Chapter 23
Walking faster than I’d ever walked before, I pushed the hotel revolving door so hard that it nearly swept me off my feet from behind. I made a beeline for the lifts, but a voice stopped me in my tracks.
‘Excuse me, Ms Bell?’
It was the receptionist who’d given me the coffee shop tip on my very first morning here, which meant she also happened to be the person who’d inadvertently set me on the path towards romantic devastation.
If she was going to challenge me about why three adults were sharing a room for two, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to sweet-talk my way out of it.
I paused, turning on my heel to face her, trying but failing to muster a grin – I needed to get the medication into Mum’s system as quickly as possible. ‘Yes?’
‘Your mom – is she okay? We called an ambulance for her a few hours ago, but it looks like she’s back already? We got housekeeping to fix up the room, too.’
My stomach unclenched in relief. ‘Oh, yes, she’s doing much better.
Thanks so much for your help. Sorry, it’s been a crazy night and I really need to get this medicine upstairs to her.
’ I lifted the heavy drugstore bag – I’d stocked up on all manner of vitamins and remedies as well as the products the doctor had recommended – to underline my point.
‘That’s good to hear – we were so worried. Umm, so before you go, we need to log the incident for legal reasons. So, if you wouldn’t mind getting your mom to fill in this form?’
She held out a sheet of paper and a pen towards me, but I didn’t take either of them.
I frowned. ‘Legal reasons?’
‘Yes, it’s just that we need to make sure the hotel isn’t… liable for any injuries or illnesses.’
‘Don’t worry, she ate some poisonous berry things she found in Central Park. The only person Mum could possibly sue is herself.’
‘Sure, it’s just that, since we were the ones who called the ambulance, and she fell ill within the premises, we really need to—’
‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, taking the form and shoving it into the drugstore bag. ‘We’ll drop the form off in the morning when we check out.’
I walked to the lifts without looking back. I found Mum and Anneka snuggled up in bed watching telly in their PJs – I hadn’t even noticed that there was a TV in the room until now.
‘I come bearing medicinal gifts,’ I said, kicking off my shoes and tipping the contents of the bag onto the foot of the bed. ‘I chatted to the pharmacist and, first things first, let’s get this activated charcoal into you, stat.’
I gave Mum a couple of ominous-looking black capsules, which she washed down with a gulp of Gatorade that I’d picked up from a bodega on the way back to the hotel.
‘Right. Next: where the fuck are these fucking beans or pods or whatever the hell they’re called?’
With effort, Mum reached over to open the drawer in the bedside table and extracted a small, black pouch, chucking it in my direction. I loosened the pouch’s drawstring and tipped a dozen or so dark-coloured beans – which looked worryingly like the charcoal capsules – into the palm of my hand.
‘Jesus, Mum, were you planning on exchanging them for a cow like Jack and the friggin’ Beanstalk?’ Anneka said, still curled up in a foetal position with her head resting in Mum’s armpit.
Mum snorted, which fast turned into a groan, and she slunk back down under the covers.
I put the beans back in the pouch, tied the string into a triple knot, and placed the pouch into the bin, the plastic liner of which I also triple knotted, as if the toxin was airborne.
‘Right, they’re gone. And, for the record, I’m never going fucking foraging again. Next up: electrolytes.’
We spent the next ten minutes encouraging Mum to drink as much enriched fluid as she could bear, before she finally snapped.
‘Please, both of you, stop watching my every move! I’m not a newborn bloody baby. I’m starting to feel a lot better, as it happens.’
I cleared the pharmaceutical debris from the bed, turned off the overhead lights and climbed in with them, enjoying the physical proximity for once.
After watching a made-for-TV movie for a while – including a crazy amount of ad breaks – Anneka gasped and turned to me.
‘Shit, I totally forgot to ask how the wedding went.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Not great.’
‘I’m sorry for ruining your night, Flo,’ Mum murmured, half-asleep.
‘Nah, it went downhill before I heard you were in hospital. Funny story actually: I found out that Ethan had also been due to get married just a couple of months ago, but he called it off not long before the wedding, just like Will did. Can you believe it? Anyway, so that’s all done and dusted.’
‘Sorry, Flo. At least you got a new outfit out of it, hmm?’ Anneka said drowsily.
‘I’m not sure the blisters on my feet agree with that assessment,’ I said, allowing my eyes to close.
