‘I thought you said you loved the plants here?’ he asks, genuinely confused.
‘I do,’ I lie. Not totally a lie. I do like plants. I just don’t know anything about them.
‘I’ve forgotten the name of that one. No, it’s coming: Ibexia,’ I say grandly, because making anything sound a bit like Latin is veryplant-like. An ibex is some sort of mountain goat, I think, because Liam likes natural history and has moved on from dinosaurs to books with other, more recent creatures in them, which he then draws.
Dan will not know I am fibbing. As an economist, he only reads books about economics and politics and he is always busy, what with the world constantly being in a state of economic flux.
Dan goes out to take over from my mother in the turning of her car.
From here, I can hear Granddad shrieking about women drivers and how giving them the vote was where it all went wrong.
My mother has selective deafness when it comes to herfather-in-law. She knows he’s just trying to start a row for fun. Eddie loves rows.
‘I’m getting out,’ she says serenely and helps out her own mother, Granny Bridget, whose fluffy hair has a pink tinge to it today.
Granny, my mother and a handbag that’s nearly as big as Teddy progress towards me. The handbag is the life support system of a carer of invalids and weighs a tonne.
My mother is tall, like me, and today is wearing one of her colourful Scandinavian peasant outfits in a variety of turquoises, with wild tribal jewellery around her neck and on her strong wrists. This is all from her other life when she had some spare cash.
Her greying hair, blonde like mine not that long ago, is in a single plait down her back, also like mine. Despite having to get two people out of the house and into the car, no easy task, and to leave my father with the carer, my mother is cheerful, and has appliedmake-up so that her northern European pale grey eyes gleam and she has a sheeny glow to her skin that always astonishes me.
My mother’s life has not been easy this past year and yet she makes it look so. She isserene.
‘I do what I have to do, Freya,’ she always says, a statement so simple and yet courageous that it silences me every time. My mother would not need a high wall and a gate or sleeping tablets, I think, shamed.
I lead Granny into the kitchen because she probably needs to sit down and she loves kitchens, the heart of the home, she says. My mother will not be lifting a finger to help with the tidying or shifting of furniture either, I tell her. She is going to rest with Granny.
Teddy is busy with her aunt Maura, Liam is playing another car racing game with his uncle Pip, who has escaped off with the wine. I turn up at the door to the room where the Xbox has been installed and give Pip a stern look, which he ignores completely.
‘Pip’s really bad, Mum,’ says Liam gleefully as he makes mincemeat out of his uncle on a psychedelic racetrack.
‘Half an hour,’ I warn Liam in order to keep his computer playing limited.
Why am I thegrown-up?
‘Tea, anyone?’ roars Maura from the kitchen.
Tea is the answer to all the family prayers.
If an earthquake hit, someone would boil the kettle on the grounds that we would think better after a pot of tea and some apple cake and that the giant earthen rift outside the house could wait, couldn’t it?
‘I brought fruity tea bread,’ says my mother, who is one of the few people not even slightly overwhelmed by my cooking abilities. Nobody ever brings food to my house anymore, except Maura, who does not have the culinary gene but shops for food well, and my mother, who works on the theory that I am too busy whipping up amazing dishes for work to whip them up at home too.
I have absolutely no idea how she finds time to cook.
‘I have meatballs for the kids in a Tupperware container and some spicier ones for you too in another one,’ she says. ‘Also, I brought cheese and ham sandwiches, along with pâté and crackers because you’ll never have had time to shop and this horde will want filling.’
‘Thank you.’ I hug her tightly, checking surreptitiously as I always do for signs of her getting too thin.
Maura, Scarlett and I worry.
Con, little brother, lost to the world of finding the perfect woman and, until this current girlfriend, working his way through the Northern hemisphere in order to do so, would not notice his mother’s weight loss. With the trauma she’s gone through this past year, it is a miracle she is still here.
‘I’m fine, honey,’ Mum says gently, grey eyes sparkling.
She is on to me. She is so empathic that, I swear, she can read minds.
Which is why I never, ever talk about the mugging with her or even imply that it has leftlong-term damage to my soul.
