Chapter 70
Rose
Poppy, sharing my mother’s flair for the dramatic, has insisted on a midnight ceremony. I am counting myself lucky that she hasn’t insisted we dress up in pagan robes and smear our faces with golden syrup.
I’m also a bit tired, truth be told. I stayed up late last night reading one of Mum’s diaries. I know she said not to bother with them right now, but, well, what’s she going to do about it? I curled up in my teenaged bed, and spent hours enjoying her first-hand accounts of her show-biz exploits.
The diary I read covered the Penny Peabody era, and was perfect – not too much turmoil, not too much hand-wringing and trauma, just a lot of very amusing anecdotes about life on set, and actors who played tough guys insisting on having exactly the right blend of aromatic oils burning in their dressing rooms, and who was bonking who.
She has such a witty and engaging style, I have no doubt at all that, like Poppy, she could also have been a writer. Maybe we’ll edit her diaries and publish them; they could easily be cult classics. All those perverts who watched her nude carousel horse scene would buy them.
I know all the diaries won’t be so much fun. I know some of them, in fact, will be extremely painful – but that is a journey for another day. For now, it’s nice to imagine her healthy and happy and enjoying her twilight years.
Poppy has been in the mower shed again, and emerges brandishing a plastic petrol can. She pokes the ashes in the barbecue, and pulls a face.
I don’t blame her. The contents are pretty revolting – the half-melted face of our Tiny Tears Gareth effigy, distorted into horror-movie form, chubby arm folded over her head as though trying to ward off the flames.
Tonight, she has decided, we are going to get rid of our Guilt Lists in style.
It’s a pleasant night, the countryside sky draped with the kind of dazzlingly clear stars that you just don’t see in the city. I can hear an owl hooting, and the cows from the nearby farm, and it’s incredibly peaceful.
The lights from the cottage are casting a glow over the garden, and the gnome collective looks magnificently eerie – like they might come to life at any moment and frolic over the lawn, with their fishing rods and watering cans and little red hats.
‘So,’ says Poppy, grinning at me in the moonlight. ‘We’re all set. I have my list – do you have yours?’
I nod, and tug the huge wad of memo-pad notes from my pocket. It feels like a different lifetime, that night when I sat, destroyed, sobbing over all of my perceived crimes, still not quite believing that my mother had gone. I was in shock, and none of it felt real. Some of it still doesn’t.
‘Shall we read them?’ I ask, glancing at Poppy’s single piece of paper in curiosity.
I wonder if there is anything on her list, or on mine, that will damage us – that will take us back to our pre-A–Z world, when we could barely function in each other’s company.
I hope not, but I don’t think we can ever be 100 per cent sure – our relationship, like all relationships I suppose, will always be a work-in-progress, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.
She nods, and we silently exchange papers. I unfold hers, and see one word staring out at me, written in bold capital letters: EVERYTHING. Well, that’s straightforward enough.
It takes Poppy a little longer, obviously, to decipher my scrawl, and plod through the pile of crumpled squares.
I see her smiling at some, frowning at others, and finally, looking up to meet my eyes when she comes to the very last entry.
The one I didn’t even want to write: that I never gave Poppy a second chance.
‘Well,’ she says, handing the pages back to me. ‘I don’t know what to say about stabbing Yoda in the eye, but that last one? About me? I’m well and truly ready to burn that one, Rose. Because you have given me a second chance – even if it was only because Mum made you.
‘You could have said no. You could have walked away from all this, and gone back to Liverpool, and we probably would never have seen each other again. Instead, we’re here, together. And maybe … maybe you have forgiven me?’
I suppose, at heart, that all of our mother’s frantic planning and scheming and plotting has always been leading up to this.
To this one moment – to us standing here, in her garden at midnight, listening to the owl chorus and wondering what comes next.
Only one letter of her A–Z might technically have been called F for Forgiveness, but the whole thing has basically been about that one issue.
Do I forgive Poppy, knowing everything I know now? Looking back on the whole affair with hindsight, understanding how she felt? After losing our mother, and getting each other through the A–Z, and taking the first tentative and terrifying steps back into each other’s lives?
‘I do forgive you, Poppy,’ I say simply. ‘Forgetting won’t be as easy, for either of us – but I do forgive you. I love you. I’ve missed you. And now … well, I can’t imagine life without you. If you can forgive me for the way I reacted, I can forgive you for what happened. D for Deal?’
She reaches out a hand, as though to shake on it, and instead pulls me in for a hug. I wrap my arms around her, and feel her snuffling away in my hair. I suspect she’s crying, and I pat her back to console her.
‘Okay – let’s do this,’ she says, when she eventually pulls away. There is a real fizz about her tonight – a sense of boundless energy. She’s practically bouncing on her bare feet as she takes the petrol can, and pours a splosh on to the barbecue.
I stand back – the splosh looked a bit on the generous side – and wait until she lights it. With a small wooshing sound, the flames leap up, dancing gold and red in the dark night sky. There is a crackling noise, and the smell of burning plastic as Tiny Tears disintegrates even further.
She looks at me, little flickering flames reflected in her wide brown eyes, and I nod.
At exactly the same moment, we both throw our Guilt Lists into the fire, where they crinkle and crumple and turn quickly into a small pile of ash.