That once when Joe was a toddler and Gareth had gone I left him alone in the house asleep while I went to the chippie, and he was crying and terrified when I got back
That I am really bad at keeping the house tidy and everything is always a mess
That I am now so fat I can barely cut my own toenails
That Joe once accidentally-on-purpose forgot to tell me about a Geography field trip to Iceland because he knew I didn’t have the money and didn’t want me to feel bad, even though all his friends were going
That I never bought him a puppy
That I have never met this man Lewis, which shows how much I know about my mother’s life
That I neglected her, and myself, and everything
That Joe makes his own packed lunches because I’m too disorganised and lazy
That I don’t change my duvet cover for months at a time because nobody ever sees it
That when the phone rang tonight and I thought it was my mum, I was annoyed because I had to drag my fat arse away fromPoldark
That I have spoken to my mum twice in the last month and never noticed she was so ill because I am too wrapped up in myself – she’s a good actress but I should have noticed
That I didn’t remind Joe to call and thank her for that voucher she sent
After more than forty stop-off points on the guilt trip, Rose stops, and looks at what she has done. Her mother probably imagined a journal, or some neatly written-out pages of A4. Instead, it’s a tear-stained mess; an almost illegible scrawl with smudged ink and creases and incoherent punctuation. The memo-pad paper is small and square, and she has filled more than twenty sheets of it. She’ll need to go back and gather them all up.
She pauses, and finishes the wine; 600 millilitres down, a new bottle to go.
She knows she has to add one more to the guilt list. She doesn’t want to, though. She doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth she can feel tugging at her, prodding her, whispering her name like one of those Satanic blond-haired kids in old horror films.
She watched that video three times, and Mum had asked her to be honest. To tell the truth. So that’s what she has to do.
Rose wipes her eyes, and picks up the pen again. She winces because of the blister that is starting to throb on her finger, a dull ache compared to all the others. She picks up a fresh square of paper, covers Yoda’s mutilated face, and adds:
42. That I never gave Poppy a second chance, no matter how hard she begged
Chapter 16
Poppy isn’t sure what to do next. She’s watched the video, and called this man Lewis, who sent her straight to voicemail, and also phoned around various hospitals until she could confirm that it is all true. Unfortunately, it is.
She needs todosomething, and decides to take a shower. She ends up sitting on the floor, the too-hot water sluicing over her head and shoulders, burning her skin bright red, steam cocooning her in a smeared glass box. She stays in there until her fingertips are so wrinkled and puckered up they look as if they belong to a witch, and her bottom is numb on the tiles.
When she finally climbs out, the whole bathroom is filled with steam, as though she’s in a Turkish sauna. She uses a fresh towel to wipe the mirror clean, and stares at herself.
Mascara is smudged beneath her eyes, and her hair is plastered to her skull, and her body is slightly too thin. Her collarbones are prominent, and the skin around her neck is just too taut to be attractive. There are lines around her mouth from years of smoking, and her long legs are so toned they’re almost hideous.
She hates what she sees, even though she has worked hard for it.
She hates it because that face, that body, belong to the kind of woman she never wanted to become. The kind of woman who lives alone and works in marketing and has meaningless friendships and is a complete bitch to everyone who works for her.
The kind of woman who could drown in her own shower and not be found for weeks on end, or until the flat below flooded. The kind of woman nobody really cares about, because the only person who did has abandoned her and selfishly died.
The kind of woman who could break her own mother’s heart, and not even notice she was doing it.
She picks up an aerosol can of shaving cream, and takes off the lid. She holds it in front of the mirror, and sprays it all over the glass, until everything is obscured and all she can see is the cream, slowly falling down in white dollops and plopping into the marble sink.
Satisfied at her minor act of vandalism, she puts on a black satin kimono, and goes back into the living room, where she briefly considers getting out her tobacco tin again.
She can still picture it in its original home on the polished shelf in Mum’s glass display cabinet. It sat alongside her other accumulated nick-nacks and almost-antique oddities: a giant conch shell she bought from a gift shop in Dorset; her own father’s pocket watch and chain; a beer mat autographed by John Lennon when she met him in a pub in Soho in the Seventies; a tiny dragon carved out of jade.
