The Other Side of the Story

by Marian Keyes

  The driver of the lorry was a gibbering wreck. ‘Oh my God,’ he kept saying. ‘Oh my God. I thought I’d killed you, I thought I’d killed you.’

  He whipped out a mobile and made a call – sending for help, I thought passively – and I stood, holding Ema and looking at the battered car and bollards everywhere, strewn back along the road. I felt an urgent need to sit down, so I lowered myself on my not-there legs onto the grass verge and pulled Ema to me. As we sat by the side of the road I suddenly understood that the reason I was without a scratch was not because I had been ridiculously lucky but because I was, in fact, dead. I pinched my arm. I thought I felt something but could not be sure. So I pinched Ema and she looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, Lily,’ she said. ‘Play nice.’

  It was quite a cold day – I could see it when I breathed out – but I felt perfectly comfortable: dizzy, like the air was thin, but very serene. I gathered Ema into me and, cheeks touching, stillness descended on us as though we were posing for a photo. In the distance I heard the sound of sirens, then an ambulance had arrived and men were jumping out and coming towards us.

  This is it, I thought. This is the part where I watch them strap my lifeless body onto a stretcher and find I am floating fifteen feet above the scene. What I could not figure out was whether or not Ema was dead too.

  A slender torch was shone into my eyes, a blood-pressure meter was strapped to my arm and people asked me stupid questions. What day was it? What was the Prime Minister’s name? Who won Pop Idol? The ambulance man, a middle-aged reassuring type, looked at the crumpled car and winced. ‘You were bloody lucky.’

  ‘Really?’ This was my chance. ‘Are you telling me we’re not dead?’

  ‘You’re not dead,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘but you’re in shock. Don’t do anything rash.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like anything rash.’

  ‘OΚ.’

  *

  We were taken to hospital, pronounced to be in health as perfect as it was remarkable, then Mum came to ferry us to her home: an idyllic little cottage in an idyllic little village on the edge of a farming community. Mum’s garden bordered a field containing three stolid sheep and a baby lamb skipping about like a happy half-wit.

  Ema, a city girl, was dazzled by her first real-life sheep.

  ‘Bad dog,’ she shouted at them. ‘BAD dog!’

  Then she began to bark – a wholly convincing rendition –and the sheep gathered at the gate to look at her, their woolly heads together, their expressions tender.

  ‘Come inside,’ Mum said to me, ‘you’ve had a dreadful shock, you need to lie down.’

  I was reluctant to leave Ema or to even take my eyes off her, after I had so nearly lost her.

  But Mum said, ‘She’ll be quite safe here,’ and somehow I believed her. Moments later she had installed me in a wooden-beamed, rose-patterned room, and I was sinking into a soft bed with smooth, cotton sheets. Everything smelt clean and nice and safe.

  ‘I have to sort out Irina’s car,’ I said. ‘And I have to contact Anton. And I have to ensure that nothing terrible happens to Ema ever again. But first I have to go to sleep.’

  And then it was morning and I opened my eyes to find Mum and Ema in the room, Ema grinning her melon grin.

  The first thing I said was, ‘We didn’t die yesterday.’

  Mum gave me a ‘Not in front of Ema’ look and asked, ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Wonderfully. I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night but I didn’t walk into the doorjamb and damage my optic nerve, ensuring double vision for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Your father is on his way from London, he has to see for himself that you’ve been saved from the jaws of death. But we’re not going to get back together,’ she added quickly. She always had to say that to me whenever she and Dad met. ‘And I rang Anton.’

  ‘Don’t let him visit.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to do anything rash.’

  She looked sad. ‘It’s a terrible shame about you and Anton.’

  ‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘But at least I never caught him wearing a red basque and black stockings, masturbating in front of my dressing-table mirror.’

  ‘What on earth,’ she frowned, ‘are you talking about?’

