Will You Remember Me? (22 page)

It was Poppy’s turn to squeeze his hand.

Mr Ramasingh coughed. ‘I remember when my wife died, it happened so suddenly that it was like having the rug pulled out from underneath me. I actually envied people like you, who had some time to plan, put things right, be together.’

Poppy reached for the photograph that sat on the doctor’s desk. How she had envied this beautiful, beautiful woman. ‘This wife here? She’s dead?’ Tears began spilling from her eyes.

‘Yes. Six years ago. A brain aneurism. It was very sudden.’ Poppy heard the catch in his voice.

She slumped back in the chair and placed her hand on her chest. Her sobs came loudly and with such force, she had to fight for each breath. ‘Does everyone have to fucking die?’

Mr Ramasingh couldn’t help the spurt of laughter that left his mouth. He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes as he shook his head. Martin too saw the funny side and let his shoulders shake, while simultaneously trying to comfort his wife. Eventually, Poppy’s lips twitched as well.

‘Oh, Poppy, that has made me laugh! And in answer to your question, yes! Yes they do, each and every one of us!’

They drove home almost in silence. Martin didn’t comment on Poppy’s swollen, red eyes and face streaked with tears, but instead stole furtive glances at her as he took left-hand corners. He parked in front of the house and ratcheted the handbrake, but neither of them made any attempt to move. Their breathing slowed and the windows fogged, creating a bubble around the two of them. Both stared ahead, in silence. It felt cosy and peaceful. When Martin did eventually speak, his voice was husky, as if he’d just woken from a long sleep.

‘Do you ever want to ask him how long you’ve got, Poppy?’ His question came out of the blue. It was somehow easier to discuss these things in the car, leaving their home free of some of the echoes.

She shook her head. ‘No. I think it’s best I don’t know.’

‘Really?’ he asked, wondering if having a timescale would make it easier or harder.

Poppy nodded. ‘I think if I knew, then I might just give up.’

‘Don’t ever say that!’ he shouted. ‘You must never give up. This is all about getting as much time as possible for the kids, for me. You owe us that.’

‘I
owe
you that? What’s that supposed to mean? Are you blaming me for this, Mart? You think I would choose this?’ She punched her chest.

He pinched his nose and rested his elbows on the steering wheel. ‘No. No, I know you would never choose this and I’m sorry. I just hate the way Mr Whatshisname is so positive, so smiley and matter-of-fact. I know I should be more like that, but, truth is, I feel like I’m drowning and it’s exhausting.’

‘Tell me about it.’ She unclipped her seatbelt and walked slowly up the path. Her sympathy was a little thin on the ground today.

Jo had made a huge chocolate cake, covered in thick frosting, much of which was around Max’s face.

‘Cake!’ Max announced as they walked into the hallway.

‘I can see that!’ Poppy bent down and picked up her boy, which was becoming increasingly hard for her to do. She carried him to the sofa and flopped down with him on her lap.

‘What have you been up to, Maxy? Have you been a good boy for Aunty Jo?’

Max nodded. ‘Toffee did a poo-poo.’

Poppy laughed at her son’s rare sentence. ‘Do you know what, Max? I think you know exactly what is going on and you just choose to stay out of it, in your own little world. And honestly, mate, I can’t blame you. Not one bit. Sometimes I wish I could hide from the real world too.’

Maxy held up his favourite little digger for his mum to kiss, which she duly did.

Jo came through from the kitchen with mugs of tea and two large slabs of chocolate cake. Poppy groaned inwardly.

‘How did you get on?’ Jo asked eagerly as she forked the sponge into her mouth and washed it down with a gulp of strong coffee.

‘Okay. Not much to say really. Nothing new. Thanks for looking after Maxy at the last minute, mate. Mart could only finish a bit early to come and collect me, which is fair enough. And thank you for our lovely cake too – you’ve been busy!’

‘We had great fun. He is such a fabulous kid, Poppy. He just smiles and chatters – he’s so happy. We let Toffee run around on the rug and he did a poo and Max thought it was the most hilarious thing.’ Jo smiled.

‘You will stay in their lives, won’t you, Jo? Look after them, be there if they need someone to talk to? They’ve got Mart and Claudia, of course, but someone my age will be good for them.’

Jo was choked with emotion. ‘I will love them for you, Poppy, always, and I’m honoured that you’d ask me.’

