The Day We Met (15 page)

“So you don't want this, no?” I look at Caitlin, who mutely shakes her head against my shoulder, and watch the guard go back into the store, scratching his head.

“We should take up shoplifting for a living. There's never been a better combination of hustlers in the history of retail fraud,” I say to Caitlin, who lifts her head from my shoulder, suddenly dry-eyed and smiling.

My little Red Queen has still got it.

We walk through the shops, arm in arm, without talking. I look at the people going past. They seem to be walking, talking, breathing, thinking, much faster than me, as if the world has speeded up around me, leaving me half a frame behind. We stop at a coffee shop in the middle of the floor, and Caitlin orders us drinks while I sit at a table. She glances over at me from time to time, probably to make sure I haven't wandered off, and I try not to think about Rosie Simpkins—because every time I do, I'm tempted to find a phone box and dial her old number, which I suddenly know off by heart, and ask her if she's coming down the rec to look for boys to hang out with. I know where I am, and whom I am with, but I have to work hard to pin myself into this moment of time—to cling on, and make sure I stay here. I have an idea that this concentration works, but it's probably a lie I'm telling myself. I don't have any control, no idea where the fog will reach next, or when it will next blow in, always obliterating something forever.

Caitlin puts a milky coffee down in front of me, and I sip it gratefully. I don't like milky coffees, but every coffee I seem to get these days is exactly that. When I was younger, I only drank Mellow Birds. I wonder where you can get Mellow Birds from now? I drank it until I went to university and met Paul, and he
drank espresso in tiny cups the way he liked it, and that's when I changed, to seem more grown up. But now I just get endless pints of warm coffee-flavored milk, which I find pointless.

“Your dad is called Paul Sumner,” I say. “He's forty-two, he's married, has been for about ten years, he's got two daughters, you have two half sisters. He lectures in English literature and philosophy at University of Manchester, which isn't quite the world-changing poet that he said he wanted to be, but it's not bad. The university page on the word book says when and where his lectures are. He'd be really easy to stalk.”

“When did you find all that out?” she asks me.

“When you were missing,” I said. “Greg did it, actually.” I've forgotten how to use the word book thingy. “He found it all out and wrote it down for me. He's got a file of info for you at home. You need to go and see Paul Sumner.”

“No,” she says adamantly. “I thought about it a lot, after I stormed off. I thought to myself, is it really worth putting all of us, including him, through some forced reunion? I'm nonexistent to him, and what will I get if I turn up on his doorstep and crowbar my way into his life? He won't want me there, and I've got enough on my plate. I don't need to see him.”

“You do,” I say, determined. “He's waited long enough, even if he doesn't know it. And so have you. You are so young, Caitlin. You need someone.”

“I don't,” she insists, a flash of defiance in her eyes. “You never had anyone.”

“Oh, that is such a lie,” I say. “I had your gran, and I had you. You might have been the little one, but I relied on you as much as anyone.”

“Until Greg.” She looks at me carefully. “When I first met Greg, I thought he was a dick, but then I watched you two together, and it was so…happy. The way you just cared for each
other. It was almost like you must have always been looking for each other, right up until the moment you met, because you were just so pleased when you got together that it was like a…a reunion. Sickening, but in a sweet way.”

I dip my head and stare into the pallid white coffee. I want to remember how that felt, the things she describes. I can see them, I can picture them as though they are on a screen, but I don't understand them anymore.

“Can't you be nicer to him, Mum?” she asks me. “He loves you so much. I hate to see him so sad.”

“You don't understand,” I say, looking back up at her. “I feel like I don't know him. It frightens me, having this stranger in our house.”

“But we all know him,” Caitlin says. “He's Greg.”

“Is he, though?” I ask her. “Is that who he is?”

I see her face change, and I suppose she is puzzled and frightened by something that seems completely real and rational to me. This is the essence of the disease and what it does—the widening gulf between my reality and that of the people in my life. I try, every day, to reach back across it, but there comes a point when I can't, and they can't either, and then they don't even try, because my world is the one that is wrong.

“You need to go and see Paul,” I say again. “You'll need him, a parent, another grandparent for the baby. A bigger family. Don't make me play the Alzheimer's card twice in one day.”

“I can't think about it like that,” she says. “I do better if I just think about one day at a time.”

