Chapter 12
I wake up the next morning to the gentle touch of Charlie’s foot in my side. I mutter variations on ouch and roll around a little. I have hair stuck in my mouth and Betty is using my face as a lollipop, but other than that I have survived my time in the wild outdoors. I am practically Bear Grylls, but with backache. Maybe Bear Grylls gets backache too, but he’s too macho to show it on camera.
I roll over again and stare up at Charlie, who immediately takes a photo of me.
“Got ya!” he says, hopping away chuckling. “That’ll be perfect for the Sausage Dog Diaries!”
“The what?” I murmur, sitting up and wiping my face clear. I glance over and see that Luke’s gear has been folded up and assume he is out hunting, or using the Mona Lisa.
Charlie thuds down next to me and says: “That’s the name of your new blog. I tried loads of different things, but they were too similar to others—the internet is a pretty crowded place! Anyway, when I looked for this one, there was nothing. Apart from loads of ads for actual diaries with pictures of dachshunds on them. So that’s its main title, and the subheading is ‘Hitting the road and finding your joy!’—I liked that. Thought it sounded a bit New Agey, a bit self-helpy, very current. Loads of middle-aged women like you probably dream of hitting the road and finding their joy!”
“I’m not middle-aged!” I splutter.
Charlie shrugs. “Depends on when you die, I suppose. Anyway, what do you think? About the blog?”
“I think I need coffee,” I reply, stretching my arms over my head.
Right on cue, Luke emerges from the van bearing steaming mugs. I think I might actually love him.
He passes me my coffee and asks: “Did you hear the news? The Sausage Dog Diaries? Hitting the road and finding your joy?”
“I will definitely feel more joyful about it once I’ve had this. Why do you look so sprightly?” I say, staring at him with open resentment. It doesn’t seem fair that he is wide awake, fresh from the shower, looking ready to tackle the day.
“Must just be tougher than you, I guess,” he replies, grinning. “That and the fact that I went back inside and slept in my own bed once you started snoring.”
“I don’t snore! And I’m not middle-aged, and you can both... flip off!”
They both make ooh noises and I wave them away. I take my time over my coffee and feel a lot better when I finally push down half of the sleeping bag. This is something that needs to be done cautiously, in stages. It is mildly warm but not yet scorching, which leads me to believe that we are making another very early start.
“Have you done the draw without me?” I ask suspiciously.
“Yes!” announces Charlie, looking delighted with himself. “And it was mine again!”
“Oh lord,” I mutter, “what is it this time? Mummies? Vampires?”
“No, even better—theme parks!”
I close my eyes and shake my head. Theme parks. My mortal enemy. I have never been one of those people who actually enjoys being tipped upside down and spun in a circle. I even get a bit scared in a Waltzer. I remember taking Charlie to the fairground at Great Yarmouth once and that was enough. I also met Charlie’s dad at a local fair, which may or may not have contributed to my aversion.
I was one of those teenage girls on the rides, screaming loud enough that the attendants always pushed us the most, pretending to like it. Rob was one of the attendants doing the pushing. He didn’t have close family, he told me, and he worked casually at things like this, and playing with his band. The warning signs were all there, but I was too giddy to see them—in all kinds of ways.
When I got off the ride, I was dizzy and I dropped my cotton candy, and he got me a new one for free. He was good-looking and he was dangerous and he made me feel dangerous too. He made me spin even when I wasn’t on a ride. From such delightfully romantic beginnings, a relationship was born, and then an actual human was born, and now that actual human wants me to go on rollercoasters with him.
“What about Betty?” I say as soon as the thought occurs to me. “She can’t go in theme parks. Even if she was allowed, which she won’t be, she’d hate it—I mean, all that noise, and the bright lights, and the screaming, and the going upside down?”
“Are you talking about Betty or yourself?” Charlie asks, frowning.
“Maybe both. I think this might be a day that the girls sit out on, okay, son?”
“Well, we’ll see,” replies Charlie, sounding genuinely a bit deflated. “But do you want to hear the plan?”
Yes , I think, as long as the plan involves me staying on solid ground.
“Okay,” he continues, “me and Luke have checked up on stuff, and we reckon we can do three in one day! How cool is that?”
“Wow, supercool,” I respond, glaring at Luke.
He shrugs and gives me a “how was I to know?” look. I realize that he wasn’t to know, of course, and that maybe we need to lay down some rules about this road trip, because I won’t be finding my joy if I have to sit in a small metal object and get hurtled through the air.
“We’ll start at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which looks amazing—they have this ride called The Big One, and it’s the tallest rollercoaster in the UK—it’s, like, sixty-five meters up!”
This really does get better and better.
“That’s not too far away,” he carries on, “maybe a couple of hours. Luke’s booked tickets already, and we can easily be there by the time it opens. We stay there till about twelve, then head to a place called Warrington, where there’s a little one called Gulliver’s World. There’s some big rides, but also a lot for babies, so you might be fine there, Mum! Anyway, if we leave there by about two thirty, we can be at Alton Towers in time to get the last couple of hours there! Alton Towers! How fantastic does that sound?”
