The Flavours of Love (47 page)

Sometimes, I’m not that strong, so I’ll strip what I have to pieces. I’ll take the icing off a cupcake, the cream off a carrot cake, the filling out of a pastry – claiming they’re too sweet – and eat the other stuff. The stuff with fewer ‘empty’ calories. And then, as soon as I can, I’ll do whatever it takes to not keep those calories in. Right now, I don’t want this pastry and I don’t bother with my elaborate ruse. I ordered it because that’s what I do when I have coffee with someone else.

We sit, the busy café carrying on around us, without speaking for long minutes.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lewis eventually says. ‘I should have told you straight away.’

‘I don’t know if you should have, actually,’ I admit. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot and, as Joel would have pointed out, it was good that she had an adult she could and did turn to at such a desperate time. You did a good thing for a frightened young girl and that’s honourable.’

‘But?’

‘I’m not Joel. I can’t square it in my head that you would keep something so big from me. It took me a while but I finally twigged that it’s only a problem because we’re attracted to each other and there’s all this potential between us.’

Lewis grimaces in agreement.

‘If you were simply Phoebe’s teacher, what you did would be fair enough and understandable. But, there’s this thing between us – if anything happened, you’d potentially become a stepfather-type figure in Phoebe’s life, and it would drive me insane with worry wondering what other secrets you had with Phoebe or Zane.’

Lewis removes his gold-rimmed glasses and clatters them on the table, almost like a prize-fighter throwing in the towel. He nods, resigned it seems to what I’m saying, what it means, and rubs tiredly at his eyes.

‘Apart from with Curtis, I suspect you’ll always be a teacher who
wants to help children, first, which is commendable, but not great for someone like me who already has huge trust issues.’

Another nod. I wonder how much he can see without his glasses. I’m slightly delirious and have an urge to pick them up, put them on and parade around going, ‘Hello, I’m Lewis Bromsgrove and I’m so delicious that Saffron wants to lick me.’

‘Were you having some kind of weird fantasy moment then?’ Lewis asks when I return my gaze to him. ‘Your eyes went off to another land or something.’

‘Yes,’ I admit. ‘I was wondering what you’d do if I put on your glasses and pretended to be you.’

He grins at me, so beatifically I have to glance away. He really is delectable.

‘And this has got nothing to do with that guy, Fynn?’ Lewis asks, serious again.

‘Why would it have anything to do with him?’

‘He’s not exactly friendly towards me. I’m guessing I might have some competition there.’

‘I’m not a prize to be won or lost,’ I remind him. ‘And Fynn or no Fynn, it doesn’t change the fact I can’t square in my head what you kept from me.’

‘True. I suppose we can call this a classic case of failure to launch,’ he states about the potential of us without bitterness.

‘I guess so,’ I say. ‘But a lot of the fun in these things is the “will we, won’t we?” part anyway. At least we got that.’

Lewis’s laugh is deep and throaty, it reverberates happy sprinkles down my spine, and it makes a couple of people turn around with awed looks at how touching his laugh is. ‘That really isn’t the fun part,’ he chortles. ‘Not by a long shot.’

‘You know what I mean.’ I laugh, too. It’s an experience being able to laugh. When was the last time I did that? I can’t even remember.

‘I’d like the chance to change your mind,’ he says.

‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ I reply. As I said to Phoebe earlier, I don’t have the energy to argue. ‘But just so you know, I rarely change my
mind.’ He doesn’t know there have been enough secrets in my family, I don’t need to invite in the potential for any more.

‘And just so you know,’ he states with a smile, returning his glasses to his face, ‘I like a challenge.’

LIX

‘Mum! Mum! Wake up!’

My eyes fly open at the urgency of the voice and the weight on my body.

I do not know where I am for a moment, I’ve been here for three days, but still I wake up every time disorientated. I wince slightly, at the brightness of the world outside my eyelids – it’s clearly not early morning or the middle of the night. My body feels heavy, weighted down and something is far too close to my face for me to focus on it. The object pulls back a bit so I can see what it is. What it is, is divine.

