Chapter 35
Celia has decided to walk into town, to settle herself really. She passes the park she never goes to, and then takes the back streets to avoid the main roads. She wants fresh, cool air on this bright summer’s day, not traffic rumbling past her.
Crossing the river, she stops part-way over the bridge and looks across the Clyde, at the wide expanse of still water and old and new buildings all jumbled together.
At the waterside, a bunch of skateboarders have congregated.
She sees a girl doing impressive flips – or whatever they’re called – who looks like a slightly older Mathilde.
Celia has thought about Enzo a lot these past few days.
How safe she felt with him, even though it’s utterly out of character for her to blurt out such personal stuff to a near stranger.
However, it’s occurred to her that he only suggested that walk out of pity for her, and that makes her shrivel a little inside.
And was that sporty Kim person someone he’s dating, or has dated in the past?
There was definitely a frisson there. Celia doesn’t quite understand the situation with Saska either, but one thing she does know is that – adding in Laura, Mathilde’s mum – his life appears to be filled with extremely self-assured, not to mention beautiful women, and her instinct is to step away and to regard him as just another houseplant hospital customer.
Which, of course, he is. A man who happened to show up for a doorstep diagnosis and whom, so far at least, she has been unable to help.
Celia is in the thick of the city centre now, making her way through the busy shopping streets.
As a girl she imagined she would leave Glasgow one day, as Amanda planned to.
Amanda always did everything first. Off she went to London, for a college course that was swiftly abandoned in favour of a thrilling career in TV.
After having her baby, Celia had never again thought of leaving her hometown.
Now she remembers Scott in his living room with the electric fire radiating an intense heat, and what felt like an even fiercer heat coming from inside his unattractive mustard underpants.
She hadn’t touched him at that point. But she could sense the heat – a man’s heat – and then his thing twitched like a hamster in a paper bag and she’d leapt back.
Scott had laughed softly. ‘Nothing to be scared of, love.’ The kissing had started again and soon, in his bedroom, Celia had remembered her mum’s warning about ‘never going too far’.
When he’d mentioned being infertile he must have assumed – wrongly – that getting pregnant had been her only concern.
In fact, it was all of it. The whole thing.
‘It’s all right, love,’ Scott had assured her again.
‘I can’t have kids. No need to worry about that. ’
Later, as she’d left Scott’s flat, she’d tried to imagine how she would have described it to Amanda, if they’d still been close.
Would she have glossed it up, and said it was wonderful?
Or told her the truth? Perhaps it was best that they were no longer inseparable as Celia wouldn’t have been able to lie.
That afternoon, Celia and Scott hadn’t made an arrangement for their next meeting as they usually did. But still, over the next few weeks, she patrolled the park, expecting to see him, and then one afternoon she took herself back to his street, to his flat.
When she peered into the bleak little kitchen she saw that it looked empty.
Scott must have moved out. And a few weeks later she began to feel queasy, and everything seemed to trigger nausea: food frying, the smell of tinned soup, her mum smoking in the kitchen.
Yet as her bump grew, Celia also started to experience a sense of peace that she’d never experienced before.
Now it was no longer her and her mum and the still-tangible void where her dad had once been.
It was Celia and her baby, whom she couldn’t wait to meet – because things would be different then.
She remembers how neighbours had descended with gifts of velour sleepsuits and tiny hand-knitted outfits when Logan was born. ‘Oh, he’s such a beauty!’ ‘You’re going to be such a good mum, Celia. I can see that already.’ ‘He’s a wee darling, and the image of you.’
Logan did look like her – she was thrilled about that – and he still does.
They have similar slightly elongated greenish eyes and full lips.
Maybe that grated on Geoff, and he felt like the odd one out?
Celia strides on purposefully now. As she passes the skateboarders, she pulls out her phone and types a message.
Hey love I spoke to Gran this morning. Think I might’ve woken her up. She says you’ve been staying there? Thanks for keeping in touch btw. Good to know you were OK even if you wouldn’t say where you were. Fair enough. We all need a bit of space sometimes.
She pauses, wondering what else to say. She doesn’t want to give him a hard time for storming out like that, and he did have the decency to let her know he was all right. Strange that he’s at her mum’s – they’ve never been close – but she is his grandma and at least he’s close by.
Hope you’ll be home soon. Call me anytime you want to.
She’s about to leave it there because Logan teases her about her long, rambling messages when two words are usually his max. But no – she has to share this.
Just wanted to let you know I’m doing it today. I’m going to Switzerland. Will report back. Xxx
* * *
Celia has to use Google Maps to find the salon where she’s booked in for 1p.m. How funny, she thinks, that Amanda knew about this place when she lives 400 miles away and yet Celia had never heard of it.
As she approaches, she glimpses the young stylists moving around in the bright, airy space and is seized by an urge to turn right back and hurry home again.
Because this is definitely a ‘space’ – not Sue’s fishy-smelling kitchen – and Celia doesn’t belong in a salon like this.
She stops, feeling as sick as the peace lily that was brought to her for emergency care, teetering towards death.
However, she also cannot face the prospect of returning home to Amanda with her hair uncut – not to mention being a no-show at the salon.
So she forces herself in through the door, in the way that she has to mentally propel herself up the path towards her mother’s house sometimes.
And once inside she is greeted warmly, her faded old jacket whisked off her, and shown to a chair.
The place definitely has a buzz, which is how Amanda described it.
