This Holey Life (34 page)

‘For you,’ Olivia says, as I lug Imo back into the kitchen for her bottle. She hands over the picture. PC Wilson blushes, gushing a thank you, that’s really kind.

I can make out the cast of
The Bill
, hacked out of Pat’s
TV Times
, drowning under a deluge of PVA.

‘And talking of families, what about your mummy?’ PC Wilson whispers conspiratorially, winking at me in a way that would make me want to brain her with my iron had she not been so
helpful over the last twenty-four hours. ‘What’s special about her?’

‘Well,’ says Olivia as I wait for the longest time. But I should fear not. She is an angel. ‘She’s the best mummy in the whole world of course.’ She folds her arms,
her angel wings, in an amazingly patronisingly way for a three-year-old, as if she pities PC Wilson, whose mother, if she has one, must be of an inferior quality.

But I can’t stay smug for long. I have a feast to prepare. The fast is over. And the fatted calf – a sumptuous-looking sirloin of British beef – must go in the oven if we are
to eat before sundown.

I have a family. It isn’t perfect but it is mine. I will cherish them all – those that are here, and those that stay quiet in my heart and memory – and be
thankful that it never got as bad for me as it got for poor old Job.

But then, as Steve likes to say, look what happened to Job in the end. So I did. It’s all written down, helpfully in the Book of Job, in the Old Testament, nestled between Esther and the
Psalms.

But that’s Job’s story. What about Steve’s?

The story according to Steve:
It was the call-out to Dartford that did it. I didn’t really want to go, it was quite a way but it sounded like a genuine
emergency and Vick was keen for me to get back to work so I got in the van and I went, a tortuous journey, Saturday morning. But I never got there. Had to ask Craig to get that one in the
end.

Steve tells this to PC Wilson who is still hanging around our kitchen, unable to drag herself away. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘What happened next?’

I get to the A2. Past Bexley. There’s a lot of traffic and the rain’s coming down. I’m in the fast lane, behind a pick-up, piled up with all sorts of gardening junk, like
they’re on their way to the tip. It looks a bit dicey, the way it’s shoved on, a wheelbarrow at the back of it all. I keep half an eye on the wheelbarrow, wondering if we should get one
and then I get annoyed at myself for thinking such a thing. How can I be considering a new wheelbarrow? How can I be getting on with life? So soon? It’s only been a few weeks.

The rain comes down faster, there’s splash-back from the pick-up, and I put the wipers on full whack.

Then I hear a voice. Clear as if someone’s in the van behind me. I check the mirror but there’s no-one there, course there’s no-one there. The voice says:
Move over
.
I reckon I must’ve imagined it, the wind whirling through a gap in the van, tools shifting in the back. But it doesn’t sound like any of those things. And it can’t account for
this feeling I’m getting. Then the voice says it again, louder, more insistent:
Move over
. And this time I don’t think. There’s no time for thinking. Instead I feel my hand
move to the indicator, my eyes flick to the mirror, and I am moving over, to the middle lane but I don’t drop back like I should, my foot stays down on the pedal and I keep even with the
driver of the truck, the rain pouring so I can’t hardly see out the window.

Then there’s this loud bang.

I look from wing mirror to rear view. The wheelbarrow has flown off the pick-up. It’s taken off, rising above the road, bouncing backwards through the space where I was, just a
moment’s breath before. My heart’s like a frightened budgie trapped in my ribcage, beating about, trying to escape. Where the hell is it going now? But I can’t think these things.
I can’t speak them. There’s no time. The wheelbarrow, a huge metal bird, carries on bouncing, skidding and sliding sideways, backwards, dodging a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier, a red
Micra, obstacles in a bizarre It’s a Knockout race. It skids all the way across the lanes and ends up like a twisted sculpture by the side of the road. All these thoughts, all these movements
pass in a matter of seconds. The traffic carries on as if nothing’s happened, as if it were a dream but the clang of metal, the sight of the flying wheelbarrow, the voice, all repeat over and
over until I can get off the road at the next exit.

