Before She Was Mine (25 page)

And I thought of last Sunday, at the flat, Oggy draining his beer and telling me he’d reached a decision: that he’d finished with the other girl and he knew now I was the one for
him, what had we been doing messing about all these years, hadn’t it always been us. Kissing, kissing, stumbling to the bedroom, stripping off our clothes and falling into bed, with his malty
breath on my neck. ‘Freya, Freya,’ he’d kept saying. Had there been tears in his eyes? I’d waited for him to stop and reach for a condom, but he never did; the moment was
too fierce. ‘Wait,’ I’d tried to say, but he’d covered my lips with his and ground into me so that I was carried away too. I shivered now at the memory. It was right, the
sex was right and we were right and I’d been right to go back to him. Afterwards, as I was dressing, he’d pulled open a drawer and gone, ‘This is for you.’ I’d looked
up to see him holding a chunky old-fashioned ring between his fingertips. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not an engagement ring. You wouldn’t want one of those anyway,
would you? But this, I found it on the canal path, and I thought you’d like it. It’s got animals round the sides. You’re into animals.’

Too shy to examine it properly, I’d dropped the embossed copper band in my pocket. It felt strange to have him serious after these years of flippancy.

‘Wear it,’ he said. ‘Please.’

For a second, Michael’s disapproving face had flashed up, and my heart had dipped with nerves. But then I’d thought,
Actually, you can sod off, Michael, it’s my
life
.

Oggy and I had kissed for a long time on the doorstep. The old loves are the best, always.

Now I turned to face the bathroom mirror again. The light in here was harsh and my face looked drained under the black-red slick of my hair. I knew, though, that I would get through these next
few hours, and it would be all right. And then I’d escape to Oggy’s.

I patted the ring where it hung on a chain under my shirt; nobody needed to know.

The service passed in an unreal blur. There was Michael, unfamiliar in suit and tie. Other people, couples, I didn’t take much notice of. A cream-painted room with rows
of black chairs, a simple altar block, two stands of flowers. Melody sitting between us, Liv’s angora shrug on her lap. The hospital chaplain reading out names. A hymn only he had any voice
to sing. Prayers. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, and tried to recall Colin’s funeral, but the reality is I have no memory of it at all. The cold nugget of the copper ring burned against my
breastbone.

Then it was all over, and we were filing back out into the foyer, wet-eyed and stunned. Some of the parents were queuing up to write in a book of remembrance.

‘I need to go outside,’ said Melody. ‘Give me ten minutes on my own, yeah?’

We watched her make her way slowly through the double doors and out onto the grass verge.

‘Can you stick around or do you have to get away?’ Michael asked me.

‘Well . . .’ I’d promised Ray I’d try and be back at the nursery for three.

‘It’s fine. That you came, that you were here for the service is what matters.’ He took my arm and I was grateful for the contact. ‘I’ll walk you to your
car.’

We passed a teenage boy on crutches, a pensioner in a wheelchair, a young man with his arm in a sling. Smokers huddled in doorways, some wearing dressing gowns. One guy was still attached to his
drip.

‘Do you think she’ll be better now?’ I asked.

Michael shrugged. ‘It’s another hurdle crossed. She’s actually been brilliant, sorting out the right forms and filling them in, phoning the right people. You know Melody and
paperwork, and deadlines. But she got on and completed them. She’s going over to Ireland for three weeks now, to be with her mum. It’ll be a break for her. She’s handed in her
notice at the shop, though. I wish she hadn’t.’ He scratched the back of his neck, a gesture of bafflement. I thought he was looking very tired. ‘How’s Liv doing, by the
way?’

I patted about for my phone, found it, brought up My Photos. ‘Here. I cut her hair this morning. This is her with the wig on.’ Already it wasn’t quite such a shock to see.
Before I left, I’d made myself gaze at the picture till it was imprinted on my brain.

Michael brought the screen close. ‘It suits her. Tell her I said that: she suits her hair shorter.’

‘It’s just, it’s different from what we’re all used to.’

At the exit to the car park, a man was swearing at the barrier.

‘Hey, I bumped into a friend of yours yesterday,’ said Michael. ‘Your mate Nicky. I was in town getting some dinner and she was in the queue behind me. We got chatting.
She’s not having a great time of it either, is she?’

