Coming Home (19 page)

I stabbed ‘disconnect’.

I
was glad to see the living room light off when I got home. I crept upstairs and poked my head around Mum’s bedroom door when I saw that her bedside light was still on. She was sitting up in bed, looking intently at a photo album. From it, Graham’s ten-year-old face smiled up at her.

‘Oh hello, darling. How was your evening?’ Mum closed the album quickly. I pretended I hadn’t seen.

‘Good, thanks. G’night!’ I started to back out of the room. My head was full of Tom.

‘The funeral was beautiful, wasn’t it?’ said Mum.

I paused in the doorway. ‘Yes. It was lovely.’

‘All those white lilies. So beautiful.’

White lilies? There had been no flowers. We’d made sure of that by asking people to donate to charity instead. Unless …? Oh God.

‘They were lovely,’ I said, non-committal, looking for my escape. But Mum patted the bed. ‘Come and sit with me for a bit, Evie. I’m just remembering. There’s no harm in remembering, is there?’

I smiled the trace of a smile, and sat on the bed, carefully
out of touching distance. I couldn’t look at Mum, just at the bedspread. I studied the patchwork and wondered who’d made it—it hadn’t been Mum: that much I knew. I picked a repeating pattern of tiny daisies and stared at it. Mum was on a roll.

‘The coffin was so small, Evie, just him and his elephant inside—Ellie, wasn’t it? I put Ellie on his chest—no parent should have to see such a small coffin. I think the white made it even worse.’ I realised I was holding my breath. ‘Maybe we should have gone for oak, after all. But it was your father’s choice. He asked for the white. And he was right: the white lilies looked so special, didn’t they? Arranged on top?’

I traced the patchwork with my finger, forced myself to breathe. I didn’t know what to say.

‘And the readings—his teacher, what was her name? Mrs Wilson? Mrs Wilcox? She did such a special reading, didn’t she? She really captured his spirit. He was such a character. But I cried when that little boy from his class read out what he’d written himself. “Graham was the best friend I could ever have wished for and I can’t wait to see him in Heaven”—that’s what he said, wasn’t it? I cried then. It was so sweet. I wonder how he is now.’

‘Mum, stop.’

‘And then how we sang his favourite hymn, “All things bright and beautiful”. It was lovely. I’ll never forget that … I did my reading after that. Do you remember how the vicar had to support me so I didn’t fall?’

Mum’s eyes were unfocused, she was lost in her thoughts, rambling. ‘I’ll never forget the sound of that first clot of earth
hitting the coffin. I’m glad I threw it, but I’ll never forget the sound.’ Suddenly, her eyes snapped back to me, took in the expression on my face. ‘I’m just remembering, darling. I’m not sad. I’m just remembering my boy. There’s no one else left to remember him now, darling. Just you and me.’

There was no harm in remembering. I got that. But Mum was not remembering. Mum hadn’t gone to Graham’s funeral. She’d locked herself in the bathroom, screaming that he wasn’t dead and she wasn’t going to pretend he was. No one could get her out, not even me. In the end, I’d gone alone with Dad.

‘‘Course not, Mum. Goodnight,’ I said.

Back in my room, I sat on the edge of my bed, my knees hugged to my chest, and stared at nothing. Was this part of the ‘grief dysfunction’ Miss Dawson had mentioned? Was Mum regressing? Twice she’d confused Dad’s death with Graham’s and now she remembered a funeral she hadn’t even been to. I didn’t care what Richard had said about her being OK: it terrified me. I’d seen Mum go through a psychosis, depression and a suicide attempt once in my life and I didn’t want to see it again. She may be getting through her day-to-day life with a wave and a breezy smile, but she didn’t fool me. Something was amiss far below the surface and I was terrified of what might happen. I couldn’t let her deteriorate like she had after Graham’s death.

I flung myself back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I thought we’d got through this; I thought we were safe now.
Mum had got her job, got her life together. She’d got her golf, the church, her friends, even her cosy little friendship with Richard. I couldn’t let her lose all that. Taking a deep breath I pulled myself up and marched back into her bedroom. Her light was off.

