‘But I promised not to be maudlin, so I won’t be. The link to the clip is on our account, so if it takes your fancy, feel free to look – if you can handle it!
‘Now, I’m being a little lazy here, but I couldn’t think of anything fabulous to do for the letter O – no rude jokes, please, Lewis, I can see that naughty schoolboy look on your face! I’m a bit tired today, truth be told, and I think that perhaps you need to speedily move on to P – if, of course, you’ve decided to go in that direction.
‘So I’m going to keep O simple. O is for “Oh My God, Is That My Mother’s Bare Bottom Riding a Carousel Horse in a Dream Sequence?”
‘And the answer is yes – it most certainly is! Happy viewing, girls!’
Chapter 52
Poppy
She didn’t look brilliant in that last video – the modern one, not the nude one from the 1970s – and the sadness of that is sitting like undigested food in the pit of my stomach.
Despite her attempts at jollity, you could see that she was in pain, and her casual references to hospital stays were heartbreaking. We should have been there, helping her through it. It’s like watching a replay of a horrific car crash, knowing what is going to happen but being unable to stop it.
We’re at Euston Station, sitting up on the balcony looking at the departures board, waiting for Joe’s train to Liverpool to be announced. Then the two of us are off to St Pancras to get the Eurostar to Paris – because it’s time for the most mysterious letter of all, P.
I’m feeling extremely nervous about it all, and I suspect Rose is too – because she is wittering on like a mad woman, making sure that Joe knows all the house rules, has enough money, remembers to eat, goes to bed on time, and doesn’t burn the street down. He, to be fair, is looking resigned and tolerant in the face of her tirade.
‘Simon says he’ll pop round tonight, and keep an eye on you. Plus you can actually go and stay at his if you prefer.’
‘I know, Mum,’ says Joe, doing an awesome job of not rolling his eyes, ‘you’ve already told me. I’ll be fine, honest. I’ll ignore any knocks on the door, and won’t invite drug dealers round, and make sure I take my vitamin pills. I’ll be okay, don’t worry.’
‘I think,’ I say, half an eye on the board and half on my sister, ‘that Simon likes you.’
‘Well, yes,’ replies Rose. ‘He’s a nice bloke, he probably likes most people.’
‘No, I mean helikelikes you.’
‘Likelikes me? What are you, sixteen?’
‘Excuse me!’ interrupts Joe, holding his hand up in the air. ‘I’d like to point out that I am actually sixteen, and even I wouldn’t say that. But … I think she might be right, Mum. It makes me a bit sick in my mouth, but Simon does look at you in a like-like way.’
Rose gapes at us both for a moment, then shakes her head so hard her curls bobble around her face.
‘Rubbish. And anyway, I’m too old for that kind of stuff.’
Joe gives me a look, finally doing the eye-roll, as if to say: ‘See what I have to put up with?’
There is a sudden movement in the herd of people down below, a group exodus towards a platform that lets us know that the train has been announced, and we all stand up and grab our bags.
We walk with Joe to his train, and Rose insists on staying until the very last second, until its bright-red Virgin logo has disappeared off into the distance. She has tears in her eyes, and I’m not sure it’s only about her son leaving us.
After we stopped laughing at the YouTube clip, the one of mum prancing round stark-bollock-naked on the fairground horse, we were both a little melancholy.
‘It wasquitetasteful,’ she’d said, after warning Joe not to look unless he wanted his retinas burned out by his bare-butted Granny. ‘The way they draped her hair over part of her boobs?’
‘Yeah,’ I’d replied, looking through the comments section and recoiling in horror at how much of a fan base my own mother had in certain circles, ‘she looked a bit like the Khaleesi fromGame of Thrones, didn’t she? I bet she’d have been in that if she’d still been acting. She could have nailed that Diana Rigg part.’
‘But … the other video. She didn’t look too well in that one, did she?’
‘No,’ I’d replied, feeling the same myself. ‘She looked … vulnerable. I don’t think I’ve ever known her to look vulnerable before. It wasn’t nice to see. Maybe it was the thought of doing P that was getting her down as well. That must have been difficult.’
So difficult, in fact, that in the end she’d chickened out yet again – not of telling us, but of telling us herself. Instead, she’d passed all the information on to Lewis, who had typed up a series of notes and memories to get us started. And being Lewis – my mother’s sworn protector – he’d added his own spin on it all.
We’ve read the letter, which has shaken us both up – I know I was only just about holding it together for Joe’s sake, and I was 100 per cent sure that was the case for Rose as well. There were some uncomfortable truths in there, and I’m beginning to think that a fantasy version of our father might be altogether less distressing than the real version.
Now we have our journey to look forward to, and a new cassette recording full of answers to our questions – or at least the questions that Lewis, an elderly gay man, thinks we might want answering.
