After Forever Ends (60 page)

She was the sweetest of all the children. Blue eyed and golden haired, she had her mother’s gorgeous looks and full mouth. In fact, she looked nothing at all like Alexander, except often mocked his expressions, “Ah, Nattie,” I told her, “Caro and Nigel will be just fine. Don’t you go feeling bad about what happened to them. You did nothing wrong. Some bully came and decided to throw you into a bin and your brother was having none of it. Be glad he was there for you. He takes after your daddy, you know?”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah! When your dad was a lad he had an awful temper. And he especially hated it when someone would dishonour a lady.” I heard the front door to the office open and close, “I think that’s your dad now. Go see!”

She jumped off her chair and raced to the waiting room. “Daddy!”

“I don’t want another shot!” Nigel yelled, “I don’t want another shot! Mum, make him stop! I don’t want…Oy! Get away from me, Uncle Ollie!”

“Do you want to feel a needle coming in and out of your brow over and over again or just once?” Oliver asked seriously.

“Shush your noise,” Lucy told him gently, “It’s just a little sting!”

I cringed as he screamed anyway. Nigel had a flair for drama.

I could hear the excitement of children down in the waiting room now that Alexander had arrived. “Oy, you little munchkins! Natalie, my love! Come here, I heard you had a rough afternoon!” He grunted as he lifted her from the floor, “Oh, you look fine! Beautiful, in fact! Hello! Hello, all of you! Hello, Warren! Hello, Gryff! How are you, Little Bessie? Hi, Annie!”

“I’m not Annie, Daddy,” I heard a tiny voice, “I’m Bess!”

“And I’m your Uncle Ollie,” Alexander returned, “You can’t play at that one with me! I invented some of those tricks!”

“We got you the other day!” One of the chirped.

“For about three seconds!”

The twin girls giggled.

“Uncle Xan!” It was Gryffin, “Can you draw a cat for my new story I’ve written?”

I stood alone in the hall with my eyes closed and I listened to all of their voices mingling together. It was chaos, all of them talking at once and Alexander trying to lend an ear to each one. I let the sound of them fill my ears and swell my heart until I thought that I would burst from all the love inside of me.

As she got older, Natalie did not grow any less lovely in her disposition. It took my breath away sometimes how much she looked like Melissa, she was stunning, but that was where any reminder of her mother ended. Natalie was anything but an unbalanced air head. She was calm and kind and she had a spirit that was impossible to sink. Natalie was close with Lucy. Never having known her mother, she had absolutely no interest in seeing her when Melissa came to Wales.

“It’s nice that she’s here,” Nattie told her father, “But I don’t know why she’s bothered to see us now. I suppose I can sit with you and Nigel, but I don’t have anything to say to the woman.”

“I’d appreciate it if you did,” Alexander said calmly, “And you don’t have to say much.”

“Good, because I’m not going to.”

Nigel, on the other hand, was very excited. He had vague recollections of his mother and was eager to see if anything about her matched his memories. He was concerned, on the other hand, that his eagerness would somehow insult Lucy. Lucy, however, was not threatened in the slightest. “I’d like to beat the shit out of her, Sil,” She told me privately, “But knowing that she lost out on her children and I got both of them and Alexander, too, is enough revenge for me. Her stupidity and selfishness were my gain.”

Nattie was unimpressed when she got through meeting her mum. She hugged Lucy afterwards and said, “Ah, my
real
mum! I love you, Mummy!” Nigel, being more open to the experience, kept contact with Melissa for many years until she succumbed to breast cancer when he was forty-three. Still, he hugged Lucy when he returned from their first meeting and told her loved her enormously. When Alexander arrived back at the wood after the reunion, he scooped Lucy into his arms and kissed her passionately then held her very, very close. “Oh, my God,” He said about ten times, stroking her hair, “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy…you’re like a dream…”

I think my sister was very satisfied.

