‘Anyway, gotta go, sis – see you soon. Love to Mum!’
The line goes dead, and the phone goes even deader as I throw it across the room. The battery case comes off, and it all falls apart as it hits the floor.
‘This,’ I say to Jim Morrison, ‘is the crappiest birthday ever.’
Chapter 22
Rose: The Present Day
The drive has been hellish, and the air con in my car is practically non-existent. That’s what happens when you drive a 1998 Ford Fiesta held together with duct tape and prayers.
Joe makes it tolerable, and we sing along to Adele songs together, sweating away until he forces me to accept that we need to wind the windows down.
‘We’re going to dehydrate and die if we don’t, Mum,’ he says, as a welcome gust of cool air rushes in.
‘I know. But I hate having the windows open …’
‘Don’t worry,’ he answers, brandishing a copy of a road atlas that has all the country’s Little Chefs marked on it in case of pancake emergencies, ‘I’ll be on wasp patrol.’
I nod, and we sing some more Adele. We even hit some of the right notes.
‘It’s just like she’s here in the car with us, isn’t it?’ he says, as he skips forward to his favourite track.
‘It is. Maybe she’d come to a Little Chef with us, what do you think?’
‘Yeah. She’d be cool with that. I think maybe she’d be happy I’ve wound the windows down as well. How much further?’
I glance through the windscreen, squinting into the sunlight through glass smeared by sat-nav suckers – my window-fluid-squirter thingies aren’t too brilliant either.
‘Not far,’ I say, quietly. The landscape is achingly familiar now, and I am driving around these twisting roads and narrow lanes purely from muscle memory.
I see all the familiar landmarks – the twisted tree stump at the crossroads just before you get to Goldfinch Lane; the metal gate to Hawthorne Farm that once got crushed by the farmer’s tractor when he was drunk in charge of an agricultural vehicle; the old-fashioned bright-red postbox on the corner that is almost completely covered in ivy.
Familiar territory, but also a strange land. Strange because I made it so. All these years, I’ve stayed away – at first because Poppy was still living here, then because of the state of my life with Gareth and a baby, and then, later, purely to avoid being in contact with anything that reminded me of my sister.
Joe is staring out of his window, taking it all in, logging the landscape and the pretty cottages and the scarecrows left over from the annual festival earlier in the summer.
‘They look weird,’ he says, as we pass one that is sitting on a child’s swing, his tattered jean-clad legs swaying in the breeze. ‘And scary. This is starting to feel like the start of a horror film. Are we heading to place that is inhabited entirely by demonic children or devil-worshipping farmers who sacrifice passing tourists to ancient fertility gods?’
‘Have you been watchingBuffy the Vampire Slayeragain?’ I ask.
‘No. I’ve been watchingSupernatural. It’s about two demon-slaying brothers who drive round small-town America defeating evil. And I think they’d be starting to get worried right about now.’
I laugh, and keep a lookout for the sharp turning that I know will soon be coming up on the right. I’ll probably take it by instinct, but I’m not feeling 100 per cent at my most chipper this morning. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘fine and dandy’, and 10 being ‘absolutely shit’, I’m heading for a definite 27.
It has been a busy couple of days, getting Joe ready for his trip to his dad’s, sorting the house out, and having a nervous breakdown. That last one especially was pretty time-consuming, and kept getting in the way of the others.
I’d try and distract myself by ironing Joe’s boxers – for the first time ever in the history of me and Joe’s boxers – and find myself staring into space, crying into a cloud of steam. Or I’d be rooting through the back of my drawers, having a clear-out and throwing away knickers that were seven years too old and several sizes too small to be of any use, and suddenly realise I was sitting on the floor, using the knickers to blow my nose with.
I’d had the urge to call my mother every single night, and on several occasions actually did. She’s still there, listed in my contacts, under the imaginative name of Mum. Three little letters, looking so innocent, but carrying so much weight. The most taken-for-granted three letters in the entire world.
I know now how much I relied on her. How much I … used her, I suppose. I mean, that’s normal – and I am a mum, so I get that. It’s not like you want your kids to be going round feeling grateful all the time. But now, I have so many regrets.
Like the fact that I only called her when I either needed her, or felt like so much time had passed that it was my duty to call her. That sometimes I call-screened, doing 1471 to see who it was, and didn’t always bother to call back. That other times, when I heard her chirpy voice at the other end, my heart sank – because I knew I’d be stuck on the phone for ages.
That I’d make excuses, come up with a fake knock at the door or say I had something on the stove, when in reality I probably had an urgent TV show to watch, orHello!magazine to read – heaven forbid I should talk to my own mother rather than catching up on the latest news from the Swedish royal family.
Or like the knowledge that our last, final-for-ever conversation was about Nigel Farage. I mean, for God’s sake – what a low to leave it all on.