Ugh. It sounds terrible.
“More fantastic than anything I could have possibly imagined,” I say. “Thank you both so much. But what about Betty, for real? It’s too hot to leave her in the motorhome, even though she has her little fan and the cooling mat...”
I gaze up at Luke imploringly, and he pulls a “sorry” face before speaking.
“Erm... well, I’d thought of that and booked her into a doggie day care for the first one. There’s a woman right by the Pleasure Beach who specializes in looking after the pets of people who go to the theme park.”
“How very enterprising of her,” I reply, hating her guts. “Will Betty be okay with that, with being left with a stranger?”
“Have you met Betty? There are no strangers to her, just friends waiting to be licked. She’s a social butterfly.”
“Right. What about the others?” I ask, hoping against hope that wherever Alton Towers actually is, it is also completely devoid of dog minders.
“Struck out at the middle one, thought we’d take turns,” he says sheepishly. Typical—the one that sounded most like I could cope with it.
“And the last?” I don’t even want to say its name.
“Yeah, sorry... found someone to have Betty overnight there. And actually booked us into some proper accommodation at the theme park, because then we can... um, go back the next morning?”
My eyes narrow, and I hiss: “Well, aren’t you Mr. Resourceful?”
He grimaces in response, and I hit him with my next objection: “This sounds very expensive.”
This is not only a way for me to try to get out of it; it’s also true—it’s one of the many reasons I’ve never done this kind of thing with Charlie before. That and my wussiness.
“It’s my treat,” replies Luke, looking at me steadily, as though daring me to argue. “I’ve secretly always wanted to go to these places, but felt too embarrassed to do it as a grown man on his own. You know, that looks weird, doesn’t it? So thank you for providing me with the perfect excuse to be a big kid again.”
If Katie were still around, he wouldn’t need an excuse. The thought scatters sadness across my thoughts, and I’m glad for Charlie’s excited chatter.
“You’re welcome!” he says, grinning. “Oh, come on, Mum! Embrace the new! It’ll be fun!”
I suspect the only thing I’ll be embracing is a sick bag, but I nod and say I will try.
Charlie seems appeased and goes back inside, a bounce in his step. I emerge fully from my sleeping bag pupa and shake my limbs loose until everything feels almost normal again.
“I’m sorry,” says Luke immediately. “He didn’t mention that you weren’t exactly a fan.”
“No, he wouldn’t, would he? I have raised an evil genius.”
“But, look—when we stay at the hotel at Alton Towers, there’s also a water park?”
“Right. Well. I do like swimming.”
“And there’s a spa?”
“Oh. Even better. What else?”
“An eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet breakfast?”
“Okay. You’ve sold me. Just don’t gang up on me and make me do anything I don’t want to, all right? And we don’t need to take turns on the middle one. I’ll stay with Betty. I’ll tell Charlie I’m working up some content for the blog—that’ll placate him.”
Luke nods and grins at me. “It might be fun, you know. We all do need to step outside our comfort zones every now and then.”
I stare at him and wonder just how far out of my comfort zone I need to be—I lost my job, my house fell off a cliff, and I have just noticed that I somehow have bug bites on my cleavage. I remain silent and take a deep breath and sip some more coffee. I look around, at the green and the blue and the many shades of nature, and I remind myself of how happy I felt yesterday. Luke is right; I need to relax, to slow down, to avoid tying myself back up in those knots I was talking about only a few hours ago.
“Yep. All right. I hear you, and I will try to... gosh, find my joy!”
I cringe as I say it and walk toward the steps of the van. I pause in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and gaze behind me. At the wide-open spaces, at the sunlight falling through the leaves, at this man I now feel like I know so much better. I can hear Charlie laughing inside and know he is watching some silly video on TikTok, excited about his day. Who could be churlish in the face of so much bounty?
“You know,” I say, tapping the doorframe of the motorhome with my palm, “that could be a good name for the magnificent beast you call home.”
“What could?”
“Joy.”
He tilts his head and looks the van over. His eyes crinkle up with a smile, and he says: “You know what? I think you could be right. So what say you, me, Charlie, Betty, and Joy hit the road again? The Big One awaits!”
I grimace and go inside.
I take far longer than usual getting dressed and eating a bowl of cereal, because, frankly, I don’t want to set off. Because the sooner we get going, the sooner we arrive at places I have no desire to go. Procrastination is my friend.
When we finally get going, we use the motorway for the first time, which is about as interesting as it usually is. The highlight is a stop at a beautiful service station called Tebay that seems to be a tourist destination in its own right, where we stock up on gorgeous fresh produce and all-important bacon sandwiches. Luke also buys some new biscuits for his granny’s tin.
