Chapter 14
14
I n a long-practised move, Helen wedged the front door of her house open with her shoulder, manoeuvring herself and the shopping sideways, like a crab – if crabs shopped in Sainsbury’s.
‘Hello the house,’ she muttered.
The house didn’t answer, but her phone did, pinging deep within her handbag. She stumbled into the kitchen and banged her funny bone on the dresser. A card fluttered down from the top shelf and her elbow throbbed in pain. Dumping the bags on the table, she picked up the card.
Congratulations Grandma .
Well there she was! (According to Hallmark.) A rounded old woman with a cardigan, glasses and grey hair. Seriously? Daisy from work had given it to her, but then it was Daisy who, a few short weeks back, had given her the Kissable Body Powder for her fiftieth. Daisy, Helen decided as she dropped the card in the bin, obviously approached the marking of momentous life events with all the discernment of a fox approaching a chicken coop. In, out, grab what you can. Anyway… Turning her back on the bin, she stood in the middle of her kitchen, ran her hands through her hair and tried to remember what had caused all the hurrying and bumping and throbbing.
To remind her, her phone beeped again.
With boxing glove hands, she scrabbled through her bag. It might be Caro.
It wasn’t. It was a text, from Libby.
Shhh! Ben is sleeping! Finally.
!? Helen threw the phone on the table. After three (well, very nearly) years at university and another eleven in the education system before that, that was the extent of Libby’s vocabulary? With the enthusiasm of Sisyphus preparing another roll of the ball up that interminable hill, she put the carrier bags on the table and set about unpacking. Quietly.
Milk, juice, nappies, the nursing mother’s supplement Libby had asked for. Yogurt, bread, more milk, chicken, frozen beans, frozen peas, potatoes… And so on… and so on…
And although she didn’t intend it to happen, thoughts of Caro once again slipped beneath the surface of Helen’s mind, forgotten under the rising swell of her heart when she pictured her grandson’s face, and completely swept away by the eternal, unanswerable question that had haunted her most of her life: what to make for dinner.
Finally, when nearly all the groceries were out, she folded her reusable bag in half and held it pressed against her chest and waited, not knowing what it was she was waiting for, until it resurfaced. Caro.
It had been a month now.
One whole month.
Cyprus was even longer back. The cool breeze rising off the ocean to tickle against her naked body, her stomach. God, would she ever experience anything like that again?
Behind her, the phone pinged again.
Did you remember the supplement?
She didn’t respond. Instead, she turned to the last bag, and unpacked a family-sized lasagne for those days when she couldn’t be bothered (which was most days), a family-sized packet of cornflakes that Jack would eat in twenty-four hours, baby wipes, cotton wool pads that Libby had asked for, and a Rapid Rehydrate mix for Lawrence, as per his note this morning. Plus a bag of dried pellets for Libby’s rabbit. Poor Sasha. He didn’t eat much else. And didn’t she read recently that the secret to longevity was a near starvation diet? Something like five hundred calories a day? Thousands the survey had cost! Helen snorted as she scooped up the rabbit food and put it away. Whoever commissioned that survey could have saved themselves a fortune and just asked her. Rabbit pellets were obviously the secret to longevity and she’d have been happy to supply the answer for a fraction of the price.
Her phone pinged again.
What about the cotton wool pads? Did you get the round ones?
This time Helen banged out a
Come downstairs!
and moved onto the next stage of manoeuvres. The manual transference of groceries into cupboards and fridge. And how could that be, she wondered? In a world where scientists had discovered water on Mars, why hadn’t someone invented a machine or an app that moved groceries from grocery bags into fridges and cupboards?
Behind her – oh, yes – her phone pinged AGAIN, so that now, staring at the white light of the fridge interior, milk in one hand, juice in the other, her shoulders tensed to doorknobs. She threw the cartons in, banged the door closed and stalked back to the table, where she stared at the text…
Can’t come down just now. Ben is sleeping. Remember?
Can’t come down just now … Hush emoji! Helen’s lips moved as she re-read the text. Can’t come down … When she was a baby, her mother had left her in the pram parked alongside all the other prams outside the post office, or the butcher’s, or the greengrocer’s, back in the day when these places existed. And her grandmother would have done the same with her mother. And before that? How did harvests get gathered? Or water fetched? In three weeks Libby had barely left the house. Had she? Helen pressed her hands on her hips and stared out of the window. Had Libby actually left the house? She jabbed out a response
Why not?
