What about us? (7 page)

I sighed again.  Why did she
have to spoil, or at the very least complicate things all the time? I knew that
what I was about to tell her would probably only start another row, in fact I
felt sure about it, but didn’t know how to avoid it.

“Mum!” I shouted, to get her
attention.

“Uhou?” was the slurred
response.

“I can’t, I’m not there.” I
told her.

She instantly sobered up and
her voice sharpened as she realised that things were not as they usually were.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

 “I’m...I’m...” I trailed off,
unsure about what to tell her.

“You’re what...?”

Now there was a hint of anger
creeping into her voice.

“I’m in Lyme Regis, more than
four hours away.” I said, deciding on the truth.

“What? Why?”

“I’m here with a friend, to
celebrate my birthday.” I said quietly, looking over to Jack, who was studiously
staring at his feet and pretending not to listen, but I could see his eyebrows
moving.

“Hear that Gav? She’s in fuckin’
someplace or other with a ‘friend’!”

He’d come back then I thought,
as she shouted this news to the drunken lump she professed to love.  At least I
didn’t have to worry about her taking another overdose.  But any relief I might
have felt was quickly wiped out as she carried on screeching at me.

“You ain’t got no friends, so
don’t go pretending that you have.  You get yourself round here at the double
missy and bring some fucking money with you if you know what’s good for you.  I’ll
give you celebrating your birthday! Why should anyone want to celebrate the day
you dragged your fat miserable arse into this world?”

She was in full flow now and
the torrent of horrible words started to blur into each other.  I hadn’t
realised that Jack had come to stand beside me and that he had heard some, if
not all of what she was saying.  He gently prised the phone out of my taut
fingers and snapped it shut, ending the call.

“She doesn’t mean it.” I whispered,
trying to get control of myself, trying to not let the hate filled words hurt
me.

“When she’s sober...” I began
to say.

“When she’s sober, she will
have forgotten.” he said softly, finishing the sentence for me.

“But that’s what I mean; if she
really meant it, she’d say it when she was sober too.” I said lamely, but strangely,
it didn’t give me the usual reassurance that had so often comforted me in the
past.  It lost something when it was said out loud to someone else.

He studied me for a moment, then
with his thumb, gently wiped away a tear that I hadn’t felt escape.

“Do you always make excuses for
her?” he asked.

I looked up into his eyes.  “She’s
my Mum.  She’s sick and no, I’m not making excuses for her.  I’m using what
information I have to decide what’s what.”

I could see that he didn’t
understand what I meant, so I tried to find better words to explain something
that I’d never tried to explain before.

“For years she made all the
choices, or rather she didn’t always; too often she let things happen that
maybe shouldn’t have been allowed to.  I was just a kid and had to get by as
best I could.  Often she wasn’t able to, or didn’t want to think about how
those decisions or actions would affect me.  They weren’t all bad, you have to
believe me on that score, but from a lot of them nothing good ever came, not
for her or for me.  The difference is that now I make my own decisions and deal
with the consequences myself.  Now I form my own opinions and try to make the
best choice; mainly for me, but sometimes for us.  Me and her I mean.”

He didn’t say anything, he just
carried on looking at me.  It wasn’t that he disbelieved me, more like he still
didn’t really understand.  I tried again, but kept it simpler.

“Jack, she’s my mother.  Sure,
I wish she could love me in a way I could count on, but wishes rarely come true. 
She’s the only family I’ve got and when the chips are down, usually I’m all
she’s got, so that means around fifty percent of this relationship is down to
me.  Sometimes I get it wrong, that’s all.”

He went quiet for a bit, I
suppose thinking about what I’d said.  As he looked into my eyes he was
frowning and I could see he was still troubled.

“Do you make excuses for me?”
he asked quietly.

His voice was barely a whisper
and filled with some deep pain.

“Oh Jack...”

I reached up and touched his
cheek.  “I don’t have to make excuses for you.  You have your life to lead, I
have mine.  For reasons that you can’t tell me, it’s unlikely that we’ll be
spending much of it together.  But that’s ok, really it is.  You give me hope,
something that’s not been in plentiful supply in my life, so that makes it a
pretty big thing.”

In that moment, I realised not
only how lonely I’d been, but also how alone he was too.  I could feel it
coming from him in waves, creeping through my carefully layered defences, but
right there and then my loneliness had no power over me; I was free of it.  I
didn’t say any of this, but I guessed from the way his eyes held mine and how
he smiled at me that he understood.  Actually, I knew much more than that, I
absolutely knew that he felt the same.

“I hardly know you Jack, yet I
feel as though I really do, daft though that sounds.  I’m so glad I will get to
spend my birthday, this particular birthday, with you.”

I didn’t look away as I spoke,
I felt content just floating in his eyes.

“Me too,” he said.  “I’ve
missed you all the time.”

Such simple words;
spoken
so softly, yet with such burning
honesty they unleashed all the things I’d spent my life hiding.  I spoke
slowly, letting an idea form on its own, allowing the words to come out without
checking them first.

 “I know there are things you
can’t tell me and time you can’t spend with me, but we have these few days;
maybe we can make them last a lifetime.  You know, like in the war, when no one
could be sure they’d ever see each other again, so that somehow they made more
of the time they had.”

He nodded.  “Ah, time... I have
all the time in the world, but not enough to spend with you, to find out what
we could have been, or how good it would have been.” he said cryptically.

Most of what he said made no
sense at all, so I didn’t really consider it.  My heart and mind latched onto
the one word I did understand.  He’d said ‘we’ and he’d said it in a way that
gave it depth and meaning.

