Chapter 7
7
‘HAVE YOU REACHED A VERDICT ON WHICH YOU ARE ALL AGREED?’
Becca
‘Why do I feel like I’m on trial and waiting for the jury to deliver their verdict?’ I ask Niamh as we sit in my living room. Jodie and Adam have disappeared into the kitchen and to my great disappointment are not talking loudly enough for us to hear them here in the living room.
She looks tense. Her expression stiff and stoic as if she has been Botoxed to within an inch of her life. I know she has not, because we have made a solemn promise that if one of us breaks and gets it done, the other must go with them. If one of us falls, both of us fall. Like modern-day Musketeers.
She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t utter a single word but keeps her focus on the fire. This is very much not like Niamh.
‘I don’t suppose Jodie told you what they’ve decided on the way over?’ I ask.
‘Nope,’ Niamh says, her voice terse. ‘Not a word.’
‘Are you okay?’ I ask her, knowing that it takes an awful, awful lot for my ever-cheerful friend to be anything other than… well… ever cheerful.
She turns her head to look in my direction. There’s something in the slow way she does it that makes me fear her head might just keep on spinning and do a full 360 before she projectiles pea soup at me, à la The Exorcist . Shit. Something is very off here.
‘The thing is, Becs?—’
‘Sorry for keeping you,’ Adam says, walking into the room and cutting Niamh off before she’s had the chance to finish her sentence.
She quickly turns her head towards our two children and plasters on her very best understanding-teacher face. The woman is an expert at looking supportive when really she wants to burn the place down using a Bunsen burner doctored to go full flame-thrower instead.
I note that Adam and Jodie are holding hands. This augurs well, I think. They are united in their decision and neither of them looks as if they have been crying.
It dawns on me that this conversation will be one of the more defining ones of my life. That I am about to witness my son make the biggest decision of his. Everything is about to change. If Niamh is nursing the same thoughts, it’s no wonder she looks as if she might just boke.
They sit down and I bite the urge to shout at them to just spit it out. I mean, I love a bit of drama as much as the next person, but this is a lot . It has been a lot to have constantly running through my mind this last week or so. It has been a lot to realise this is a decision that only my son and Jodie can make and that my usual maternal urge to swoop in and make everything okay is extremely limited in its grasp in these circumstances.
I wait for either Adam or Jodie to speak. I can feel the tension coming off Niamh in waves and it’s more unsettling than anything our children could say in the next few minutes.
‘We’ve talked this through a lot,’ Jodie says, her voice surprisingly assured. ‘We’ve asked ourselves a million questions. It hasn’t been easy. And we know this isn’t going to be easy.’
‘This isn’t something we planned,’ Adam says. ‘But I think that’s pretty obvious.’ His face colours a little. ‘But sometimes things happen that just change everything, don’t they?’
I nod, but truth be told I’m starting to feel like we’re at the final vows stage of Married at First Sight and they’re dragging the arse out of this to up the drama. I want to remind them that this is not a TV show. And remind them that Niamh and I are both heading towards fifty and have a limited number of years left on this earth, so we appreciate it when people get to the point.
‘I know it’s not ideal,’ Jodie says. ‘But I’ve thought about taking a different route and it just feels wrong for me.’
‘And I agree with Jodie,’ Adam adds, looking at her. They share a soppy look that screams of young love and the endless possibilities that come with it.
‘That’s good,’ I say, while Niamh stays silent on the other side of me.
‘We know it won’t be easy, but we also know it will be worth it,’ Jodie says. ‘We have things to work out, of course. But there’s nothing we can’t overcome.’
‘Jesus Christ, Jodie, would you just spit it out for the love of God?’ Niamh blurts. ‘It’s bad enough you’ve made me wait so you could tell us together. This isn’t the bloody X Factor . There’s no need for a big reveal!’
Jodie and Adam sit, wide-eyed and their mouths gaping as they look at a now very ruffled Niamh. I’m struggling to take this version of my best friend in too, to be honest.
‘Woah there, Mum!’ Jodie says. ‘I thought I was supposed to be the hormonal basket case in this scenario!’
Niamh glares at her. She’s using the best scary mother/scary teacher-demanding-the-coursework-you-promised-would-be-completed-a-week-earlier face I’ve ever seen. I’m afraid to speak in case she sends me to detention, so I stay quiet. I’m almost intimidated enough to put my finger on my lips as if I was back in primary school, trying not to annoy my teacher.
‘Okay,’ Jodie says, throwing her hands in the air. ‘We’ll get to the point. We’re going to keep the baby.’
My eyes dart immediately to Adam, desperate to see if he looks content with the decision. It’s not a case that I don’t believe Jodie that this is a fully joint decision, more that he is my son and of course he is the person I care about most of all in this scenario.
‘Okay.’ Niamh’s voice is even. ‘Well, we said we’d support you in every way we can and we will. But have you worked out how you will manage this? I mean, Adam’s at university in Manchester. You’re halfway through your degree, Jodie. I’m not for one second suggesting you’re making the wrong decision – but this is going to be tough.’
I don’t speak, but I nod. Niamh is not wrong. This is going to be tough.
‘We know it will,’ Adam says. ‘So the plan is that I look to transfer my studies back here. I need to look at course provision and make that decision. I can finish my first year and be back in the summer in time to support Jodie. Hopefully I’ll get a summer job and work those months to put some money behind us.’