Because Libby needed to start moving.
Mum!
Helen sighed, a huge, enormous sigh, exactly the shape and sound her mother used to make. Arms folded, she leaned against the counter and looked around. The kitchen, her kitchen, was chaos. A battlefield of strewn and stained baby-grows and spit-bibs. Newly opened packets of nipple shields and bottles filmed with milky residue. A bouncy chair on the table, in place of the fruit bowl (were they all to eat the baby?), a bin stuffed full of mulchy plastic yellow parcels that stank . Lawrence, this was Helen’s theory anyway, simply didn’t see the mess. Jack she knew was using all his strength to ignore it, pinching his nostrils together every time he passed the bin. He had the same look when he came out of the bathroom these days, which wasn’t surprising given the fat, rolled wads of bloody sanitary towels and cotton wool pads smeared with baby-shit that greeted him every time he made the mistake of pressing the pedal bin open. It made her smile, his terrified expression. Yes, water on Mars or not, it was still only women who retained the ability to deal with these animalistic aspects of life. One whole month of the shit, if not quite hitting the fan, then certainly splattering everywhere else (and with Libby’s movements wholly synchronised to a baby that seemed to sleep twenty-three hours out of twenty-four) she was, she knew, the only person capable of cleaning up the mess. A metaphor for her life.
She looked up at the clock. Ten past one. Seventy minutes past midday, almost the same age as she was. Time was running away from her, had turned its back without a second glance and was sprinting off. How the hell was she going to catch up with the rest of her life?
She didn’t know. So she did what she always did in times of crisis; she made herself a coffee, picked up the newspaper from the hall floor and went into the living room.
* * *
The first thing she did was turn to the property pages; a habit acquired on the back of her conversation with that bank clerk. Because if Lawrence had been deceitful enough to re-mortgage without telling her, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she too, might one day open the paper and find her own house for sale. Conversations these last couple of weeks had proved impossible. Lawrence was either avoiding her or cradling the baby. A deliberate tactic, Helen suspected. Plus, she was exhausted. And where would it leave her anyway? She only had so much room in her head. Lawrence’s deceit seemed (ironically) like a mountain too many. Libby obviously still needed a lot of support, Kay had been on the phone just yesterday with the solemn (but in Helen’s mind, sensible) news that her mother was going to be admitted into the nursing home today. Gosh… It was happening today! The paper slipped from Helen’s hands, floating to her lap as if her arms were too weak to hold it. There was a time when the three of them, Kay, her, Caro, were so tightly entwined nothing slipped by, like this barely remembered but oh-so-big event had almost done. But that was life, wasn’t it? If they’d started out as swift and conjoined as a mountain stream, it was sadly inevitable that they would diverge, that the rivers of their lives would separate as surely as a delta on a flood plain.
Caro, for example, was already back at work. She had obviously moved on. And if that was the case, well… Helen didn’t know what she thought. Was she impressed by Caro’s invincibility? Her determination to keep pushing forward? Yes… with reservations, yes, she was, but there was something else. Something so ugly Helen knew it could never be revealed. She was jealous. After everything Caro had been through, she was actually jealous because Caro was back at work, back at life and, according to Kay, had even been to New York. And where, despite all her half-fledged but earnest ideas in Cyprus, had Helen managed to get to? Suspected hernias from the patients and the brain numbing office chat of last night’s TV. Oh, and Sainsbury’s. Twice a day – that’s where.
She didn’t like this Helen. This person who stood on clifftops sullenly watching other people’s ships depart. But what could she do? How could she possibly set her own sails? The cliff felt too high and the other ships were too far away and all she could do was watch this glittering armada that was supposed to be the second half of her life ease further and further out of sight.
With all sorts of sighing going on and very little attention being paid, she picked up the paper again and scanned through. At least the house wasn’t up for sale. So far. She continued flipping through until, at the bottom of the last page, her eye was caught by images of a smart block of flats. Neat balconies and even neater communal gardens, filled with an unlikely number of people enjoying them on an unlikely fine day. An advertisement for a new development on the other side of town.
Helen read through the details, and then read through them again. The development was to consist of one- and two-bedroomed apartments with Juliet balconies, mostly facing south or south-west. As if the descriptions were a puzzle she needed time to contemplate, she lifted her chin and frowned and sure enough the answer came. Yes. Yes, she could picture herself on a Juliet balcony. Every morning with a cup of tea and a face to the sun and no winsome Romeos below buggering up the view. She smiled. Was it a glimpse of a ship within reach? Maybe.