As she prepared for bed later that evening, Poppy stood and stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She looked sick. For the first time she realised it must now be obvious to anyone who glanced at her through a window or met her in the street. She had started to notice how people looked the other way or crossed over to avoid her and that made her feel like one of the afflicted. Her chest was concave; her skin, which had taken on a greyish hue, was taut, stretched over her skeleton without the layer of fat that had given her her shape. She hated the way her body looked. She smiled at the irony of it: she had disliked the curve of her hip and the slight bulge of fat on her stomach her whole life and yet now she would happily swap her skinny form for her old self. Her teeth looked large in her mouth. Black circles sat beneath her eyes and her hair was lank, thin.

She swallowed the handful of drugs that had become her habit and cleaned her teeth. Spitting into the sink, she recoiled at the globs of blood spattered around the plughole. She ran the tap and swilled the water with her hand; out of sight, out of mind.

Reaching down, she plucked the box of tampons from the shelf behind the loo and shoved them in the pedal bin, trying not to think of all they represented: making babies, having babies, the cycle that meant life. ‘I won’t be needing those again.’ She smiled, kidding herself that she had found the one advantage to being sick, refusing to allow the painful truth to permeate, that her body was failing, shutting down.

‘I am so excited!’ Peg jumped up and down on the sofa in her new frock. The floaty skirt billowed around her as she bounced and the sequined bodice caught the light and shimmered, making her look like a human glitter ball.

‘Peg, take it off! You’ve got three weeks to go and you’ll have it ruined if you put it on every single day until then. People will think you are turning up in an old rag.’ Poppy sighed.

‘But I LOVE it so much!’ Peg jumped higher and higher, fluffing the skirt with her hands.

‘I know, love. But we need it to stay white for as long as possible. You don’t want to get it dirty, do you?’

Peg shrugged her shoulders, not fussed really whether it got dirty, so long as she could wear it.

Martin laughed from over the top of the paper, delighted that the fifty quid price tag he had ummed, ahhed and sweated over had turned out to be worth every penny. To see Peg that happy was something he would pay any price for. The party had turned out to be a wonderful idea, for which he took full credit. The buzz of the planning was giving them all a lift. Even Poppy, though she looked frail and a little green around the gills, had got some of her vitality back.

‘She’s all right in it, Poppy,’ he commented.

‘Oh, is that right? Well that’s good then, Peg, you can just ignore me and do what your dad says.’

Martin tutted in response. He was in no mood for another bickering session.

Poppy picked up her phone as it buzzed on the counter top. ‘Ooh, I’ve got a text message from my mum!’ Martin watched as her face lit up; she reminded him of Peg. The moment the message was opened, the light disappeared from her eyes.

‘Oh,’ said Poppy, ‘she says she can’t make it, but hopes we have a “GR8” time.’

‘Hey, that’s Cheryl, queen of text speak. She always was a teenager at heart.’ Martin tried to lighten her obvious disappointment.

‘Urgh.’ Poppy shuddered, thinking of her own teenage years and her mum coming home in the early hours smelling of booze and sex.

‘Have you spoken to her, Poppy?’

‘No. I mean yes, but not properly, not about, y’know…’

‘Does Cheryl know about your bug?’ Peg enquired matter-of-factly between bounces.

Martin raised his eyebrows; they couldn’t have a conversation without Peg sticking her oar in.

‘No, lovey, not yet. I haven’t had a chance to tell her.’ Poppy scrolled through her messages, avoiding eye contact with Martin, who knew it was more a case of avoidance than lack of opportunity.

‘Well you better get that sorted!’ Peg advised.

Martin chuckled. ‘For once your daughter is right. You better get that sorted.’

‘GR8. That’s all I need – both of you telling me what to do.’

‘It’s for your own good, Poppy Day!’ Peg shouted, using her dad’s name for his wife.

‘Right, that’s it! Go upstairs and get that bloody dress off – now!’ Poppy raised her voice.

The letterbox flap banged against the door.

‘I’ll get it!’ Peg skidded across the floor in her pink socks en route to the stairs. She came back holding a small stack of mail and sat with it on her lap, flicking through the envelopes.

‘Give me that!’ Poppy grabbed the bundle from her daughter’s lap. ‘Don’t make me tell you again – go and get that dress off and hang it up in our room. I am confiscating it until the party!’

‘No, no, Mum, please! Let me hang it up in my room so I can see it,’ Peg pleaded.