I find a pay phone, by a row of shops, the rain easing up by now. I call the police. Tell them about the pick-up, the wheelbarrow, giving descriptions and locations and my address. Then I sit
back in the van. I sit still, the window open to help me breathe, and I wonder at what just happened. My heart’s settled down but all my senses are fired up. I notice the drops of rain on my
windscreen, no longer falling but sliding down. Each one stands out, unique and clear. I hear the sound of a man and woman passing by, her heels on the pavement, his deep voice asking her
something. I smell the newly-cleaned pavements, the heat washed off. The washing powder waft out of the launderette. I touch my face with my hands, to check I’m still here. The heat of my
cheeks. The stubble poking through my skin. The taste of blood in my mouth, where I must’ve bitten my lip. And this other feeling. A sixth sense maybe. A gut feeling. That something has
happened. Something I can’t define. Something supernatural. But I shake off the feeling, switch on the radio, try to pull myself together, wonder what I’m doing here when I have a job
to get to.

Then.

I look up, out of the open car window and see a young woman coming out of the launderette pushing a toddler, maybe eighteen-months-old, in one of those umbrella buggies. She’s carrying
a big bag of washing, a stripy plastic zip-up bag you get in the pound shop and the boy is clutching a rubber ball. She stops outside and murmurs something, more to herself than the child. She
swipes at her hair, which has come loose from a pony tail and puts down the bag. Then she leaves the toddler in the pushchair while she darts back inside to get whatever it is she’s
forgotten.

But the toddler isn’t buckled up properly. I watch him shrug his arms out of the shoulder straps. He looks surprised, like he didn’t expect that to happen so easily. Then he
inches forward on his bottom and sits on the edge of the pushchair, swinging his legs, looking behind him for a glimpse of his mother. But she hasn’t re-emerged from the shop. I will her to
hurry up. Hurry up. I know I’ll have to do something if he gets himself out the buggy.

He drops his ball. We watch it bounce across the pavement. He jumps down onto the pavement and I get myself out of the car. But he’s quick. He toddles with surprising speed and
determination after his ball. Towards the road. Not a busy road but there’s this sharp bend. I have to be faster. I’m running towards him and right then I hear a shattering scream. A
mother’s scream. That sound I never wanted to hear again. I’ve nearly reached him, watching his little body bent forward in concentration. The scream makes him stop and turn round,
balanced on the edge of the kerb. He wobbles, like in a cartoon, teetering on the brink of a cliff. Which way will he go? He falls towards the road. I lurch forward like I have super human strength
and speed.

I can do this.

I can save him.

His coat is in my hand. I pull and he falls backwards onto me, just as a car speeds round the corner. The driver has no idea, carrying on as if nothing has happened. But my life will never be
the same again.

The mother cries and thanks me and the relief in her eyes makes me cry too, like I’ve not cried since Thomas’ death. She looks at me as if I am unhinged and asks if she can do
anything to help, all the while clasping her son to her like she’ll never ever let him go.

I get back in the car and call Craig. Tell him he’ll have to take the job. I’m going home. I drive away, Dartford behind me, back onto the A2, and then ahead –

– a rainbow...

I let the car take me back to Penge. But when I reach the high street, the car doesn’t take me home – that sounds stupid, I know – but I have switched off, gone on
automatic. I end up in the car park of St Hilda’s, my hand taking the keys out of the ignition, my feet getting me out of the car and across the car park and into the church which happens to
be open so that one of the ladies can do the flowers. She’s sticking long yellow crysanths into a huge vase, lots of tangled greenery and the smell is the most beautiful thing I have ever
breathed in. Like I’ve entered heaven on earth.

And there’s the vicar. There’s Desmond turning to welcome me.

This is what I will come to know as my mountain top experience, though it happened in the London Basin. Desmond knows me from the funeral, from our children’s christenings. He sits me
down as he can see I am shaking. He tells me I’ve had an epiphany. I say that sounds painful. He says, with a simple lack of humour, such moments can be painful but they can lead to great
peace and a wonderful joy.

Revelation: If I hadn’t survived the wheelbarrow flying off the back of the pick-up, then I wouldn’t have been there to save the boy. It is not all random – a pack of cards
thrown into the air to fall where they will. A load of timber washed ashore. This was planned so I would be in that place at that time. I moved over when I was told to move over. And I survived. So
did the occupants of the Vauxhall Cavalier and the Micra. So did the little boy. Another set of parents didn’t have to go through what we’ve been through. If Thomas hadn’t died it
is quite possible that I wouldn’t have gone off to Dartford that Saturday morning. We would have spent the day together. The park, shopping, a day out to Worthing. Other people would have
died in his place. Other sons. He didn’t die in vain.

