‘We’re fifteen minutes from RADA. I’ll spread my wings in bed,’ Lucy said. ‘I can get up at eight forty-five for classes.’
‘Hmm.’ Simone had busied herself with the brutal chicken work – they were catering for a cricket match later that evening, had hundreds of them to do, but all through the evening she kept thinking of it, how off it had seemed for Lucy.
That night, Simone brought her home a chicken with a pea salad and pea purée. She’d handed it to Lucy, who immediately set it on a plate and started eating it. She regularly ate two small dinners, one at six o’clock, one when Simone got home at midnight, and never gained an ounce because she usually forgot lunch and breakfast.
‘So you’re not even going to put in for –’ Simone had started.
‘Nah. Halls are so horrible, too. Shared showers.’ Lucy made a face.
Simone had hesitated. The thing was, she didn’t want Lucy to go, either. She was saying the right things, but not thinking them. Simone had found it difficult when Lucy had stopped breastfeeding – just refused one day, and never asked again – and when she didn’t want to hold Simone’s hand any more. Simone had hated it when she had lost her toddler pot belly, when she learned to put her shoes on herself.
Was it because Lucy was an only child, was it because Simone was somehow over the top compared to other mothers (to otherpeople)? She wasn’t sure. Everyone feelsdifferent from others in their own mind, she supposes, but this felt somehow primal to her. A melancholia. To Simone, parental love is so very close to sadness. You are given the love of your life and then, slowly, over a twenty-year period, you have to watch them fucking leave you. She once said this to Damien, who had looked confused and said, ‘But that’s the whole point!’ She’d never spoken to anybody else about it. Everybody seemed fine with it, celebrating milestones met and school years passed through. Simone never took a single September first-day-of-school photograph of Lucy by their front door; she couldn’t bear to think of parenthood rushing by that fast, like lightning. A life phase made of cuddles and lunchboxes and Tommee Tippee and Crayola and rice cakes and stickers, snuffed out suddenly one day like a death, when they leave.
Nevertheless, Simone knew that good parenting required her to find out what was going on. Lucy ought to want to live out. To play loud music late at night, to have sex with strangers, if she wanted to – Lucy is, Simone is fairly sure, a virgin, deeming most of the boys in her school ‘either hooligans or, worse, wannabe poets’ – but Lucy doesn’t want to.
‘Is this …?’ Simone started to say delicately. ‘Is that all it is, then? You want convenience?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ she had said, putting too much chicken in her mouth to talk any further. Simone waited for her to chew and swallow, but no more information came. Instead, she turned on the television, flicked to something,Taskmasteror something like that, but when Simone checked her phone, then looked discreetly at Lucy, she hadn’t been watching it, her eyes glassily looking to the floor.
And now it is likely irrelevant, all that navel-gazing, untangling her wants from Lucy’s. They’re here, together, no future, no phases passing them by, and Simone couldn’t feel worseabout it, but also, is part of her just slightly relieved that Lucy cannot leave her? The paradox of motherhood.
Sleep is lost to her now.
And so Simone sits there and thinks some more. She runs through her tiny and stupid list of possible solutions, discounting them all once again. Getting a lawyer, handing themselves in, staying hidden. The possibilities circle until she is tired of them.
She thinks about the moment she shot the stranger. She thinks about the pink fuzzy marks the gaffer tape left on Lucy’s mouth. She thinks of the bag full of cocaine.
‘I think it’s actually a renowned stargazing point,’ Lucy says, startling Simone. ‘And I’m so entitled I forgot to even look.’
Simone turns in surprise. ‘Is it?’ Lucy’s hair is mussed-up candyfloss around a scrunchie. ‘Nice hair,’ she adds.
‘The fork has done more harm than good.’
There, in their timeless universe, Lucy sits down close to Simone’s body. Her flour-bag baby, grown up. She rests her head against Simone’s.
‘I dreamed of him,’ Lucy says. ‘The hand.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A better woman could have escaped. In the dream I tried harder.’
‘No, they couldn’t.’
Simone allows the conversation to lapse, but after a few moments, it’s time to address it.
‘We need a plan,’ she says delicately. ‘At least for the next while.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ve been kicking it around in my mind.’
‘Come up with anything?’ Lucy says, still leaning her body against her mother’s.
‘Nothing good.’
‘The only option is exoneration,’ Lucy says, her voice so deep and full and theatrical that it carries with it an authority, too. She says nothing more for several seconds, then: ‘Until we can prove our innocence, we need to stay hidden.’
Simone waits a beat, nodding slowly. Exoneration. ‘How will we prove it?’
