The Flavours of Love (41 page)

Phoebe reaches into the other bag, pulls out the shiny, black-purple aubergines, weighing them in her hand. Out come the speckle-skinned dark green courgettes, the large, brown papery onion, the
bulbous, shiny red tomatoes, the mug-shaped red, green and yellow bell peppers, and the pot of herbs de Provence. I have olive oil, I have basil leaves from the plant on the kitchen window sill.

‘Aunty Betty was asleep,’ Phoebe says, unnerved, I think, that I haven’t spoken. ‘She didn’t stir when I went in, so I left the tray on the side.’

‘She didn’t stir?’ I ask, concerned.

‘She was snoring her head off but didn’t wake up,’ Phoebe clarifies.

‘Ahh, right.’

More things come out of the bags: fresh chicken pieces, rustic bread flour to use in the bread machine, which I have barely looked at in over eighteen months. We used to wake up to the smell of baking bread, having programmed the machine the night before, and it’d be a special treat every morning to have fresh bread for breakfast but, like a lot of things, that ended over eighteen months ago.

‘Do you want to start on washing the vegetables while I put the bread on?’ I say to Phoebe. The words melt delicately and delectably on my tongue; they drizzle stars of happiness into my ears – I am spending time with my daughter because she wants to. I am cooking with my beloved little girl and I haven’t forced her to be here.

‘OK,’ she says, without a dismissive shrug, without an irritated eye roll, without an exasperated sigh. It’s almost too delicious to believe.

*

‘How do you want me to chop the peppers?’ Phoebe asks.

‘Into large chunks.’ I resist the urge to go and show her. ‘I find it’s easiest if I lay the top down on the chopping board, slice it in half downwards. Take out all the seeds and stalk, then slice the halves into quarters lengthways and then cut them up into three? But that’s how I do it. You may find it easier to do it another way.’

‘I’ll do it your way,’ she says.

I am making chunky rounds of the aubergine. Once they are all on the chopping board like large, green-tinged white counters for a game, I start to halve them, to make them big enough to not
disintegrate while cooking, but small enough to be bite-sized. The secret, apparently, to not creating a tasteless pot of gloopy stew when making ratatouille is to cook the ingredients separately first, then to combine them all towards the end of cooking. Joel loved aubergine. I could live without it, personally, but he would eat it every day if he could.

‘This reminds me of when you were a baby,’ I say. ‘When you were about six months old and I had to start weaning you onto solid food, I used to drive your dad mad with the time I spent cooking. I’d be obsessed with trying to make the healthiest foods for you, I didn’t want to feed you any of the shop-bought stuff so the moment you were asleep I’d be in the kitchen, steaming sweet potatoes and carrots and broccoli. No, no, not broccoli after the first time because it stank! Then I’d be mashing it through a sieve and putting it into little pots and ice cube trays and freezing them.

‘Sometimes I’d spend whole Sundays doing that so you’d have fresh, homemade food to eat all the time. Most of the time you’d just spit it out – probably because it all tasted the same after it’d been defrosted and heated up – and fixate on what your dad and I were eating. Always making a grab for it. After all the stuff I read and cooking I did, I’d catch your dad giving you sneaky bites of his baby corn or garlic bread or something. I remember one time, when you were about one, he gave you a couple of chippy shop chips.

‘I got
so
mad because I’d spent so much time on getting the nutrients right in your meals and he did that. But he was like, “Seriously, Ffrony, it’s a couple of chips. All food is all right in moderation.” He was right, but still … By the time Zane was born pretty much everything was labelled organic and I’d lost the will to purée anything ever again so I let your dad do what he wanted. Poor kid. Speaking as one of them, most second-born children get a rough deal.’

The only sound that comes from Phoebe’s direction is the phumping of the knife as it comes through the peppers and hits
the wooden chopping board, scoring more cuts onto its surface. I stop my chopping and close my eyes in regret as I realise what I’ve done. It wasn’t intentional, but the effect is the same.

‘What’s it like,’ she says, quietly, ‘having a baby?’

