The Flavours of Love (44 page)

‘Oh, God, what?’ she asks. Her eyes, dulled by the aches of her body and probably from throwing up, avoid me. Instead, she leans heavily on the trolley.

‘I need you to tell me who the father is.’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘It’s not Curtis.’

‘It is!’ she insists loudly, then lowers her voice. ‘It
is
.’

‘I’ve seen you and Curtis together, he is not the person you were talking about five weeks ago. He’s a lovely lad, and I don’t for one second believe he lied to you about not getting pregnant first time. He’s not that sort of boy. You love him like a friend, yes, I can see that, but he doesn’t make your heart race and he doesn’t make you so desperate to be with him that you’ll convince yourself you really believe any cock and bull story you’re fed about contraception. Tell me who he really is.’

She wriggles her body as if trying to free her back and rolls her shoulder in a circle while she stares down at the items in the trolley.

‘I thought we’d got to a really good place, you and me,’ I say. I’m not usually into emotional blackmail, but needs must. ‘I thought we’d got to the stage where we could trust each other with almost anything. I’d really like you to tell me who it is. I’ll try not to get angry.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ she says quietly. ‘He’d get in so much trouble.’

‘With who?’

Shrug. ‘Everyone.’

I step forwards, place my hand on her bare forearm. Her skin is clammy and cold under my fingers. I take her face and tip it to
face me, her eyes are unfocused and bloodshot. A line of sweat is collecting across her forehead, and she reaches down to rub her stomach. ‘Are you in pain?’ I ask her.

Shrug.

‘How long have you felt like this?’

Shrug.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were feeling ill?’

Shrug.

‘We need to get you to a doctor,’ I say, reaching for the bags in the trolley. In between my stretch for the bags and saying the word doctor, Phoebe’s eyes roll back in her head and she crumples to the ground.

LIV

I want to cry.

The ache in my throat, the caught air in my chest, the wet smarting behind my eyes are all parts of it, are all parts of the anatomy of tears I want to shed.

I can’t let myself do it, though. Right now, crying feels like the weak option. Normally I wouldn’t think that, but in this moment, any tears will admit that everything is still falling apart when it was meant to be getting better.

I want to feel better. I need to feel better. I need to feel full, crammed with so much stuff there is no space for anything else; not even the smallest cavity for this dread and anguish. I want to purge, too. I want all of this stuff that’s inside, the worry, the uncertainty, the guilt, to be excavated so I am empty; so I am nothing.

Is this what happens when you ask to feel something else? Do you need to be specific and say exactly what you want to replace the anger with because you’ll get what you’re given? What I’ve been given to replace the anger is terror, torment and even more guilt.

I’m sitting in an easy chair in a hospital room in the children’s hospital of Sussex Royal County Hospital, The Alex, as they call it. Phoebe has had surgery to remove an ectopic pregnancy as well as the resulting ruptured Fallopian tube and I am waiting for her to wake up. I am waiting for her to wake up before I call Aunty Betty and Zane, before I have to introduce new worry into their lives.

This little room, only a bit bigger than my bedroom at home, is surprisingly full with machines: electronic panels on the walls, a mechanical arm with a small television screen that hangs over the bed like a dentist’s close-work light, and two portable units she’s
hooked to that bleep intermittently and have colourful displays of her heartbeat and blood oxygen levels. Despite those bleeps and flashes, everything feels still in here. Tranquil, almost. Phoebe seems peaceful as she sleeps, her face in profile against her puffy pillow.

I’ve noticed the furtive looks amongst the staff when they hear or read her date of birth and find out she was pregnant: they wonder if I’m up to the job of being her parent; they silently ask how I let this happen in the first place; and quietly question how I allowed this to continue without her having a proper appointment with a midwife or GP. Their scorn and disdain aren’t necessary – no one can hate me more than I hate myself. I hate myself for not noticing, for not hurrying her up so she could have gone for a proper consultation with a medical person no matter what her final choice was going to be. I hate myself for not predicting this was going to happen.

