“I talked it over with Nova,” he said.
I will not be in the hospital, she will. For a long, long time.
“I have to tell you this. We’re getting serious. That is, I feel this relationship is serious and I want you to know who I truly am before it goes any further. I think it’s only fair to you that you know this and see if it’s something you can handle.”
The coil of fear, anger and indignation loosened in my chest as it filtered into my worry-addled brain that he wasn’t talking about ending things with me. He was talking about going further, talking as though whether our relationship continued was wholly my choice.
“I, I haven’t ever told a girlfriend this. Which is why I had to talk it over with Nova first. This is her history, too, so if I reveal this about me, it’s about her as well. She said if I thought you felt for me what I feel for you, then I should, because she wants you to be around.”
A modicum of guilt flitted across my conscience: I’d misjudged her. Again. But the guilt was only a sliver because what should have been about us was once again about her, too. Why did he have to bring everything back to her? Everything. Was there a decision he had made in his life that he hadn’t checked with her first?
His fingers skitted slowly across the table, laced themselves with mine. “I love your hands,” he said, staring down at them. His eyes lifted up to meet mine. “I love you.”
I felt my heart bubbling up again with everything I felt for him. He said it so easily. He said it as though he constantly said it; as though this wasn’t the first time.
I opened my mouth and he pressed his fingers over my lips.
“No, don’t say it back,” he said, before taking his hand away. “I don’t want you to feel pressured. Not when you don’t know everything. I don’t want you to feel trapped to stay because you’ve said it.” His face creased as he closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “I haven’t said this before. Anyone who knows has always known, so they don’t need it to be explained.” He fixed me with a gaze, steadying himself to say what had to be said.
“My mum, who I hope you’ll meet one day, is manic depressive. I know people call it bipolar these days, but we always called it manic depression, she calls it manic depression. That’s it. It doesn’t sound so big when I say it, but it is, of course. It’s been a part of our lives since we were old enough to know. Do you know what manic depression is?” he asked, suddenly realizing that I might not know what he was talking about.
I nodded. I knew.
“But she’s not a psycho,” he said, suddenly angry. “Anyone who even thinks that—”
“I don’t think that,” I cut in, tightening my fingers around his to stop him. “I’d never think that. Never.”
“But you have to know that she’ll always come first. Always. That’s why I had to tell you now before we got any deeper into this. I don’t want this to end between us, but it wouldn’t be fair to you not knowing that. Do you see what I mean?”
I nodded. Calm was flowing through my body, one cell at a time. No fear, no anxiety, nothing but calm. And then something began at my core, spreading, blossoming inside me like a baby growing. I felt it growing, taking on its own life, filling me up until my body, my heart, my mind were saturated with it. It took a few moments for me to understand what it was—for the first time in years, I knew what hope felt like.
“I know this isn’t exactly what someone who’s just started a relationship wants to hear, that they’ll never come first, but that’s the way it is. I haven’t needed to do anything in years, and Nova’s parents are usually the people who are there first, but if Mum needs me, I have to drop everything to go and be with her. Do you understand?”
I smiled at Mal. What he said was exactly what I needed to hear; it was what had planted the seed of hope inside me.
“I want to tell you a story,” I said to him. “It’s a true story. It’s a story about me. By the time I’ve finished telling you the story, I hope you’ll understand why I had to tell you, and why I’m glad you told me what you told me.” I sounded dramatic, but I didn’t mean to. Like Mal, I was unused to telling anyone this, so in the telling it sounded dramatic. People saw me, they made assumptions, they gossiped about me. Rarely did people ask, never did I tell.
At the end of my story, where there should have been “happily ever after,” he kissed me instead. He kissed me and he made me a promise.
We all make promises. I believe we all mean to keep them. The one Mal made me he wanted to keep, but of course he didn’t realize at the time—I don’t think either of us did—the price he’d have to pay to do so.
“So it’s all very well you two apologizing and explaining why you did it, but the next time you’re about to say something about someone, maybe you should think that you don’t know all the facts. That their life may look perfect, but it may actually be fragile and sad and beset with a multitude of problems.
