She looks down at the china cup in her hand. “Yes, I suppose. It’s been a long day. Thought I’d recharge.”
“Good timing by me, then,” I say, and like a reluctant, awkward stranger making space on a park bench, she moves over.
The van is stuffy and smells sweet, like warm fruit, and I’m glad when she doesn’t ask me to pull the door to, to shut out the fresh sea air. It reminds me of that trip to Edinburgh, that smell. The way I’d told her, in the silence of the tiny van, parked in a pitch-black campsite, that I hadn’t slept for weeks. That every time I closed my eyes, my dreams would take me to that classroom at Fortescue Lane, with him, and it would be so vivid, so real, that I swore I could smell his aftershave on my neck, like I still could that night when I got home. She sipped. That’s all she did. I wanted her to hold me, to cradle me, to tell me she wouldn’t let him hurt me again. But instead she’d said, “You know dreams aren’t real at your age, Emmeline,” as if a bad dream is all it ever was, and once again, brought the cup to her lips.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asks now.
“I was actually thinking maybe we could have dinner or something.” I hate the way my skin prickles with embarrassment at such a simple, normal suggestion. “I thought you might be working, but if you’re taking a break—”
“I actually have plans shortly.”
“Oh. Do you?” What I want to say is, why would you email me, then? Why would you send me a message, telling me you’re here, at this festival, in the next town, if you didn’t want to spend time with me? “It’s just, well, it’s been a few months and I thought we could spend some time together. Have a drink? Take a walk? Have an ice cream to celebrate?”
“Celebrate?” Mum stops, tea at her lips. “What is there to celebrate?”
My heart sinks, as if it is a rock dropped into a tank of water. “My birthday, Mum. My thirtieth.” And I know. I know from the way her hazel eyes glint, the way they widen, just a little, that she had forgotten. That her emailing me a couple of weeks ago, to “check in,” to tell me she’d be here, saying she’d “hoped” to see me when I said I was working but would ask for time off, was just a coincidence.
“Oh, Emmeline, stop it,” she says, clattering down the cup and saucer on the wooden counter behind her. “Don’t insult me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know it was your birthday. I didn’t forget. How could I?”
I nod. “Well. That’s what I meant by celebrate. Thirty. It’s kind of a big deal.”
“Is it?” she asks. “It is but a number, sweetheart, you know that. People place too much meaning on age.”
“Maybe,” I say, and then I change the subject, because I can feel her gearing up for a debate, about age, about people, as if she isn’t one of us. “So, how is everything? Have you been traveling a lot?” Most might ask about business, but I know better. I’ll be accused of caring too much about money if I do that.
She settles in the seat beside me, leg inches from mine, but never touching, and begins to list the places she and Jim have been since January. I have never heard of Jim before, but she talks as if I have known him all my life. Mum has always done this with boyfriends. One minute she doesn’t know them, the next minute they’re talked about as if they have been part of the furniture since day one. When I was seven, it felt like Den had been in my life all along because of this—because of Mum and her routine of jumping feetfirst, introducing me to them quickly, bypassing “dating” and going straight to meals at home and eating in front of the telly together, them helping me with my homework, putting me to bed. Mum and Den, someone I called my stepdad, were actually only together for three years, yet I don’t remember a time before him. He and Mum got together when I was five, and he’d left when I was eight, almost nine. It went from him hiding sweets in his jacket for me to find, picking me up from school, and reading bedtime stories, to waiting for his key in the door and to looking for him in every red car that drove by, for however long it took me to realize he wasn’t coming back.
“We went to Cornwall last weekend, for a festival in Bude,” Mum says, brightening.
I nod enthusiastically.
“And before that, we actually went to Guernsey, which was glorious. There’s something special about it. The air…” Mum pauses and looks skyward, as if she can see the sort of air she’s referring to, around us. “It feels clean. Welcoming. A little bubble all its own, you know?”
“Like Skye,” I say, and she nods, eyes lighting up as if something has ignited.
“Yes, Emmeline,” she says, “exactly like Skye,” and I curse myself that my stomach sparks with something. Validation. For pleasing my mum, for getting something right for her, as if I am three, and a “good girl,” and not a grown thirty-year-old woman.
“And what about you?” she asks, smiling thinly. “I said to Jim just a few nights ago, that for all I know, you could be on the other side of the world. That’s why I emailed. What have you been doing with yourself?”
It’s times like these that I wish I had the relationship with my mum that my school friends had—that Rosie has with hers. I’d love to confide in her about Lucas. About the wedding, about Fishers Way and my roasting-hot room, and how much I worry sometimes, that I’m so off track, so “off plan” from where I thought I would be at this time of my life that it fills me with panic. That I’m scared of the loneliness that swamps me sometimes, so much I feel like I can’t breathe. That despite it being fourteen years ago, while I no longer dream of Mr. Morgan, his hot, wet voice in my ear, his hand bruising my thigh, I often feel guilt, of all things, about him, about telling someone what he did to me that night. Because he was suspended while it was “looked into.” He moved away alone, for a while, away from his wife and children—one of whom was my best school friend, Georgia. So many people hurt—so many people I cared about, and because of me. “Because of him, Emmie. Not you. It was all him,” Lucas would say, like he has so many times before, if he were here now. But I don’t tell Mum this stuff. It has never been that way for us.
“I haven’t been up to much,” I say to Mum, pausing to look around the tiny, musty space. I can hear a band—electric guitars, a fast, jolly violin—just beyond the van and its little cubbyhole on the field. “I’m still renting the place on Fishers Way.”
“Not the flat?”
“No,” I say. “I told you, I rent a room now. I left the flat eighteen months ago. I just couldn’t afford it anymore.”
“Well, I told you that a long time ago, Emmeline, but you refused to listen to me. You should have never tried to keep it on once, you know, erm, the police officer up and left you.”
“Adam,” I say, and I ignore the little jab in my stomach at the “up and left” part of her sentence. As if it was nothing. It was a long time ago now, yes—four years—but Adam, my first serious boyfriend, leaving the flat we’d moved into together, planned futures in, picked out furniture for, certainly didn’t feel like nothing back then. But then, Mum had “up and left” me all over the place when I was just fourteen, and she’s had more boyfriends and breakups than I could ever count. “We are meant to be babied only when we are babies,” she used to say, when I’d show heartache, show fear, or simply ask her to come with me to the dentist, or to miss a trip to help me study, like Georgia’s mum did, with flash cards and timers and plates of cookies. Of course it is nothing to her.