Miss You

SEVEN Tess

December1997

On Christmas morning, I woke up to the distant clatter of saucepans. Leaping out of bed, I ran downstairs in my nightie and bare feet. In the kitchen, Mum was crouching down to look at the progress of the turkey through the glass door of the oven. She turned and smiled up at me. “How was Midnight Mass?”

“I knew it couldn’t be true!” I was bursting with joy as I ran towards her, arms outstretched. Then I woke up, the cocoon of exquisite happiness shattered by crushing disappointment.

The room was dark, the blankets and pink chenille bedspread heavier than my duvet at home. The warm aroma of roasting turkey and distinctive clatter of someone cooking filtered up from the kitchen below. The O’Neills’ guest room, I remembered.

I wondered how long my dream had lasted. Was it a few minutes, or just a second? How did the brain do that? How did the sleeping consciousness manage to construct a story to interpret the smells and sounds around it? And why did I have to wake up so soon? I closed my eyes tight, trying to conjure Mum back, but she’d gone.

Was this the sign? I suddenly thought.

Mum could have said anything, but she’d mentioned Mass.

Hope was sleeping in the twin bed an arm’s length from mine.

“Happy Christmas, Tree!” she said, opening her eyes. “Christmas Tree!” she repeated, delighted.

I don’t think I ever saw Hope being sad. Obstinate, yes, angry for no reason, yes, but she’d always been like that. Sometimes I looked at my sister and I wondered whether she missed Mum at all. I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t going to introduce unhappiness if there was none. Sometimes I asked myself, if a five-year-old child can get over it, why can’t you?

“How was Midnight Mass?” Mrs.O’Neill said as we gathered in their living room to open presents.

“Same as usual,” said Doll, straight out.

She’d always been much better at lying than me, keeping it simple, gambling on getting away with it, rather than making up a narrative to explain our absence in case any of the congregation reported back on us.

I wondered if it was my guilt at going to the pub the previous evening instead of going to church that had subconsciously put the words into Mum’s mouth? Her presence still felt so strong, I was strangely disoriented.

“Which ones are my presents?” asked Hope.

With money Dad had given me, I’d got Hope a CD player from him. I’d bought her a carol compilation. Santa Claus had got her a stocking full of chocolate, although he didn’t actually visit our house or the O’Neills’ because we didn’t have chimneys: Hope was very literal-minded, and the idea of a big man with a beard sneaking around at night frightened the life out of her.

I’d got Dad some Homer Simpson socks from Hope and a bottle of Jameson’s from me, because that was the whiskey Mum always used to buy him. Dad seemed pleasantly surprised, as if he hadn’t expected anything.

Then it was my turn to open the gift of dangly earrings from Accessorize that I’d bought from Hope for me.

“Where’s your present for Tree?” Hope asked Dad.

I probably should have realized I was meant to buy myself something from him too. I felt like an idiot for believing Mum’s exclamations of surprise when she opened his gift of cheap perfume each year.

“Well now,” said my father, uncomfortably. “I didn’t really know what to get you, Tess, so you’ll be better off getting something for yourself.”

He stood up, took the money clip out of his back pocket and peeled off first five, then, aware of Mrs.O’Neill watching him, a further five ten-pound notes, which was generous, but I’d have preferred it if he’d thought of buying me a gift.

Mum always got me a diary, a normal page-a-day from WHSmith which she customized with a fabric cover she embroidered with my name and the year. It was the first Christmas I hadn’t received a diary since I was ten years old.

At lunch, there was a box of twelve crackers, which we never had at home because of the cost. After the shock of the initial bang, Hope became obsessed and went around the table insisting on pulling every single one, collecting up all the little gifts in the pink handbag Doll had bought her, but allowing us, after a small debate, to keep our tissue paper crowns.

“It’s what Christmas is all about, children, isn’t it?” Mr.O’Neill remarked, on several occasions, as if to remind himself.

Mrs.O’Neill made turkey with all the trimmings, with extra little sausages for Hope, and, for dessert, her very own Ice Cream Factory, which was a tub of soft-serve and a selection of Smarties, jelly beans and chocolate buttons, because Mrs.O’Neill had had enough little ones of her own to know that they didn’t always like Christmas pudding.

