Six Months to Get a Life (23 page)

Today was a day of contrasts. On the one hand, Lucy celebrated her fifteenth birthday. She met Jack for a pizza after school and then her dad took her to the hospital to be with her mum.

On the other hand, Mrs F, Dave’s mum, passed away in the night. I had thought about going round there today to call in on her but I was too late. Dave texted me this morning to give me the sad news. Dave and his dad were there when she died. She drifted off peacefully in her sleep. I feel for Dave. He will miss his mum. She suffered a bit towards the end so I bet he is relieved for her that her suffering is over.

Since I got his text this morning I have been half expecting Dave to phone me. When I last saw her back in April, Mrs F implied that Dave would discover some news after her death that would surprise him. She thought he might need my support. I still haven’t got a clue what she was referring to but I am here for Dave. I texted him to tell him as much today.

I hadn’t seen my mum and dad for a while until today. Because I had told them I was busy on my actual birthday (I hadn’t told them quite what I was doing), they invited me over for a pre-birthday tea.

I walked to their house from work. As I stepped in
through the front door and into the kitchen, something felt different. Physically the house hasn’t changed from when I had stayed there. The lamp in the hall was still plugged in to the faulty time switch which keeps it on all day and turns it off just as it gets dark. The fridge did its best to drown out conversation with its annoying hum and the bathroom door wouldn’t shut properly after Jack had kicked it a couple of months ago.

Yet despite not changing, the house had somehow regained its charm. It felt like a home again rather than somewhere I had lodged while life went on around me. I have been back there a few times since I moved out, but it was only today that I really felt comfortable there again.

My mum had cooked cauliflower cheese and gammon, one of my favourites. Before the meal we raised a glass to Mrs F. My parents knew her too when I was growing up and would probably put in an appearance at the funeral.

After an appropriate pause for reflection, my parents turned their attention to me. ‘How’s life in your flat?’ my dad asked. As conversation starters go, that felt like a fairly innocuous start.

‘Oh, you know, I can come and go as I please.’

‘Yes, but are you doing much coming and going, son?’ he followed up.

‘Dad, I’m doing OK,’ I assured him. ‘It is nearly six months since my divorce. In that time the boys have regained their mojo and I am not a grumpy dad as often as I used to be, so they seem happier spending time with me. My new job is more interesting than my last, and I have got my own flat. That can’t be bad going in anyone’s book, can it?’ Counting my achievements off on my fingers like that felt pretty good to me. I glossed over the fitness-related objective though.

‘That’s great son, but are you happy?’ my dad countered. He was like Albus when he gets a bone. He wouldn’t drop it.

And then my mum joined in. The tag team at it again. ‘And what about that woman you mentioned when you came to your father’s seventieth? When do we get to meet her?’

I told my parents about Amy’s accident and her subsequent recovery. I even told them about Jack and Lucy. They knew about Lucy already but not about her connection with Amy. I thought they would have a field day about that bit of gossip but they didn’t. And I told them about mine and Amy’s current issues - Amy’s low self-esteem because of her damaged appearance and lost sight, my ex’s interference in our affairs because of her jealousy, or to put a positive spin on it, her concern for her boys’ upbringing, and my apparent inability to stop myself from saying the wrong thing.

‘Amy sounds like a lovely woman. You should make sure you sort your differences out with her,’ my mum advised. In that sentence, my mum moved on from fifteen years of showering my ex with praise to affirming her allegiance to Amy. That was the social worker in her kicking in, backing the injured victim. In this instance I didn’t mind in the least.

But my mother hadn’t finished yet. ‘Tell us more about Amy,’ she suggested. ‘What does she do for a living?’

‘She writes articles about sex,’ I told my parents. I couldn’t resist it.

‘Does that mean she is good at it?’ my dad asked.

Talking to my parents about Amy was therapeutic. If I can’t talk to Amy, and I still can’t at the moment because she is avoiding me, then the next best thing seems to be to talk to someone about Amy. The conversation made me realise yet again how important Amy has become to me. I have done pretty well in my quest to get a life but I won’t consider my mission accomplished until Amy and I are together again.

Amy’s mobile phone was smashed to pieces in the accident. As a consequence, I haven’t been able to talk directly to her when I haven’t been at the hospital. Most of my communication with Amy over the past six days has been third hand, via her mother. Tonight, Imogen phoned me from the hospital and passed the phone over to Amy. We exchanged pleasantries and then Amy gave me the bad news.

‘They aren’t sure I will be out of here by Friday night.’

