KATY REGAN
The Story of You

Dedication

In loving memory of Nanna R and Grandad F

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Epilogue

Reading Group Guide

A Q&A With Katy Regan

Keep Reading: The Story of You

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Katy Regan

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

PROLOGUE
Mid-May 2013

The first time it happens, I’m on the Tube; coming back from a Depression Alliance coffee morning with Levi, which would be about as much fun as it sounds if Levi wasn’t one of my favourite patients (I know you’re not supposed to have favourites in this job, but sometimes you can’t help it).

It’s Friday, rush hour, in the middle of a May heat wave, so you can imagine the fun and games. I’m sardined in at all sides, about halfway down the aisle, right hand gripping the bar above, really wishing I’d shaved my armpits.

‘Everyone move down the aisle,’ the driver shouts through the Tannoy. ‘This train’s not moving until everyone moves down.’

Most people just tut and stand there. It annoys me when people do that. There’s a time for rebellion, I think, and rush hour on a Friday is not it. I want to get back, jump in the shower, then pop into the Turkish bakery for some of those pastries my sister Leah likes, and get to her house before 7.30 p.m. to catch the kids before we talk. If you get to my sister’s house at 7.33 p.m., forget it. Toys packed away, entire house wiped down. It’s like she never had kids.

I nudge the person next to me to get her to budge up. She staggers slightly and I murmur an apology. She’s trying to eat a prawn-cocktail salad standing up and I think: that’s dedication, that is. That’s hungry.

Eventually, the doors close and we jolt into action; soon I’m hurtling through the dark.

I crane my neck to look at the Tube map above: fifteen stops to Archway, which is home, but only four till Leicester Square, when all the tourists will pile out. It’s not so bad when you break it down like that. A poster grabs my attention: something about match.com and ‘making love happen’ and, just below it, a woman wearing a badge in the design of a Tube stop that says BABY ON BOARD. My eyes drift automatically to her midriff: there’s no sign of a bump yet beneath her white, broderie-anglaise blouse. Probably in those first vulnerable months, I think. Maybe just found out, giddy with excitement. I watch her, imagining her life. I like this game – it comes with the territory of the job, I suppose. I think, here’s a woman who knows how to do pregnancy; this is no martyr, soldiering on. I imagine she will get home tonight to her Victorian conversion, where husband (Steve, thirty-four, civil servant) will be waiting with a vast shepherd’s pie and give her strict instructions not to lift a finger.

There will be a pile of pristine baby-grows already in the drawer; a basket filling daily with talcs and wipes and cotton-wool buds. I was obsessed with the baby basket when Mum was pregnant with Niamh. I would pull it from under her bed and pore over the baby-scented goods; count what new items she’d got that week, grilling her about names: Niamh or Sadie if it’s a girl, Richie if it’s a boy. (Richie King! What a name! He’d have got the ladies, if he’d ever made it into the world.)

I imagine this woman will call her baby Ben; Ben or Holly – something safe that will never go out of fashion. The train stops at Embankment and many get off, but the hordes get on. A woman listening to Daft Punk next to me disappears and is replaced by a man wearing white, stained overalls. He’s sweating and smells as if he’s had a few after work – as well as of something else, something heady, which hits you immediately between the eyes. Turps. Takes me a while to put a name to it. Must be a decorator, I think.

The train hisses on to Charing Cross. It’s becoming like a furnace in here now; I can feel the hand that’s gripping the bar above is clammy with sweat, and the straps of my rucksack are rubbing on my shoulders. The carriage sways and shudders along, the man who smells of turps accidentally puts his hand over mine and we exchange a shy smile. I can see the pearls of perspiration form on his shiny head, and then, before he can stop them with the handkerchief he is struggling to take from his pocket, run down to his ears and onto his eyebrows. I feel sorry for him; I think, I bet he can’t wait to get out of here.

Woman with the prawn-cocktail salad is hanging on with one arm in front of us now, wilting with the heat. She suddenly yawns, a huge, wide, doggy yawn, revealing bits of iceberg lettuce. When she eventually clamps her mouth shut, a gust of fishy breath envelops us. Man who smells of turps and I exchange an eyebrow raise. What a relief, someone else who has surpassed me in the bad-Tube-etiquette stakes. I love the nonverbal communication that goes on in the Tube, the humanness of it all, the fact we’re so often thinking the same.

It comes as I catch my reflection in the window: dark hair pulled back and badly in need of a wash; eyes always more smiley (and crinkled at the sides) than I expect. It starts, deep and penetrating, a heart-burn in my chest, then, travelling at speed, spreads down my limbs, up my neck, my face, into the palms of my hands, until I feel something has to happen to release me from this heat, or else I will combust, surely? I will pass out.

I cough, then swallow, or try to, but it feels like a bunch of dried leaves has been shoved in my mouth. God, I’m going to be sick, I think; I’m actually going to puke. And I panic – I think, I don’t have a bag. But then, as suddenly as the heat struck, an icy wave descends – the chills – and I gag, but nothing comes out. I am sweating buckets now. If I raise my shaking hand to my forehead, an actual droplet comes off on my finger. My heart pounds hard and fast, like a spray of bullets. I can’t get my breath and I think, my God, I am having a heart attack.

I blink back the sweat and open my eyes, but the Tube map in front of me is swerving so much that I have to close my eyes again in case I pass out. We stop at two, maybe three more stops and I tighten my fingers around the bar above me; reach out to a vertical pole in front of me, but my palms are so wet that it slides right off and I stumble, accidently standing on the man-who-smells-of-turps’s foot. I shake my head by way of apology, but I don’t look at him, although I am aware of him looking at me. It feels like a bag of wet sand is sitting on my ribs. No matter how much I try to expand my chest, I can’t get enough air, and I am consumed – overwhelmed – with a wave of terror that this is it: I am dying. But I’ve been lied to, cheated. Everyone said Mum died peacefully, that death is peaceful; but it isn’t, it’s horror.

The last thing I am aware of, someone is touching my arm. I say, ‘I think I am having a heart attack,’ and then there’s a screeching sound, the wail of an alarm. Then I am sitting on a bench on the Tube platform; the man in the white overalls who smells of turps is holding my hand. Another man in green overalls is asking, ‘Are you a diabetic?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not diabetic. But I’ve just found out I’m pregnant.’

Chapter One
Three months earlier
February 2013

Dear Lily

I’m going to end it with Andy. I’ve decided.

I’m sitting here, alone at a restaurant table for the second time this week, whilst he’s outside arguing with the Ex, and I’ve decided enough is enough. There’s only so much sitting alone in restaurants picking at olives a girl can take. I don’t even like olives!!

Andy’s a nice man and it’s been great to have the company, but I’ve realized that’s it: it’s just company, someone to watch telly with and go out for dinner with and cook with (though even that’s started to grate: How many hours has that man spent with a pestle and mortar? What’s wrong with a shop-bought curry sauce now and again?). I’ve started to wonder, what’s in it for me, you know? How did I ever think I could have a successful relationship with a man going through a messy divorce? He needs too much himself. He’s broken. And, as you and I know, I spend enough time with broken people in the day job. I can’t be the therapist outside of it too.

Oh, Lily, but I’ve started to wonder if I’m the broken one, if I’m the one who needs therapy. Am I to keep doing this? Is this to be the pattern my relationships take? Long periods of celibacy followed by unsuitable, emotionally unavailable men? It’s like I pick them out or something.

I worry that what happened all those years ago has scarred me forever, that I’m too scared to fall in love with anyone – because look what happened when I fell in love with Joe, look at the fallout then! Maybe going out with people like Andy, who I’m never going to fall in love with, let’s face it, is my way of dipping my toe in relationships, playing at having a boyfriend but never actually diving in with both feet. And that’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? That I might never fall in love again? That at thirty-two that’s it, game over?

I sneaked my notepad underneath some work notes and pretended to read them whilst really watching Andy arguing on the phone to his Ex, outside yet another Modern European brasserie in central London. It was something I’d grown very accustomed to during the past year.

From a purely psychological point of view, it made fascinating viewing. Andy was a confident man, very male in his behaviour and attitude, and yet he looked so weak when he was on the phone to Belinda (or Belinda Ballbreaker as I call her, since she means WAR in this divorce. She means war in life, generally, as far as I can tell …)

He had his back to me and was flexing alternate bum cheeks, running a hand, anxiously, through his salt-and-pepper curls. Andy was a very handsome man, yet it struck me at that moment that his hair was not dissimilar to Russell Grant’s. Maybe this was the self-protection kicking in, the physical attraction waning to make The End more bearable.

‘Sorry, sorry, so sorry, honey.’

Eventually, Andy came back inside the restaurant, red faced and apologizing profusely. I looked studiously at my notes, as if I’d been doing this all the time. ‘She hung up on me,’ he said, palms in the air, as if this had never happened before. ‘She actually put the phone down.’

I made a sympathetic face but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to know what would happen if I didn’t offer advice or thoughts like I usually did; if I didn’t allow him to offload on me.

Andy stood there for a few seconds, as if needing to physically recover from the latest bashing from his Ex. It was no good – he really was good-looking, with his piercing blue eyes and his dusky skin tones. No matter if his hair had a touch of the ‘Russell Grant’ about it … He looked like an architect, I thought, and I’d always fancied dating an architect: that mix of practical and creative.

I picked up the menu and pretended to read. Eventually, when he realized he was getting nothing from me, he came round the back of my chair and wrapped his arms around my neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, nuzzling into me. He smelt of soap and the outside. ‘You’ve been here all this time, sitting patiently.’

‘That’s all right.’ I shrugged. ‘I always know to bring a book with me to dinner now.’

‘Or your notes, you have here I see …’ he said, indicating the work file I’d got out.

(Sarcasm is generally wasted on Andy.) ‘Why can’t everyone be as lovely as you, Robyn? Tell me. Why do I always go for the feisty ones?’

I bit my lip. Robyn wasn’t about to be lovely Robyn any more.

He sat back down again. I knew he was waiting for me to ask him about the conversation with Belinda, how unfair it all was, what a bitch she was, but I resisted.

‘So how was your day at work, beauts?’ he said, finally, after we’d ordered – me the ham-hock terrine, him the goat’s cheese and beetroot. ‘How are the certified mental as opposed to my ex-wife who’s yet to be diagnosed?’

I took some bread from the basket and tore at it. ‘Oh, you know, just a day like any other, really. Two sectioned, one attempted suicide.’

I knew that throwing a word like ‘suicide’ into the conversation this early on in the evening would be seen as provocative by Andy, but to be honest, he’d annoyed me. I felt like being provocative.

‘Oh dear. Liam again?’

‘Levi, it’s Levi.’

‘Sorry, Levi. Cry for help, I imagine?’

‘Yes, most probably,’ I said. This was Andy’s line for everything.

I wondered when I should break the news to him: now, or after the meal? In between courses? I felt like giving my own little cry for help: ‘Argh! Get me out of this!’ Maybe I wouldn’t tell him at all. Maybe I’d give him one more chance.

Andy picked up the wine menu. I could tell he wanted to get back to him and the phone call, but I was determined to carry on.

‘Anyway, I also went to Lidl with a sixty-three-year-old woman dressed in hot pants and a Stetson today,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell, is that all she was wearing?’ said Andy.

‘Pretty much …’

‘Poor woman …’ he added. He had a look on his face like I’d told her to put on the hat and hot pants as some sick and twisted joke. ‘I mean, can you imagine the humiliation, how embarrassed you’d be?’

‘Andy, she’s manic, she couldn’t give a toss,’ I said, laying my napkin on my knee. ‘She’s so disinhibited, it’s a miracle I got her to put on any clothes at all.’

‘Ah, but this is the issue, isn’t it?’ he said, leaning back into the chair and lacing his fingers. Andy likes to do this – try to have some philosophical debate, when actually, I doubt he’s genuinely that interested. I know he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

‘What’s the issue?’

‘That’s the job of the psychiatric nurse, isn’t it? To make sure she knows when she should be inhibited and when she shouldn’t.’

I tried really hard not to look irritated.

‘Well, I don’t think …’

‘I mean, can you imagine how awful that would be?’ he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice. ‘How demeaning, being allowed to walk into a supermarket in hot pants when you’re drawing your pension?’

I started laughing. Sometimes I think Andy thinks I am much more earnest about my job than I actually am.

‘Yeah. It’d be brilliant. Sixty-odd, waltzing around Dulwich Sainsbury’s in your hot pants, all the yummy mummies running out of there screaming, “Aaaaagghhh!”’

Andy pulled his chin into his neck.

‘Robyn, please.’

‘Well, honestly.’

He went back to the menu.

‘Let’s order wine, shall we?’ He smiled, determined not to make this into an argument, even though I was up for one now. An argument would make this whole thing easier, of course.

I waited. I counted.

‘Do you know what Belinda said to me?’ he said.

Eight seconds. Impressive.

‘No, what did she say to you?’

‘That I was selfish – I mean, of all the things … That she wasn’t surprised the girls didn’t want to spend much time with me because I didn’t know how to talk to them, that I didn’t understand them. She said I don’t listen to them properly when they call and …’

The starters came, and he was still going on about it. Then, suddenly, mouth stuffed full, he started waving his hand in front of my face.

‘Oh, my God, I completely forgot to tell you! I’ve got a surprise!’

‘A surprise?’ My stomach lurched. I’d psyched myself up now. Don’t start being perfect boyfriend now.

‘Yep,’ he leaned forward and put his hand on mine. ‘I haven’t got the girls next weekend – their mum’s taking them on some sort of girly shopping extravaganza; my idea of a living hell, as you know – so I thought we could go away together.’ He patted my hand and grinned at me. He did have a lovely smile, the most unusually blue eyes. ‘Well, actually, I just thought to hell with it and I’ve booked somewhere.’

I forced a mouthful of food down my throat. ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.

‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ he said, disappointed. ‘Robyn, come on, you could look a bit more excited.’

But I wasn’t excited, I was irritated: irritated by his having delayed our dinner by twenty minutes to have an argument with the Ex; irritated by him talking about nothing but his ex-wife; irritated and bored to tears with the whole divorce saga. No, I’d made my decision. The fact I didn’t feel even a smidgen of excitement about the prospect of a mini-break (and I’d been hankering after a mini-break for absolutely ages) cemented it.

I sighed. ‘Oh, Andy, I’m just a bit bored of it, that’s all.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of always talking about you and Belinda and the girls and the divorce.’

He looked genuinely hurt and shocked and, for a second, I felt bad.

‘But it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, Robyn, you know that. I can’t just switch my emotions off when I see you. Like a tap!’

‘Really?’ I tried not to say it unkindly. ‘Because I’d like you to try, Andy, just a little bit.’

He frowned, his shoulders slumping, genuinely deflated. ‘But you’re so good at listening.’ The innocence with which he said it killed me. ‘I thought you were interested.’

