The Flavours of Love (41 page)

‘It’s different every time. Well, it was for me, anyway. Having you and having Zane were very different experiences although I was terrified both times because I didn’t know what to expect. That’s only part of having a baby, though. It takes a while to get your head around, but you’re not only having a baby, you’re starting the life of another person. By that I mean they don’t stay babies for long, you turn around and they’re one, five, seven, ten, fourteen. They’ve got their own little personalities and it’s amazing. And it’s hard and it’s relentless, and I’ve never experienced love like it.’ And sometimes I wish I had my other life back, I wish I wasn’t tied down and responsible for someone else’s existence. I could never say that to Phoebe, pregnant or not, because that would hurt her in ways she doesn’t need to be damaged – she could never understand what I meant until she was there herself. ‘And it’s pretty damn scary because, if you’re like me, you’re always conscious of the ways you’re going to screw up, you’re always scared of hurting your child, and then you go and mess up in ways you hadn’t even thought of. I suppose what I’m saying is that when you think about having a baby, you need to remember that you’re giving birth to a whole new life –
your
whole new life, not just the child’s.’

‘Have you ever had an … you know? Have you ever done it?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I reply.

‘Would you tell me if you had?’

‘Normally, no I wouldn’t because there are some things you don’t need to know about your parents, but in this instance, because of your circumstances, yes I would. I think it’d be important for you
to know that I’d done it and survived. I do know a couple of people who might talk to you about it if you want?’ I glance sideways at her.

She shakes her head and reaches for the green pepper, concentrates on dismantling it for our dish.

‘What would you do if you were me?’ she asks.

That is the question she asks, but I know the question she really wants me to answer. I stare at the greeny-white sides of the aubergine slices I am halving. I struggle to find the right words, the perfect blend of words that will tell her what she needs to hear. I know how Joel would say it, but
I
have to say it. She has to hear it from me, in my way, otherwise she will not believe me. ‘Phoebe,’ I say as gently as I can, ‘I wish with all my heart I could tell you what to do. As your mother, I want to make everything as easy as possible for you, and especially after everything that happened with your dad … but I can’t.’

‘You tell me what to do all the time.’

‘This is different. This, this is such an important decision, and I wish wish
wish
that you weren’t in this situation and that you weren’t having to make such an adult decision when you can’t legally do most of the stuff an adult can. I will help you make the decision, I will answer your questions, I will write lists with you for and against each option, I will listen to everything you have to say, and I’d like to sit down with you before you make the final decision and go through them in case there’s something you haven’t thought of, but I can’t –
won’t
 – tell you what to do. The final decision has to come from you. It’s your choice. You are not me, and what you choose has to be the option
you
think you will find it easiest to live with. If I don’t let you do this, I will be ruining your life. There are no simple answers, only what you think will be easiest to build your life around. And whatever choice you make, I will support you one hundred per cent, but it has to come from you and what you think will be easiest to live with.’

‘That’s what Aunty Betty said.’

‘She’s a wise woman, then.’

We say nothing, the rapport of our knives chopping sounds
out of time, like two hearts close together but beating to their own rhythms.

‘Mum,’ she says suddenly, sounding like my lost little girl. ‘I’m scared. I’m really, really scared.’

It takes two strides to reach her, it takes a second or two to remove the knife from her hand and place it carefully beside the jumble of peppers. It takes two seconds more to put my arms around her and pull her towards me. And it takes no time at all for the misery, suspicion, anger, hatred, despair, pain, guilt and unrelenting loss that has kept us apart since
that day
to dissolve away.

Her sobs are loud, uncontrolled, rising; each one ploughs a new groove of grief into my heart. I place my hand on the back of her head, another in the middle of her back, holding her as close to me as I can.

All the desperate, jagged moments in the fragmented shell of our lives come together and I have her back. I have my daughter back. She has her mother back.

‘Are you listening to my heart beating, Babes?’

His hand strokes lightly through the curls of my black hair.