Upstairs the bathroom door banged against the wall. (Jack approached doors as if they didn’t exist). The baby let out a loud cry, Libby hissed and Jack snapped back. All as predictable as the clock on the wall. Sighing, Helen folded the paper and stood up. She hovered a moment, then went to the bookcase by the patio doors and tucked the paper between her recipe books. For later. For when she could think about a Juliet balcony undisturbed.
* * *
The catastrophic stroke her mother had suffered, the news that Sean had interrupted her board meeting with, hadn't killed Caro’s mother, but it might as well have. No one could say if she would wake again. And worst of all, Caro could not decide if she should. Because wouldn’t it be better if they never had to face each other? Wouldn’t it be easier?
Thinking this, and damning herself to all kinds of seventh circles of hell for doing so, she bent down and reached her hand underneath the white stone that sat by the back gate. She knew exactly where to find it, tucked into the back-right corner, propped up against the fence. In fifty years the hiding place had never changed, like a little door that had been left permanently ajar. One through which she might slip back in. Not as Caro, of course, with a slimmer, straighter nose and a six-figure pay packet. But as Caroline. Her mother’s daughter, with whom on a fine Sunday morning she might once again share time peeling potatoes.
What ifs, and what might have beens… She swept the key clear from the stone, pushed back on her heels and straightened up. Sean, her brother, hadn’t needed to tell her where to find it but Caro had let him anyway. It was the least she could do. He’d never stopped coming back home. Hadn’t in fact gotten much further than Kay in terms of moving away from where he’d grown up. So she’d stayed quiet on the other end of the phone, and allowed him to describe the stone, the colour of it, the way it was half hidden by the snow-in-summer that smothered the rockery. It had felt like an impertinence to do anything else.
She leaned forward to brush the dirt from the knees of her trousers, feeling the cold weight of metal in her hand. As she straightened up, her fist uncurled to reveal an old-fashioned brass skeleton key attached to a faded red leather Stonehenge key fob. It was, she considered, before she’d had the chance to stop herself, not so very different in length from that of the baby.
The baby. She was incapable of saying mine or my because on a fundamental level it had become clear to Caro that it had never been hers. If it had, if she’d had even the smallest stake, the tiniest genuine, authentic claim, her body, she was convinced, would not have betrayed her like it did. It would have fought harder. She would have fought harder, as she had for everything else in life. She would never have let it slip away.
Her fingers curled over the key, covering it, and deep in her heart a door closed quietly. She took a deep breath, walked across the garden, put the key in the latch and turned it.
Inside, the house was as cool and dark as she had anticipated. Despite the fact that it was August, the air was chill. And stale. This back entrance opened straight into the kitchen, where immediately Caro saw the single plate, knife and fork neatly stacked, sitting by the sink waiting to be washed. Exactly as her mother would have left them. Feeling like an intruder, she left her handbag next to the kettle and tiptoed through to the front room.
The smallness of it took her breath away. She stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, almost swaying. When had she last visited? She couldn’t remember. Five years? Maybe even six? Either way, it was long enough for an estrangement to have formed. For her to be able to look at the room she had spent the formative years of her life in with new eyes. Three strides and she’d be at the front window. The front door was only another stride beyond, and in turn opened straight onto Artillery Terrace. How had they all managed? Still holding the doorframe, she looked around the gloomy room. From the bookcase, to the dining table in the corner, to the electric fire in its cheap wood surround. How had the four of them, her brother, her father, her mother, herself, lived in this tiny house? Releasing the frame, she pulled the corner of her cashmere wrap tighter, wrapped her arms across her chest and hugged herself. How had they eaten and slept and entertained themselves? How had they found the room to dream? Or the space to fall in love? (Which she had, at least once, in the third year of secondary school, and which her brother had, several times.) Or fall out of love, for that matter? As her parents so conspicuously had. Where had Sean and herself raged through toddlerhood? And adolescence? And where in God’s name had her mother gone to cope with the crushing disappointment of her own life?