‘Andy, I am interested, to a point. All I’m saying is, just, it would be nice to be asked how I am, occasionally, and to be allowed to reply in more than one sentence before you start talking about you again.’

‘But you don’t like talking about yourself.’

I kind of laughed. This was true. I had said that.

‘But, I didn’t mean like never, ever, ever!’

Andy searched my face. It was at times like this that I worried he might be on the spectrum. He just really did not get it.

‘Your relationship with Belinda and the girls, it’s becoming like a chronic ailment,’ I said. ‘Like a boil on your bum, or sinusitis. It never goes away, and yet, I get a daily update, whether I like it or not. And whenever I suggest anything that might help, you’re not interested. Sometimes I feel like you just want to moan.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. Well, can I make it up to you? Will you come away? I’ve booked a lovely hotel in Watford.’

‘Watford?’

‘That’s the nearest town – it’s actually on the outskirts of Watford. It has a spa, a golf course. I could play a round whilst you get pampered. Have a facial or a massage – one of those treatments all you girls like to have?’

‘Andy,’ I said, and as the words left my mouth, I did feel reassuringly sad. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to go away together. In fact, I think we should break up. I’m really sorry, but I just think this isn’t working any more.’

Chapter Two
March

Robyn,

I hate to do this on Facebook, but I haven’t got your number and the email address I tried doesn’t work any more. I’ve got some really bad news: my mum died suddenly on Tuesday. She was fine, went out for a curry with Dad, then came home and had a heart attack. I can’t believe it. I know what people mean now when they say, ‘I keep expecting her to walk through the door.’

I’ve never seen my dad like this. I know this won’t have rocked his faith in the long run, but he’s struggling. I think he realizes it’s different when it happens to you, you know?

Personally, I am enraged: I mean, fifty-nine? WTF. Thirty years of service and that’s how he repays my dad? If one more person tells me he works in mysterious ways, I’ll punch them. I remember you saying that to me once, after your mum died. I remember exactly where we were, too – down the cricket ground. I probably gave you a cuddle, then tried to slip my hand up your top … God, I’m sorry, Robbie. Going through all that at sixteen, with only a sixteen-year-old me to talk to. I had no idea. Now I do.

The first person I thought of calling was you, because I knew you’d understand but, like I say, I had no number, so here I am telling about the death of my mother on f**ing Facebook!

The funeral’s a week tomorrow (1 April) at 3 p.m. at St Bart’s, Kilterdale obviously. (Dad says he’s giving it, but I’ll believe that when I see it. He’s a mess.) I’d love you to be there. I know Mum would too. She was talking about you just days before she died, about that time we all went on a barge holiday to the Norfolk Broads and she had one too many Dubonnet and lemonades and fell in. Hey, she wasn’t a typical vicar’s wife, was she?

Anyway, my number’s below. Hopefully see you there.

Hope you’re well, darl X love Joe X

I smiled as the memory floodgates opened … The barge holiday and the night of Marion’s ‘Dubonnet Splash’. My God, I’d completely forgotten about all that. Joe and I had only been seeing one another a month and were still in the unhealthily obsessed stage when, against their better judgement, Marion and the Reverend Clifford Sawyer (Joe’s dad) decided to take us with them. A rev he may have been, but Cliff loved a tipple, as did Marion, and a major plus point of a barge holiday, they soon found, was the number of pub stops one could make along the way.

We’d all been in the pub this one afternoon, but Joe and I had offered to go back to the barge to make a start on the carbonara for tea. But we hadn’t made a start on tea, we’d just made out. Marion had come back tipsy and, seeing us suckered against one another (thank God, fully clothed), surrounded by chopped raw bacon, because that’s as far as we had got, she’d dashed off in desperation for fish and chips, falling, as she did, in between the canal bank and the boat. She’d done this Carry On-style dramatic scream. Oh, how we’d laughed …

‘Robyn, if you could tear yourself away from Facebook and whatever is so funny just for a second, then perhaps you could fill us in on last night? By all accounts, it was an eventful one?’ (It was only then that I realised, I was still laughing sixteen years later.)

I’d got Joe’s Facebook message on the night shift. By now – 8 a.m. at handover – I could think of nothing else. I knew it off by heart. I’d read it so many times.

I turned away from my computer to find the whole office waiting for me to start and Jeremy – our team Manager, perched on the edge of a desk, wearing one of his ‘five for a tenner’ shirts.

‘Yes, it was eventful,’ I stuttered. ‘Really, really busy actually.’

In fact, there must have been something in the planets – something in the full moon, which hung like a mint imperial over south London – because, as well as receiving Joe’s Facebook message, the first contact I’d had from him in five years, it had been one of the busiest night shifts I’d ever done. Everyone was going mad.

John Urwin – one of Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust’s most notorious clients – had been arrested after being caught having sex in Burgess Park.

‘And all you need to know about that,’ I said, when I finally got myself together enough to join in handover ‘is that he was butt naked when arrested but still wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and I think you have to love John for that.’

Kaye, Parv and Leon, also CPNs (community psychiatric nurses), had an affectionate giggle, but Jeremy was not amused. ‘If you could just stick to what actually happened, Robyn.’

And so I told them how John was a little ‘agitated’ when I arrived at Walworth Police Station. (This was a distinct downplay of events. I’d been able to hear him shouting as soon as I got there.)

‘WHY CAN’T A MAN HAVE SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND IF HE WANTS TO? IT’S AN ABUSE OF MY HUMAN RIGHTS, DOCTOR! MY HUMAN RIGHTS!’

But Dr Manoor and I had managed to calm him down. Dr Manoor has been John’s psychiatrist for years, and thankfully knows him as well as I do.

John is perhaps one of the more extreme clients I work with (although there’s not really such a thing as ‘extreme’ in this job) and institutionalized now. I find people like him the absolute saddest. It’s as if they had their breakdown aged 18 and stayed that age – arrested development. John has been sectioned more times than most people have had hot dinners. Still, if you talked to John when he was well, he talked a lot of sense. He was a bright man – he could tell you every single species of butterfly – and he was in a relationship.

Because the night shift had been so full on, handover ran over. As well as John Urwin baring all in Burgess Park, Levi Holden was admitted with an overdose. I really don’t mean to sound glib when I say this happens quite often.

Of the thirty people on my caseload, Levi is probably my favourite: six feet of utter gorgeousness for a start. He’s also hilarious, when he’s not suicidal. And even when he is suicidal, he’s probably funnier than the average person. He has a little job washing cars in the Dulwich Sainsbury’s car park. The other day, he was making me laugh so much, slagging off all the Dulwich mums in their four-by-fours and their two-hundred-pound weekly shops.

‘Those mo-fo dull witches wid der massive wagons and their whining dollies in the back and enough food to feed the whole of Peckham. It’s a wonder they’re not more mo-fo wide, the amount of money they spend on food!’

I laugh a lot in my job. I guess, with darkness has to come light, and you’d be amazed how gallows the humour can get. ‘You don’t have to be mad to do this job, but it helps,’ they say. But I wonder if we’re not all a bit mad already, and it’s just a question of when, not if, the lid comes off.

I find it hard at the best of times going home and straight to sleep after a night shift. Your body is exhausted but your mind is on overdrive: Will Levi take another overdose? Will John be on the psychiatric ward, yelling for his Dennis the Menace wig? These are usually the things I am thinking as I leave the office for my bed. Today, however, it was Joe’s Facebook message.

We were having one of those freak, early spring warm spells – Peckham’s teens had already stripped to their Primark hot pants – and so I decided to walk to Oval rather than get the bus. Camberwell was alive and kicking: African ladies in tropical-shade headdresses, stalls piled high with okra and plantain, spilling onto the street. A watermelon rolled onto the pavement. As I put it back, I could just make out the wiry form of Dmitri, the owner of the shop, sitting like a drying chilli on his deckchair at the back. I passed Chicken Cottage and the launderette, where the aroma of fried chicken turned into the heavy, bluebell notes of Lenor. Across the road, in the park, a group of teenagers were dancing to some rapper blasting from a pimped-up beatbox. The heart of South London couldn’t have been beating harder if it tried, and yet, amidst all of this life, I was thinking about death – of Joe’s mum, and my mum, and everything that happened in Kilterdale, and how I really didn’t want to go back there, for a funeral of all things. The question now, of course, was how the hell was I going to get out of it?

Eventually, I caved, and went into Interflora in Camberwell. The woman behind the counter was eyeing me up over her half-moon glasses, as if she knew my game.

‘Can I help you, madam?’ she said eventually.

I smiled at her. ‘No, I’m just looking, thanks,’ and continued pretending to browse around the shop, which didn’t take long since you couldn’t swing a cat in there.

‘Okay, well if you need any help …’ she said, going back to her book, but I could feel her eyes on me; they were following me round the shop. Eventually, I felt compelled to speak.

‘Uh, actually, could you recommend flowers to send to a funeral, please?’

She perked up at this and took off her glasses.

‘Well, the classic of course is the lily,’ she said, getting up from her seat behind the counter and coming round to the front. She had a matronly bosom and was wearing a lilac, pussy-bow blouse. ‘But you can have bouquets arranged with carnations, roses; anything you like.’

I nodded, remembering the carpet of bouquets left outside the crematorium at Mum’s funeral. The messages that all started, ‘Dearest Lil …’ and finished, ‘Always in our thoughts.’ I remember being so depressed that Mum had now become merely a thought in people’s heads. How long before she wasn’t even that?

‘May I ask who it’s for?’ asked the woman. She was much more friendly now. ‘Is it a close family member? Do you know what sort of flowers they liked?’

‘Roses,’ I said, ‘peach ones.’

I must have spent more time with Marion up at the vicarage that summer than I remembered.

‘We do a lovely wreath with peach roses,’ she said. ‘Some irises, green foliage … When is the funeral?’

‘A week on Friday.’

‘In London?’

‘No, up North. A little village near the Lake District.’

She let out a little gasp. ‘Which one? My son and daughter-in-law live up there.’

I hesitated. Nobody had ever heard of it. ‘Kilterdale,’ I said.

‘No … my son lives in Yarn!’

I was genuinely shocked. In fifteen years of living in London, I could count on one hand the number of people I’d met from anywhere near my home village, it was so back of beyond.

She said, ‘It’s glorious up there. Always fascinates me how anyone would move from somewhere like that to here.’

There was a long pause. It was only when she spoke again that I realized she’d wanted an answer to that question. ‘Anyway,’ she looked a bit embarrassed that her foray into conversation hadn’t been more productive, ‘that needn’t be a problem. You can have a look at what the wreath might look like here – I have some in the back – and then we can contact an Interflora branch near where the funeral is being held.’

I felt my shoulders relax. ‘That would be great, thank you.’ Then, as I watched her bustle into the back of the shop, the nagging guilt crept in.

‘I had no idea, I’m sorry. Now I do.’ Joe had said in his message. But he did have an idea, even at sixteen. Whilst other lads in his year were worrying about popping cherries, getting it on with Tania Richardson, Joe was dealing with me, posing as his sane-and-together girlfriend but who, inside, was collapsing with grief. Now here I was, copping out of his mother’s funeral.

I was kicking myself for even joining Facebook, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be in this position, and Joe would never have found me. I only have fifteen Facebook friends, as it is, most of whom are work colleagues. I say things to my sister, Niamh, like: ‘Why does this person I did swimming with twenty years ago want to be my friend?’ Which she thinks is hilarious. Niamh is nine years younger than me, the accidental result of a drunken, food-themed fancy-dress party for my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary – yep, my sister was conceived whilst my parents were dressed as a ‘prawn cocktail’: Mum as the prawn and Dad as Tom Cruise in Cocktail – and therefore thinks I am geriatric. ‘It’s a social-networking site, dumb-ass. You social-network on it,’ she says. I don’t think I’ll ever like it, though: I don’t want blasts-from-my-past being able to find me, or to see pictures of the sorts of drunken states my sister gets herself into. I worry about her. She turned twenty-three in January and I still worry about her.

I picked up some freesias and inhaled their lovely scent, wondering how long you could leave a message like Joe’s before you answered it, and decided two days was already too long.

‘Here we are …’ The lady clattered through the plastic strips of curtain separating the shop from the back, carrying a peach-flowered wreath. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ she said, holding it up. ‘They’ll be able to make you one up like this in no time.’

I sniffed it.

‘Yes, it’s lovely. How much?’

‘They start at seventy-five pounds and go up to a hundred.’

‘Seventy-five pounds?’ It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it.

‘It is expensive, but then when you think of what it’s for … what those flowers say. Your personal goodbye.’

As if I didn’t feel guilty enough already.

Going in person would say a hell of a lot more, I knew that. I knew that for much less, fifty quid perhaps, I could get a train ticket up to Kilterdale, or fill up my car with petrol. So, I wouldn’t even be able to plead poverty if I sent the flowers.

‘I’ll have a think about it,’ I said, having decided to do nothing of the sort.

‘Okay, well don’t leave it too late to order.’ She went a bit frosty after that. ‘They need time to make it up.’

I made a swift exit out of there.

Chapter Three

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if Eva – my Polish, hoarding next-door neighbour – lies in wait for me. I’d made it into the lobby of my block. I’d even got so far as leaning across the mound of bin bags that block her entrance and, as each day passes, mine, to put my key in the lock, when she swung open her door.

‘Ah, Missus King …’ She was wearing a mustard-yellow sun dress, which clung to her form like clingfilm around an enormous block of cheese. ‘I very happy I sin you, I bin worried sick of you. I not seen you for days.’

Behind her, an avalanche of more bin bags stretched back and up, indefinitely.

‘Eva, you saw me yesterday, remember?’ I said, peering past her shoulder. I was always fascinated about how she might sleep: wedged between shelves like you saw on those Channel 4 documentaries about chronic hoarders? Up against an ironing board? ‘We were discussing when you might ring the council for someone to help you come and move this stuff so I can get to my front door without straining a muscle.’

I just gave it to her straight these days. I was over being subtle, even polite.

She looked me up and down through those dark, hooded eyes then: ‘You look thin,’ she sniffed, ignoring me. ‘You still pining for zis, zis little man?’

I laughed. ‘Andy, you mean? No, Eva, I’m fine, it was for the best, but thanks for asking,’ I said, pushing the bags aside with my foot.

‘He no good enough for you,’ she said, as I managed to get close enough to my door to open it. ‘He too old. He no give you enough attention …!’

‘Don’t worry, Eva, I’m really okay,’ I said, then, before I closed the door, ‘Now promise me you’ll ring the council about those bags!’

I locked the door and leaned against it for a second, just closing my eyes. Silence. The thing was, Eva was right: I was pining for Andy – not pining so much as missing him; I was in an ‘Andy mood’. Joe’s message had caught me off guard and I suddenly craved the familiarity of him.