I nuzzle my head as near as I can to his chest, the material of his T-shirt caressing my cheek. ‘Yes. I like to make sure you’re still ticking properly.’

‘And am I?’

‘Yep, working perfectly.’

‘Great. Can you sit up now, then? I can’t keep the TV this loud without the sound distorting.’

‘Sorry, mate, it stays that loud as long as I need to listen to your heartbeat
and
hear the film.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘For as long as it takes.’

We’ve come to the beach.

After her tears had subsided, we needed to get out of the house. We needed space, the expanse and freshness of being outside to talk without the fear of Aunty Betty, who seems to walk on air sometimes, appearing unexpectedly. She can’t hear this conversation, no one can.

I’ve set aside my guilt and self-disgust and opened up the beach hut. Fynn has taken care of it. It’s been repainted, sealed, aired; loved and cared for in the time he ‘owned’ it. I can tell, though, that he hasn’t used it. He hasn’t sat here and enjoyed the view, or watched people go by or – as Joel often did – used it to get chatting to people. When Phoebe was in school and Joel would take Zane out so I could work even though I was technically on maternity leave, he found that the combination of a beach hut and a baby were the strongest people magnet there was – especially for mothers with young children. He’d come home with several numbers and offers of play dates. (‘
Play dates for who, exactly? Our son is seven months old,
’ I’d say to his grin.) I could tell that Fynn simply looked after it for us.

Between us, we wrestle the double deckchair out of the hut and set it up to face towards Worthing. From here we can see Worthing pier. I pull my jacket around myself and sit on the deckchair first, Phoebe drops herself on top of me, and turns her body into mine like she used to when she was much younger.

It’s a cool, blustery day; the temperature lowered by the strength of the wind that whips foamy peaks into the surface of the sea. The blustery breeze and cold have seen off all but the most dedicated joggers and dog walkers. Almost all the beach huts I can see from here towards Brighton and towards Worthing are locked up tight – no
other owners are insane enough to venture down here. Except for one beach hut, far down in the distance, which has someone working on it, his tools laid out on the promenade, a workbench all set up with power tools, a portable generator by its side. I cuddle Phoebe close to me, sharing my body heat with her, revelling in the ability to do this with her, and watch the man, in his forties, portly and with a ponytail, work. His fingers must be numb in this wind.

‘Why don’t you talk about Dad?’ Phoebe asks me.

‘I do,’ I reply.

‘You don’t. Earlier, when you were going on about feeding me is the first time in ages and ages you talked about him without me saying anything first. I always say stuff about him and what he’d do because you don’t talk about him.’

‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Is it because of what I did?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Is it because … because you’re angry about what I did that day and so you’re angry with Dad, too, because he didn’t call and tell you, like, right away?’

‘No.’ I tug her as near to me as possible. ‘No, it’s nothing like that at all. It’s because …’ It’s because I avoid fresh pain, I avoid digging up old pain, I avoid current pain, I avoid all pain at all costs even though it seems to hunt me down, seek me out and rub my heart in it. Pain wants nothing more than to snuggle up to me and make me its new home. I avoid pain so it does its best to live itself through me. ‘I don’t know how to talk about him without breaking down. Even now. I think about him all the time, please believe me. Almost everything I do or say has a thought of him in there somewhere, but it has to stay there as a thought so I can function.

‘Not many people want to deal with a woman who bursts into tears nearly two years after her husband has died because they’ve mentioned they were thinking of going to Lisbon on holiday and that’s where she met him. The only way I can function in normal society is to not talk about him much.’

‘Is it all right if I do? And Zane?’

‘Of course.’ I kiss her head, enjoy that unique smell of her. ‘Of course you can. I’m sorry you didn’t feel as if you could. You two can talk about him as much as you like. Do you talk about him with each other?’

‘Yeah. We write in those books you gave us and put stuff in the memory boxes. But you knew him the longest, so there’s stuff I want to ask you. And Zane does.’

‘Like what?’

She thinks for a moment, then: shrug. ‘Dunno. Just stuff.’