Striking black and white photographs of modern urban buildings adorn the walls, and Celia’s spirits lift at the sight of several anthurium clarinervium on a shelf, seemingly in excellent health.
She doesn’t recognise the music that’s playing, but she likes it.
It’s at once relaxing and invigorating and now she experiences a tiny flurry of excitement as she is led to a basin and her hair is shampooed by a person other than herself.
Celia can’t remember the last time this was done for her, what with her and Sue’s arrangement spanning a decade or more. Conditioner is applied, and as the young man’s hands swirl rhythmically across her scalp, Celia almost forgets that Caravan Day ever happened.
Now she wonders if he has gone into something of a reverie himself, and forgotten to stop swirling, in the way that you can easily forget to stop posting Kettle Chips into your mouth once the big sack’s open.
However, it’s so heavenly that she’s happy for it to go on for as long as he’s prepared to do it.
No part of Celia’s body has ever been massaged before – not even by Geoff.
Now she realises that this is what it is.
In places like this, instead of gouty feet talk you’re treated to a head massage .
‘Thank you,’ she says, almost weeping with gratitude when it ends. Amanda has paid for all this upfront. ‘An early birthday present,’ she insisted. How can Celia ever repay her?
Celia’s stylist, Jenna, is from Orkney. She’s young and pretty with a choppy dark bob and a silver nose ring, dressed casually in baggy denim dungarees and a white vest. She chats away about growing up on an island while Celia nods and chips in occasionally, thoroughly enjoying herself now.
Eventually they fall into a comfortable silence, and Celia watches through the mirror as Jenna snips deftly. And as the drab locks fall away and she sees a new person emerging.
You won’t recognise yourself.
Now much of her hair is lying on the salon floor and what’s left is a soft elfin crop. When she came in here she’d felt a little reckless and said, ‘Honestly, I’m happy for you to do whatever you think.’
Jenna had looked surprised, but pleased, as if readying herself for the challenge.
She’d probably assessed her as a bit mumsy, Celia realised.
Someone who normally has her hair cut in someone’s kitchen.
‘If you’re sure?’ Jenna asked. ‘Okay then. Let’s go for it!
’ And now, having finished, she is holding the hand mirror so Celia can see the back.
She doesn’t really care about the back. But she beams a huge smile and says, ‘I love it! I really do.’
‘I do too,’ another stylist calls over. Cropped hair, tattoos covering his muscly upper arms; from what she’s noticed of his demeanour she assumes he’s the owner. ‘That is such a cute cut. You look a million dollars,’ he adds.
Celia blushes and smiles and checks her reflection again. Jenna’s cut has worked magic, lifting away not just the weight from her but also brightening her somehow. She looks almost filtered – but real.
She thanks Jenna profusely and leaves a generous tip, aware of what Geoff would have to say about that. Then she steps out into the cool, breezy summer’s afternoon, feeling as if she is ready for anything.
With a little time to spare she wanders through the back streets, stopping off at a funny little shop she pops into occasionally when she wants to try out a new treatment for a plant.
She supposes it’s a health food shop, a little unkempt and dusty, and she wouldn’t like to study the use-by dates on some of the products too closely.
However, she selects a few packets and tubs, going on nothing but instinct with a rising sense of optimism filling her heart.
A little farther down the street she is surprised to see that the comic shop Logan loved as a child is still in business.
It was always the American superhero comics that he wanted.
She’d treat him occasionally, safe in the knowledge that Geoff would have no idea that it had been as pricy as a book.
Actually, she didn’t care if he found out. It was only a comic, for God’s sake.
Celia has read that you take cues on how to raise your kids from your own parents.
That you either follow their lead, mining your own upbringing for clues on how to do things, or you go the opposite way, which is what Celia has done – rejecting the example her own parents set.
She didn’t want Logan to experience things in the way that she had: discovering his mum lying on the floor the morning after a party, surrounded by shattered vol-au-vents.
Or mentioning the school trip to Blackpool, knowing deep in his gut that the two steps needed for him to go were insurmountable.
Step One was getting the form signed. Celia could do that; she’d forged her mum’s signature plenty of times.
But then would come the paying for the trip, and money was always tight.
At her primary school there was this club that no one wanted to be a member of: the ‘not on the school trip club.’ The two or three kids spending the day in a classroom, allowed to play board games in lieu of a day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, with a resentful teacher keeping an eye on them.
Right from the start, from the moment Logan was placed in her arms, Celia knew she would do things differently.
She’d be loving of course, and kind and caring – but also actively involved.
She would be part of his life, as much as he’d let her.
And so she didn’t resent the fact that she was the hands-on parent, the one pushing the swing in the drizzly park, accommodating his numerous food fads and helping him to learn to read and write and just loving him.
Her phone rings. She pulls it from her bag, expecting it to be Amanda, demanding a photo of Celia with her new haircut. But it’s not Amanda and when she sees Logan’s name displayed, her heart soars. ‘Hello, love!’
‘Hey, Mum,’ he says.
All at once she feels choked and yearns to hug him. ‘Darling, I’ve really missed you. Are you okay at Gran’s?’
‘It’s all right.’
She runs a hand back over her hair, still surprised at how different it feels, and manages not to ping questions at him. Why are you there? Are you still mad at me? When are you coming home?
‘It’s nice to hear your voice,’ she says, adding, ‘You got my message then, about meeting Dad?’
‘Yeah, I did.’ She can tell he’s smiling now. ‘That’s why I’m calling. I just wanted to wish you luck.’