They were happy together, Lucy and Alexander. Their marriage was not perfect, but it worked. They needed each other. Lucy needed the consistency and support Alex offered her. He was safe, secure, solid, and she knew that he’d never hurt her. Lucy was a calming influence on Alexander. She didn’t take any of his rubbish and gave him a reason to behave, motivation to work hard and stay focused. She loved him, certainly, but there was never any question in anybody’s mind that she’d put him out if she had to. I think Alex liked that, the idea that his wife could make it without him. It made him want to please her. Plus, she took care of him, which was something that Alex had always desperately needed. They were an excellent team. The friendship and affection that they’d always shared had grown deeper and deeper until they’d become a part of each other. Once they’d recognised it as love, it had taken them over. Bless their hearts, they endured the pitfalls and made it work.

“In the end,” Alexander told her on their tenth anniversary, “It’ll just be you and me. The kids will have grown and gone and it’ll be just you and me staring at each other with nothing at all to do.”

“That’ll be brilliant!” Lucy giggled, “I’ll make pies!”

Alexander brought out his old oil paint set out to the cabin one summer and sat with her and their three girls in the garden. I watched him show each of them the different brushes and explain what each did. They opened and checked every jar carefully.

“Is it still good?” Lucy asked excitedly.

Alex nodded. They smiled at each other. “Are you ready?” I heard him ask the girls.

They nodded enthusiastically and walked to the car with him, all three holding on to his hands. He pulled out four large canvases and the four of them headed out to the clearing by the pond. Lucy and I sat on the stoop and chatted while they stood in the sunlight until each had finished their first painting. Annie’s was complete Picasso nonsense. Bessie’s was of birds in the sky. And Nattie’s was the sun shining grandly across the pond, reflecting light all over the wood. Alexander painted three little girls standing behind canvas with brushes in their hands. Those paintings still exist, hanging proudly in the front room of the cabin in the wood.

Now, I watched all of my children grow with great interest, but there was something about my Griffin which was special. This is not to say that the others weren’t but Gryffin had his own way about him. The child was a deep thinker from an early age. He questioned everything. He wanted to know all about the world…scientific things, but he always seemed to be heading toward spiritual answers. He had a fascination with the soul, with all the supernatural possibilities the universe offered. It crossed over into the occult at times, this thirst for knowledge, but we never discouraged him from reading books on Witchcraft or ghosts or demons. It was all research for him, really. He took bits and pieces from everything and used them to make sense of the world around him. He used everything in his writings.

Gryffin wrote his first poem before he was old enough to write it down himself. Oliver and I were sitting in the living room in the rented cottage when he sprang off the bottom step and landed almost in the middle of the room.

“Gryffin Alexander!” Oliver scolded, “It’s way past your bedtime!”

“I know, Dad, but I’ve written something!” He swore breathlessly. “It’s in my head and I need you to put it on paper before I forget it!”

Oliver and I exchanged glances. Ollie grinned suddenly and I said, “Right then. I’ll get pen and paper then.”

This was the poem:

“When God made Adam and Eve, they were meant to eat the poison apple

When God made the horse it was meant for man to ride

When God made the camel it was meant to walk the desert dry

When God made the people they were meant to live and die”

He was four years old. I thought it was rather magnificent. It was something he got from my dad, this love of the written word, and it wasn’t there that he stopped writing. We got him a tape recorder and he told his stories by mouth for about a year until he got his penmanship under control. He read as well, read everything he could get his hands on, even newspapers and things that we knew he couldn’t reason for himself. He wanted to know everything, sometimes just for the sake of knowing it.

Gryffin was the jokester of the family as well. He was a cheeky monkey from the moment of birth, I think. He could pick out the absurdity in any situation and bring it to light immediately, which was infuriating when you were angry with him to begin with. For instance, Oliver once got so angry with him over something he told him, “If you ever do that again, I’m going to punish you and you’re not going to like it!”

“Well, obviously, Dad,” Gryffin retorted as if his father were the stupidest person he’d ever met, “Why would I like it if you were punishing me?”

Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky. He was very lucky Oliver was his dad and not Alexander. Alex would have knocked him to the floor without a second thought. Oliver, no matter how angry he was with the boys, never hit them. I don’t think he hit them even once. Not like me. I’d spank if I had to. I always felt badly afterward, but I’d do it.