I went into the living room and turned on the TV for company – since Andy and I finished last month, I’ve done this every day – then I ran a bath. I’m also the cleanest I’ve ever been.

It’s funny; when I bought this place – a slightly shabby, ground-floor, two-bed in a small, 1930s block – four years ago with the money Mum left me, I relished coming home to an empty flat. After spending all day talking to people – often about their suicide plans: how they had the vodka and the Temazepam at the ready – I relished having a place to myself; a sanctuary from all the madness. I’d often just sit there when I got in, in silence, take the phone off the hook, read a book, eat sweetcorn straight from the can. Then, a year ago, along came Andy and changed all that. For the first time in four years, I had a boyfriend; and, what’s more, I liked it.

I made sure the bath was as hot as it could be without actually scalding me, then I got in. It was 6 p.m. – 6 p.m.! What the hell was I supposed to fill the rest of the evening with? There’s only so much lying in a bath and exfoliating you can do, after all. I thought about poor Joe – about those awful few days of bereavement, the shock, the need for people around you. Then I thought about the reality of going back to Kilterdale and seeing him after all this time, the feelings it might unearth, the memories I’d boxed up for sixteen years now. It made me so anxious.

I thought about Andy – familiar, benign Andy, who was so wrapped up in himself it made it impossible for you to think about anything else – about calling him and inviting him over, just to ‘veg’, as he put it. I imagined sitting next to him on the sofa, watching Dragon’s Den, and sharing a kedgeree (Yes, Andy was a big fan of a smoked-fish item, I thought fondly). What harm could it do?

I met Andy on a speed-dating night. I’d gone with Kaye from work – God, I love Kaye. She always says to me, ‘Kingy, never settle. There’s far too much fun to be had with a packet of Oreos and BBC iPlayer.’ (Kaye is thirty-seven and still refuses to settle. She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of Oreos.) He was the older man – forty-two to my thirty-one – and I liked that, the idea of being looked after for a change. We chatted easily for the allotted three minutes. Afterwards, he made a beeline for me at the bar.

‘I like you, Robyn. You’re different. In fact, I’d say you’re marriage material,’ he said, and from there, ‘we’ just sort of happened. I gathered he felt free to throw around phrases like ‘you’re marriage material’ because he was going through a horrid divorce and therefore never likely to marry anyone ever again. And we had a lot of fun for a while, Andy and I. I even liked the fact he’d been married and had two kids, at first: it made him seem ‘normal’, as in, what you’d expect a normal, functioning bloke to have done at forty-two, I guess …

Before Andy, I’d given up on any kind of normal. I’d realized normal – as in marriage and kids – was not the way it was going for me. And that was fine, I’d made my peace with that. Kaye and I had decided that, if all else failed, we’d join a hippy commune and grow our armpit hair and eat biscuits all day like we did at work. But then Andy came along and he made me believe in normal again. He made me want it.

I topped the bath up with more hot water and lay back, staring despairingly at the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling, which was encroaching like an oily tide.

Finishing with Andy had probably been the most amicable ending of a relationship I’d ever known, perhaps because I’d never been more than someone nice to fill a space for him, and that was fine. It was as though he’d swooped in, post-separation, for some respite care at the Hospice of St Kindness (i.e. me, or anyone else who would listen to him) and was now recharged, ready to take on the world again. When I’d told him it was over, he’d looked disappointed and taken aback, but not hurt, I noted. It was the sort of expression you might wear if you’d just been told there was no more carrot soup on the menu and you’d have to have leek and potato.

After leaving the restaurant, we’d walked to the Tube together, even chatted as we glided down the escalator. As would be the case, a busker was singing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ with accompanying pan-pipe backing track when we got to the bottom. He’d taken hold of my elbows and we’d gazed at one another with sad smiles as the busker sang how sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes it hurts instead. Then Andy said, ‘I’ll be in touch.’

And I’d smiled, because he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t help but promise, even at the end, something he couldn’t deliver.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to.’

‘At least let’s have a cuddle, then?’ he’d said, opening his arms; and we did, and it was nice. Andy’s a good hugger. It’s the one thing we’d both done well probably because there’s no pressure in a hug, is there?

‘Okay, bye then,’ I’d said.

‘Yeah, I will call though, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I’d said.

‘Take care of yourself, honey.’

Then we’d turned and gone our separate ways. Two minutes later, I was gliding up the escalator when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming down the other way.

‘Sorry, I went the wrong way,’ he said, and I laughed to myself all the way home because, was there ever the end of a relationship that so exactly replicated the relationship itself? Hit-and-miss, half-baked, stop-start. Just a little bit of a shambles, basically, with some farce thrown in.

No, finishing with Andy Cullen was the right thing to do, I decided, lying there until the bath water grew cool. I didn’t want to see him, I was just scared and putting off getting back to Joe.

I decided to ring my sister, Leah, instead. It’s practically impossible to have a normal conversation on the phone with her these days because she’s always so busy with the kids, so it’s a numbers game: if you ring her ten times, you might just get lucky once. Jack, my five-year-old nephew answered. We had a short discussion about peregrine falcons – I totally dig the conversations I have with my nephew – then I said, ‘Is Mummy there?’

There was some high-pitched squealing in the background, which could have been Leah or Eden, my three-year-old niece – it was difficult to tell.

‘She’s cleaning up Eden’s poo,’ said Jack.

‘Oh,’ I said, darkly.

‘She needed the toilet but didn’t make it. A poo fell out of her skirt in the kitchen.’

I laughed. Then stopped. Jack wasn’t laughing. This is because Jack knew that a poo in the kitchen was on a par with the apocalypse for his mother.

‘Okay, well, don’t worry. Tell Mummy—’ I was about to tell him I’d call back later when Jack shouted:

‘Mummy! Aunty Robyn’s on the phone!’

I could hear Leah’s sigh, literally metres away in the kitchen.

‘Well, tell Aunty Robyn that I am knee-deep in your sister’s crap at the moment and that her beautiful, adorable, butter-wouldn’t-melt niece’s bum has exploded all over my new kitchen floor.’

‘Oh.’ Jack came back on the phone. ‘Mummy said the C word.’

‘Mm,’ I said, ‘she did. That must mean she is very stressed. Tell her I’ll call her later, okay?’

‘She’ll call you later, Mummy!’

‘Ha! Well, she can try, but I’ll be doing bedtime then …’

I reasoned that I may not have got to speak to my sister, but at least any yearnings for Andy, and/or a boyfriend or family life had been very successfully abated.

That evening, I sat on the sofa, nursing a bottle of wine, writing fantasy replies to Joe, hoping that, the drunker I got, the more likely I’d be just to press ‘Send’.

Dear Joe,

I’m so sorry to hear about your mum and ordinarily I’d love to come to the funeral, but unfortunately I am on holiday …

Dear Joe,

I can hardly believe it’s taken me three days … the reason is, I was trying to think of a way of telling you …

Dear Joe,

Oh, my God, what must you think of me?! I rarely log onto Facebook so …

In the end, three days, in fact, after Joe sent me the message, and mainly because I ran out of different ways to apologize, I wrote:

Dear Joe,

I’ll be there. See you at 3 p.m.

Robyn x

Chapter Four

Dear Lily

I was thinking today that of all the things I’ve told you so far, I haven’t told you how I got together with your father. He says it’s typical of me, that the day we should get together is the day I save him, when what he doesn’t know is that he saved me.

The date was 18 May 1997 – almost sixteen years ago! It was the end of the summer term, of high school, and we were signing one another’s shirts: SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMOND! Although, personally, I was doing nothing of the sort …

Picture your mother: I am sixteen, I have thick dark hair with a fringe, and very recently I’ve committed trichological suicide by trying to dye it peroxide blonde. Your granddad didn’t notice for a fortnight, which gives a very good indication of how he was at that time. The barnet is an atrocity; every time I get it wet, it goes green for some reason, and so my sister Leah gives me a ‘body perm’ in the kitchen one Saturday, in the hope this will distract the eye (it doesn’t).

It’s been six months since we lost Mum and I’m blown apart. There seem to be bits of me everywhere; some shrapnel is still inside. I don’t know who I am, or who to be, and so I try different guises: ‘arty’, ‘rebel’, ‘one of the crowd’. Mostly, I am just all over the shop. But you have to at least believe it’s going to be okay, don’t you? And even though Mum is gone, I still believe in life. I think, if I can get past this bit, it will get better. Your grandma always said I was the strong one, and I’m determined to prove her right.

So here I am, this mad, sad, determined girl with green hair on the day I save your dad’s life at Black Horse Quarry. On the day he saves mine.

In those days, the quarry was a glittering lagoon to us; our little piece of paradise. Now, I realize, it’s a death trap, surrounded with dog-turd-laden scrubland (funny how what you remember and what actually was are often two different things). The wayward among us would bunk off and go down there in those last weeks of term. That day, I was there with my best friend, Beth, as usual. Your father was there with Voz and other members of ‘The Farmers’. There were also some ‘Townies’ (named because they went to school in the town, rather than in Kilterdale – the back of beyond – like us ‘Farmers’); all that strange, male, tribal rivalry. Saul Butler was ringleader of the Townies. Your dad had a love – hate friendship with him (i.e., he knew he was an idiot but that it was wise to keep on the right side of him too).

So there was I, sucking my stomach in, in my new tie-dyed bikini. Beth and I were discussing losing our virginity. Beth had lost hers the week before to Gary Trott. It had been quite the spiritual experience and, apparently, she’d ‘cried uncontrollably’.

I said to myself then: Robyn, you are not ‘crying uncontrollably’ with any old person. You will wait for the right person – for Joe.

The quarry had almost mythical status in the area back then. There were cars and old shopping trolleys down there for us to get our legs tangled in and our parents had forbidden us to go anywhere near it – which obviously heightened its appeal.

It was surrounded by cliffs of varying heights that we called the ‘forty-footer’, ‘sixty-footer’ and ‘hundred-footer’. (Only those with a death wish attempted that.) It was a scorching day, this 18 May 1997. My skin was sizzling away in Factor zilch coconut oil. Beth was jabbering about Gary Trott. I was looking at your father, admiring his muscular legs in his Speedo swimming trunks. All the boys were running to and from the edge of the hundred-footer now; your dad was pretty wild back then – all this energy and none of it channelled, trying to be the big man in front of the Townies. There were several big splashes as the Farmer lot jumped in. Then there was just Saul Butler and your dad, standing on the edge, sizing each other up.

‘Come on!’ Voz was shouting from the water. ‘Sawyer, jump!’

Butler looked at Joe, then took a few steps back as if to run in – which is why I think Joe jumped the way he did, suddenly and awkwardly and not far enough out. But Butler didn’t jump, just Joe.

Beth was still talking. Your father hit the water. There was a lot of screeching, but the sun was blinding my vision. I got onto my knees to get a proper look. Then I realized that it wasn’t your dad who was screeching, because he was still under water.

There was a huge commotion and I felt this monumental surge of determination. I’d seen someone die (Mum) before my very eyes, and I wasn’t seeing it again. I ran round to that side of the quarry; your dad was surfacing on and off now, gasping for breath. Voz was trying to keep him afloat but he was struggling, shouting out. ‘He’s got his foot stuck!’ I didn’t even think this would be the first and last time I would jump off the hundred-footer, I just did it. It seemed to take forever to hit the water. I remember feeling overcome with gratitude that it was at least the water, rather than a crane or a trolley. I swam with all my might to Joe. All those years swimming for Kilterdale paid off, because I was a demon out there! Your dad was trying to keep his head up. There was wild terror in his eyes – it reminded me of a panicked horse. I dived down below. I could see his foot flailing in the murky water. He had it wrapped round some tubing – it looked like the inner of a tyre, but I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t take me long to set his foot free, then I pushed him up, me following, until we got to the sun.

It was ages till he could breathe properly again, once Voz and I had pulled him onto the rocks. He must have belly-flopped because he’d really winded himself. When I looked up, Butler was still standing at the top of the cliff, white as a sheet.

Everyone was hugging me, calling me a hero, but all I could think was: Great, the first time I get to have skin-to-skin contact with Joe Sawyer, I look like this. Do you know the first thing your father said to me, after, ‘I think you just saved my life’?

It was, ‘Did you know your hair was green?’

So, that was how I met your father. That was the start of the summer that changed everything.

As soon as I’d heard that whooshing sound that told me my message telling Joe I was coming to the funeral had gone, I’d wanted to reach inside the computer and take it back again. Now there was the four-hour journey up to Kilterdale to worry about. So much time to sit and mull.

Thankfully, the train was so packed that I spent most of the journey sitting on my bag by the Ladies’, too busy moving every time someone needed the loo to think about where I was going. I eventually got a seat at Crewe; halfway, I always think, between London and Kilterdale. The tall sash-windowed houses of London are far behind, we’ve passed the Midlands plains, and now the wet mist of the North has descended; there’s the red-brick steeples, the people with their nasal, stretchy vowels. Soon, there will be the hard towns with their hard names – Wigan Warrington – before the factories thin out into fields and sheep, and then that crescent of water, surrounded by cliffs and mossy caves. The grey-stone houses stretching back, higgledy-piggledy. The whole thing looking as if it’s about to crumble into the North Sea at any moment. Kilterdale: my home town. It’s the place I used to love like nowhere else, and now it was the place, save for the odd guilt-provoked trip, I avoided at all costs; where life for me began, and life, as I knew it, had ended, too.

I closed my eyes. At least there was one benefit of going back: I’d get to ask Dad about Mum’s ashes. Since the day we’d got them back from the crematorium, delivered to our door and so much heavier than I’d ever imagined, we’d kept them on the mantelpiece in a blue urn. Denise (evil stepmother, although not so much evil, perhaps, as hugely insecure) had gradually colonized the area: replaced the photos of us with ones of her own daughter, but the ashes had never moved. Last time I’d been home, however, they hadn’t been there. I’d asked Dad about it then and several times since but he’d always shirked an answer. This time, I decided, I couldn’t let it go.

An old man got on at Lancaster and sat next to me. He was eating his homemade sandwiches out of tin foil. I secretly watched him as he munched away, then as he brought something rustling out of the plastic bag beside him. It was a DVD. When I craned my neck, I saw it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

‘I love horror films,’ he said, when he caught me looking – a really naughty glint in his eyes he had, too.

‘Me too,’ I told him. ‘And Texas is definitely in my top five, although I’d argue that Halloween is your ultimate classic horror. Have you seen that?’

Stan and I chatted the rest of the way home. He told me he was eighty-three and used to be a cinema usher. He’d lost his wife four months ago and slasher-horror got him through the long, lonely nights (Stan seemed completely unaware of the irony of this). He also told me he’d been a bit depressed since she’d died and was just coming back from a hospital appointment about the blackouts he’d been having.

‘I think it’s when I’ve had enough,’ he said, ‘when I miss her too much. Part of my brain just shuts down.’

