Suddenly, she knows that he’s right – that everything will work out. She’s exactly where she’s meant to be, with exactly the people she’s meant to be with.
With Joe’s hands on her waist, and their baby in her arms, she feels like the richest woman in the world.
Chapter 7
‘Earth calling Jess, Earth calling Jess … are you OK? You’ve gone really pale, and … well, sod you, but even I’m having palpitations here!’
Michael’s voice calls to me, brings me back to the here and now, and I stare at him for a moment while I adjust to the new reality. I am sitting in my dead mother’s kitchen, with my traumatised cousin, in front of a box of secrets. That beautiful middle – that early time with Joe and Grace – is another land. Another universe.
I need to talk to my cousin. I need to explain things to him. But first I need to breathe.
‘I’m OK, Michael,’ I say quietly. ‘I was … just remembering things. So, I presume you have questions?’
‘Approximately seven million. But I’m kind of scared of asking them in case it … I don’t know, pushes you off a mental health cliff or something. Then I’ll have to jump off after you, and we’ll both end up going splat. So why don’t you just take your time, and tell me what you want to tell me, and we’ll take it from there.’
It sounds like a sensible plan. Michael, for all his pretence of fairy dust and winsome ways, is actually quite a sensible person.
‘All right,’ I reply, finishing my tea and grimacing as the lukewarm liquid sloshes down my throat, ‘well, I’ll start kind of at the beginning. When I was almost seventeen, I went off to college – the big sixth form one on our side of Manchester? It’s still there, I know.’
‘The one with the drug dealers and metal detectors where even the teachers were in the Crips or the Bloods?’
‘It wasn’t like that, and I’m sure it still isn’t – you’re buying into your parents’ anti inner-city prejudice, which is disappointing. It was … different, yes. Very. There were kids there from a lot of different backgrounds, and it was big and loud, and there were … foreign people!’
He giggles at my tone as I whisper the last two words, as though it’s a dirty little secret – which, in the whitewashed world of our middle-class childhoods, it almost was. When you come from a family where eating a chicken tikka masala is viewed as some kind of exotic gamble, mixing with ‘foreigners’ is considered the height of daring.
We’ve both grown up with that casual racism that is so common, even now – throwaway comments about the black-heavy line up of sprinters at the Olympics; refusing to accept that the new Chinese people running the chip shop could understand how to properly fry a piece of battered cod; veiled references to the smell of curry or the cruelty of the Japanese or the way there was no need for famine or drought in the Third World if they could just figure out how to run things better.
Going to college was one of my early attempts at breaking free of all that – I wanted to expand my horizons, live more freely. That most definitely happened.
‘But,’ I add, before I lose my courage, ‘there was also Joe. Joe Ryan. To be honest, I think my parents would have been happier with the foreign people. In fact they thought of him as foreign anyway – he wasn’t one of us, you know?’
‘I do. So by Joe, you mean Daddy Joe Joe? Which, now I say it out loud, sounds like a jazz musician from the twenties …’
‘He wasn’t a jazz musician. He was … he was just a boy. But the most beautiful boy that I’d ever seen.’
Michael rests his chin in his hands, and gazes at me wistfully. I swear I even hear a small sigh escape his lips, and am reminded that he spent his teenaged years reading romance novels ‘because of all the gorgeous men with brooding good looks and punishing kisses’.
‘What was he like? I do love a story that starts with a beautiful boy …’
I close my eyes, and can still see Joe looming above me on that first day, in his beanie hat and baggy jeans, that crooked smile transforming his face. I know he’ll look different now. I know he’ll be different – we both will; too much has happened. But right now, he’s there, vivid and sunlit, brown eyes shining as he helps me to my feet.
‘He was very handsome, but in a way that was a little bit dangerous too, if you know what I mean? He was tall, and older than me, and he had his own car. Classic boy racer Ford Fiesta. That alone made him pretty irresistible. He had thick, wavy dark hair, and big brown eyes, and a wicked smile that made you think he might have been a pirate … like he was always planning to do something naughty, and you’d definitely enjoy it.’
‘Oh my! I’m a sucker for a naughty pirate. I’m imagining him as that chap off Poldark, is that all right?’
‘Even better-looking,’ I respond, smiling. Because in my mind, he was.
Michael makes an impressed ‘oooh’ sound, and says: ‘And you, Jess, back then? You were like some innocent virgin wench from the village?’
I can see that Michael is busily forming his own narrative here, one that’s informed by his inner romantic. Of course, real life is grittier than that. Real life comes in shades of truth, not primary colours of fantasy.
‘I suppose so, in a lot of ways,’ I answer. ‘Our lives were very different. I’d always lived here, going to a good school, having the best of everything and still feeling suffocated by it, not realising at all how lucky I was. Joe … well, he grew up in and out of foster care, in Manchester and in Ireland, where his family were originally from. He’d not had a good start in life, but somehow managed to stay out of trouble, get himself to college, where he was undoubtedly one of the coolest of all the cool kids.
‘He had this group of frankly terrifying friends, who all swore a lot and smoked and had piercings, but were actually OK once you got to know them. It was … totally alien to anything I’d ever known. And pretty intoxicating, especially to an innocent virgin wench from the village. As you can imagine, my parents were thrilled when they found out I not only had a boyfriend, but a boyfriend they’d never approve of as long as they lived. They didn’t care that he was brave, or kind, or that he loved me to the moon and back.’
Michael nods. He gets that – he’s currently living it, that constant struggle to meet up to familial expectations, the battleground between being himself and not alienating the people he loves.
‘I can imagine. They’d prefer a castrated vicar to a virile pirate, wouldn’t they? So, how did it start, between you two?’
‘On my side it started the moment I laid eyes on him. He was everything a girl of my age could possibly have wanted – older, dangerous, sexy, confident. Well-fit, as we said back then. That was enough to get me hooked – it was only later that I understood the other stuff. The more important stuff, like his sense of loyalty, his resilience.
‘For him, I think it was similar – he said later he was smitten that first day too, but being older and more experienced, also didn’t automatically fall head over heels in love like I did. It started properly, I suppose, on my seventeenth birthday, not long after. I accidentally bumped into him in the corridors – and by accidentally, I mean I’d been stalking him and knew his lesson schedule and was able to artfully design it so I was there at the same time.