Chapter Six
A few hours later we arrived in the city that would be home to my daughter for the next three years. We’d broken the journey with a trip to the motorway services and the standard stale muffin and scalding coffee offered by all such establishments.
‘We’ll need to work out which are the best service stations for future visits,’ Joe said, as he contemplated the pleather driving gloves in the wire discount basket near the exit.
I say discounted but obviously everything in those baskets is at least fourteen times the price you could buy it for elsewhere. Captive audience and all that.
As we left, I regarded the centrally positioned massage chairs with the usual disbelief that anyone would ever choose to spend the equivalent price of a Cotswolds minibreak to lie on a vibrating bed in full view of the motorway-using public, and visions of our future opened up in front of me.
My husband compiling spreadsheets of useful highway information, planning our routes to English caravanning-holiday destinations using the cost of petrol and availability of roadside KFC as metrics while I meekly accepted the fact that a vibrating chair massage overlooked by lorry drivers would be my new annual highlight.
‘Well, this all looks very nice, doesn’t it,’ Joe said now as we queued in stationary traffic at a four-lane junction.
Layla was studying the sat nav. ‘I think we need to turn right here,’ she said, prompting a blast of horns from neighbouring drivers as Joe put on his indicator and nudged across to the other side of the road. ‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘Not a problem,’ he said, cheerily ignoring the hand gestures of the drivers we’d cut in front of. I cringed down into my seat, grateful for the foliage of Sideshow Bob for the first and only time on the journey.
We began the steep climb out of town towards university buildings that loomed in stately grey on the brow of the hill.
‘Student Union,’ said Joe, nodding in the direction of an ugly construction of brown shoeboxes that straddled the railway tracks.
Everywhere we looked people were milling about, many of them obviously parents and new students.
‘And here we are!’ Joe indicated left and we pulled into Milton Court halls of residence. We were greeted by two youths clad in orange t-shirts.
‘Hey guys!’ said the one holding a clipboard as Joe wound his window down. ‘You moving in today?’ He peered into the car, squinting at Layla and then at me tucked behind my massive pot-plant like a character out of Gorillas in the Mist.
‘We sure are!’ I said, in what I immediately realised was a children’s television presenter voice.
The youth gave me a puzzled look. ‘Do you know which block you’re in?’ he asked Joe and Layla, clearly deciding that they were the important members of the party.
Once we’d exchanged basic information and the existing students had directed us to the overflow car park, we picked up the keys from the main reception and located Layla’s block.
She had remained fairly quiet throughout the process, as had I.
There was an odd atmosphere brewing, something between that of the funfair and a walk to the gallows.
Joe seemed to be the only one capable of normal conversation as we walked up the communal staircase to the top floor flat Layla would be sharing with seven strangers.
‘Have you got the shortbread?’ I asked her urgently, as if there was some sort of time limit on offering snacks to new housemates and if she didn’t do it as soon as they met then she’d be immediately ostracised.
‘No!’ She looked panicked. ‘I left it in the car with everything else.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Joe as we got to the communal kitchen. ‘Looks like we’re first to arrive.’
We all gave a sigh of relief. I’m not sure why but I suppose it felt too soon for us as a family to put on our game face and start introducing ourselves, striking the right balance between friendly and casual, or in my case, supportive and overbearing.
We unlocked the door to Layla’s room while Joe went back to the car to start the arduous process of unpacking.
‘Don’t forget the shortbread,’ I called after him, in the same tone as one might have said, don’t forget the Elgin marbles.
‘It’s a nice view.’ I crossed to the window. It wasn’t really a terribly nice view. The city landscape broke the horizon in a series of beige and silver rectangles, the sky was an ominous gun-metal grey, and a few spots of rain had started to fall, pinging against the glass.
‘Yeah.’ Layla was opening and shutting cupboard doors to see what storage she had.
‘I’ll go and give your father a hand,’ I said, thinking of Joe battling to keep the various boxes and bags dry.
But for some reason I found myself unable to move.
It felt as though the time of our separation was edging incrementally closer and suddenly the idea of leaving the immediate vicinity of my daughter was unbearably painful.
‘Or we could put the kettle on?’ she said. ‘While we’re waiting for Dad?’
Joe arrived a few minutes later grunting under the strain of multiple boxes and bags, which made me feel a tiny bit guilty.
I’d asked him to get the bedding first, having seen on a #UniFresherMum post that getting the bed made was a good thing for parents to do, thus freeing up their child to make friends with the rest of their corridor.
Except there didn’t seem to be anyone around to make friends with.
I’d seen a couple of parents as our paths crossed on the stairs, practised my ‘God, this is a momentous day!’ facial expression on them, rolled eyes about the weather, etcetera, but I wanted to see the people who would be Layla’s flatmates, and could become her closest friends.
I wanted to have a picture in my head when she said, ‘oh, me and Clara went to the bar,’ or ‘Nigel’s broken the oven,’ or ‘Anika’s been arrested on drugs charges again.
