Losing You (3 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to Bonnie. ‘You were going out. I’ve sabotaged your day.’

‘It’s no problem,’ Bonnie said, with a smile.

That made it even worse. Even though we’d been on the island for less than two years I still felt I was finding my feet, but Bonnie had been one of the people I had decided would be my friend. She was in the same position as me – bringing up a young son alone – and she was doing it with uncomplaining cheerfulness. She had short hair and a pale face with red
cheeks and she was quite large and I felt that it wouldn’t take very much makeup to turn her into a circus clown.

‘But you said something about Christmas shopping?’

‘That’s right. I have a rule, or maybe it’s more of a challenge: all Christmas shopping has to be done in one day. And this is the day.’

‘Or, in fact, half a day, in this case,’ I said anxiously.

‘Three-quarters of a day. It’s not eleven yet. Which is plenty. Ryan and I are heading into town and we’ll be back in about six hours, laden like packhorses.’

‘So I’d better say happy Christmas,’ I said, ‘and a happy new year and everything.’

‘That’s right,’ said Bonnie. ‘You’re flying off. That’s the way to turn forty. I’m so sorry I can’t get to –’ She stopped.

‘Get to what?’ I said.

‘I mean, that we won’t get to see you over the holiday. But let’s meet up properly in the new year.’

I said I’d like that. Then I went to retrieve Jackson from where I’d left him, in front of a computer game with Ryan, who grunted but barely looked up as we gave Bonnie a Christmas-and-new-year hug and went out. When we were back in the car, Jackson retrieved another miniature computer game from his pocket and started to play. I glanced across at his serious face, the tip of a pink tongue sticking out in ferocious concentration and his lick of black hair tickling his screwed-up brow, and didn’t attempt conversation. I was going over my mental list again: passports, tickets and credit cards. If I got to the airport with those, two children and one nearly new boyfriend, nothing else mattered.

I took the scenic route home. Instead of snaking through the back-streets, I drove down the main street, imaginatively
named The Street, wound to the left to reach the beach and turned right past the deserted caravan site, the closed-up beach huts, and the boat-maker’s yard, which was now full of boats pulled up for the winter.

Our house was in a motley line of dwellings just across the road from the boathouses and -yards and mooring jetties. They were all old enough to date from a time when people evidently didn’t see much point in a sea view as against the disadvantages of an icy wind and occasional floods. The grand Georgian houses, the manor houses and rectories were safely tucked away inland. The cottages that lined The Saltings were odd, ill-sorted and squeezed in at strange angles as if each had had to be fitted into a space slightly too small for it. Ours was probably the oddest of all. It was made of clapboard and looked more than anything like a square wooden boat that had been dragged on to land, turned upside-down and been unconvincingly disguised with a grey-slate roof. It had been hard to sell because it had a tiny garden at the back and almost none at the front, it was damp and the rooms were poky, but Rory and I had fallen in love with it immediately. From our bedroom window we could see mud and sea and beyond that nothing except sky.

As Jackson and I approached the door, we heard a desperate scratching, whimpering and groaning from inside.

‘Stop that, Sludge,’ I shouted, as I fiddled with the key in the lock. The door opened and a black apparition flew at us.

The time between our arrival on the island and Rory leaving was mainly a disaster of bills and half-finished building work, then more bills. Almost Rory’s sole contribution to the household in that terrible period was to give in to the drip-drip-drip entreaties of Charlie and Jackson over many
years for a dog. In a blur of events that happened almost simultaneously, he obtained a Labrador that looked like an oversized mole, christened her Sludge, left her with me and left me. When Rory walked out, I couldn’t believe it. I literally couldn’t compute in my brain that he could be somewhere else from me; well, after the last few weeks together, I could imagine that. But even so, I didn’t see how he could be away from the children.

However, it quickly became all too clear that Sludge would never leave us. In fact, she seemed to suffer acute separation trauma if we left the house to go to the shops. As we came in and she went through her emotional welcome home, Jackson asked for the hundredth time why we couldn’t take her with us on holiday and I said because she’s a dog, and he said that we should get her a pet passport and I said that pet passports took a lot of time and money, and I didn’t even know if they had them for the States, to which he said, unanswerably: so?