‘I know you’re not asleep and there’s something I need to say. You don’t have to answer, but please listen to what I have to say.’ I paused. Mum was so still I knew she was listening. ‘Graham’s funeral,’ I said. ‘You weren’t remembering it. You weren’t there. You’ve pieced things together from what other people told you, but they’re not memories. It’s important that you know that. I’m not going to let you get confused. Don’t go down that route now, Mum. You’ve got through all that and you’re fine. You’re on the right track. Don’t bring it all back up again. Please.’

Silence.

‘Mum. Do you hear me?
You weren’t there!’

I crumpled against the bedroom wall, the fight having suddenly left me, and waited for a response, something, anything at all to show that Mum had heard me. When nothing came, I turned to leave. Only as I reached the door did her voice come, tiny, from the bed.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I do know that.’

M
um’s golf club wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I’d never played golf, but I’d always imagined clubhouses to be quite plush places with oak-panelled walls and overstuffed sofas, the scent of a million old cigars ground into thick carpets. But Mum’s club, with its sticky Formica table tops, self-service cafeteria and lingering smell of last night’s chips, bore more resemblance to a motorway service station than any sort of members’ club. It was, Mum told me apologetically, only a temporary base while the real clubhouse was given a much-needed refurbishment.

Mum was happy, though. She’d worried that it might look unseemly to play golf so soon after her bereavement, but she’d told me that she’d had a chat to her friends, who’d assured her that no one would think the worse of her if she came and, furthermore, had insisted that she’d regret it if she didn’t take part in the annual Ladies’ Morning Challenge—it was the highlight of the recreational golfing calendar.

‘Would you mind dropping me off?’ she’d asked coyly. ‘I’d like to have a drink or two at the Ladies’ Lunch.’

I didn’t mind at all. The scene with her in the bedroom last night had left me shaken. Even though Mum had said
that she knew she wasn’t at Graham’s funeral, part of me felt she’d said that just to appease me; that she’d lied to shut me up. Maybe she thought I was the mad one. I had no idea what was going on in her head. Anyway, the fact was, I was more than happy to drop her off: although I’d had to concentrate hard on making normal conversation with her in the car, it meant I’d be alone till after lunch—and I had plans of my own.

All Mum’s ‘golf girls’ were there. It was a mark of how well they knew Mum that they didn’t make a fuss of her over Dad’s death, welcoming her instead with a mix of bawdiness and laughter that made me smile. She was in good hands. Feeling more than a little deceptive, I waved them off to the first hole then headed home to make a start on my own little projects: first, Uncle David; second, Tom.

I found Mum’s address book tucked in the desk drawer where it had lived for as long as I remembered. Some of the pages were so well thumbed the paper was thinning. I don’t know how long it had been since she last had any contact with Uncle David, but the book was old enough to give me some hope that his address might be there.

Although Mum had indicated that she didn’t want me to contact her brother, I’d decided to do it anyway. Over and above everything else, it was only polite to let Uncle David know that his brother-in-law had passed away but, besides that, I was twenty-eight years old, for goodness’ sake, not a child who did whatever her mother thought best. Mum’s
acting weird had given me the strange feeling that I was the adult in the relationship, like I was the one protecting her, and not the other way around.

Anyway, I reasoned, maybe enough time had passed for whatever it was that had caused Uncle David and Mum to become estranged to have faded into insignificance; maybe they were both too proud to make the first move. But he was Mum’s closest living relative and the pair of us were hardly in the position to pick and choose our relatives: we were currently a family of two and a secret half, and I’d welcome the addition of an uncle, however elusive. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I found Uncle David’s details under ‘E’ for Evans—Mum’s maiden name. But then there was a problem: no email address. Of course, back when Mum wrote it down, there was no email. There was a phone number and a postal address in Oxford. I wasn’t going to phone, so it would have to be a physical letter. Sighing, I searched my parents’ heavy wooden desk for the pad of watermarked Basildon Bond I knew would be there somewhere, chose a pen and started writing.

Half an hour later, when I was happy with my handiwork, I sealed the envelope, dug out a stamp from the tin my parents kept in the desk, and walked down the road to the postbox. I stared at the envelope for the last time, crossed my fingers and pushed it through the slot.

Next on my agenda was Tom. I was desperate to find out
more about him. It fascinated me that there was this person out there who shared so many of my genes. With Luca’s warning still ringing in my ears, I needed to find out as much as I could. I knew Tom wouldn’t be Graham—of course he wouldn’t be Graham—but, before I could decide whether or not I wanted to meet him, whether it was safe to tell Mum about him or anything, I needed to know what sort of person he was. Settling myself with a coffee at the dining table, I opened up Google on the iPad and typed ‘Tom Peters’ into the search box, flinching as the screen suddenly filled with images and links to mentions of my half-brother.