My gaze wanders over the lines of her young face, her hair pulled back into the low ponytail she’s taken to wearing since not being at school. She seems so untroubled in this moment. Even when I look in on her most nights she doesn’t look completely relaxed – there’s always that shade of loss we often take with us into the dreamworld. Now that powerful drugs have knocked her out, she can sleep, she can finally let go.

I’ve been holding her little black and silver box of secrets in my hand since they took her down to surgery. Before I had to call the ambulance, it felt like I was getting through and that she was about to tell me who was really responsible for this. She confirmed there was another man involved and he was still on the scene, probably still manipulating her. All she had to do was give me his name.

All I have to do is unlock this phone and I’ll have all the information I require.

I’m desperate to find out the truth, to arm myself with the information that I thought she was about to give me. The second I look, though, I will have crossed a line. I will have actively invaded her privacy and that goes against everything I believe in. My parents had no sense of boundaries, I was never allowed privacy because I
wasn’t an autonomous being as far as they were concerned so they had a right to know everything, all the time. Even when my mother came to stay in my flat in the years before I moved in with Joel she would open my post, sometimes go through my belongings because I was still her child in her mind and I required no privacy. I’ve tried too hard to go the other way, and it’s ended up here – with Phoebe hospitalised because I allowed her too many secrets that I convinced myself was privacy. There’s a fine line between privacy and secrecy – Phoebe has crossed the line. I have to cross it too as her parent, but it stirs up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings inside.

I feel like I am reverting to type, I’m being my mother.

Phoebe knows I check the history on her computer, the rules being if it looks like anything has been deleted or that she’s been using private browsing, she loses her computer indefinitely. I can check her phone whenever I want, too, and if it looks like anything has been deleted or the calls and texts don’t match up to the bills then she loses her phone. I have never checked her phone. I check the computer because, I convinced myself, all the danger was on that nebulous thing called ‘the internet’. It wasn’t other people she knows and cares for in real life. It wasn’t the real-life friends she hung out with on social media. It was chatrooms and perverts and porn – strangers, not the people who had her phone number, who were friends in the physical world. When you hung out on social media with the people you hung out with in the real world, your mother could relax. She’d tell herself not to fret that you’re bunking off school, that you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be which leads to your father being there too, and meeting up with the person who was going to take him away for ever.

It was all of it, of course. I should have been involved, should have known what she got up to via her phone – I should have checked.

The main reason I didn’t check her phone was because I wanted to believe she’d earned back the trust she’d lost because Joel would have wanted me to try to trust her again, he would have convinced me that she’d made a mistake and was genuinely, heartbrokenly sorry and wouldn’t do anything like this again.

Over and over goes the phone in my hand. Over and over, spin, spin, spin.

I’m scared to check in case it is Fynn. Or it is Lewis. Or it is any man I know. If he’s familiar to me, I’m worried I’ll lose the plot and go after him and all the anger I feel at the loss of Joel, the devastation of my life, the powerlessness created by the letter writer will be unleashed upon this man. He’d deserve it, but Phoebe and Zane don’t. They don’t deserve to lose another parent, probably to prison this time. The rational me understands and believes that, but the me who would want to hurt the man who has done this to my daughter might not be as reasonable.

If I don’t check, though, I can’t go to the police about the stalker because having that sitting there, a ticking bomb for any reporter to unearth and detonate at some later date, is too big a risk to take with Phoebe.

Through the strip of window embedded in the wall opposite where I sit, I spy the panorama of Brighton: the buildings slotted together like irregular, multicoloured building blocks, and the mysterious misty seascape beyond the buildings. From this angle I can’t see the beach, from this height I can’t see the people. They’re both there, they both exist even though I am looking right at them and I can’t see them. The answer to what I do next is probably the same: staring me right in the face and I can’t see for looking.

What would Joel do?
I ask myself.

What would Joel do?
I ask the Universe, God, Whoever is out there.
What would Joel do?
I ask Joel.