I feel a huge bubble of emotion rise in me as I watch my son talk about such a huge decision and bring such a level-headed approach to it. These all feel like very grown-up decisions to have to make given that he’s not even twenty yet and this morning I had to remind him to change his bed sheets before they walked themselves to the laundry basket.
‘We know it’s early days in our relationship, but we’d like to think we’ll still be together,’ Jodie adds as she squeezes Adam’s hand.
Just as I can still see the boy in him, I can still see the little girl in her. She was the first of our communal babies – the sole focus of our friendship group until the boys came around. I have loved her from the very moment she was born.
‘But even if we aren’t together,’ my boy says, ‘I want to be as present in the baby’s life as possible. I don’t want to be an absentee parent.’
He sounds so earnest. When did our young people become so sensible? How can we be at this stage already – talking about babies and parenting? Becoming a granny, for the love of God. When I think of ‘granny’, I can’t help but think of my own – my mother’s mother – who always, even when I was little, very much fit the stereotype from the get-go. She always had her greying hair set in curlers at the hairdressers once a week, and by some miracle of science that short and boofy style lasted until her next appointment. It always sat perfectly – as if it were a hat plonked on top of her head. She dressed almost exclusively in lined skirts that stopped just below her knees, and soft woollen jumpers or twinsets. She had a brilliant line in brooches which I loved to search through, pretending they were pirate’s treasure.
I could always see the trails of spider and varicose veins in her legs through the American Tan tights she wore every day with her slippers. She only put shoes on her feet when she left the house and my abiding memory of them was that they were low-heeled, laced up and definitely prized functionality over fashion.
Granny never wore make-up. She didn’t ever fall into the trap I myself have tumbled into many, many times and spent a clean fortune on skincare products in the hope of miracle transformations. She was very much a soap and water type of woman, dabbing on some Nivea creme after. I can still conjure the smell of it, along with the comforting scent of her talcum powder, in my memory, just as I can the softness of her skin. She must’ve been doing something right.
But I’m a million miles from where she was. My hair has a mind of its own – managing to be neither straight nor curly, instead opting for some sort of frizzy combination of the two. It can be calmed with straighteners when I can be bothered to get them out. Otherwise, given that the majority of my days are spent at home writing copy, or venturing no further than the park with the dog, or my mother’s house, I run a brush through it and hope for the best.
My daily uniform is more likely to be leggings, or skinny jeans with a T-shirt and a hoodie, than anything as refined as a twin-set.
Last year I bought my first pair of Crocs, much to my twins’ disgust, but let me tell you those bad boys are like a hug for your feet and Niamh had to threaten an intervention to stop me from wearing them everywhere. It was only when I bought her a pair for her birthday that she finally understood my obsession. Still, she says they are very much ‘inside shoes’. Give it time though. She’ll be nipping out to the shop in them soon enough. It will only grow from there. If I’m not mistaken, that ‘loungewear’ she is wearing is actually her best pyjama set from M&S. Crocs would’ve finished the look off nicely.
Anyway, I digress, I am not granny-like but yet here I am, listening to my boy telling me that I am most definitely going to be a granny. I want to hug him – and Jodie – and at the same time I want to give them both a good shake.
I want to hug Niamh – then spirit her away somewhere with wine and ask her how she really feels about it all. I know that, like me, she will support our kids, but I also know that, just like me, she is dealing with a tsunami of emotions. Excitement will be in the mix somewhere, I realise. Deep inside me, my poor, decrepit ovaries have given a splutter of dusty enthusiasm at the thought of there being a baby in my life that I’m able to access for cuddles, head-sniffs and that incredible newborn-scrunched-on-your-shoulder feeling.
But the bigger feeling is worry. How will the kids cope? They have their plans – but how do I really feel about Adam dropping out of his course? Even if he will be picking back up closer to home. He had wanted to go to Manchester to study that particular computer programming course since he was fourteen. It is ridiculously competitive to get a place, but he had done and now he is going to walk away.
Will their relationship – or more importantly, perhaps, their friendship – survive the pressures of being young parents? God knows my own marriage didn’t survive being not-so-young parents. It was tough. And if their friendship doesn’t survive, what will that mean for Niamh and me? At the very best it will be awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t want to think about the very worst.
And God, I think, if Adam comes home to continue his studies that means that Saul will be in Manchester without the support of his younger (by ten minutes) but infinitely more sensible brother. Of course, Adam is not his brother’s keeper, but knowing that there has been a guiding hand on side has made me feel a lot easier about Saul studying across the sea.
Now is not the time for worrying about this though. Certainly not this very minute. I’m suddenly aware that Adam is looking directly at me, the same look I remember from his childhood on his face. It’s the look he had when he would hand me a painting he did at school, or when he would show me what a good job he’d done of tidying his bedroom. It was a face that was calling out for approval and acknowledgement.
I have to hug him. I need it as much as he does, so I stand up and gesture to him to the do the same before pulling him into a ‘giant squish’, as we used to call it when he was little. ‘I’m proud of you, Adam,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll all get through this together and take it one day at a time. We’ll work it all out.’
I’m aware that Niamh has stood up too and is hugging Jodie and it’s one of the loveliest, but also most surreal and most terrifying, moments of my life.