by Beth Moran
‘Woah,’ Bronwyn gasped, around a mouthful of walnut muffin. ‘Did they reinstate the money?’
Mel’s shoulders slumped. ‘Nah. Said they couldn’t, their hands were tied. But one of the women and the man interviewing me cried while they said it. And one of ’em slipped a card in me pocket with the number for a discrimination lawyer.’ She blotted one eye with a napkin, leaving a smear of sugar from her doughnut across her cheek. ‘As if I could afford a lawyer, when I can’t even spring a taxi for something as important as Tate’s therapy. As if I could find the time and energy to fight this, in between hospital appointments and meetings and cookin’ and cleanin’ and carin’ for four wild and crazy kids along with my severely disabled son.’
‘Oh, Mel, the whole thing stinks,’ Bronwyn said, coming around the table to hug her friend.
‘Yeah, it stunk even more when I snuck in and stuffed Tate’s dirty nappy behind the radiator in the office of the boss woman who shoved Tate’s case notes at me and said if it was that important I’d find a way.’
We laughed at that, long and loud. Sometimes life is so darn stinky you have to laugh, or else you’ll never stop crying.
‘What about when Greasby pool reopens?’ Bronwyn asked, after we’d dried our eyes and recomposed ourselves. ‘Where we’re doing the triathlon. Will Tate be able to do hydrotherapy there?’
Mel shook her head. ‘I’ve already asked ’em. With all these cuts, it can barely afford steps, let alone a hoist.’
‘That’s total crap,’ Bronwyn announced, her Welsh accent deepening with passion. ‘It’s plain idiotic. It’ll cost far more to treat Tate’s condition if it worsens than pay for a hoist, surely? You should write to our MP.’
‘Our MP thinks people like Mel should get a job and pay for their own taxis,’ I said. ‘We’d be better off raising the money ourselves.’
‘Amy!’ Bronwyn rounded on me, her enthusiasm loud enough to catch the attention of the remaining Larks who’d not slipped off to enjoy the rest of their Sunday yet. ‘You’re a genius. Let’s do it. Did you hear that everyone?’ she called across the café. ‘Amy’s had a fab idea. We’re going to run and swim and whatever else it is you do in a triathlon to raise money to get a hoist for the new Greasby pool, so Tate can still do his hydrotherapy even though the government’s stolen his taxi money off him.’
Um, are we?
‘You’d better get one of them fundraising web pages sorted, Ames.’ Bronwyn winked as the café erupted into excited chatter. ‘We can get it out there on social media. Maybe tell the Nottingham Post?’
‘Or the radio?’ someone else suggested.
‘What about Notts TV?’ Dani chipped in. ‘They’re always looking for local-interest stories.’
‘There you go, Mel.’ Bronwyn grinned. ‘We’ll have a hoist sorted in no time.’ She took a satisfied slurp of coffee. ‘What are we looking at, anyway? What does a decent hoist cost? Only the best for Tate.’
Mel cleared her throat. ‘Well, the best one’s a PoolPal…’
‘So how much?’
‘Thirty-thousand pounds.’
‘Right.’ Bronwyn downed the rest of her coffee and stood up. ‘I’m off. I will say this before I go though: you’ve got guts, Amy, to take on a project this size. I wouldn’t have thought you’d got it in you, but I stand corrected. Total respect, and we’re with you all the way. Go Tate!’
She whirled out the door in a gust of wind, leaving me gaping and gibbering in her wake.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mel said. ‘She’ll have forgotten about it by next week. You don’t have to do this.’
The trouble was, I looked in her eyes as she said it. A mother, on her own, like me. Who’d made mistakes, like me, with gargantuan consequences. Who would swim down to the depths of the ocean, cycle up to the moon if it would help her child, if it would help make his life less bone-grindingly tough and bring some much-needed happiness into it instead.
‘I know.’ I smiled. ‘But I want to.’
Mel dabbed another sprinkling of sugar on her face – both cheeks, this time.
‘I’m not doing any press, though,’ I added. ‘I can organise it, but I’m not appearing in the paper or on the radio. And definitely not on television. You can do that bit, show everyone how gorgeous Tate is.’
‘Oh, come on now, Amy.’ Dani stopped on her way out and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Don’t you want your fifteen minutes of fame?’
‘I most definitely do not. Fame’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘I’ll do the media side of things if Amy doesn’t want to,’ Selena said from the table behind us. ‘I mean, for little Tate, of course. Someone has to do it, and it might as well be someone with no—’
‘Brain?’ Dani muttered as she made to leave.
‘Capacity for human kindness?’ Mel whispered, eyebrows raised questioningly.
‘Chance of actually donating any money herself unless she has something personal to gain from it?’ Dani added, earning herself a discreet high-five from Mel before she sashayed off.
‘Confidence issues,’ Selena finished abruptly, sensing that she was the butt of a joke but not sure what it was.
‘Please, feel free. I’m well aware that I’m nowhere near confident enough to be on television,’ I replied.
Marjory peered around Selena’s brittle ponytail and winked.
