Before She Was Mine (6 page)

I glanced up, surprised. ‘We don’t do presents. I haven’t got him anything.’

‘I know. He said it doesn’t matter.’

The paper tore away and I was holding a book:
The Rough Guide to Israel & the Palestinian Territories
. ‘Oh. Wow. This is – unexpected.’

‘Is it a gardening manual?’ asked Liv.

I studied the palm trees on the cover. Whatever had induced him to get me this? The guide was clearly well used, the cover curled at one corner and the spine creased. Michael did like to mooch
around second-hand bookshops; I could imagine him sliding it off a shelf, on a whim. But why pass it on to me?

‘Hmm. Tell him I don’t know how I’ve survived without it.’

I supposed he must have meant the guide as a dig because I never went anywhere. I’ve a terrible fear of flying, for a start – I suffer from a recurring dream where the plane
I’m on climbs vertically and then drops like a stone. Abroad frightened me. I didn’t even hold a current passport. In fact, the only time I’ve been out of the UK was for a school
trip when I was thirteen and we took a ferry to Belgium for two days. I hated every minute. Holidays with Liv were taken in this country, always based around some ecologically interesting area
– wetlands one year, shingle coast another. I didn’t really mind because it was just what we did, and some of it was cool, e.g. map-reading and watching seals. If Colin hadn’t
come off his motorbike maybe we’d have done more usual stuff: sandy beaches, shopping, video arcades. Liv has a photo of Colin and me, aged two, filling a bucket with seaweed. But
there’s no point dwelling on what might have been.

I used to go away with Liv till I was about sixteen, and then I rebelled so she left me to camp at Nicky’s for the week. Basically, I stopped having holidays then. Even British ones seemed
like more bother and expense than they were worth. And the idea of navigating InterRail timetables or foreign currency or health insurance froze my mind. How on earth do you arrange these things?
Liv didn’t know, wasn’t interested, didn’t approve of travelling around much anyway on account of the carbon emissions.

Nicky went with her parents annually to her mum’s friend’s villa in Portugal, but these trips were always organised by Derek; Nicky’s only responsibilities were to pack and
climb into the car. Melody’s holidays were irregular, spontaneous and boyfriend-led. No room for an awkward daughter in the hold.

Get off your backside and see the world
, Michael was saying to me.

By landing in a war zone, though?

‘Don’t forget my present,’ said Melody.

The book slid to one side. I picked up the golden box.

When I lifted the lid, it was to find a silky nightdress covered in a rose pattern, a riot of pinks and purples. I lifted the chemise out by its straps, and two slender mauve ribbons unfurled
and fell gracefully from the centre of the bust. ‘My God,’ I said. It was the kind of outfit that would have looked fantastic on Melody. I knew it would make me look like a half-hearted
transvestite. ‘Add a touch of glamour to your life’, read the label. A sudden memory of standing in Melody’s bedroom early on, peering through the drapery of scarves and necklaces
into her dressing-table mirror while she rubbed foundation into my jaw line.
Your skin’s so like mine. I’ve waited years to do this, Frey.

‘Gosh, thanks very much,’ I said.

‘Every woman needs a bit of silk in her wardrobe, doesn’t she?’

‘Just wish I had someone to wear it for.’

‘What about Oggy?’

‘We’re not seeing each other any more.’

Melody shrugged. ‘Oh, you’ll get back together, you always do. In the meantime, wear it for yourself. Be gorgeous for gorgeous’ sake.’ Across the room, Geraint lowered
his face and hunched deeper into his chair. ‘What did Liv get you?’

‘A coat,’ said Liv.

Which I had to pick myself
, I thought ungraciously. The next moment I was ashamed. As if Liv hadn’t had enough to worry about these last weeks. If it had been me with a scary lump,
I’d have been a weeping mess, never mind arranging present lists.

‘It’s really nice,’ I said. ‘It’s like a bomber jacket.’

‘You going to show me, then?’ asked Melody.

‘It’s hanging up in the hall. Come and see.’

‘I need to check the turkey,’ said Liv, getting to her feet as well. Geraint stayed where he was, only his eyes flicking to the side as we trooped past him.

Melody and I hadn’t even reached the newel post when she stopped unexpectedly, making me bump into her. When she turned around, her face was alight.

