The Day We Met (12 page)

“Thank you,” Mum says, still gripping my hand.

I turn and look at the receptionist for one last moment, and I know this is absolutely the right time for me to come out with a witty and stinging one-liner that will make her see I am not a pitiable person, and not just a disease. But nothing comes to mind, which reminds me, only too clearly, that I am both.

It turns out that there are a lot of pretty, blond, ponytailed girls in the canteen, so many that I wonder if we might be politely escorted from the premises as we approach one after another.

Fortunately, this is one of the rare occasions when being female and over forty is actually a plus, because no one expects us to be there for nefarious purposes, although it takes several baffled, bored, and disdainful “no”s until we finally find a blond, ponytailed girl who knows who—and, crucially, where—Becky Firth is.

“She's not in today,” the girl who reveals herself as Emma tells us. “Literary Crit lecture. No one comes to that one, if they can help it. She might be at home, though.”

“Do you know where home is?” I ask her, relieved that Emma is clearly not remotely concerned about Becky's privacy, since she happily writes Becky's address and number down for us.

I snatch it from her hand and I feel purposeful: I am
doing
something, for me, and for Caitlin. I'm finding her, rescuing her, bringing her home. I am being her mother. I feel strong and free for a little while—seconds, even, perhaps as many as ten. And then I realize that I have absolutely no idea where I am going.

Fortunately, Becky is in when we arrive, after a fraught bus journey, which I undertake begrudgingly, for the greater good, since I am clearly not the maddest person on the bus. The afternoon has grown steadily darker and wetter; water glazes the streets, turning them into a grimy mirror, reflecting the world back, perhaps as it truly is, with colors bleeding into one another—a fluid place, always on the brink of being washed away. That's how I feel now: like I am on the other side of that grimy mirror, trying to wipe away the smear to see more clearly and be able to understand.

“Filthy weather,” Mum says, and I try to remember a time when it has not been raining. Becky answers the door wearing a T-shirt, underwear, and little else. I want to tell her to put a sweater on. She looks freezing, and her long bare toes, curled on the tiled floor, are enough to make me shudder.

“I'm not religious,” she says, looking from my mum to me.

“Me neither,” I tell her. “Or at least, if I do believe in God, right now I'd quite like to have some mostly four-letter words with him that have got nothing to do with spreading the Gospel.”

Becky begins to close the door.

“It's about Caitlin. You know her, don't you?” My mum jams her foot in the door with the sort of hard-core determination to get results that I thought only East End cops and door-to-door salesmen have. Becky looks at Mum's sensibly clad foot and warily opens the door again.

“I'm Caitlin's gran,” Mum says. “Please, if she is staying with you, if you know where she is, please tell us. We know that she's not at university anymore, and we know she's pregnant.”

“What the f—” Becky's eyes widen as she bites her lip hard to stop the swear word, clearly still enough of a good girl not to want to swear in front of somebody's mum and gran. Becky did not know Caitlin was pregnant. Perhaps that means she isn't. “Oh my God. I thought she'd got a…”

“Got a what? Morning-after pill? Condom? Education on safe sex?” I ask.

“You're a fine one to talk,” Mum says. “We think she might be pregnant, but we don't know for sure. That's what I should have said. She's not at home, and we're worried about her. Please, Becky, we don't want her to be alone, not at the moment.”

Becky nods and opens the door wider, her freezing bare feet taking steps back. “Come in out of the rain.”

Her house smells of curry and wet washing. We stand in the hallway, and in the living room I can see Caitlin's wash bag on a squat little table. My heart leaps and I close my eyes, waiting for the threat of tears to pass. I didn't know what I'd been thinking might have happened to her.

And then I feel angry. Surely there is nothing so bad that she would be happy to let us all worry about her so much?

“She's here,” I say, turning to look at Becky. “Her stuff is here.”

“No, I mean yeah, she is staying here. But she's at work at the moment.” Becky looks uneasy; she grabs a hoody from the banister and slips it on, hugging it around her. “She said she just needed a place to stay, to think until she got herself straight, got a place, and stuff. She said there's been some…trouble. She hasn't really talked to me much, or at all. She's been working all the time, so…” Becky peers into the front room, in which I can see
a sleeping bag and some clothes strewn across the carpet. “She's not said anything about being pregnant to me, and, well, she's been here two weeks…. She tells me everything.”

