Chapter 29 Two Cheeky Corgis, One Pep Talk, and Hammering It Out
I know, of course, exactly how many weeks, days, minutes, and hours it has been since Baby turned eighteen. I know exactly how long I had been waiting to hear that news—to find out that the process had begun.
Now, I am still waiting. The process has begun, but nothing else has happened. If I’d been a little obsessive about checking my phone before, I am now reaching Olympic gold medal standards. The damn thing is practically glued to my hand, like an extra appendage. Gemma Mobile Hands. Even in lessons, I have it out on the desk, breaking all the rules that I set for the students and usually abide by myself.
Days and nights have passed with no news. Halloween has already come and gone, quickly followed by Bonfire Night, and before it seems feasible, everyone is talking about the staff Christmas party and the shops are all full of boxes of crackers and jumbo tubs of Roses chocolates. Nothing says “birth of our Lord and Savior” quite like a jumbo tub of Roses.
I live my days and nights in a surreal hinterland of actually happening and what-might-happen. I get on with work and I spend time with Karim—or King I-Love-You the First, as he occasionally insists on being called—and I see my friends and I walk Bill and I do yoga and I run and I swim and finally I watch The Bridge and I do absolutely everything I can to keep myself busy.
It doesn’t work, of course. I seem to have developed a superhuman ability to do one thing perfectly well, while all the time actually being completely focused on something different. The gap between the external and the internal, the surface me and the background me, is widening, and I fear I am going to have some kind of crisis if it continues.
I know it is ridiculous, but I don’t seem quite able to end it—to clear my mind, to stop planning for the unplannable, to switch off and relax.
She has my email, my phone numbers, my address. She has had them for over a week, and it feels like the longest week of my life. I am spiraling between certainty that she won’t ever get in touch and sheer excitement at the thought of getting to find out about her.
I am made up entirely of questions—what does she look like now? What are her parents like? Does she have any pets? Is she doing exams and planning on going to uni or doing an apprenticeship or something entirely different? What’s her favorite food and color and song and book and film? Most important of all, has she been happy?
I have tried, over the years, to keep all of this curiosity under control. There never seemed to be any point in indulging it. Early on, when I was still very young, I seemed to have more resolve—I told myself I didn’t deserve to know anything about her, that I had given up all right to know a single solitary fact.
It was brutal, but it also allowed me to go on, to move forward with my own life. In fact, it motivated me—if I didn’t make something of myself, if I didn’t succeed in dragging myself out of the future that seemed to be mapped out for me, then it would all have been wasted.
As I’ve aged, it has grown harder—to ignore the questions, the wondering, the way I find myself imagining her and what she is doing and how her world looks. As I’ve matured, and as she has grown up, it has been almost impossible not to wonder—but I have still tried.
Meeting Katie, though, falling into that rabbit hole that had me convinced she was actually my daughter, showed me that it is not something that is likely to go away. I will always wonder, always imagine. Always yearn. Be forever hers.
Now, as my actual daughter and I make tentative steps toward each other, it is almost unbearable—knowing she is so close but also knowing that I have no way to make her take that final step. To reach out.
It is hard, and it is sucking the life out of me, and I know that I cannot go on like this for any length of time. I will simply burn out, fade away, lose my ability to do all the things I need to do, to be all the people I need to be. I have to find a way to calm down about it all, I know that much—but what I don’t know is how to go about that.
It is actually Katie who finally shakes me out of it.
She turns up on my doorstep on a Saturday morning, brandishing her phone and her pink tutu. I groan as I let her in, and say: “Did your mum send you? Is she worried about me? Are you going to try to make me dance it out?”
She pulls a face at me and replies, “No, my mum didn’t send me, and yes, she is worried about you, and dancing it out is a tried-and-tested method.”
“No. Sorry, Katie, but no. I cannot face another session of K-pop.”
“Doesn’t have to be K-pop. We can do something from your era, like Bach or Beethoven, if you prefer?”
She grins at me, and it is contagious. Cheeky pup.
“How about a walk instead?” I counter. “There was someone out there with a metal detector earlier. We can laugh when they get a beep and dig up a Guinness can.”
