‘Maybe I do. I think I forgot. Things get muddled in my head sometimes.’
‘No, that’s me – things get muddled in my head,’ I say and she lets go of my hand.
The air rapidly darkens and it starts to rain outside. The sound of birds has been replaced by an impatient wind, blowing the curtains and bed sheets about the place. The room seems to have faded, like I’m watching a remastered colour version of an old black and white film, I can tell something is not quite right. The scene no longer seems authentic and it reminds me that I’m lost. I sit up and reach for Jo.
‘Please find me, I want to be found.’
But the little girl in the pink dressing gown stands up and takes Jo’s hand before I can reach it. She pulls her towards the door. The room starts to fall apart, huge jigsaw-shaped pieces of it falling down into the darkness below. I have to hold on. I so badly want to knit the pieces of my life back together, but I don’t know how.
‘Do you have to go?’ I ask.
‘I think so, don’t you?’ Jo says and they leave my room together, closing the door behind them.
Then
Christmas Eve 2016 – Morning
There is never a good time to lose someone you love, but the death of a loved one at Christmas is a truly terrible thing. Both our parents died at Christmas time and it was never the same after that. It’s something we’ll always have in common no matter how far we drift apart. Spending Christmas Eve together was Claire’s idea, not mine, but I couldn’t say no, it has become a morbid tradition of ours. She said we should try to remember what we’ve got, not what we’ve lost. I’m trying. I know she sees them in me. Sometimes it feels like she’s trying to extract any last fragments of our parents from my DNA just by staring at me. I have the same eyes as our mother. I sometimes see her too, looking back at me in the mirror, always disappointed by what she sees.
Kingston High Street was my choice; it’s always busy. The twins are a welcome distraction from the day ahead, a pair of terrible twos. Claire pushes them around in the biggest double buggy I’ve ever seen. They both grip onto their own toys in their tiny fists; they never have to share. A boy and a girl, she has her own perfect little family now, it really should be enough. She loves the twins more than she loves me, more than she loved any of us, which is how it should be. I’m going to tell her today, not all of it, just what she needs to know when the time is right.
‘That’s far too small for them now, silly,’ says Claire.
‘I know, just thought it looked pretty.’ I put the 0–6-months dress back on the rail. I did the pregnancy test this morning while Paul was still sleeping. It was positive. I think I already knew that it would be. I don’t know how I am pregnant now after so long trying. I think it’s a sign, it must be. It’s time for me to move on and start living my life with Paul. Just Paul. A family of our own that nobody can take away from us. I want to tell him first before I share the news with anyone else. I’ve rehearsed the scene in my head, he’s going to be so happy. I’ll tell him tonight.
I buy the twins some clothes that Claire picks out, may as well get them something she likes, they won’t even remember this Christmas let alone what they were wearing. I wonder if they’d remember me if I were to disappear from their lives sometime soon. I looked it up the other day, the term ‘godmother’: ‘A female arranged to be the legal guardian of a child if untimely demise is met by the parents.’ Untimely demise – I can’t get that phrase out of my head. Being their aunt and a godmother hasn’t really meant an awful lot yet, but it will. I plan on doing a lot more for them when they’re older. They won’t remember what happens this Christmas, it won’t count.
The number of last-minute shoppers bustling and hurrying along makes it almost impossible to progress from one shop to the next. I find it strange that the people we pass, saddled with bags and debt, all look so happy. Sometimes I feel like everyone is happier than I am, as though they’re all in on a secret I’m not privy to. The wide smiles on their faces are too loud. I find myself hating them, hating everything. The Christmas lights, songs, fake snow, all the things I used to enjoy, leave me cold. Claire isn’t enjoying the experience either. We’re more alike than I care to admit and I can see her already sinking down into a bad mood or worse. It’s probably better to share my news sooner rather than later if I’m to prevent her from going somewhere too dark for me to follow.
I steer our little herd towards a small Christmas market, Claire likes this sort of thing. She stops by a stall selling scented candles. She lifts each one in turn, holding them up to her face and breathing them in. Each has a different name. Love. Joy. Hope. I wonder what hope smells like.
‘That friend from university you said you bumped into . . .’ she says, still looking at the candles. I freeze to the spot I am stood on and the busy Christmas market seems to quieten.
‘He’s not a friend, he’s an ex,’ I manage to say.
‘Whatever.’ She picks up a diffuser, its sticks spiking outwards like a stretched hedgehog. ‘I remember him now, it came back to me last night.’
Last night when I woke up in his bed.
The words were definitely in my head but I’m still scared she somehow heard them. She carries on without looking at my face and I’m glad, I don’t trust it not to give me away.
‘He was a medical student, wasn’t he?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t leave you alone when you split up with him, do you remember?’
‘I remember. He was upset. He didn’t understand why I broke it off. I couldn’t explain to him that you made me.’
‘I didn’t make you. He just wasn’t right for you. He was pleasant to look at but something wasn’t quite right up here.’ She taps her temple with her index finger. ‘You do remember him calling you non-stop when you ended it? Waiting outside your flat in the middle of the night?’
‘Like I said, he was upset.’
‘Did you never wonder why he stopped harassing you in the end?’ She turns to face me, her eyes shining with delight, before returning her attention to the items on sale.
My mind whirrs into overdrive. The pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I needed to solve start to slot into place.
‘What did you do?’ I ask.
‘Not much. I wrote some letters, that’s all. It’s a shame people don’t write to one another any more, don’t you think?’
She doesn’t look up, just casually makes her way along the stall, picking up pastel-coloured lumps of wax, lifting them to her face and breathing them in.
‘Tell me what you did.’
Finally, she turns to face me. ‘I wrote some letters to the head of the medical school from women who wanted to complain about his conduct. Your ex. I wrote them all on different paper, using different handwriting. It was really very clever.’ She smiles. ‘Then I rang him from a payphone and said the letters would only stop if he left you alone.’ Her smile erupts into laughter.