“Where is work?” I ask her, guessing from the way she is talking to me and not my mother that Caitlin doesn't tell her everything at all.

“Oh.” Becky's shoulders slump and it's obvious this is one piece of information she truly doesn't want to divulge to her friend's mother and grandmother. “Um, well, it's in this…”

She says the last two words so quietly that I'm not sure I've heard them correctly until my mother repeats them.

“A strip club?”

This is the program from Caitlin's first ever school play that she had a part in when she was eight. Caitlin was the Red Queen in the school's production of
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
. I remember very clearly the day I picked her up from school and she came bouncing out of the classroom to tell me she had a part, and lines to learn, and a song to sing all by herself. Instantly I felt my stomach knot with fear. Caitlin had always been a happy-go-lucky, cheerful little girl—in situations that she was comfortable or familiar with. But as soon as you put her in a place she didn't know, or in front of unfamiliar faces, she'd close up, turning her face away from conversations, hiding in my skirts, behind my legs. She told me she didn't like people looking at her if she didn't know who they were. Think who they might be, she'd told me, her eyes big and fearful. It took me too long
to realize she was afraid of seeing her father and not knowing who he was.

Her first few weeks at school had been a nightmare: she'd wept with such genuine grief every morning as I dragged her into the playground that I'd wanted to, almost had, taken her out of school completely. “I don't know anyone here,” she'd sob. “I'm going to be so lonely. Why can't you come with me?”

It had taken a good many dreadful days like that, but gradually Caitlin had made friends, with the other children and her teachers. She'd slowly come out of herself to be the funny, cheeky, popular little girl that I knew she could be. But nothing had changed in the last few years; she'd even had the same class teacher. And although she'd made a charming donkey, and then sheep, in the two previous nativities, no one had made her stand alone on a stage and remember lines, or sing. I
knew
she would fail, I was certain of it, and I knew how upset she would be because of it. My only thought was to rescue her from experiencing this crushing disappointment at such a young age. I had to protect her. The next day when I picked her up, I had a word with her teacher while Caitlin ran off to chat with some of her friends before they left for home. I watched her skip and twirl, laugh and hop as I talked.

“I don't think she's up to this,” I told Miss Grayson. “You remember how she was at first? I think this is too much for her. Can't you maybe think of a reason to change her role?”

“She's so happy and proud about it, though,” Miss Grayson said to me. “And she's doing really well in the rehearsals!”

“Yes, but that's not real, is it? That's not like seeing all those strange faces looking at you.”

“I think you underestimate her,” Miss Grayson said. And she said it with a smile and warm tone to her voice, but I knew she was criticizing me for not having enough faith in Caitlin. I
didn't ask her again to take Caitlin out of the play, and I remember thinking, she'll see. When Caitlin freezes with terror or runs off the stage in floods of tears, she'll see.

Costumes for school plays, I think, were invented and put on this earth to test mothers. I hated putting together school costumes, so Mum came over and we made the costume together, all three of us. Mum was bossy and controlling, Caitlin was honing her diva skills, and I kept sewing the wrong bits of material together. But it was a happy time, a laughing time. Caitlin rehearsed her lines and sang for us while we fitted her into her little red shift dress and painted her cardboard crown.

I wanted that time, the preparation time, to go on forever. I didn't want the play to ever come, and I started to hope that maybe Caitlin would get a cold, or lose her voice. That something would happen to save her.

I turned up half an hour before the play was due to start so that I could claim a seat at the front, and be there for her when she rushed into my arms. I still had to fight for my front row seat, mind you. The other mothers—the real ones that had husbands, and parkas, and who baked cakes for the fairs—had already put cardigans on chairs, claiming all of the front row seats in advance. Most of them disliked me anyway. I was an unknown quantity, turning up at the school gate in high heels and lipstick; with no obvious husband on the scene, I was viewed as a threat. I would stand there on my own at chucking-out time, pretending to be reading a book while we waited for the bell to go, the other mums all standing around in little huddles, and—in my head, at least—bitching about me. So it took quite a lot of nerve for me to pick up one of the reservation cardigans and put it on the second row behind me, but all I could think about was being there for Caitlin, right in front of her eyes when she needed me, ready to scoop her up in my arms and protect her.

