A Daughter's Secret (7 page)

‘You must have found somewhere very private.’

Anger flashes in her grey-blue eyes.

‘Yeah, private. Have you heard of that?’

She moves her gaze away, stares steadily out of the window, her eyes tracking the humming stream of traffic. I try to quell my frustration. I can’t push too hard; there’s enough push coming from outside without me adding to it. I look up at the clock: our time’s almost gone now.

‘We’re going to need to stop soon,’ I tell her, half expecting her to spring up, but she’s still sitting there, gaze far away.

She jerks her body round, eyes bright and damp.

‘You don’t understand what he’s dealing with,’ she says, her voice rising, distorted with emotion. ‘People don’t understand why he had to leave us, but I do. I
know
him, Mia.’

It makes my heart hurt for her. It’s not just the words, it’s the depth of feeling that soaks through them.

‘Do you want to come back and talk about it some more?’ She nods. I continue, trying to rein in my words. ‘None of this is your responsibility, OK? Loving him doesn’t mean you have to defend him, whatever people are saying right now.’

She looks up at me again, a small smile on her face. Is she smiling at the sheer stupidity of my remark? The very idea that she could stop her vigilance? She nods mechanically as if she’s pacifying me, her eyes somewhere else again.

‘Thanks, Doc,’ she says, standing up.

‘You know I’m not a doctor, Gemma.’

‘Yeah, no, I was just saying,’ she says, grabbing her rucksack.

‘Bye, Gemma,’ I say to her retreating back. ‘You did some good work today.’

I don’t know if she even heard me.

January 1990 (eleven years old)

I’ve thought for ages and ages about his present. I’ve saved up all my babysitting money from looking after Katy next door, and spent the whole lot in one triumphant splurge. It’s a red-leather song book, his name embossed on the front in gold. Mum, who will scrape a bubbly layer of mould off a piece of cheese rather than throw it away, would be disgusted with me, but I don’t care. Before we set off for the station, I wedged it deep inside my rucksack where she wouldn’t see it. She cries when she puts me on the train, but in a Mum-ish sort of way, only letting a few tears escape and rubbing at them angrily with the woolly arm of her striped cardigan. I wonder if I should cry too, but I’m too excited. It’s eighteen months since I’ve seen him. Eighteen months since he last came home, and left again. Eighteen months since it definitely stopped being his home and became just ours. It feels like our house has faded to black and white, some crackly old TV programme that I don’t want to watch, like he was the thing that made it colour.

I’m going care of the guard, even though the guard doesn’t seem remotely interested in my welfare. I feel terribly grown-up, like I’m going to a business meeting in
Howard’s Way
. I buy a cup of tea and a KitKat from the buffet, and ask how long it is until we get to Bristol, all nonchalance.

I heave open the door when the train pulls into the station, then stand on the freezing-cold platform looking left to right for Lorcan. I don’t feel like I’m going to a business meeting any more – I feel like a girl who misses her mum, and who should have listened when she told me to wear a vest. I’m just starting to think I should pick someone out of the bustle and ask for help when he comes loping up the platform and folds me into a hug. A sob rises in my throat.

‘There you are, petal. I’ve been searching for the platform.’

‘You found me though.’

‘Of course I found you!’

Lorcan grabs my hand on the way out of the station, swinging it high up in the air as we walk down the busy road. I wonder if I’m too old for hand-holding, but I don’t want to make him realize how long it’s been since he’s seen me in case it makes him sad. Besides, I like it, even if I am too old. I swing even higher, and he laughs.

We stop for fish and chips on the way, the chips so hot they almost take the skin off my fingers, the steam rising off them and mingling with my cloudy breath. We walk for ages, toiling our way up a long, steep hill until eventually, right at the end of a terrace, we find Lorcan’s flat.

It isn’t really a flat. It’s a floor of a house, with a big room for him, and a tiny kitchen area in the corner of the sitting room where I’m going to sleep. I’ve never slept next to a microwave before. The bathroom is on the floor below, a handful of brushes splaying out of a tooth mug like a bouquet of ugly plastic flowers. I can hear someone shuffling about upstairs, a snatch of bass booming out when they open their door. Lorcan says no one owns the house, it’s a collective, but Jackie, the woman we met in the kitchen, acted as if it was hers. She looked at me as if she was deciding whether or not to welcome me, sneaking glances from behind her straggly curls as she scrabbled around the kitchen drawers for a bottle opener. I hoped Lorcan wouldn’t have a glass of her wine, but he did. He clinked his glass against hers, and I tried to analyse what their eyes said to each other. I’m getting good at that, now I’ve realized that people don’t say everything they mean with actual words. Lorcan’s eyes had a laugh in them, but they often do, even when he’s just paying for chips. That’s why everyone likes him so much. I won’t tell Mum about Jackie, but in my mind I will tell her that she’s got froggy eyes, always bulging out with all the staring she can’t stop doing. ‘Frog Features’, that’s what we’d call her. Lorcan always thinks of the rudest, funniest nicknames, and Mum pretends to be horrified, but she can’t help laughing.