‘Why not? Everything is OK, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Yes, everything is fine, but the doctors are still concerned by the headaches.’

Up until this point it was odds on that Amy would be let out in time for the party. Imogen has even bought a huge ‘welcome home’ banner and Jack and Lucy helped her put it up over the weekend in case Amy came home without much notice. The news that she won’t be home is gutting, for me but also for Amy. She will miss her daughter’s party (I expect that’s how she thinks of it). To be frank, it won’t be much of a party without Amy.

‘I want to come and see you,’ I said, almost pleadingly.

‘Not yet, Graham,’ Amy resisted, ‘perhaps come at the weekend and tell me how the party went.’ Well, that’s something I suppose.

‘Sergeant Atkinson has just been in to see me,” she continued. “They have caught the driver who knocked me down.’ Now this was really news. A small part of me tensed up as she talked. Was I about to hear something that would turn my world upside down again? Was she about to tell me that my ex had tried to kill her as part of some mad scheme to win me back or protect her children? Surely not.

It wasn’t her. It was officially an accident rather than anything premeditated. Obviously I never thought for a minute that it was my ex.

Instead, it was just some woman with a bunch of misbehaving kids in the back of her car. She wasn’t drunk, just distracted by a fight between her offspring. The woman handed herself in at Tooting police station this morning. She took her eyes off the road for a moment to shout at her children and that was all it took.

She should have stopped to do whatever she could do for Amy but I can understand her innate desire to protect her family unit. I haven’t got the energy to stay angry at her. But that doesn’t mean that I have forgiven her either. When I asked Amy how she felt, all she would say was, ‘It probably could’ve happened to anyone but she left me bleeding on that road. Don’t expect me to send the bitch a Christmas card.’

As soon as I had got off the phone from Amy, I phoned my ex. ‘Helen, I can officially tell you that you are no longer a suspect in the investigation of the attempted murder of my Amy,’ I told her.

‘I should hope not too,’ Helen said.

Helen is my ex. At the start of this diary I didn’t want to name her because the diary was about me. It wasn’t to be about her. That was the excuse I gave anyway. Looking back on it now, I think I was trying to turn my ex in to a non-person. Someone who didn’t have a personality, who
didn’t even have a name. It suited me at the time to think of her as all bad, as someone at fault, someone to ridicule even.

The truth, of course, is less black and white. Helen has got a personality. She is in fact similar to me in a number of ways. She has her strengths and she has her weaknesses. As I have demonstrated over the course of this diary, so have I. We all have our faults. One of mine and Helen’s faults was that we weren’t very tolerant of each other. We took our time to discover that fact, and when we did discover it, we found we couldn’t change. We got divorced. That is the simple truth.

I now feel confident enough in myself to admit that Helen isn’t just a thing. She was an important part of my life for fifteen years and, as the mother of our children, she will continue to be important.

Being able to acknowledge Helen as a person again and not just as ‘my ex’ is probably an important step in the process of moving on in my life. Without overdoing it, I do feel liberated now that I have brought myself to share her name in this memoir. Will this mark a stage in our lives when I am not studying Facebook the next time my boys tell me there was a strange man in the house? Well, only time will tell I suppose.

Helen agreed to pick Sean up from the party on Friday night, and possibly even Jack too depending upon how he is finding it. With Amy not being there now, part of me feels that she might as well pick me up and drop me back at my flat too. This party could turn out to be a real damp squib.

My forty-third birthday party has come and gone. Some people will remember it forever, some will want to forget it and others woke up this morning not being able to remember what they got up to last night. Needless to say, Katie is in the latter category.

When my alarm clock woke me up yesterday morning, I wanted to turn it off and go back to sleep. I can’t remember ever having woken up on my own on my birthday before. In the last few years I have had my boys jumping on my bed thrusting presents at me within two minutes of the alarm going off. Not today, though.

I forced myself to shower and get dressed because I had agreed to help Imogen clean and prepare Amy’s house for the party. The domestic help must have been given the day off again.

As I drove through Raynes Park and up to the Ridgeway, I couldn’t bring myself to get excited about the events to come. This wasn’t shaping up to be the party to end all parties. When I set out to sort my life out in six months, I had imagined that my birthday party would be a triumphant occasion at which my hordes of new friends would come together to celebrate my spectacular achievements and to toast my new-found conviviality.

Instead, it was looking like I would be playing second fiddle to a teenage girl, gate-crashing her birthday party, held at her mother’s house while her mother avoids me in hospital. Woo-hoo.