Stan had a squiffy eye, so you weren’t quite sure which way he was looking, but as I looked at his good one, I said, ‘I think you put that beautifully.’

Stan was also a blessing: since I was enjoying our conversation so much, I didn’t even notice we were pulling into Kilterdale.

There was the familiar tug of guilt when I saw my dad at the end of the platform. I know he wonders why I don’t come home more. Last Christmas was special, however. Denise’s sister invited her to spend it with her in France, and so just Dad and Niamh came down to London. Niamh and I hatched this plan to go swimming in the Serpentine on Christmas morning, just as we used to go in the sea at home on Christmas Day when Mum was alive, all and sundry looking on: There they go, the nutty Kings! Amazingly, Dad said, yes – must have been still drunk from the night before – and I saw a little of my old dad that day, the hairy hulk emerging from the water, his teeth yellow against the icy blue hue of everything else, and yet the best sight ever: Bruce King and his big, wonky, yellow teeth. My dad laughing.

He wasn’t laughing now, however, standing at the other end of the platform. He looked sheepish. He often looked sheepish these days, as if he was perpetually in the doghouse, which he probably was, for leaving Denise home alone for half an hour. I’d asked him specifically to come on his own, though. There were things I wanted to talk to him about that I didn’t want to discuss once we’d set foot in Deniseville (a twisted world on a par with some of my patients’ psychotic delusions) and we were going to Mildred’s Café, like old times, for some ‘Dad and Daughter’ time.

As I walked towards him, I could see that his thick, strawberry-blond hair was combed neatly in a way he never had it when Mum was alive; when he would regularly pick us up from Brownies wearing leathers and smelling of beer. Now he was wearing red chinos, pulled slightly too high, and a linen blazer. He looked like Boris Johnson.

‘All right, Dad,’ I said. Despite the fact I spent a lot of my time disappointed with him, I couldn’t stop the rush of love I felt when I saw my dad: the pure, blood kind, not based on any kind of spiritual connection.

‘Hiya, Bobby,’ he said, and we hugged briefly as he brushed his whiskery jowl next to my cheek. ‘Journey all right?’

‘Yeah, grand.’

We walked to the car in the evening sunshine. Dad doesn’t do standing on the platform and chatting. Mum would have told you half her news before you even got to the car. ‘I see you’ve brought the weather with you, like your sister,’ he said.

‘Oh, is Niamh here?’ I said, helping Dad lift my case into the boot. This would have been a big improvement to matters. Niamh has grown up with Denise. She understands her; the atmosphere improves.

‘No, but she was, she was here with Mary last night, but they’ve gone off on one of their expeditions for the weekend. You know how those two are attached at the bloody hip,’ Dad said, slamming the boot shut. He turned to me and studied my face for a second, as if about to say something profound, then changing his mind.

‘She’ll never find herself a boyfriend, the rate she’s carrying on.’

I pictured my sister and Mary, cuddling up under the stars in their clandestine tent, and I felt like crying. I wished she’d just tell Dad. It must be a huge burden for her to carry around.

Dad patted the pockets of that beige jacket for his car keys. I stepped back to give him the once-over.

‘We might have to have a word about this little ensemble, Dad,’ I said.

He raised his bushy blond eyebrows. ‘You’re a cheeky bugger, now get in that car,’ he said. When I looked in the rear-view mirror, I saw he was smiling.

The car was spotless.

‘Just had a valet, Dad?’

‘Every Monday. Without fail,’ he said, as we turned out of the station. ‘You know how Denise likes things spick and span.’

Oh, I knew.

Dad used to drive a pick-up truck. He used to bomb around the lanes like a nutter, one tanned arm hanging out of the window, thick gold chain around his neck, smoking a café crème, us three rattling around in the back – with no seat belts – amongst the timber and the old car parts, and the paraphernalia of whatever project Dad had up his sleeve at the time. I used to hate it when people asked when I was younger: What does your dad do? Because, genuinely, I didn’t know. I longed for him to have a normal job like my friends’ dads – on the railway, or with the Gas Board, but my dad had various jobs which changed all the time, so I could never keep track. He rented boats out to fishermen in Morecambe Bay, he mended people’s cars in our back garden, he did up houses (just not our own). He had a stint as an ice-cream van driver one summer, but used to swear all the time at kids who annoyed him. ‘Oh, piss off, Johnny, you little pillock.’ Mum used to tell him off, whilst finding it hilarious. I didn’t laugh at it then, but I do now. My dad’s funny. Just not always funny ha-ha.

It’s only a five-minute drive from the station to Mildred’s Café, near the shore, but you have to go the whole length of Kilterdale, and it’s like passing through a museum of my life; where at every turn there’s a relic from my past. We pass the swimming baths, where just the whiff of chlorine means I’m ten again, flat-chested and streamlined as a dolphin – through the muffle of the water, I can hear the cheers of my parents, (in particular, my mother and her foghorn voice, which Niamh inherited): ‘C’mon, Bobby!’ as I pound towards the finish line, another medal for Kilterdale Carps.

There’s the tiny cinema where, when Niamh was a baby, Mum would drop Leah and I off for the Saturday matinee, where they’d play old films. I loved those little snippets of freedom, the times alone with my big sister. The building is dilapidated today, but I can still smell the popcorn, the fusty velvet of the seats; I can still feel the ache in my throat as I tried not to cry at E.T. in front of Leah, and the feel of my hand in her bigger one on the walk through the fields back home. I miss Leah, I think. I miss us being children together.

We pass The Fry Up, Kilterdale’s chippy, where every Friday we’d go, all five of us, Mum letting us have cans of Dr Pepper and her always having a battered sausage: ‘It’s not as if I eat like this every day of the week, is it, girls?’ she’d say, grease dripping from her chin. In the summer, we’d sit on the little bench outside, Niamh being fed chips in her pushchair – the same bench on which, years later, I’d sit with Joe eating chips, and we’d talk about our lives that were yet to unfurl, no idea of what was to become of us, what lay ahead. I savour those summers, these memories. In my mind’s eye, they’re like sunbursts, sparkling on the sea. But then, like a current dragging me under, I always come back to the summer of ’97. Those memories feel like the cool, dark waters that run beneath the sunburst-covered sea, beneath everything I do.

We had to go down Friars Lanes. Due to the early warm weather, the hedgerows were high and bursting with green shoots; the fields, brown and cloggy with mud in the winter, were speckled with green. If you looked up, the trees were smudged with birds’ nests. They looked like masses of black thread.

I could feel Dad looking at me. ‘So,’ he said, eventually. ‘Why are you going to this funeral?’

He rarely spoke so directly and I started, found myself feeling defensive.

‘I don’t know, ’cause it’s his mum and it would be nice to support him. Because Marion was so good to me when my mum died?’

Dad nodded slowly and looked at me with this sad smile.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Nothing, it’s just …’ He paused for what seemed ages. ‘I thought you’d left all that behind, Robyn …’

‘I have.’

‘So …’

I tried to look at the fields, the copses beyond, not at the lanes unfolding in front of us.

‘So, what?’

‘So, I’m worried about you, that’s all. I’m just being concerned Dad.’

I was touched he was being concerned Dad.

‘It’s just the service and a few sandwiches back at the vicarage,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it was an excuse to see you.’ I reached over and touched him on his shoulder. He flinched, just ever so slightly, but he did, I felt it.

‘Okay, well that’s all right then.’

‘Dad, I’m thirty-two,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

He patted my knee and smiled. ‘And you’re still my little girl,’ he said.

Silence descended. It was thick and sticky and I didn’t know how to move it.

Dad spoke, eventually, changing the subject: ‘Look at them fields, eh, Robyn? Absolutely marvellous. I bet you miss all this in London, don’t you?’

I wish I did. I wish coming back was like therapy for me, like going back home was therapy for other people.

‘Yeah, not many cow-pats in Archway,’ I said. I kept looking out of the window, so he couldn’t see my eyes water.

I was glad once we’d got to Mildred’s. There was something about travelling in a car with Dad these days that was intense, what with the elephant squeezed in there with us.

We sat at our usual table at the back and ordered the same thing we ordered when Mum was alive: me a cappuccino and a millionaire’s shortbread, Dad a cup of tea and a teacake. Mum used to have a banana milkshake with cream on top and a herbal tea. She thought the latter cancelled out the former. She was a bit deluded like that. It’s probably why she thought three Rothmans a day couldn’t hurt anyone, and maybe they didn’t, who knows? Maybe the Rothmans had nothing to do with it.

Dad pulled up his red trousers, sat down and searched my face.

‘Bloody Nora, you look more like your mother every time I see you. Same beautiful smile.’ His eyes still welled up when he mentioned her.

‘Thank God, eh, Dad? I lucked out, gene-wise.’

‘Yep, you got your mother’s looks. Niamh is more of a King, I think, and Leah, well …’

The teacake had arrived.

‘Have you spoken to her, Dad?’

Dad made sure every millimetre of that teacake had butter on.

‘No, I haven’t managed to yet.’

‘But you know how upset Mum would be if she knew you two hardly spoke.’

‘She’s never in, I’ve tried lots of times.’ I was kind of disappointed he felt he could just lie like that.

‘Dad, Leah hardly ever goes out in the evenings any more, you know what she’s like about leaving the kids.’ He looked up. ‘Okay, you don’t, but I’m telling you, she’s paranoid, especially about Jack and his asthma. She had to take him to A&E the other night.’

Dad had picked up the teacake but put it down again. His whole face sort of slid.

‘Did she?’

‘Yes.’

A blackbird appeared at the window. It sounds ridiculous, but I sometimes liked to imagine it was Mum when things like that happened, checking in on us. I felt like she was urging me to get to the point.

‘Dad, also, about the ashes,’ I said. ‘Please can I have them? I’ve been asking for over a year now.’

‘Well, it’d help if we saw more of you. There’s only Niamh that comes to see us.’

Thank God for Niamh, I thought. I hated what had happened, but most of all I hated what it had done to my relationship with my father, with my home town. As a family, we used to be so close.

‘Anyway, I’ve got some news,’ he said, changing the subject. Dad never had news. ‘Denise and I – well, I … am selling the house. We’re going to move to somewhere smaller. It’s too much for Denise to clean.’

That blackbird flew off then, presumably to have a good snigger.

Weirdly, I didn’t feel emotional about them moving out of the house we all grew up in; it hasn’t been ‘our’ house since Denise moved in, four months after Mum died, anyway, and magnolia-d the living daylights out of it.

‘That’s great news, Dad,’ I said. ‘So when might this be?’

‘We’ve put an offer in on a place in Saltmarsh, so all being well … a couple of months?’

I smiled. ‘I’m pleased for you, Dad,’ I said, and I was. Staying in that house with all the memories of Mum had affected him more than he let on, and whatever I felt about Denise, I couldn’t bear Dad to feel sad. ‘It’ll be good, a new start.’ He looked pleased I’d taken the news so well.

‘So, Mum’s ashes then,’ I continued – he wasn’t changing the subject that easily. ‘All the more reason for me to have them. Mum would hate to be in any house but that one. She loved that house.’

I tried to imagine Mum being happy in a dormer bungalow in Saltmarsh when she was alive, and struggled.

‘I know, I know.’

‘Even if she never got her new kitchen.’

Dad laughed, then sniffed, his eyes misting over again.

‘Also, when are you going to call Leah?’ I said, patting his hand. ‘Because surely this is the perfect opportunity for you two to stop being so ridiculous? The funeral was sixteen years ago.’

He sighed. You conned me into thinking this was a nice cup of tea with my daughter and you planned this all along.

‘I will, okay? Just don’t bloody hassle me, Robyn,’ he said. ‘You know how I hate to be hassled.’

‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry.’

I feared I’d overstepped the mark; rocked what was turning into the first proper, one-to-one chat with my dad for over a year, and was eager to rein things back, but then Dad looked up and his whole face lit up. ‘Oh, here she is,’ he said, smiling at someone behind me. The scent of Elnett reached me before I even turned around, to see Denise walking towards us – her jet-black hair sprayed stiff, the lashings of silver eye shadow right up to her brows, and that look in her eyes already: This IS a competition and I shall win.

I looked back to Dad. I wanted him to see my face, how annoyed I was that he’d clearly invited her, but he’d already got up and was getting his wallet out. ‘What do you want, love? I’ll get it.’

Chapter Five

I timed my arrival at the church to avoid the bit where everyone mingles outside before they go in. I’ve never liked that part. I can still remember to this day, outside this same church, the humiliation of having to face my six-foot, surf-dude cousin, Nathan, whilst I was a blotchy, snotty wreck at my own mother’s funeral. All the embarrassing hugs from people I didn’t know. I was glad Joe was spared that part too, because he was carrying the coffin. I walked up the path of St Bart’s, just as they were taking it out of the hearse. It was pale oak against the vivid blue sky, with a waterfall of peach roses on top (I was right about those).

There was the crunch of shoes on gravel. Someone cried ‘one, two, three’ as it was lifted onto the shoulders of six men. I recognized Joe straight away, of course; at the back, one trouser leg stuck in his sock, a look of such gritty determination on his face, as if he were about to charge through the stained-glass window of the church and deliver her to the gates of heaven himself. I recognized every single one of the five other pallbearers too: Joe’s uncle Fred at the front. Peg-leg Uncle Fred, Joe used to call him, Joe being one of those people who could get away with insulting people to their face. On the other side of him was Mr Potts, still with his extraordinary eyebrows. Mr Potts would often be sitting at the vicarage kitchen table when you went round, talking really animatedly as his caterpillar eyebrows did Mexican waves across his forehead. Joe and I used to debate how differently Potty’s life could have turned out, if only he’d trimmed those eyebrows. So simple! He could have had a wife by now. Behind him was Ethan, Joe’s youngest brother, and then at the back, his other brothers, Rory and Simon, and then Joe. Joe’s dad was at the front of it, all in his black funeral regalia. So he’d made it. But then, as if the Reverend Clifford Sawyer was going to let any other rev guide his beloved Marion on her final journey to the gates of Paradise.

I gave the coffin a wide berth and joined everyone else in the churchyard. Half of Kilterdale was there. Side on, you could see how all four Sawyer brothers had the same profile: long face, these big, deep-set doe eyes and a slightly beaky nose; all put together it was somehow very handsome. Ethan has Down’s syndrome, so his features are obviously a little different, but they all have the same hair: light brown, with a hint of red, and so fine and straight you never have to brush it.

People’s conversations tapered to a murmur and then that awful, sombre silence as they parted to make way for Marion’s last journey.

The plan was, I’d slip in at the back, say a quick ‘Hi’ to Joe at the end of the service, then slip out again, unnoticed. I found a place on the back pew and kept a low profile, leafing through the Order of Service. The first, magical, angelic notes of ‘In Paradisum’ from Fauré’s Requiem struck up just as they brought her in. Then, it was unbelievable: the whole place was illuminated by a freak beam of sunlight coming smack-bang from between Jesus’s thighs, on the far right window. It really was like heaven in there – and I wished, not for the first time, that I was a believer. But then perhaps when you work with people who try to recruit disciples in Morrison’s, you start to equate religion with madness.