Oh boy.
Despite all the buzz about Bronwyn’s idea, which had somehow in everyone’s head become my idea, I made it outside while it was still twilight. Bright enough to give myself a complimentary pat on the back, while still dark enough that I could wrestle my anxiety back inside its cage without too much trouble.
Also dark enough that when a shadowy figure loomed out of a doorway at the edge of the square, I let out a strangled squeal, jumped about eight inches off the ground and felt exceedingly fortunate to have emptied my bladder only moments before.
‘Audrey! What the hell?’ I felt almost pleased to see her, so relieved at it not being a man in a baseball cap. ‘It’s not okay to jump out at people in the dark.’
She stood in front of me like a mousy-haired mountain. ‘Should I have hidden in your rhododendron bush instead?’
‘I don’t have a rhododendron bush,’ I responded, feebly.
‘This will have to do, then.’
We stood there and glowered at each other, as the sun inched closer towards the horizon, and Selena inched closer to leaving the café and finding her daughter lurking in a doorway instead of in bed with a migraine as she’d been led to believe.
‘Have you told anyone?’ Audrey said, eventually.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Really?’ She narrowed her eyes.
‘I know what it’s like to be gossiped about. And who you choose to spend your time with is none of my business. I’m not going to mention it to anyone.’
One eye unnarrowed itself a micrometre.
‘I promise. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to be your friend, Audrey. Which, if successful, would make the grand total of my friends four. I really don’t have the capacity for enemies.’
‘If you told the other Larks, then it would be a funny story and you’d make more friends. Nice ones.’
‘The kind of people who would want to be my friend because I told them the private business of a fellow Lark for a cheap snigger do not count as nice.’ I rubbed my face, exasperated. ‘Look, I have to get back. All you can do is take my word for it. But if I was going to tell them, surely I’d have already done it. There’s Mel leaving, why don’t you ask her?’
Audrey shifted from one foot to the other, still unsure. Then, her gaze focused on someone behind me and a hint of a smile twitched at her pale lips. ‘If Nathan heard you’d been spreading rumours, he’d think you were a right bitch. Probably ask you to leave the Larks. Definitely stop giving you the special treatment.’
‘Okay, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it makes you feel better to th
ink you’ve blackmailed me into not spilling your secret, rather than choosing to believe I’d not say anything because I’m a decent person with a shred of integrity and not, actually, a right bitch, then… Whatever, Audrey. I’ll see you around.’
And with that retort reverberating around the square, I stomped home and proved I wasn’t a right, or a wrong, bitch by emailing Sean and telling him he could communicate with his abandoned son, as long as he had a phone conversation with me about it first.
An almost instant reply. Did this man do anything apart from sit at his computer waiting for emails to ping through?
It asked if I would be prepared to meet him face to face.
What!?
I answered almost as quickly, before I had time to think about it:
How? Aren’t you in the US?
Three seconds:
I can be in England in ten hours. Just tell me when and where.
Don’t even go there, I instructed my non-bitchy self, who was starting to seriously waver. No point wondering why, if it’s that easy, he hasn’t been here before. Count to ten, think of Joey and be prepared to give him a chance to explain.
Joey speaking to Sean on the phone, messaging – even FaceTiming was bad enough. Meeting face to face? That was a completely different level of stress migraines, queasiness and spiralling day-mares. Sean, here, all real and hugging Joey and taking him to places I can’t go and telling him things that I can’t like, ‘Call me “Dad”!’ and ‘I’m proud of you, son,’ and being actually, really there.
It was my worst nightmare. And I’ve got some bad ones.
Joey’s dream come true.
I might not be able to sleep, eat or think straight until it happened, and possibly not until he was safely back on the other side of the Atlantic, but it was time to get over my own fears and harrowing memories and put my son first.
I would give Sean Mansfield a chance to meet the child he abandoned. But I decided to wait a bit longer than ten hours before I told him when and where.
32
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Seventy-Four
Monday afternoon, I spent a jittery one hour, thirteen minutes and four seconds in the back garden. It was a glorious new stage of the Programme: Time Outside During Daylight. To begin with, I pressed myself against the wall of the house and simply waited for the ground to stop spinning like a demented merry-go-round. But after a while, I noticed a humungous dandelion growing in a bare patch of dirt near the back fence. Inching towards it, arms out for balance, because planet Earth was clearly moving faster than usual that day, I wobbled down to a squat and yanked it out with a satisfactory cloud of damp soil. But there, a couple of feet away, was another one. Hardly a surprise. Cee-Cee had always tidied up the garden, and the weeds weren’t going to pull themselves up out of respect for her memory.
I sucked in a nose-full of wet earth, mingled with the scent of rotting leaves. Stood up again and observed how the light reflected off the droplets still clinging to the grass, the richness of the autumn foliage – so many shades of orange and gold, bronze and russet. Sunshine yellow and deep chestnut brown. There was a slug on the concrete fence post. Fat and glistening, its back patterned like the bark of a tree. If I focused in small, to about a square foot, I could do this. If I gave myself something to do, kept my mind and my eyes and my hands working together, I could block the anxiety, keep it waiting at the top of the slide into panic.