“You know how you need to live your life?” I tell her. “As though everything is completely fine. Make your choices that way. That's the way I want you to live your life, Caitlin. The way you want to, not the way that circumstances dictate.”

“But you
are
ill,” she says. “And maybe I am too. And
maybe I could pass the gene on to my child. And it could do the same. It's not the same as you, aged twenty, deciding to keep a baby, Mum. You had no idea about the hereditary gene; you were making a decision just based on one thing. But I do know, and I have to think about more than just will I be able to cope or get a job or get an education. I know that I can do all of those things, because I've seen you do all of those things and still be a brilliant, brilliant mum. It's not that. It's will I be leaving my child alone before it's properly grown up? Will I be turning him or her into a carer? Will I be giving them this disease that is…I've decided what I'm doing, and it feels right. But it's still so…”

She doesn't finish her sentence—she doesn't need to. If I had known then, on the day I discovered I was pregnant with Caitlin, if I had known, on the periphery of that sunny day, that the fog was already gathering, and slowly, slowly beginning to roll in to claim me and perhaps my unborn child too, would I have gone through with the pregnancy? Would I still be sitting here opposite this wonderful young woman? I look at her now, her black lashes sweeping her cheeks, the cupid's bow of her lip, that mole on her ear, and of course I say with my whole heart: yes, yes. I'd never miss a second of my life with her, or her life with me, because I know how golden and how shining it has been. But then, at that moment, when the line on the stick turned pink, if I had known then? And I realize I don't know the answer.

“You can take the test,” I say. “You can find out for sure about the gene, if you think it will help. And it doesn't have to follow that you have it. Aunt Hattie had all her marbles, right up until she dropped dead of a heart attack. You don't have to wonder; you can find out.”

“I don't know if I want to know,” she says. “And knowing that I
can
know makes it so much harder to put it out of my
head. So, what's better, for me to know for sure, or not know for sure?”

“I know the answer,” I say. “I know what you have to do.”

Caitlin looks skeptical.

“You have to decide as if it's not even a possibility, you have to decide to live your life the way you would, whatever else is happening. And do you know how I know that?”

She raises a brow.

“I know because that's what I did. I gave birth to you, and brought you up and turned down a million lovers, and married the very last one because I believed that I had all the time in the world. And I'm glad I've lived my life that way; I wouldn't have changed anything. Not a thing.”

“Not even Greg?” she asks me. “Would you have waited all of those years for the love of your life if you'd known that almost as soon as you had him, you'd lose all the feelings you had for him?”

“Let me buy you that dress,” I say, nodding at a little floral frock in the nearby shop window, cream cotton covered in pink roses. “It's so pretty, and if you team it with some nice red shoes, and nails and lipstick, imagine what a delight you will be!”

“I hate colors,” Caitlin says, “but as you've played the AD card…”

She lets me pull her up from the table and into the shop to try on the dress, which suits her so perfectly and allows for some bump room too. Happily, I take her to the money counter and get out my card. It's then I realize that I've forgotten my PIN. It seems I can forget the year I was born after all.

This is the cover of the CD that Greg brought me on the first day I met him as Mum's official boyfriend. I'd met him before, of course: he'd been around the house for a while. But then he was just the builder, listening to Radio One like he thought it was cool. I hadn't really noticed him. Then, after he'd finished the loft, that was when Mum started seeing him, and I thought, how could she be so stupid? I mean, he's a lot younger than her, a lot. And although Mum is sexy and funny and pretty, I couldn't see why a man would ever seriously want a woman so much older than him. I thought he was taking advantage of her, playing her. And Mum said she thought that might be the case too, except she'd already given him all of her money when he converted the loft into her writing room. And anyway, she said, if it was just a fling, it didn't matter. It wasn't a fling, though. We both knew that when she invited him to have dinner with us. And he
brought me this CD of the Black Eyed Peas, because he thought they were cool. But I hate the Black Eyed Peas, and it was a CD, and no one had a CD player by then, not even Gran.

He gave it to me and I looked at it and chucked it on the side, which I knew was really bad-mannered. I knew I was being a textbook-rude potential stepkid, but for me it didn't seem like a cliché. What did this man want with my mother? I mean, I was fifteen—if he was going to take an interest in either of us, it should have been me. Even though that was wrong in a different way! Not that I was jealous—don't get me wrong. If I think of Greg in that way, I feel a bit like I want to puke. No, I never fancied him, even before he was my stepdad, and now…well, now he's just my stepdad. But I didn't want him to like me and not Mum. It was just that I couldn't make sense of it. Which shows that I was pretty small-minded back then, all of five years ago.

