I know I’ve asked a lot of you both throughout this whole A–Z, but now I am being cheeky and asking even more. Put on your medals, and be proud of who you are – but also ask who youcouldbe. Are you living the lives you should have led? Are you happy going in to work every day? If not, it’s never too late to change – and being happy in your work is one of the biggest victories of life.
Personally, I was always devastated never to have won an award. Penny Peabody came close – I was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a British Drama by some cheesy TV magazine – but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps there will be a film set in heaven, and I can chalk up an Oscar there!
Anyway. The card is full, and I am tired, so I will bid you a fond farewell.
To victory!
Mum xxx
Chapter 65
Rose
‘She’s right, isn’t she?’ I say, swooshing my huge hair over the nylon medal necklace. The plastic disc hangs low, perched on my chest. Poppy is wearing hers, too, and I suspect we both look ridiculous.
‘Of course she’s right,’ replies Poppy, who is already looking through the illustrations ofThe Secret Garden, stroking them as though they might come to life beneath her touch. ‘She always is.’
‘My job is boring,’ I say, Stephen Hawking nestled on my lap. ‘In fact my whole life is boring. I’m going to do that teacher training.’
Poppy looks up at me and smiles. So much of the underlying enmity between us has been drained away by that letter of Mum’s, by David Bowie, by the uncontrollable sobbing on each other’s shoulders. It feels so much easier to be around her, like a particularly nasty boil has been lanced and can now start to heal.
‘And I’m going to write that bloody book,’ she says. ‘We’ve both done all right, but somewhere along the line, we’ve also both been knocked off track – and we can’t keep blaming other people for that. We can’t keep blaming Gareth, or each other, or stuff that happened a million years ago – if we want things to change, we have to make them change. We have to make Mum proud again.’
‘We will,’ I say, forcefully – because I really believe that is true. I believe that I can try and become a Biology teacher, and I definitely believe that Poppy can write ‘that bloody book’. She might not be here with us, but our mother is still an inspiration. She is still making me feel as if I might emerge from life victorious, in exactly the same way I always tell Joe he can be whatever he wants to be as long as he works hard enough.
We’ve cracked open a new bottle of very nice gin, and I raise my glass.
‘A toast!’ I say, holding it towards Poppy.
‘To our mother, crazy old lush that she was – and to us! To victory!’
Poppy chinks her glass against mine, and we both down our drinks in one, barely blinking as a double measure of gin goes down. That, I think, as I pour us the next, is genetics at work.
Chapter 66
Poppy
I’m not entirely sure thatHomes & Gardenswould recommend redecorating while completely off your head on gin, but we’re pushing the envelope here. We should probably get a double-page spread: Interior Design – the Tanqueray Way!
W has turned out to be for ‘Wonderwall’, and now neither of us can get that song out of our heads. It also explained why Mum had taken down those family pictures of hers, leaving one wall dotted with spooky bare patches and faded frame outlines.
She’d managed to somehow get a copy of the Oasis single – possibly from my bedroom, as I’d left a stash of vinyl in there when I moved out – and glued a circular note on the middle section. The note is written in a spiral, in tiny writing that gets smaller as it curls inwards. A strange mix of her usualAlice in Wonderlandtendencies, and Britpop classics of days gone by.
‘Create your own Wonderwall, my darlings – and tend to it! Keep it alive like it’s a garden of our history. And remember: all the roads we have to walk are winding …’
Along with the single was a huge brown file, crammed full with photographs. The albums on the bookshelves are still stocked, so she must have had copies made – or, more likely, Lewis had.
The pictures cover vast amounts of time, and flicking through them is a bittersweet experience – because like most trips down memory lane, there are a few ruts in the road, and a couple of muggers waiting to threaten you at knifepoint and steal your emotional handbag.
There are a few more of our own mum as a baby, with her serious-faced parents, and one of her father in his Royal Navy uniform. There’s even a much older one, of our great-granddad, also in a Navy outfit, with sleeked-back hair and a face like Errol Flynn. He’s grinning at the camera in a way his son never seemed to manage, and looks quite the character – he’s also holding the very tobacco tin I stole from the Posh Room, although it looks shiny and new in the picture.
There are a couple of Mum as an impossibly cute toddler, with bundles of blonde corkscrew curls, wearing those frilly knickers that they seemed to like back in the day. One of her as a schoolgirl, early 1960s I’d say, spoiling her studied pose with the fact that one of her socks is pulled up to her knee and the other is sagging around her ankle.
After that, as Mum pursued her acting career, they all become a bit more glamorous. Mum’s headshots through the ages; pictures of her with the famous and semi-famous, photos taken on sets and in dressing rooms, drinks glasses jostling for place with pansticks and clouds of smoke puffing up from huge glass ashtrays.
There’s one of her with her own mum, early 1970s from the state of the boot-length Afghan coat my mum is wearing, in what I recognise as Piccadilly Circus – the same, but with bright Cinzano ads and Ford Cortinas and mini-skirts. My grandmother looks a bit awkward, overwhelmed by it all, and I’m so sad I never got to meet her. So sad that our own mum had to deal with her death all alone, much younger than we are now, and without any family to help her. Without a crazy A–Z to get her through it.
Our father features in a few pictures – one of them together in a bar, again shrouded by smoke and barricaded in with a table full of empty glasses. She looks young and vibrant and completely loved up as she snuggles against him; he is a little more aloof, with a now retro-cool 1970s beard, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. They look impossibly young and stupidly glamorous.