Caro turned back to the cramped narrow kitchen and then back again to that single front-room window. Dreams? There had been no room in this house for dreams. And as she stood and looked out at the pavement beyond and the row of identical terraced houses opposite, what she couldn’t understand was why she hadn’t understood before. No wonder her father had retreated to the armchair in the corner – which was still there. No wonder Sean had become a walking, talking carbon copy of him. How could you not, in such proximity? And… In a swift decided movement, she went to the window and pulled the net curtain back, craning her neck to see along the road to the junction, the corner where for so many years she had waited for the bus to take her to school. No wonder her mother had seemed to reserve every last ounce of energy she had to push Caro away. Out the door, up the street, onto the bus. If she hadn’t, was there a chance Caro too would have stayed?
Again, she turned back to the tiny front room. It was, as always, neat and tidy. The ceramic cats, her whimsies, were dust free on the window ledge, and behind the dark glass of the tall cabinet unused crystal glasses stood in neat rows. On the coffee table was a copy of the Radio Times , the remote control and a leather glasses case. The carpet had been recently vacuumed, the mirror above the mantle was smear free, and, looking at all these familiar yet strange objects, suddenly Caro was remembering something. Helen had said it, about a school reunion she’d attended. It had been like meeting a bunch of strangers she knew intimately. She smiled. Coming home was exactly that. Take out the people and replace them with ornaments and she was in a strange place that she knew as well as her own heart. So would… could this really have been her?
Polishing, dusting, standing on the front doorstep to wave the teenagers off to school? She thought of her own apartment, clean, white, light, airy. The clever electronic door lock she could activate with her mobile while still in the lift. And then she thought of the baby, and perhaps for the first time since it had all happened, the memory softened. It was still brutal, still a great soft wallop through her guts that weakened her knees and made her lumpy with dullness, but now she sensed something beyond the blow. Briefly felt, but there. A glimpse of a place she might one day get to? Her head dropped as if it had suddenly become too heavy for her neck to support it, and for a moment she stood in the middle of the room, seeing nothing, hearing only a low hum. Then from the street outside a woman’s shout cut through and Caro looked up. No. She shook her head. This couldn’t have been her. She couldn’t have stayed and this, she understood, was the glimpse of that somewhere she might get to. That gently sunlit upland of no regrets. Because if she’d stayed, she wouldn’t have lived the life she had. Even if it had led to where it did.
The thought was a quiet little engine. It had Caro moving to the front door and unlatching it, wedging it open with a dining chair that still had her mother’s apron hooked over. It had her filling the house with sunshine and light.
An hour or so later, she’d stripped the bed in her mother’s room, washed the sheets and had them hanging on the line. She’d poured away the milk in the fridge and re-stacked it with the groceries she’d brought from her apartment. And she’d unpacked her bag. It hadn’t taken long. This time was only an overnight visit. She had to be back for one last presentation she’d promised Matt, the day after tomorrow.
The next few hours loomed before her like a tsunami.
Was she mad? Shouldn’t she have just booked into the Holiday Inn, at least to ease herself in gently? Or going further, asked Matt for an extended absence instead of… Unable to decide and unwilling to consider it further, she went down to the kitchen, made herself a cup of tea, took it into the front room and sat in her father’s armchair.
Relax, she whispered, and turned to look at the front door. Her father had been dead for nine years so it wasn’t like she was expecting him to walk in and yell: Up! Scattering her with the shotgun of his voice out of his chair. And yet that’s exactly what a part of her was expecting. A little numb, she turned away from the door to the bookshelf tucked away in the alcove. On the bottom shelf were a row of photo albums. She took one out and began leafing through.
Sean, herself, her mother and father. Tansy, the cat… She’d almost forgotten they’d once had a cat. Summers and winters, herself as a Brownie, Sean in his new school blazer, her father in the garden, and, very rarely, her mother, in the kitchen, or hanging washing, or back in the kitchen. There, like the wallpaper was there.
She kept leafing through until she came to a page of photos taken at Stonehenge. The photo that she couldn’t stop staring at, that she pulled free of the plastic film, was that of Sean, herself and her mother. Two small children, bucket fringe haircuts and tiny shorts. Suntanned slim limbs, swinging loose from the ancient stones. And behind them her mother, in a brightly flowered sundress, with a smile as wide and easy as her children’s.
Who had taken it?
Not her father. She didn’t have a single memory of her father outside of Artillery Terrace. And the day trips that her mother had taken them on were few and far between. But, yes, occasionally they had made it to Stonehenge. It was, after all, only a few miles up the road. And going by this photograph, they’d had fun. They’d been happy.