Greg sat at the table. Mum had gone to town making a paella. Seriously, she'd seen it on some cookery program and went out and bought a special pan, and saffron, and all these prawns with legs and heads, which made me want to vomit, and she spent all day on it, without bothering to inquire if the builder ate seafood. Well, I thought that he certainly wouldn't: he would eat bacon sandwiches and maybe hunks of cheese. And I was right—about the not eating seafood part, at least. Greg is actually severely allergic to seafood, and it took him ages to say anything. He just sat there, staring at the prawns, which were staring right back at him, seriously considering risking anaphylactic shock just so he wouldn't let my mum down or look stupid in front of me. I asked him, quite rudely, what his problem was with the food that Mum had made. Which was when he went bright red and confessed he might die if he ate it. Mum was mortified. She tipped the whole thing in the outside bin, like somehow even a
prawn eyeballing Greg might set him off, and that pissed me off because I'd only just decided to like paella.

Mum ordered Chinese, which on that night I decided I didn't like, and I pushed some special fried rice around my plate and made it very clear that I was missing the prawns. Greg kept saying he was sorry, and I kept blanking him. And then he went to the loo, and Mum leaned over and pointed her finger right in my face and said, “You do realize that you are playing the role of nasty spoilt brat to perfection, don't you, Caitlin?”

I shrugged. “I'm sorry,” I said. “Someone has got to protect you, and there is only me.”

“I don't want you to protect me,” she said. She sat back a little bit and looked at me, and she looked surprised, which hurt me. “You are old enough to know that I don't want protecting from feeling this excited or giddy about the way he looks at me, or when he touches me. I want to feel those things, and be happy, even if it's just for a little while, and even if it all goes wrong. That's what life is about, Caitlin—taking chances to try and be happy.”

“Why do I have to meet him, though?” I said. “I've never met any of your other men.”

Of course, I said it at the exact moment Greg came back into the room, and I made it sound like he was only the latest in a very long line of conquests. Of course I did. But Greg didn't go red or flinch away from it, like he had the prawns.

“I asked your mum to let me meet you,” he said, “because I want to be part of her life, and that means being part of your life too. And even if you don't like me, your mum does. So how about you go back to being just this really funny, clever girl that your mum tells me you are, and we can decide from that point on if we can stand to be in the same room as each other? I'd like
us to get on, but just so you know…if we don't, there is no way I am giving Claire up.”

I stopped playing the brat after that, because it did seem like such a terrible cliché, and I could see he and Mum were serious about each other. But I did still think he was a dickhead. Right up until the day Esther was born. That day, he became my hero.

We get back from shopping and I think Mum is happy. She is singing as she goes into the house, taking up to her room the bags full of clothes that were meant for me and trying them on. She's talking about going out later with someone called Rosie, down the pub, to see who's about, maybe get a snog. I thought I'd get used to the way she fades in and out of our lives, but I don't. Each fade-in is a little shorter; each fade-out is a little longer. I stand at the bottom of the stairs for a moment, wondering what I should do to try to bring her back, but she is singing and she seems so happy.

Gran is in the living room with Esther, making her watch a program about elephants that is narrated by David Attenborough.

“Look, sweetheart, look, aren't the elephants lovely,” I hear her say.

“I want
Dora the Explorer
or
Octonauts
or
Peppa Pig
,” Esther insists. Gran isn't like Mum, though, who has always given Esther her way with everything, cheerfully stating that she has her in training for a career as a despotic dictator. Gran tries really hard to make things
better:
she likes to improve things. And now she's trying to improve Esther by making her watch something educational, which is funny. I love Gran, and I love Esther, and I'll love my baby, the same way Mum and Gran have loved us. Perhaps not exactly the same way: similar, but better.

I feel better, having spent a morning with Mum, and after what she said to me. Before she decided she wanted to go out on the pull with Rosie, it was all making sense. It sort of feels like she's given me back my future.

I go and sit down on the sofa, and Esther brings me the remote control.

“I want
Dora
or
Peppa Pig
,” she whispers, as if Gran will not notice.

Gran despairs, and rolls her eyes, and I switch channels. I know all of Esther's favorite channels by heart.

