Miss You (12 page)

‘How long?’ I asked Doll, in Fred’s parents’ bedroom where we left our coats and checked our teeth for lipstick smears in the dressing-table mirror.

‘I wasn’t sure if it was serious,’ was Doll’s excuse for not telling me.

‘It’s serious?’

‘He calls me Maria D!’

‘And you like that?’

It was what she was called when teachers took the register. To distinguish her from Maria Lourdes who was Maria L.

‘I think it sounds more grown up,’ said Doll, smoothing down her clinging black-lace dress.

I stared at my reflection. Standing next to Doll seemed to emphasize my height, because she was petite and perfect. On social occasions, I always felt self-conscious beside her, like a slightly
censorious chaperone instead of a best friend. I was wearing black jeans and a red velvet top with a floppy kind of neckline at the front that made it look a bit fifties, and matching Ruby Gem
lipstick from the palette of lip colours that had been Doll’s Christmas gift to me. I sometimes felt I’d been born into the wrong era as far as fashion was concerned. With long legs and
slim hips, I looked good in jeans or trousers, but my top half was two sizes bigger. A swimmer’s build, my mum used to say, after one of the medallists at the Barcelona Olympics became a bit
of a pin-up and went on to advertise cosmetics.

I couldn’t work out whether the funny feeling I had was because I was jealous that Doll was moving on without me – not that I fancied Fred myself, and even if I had, he was way out
of my league – or whether I was just annoyed with her for not telling me straight out. Was I acting so pathetic that my best friend didn’t dare tell me she was going out with her dream
boyfriend?

The people at the party were mostly from our school year, although there were a few additions who looked like they were probably footballers. As far as I was concerned, they
divided into three basic groups. Those who knew about Mum, who mostly smiled at me, or said, ‘How ARE you?’ to which the only answer was ‘Fine.’ Then there were the people
who didn’t know about Mum, who asked how I was liking university, so I had to tell them, even though I didn’t want to keep bringing it up. I decided that ‘Thank you’ was the
best response when people said they were sorry, but that sounded like they’d said, ‘I like your top,’ or something. Then there were new people, but I wasn’t confident enough
to introduce myself to them.

My peers mostly had proper jobs now and were aspiring towards a mortgage and an interest-free dining suite, whereas I’d gone backwards, so far backwards that I was spending my days at the
primary school we’d all been to.

‘God, Mrs Corcoran, I was always terrified of her!’ said Cerise McQuarry.

‘I still am!’

We were drinking rosé cava in the kitchen. It was all cava in those days. Nobody had even heard of Prosecco.

‘Lucky old Doll, eh?’ said Cerise. ‘The One Most Likely to Marry a Millionaire . . .’

‘That’s assuming Fred becomes a millionaire and they get married,’ I said.

Cerise gave me that look I used to get a lot at school. She had been The One Most Likely to Be a Model, which is probably why she’d mentioned the yearbook, but for the time being, she was
working behind the No 7 counter in Boots.

I’d been The One Most Likely to Be a Teacher, I suppose because I was a bit swotty and pedantic. Being a teacher was what Mum had wanted for me, but I’d never been sure. Even less
so, now. The staffroom at St Cuthbert’s was divided by a strict hierarchy. We teaching assistants sat together to eat our sandwiches, while the teachers sat up the other end moaning about the
National Curriculum and the amount of work they had to do at home. It didn’t sound like much of a life.

I’ve never been great at parties. If you’re tall and shy, it’s worse than being small and shy because when you’re tall, people approach you with the assumption that you
must be confident, so then if you’re a bit tongue-tied, they think you’re stand-offish. The other problem is that a lot of men are quite short, so they say things like,
‘You’re a big girl, aren’t you?’ which puts me on the defensive.

There was one guy here, however, who was so tall he had to duck when he moved from one room to another. Our fingers touched as we both went for the last sausage roll and then did this kind of
‘You, no you, no really’ thing. I wasn’t even hungry, but looking at the food made it seem like I was doing something rather than just standing there on my own.

‘Fred says you’re Maria’s friend?’

It took a moment.

‘I call her Doll,’ I said. ‘Dolores, rather than the children’s toy. Did you know Maria Dolores means “Mary of the Sorrows” . . .’ I prattled on.