I endure the morning at Blackpool, refusing to go on anything faster than the Dora the Explorer boat ride. I do get a kick from watching Luke and Charlie charge around, though, speeding from ride to ride to pack in as much as they can. Luke seems to devolve from being a grown man to becoming even more of a teenager than Charlie, and I see a lot of dads acting the same way—I wonder if there is some kind of tested theme park phenomenon that provokes this response.
I mainly sit around a lot, trying to find patches of shade on another warm day, taking pictures of them. Luke buys us all The Big One baseball caps, insisting that we need souvenirs at every stop, but only the two men in my life actually take on the ride—I actually feel a bit sick looking at it from ground level.
When we finally leave, Charlie is still on an adrenaline high—chattering about it, describing it, reliving it, sharing stories of how Luke screamed like he was in a slasher movie when they reached the top. He is still wired by the time we whiz down the M6 to the next theme park, where I gratefully bow out. Betty and I spend a very pleasant hour and a half writing and sniffing bottoms. I’ll leave it a mystery as to who did what. We’ve parked up by a grassy area, and I take her out for a little trot and get some sandwiches ready for the adventurers’ return. When they finally turn up, they are both laughing and soaking wet.
“Last stop the log flume?” I say, looking them up and down.
“Yeah,” says Charlie, “it was perfect in this weather! Lunch. Awesome. We saw dinosaurs.”
It’s a garbled sentence really, so I just nod as he slumps down on the sofa and points the fan at his face. Within seconds, he has inhaled his sandwiches and moved on to a banana. Luke produces a bowl of strawberries from the fridge, and they disappear so quickly, it is like a magic trick. Charlie looks up hopefully, and I pass him the Scottie-dog biscuit tin. It feels impossible to keep him fed at the moment—but then again, he is using a lot of energy.
“So,” I say, once starvation has been averted, “dinosaurs? Real ones, like Jurassic Park ?”
“Well, no, Mum, because that’s a film and dinosaurs are extinct. Silly.”
“Well, you know me, I have a PhD in Silly.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t realize you had a qualification. Should I call you Dr. Silly from now on then?”
I respond by throwing a tea towel in his face, because that seems reasonable.
Luke shows me his pictures of the actual dinosaurs—a walk-through exhibit that probably enthralls little ones, and possibly Charlie on a good day. He says he’ll send me some copies for my blog, and I wonder how I have somehow turned my life holiday into work.
Except... well, it’s not actual work, is it? I’m enjoying it and I’m not getting paid, so it can’t be.
As we hit the motorway yet again, I decide that as we are having a boring stretch of the day anyway, I will do some chores. I have been putting off checking my emails and feel the vivid colors of my current world fade to gray as I log in. I feel like it’s Monday morning all over again.
I do a quick scan, see that there is a lot of junk, confirmation that Nina has been sold—RIP, Nina—and a reminder to book my VIP slot in the Next Sale, which I think I will give a miss. There is also some paperwork to do with my former job, which I deal with quickly.
That done, I give Barb a call—I already feel like I haven’t seen her for years, and she was such a kind ally.
“Oh, hello!” she says, the sound of glasses and laughter in the background. “We’re just having a barbecue! Anthony installed a hot tub, so we have my sister and her tribe around to celebrate...”
I have been to Barb’s house a few times, and the image makes me smile. She is so efficient, so hardworking, so precise—but also so bright and colorful. Like a robot rainbow. I know that the garden will be perfectly mowed with stripes down it, and the food will be served on matching tableware, and the drinks will be summer cocktails that she has made from scratch. Oh, to be more like Barb.
“Sounds fab. I’m in a motorhome on the M6, heading to Alton Towers.”
“Ooh, get you, the open road—fancy-pants!”
I have no idea why she views the M6 as fancy. I glance out the window and see the usual dazzling blend of parking areas, concrete bridges, and green signs. She’s clearly never been on it herself.
“How is it going then, the big adventure? How is... I’ve forgotten his name?”
“Charlie?” I supply, knowing full well that’s not what she means.
“No, you tease! The other one...”
“Luke. And he’s fine, thanks. It’s been a lot of fun so far. I’ve slept outside and we’ve done some wild swimming.”
There is a pause, and I can imagine the look of horror on her face. The chlorinated hot tub is probably Barb’s idea of wild swimming.
“You mean, like, in an outdoor pool? A lido maybe?”
“Oh no—I mean like in an actual river, and an actual lake. With fish and aquatic insects and mud and plants that tickle your toes.”
“Ugh! How horrid. But I’m glad you’re having a nice time. Did you get the letter about the layoffs?”
I confirm that I did, and we catch up briefly on our colleagues, sharing our surprise that sixty-seven-year-old Barry has opted to relocate to Kidderminster. We wonder if maybe he is trying to escape his wife, whom he has complained about solidly for the last two years.
“So I have some letters for you here, and some travel brochures,” Barb says, and I hear the background noise change as she goes inside. “Some junk stuff. One from Charlie’s school maybe?”