‘
Merry
Christmas, Frey.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ I said cautiously. Perhaps she had been drinking, after all.

‘You did like your nightie, didn’t you?’

‘It was great. Very rosy.’

She clasped her hands in satisfaction. ‘Oh, my God, everything’s so perfect!’

I thought that was overdoing it a bit, so I stepped past her and reached for the sleeve of my new coat. I knew Melody would hate it. She’d call the colour sludgy, wrinkle her nose at the
ribbed cuffs. ‘Why do you dress like you’re about to walk onto a battlefield?’ she asked me once. ‘All those nice funky clothes I bought you when we first met.’ I
remember thinking that if she’d chosen to keep me rather than give me up for adoption, she’d have kitted me out in pink and lace and artificial flower hair slides, and I’d
probably have grown up clacking around in unsuitable shoes instead of scrambling up and down ditches in my wellies. And as we stood there in the hallway, I was transfixed by a sudden pang of
longing to be a little girl again, holding Liv’s clipboard for her and marking off water-vole burrows.

Melody lifted the other sleeve of the coat. ‘Yeah, very grungy, Frey. Suits you.’

‘Sure.’

‘It does. It’s your style, I’m not going to criticise. No need to look so down.’

‘I’m not down.’

‘You are.’

‘I’m nostalgic. That’s not the same.’

‘Nostalgic for what?

‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Tell me, hun.’

I exhaled slowly. ‘I suppose, a time when I fitted in. Christmas when you’re a kid, you know where you are. It’s safe. Now I’m not sure I belong.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I’m not explaining it very well. What I mean is, I can’t rewind. I can’t go back and find the place I felt right . . .’
So I need to have got to the next stage.
I need to have my own base, be starting some new venture of my own. A new job, a man, a family, even. Any step forward. Something other than this axolotl existence.
‘It’s like they
say, Christmas is for children – it is, though, isn’t it? Those are the happiest Christmases. However the rest of us flounder about – and basically once you’re past that
stage it gets sad because you can’t—’

I didn’t get to complete the sentence because Melody put her finger to my lips and arched her brows dramatically. ‘For children, you say?’

I nodded.

‘As it happens, I might be able to help out there,’ she said.

It took a few seconds for her meaning to sink in.

‘You don’t mean you’re pregnant?’ I hissed.

‘I do.’

You’re too old
, I almost said. ‘Does Joe know?’

‘Of course he does.’

‘Is he all right with it?’

‘He’s thrilled.’

‘How far on are you?’

‘Only just begun really. I used one of those super-early predictor tests.’

‘You’re sure you read it right?’

‘Of course I’m sure. I’m going to see the midwife in the New Year.’

It was true, then. The next second I remembered my manners. ‘Congratulations!’

‘Shhh.’ Melody glanced behind me towards the lounge door and the kitchen.

‘Have I to keep it a secret?’

‘Just for a few weeks. I want to try and get a scan photo, then I can show people the baby’s picture.’ She grinned and gave a little shiver of excitement.

You’ll be keeping this one, will you?
I couldn’t stop the sentence popping, fully formed, into my head. For a terrible moment I imagined what would happen if I spoke it aloud,
how her face would crumple, what devastation it would wreak after the years we’d been so careful with each other.

I took a deep breath. ‘Yes, just think,’ I said.

After Melody had gone, I put on my new coat and went and sat in our garage for a while, trying to work out how I felt. The truth was, I couldn’t take it in. Melody
wasn’t a mother-type. I just couldn’t picture her with a baby at all. Hadn’t she said herself she wasn’t cut out for child-rearing, and it was the best bit of luck I ever
had in my life that I didn’t get brought up by her? Wasn’t her running joke that she couldn’t even be trusted to look after a goldfish?

And yet for all that, I know she didn’t give me up straight away. Attitudes were different in the 1980s, and when she gave birth she was only fifteen, a minor. Jesus, at fifteen my idea of
a crisis was a morning where my hair wouldn’t go flat.

I know she only had me for forty-eight hours before I was taken away to foster carers. That she then had weeks of counselling, and she found it really hard to make up her mind despite Grandma
Abby going on at her about what a fool she was to even think about keeping me. I know she dithered for three months, till her social worker said that really it was the best time for me to move,
before I formed attachments.