And I did. For nearly fifty minutes, I pulled weeds in my little haven. Cee-Cee had kept shears and a fork in a small storage box in one corner, and once the weeds were mostly gone, I started pruning back the bushes. Whether they needed pruning, or how to prune them, I had no clue, but the point was I had both feet firmly planted on outside territory, the gentle kiss of November sunshine on my skin, and I was, quite literally, reclaiming ground.
Until, suddenly – maybe I’d simply used up my courage for that day – I couldn’t. Unable even to divert the few feet to put the shears back in the box, I bolted inside, slamming the door behind me.
Still, I reflected later, when safely under my duvet, it was a magnificent step forward. That brief time outside had begun restoring something askew in my soul. Working on something tangible, soaking up the sunshine, marvelling at the vibrant colours of the plants, the details in the leaves and bright contrast of the berries had been like a balm to my frayed heart. The air felt different in the daylight. Clearer. Richer. More alive. And, to my joy and wonder, in a deep, soft place below the buzz of the anxiety, I had felt those things, too.
I was roused from my brief celebratory snooze by the thumps and crashes of multiple hungry teenagers marauding through the house in search of snacks. Hauling myself out of bed (being brave apparently used up a lot of energy), I tidied myself up and went to say hello, dodging the mound of giant school shoes and black rucksacks in the hallway.
‘Mum, have we got more popcorn?’ Joey yelled.
I followed the scent of hormone-infused body spray into the kitchen. ‘Hi, Joey, how lovely to have you home. How was your day? Oh, and I’m great, thanks for asking.’ I grinned at the other boys. ‘Hey, everyone. Popcorn’s in the cupboard where crisps used to live. Are you guys okay?’
Joey’s swim club friends were all various stages of okay, ranging from ‘sound’ to ‘awesome’. I began hustling them into the living room, so I could get some admin done at my desk, but while they were still bottlenecked in the obstacle-ridden hallway, I heard one ask, ‘Did you tell your mum about the scout?’
The hair on the back of my neck pricked up. No offence to the others, but there was only one member of the Brooksby swim team worth scouting. And he’d already been scouted by the best club in the region.
‘Shut up,’ Joey hissed. I poked my head round the kitchen doorway and found him shoving the others into the living room as fast as he could. ‘Of course I haven’t. Stop stirring.’
He banged the door shut, muffling the sound of boy banter, and I hesitated for only a moment before settling down to my accounts. Pursuing this now might mean a better chance of finding out the truth from the other boys, but then secrets might end up being revealed on both sides. And mine would result in far wider consequences.
I could grill Joey once his friends had left, inviting accusations of earwigging and potentially a total clam-up. Or, I could try another tactic altogether.
I’d barely spoken to Nathan the day before, since he’d arrived at the café just as I was leaving. But when he texted me that evening, it made my cheeks warm up and a tiny sparkler fizz away inside my heart.
I made myself wait one minute and thirty-five seconds before I read the text. There is no significance to that number, except that ninety seconds seemed reasonable and it took another five seconds for me to stop fumbling with my phone and open the message.
You snuck off yesterday without arranging challenge 2. Feeling chicken?
* * *
Feeling busy! I had to get home for a conference call.
Yet you had time to stop and chat to Audrey. Or should I say CLUCK to Audrey?
* * *
Ha ha (if I knew what emoji indicated sarcasm I’d add it now – as I don’t, I’m sending this one of fries as I’m guessing that will irritate you the most), I’m not discussing our challenge in front of the Larks. We’d never hear the end of it.
* * *
What’s it to be, then? Lunch in the café?
I thought about that. I desperately wanted to conquer spending some daylight hours in public, after my victory in the garden. But there was something I wanted – needed – to conquer more.
I want to watch Joey train. From the right side of the window.
A speedy response:
Cool. Tomorrow evening?
* * *
Okay. And we’ll go somewhere random and spontaneous afterwards. My choice.
A much slower response to that:
Deal.
* * *
It might require a sh
irt. And non-trainers. I haven’t decided yet.
* * *
I’m looking forward to it
(a row of chicken emojis).
I could have asked Nathan about the scout, but I didn’t want to go behind Joey’s back if I could help it, especially when his relationship with Nathan meant so much. And I was the expert here on sussing out a scout. I’d go along to training, find an inconspicuous spot to spy from and draw my own conclusions.
Well check me out! All going along and drawing my own conclusions! Goodbye begging for scraps of Cee-Cee and Joey’s conclusions and good riddance!
33
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Seventy-Five
The following morning, I phoned Antonio Galanos, Head of the Notts County Council leisure department, and introduced myself. Mr Galanos fussed and fawned and waffled on about all the amazing shiny new facilities at the Amelia Piper Swimming Centre, and how he really hoped I would be their guest of honour at the grand opening and I was very welcome to bring my family and friends along, they would have a wonderful time and be very well looked after.