‘Come to Dee Nee.’
Jewel actually holds out her arms and goes to her, but as soon as she’s in Denise’s arms she realises what she has done. She looks to her mother uncertainly and the frown appears, the flared nostrils, the obvious distaste and disgust of anyone and anything that is not her mother. The irritated sounds start. Denise stands up. The legs start to kick out, frantically. Socks hang on for dear life off the tips of her toes.
‘Look there’s Mama. Mama’s still there.’
Jewel’s sounds of irritation and distress stop, but the face is still on, in full force. She’s not sure about what’s happening here but she’s quite sure she doesn’t like it. Maybe.
‘Hi, Mama.’ Denise waves, and encourages Jewel to do the same. Jewel waves. She brings her on a little walk around the dining room. And then to the TV room. But as soon as she goes to the kitchen out of Ginika’s eyeline, the horror movie screaming starts. Ginika stands up.
‘Leave her for a moment,’ I say. ‘Let Denise deal with it.’ It pains Ginika to leave her but I’m firm. ‘We can finish this section off tonight.’
The screams, the yells, the absolute piercing hysteria echo around the house interwoven with Denise’s gentle soothing voice, songs, and chatter, and I can tell that Ginika’s barely able to concentrate on what I’m saying or the textbook in front of her. But I continue, push through the wall of noise hoping we can get past it.
I call out some words and Ginika writes them down.
‘Where did you and Gerry go on honeymoon?’ Ginika asks suddenly.
‘I think we need to focus on the work, Ginika,’ I say brusquely. But she won’t. I have taken her child from her and she is irritated by the lack of control. I push her forward. She pushes back.
‘You said in the podcast that Gerry sent you and your friends to Lanzarote because you were going to go there on your honeymoon.’
‘Yes.’
She puts the pencil down. ‘So why didn’t you go there? Where did you actually go?’
‘Somewhere else,’ I say, handing her back the pencil.
She fixes me with a strange look, unhappy with my response. Here she is raw and vulnerable and I won’t answer her questions. I sigh and begin to explain, when she holds her hand up to stop me. She cocks her ear and listens.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t hear anything.’
It takes me a moment to realise that Jewel has stopped crying, that in fact it has been silent for a few minutes. Ginika jumps out of her seat.
‘It’s OK, Ginika, I’m sure she’s fine,’ I say, reaching out to her, but she moves quickly, away from the table, through the kitchen and straight upstairs. I follow her, holding on to the banister and hopping behind her as fast as I can. Ginika doesn’t wait, she rushes ahead of me up the stairs. I find her standing at the door of the small spare bedroom, blocking my view. Breathless, I peek inside. Denise is sitting up on the bed, against the headboard, her legs out before her, staring out the window, with Jewel fast asleep on her chest, wrapped in a blanket. The room is dark, lit only by the street lamps that shine inside. Denise looks at us, confused as to why we’re staring at her.
‘Sorry,’ she whispers. ‘Was she not supposed to sleep? It’s late, she seemed tired.’ She looks at Ginika and then to me, worried she’s upset the mother.
‘No, it’s great,’ I say, grinning. ‘Perfect, Denise, well done.’
I go to lead Ginika away, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t seem pleased.
‘We have to go,’ Ginika says loudly and Jewel stirs.
‘What? But why?’ I ask, whispering. ‘We can get a lot of work done now.’
‘No,’ Ginika says, distressed, and going for her baby. ‘We have to go home.’ She lifts Jewel from Denise’s body, and leaves the room.
22
Despite the awkwardness of Ginika grabbing Jewel from Denise’s arms and announcing she’d like to leave, Denise offers to drive Ginika home, and Ginika accepts. It could be for one of two reasons; to further stamp her authority on her place as mother, or because she feels bad putting me out again. Alone, with a frazzled head, I sit on the couch in silence. Ginika’s question about my honeymoon stirs my thoughts.