I ask her to open it and discover that it is a letter inviting him back for a farewell assembly next week. I glance over at him, see that he is asleep, and decide that I will ask him later. I really hope he doesn’t want to go—I am worried that finding my joy is a tentative state of affairs, and that if I am forced to go back to the town where we lived so soon, forced to face the memories so quickly, my joy will evaporate and I will be finding my desperation instead. That’s not as catchy a hookline really. Still, if he wants to do it, wants to go back and see his friends, I will find a way to make it happen.
“There’s a couple more...,” Barb says, and I hear her riffling through them.
“This is so exciting!” I announce. “The suspense is killing me—what is it? Is it a telegram from the king? Is it an invitation to a high-stakes baccarat game in Monaco? Is it tickets to a masquerade ball in Venice?”
“Erm... looks like a gas bill?” she replies, sounding disappointed on my behalf.
“Oh. Okay. Could you take a pic and send it to me so I can sort it out, please? Anything else?”
“One more... looks official.”
“Is it in a brown envelope?” I have an irrational fear of brown envelopes, as they are forever linked in my mind with taxes, driving licenses, and other scary government-based organizations.
“No, white...”
She opens it up and is quiet while she presumably reads it.
“Oh dear... not really a nice one, this, Jenny! It’s from your insurers, saying they’re considering not paying out on your home contents claim until they have investigated a bit further. Apparently they suspect it was due to erosion, which you’re not covered for because that’s a specialist policy you don’t have. I’m so sorry. They’re absolute bastards, aren’t they? Excuse my French!”
Barb never swears, and I can imagine the perfect pink blush as she feels ashamed of herself. She is, however, right in her choice of word. I had suspected there might be problems, because, well, why wouldn’t I? I rack my brains to remember what Bob said on the night it all happened, and although there was definite reference to storms and rain and sea currents, sadly I do seem to recall that erosion was mentioned as well.
I know I don’t have a “specialist policy,” and wonder right now how big of an idiot that makes me. For all I know, it was mentioned in the small print of my lease or something—but, seriously, nobody expects this to happen, do they?
I tell Barb not to worry about it and promise to stay in touch before I hang up. I feel a bit deflated, a bit worried, a bit anxious. Even without the insurance, I remind myself, I am financially okay for a while longer—but it acts as a trigger, that letter. It trips me up, catches me unawares, stabs me in the back. I have been ignoring reality and very much enjoying it, and now I feel sucked back in.
I try not to let it take over, try not to let it defeat me, but by the time we drop Betty off at her doggie holiday pad and reach Alton Towers, I am not in the best of moods. But I don’t want to bring down Charlie and Luke, so I fake it in the hope that I will eventually make it.
We park the motorhome, and Luke explains some complex logistics—he can’t leave it there overnight, so he plans to go back to the place where Betty is staying and park it there, then cycle back to the hotel and meet us. As we board the monorail that takes us into the park, I am still dizzied by how much all of this is costing. Even though Luke is cool about it, I’m not sure I am.
“Hey, guys,” says Charlie, forming the words around the stick of rock candy he has in his mouth. He got it earlier and it says “Blackpool” down the middle. He tugs it out and asks: “If you were a piece of rock candy, what would you have written inside you?”
“I’m not sure,” I answer, “but yours would probably say ‘evil.’ Or maybe ‘hungry.’ Or maybe both.”
“Ha! That’s a good one. Mum, I think yours would be ‘red wine,’ or ‘go away, I’m tired.’ Luke, I reckon you’re more of a ‘wobbling frog’ dude. Maybe, if the rock was big enough, you could be ‘pretty hot for an old man.’ So many possibilities...”
Luke and I share a smile, and I ponder the question with far more depth than it warrants. Right now, at this precise moment in time, if I were a stick of rock candy, it would say “anxious” down the middle. I have the urge to bite my fingernails, which is odd as I have never done that before in my life. Hey, who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
Once we have checked in at the very pretty hotel, we head to the entrance of the theme park. Lots of other people seem to be leaving, and the pathways are awash with red-faced toddlers and fractious kids and exhausted-looking parents and couples carrying huge cuddly toys they have presumably won at stalls. The brutal heat of earlier in the day has faded, and the park itself is actually a lot more attractive than I expected. There are lots of green spaces and sparkling water features, an old building that looks like it was maybe a manor house once upon a time, and a main street lined with shops and cafes.
We equip ourselves with cool drinks and more snacks for Charlie, and the boys consult a map to see where they want to go first. Luke has bought some kind of pass that lets us get fast-tracked onto certain rides, which probably cost more than Nina.
I am angry with myself for suddenly seeing everything in financial terms, for sliding back into my old routines and my old thought processes, but I don’t seem able to quite stop it. I am making it an issue when it’s not, and I am disrespecting Luke’s generosity by continuing to scratch away at it. I suspect it’s a combination of talking to Barb and being in places I hate. It’s not really the money I’m worried about—it’s everything. I’ve successfully managed to shut down most of my usual worry-worms on this trip so far, and I don’t want to let them sneak back in.
