The Day We Met (14 page)

I watch Caitlin's profile as she is driving. I am taking her shopping—we decided it last night, during an impromptu sleepover. Caitlin didn't want to go back to Becky's house to get her things, not even her iPod. She didn't want to see Becky, at least not for the time being, and I understood that: Becky was part of her old life, and Caitlin is getting ready to embark on a new one. Even so, Mum called Becky to tell her that Caitlin was coming home, and asked her to pop a few things in the post.

So even though she barely took anything with her to London when she ran away, and I am taking her shopping, it's still a tenuous excuse to leave the house, but I'll take it. I am allowed out if Caitlin is with me, and it's the next best thing to being alone. Things have been a bit better between Mum and me since I went for a walk with Ryan, and she took me to London to find Caitlin. It's not that we suddenly understand each other, or
that everything is now okay between us, simply because we got a train and fronted up to a strip club owner, but it's the first time in a long while that we've had a shared experience that I still remember. We've got something to talk about apart from the articles she cuts out for me from the
Daily Mail
. And we are trying to be kind to each other. She is trying her best not to be quite so in charge of me. I have even been allowed my credit card, and I know my PIN—it is the year of my birth, 1971. I am unlikely to forget the year I was born, which is why I chose it a few years ago, way before I was diagnosed, because I'd forgotten the standard issue one so many times that I was getting my card retained and cut up on almost a monthly basis. We used to laugh about it, Caitlin and I. We used to laugh about how ditzy and silly I was. How cute, I suppose. Silly Claire, never can remember her PIN, her head is so full of thoughts. Now it's hard not to wonder if, even then, little chinks of darkness were breaking through the light, claiming little bits of me.

Caitlin yawns, just as she used to when she was a baby, her whole face stretching into a wide circle.

“Are you tired?” I ask her, unnecessarily, and she nods.

“I've been exhausted almost since it happened, I suppose,” she says.

I do remember that we got home after nine last night, but Esther was still up, engaged in a game of hide-and-seek with Greg. I felt odd seeing her with him: she looked so happy, so smiley, and yet I felt like he shouldn't be looking after her. Almost like I'd left her with a stranger. Although I know he is her father and my husband, I didn't like the fact that she had been with him. The sense of unease and disquiet I feel, whenever I see him, grows. I read what I have written, what he has written, in the memory book, and it's such a beautiful story. But that is exactly what it feels like to me: it feels like a story. It's such a shame
that the heroine has checked out already. Like Anna Karenina throwing herself on the railway tracks at around chapter three, or Cathy dying before Heathcliff even arrives.

Esther was overjoyed to see Caitlin, and she fell asleep in her big sister's arms within a matter of minutes. Caitlin had carried Esther upstairs, but I'd steered Caitlin into my room and tucked her up in my bed, Esther still in her arms. Then I got in too.

“Remember when we used to have sleepovers, you and me?” I said.

“You must be the only mum in the world that wakes their child up so they can come and sleep in bed with them.” Caitlin smiled.

“I missed you,” I said. “I never got enough time with you when you were little. I was working or studying so much. There isn't a rule book that says you can't have a little midnight chat with your children!”

She settled down into the bed, and we put on the TV, keeping the volume low so as not to wake Esther. We didn't talk about the pregnancy, or the boy, or the exams, or the secrets, or my illness—we only watched some terrible film until finally Caitlin drifted off too. For a long time after that, I watched my daughters sleeping—the colors from the screen playing out across their faces—feeling very calm, very peaceful.

At some point, I heard Greg stop outside the bedroom door, probably thinking about coming in, and my heart raced and every muscle in my body clenched, because I didn't want him to. The idea of this man that I know increasingly less coming into my bedroom unnerves me. Perhaps he sensed it because, after a moment, the shadow of his feet at the bottom of the door moved away. I stayed awake a lot longer after that, though, listening, waiting. Anxious that he might come back.

When I announced that I was taking Caitlin shopping, I could see that Mum thought this was a bad idea—the woman with dementia going out alone with her fragile daughter—but still she let us go, watching Caitlin pull my car out of the drive, standing with Esther on her hip, my younger daughter still protesting loudly about being left behind.

“How are you feeling?” I ask Caitlin.

“You mean, aside from tired?” Caitlin says. “Sort of better, now that it's all out. Relieved, I suppose.”

“Gran's making you appointments,” I tell her, even though I am fairly sure she knows it already. I tell people things more than once, so that I can also remind myself. Load and reload my short-term memory, like constantly filling up a bucket with holes in it. The opposite of bailing out my brain. “GP tomorrow, hospital, and then…”

I stop talking, and Caitlin keeps her eyes straight ahead as she pulls into the shopping center car park. She doesn't want to talk about the pregnancy; even though she's decided to keep the baby, she doesn't want to discuss it. Perhaps it's because she thinks it's insensitive to talk about the future, when that word has so little meaning for me. Or perhaps it is because she is so uncertain about what the future will mean to her. We have never talked about it, about the possibility that this affliction might be lying in wait for her and her children. That alone would be enough to make anyone hesitant about what may come.