Caro stared at the little girl in the photograph. Was that really her? It didn’t seem possible, and she couldn’t find a way of tracing the thread back, connecting these two people again.
Until, staring at the photograph, the answer to the question she’d been torturing herself with ever since she’d heard, crept up and wrapped around her heart, squeezing like a bear, cutting off her breath, sending tears streaming down her face. No, it wouldn’t be easier if her mother never woke, if they never had to face each other again. Despite the fact that she knew the stroke was her fault, she knew it was the shock of the phone call from the hospital requesting, as next of kin, her mother's permission to go ahead with the hysterectomy, explaining the aftermath of the miscarriage…The photo slipped from her hand. What had her mother thought? What on earth had gone through her mind? Caro folded her arms and shook her head furiously. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that her mother woke again. And to make that happen, she’d stay as long as it took, and somehow find her way back.
* * *
Taking refuge from the squabbling of her almost adult children upstairs, Helen stood in the middle of her garden looking at the rabbit hutch and the boundary of the pen. Poor Sasha. Ten years stuck in that space. Ten years hemmed in by chicken wire. Without stopping to think, she strode across, unlocked his cage and carried him out to the wide-open expanse of the lawn – where he froze, his body trembling. Come on, Sasha, she whispered. But Sasha didn’t move. Just a peek, she coaxed, but even his eyelids remained frozen shut. He was, literally, petrified. Disappointed, Helen scooped him up again and popped him inside the pen where he came back to life, sniffing the grass under his nose as if it had just materialised. ‘Sasha.’ Helen shook her head. ‘ You need to be brave.’ In response the rabbit darted underneath his hutch where he sat looking at her with empty black eyes.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Helen said. ‘I was only trying to help.’
Sasha didn’t respond.
Sighing, Helen walked across to the patio chair, stretched her legs out and pulled the straps of her top down from her shoulders, soaking up the sun. She still had tan lines from Cyprus which, as she twisted her head to look, felt so ridiculous it made her chuckle. She’d gone to Cyprus as a married mother of two, and now she was a (hopefully) soon to be divorced grandmother. Her tan lines were older than her grandson. Yes, it was almost funny. Tiny gorgeous Ben was younger than her tan lines.
Four weeks. Already? Helen pointed her toes and lifted her chin to the sun. Love, she thought, dismantles time. Takes it apart quicker than an Allen key on an IKEA table. Hours become specks, because every time Libby had handed the baby over, she had simply sat with her nose pressed against his chubby thigh, or his arm, or the top of his soft, soft head and passed away speck after speck after speck. And in this pleasant way four weeks had flowed past easy as silk.
Horror, on the other hand, freezes it. She sat up, suddenly cold. Horror superglues itself into consciousness, so it sticks like a lid on a half-used paint tin. You never get past it and you can never confront it, not without damage, even though it wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried.
In moments when she could be absolutely sure that Ben would not be heard in the background, she had gone to pick up the phone and call Caro. More than a thousand times it seemed. But their timetables hadn’t coincided. When Ben was sleeping, Caro had been working. She’d been in New York when Helen had been in Sainsbury’s buying nappies. Just like old times, really.
She understands, Kay had said. Things are busy for you.
But is she alright? Helen would ask.
She says she is, Kay would answer.
Well she must be, if she’d been to New York.
Above her head, from the open window of Libby’s bedroom, Ben's cries rose. He was getting louder. In fact, he was getting louder every day. He’d found his lungs. She got up and went inside.
Libby came down the stairs and instinctively Helen held her arms out. The baby was handed over, Libby tugging her saggy pyjama bottoms up. Her stomach looked like a deflated balloon. She was young, it would work its way back, but it would never be the same. Helen averted her eyes. This was just one more thing Libby would have to find out for herself.
‘Jack woke him,’ Libby sulked.
‘Why don’t you take him out?’
‘Where?’
‘For a walk. Get some fresh air. I’m sure he’ll drop off again.’
‘I’m knackered, Mum,’ Libby whimpered. ‘I can’t.’ And she brushed past Helen, collapsing onto the sofa in the living room.
Concentrating on her grandson, Helen shucked him into the crook of her arm. His little eyes were red rimmed. ‘He needs to sleep,’ she murmured.
‘So do I,’ Libby grumbled, flat out on her back, hands flung over her eyes.
‘I’ll take him for a walk then. You have a shower.’ The day was glorious but more than that, sixty seconds in her daughter’s company and already Helen was irritated.
