The Story of You (41 page)

I held it up and gasped.

‘Do you know what?’ I said. ‘This is what I imagine her wearing when I think of her.’

‘God, that’s so weird,’ said Leah. ‘Because so do I. That and the massive sunglasses.’

‘Yes. The massive white-framed sunglasses!’

‘Although, let’s face it,’ chipped in Niamh, ‘half the time she used to sunbathe in her underwear. Even I remember
that
shame!’ We all then remembered about the boiling-hot day, when Leah had brought home a couple of mates from school without ringing first, and Mum was making quiche Lorraine with Niamh in only her pants (Niamh, oddly was fully dressed).

‘I have never been more mortified in my life,’ said Leah, dryly.

‘The worst thing was,’ I chipped in, ‘she wasn’t even bothered – boobs out, belly out. She was like, “Well, we’re all girls here …!”’

We were there for three hours; it felt like three hours with Mum. There were the clothes – so many beautiful clothes (and some horrors; in particular a 1970s bright mustard polo neck and a couple of diamond-encrusted, shoulder-padded monstrosities). But there were also old calendars with her hospital appointments on, her and Dad’s engagements, our school events … And then there was her handbag: a roomy tan bag from Dolcis, with her reading glasses and her purse and some stamps and her work badge that said
LILLIAN KING: SENIOR MIDWIFE
on it (I used to stand and watch her put that on before every shift); the old cheque books and progammes from the endless dance shows we were in, which Mum loved but Dad had to sit through. Just stuff from a life lived. An ordinary life lived by an extraordinary person.

I couldn’t remember the last time we were all in Kilterdale, in one room together (must have been when Mum was alive), and that alone felt like a blanket of comfort around me, let alone our mother’s possessions; pieces of her, fragments of the life she had lived, and we had shared. The life that only we knew. It felt like such a privilege.

I looked over at my sisters on the floor. They were fully involved in a heated debate over who should have a pair of our mother’s snakeskin Saxone heels, and so I took my chance. I picked up the tan handbag so it was nestling against my bump, stuck my head in, and took a great lungful of that glorious Obsession/Vosene/Rothman’s potion. My mum. The woman who gave birth to me. The reason I am here.

I was thinking of the letter she wrote to me before she died. She’d been hardly strong enough to hold the pen and had had to keep having breaks but, finally, she got it down:

‘Of the three of you, I am least worried about you because I know you are going to be fine. I know you are strong.’

Right now was the first time in sixteen years that I actually believed her. But then, that’s because I wasn’t really strong back then; but I am now.

Rising from the back of Kilterdale, as if keeping watch over the village, as if holding the people to its broad chest, is a hill, and at the brow of that hill is an ancient wood where, in a glade, Joe and I had an oak tree planted for Lily. I used to worry I’d regret that tree; that, as it grew – something Lily never got to do – I’d somehow resent it; but, actually, over the years, I’ve found it incredibly comforting to go there. Sometimes I just sit and think; sometimes I take the Sunday papers and, like today, a flask of tea. I like how, despite the huge, much older oaks that almost form a canopy now, in the fullness of October, our tree still finds its way to the light, to keep on growing.

I’m on my way there in my car – or I should say,
our
car – the little Renault 5 that stays in Dad and Denise’s garage for all three of us to use, if ever we go back. This week, staying at their new house has been one of the nicest I’ve ever spent with them. Not a defensive swish through a beaded curtain in sight from Denise. I think she’s thoroughly enjoyed her role as matron. Her relief to be finally out of the house that was my mother’s is palpable; she has relaxed, Dad has relaxed. I imagine my mother – if she could see us all – has relaxed, too. I imagine she has been wondering, as I have, what took them so long.

Today, I am thirty weeks pregnant. I said those words to myself when I got up this morning. I opened the Velux window of the spare room – the sun was just climbing over the hills, and the trees of this wood were stacked in three neat rows, growing lighter in green as they neared the horizon. I stuck my head out. The air was so fresh, you could smell the sap rising, and I said,
Today you are thirty weeks pregnant.
Your baby has pretty much the same chances of survival if she was born now, as a baby that has gone full term.
I felt like I’d shed a skin, stepped into another life, one without constant anxiety.

I can’t say for sure what will happen to Joe and me in the future. Some days, I worry I have put him through too much – it’s too late. Other days, I read his letter and I’m hopeful it’s not. Whatever I think I always knew deep down, that he wouldn’t reject me when he knew the truth. It was me who had to accept the truth and then to accept me. And now that I’ve done that, and I have told my sisters, that truth doesn’t seem so dark and so terrible any more; it feels like it’s melted, like snow beneath the sun.

What else do I know? I know that, whether or not Joe and I work out, I don’t want him to be a weekend dad. I’ve been thinking about what he said to me that night all those weeks ago, when he lay on my bed in London, about him wanting to be there for the hard bits, the difficult bits too, the discipline and the potty training, and I’ve decided I want that too. Of course I want that too! Whether that might be in the same house or separate ones, I want that.