In the afternoon, Dad and Mr.O’Neill went to the pub and Hope settled down with Mrs.O’Neill in front of the big TV to watch a Disney film. After Doll and I had done the dishes, she suggested we go for a walk.

There was a pale, silver path across the water towards the wintry sun. When the colors were mistily muted like this, you could see why the town had attracted artists in its heyday, including Turner himself. Nowadays, most of the Victorian villas where well-to-do Londoners used to enjoy their holidays had become old folk’s homes, or hostels for what everyone referred to as “Care in the Community,” a motley collection of addicts and people with mental-health problems who wandered around the town during the day. Dingy loops of tinsel hung in joyless windows.

There were a few other people out and about, walking off their lunch. Without the usual bleep and rattle of slot machines from the amusement arcades, my ears tuned in to tiny snippets of conversation.

“Sad for those boys...,” an older woman in a wheelchair said to the younger woman who was pushing her along.

“A tragedy...”

Were they talking about a bereavement of their own, I wondered, or the Royal Family’s?

I guessed the two men in their thirties walking towards us were brothers who’d come home for Christmas. Or perhaps a gay couple? As they approached, one of them checked Doll out. So not gay. The other one was talking.

“...that’s the thing about living the dream...” From the look of him—cheap jeans and a leather jacket the color of diarrhea—I didn’t think things had worked out the way he’d hoped.

“What do you think the dream was?” I asked Doll.

“What dream?”

“Never mind.”

I’m always listening in to other people’s conversations and making up stories in my head to explain their history. Mum was the same. We’d go for a cup of tea in a cafe on the seafront and we’d be having this perfectly normal chat, but when the couple at the next table left, we’d immediately start discussing everything we’d overheard: “He’s feeling guilty about something... I didn’t believe him when he said he was sorry, did you? Do you think she was his bit on the side...?”

Doll didn’t really do that, because she usually had a lot to say herself.

We went down onto the beach. The tide was out and the sea was very calm, with waves no bigger than ripples of silk breaking over the flat, wet sand.

“Lapping with low sounds by the shore...”

“You what?” said Doll.

“It’s from Mum’s poem.”

“Oh.”

Was there a time limit on grief? Three months? Six? Even Doll wouldn’t be patient forever. Wasn’t it time I “came to terms with” or “got over” it, or were these just phrases clung to by those who had never suffered a loss?

“In Italy, you visit your dead relatives on Christmas Day,” said Doll. “There are flower stalls outside the cemeteries. It’s kind of a nice idea, don’t you think?”

I thought of Mum’s grave, at the end of a row in the cemetery. Apparently, you had to let the earth settle before you put a headstone up, so we hadn’t done that yet. I hated the thought of her lying there with people she didn’t know, under a litter of dead flowers and rain-soaked teddy bears. On the next grave along there was a shiny black heart-shaped headstone bearing the message All ways in our heart’s, which Mum would have hated because she was very particular about spelling and punctuation. I should have gone today, I thought. It hadn’t even occurred to me, because I didn’t have any real sense she was there.

“...Fred says it’s like including them in the party,” Doll continued.

“Fred?” I tuned back in.

“Fred Marinello. His dad’s Italian.”

“Duh!”

What I was asking, and she knew I was asking, was, how come you’re suddenly so familiar with Fred? I should explain that Fred had been the captain of the football team and the coolest boy in our year at school. At sixteen, he’d been given a contract by a local semi-professional football club, their youngest ever signing, and recently, it was rumored, been scouted by Arsenal. The story had been front and back of the local newspaper under the banner Fred for the Premiership? Fred was the nearest thing the town had to a celebrity and every girl in our year fancied him.

Now that I thought about it, he’d been in the Crown the previous evening with a crowd of lads and I’d noticed Doll exchanging a few words on the way to the ladies and pointing back at me, as if to say, “We’re sitting over there.”

“He comes to the salon for a leg wax,” she said, breezily. “Some of the Premiership players have them, apparently, for the aerodynamics.”

I laughed.