Imogen was there waiting when I pulled the car on to Amy’s drive. She gave me a birthday kiss on the cheek. When I didn’t respond with a broad grin and a witty remark, she immediately got the measure of me.

‘Now you listen to me, Graham, this is Lucy’s big day. Despite her mother not being here to share it with her, Lucy has been talking about it for the last week. If she can cope with her mother being in hospital for her birthday, then so can you. Come on, I’ve got some jobs for you to do.’ And off she marched in to the house.

As I mopped floors and scrubbed surfaces, I thought about Imogen’s words. Yet again I had been too self-absorbed. This party isn’t just about me. In fact it is mainly not about me. I owe it to Amy to make Lucy’s day a success. I owe it to Lucy too. And to Jack and Sean. I gave myself another mental kick up the backside and got on with the mopping, the brushing, the toilet-cleaning, the heavy lifting and the plating of assorted confectionary.

Imogen had designated the kitchen and adjoining conservatory as the ‘adults’ zone’ and the oak panelled dining room as the ‘young people’s zone’, the idea being that the kids couldn’t get to the alcohol in the kitchen fridge if they were restricted to the dining area.

I toiled long and hard to take most of the furniture out of the dining room, to provide the kids with a decent sized dance area. I am sure that pleased Jack.

By the time Lucy, and then Jack and Sean, arrived at Amy’s from school, the dining table in their party room was laden with soft drinks and more sweet stuff than they could possibly eat. The sound system I had stolen from Helen’s
was also in place. I heard Jack telling Lucy that I might not be cool but at least I have cool speakers. I bet they won’t be playing my music on them.

About an hour before the first guests arrived, Lucy went off to do what teenage girls do before parties and Jack and Sean sat watching some rubbish on Amy’s cinema-sized telly. Imogen and I took the opportunity of this quiet moment to have a calming cup of tea and to take stock.

‘Thanks for doing all this, Imogen,’ I offered in the best conciliatory tone I could muster. I am in no doubt that the party wouldn’t have happened without her energy and enthusiasm.

‘Graham, it’s my pleasure. More than anything I want to see young Lucy happy. It’s her day.’

‘She’s a great kid.’

‘I also want to see Amy happy,’ Imogen continued. I sensed there was more to come so I just nodded while fiddling with the handle of my china cup.

‘Are you the one to make her happy?’ she asked. I felt like I was about to be interviewed for a job. It was a job I knew I wanted so I couldn’t flunk the test. But having said that, a part of me didn’t want to be having this conversation with Imogen. I wanted to be having it with Amy.

‘Imogen, I want very much to make your daughter happy, but it’s hard to do that when she doesn’t want to see me.’

‘Graham, don’t you get it? It isn’t that she doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want you to see her. Not looking like she thinks she does, anyway.’

‘But that’s just stupid,’ I protested. ‘Amy is the most glamorous, the most alluring, the most seductive person I have ever met. I can’t take my eyes off her smile. A few scratches here and there isn’t going to change that.’

Imogen put her hands up, indicating me to stop. ‘It isn’t me you should be telling this, is it?’

And then I got it. Grow a pair, Graham. Get off your arse. Get your backside in gear. Get your car in gear.

I grabbed my car keys off the kitchen side and ran out of the door without so much as a word to my boys about where I was going.

I sprayed gravel everywhere as I accelerated out of Amy’s drive and up Parkside towards the A3. I drove as quickly as I could through the rush-hour traffic to the hospital. The adrenaline was flowing as I dumped the car on zigzag lines past the hospital entrance and ran in through the doors to the Atkinson Morley wing.

Had Amy simply been waiting for me to show her how little her injuries affected me? If so, then I have been a wimp, a pathetic excuse for a lover, making Amy and myself suffer unnecessarily. That was about to change. I was going to set the pace in a relationship for once in my miserable life.

I hurtled up three flights of stairs and ran through corridors, dodging all obstacles in my way until I reached Amy’s ward. I didn’t even hesitate. I barged straight in.

Amy’s bed was empty. I stood there for a minute catching my breath and wiping the sweat from my forehead. Looking around, I saw that her bed was made. Her bedside locker still contained a few of Amy’s knick knacks but her handbag was notable by its absence. I was about to open the travel case at the foot of the bed when Amy coughed. ‘Are you after me?’

I turned around. Amy looked stunning. Dressed simply in jeans and a white long-sleeved top and a black leather jacket, she could have been a model. Her hair looked fantastic and the wrap-around sunglasses didn’t look out of place. I expect my jaw dropped.