“You can't sit there,” one of the mums told me, a cake-baking PTA mafia mum—the sort that organizes tombolas and sells raffle tickets door-to-door to old ladies who really need the money for food.

“I think you'll find that I can,” I told her, crossing my arms, settling my large bottom onto the tiny chair and giving her a look that said: “You can try and mess with me, bitch, but if you do, I'm taking both your arms and that bloody stupid bob hairdo with me.”

Scandalized, she marched away and left me in my prime seat. I could hear her shrilling to the other mums about what a terrible monster I was, and that it just “wasn't the done thing,” right up until the lights went down and Miss Grayson struck up a tune on the piano. I clenched my fists, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands.

My poor Caitlin.

For the first few scenes, she wasn't on stage. In any case, these were dominated by coughs and shuffles in the audience, and small children whispering to each other, or waving to their mothers, when they should have been delivering lines. I tried to relax, to tell myself that this was what school plays were all about, but I couldn't. I knew Caitlin and I knew how bitterly disappointed she would be, and how crushed, and how much it would take for her to come back from this failure.

And then she walked on stage, in her little red shift dress and her cardboard crown, and she was…brilliant.

I sat open-mouthed while she delivered her lines with such imperious queenliness, making the crowd laugh at every punch-line, and boo when she demanded someone's head must come off. She outshone every other child on the stage, which I know I would think, because she was my Caitlin, but it was true. My little girl had found her element, and she was completely at ease
in it. Yes, when she came to sing her solo, her voice trembled; and instead of the loud, booming, queenlike voice she'd been using to deliver her lines, out came the small melodic voice of an eight-year-old girl. But nevertheless she sang, without faltering once. And when, as she finished, the audience burst into spontaneous applause, she beamed with such pride, right at me in the front row, and I knew then that Miss Grayson had been right, and I had been wrong.

I learned something about both Caitlin and myself that night. I learned that she was and is a work in progress—a human being evolving in the world—and that no one, least of all me, should try to guess what her limits are. Being a mother is about protecting your children from every conceivable thing that might cause them hurt, but it's also about trusting them to live the best way for them, the best way they can; and trusting that even when you are not there to hold their hand, they can succeed.

The girl spins slowly, languorously, around the pole, sliding down it so that she hangs upside down; her acrylic nails graze the grimy stage as she performs inverted arabesques, her thighs holding her in place until somehow she's folded back on herself. Her arms wrapped around the pole, she kicks her legs out behind her, scissoring through the air as she circumnavigates the stage. At her feet, three or four men watch her slight frame contort and stretch. All eyes are fixed on her, on her meager breasts, barely there at all, her ribs straining against her taut, pale skin, her flat, boyish behind and her bored, vacant expression. At least this girl keeps her thong on.

I am glad I don't work in a club where everything comes off, although I know that does happen in the private room. A lot goes on in there that I'm not supposed to know about, and so I do my best not to notice the other money-making opportunities
available for the dancers if they want them, which most of them do now and then, treating it as casually as they might an extra nightshift stacking shelves at Tesco. I suppose that was what shocked me the most when I first took this job in the spring: the way that selling yourself for sex, one way or another, is so…doable for the dancers. In this club there are none of those well-bred, educated girls that you read about in Sunday supplements who decided to strip to be postmodern or pay their way through university. Here, every single dancer is a woman without choices, without a future that extends beyond the next dance. I saw them, saw their faces, and I got that. I feel the same: a girl without a future. No college degree, no boyfriend, and a fifty percent chance of carrying the gene that could give me a degenerative brain disease before I've even really worked out what I want from life. Mum did not know she had the gene, and neither do I yet. But now I know that I could find out whether or not I do have it, I don't know if I want to. Because there is one choice I don't want to make based on what might happen; there's one choice I know I need to make based on the kind of person I am now.

And that's the choice I made: to keep the baby.

