I’d tried not to sink into an alcoholic misery for Joe’s sake, but had ever-so-slightly cracked last night, when my neighbour Simon called round with a six-pack of Carlsberg and two Pot Noodles. He’s old-fashioned like that.
Joe had told him about my mum, and he was checking up on me. He’d lost his own parents years earlier, and it was good to talk to him. Good to be told that one day, eventually, it would start to feel better. That, in the end, I might actually wake up and not be paralysed by guilt and grief.
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but at least he tried. And I am not one to turn my nose up at a man who comes bearing Pot Noodles and beer.
Truth be told, I have a pathetic little crush on Simon. He’s a builder, and has hair cut so short he looks like he’s in the Navy SEALS, and he often walks round without his shirt, wearing cargo pants and those big belts with tools in them and steel-capped boots. Maybe there’s something hard-wired into women to always go a little bit ga-ga about that, I don’t know – some kind of primal biological response to being in close proximity to a seasoned hunter-gatherer. Or maybe I just think too much.
Anyhow, he’s a nice bloke, and would undoubtedly be horrified that I’d even entertained such thoughts. Not that I was thinking them last night. Last night, I was just panicking. About Joe leaving. About coming here. About seeing Poppy again. About not being able to call my mum and tell her I was panicking about all those things. It wasn’t pretty, and the beer and the company helped, especially as Joe was out having one last hurrah with his mates.
I’d even told him a little bit about Poppy, or at least explained that I hadn’t seen her for years.
‘Why?’ he asked, predictably, frowning at me over the lager we were drinking straight from the can.
‘Long story, best left untold,’ I replied, simply.
‘Fair enough. Families, eh? Who’d have ’em?’
And with that, we’d clinked cans, and left the subject alone. Which was genuinely the best place for it.
Sadly, we didn’t leave the lagers alone, and they’d taken their toll on my spirits this morning. As well as my head, which is banging and throbbing and doing all kinds of things I wish it would stop doing.
The turn comes up, and I take it a tiny bit too late, tyres screeching as we go, ending up on completely the wrong side of the narrow road. Luckily, there is rarely anybody else on this particular narrow road, as the only place it leads to is my mother’s home – Greenfinch Cottage, the place where I grew up.
It’s close enough to the village that you can walk to the pub, and close enough to the main road that you can occasionally hear traffic at busy spells, but other than that it is totally secluded. The nearest neighbour is a farmhouse two miles away, and all you hear from there is the noise of cows and industrial-sized ride-on lawnmowers.
The cottage isn’t quite chocolate-box pretty – the whitewashed stone and thatched roof are offset by quite an ugly extension that got built on to the side before we moved in, and which Mum always vowed to get rid of for ‘committing crimes against my aesthetic sensibilities’. She never did, though, and over the years I suppose we just grew into it – using it to store our bikes and winter boots and boxes of books we never read any more but couldn’t bear to get rid of.
The cottage is surrounded by really very, very pretty gardens, and I suck in a quick breath as we approach, bumping down the driveway that becomes less of a road and more of a track as you go. In winter, it fills up with muddy water, and in summers like this one, it becomes so rutted it feels like you’re driving over speed bumps.
I had no idea how I was going to react when I finally came back here, back to this place where I spent so many years. Happy years, on the whole, barring the usual dollop of teenaged angst. Years filled with my small, cosy life; with my delightfully eccentric mother and my little sister and tiny local school, and my village friends. I’d even brought Gareth here, all those years ago, in another lifetime.
Now I’m here, I feel like I am having some kind of out-of-body experience, seeing it all again through alien eyes. I’d expected tears, or that familiar raw, panicky sensation I’ve been living with for days now, like acid burning away at my insides, but I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’ve come … home.
I park the car up, and look around. Some things are the same. The grave-markers for Patch, and the goldfish, and the pets that died before them, at the end of the garden. The jasmine, growing wild on its trellis, and the honeysuckle in glorious shades of pink and white and yellow.
The garden gnome collection has grown even bigger, which makes me smile. She did always love her garden gnomes, my mum; insisted she used to be one in a previous life – ‘I was the glamorous garden gnome, darling, wearing diamond earrings and a mink coat.’
Some things, though, are different. I see the barrels she’d told me about, rescued from a nearby farm, and planted with bright-blue trailing lobelia. I see a new bird table, complete with nuts and a little bath, now completely dry in the midday sun. I see a really very lovely carved pinewood bench, and a small matching table, where I can perfectly easily imagine my mother – perhaps with Lewis – enjoying a glass of wine as they gaze out over the hills on a day just like this one.
And, tucked away by the side of the cottage, I see a small black Audi A1. I don’t need a million guesses to figure out who it belongs to.
‘Damn,’ I say, slapping the steering wheel with my hand so hard I accidentally honk the horn and scare up a small flurry of starlings. ‘She’s already here. I should’ve known she’d turn up early.’
‘To be fair, Mum,’ says Joe, grinning at me, ‘she’s not early. We’re late. To be fair.’
‘Will you please stop saying the word “fair”, Joe?’ I reply. ‘If life was fair, do you think someone as lovely as Adele would ever have had her heart broken?’
‘I think,’ he says, winding the car windows back up so wasps don’t get in, ‘that Adele probably consoles herself by counting her millions, polishing her Grammies and kissing both her baby and her Oscar goodnight, don’t you?’
Darn him and his logic. He has a point.
‘So,’ he adds, looking at me expectantly. ‘Shall we get out of the car? I mean, we’ve come a long way to just stay in it.’
I nod, but know I don’t want to. While I’m in the car, I’m still on my own territory. While I’m in the car, I can do ugly crying and nobody will see. While I’m in the car, I don’t have to walk into that cottage, which will destroy me. And while I’m in the car, I won’t have to deal with Poppy, who is now striding towards us, looking annoyed.
She’s perfectly turned out in posh skinny jeans and a fitted blouse, wearing high-heel wedges that I could never drive in, and has a black leather jacket slung over her shoulder. She has her phone in her hand, and is doing her best to keep a murderous look on her face.
The only thing that’s spoiling it is her eyes. They’re red, and raw, and her mascara is clumping in jagged spikes.
