“Hey, Ash,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I’m really confused. I need to think.” He fishes into his coat for the keys.
“Let’s go,” he says.
23
We wander backin, sheepishly, to find the lights on full and my mother sitting at the kitchen counter with a cup of tea. I wonder how long we were gone. Was it hours? It seemed like hours. And I’m quite drunk, having drowned the tension in the twenty-minute car ride back with vodka as Ash drove in awkward silence.
“Mara. Finally,” she says, raising her teacup like it’s filled with gin. “You’re back at the party.”
“Mum, what happened? Where is everyone?”
She turns to me, and I can see her eyes are red, puffy. She’s been crying.
“Mum!” I say, rushing forward to her, reaching out my arms, then awkwardly not knowing where to put them when I get there. Hugging my mother is not a natural act for either of us. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened; the party is over; everyone has gone. And once again, Mara was nowhere to be found.”
I can feel Ash shifting uncomfortably behind me as she speaks.
“Oh, Mum, sorry. We just went for a drive, to see the, um, the dark park, and then we kind of... well, the time...” I slip my phone out of my pocket and see several missed calls, some from Ben, some from Mum, and the time is nearly midnight. “Fuck,” I say quietly.
“Your brother announced they are pregnant. You’re going to be an aunt,” she said.
“I’m going to be an aunt?” I feel genuinely thrilled at the notion. I look back at Ash and smile, biting my lip. Anauntie.
“Yes, and it would have been nice for you to be here for that,” my mother says. And then she starts crying again, clutching a scrawny tissue to her face, a guttural moan escaping from her. “What did I do, Mara? What did I get so wrong? It feels like you hate me. I can’t bear it.”
“I don’t hate you,” I say, shaking my head.
“All I do is worry about you.”
I stare at her for a moment. This is the depth of the failure she feels when she sees me.
“I think about you all the time. Are you happy? Do you have friends besides Charlie? Do you have a local pub? Who are your work friends? I don’t know anything. I’m not in your life.” Her voice cracks again, and I look out the window, ashamed.
“It’s not that strange for kids to leave home and go and make their own life, Mum. My friend Charlie has never gone back to North Yorkshire.”
“I don’t even really know Charlie,” my mother says pitifully.“You look so beautiful tonight, Mara. So radiant. So happy, for the first time in so long, and I’m no part of it.”
“Please stop worrying,” I say, trying to be light now. Upbeat. Trying to convince her there is nothing going on here. “I’m getting my shit together. I’m making friends,” I say, nodding toward Ash, who I think—right now—hates me. My mother doesn’t say anything at this, so I continue. “I’m dating.”
“Oh, are we talking about this man you met?” my mother says, shooting me a look of cold disbelief. Too worn-out, too upset to play the game of pretending to believe my stories anymore.
“Does she even work at an art gallery?” She addresses this to Ash.
He stands, stunned for a moment, and then looks to me and back to my mum.
“Yes,” we both say at the same time. Ash’s answer is firm, but mine is strangled, humiliated.
Shamed, my eyes flicker up at her, then at Ash. They are now bonded by me. Not a love of me, but aknowingof me.
“Mum, I’m doing well. It’s lovely in Broadgate. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I say, and I feel the tears coming to me now and I work hard to keep them at bay. I glance back at Ash, who has a look of intense pity on his face, and I look away again. Then at the floor. Should I just tell her how it all went wrong? How I’m so embarrassed and ashamed? How I just want to clear up the last ten years and start again?
Then the sadness turns to anger at myself. A simmering, bubbling anger. A surge of it so strong I want to smash something. I turn, fish a large black garbage bag out of the drawer, and begin to toss things into it. A paper plate. A deflated baby blue balloon, with a hole in it where someone sucked out the helium to the delight of their audience. The crusts of several quiches hidden under a papercup with some alcohol-soaked soggy fruit festering at the bottom. I clean quickly, angrily. I am doing it as an act of revenge.
“This is why I don’t come home! You guys make me feel like such a failure,” I say, picking up an empty vodka bottle, surveying it first with the aim to finish the dregs, but they’re gone.
Mum flinches as I toss glass bottles in and they clang loudly together—not smashing, I don’t want them to smash, but I want to hear the sound that they might. “No one thinks that, Mara. We just want to know you again.”