“Was it okay?” Gran asks me, and I nod, because it was okay.

“I'm taking you to the hospital tomorrow. The appointment's at ten,” Gran informs me. “They'll check you over, give you a scan.”

I nod, and shift in my seat. Esther has climbed onto my lap, and weighs heavily on my abdomen. I can feel the resistance there now, the pocket of life expanding into my body. I move Esther to one side and wrap my arms about myself, realizing it's an unconscious gesture to protect that unknown universe that's spiraling inside of me. Does that mean I'm becoming a mother already?

“I cut this out for you,” Gran says, and offers me a flimsy bit of newsprint. “It was in the
Daily Mail
about getting back into further education after having kids.”

“Thanks,” I say, taking it and folding it up before tucking it into my pocket.

For as long as I can remember, Gran has always sent us pieces of paper she has cut out from newspapers. Articles about diets or parenting, or about books on how to be a teacher…Everything that Mum already did, Gran would persist in sending her clippings from papers with advice about how to do those things better—which I took to mean that she thought Mum didn't do them very well in the first place. Once, I asked Mum why Gran did it, and Mum said she was trying to be helpful, even if she was coming across as batty and controlling. And then Gran sent her a clipping about diets to control yeast infections, and Mum sent it back with the words I DO NOT HAVE A THRUSH PROBLEM written in red marker pen across it.

After that, the clippings escalated into some kind of crazy war of attrition, with Gran sending Mum ever more bizarre articles about sex addiction, weight loss, body dysmorphia, all kinds of cancer—and Mum sending them all back again, sometimes with a red-penned message, sometimes torn into little bits. It was like a constant joke they each played on the other, but a joke that annoyed them all the same. Gran still cuts things out of the paper, but she keeps them in a drawer in her spare room now. I know this because I saw her secretly filing one away the other day. The headline read: T
HE
A
LZHEIMER'S
E
PIDEMIC
.

Now that Esther is engrossed in the TV, I get up and go find Greg in the kitchen. He's bent over the memory book, writing. Greg has taken to writing in the book almost as much as Mum. I wonder if he's read my bit yet. I wrote it for him, really,
more than for Mum. I know it's supposed to be her book, but I want him to remember that he is part of this family too, and that we all love him. Even me. I love him too, now.

I sit down next to him, and he looks up at me. There are tears in his eyes. Greg was always a bit soppy, a bit poetic. Mum used to tease him about it, this big burly man with a poet's heart. He said she brought it out in him.

“It's hard for you, isn't it?” I say. “You're losing her first.”

“I keep thinking, if I can just remind her, somehow, then it will all come back. She'll remember me again, like she used to. Then we'll have each other again.”

“What are you writing?” I ask him, but he closes the book. It's thick now, bursting with memories, and mementos—objects and photographs peep out from the pages. Mum's tried to stick literally everything in there over the last few weeks. On one page there is a half-sucked boiled sweet that she swears blind was partially eaten by Nik Kershaw at her first ever gig. The book has become part of Mum, and part of the family: it's always around, always being added to or read. But the pages will run out soon, and that frightens me. As Mum puts more and more of her head into the book, I'm scared that when she runs out of space, her head will be empty and she will be gone. Before I went to London, I was trying to think of ways to add more pages to it—maybe tape some in the back, or staple them. But as I pick up the closed book, I can see that it isn't just its contents that have bulked it out—there are several new pages in the back too. The quality of the paper is the same, and I can only see they are new because the alignment isn't exactly perfect. Opening the book, I examine them closer and see that someone has painstakingly glued a strip of material to the inside spine, and then stitched on the pages by hand. I look at Greg, and he shrugs.

“I don't want it to end.” He goes to the fridge and gets out a beer. “Are you okay?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that,” I say. “I don't know. I'm stuck in a sort of limbo. I think we all are, don't you?”

“Maybe,” Greg says. “I'd like to be. I'd like to be stuck in one perfect day where everything is just the way you have always wanted it to be. I've had a lot of days like that with Claire and Esther and you. I always thought there'd be so many more. It turns out there weren't nearly enough. Nothing can ever stay the same, not even if you want it to,
so
much.” He stops, waiting for the emotion to fade out of his voice. “Life is moving on around you, Caitlin, and in you. You need to make sure you keep up with it.”

“What do you mean?” I ask him, although I think I know what he is going to say next.

