Putting Alice Back Together (31 page)

‘Come back.’ I closed my eyes as Bonny held me tighter.

‘Of course I’ll be back. It’s just ten days, Bonny.’

And then it was my turn to walk through the doors and I knew how my sister was feeling as she watched me leave.

You have my absolute permission to shoot me if I ever describe myself as jaunty, but I was shiny and
ready
, as my time came to go through the doors.

I can’t even remember what music the customs officers were playing. You’d have to ask Bonny.

I was going back.

I was moving forward, by going back.

I was ready.

Seventy-One

My paranoia as to people thinking I’m gay when out with Roz has been slightly merited.

I mean, had I been trying to pull on this trip home, it would have proven difficult.

Roz was finding her own style now—lots of linen trousers and blouses and flat shoes.

She smelt great. She even wore make-up, but it was still—well, kind of obvious.

I accepted the quizzical frowns when she cuddled me because I started bawling at Singapore Airport because Hugh had once said he liked it, and when I had a little panic on the descent to Heathrow and she held my hand, I didn’t care that two horrible teenagers nudged each other and giggled.

I guess they thought I was the girly one.

Mum had known I was bringing a friend and the second she opened the door I could tell she was petrified of Roz, but Roz was so used to that, that she soon put Mum at ease. I left Roz chatting away with her in
the kitchen as I roamed about the house, checking out the changes.

It was the day before Christmas Eve and we were too excited to sleep so we took the tube to Oxford Street. Even Mum came along, and Roz took a hundred photos and we bought last-minute presents and enjoyed the mayhem, and then it was back home and Mum refused Roz’s offer to help with dinner, but gave me a wide-eyed look and nodded her head towards the kitchen.

I had been summoned.

I was in my old room, she explained. Roz was in Bonny’s till Christmas night, when she’d have to have the sofa because Eleanor, Noel and the kids would be staying. Mum would sleep on a camp bed in the back room, so Eleanor and Noel would have hers and the kids would be in Bonny’s, which had once been Bonny’s and mine. Eleanor always had her own room—it’s really too confusing to explain.

‘That’s fine,’ I said patiently, because Mum always gets in a lather about room arrangements.

‘Why don’t I put the camp bed in your room tonight?’ Mum said. ‘I could set it up now.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it would save us all moving our things around. You and Roz can share. I can set up Bonny’s old room for the kids.’ (I will spare you all the logistics of the conversation—I’m sure you’ve had one similar.)

‘Just leave it as it is,’ I said, turning to go.

‘It would make things easier,’ Mum said.

I don’t know why, but though I’d matured a great deal over the past months, a few hours back home and I was seventeen again.

‘I don’t want to share!’ I whined. I didn’t. No matter how much I hated having the flat to myself, I loved having my own room—and it was the same here. Roz chats till she’s unconscious and then she snores and then she gets up at some ungodly hour like seven. I’d put up with it for the wedding ‘cos I couldn’t afford otherwise, but I didn’t want to share my bedroom.

I almost stamped my foot.

It was like being in a time warp, really.

‘I’m trying to make this easy on all of us,’ Mum said.

‘Why can’t you just leave it as it is—?’

‘Alice!’ she interrupted. ‘It might take a bit of getting used to, but Roz seems lovely. You’re the happiest I’ve seen you in a long time.’
She doesn’t…?
a little voice said.
She doesn’t actually think…?
‘Now, I’ll put the camp bed in your room. I’m not going to come in and say goodnight, so what your arrangements are behind closed doors…’
Yes, she bloody well does!

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘Roz and I—well, we’re not…’

‘Alice, I’m not blind,’ Mum said.

‘Roz is,’ I said, ‘but I’m not.’

‘I’m not going to get upset.’ Mum was very patient. She was putting on a very reasonable voice. ‘You don’t have to pretend to me.’

And I stood there in the kitchen and realised how far we’d come.

I wasn’t hysterical that she had dared to think…

Mum wasn’t having kittens that maybe I was…

I started to laugh.

‘Mum…’ I was laughing so much I was crying and in the end Mum was laughing too. ‘I’m not a lesbian!’