  I frowned back. ‘Nothing. I’m simply saying how good it is that that never happened. It would make things considerably more difficult between us because each time I saw him I might want to laugh.’

  ‘And what was that about not walking into the doorjamb?’

  ‘Just that I am happy that it didn’t happen.’

  A shadow crossed her face and she pulled Ema to her protectively and said, ‘Let’s make pancakes, shall we?’

  They disappeared into the kitchen and I dressed slowly and sat in the sunny window seat humming to myself until the wheels of a twenty-year-old Jag crunched on the gravel outside announcing Dad’s and Poppy’s arrival from London.

  Mum watched Dad getting out of the car and rolled her eyes. ‘Just as I expected, he’s in tears. He has such an obnoxious streak of sentimentality. It’s terribly unattractive.’

  She opened the front door and Ema was so excited to see Poppy that she began to choke. Hand-in-hand they ran off together to break things and Dad gathered me in his arms, so tightly that I also began to choke.

  ‘My little girl,’ he said, his voice thick with tears. ‘I haven’t been right since I heard. You were so lucky.’

  ‘I know.’ I managed to break free and take a breath. ‘When you think about it, all my life I’ve been lucky.’

  He looked slightly puzzled but because of my brush with death he was obliged to humour me.

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘Of all the times I drank from a can of Coke on a summer’s day, and not once was I stung by a wasp which had crawled in. Never did I go into anaphylactic shock so that my tongue swelled up like a rugby ball. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  Mum looked at Dad. ‘She keeps saying things like that. Why, Lily?’

  ‘Simply making conversation.’

  We lapsed into awkward silence, all the better to hear the happy shouts of Ema and Poppy tormenting the sheep. (‘Bad dog. NASTY dog.’) Mum looked in the direction of the racket, then snapped her head back and pounced. ‘What are you thinking now?’

  ‘Nothing! Just how happy I am that all my toenails grow in the right direction. Having ingrown toenails must be bloody. And the operation to remove them sounds dreadful.’

  Mum and Dad gave each other a look. (‘Dirty dog. HAIRY dog.’)

  ‘You ought to see a doctor,’ Mum said.

  I ought not. I was simply in the grip of one of those bouts of gratitude which sometimes assail me post-disaster. I tried to explain. ‘Yesterday, there were so many ways Ema and I could have died. We could have been hit by a bollard, I could have driven the car into a ditch because I couldn’t see where we were going or we could have ploughed into the back of the lorry. Being saved in so many different ways has made me think about all the terrible things that could happen but actually don’t. Even though not everything is going well for me at the moment, I feel lucky.’

  Their faces were blank and I ploughed on. ‘Last night I dreamt that I was carrying Ema through a wasteland, and huge rocks were falling from the sky, landing just behind us, and cracks in the earth were opening up just after we’d stepped over them. But Ema and I were untouched, and a path to safety generated itself and came up to meet my foot, precisely when I needed it.’

  I finished. Their faces had remained set in blankness.

  Finally Dad spoke. ‘Perhaps you have concussion, love.’ He turned on Mum, ‘Look at what we’ve done to her. This is our fault.’

  He was full of grandiose talk of taking me to Harley Street, nothing but the best, but Mum slapped him down. ‘Please don’t talk such nonsense.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ At least one of them und
erstood.

  Then Mum added, ‘The local chap will do fine.’

  I tried to hide it but could not. It was like when I had been mugged, except the entire opposite, if you know what I mean. Back then all I saw were the terrible things that could happen to human beings. This time all I saw were the bad things that did not happen.

  The world is a safe place, I thought. And life is a low-risk activity.

  The following day Dad returned reluctantly to London – Debs needed him urgently, to open a jar of jam or something – and it was just Ema, Mum and me. The weather was glorious and so was my mood. I thought I might burst with the joy of not having tinnitus. Or leprosy.

  With shining eyes I said to Mum, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to not have gout?’