‘Zane?’ I whisper. I’m afraid to say it too loud in case I wake myself up from this dream. ‘Zane?’

‘Yep!’ he says, happily. He bounces on me, twice, and the curves of his knees crush most of my internal organs. He’s towering over me because he seems to have doubled in size since he left three weeks ago. ‘I came back. Can’t believe what Pheebs has done now!’

If he’s here, then so are they and that means … They stand on the other side of Phoebe’s bed like twin peaks of disapproval. They’re not sure who to aim their disapproval at – when one is glaring at me, the other looks at Phoebe, then they swap.

‘Betty called us,’ Joel’s mum says. ‘She thought we should know.’

‘Oh, OK.’ I can’t believe Aunty Betty would stitch me up like this. This is the last time I take her in.

‘I can’t believe she got to ride in an ambulance,’ Zane says. ‘Flashing lights and everything, she said. Not fair.’

I cuddle Zane, draw him close to me to stop him causing me any more physical damage, and because my little boy is home. I’m going to bask in that for a moment. I’m not going to allow thoughts that
having him here is another point of weakness, because I don’t care right now. He’s back, he’s here and I can put my arms around him.

‘You could have called us, Saffron,’ Joel’s dad says. ‘We would have come sooner.’

The temperature hadn’t dropped enough in hell for me to do that
, I think.

‘Please,’ Joel’s mum says suddenly. She is staring right at me, and there is a look I’ve never seen before on her face. On anyone else I would think it was humility, regret. ‘Please,’ she repeats. ‘Can we start again? I know Joel isn’t here to see this, but let’s put the past behind us. Let’s be kinder to each other. And move on with a new understanding.’

Bloody hell, what did Aunty Betty say?
I wonder.

‘Yes, of course,’ I say. I take the opportunity to snuggle my face into my little boy’s neck, to smell him and hold him. I’m so lucky that I’m allowed to do this, that it’s my purpose in life to do this.

I could point out that none of it was me, it was all them. I could remind her that I’d turned myself inside out for years attempting to be good enough, and they wouldn’t have it. I could say that I thought things would be different after Joel died and was gutted beyond reason when I realised things were going to carry on as before. I could say all that but I don’t. None of it matters because they’ve brought my baby home. I can forgive them almost anything right now.

XI

LX

She’s going to come for me today.

It’s one of those things I have been waiting for and today is the day it will happen.

I feel it.

There’ve been no letters at the hospital for three days, I don’t know of any new attacks on my car because it has been towed and I haven’t the time to go get it. I do know that someone called the hospital and asked when Phoebe would be sent home. The nurse who answered said they couldn’t give out that information but she did confirm that Phoebe was a patient. I knew it was her, checking to see if we were still there, finding out if I’d called the police and we were under police guard. Trying to work out how much longer I’ll be alone in the house for stretches of the day so she can come kill me.

Every day for the past four days I have come home from the hospital at the same time to get more clothes, return dirty clothes and cook some food for me and Phoebe. Aunty Betty comes and goes as she pleases during the day – getting fed by various people – but she always stays with Phoebe when I’m not there.

I can feel
her
approach like the coming of a bleak winter. The sensation hangs in the air, a chilling, threatening menace of things to come. She has always been coming for me, I realise. If I read the letters from the beginning, it’s obvious that they were simply the precursor to today.

It’s going to be today because Phoebe is meant to be leaving hospital tomorrow, so we’ll all be here again, the house will be alive again and I won’t be alone – properly alone – like this for a long time.

She’s coming for me and I’m ready.

I stopped off on the way home to buy some blackberries. They are my flavour I love. I haven’t had any since
that day
. I don’t even look at them in shops, my eyes seem to develop a blind spot wherever they are. I skim over recipes with them in books and on the internet. I loved, all that time ago, the tanginess of blackberries. I adored the sensation of several little explosions on the tongue.
That day
, I was going to sit down with my bowl of blackberries and read a magazine with the radio in the background and wait for my husband to come home. Instead,
that day
I began my wait for today.