‘Do you mean the actual physical having it, or all the stuff that comes afterwards?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘It’s different every time. Well, it was for me, anyway. Having you and having Zane were very different experiences although I was terrified both times because I didn’t know what to expect. That’s only part of having a baby, though. It takes a while to get your head around, but you’re not only having a baby, you’re starting the life of another person. By that I mean they don’t stay babies for long, you turn around and they’re one, five, seven, ten, fourteen. They’ve got their own little personalities and it’s amazing. And it’s hard and it’s relentless, and I’ve never experienced love like it.’ And sometimes I wish I had my other life back, I wish I wasn’t tied down and responsible for someone else’s existence. I could never say that to Phoebe, pregnant or not, because that would hurt her in ways she doesn’t need to be damaged – she could never understand what I meant until she was there herself. ‘And it’s pretty damn scary because, if you’re like me, you’re always conscious of the ways you’re going to screw up, you’re always scared of hurting your child, and then you go and mess up in ways you hadn’t even thought of. I suppose what I’m saying is that when you think about having a baby, you need to remember that you’re giving birth to a whole new life –
your
whole new life, not just the child’s.’

‘Have you ever had an … you know? Have you ever done it?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I reply.

‘Would you tell me if you had?’

‘Normally, no I wouldn’t because there are some things you don’t need to know about your parents, but in this instance, because of your circumstances, yes I would. I think it’d be important for you
to know that I’d done it and survived. I do know a couple of people who might talk to you about it if you want?’ I glance sideways at her.

She shakes her head and reaches for the green pepper, concentrates on dismantling it for our dish.

‘What would you do if you were me?’ she asks.

That is the question she asks, but I know the question she really wants me to answer. I stare at the greeny-white sides of the aubergine slices I am halving. I struggle to find the right words, the perfect blend of words that will tell her what she needs to hear. I know how Joel would say it, but
I
have to say it. She has to hear it from me, in my way, otherwise she will not believe me. ‘Phoebe,’ I say as gently as I can, ‘I wish with all my heart I could tell you what to do. As your mother, I want to make everything as easy as possible for you, and especially after everything that happened with your dad … but I can’t.’

‘You tell me what to do all the time.’

‘This is different. This, this is such an important decision, and I wish wish
wish
that you weren’t in this situation and that you weren’t having to make such an adult decision when you can’t legally do most of the stuff an adult can. I will help you make the decision, I will answer your questions, I will write lists with you for and against each option, I will listen to everything you have to say, and I’d like to sit down with you before you make the final decision and go through them in case there’s something you haven’t thought of, but I can’t –
won’t
 – tell you what to do. The final decision has to come from you. It’s your choice. You are not me, and what you choose has to be the option
you
think you will find it easiest to live with. If I don’t let you do this, I will be ruining your life. There are no simple answers, only what you think will be easiest to build your life around. And whatever choice you make, I will support you one hundred per cent, but it has to come from you and what you think will be easiest to live with.’

‘That’s what Aunty Betty said.’

‘She’s a wise woman, then.’

We say nothing, the rapport of our knives chopping sounds
out of time, like two hearts close together but beating to their own rhythms.

‘Mum,’ she says suddenly, sounding like my lost little girl. ‘I’m scared. I’m really, really scared.’

It takes two strides to reach her, it takes a second or two to remove the knife from her hand and place it carefully beside the jumble of peppers. It takes two seconds more to put my arms around her and pull her towards me. And it takes no time at all for the misery, suspicion, anger, hatred, despair, pain, guilt and unrelenting loss that has kept us apart since
that day
to dissolve away.

Her sobs are loud, uncontrolled, rising; each one ploughs a new groove of grief into my heart. I place my hand on the back of her head, another in the middle of her back, holding her as close to me as I can.

All the desperate, jagged moments in the fragmented shell of our lives come together and I have her back. I have my daughter back. She has her mother back.

XLIX

8 months before
That Day
(February, 2011)

‘Are you listening to my heart beating, Babes?’

