worried that you wouldn’t feel anything, then.’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.

  * * *

  I spent a long time putting Matilda to bed that night. Lingering over the bedtime story, snuggling with her under the duvet, listening to her ramblings about what kind of frog Kermit might actually be.

  She may have been our only child, but she’d never really been an only child because she had Josh. That was why we’d never had another one. There was no need, we already had two children. Only now, we didn’t. Well, it didn’t seem like it, anyway. Certainly not to Matilda.

  ‘Where do you think he’s sleeping?’ she asked.

  I knew better than to ask who she was talking about. I always understood who ‘he’ was referring to.

  ‘He might have got himself a little flat,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t they cost a lot of money?’

  ‘He’d be renting it. I expect he’s working.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, you need to work to be able to afford a roof over your head.’

  ‘What if he hasn’t found a job?’

  ‘I don’t know, love.’

  ‘Will he be sleeping on a park bench like Mr Stink?’

  ‘No, sweetheart. There are hostels for people who can’t afford somewhere of their own.’

  ‘What are hostels?’

  ‘Big rooms where lots of people can sleep, maybe on bunk beds.’

  ‘Urrgh. Who’d want to share a room with my smelly brother?’

  I smiled at her, imagining how much Josh would be missing that kind of taunt.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll have made some friends,’ I said.

  Matilda nodded and twiddled a strand of hair. ‘He won’t have got a new girlfriend, though, will he?’

  ‘No. Caitlin’s his girlfriend. You like her, don’t you?’

  Matilda nodded. ‘And I don’t want my violin lessons to stop.’

  * * *

  Chris was sitting in his usual place at the kitchen table when I came down. It was a wonder Matilda hadn’t drawn a picture of him yet with his head sticking out of the top of a Mac.

  I glanced at the screen as I walked past. It wasn’t the usual Missing People website, though. It was an email. One that started ‘Dear Josh’.

  Chris stood up. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ he said. ‘Can you read it and tell me what you think?’

  I nodded and sat down.

  Dear Josh,

  I’m sorry I haven’t written before. Ali’s so much better at it than I am that I tend to leave it to her. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for being crap.

  Anyway, something happened today to make me realise I should have done this a long time ago. I met my birth mother. Grandma and Grandad adopted me when I was a baby. They told me when I was Tilda’s age. And later, when I was about thirteen, they told me why I was adopted. I was an abandoned baby. I was left outside a doctor’s surgery after I was born. It’s a pretty tough thing to find out and it screwed me up a bit when I was a teenager. Actually, it screwed me up a lot and not just when I was a teenager. It probably explains a lot of things I’ve said and done that I shouldn’t have, and a lot of things I haven’t said and done that I should have. That’s not an excuse. I’m just saying. But I am sorry I never told you or Ali. I’d told your mum about it and then she’d walked out on you as a baby. So I got it into my head that if I told anyone else they’d walk out on me too.

  Grandma finally told Ali about it when she was mad at me for missing Tilda’s birthday party (I couldn’t bear to be there because I was scared of losing her too). And Ali was brilliant, as she always is, and persuaded me to go to counselling with her. We’d been having problems because I blamed her for letting you see your mum, and I wouldn’t talk to her about how I felt (yes, I know, ‘Loser’). Anyway, not long a
fter that, one of Ali’s clients revealed that she had abandoned her baby outside a doctor’s surgery in Halifax when she was sixteen. She’d run away from home to have me after she’d been raped by her brother-in-law. Which, again, is a pretty tough thing to hear.

  So that was how I found her. Or rather, how Ali found her. Her name’s Jayne. She’s a nice lady (although she won’t have heard of any of the bands you like, and I have a sneaking suspicion she votes Tory). And the first thing she did when I told her about you was ask if I’d written to let you know that you are my son.