  She snapped, ‘Right, that’s it!’ lifted the phone and requested a home visit.

  Dr Lott, a young, curly haired man, appeared in my rose-covered bedroom, less than an hour later. ‘What appears to be the problem?’

  Mum answered for me. ‘Her relationship has failed, so has her career, yet she feels very happy. Don’t you?’

  I assented. Yes, that was all true.

  Dr Lott frowned. ‘That is worrying.

  ‘Worrying,’ he went on, ‘but not actually a sign of illness.’

  ‘I was almost killed,’ I said.

  He looked at Mum. Raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  ‘No, not by her.’ I explained about the accident.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘This makes perfect sense. Your body is so surprised at still being alive that you’re experiencing a massive rush of adrenalin. This explains your elation. Don’t worry, it should soon pass.’

  ‘I should be feeling depressed again shortly?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he reassured. ‘Possibly even worse than usual. You may experience what’s called an adrenalin crash.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Mum said. ‘Thank you, Doctor, I’ll see you out.’

  She walked him to his Saab and their voices floated in through the window.

  ‘Are you sure you can’t prescribe something for her?’ I heard Mum ask.

  ‘Like what?’

  Mum sounded puzzled. ‘Something like the opposite to anti-depressants?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with her.’

  ‘But she’s quite unbearable. And I’m worried about what all this positivity is doing to her little girl.’

  ‘The one who was shouting at the sheep? She doesn’t seem traumatized. And, frankly, her mother being upbeat and positive after such a shock is the best thing for her.’

  I felt like clenching my fist in a victory salute. Worry about Ema was a constant stone in my shoe; I was overjoyed to discover that – entirely by accident – I was doing the best for her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Lott promised Mum. ‘Lily’s elation will pass soon.’

  ‘And while we’re waiting?’

  ‘She’s a writer, isn’t she? Why don’t you try persuading her to write about all of this. At least if she’s writing about it, she won’t be talking.’

  He had barely finished his sentence when I had reached for a pen and notebook and watched my hand write, ‘Grace woke up and discovered that once again a plane had not landed on her during the night.’ It was a good opening sentence, I thought.

  And so was the paragraph which followed, where Grace had a shower and did not scald herself, had a bowl of muesli and did not choke to death on a nut, put on the kettle and did not get electrocuted, thrust her hand into a drawer and did not sever a vein on a knife, left the house and did not skid on a stray apple core into the path of a speeding car. On the way to work, her bus does not crash, she avoids contracting ear cancer from her mobile phone and nothing heavy falls out of the sky to land on her work-station – all before nine o’clock in the morning! I already knew my title. A Charmed Life.

  * * *

  It took me less than five weeks. During this time Ema and I stayed at Mum’s and for fifteen hours a day I sat at Mum’s home computer and clattered at the keyboard, my fingers unable to keep up with the flow of words from my brain.

  When it became clear I was in the grip of something big, Mum assumed care of Ema.

  On the days she had to go to work (a part-time post selling National Trust aprons at the local stately home) she simply took Ema with her. And when she was not at work, she and Ema wandered the fields together, picking wild spring flowers and becoming (in her words) ‘women who run with the sheep’. Leaving me free to transfer my story from my head to the computer.

  My heroine was a woman called Grace – not very subtle, I know, but it was better than calling her Lucky – and she was the star of a complicated six-way love story set against a background of all the terrible things that do not happen to us.

  That first night I read what I had written to Mum and Ema.

  ‘Darling, it’s adorable,’ Mum said.

  ‘Dirty,’ Ema agreed. ‘Filthy.’

  ‘It’s absolutely wonderful. So cheery.’

  ‘But you’re my mum,’ I said. ‘I need someone impartial.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lie to you, darling. I’m not that kind of mother.’ Blithely, she added, ‘When I insisted you saw the doctor I hope you didn’t think I was being unkind, I was simply concerned about you.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘By the way, Anton rang again, he desperately wants to see Ema.’

