Then, every year on his birthday, I wonder if I’ve failed Luke somehow in not reminding him enough about his dad.
‘It’s OK about the dog, Mum,’ says Luke, looking at me withJean-Luc’s eyes, which are blue with startling shards of copper close to the irises.
‘Heterochromia,’Jean-Luc told me when I fell in love with his eyes. ‘When you have completelydifferent-coloured eyes or a very obvious combination of colours in both.’
‘Rare?’ I asked him. It was so early in our dating career but even then, everything about him seemed rare.
‘Very,’ he said, moving in to kiss me so I had to close my eyes and stop staring at his.
Luke is a beautiful mix of his father and I, but I no longer see any of that: I just see Luke. A gangling boy with a warm heart, large hands like his dad, a glorious sense of humour and thick dark hair that defies any comb.
‘I know it’s not a dog,’ Luke goes on. He is so stoic and strong, my little warrior, kindest boy ever. ‘I know we can’t have one. When I’m a grown up, we’ll have a dog.’
‘The dog might eat tomorrow’s birthday hamster,’ I say, deadpan.
‘Hamster?’
Luke looks joyous and leaps up to hug me. ‘Mum, I’ll look after it and –’
‘– walk it,’ I say, still grave.
He giggles. ‘You don’t walk hamsters,’ he says.
He’s so happy at the thought of any living animal to care for. I think of the small bundle of fur I’ve been waiting several weeks for, ready to be picked up by my mother today. The rescue people Shazz knows are desperate for homes for two lots of puppies rescued from inept puppy farmers trying to make a living from beautiful animals for the Christmas market. It’s due to Shazz and the abandoned dog overload that we’re getting any puppy this close to the holidays. I can’t wait to see Luke’s face.
Later in the day, I get two texts from Marin.
The first is:We are thinking of you today.
The second is an invitation to Joey’s tenth birthday party to me, to my phone, but written to Luke as if Joey had written it with his mother watching. It’s sweet:
Dear Joey, will you come to my party because it will be boring without you? It’s the cinema, Joey. p.s. I’m ten and I’m not supposed to ask for presents.
And then I can see absolutely where his mother takes over.
‘No presents! Your presence is enough!’
Marin knows that money is tight in our house and that while Joey goes to a private school where kids get things like iPhoneear-buds for Christmas, Luke goes to a school where lots of the kids don’t get anything if the Vincent de Paul do not step in.
Honestly, just bring yourselves, is written firmly in Marin’s utterly detectable text.
Friendships are strange. They start off one way and twenty years down the line they become something totally different. When I met Nate, Finn and Steve, and later met Marin she was dating Nate, we were all young and full of beans, going to change the world, have fabulous adventures, travel, never be tied down and be friends for ever, obviously. It sort of worked out like that. Marin and Nate fell in love and they were right for each other, absolutely. I was the crazy one for a while, travelling a lot, a variety of jobs, interestingsix-month relationships around the world with interesting men. And then I metJean-Luc and that was it: he was the only man for me.
In those early years, the four of us saw each other all the time. The men clicked andJean-Luc became part of the Steve/Finn/Nate gang, going to the pub and playing snooker, watching sports together, supporting opposing teams just so they could rib each other.
There was a rivalry between Nate, Steve andJean-Luc that somehow Finn never took part in – which would wind the others up even more. The secret, I always felt, was that Finn was so fiercely intelligent, a polymath, and utterly confident in his own skin that he never had that need to compete with his friends. We’d meet Finn’s girlfriends, and for such a clever man, he had an unerring knack for picking totally the wrong people for him.
Jean-Luc and I wanted a family, but it didn’t happen for years. We turned to infertility treatment and, finally, I became pregnant. It was amazing, joyous. Marin was one of the few people who knew about the infertility treatment, and I begged her not to tell Nate. I knew he’d have felt superior toJean-Luc if he knew: Nate could be childishly macho. If he became aware that we’d needed help to have our baby, then he’d feel superior to my darling husband in the ultimate way.
Marin was delighted. She was pregnant with her second child – due almost the same time as me.
‘We can go through it together,’ she said, happily.
Afterwards, did it really matter that we had spent three years and so much money trying to have a baby by IVF? Was that important? No.
Nothing was important but looking after my beautiful little baby boy all the time I was grieving. Without Luke, I don’t think I could have kept on living because my belovedJean-Luc wasn’t in the world: suddenly he didn’t exist, he was gone.
At the time, so many people said the wrong thing.Everything happens for a reason.I blocked those helpful souls from my phone. Or worse, ‘God has a plan’. What plan was that, precisely? Needless to say, the ‘God has a plan’ people were immediately blocked.