I know she was asked to come up with a wish list for the type of adoptive family she wanted and she put that she wanted a big house with a garden and a piano. ‘But they did say they
couldn’t guarantee anything,’ she told me later. ‘I just thought a piano would have been nice.’

I know that when she came to sign the final consent form, she got an attack of nervous giggles and they all thought she was going mad.

I obviously know that her social worker encouraged her to write me a letter because I have it; Liv and I used to read it together from when I was about eight. It’s half a side of loopy,
childish script, with circles instead of dots over each i, which I’ve since read graphologists consider a sign of dishonesty, though I don’t believe Melody is dishonest, no more than
most people. The letter says pretty much what you’d expect. That she loves me but she wants me to have a better life, that she hopes I’ll be good for my new mum and dad and grow up to
be happy. That her name for me was Fay Johanna.

She wrote to Liv every year asking how I was doing, and Liv always replied, though no photos were ever exchanged and neither party knew where the other was based because the letters went via
social services. Liv used to ask me what I wanted to go in our letters – teachers’ comments from my report, lost milk teeth, school trips, any little achievement or adventure –
but she was the one who actually wrote them. I didn’t object because I thought it had to be that way. Maybe it did.

So I’ve grown up aware that Melody thought about me and wished me well, and in turn I knew stuff like when she bought a new car or changed her boss or tripped over doing salsa and broke
her arm. I’ve always had a sense of her. Even as a shadowy pen pal she was part of my life. Remote, but there.

I tried again to imagine her with a new baby. The picture wouldn’t gel. But a baby there would be, it wasn’t going to go away.

I’d have to get my head round it somehow.

When I went back, Liv was still in the kitchen, battling with the turkey.

‘Tell me about when I was little,’ I said.

She looked up from basting, her face shiny with the heat. She’d tied her hair back with a duster, which must have been the first fabric to hand.

‘I’ll do the carrots for you.’

‘Thanks.’ She hefted the turkey over, basted it, and with an effort, slid the tray back into the oven. Then she put her palms flat on the worktop and hung her head.

‘Do you feel faint or something?’

‘It’s warm in here. Open the back door, will you?’

I put the peeler down and did as she asked.

‘OK,’ she said, recovering herself and shifting to the sink where a plate of parsnips waited. ‘Let’s see. When you were little.’

‘Was I a good baby?’

‘Oh, the best. I think the people who’d had you before us had got you into a routine. You slept through, you were pretty keen on your food. You weren’t talking or walking but
you were bright as a button, we could see that straight away.

‘What was my first word?’

‘“Ta”. You used it to mean please as well as thank you. And even when you couldn’t say much, you’d wave your arms and legs around when we spoke to you. It was very
sweet.’

I looked across at her as she scrubbed the parsnips. Her eyes were gazing out over the garden, but unfocused, as though she was watching scenes invisible to me.

‘How happy were you that you had me?’

‘Happier than a king.’

I’ve asked her before; that’s her stock answer. I never tire of hearing it.

‘And you used to love watching water come out of the outside tap,’ she went on. ‘And the first time we took you to the beach, you didn’t like the feel of the sand on your
feet and you had a screaming tantrum. And later in the week you saw some shrimps swimming in a rock pool and you couldn’t stop giggling at them. You won’t remember, though.’

Melody popped unbidden into my head, Melody and her expanding embryo. I longed to confide the news in Liv. ‘Do you like babies?’

‘I liked
you
. Oh, and another thing you used to do: you really developed a taste for Calpol, and sometimes you pretended your teeth were hurting so we’d give you some. And of
course it’s poisonous if you take too much, and I never knew whether or not you were faking. Colin would be saying, “Oh, give it to her,” and I’d be saying, “No,
let’s wait.” You were a devil for it.’

‘A druggie before I was two.’

She stopped cleaning the parsnips and her shoulders drooped again. I wondered whether she was remembering Colin. That’s the trouble with reminiscing. You don’t know what else
you’ll drag up.

‘Do you want to sit down for a minute?’

Liv just shook her head. I left my carrots and went to see what was wrong.

‘Oh, God, Mum.’