Chapter 17
17
A LITTLE SPARK
‘I probably shouldn’t be eating this,’ Laura says, loading a second slice of bread with thick, greasy chips which are scenting the air of my living room with their perfect vinegar-heavy aroma. ‘I swore once the funeral was over, I’d get back to eating properly. Our freezer is full with lasagnes and casseroles that the neighbours dropped in to Mum over the last couple of months. There were so many we became the official overflow zone.’
‘I do love a good lasagne,’ Niamh says, squeezing the bottle of tomato ketchup so tightly it makes the same noise as a watery fart.
‘You can have whatever you want from my house. Or Mum’s freezer. She’s not going to have much use for them now, and Conal says he can’t bear to even look at them. He’s taken to referring to her freezer contents as the “pot luck of impending death”,’ Laura says. ‘I don’t think either of us will be able to look at a lasagne the same way ever again.’
I nod. ‘I remember from when my dad died. But it wasn’t lasagne – he went too quick for the neighbours to start batch cooking and stockpiling. It was the egg and onion sandwiches that were made on an industrial level by my aunties and cousins to feed the mourners. I used to love a good egg and onion. Of all the food that gets offered to at a wake to go with your cup of tea, they were my favourite. I even liked them more than the pastries Erin and Flora at the bakery on Ivy Lane sent up. But now they just remind me of death.’
‘They smell a bit like death too,’ Niamh says, with a soft smile and a wrinkle of her nose.
‘But they are lovely, all the same. Maybe you’ll warm to them again in time,’ Laura says before taking a large bite from her chip butty and immediately melting into a semi-orgasmic state as a trickle of melted butter runs down her chin. She wipes it away hastily, finishes chewing and laughs. ‘Excuse me for being such a hallion. But these are so good, even if my waistline will regret it later,’ she says.
I look at my friend, still just about as slim as she was when we were teenagers. Okay, she may now be nudging more towards a twelve rather than the svelte size ten she had been, but she’s nowhere near needing to worry about her waistline. I, on the other hand, probably should be worried about mine, but in the spirit of helping young me love myself again, I’m just going to push the worry aside for a bit. I know I’m never going to have a flat stomach and I made my peace with that a long time ago. After all, I never actually had a flat stomach in the first place. The pot belly my mother lovingly referred to during my childhood just continued to grow with me, and then, after gestating the twins – both in excess of five pounds when they were born – I knew the battle was forever lost.
‘Nonsense,’ Niamh says, cutting through my thoughts. ‘It’s actual science that calories consumed during the grieving process do not count. And I’m a science teacher so I speak with authority.’
‘See!’ I say. ‘So eat up and enjoy it.’
‘Oh, there’s no way I’m not eating it,’ Laura says. ‘It’s just what I needed. Just like coming here to see you two was just what I needed too.’ There’s a pause. We haven’t got round to discussing the letter just yet, having agreed that the hot chips had to be prioritised. I even reminded my friends of chipulary burns and we laughed. It has been easy to believe for just a while that everything is okay in our world and that we hadn’t just unleashed the wrath of our younger selves on each other.
‘Girls, honestly. I’m so grateful for you. I didn’t expect for one moment you’d walk back into my life on Friday. I’ve wanted to call you both, to make this right, so many times, but I suppose I was just a coward.’
Niamh and I shake our heads even if part of me – the part of me who was so badly hurt by Laura’s actions – thinks that yes, she was a bit cowardly. She had been cowardly at the time in not making it right and that had continued through the years. Maybe I’m just as guilty. I didn’t have the time or mental energy, or forgiveness in me to try and make it better. Life moved on. Still, like the grief of losing a parent, it had a habit of jumping back up and biting us in the arse from time to time.
‘We can’t change the past,’ I tell her, because ultimately, I can still be hurt or cross or angry, but it’s not going to provide me with a time machine to go back and make sure things played out differently. And, truth be told, if I did have a time machine I’d probably go for something on a bigger scale – like warning the world of impending atrocities, or making sure my father had seen the doctor the day before he died instead of saying he’d wait and see how he felt in a day or two.
‘That’s true,’ Niamh says. ‘And I know because, as we’ve already established, I’m a science teacher and I can say with confidence no such technology exists.’
‘You’re a biology teacher,’ I tell her. ‘Unless time travel can be facilitated via a process of photosynthesis, I don’t think it’s quite in your field of expertise.’
‘You won’t be saying that when I suddenly have knowledge of all the winning sports fixtures next year and coin it in at the bookies,’ Niamh says.
I can’t help but laugh. ‘You’re not Biff from Back to the Future either.’
She simply shrugs and smiles before taking a slurp from her can of Diet Coke.
‘Seriously though,’ Laura says. ‘I appreciate you coming to the wake. And reaching out to me. Just being there for me, you know? And I know Mum would think the same because she loved you both very much.’
‘We loved her too,’ Niamh and I say, almost in unison.
‘And we love you,’ Niamh adds.
Laura grabs a napkin and wipes her mouth, and then grabs another and wipes her eyes. There’s a pause.
‘So, the letter…’ she says. ‘I don’t know what I expected from it but the truth is, it really unsettled me. Made me think about my life way too much. It made me question myself. Am I where I’m meant to be? Did I do everything I wanted? Becca, you read your letter, did it make you feel weird?’