“Go and see your dad,” Greg says. “Go and see this Paul Sumner bloke. I know it's scary and you've got a lot on your plate already. But something like that, reaching out to a person who is so much part of you…it's not something you should put off, not for anything.”

“I've never had a dad before,” I say. “Well, not before you.”

“Don't be silly,” he says, looking at his feet. “You think I'm a dork.”

“Oh God, dork is such a dorky word!” I laugh, and he smiles. “But seriously, though, you are my sort of dad—a kind of one and, well, you know. Thanks for that.”

Greg laughs again. “That's the most underwhelming endorsement of fatherhood I have ever heard!”

“You know what I mean,” I say, and the thought of him not being around inspires a surge of panic. “Please, Greg, don't disappear, will you, please…afterwards. Don't take Esther and
go, please. Because…it's not just Esther, it's you too. You are my family now. I mean, you won't just go and leave me, will you?”

It's not until I've stopped talking that I realize there are tears on my cheeks and I'm holding on tight to my own wrists, clenching them hard.

“Caitlin.” Greg says my name, looking anxious, surprised…“I'd never do that, love. I'd never split you and Esther up, not for anything. And…we are a family. We always will be. Nothing will change that. I'm your dad, and you're stuck with me.”

“Good,” I say, nodding. “This Paul Sumner…I don't know anything about him. But you two…I can't do without you two.”

Greg rests his hand on top of the book. There's a thump from upstairs where Mum is in the bedroom, and we both look up. We both will ourselves to stay where we are, and not go and check on her. Mum hates it when we check on her, especially at home. She hates that her life is never private anymore.

“Look,” Greg says. “Go and see your father. You need to. You need to look the other person who made you in the eye and declare yourself. I don't see how you could possibly know yourself completely until you've done that.”

I shake my head. “There's Mum, and Esther and…”

“The baby,” Greg finishes for me, choosing his words carefully. “If you like, I could take a couple of days off, drive you up there?”

“No,” I say, and suddenly the decision is made, and it feels freeing. “No. You know what? Gran is taking me to the hospital tomorrow for a checkup, and then I think I'll just go. And stay in a hotel up there. I mean, if you and Mum will sub me some cash…” I give him a hopeful smile, and he nods.

“But you'll be okay, up there on your own, in your…?”

“My condition?” I laugh. “I have to decide what to do, and
I have to decide now, don't I? Mum would never wait around, like I have been…dithering. She would never wait for life to happen to her—stick her head in the sand, hide away from her past or her future. She's never done that, has she? She has always been brave. Look at what happened when she met you! She was brave, and took a chance. And look at what happened when Esther was born! She never gave up, not ever. And even this thing that she cannot fight…even now she isn't giving up. So yes, fine, I'll go and introduce myself to my biological father. It's something to do, isn't it? It's something that I
can
do. And maybe it will help Mum too.”

Greg is about to say something when a fat plop of water lands on the kitchen table. For a second, Greg and I stare at it, and then up at the ceiling…where a damp dark circle gives birth to a second droplet.

“Oh,” I say, standing. “She said something about going to run a bath….”

“Wait here,” Greg says. “I'll go.”

But I follow him anyway, thinking about what Mum said in the shopping center. Greg might be the very last person she wants to see.

He gets to the top of the stairs in three easy strides, skipping stairs as he goes. At once we see the water seeping out from under the bathroom door, and soaking into the landing carpet, a small tidal wave adding to the damp patch as Greg opens the bathroom door and we are enveloped in steam. Stepping into the water in his socked feet, he hisses in a sharp breath: it must be boiling hot. Fighting the wave of heat, he turns off the hot tap and throws down what towels he can find before returning to the landing, where I am standing. Mum has let the bath overflow. It's a simple enough thing, and an easy mistake to make, for anyone, not just her. So why does it feel so ominous?

There's another bang and the door to Mum and Greg's bedroom opens, slamming against the wall. Which is when we notice a pile of clothes on the landing. A shoe, Greg's, ricochets off the doorframe and lands at his feet.

“Claire?” He approaches the room hesitantly. I am just behind him.

“How dare you!” Mum scrambles over the bed to confront him, her eyes full of fire. “You must think I'm an idiot. I've read about men like you. Well, you've met your match in me, mister. I'm not some poor little old lady who you can con out of her cash. Take all your stuff and get out of my home!”