‘Doesn’t look very sorry now!’ he said, glancing into the living room. ‘I’m Warren, by the way.’

‘And your connection is?’

‘What? Oh, I’m the goalie.’

We had a dance and it was kind of nice to feel a great meaty hand round my waist and to get a proper kiss when the bongs went. Warren was so tall and built, he made me feel almost delicate and
petite in his arms.

‘Come on, get your coat!’ he murmured into my neck.

‘I don’t think so, thank you very much!’ I shrank away, prim as a nun.

‘Did he honestly think that I was going to have sex with him after one snog?’ I asked Doll on the way home.

Her silence spoke volumes.

‘Oh my God, you and Fred? You’re . . . ?’ I said, feeling suddenly very sober. The reason I’d felt isolated at the party was nothing to do with Mum dying. They were all
having sex. And I was still very much a virgin.

‘Sorry, Tess,’ Doll said.

She meant for not telling me.

I remembered when we’d first started thinking about boys we’d taken it in turns to practise our kissing technique on the mirror in Doll’s bedroom, which was odd when you think
about it, because something cold and flat was never going to approximate human lips, and you kept your eyes open to see how you were doing, which people in romantic clinches don’t normally
do.

Since then, Doll and I had both gone on dates, but nothing more serious than a milkshake on the seafront, or a movie. We’d always shared the extent of the physical contact, comparing love
bites and how far we’d gone on a scale from one to ten, although, since neither of us had actually been ‘all the way’ it was sometimes difficult to calibrate the experience. What
seemed like a five one year only felt like a two the next.

Now Doll had got to ten, and I probably wasn’t even at six, because I wasn’t keen on boys touching my breasts, let alone down there.

‘Is it nice?’ I asked.

‘It’s bloody fantastic. Much better than I thought.’

‘Do you love Fred?’ I asked, feeling about twelve years old again.

‘I think so,’ said Doll. ‘I can’t believe it sometimes. Fred Marinello!’

It was a cold night. Our breath made clouds and our footsteps pinged on the pavement. I looked up at the dome of stars.

‘Isn’t it weird that there are thousands of couples who’ll meet for the first time tonight?’ I said. ‘And some of them will last two weeks and some of them will
still be together in twenty years’ time, but none of them know right now . . .’

Doll looked at me as if I’d lost it.

‘Warren’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s in telesales.’

I wasn’t thinking about Warren. I wasn’t even thinking about me. It’s just that sometimes when I’m looking at a clear night sky, with all those stars, the universe seems
so vast and random, it’s strange to think how our tiny little moments down on earth can hold so much significance.

‘He’s got a company car,’ said Doll, as if that clinched it.

‘Look, I know you think I’m choosy,’ I said, ‘but when Warren said, “Come on! Fred says you’re in need of a good seeing-to!” it wasn’t the most
seductive line I’d ever heard.’

‘Oops!’ said Doll. ‘Sorry!’

‘I’m really happy about you and Fred, though,’ I said, because I thought I was supposed to. ‘I’m just a bit sad that I won’t see so much of you. Which
probably makes me a horrible selfish person!’

‘That’s two of us then!’

We laughed and, for a moment, we were back to normal, then we both went quiet again because it wasn’t really as symmetrical as that.

You could hear Hope from down the street. Dad and Mr O’Neill had gone to the pub and Mrs O’Neill hadn’t wanted the CD on again with Big Ben coming up.

‘She does like her carols, doesn’t she?’

Mrs O’Neill had brought up four boys as well as Doll, but I’d never seen her looking as worn out as she did after an evening with Hope.

‘Shall I just take her home?’ I suggested.

‘At this time of night?’ said Mrs O’Neill. ‘When the guest room’s all made up?’

I said Hope could have the CD player on in the bedroom, if she stopped carrying on and brushed her teeth and got into her pyjamas first. Just to make sure she behaved, I got into the other twin
bed straight away, instead of having a Snowball with Doll and her mum.

The CD played all the way to ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ before Hope finally fell asleep.

I lay on my back thinking about New Year’s resolutions.

When I was young, I used to write them out in my best handwriting and tie them into little scrolls with coloured thread from Mum’s sewing box, then hang them from the knobs on the chest of
drawers in my bedroom.

I will always do the washing-up.

I will help Mum more.

