Chapter 1
Thousands of songs and poems and stories have been written about love. Millions of pages have been filled with trillions of words; countless sad songs have been sung in countless sad bars by countless battered men with battered guitars. Endless nights have been fevered with the search for the perfect match that will make everything all right. For the ‘one’ that will make everything – everything – feel better.
It starts early, if you’re lucky. With parents who adore you, with attention and kindness and indulgence. With books filled with pictures of cartoon hares challenging you to guess how much they love you. With friends or siblings or aunties or granddads, a whole world of love surrounding you like a sheltering, cocooning bubble.
Before long, though, it’s not cartoon hares or Mum and Dad. It’s a whole different world of love. It’s that boy who sits in front of you in Geography; the one with the gorgeous hair and the cocky smile and the cool trainers. The one that makes you giddy when he smiles, and whose name you doodle surreptitiously on your pencil case, trying out his surname for size in advance of the inevitable wedding.
You talk to your friends about him, all the time, and you think about literally Nothing Else At All. You analyse every word, every movement, every casual chew of every gunked up wad of gum. He is the only thing that matters, the only thing that feels real. It might not be the same for everyone. It might be a girl pining for a boy, a boy pining for a girl, or any combination of the above. It might happen when you’re fourteen, or when you’re forty. But at some point, it probably will happen – the search for love will begin.
You won’t be alone in your obsession. In fact, rarely has a subject been so well discussed and yet so badly understood – because it seems to me that nobody has a clue what love is all about. We’ve all experienced it, but we all have a different version of it.
The voices on the radios and the iPods and the record players all around the world; the words on the pages of books in libraries and stores and on dusty shelves, the names and heart shapes carved into tree trunks – they all have a viewpoint. They just don’t seem able to agree what it is.
Is it a many splendoured thing, or a crazy little thing? Is it a battlefield, or is it a drug? A red red rose, an unchained melody, a labour lost? And is it really all you need, like The Beatles would have us believe?
I’ll be buggered if I know – it’s confused me since the beginning.
But I do know this one thing, with complete certainty: I have lived with love. I have felt its touch, and blossomed beneath it, and been transformed by it. I have been blessed by it, and burned by it. I’ve felt the scars it leaves when it’s snatched away, the pain that lives in the void of its absence. I’ve seen it packed up, in a small white box, and wheeled down the aisle of a church.
I’ve lived my life with love, and for so many years now I’ve lived my life without it – and I know which I prefer. It’s what the kids might call a no-brainer.
So tonight, as I lie here beneath a too-familiar duvet in a too-familiar house surrounded by too-familiar noises, I’ve decided that I need to be brave. I need to find my courage, and look for love again. I need to reach out, and see which way my story ends. To find him, and hold him, and tell him how much I regret the terrible things that happened between us. The terrible things that happened to both of us.
Nothing so far in my life has led me to believe in fairy tales or happy endings. I am not a Disney princess, and my world is completely devoid of picture-perfect moments and moving speeches and passionate yearning.
But tonight, I have stayed up late, reading by the light of a full, silvered moon shining through my open curtains. And tonight I have made my decision – to reach for that happy ending, even if I never find it.
The sun crept over the trees about ten minutes ago, gold usurping the silver. It’s a fresh dawn. A new beginning. The start of rediscovering everything I thought I’d lost.
Only twenty-four hours ago, I was getting up, brushing my teeth, drinking tea alone in a silent kitchen as I was preparing for a funeral. Preparing to say my final goodbyes to a woman I loved. Hard to believe that was only a day gone by.
A day that started with a funeral – but ended with hope. Hope that I discovered wrapped in tissue paper, hidden in a box, among the forgotten clothes and broken sewing machines and decaying cobwebs of a long untouched attic. Hope that I never knew existed, and which now illuminates my being like sunlight filtered through lemon-washed linen.
Hope. How did I ever live without it?
Chapter 2
The Beginning – the day before
My mother’s funeral is a small, sad affair, held on a sunny early summer’s day that somehow makes its lack of fanfare feel even worse. Nature is having a party, but nobody else is celebrating.
The crematorium is picturesque, its tree-lined routes shaded by pink and white cherry blossom, the blooms so heavy and full with life that they droop and spill onto the pathways. The petals flutter and dance in the breeze, settling on the hearse as I follow in the solitary funeral car, vibrant against the sombre black as I drive alone towards our destination.
I look through the car window and see life and energy and rebirth; I hear the sound of birdsong and the low-level hum of insects. I feel the soothing warmth of the sun on my skin through the glass, and I close my eyes and try to stop myself enjoying it. It seems disrespectful to enjoy anything on a day like this.
There are only five of us at the funeral, and that includes the vicar. Or the celebrant, whatever the official name is for the middle-aged lady who stands at the front, attempting to string together a coherent tribute to a woman she’s never met. Who had a life that feels too small, too narrow, to fill a whole five minutes’ worth of platitudes. She was my mum, and I loved her – but there isn’t much to say.
We all sit there, dappled by stained glass light, in one small row. The sum total of my mother’s world: me, my aunt Rosemary and uncle Simon, and my cousin, Michael. My mother hadn’t planned this funeral – she wasn’t one of those people who made special requests about how the end of her life should be marked.
Of course, she might have done, if she hadn’t been incapacitated by a series of strokes four years earlier. After that, she was barely capable of eating a jelly on her own, never mind articulating her last wishes.
The service is blessedly short; the awkwardness over quickly. I’m struck again by the confines of my mother’s life, the controlled environment in which she failed to thrive. A stage lit entirely in shades of beige. I wish there’d been more joy, more abandon, more rule-breaking.
I cast glances at Rosemary, my mother’s sister, who sits upright and rigid throughout. If she feels any emotion at all, she doesn’t show it – not even a sniffle into a clenched tissue, or a hand held in her husband’s. Nothing to mark the fact that my mother, who she grew up with, must have played with and laughed with during simpler times, is gone. I struggle to imagine them as children together, carefree and adventurous.
I always wanted a sister, always dreamed it would be joyous. Someone to share my triumphs and sorrows, and help me through days like this. But perhaps, I think, looking at my aunt, it wouldn’t be like that at all.
She is the very epitome of a stiff upper lip, and it’s infectious. It sets the tone, and informs the way we all behave, as we say our goodbyes to a woman who was a wife, a mother, presumably at some point a lover, an angst-ridden teenager, a little girl with gaps in her teeth. She must have had hopes and dreams and wild moments and passions and regrets – at least I hope so.