‘I want to go somewhere relaxing, Gerry,’ I say, massaging my temples as he opens another adventure magazine. ‘After all the wedding arrangements, after the big day, I honestly just want to go to a beach and lay there all day drinking cocktails and never get up.’
He looks at me, bored. ‘I don’t want to lie on a beach all day, Holly. We can do that for a few days but not every day. I want to do something. I want to see the world.’
‘Look, we’re seeing the world right now,’ I say, flicking through the pages. ‘Hello Iceland, hello Argentina, hello Brazil, hello Thailand. Oh, hi there, Mount Everest, don’t think there’s a beach near you.’
‘I never said I wanted to climb Mount Everest.’ He pushes the brochure closed and it closes on my finger.
‘Ow.’
He stands up and leaves the table. But there’s nowhere really to go, we’re in our first flat, a one-bedroom with a small living space. Flat is rather a grand description; it’s more of a bedsit. Our bedroom has a wall that doesn’t reach the ceiling but separates sleeping from living. Gerry paces the small space there is to walk between the couch and the TV, like a caged lion. I can see he’s about to explode.
‘Why do you have to be so lazy, Holly?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You’re lazy,’ he says, louder.
‘A beach holiday isn’t lazy, it’s relaxing. Something you don’t actually know how to do.’
‘We’ve had five of these holidays already. Five different hotels on five different islands and they all look exactly the same. There’s no culture.’
I laugh at this, which makes him even angrier. I should let it go but … ‘I’m sorry I’m not as cultured as you are, Gerry.’ I open a brochure. ‘OK, let’s go to Ethiopia, live a nomad life in a desert camp and join the local tribe.’
‘Shut up!’ he roars.
I wait until the veins stop protruding in his neck.
‘Look,’ I begin again, calmly. ‘There’s a place in Lanzarote. It’s a beach resort but it also does boat trips. You can go see dolphins and whales. They even have a volcano, and you can take a coach tour to see it.’
I hold the brochure up.
‘I saw that when I was ten years old,’ he mumbles, but at least he’s calmer. ‘If you want to see dolphins and whales I’ll show you a place that has dolphins and whales.’ He leaps over the couch and sifts through the pile of magazines on the kitchen table. He reaches for the Alaska Adventure travel magazine.
‘I don’t care about dolphins and whales,’ I whine. ‘That bit was for you. There are no beaches in Alaska.’
He slams the brochure on the table. I jump with fright. Then he picks it up again and this time throws the brochure on the linoleum floor that’s burned and bubbling from previous owners’ cooking disasters. The magazine makes quite the bang.
‘Gerry.’
‘Let’s look at all the things you don’t want to do, and eliminate them, shall we?’
He throws another brochure on the ground, harder this time. ‘Iceland. That’s boring, is it? Glaciers and hot springs are so shit. No beach. Peru,’ he slams another on the floor. ‘Who wants to see Inca trails and the highest lake in the world? Not you. Cuba, what a shithole,’ he throws that on the floor too.
With each thud, I think of the couple beneath us.
He throws a few more down at the same time. Extra loud. The floor’s vibrations rattle the stove.
‘But here we go.’ He lifts the holiday brochure up in the air like a trophy. ‘Two weeks getting drunk and sunburned with a bunch of hen and stag parties, surrounded by English-speaking people and eating burgers and chips. That sounds like an adventure.’
He throws it back down on the table.
I look at it, eyes wide, heart pounding at his behavi
our.
‘I want to do something different, Holly. You need to leave your comfort zone. Be braver, be more exciting! Open your mind!’
I am currently so thoroughly pissed off with everything – the wedding arrangements, the invitations, the RSVPs, the deposits, this shit flat, with Gerry, with getting a mortgage for a new house – that I don’t bother holding my tongue. And why should I, my husband-to-be has just accused me of being lazy, and boring.
‘I am leaving my comfort zone, Gerry. I’m marrying you, you absolute psycho.’
‘Nice,’ he says, straightening up.
He leaves the flat and I don’t see him for two days.
