‘It’s one at a time,’ she explained. ‘So I’ll wait for you outside. There’s something I want to discuss with you anyway, so…’
Only half an hour later – slots to see baby Tom were in great demand – I found her sitting on a wall eating a Snickers and drinking Diet Coke. It was a beautiful spring afternoon.
‘Healthy diet!’ I teased, jumping up onto the wall beside her and reaching for the can of drink.
‘Oh, I know,’ Mum said. ‘It’s the specialkeeping-cancer-at-baydiet. Haven’t you heard of it?’
‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ I asked, once I’d taken a sip from her can. ‘He looks like Alek already.’
‘It’s the eyes,’ Mum said. ‘It’s those ice-blue eyes. Though that might change. Yours were pretty blue when you were born and then they went all sludgy and green.’
‘Thanks!’ I said. ‘Lucy looks dreadful though, doesn’t she?’
‘So did you,’ Mum said. ‘So did every new mother, ever.’
‘Luckily, there were no mirrors,’ I told her. ‘So I never realised.’
‘I have photos somewhere,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll show you.’
‘So you said there’s something you want to talk to me about?’ Perhaps it was the fact of having been in the hospital, but while I was with Lucy I’d started worrying that maybe Mum’s cancer was back. ‘You’re OK, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘I’m fine. No, this is more about you really. Well, indirectly it is, anyway.’
I’m not sure why, but I suddenly thought that she was going to tell me who my father was. I thought she was going to say that it hadn’t been Bert the minicab driver after all. Seeing baby Tom with Alek and Lucy had made her regret all those years of making a stupid story out of something so important. I braced myself for a revelation.
Instead she said, ‘I wondered if you’d heard the news.’
‘The news?’
‘About your Billy?’
‘Oh,’ I said, simultaneously disappointed and annoyed. ‘Please don’t call him that. He’s not my Billy at all.’
‘Sorry,’ Mum said. ‘But have you? Heard?’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything at all. What’s happened? Did the idiot get Covid?’ I’d read about how anti-vax Billy was.
‘No,’ Mum said. ‘He’s been arrested.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘For rape.’
‘Rape?’ I repeated. ‘Oh, wow.’
Mum nodded. ‘Apparently there’s a whole flock of them crawling out of the woodwork now.’
‘A flock of…?’
‘Supposed victims,’ Mum said.
‘Don’t call them that,’ I told her. ‘Don’t saysupposedlike that.’
‘I just mean they’re probably gold-diggers,’ Mum said. ‘It’s what the papers are saying, anyway. I mean, he must be worth a bit, mustn’t he?’
‘And where did you hear this?’ I asked.
‘In theMail,’ Mum said, prompting me to roll my eyes. ‘I know you don’t like it,’ she went on, ‘but I like a bit of celebrity gossip myself. And the proof of the pudding is that you wouldn’t even have known about Billy otherwise.’