Two hours later, I had a more complete idea of the entity that was Tom Peters. In a nutshell: he was a second-year law student at Warwick University; he had a girlfriend called Sophie (blonde, beautiful, also studying law); 267 Facebook friends—about 150 of whom appeared to want to replace Sophie as far as I could tell by the flirty comments and selfies of themselves in various states of undress that they posted in his timeline. On Twitter, he had 1,094 followers. ‘@TeePee94’, ran his bio. ‘Amateur sportsman, comedian and lawyer-in-waiting. Live and let live.’ He was sports-mad, played in the university cricket and rugby teams, and wasn’t averse to delivering a bit of stand-up comedy, usually to good reviews. I loved that he seemed to be an all-round good-egg sort of a bloke. Staring into space, I wondered what Graham would have been like had he been able to grow up. Definitely a good egg, too.

Still, these facts weren’t enough. I needed to know as
much about Tom as was humanly possible without meeting him. I clicked on the link to a review of one of his stand-up gigs in Coventry and smiled as I read it. I loved that my half-brother was funny. Had he got the ‘performance’ gene from Dad? I wondered. One of the reasons Dad had become so successful was his ability to engage an audience and deliver quite dull facts in an amusing way. Flicking onto YouTube, I searched for videos of Tom performing, but nothing came up.

How would we meet for the first time? I wondered. Did Tom even know about me? My friend Clem lived in Warwick. Maybe we’d be sitting in the tea rooms that she ran, enjoying a cream tea and cackling like witches, when in he’d walk, unmistakably my brother. He’d do a double take as he passed by my table.

‘Excuse me, but do we know each other?’ he’d ask.

‘I do believe you may be my long-lost brother,’ I’d reply, super-cool. I shook my head at my corny imagination. I’d been watching too many Hollywood movies. It’d probably be far more mundane than that.
If
I decided to meet him.

I scrolled through Tom’s Twitter feed and saw with a jolt, as newer tweets loaded, that he wasn’t currently in Warwick. He was actually staying down in Maidstone for a couple of weeks, working at a café while he revised for exams. Maidstone was about half an hour away by car. I typed ‘Harry’s Café’ into the search box and clicked ‘images’—there it was, the place my brother most likely was right now. I looked at the café’s door and imagined
him walking through it each day. The thought of it blew my mind.

I didn’t hear the phone ring at first, so intense was my concentration on the iPad screen. I’d toyed with the idea of following Tom on Twitter but had decided it was too risky. Instead, I was scrolling through his Tweets, sucking up every last piece of knowledge I could about him, trying to get to know as much about him as possible before I decided whether or not I wanted to announce myself as his secret half-sister.

‘Hi, darling, it’s just me,’ said Mum. It was hard to hear her over the background noise. She was in the bar or restaurant. I looked at my watch—it was already three o’clock.

‘How was the match? Did you win?’ I asked.

‘We won! No thanks to me, though: the third hole took me nine shots! Nine! I usually do that in about four, but thank heavens Margot got a birdie!’

‘Wow, congratulations! Nice one! So have you been celebrating?’

‘Can’t you hear, dear? It’s like a hen night in here! The prize was a magnum of champagne and we’ve drunk the lot!’ I could hear the unaccustomed giggle in her voice now she mentioned it. Mum rarely drank more than the odd whisky or glass of wine. ‘Are you able you come and pick Richard and me up in about twenty minutes? It’ll take us that long to sort out the bill.’

I raised an eyebrow. Richard? At the Ladies’ Morning? ‘Sure. Glad you had a good time.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘Oh nothing much, you know, pottering about at home. A bit of work.’ Lying to my mother. ‘I’ll see you in a bit. Bye.’

I
didn’t consciously decide to go and see Zoe: I woke in the wee hours, absolutely sure of the fact that I had to. I’ve no memory what I was dreaming about, no idea why the thought came to mind, no clue why it woke me, but it did. My eyes snapped open and I lay rigid in bed, my muscles still paralysed with sleep, arms by my sides, and I knew with every fibre of my being that I had to see her again.