‘Technically, yes. But it’s like the moon – I know it exists, but it still doesn’t feel real.’
I throw an olive at her, just for fun.
‘I used to be different. I loved poetry and plays and art. In fact I thought I’d probably be an artist when I was older.’
I wait for the mockery to continue, but she just raises her eyebrows. ‘Yeah. You are really good at drawing, Mum. You wrote all those stories for me when I was little, and you did all the illustrations of pixies and frogs and stuff.’
I smile, thrilled that she remembers. I loved drawing them, was so sad when she grew too old to be interested. Maybe I should start doing manga instead.
‘Yes, I enjoyed that. Obviously, I didn’t grow up to be an artist in the end, but back in the day it was one of my ambitions. Anyway. So, when I was eighteen, I played Juliet in the school play.’
She snorts with laughter at that point, and I can’t blame her. Looking at me now, it must be a leap of imagination. I quote a few lines, just to convince her.
‘So what happened? Did you fall for your Romeo?’ she asks sarcastically, then looks shocked when I actually nod.
‘I did. I fell for him like no girl has ever fallen for a boy before. He was new in the college, setting all of our boring Surrey girl hearts a-flutter. He’d moved over from Dublin, and oh my Lord – that accent! At risk of making you feel sick, it was soooo sexy.’ Of course Beth rolls her eyes again at this, but I press on. ‘And he was good-looking too. Classic tall, dark and handsome, with these amazing green eyes – they were kind of flecked with gold, always made me think of sunlight dappling through the trees in a forest…’
Even now, I can still see those beautiful green eyes. Remember the way they made me feel like I was the only girl in the entire world when he looked at me.
‘He was fun too,’ I tell her. ‘One of those cool boys. The ones who seem so comfortable in their own skin that whatever they do is by definition also cool. Even if it’s stupid. The ones who can skateboard off a roof and break their leg, and make everybody else want to do the same. You know the kind I mean.’
She smirks, and says yes, and I wonder who her cool boy is. I can tell from the look in her eyes that she is familiar with the concept.
She leans forward, elbows on the table and chin in her upturned palms. ‘Did he make you go all googly?’
I laugh. It’s a good expression. ‘God yes! Gross to hear from your mum I know, but he was so hot – I literally turned to jelly every time he held my hand. And even though I didn’t have much to compare it to, he wassucha good kisser!’
‘Gross, yeah, but okay – I get it. And did he like you back?’
It’s all flooding back now. The connection. The sheer joy of our eyes meeting at the first play rehearsal. Of the swoop and swirl and stomach-spinning shock of finally realising what love was. It was dizzying, thrilling. Like being on the world’s biggest high, so high the rest of the world looked tiny and irrelevant to us. Every touch of his hand, every brush of his lips, every word he whispered… they transformed me. Changed me. And damn him, Jurassic or not, I swear I can still feel it all like it was yesterday.
There is nothing in this world quite like falling in love – especially for the first time. I hope that one day, my darling daughter finds that out for herself. But I also desperately hope that she never experiences the flip side of that love – because none of this was simple, and all of it left very deep scars. Things happened to me after our split that I have never told another living soul, and those scars will never leave me.
‘Yes,’ I say simply. ‘He did like me back. Our parents though… well, that was a different matter. Mine hated him, and his hated me.’
‘Why? I mean, I didn’t really know your mum and dad that well, but why did they hate him?’
My parents were older when they had me, I was a late surprise. Maybe that’s why they were so overprotective.
‘Complicated stuff, doesn’t really matter now. But the grown-ups did everything they possibly could to keep us apart, and you can imagine what effect that had.’
‘It made you even more determined to stay together,’ she replies, a sense of wonder in her tone. This must be quite the change in image for me, her boring old mum.
‘It did. So we decided we were going to run away. We’d saved money from our Saturday jobs, made a plan. The only bit we weren’t sure about was where we were going to go. So, this was in the year 2000 – we had mobiles, these little Nokia bricks you’d wet yourself laughing at – but we didn’t have smartphones. Plus, I suppose we were just caught up in the romance of what we were doing – so we went to the library, and got a map.’
‘A paper one?’ she says, sounding incredulous.
‘Yes. A road map of the UK. And we opened it on a random page, and we closed our eyes and held hands, and counted to three. Then together, we pointed at a place…’
I still recall how we giggled, intoxicated by our plan, by the whole concept of what we were going to do. We weren’t complete idiots – we’d waited until we finished our A-levels – but we were maybe eighty per cent idiots. Would we have made it? I wonder. If we’d actually run away, found a flat together, lived that dream? The odds say no, but my heart still thinks maybe yes.
‘That place,’ I tell her, shaking my head. ‘Was Bonnie Bay.’
‘No way!’
‘Yes way. It’s on the coast north of Aberdeen, like the bookshop says, at the edge of the world. We looked it up afterwards. It seemed so beautiful, so dramatic, so completely perfect for us. We made our arrangements – a train, many long coach trips and possibly some hitchhiking – and we were all set to go.’
Beth is fascinated now, completely enraptured. ‘So why didn’t you? Or did you? Have you been there before?’