  So, here I am. I think your mum has already told you this, and I know Ali and Caitlin have told you too, but I’m going to say it now. I’m your father. I always have been and I always will be. And when your mum said that I wasn’t, it was the scariest moment of my life. Because of all the people I couldn’t bear to lose, you come top of the list. I still remember the day when I came home from work and found you alone and screaming in your cot and I knew at that moment that whatever I’d felt for you before was nothing to what I felt then, or what I would feel the next day or the one after that.

  We’ve been through so much together since then. Somewhere deep inside I still knew I was your father, but when you left I realised that you weren’t sure who you were any more. And because I know exactly how that feels, it hurt really bad and made me doubt myself.

  I’m glad your mum set the record straight. But even if she’d been telling the truth the first time, it wouldn’t have changed anything for me, least of all how much I love you.

  It was pretty emotional to meet Jayne today, and I’m hugely grateful to her for sacrificing so much for me, but she’s not my mum. Grandma is. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t my blood relative, in the same way that it wouldn’t have mattered if you weren’t my blood relative. Not to me, anyway.

  But it turns out that you are my son, in every sense of the word. And the hole you have left in my life, in all of our lives, is so massive that even though we have pretended to go on with our lives, everything actually stopped the day you left and won’t start again until you come home.

  Tilda misses having a big brother to annoy, Ali misses having the piss taken out of her about her cardigans, and I miss being able to hang out playing guitar with my best buddy and pretend I’m a hell of a lot younger than I am. You have a grandma who can’t bring herself to say your name because it hurts so much and a girlfriend (I truly have no idea how you managed to land such a bloody amazing girlfriend) who sits in your room every week to feel close to you when she comes to give your little sister a violin lesson. And now, you also have another grandma who, though she’s never met you, has already started worrying about you.

  When you’re ready, Josh, your family is waiting for you.

  Love,

  Dad

  I wiped the tears away and turned round to face Chris, who was standing in front of the Aga.

  ‘Is it too long?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘Good. Then press “send” for me, please, before I chicken out.’

  * * *

  Tania smiled at us as we entered her room. She also raised her eyebrows slightly as Chris strode in and sat down, pulling up the sleeves of his jumper as he did so.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘how are we today?’

  ‘We’re good,’ Chris said. ‘We’re fighting.’

  ‘Not fighting each other, I hope?’

  ‘No,’ said Chris with a smile. ‘I mean, I’m fighting. And I think I’m finally on the same team as Ali.’

  ‘Well, I’m bloody glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘What brought this on?’

  ‘A few home truths from Jayne, my birth mother.’

  ‘You see,’ said Tania, turning to me, ‘we go to all this trouble with our training and qualifications when all they actually need is a kick up the arse from their mum.’

  I smiled at her. Chris smiled too.

  ‘I’ve emailed Josh,’ he said. ‘Told him everything. Particularly how screwed up I was with the whole identity thing.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll come home?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s up to him. But at least he knows I care now.’

  ‘And what about your birth mother? Are you going to see her again?’

  ‘Yeah, I am. We’ve invited her round for Josh’s birthday.’

  Tania raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Matilda wanted to do it,’ I said. ‘We think it’s important for her that we mark it, rather than pretending none of us are thinking about it.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chris. ‘I mean, it’ll be tough and everything, but I’m going to be there this time. I’m not going to leave Ali to deal with it on her own.’

  Tania turned to look at me. ‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. And what about the two of you? What happens now?’

  ‘We struggle on together,’ I said, ‘just like everyone else.’

  ‘No happy-ever-after glitter dust?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a bit more talking. A bit more understanding.’

  ‘A bit more sex, hopefully,’ said Chris.

  I smiled at him and shook my head.

  ‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Tania. ‘Someone being embarrassingly honest in the counselling room. So what do you think is the best way forward now?’

  ‘We go away and work at it,’ said Chris. ‘Ali knows someone I can go and see to talk through all my stuff.’

  ‘And you’re prepared to do that?’