Doll didn’t. She took her profession very seriously. She had wanted to be a beautician since she was five and got a doll for Christmas with hair that grew when you cut it. Being the baby of her family and the only girl, she’d been allowed to experiment with Mrs.O’Neill’s old stubs of lipstick and dried-up pots of eyeliner. On one occasion, when we were about seven, Doll had used me as her model, horrifying my mother, and causing our families to sit in different rows at Mass for several weeks.

“As a matter of fact,” Doll said, “he’s invited us to a New Year’s Eve party.”

“Fred? Us?”

“Well, me, but I said could you come too.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.

“Oh, go on. If you’re there, we’ll be able to stay as long as we like. You know how my mum is.”

My mum had been slightly wary of Doll’s influence on me, whereas Mrs.O’Neill had always encouraged our friendship because I was the one who read books and knew what homework we’d been given, and what you were supposed to bring in for cooking classes, that sort of thing.

“What about Hope?” I said, searching for an excuse. “Dad’s bound to want to go to the pub.”

“She can stay at ours, can’t she?” Doll said.

“But I don’t have anything to wear.”

“Now you sound like Cinderella.”

“So it’s all arranged, is it?” I said.

“You shall go to the ball,” said Doll.

It was only when Fred Marinello opened the door on New Year’s Eve that it clicked. Fred’s smile like a sunlamp. He’d had crooked teeth as a child, but they’d recently been knocked out in a goal-mouth clash, so now he had a full row of even white caps.

His eyes travelled up and down Doll’s body.

Then, as if he’d only just seen me behind her, “Tess!”

I was as tall as Fred even in flats, and men like him didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

“Sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “She was a nice lady. Your hair suits you like that, by the way.”

Usually I tied my long curly hair back to keep it under control, but this afternoon Doll had insisted on straightening every strand and parting it at the side so that half of it fell across my face. When I moved my head, I could still detect a slightly scorched smell.

“Doll did it,” I said.

“Talented as well as beautiful...” Fred kissed Doll on the lips.

I felt pretty stupid. I was good at making up stories about the lives of people I’d never met, but I’d missed my best friend’s first big romance. Recalling the conversation we’d had recently about The One, and all that stuff about Italian families, it had been obvious really.

“How long?” I asked Doll in Fred’s parents’ bedroom, where we left our coats and checked our teeth for lipstick smears in the dressing-table mirror.

“I wasn’t sure if it was serious,” was Doll’s excuse for not telling me.

“It’s serious?”

“He calls me Maria D!”

“And you like that?”

It was what she was called when teachers took the register. To distinguish her from Maria Lourdes, who was Maria L.

“I think it sounds more grown up,” said Doll, smoothing down her clinging black-lace dress.

I stared at my reflection. Standing next to Doll seemed to emphasize my height, because she was petite and perfect. On social occasions, I always felt self-conscious beside her, like a slightly censorious chaperone instead of a best friend. I was wearing black jeans and a red velvet top with a floppy kind of neckline at the front that made it look a bit fifties, and matching Ruby Gem lipstick from the palette of lip colors that had been Doll’s Christmas gift to me. I sometimes felt I’d been born into the wrong era as far as fashion was concerned. With long legs and slim hips, I looked good in jeans or trousers, but my top half was two sizes bigger. A swimmer’s build, my mum used to say, after one of the medalists at the Barcelona Olympics became a bit of a pin-up and went on to advertise cosmetics.

I couldn’t work out whether the funny feeling I had was because I was jealous that Doll was moving on without me—not that I fancied Fred myself, and even if I had, he was way out of my league—or whether I was just annoyed with her for not telling me straight out. Was I acting so pathetic that my best friend didn’t dare tell me she was going out with her dream boyfriend?

The people at the party were mostly from our school year, although there were a few additions who looked like they were probably footballers. As far as I was concerned, they divided into three basic groups. Those who knew about Mum, who mostly smiled at me, or said, “How ARE you?” to which the only answer was “Fine.” Then there were the people who didn’t know about Mum, who asked how I was liking university, so I had to tell them, even though I didn’t want to keep bringing it up. I decided that “Thank you” was the best response when people said they were sorry, but that sounded like they’d said, “I like your top,” or something. Then there were new people, but I wasn’t confident enough to introduce myself to them.

My peers mostly had proper jobs now and were aspiring towards a mortgage and an interest-free dining suite, whereas I’d gone backwards, so far backwards that I was spending my days at the primary school we’d all been to.