I’m still daydreaming on the couch when my phone rings and Denise’s profile image, wide-eyed, with a chocolate profiterole stuffed halfway into her mouth, fills my screen.
‘The package has been delivered,’ she says, mysteriously.
‘Thanks, Dee Nee, I appreciate it. I hope Ginika was OK with you. She’s not comfortable with anyone other than herself being with Jewel. She’s at the early stages with a foster family and she’s understandably struggling.’
‘God love her, it breaks my heart. She seems excited about the lessons though.’
‘Really? That’s good, but I’m not sure how we’re doing, because I don’t actually know what I’m doing. I’m following the textbooks but I’d really prefer for her sake if she went to a tutor.’
‘Why don’t you help her write the words from the letter? Why do you have to teach her from scratch?’
‘Because that’s what she wants. She doesn’t want anybody to know the contents of the letter, and she wants to achieve this herself.’
‘The learning is almost as big as the letter itself. It means she has control over something in her life for once. And if, when the time comes and she can’t write the letter entirely by herself, you can always help her. Don’t feel like this is the only goal here.’
‘True.’
Silence, apart from the indicator as she drives.
‘Denise?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you know why Gerry sent us to Lanzarote?’
‘Wow. Your mind is travelling tonight.’
‘Ginika asked me something that got me thinking.’
‘Well, let me think …’ She clears her throat.
It was the July letter. The fifth letter. A simple Have a good Holly day! PS, I Love You … with instructions to visit a specific travel agent. He’d booked a holiday for me, Denise and Sharon, through a travel agent on 28 November, a day during a time that he should not have left his bed. He had a taxi waiting outside the travel agent. Barbara the travel agent had told me the story, under duress, more than twenty times.
‘Didn’t you tell us it was where you were both going to go on honeymoon? It was like he was giving you a second honeymoon? Am I right?’
‘It’s where I wanted to go on our honeymoon.’
‘Yeah. That’s nice.’
Silence.
‘And the dolphins. The next letter was about seeing dolphins.’
The August letter. He’d led me to a spot where you could view them from the beach.
‘I can’t quite remember the reason for that one, did you always want to see dolphins?’
‘No. See, that’s the thing. I didn’t want to see dolphins. He did.’
‘Well, you didn’t want to do karaoke again either, as far as I remember.’
‘No.’
‘I suppose the point of some of his letters was to take you out of your comfort zone.’
The phrase jolts me.
You need to leave your comfort zone, Holly. Be braver! Be exciting! Open your mind!
I muse on the concerns I’ve never shared with anyone before, concerns I’ve always brushed aside until the past few months when I’ve been forced to re-examine Gerry’s letters for the sole purpose of guiding the PS, I Love You Club. The process is making me see his letters differently, in ways that mostly make me feel uncomfortable. ‘Do you think that that particular letter, and that trip, was like a “fuck you”?’ Why dolphins?
‘How could it be?’
‘Like a remember the time you wouldn’t do the stuff I wanted to do?’
‘Holly you went to South Africa on safari for him. You slept in a hotel with giraffes. You let him see plenty. He got exactly the honeymoon he wanted in the end.’
‘In the end.’
Silence.
‘So no, I don’t think it was a “fuck you”. That wasn’t Gerry’s style. Not the Gerry I knew, anyway. And wasn’t it the place you wanted to go to? I see it as a gift. Why are you thinking this after all this time?’
We’re both silent. I notice her car engine has stopped running, that the background is quiet. I stand and move to the window and I see Denise sitting in her car, outside in my driveway. The car’s inside light is on, revealing her.
‘I think,’ she continues after a long pause. ‘That if anything, he was compromising. Maybe he realised he made you do something you didn’t want to do and he felt guilty. Or maybe he didn’t feel guilty at all but it was like a do-over.’
I lean my forehead against the cold window. ‘Denise, why are you staking out my house?’
She looks up and sees me at the window. ‘Well, aren’t you the spooky sleuth.’
‘I’m OK, you know. You don’t have to worry about me.’