A cough echoed around the cool caverns of the church. Some kid goes, ‘Daddy, you’re funny,’ just as Marion was lowered onto the trestle. Joe’s dad stood at the feet end, palms pressed together. ‘Well,’ he said, gesturing to the beam of sunlight, ‘she’s here, ladies and gentlemen.’ And everyone laughed and shed a tear at the same time, including me.

The service was lovely. I know people always say that, but I feel I can comment with sincerity, since I’ve been to a few not-so-lovely ones in my time, including my own mother’s. Joe’s dad told funny stories: how Marion was working behind her parents’ shrimp bar on Morecambe front when they met, but that even the ever-present whiff of cockles couldn’t keep him away, such was her luminescent beauty.

Occasionally, during the hymns, I looked over at Joe’s pew. Rory and Simon were grim but dry-eyed, Ethan looked confused as to where we were on the Order of Service, but I decided Ethan was probably fine, in Ethan’s own world. Joe was on the end, crying his eyes out, wiping the snot and the tears on the back of his hand because Joe wouldn’t think to bring such a banal item as a packet of tissues. And although I knew the pain he was feeling, I also thought: Good for you, Joe. Him being such an open book was always the thing I loved about him. In fact, when I look back to that time, I can probably remember Joe crying more than me.

It was such a warm day that they’d left the door open, and so if I looked to the left, down the hill on top of which the church teetered, and past the crumbly tombstones, I could see the sea, springing up the glossy, black rocks; the same sea Joe and I had played in as loved-up teenagers, and it comforted me for some reason. Here we were, in this church, half on land, half looking like it might slip away into the sea at any time. This was all so momentary; we were all just passing through, liable to drop off the end of the world at any given time.

Of course, I didn’t philosophize like this at my mum’s funeral. I was far too busy concentrating on the church door and whether my bloody sister was going to walk through it in time. If I’d known that when she did, the real trouble was going to start, I might have concentrated more on thinking about Mum. I guess I’m still a bit angry about that.

A funeral congregation always says so much about the person in the box, I’ve always thought, and there was every walk of life in that church: old and young; your floral-society twin-sets; as well as single mums and ASBOs and hoodies from the work she used to do with the Probation Service.

And me … I wished I’d had a chance to thank Marion. For feeding me, and often Niamh, in that year Dad was mainly AWOL; for being my mum, basically, when I didn’t have mine. And when I thought about it like that, I felt really glad I’d come.

Ethan stood up and read a ‘poem’ he’d written, which was all of two lines and said: ‘Mum, I miss you and I love you. I hope you can hear me, from Ethan.’ That was it. Niagara Falls. Just as I was recovering, Joe stepped up to the lectern. He hugged Ethan, then unfolded a piece of A4 paper, his hands trembling. It was all I could do not to go up there and give him a hug.

‘Words can’t really express how much I’m going to miss my mum, or how much I loved her. She was so many things to so many people, but to me, to us, she was just our mum.’

Our eyes met briefly and I smiled at him, encouragingly.

‘I wrote long lists of what she meant to me. I even tried writing a poem, then remembered why I’d put all those terrible love poems in the bin when I was a teenager.’ There was the odd murmur of amusement from the congregation, including me. I still had some of those terrible poems sitting in a box, along with the doodles and sometimes multiple-choice quizzes (he was always very creative with his love letters). ‘And then I found this,’ continued Joe. ‘I think if you replace “love” with “Mum”, it describes her perfectly.’

He read 1 Corinthians 13:4–8.

‘“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”’

He was doing so well until the last line, when he broke down. ‘“Love never ends …”’

And I cried again then, too: for Joe, Marion, my own mum, absent parties, it didn’t matter. Crying was just a nice release.

I waited for the congregation, plus any undesirables from schooldays who might be lurking, to leave. Then I went to find Joe. He was standing near the gate, talking to an old woman in a floppy velvet hat.

‘Then it was 1980 and I think your mum only had Rory … no, wait … maybe she had Simon, too.’

Joe spotted me and stretched his hand over the lady’s shoulder so that our fingers touched. ‘Sorry, excuse me, Betty. Here she is!’ I couldn’t help but notice how his face lit up.’

‘Hi, look, I’m not stopping,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to say, beautiful service for a beautiful lady – and your reading, Joe, it made me cry.’

‘Oh, I think Ethan stole the show.’

‘They were both gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Your mum would have been really proud.’

The old lady started off on one again … ‘No, I’ve just remembered, Simon was about five months old …’ and I took the opportunity to study Joe’s face. I’d last seen him three years ago, in the pub on one of the rare Christmases I’d spent in Kilterdale, and been surprised to feel a stab of jealously at the fact he was with Kate, his girlfriend at the time. That he’d even moved in with her. He’d aged since then (but then, grief does that to you). The dark circles he was always prone to around his eyes were more pronounced, and when he smiled, which was often, there were quite deep lines running from his eyes to his hairline, which when I studied him closer, was peppered with a few grey hairs. But older suited him; as though he’d always been older, his face just waiting to catch up. Every time our eyes met, I saw that behind his eyes was the same person I’d known.

The woman took a breath. I really had to go.

‘Joe, I’ll call you, okay?’ I said, squeezing his hand. ‘I don’t want to interrupt,’ but he squeezed mine tighter.

‘But you’re not interrupting.’ His eyes were pleading with me. ‘Come on, don’t go yet. Please? This is Betty.’

Betty looked pretty cheesed off I’d waded in and ruined her flow.

‘Betty used to be a lollipop lady, and knew us all from the very first week Mum and Dad moved to Kilterdale. She used to cross us over to primary school, didn’t you, Bet? Hand me bootleg sweeties from her pocket.’

‘He was a bloody nuisance,’ she said, and Joe and I laughed. ‘A few penny sweets and he was high as a kite.’

Joe had been diagnosed as hyperactive when he was little, and was never allowed sweets or stuff like Kia-Ora. By the time I met him, at sixteen, he was still bouncing off the walls most of the time, but I’d always loved that about him – his energy.

I said, ‘He didn’t improve with age.’

‘How do you know?’ said Joe. ‘You haven’t spent any time with me for sixteen years.’ He was looking at me, quite intently. I couldn’t help think that comment was loaded. ‘Anyway, this is Robyn.’ He said, eventually.

‘Robyn, eh?’ said Betty. ‘That’s a funny name for such a bonny girl. Is she the lucky lady?’

‘No, no …’ Joe said. ‘There is no lucky lady at the moment, Bet.’

So he was no longer with Kate?

‘Robyn’s a friend. A very old, good friend.’ His gaze was intense enough for it to make me look away.

‘She’s a l’il corker, too. Look at all that lovely thick hair,’ Betty said.

‘Now you’re making me blush, Betty,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I still blush,’ said Bet, ‘and I’m eighty-six!’

Betty eventually gave Joe her condolences and shuffled off. I really did have to be getting back to Dad and Denise’s, even though an evening with them – Dad watching Gardener’s World, Denise bringing him endless, elaborate snacks, didn’t exactly fill me with glee. I opened my mouth to say as much when, from out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thickset bald bloke making his way over. He had one child by the hand and was pushing a twin buggy – with twins in it – with the other. Stopping, he slapped an arm around Joe. ‘Hey, Sawyer!’ It was only when he was right up close that I realized it was Voz. ‘You did really well, mate. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up there and do that.’

‘Cheers, Voz,’ said Joe, giving Voz a manly back-slapping hug in return. ‘That means a lot.’

‘All right, Vozzy?’ I said. I was adopting my old matey, blasé school tones, when really I was shocked. I hadn’t seen Voz for years – since that day Joe nearly drowned at the Black Horse Quarry. Who was this beefcake before me? What had happened to runty Voz?

‘All right, Kingy. How are you?’ For some reason, I was touched that he’d used my nickname. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You have!’ I said. Joe sniggered. ‘I mean … you look like you’ve been busy.’

He giggled. When Voz used to giggle, he used to look like a cute rat; now he looked like a cute fat rat, all his pointy, ratty features concentrated in the middle of a big round face.

‘Yep, this is Paige.’ The chubby blonde child holding his hand stared back gormlessly at us. ‘Paige is eight.’ (Eight? What had I produced in the last eight years?) ‘And these little monsters are Tate and Logan.’

Tate and Logan? Bloody hell.

‘That’s my missus, Lindsay, over there.’ He pointed to a pretty, dark-haired girl chatting to Joe’s brother. ‘We’ve got another on the way in January.’

‘Wow, Anthony, are you going for world domination?’ asked Joe. ‘An assembly line of Vozzies keeping the whole of the northwest in wallpaper?’ (Voz’s dad owned the Wojkovich Wallcoverings empire.)

‘You’ve got to get cracking while you can.’ Voz laughed. ‘Any of you got kids yet?’

‘No, no …’ said Joe.

‘Not that you know of, eh, Sawyer?’

‘And what about you, Kingy?’ said Voz, when nobody said anything. ‘I hear you work up on the funny farm?’

‘Yep. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ I smiled.

‘So are you like a shrink? A psychiatrist?’ Voz asked.

‘Well, no, I can’t prescribe the drugs, but I can administer them.’

‘What, someone leaves you in charge with a needle?’ Voz seemed genuinely alarmed by this.

‘Yes, and in people’s own homes. I visit people at home who have mental-health problems.’

‘Can you do something about my missus? She’s got a few mental-health problems.’

‘I tell you what – because it’s you, Voz – I’ll do a two-for-one.’

Voz turned round at the sound of two girls talking loudly. ‘That’s Saul Butler’s wife, isn’t it?’ he said, gesturing to the one with red, bob-length hair. ‘Is Butler not here, Joe?’

I looked quickly to Joe.

‘No, I invited him – his kids all went to one of the playgroups Mum ran.’

So Saul Butler had kids?

‘But he never got back to me, so – you know – his loss.’

Voz grinned at me and for a second he was just little ratty, giggly Voz again, who used to cry actual tears when he laughed. ‘I reckon Butler always fancied you, Robyn. I bet he was well jealous of you, Joe.’

Joe smiled at me. ‘Well, yes, I was a very lucky boy.’

‘I always remember that time up at Black Horse Quarry, when you jumped in. D’you remember?’ Voz said, adding, ‘When you nearly died?’

‘How could I forget?’ said Joe.

‘That was a competition for Butler, that was.’ Voz said, pointing decisively. ‘I’ll never forget his face, standing at the top of that hundred-footer. Absolutely gutted that you had the balls to jump and he didn’t.’

‘Yeah, well, turned out he was the sensible one, didn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘I might well have died if Robbie hadn’t saved me that day.’

‘Och,’ I said, modestly. ‘No …’

One of the twins in the buggy started to cry then, thank God. ‘Right, well, I’d better get these rug rats home,’ said Voz. ‘You take care.’

The moment Voz trundled off with his army of children, Joe’s face collapsed. I remember that effort too.

‘Tired?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ He took my hand. ‘Look, don’t go, Robbie. Come back for the wake.’

Robbie. Nobody but Joe ever called me Robbie.

‘I can’t, Joe. I have to get back to London.’

‘So do I,’ he said.

‘You’re in London now?’

‘Well, Manchester, but you see,’ he said, pointing, ‘that stopped you. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know I lived in Manchester. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’

‘Joe,’ I sighed. Didn’t he get that I wasn’t just some unfeeling cow but that I was trying to make a polite exit here without having to go into one?

‘Come on, I haven’t seen you for three years. I don’t want to go back on my own and face all those people.’

Then it clicked.

It was a funeral, his mother’s funeral. What was I doing?

Chapter Six

‘Only plus of being a vicar’s son,’ Joe used to say, ‘is that you get a big house’; and it was big compared to the houses most kids who went to our school lived in, but not, I noticed, anywhere near as big as I remembered it from the last time I was in it, years ago. Still, I’d always loved Joe’s house, maybe because it was what ours might have been if Mum and Dad had spent less on socializing and throwing parties, and more on doing the house up (but then, ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Mum used to say. Obviously, she didn’t expect to go quite so soon).

Our house was big too: ‘The big pink house in Kilterdale.’ But it was a wreck. Mum and Dad had bought it when I was six, for a pittance, with some big plans (Dad in particular was good at those) to do it up and turn it into a ‘palace fit for a King!’ It was always the party house – there was nothing to spoil, after all, since nothing had been done – and every summer, we’d hold the King Family Extravaganza, where Mum and Dad would dress up as some famous couple – Sonny and Cher, Marge and Homer, Torvill and Dean – and Dad would serve hot dogs and beer from his old ice-cream van. The big renovation plans began, finally, when I was eleven, but then Dad’s work dried up and they’d always spent so much on socializing, on living for the now instead of thinking about the future (good job, as it turns out) that they couldn’t finish. One year, we had to move into a caravan in the driveway, because we couldn’t afford to finish off the plumbing. Leah (who was fourteen at the time and very unamused by the whole situation) would shout at the top of her voice things like: ‘If I have to shove anyone else’s shit down this septic tank, I am going to throw it at them!’ I dread to think what people on that street thought of us.

It was a shock to the system then, dragged up amidst such chaos (and a lot of fun), to meet Joe, whose house was a vision of sombre, deep contemplation – at least, that was what I imagined. The first time I went there, his dad was wearing his dog collar. We all had tea and biscuits in the living room, making polite smalltalk to the background sound of the grandfather clock ticking away. I bit into a ginger nut and Joe looked at me like I’d just flashed my bra:

‘Oh, no’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You didn’t say Grace, and we always says Grace before we eat anything.’

I felt sick. They let me suffer for a good ten seconds before they all started killing themselves laughing. So that was the kind of ‘good’ church family they were. That was the kind of home the Sawyers had.

The vicarage was an Edwardian villa-type affair, with huge front windows and a big conservatory off the back. The front doors were open when I got there after the funeral, so you could see right through the sun-flooded hall of the house to the lawn, where people were milling in the sun, drinking cups of tea. The scene was very tame – mind you, I’m not sure what I expected: a free bar, like at Mum’s (recipe for disaster in retrospect)? Most people were over fifty and very sedate. I was a bit disappointed the probation lot hadn’t turned up; they’d have livened things up a bit.

I did a quick scan for alcohol and could see none, which panicked me. Then I spotted Mrs Murphy, our old deputy head, and panicked even more – this was exactly why I’d worried about coming: blasts-from-the-past absolutely everywhere. I looked around for Joe, but couldn’t see him, and so I took myself off to the buffet table, before finding a quiet corner, where I was immediately joined by a woman who’d just got back from a Christian Aid mission in Somalia. I’d just put an entire mini pork pie into my mouth when she started telling me about all the horrors there, so all I could do was nod. She left soon after and so I went for a wander, to find Joe, and hopefully some alcohol. I ventured into the cool, dark hall, where one woman – angular and the colour of digestive biscuits – was talking at the top of her voice to an audience, who looked as if they’d not so much gathered, as been passing through and seized against their will.