We were a bit hysterical really.

‘Oh.’ She looked a bit disappointed once she had calmed down. ‘But if you were,’ she checked, ‘I mean if you had been, did I handle it well?’

We had the best evening.

Mum and Roz just hit it off. So much so I went and had a bath.

I could hear Roz and Mum laughing and chatting and it was nice to be able to relax, to know they were getting on. I came downstairs and they didn’t stop their conversation.

‘I’ve had three,’ Mum said. ‘I know exactly what it’s like.’

‘Yeah, but Lizzie had to put up with a lot,’ Roz said.

‘So did mine.’

I was combing my hair and pretending to watch the TV but just listening.

‘You weren’t gay!’ Roz pointed out.

‘No, but I had loads going on when they were teenagers—all the way through, really. To tell you the truth, Roz, I was in a right mess, trying to keep tabs on him all the time, and then he went off with some lovely young thing. He was always stalling with money. I know I wasn’t great with the girls, but I was trying to keep things going…’ Mum said.

And they chatted on, about how hard it was dealing with your kids’ issues when you had issues of your own, and I felt not jealous, not excluded, but an outsider. I heard a different side to my mum and a different side to Roz too.

‘You need to get out there,’ Roz said later, and Mum just harrumphed.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘I didn’t either. Get your hair done,’ Roz said, ‘join a social club.’ Mum just shrugged. ‘You should do something just for you.’

‘I keep meaning to ask Noel to do my teeth,’ Mum admitted. ‘That’s Eleanor’s husband—he’s a cosmetic dentist.’

‘You should, Gloria.’ Roz nodded furiously.

Yep, Mum does have a name, and I listened as Roz used it.

I have a pretty spectacular friend.

I could never have had the night I had with Mum without Roz there. Could never have learnt so much about Gloria.

We showed Mum YouTube and she was delighted. She kept asking if it was legal as she typed in her searches, pushing the enter button as if she expected the police to jump out of the screen and arrest her, but she soon got over it.

There was even the
Bionic Woman
there.

I lay in my bed that night. I could hear Roz snoring across the hall, Mum was back on YouTube. ‘I Wanna Go Back’ wafted up the stairs, and then it stopped and I could hear Mum flicking the lights off.

It felt good to be home.

Seventy-Two

Christmas Eve, was… well, Christmas Eve.

Hand up turkey’s bum, dashing to corner shop for Sellotape, and then at two p.m. Roz asked what I had got Mum for Christmas. I showed her the perfume I had bought at the airport and the next three hours were spent with the last of the last shoppers, choosing a necklace and nice jumper for her.

And Christmas Day was Christmas Day at the Jamesons’.

I will spare you the details except to say it was nice and, like any family at Christmas, it had its share of drama.

I worried that Roz would get bored. I mean, it was her first time in London, but she was so genuinely happy to be around us mad lot that I realised how much she must miss her own family.

Eleanor was a misery—excused herself three times during Christmas dinner.

I could see Mum’s lips disappearing; saw my niece and nephew getting awkward when she had been gone one puke too long, and went upstairs to check on her.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked as she came out of the loo.

‘Fine.’ She brushed past me and I had that terrible repeat feeling again. I saw Eleanor rinsing her mouth in the sink and then she went to go downstairs, and just as Lex had to me, at this very spot, I called her back.

‘You
can
talk to me.’

I never really expected her to.

Eleanor is an enigma, this distant older figure who happens to be my sister.

I never expected her to start crying.

‘I’m pregnant.’

This time last year I’d have congratulated her. This year I stood there.

‘I can’t tell Noel.’

We sat in her old room, filled with her kids’ presents. The kids are twelve and thirteen. Maybe she and Noel didn’t want to start over again.

‘Doesn’t he want any more?’

‘He’d be delighted.’ She was crying in earnest now. ‘It might not be his.’

Is it just mine, or are all families like this?

I stood there as she crumpled and asked myself that question. I got a very rapid answer.

Yes.

Yes.

Bloody hell,
yes
!