‘When you remember what this “stuff” is, feel free to ask.’

‘Are you going to get married again?’

‘No. Next question.’

‘Are you going to marry Mr Bromsgrove?’

‘No.’

‘You do
like him
like him, though, don’t you?’

A few hours ago I convinced myself that I needed to be more honest and open with Phoebe. I’d forgotten
that
needs to be filtered through the sieve of ‘Things you don’t need to know about your parents’. ‘He seems like a very nice, decent person.’

‘He’s still my teacher, though, so I don’t think you should go there.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘I always thought I would marry Uncle Fynn,’ she says, dreamily.

An icicle of shock slips unpleasantly down my spine. When she was five Phoebe would regularly ask me who she was going to marry. She would relentlessly question me about who it would be, running through the names of all the male non-relatives she knew – even a couple of our elderly neighbours – asking if he was the one. I don’t remember her ever including Fynn in her list, not once.

‘Fynn?’ I say, as unsuspiciously as possible while every single hackle is raised. ‘Why Fynn?’

‘Don’t you think he’s well hench?’ she asks, obviously forgetting who she’s talking to and about.

‘Hench?’

‘You know,
hench.
’

‘He’s old enough and close enough to be your father,’ I say.

Shrug. ‘Still hench.’

If it was him, she wouldn’t be talking so openly about him and his looks, would she? She would keep it quiet, as she has been from before all this came out. She wouldn’t say all that, knowing it could make me guess about them. It sounds to me that I am trying to convince myself that it couldn’t be him. But it couldn’t. He is not that man.

Her phone beeps in her pocket and after hesitating for a few moments she takes it out. All social media has been deleted from her phone, but there were still texts. Messages from people who must have been her friends to get her number. Phoebe braces herself before looking at the screen.

UNCLE F

She heaves a sigh of relief and repockets the phone. It’s a coincidence, of course. He said he couldn’t be around me, not that he couldn’t be around the kids. I’m sure he’s texted Zane, now that he knows he’s not here. And he wouldn’t be who he was if he didn’t contact Phoebe today after the drama of last night.

Another icicle slides down my spine.
It can’t be him
. He’s not that person. Phoebe is like a daughter to him, she’ll be like a sister to any children he goes on to have, he wouldn’t do that to her.

‘Phoebe,’ I say, seriously. I need to step away from those thoughts as they will not only drive me crazy, they will distract me from what I need to do. I brought us here with a specific purpose, I needed to be away from the house and from the potential of being overheard for a reason. I have been looking around while talking to Phoebe and I can’t see anyone here that seems to be lurking, I can’t see anyone who is near enough to eavesdrop. The man who is working on the beach hut is too far away, too engrossed in his task to pay us any mind.

‘Yes?’ she replies cautiously.

‘I have to tell the police what we know.’ Quick, clean, precise.

Until this moment, when she grows still and fearful against me, I haven’t noted how free, mobile and unburdened she has been since she cried. She is now like a lump of rock in my arms. ‘Why?’ she eventually mumbles.

‘It’s not the best timing with everything else that’s going on, but it needs to be done. We can’t live with this indefinitely.’ Now I know how far
she
will go to hurt me – spreading rumours about Phoebe being worse than anything she can write or any violence she can visit upon my car – I have to end this. To do that, I have to take away the power she has by confessing all our secrets. ‘Also, Phoebe, people like Zane, your grandparents, Aunty Betty and Uncle Fynn, they deserve to know who did this and to have the person who did it brought to justice. This limbo they’re living in is horrible. We –
I
 – have to put an end to that.’

She remains silent, stays still.

‘You’re not a young girl any more, you’re much stronger, and I know the timing could be better, but the police won’t tear you to pieces, I’ll be with you every step of the way to protect you and to stop them if they upset you. But, we need to tell them so they can catch her.’

‘What if they don’t? What if they can’t prove it? If they arrest her and let her go, she might get really angry and she’ll know it was me, so she might come after me.’