20
A ringing phone, Janey is to think later, used to be such a wonderful thing. So full of excitement and possibility. A boy, some gossip, just a friend for a chat.
Now it is almost certainly someone attempting to scam you out of your life savings, and nobody younger than her ever picked up the phone for anything.
This definitely is not an improvement. Also, you’d think it would make public transport more pleasant, but it turns out the last guys on earth who still think having a mobile phone is magical and impressive are businessmen who like to bark things about paradigms into their phones in the middle of train carriages. On speaker.
But now, the phone is ringing and it’s Lish and she picks it up without thinking too much about it, even though Lish and she usually WhatsApp each other ‘worst patient of the week’ awards, while feverishly hoping the hospital will never have a reason to subpoena their WhatsApp messages and promising faithfully to one another that if this happens they will both throw their phones into the sea.
She is listening to the ridiculous roar of Dwight’s car tearing off down the sea road – and feeling slightly envious of her daughter, which isn’t a good look but even so, it isn’t every day a cowboy comes to whisk you out on a sunny afternoon, even if it is to the Caithness Builder’s Merchants – and idly considering another cup of tea when she presses hello.
‘Hey, you!’
At first Lish isn’t saying very much. But gradually, her choked voice starts.
‘Janey? It’s Lish.’
Janey knows immediately. ‘What is it? What is it? Not the girls?’
‘No, no . . . it’s Johnson.’
Lish’s sweet, rotund, gentle husband, their postie.
Everyone knows Johnson; he is beloved in the town.
It’s rare the week he doesn’t come home with a dozen fresh eggs, or the joys of some overflowing plum trees, or, on one memorable occasion, a brace of skinned rabbits hanging in the larder that made Lish scream her head off.
‘What? What?’ The worst things ran through Janey’s head: his red van, upside down in a ditch. A stray shotgun across a field.
‘He’s had a stroke.’
‘Oh, my God ! Are you at the T she never does. Janey stops babbling immediately and there is silence in the little space made by the drawn curtains around the bed. ‘I know he’s going to . . . I know they’re going to do stuff . . . ’
They all murmur in agreement.
‘And you’re right about Sandro, he’s a nob.’
‘He is !’
‘But . . . I thought . . . I thought . . . ’ Her voice is cracking.
‘I just thought at this age . . . God. I thought we’d have it worked out.
That we’d have our careers, and know what we’re doing and have learned a bit about the world and raised our children, God save them, and they’d all be launched . . . ’
Janey makes a sceptical face but the rest of them nod.
‘ . . . and then there’d be some space , do you know what I mean?
Some time. To look around on your life, in the middle of it, and think, well, phew.
Here we are. This is cool. This is great.
Okay, the menopause is a pain in the fricking arse, but otherwise these should be calm waters now.
We’ve done the career, the finding the guy, the babies, the teens . . . now it’s time for us.’
She tears up again.
‘But it never is. It never is. There’s always, always something.
Now it’s my Johnson. But then next it’s going to be my mum, I know it, she’s already forgetting things and she’s four thousand kilometres away and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about that, because for damn sure my brothers are utterly fricking useless. And one of Emma’s . . . ’
She tails off, obviously not quite ready to share whatever that was.
Janey looks at her, surprised. And slightly worried.
Lish is the friend who always has everything figured out, who knows who she is, who lives so comfortably, cutting through the world like a steady ship.
It worries her suddenly. If even Lish feels this way, what hope is there for any of them?
Lish’s voice is tailing off. ‘I just wanted . . . I just wanted five minutes of fucking peace and quiet,’ she says, in a voice so quiet it is almost a whisper. ‘I take on all the obligations of love – I do. I always have.’
‘But . . . ’ Janey is more flabbergasted by this than by the terrible thing that has befallen Johnson. ‘But you’re always so calm.’
Lish rolls her eyes. ‘Of course I am! I have to be! I’ve seen anxious mothers in childbirth and I’ve seen calm ones, and you know who makes it through the best?
I watch terrified mothers, older mothers, IVF mothers leave hospital, fretting over their babies, and guess what – the babies fret right back.
Those babies are going to be screaming every night – for years.
You work hard and project calm out into the world and that’s the only way you’re going to get through. ’
Janey nods. It isn’t advice she’s always been able to take, that’s absolutely for sure. But she recognises the truth in it.
‘I thought we’d have longer.’
Lish squeezes Johnson’s wrist again, and his fingers flutter.
‘He is going to recover,’ says Janey.
‘He is,’ says Lish. ‘Very slowly. And then it will be something else. And then something else. And then we’ll be old.’
Janey gives her a hug. ‘You know that chart that always shows women’s happiness peaking and going upwards after sixty?’ she says. ‘We need to cling to that.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ says Lish. ‘That’s because their husbands die. And I really like mine!’ And she bursts into wails again.