‘I’ll never forget when Marion came to my Zumba class,’ she was saying. ‘It was last summer. Or was it the summer before? Or was it the one before then?’

Why was it always the one who knew the deceased the least, who talked the loudest at funerals?

I went on to the kitchen, where people were poring over clip-frame pictures of Marion, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at. Old Potty was there with his Mexican-wave eyebrows. I was contemplating slipping out, texting Joe later, then I saw Mrs Murphy looking dangerously like she was making a beeline for me, and decided on a tactical toilet break. I sloped upstairs.

The house had hardly changed in eighteen years. It had the same smell: furniture, polish and books. The wide, dark staircase seemed modest enough now, whereas it used to seem so grand to me, so full of mystique, probably because it led to Joe’s bedroom, which was the only place we could be alone, doing whatever we did in there – learning Zeppelin lyrics off by heart, discussing Potty’s eyebrows … Joe’s mum occasionally walking past with the Hoover.

‘Joseph, leave your door open, please, otherwise Robyn will have to go home!’

Behind that door, we’d be sitting, holding our breath, often in various stages of undress. It seemed like an age ago, another life ago. Like it didn’t even happen.

There was the same mahogany side table at the top of the stairs, with the photos on top. I paused to look at the one of all four boys, an eight-year-old Joe on the end, pulling a stupid face, desperate to dash off as soon as the picture was taken.

I gave myself a quick once-over in the long mirror just before you get to Joe’s room.

I was wearing a black Monsoon shift dress. Last time I looked in this mirror, the girl staring back at me was terrified, with peroxide hair: white face, white hair. I just remember that.

The door to Joe’s bedroom was half open, just a slice of the view of the rolling sheep-dotted fields, then the flat grey line of the sea. I couldn’t resist it. I went inside. It smelt different, of a guest room, but it was still completely Joe’s room. There was still the poster of Led Zeppelin’s album Physical Graffiti (Joe and I were alone and, it has to be said, slightly ridiculed in our appreciation of Led Zeppelin, which as teenagers was enough to make us believe we were destined for one another) and, above his bed, Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue pouted back at me. Clearly, Joe’s older brothers had introduced him to Betty Blue and the wondrous sexiness that was Béatrice Dalle, since we were only little when the film came out, but I’d often looked at her in that poster; the tough, gap-toothed poutiness and the cleavage, and I’d wanted to be Béatrice Dalle at sixteen. I wanted to be French and insouciant and wild and sexy. I was kind of annoyed with this gawky, traumatised teenager, who just desperately missed her mum. I wandered around for a bit, examining Joe’s odd collection of boy trinkets: rocks and fossils, and then – I couldn’t believe he’d kept it this long! – the ‘ironic’ pen in the shape of a lady; when you tipped her up, her knickers came off. I’d brought it back from Palma Menorca for a laugh, in 1997. That year – the summer we got together – Joe went to Amsterdam and bought me a wooden clog specially engraved with my name. The fact he’d queued up to get that done (because ‘Robyn’ was never on any merchandise in the land) thrilled me. ‘He must really like me,’ I’d thought, ‘If he’s willing to queue in front of his mum and dad, to get a wooden clog signed.’

‘He’s got tenacity, that one,’ I remember Dad saying. A few months later, Joe wasn’t allowed to set foot in our house. But I still have that clog, and sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I just like to turn it over in my hand; feel its wooden, smooth simplicity.

I stood in front of his bed – it was the same metal, tubular bed in 1980s grey that he’d had back then – and remembered how I’d had some of my most uncomfortable nights in it. It was like sleeping on a climbing frame, and yet, in the times we’d snatched together, it was also where I was happiest; where, for a while, I could forget about Mum, curling around Joe’s warm, strong body. We’d lie there in the dark, thrilled just to be naked together.

Joe was obviously sleeping in this room because there was a wash bag on the bed. I stood looking at it, feeling a wave of sadness. Imagine coming home, to sleep in your childhood bed, knowing your mother is to be buried the next day. Just then, the door flew open, making me jump. It was Joe. He slammed it shut, his back towards me, swearing, leaning his forehead against it for a moment, before fiddling in his inside jacket pocket and producing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He unscrewed the top, muttered something about Sorry Mum and have to do this, and then tipped his head back and took a swig. Then he saw me.

‘Bloody hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ he said.

Then, when he’d realized what he’d said, ‘That’s going to keep on happening, isn’t it?’

I smiled. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you want some?’ he said, holding the bottle out. ‘Can I just say, it was a huge oversight by me not to have organised booze at this wake.’

‘Yup,’ I said, taking a gulp. ‘Still, I don’t need booze to relax.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘’Coz I do.’

I handed him the bottle back. ‘Jack Daniel’s? Going for the hard liquor, then?’

‘I can’t take any risks,’ he said. ‘It needs to reach my bloodstream instantly. I just can’t talk to people any longer.’

There was a long silence, during which we just sort of looked at each other.

‘So, er … the bathroom’s two doors down,’ he said, thumbing in that general direction when I just stood there, still clutching Miss Knickerless. ‘Same place it’s always been.’

I felt my cheeks grow hot.

‘God, sorry. I couldn’t resist, I just had this mad desire to—’

‘Snoop around my bedroom?’

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’

‘I’m joking, Robyn.’ His eyebrows gave a little flicker of amusement. ‘It’s actually really sweet.’

He looked pale as anything, washed out. I’d forgotten about that bit, the tiredness, and he pushed the stuff to the side, collapsing on the bed.

‘I should go,’ I said. He’d come up here to be alone, lose himself, and here I was, making that impossible, but he said, ‘Don’t go. Why do you keep on wanting to go?’

He looked genuinely annoyed – Joe and his transparency.

‘I don’t know, because you want to be on your own?’

He tutted, dramatically. ‘I don’t want to be on my own. I just can’t take much more of people, of Betty. We’re only on 1978. There’s thirty-odd years to get through yet.’

I laughed, despite myself.

‘I needed someone to save me. Where were you, Robbie?’ he said, turning on his side.

‘Snooping round your bedroom?’

I sat down on the bed next to him. Up close, it was like he’d changed even less, and I had this urge to give him a hug, but wondered whether that was appropriate, him lying on a bed and all, so I said, ‘It’ll be over soon. They’ll all bugger off home and then you can go to sleep or watch a film. That’s what I did.’

‘Really, what did you watch?’

‘The Evil Dead.’

‘You are joking?’

‘I’m not, as it happens. It’s my job, you see. You start off quite PC and normal and, before you know it, you can’t operate in normal society.’

Joe thought this was really funny. ‘So, basically, you’ve become like, the world’s most un-PC mental-health nurse? Telling schizophrenics to get real?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

We were both giggling now – funeral hysteria.

‘So, anyway, let’s get back to this Evil Dead thing,’ he said. ‘Talk me through that.’

‘Well, I found that the key is distraction, not stimulation,’ I tried to explain. ‘No tear-jerkers, which rules out a lot more than you may think, for obvious reasons. No documentaries or kids films ’cause they just remind you of too much. So, yeah, slasher-horror really is your best bet. The Evil Dead is the ultimate wake-movie.’

Joe tried to be serious for a second, then smiled. ‘You always did have all the best advice,’ he said.

He turned on his back, closed his eyes and let out this huge sigh. I was looking at the shape of his lips, the Cupid’s bow, the wideness of them, the way they always looked like he was about to say something amusing, trying to remember what it felt like to kiss him. Then remembering that I shouldn’t even be here.

‘You bought me that pen,’ he said suddenly. I’d forgotten I was still holding it.

‘Funny, wasn’t I?’ I said. ‘Such a sophisticated, witty sixteen-year-old.’

‘You were,’ he said, taking it and tipping it upside down.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘I thought you were – cute, complicated …’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, weren’t we all?’

‘I’m not surprised that you work for the Mental Health Service – the sidelined in our society … You always liked the underdog.’

‘Me and you, too, then, hey?’

When I’d last seen Joe, three years ago, he’d been living with his girlfriend in Preston but seemed a bit lost, career-wise, working in a sports shop. In our brief email exchange during the last few days, he’d told me he was now teaching English to NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – kids who’d spent most of their lives skiving off school or inside, basically, and wanted to turn their lives around. He absolutely loved it, he said. The perfect job, if you took away the mounds of paperwork, which was exactly how I felt about my work.

‘I can’t say I’m surprised, either, Joe. All that energy had to go somewhere.’

‘We were a pair of little revolutionaries.’ He grinned.

‘Were we? I can’t remember. I just remember you used to say to me –’ I assumed the younger voice of Joe’s radical years – ‘it’s evolution, Robbie, not revolution.’

‘Did I? God, what a dick. I was so intense!’

‘Oh, Joe, you’re still intense.’

‘How would you know?’ He said, tapping my thigh, as if chastising me for not getting in touch. I ignored it.

‘Actually, you saying that really helped when things were grim,’ I said, seriously. ‘I sometimes say it to my clients.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, just to remind them that recovery … it takes time. Step by step. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.’

He smiled. He knew what I was getting at.

The room was growing dim, it was getting late, and I was here, having a heart-to-heart, the very thing I’d promised myself not to do. I stood up.

‘Look, I really should be going now,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go downstairs and say, “Hi” to your dad, okay?’

But Joe suddenly got up from the bed and went rooting in a drawer for something.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Trying to make you stay.’

‘Joseph Sawyer,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t supposed to come in the first place!’

He turned around. He looked hurt.

‘But why?’

Why did he not get it?

‘Because,’ I sighed, exasperated. ‘Because … oh, God, it doesn’t matter.’ I’m really glad I did come.

He had something in his hand. He put it behind him and, walking backwards, picked up the bottle of JD off the table with his free hand and handed it to me. He always did have this way of making you do things. ‘Come on, drink up,’ he said. ‘This is going to take you right back.’

That’s what I’m worried about.

But then, there was a sound like someone loading a gun, a click, the whirr of a tape being rewound and then, the bluesy, achey riffs of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ – we used to listen to this track, this album, all the time – and when I saw Joe’s face, the look in his eyes (well on his way to drunk, mainly), I understood that – even if I didn’t want to – Joe needed to. He needed to be anywhere but here.

We swayed – it’s one of those songs that make it impossible not to – but rather awkwardly, like the first self-conscious dancers on the floor at a wedding reception, and I suddenly felt old. It didn’t feel like it used to feel, and when we smiled at one another, it was because we both knew this. I took off my shoes and we danced, passing the bottle between us. It felt like undressing, like a layer of tension was being peeled back. Joe held both arms out, his eyes shimmering with tears.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Please? I need a hug.’

I wrapped both arms around his neck then; his suit jacket felt stiff and restrictive and so I took it off for him. We leaned our heads on each other’s shoulders and, as we danced, I could feel his whole body shudder. And I just held him like that, and let him cry as I stroked his hair. The song finished, I was still holding him. He looked up at me.

‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ He said. ‘I can’t stay here.’

We didn’t talk about where to go, we just went; it was like our feet remembered the old route and took us there: down the long, sloping lawn, through the front gate and out onto the path. I didn’t know what time it was, but everything was awash with a lilac hue and the tide was out, leaving sweeping, silver channels like liquid mercury. The air smelt like the inside of mussel shells. Were we drunk? I should hope so, the amount of Jack Daniel’s we’d put away. We were holding hands – it just felt like the right thing to do. We turned left at the gate and out of the cul-de-sac that wraps itself around the bottom of the vicarage. The houses get lower, the closer you get to the sea around here, so you have the big old houses like Joe’s and our old pink one, up on the hills, with a bottom tier of white bungalows petering out to the sea. And this is where we were now, walking – not entirely in a straight line – hand in hand, among the white underskirt of Kilterdale, with the lilac sky and the black shadows and the low houses with their big, glowing fly’s-eye windows; and I didn’t know whether it was because the houses were so low that the sky seemed so big, but it did; so big and empty, like everyone had deserted.

We passed Joe’s hip flask between us. We’d filled it with the remainder of the Jack Daniel’s and then sneaked into the kitchen and put some Coke in there, too, because we didn’t want complete amnesia, just a blurring of the edges, and I could tell the edges were already blurred because we were getting onto fundamentals.

‘So … relationships,’ said Joe. ‘You got some nice guy to look after you?’

‘We just ended, actually.’

‘Oh, shit. Sorry. Why?’ There was a pause, where I knew what Joe was going to say next. Such a mix of self-absorption and selflessness, I haven’t seen in anyone since. ‘Was he just not as good as me?’

‘No, he was just still married to another woman …’

‘Robyn King,’ he said, ‘a marriage-wrecker?’

‘Oh, no, he was separated. He had been for a long time. He was just eking out the longest, most painful divorce in the history of divorces, and I was his therapist. It was never going to work.’

‘There you go, you see – I said you always liked the underdog.’

‘I forgot how the only time you’re sarcastic is when you’re drunk.’

‘It is my mother’s funeral.’

‘Like that’s an excuse.’

We got to the stile that takes you over the fields to the other end of the village.

‘So, what about you?’ I asked. We were trapped in the stile, so were facing each other, our faces inches apart. ‘You were with a girl called Kate, last time I saw you. What happened? Not as good as me?’ I said grinning.

He’d been drinking from the flask again and he laughed, coughed.

Stop flirting, shut up.

‘Nice girl,’ he said, ‘but she had thick ankles and I just couldn’t get over it.

‘See, I told you she wasn’t as good as me,’ I said, flashing my dainty ankles (my body improves as it peters to the ends) and resolving, really, to stop the flirting. I was getting carried away.

We stayed sitting on the stile for a bit, passing the flask to and fro. Beyond the fields, were the cliffs, and beyond the cliffs, you could hear the sea.

‘You could be seventeen in this light,’ said Joe. He had his hand over mine, and all I could feel was that hand, as though that warm area of skin was all that existed.

‘Don’t say that,’ I said.

‘Kiss me,’ he said suddenly, and I laughed.

‘Joe, I can’t kiss you!’

‘Who cares? Why not?’

‘That’s why.’ Because you don’t care, I thought, because why would you? On a day like today? Whereas for me, I was thinking to myself as I looked at the lovely shape of his mouth, it’s not that simple, Robyn, and you know it.

He groaned. ‘Come on,’ he said, and we carried on walking over the fields. A pale disc moon was now intensifying in the sky. The poor old trees, after centuries of being blown mercilessly by North Sea gales, now leaned permanently over.

I leaned over, too.

‘What are you doing?’ said Joe.

‘Checking they’re really like that, or if I’m actually that drunk.’

