Perhaps she wouldn’t have liked being called Gracie by the time she was ten. And maybe Daddy Joe Joe would have been just plain Dad. And maybe she wouldn’t have been quite so angelic. She remains, frozen in time, impossibly perfect and forever loved.
Some of the cards were still in envelopes, and I keep these together with their contents. Every scrap of information, every point of contact, feels sacred and precious.
As well as the birthday cards, I have a selection of thick, solid letters, a series of postcards, and some envelopes that contain both a postcard and a small chunky object that I suspect is chewing gum, judging from the dates I can see on some of the envelopes.
Everything has value at this point – if Joe sent a postcard from London or Dublin, it tells me he was there. I will discount the possibility that he sent them from different places just to confuse me – that makes little sense – and anyway, on several the postmark across the stamp is still visible.
It doesn’t take long to read the postcards, as they seem to contain one of two simple messages. Some say ‘Wish you were here xxx’, in Joe’s familiar loops and curls. Some say ‘Happy Birthday Jess xxx’. One says more, but it makes me too sad to contemplate, so I focus instead on my sorting process.
I lay the postcards out on the table, and gaze briefly at the idealised scenes on each of them – St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, rural Ireland, the sandy coves of Cornwall, the Tower of London. Joe was in all of these places at some time between the first one, in late 2004, and what seems to be the last one, in 2008.
The unopened envelopes are more frightening. Some of them feel hefty, crammed with paper. A few are lighter, but still sit seriously in my hands. Maybe that’s why my mother never opened them– she was also scared of what they might contain, and the pain she played a part in causing.
These letters will entirely possibly change the way I view my life – certainly the way I view my past. Joe is a human being, not a superhero, much as he felt like one to me at the time – and reading his letters will be difficult. There will be anguish, and regret, and possibly anger – because for all I know, he assumed I was ignoring him for all these years.
I don’t open them for this very reason. I am not ready for any of that just yet. Instead I look at the envelopes, and see that some were sent to the now-closed hospital where I was initially treated, and clearly passed to my mother. Maybe she arranged it with the staff. Maybe I didn’t want them and gave them back. I don’t think I’ll ever regain complete clarity about that period of my life.
Others were addressed to me here, presumably delivered while I was still away, or later maybe delivered into that strange outside mailbox, ready to be snaffled and hidden in the attic. Some have come through the postal system, others look as though they were brought by hand, with just my name scrawled on the front.
I examine the postmarks and old stamps on various envelopes and cards, and at one stage even use my father’s ancient magnifying glass, the one that for some reason has continued to live in one of the kitchen drawers as it might ‘come in handy one day’.
It does, in fact, come in handy, and I am able to make out the places of origin and the date on most of the envelopes. Some are smudged and impossible to read, but it looks like a lot of the letters come from the Manchester area, others from further afield. The dates and places on the cards and postcards are varied, pieces in the jigsaw that might lead me back to him, or at least allow me to follow the footsteps of his life as he moved on without me.
I lean back and survey the neat stacks. It all looks so very old-fashioned through modern eyes – Michael’s generation is the first to grow up overwhelmingly digital; mine still remembers sending postcards from holiday rather than Instagramming the beach and Facebooking your cocktail.
I still recall queuing at the post office behind old ladies picking up their pensions, and getting bank statements on actual paper through the letterbox. In fact I think I even still have a book of stamps in my purse, a hangover from my mother, who always liked to have them in the house in case of a postal emergency.
There is actually something wonderful about having all of these items here in front of me, being able to touch them and hold them and imagine that Joe’s fingertips touched them and held them too, and that through that we have almost touched and held each other.
You can’t do that with an e-mail or a text. It just doesn’t feel the same, at least not to me. This feels real, without the sense of transience that the virtual world has.
Over the years, on occasional very bored nights in with my housebound mother, I have toyed with the idea of finding out what happened to Joe. I have even gone so far as to google him, and always felt a mix of emotions when the internet reminds me of how common a name Joe Ryan is.
The internet can also take you on some weird odysseys – like when you start looking at a search engine to see who sang a song you heard on the radio, and it leads you down a tunnel of click-bait until you somehow find yourself on Rightmove pricing up property in the mystery singer’s home town, and getting pop-up ads for the cheapo version of the frock she wore to the Grammys.
I always resisted that odyssey with Joe. I knew there must be ways to narrow down my Joe Ryan search so I’d be more likely to find the right one – but in the end, something always stopped me. Common sense. Cowardice. A combination of the two.
I’d close down the screen and tell myself to stop being stupid, it was all dead and gone, and why would I want to know what had happened to him anyway – he left me while I was in hospital, after a breakdown brought on by the death of our daughter. I didn’t hate him for it, and understood that he had also been grieving and broken – but I did know that he’d hurt me, badly, at a time when I needed no more hurting.
Now, that has all changed. Everything has changed. That extra hurt I’ve always thought he caused might not have come from him. The years I’ve spent alone might not have been necessary. The regret I’ve always felt at our love ending so abruptly and unilaterally might have been wasted.
I lock the front door, and give the house one final check over. It is strange, still, being here without my mother, even though she died over a week ago. I still feel that I should be doing my nightly routine – emptying a commode, or putting a load of washing in, or filling her pill box for the next day. Talking to her, and reassuring her, and trying to maintain her dignity as we shuffle together to her bed, her clinging to my neck with shaking arms and always-cold fingers.
Instead, I have only myself to deal with. I fire off a quick text to Michael to tell him that I am fine. I repack the letters and cards into the box, but this time in date order. I pour myself a glass of water and then, on impulse, also grab the remainder of the gin.
I gather my phone, my supplies, and the box, and I walk upstairs to my bedroom. The same bedroom I had as a child, with its high ceilings and wide windows and decades’ worth of memories.
I played in here as an infant, lining up dolls for tea parties. I laughed in here with friends as a teenager, listening to Sir Mix-a-Lot sing about big butts and sighing over Edward Scissorhands. I yearned for Joe in here, from that first day I met him – lying on my bed, imagining him kissing me, imagining him touching me, imagining him making love to me in the idealised way that only a girl who has never made love can. Hoping that maybe he’d somehow feel the same.