“Are you okay?” Luke says quietly as we join the queue for a Mum-acceptable ride—i.e., a very small rollercoaster that seems to be full of toddlers. “You seem a bit down.”
Charlie is ahead of us and is chatting to two teenage girls who are taking their little sister onto the ride.
“Ah no, I’m sorry—I’m okay. Just a bit of disappointing news from home. I don’t want to talk about it, really. Not now anyway. Just ignore me. I’ll snap out of it.”
“You don’t need to snap out of anything,” he says as we shuffle forward a few paces. “You’ve been through a lot, and there are going to be downs as well as ups. I don’t expect you to be ‘on’ all the time—nobody can be.”
“Charlie seems to be managing it,” I reply, nodding toward him.
“Well, Charlie is eighteen and talking to two pretty girls at a theme park. That’s the definition of paradise in most young lads’ minds. You’re in a slightly different position. If you want to go back to the hotel and have a bit of time on your own, just say so—I can hang with Charlie. You could go to the spa or watch TV or have a bath, whatever you like.”
I briefly think about it, but I know I wouldn’t be able to relax. I know I’d just start thinking about the insurance and how unfair it is after I’ve paid them for all these years, even when I could barely afford it. Then I’d think about all the things I can’t replace, and how the money wouldn’t help with that anyway. Then I’d think about Charlie’s leavers’ assembly and how that would have been a definite date in the diary not so long ago. And then, and then, and then... It would be an endless spiral to nowhere good at all. I know myself well enough to be able to predict it, and it annoys me—how is it that we can see what we’re doing wrong, and understand why we’re doing it, but somehow can’t quite break the pattern?
“Thank you,” I say, smiling and trying to put some oomph into it, “but I actually can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than right here with you two.”
“Okay then. That’s settled. Are you ready for the crazy adrenaline spike that is this very tame rollercoaster?”
“I was born ready!” I say, shaking my fist.
I actually do kind of enjoy it—it is fast enough for the breeze to cool me down, but not so fast that I fear I will revisit my sandwiches.
When we get off on the other side, Charlie and Luke are planning to head to something called Nemesis.
“Nemesis?” I say. “What a charming name!”
“It’s not one for you, Mum,” Charlie answers, shaking his head. “You sit in a carriage that dangles down, and it goes at, like, fifty miles an hour, and it does a corkscrew, and... well, even I think it looks a bit scary!”
I stare at the toddlers getting off the little ride we’ve just done. I look at the picture of Nemesis on Charlie’s phone. I feel the churning anxiety that is starting to burn inside my stomach, the knots that are retying, the fear I am fighting that has absolutely nothing to do with theme park rides and everything to do with the rest of my life. With the cottage, with the losses, with the conversation I had with Luke last night.
I can’t change any of that. I can’t fix past mistakes, or wish my house would fly back onto land like a video rewinding, or control many of the things I know I am likely to start worrying about now the process has started. But I can change this—I can change this one thing, right now, at this exact moment.
“I want to go on Nemesis,” I say loudly—loud enough to convince myself. “Take me to Nemesis!”
“Mum, are you sure?” asks Charlie, looking slightly worried about me. I don’t blame him. I’m worried about me too.
Luke grabs hold of my hand and waves it in the air, like I am Rocky and I have just defeated Apollo Creed. “Yes, she’s sure! She’s a champ! Come on, let’s run—it’s always more fun when you run...”
I am swept along with the two of them, falling quickly behind because they are both over six foot and I am very much not. They wait for me, and we go to the queue and we show our fast-track passes and before very much time has elapsed at all, I find myself sitting in what feels like a very flimsy piece of metal, trapped under an overhead restraint, being flung around at a squillion miles an hour. I am sitting between Charlie and Luke, and my hands are in my lap, fists clenched. My heart is pounding, and as the carriage starts to clang and bang and chug up a steep metal track, I know I have made a terrible mistake. It is too high. It is too loud. It is too dangerous. My breath starts to speed up, coming in short panting gusts, and my eyes feel wrong—I am blinking rapidly, trying to clear the fuzzy bright light on the periphery of my vision.
Our carriage pauses at the very top of the hill, and I am petrified. I think I might actually pass out and can’t believe I allowed myself to get carried away like this. I’ve gone from I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar to I Am Woman, Hear Me Cry Like a Baby within minutes. “It’s okay!” Luke says, leaning over so he is right next to my ear. “It’s all right—we’ve got you!”
He unclenches my fist and twines his fingers into mine, and on the other side of me, Charlie does the same. They both grip hold of me tightly, not letting go. I look from one face to the other, see their concern, their encouragement, their reassuring smiles. I stare straight ahead and tell myself it is all going to be fine, that I am not alone, that I can do this. And then we drop.