Poppy pushed her forehead with her thumb and forefinger as if to relieve some unseen pressure. ‘Okay, but if you so much as remove it from its hanger, that’s it, you will have to wear one of your old dresses and that one is going back to the shop!’

Martin winked at his daughter as she marched past with her arms folded. Peg winked back; she knew her dad wouldn’t let this dress go back to the shop.

Poppy sorted the invite responses into a separate pile from the bills and pizza flyers and tucked her legs up underneath her. This was one of the best things about having a party: reading the acceptances, scanning the notes. She selected one, placed her finger under the sticky flap and pulled out the reply slip.

‘Oh, fab, Rob and Moira Gisby are coming! I didn’t think they’d travel all the way down from Scotland, but they are.’ Poppy read the details. ‘They are going to stay with Rob’s brother who lives in Andover, so that’s handy. It’ll be lovely to see them, Mart.’

‘It will.’

Martin gave a small smile, remembering the role Sergeant Gisby had played in bringing him home from Afghanistan, the support he’d given Poppy. He tried not to think about it too much, but at the mention of Rob’s name he was back in that hotel room in London, newly freed and with one hell of a mess going on inside his head. Rob had found him distressed and aggressive, yet his tone had been kind: ‘You don’t need to say sorry, son. You’ve been through a lot. And call me Rob.’

Poppy drew him from his musing. ‘Claudia can make it, which I knew already, and she is offering to pay for the food. Honestly, that woman – what would we do without her, Mart? I’ve told her it’s all taken care of, but she is always trying to make our lives easier. I love her, Mart, I really do.’

He smiled. They all did.

‘Jenna and Ryan are coming but are leaving the boys behind. They’re going to make a weekend of it and stay in a B&B.’ This she uttered quickly, as if that would make the information more palatable.

‘Yay!’ Martin raised his fist half-heartedly.

‘Don’t be mean, Mart. Jenna is our mate.’

‘I know, but that knobhead she’s with… I can’t stomach the bloke. He thinks he’s a bloody gangster, but he’s just a lazy git.’ He pursed his lips.

‘Blimey, you’ve got to learn to stop holding back – what do you really think of him, Cricket?’

Martin smiled. ‘I can’t help it, Poppy. He is not a very nice bloke and I don’t want him at our do. I don’t want him near Peg and Max and I don’t want him dipping into our guests’ pockets and helping himself.’

‘What a thing to say! Just because he’s lazy and you don’t like him doesn’t make him a criminal.’ Poppy laughed in spite of herself. ‘Oh God, you haven’t invited Danny, have you?’ She suddenly thought about what might happen if Jo were to bump into him, especially with a few glasses of plonk inside her.

‘No, thought it best not to, in case Jo is in handbag-swinging mode.’

‘Who’s in a handbag-swinging mood?’

‘Oh, here she is – Batfink with her supersonic sonar!’ Martin shouted as Peg came down the stairs.

Poppy and Martin laughed at their daughter, who didn’t know who Batfink was but decided it wasn’t necessarily a compliment.

Poppy waited until everyone was occupied – Peg in front of the telly and Max with parking all his diggers and trucks in a neat row, ready to be counted. Taking her mobile phone into the kitchen, she pressed the screen to connect to her mum.

‘Yep?’ It was a bloke’s voice.

‘Can I speak to Cheryl please?’

‘CHERYL! PHONE!’ the man bellowed, without another word to ask who was calling or to offer any pleasantries.

Poppy heard her mum’s cackle getting louder, until she finally breathed into the phone, part wheezing, part laughing.

‘Hello?’

‘Mum, hi, s-sorry to interrupt you, are you working?’ Poppy experienced the usual stammer of nerves.

‘Yeah, but that’s all right, love. I’ve got one punter passed out on the floor and another one trying to do the flamenco in his undies – it’s bloody chaos here!’ She chuckled, clearly enjoying every second of the non-stop party that was her life.

‘Can you go somewhere a bit quieter, Mum, so you can hear me properly?’ More to the point, so Poppy didn’t have to listen to the raucous shouts, screams and clapping that filled the background. There was a second or two of silence and Poppy heard the creak of a whining hinge.

‘That better?’ Cheryl asked.

‘Much, thanks. I wanted to talk to you, Mum…’

‘Fire away.’ Poppy could tell Cheryl was speaking from the side of her mouth. She couldn’t remember a single occasion when her mum had spoken to her without reaching for or sparking up a fag. Just the idea of it made Poppy feel nauseous.