I will save my pocket money.

I’d long since stopped writing them out, but I still made them in my head – everyone does, don’t they? – but now I couldn’t think of any.

A year ago, Mum and I had seen in the New Year together, with the silver tinsel tree twinkling, Jools’s
Hootenanny
on the box and a small glass of Baileys. My resolutions had been
pretty straightforward: to revise really hard for my A levels in order to get the grades for university; to save enough money from my Saturday job at the One Stop to go travelling in the
summer.

‘What are yours?’ I remembered asking her.

‘Mine’s always the same, Tess,’ she’d replied. ‘To be happy with everything I have.’

To be honest, I’d been exasperated with her, because I thought if Mum hadn’t been so saintly, she could have made a bit more of herself. She was an intelligent woman, such a fast
reader that she got through two or three library books every week. She could answer all the questions on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
She could have done something better with her
life.

Now, it occurred to me that I might have missed her meaning.

Did the fact that Mum had to
resolve
to be happy mean that she wasn’t
actually
happy?

Had she not felt fulfilled in life?

Why hadn’t we talked about all these things?

Why hadn’t she told me what she was thinking, instead of giving me that infuriating smile that said,
You’ll find out soon enough
?

Why, when she could have said anything, did she ask whether I’d been to Midnight Mass?

And what was I supposed to deduce from a bloody butterfly?

I turned my face to the wall in a silent howl, my shoulders heaving as hot tears cascaded down my cheeks. Curled up like a baby, my legs scrunched up to my chest, I sobbed and sobbed, until I
could almost feel Mum bending over me concerned, like she did when I was little and had a temperature.

In
Truly, Madly, Deeply
, which Doll had rented one Friday mistaking it for a straightforward romcom, Juliet Stevenson had cried so hard that Alan Rickman came back from the dead to be
with her.

But there was no cool, damp flannel for my forehead, no soothing ‘There, there! You’ll feel better soon, I promise.’

In the slight chill of a room where no one usually slept, I yearned for Mum so much, my heart literally ached.

‘It’s not that I can’t cope,’ I told her silently. ‘It’s just that I miss you being there when we come home from school because the house feels so empty. I
miss talking to you in the kitchen and I miss not talking because we’re both eavesdropping. I just miss you so much, Mum! It’s not the same when you’re not here . . .’

I suddenly thought how sad she would be to see me like this, crying my eyes out and making Mrs O’Neill’s pillows all wet.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I said.

And I could almost hear her reply: ‘I’m sorry too, Tess. It’s not what I wanted either, you know.’

Ross died at midday on New Year’s Eve.

The decision was etched on my parents’ faces that morning, though they didn’t tell me. If I’d asked, would they have allowed me to be in the room? I didn’t because it
felt like something private between them and him. They’d brought him into the world and spent five years with him before I ever came along. I would only be in the way. So I didn’t get a
chance to say goodbye, because nobody wanted to face up to what was about to happen. ‘Passed away’ is so much easier than ‘switched off’. It would have been an empty
farewell anyway, since he was brain dead. The only difference I could detect when I was called in was that the machines had stopped whooshing and bleeping. The room was totally silent. I was glad
he’d gone while it was still light, rather than just before midnight with fireworks going off and cars sounding their horns in the street outside.

We all flew home a couple of days later in a plane full of hungover skiers except for the one empty seat next to me. Following long deliberation, my parents decided to cremate what was left of
his body after the organs had been donated, and scatter the ashes at sea. Ross had always loved the sea. He’d always talked about trying to set a record for rowing the Atlantic.

Exactly a year later, on New Year’s Eve, my parents and I set off to Lymington to catch the ferry to the Isle of Wight. We were silent, the beating of the windscreen wipers marking time as
the tyres sloshed through the surface water on the M3. Next to me on the back seat lay a large bouquet of white lilies.

Dad had it in mind that we’d row out into the bay in the little clinker boat that came with the coastguard’s cottage we always used to rent for the summer, and drop the flowers in
the same area of the bay that we’d scattered the ashes the previous spring. But when we stopped outside the cottage, it was raining so hard and the wind was so strong, it felt as if someone
was throwing giant buckets of water at the car, rocking it with the force of the gusts. Through the steamed-up windows, it was impossible to distinguish where the meadow ended and the sea
began.