  ‘Yeah. We’re going to start looking around at houses too. We’re not going to put ours on the market just yet, we’re not sure it’s the right timing for Tilda, but maybe next year, when things have settled down a bit.’

  ‘And do you promise to love and cherish this woman and tell her all the stuff that’s going on inside your head, even when it’s dark and scary?’

  ‘I do,’ said Chris.

  ‘And do you promise to love and cherish this man and take your mind off everybody else’s problems long enough to remind yourself what a top catch you are?’

  ‘I do,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘Marvellous. I’m very happy to pronounce you in a better state now than when you first arrived. You may kiss your spouse.’

  I turned to smile at Chris. He got up, walked over and kissed me on the lips right in front of Tania.

  ‘Thank you both very much,’ she said. ‘If you do wish to come and see me again at any point, I’ll be here for you. In the meantime, please bugger off so I can help the poor sods who are quaking in their boots in the waiting room out there, having no idea what they are letting themselves in for.’

  Chris shook Tania’s hand and thanked her warmly. I gave her a hug, unable to manage any words.

  ‘Now go,’ she said, shooing us away, ‘before you make my mascara run.’

  I followed Chris out of the door. The couple in the waiting room were younger than us. I recognised the expressions on their faces. I smiled at them as we walked past.

  ‘She’s good,’ I said to them. ‘A bit off the wall, but good. You’re in very safe hands.’

  I’m not a food snob, not in the slightest, and it’s not like I’m one of those people who won’t ever eat processed food, but I asked her one day if she’d mind getting something a bit healthier for my sandwiches than Dairylea, and she said, ‘Of course, love. I’ll get some Dairylea Light.’

  31

  I woke up. The realisation of what day it was and who wasn’t there to celebrate it crushed me the instant I opened my eyes. One year ago, I would never have imagined how an empty room in the house could make so much noise. But then, one year ago I didn’t know a lot of things.

  It was a bright morning outside. The sun was already forcing its way through the curtains. I turned to look at Chris. I hadn’t realised until that point that he was awake too.

  ‘Did you get any sleep?’ I aske
d.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right, does it? Without him.’

  Chris shook his head. ‘Do you think it ever will?’

  ‘I don’t know. I remember reading an interview with a woman whose son had been murdered. She said it was still the first thing she thought about when she woke up and the last thing she thought about at night. But that, in between, there were sometimes periods when she’d go for a few hours without thinking about it.’

  ‘I know it sounds awful,’ said Chris, ‘but at least, if you know what’s happened, you can mourn. This not knowing, it’s horrible.’

  ‘He would never have –’

  ‘No, I know. I’m sure of that too. Well, as sure as I can be, anyway.’

  ‘Where do you think he is?’

  I’d never asked the question before. Nor had Chris, although I suspected he thought about it as much as I did.

  ‘A big city somewhere, I guess. One that he can lose himself in.’

  ‘That’s what Jayne did,’ I said. ‘After she left you. She got on a train to Leeds.’

  Chris was quiet. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I eased my body closer to his, wrapped my arm around his chest.

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ said Chris. ‘That both of them ran away from home when they were sixteen. Both because of me.’

  ‘Both because they loved you,’ I said, rubbing my hand up and down his arm.

  ‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘It’s the only way.’

  Chris kissed me on the shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Being bloody brilliant and putting up with me.’

  ‘You’ve been through an incredibly tough time.’

  ‘Yeah, and so have you. But no one’s been there for you, have they?’

  ‘They are now, though,’ I said. ‘That’s what matters.’

  He kissed me again. On the lips this time. ‘So how are we going to do this?’

  ‘We’re going to get up and deal with it together and simply get through the day the best we can.’

  We were interrupted by the sound of Matilda bursting out of her bedroom. She didn’t run straight into our room, as she usually did. It was another door that we heard opening and shutting first, before a small, forlorn face appeared in our room, looking much as it would do if Santa hadn’t come in the night.