undid a button and I thought, yes, he’s right about going out to fight.
An answer, at last.
‘Here, before I forget.’ He tore a piece of paper out of his notepad. ‘It’s a list of Phil Collins’ most upbeat ballads to cheer you up … and also my contact details in case you want to run that draft speech by me.’ He folded the page and handed it to me.
‘Thanks, but I’m thinking I might do better starting with a fundraising cake sale than standing up and talking to a whole load of people.’
‘Like tonight? Tonight wasn’t all bad, was it?’
‘Goodbye.’ I smiled.
‘Let me know about that speech. Or if you just need other advice, help, whatever.’
I stood on the kerb and watched him hail another cab – a single sharp swing of his arm to command its attention, after which it cut through a lane of traffic to meet him. Its orange light flicked off and I heard him say, ‘Hampstead.’ A mumbled address that I didn’t catch, then, ‘That’s right, near the running track.’ He took his seat and looked out of the window at me.
I smiled, waved, then looked away first because I’d been taught never to look as desperate as you feel.
I bounced on the back of my heels and glanced down the canned goods aisle for any sign of my mother. We’d arranged to meet by the custard but then I was early, much earlier than I usually was to meet a mother who was always, without fail, on time.
We’d last spoken a few weeks ago, the morning after the parents’ meeting, when I’d telephoned to tell her about this thing that I’d met some people at and that I’d felt positive about. But I hadn’t got into the details of the thing before she asked me who had babysat that night. I hadn’t been prepared for the silence that followed when I told her it was Dave’s mum. I hadn’t been prepared for how bad I’d feel when the conversation ended without her knowing anything more about the thing.
In the end I’d been the one to break the silence by calling her after ten days and telling her that she was needed.
I pointed the trolley in the direction of the home products aisle and checked Mia was still comfortable and curled into my chest, still safe and snug in the soft hold and stretch of the sling. I held my ear close enough for it to be tickled by the soft fuzz on her head, which smelt of warm milk and clean new skin, and listened to the snuffling sounds she made before sleep. I set off at a slow pace, keen to deliver her into a heavy slumber so I could get a head start on buying the bleach.
Above me a luminescent sign waved on cold breezes – on it, a scrawl in thick black text, silently shouting:
Promotion. Buy One Get One Free.
Just buy the bloody tinned peaches.
Don’t say we don’t do anything for you.
And I wondered how Mum would be that afternoon.
You buy bleach like other people buy milk, she’d said to me the other week as she beheld five empty bottles of the stuff lying in the recycling box like a gang of defeated bowling pins. And she was right – we used it so much nowadays to keep an army of disease-causing bacteria in retreat: MRSA in the fruit bowl, E. coli in the toilet – but the way she’d said it had sounded like we were being hysterical.
I arrived at my aisle and began filling the trolley with soft bricks of antibacterial wipes. A long time ago, five years or more, Dave and I had taken a set of glorious supermarket shopping trips nestled within a set of equally glorious sunny days when we had filled most of a trolley with bleach and wipes and floor cleaner. Once upon a time those products had been used to clean and polish the big new house we’d found to fill and decorate with candle-holder, casserole pot wedding gifts. The same house in which we’d planned Dave’s new plumbing business, discussing his dreams of one admin assistant and fifteen plumbers by the second year, laying out the budget sheets on a family-sized kitchen table. The same big house that would accommodate our shared dream of two, three, perhaps four children.
Products to buff a shining dream!
Products to bury mortal threats!
Back then we’d wiped away the ghosts of the previous occupants – eradicating their food smells and the stains of their lives with nuclear yellow floor cleaner, bars of sugar soap and piles of scouring blocks. Then, in another glorious trip, we’d filled another trolley at the DIY shop – this time with sandpaper, paint samples (cerulean, slate and rose white) and plastic-sheathed brushes. Three children or four? we’d asked each other.
The sky’s the limit!
Then we waited in our new house. And those big spaces accumulated dust and spider legs, and the paintbrushes remained unopened.
And then I had thought: All right, maybe not four or even three children, as Dave employed his sixth plumber and thought about getting that office help.
We put down our paintbrushes and started having tests instead. Juggling the mood swings from hormone injections – too much! too little! – and the mood dips, and the terrible grinding disappointment of it all.
And, later still, when I’d lost count of the plumbers on Dave’s burgeoning books, we said: Maybe one would be enough. One child, and a spare room?
I’d travelled back and forth to the hospital on the number 8 bus. And in between appointments there was still the matter of getting to work on time and the dentist and the things people said, oh the things they said, the work appraisals and office politics, and the nausea and the bloating, the making time for ‘us’ and feeding ourselves.
Up until then, we’d always taken it in turns to cook, to surprise each other at dinner with the way Camembert didn’t work with chicken as expected, or how passionfruit worked better than expected with chocolate. And wine. Always too much wine! But then the tests and the waiting for results took up lots of energy. Something had to go. It’s not like we stopped having dinner. We still had dinner. Dinners at home, dinners out, aborted dinners, miscarried dinners. But they were increasingly silent and, I suppose less surprising because we knew by then that chicken did not work with Camembert. The point was that we were still sitting at that table together, the point was that in the middle of it all we hadn’t forgotten about us.
All the false starts. The recoveries. Starting all over again. No end.
Not for years.
‘Cooee!’ Mum called to me from the end of the aisle, waving a cauliflower in the air. ‘I’ve been here an age.’ She was inspecting the loose potatoes like an archaeologist with a new find when I arrived at her side. ‘Looked for you everywhere. We did say the custard and there you were, daydreaming by the floor mops, so I thought I’d make a head start on the fruit and veg essentials.’
She had once been tall, statuesque even. Now I spoke down to a silver-gold helmet of hair. ‘Thanks for coming shopping with me. It’s hard … with Mia. She’s fussy a lot of the time so having you here, it’s …’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s nice to be helping somehow.’ She made space in the trolley for the potatoes, nestling them between a bag of onions and a bag of apples. She had always been strategic like that. A knack for not bruising soft things.
Then she turned to me and laid her cold palms on my cheeks. ‘You’re always so proud. Like your bloody father, God rest his soul. It’s that Scottish DNA. You think you can do it on your own but there aren’t many who can do that and the sensible ones don’t even try. If your father had complained a bit more then maybe he’d still be here. Oh dear.’ She turned away from me to study a row of mangoes. ‘Look at these. Obviously hard as rocks!’
She knew I hated it when she talked about