It only takes a few minutes, but by the end, I am a wobbling wreck of a human. My legs are jelly, and Luke has to help me out of my seat, keeping an arm around my shoulders as we walk away. Charlie is buzzing around us like an inebriated fly, jumping and laughing and saying, “I don’t believe you did it! You rock, Mum!” That makes me feel a bit better, a bit prouder, a bit stronger—but it doesn’t negate the nausea, and I am grateful to move along, to get away from the evil thing of steel and speed. We follow the crowds through to a place where there are photos up on screens, and we find ours—it is hilarious. I have my eyes clamped shut and my mouth is a huge screaming O , my hair flying behind me. At my sides, Charlie and Luke are still holding my hands, looking a lot less terrified but still pretty crazy. Luke puts our order in and we wait while they are loaded into a bag for us. I realize that these are the first “proper” photos—not on-my-phone photos—that I have amassed since I lost a lot of my old ones.
“So,” says Charlie as we make our way back outside, “what’s next, Mum? The Wicker Man? Oblivion?”
“Well, son, they both sound perfectly delightful—but no thanks. I did it, and I’m pleased I did, but that wasn’t something I want to repeat in a hurry. I’m going to find some grass and become horizontal for a while. Run free, little man, run free...”
He looks disappointed for a split second, then his phone beeps, and he suddenly doesn’t care anymore. “Would it be okay with you guys if I went off on my own for a bit?” he asks, grinning. “Tasha and Lily have asked if I want to go on some rides with them...”
“Tasha and Lily?” I repeat, momentarily confused. “Oh! The girls from earlier... Yes, that’s fine. I don’t mind. Luke might want to come with you, though.”
I know, of course, that Luke will not want to go on a double date with my son and two teenagers—or at least I hope he won’t. It just amuses me to make Charlie think it for a moment.
“Nah, off you go, Charlie,” Luke replies. “I’m feeling like a lie-down myself.”
We make arrangements to meet him back at the hotel for dinner and find a shady spot by the side of a lake. It is nearing closing time, and the park is emptying out. Slow, tired lines of people are straggling toward the exits and the parking lots; too much fun had by all.
I stretch out on the grass, thrilled by the simple touch of the ground against my body. The ordinary joy of being flat and still and stable. Luke joins me, and we are both quiet, listening to the random sounds of music from rides and passing chatter and the birds on the water.
“So. Do you feel better after that?” he asks eventually. “Felt like a bit of a watershed moment.”
“Yeah. I literally faced down my Nemesis. I don’t know... I was starting to feel the stress creep back in. There’s a dispute about the insurance payment, predictably enough, and while that isn’t actually a disaster, it was just... dragging me back into the whirlpool, you know?”
“I do. And if you need any help challenging them, let me know. My brother’s a lawyer; he’ll always write a letter that sounds like he’s about to smite them with Thor’s hammer.”
“Wow. Nice image. Maybe you should have been the writer...”
“Nope, I’m numbers, not words. That’s your bag. Is that why you were worried about how much this was costing earlier?”
“Probably. Although I might have been anyway—these places aren’t cheap. It’s one of the reasons we’ve never been before. That and my terror.”
“Your former terror, now vanquished.”
“Maybe.”
He rolls over onto one side and props himself up on his elbow, looking down at me. The sun is behind him and he looks dark and mysterious. His hair is slightly longer than when we first met, and I realize he keeps it so brutally short because it is the kind of hair that curls if you don’t. I’d quite like to reach out and touch it, but that would be, you know, weird.
“You do remember what I told you last night, don’t you, about my working life?” he asks.
“Yeah. Of course. I remember everything you told me last night.”
Her bedroom. Her sheets. Her cuddly toys. Forever burned into my mind, that terrible image.
“Well, believe me when I say I’m not worried about money, or about a day at a theme park. I live cheaply most of the time—the odd ale, fuel, camp fees, food, not much else. It’s simple, and I don’t spend much, and I have plenty. In fact, it’s actually really nice to be able to do this—to use some of it on fun, on something frivolous, something that brings someone else pleasure as well as me. So, please, don’t be a selfish moo and deprive me of that!”
“A selfish moo?” I repeat, laughing. “What kind of a phrase is that?”
“One of my gran’s. She called everyone a moo when she was annoyed with them. Selfish moo, silly moo, greedy moo, cheeky moo, naughty moo... I was called pretty much every kind of moo by the time I was ten!”
“You talk about her a lot. Were you close?” I ask, more than happy to stop talking about money. Nothing is guaranteed to put me on the misery train faster than talking about money. That insurance letter has been one heck of a downer.
He flops back down and says: “Yeah. We were. My parents were busy people, and my brother and I spent a lot of time there when we were kids. She was the first person I ever lost, and I still miss her. When Katie was born, one of my first thoughts was that I was so sad she didn’t get to meet her. We gave her my gran’s middle name—it was Marjorie, so you can see why we didn’t make it our first choice...”