‘I love you,’ I muttered as I walked towards her. It was hardly a Paul Hogan to Linda Kozlowski in Crocodile
Dundee (I had a big crush on her) or Tom Hanks to Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle (I had a crush on her too). My Shakespeare deserted me too, so I just stuck with the simple-is-best approach.

I took Amy’s sunglasses off and kissed her. And kissed her again. And then she kissed me back and we held each other, tighter and tighter until she winced. In the heat of the moment I had forgotten entirely about her injuries.

I will always relive that moment in my mind, the moment I stopped being a total wuss and manned up. The moment when I totally let go of my inhibitions and laid my emotions bare in front of Amy. I will never forget her reaction, her joy at knowing that I wanted her, and her now, not her as she was before the accident. I will never forget the moment I got a life.

We stayed standing, entwined in each other’s arms, for quite some time. Eventually, Amy asked if we were going to the party.

‘Are we going?’ I asked incredulously. ‘You haven’t been discharged, have you?’

‘Why do you think I have got my jacket on?’ she asked. ‘The doctors have given me permission to come home for the night. I was on my way to the lift when I saw you coming from the other direction.’ The night was getting better and better.

Amy and I made our way back to my car which, miraculously, hadn’t been towed away. The journey home was much more leisurely than my dash to the hospital an hour earlier had been. Amy and I didn’t say much to each other. For my part, I was getting my head around having Amy with me this evening. And Amy was just looking forward to coming home.

As we pulled in through the gates, we could hear the
monotonous thud of modern bass-heavy music blasting out of the open dining room window. Unsurprisingly, Lucy’s music was drowning out whatever was being played by the adults in the back of the house.

‘Where do you want to go first?’ I asked as we walked towards the front door. Amy stopped me and kissed me again. As we were kissing, the front door opened, throwing light on to us standing in the porch. People burst out of the house seemingly from every direction and surrounded us. Amy detached herself from me and hugged her daughter and her mother. Jack hugged me. As I wiped a tear from my eye, Sean told me to stop being such a sissy. A drink was thrust in to my hand, I think by Dave who had turned up despite his mother dying a few days ago.

I felt incredibly happy.

Eventually Lucy led her mother back in to the house and everyone gradually followed. Most of the teenagers drifted off back into the dining room and the monotonous beat started up again, only quieter in consideration of Amy’s fragile head. Lucy, Amy and the rest of the adults sat in the conservatory.

I looked around. Dave was there, as were Bryan and Katie, although they weren’t sitting together. John and Tracey were there, although they weren’t sitting anywhere near Bryan and Katie. Ray was there, and he was sitting next to Mr Def Leppard from my upstairs flat. That was interesting.

Hills and Donna were there too. Hills was drinking from a vodka bottle so I reckon it must be Donna that’s pregnant.

All in all, there was a good turnout to celebrate my spectacular achievements and to toast my new-found conviviality. I was even thinking of getting up and making a speech. Luckily for me, and for everyone around me, someone put the music back on.

Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’.

‘Who put that shit on?’ I asked, outraged that anyone would think I am old enough to remember Stevie Wonder.

‘Do you know who sings this song?’ Amy piped up as people looked at me awkwardly.

‘Stevie Wonder,’ I responded, thinking, ‘what am I missing?’

‘And what’s he?’ she asked me with a glint in her eye.

‘I don’t know, about 70?’

‘He is blind,’ Imogen said, from beside the stereo.

‘So is that guy who used to be the Home Secretary,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t mean I have to listen to him.’ And then I suddenly got where they were going with this. Amy was looking for inspiration from people who couldn’t see very well but had continued to make a success of their lives.

‘That nice man who played Columbo only had one eye,’ Imogen pointed out.

In an attempt to bolster Amy’s confidence still further, I tried another one. ‘Wasn’t that England goalie blind in one eye?’

‘Gordon Banks lost an eye in a car crash and had to retire,’ Bryan corrected me. I shut up then.

‘Homer was blind too,’ Hills joined in.

‘Homer isn’t blind!’ Jack protested. I hadn’t noticed him come in.

‘Homer the ancient Greek poet, not Homer Simpson you chump,’ Hills explained, ruffling Jack’s hair, much to his disgust.

‘And you know one-eyed people can drive.’ This one from Sean.

‘You are all too good to me,’ Amy managed to mutter through her tears.

The party continued late into the night. Other notable events included Katie punching Bryan and then falling out
of the conservatory doors in to a raised flower bed, Dave talking to my ex Helen and going off in the car with her and Sean, Jack throwing up in the aforementioned raised flower bed (‘it must have been the dodgy pizza’) and Amy telling me she loved me too.