‘So, do you approve?’ says Lorcan, curling out his hand theatrically.

‘It’s nice,’ I say uncertainly, sitting on the edge of his bed. The sight of his bedspread, that familiar parade of faded Indian elephants that I would snuggle under until I was told it was high time I went to my own room, makes my heart wobble and shrink in my chest.

‘
Nice
?’ says Lorcan, in the voice he uses when I should know better. ‘Give me a proper word.’

I pause, hating the tears that are threatening. Of course it’s not nice.

‘It’s different. It’s not our house,’ I say, my voice rising up high to betray me.

Lorcan puts out his hand to cover mine, and smiles at me, his dark blue eyes searching my face.

‘What’s Claire been saying to you?’

She’s said lots of things, but they’ve just been dry heaps of words. Endless stuff about them both loving me very much, about how adult relationships are hard to understand. It’s like she disappeared for a while, even though I could see her in front of me doing all the normal things, like packing my lunches and driving me to school. She seemed to think it was kinder to pretend to be someone else – a made-up mother I’d never met before, who didn’t shout at me to clear up my room but also didn’t hug me like she really meant it. Lorcan listens intently as I describe it, then leaps up. He sticks his long, skinny arms out, dead straight, and lumbers forward, eyes glazed.

‘Revenge of the Killer Mother!’ he says, and I giggle, even though it means I’m two-faced and horrible. ‘Sounds like a zombie film. It’s not like you’re a kid any more. You’ll be a teenager next year!’ I nod slowly, maturely. Like a person who takes an Intercity train and buys a cup of tea, not a Coke, with their own money. It’s not a year really, I wish it was. It’s twenty-one whole months away, but it does just squeeze into 1991. ‘You understand what’s going on.’ He sits back down again, the springs of the spongy mattress groaning in protest. ‘Ask me anything.’

A hot starburst of excitement explodes inside me: I can almost feel myself expanding on the spot like Alice does when she drinks the potion, taller and taller, until I’m big enough to deserve his belief in me. He stares at me like he’s excited too, but when I go to speak, nothing comes. ‘I . . .’ I can feel my cheeks glowing a hot crimson, but Lorcan’s crossed the room, is rootling in the pockets of his corduroy jacket for his tobacco tin. Or maybe he’s going to put it on, and ‘pop round the corner’. He’ll be swallowed up whole, claimed by the darkness.

‘Does Mum love you more than you love her?’ I say, the words a desperate jumble. As soon as they’ve flown from my mouth, I want to hoover them back up again. I am so stupid. Right now I can believe that this is a blip, a temporary suspension of normal service, but if he says yes . . . Lorcan turns towards me, the half-rolled cigarette trapped between his long fingers ready for him to lick. I dig my sharp fingernails into my palm, glad I haven’t cut them, keep my eyes glued to the elephants.

‘Don’t believe in the kind of love they sing about on the radio,’ he says. ‘“Especially for you . . .”’ he croons, high-pitched, his hatred for ‘manufactured crap’ poisoning the words. He must NEVER know I’ve got the Kylie album.

‘What about your songs?’

If we can talk about the album he’s been recording, his new manager, we can swerve away from this stupid, awful swamp I’ve waded into. Although I’m worried: his house isn’t very nice, no one can be paying him very much for the album. If only people knew how talented he is: unique.

‘Especially my songs!’ he says. ‘Lust gets you through the beginning, but it’s a bonfire. It burns itself out.’ I try to keep my face in the right position, like I’m considering the point. One of my friends lent me her dog-eared copy of
Forever
, and I read it, guiltily, out of the house, knowing how much Mum would disapprove. I told Cara I loved it: that’s what you have to say about
Forever
, but it frightened me a bit. ‘It was like that with us. Couldn’t stop. And then, year on, guess what, a baby.’

