Remy
REMY
T hey say your childhood bedroom is a window into your future.
I don’t actually know who “they” are, but if you say any proverb slowly, emphasize the right words, and have a faraway look in your eye, people will believe it.
I believe it.
Nova’s childhood bedroom was studded with Blu Tack and plastered with posters of pop stars, R I’m eating home-cooked meals, racing through my Tbr pile, going on daily walks, and drinking so much water I’m peeing nonstop.
“Remy!” I hear Mum call from the garden. “The food’s getting cold!”
I’m just joining Mum at the picnic table in the garden when my phone vibrates with a message.
Me
Still on for tomorrow night? X
Nova
Sorry! David’s got this work thing he wants me at. Another time! X
I throw my phone onto the table. It ricochets off a plate, knocks over a glass of water, and lands in the puddle it made.
Mum laughs with her head knocked back. “You’re a mess, sweetheart,” she tells me. Retrieving the phone, she wipes it dry on my jumper sleeve and reads Nova’s message. “Oh. Again?”
I lean forward, picking at the leaf of a tree whose branches shield Mum’s garden table from the sun.
“Again,” I confirm. “I just… Nova’s all that’s left.
I thought we’d see each other more, to make up for us both being two friends down, but it’s the exact opposite.
Now she’s back with David, I hardly see her. ”
“That’s how some people handle moments like this,” Mum says.
“Maybe a part of Nova believes that, without the four of you, the friendship can’t exist like it used to.
Despite how close you all are to each other, you have always been an inch closer with Mel, and Nova with Lin.
So, she has lost, in quick succession, her cousin Jackie, her best friend, and her other best friends. ”
I peel the crisp leaf apart. “That makes me feel like I’m not enough for her without Mel and Lin.”
“That’s just Nova’s flaw,” Mum says easily.
“She has a tendency to see things in extremes. But that’s friendship for you!
Accepting no one is perfect and valuing what they can provide over what they can’t.
The reason you all work so well as a foursome is because you each have your own love language and you each prefer to go hard in that area rather than soft in all areas.
Where Nova goes hard is in the joy she brings you all; no one makes you laugh like she does and there’s no dampened mood she can’t lift, but where she falls short is in her tunnel vision.
You can’t enjoy the benefits of her strengths without accepting the realities of her weaknesses.
Nova is the baby of the group; just give her time. ”
This is my mother in a nutshell. Yes, she might wear a cape around the house and have full-blown conversations with her plants, but she also dispenses the wisest of words.
I still sigh and Mum bends down to kiss my forehead, the bridge of my nose, and then the bow of my lips, a loud smacking sound following each one.
“And you’re my baby,” she says, now squashing my head against her chest. “I’d hoped you would step into this new season of your life with wild abandon, but it looks like you’re being given a push. Best not to fight it.”
Mum works in theater, so everything she does and says is dipped in a coat of dramatics.
She shaved all her hair off last year to “free herself.” She’s currently sporting two different shades of blush on her cheeks and two different earrings because she couldn’t decide on just one.
Her blue shirt is patterned with creases—“even though I ironed it this morning, promise!”—and her knee-high heeled boots mean you hear her in the room before you see her.
She has an angular face that makes you stop, tilt your head, and stare.
For a minute, you wonder if the sharp cheekbones and diamond-tip chin work for her, before ultimately and confidently deciding they do.
I got my mum’s almond eyes and her top-heavy lips, but with a softer face. My quiet temperament and old soul… well, that could have come from anywhere else on my family tree.
Mum had me via a sperm donor, so I don’t know who my dad is.
I think about the idea of him every now and again—on Father’s Day or Christmas—but the urge to hunt him down and find him has never materialized.
I know he and his sperm were Black British with parents from Ghana; that he was six foot two and university educated.
The girls could never understand my disinterest in learning any more than that, especially Nova: “What if he’s famous now? Isn’t Idris Elba Ghanaian?”
For me, my mum has always been enough. When I was living on my own, I didn’t see her as often as I’d have liked, but once a month, we made sure to have lunch in the house my grandparents left to her.
This lunch ritual, often in the garden if the weather is good, was my grandma’s way of getting us to attend her church.
“No church, no food,” she’d say, and we’d say, “The food is too good to miss.” Grandma’s DNA was all Ghanaian, as far back as she could remember, but Grandpa was half Ghanaian half Jamaican, so Grandma would cook plates of saltfish fritters, fried dumpling, and escovitch fish served alongside slices of hard dough bread, bowls of rice, curried goat, and brown stew chicken.
Then she’d add a pitcher of her homemade fruit punch that Grandpa would be caught adding splashes of rum to.
When both my grandparents passed, Mum refused to let the tradition die too, so we blocked out the third Sunday in every month to eat together.
At the mention of my new season of life , I’m reminded why today feels so different. I think this might be one of the last Sunday lunches where it’s just the two of us.
Mum is officially seeing someone.
I’ve met Eric a few times. I like him, I guess.
I was hesitant toward him at first, but only because he represented change, rather than any fault in his personality.
He’s a smiley, chilled-out guy, which perfectly complements Mum’s smiley, often exuberant self.
She says they’re taking things slow, but I can’t shake the feeling that, one day soon, they’ll be an official couple, and I really need to go back to having my own place by then.
“How’s the book coming along?” Mum asks, tearing into a fresh loaf of bread before snatching her fingers away from the escapee steam.
“Fine.”
“That bad, huh?” she says. “Is the money running out? I don’t really get how the chunks work, but you received the last one, right?”
“Yeah, on publication of the paperback, and after taxes I don’t have much left.”
“I told you to consider offshore accounts.”
“ Mum .”
She holds her hands out in surrender. “I’m just pondering aloud, but I really do think you should only pay taxes when the government party you voted for is in power. Otherwise, you end up wasting your hard-earned money on other people’s mistakes.”
“You do know logically that wouldn’t work, right?”
“ Please .” She stabs her fish with a fork. “Who uses logic these days? It is the opium of the creative and free.”
I laugh and help myself to more rice. “Mum, you can’t just change quotes from historical figures and make them your own.”
“Is that not the English language in its entirety?” She dramatically drapes an arm across her chest, and I know an entertaining but likely illogical maxim is coming my way.
“Everything and anything you and I say has already been said before. Mmm.” She nods to herself before returning to her plate.
“And who’s to say Karl Marx didn’t steal that quote from a hermit—who would of course be none the wiser—he met someplace way back when? ”
“Fine, you win. And I’m okay for money. It’s just that… considering the time between writing a book and getting it into a saleable condition and then actually selling it is unpredictable, I need to finish something soon.”