If you look, if you take your blinkers off, if you dare to be honest, if you dare to ask and stop for long enough to hear.

Well, I stand corrected.

My family isn’t dysfunctional—it’s crazy, yes, but completely normal.

‘I can’t have an abortion…’

‘Okay.’ I sat with my arm (awkwardly) around her. (I’ve never cuddled Eleanor before.)

‘I don’t want to break up the marriage,’ she sobbed, ‘but if he finds out…’

‘Do you have to tell him?’ I was all for honesty (well, not really, but I was trying now), but if it had been but a moment’s madness… I guess I was offering options—but you may have realised by now that when my family fucks up they do it in style.

She stood up, went into her bag, pulled out her purse and her shaky, skinny fingers dug inside and she took out a picture.

She wanted to be caught, I realised.

I mean, you don’t carry a picture of your lover in your purse if you don’t want to be found out.

‘What if the kids went in your bag? Or Noel?’ I said as she handed me the photo.

I looked and looked and I looked again.

There was going to be no mistaking who the father was when this baby arrived!

‘He’s my personal trainer,’ Eleanor said and I started to sweat because was I supposed to not comment that he was black?

I honestly didn’t know what to do. I should have just stayed quiet, I suppose, like Lisa does, but I stared at the photo and then I looked at Eleanor.

‘Whatever happens…’ I watched her flinch as she braced herself for an incoming platitude ‘… your baby is going to have beautiful teeth!’

We laughed.

On her worst day, with more to follow, we sat on
the bed and laughed, a sort of hysterical laugh, because sometimes that’s all you can do.

I told her to tell Mum.

She said Mum wouldn’t understand.

I said try her—Mum’s a lot stronger than she seems. And if she doesn’t understand when you tell her, find someone to help who does understand, and that included me.

And by the time we were down the stairs and back in the dining room I realised I had another sister.

It was Christmas and it was fab and then it was the lull that preceded New Year. There was some place I needed to be and I did not want Mum to come with us.

I made some vague excuse, and I could tell she felt left out as she waved us off, but there was no question of bringing her.

It was a fifteen-minute walk to the hospital. Roz had rung from Australia and there was a package for me to collect.

The medical records department was suitably dreary. The miserable clerk said that it was only skeleton staff on over the Christmas break and that I’d have to come back in a couple of weeks. I nearly turned to go, but Roz was insistent. She had it already arranged, she said. Could she check again if there was a package for me?

I stood there sweating, sure I would hear that due to an administration error those little pieces of paper that had meant so little at the time but seemed vital today were lost.

And I promised I wouldn’t make a scene.

I didn’t exactly have the right to, ten years on.

Whatever happened, I had promised I would just accept it.

But I got a large envelope that I wasn’t ready to open, so we walked to the cemetery.

I had no idea where to go, but Lex had given Roz instructions and off we headed—to stare at some signature in a book of remembrance, probably.

I was determined not to fall apart—not just for me. I wouldn’t do it to Roz.

The grass was icy and it crunched under our feet. We sat on a bench and I opened the envelope.

There was a little armband, ‘Baby Jameson’, and it had the date.

There were photos too—I looked so young and scared and she looked so tiny and perfect.

There were footprints and handprints and I traced the outline of her toes just as I had that day, and suddenly I wanted to hold her.

There was the little yellow blanket too, a sort of nappy square in faded lemon, and I buried my face in it and inhaled. There was no scent of her, but there was the feel of her, and I held it on my face for a while and I wanted to hold her so badly, how much I cannot adequately describe.

Roz sat in silence till I was ready and then we headed over to a little wall.

And there it was.

There, amongst so many plaques, we found it easily.

Lydia Jameson

You are loved

Not
were
.

I was so grateful that Lex hadn’t written
were
, because
till now, by me, she hadn’t properly been. I didn’t want love to be past tense, some proxy love I would later read about and agree with—I’m glad for the time Lex gave me with that single word to catch up.

To grow up.

Lydia Jameson, you
are
loved.

Seventy-Three

I don’t think I could have done this trip without Roz.