She’s coming for me today and it’s what I’ve been waiting for.

*

I’m in the kitchen, of course. That’s where I’m going to wait for this to happen. I’m not going to eat the blackberries, I’m going to make my recipe for the book. I’m going to use it to create something I love.

I have laid out what I need and I examine each of them closely, running my fingers lightly over the surface of them to ensure I truly have everything:

Blackberries

White sugar

Lemon juice

Vanilla extract

Butter

Light brown sugar

Salt

Ground almonds

Plain flour

I have also taken out the beige ceramic mixing bowl that Joel bought me on the day he died from the cupboard under the sink. I put it there because I couldn’t look at it. For some reason it became a symbol of what had gone wrong. It had been in her car and I wondered
often if he hadn’t bought it as a surprise for me, would he have come home instead of dropping it off in his car? Would he still be alive? I have washed it out, and it sits beside the ingredients. This will be a good thing, an
appropriate
thing to do while I wait.

*

The berries explode and disintegrate under pressure from the fork in my hand. They become mush against the white sides of the bowl and every few seconds I have to stop, to look at the stain on the tiles, to remind myself what I’m doing this for. For Phoebe. For Zane. For me. For Joel. Especially for Joel.

‘
J-J-J-J-J’s House!
’ Joel echoes to me. ‘
J-J-J-J-J’s House!
’

‘
Your husband has been involved in an incident,
’ the he one echoes.

‘
So, Unc, what you been up to?
’ Zane echoes, too.

‘
Everyone hooks up,
’ Phoebe echoes behind him.

‘
I think it’s great. The idea of finishing the cookbook and the talking,
’ Lewis echoes.

‘
It was only sex to you?
’ Fynn echoes.

‘
Please believe in yourself, Saffron,
’ Aunty Betty echoes.

*

All the voices, all the things that have been said, the utterances of the people of my life are alive in here. They talk at once, they’ve all made their impression on the fabric of the heart of our home and now they fill the room, fill my head. I stop what I am doing and allow the strands of my life, the flavours of the different types of love I’ve experienced, to descend.

They are so loud, so clear, so present, I almost miss the first one:
Knock-knock
.

My heart is drumming out its usual rhythm, my chest creates its normal in and out. I should be scared, terrified, of who is on the other side of the door. But I’m not. This is inevitable, so I don’t need to be frightened.

Knock-knock
comes again. Louder this time.

My heart flits over a beat. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I am scared and I simply don’t know it. Maybe I’ve been living in a state of fear
for so long, ever since
that day
, that what I think is normal is what most people think of as being terribly afraid.

It takes me seconds to reach the door. My hand is shaking. I
am
scared.

‘
If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call the police and tell them to go to the house and call Fynn and ask him to come here to be with you,
’ I told Aunty Betty as I left her this morning. I have fifteen minutes left to call her, then she will do as I asked.

My trembling hand makes contact with the doorknob and I turn. I edge it open.

A boy not much older than Zane stands on my doorstep. His skin is alabaster white, his curly hair matches the colour of the freckles dotted across his nose. He has striking green eyes and he’s dressed like he is on his way to hang out with his homies in da (posh boy) ’hood: branded hoodie, branded low-slung jeans and NYC baseball cap – all brand new, all ridiculously large on him.

‘Yes?’ I wait for her to leap out at me, to appear from beside him on the doorstep and to barge her way in, like a battering ram making light work of a barricaded door.

‘This lady told me to give you this.’ He holds up a cream envelope.

Saffron Mackleroy

is scrawled on the front.

‘Which lady?’ I ask and don’t take the envelope.

‘Dunno,’ he replies with a shrug.

‘If you don’t know her, why did you take something from her?’ ‘Cos she gave me a fiver.’

‘Don’t you know you’re not supposed to take stuff from strangers?’ I say to him. I am stalling, of course. The longer I talk to him, the longer the time is until what is going to happen will happen.

‘It was a fiver,’ he says.