His hand strokes lightly through the curls of my black hair.

I nuzzle my head as near as I can to his chest, the material of his T-shirt caressing my cheek. ‘Yes. I like to make sure you’re still ticking properly.’

‘And am I?’

‘Yep, working perfectly.’

‘Great. Can you sit up now, then? I can’t keep the TV this loud without the sound distorting.’

‘Sorry, mate, it stays that loud as long as I need to listen to your heartbeat
and
hear the film.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘For as long as it takes.’

L

We’ve come to the beach.

After her tears had subsided, we needed to get out of the house. We needed space, the expanse and freshness of being outside to talk without the fear of Aunty Betty, who seems to walk on air sometimes, appearing unexpectedly. She can’t hear this conversation, no one can.

I’ve set aside my guilt and self-disgust and opened up the beach hut. Fynn has taken care of it. It’s been repainted, sealed, aired; loved and cared for in the time he ‘owned’ it. I can tell, though, that he hasn’t used it. He hasn’t sat here and enjoyed the view, or watched people go by or – as Joel often did – used it to get chatting to people. When Phoebe was in school and Joel would take Zane out so I could work even though I was technically on maternity leave, he found that the combination of a beach hut and a baby were the strongest people magnet there was – especially for mothers with young children. He’d come home with several numbers and offers of play dates. (‘
Play dates for who, exactly? Our son is seven months old,
’ I’d say to his grin.) I could tell that Fynn simply looked after it for us.

Between us, we wrestle the double deckchair out of the hut and set it up to face towards Worthing. From here we can see Worthing pier. I pull my jacket around myself and sit on the deckchair first, Phoebe drops herself on top of me, and turns her body into mine like she used to when she was much younger.

It’s a cool, blustery day; the temperature lowered by the strength of the wind that whips foamy peaks into the surface of the sea. The blustery breeze and cold have seen off all but the most dedicated joggers and dog walkers. Almost all the beach huts I can see from here towards Brighton and towards Worthing are locked up tight – no
other owners are insane enough to venture down here. Except for one beach hut, far down in the distance, which has someone working on it, his tools laid out on the promenade, a workbench all set up with power tools, a portable generator by its side. I cuddle Phoebe close to me, sharing my body heat with her, revelling in the ability to do this with her, and watch the man, in his forties, portly and with a ponytail, work. His fingers must be numb in this wind.

‘Why don’t you talk about Dad?’ Phoebe asks me.

‘I do,’ I reply.

‘You don’t. Earlier, when you were going on about feeding me is the first time in ages and ages you talked about him without me saying anything first. I always say stuff about him and what he’d do because you don’t talk about him.’

‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Is it because of what I did?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Is it because … because you’re angry about what I did that day and so you’re angry with Dad, too, because he didn’t call and tell you, like, right away?’

‘No.’ I tug her as near to me as possible. ‘No, it’s nothing like that at all. It’s because …’ It’s because I avoid fresh pain, I avoid digging up old pain, I avoid current pain, I avoid all pain at all costs even though it seems to hunt me down, seek me out and rub my heart in it. Pain wants nothing more than to snuggle up to me and make me its new home. I avoid pain so it does its best to live itself through me. ‘I don’t know how to talk about him without breaking down. Even now. I think about him all the time, please believe me. Almost everything I do or say has a thought of him in there somewhere, but it has to stay there as a thought so I can function.

‘Not many people want to deal with a woman who bursts into tears nearly two years after her husband has died because they’ve mentioned they were thinking of going to Lisbon on holiday and that’s where she met him. The only way I can function in normal society is to not talk about him much.’

‘Is it all right if I do? And Zane?’

‘Of course.’ I kiss her head, enjoy that unique smell of her. ‘Of course you can. I’m sorry you didn’t feel as if you could. You two can talk about him as much as you like. Do you talk about him with each other?’

‘Yeah. We write in those books you gave us and put stuff in the memory boxes. But you knew him the longest, so there’s stuff I want to ask you. And Zane does.’