“Or look on in absolute astonishment when they find an Anglo-Saxon horde.”
“Unlikely, but yeah—that would be good. How are you doing anyway? And if your mum didn’t send you, why are you actually here?”
“Because I was worried about you as well,” she replies as we troop down the stairs and out again. I have already walked Bill, so I steel myself against the mournful howl he lets out as we walk past. It is almost human, as though he is trying to form the words “Please take me tooooooooo!”
“In class yesterday,” she continues, putting her tutu on her hair like some kind of strange ceremonial headdress, “you didn’t even line your pens up. And later, you said that Elizabeth the Second made a speech to her troops about the Spanish Armada.”
“Gosh—I didn’t, did I?”
“You absolutely did. And hardly anyone noticed, and those of us who did probably realized it was a mistake, but you never know . . . A couple of kids might fail their exams because of it. I mean, you could be ruining their lives, you know?”
I laugh at the drama, and as we make our way down onto the sand, reply: “I don’t think it’ll come to that. But it’s not like me, is it? I feel a bit like I’m coming apart at the seams to be honest, Katie.”
“I know,” she says, her pink tutu streaming behind her in the wind, “and I think you’d better sew yourself back up. She might get in touch, she might not—but whatever she decides, she’ll have her reasons. You have to maybe try to trust her a bit.”
“You’re right,” I say, nodding, seeing the corgis run toward us. “But it’s hard. She has my details, and I feel like I’m on some kind of countdown. Plus, watch out for one of those corgis; he likes to pee on people’s feet.”
She nimbly moves her Converse sneaker just in time, and the dog looks up at her, annoyed as he only hits sand. We say hello to their owner—Corgi Man—as we pass him by.
“You’re not on a countdown, though, are you?” she asks. “It’s not like you’re on a time limit. Nobody turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Maybe signing up to the register was a big deal for her. Maybe reaching out and getting your details was even bigger. Maybe she’s not quite ready for the next bit yet. You have no idea what’s going on in her life outside you either, do you? She might be doing exams and feeling the pressure. She might have a complicated relationship. She might be dealing with stuff with her parents. You’re only seeing it from one side, which, as you’ve always taught us in class, isn’t right.”
My knee-jerk response to this accusation is to claim it’s unfair. To deny it. To say I’ve always tried to see things from her side. But then I start to wonder if I really have.
Life is complex, for everyone—and especially for a teenage girl making her way in the world. Add in the conflict she might be feeling about me, and it’s even more of a mess. I have no idea if her parents know she is thinking of getting in touch with me, and no idea how they might feel about that, but even if they are supportive, there is bound to be part of her that is worried about hurting their feelings as well.
In short, Katie is probably right—this isn’t just about what I want, and it’s nowhere near as simple as I want it to be. Nothing ever is.
“Okay,” I eventually reply, “I see your point.” We stop at the edge of the waves, gray and white froth chasing our toes at the shoreline, the wind turbines waving at us in the distance.
“I see your point and you’re probably right,” I continue. “I need to stop holding on so tightly to it, because apart from anything else, it’s not going to change a thing. When—if—she contacts me, it’ll be on her schedule, not mine. And in the meantime, I suppose I’d better buck my ideas up. Elizabeth the Second and the Spanish Armada? I’m so ashamed!”
“As you should be. I’ll settle for a full apology in writing. But seriously—yeah, maybe you need to just chill out a bit? Because otherwise, if she does want to see you, you’ll be a complete wreck by the time it happens, and that won’t be a good look on you. Now let’s go back to your place and dance it out.”
“Do we have to?” I plead, sounding like a teenager myself, I realize.
“We do, but you can choose the track.”
We clamber over the dunes on the way back to the flat, and I am grateful to have this young woman in my life. As a student and, it seems, as a teacher—on some things at least. She is not my daughter, but she is important to me.
So important that I plan to completely annihilate her in the dance-off. I decide that we will do “U Can’t Touch This” and that we’re both going to be MC Hammer—because if you’re struggling to move forward, then maybe dancing sideways is the next best option.