Same Time Next Week

Chapter 54

After work, before the Tuesday meeting, Amanda went to sit with her mum at Hyde’s funeral parlour. She was comforted by the fact that they told her she was dressed in a black beaded suit and black shoes with bows on the front. It was what her mum liked to wear when she wanted to look smart, so that was one thing Amanda had no need to get irate about.

Mr Hyde’s assistant had told her they were taking her mum up to the crematorium on Friday morning. Amanda had asked if they could take her up in a proper hearse and she’d pay for it. She’d tried and failed not to break down when she explained why, and apologised for putting him in a bit of a difficult position by asking. The assistant said he’d have a word with Mr Hyde and come back to her as soon as he could.

She didn’t request to see her mum, she’d already kissed her goodbye, but she just wanted to sit in the room with her closed coffin. She put her arms around it, placed her cheek against the wood. The moment was indicative of their whole relationship: a daughter wanting to be close to a mother but there always being something in the way of it.

‘I did love you, Mum, all my life, even though you drove me bonkers for most of it. I wish you could have loved me. I just want to say that I’m letting you go with my forgiveness that you couldn’t manage it. I wouldn’t want you not to lie at peace.’

Ingrid had backed the wrong horse. But even now, if she were to miraculously wake up and find out what her beloved son had done, she’d have merely said, ‘Well, the money would have been his anyway in the end, so what does it matter how he got it?’ It wasn’t worth Amanda having another sleepless night over.

When she came out, Mr Hyde himself met her at the door and said that they could do as she requested, as long as she was happy to bear the additional cost. The driver would be leaving at eight-thirty and if she wanted to be here and follow them up, there could be no objections.

As she was transferring him the money for the hearse, she asked Mr Hyde if Bradley had been up to visit, and was told that he said he wouldn’t be coming up. Apparently there was a note on the file that his sister would be collecting the ashes. And would she like to take her mother’s rings now, or should they send them to her brother?

When Erin got home from work she found a letter on her doormat, her address written in what looked like an elderly person’s spiky handwriting. She opened it up to find another envelope inside and a piece of paper wrapped around it. A note, from Molly at the grief club. It said that if ever she wished to return at a later date, not to hesitate to ring her, and to take good care. And that enclosed was a letter which Alex in the group had asked her to forward, because she would not have compromised Erin’s privacy by giving him her address.

It was a blue envelope with her name written on the front in large, slanted lettering.

She opened it: there was a mobile phone number on the top right.

Dear Erin

How stupidly remiss of me not to store your phone number or know how to get in touch with you, so I’m resigned to Molly post which I hope is quicker than a pigeon.

I’ll be brief. I told you the last time we met that I was going on a dinner date with a very nice person – and she was. But… she wasn’t you and I spent all evening wishing she were. And I was building up to telling you that at the next Wednesday meeting, but you didn’t come and the dip that brought to my spirits was quite telling. VERY telling.

Please ring me if you think that we might meet again, but not as friends, I have enough of those bastards. We can inch along at our own pace like the battered midlifers we are. I promise to hold your heart in cushioned hands, but I would like very much to see you, and say all this to you in person.

Alex

She didn’t tell them about the letter when she went to the diner for their Tuesday meet-up. She needed to think about it clearly, with no interfering radio waves. She let the others talk: Amanda about her mother and the non-funeral and her tosser brother; Astrid about her new business venture; Mel about the band. They’d finally found a name: The Change and they had a gig lined up already – and as it was for charity, Mel said, it didn’t matter too much if they were totally shit. Erin made the coffees and commented on other people’s business, but kept her own locked up inside her for now.

Erin wasn’t the only one who hadn’t totally bared her soul that evening. Mel had only shared the good news about the band. It all started to feel a bit real now they had a name, which wasn’t that groundbreaking, but it seemed to fit them, in more ways than one.

She knew they had a deal not to compare what they were going through, nor hold back from saying what was bothering them, but still, she didn’t feel right laying it on her new friends how she was doing at present, not with all the rubbish that Amanda was having to cope with. She knew that she’d brought the name ‘Steve’ to the coffee table too much. Or ‘Sieve’ as it said on the money-clip; she never did get round to sending it back.

She hadn’t seen or heard from him since she’d told him they were totally over. There wouldn’t have been any point in him sending massive bouquets of flowers and lying prostrate on their path in the hope of forgiveness, but he didn’t try anyway. He’d be getting looked after at his mum and dad’s and they’d be saying all the things to him he needed to hear. She didn’t really blame them, families should be loyal to their own. Her mum and dad would have been the same with her if they’d still been here and she really wished they were.

Steve must have been back when she was at work today because some of his things had gone from the house. She’d had a little hiccupy sob about it, but she knew it was just a ghost feeling, her body so used to being stung it was merely trying to act on a familiar response. She’d had plenty of weak moments recently but every time she did, she forced herself to think of Steve with his trousers round his ankles bonking Chloe in the school toilets. The image helped to reinforce that she deserved better.

It also helped that when Steve was picking up his collection of expensive trainers and other detritus, she was in the solicitor’s in town in her lunch hour, because she’d taken control and started the painful business of pulling apart thirty years’ worth of strands. Every strand separated was one nearer to the end of her hurting, to finding her equilibrium; she had to think of it in bite-sized pieces.

She finally changed her sheets when she got home from the diner; that act had been way overdue. She took in a long, last noseful of faded Oud Wood before she stuffed them in the machine. A bittersweet goodbye.