‘I know, Holly, but do we always have to remind you that everything is not all about you?’ She gets out of the car with a large bag in her hand. She walks up the drive, looking at me as she speaks into the phone. ‘I left Tom. Can I stay with you tonight?’
I rush to open the door. Her eyes are filled with tears and I embrace her.
‘On the other hand,’ she says, tearful voice muffled, ‘life is peculiar. Gerry may very well have had a dark side we didn’t know about and he was fucking with you from the grave.’
I hug her tight.
Gerry and I moved at different paces. Me, slow and inconsistent, in all directions, few steps forward and then a few steps back; him solid, fast, eager, curious, focused. Mostly I wanted him to slow down, to enjoy the moments instead of rushing through everything with such high energy. He thought I was lazy and was wasting moments. We were the couple equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your belly. A brainteaser, a bimanual interference manifested in a relationship.
I wonder if his body always knew what we didn’t: that his moments were more limited than most, that he didn’t have the time that I had. His rhythm was in sync with his time. He needed adventure because he wouldn’t live to see his thirties. My body had longer, and it took its time to gather momentum, to become curious and adventurous. By the time that happened, he was gone. Perhaps it was his leaving that made that happen.
I wonder if he was frustrated with standing still with me when there was a clock inside him ticking and pushing him to move forward. I wonder if I held him back. I wonder, if he’d met somebody else, would he have lived a more fun, exciting, fulfilled life. I wonder, I wonder all these distressing thoughts as a form of self-punishment, but my heart always responds. My heart holds the answer with confidence, firm in the knowledge that we may have had different rhythms but we were always in sync.
23
The bottle of wine is open. Denise and I are on the couch, our feet tucked underneath us as we face each other. Denise’s wine glass trembles as it travels to her lips.
‘Start from the beginning and leave nothing out. Why have you left Tom?’ The words feel alien in my mouth.
The reservoir inside Denise bursts its banks and she goes from being completely in control to losing it completely. I watch her cry but I’m too impatient to wait for answers.
‘Did he have an affair?’
‘No,’ she half-laughs, wiping her eyes.
‘Did he hit you? Hurt you?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘Did you?’
‘No!’
I search for a box of tissues
but can’t find any so I return from the bathroom with a toilet roll. She has calmed a little but her voice is so shaken and broken I have to concentrate on hearing the words.
‘He really wants a baby,’ she says. ‘Five years, Holly. We’ve been trying for five years. We’ve sunk all of our savings into it, we’ve nothing left and I still can’t give him a baby.’
‘It takes two people to make a baby, this is not all on you.’
‘It is me.’
We’ve never discussed this before. I never asked, it’s none of anybody’s business but their own.
‘If I step aside, then he could meet somebody else and live the rest of his life the way he wants. I’m standing in the way of his dream.’
I stare at her, my mouth agape. ‘This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘It’s not,’ she replies, turning away from me and crossing her legs. She directs her justification to the fireplace instead of me. ‘You haven’t lived in our shoes. Every month he was so hopeful. You’ve no idea what that’s like. Disappointment after disappointment. And then every meeting, appointment, every single time we began IVF again, he believed every single time that it was going to happen, and it didn’t. And it’s not. It never will.’
‘It could still happen,’ I say gently.
‘It won’t,’ she says firmly. ‘Because I’m not trying any more. I’m exhausted.’ She wipes her eyes, a definite look in her eye. ‘I know that Tom loves me, but I know what he wants, and he can’t have that with me.’
‘So by breaking his heart and leaving him, you are actually making it easier for him?’
She sniffs in response.
‘He wants you, Denise.’
‘I know that he loves me, but sometimes that’s not enough. The past seven years, since we got married, we’ve been obsessed with making a baby, making a baby. It’s all we talk about. We save and plan, plan and save to make a baby. There’s nothing else. And now there will be no baby. So what the hell are we? If we move on, I know what I won’t be. I won’t be a wife who couldn’t make a baby, and he won’t be a loyal husband who settled for second best. Does that make sense?’
Postscript Page 15