‘Did she tell you much about it?’

‘I’ll say. We ended up going to the Crown, and she poured it all out. She said she and her fiancé’d had a meeting but it had turned into another row. They’ve not
spoken since. His mother put the phone down on her. Fucking mess, eh?’

‘Well, the wedding might only be postponed.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Christian’s taking a breather,’ I said. ‘To get his head straight.’

‘Right.’

‘You reckon he’s got other plans?’

‘He’s certainly pissing her about. And it’s a damn shame to treat a girl like Nicky that way. She could have any bloke she wanted. I said as much.’

‘That’s what I told her, too,’ I said quickly, trying to ignore the little flare of jealousy in my chest.

‘So I dunno what he’s playing at.’

I saw again Christian’s wide blue eyes. ‘He’s only being honest. Better to say early on if you have doubts.’

‘Better not to behave like a prick.’

‘They’ll work it out. It’s nothing, in the scheme of things.’ Funny to think how, twelve months ago, Nicky’s wedding hitch would have seemed like the absolute worst
disaster.

We reached his van and I leaned against it. ‘OK?’ he said. ‘Not feeling giddy, are you?

‘Exhausted, all of a sudden. Don’t know why.’

‘Release of tension. You did well, Frey. You really did. These things are never easy.’ And he stepped forward and gave me a huge hug. It felt nice to rest against him and close my
eyes for a minute.

‘Hey,’ he said at last, loosening his hold, ‘you didn’t happen to hear Wem FM on your way in?’

‘No. I was listening to a CD. Why, what did I miss?’

‘Kim. On a phone-in about love rats.’

‘Shit, no. Did she actually give out your details?’

‘She tried but they wouldn’t let her, kept saying, “No full names”. I think they warn callers before they go on air. Libel laws and stuff. The station doesn’t want
to end up in court.’

‘And what did she claim you’d done?’

‘Mostly what I did. That I ended the marriage because it wasn’t working and because we were both unhappy. That makes me a bastard.’

‘What did the presenter say?’

‘Cut her off after a minute or two because she was starting to rant. A couple of other women phoned in later to agree I sounded like a git.’

‘You could have done without that.’

‘Yup. God, I’m glad you came today, Freya.’

He looked at me for a long moment.

‘Anyway, you’d better get back to Melody,’ I said, stepping away and tugging at the handle of the van door.

‘I think you’ll find that’s my vehicle.’

I groaned. ‘God, see what state I’m in.’ But as I moved round the bonnet of the van, I noticed a paperback book lying on his dashboard. ‘
A History of VSO
? What on
earth are you doing with that, Michael?’

He looked away, thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘You know.’

‘Not really.’

‘Just that it does me good to think I could take off, if I wanted. That there’s the option. You could come too. Stuff some clothes in a rucksack, hop on a plane, easy.
Whoosh.’

‘Yeah, right, me on an aeroplane. I’d be hysterical before we even took off.’

‘You wouldn’t. You could go to the doctors and get some pills. Anyway, think of the pay-back. Don’t you need something like that in your life, at least to dream
about?’

‘You must be kidding,’ I said. ‘Neither of us could disappear right now. Too many people here need us.’

He muttered something I couldn’t catch and turned away. ‘What? What did you say?’

He looked back, wearily. ‘I said, “Don’t I know it.”’

Then, before I could reply, he was striding away across the car park.

Driving back from the hospital I wanted only to take myself home and crawl into bed. By the time I reached the nursery, though, I found my mind was racing, my brain and muscles
completely wired. I had this sense of having walked across a lake of fire and come out the other side. The funeral was over and I’d got through it without disgracing myself. Surely I’d
never again face any test as tough.

Ray clocked my state at once and sent me out to the raspberry field so I could be on my own. It’s a cool, green, ordered space, well back from the greenhouses, adjacent to farmland.
Several occasions I’ve been working here and a fox has trotted right past me; another day I saw a sparrowhawk eat a woodpigeon just the other side of the fence.

I unrolled my ball of twine and set to work. For the first half hour there was only room in my mind for painful images of the chapel, of the maternity ward, of Melody newly pregnant. The world
was tipped upside down and would never be right again. But gradually, gradually, I began to feel a little bit calmer. The quiet of the field helped soothe me, and the repetitive threading and
knotting as I moved along the nets.