“Where shall we start?” I ask her, determined to be cheerful, as we head into the first store. “Dreary Black Goth Clothes ‘R' Us? Or maybe something with a bit of color?”

Caitlin looks around us, at rail after rail of garments, all of which I could have worn and probably did in the late 1980s—me and Rosie Simpkins, who was my best friend back then. Every Saturday we would try to buy an outfit for under a fiver.
We did it nearly every week, as well, going out that night feeling like the bee's knees, with our bits of lace tied round our wrists, trying to look like Madonna, circa “Like a Prayer.” Everything in this shop could have come from that era.

Funny how things change, and yet nothing changes. I look around for Rosie, wanting to show her a leopard-print shoulder-pad dress I've found in the sale, when I remember that Rosie Simpkins is married now, and fat and round and happy as a clam, with about a hundred kids. Caitlin looks up at me, over her arm a seemingly endless array of leggings and large T-shirts, all of them black, everything almost identical to what is already in her wardrobe, except slightly bigger and made with Lycra.

“I know what it's like,” I say to her, as she adds another T-shirt to the bundle. “I have been there, remember, with you? Maybe this is the time, you know? To give up the Goth rock-chick look and just be what you are naturally, which is exceptionally pretty. You know, as you are about to become a mother?” She stops and looks at me for a moment, and then, taking a deep breath, walks on.

“Okay, then, fine. I'll go there. Please, buy a nice dress for your mother, who is seriously ill. You made me say that, and you're making me say I just want to see you in something pretty just once before I die. It's your fault!”

I expect Caitlin to laugh, or at least smile in that way she does when I crack a joke that she knows is funny but doesn't want to admit it. Nothing.

“I'm not you,” she says, pausing by a rack of peach ra-ra skirts. “Or then again, maybe I am you, and that makes it worse. Not because I don't want to be you, just because…”

I follow her as she stops in front of a mirror and looks her reflection in the eye, refusing to dwell on her abdomen. Her breasts look a little bigger, but her stomach is still pretty flat;
perhaps there might be a little bump there, but if so, it's barely visible, and yet she doesn't want to look at it.

“Are you afraid of coping, on your own?” I ask her. I had my mum, of course. Most of the time, I didn't want her—most of the time, I thought she fussed too much and was controlling or cross, or sometimes just crazy—but she was always there, and I was always grateful. My mum has always been my constant fallback position, and she has never once shirked from that. Not even now, when it's costing my mum her happy little life, her operatic society, her bridge club, that nice chap who plays piano at the am dram and takes her out every Wednesday when it's two-for-one at the cinema. The films they've seen this last year, Mum and her gentleman friend. She's become quite an expert on Tarantino. I'm sure they don't care what they see: it's just an excuse to hold hands in the dark. Now, though, all of that, all of the life she has built for herself away from me, is on hold, perhaps forever. And yet still she came.

“I'm afraid of everything,” Caitlin says suddenly. “This…” She gestures at her middle. “This has happened at the worst time, hasn't it? It feels like I shouldn't be happy about this now, but I am. I know I am, but it's like my heart won't tell my head that I am. My head is still freaking out about it.”

“Of course it is,” I say. “And it will take you a while to adjust to that little person. But you can be a great mum and still do whatever you want to. This isn't the end of your life, Caitlin, it's just the beginning….”

“Or maybe the middle, if I get sick like you.” Caitlin looks at me, and for a moment she is Rosie Simpkins again, and I have to look very hard at the little mole on her left earlobe, the one she's had since she was born, and pull myself back into the present moment. It's like hauling myself through mud, but I make it.

“Mum, you are ill. You are so ill and…Esther will need me. She will need looking after, and so will Greg. And Gran can't do it all on her own—she can't bring up a three-year-old—she's too old for that now. They will need me to be someone that I'm not. I'm just not. I can't even take an exam, or get dumped by a boy, without cocking up my entire life. How can I do anything for them, or for you, or this baby? How will I ever be good enough in time?”

A sob catches in her throat, and she turns away from me, walking quickly out of the shop, still carrying the clothes, setting off peals of alarms. I go after her, and get to her just as the security guard catches up with her.

“Sorry,” I say, and take the bundle of clothes from Caitlin's arms, standing between her and the guard. “My fault. I've got early-onset Alzheimer's. It means I make so many stupid mistakes, but we're not shoplifters. We are going to buy all of this, so if we can just go back to the…thingy where the money goes, and I'll pay for all of them.”

The security guard looks at me, certain that I am lying. And who can blame him? First of all, it was clearly Caitlin holding the clothes when she went out of the door; secondly, I am hardly a little old lady in a nightie. At least, I don't think I'm wearing a nightie. I look down to check. No, I am fully dressed and not looking the least bit like a mentalist.

“I know,” I say. “It's really tragic, isn't it?”

“And I'm pregnant.” Caitlin sobs out of the blue, tears rolling down her cheeks. “And I don't even like any of these clothes. I don't want to wear leggings. Leggings are for people who've given up on life!”

I stifle a giggle as the poor baffled young man takes the bundle of clothes from my arms. “Just be more careful,” he says. “Okay? Maybe don't go out without a…”

“Grown-up?” I nod solemnly, and Caitlin sobs onto my shoulder in gratitude.