“God, Mrs.Corcoran, I was always terrified of her!” said Cerise McQuarry.

“I still am!”

We were drinking rosé cava in the kitchen. It was all cava in those days. Nobody had even heard of Prosecco.

“Lucky old Doll, eh?” said Cerise. “The One Most Likely to Marry a Millionaire...”

“That’s assuming Fred becomes a millionaire and they get married,” I said.

Cerise gave me that look I used to get a lot at school. She had been The One Most Likely to Be a Model, which is probably why she’d mentioned the yearbook, but for the time being, she was working behind the counter in Boots.

I’d been The One Most Likely to Be a Teacher, I suppose because I was a bit bookish and pedantic. Being a teacher was what Mum had wanted for me, but I’d never been sure. Even less so, now. The staffroom at St.Cuthbert’s was divided by a strict hierarchy. We teaching assistants sat together to eat our sandwiches, while the teachers sat up the other end moaning about the National Curriculum and the amount of work they had to do at home. It didn’t sound like much of a life.

I’ve never been great at parties. If you’re tall and shy, it’s worse than being small and shy because when you’re tall, people approach you with the assumption that you must be confident, so then if you’re a bit tongue-tied, they think you’re stand-offish. The other problem is that a lot of men are quite short, so they say things like, “You’re a big girl, aren’t you?” which puts me on the defensive.

There was one guy here, however, who was so tall he had to duck when he moved from one room to another. Our fingers touched as we both went for the last sausage roll and then did this kind of “You, no you, no really” thing. I wasn’t even hungry, but looking at the food made it seem like I was doing something rather than just standing there on my own.

“Fred says you’re Maria’s friend?”

It took a moment.

“I call her Doll,” I said. “Dolores, rather than the children’s toy. Did you know Maria Dolores means ‘Mary of the Sorrows’...,” I prattled on.

“Doesn’t look very sorry now!” he said, glancing into the living room. “I’m Warren, by the way.”

“And your connection is?”

“What? Oh, I’m the goalie.”

We had a dance and it was kind of nice to feel a great meaty hand around my waist and to get a proper kiss at midnight. Warren was so tall and built, he made me feel almost delicate and petite in his arms.

“Come on, get your coat!” he murmured into my neck.

“I don’t think so, thank you very much!” I shrank away, prim as a nun.

“Did he honestly think that I was going to have sex with him after one snog?” I asked Doll on the way home.

Her silence spoke volumes.

“Oh my God, you and Fred? You’re...?” I said, feeling suddenly very sober. The reason I’d felt isolated at the party was nothing to do with Mum dying. They were all having sex. And I was still very much a virgin.

“Sorry, Tess,” Doll said.

She meant for not telling me.

I remembered that when we’d first started thinking about boys, we’d taken it in turns to practice our kissing technique on the mirror in Doll’s bedroom, which was odd when you think about it, because something cold and flat was never going to approximate human lips, and you kept your eyes open to see how you were doing, which people in romantic clinches don’t normally do.

Since then, Doll and I had both gone on dates, but nothing more serious than a milkshake on the seafront, or a movie. We’d always shared the extent of the physical contact, comparing love bites and how far we’d gone on a scale from one to ten, although, since neither of us had actually been “all the way,” it was sometimes difficult to calibrate the experience. What seemed like a five one year only felt like a two the next.

Now Doll had got to ten, and I probably wasn’t even at six, because I wasn’t keen on boys touching my breasts, let alone down there.

“Is it nice?” I asked.

“It’s bloody fantastic. Much better than I thought.”

“Do you love Fred?” I asked, feeling about twelve years old again.

“I think so,” said Doll. “I can’t believe it sometimes. Fred Marinello!”

It was a cold night. Our breath made clouds and our footsteps pinged on the pavement. I looked up at the dome of stars.

“Isn’t it weird that there are thousands of couples who’ll meet for the first time tonight?” I said. “And some of them will last two weeks and some of them will still be together in twenty years’ time, but none of them know right now...”

Doll looked at me as if I’d lost it.

“Warren’s all right,” she said. “He’s in telesales.”