The answer diffuses through me – my skin, my lungs, my heart – like an expensive, delicate perfume until it arrives in my mind.

I am not Joel.

It doesn’t matter what Joel would do because I am not him. I am me. And I need to do what I would do.

Slowly I type the password, the key to the secrecy box, into the waiting space. I almost hear the latches being drawn back, the handle being turned and the door being thrown open to Phoebe’s secret life.

It takes seconds to find him. It takes minutes to work out who he is. It takes twenty minutes to read through their message chain. And it takes a microsecond to know that, like the Mount Vesuvius eruption that levelled the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, my explosion is going to level everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity.

My hand shakes as I place the phone on her bedside table. It’s set back onto the last message to Curtis it was on so she won’t know what I read, what I discovered until I confront the bastard and I tell her that I looked.

‘Mum?’ she croaks. She tries to move but doesn’t manage anything beyond a slight shift of her torso – her body probably feels like it is weighted down by boulders, her throat will be arid and tight. She doesn’t open her eyes, probably too much effort at the moment. I clasp my hand around hers.

‘I’m here, lovely girl, I’m here.’ I smile at my daughter who can’t see me but can hear me.

Not being able to touch Joel at the morgue was something that underlined my loss in so many ways in the following days and weeks and months. Since I first clung onto his hand on the flight to Lisbon, I loved to touch him, I loved to be touched by him. Being restrained, ordered not to connect with him physically, added a cruel dimension to losing him. The policeman’s grip on my forearm, a stern restraint from interfering with ‘evidence’, underlined how totally he had been snatched from me – reminded me that my connection to him in the physical world was gone. I promised myself then I would touch the people I loved as much as possible in case I was ever denied that again.

I lean over the bed, stroke my daughter’s face and press my lips to her cool cheek. She usually protests at my touches, doesn’t understand that I need to do this in case I’m not allowed to do it again. Right now, her entire being seems to relax when I make contact with her.

‘I’m right here, beautiful girl. I’m right here.’

LV

‘You need to stay here until I come back,’ I tell Aunty Betty.

She hasn’t had time to change from today’s visit to the post office, which she’s done alone. For the past three days I’ve accompanied her there, which is why Phoebe and I were up and out early, so I could be back in time to take her, but she’s sneaked off to do it alone. I don’t have time or the spare amount of annoyance to bring it up with her now. I do, though, need her to understand how important it is that Phoebe isn’t left alone. I don’t want her waking up alone, to be confused why I’m not there.

‘I don’t understand where you’re going,’ Aunty Betty replies.

‘I have something urgent I need to do. It can’t wait. But I want you to promise me that you won’t leave her. Play the old woman card and I’m sure one of the nurses will get you anything you need. The loo’s right there. Don’t talk to anyone who isn’t a doctor or a nurse and who can’t prove they should be in here. If they can’t prove they should be in here, kick up the biggest fuss you can.’

‘Child, you want me to check if someone can prove they should be in here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would some—’ Aunty Betty stops talking and her usually animated face draws still, wary. She’s a smart woman, she understands what I mean. ‘The letters?’

I nod.

‘You’re going to sort that out now?’

‘No, this is something else entirely.’

She jerks her head questioningly towards a fast-asleep Phoebe.

I nod, gravely.

‘I won’t leave her side.’

‘Don’t tell her where I’ve gone, I’ll do that myself later. If she wakes up and asks for me, call me. If you can’t get hold of me, call either Brighton or Hove police station because that’s where it’s likely I’ll be.’

For a moment, when our eyes meet, I have a flash of Joel staring at me, and the way her mouth is set reminds me of how his mouth would contort itself right before he would ask me not to do something.

‘You do what you’ve got to do,’ Aunty Betty says.

If she’d asked me not to do it, I would have thought twice. I would have tried to find another way. But I have to do this. He deserves to experience this now, while I am this angry. If I’ve had time to calm down, to be reasonable, to decide to talk it out, I’ll let him get away with it. And he’ll do it again. He’s probably done it before.