Mum raised me on Austen and Brontë, and the notion of romantic love and sex as one—a pure, sacred thing. I grew up believing in true love, and that improbable coincidences would always save the day. Even in our little, uniquely female world, where there was no father or grandfather, no brothers or uncles, I still thought that when my hero came, he would be infallible: he would be my key to being happy. Like when Greg came into Mum's life, and she just…relaxed. Like he was her missing piece, which she didn't even know she was constantly searching for, but had now found.

Until Greg, though, Mum had always been careful to keep her private life private. There had never been any boyfriends
sleeping over, or staying for tea—not that I knew of, anyway. No parade of men making halfhearted attempts to get to know me as I grew up. I wonder if it might have been better if she'd let me see that relationships come and go, that people can use you and hurt you, tell you one thing and then just change their minds in the blink of an eye. Maybe, maybe it would have helped if I didn't believe so much in the idea of falling in love. For years as a little girl, I used to dream that the reason Mum chose to be alone was because she was still so in love with my father—that ultimate shadowy hero—who I felt certain would come back one day and reclaim us both. But he didn't come back, and, if he's thought about Mum at all during the last twenty years, I know now that not for a single moment of his life has he ever been preoccupied by me—because, for him, I don't exist. All this time I've been worried I might somehow bump into him; but even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered. It would only have mattered if, for all of these years, he'd been worried about somehow bumping into me too.

Of course I was hurt and angry when Mum told me the truth, but I don't know why the news was quite so hard to take. I don't know why it drove me out of the house, away from Mum and Esther, when they both really need me, and back here to this place that I had hoped I'd seen the last of. But I couldn't stay there. Knowing that he'd never once worried about bumping into me, knowing that I didn't exist for him, I couldn't be at home and not be angry with her. And I can't be angry with her.

Not when I have also carelessly lost the father of my own baby.

I look at my watch. It's just after three in the afternoon. The club is dead at this time of day during the week, except for the regulars or the occasional table of suited business guys—maybe a stray all-day-drinking stag or birthday do. Another
twenty minutes and I'll be ejected once again into the real world of car fumes, bus lanes, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the very real and pressing need to work out what to do…I want to go to Mum—I want to ask her for help—but I can't. I can't let her know what a mess I'm in.

The old man who comes in every pension day arrives at the bar, and I pump cheap imitation draft Coke into a shot of watered-down whisky for him, just the way he likes it. He turns on his bar stool and licks his lips as he watches the girl finish her act. It comes to something when being in here is a better prospect than being out there.

The dancer finishes, scoops up the scrap of material that constitutes her bikini off the floor, and walks off stage, tottering awkwardly in her high platforms. There is a lull between performances, and briefly the room is filled with coughs and sniffs. Even the smell of sweat and stale beer seems more acute in the silence. Ten more minutes and my shift will be over, and then what? Is today going to be the day I call home and tell them what I've done? Tell them not to worry, that I'm fine?

I know they will be worried sick, but I don't know if I'm ready to see them yet. Especially not Mum. Mum always thinks I can do anything at all I set my mind to, and be brilliant at it, and I know she won't judge me for what's happened, but I also know she will be disappointed. And I don't want the last thing she remembers feeling about me to be disappointment.

The first morning after I arrived back in London, I went to see Sebastian, just to make sure he hadn't changed his mind about us. I know that is pathetic; I know how it sounds. If it were Becky saying the words to me, I'd be handing her a giant bar of Dairy Milk and a bottle of wine and telling her to forget about the loser. Easier said than done, though, isn't it? To be grown up and rational.
To know when something is really over—especially if it's not really over for you. It seemed to me that someone couldn't just appear to feel so much for you one minute, and then for that all to be gone the next. That just didn't seem possible, or even proper. Love isn't something that comes and goes, is it? Isn't it something that, when you boil it right down to its essence, always has to be true? That's what I always thought falling in love would be like, and then I went and did it and it was crap.