I wasn’t thinking about Warren. I wasn’t even thinking about me. It’s just that sometimes when I’m looking at a clear night sky, with all those stars, the universe seems so vast and random, it’s strange to think how our tiny little moments down on earth can hold so much significance.

“He’s got a company car,” said Doll, as if that clinched it.

“Look, I know you think I’m choosy,” I said, “but when Warren said, ‘Come on! Fred says you’re in need of a good seeing-to!’ it wasn’t the most seductive line I’d ever heard.”

“Oops!” said Doll. “Sorry!”

“I’m really happy about you and Fred, though,” I said, because I thought I was supposed to. “I’m just a bit sad that I won’t see so much of you. Which probably makes me a horrible selfish person!”

“That’s two of us then!”

We laughed and, for a moment, we were back to normal, then we both went quiet again because it wasn’t really as symmetrical as that.

You could hear Hope from down the street. Dad and Mr.O’Neill had gone to the pub and Mrs.O’Neill hadn’t wanted the CD on again with Big Ben coming up.

“She does like her carols, doesn’t she?”

Mrs.O’Neill had brought up four boys as well as Doll, but I’d never seen her looking as worn out as she did after an evening with Hope.

“Shall I just take her home?” I suggested.

“At this time of night?” said Mrs.O’Neill. “When the guest room’s all made up?”

I said Hope could have the CD player on in the bedroom, if she stopped carrying on and brushed her teeth and got into her pajamas first. Just to make sure she behaved, I got into the other twin bed straight away, instead of having an Amaretto with Doll and her mum.

The CD played all the way to “In the Bleak Midwinter” before Hope finally fell asleep.

I lay on my back thinking about New Year’s resolutions.

When I was young, I used to write them out in my best handwriting and tie them into little scrolls with colored thread from Mum’s sewing box, then hang them from the knobs on the chest of drawers in my bedroom.

I’d long since stopped writing them out, but I still made them in my head—everyone does, don’t they?—but now I couldn’t think of any.

A year ago, Mum and I had seen in the New Year together, with the silver tinsel tree twinkling and a small glass of Baileys. My resolutions had been pretty straightforward: to study really hard for my A levels in order to get the grades for university; to save enough money from my Saturday job at the One Stop to go travelling in the summer.

“What are yours?” I remembered asking her.

“Mine’s always the same, Tess,” she’d replied. “To be happy with everything I have.”

To be honest, I’d been exasperated with her, because I thought if Mum hadn’t been so saintly, she could have made a bit more of herself. She was an intelligent woman, such a fast reader that she got through two or three library books every week. She could answer all the questions on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? She could have done something better with her life.

Now, it occurred to me that I might have missed her meaning.

Did the fact that Mum had to resolve to be happy mean that she wasn’t actually happy?

Had she not felt fulfilled in life?

Why hadn’t we talked about all these things?

Why hadn’t she told me what she was thinking, instead of giving me that infuriating smile that said, You’ll find out soon enough?

Why, when she could have said anything, did she ask whether I’d been to Midnight Mass?

And what was I supposed to deduce from a bloody butterfly?

I turned my face to the wall in a silent howl, my shoulders heaving as hot tears cascaded down my cheeks. Curled up like a baby, my legs scrunched up to my chest, I sobbed and sobbed, until I could almost feel Mum bending over me, concerned, like she did when I was little and had a temperature.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply, which Doll had rented one Friday, mistaking it for a straightforward romcom, Juliet Stevenson had cried so hard that Alan Rickman came back from the dead to be with her.

But there was no cool, damp flannel for my forehead, no soothing “There, there! You’ll feel better soon, I promise.”

In the slight chill of a room where no one usually slept, I yearned for Mum so much, my heart literally ached.

“It’s not that I can’t cope,” I told her silently. “It’s just that I miss you being there when we come home from school because the house feels so empty. I miss talking to you in the kitchen and I miss not talking because we’re both eavesdropping. I just miss you so much, Mum! It’s not the same when you’re not here...”

I suddenly thought how sad she would be to see me like this, crying my eyes out and making Mrs.O’Neill’s pillows all wet.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” I said.

And I could almost hear her reply: “I’m sorry too, Tess. It’s not what I wanted either, you know.”