‘I was a surprise?’

‘You were
definitely
a surprise, my darling.’

‘Did you think I was a boy?’

‘I didn’t know
what
you were,’ he says, his voice coming from somewhere else. ‘I was a kid myself. We didn’t even know if we were going to keep you.’

My heart is thumping in my chest, so hard I think he might hear it. I put my hand over it to muffle the sound.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No. My beloved parents nearly keeled over when we told them. We really thought we might have to . . . not have you. Or have you adopted.’ He cocks his head, grins. ‘You might have liked that. Mr and Mrs Average, in leafy Surbiton. “Dad-dy, my pony ate all the apples.”’

I reach up, fling my arms around his neck, bury my head in the bony hollow beneath his shoulder.

‘I would never have wanted that! Never!’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure as sure.’ I’m crying, but I’m crying like Mum does, sneaky tears she thinks I don’t see.

‘Good. Because I’m so glad we kept you,’ he says, rocking me against him. ‘Precious girl. There’s no one in the world who loves me like you do.’

Chapter Four

Lysette’s invariably late – three children will do that to a person. I try and do what I’d counsel a patient to do, shift my mindset and change a problem into an opportunity. At first I find my advice intensely irritating, but gradually I start to relax into it. It’s a hotel bar, this – superficially elegant, with its oatmeal sofas and slinkily dressed waitresses, but its proximity to King’s Cross Station gives it an undercurrent. Commuters waiting for the delayed 7.15 to Nowheresville shun the overpriced Chablis in favour of swilled-back pints of Guinness; a besuited couple surreptitiously hold hands under a table, treasuring their last stolen moments before they head home to their other halves. Do they kiss in the photocopying room at work, I wonder, my eyes following her bare fingers as they caress his meaty digits, wedding ring firmly jammed on?

Lysette appears from behind me, squeezing me into a hug so tight I can barely breathe, her chin tucked into the crook of my neck. She nuzzles in and kisses my cheek, smelling of rose oil and something else I can’t identify: does motherhood have a musk of its own, a hormonal mix of unconditional love and exhaustion that seeps from your very pores? I twist round, and hug her fiercely back, batting away the inevitable stream of apologies. We always promise each other we’ll meet more often, but yet again it’s been a gaping two-month hole. There aren’t many people who join up my past, my present and my future: she’s a string of fairy lights strewn across my history. I signal for the barman.

‘Wine?’ she says, twisting up her small, neat nose at my nearly full glass. It’s funny watching someone age in front of you, a living embodiment of the passage of time. She’s still the girl I knew – constantly smiling, her face pixie-ish and mischievous – but her hazel eyes are ringed by a subtle network of lines, her forehead similarly decorated when her fringe is swept aside. She still looks lovely, but it sort of denies me the luxury of denial. When we were sixteen, thirty-six would’ve seemed positively ancient.

‘Only proper booze hounds drink Martinis on their own.’

‘A Martini!’ Her enthusiasm fades as she darts an anxious glance at the drinks list.

‘Don’t worry, I’m buying,’ I whisper, quietly enough to be out of earshot of the barman. ‘I invited you on a date.’ Her face relaxes, and I feel instantly guilty for the momentary stress I caused her. I thought it would be easy for her, near to where her train comes in. Since when did I get so spoilt?

‘Gin, on the rocks, with a twist. Hang on, that doesn’t work, does it?’ The barman’s laughing at her, immediately drawn in by her warm chaos. She smiles at him, her light brown curls tangling down her shoulders, benignly flirting. She somehow manages to make the simplest of outfits look sexy. Today it’s a stripy Breton shirt over rolled-up boyfriend jeans, little black mules jammed on as an afterthought. I would agonize over my outfits when we were teenagers, saving up for literally years for a black dress from the kind of Knightsbridge store with a security guard, and she’d still outclass me with something from a charity shop: it’s being comfortable in her own skin that does it. ‘Whatever you think, as long as it’s not vodka. Two?’ she says, looking to me, and wiggling her eyebrows.

‘I’m fine for now.’ She stares meaningfully at my nearly full glass, and I take a large gulp to reassure her that I’m no party pooper. ‘Ooh, Saffron made you this,’ she says, pulling a crumpled piece of cardboard out of her overflowing cotton shopping bag and slapping it down on the bar. It’s a wobbly outline of something – a woman perhaps – with some clumsily crayoned-on eyes and a clump of shiny green nylon feathers.