  ‘No. He can’t come. I can’t see him. I’ve had medical advice. I might do something rash.’

  ‘You can’t deny him the right to see his child, especially after she almost died. Lily, please do try to be less selfish.’

  Never mind Anton, I had to think of Ema. Although she was handling this latest trauma with her characteristic aplomb, regular contact with her dad was vital for her well-being.

  ‘’Κ,’ I mumbled, surly as a teenager.

  Mum left the room and returned some time later. ‘He’s coming tomorrow morning. He asked me to thank you.’

  ‘Mum, when Anton comes today, you’ll have to greet him and hand Ema over, because I can’t.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because,’ I repeated, ‘I’ve had medical advice. I might do something rash.’

  ‘What manner of rash?’

  ‘Just… rash. I need this… adrenalin rush, phase, whatever it is, to pass, then I can see him again.’

  She was displeased, more so when I drew the curtains in the study, in case the sight of Anton caused a bout of rash behaviour. I immersed myself in Grace’s complicated love life and lucky escapes and waited for the time to pass.

  Hours later Mum walked in. I pulled the earplugs from my ears (inserted in case the sound of Anton’s voice triggered an onslaught of rashness) and asked, ‘Is he gone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Fine. Thrilled to see Ema and she was beside herself. Such a daddy’s girl.’

  ‘Did he ask about me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “How is Lily?”’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘And then what did you talk about?’

  ‘Well, nothing, really. We were playing with Ema. We were mocking the sheep.’

  ‘And when he was leaving, did he say anything about me?’

  Mum thought about it. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘Charming,’ I muttered at the screen.

  ‘Why do you care? You left him.’

  ‘I don’t care. I just can’t believe how rude he was.’

  ‘Rude?’ Mum asked. ‘From the woman who sat in the study with the curtains drawn and her ears stuffed with silicone. Rude, darling?’

  His second visit did not disturb like the first: he had come to see his daughter and had every right to do so. As Mum said, I should have been glad that my child had such a devoted father. Thereafter, he came from London every five or six days and on each visit
I remained cloistered. Although once – even through the earplugs – I heard him laughing and it was like bumping a once-broken limb; I was shocked at how much it was still capable of pain.

  One night I was lifting Ema into bed and she whispered into my neck, so quietly I barely heard it, ‘Anton smells nice.’ It did not mean anything, Ema was not big on coherent sentences and she could just as easily have said, ‘Anton licks trees,’ or ‘Anton drinks petrol,’ but it generated a longing so intense and familiar, I wanted to howl.

  I was obliged to resuscitate the mantra which had helped me through the early days of the split: Anton and I had been in love, we had had a child together, we had been soul-mates from the moment we had met. The end of something so precious could only be bloody and perhaps the break would always remain capable of hurt.

  I thought of those halcyon days just before I left London, when I had thought Anton and I were one encounter away from being friends. I had been astonishingly deluded: we were nowhere near it.

  Daily, I continued to write, the words pouring from me, and every night, before we put Ema to bed, I read that day’s work and Mum raved about it. Ema too offered comments. (‘Jiggy.’ ‘Seedy.’ ‘Farty.’) I did not experience the ‘adrenalin crash’ that Dr Lott predicted but over the five weeks, the more I wrote the more my sense of salvation dwindled. By the start of May, when I finished the book, I was almost back to normal. (Although perhaps still a little more buoyant than I had been before the accident.)

  I knew that A Charmed Life was a dead cert; people would love it. This was not arrogance; I also knew the reviews would be savage. But perhaps I had learned a little about publishing by then. I had seen how people had reacted to Mimi’s Remedies and intuited that this would generate a similar response. The story and setting of A Charmed Life were nothing like those of Mimi’s Remedies, but the feel was. For a start, it was terribly unrealistic. If I wanted to be nice about it (and why not?) I could say it felt magical.