“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know what was funny.” She’s telling the truth. She’s forgotten. Her mouth is turned down now.
She feels ugly. Self-pity isn’t attractive, Flora once said to her. Ruth ceased calling Flora “Mum” when she was a teenager. It seemed wrong by then. There was so little that was maternal about Flora.
“Really?” Emily asks. It seems to Ruth that she’s sneering.
“Leave her alone,” Jayne says. “She’s drunk.”
“No shit.” Emily hates drunks. Women who drink should not be allowed to have kids. It ruined her mother. She didn’t deserve to be called a mother after she started drinking.
Ruth grabs her phone and opens the photos. She needs to see Alfie. Nothing else matters. She scrolls through her images of him, relishing each one. The sight of his face is as powerful as ever.
She’ll sort herself out and she’ll do it for Alfie. The disgust on Emily’s face is fair. It’s what Ruth deserves. But she wants to do something to avert it; she wants to convey how much she loves her son.
She finds a favorite photograph of Alfie and turns the phone, shows it to Jayne, first.
“Lovely,” Jayne says, but her tone is flat, the word doesn’t ring true. She’s mocking me, Ruth thinks.
“Don’t humor me!” she snaps.
“Hey!” Jayne says, then, more softly, “Ruth, I’m not mocking you.”
Ruth’s hand trembles as she offers her phone to Emily. “Here,” she says. “Please. Look at him. I’m going to get sober for Alfie. Even if Toby is dead.”
“Toby is not dead!” Jayne snaps this time, exposing her frustration. She doesn’t mean to. Emily has got to her.
A feeling of looseness takes over all of Ruth’s body, like a melting. She begins to tremble. Her phone tips from her fingers. Emily catches it before it falls and feels bad. Ruth’s decline is alarming.
Emily studies the phone screen. “I see Alfie,” she says. “He’s really cute, Ruth.” She swipes, looking for another picture, something else to admire. “He’s grown so much since I last saw him.” Her words sound hollow, to her, but she means them. Alfie is a beautiful baby. He has his mother’s gentle eyes.
Ruth stands. Her chair almost falls backward. She wobbles, too, clamps a hand on Jayne’s shoulder to steady herself, her fingers digging in painfully.
“I feel sick,” she says.
She covers her mouth with her hand. She can’t vomit into the kitchen sink. It would be too humiliating. She makes it down the hallway, steadying herself against the wall. Jayne helps her upstairs. Ruth is almost bent double by the time they reach the bathroom.
“Do you want me to come in?” Jayne asks.
“No.”
The door shuts in Jayne’s face. She flinches.
Emily keeps scrolling on Ruth’s phone. Back, back, back. Alfie gets younger and younger. His face loses definition. His eyes expand in proportion to his head. His hair disappears into wisps. It fascinates Emily, the rolling back of time, the undoing of what is done.
Her thumb freezes over the next image. She stares at it. It’s an anomaly among the baby photographs.
It shows the gang. Minus Rob. She checks. It was taken earlier in the summer a few weeks after his funeral.
In the picture she sees Edie and Imogen, Toby, Mark, Paul. They seem to be at Glastonbury Festival. Emily sees the Pyramid Stage behind them. Jayne isn’t in the picture, nor is Ruth. But the men are clustered around Edie and Imogen.
She feels tension spread along her jaw. Paul lied about this. Heis a lying bastard. Filthy words, curses and insults she learned from her mum’s boyfriends, and heard spew from her mother’s mouth when her mother was drunk, Emily applies them all to Paul.
She knows exactly when this weekend was, and Paul lied about where he was going. He told her with shameless, barefaced dishonesty that he was going on a weekend away with the guys from the gang. Canoeing, he said. He came back suntanned.
He never mentioned Edie, nor Imogen. And Emily has begged Paul to take her to a festival. But he refused. He felt too old, he said. He’d been to enough festivals. She should go with her friends. It would be more fun.
And here he is, in T-shirt and shorts, looking as if he’s having the best time. Everyone’s smiling at the camera, except Imogen.
If Paul lied about this, then what else is untrue? Emily feels a shattering sense of betrayal, and with it shame, that she fell for Paul’s promise that he would always be completely honest with her.