“Yeah. That’s never quite made a comeback, has it? So, are your parents still around?”
I realize I sound slightly nervous as I ask that, because Luke is in his forties, and I am in my thirties, and this is the age when parents still being around isn’t always guaranteed. I feel a sharp tug in my chest as I even think this and take a deep breath to try to shoo it away.
“They’re still alive. No need to sound so worried! They’re still busy people, and they live in New Zealand now. They were both GPs, and now they’re retired and spend their time climbing hills and visiting lakes and generally having a good time.”
“Wow. That sounds awesome. What about your brother?”
“He’s younger than me and lives in London and has three kids. Anything else you need to know, Officer?”
“I’m being really nosy, aren’t I? I’m sorry. It’s just the way I’m made.”
He sits up and grabs a bottle of water from the backpack next to him. He passes it to me first, because he is a gentleman, it seems.
“I don’t mind,” he replies, looking off across the lake. “It just takes a bit of getting used to. I think I’ve talked more about myself over the last week than I have in the last four years. It makes me feel both better and also more... exposed, if that makes sense?”
“It does,” I say, nodding. “And I get it, I really do. I might not have gone off grid and lived in a motorhome or anything, but I’ve led a pretty quiet life. Me and Charlie against the world kind of vibe. I’ve never had really close friends. I’ve just been too busy... and maybe too much of a wuss.”
“Well, as we saw today on Nemesis, you are a wuss no more! But what about your family? You didn’t talk much about them last night, but obviously there’s some kind of rift. What happened?”
I close my eyes and wonder how to encapsulate it all into a few sentences. How to distill decades of mistakes, regret, and hurt into a few words. It feels impossible, really—and it also feels dangerous. Like something I shouldn’t do, because if I start letting it all unravel, before I know it, I’ll have a giant ball of yarn at my feet and will be totally naked.
I feel a gentle touch against my hand, feel Luke’s fingers briefly make contact with mine. I want to grab on, to hold tight, to console myself the way I did on that rollercoaster. But I don’t, as that might only make it harder.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he says quietly.
“We say that to each other a lot, have you noticed?”
“We do. Like we’re both so aware of how easy it might be to take a wrong step. That doesn’t make it a bad thing—maybe it just means we’re, I don’t know, respectful of each other’s boundaries? Oh God, I sounded like a self-help book there, didn’t I?”
“A bit, to be honest—but hey, I’m writing a blog about finding my joy, so I’m in no position to judge!”
I sit up, drink some more water, and look down at Luke sprawled on the grass. He takes up a lot of space. He is dressed in baggy shorts and an Iron Maiden T-shirt, and I can’t imagine him suited and booted and working in corporate finance. I will never know that version of him, and that is okay—we all change. We all grow, and evolve, and who knows how many new skins we will wear before the end?
“Well,” I say slowly, “if you’d asked me about my family years ago, I’d have had a simple answer. I’d tell you they were controlling, manipulative, domineering. I’d have told you about how stuck-up I thought they were, how they had my whole life mapped out for me with no regard to what I wanted. How they tried to trap me and stop me from living the life I wanted. I’d tell you about their snobbery, and their judgments, and their cloying insistence on what was right for me and what wasn’t. I’d have said they were suffocating me, that they only loved their fantasy version of me, not the real one. I’d have told you all of that, and meant every word.”
“And now?” he says gently. “Now you wouldn’t?”
“Now... I’m not so sure. Now I’m an adult myself, and the mother to an eighteen-year-old. Now I have more life experience of my own and understand the way a parent wants to protect their child a lot more than I did back then. When I have fights with Charlie, when he accuses me of treating him like a child, I can see both sides of it. Basically, now I’m not entirely clear on any of it.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“Nothing. Everything. Maybe somewhere in between. I was seventeen when I met Rob, Charlie’s dad. I was on track for all the usual good stuff—final exams, university, career, and, at least in their minds, I suspect, marriage to a suitable man. Financial ease, couple of kids, everything all very nice and ordered. Then I went and made it all messy. I fell in love, in that deep and completely committed way you only ever seem to be capable of when you’re that young.
“Rob was older than me, and he was... well, he was a drifter, a dreamer, even back then. He’d left school at sixteen, never had a proper job, played drums in a band.”
“Oh no. That’s a red flag,” he says, smiling. “The drummers are always the crazy ones.”
“Yeah—tell me about it! But none of that mattered to me. He was the love of my life. He was my world, and there was no way I was ever going to be parted from him, you know? I didn’t think I could actually breathe without him.
“My parents were not pleased and didn’t try to hide it. At first, it was little stuff—they tried to keep me in at night, booked me up with other things, tried to distract me. Told me I was too young for something so serious, that I needed to concentrate on my schoolwork. Then they stepped it up, gave me a curfew, told me I couldn’t see him anymore...”
