I tried to speak with Becky once, when I saw her in town and she asked how Mum was doing. I tried to explain how Daniel buys all of Mum’s clothes and insists on driving her everywhere, but it didn’t sound like anything when I put it like that.
‘He’s always been considerate,’ Becky said. ‘They’re so loved up.’ And she looked kind of sad then. ‘That’s why we see so much less of her these days, I s’pose. She can’t bear to be away from him. Don’t blame her really.’ She winked. ‘Why would you want to look at any other face if you had George Clooney at home?’
She smiled, and I smiled and wondered if it wasn’t so awful really. Because that was before the worst of it, when I’d still convince myself that maybe it was a misunderstanding, cos Daniel isn’t the kind of man who…And Mum would leave him, wouldn’t she, if he was?
TEN
You’d think we’d get used to how Daniel shifts, flipping from sunshine to thunder and back again without giving us a chance to look up at the sky. He’s all teeth when he comes into my bedroom, no longer the fairy-tale wolf with a pregnancy test but poster-boy Hollywood, whiter than white, holding a pack of cards, asking if I fancy some rummy, or another game perhaps, if I prefer.
‘Later maybe,’ I say, waving my phone like it’s about to ring, which it isn’t, obviously, cos Grace is busy, and these days she’s literally the only one who ever calls. Her new voice-mail’s gone so giggly I felt like I was interrupting a kiss when I tried her just now, so I hung up without saying a word.
Then, miraculously, my phone does beep, and Daniel, still with that smile Mum and I both fell in love with, tells me he’ll leave me be, and thank god, because the message is from Jacob, only it’s not just words he’s sent me, but a whole load of flesh too.
Again. Tonight…
It’s written in red across a photo of his naked chest, which looks pumped. There may even be oil too.
How do I reply to that? Grace would know. But…
I could ask Hannah and Rosa, only things are still off since one of them screenshotted our conversation about Grace and Nell, the one where I wondered too loudly if they’d ever remove their tongues from each other’s mouths for long enough to do anything other than Snapchat their loved-up faces to the rest of us loveless no-hopes. Luckily Grace hadn’t been bothered. ‘Cos it’s probably true,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t help it – Nell’s like crack.’ And her eyes had dilated at just the thought of her.
I want it. That irresistible urge, I mean. That pull towards someone and the way it lights you up after, how Grace glows as bright as the screen of her phone when a message comes through from Nell. But it’s terrifying too, how easily love swallows you and then how easily it can swing the other way.
So with no Grace and no clue, I ignore Jacob and search for some escape in the stranded: in the Desert Island Discs Mum listened to on the morning she brought me home from the hospital, sticking on Radio 4 in the hope, she’s said in the years since, that those very wise and very adult voices would feed her as she fed me, that their calm would grow her beyond her sixteen years.
I can’t imagine Mum that young, a year younger than I am now, shuttled, like some 1950s-shame-on-her-family kind of girl, to the country when her parents discovered she was – how did she say they put it? – Sixteen And With Child. But it wasn’t the 1950s – it was the 1990s, very almost the noughties, when Beyoncé was just kicking off with Destiny’s Child and Geri Halliwell had already quit the Spice Girls.
She always said the programme’s theme tune was enough to take her somewhere that wasn’t her grandmother’s spare bedroom, somewhere she could stroke my face without someone more adult than her worrying she was being too clumsy or, worse, too motherly, when the hope was she’d still give in to their pleas to hand her baby over to strangers.
‘I’d never have given you up,’ Mum says, when I ask her to tell me the story for the millionth time in the kitchen later, when I’m fetching the bread and the margarine for lunch, when we’re obviously avoiding talking about Daniel’s pregnancy-test threat before. ‘They couldn’t tell me what to do. It was my body,’ she says. ‘My choice.’ And her voice right now is a warning or a weapon – whatever it is, it’s something fiercer than I’ve ever heard from her. And in that there’s hope that maybe the defences she built to protect me when I was a baby are still there. But Daniel must’ve sensed her sudden bolt of backbone too, cos he’s like Harry Potter, or Voldemort maybe, apparating from the dining room where he was running through lines to lay a hand on her shoulder and remind her, very gently, of his callback this evening, of his need for quiet, and then, like always, of how he rescued her from that ‘bad, bad past’.
He moves back into the other room, not pulling the door to behind him, despite telling us he’d appreciate not being disturbed. So my mum and I, even though I might want to talk to her about Grace or Jacob or, god forbid, Daniel, we basically sit in silence broken only by Grace and her OMG-you-have-tosee-this photo of her and Nell somewhere totally cool, looking totally happy with ten thousand heart emojis and an afterthought that we should totally all go there together sometime.
Totally, I think, and maybe even my face looks sarcastic because Mum breaks the rules of all this quiet and asks if I’m OK.
‘Isabel, love?’ she says when the only answer I give her is the thump of my phone on the breakfast bar. ‘What is it?’
And where do I start, right? Cos the list is endless and it’s not as if she’s not on it. But here I go, knowing better than to voice it so grabbing a pen and paper to write it instead.
Can we go somewhere? To talk?
Before I’ve even handed it to her, she’s shaking her head, like it’s not a Post-it I’m holding but a bomb.
‘Please.’ It’s a whisper that’s also a beg.
‘Not now.’ Her fingers have already torn it, my last resort, into tiny shreds. ‘Later,’ she says, ripping those tiny shreds into even tinier pieces before separating them and shaking them around in the bin.
And I get that she’s scared, cos me too. But I’ve been here before, watching her literally throw away some problem she can’t handle.
‘You can’t get rid of me that easily,’ I say. I’m right up in her face so she can’t escape the whisper, the hiss. ‘I’m not the cat.’
It’s clear from how her face breaks that she’s remembering how easily she ditched it.
And I’d wait for more Not now, Isabel. Later, Isabel, but another message pings in from Jacob.
No skin this time, just: I shouldn’t have to ask twice. Tonight.
‘Isabel?’
I slide my phone into my pocket so Mum can’t see it, the threat I thought I’d tempered.
It beeps again.
It’s funny how much Jacob wants a piece of me when Mum just threw those dark and broken pieces of me straight into the bin.
ELEVEN
Grace came out when we were, like, seven and she got obsessed with Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess after her older sister gorged on the box set twice over one summer holiday, letting Grace sidle in with her on the sofa while their mum and dad either worked or bawled at them to get outside in the sunshine while they still could.