Gryffin was always quick with the comebacks. All three of our children had grown up around banter and could hold their own in a battle of wits, but Gryffin was particularly sharp. That is when you got him in the mood to talk. Most of the time he’d just sit quietly and you never knew where his mind was at. Gryffin was a constant thinker. I don’t think his brain ever shut off. He was a worrier, too, which I never quite understood. Sometimes he’d worry himself into a stomach ache and I’d have to get him a hot water bottle to hold against his belly. “You can’t do this to yourself, Darling,” I’d smooth the hair away from his forehead, “You have to learn how to rationalize all this anxiety…”

“I knows it,” We lived North of Cardiff in Wales. Far enough North that the very distinctive dialect that exists down there should not have factored in, but it did. Oliver made sure that all of our children started off speaking clearly instead of adopting that dialect, even though he, himself, was able to speak both fluently. Therefore, once they started school and they began hanging around with all the trash talkers in town, all of our children could both communicate effectively and, as Gryffin was ever famous for, throw verb conjugation and the proper English language to the winds. And sound like he had a mouth full of stones as well. He’d respond in the Cardiff jumble, “I don’t wants at do it, it’s just all sorted-like and I don’t like to not acts like it don’ bother me ‘cause it doos…”

“Gryff…stop talking your nonsense!”

“Sorry, Mum,” He immediately spoke properly, “I just do it anymore and don’t think about it.”

“Well, that is a problem then, isn’t it?”

He laughed softly, “Only for you.”

Gryffin grew tall and strong over the years. He was a quiet lad, thoughtful. Gryffin looked just like his dad, so much it was scary, but he’d inherited more than being handsome from Oliver. Gryff had a gentle voice and a gentle disposition. His touch was always soft and easy. He was honest to a fault and did his best never to harm any creature. Of all the children, I was the closest with Gryffin. Why, I’m not sure. I think he chose me. Caro was stuck to her daddy from day one. Warren always seemed to gravitate to his uncle Alex. Natalie was definitely Alex’s girl. Nigel usually turned to Oliver. Annie and Bess loved Lucy. But Gryffin, he was my little buddy. He’d sit and talk to me for hours while I knitted. I never had to ask him to do anything twice. He could make me laugh so hard I’d cry. He was my son, certainly, and he respected me as an authority figure, but he loved me as his mother and as his friend. We were playmates.

Annie and Bess made their way through their childhood much I suppose like any pair of look-alikes who were struggling to establish their separate identities in a world that wanted to think of them as the same person. Those two were identical down to the pads of their feet. Unlike their fathers, it was hard to tell one from the other even once you got to know them. Still, like their fathers, they were fundamentally different. Annie was good at mathematics, Bess was good at Language. Annie liked light haired boys, Bess preferred dark. They fought like two cats locked in a box as well. You would have thought that they hated each other the way they’d scream and pull hair. Lucy and I, having grown up separate, couldn’t understand that. We’d rush in to break up the tussle, but Oliver and Alexander would stop us when they were home.

“Let them go, Love,” Oliver pulled me back gently by the hand, “They’re all right.”

“Annie’s going to kill her!” I swore as Annie grab her sister by the shirt and threw her to the ground, then sat on her and hit her in the shoulders.

“She’s not trying to hurt her,” Alexander promised, but he poised himself on to the edge of his chair to see better, “If she wanted to hurt her, she’d be punching her in the face-like.”

“Bessie’s not even crying,” Ollie added, “She’s just screaming her head off, yeah.”

“Stop it, you two!” Lucy jumped to her feet and headed to the girls, but Alex caught her by the elbow. “Let me go, Xander!”

“No!” Alex told her in a firm, gentle voice, “They have to do this! You don’t understand! Oliver and I do! They have to settle this!”

Lucy looked disgusted.

“It’s a twin thing,” Oliver explained, “You don’t understand. We do. Let them sort it.”

So we did. We sat in our chairs, Lucy and I biting our lips, and we watched the two youngest girls slap and punch the hell out of each other. When they were done, they sat with their backs to each other and they cried. When they were done crying, they checked to make sure the other was all right and they went inside and both had a kip. They fought again from time to time, but each spar became less violent until it was mostly just arguing that went on. They were never as tight as Oliver and Alexander. It wasn’t until there was an advantage or some hint of trouble that they suddenly united or, as they were coached by their father and his brother, conveniently attempted to switch identities. It worked often. Even on me.