Charlie and I had had an animated discussion on the phone the previous evening. I had said that I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea for her to be out the night before we went away. She had hardened her voice in a way I knew well, and asked why. I said there was a lot to do and she said she could do it when she got back. It never became an argument because really I felt relieved, and she knew it, that her enemies were, perhaps, becoming her friends. So when she said that she would come back early and feed Sludge, put the washing out, tidy her room and do her packing, I didn’t say anything sarcastic, I didn’t pull a face down the phone at her, I didn’t laugh. I did mention that she had a paper round to do as well, but she had said she would do that on her way home
and then she would get everything else done. There was plenty of time. And she was right. There
was
plenty of time.

I hadn’t fed Sludge this morning because Jackson or Charlie liked to do that: she’s so pathetically grateful. And Sludge had done what Sludge always did when she hadn’t been fed: she found something else to eat or, failing that, something to chew. In this case it was a box of porridge oats. Oats and fragments of box were scattered through the living room. I took a deep breath. This was the first day of the holidays: nothing could make me angry on the first day of the holidays. At least she hadn’t eaten the mail, which had been pushed through the door in my absence – a larger pile than usual, and mostly birthday cards as far as I could see.

I put them to one side to open later. I picked up the fragments of box, then took out the vacuum cleaner and in a few minutes the room was as it had been. Jackson fed Sludge, not that she needed much feeding, full as she was of oats and cardboard.

Nor was I angry when I went into the kitchen and found the clothes still in the washing-machine. If Charlie hadn’t fed Sludge, it was hardly likely that she would have hung out the washing. Of course, it meant that the clothes we needed for our holiday would now have to be put into the dryer but that wasn’t a significant problem. I bundled them in and turned the dial to forty minutes. That should do it.

And, of course, it was almost a logical necessity, just about as certain as that two and two make four, that if Charlie hadn’t fed Sludge and hadn’t hung out the washing, she wouldn’t have tidied her bedroom or packed. I went upstairs and gave her room the most cursory glance. I knew that the bed hadn’t been slept in but it looked as if it had been, then
jumped on. Clothes lay on the carpet where they had been dropped. There were a belt, an empty violin case, a fake tigerskin rug, pencils, a broken ruler, scissors, a pair of flip-flops, CDs with no cases, CD cases with no CDs, a string bag, a couple of teen magazines, a book splayed open, the top half of a pair of pyjamas, a large stuffed green lizard, a couple of small piles of dirty clothes, a broken hairdryer, scattered items of makeup, disparate shoes and three bath towels. Charlie seemed to prefer using a clean towel after each bath or shower, though not to the extent of putting the dirty ones in the washing-basket.

Her laptop computer sat on her desk with a tartan pencil case, several notebooks, a pink-capped deodorant, a bottle of Clearasil, a shoebox, a furry cow, various assorted piles of schoolwork and much, much more.

I felt a sense of violation even peering into her room through the gap of the open door. Since she had had this new bedroom she had been firmly private about it. I didn’t clean it. Well, neither did she, but we had an agreement about that. I would leave her to do as she pleased in her room, order it as she wished, so long as she tidied up in the rest of the house. She hadn’t exactly kept her end of the bargain, but I had kept mine. I felt a pang about it, of course. In the past, she had always been open, almost terrifyingly so, with me about all her fears, troubles and problems, until sometimes I felt heavy with the weight of her confessions. That had changed, as it had to, as she changed and grew. It wasn’t that I believed she had important secrets to keep from me. I knew that she needed a door she could lock and a space she could call her own. Sometimes I felt excluded but I couldn’t separate that feeling from all of my emotions at
watching my only daughter become a woman; someone separate from me with her own life.

So I didn’t do any clearing up. I didn’t do any of her packing. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t on my wrist. Where was it? On the side of the bath? On the floor next to my bed? In a pocket somewhere? By the sink? But at that moment a sheep emerged from Charlie’s ridiculous sheep clock and bleated the hour. Eleven o’clock. No rush. So I left the room – except that I took her flip-flops off the floor to pack because she would probably forget them and I’d end up having to buy new ones.