I didn’t change immediately but there was a shift. I came to realise that God doesn’t want bad things to happen. God listens when we cry out. Even Jesus cried out.
Why have you
forsaken me?
God knows what it is like to lose a son. My pain is His pain. The cross is His way of saying: I know how you feel. People say it’s all part of God’s plan but
that’s not exactly a great comfort when you’re in the deep dark pit of depression. But I began to see there was something beyond me and bigger than me. I began to think of all the
things that have happened in my life that might not have happened. All the disasters in the world that have been divinely averted. And I began to feel that peace seep into my bones and spread
throughout me. And peace was followed, surprisingly, unexpectedly, by joy.

PC Wilson shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Steve remembers he has an audience. For a while he was back in the van, driving across his mountain top. Now he’s back in our kitchen.
‘I’m sorry, Vick,’ he says, out the blue.

‘Sorry? What’ve you done now?’

‘I’m sorry my experience changed your life. I don’t think I took you into consideration in this, not like I should have done. I mean I thought this would be a better life, for
all of us. I still do. Only I haven’t thought enough about you... You know, you don’t have to do this curate’s wife thing. I’ll stop it all now. Go back to plumbing. I can
be a lay preacher. There’s all sorts of voluntary work I can do in the church. I want you to be happy. And I want to honour you.’

‘Honour me?’

‘I don’t think we do half enough honouring these days.’

‘You’d really give it all up?’

‘Well, obviously not all of it. Just the vicar bit.’

‘But what about Desmond? He’s retiring.’

‘I admit it may not be the best timing, both of us going together, but like I said, there’s someone else in control here. It’ll work for the good.’

PC Wilson coughs. ‘I think I might just head off now.’

‘Hang on a sec,’ I say, pushing her back down. ‘Steve, I don’t want you to give it up. I think you should be vicar. I mean, who else could do it as well as you? Who else
knows St Hilda’s like you? Who else knows the community?’

Steve is silent.

‘Don’t you think that’ll mean more work?’ PC Wilson chips in.

We look at her. Steve says, ‘more responsibility, not necessarily more work.’

‘And what about a vicar’s wife? What does that mean for Vicky, here?’

Steve looks at me. ‘It’s what you make of it,’ he says. ‘You can go back to teaching if that’s what you want.’

Teaching? Do I really want to leave my kids to go and teach other people’s kids? Or do I want to be a fully-fledged vicar’s wife?

‘Shouldn’t you be getting off home now? We’ve kept you far too long. Or would you like to stay for lunch?’ I check my watch,‘Well, a very late lunch. It’s
roast beef.’

PC Wilson gets up reluctantly from our kitchen table. ‘I’m tempted but I’m needed at home,’ she looks around the room.

‘You’re a nice family set-up here,’ she says. ‘I wish they were all like this.’

I show her to the front door. She puts on her hat and says to me: ‘We don’t all need a title to make us happy. I’ve been in the force and never bothered about going for
sergeant or promotion or anything. I like what I do. I’m good at it, I think,’ she coughs again. ‘But sometimes we need a status of our own. Something of our own. Do you know what
I’m saying?’

I know exactly what she’s saying.

We are gathered in the back room, the dining room once more, as Jeremy is returning to Dulwich tonight – along with Martin, the jammy dodger. Steve lets Martin carve the
beef, a gesture full of grace and humility that ignites a surge of love for my husband. I want to honour him. I want to do the best for this family. My family.

I look around at them all, cramped round the table in the poky room: baby Imo in her high chair, a cocktail sausage squeezed in her chubby hand. Rachel, next to Jeremy, listening intently to his
adventures, on the train to Dawlish, dodging the guard the whole way, finding Jessica’s mum in her painted cottage, screeching with joy to see her daughter, Jessica hugging her, how it was
worth the aggro and maybe he’s right. Dorota and Roland side by side, quiet, watching the people around them, but mainly watching each other, offering vegetables, passing gravy, spooning
horseradish, a choreographed dance learnt long ago in their youth. Dad and Pat yabbering away, about the food, the campervan, plans for the garden, for next week, and though it hurts like hell,
thinking of my missing mum, this pain is mixed in with – yes, it has to be said – relief.