It had been easy enough to find Sebastian's new house-share. All I'd had to do was to wander onto campus, ask around a bit. The same people I'd sat in lectures with until recently all smiled, nodded, and stopped to catch up, never guessing that I wasn't meant to be there. My departure obviously wasn't news. No one knew yet that I'd failed my exams—no one knew I'd dropped out—and although they all knew that Seb and I weren't together anymore, none of them knew I was pregnant. Not even Seb, to be fair. Which was another reason I couldn't stay at home and be angry with Mum. I couldn't be angry with her for having done something I was thinking about doing myself right now. Her choice back then made me furious and hurt me, and it had certainly been the wrong thing to do, but it was a choice I now understood, all the better after seeing Seb again.

The thing I had most wanted from him was a hug, but from the moment he opened the door, he was pissed off that I was there.

“What do you want, Caitlin?” he asked wearily, rolling his eyes.

“I don't know,” I said. I tried not to cry, but I did, just like that. Stupid, red-faced, noisy snotty sobs that went from naught to hysterical in under six seconds. “I wanted to see you. I miss you.”

“Don't miss me,” Seb said irritably. “I'm not worth missing.”

“Can I come in?” I pleaded, like some bloody girl. “After everything that's happened, I just need to talk, and you are the only one I can talk to about it.”

Seb sighed heavily, looking back over his shoulder toward where the pounding sound of some shoot 'em up video game was coming from.

“There's nothing else really to talk about, is there?” he said, allowing me into the hallway. He did not shut the front door. “We had a thing, and it's over now.” He pursed his lips, unable to look directly at me. “I'm sorry about the…you know. It must have been shit for you. But…it's time to let it go, babe, okay? We've both got to get on with our lives now.”

“Don't you care at all?” I sobbed, so stupidly. Like I wasn't even me, I grabbed hold of him, grabbed his T-shirt in my fists, wailing, hoping that he'd fold me in his arms and kiss my snot-soaked face. Like that was ever going to happen.

The reason I'd gone to see him—the other reason apart from hoping he did still love me—was to tell him that I didn't go through with the termination: the termination that he hadn't come along to with me, because he'd had an important university rugby match. Which, by the way, I'd said I was fine about, when what I should have said was, “You are an unbelievable dick, Sebastian.” But I couldn't make myself, because I still thought that maybe, maybe, he might change his mind and want me back again. I make myself sick. If I were a guest on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
, or something, I'd throw a shoe at my head.

When the day came, I just couldn't do it. I got up, had a shower, got dressed, picked up my bag, and then…I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, this is the dress that you
will have worn to the termination of your pregnancy. And just knowing that meant I couldn't go through with it. Which surprised me. I believe in the right for women to choose, but it never occurred to me that if I were in that situation, I would choose life—even though, actually, when you think about it, it's completely obvious: Mum chose me. Instead, I curled up into a small ball in my bed, folding myself up as tightly as possible. I closed my eyes and stayed very still, as though somehow I might be able to wish myself out of time and stay just like that forever, with the tiny essence of life inside me, and pretend I hadn't just found out that Mum was desperately ill, or that there was a fifty percent chance I might have a gene that would make me more likely to develop early-onset Alzheimer's too, and that if I did, there was also a fifty percent chance of passing it on to my child. I did my best to un-know those things, because facing the future was hard enough, and I wanted my choice to be made by the person I am now, and not the person I might be one day. It wasn't that simple, though, and I just wanted one other person to tell me I was doing the right thing.

I was going to tell Sebastian all of that, thinking he might suddenly feel the same, and we might have this baby together. When I looked at his face, though, I knew that the last thing he wanted to know was that I was still pregnant. Was that the look Mum had seen on my father's face when she broke up with him?

“What does it matter if I care or not?” Seb said, glancing back over his shoulder again, toward where the fun was. “What point is there going over and over it? Really, Cat, pull yourself together. You're not doing yourself any favors.”

And that last look he gave me…It was such a cold look; it was the look of a boy who was entirely detached from me and us, and everything we might have been. I couldn't stop crying,
the tears rolling down my face while he just stood there and looked at me.

“Christ.” Seb shook his head, closing the door two inches. “You are too much, don't you see that? I did like you, at first, but you…you killed it. And I'm sorry about everything else, but that's not my fault, Cat. You're the one who didn't revise…. I passed my exams.”