‘Yes and no,’ I admit. ‘I feel really disappointed in myself, I suppose. I’ve not exactly set the world aflame with my talent, have I? I’m single, heading for fifty and alone. But I’m still glad I read it.’
‘And you, Niamh?’
Niamh gives her head a shake. ‘Not read it. And I’m not sure I want to. I don’t want to be unsettled or disappointed in myself. Thank you very much. I’m not sure any good would come from opening that particular can of emotional worms.’
‘Emotional Worms would be a brilliant name for a rock band,’ I muse.
‘But sixteen-year-old us wanted now us to be able to read these, Niamh,’ Laura interjects, ignoring my frankly brilliant suggestion. ‘It was important to us at time so don’t we owe it to our younger selves?’
‘There are a lot of things that were important to sixteen-year-old us that we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot barge pole now. Tom Cruise, for example. He was the ultimate ride to young us, but now he gives me the dry bokes with all his Scientology carry on. I’m strictly Team Nicole and Team Katie,’ Niamh says, in the voice she uses when she wants to make it very clear that the discussion is not one worth pursuing. I love my friend with every part of me and I would lay down my life for her in a heartbeat, but when Niamh has decided something, you can bet your life on it that the lady is not for turning. I have no desire to push this further and unleash her scary teacher voice.
‘The worst thing in my letter,’ Laura says, folding her chip paper over her remaining food and pushing it away, ‘is that I said I wanted to make sure my mum got to live the life she missed out on by having us so young.’
Her voice wobbles and I feel a lump form in my throat.
‘But that’s lovely, that you wanted that for her,’ I reassure her.
‘It would be, if I wasn’t such a sanctimonious bitch about it,’ she says. ‘I mean, I don’t think I was purposefully mean, but you know how teenagers think they know absolutely everything and have 100 times the insight of their parents?’
‘Oh God, yes,’ Niamh and I say, this time in perfect unison.
‘And just wait ’til we all get landed with Generation Z or whatever the latest iteration of crotch gremlins are collectively known as. I love Fiadh dearly but her teenage years are going to kick my arse,’ Niamh adds.
‘I will get my mum to say a novena for you,’ I say, even though my lovely mum is not the novena-saying type.
‘Can she say one for me that I’m able to survive to the end of term without losing it completely with Year 11?’ Niamh asks.
‘Of course,’ I say, before turning my attention back to Laura who is obviously still struggling with the contents of her letter. ‘Are you okay, love?’ I ask.
Laura shrugs.
‘I’m sure you weren’t that bad,’ Niamh tells her. ‘And you can’t judge grown-up you by teenage you’s actions.’
Laura raises one finger to signal we should wait just one moment while she rifles in her bag and pulls out a folded sheet of A4 paper on which I immediately recognise the distinctive loop and swirl of her handwriting. She unfolds it, scans it for a second and clears her throat.
‘I hope that you – grown-up me – have acknowledged all the sacrifices Kitty made to be your mother. She hasn’t had half the opportunities you have and it must be hard for her to face the reality that her children are smarter and more worldly-wise than she is.’
I try to keep the cringe from my face, and I know Niamh is trying to do the same when I hear her cough and protest that her drink went down the wrong way.
‘I – we – have a responsibility to help her expand her horizons beyond her own front door. I have realised that sooner rather than later…’ Laura stops and takes a deep breath before looking at both Niamh and me. ‘Hang in there, girls, this is a doozy,’ she says. ‘I have realised that sooner rather than later it will be my job to parent my parent and to become her educator. In fact, I think I might already be doing that.’
I want to assure Laura that it’s not that bad. That’s it’s not patronising. That it reflected the kind of remarkable, hard-working and whip-smart woman Kitty O’Hagan was. But I can’t. As well-intentioned as my dear friend was, this is pretty damn ropey.
Laura continues. ‘I won’t make the same mistakes Kitty made. I am already wise to the pitfalls of life. I already know I have one thing in my favour that Kitty did not – and that is a loving, fearless mother. And I’m going to make sure the pair of us live the big life we both deserve. I’ll bring her with me on my life’s great adventures.’
There is silence in the room – punctuated with sniffs and sighs – because we all know that Laura and Kitty did not set off on some grand adventure together and it’s now too late for them to do so. This is a much more painful realisation than the smug bollocks of her teenage bravado-fuelled intro.
‘So, you can imagine, I feel like shit. I really let her down. She didn’t get to live a big life. We didn’t travel the world together and I certainly didn’t take her on my great adventures, unless you count getting her to babysit Robyn for me while I was at work. Girls, I think I treated my mother like the hired help and not like the legend she was. I can’t stop thinking of the times I mentioned going to concerts, or away for city breaks with Aidan and she mentioned she’d love to do something like that sometime, and I never arranged it for her. Not that I even arranged them for myself all that often. It was so hard to find the time. I kept thinking I’d get round to doing it more and bringing her with me, but I didn’t because I was too caught up in raising Robyn and trying to keep my marriage on track and working… I let her down in the end and I can’t change that – unless we get that damn time machine,’ Laura sobs.
But her words, and her tears, act as another spark to the kindling I set after reading my own letter. We can’t change the past, but we’re not dead yet and we can absolutely change the future.
And I should have realised as soon as I saw all three of our names on the top of the box, that I am not in this on my own.