“I bet that went down well. Nothing quite as effective as telling a teenager they can’t do something to make them want to do it even more.”
“Exactly. My older brother was allowed to do whatever he wanted, so it always seemed like this huge double standard—I went on long rants about the patriarchy and all sorts... and, yeah, it didn’t work at all, keeping us apart—in fact, it made it all even more exciting. There was a lot of conflict, a lot of very hurtful things said on both sides. I think they still assumed I was their malleable little girl, and I assumed they were evil, nasty old control freaks trying to brainwash me into being a Stepford wife, and the truth... well, the truth is there was probably a bit of both going on.”
“It got bad, I take it? Bad enough that you left?” Luke sits up beside me, frowning.
“Oh yes. It got very bad. The curfew didn’t work, so they started locking me in my bedroom at night, which made me crazy. Even more determined. So one night I climbed out of my window and snuck off to be with him. When they saw I wasn’t there, they called the police and got Rob arrested for abducting me. It was an insane drama. I was seventeen, and once the police realized I was with him of my own free will, they let him go—but it felt like there was nothing to go back to after that. I only went home once more, to get some of my things, and then I walked out and told them they’d never see me again. And later... even when I was alone, with a baby, and Rob had done what they probably suspected he would all along and walked out on me, I still somehow couldn’t go back on that. I don’t know if it was pride, or me just being stubborn, or if I genuinely did think I was better off without them. It all feels so long ago now. But fast-forward a lifetime or so, and here we are. I have Charlie. I had a home and a job and I didn’t feel like I’d done a bad job of it all, really—didn’t feel like I’d missed out. Except now...”
“Except now,” he continues for me, “some of those things have literally fallen off a cliff, and everything feels uncertain, and you’re wondering about it all? About your parents? About the past?”
“Not just the past,” I say firmly. “About the future. That thing Charlie said about us being a family. The way he’s always loved being with his friends who have siblings. The questions I know he has about me, about my background.”
“Has he asked?”
“Yes, kind of. But not seriously until the last few years. By that point, I was so deeply embedded in it all, you know? I tried not to think about them myself, to the extent that I think I’d almost stopped. Whenever he raised the subject, I’d try to answer in a bland way that wasn’t exactly lying, but also wasn’t exactly answering—and he’s a nice lad, he could see that it upset me, and he never pushed too hard. I think maybe I’ve been a selfish moo, Luke.”
This is the first time I’ve admitted this properly out loud, and it says a lot about the way I feel about Luke. I feel safe with him, I realize—able to be myself, even when I don’t like what I’m being.
“I wonder if I’m being fair to him, keeping all this a secret?” I continue. “Keeping him away from his relations? I made the decision to cut them out of my life before he was even born, and I did it when I was younger than he is now, because it felt like they’d boxed me into a corner. It was the only option I felt I had. But do I have the right to make that decision on his behalf? I don’t expect you to be able to answer that, by the way...”
“Good. Because I can’t. It’s a tough call. All I can say is that from what I’ve seen, you’ve done a good job. You’ve been a good mum. So I’d say maybe trust your instincts? I think you’ll come to the right conclusion—but you don’t have to come to it right now. You’re still reeling from everything that happened, so you’re going to feel a bit off-balance. Maybe keep doing what you’re doing, keep finding your joy, or whatever it is we’re doing on this crazy trip—and then perhaps the answers will start to feel a bit clearer.”
I stand up and swipe the grass off my legs. I feel more robust physically now I’ve recovered from Nemesis, but a wee bit wobbly emotionally after that info dump. I reach out, extend my hand. Luke grabs hold and I pretend to heave him up, making comments about the biscuit barrel, and we make our way to the pathway.
“Back to the hotel for me, I think,” I say. “Might accidentally fall into the bar for a little glass of wine...”
“Sounds like a terrible accident that could most definitely happen. I’ll get Joy moved and see you back there. Won’t be long. I might accidentally order a beer or two as well, as I don’t have to set off first thing for a change. Hey, do you want to see what I got from the photo place? It was some kind of package deal I just said yes to because I felt a bit sick...”
I nod and he pulls some printed photos out of the bag, enclosed in cardboard frames. My traumatized face, immortalized in print. Then he shows me a fridge magnet and a key ring.
“These are for you,” he says, passing them over.
“Well, that’s very kind. It’s a shame I don’t have a fridge, or the keys to anything that still exists.”
“I know that—it’s an aspirational gift. Kind of like, here are the first steps toward having those things, if that’s what you decide you want.”
“So,” I say as we reach the gates and follow the wooded path to the hotel, “I’m not just finding my joy—I’m finding my fridge and finding my door and finding my car?”
It’s a tall order, I think. I’m not sure I feel capable of it all, and suspect he has more faith in me than I have in myself right now.
“Exactly! But before any of that, you can find your wine, and find your nice dinner, and find your very own squishy hotel bed...”
“That,” I say firmly, “sounds like a most excellent plan.”