I am always with you. I will always be here.
Through the days and months – through years – after my mother left, I’d held those words close to my heart. Police had long since closed the investigation, ruling her disappearance a suicide after finding her clothing and jewellery on the beach, with witnesses claiming they’d seen a dark-haired woman enter the sea the morning she went missing. Still, I believed.
I knew she’d return, even as my aunt Carolyn closed up the dingy council flat Mum and I had lived in, moving me into her huge, empty house. Despite the nightly nightmares that my mum had drowned – despite the memory of her face and arms around me growing fuzzy – I trusted she’d come back. Every night I fell asleep without her was like a kick to the gut, but hope is a funny thing. It has a way of springing up anew after withering away, like daffodils each spring.
Slowly, though, the soil inside of me grew drier, until the very part that hope fed off was dead: unfertile ground, barren and wasted. The tender shoots stopped growing, leaving behind thistles of longing, anger and pain. I still stared out at the sea, but now each breaking wave was like a tombstone marking my mother’s grave, reminding me over and over that she’d left. That she’d chosen to leave, despite the words she’d said to me each night. Wherever my mother’s final resting place was – for her body had never been found – she wasn’t here.
I’d been wrong to believe in her. I’d been wrong to trust. She didn’t keep me safe – just the opposite. She’d hurt me, so much that some days I hadn’t been able to catch my breath.
Now, thirty years later, I felt neither anger nor pain. My mother was gone, and life carried on. I couldn’t say I was happy, but then, I didn’t want to be happy. Being happy meant you had something to lose, and I wasn’t about to risk that. I might have moved past hope, but those brutal years of longing had made their mark, the sole of their boot permanently imprinted on my heart. I was moving through life in a comfortable bubble of my own making and the only person who had the power to hurt me was me . . . and maybe Dolby, when she rejected my lap in favour of her fuzzy blanket. I’d take the vicissitudes of a cat over those of other people any day, though.
I tore my gaze from the café window and unpacked the little lunch I put together each morning, running my eyes over the familiar items: ham (honey-roasted, two slices) and cheese (Emmental) sandwich (granary bread), raspberry yoghurt (sugar free), ten celery sticks and my refillable water bottle. I’d eaten this lunch for years and when I laid it all out on the table it was like being with an old friend – a friend who demanded nothing in return, with whom I could eat in comfortable silence.
Halfway through crunching my celery, I spotted the colourful front page of The Post on the next table, complete with a lurid headline about a footballer’s affair. A man handed out the paper on the promenade each morning, always smiling at me as I passed (I don’t know why because I always rejected his outstretched hand – reading free newspapers full of gossip never appealed). Now, though, I drew it closer, always eager to place another barrier between me and the outside world.
I aimlessly flipped through the pages, running my eyes over articles on the latest summer trends and celeb weddings. Reading this newspaper made me feel like an alien from another planet. Who were these people, and why would I care? I was just about to fold it up and push it away from me when a tiny boxed advert in the classifieds caught my eye. The text leaped out at me, each word hammering my eyes.
I am always with you. I will always be here.
My heart pounded and everything inside me went cold. The words echoed in my mind, growing larger and larger until they pressed on my skull. Images of my mother holding me close each night as she whispered those same ten words clawed and scratched at my soul, demanding entry, and I shoved the paper away from me.
I sat frozen for a minute, forcing air in and out of my lungs as I batted away those memories. Then, I let out a little laugh. God, how silly was I? It was just ten words. Ten insipid words, uttered a million times by a million people all over the world. Maybe whoever had placed the advert – for there wasn’t any contact information – meant them, but my mother hadn’t. My heart may have sizzled and smoked painfully for years after her death, but hard scar tissue had finally formed. Any memories were just that: memories, echoes of events long past that couldn’t breach my defences.
I gathered up my lunch things and slung my cooler bag over my shoulder, looking out to the sea again. My mother had chosen to die. She wasn’t coming back.
And I was perfectly fine with that.
CHAPTER THREE
JUDE
July 1980
Jude fizzed with excitement as she pulled on her tank top, struggled into her favourite pair of skin-tight jeans, and shoved her feet into the high-heeled sandals she’d been dying to wear all summer but would have frozen her toes off if she’d tried. It was her twentieth birthday today and after weeks of rain and fog, it felt like summer was actually here. She was itching to take advantage of the fine weather. Sun brought out way more punters than the endless drizzle and cold she’d been struggling through. More punters meant more money . . . and more money meant an even greater chance of moving to London at the end of the summer.
She made a face, thinking of the meagre two pounds she’d earned yesterday after singing for hours in the freezing wind on the promenade, trying not to shiver, even though she was already wearing four layers. God, she couldn’t wait to get out of this godforsaken town, where people’s dreams of seaside holidays went to die. London, baby . . . that was where it was at. That was where she would start her career as a singer. She could feel it in her bones, though Carolyn always rolled her eyes when Jude said that, asking if ‘her bones’ knew for certain that she’d be able to earn a proper wage and make a living once she was there.
But Carolyn was always like that: the practical older sister, doing everything in her power to keep Jude out of trouble ever since their parents had died in a car crash when Jude was fourteen. Carolyn had just turned twenty-two, but she’d taken on the role of both mum and dad with a sense of responsibility that Jude both admired and hated, often at the same time.
Even her parents hadn’t been as strict as her elder sister, and Jude was certain that had played a major role in her acting up and getting excluded from school at seventeen – although she had to shoulder the biggest chunk of blame; no one had forced her to smoke dope on school grounds. Carolyn had begged and pleaded the headteacher to take her back, but Jude hadn’t bothered to turn up to the meeting her sister had arranged. She wanted to be a singer – she was going to be a singer – and that was that. Why did she need to learn anything else but music?
She’d spent the next few years working part-time at the supermarket (Carolyn had insisted she either get a job or go to school) and taking music lessons in piano, guitar and voice. Music was her life – the place where she could go to be herself and to escape from the dull, cloistered world – and even Carolyn couldn’t stop smiling when Jude sang. Singing and writing songs made her free, and she couldn’t wait to do it for the rest of her life.
First, though, she had to get to London. She had almost enough saved up for rent in a bedsit – she’d looked through the London newspapers at the library to see how much it might cost – and all she needed was a little bit more. If the weather would just cooperate, come September she would be on her way. Twenty years old and a Londoner. Jude couldn’t wait to say those words.