I knew then that there was
every amazing possibility that he could love me.  You can’t imagine how that
knowledge affected me; I had no words, there was nothing I could say to explain
myself.  I suppose our first kiss was inevitable, but that didn’t make the timing
of it anything less than perfect.

As we stood there he wrapped
his arms around me and buried his face in my hair, just murmuring my name,
seeming to have the exact same level of wonderment that I was feeling.  Smug
was not something I’d ever had much of a chance to experience, but for the rest
of the afternoon, smug was exactly how I felt.

Neither of us had taken any
posh clothes and in fact, he hadn’t taken anything else at all.  In the evening
we were both ravenous; what with the fresh sea air and all the walking we’d
done, so we decided to have dinner in the pub where we’d had lunch.  The menu
had loads of stuff on it that I’d never eaten before and we ordered a huge
seafood platter to share, with dips and onion rings and ate it with our
fingers, giggling and pulling faces at some of the flavours and textures.  He
seemed as uncertain as I was about some of the bits on the plate, but we
finished most of it and shared a bucket of ice cream for pudding; all different
flavours and covered with lashings of chocolate sauce.

Afterwards, we were so full we
could hardly move and after some sleepy indecision, settled on a waddle along
the beach to walk some of it off.  I didn’t think my poor feet could walk
another step, but the coolness of the sand was bliss and I wriggled my bare
toes deep into it whenever we stopped.

We left the lights of the town
behind us and I could see so many stars, more than I’d ever seen in my life
before.  There was a new moon suspended over the dark water and that wonderful sound
of the
waves lapping on the beach. 
We were in
no rush and walked hand in hand, stopping often, to kiss or just to stroke each
other’s face, as though neither of us could believe that the other one was
really there.  I thought that nothing could have made it more perfect than it
was.

But then he gently took my hand
in his and placed my free hand on his shoulder.  Then he put his arm around my
waist and started to sing a song that I didn’t recognise.  He knew some of the
words and hummed the rest and we began to dance slowly in time with the song.  I
followed his lead and we twirled, ankle-deep in the water, alone on the beach, but
together in our own wonderful world.  I felt as though
I’d
stepped into someone else’s story, someone unknown, whose life was more
interesting
than mine could ever be and
then realised that it was really mine; all mine.

That night I made love for the
first time.  There had been dark times before, when one or other of my Mum’s
louts had taken by force and with horrible carelessness what they wanted.  There
had been no love involved, only fear and the certainty that Mum would choose
not to believe me. 

With Jack though, it was
exactly as I would have wanted it to be; gentle, surprising, tender and safe.  Afterwards
we lay next to each other, arms and legs all intermingled, not wanting to
sleep, not wanting to let the magic disappear through the open window, only to get
lost in the waves.  I didn’t trust myself to speak; I might have said the wrong
thing, so I contented myself with the warmth of his body and the fact that he
seemed very happy to have me there.  His hand reached for mine and I felt him trace
patterns over it, then we laced our fingers together.

He sighed and then in the
darkness whispered, “I love you Grace, crazy though that must seem to you.”

“Yes, it’s crazy.” I said with
a smile.  “We could be crazy together though, but only if I’m allowed to love
you back.”

In the seconds that followed my
words and as I waited for his response, I don’t know which of us was more still. 
His face was only inches away from mine and in the strange light it looked
pale.

“Permission granted.” he
whispered, then silenced my gurgle of delight with a long kiss.

When I woke up, I was aware of
an empty space beside me in the narrow single bed and my heart lurched.  I
didn’t want to open my eyes, so I tried to listen for sounds in that unfamiliar
room.  Was he in the other bed, or the bathroom? But I could only hear the
waves, which normally would have delighted me.  I slowly sat up and only then
did I open my eyes.  The other bed was still made and only my clothes were on
the floor.  The bathroom door was open, so I could see all too clearly that it
was empty and I had to stifle the sob that was clawing its way up to my throat
from somewhere deep inside me.

In that confused
moment, when I was feeling so foolish, sad and lost, the whole room shimmered. 
I blinked, trying to clear my eyes.  It was the strangest
thing, as though the room itself suddenly became
elongated.  The door appeared to be a long way off and somehow, in the space
between it and the bed, Jack was walking quickly towards me.  He was very far
away, but getting closer at the same time and his face was twisted as if he were
in pain.  I was worried and reached out to him.  Was he hurt?

It seemed to last only a second
and then he was by my side, sitting on the bed, gathering me up in his arms.

“Grace, Grace, I’m sorry.  I
meant to be back before you woke up.  Grace don’t cry, please don’t cry.”

“Mnumph, happy tears.” I
blurted, into his now soggy shoulder.

He pushed me away gently and
held me in front of him, watching me carefully.  As I smiled, he seemed to
relax.

“Grace, I meant everything I
said last night.” he said, soundings so serious.  “I do love you.  I can’t
promise you all the things a man should be able to promise the woman he loves,
but that doesn’t change the fact.”

The tears dried up instantly
and any silly thoughts I’d had, melted away.

There was a gentle knock on the
door and I looked up, pleased to see that it was back where it should be.  I
glanced at Jack.

“Breakfast for the birthday
girl!” he proudly declared.

He went to collect the trolley
that had been left outside and then carefully wheeled it to the side of the
bed.

There were red and blue flowers
in a tall, thin vase.  On a tray was a jug of fresh orange juice, tea in a
proper teapot with china cups and saucers, thick slices of toasted white bread,
fried eggs, bacon, sausages and great big grilled mushrooms and tomatoes.  There
was another china plate with butter, jam and marmalade and still another, with
a pile of muffins on it.