‘You’re actually that drunk. Now give me some of that,’ and he took the flask from me. It was much colder now and we held onto one another, for warmth as much as anything else, dodging the turf-covered rocks and the sheep shit. Now and again, one of us would trip spectacularly, the other hoisting them up, and then we’d carry on, oblivious, conversation rolling like the fields themselves.

‘You heard me talking to my mum,’ said Joe. ‘That’s a bit embarrassing.’

‘Joe, I used to go into my mum’s wardrobe, put on her clothes, then prance around the house, pretending to be her. How’s that for embarrassing?’

‘And did it help?’

I loved that Joe didn’t bat an eyelid. Andy would have given me that look, the one that said, ‘Robyn, I really like you, but sometimes you scare me.’

‘At the time, yes, and if chucking things at the wall helps you, or getting paralytic, or dressing up in your mum’s clothes, then you should do that, too.’

‘Excellent. I’ll think of you when I’m wearing one of my mum’s skirts and maybe a nice blouse.’ He was holding out his hand for me to take it. ‘Shall we go through the farm, like old times?’

The cold air and the walk had made the booze go more to my head now, and I didn’t really care where we went or what we did. I just knew I didn’t want to go home yet.

We trudged up the lane. The farmhouse had most of its lights on and there were sheets hanging on the washing line, billowing against the sky, like a child’s idea of a ghost. Chickens were roaming around outside, doing their odd little jerking movements, like clockwork toys, and to our left, behind the milking shed, was the barn, the one that all the kids used to play in, much to the annoyance of Mr Fry, who’d come and shine his great big torch in your eyes and swear his head off.

‘Come on,’ said Joe, pulling me towards it. ‘It’s bloody freezing, let’s go inside.’

‘We’ll get done,’ I said.

Joe grabbed hold of my face; he was laughing. He put his forehead so it was touching mine.

‘Done? You’re so sweet,’ he said. Then he kissed me once, hard on the lips, and I startled – Joe’s face, that mouth, suddenly right there, like the last sixteen years hadn’t happened at all. I lifted my face instinctively for more, but he was pulling me by the hand. ‘We’re not sixteen any more, you know,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, what happened to the naughty Robyn King I know and love?’

‘She grew up,’ I said, not knowing if he heard me. He took me inside anyway. The bales were piled right up to the ceiling, then graduated like steps to a cluster on the floor. There was an old wardrobe, timber stacked up on one side of it; to the right, there was a tractor – or the skeleton of a tractor – about to be mended or tended to, with all its doors and metalwork removed. It was huge and looming and really quite sinister. It reminded me of a prehistoric creature, about to stir and let out a deafening roar.

We leaned back on the bottom rung of hay, and finished what was in the flask. I wasn’t wearing tights, and my legs were goose-pimpled. Joe took off his suit jacket and lay it over them. We lay back like that for a while, next to one another, just looking up at the stars that throbbed in the gaps of the corrugated-iron roof.

Then Joe said, ‘I found her, you know.’

I turned my head to him. ‘Your mum?’

‘Yes. She’d stayed up after Dad went to bed. I got up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and the light was still on in the front room. She was sitting in the chair, but sort of half sitting on it, half slumped over, and I thought, that’s a funny position for anyone to go to sleep in – with her body all twisted, half her bum on the seat. And then I moved her hair from her face. God, it was horrible, Robbie. Her skin was grey, it looked like putty, and it had, like, slid off her face. And she was just absent, gone. All that was left was this shell …’

I took Joe’s hand and stroked it with my thumb.

‘I’m so scared I’ll never be able to get that picture out of my mind,’ he said.

I leaned over and I hugged him then. ‘You will,’ I said. ‘It takes time, but you will.’

‘Promise?’

‘It’s evolution, not revolution, remember?’

He nudged me and gave a little laugh.

‘It is,’ I said.

We stayed like that, lying down, our arms wrapped around each other, my cheek against his. I inhaled his smell. I already knew.

What did it matter? Who did care, anyway? Wasn’t this what it was about, life? Seizing the day, just being; not thinking so much all the time? It was funny, I thought, how sometimes there was nothing like death to make you feel so alive.

He pulled away from me and we hesitated, then I lifted my hands to his face. He lifted his eyes to mine. I couldn’t stop staring at that face, seeing how his eyes, or rather the person inside those eyes – his gaze – was the same. Did he see the same thing in me? Does that ever change?

‘You’re strong,’ I said. ‘Stronger than you know.’

‘Not stronger than you, everything you’ve been through, all of that.’

‘We’ve been through,’ I said. ‘You are strong.’

Silence, except for somewhere in the distance I could hear a chicken squawking. It was incongruous, a rude interruption.

‘What did we do to each other?’ he said, the words toppling out, ‘that means nothing, nobody …’ I kissed him then and the curve of his lips, the way it moved with mine, the little dance we did, it was so familiar, it shocked me; and when I looked at his face, his lovely face, I recognized it so much, it was like looking at myself. We lay back on the straw: it scratched and prickled the backs of my thighs and my arms like anything, but I couldn’t have cared less, I didn’t care about anything, I wasn’t thinking anything – that was the beauty of it. And I looked into Joe’s eyes and told myself that he didn’t want to think either – not today. We kissed, but in a frenzy, as if we had no control over our movements because we were in shock, in shock that this was happening at all; at least, that’s what it felt like. Involuntary. A brilliant, beautiful shock. I turned on my back, Joe was next to me and I wriggled my bum, so I could lift my skirt up, and started to take off my knickers.

‘What are you doing?’ whispered Joe.

‘What?’ I said, pausing.

He ran a finger down my arm.

‘I want to savour you more than that yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve got lots more kissing to get through yet. Lift up your bum, come on.’

I shifted so I could do as I was told, and he gently pulled down my dress, then arranged it on my legs and lay down next to me. I looked at him, a bit unsure then, but he moved the hair from my face, gently slipping one hand under my head, so I didn’t have to crane my neck to reach him, and kissed me – sweet, sweet kisses, on my forehead, my eyelids, my mouth. My throat had gone dry and I was trembling. He reached down and, very softly, ran the tip of his finger up my leg, just getting to my knickers, before he sent it in little circle movements across and between my thighs and, then, just as I felt I might explode, back down again. I buried my face in his chest and dug my heels into the straw, so I could bear it, this feeling that was so familiar and yet so wonderful that I doubted I could ever have had it before – like déjà vu.

He looked beautiful in the half-light – his eyes shone. The tractor skeleton loomed over us, the height of two men. But I wasn’t scared one bit; I was safe. I leaned down to undo his flies, but he put his hand over mine, stopping me; he took my hand and kissed it, then lay it across my chest. I gave a low growl of frustration and he smiled. Then he continued stroking the other leg up to my knickers again, this time stroking underneath me, a feathery, gentle touch, barely detectable through the fabric, which was wet. He pushed the material to the side, slid one finger inside me, then another, and I gasped – I couldn’t help it – and when I looked at him, my eyes wide, disbelieving, Joe looked so happy as my whole body bucked, then shuddered. I could bear it no longer. I pulled at his trousers but my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t do it, so he kicked off his shoes, sat up and wriggled out of them.

‘I haven’t got one,’ he said.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, pulling his shoulders back. ‘It’s okay. It’s fine, honestly.’ I sat up and kissed him on the neck. ‘Just come here, please … For God’s sake.’

‘Robyn …’

‘Come on!’

I took my knickers off and flung them to the side; we were both giggling now and shivering, half with cold, half with desire.

I lay back down and then Joe was inside me, the length of his whole, warm, strong body against mine. I wanted to cry, I was so happy, and I cried out again. When I flung my head to the side, I saw that a chicken had wandered into the barn. I could make out its fat, black body silhouetted; its shadow was long on the straw floor, and in the moonlight its lidless eye was blinking at me.

Chapter Seven

‘Right, how do you like your eggs, Robyn?’

The atmosphere at the breakfast table at Dad’s the next day was frosty, to say the least. Denise was the martyred waitress, wafting dramatically in and out of the beaded curtain separating the dining room from the kitchen (I swear she only had it fitted so Dad could actually hear her go in and out of there). Dad was doing what he always did when there was an atmosphere: hiding behind his newspaper.

I watched him, reading the sports pages, picking his nose, unable to even believe myself, that I could possibly feel this bad. I’m not a big drinker, normally. I don’t like the feeling of being out of control. This wasn’t always the case. At university, I was that girl with traffic cones in my room, that girl to get in any old minicab. I once held up the traffic on Blackfriars Bridge when drunk (and spent a night in a police cell for the privilege). But there’s only so long you can carry on like that before you realize it’s not fair to have everyone worry constantly about you, even if you’re not worrying about yourself. Now, I never drink so much I’m out of control. Last night, I did. Maybe I felt safe? Still, I wasn’t going to let Denise have the satisfaction of knowing that.

I sat motionless at the dining table, my throbbing head slowly catching up with the pleasant dull ache between my thighs. If I sort of pursed my lips and closed my eyes, I could still smell Joe on my top lip: his muskiness, Jack Daniel’s. When Denise came marching back from the kitchen, I felt like she’d caught me in the act.

She plonked a cup of tea down in front of me.

‘You look like you need that,’ she said. The slogan on it said: DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A MUG? I chose not to take this personally. Then she rattled through the beaded curtain, to make my poached eggs. I might have helped, but feared that, if I moved, I’d most definitely be sick.

From behind his newspaper, Dad tutted. ‘How come madam here gets to choose what type of eggs she gets? It’s not a bloody hotel, you know …’

‘Really?’ said Denise from the kitchen. ‘You could have fooled me.’

I apologized for waking people up; it’s much easier that way. Apparently, I’d come in at after 3 a.m., then set the smoke alarm off by making a bacon sandwich. Denise said my dress was left in a heap by the toilet, still in the shape that I’d stepped out of it (and I could go and pick it up when I was ready, too).

‘Did you get back to sleep, Denny, love?’ Dad said.

‘No, but it’s fine,’ she said. (Fine, fine, fine.) ‘I’ll have a nap later, if I get the chance.’

Denise was huffing and puffing and clattering in the kitchen. I was taking slow, tentative slurps of tea, looking through the French doors at the dull grey sky and the grey concrete. When Mum was alive, that garden was a mass of wild flowers and colour; six months after Denise moved in (which was only two after Mum died, Christmas ’96, just to add insult to injury), she had it paved over – apparently because she had a ‘bad back and found it hard to garden’. Maybe it was this which angered me – this feeling I can’t seem to shake, that Dad has let Denise pave over him, us. Maybe it was the thought that if Mum could see those grey slabs, she’d be so disappointed, or that last night had ignited something in me, set some kind of change in motion. Whatever it was, I felt daring. I was not leaving this house without the ashes.

‘Right, so,’ I announced suddenly, pressing my palms on the table for extra emphasis. From behind his newspaper, I saw Dad’s eyelids flicker with alarm. ‘Where are Mum’s ashes? ’Cause I’m not going home without them.’

Dad coughed and put his paper down. Denise came out, carrying my eggs, a miasma of Elnett and frying fat, the tops of her jeans swish-swishing. She stopped when she got to the table, holding the plate in her hands.

‘Well, Bruce, have you told her?’ She’d overdrawn one of her brows with eye pencil, so it went too far towards her temple. It made her look even more mad than usual.

‘Told me what?’

‘He can’t find them, Robyn,’ she said, putting my plate down.

I felt my throat constrict with panic.

‘What do you mean, you can’t find them?’ I said, my voice wobbling. ‘Dad, are you saying that you have actually lost Mum?’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Well, where are they, then? Denise, any ideas?’

I didn’t hate Denise but I didn’t trust her either. Mum was a hard act to follow and she knew it. I always got the sense with her that she’d never got over one vital fact: Dad had never wanted to end it with Mum; it ended because she died. It would have been easier for Denise if it had been divorce.

‘Because I don’t mean to be rude, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but I know you’ve sometimes found it difficult, looking at …’ Dad was boring holes into me with his eyes. I stopped just in time. ‘Just, maybe you moved them, that’s all?’

The realization that, yes, I was accusing her of hiding my mother’s ashes, made Denise’s throat flush red – was that anger, or guilt? ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I have polished that urn every single day. I do it at the same time as I do my cats and trophies.’

That was nice, I thought, ranking all that remained of my mother with her badminton trophies and ceramic cats. And, anyway, I didn’t believe her.

‘Also, if you three girls can’t look after your mother’s ashes yourselves, well …’ She flounced off in the direction of the kitchen again. ‘I’ve done my bit.’

‘Denise, excuse me!’

Dad slammed his newspaper shut. It made me jump. ‘That is enough, Robyn, thank you. Stop talking about the ashes in front of Denise. It’s bad manners.’

Bad manners? My mum’s memory was now a bad manner?

‘And in front of your dad,’ added Denise. ‘It only upsets him.’

This was unbelievable.

‘Look, I’m not saying anyone’s put them anywhere,’ I said, finally, even though this was exactly what I was saying. ‘I just … I need them.’ And, as soon as I started talking, I became more resolute that this was absolutely what had to happen. ‘By August, by the time you move out.’ Dad was still glaring at me, petrified about what I might say next. ‘Mum wouldn’t want to be in any other house but this one; so, if she can’t be here, I want her with me.’

Chapter Eight

Dear Lily

I’ve so many emotions flying around, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m telling myself, I’m always like this when I’ve been back to Kilterdale, and this time was so much more poignant – for obvious reasons – but I’m sitting here, writing this on the train, crying my eyes out. God knows what the other passengers think of me.

It was so good to see your dad! It was wonderful. I felt like how I used to feel, before I lost Mum, and we lost you and I somehow lost myself. I felt like I was THAT girl I used to be, who I never thought I’d find again, and this horrible emptiness, which I realized is always with me, wasn’t there any more.

And yet, I was so reckless, Lily. I can’t believe how reckless I was. What was I thinking of?! What if I am pregnant? My God. I would never ever forgive myself.

*

As soon as I reached civilization at Euston Station the next day, I went to Boots and got the morning-after pill. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. It was like I’d been under a spell, lawless for a moment. I decided to put down what happened to anxiety at being back in Kilterdale and total excitement at seeing Joe again, and resolved to get on with normal life as best I could.

I was still anxious about the ashes, however. Despite Dad searching high and low, he hadn’t been able to find them, and I could tell he’d begun to panic himself. Denise was making a good show of acting concerned but I wasn’t buying it. She was acting shifty, if you ask me, staring out of the kitchen window as Dad and I ransacked the place, as if she knew something we didn’t.

It made me feel a bittersweet camaraderie with Leah, who would definitely hold Denise up as prime suspect. Sweet because I treasured any chance to feel bonded with my eldest sister these days, I suppose, and bitter because it took losing our mother’s ashes and suspecting our stepmother had taken them, to do it.