I carried them to my bedroom and tossed them into my suitcase, which was now almost full. Walking down the stairs I almost collided with what looked like a peculiar half-boy, half-robot coming up. It was Jackson, looking through the camcorder Rory had bought for us a year ago and which I’d never even got out of the box. I’d planned to take it to Florida and had already packed it, but Jackson can sniff out electronic equipment just as Charlie can sniff out chocolate.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Filming,’ he said. ‘It’s brilliant.’

‘That was meant for the holiday,’ I said. ‘There’s no point in filming our house. We know what it looks like.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jackson said.

‘Yes, it does. I charged it up specially.’

‘I’ll charge it up again,’ he said, proceeding on his way, leaving me on the stairs with my mouth open. Holiday films are boring enough without being preceded by a ten-minute wobbly journey round your own house. But I knew that once Jackson had attached himself to something technological, it required major surgery to detach him from it. Besides, I had
other things on my mind. Eleven. Charlie deserved a lie-in at the end of what had been a difficult, tiring term at school but she had a paper round to do, she had packing, she had a holiday to prepare for. I picked up the phone from the low table at the bottom of the stairs and dialled her mobile. I was immediately connected to her voicemail but that didn’t tell me much. As I’d found to my cost over the previous year, there were several dead zones on Sandling Island where mobile phones lost their signal. Charlie might have switched off her phone or left it in a drawer in her room or she might have been on her paper round already. I made a mental note to call her a few minutes later.

I stood in the living room, briefly at a loss. I had about eight things to do and there seemed no compelling reason to choose one to do first.

It was my birthday, my fortieth birthday. I remembered the unopened mail and decided that, before anything else, I would have a cup of coffee and look at the cards and intriguing little parcels that lay on the kitchen table. I put the kettle on, ground some coffee beans, pulled out the white porcelain cup and saucer that Rory had given me this time last year. I remembered opening it as he watched me, sitting at this very table. One year ago, as I turned thirty-nine, I was still married, and we had been starting our new adventure together. Looking back with the merciless clarity of hindsight, I could see the ominous signs. Perhaps if I had recognized them at the time, I could have saved us. I could recall the day clearly. Rory had given me the lovely cup, and a shirt that was several sizes too big, and later in the day we had gone for a long walk round the island in the rain.

Now I was forty and single, with the wreck of my marriage
smoking behind me. But because of Christian, I felt younger than I had for a long time, more attractive, energetic and hopeful. Falling in love does that.

The kettle boiled and I poured the water over the coffee grounds, then opened the first card, from my old school-friend Cora. I hadn’t seen her for years but we remembered each other’s birthday, clinging to our friendship by our fingernails.

There were about a dozen cards, and three presents: a pair of earrings, a book of cartoons about getting older, and a CD by a sultry young female singer I’d never heard of. I nearly didn’t bother with the large brown envelope at the bottom of the pile, addressed in neat capital letters, because I assumed it contained a brochure. As I ran my finger under the gummed flap, I saw a glossy sheet inside, and I drew it out carefully. It was an A4 photograph of Jackson and Charlie, with ‘Happy Fortieth Birthday’ written in Charlie’s flamboyant scrawl along the white border at the top and their signatures underneath.

I smiled at the faces smiling at me: there was Jackson, rather solemn and self-conscious, his neat dark hair with its widow’s peak, his tentative smile, his dark brown eyes gazing directly into the camera. Charlie stood beside him, her copper hair in a glorious tangle, her wide red mouth flashing a smile that dimpled one cheek, her blue-green eyes in her pale freckled face.

‘Jackson!’ I called up the stairs. ‘This is lovely!’

‘What?’ came his voice.

‘The photo. It arrived in the post.’

‘That was Charlie’s idea. She said it was more exciting to get things by post.’

‘It’s really good,’ I said, looking at the image once more, the two pairs of bright eyes. ‘Who took it?’

He put his head round the kitchen door. ‘What?’

‘Who took it for you?’