’ How would I know what to visualise if I hadn’t managed to clap eyes on Clara, Anika and Nigel?
(For clarity, these people are invented – I imagine it’s unlikely she’ll meet a Nigel under the age of fifty.)
In any event, I needed something to keep me occupied and making the bed seemed an obvious choice, so once we’d located the teabags and mugs, I left Layla in the kitchen and set to work dealing with the basic domestic chores.
Joe stopped me as I was arranging and rearranging the books on her shelf, telling me that Layla would probably want to decorate and personalise her room herself.
‘The main thing, Hattie, is to make sure everything’s out of the car, get the basics sorted, the boring stuff like the pots and pans, and then leave.
We’ve already been here for almost two hours.
Any longer and it will be harder to say goodbye.
And we might cramp her style.’ He shrugged.
‘Well, you definitely will. I’ll probably just score points for being a cool dad however long I stay. ’
I didn’t even have the energy to rise to his joke (because it obviously was a joke – we all knew that I was the cool parent).
And I understood what he was saying. But I was also coming around to the realisation that I may require forcible extraction from the building.
Joe, from his expression, was evidently reaching the same conclusion.
‘Can we at least wait until someone else has arrived?’ I whispered, as Layla returned having established where the laundry room was located (a somewhat optimistic search I felt, given her lack of enthusiasm for using the washing machine at home).
‘Oh, actually I’ve just seen some people down by the tumble dryers,’ she said, looking pleased. ‘We were talking about where you get the tokens to use them. They’re not on this floor but they seemed nice.’
‘Boys or girls?’ I said quickly. ‘What were their names? Did you ask what course they were doing? Which floor are they on? Were their parents with them? Do you think they were freshers or…’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to pump them for their entire backstory,’ said Joe as Layla backed away from me, a look of mild alarm on her face.
‘Anyway, I think some of the rooms in this flat are already occupied. There’s a pint of milk in the communal fridge that we didn’t bring, and I’m sure I heard music coming out of room seven. ’
‘What kind of music? Creepy music?’ I said, not entirely sure what I meant.
‘I think we should go,’ Joe said, gentle but resolute.
‘We’ve already stayed past our allocated slot in the car park.
We should let Layla settle in.’ He turned to his daughter, who was now sitting quietly on the side of her bed, hands folded into her lap.
‘You could go and knock on number seven’s door, Layles?
Introduce yourself? Offer the person playing thrash metal a cup of tea? ’
‘Or you could sit in the kitchen,’ I said. ‘And just sort of look approachable when someone new arrives?’
Neither option seemed to be that appealing. I wondered how I would feel about sitting on my own in a draughty kitchen that smelled faintly of fish, waiting to accost random passersby. Or indeed, being brave enough to go and bang on a stranger’s closed door.
I went to sit next to her on the bed. ‘Why don’t you carry on sorting your room out,’ I said.
‘Stay here and keep an ear out for anyone arriving? You could wedge your door open. I know it’s against fire regulations but it’s easier to hear what’s going on and makes it more likely that someone will come and say hello. ’
She nodded. ‘Okay. Yeah. Sounds like a plan.’ Her smile was a little wobbly and I felt my bottom lip start to quiver.
‘Okay, so – we’ll be heading off then?’ said Joe tentatively.
I stood up and plastered some fake cheer onto my face. ‘Yup!’ I said with a bravado that fooled nobody. ‘And message us as soon as you like, or ring. It’ll give your father and I something to do in the car other than ranking service stations!’
She stood and held out her arms for a cuddle.
I was instantly reminded of all those mornings, dropping her off at school.
Layla dressed for reception class, wrapped in a scarf and duffle coat, unbearably cute with stumpy plaits and wide eyes.
Me looking like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, trawling through her bookbag to make sure she had her reading record and the signed slip of paper for Forest School and the right sandwiches and the carton of juice she liked.
How on earth had that little dot become a fully grown woman who was starting university?
A person I no longer needed to crouch down to hug but instead had to reach up to wrap my arms around her and whisper a mangled ‘love you so much’ into her ear.
It was unfathomable.
And yet, fathom it I must. Because it had happened.
And now I was saying goodbye. Goodbye to the bum-shuffling baby who never learned to crawl, goodbye to my little mittened preschooler, goodbye to the nervous reception child, goodbye to the confident year six pupil who’d outgrown primary school, goodbye to the gawky pre-teen with her spots and training bra and first period.
And goodbye to my beautiful, clever, darling girl who would never again be described as ‘living at home’, only, ‘back for the holidays’.
I know I’m making it sound as though she’d died.
And I’m sorry, because that’s terribly insensitive to parents who have suffered the tragic death of a child.
But in those moments, it did feel like a bereavement of sorts.
A wrenching away. A pulling apart. The finality of separation.
And as I made my way out of that flat, back down the steps that would take me to the car, and then far, far away from my daughter, the numbness that I knew would develop over the hours into a physical pain reminded me of a sensation I’ve only experienced once before – when my father died. It was grief.