‘I think it probably happens more than you think,’ Mum mumbled.
‘What does?’ I asked, stretching my entire body.
‘Relationships falling apart in the run-up to a wedding.’
‘Well, I don’t know anyone else it’s happened to,’ I said. ‘Do you, Anneka?’
‘Nope,’ she said, through a yawn.
‘It happened to me, before I met Joe,’ Mum said matter-of-factly, as if it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken about Anneka’s dad in many, many years.
Anneka immediately sat bolt upright. ‘You never told me this, Mum.’
‘Well, I assumed you wouldn’t want to know that I’d been in love with someone else before your dad.’ Mum shifted herself into a slightly more vertical position, crunching her shoulders one by one, as if resetting her body after its hospital trauma.
‘Maybe not when I was a kid, no. But I’m in my forties now; I think I can handle it.’
‘Can you tell us what happened?’ I asked, also sitting up. We shuffled around so we were all sitting cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, like the world’s weirdest girly sleepover, the muted TV the only source of light.
Mum shrugged. ‘There’s not that much to tell.
I met someone at the shoe shop where I worked when I was seventeen, we fell in love and were due to get married about a year later.
But a fortnight before the wedding, he just…
disappeared. He quit his job, left his flat.
I was heartbroken. My mum reckoned he was living a double life, said she never really trusted him.
Not that she’d ever bothered to share her misgivings with me before he vanished.
But it was that very heartbreak that led me to Joe. ’
Anneka and I glanced at each other. She’d never spoken about this part of her life before – nor had she ever mentioned her mum. I could tell Anneka wanted to keep the conversation going as much as me, but we’d have to tread carefully.
‘How did you meet Dad, Mum? You’ve never told me anything beyond the fact he was your milkman.’ Anneka clutched a pillow to her chest.
Mum smiled, wistfully. ‘Well, after my ex upped and left, I found it impossible to sleep, and I often used to sit in the living room with the curtains open, just staring at the sky. I started waving to Joe and his dad when they did their early morning milk rounds. Then Joe took over the round by himself, and I found myself getting up early just so I could see him, even though my insomnia had passed. And then, on Christmas Eve, I swung open the front door just as he was posting a Fudge bar and a Christmas card through the letterbox for me and asked him to take me out on New Year’s Eve. The rest, as they say, is history.’
Anneka hugged the pillow tight, as if letting it go would somehow disrupt this unprecedented flow of revelatory conversation. ‘That’s why he used to give you Fudge bars every Christmas.’
‘Yes, Christmas was always a special time for us after that.’
My mouth dropped open. ‘So you only started hating Christmas after Joe died?’
‘I don’t hate Christmas, Flora. It just felt too hard without him.’ She dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her pyjama top and I squeezed her knee.
‘Thanks for telling us this, Mum. It’s such a nice story,’ Anneka said, still hugging the pillow.
‘Yeah, shame my own parents didn’t see it that way.’
‘Because he was Black.’ Anneka spoke the words as a statement, not a question, still stroking the pillow and not looking up from it.
Had they ever spoken about this before? Or had Anneka put the pieces together herself about our fractured family history? I had to presume it was the latter if Mum’s emotional unavailability to me was anything to go by – up until this moment, this conversational territory was a no-go zone.
Mum nodded grimly. ‘Bingo. Dad was furious, and Mum just went along with him. Eventually, they gave me an ultimatum. It was the easiest choice I ever made.’
Anneka discarded the pillow and hugged Mum, instead.
‘So that’s why you cut ties with them?’ I asked, leaning my head on Mum’s shoulder.
I’d never been told why I’d never met my maternal grandparents.
I did know that Joe’s parents had both passed away before Anneka had even been born.
But I’d been brought up to never question why our family didn’t extend beyond the three of us – it had always been the Bells versus the world.
‘I think it’s more accurate to say they cut ties with me,’ Mum replied.
‘Are they still alive, Mum?’ I asked.
‘No, love, they’re not. I went to both their funerals when Anneka was very little. They did leave me some money, though, which I never touched – until now.’
‘For this trip?’ I whispered, eyebrows raised.
Mum nodded and Anneka gasped. ‘Mum! You told me you won on a scratchcard!’
‘I did!’ she said. ‘It was just… a fiver, not five thousand.’