I couldn’t wait to come up here to Lily’s tree. I suppose it’s my way of saying, don’t worry, you won’t be forgotten, but also to mark the start of something, because for every day that Lily’s tree grows now, hopefully, I will too, and I feel comforted by that, like Lily’s still part of things.

I turn a corner, change gear to make the last climb of that hill. I feel oddly light, like when I reach the top, I might just carry on, take off into the sky, like a helium balloon. Everywhere is so verdant: the green sprouts from every crevice of the countryside, from in between the folds of the hilly fields I can see from up here, like the countryside is literally bursting at the seams. The road is narrow, because of the fat hedges at either side, and I feel like I almost have to breathe in, to hold in my bump – pretty enormous to me, although I am told there is still a way to go, that I won’t believe how big I become! – to fit through.

I park at the little layby and get out, pausing to drink in the green smell and make the short walk through the woods to the glade and that tree, which is just over fifteen years old now, but still a baby compared to the others around it.

There’s this convenient little tree-stump chair next to Lily’s tree and I sit down on it, slightly breathless after about a fifty-metre walk from the car – I wonder what I am going to be like at thirty-seven weeks pregnant? Thirty-eight, hopefully, thirty-nine? I know Joe has been up here on occasions, too, over the past fifteen years, even though we’ve hardly been in touch; I’ve liked to think of him sitting here, the sunlight dappling through the leaves. I’ve liked how the tree has connected us in some way; how, whatever happens to my and Joe’s relationship, it still does.

I get out my flask of tea. From up here, I can see that skirt of Kilterdale, the white froth of bungalows, right up to the hem, and then the sea, silvery and endless. I feel different. I can’t put my finger on how, at first, and then I realize that that twist in the gut I always got when I came back here to Kilterdale, the feeling that every single beautiful memory I have of this place was taken from me, is gone; that those memories are starting to filter back now. I’m getting my hometown back.

I unscrew the top off the flask, set it on the floor, and am just about to pour it in the cup I have attached, when I hear something, footsteps, a familiar bounding rhythm, and I know before I even turn around who it is.
Maybe one day, in the future, we can meet there
.

‘Hello, I thought I’d find you here.’ And then he’s there. Joe, his hair falling over his eyes, wearing a green polo shirt, as fresh as the countryside, and I’m already smiling. ‘I’ve got these,’ he says, walking towards me, turning two fun-sized Mars bars from his jeans pockets. ‘I’ve got the chocolate if you can provide the tea.’

‘Now that’s an offer I can’t refuse,’ I say, and I pour the tea as he sits down on the ground next to me, elbows resting on his knees, blowing the hair out of his face. That hair that he can’t do anything with – I wonder if the baby will inherit that? He needs a haircut.

‘Do you know how pregnant I am today?’ I say as he unwraps the chocolate. ‘I’m thirty weeks pregnant, which is more pregnant than I have ever been in my life.’

‘I know,’ he says, reaching up and taking the tea from me, squinting, smiling with the sun. ‘I feel like we made it, don’t you?’

And I do, I say, I do.

He puts the tea down and shifts up then, wrapping his arms around my knees, laying his head on my knees. It feels so good. We sit like that, the breeze blowing the leaves of Lily’s tree gently, and I think how there are two choices in life: to continue to tell yourself the same old story, or to be constantly writing yourself a new one. To be right, or be happy, I suppose; and I believed, for the first time in years, in that moment, that I could be happy and that was all that mattered – that what Joe could give me was bigger, more powerful than what Butler could ever take away.

Dear Lily

I write to you from the arctic tundra of Kilterdale shore, where today I am to scatter my mother’s – your grandma’s ashes. (It’s what she would have wanted – swimming on Christmas Day!)

It’s a big day! I’m saying goodbye to her, I suppose, and I’m saying goodbye to you. Lily, this is to be the last letter I ever write to you, and therefore I need you to know certain things: I may be saying goodbye today, but will never forget you for as long as I live. I won’t forget that you existed – if only as a life inside of me – or how losing you changed my life. I won’t forget what you taught me.
That
will go on forever, inside of me.

Writing to you has been my saviour at so many times, the only place where I have been able to be a hundred per cent honest about my life, but also where I have been reminded how beautiful life is, how, even when the worst things imaginable happen, good things happen too. I have some amazing people in my life, Lily. Love continues to grow, and ultimately, I think, to win. That’s what life, what losing you, has taught me. It’s also taught me that although your past will always be part of your story, it’s not all of you and you can’t –
mustn’t
– let it define your future.

And I have a future, I have one with Joe, your father and our new baby – a little girl, Megan Lillian Sawyer. She’s beautiful and she will always, in some ways, remind us of you. But I have to move on, my love. This is why this letter will be the last, because I have to leave the past where it belongs. I have to let you go.

THE END