Growing up, Leah and I had the classic big sister/little sister relationship: we hated and loved one another with equal fury. We knew one another better than anyone else. Then Mum got diagnosed with cancer in January 1995 and died in October 1996 and it felt like I lost not just Mum, but my big sister too. Not only did Leah behave outrageously at the funeral (turning up, just as they’d closed the curtain on the coffin, with her boyfriend at the time, who’d never even met our mother, and was wearing a back-to-front baseball cap – small detail, but I’ve never forgotten it), but she then proceeded to get off her head at the wake, shout at Denise and then leave to go back to university two days later, leaving me and Niamh to pick up the pieces. Our relationship has never really recovered from that. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d even see her much at all if it wasn’t for her kids, who I adore. I feel like sometimes she uses them as a barricade; an excuse for not being able to do anything. She seems so angry all the time and, yet, I don’t know what about. But I keep making the effort because, essentially, I miss her.

I call her as I’m walking home from the Tube. I’m thinking, perhaps the whereabouts of the ashes is something we can bond over, at least.

She picks up after two rings,

‘So, can you believe it, Lee, they’ve lost our mother’s ashes?’ I said. ‘They’re still not on the mantelpiece. I reckon Denise is behind it.’

‘Oh, really?’ She was driving, and on the hands-free, but still, she sounded distracted, unfussed. ‘Could we chat about this later? I’m trying to get home at the mo, kids going mad in the back …’

I couldn’t hear any kids, which was odd. Also, it wasn’t like Leah not to be outraged with Denise, which is her default setting at the best of times. ‘I’m seeing you soon, aren’t I? We can talk about it then.’ Then she said she had to go.

Nobody talks about how Leah had a massive go at Denise in front of everyone at the funeral. It made no sense at all. Denise and mum were friends from the badminton club, so she had every right to be there. Nothing was going on between her and Dad at that point, and yet Leah just laid into her, shouting, ‘Jump in your own grave so fast, would you?’ God, it was like a scene from Eastenders and Leah and Dad have never really talked since, and us three girls don’t talk about Mum much either, because of what happened, which I find really sad.

I arrived home, having made Leah, before she hung up, promise on her life that we’d discuss the ashes when I next went round. Then I made myself some soup and settled down to watch re-runs of some seventies sitcom … I felt calmer now the hangover had subsided and I was back in my own space. I felt like what had happened in Kilterdale was a dream; that it had happened to somebody else, in another life.

Then, the next day, Joe sent me an email: distinctly flirtatious and with a photo of me that made me actually gasp. I knew I couldn’t do this with Joe. I had to nip it in the bud.

4 April 2013

From: robyn.king@nhs.uk.kingsbridge

To: JosephSawyer@man.edu.co.uk

Dear Joe, thanks for your email. I particularly enjoyed the picture of me wielding the bottle of JD and Miss No Knickers – just how one should behave at a funeral.

I’ve been thinking of you often. I found those days following my mum’s funeral really tough, so I hope you’re taking it easy and being extra nice to yourself. Did you manage to watch a good horror? I recommend it. I found it to be a bit of escapism, if any escapism is possible at the moment.

Joe, I want to apologize. As wonderful as it was to see you, I shouldn’t have got so carried away and drunk. (It was your mother’s funeral, for God’s sake!) You’ve no doubt got all sorts of emotions going on at the moment and me just unleashing myself on you like that can’t have helped. So, I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me. We can never talk of this again, and be friends. It’s so great to be back in touch. Call me any time. R xxx

‘Right, Kingy, do you want to come in?’

Just as I often thank the lord for London and its ability to swallow me up and allow me to disappear, so I am thankful for my job. After my eventful weekend, I didn’t have a chance to stew in a pit of self-loathing, because immediately I got to work, Jeremy called me into his office.

He wanted to talk to me about Grace Bird, a forty-one-year-old woman about to be discharged from hospital, who had specifically requested me as her CPN. I felt rather special, especially since, apparently, she’d based her decision on watching me with other patients at Kingfisher House Psychiatric Unit, where she’d spent the last two months. I also knew this irked Jeremy, because Jeremy is the sort of man who can even make providing mental-health services a competition.

He gestured to the only spare seat in his office, one of those low chairs, the colour of Dijon mustard, with wooden arm rests mental-health services are full of them – and shut the door. ‘So, shall we talk Grace Bird?’ he said. The office smelt of a mixture of the egg sandwich he was eating and TCP. He gargled with it every morning, with his door wide open. ‘How are we feeling about meeting her?’

I felt like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, being prepped before meeting Hannibal Lecter, the way he was going on. This wasn’t the first time he’d had a word with me about the infamous Grace.

‘Um, fine, I think,’ I said. Grace had schizophrenia, and a history of hearing persecutory voices. ‘I’ve read Grace’s case notes and chatted to people. I’m looking forward to meeting her. I think we’ll get on.’

Jeremy nodded and excavated a bit of egg sandwich from his back molar.

‘You know, she has got a challenging background, although nothing out of the ordinary: years of sexual abuse by her stepfather sent her over the edge – nasty piece of work by all accounts, he was. She was brought up in a hotel, and the stepfather was the manager, apparently. Used to abuse her in the guest bedrooms.’ He made a face, as if he was describing a disgusting meal he’d had.

‘Horrible,’ I said. Jeremy was harmless and also quite passionate about his job in his own (his very own) way. But there was sometimes a salacious tone in his voice, when he talked about patients, that didn’t sit well with me, like he enjoyed the drama.

‘You do know she’s had three CPNs beforehand who she’s not got on with?’ he said (you had to love his management style – so encouraging).

‘Yes. I think I did know that.’

‘Although, she’s particularly requested a woman this time, so, you know, you might be okay.’

He told me how he’d been Grace’s CPN for years; that they went back to the year 2003, when she had her breakdown and came into the system.

‘Oh, so you know her well, then?’ I said.

‘Yes. And I can tell you, she has a very definite cycle.’

I laughed. ‘A cycle? That makes her sound like a washing machine.’

He frowned, a bit affronted.

‘What I meant was, if you would just let me finish, is that she runs like clockwork. She has …’ He paused, belching quietly into his hand. ‘And no, I won’t make any apologies for this, ’cause it’s true. She has a very definite “cycle” of behaviour.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So what does this cycle consist of?’

‘Well, she has an episode every May, without fail, like we’ve just seen now, when she’s generally found wandering the streets at night, starts hearing voices, saying people have broken into her flat at night. Then June, we’re not usually too bad, but come August and we’re downhill again. Always mid-August. Always the same time.’

‘Is she not on a CTO this time?’ I asked. It would make sense after so many admissions. A Community Treatment Order meant she’d have to sign a form to say she’d come into hospital for an injection, because she couldn’t be relied upon to take her medication herself.

‘I don’t know,’ Jeremy said, a bit defensively, like I was trying to get one up on him, which I wasn’t. ‘But this will be something you can discuss up at the hospital.’

He bit into his sandwich and chewed, breathing noisily through his nose. ‘Sorry, you don’t mind if I eat this now, do you? Molls is potty training – we had several accidents this morning, including a number two, and I didn’t get time for breakfast.’

‘No, not at all,’ I said, although ‘breakfast’ and ‘number two’ in the same sentence made me gag.

‘So, has anyone got to the bottom of Grace’s … “cycle”? Why episodes happen at certain times?’ I asked.

Jeremy carried on chewing. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I mean, the summer – like Christmas – can be a very alienating time for people like Grace. Everyone’s having barbecues, going on holidays …’

This seemed tangential but I nodded anyway.

‘And also she’s got this thing with taking people’s photos – I’m sure they’ll fill you in when you get there. Needless to say, it gets her into trouble on the ward. She’s got no idea of personal boundaries.’

Having finished his sandwich, he started applying some cream to a flaky red patch on his elbow.

‘Sorry,’ he said. He made a wincing noise as the cream touched his skin. ‘Psoriasis. It’s really flared recently.’

I couldn’t wait to meet Grace now. I’d read her case notes and there were things that chimed with me, things people had said to me about her, that reminded me of things people said about me, when I was younger, before Mum happened and that summer happened, and I probably grew up ten years in one: ‘She’s a handful, that Robyn King’; ‘She’s not at all as sensible as her big sister.’ It made me want to rise to the challenge of her. To show Grace what I was made of.

When a patient was about to be discharged to the homecare team, us CPNs often went along to the hospital for ward round and what was called a ‘discharge planning meeting’, so we could meet the patient beforehand. As discharge planning meetings went, Grace’s was pretty painless. Dr Manoor was Grace’s consultant, which made things easy, because we’ve got quite a rapport going now, Dr Manoor and I. Whenever he calls me up to come in and assess, we always have a joke: ‘Who’ve you got for me this time, Ramesh?’; ‘Are we going to need a stiff drink after this?’

As well as Dr Manoor, there was Michelle, the OT – occupational therapist – who never seems as frazzled as the rest of us. I like Michelle. It was the senior nurse I didn’t take to – someone called Brian Hillgarth, who I’d never dealt with before. He had dandruff and this off-putting habit of never meeting your gaze when he was talking to you. I didn’t like the way he spoke about Grace either. He kept saying things like, ‘Like all chronic schizophrenics, she has fixations about things …’ What did he mean, ‘Like all schizophrenics?’ (Like all people called Brian, you never meet people’s eyes when you’re talking to them.) I felt like he spoke about her as if she was beyond help, beyond hope.

There was also this matter of her taking photographs.

‘The problem is, she was putting that camera in patients’ faces,’ Hillgarth was saying. (I couldn’t help thinking there were worse places she could have been putting her camera.) ‘Taking pictures of them brushing their teeth, or in the art room. I mean, these patients are paranoid enough.’ There was a pause during which everybody looked at one another as if to say, We know, Brian, it’s a mental hospital.

‘So, can I ask, what’s with the photography in the first place?’ I said. I was curious. ‘Is Grace generally interested in photography? Is it something she does as a hobby?’

This seemed to completely confuse Brian, who said, ‘I think my point is, she’s abusive with it.’

‘Abusive? What, with a camera? How do you mean?’ Everyone sort of looked at the floor. As CPNs went, I was probably quite outspoken.

‘She gets a bit upset, I think,’ said Michelle, ‘when people don’t want their photo taken, you know.’ Michelle was such a softy; if Grace had been beating people over the head with a mallet, she’d have put it down to her just being ‘a bit upset’.

‘No, I’d definitely say, she’s abusive,’ Brian said. ‘Personal and insulting when people don’t want their picture taken. She told one rather large patient that they were supposed to “eat what’s in the fridge, not the fridge itself”.’ I had to bite my lip so I didn’t laugh. I’ve always liked the naughty ones.

The meeting went on for forty-five minutes. It seemed Jeremy was right about one thing at least: there was a pattern to Grace’s admissions (May and August figuring strongly), but nobody had got to the bottom of why.

‘So she’s not on a CTO?’ I asked.

‘She was trialled,’ said Dr Manoor. ‘But there were side effects with the injections: tremors, weight gain …’ Often the side effects were worse than the mental illness itself but, without the CTO ensuring Grace would agree to come into hospital to have her injections, I’d have to work hard to keep her compliant.

Eventually, they called Grace in. She was tiny and ever so sweet-looking, with this delicate, fawn-like face and these big brown eyes shining out from beneath the Yankees baseball cap she was wearing. The skin on her face had been ravaged by fags and booze and emotional pain, but there was still a girlishness to her; then, she spoke.

‘Wotcha?’ she stuck a tiny hand out and I shook it. ‘I’m Grace, and you are …?’

‘Robyn.’

‘Robyn,’ she said, screwing her tiny nose up. ‘Isn’t that a boy’s name?’

‘And a girl’s,’ I said. ‘Although, my theory is, my parents wanted a boy and so didn’t really have any proper girls’ names on their list.’

She laughed, but like it was an afterthought, then carried on staring at me, quite intently.

‘You’re pretty, ain’t ya?’ she said, eventually. ‘She is, she’s pretty, i’n’t she?’ she said to the rest of the room. I could feel myself glowing beetroot. ‘It’s the eyes – you’ve got lovely brown eyes. And great bone structure. Have you got Slavic in your blood?’

‘I’ve got Cumbrian, does that count?’ I said, and everyone including Grace laughed – although Grace a little later than everyone else. She swung a leg over the chair and almost bounced into the seat. She was wearing a grey poncho with reindeers on it, rust-coloured trousers, white trainers and the cap.

‘I’m glad I demanded a girl,’ she said. ‘They normally give me smelly old men to look after me. One before last, looked like a massive strawberry,’ and I smirked, because I knew exactly who she meant (Jezza – Jeremy), and he did, he looked exactly like a massive strawberry. ‘He had this big fat red face with pits all over it, and this hair, sitting like a toupee on top …’

‘Grace …’ Michelle was laughing too but had her hand over her eyes, shaking her head. ‘We’ve talked about being personal, haven’t we? Sometimes you’ve got to think before you speak.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Grace said, ‘That’s my problem, innit?’ I never think before I open my big mouth.’

We had to get some of the big questions out of the way: likelihood of her topping herself after discharge from hospital, for example (low, she assured us, the council were coming to do up her flat if she could stay out of hospital – and alive – long enough), and whether she promised to stick to taking her medication.: ‘Well if it’s that or a needle in my bum, then I’d better be a good girl, hadn’t I?’

‘And would you like to see one of the crisis team, Grace?’ Dr Manoor asked. ‘For a while, after you’re discharged?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘I just want to see Robyn.’

I felt this little bubble of pride.

Then, the most bizarre thing happened. Brian reached behind him, brought out something and held it out to Grace. ‘My camera!’ she gasped, turning it around in her hand, as though it was her engagement ring that had been found. ‘I thought it was gone forever!’

‘We had to pretend it was lost,’ Brian said to me, like it was a dummy and she was two years old. ‘She was just driving everyone mad.’

‘Got time for a chat, Grace?’ I said, as we were all getting up to leave. ‘Just the two of us?’

She looked at me, a little suspiciously, before breaking into a gap-toothed smile. ‘All right,’ she shrugged. I followed her out of the door.

We went to Grace’s room to collect her cigarettes.

‘We’ll have to freeze our bums off outside,’ she said, rummaging around in her coat pocket. ‘No more smoke rooms. As if they could make these places any more bloody depressing.’

We had to walk around a zigzag of corridors, before we got to the lift that took us to the main entrance outside. The walls were filled with pictures of dodgy, replicated beach landscapes, in an attempt to brighten the place up. Grace gave me the lowdown as we were walking.

‘Room Five. That’s Harry. Hasn’t said a word in two months. Spends all day watching DVDs about polar bears … All right, Harry?’ She popped her head around the door. I could just see a large, white-haired man, sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead. ‘Those polar bears behavin’ themselves?’

I waved at Harry but he didn’t wave back.

‘Room Seven, Winnie – conked up to the eyeballs, bless her. Tried to hang herself on a curtain last week.’

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