Chapter 65
Rose
‘She’s right, isn’t she?’ I say, swooshing my huge hair over the nylon medal necklace. The plastic disc hangs low, perched on my chest. Poppy is wearing hers, too, and I suspect we both look ridiculous.
‘Of course she’s right,’ replies Poppy, who is already looking through the illustrations of The Secret Garden, stroking them as though they might come to life beneath her touch. ‘She always is.’
‘My job is boring,’ I say, Stephen Hawking nestled on my lap. ‘In fact my whole life is boring. I’m going to do that teacher training.’
Poppy looks up at me and smiles. So much of the underlying enmity between us has been drained away by that letter of Mum’s, by David Bowie, by the uncontrollable sobbing on each other’s shoulders.
It feels so much easier to be around her, like a particularly nasty boil has been lanced and can now start to heal.
‘And I’m going to write that bloody book,’ she says.
‘We’ve both done all right, but somewhere along the line, we’ve also both been knocked off track – and we can’t keep blaming other people for that.
We can’t keep blaming Gareth, or each other, or stuff that happened a million years ago – if we want things to change, we have to make them change. We have to make Mum proud again.’
‘We will,’ I say, forcefully – because I really believe that is true.
I believe that I can try and become a Biology teacher, and I definitely believe that Poppy can write ‘that bloody book’.
She might not be here with us, but our mother is still an inspiration.
She is still making me feel as if I might emerge from life victorious, in exactly the same way I always tell Joe he can be whatever he wants to be as long as he works hard enough.
We’ve cracked open a new bottle of very nice gin, and I raise my glass.
‘A toast!’ I say, holding it towards Poppy.
‘To our mother, crazy old lush that she was – and to us! To victory!’
Poppy chinks her glass against mine, and we both down our drinks in one, barely blinking as a double measure of gin goes down. That, I think, as I pour us the next, is genetics at work.