I thought of a morning spent shopping with Melody early on in our relationship, telling her as we wandered through the rails of clothes about how Liv would only ever take me to play in the one
playground that was near the brook so she could look for water voles. Complaining that Liv, with her untamed hair and men’s shirts, stood out embarrassingly from the other mothers. Moaning
about Geraint. Melody laughing at my descriptions. Another day, Melody stroking a blusher brush tenderly across my cheek. It had been so cool at the time to suddenly be hanging round with
Melody’s crowd, with the laid-back Michael and his weird, fragile fiancée.
You might have Geraint but I’ve got another mother
, I remember thinking as I watched Liv fill
out her boring old Natural England reports. When I came back from uni and set up camp at Love Lane, it was supposed at least in part to be a punishment for Liv.
Let her struggle with the
housework on her own. Or, if she wants me back, let her boot her boyfriend out, a straight choice
. Not that I ever put that to her. I did stop calling her ‘mum’, though. She never
said anything, so I presume she didn’t notice.

Then I thought of Nicky asking me straight out why I hated Geraint so much; it was an Easter Monday and we’d been holed up in her bedroom watching some utterly dire romantic comedy about a
completely stupid, rubbish couple who deserved a good slap. And I’d gone, ‘Because Geraint smells like a badger,’ which wasn’t even true but seemed like the most hilarious
thing to come out with at that moment, and Nicky had choked on her creme egg.
Because he’s there
, is what I really wanted to say.
Because he’s not my dad. Because he’s
too old for Liv, and too beardy, and because he has this way of looking at me that makes me feel as though I don’t belong there. He wants me to move out, move on. Even though it’s my
house. Even though it’s none of his business what I do with my life.
But I didn’t say that because I was embarrassed to be back home again after uni, after Love Lane.
Great hairy
oaf.

And then I found myself recalling, of all things, a conversation I’d once had with Nicky’s mum Joan when I was about sixteen. We’d been in the garden because she was having a
barbecue and she’d had a fair amount to drink, which wasn’t like her. She’d sidled up to me and gone, in a voice full of tragic-sympathy, ‘Nicky and I always think
you’re marvellous the way you’ve handled being adopted. So brave. Because it must be difficult, Liv not being your’ – she’d lowered her voice – ‘real
mum.’

‘Well, you know, it beats being put out on the street,’ I said to her. Then I’d asked if she knew how many kids in my class lived with someone who wasn’t their biological
parent. She’d looked sick and made a swift exit, so she never got to hear the answer, which was:
At least half of them
. Because the plain fact was that in every other household
you’d have found a stepmum or stepdad, a granny or aunty or even in one case a neighbour standing in for absent kin. There were IVF and ICSI babies, born from donated sperm and eggs. And I
knew other adoptees, too. In my maths group we had a Vietnamese boy called Hung whose dad was a ginger Scot and whose mum was half-Italian. Who says families have to match? Love’s the glue
that holds people together, not genetic fit. Hell, if genes alone did it, every biological family would be a shining unit like something out of
Hello!
magazine. Not Tyler Dawes taking a pop
at his dad with an air rifle, or Sheree Lewis throwing hot coffee over her mum during an argument about skirt lengths.

We weren’t just talking modern times, either. I’d done history GCSE and I knew that mix ’n’ match parenting was perfectly acceptable pre-1950. For a start, people
didn’t live that long. Women died in childbirth and men in wars, so millions of households would have had to draft in a new mummy or daddy to keep the place ticking over. Children from poor
homes would get sent away to live with rich relatives; wealthy parents employed nannies or boarding schools to do their child-rearing for them. That was the norm. You’d have been thought odd
if you’d resisted. Also, till the Sixties there was rubbish access to contraception or abortion so if the wife played away, how many husbands would have been bringing up sons or daughters
they knew weren’t theirs? What about all those ‘natural’ offspring, all those ‘wards’ with their mystery benefactors? And how many young unmarried mums were forced to
pose as big sister to their own baby? I’d had years to think about all this, marshal my arguments, and my conclusion was that the whole business of raising kids has been a make-do patchwork
from year dot.