‘That would be great,’ Libby said through her hands. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed.’
Helen didn’t respond. She stood in the doorway, swaying Ben, occasionally glancing across at Libby whose hair was greasy and whose pyjama top was buttoned wrong. ‘There’s half a quiche in the fridge,’ she said tersely. ‘Heat it up and have some lunch. Then take a shower.’
Libby took a cushion and balanced it on her chest. ‘I just want to sleep.’
And Helen turned away. She pressed the pad of her finger on Ben's button nose and cooed at him. 'It’ll get easier,’ was all she trusted herself to say. ‘But you have to start moving, Libby. It’s time.’
‘I am moving, Mum.’
‘From the bedroom to the kitchen.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Helen switched Ben into her other arm. (He smelt so good.) ‘It means,’ she said, ‘that you have to get up. Face the world again. I mean, if I wasn’t here you’d have to go out and buy the nappies yourself.’
Libby turned the cushion over. ‘But you are here,’ she said quietly.
So quietly, without a trace of resentment, that Helen’s irritation evaporated.
Libby had the cushion over her face now, as if she was hiding herself.
She was, Helen realised with a sudden clarity, scared. As well she might be. Having a baby was scary. The sudden, absolute, constant responsibility of keeping another human alive was terrifying. And her daughter was still so much a child herself. So how fortunate that she was here to help. How wonderful that she was right here beside her. She took Ben’s finger and shook it, a How-do-you do? shake. ‘Why don’t you start with a shower?’ she said. ‘And some clean clothes. I promise it will make you feel better.’
Slowly Libby came out of her hiding place and lowered the cushion to her chin. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘OK.’
Feeling as if something had been achieved, Helen left Libby on the settee and went out to the front drive where Ben's pram stood sheltered against the wall. She tucked him in, released the brake and rocked the pram back and forth. He opened his eyes once, flung up a tiny fist of resistance and then fell, loose as water, into sleep. The day was warm and sunny, all along the front border the roses were in full bloom and here she was with her grandchild, deftly steering her daughter though these difficult first weeks. It was all good and she should have been feeling all good… except this Helen, grandma Helen, felt as far away from sailor Helen, sex-on-the-beach Helen as the Helen who had once walked up the aisle to meet Lawrence. All these Helens, she thought. One would be enough. To make a decision and move forward, one would be enough.
‘Stay simple,’ she whispered at her grandson. ‘Stay just as you are. Baby simple.’
‘Mum!’ Behind her the front door slammed.
Helen turned to see Jack standing on the doorstep, a flushed, excited look on his face. ‘Can’t you ever just close a door, Jack?’ she said.
‘I just did, didn’t I?’ Jack glanced back at the front door. ‘Where are you going?’ he said, walking across to her.
‘I’m taking Ben for a walk.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know where, Jack. Just a walk.’ There was a nub of irritation in her voice. Did it matter where? And when were her children ever going to stop asking questions?
‘Well do you want to come with me?’ Jack offered. He had his head down, shy.
Helen frowned.
‘It’s results day.’
‘Jack!’ Helen’s jaw dropped. She’d forgotten. How could she possibly have forgotten? His A level results were out. The day his future was decided. (Which was rubbish of course, but was how teenagers weaned on a diet of The X Factor viewed life.)
‘All or nothing.’ Jack shrugged.
Helen smiled. ‘Of course I want to come. Let’s go.’ What else could she say? Jack had all his hopes pinned on this flag of achievement. Which of course could get blown over or trampled on at any time. Libby, after all, got it all. Two A*s And an A. And where had that landed her? Supine on the sofa, unable to button her pyjamas. Life was a slippery eel. You might grab its fat belly one day, only to watch helplessly as it slipped free the next. A level results were only A level results. Life was sudden and people were as many segmented as a citrus fruit. And if she knew only one thing, it was this – the good-looking, slim-hipped, smooth-skinned Jack of today was going to be a different person to the Jack of tomorrow and would need a whole lot of other things besides A levels. Just as the Jack of yesterday had once only needed a red elephant called Efant and wouldn’t have known what A levels were if she’d cut them up into soldier-sized pieces and served them with dippy egg.
The truth of this made her eyes sting. Nothing stayed. Everyone left. She looked down at tiny Ben sleeping peacefully. Life. Who would possibly believe that it becomes so complicated?