‘I don’t think I fooled him. He knew I was doing English and History and French, so there was no need for me to be anywhere near the science and engineering block. He didn’t call me out on it, for which I was very grateful, and when he found out it was my birthday, he gave me this grin that absolutely melted all my body parts. I’m an old lady now and I can still remember how it felt.
‘He said, really slowly and calmly, “Well, if it’s your birthday, I should give you something – but as all I have on me is a packet of chewies, that’ll have to do – unless you want to maybe meet up later, grab a coffee or a drink?” Which of course I did.
‘We did meet up, and one thing led to many other things, and he did give me the packet of gum – it became a kind of tradition. Every year, after that, he’d give me a pack of gum for my birthday. Except on my twenty-first, when he gave me twenty-one packs of gum. So, anyway, after that, we were together, big time.’
I pause, and actually smile at the memory.
‘Well don’t leave it there! What happened next?’
‘A cliché happened next,’ I reply, getting up and busying myself making more tea. I don’t want it, but I need to be in motion. I need to be doing something that is real while I tell this tale, and Tetley’s teabags are about as real as it gets.
‘I got pregnant – and in 1999, I had a baby.’
The words sound so simple. And, if I can persuade myself I’m talking about someone else, maybe they are. Millions of women have babies every single day. It is a commonplace miracle; a classic curve in the circle of life. But this is my baby I’m talking about, and my fingers tremble as I add a splash of milk, the white too vivid as I see it through hyper-alert eyes.
Michael is silent, which is an unusual state of affairs for him. He sits at the kitchen table, gin glass acting as a sentry, frowning and guarded.
‘Nineteen ninety-nine … that’s the year I was born. Jess, is this one of those stories you see on daytime television, or read about in the real-life sections of magazines? Are you actually my mother, who gave me to Rosemary to raise to avoid a scandal?’
‘No!’ I say firmly, genuinely surprised at the route his train of thought has taken. ‘No you’re not! Michael, love, if you were, I would never have given you up to be raised by incredibly repressed wolves …’
He puffs out a relieved gust of breath, and nods.
‘OK. Cool. Not that I’d have minded you being my mum, Jess, but … well. That would have been complicated, wouldn’t it? And now I pause to think, I remember that card we looked at was for a girl anyway. So … you don’t have a daughter now, Jess. Which means something else happened …’
I stand by the window, watching two magpies fight over a discarded crisp packet that has somehow found its way into our garden. One for sorrow, two for joy, I think – and I suppose I’ve known both.
I sit down at the table, and cross my arms over my chest.
‘She died. There was an accident. This is one of the things I can’t talk about yet, Michael, so I’ll have to leave it there. For now. So please don’t push.’
‘I never would, Jess,’ he says, reaching out to place a hand over mine, a sudden sparkle of tears in his eyes.
‘And don’t cry. And don’t be too nice to me.’
He snatches back his hand, and screws up his eyelids to squeeze away the tears, and it’s almost comical, this attempt to comply with all my commands. I am tempted to throw in a random request, like ‘rub your tummy and pat your head’, or ‘do your best impression of Madonna in the “Vogue” video’, just to see if he does it.
‘OK … but, I have to ask – is that what your therapists suggested? That you never talk about it, that you pretend it never happened? Because I know I’m just a layman, but it doesn’t seem overly healthy …’
‘Of course it wasn’t what they suggested! To begin with, their big mission was to get me to remember. To find the things my brain had shut down to protect me, to guide me through it in a safe environment. To acknowledge the grief, acknowledge the loss, allow the pain to take its course. All of that undoubtedly wise and sensible stuff. And I could do that, to some extent, when I was away – when I was with them, and everything they said seemed to help and make sense. But they didn’t have to live here, did they?’
I glance around, at the neatness and the order and the museum-like quality of this kitchen, this house. This prison.
‘They didn’t have to come home to a … a living mausoleum! My mum tried, she really did, but not long after I moved back here, my dad got sick with his heart condition. And I felt like his heart condition was all my fault – like the stress of dealing with me and everything that happened brought it on.
‘It all felt too precarious, too fragile – so I started to forget again. Deliberately. They did too. We packed it away in a box and hid it in the attic, emotionally and, apparently, physically.’
Michael follows my gaze to the box sitting across from us. It looks so innocent, our fingerprints still visible in the dust, a faded yellow label on the side announcing that it contains a pair of size ten gentleman’s brogues, with a little illustration for anyone who was unsure what a shoe looks like.
He pokes one finger at it, and says: ‘So, I presume that after the … accident … that was when you ended up in hospital?’
‘Not immediately, no. It was … well, maybe six months later, I suppose. Everyone was expecting me to get better, and instead I was getting worse, and ultimately I broke. It all stretched my mind too far, and I broke. And for the next two years, basically, my life wasn’t my own.’
I sound bitter as I say this, and decide that my bitterness is both righteous and unfair. I don’t think there is any doubt that I needed help. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be here right now otherwise.
But I still remember the simmering sense of rage and betrayal, the fury at being taken away from my small world of self-destructive grief, my anger at someone daring to try and make me leave that behind.
I was desperate to cling on to that pain – because that’s all I had left of her. All I had left of my precious Gracie. The pain of her not being there. There was a baby-shaped hole in my heart, and I didn’t ever want to lose it. It was killing me softly, but it was all I had.
Michael is turning all of this over in his mind, probably realising that when he was a child, I was eating my food from plastic trays and taking pills with my morning juice. Maybe also wondering if he ever met Gracie, and if he was old enough to remember, and trying to sift through his own memory banks. Questions he doesn’t dare to ask.
‘This must be strange for you,’ I say, ‘hearing all of this. You thought you were just signing up for a funeral, which is bad enough, and then you end up getting whacked around the head with all these revelations …’
‘It is, yes,’ he replies, quietly. ‘Strange and horribly sad. From being little, you’ve always been in my life, Jess. Different from the others, always ready to listen, never judging. You’ve never seemed weak, or broken, or fragile at all. And now we’re sitting here, and I’m terrified of a bloody shoebox, and I have no idea why seeing this stuff sent you off on a spiral like that.’