“And also, you might want to think how you’d feel if they were standing right behind you whilst you rip them to shreds. Yes, that’s right, how you’d feel, because it’s obvious you two don’t care at all what other people might feel.”
I give the silent, shocked duo another mean-eyed glare and march out of the locker room again. I climb in my car and push my key in the ignition, but I do not turn it. I do not drive.
I stare out of the windshield. Not only do I definitely have to find a new gym, I desperately have to get a new life.
“I need a dolphin.”
“OK,” Mum said.
“And where would you put it?” Dad said.
“In the bath,” he said to Dad. And turned to Mum, because Dad was going to be what Mum called “difficult.” “I really need a dolphin.”
“OK,” Mum said.
“What do you mean, ‘OK’?” Dad said to Mum.
“What does ‘OK’ mean to you?” Mum asked him.
“You’re going to get him a dolphin?”
“If he needs one, why not?”
“I can really have a dolphin? A real life dolphin?”
“Yes.”
He smiled at Mum. She was the best mum in the whole world.
“When?” he asked Mum. “When can I have my dolphin?”
“Well, I’m going to have to save up for it, so it might take a while. I can imagine them being quite expensive, ’cause goldfish are about two pounds fifty, so dolphins, which are really, really big, will be loads more expensive than that. And they’ll eat more. And we’ll need a bigger bath or another bath altogether because we need to have showers and things. But if you need a dolphin, I really want to get you it. And all the money we have has to go on food, and clothes and bills. So, what I think we’ll do is not go on holiday for a while, and maybe not buy any more computer games, and then we’ll save all that money up toward the dolphin. Does that sound all right to you?”
Leo grinned and nodded. He really was going to get a dolphin.
“OK, it’s a bit late to do it now, but tomorrow, I’ll call up and cancel that trip to Portugal we had planned. It’s a shame we won’t get to see all that stuff there, but the dolphin’s more important.”
“We can’t go to Port-gal?” Leo asked. They were going on a plane and everything. And he wanted to show Richard and David and Martin the pictures Mum said she’d take of him on the plane. None of them had been on a plane. And she’d shown him pictures of their white house over there and the swimming pool—right in their back garden. He could swim in it.
“Afraid not, sweetheart. We’re saving for a dolphin, remember?”
“But I want to go to Port-gal.”
“Sorry. We can’t do both. Now, you’re a big boy, so this is a really grown-up decision you have to make. Either we get a dolphin or we go on our holiday. Why don’t you go upstairs and think about which one you want. It’s fine with me either way.”
“OK,” he said and returned to his bedroom and the picture book with pictures of dolphins. Tsk. If he’d been allowed to get a do
lphin, he was going to ask for a shark next.
It really wasn’t fair sometimes.
Leo, age 5 years and 6 months
CHAPTER 9
T here’s no change. Another six days and there’s been no change.
I have to tell my family everything today. I know the second I do, they’ll be down here, a convoy of Kumalisis and one Wacken, before I’ve settled the phone in its cradle. I’ve been hoping things might have got better and that I’d be able to tell them everything when Leo is awake, but that hasn’t happened. Yet. It hasn’t happened yet. Bringing more people into this means I am accepting a small defeat. I am saying that there is something going on that Keith and I cannot handle alone. We need help.
The café is in darkness as I come in through the front door and rush to disable the alarm—bleeping in the back like the countdown to Armageddon—before it goes off and half of East Sussex police force descends upon this place. It’s happened before. Last year, Leo and I had come over to the café to get some of the giant fairy cakes I’d baked earlier for an after-dinner treat, and for some reason I had typed in the wrong number three times. Before we knew it, the world outside was illuminated by flashing blue lights and what looked like a whole platoon of officers appeared, all of them ready to deal with whichever criminal had dared to break into our little café. Leo and I had been terrified at the speedy response and the number of officers that arrived, and while he thought he was clinging onto me for protection, I was clutching him just as tightly, partly to be ready to step in front of him and partly to ease my terror. Keith had been on duty at the time and he’d come with them, and had obviously been overjoyed that his wife had shown such utter ditziness by getting the code to her own café wrong in front of his colleagues. I could hear them all laughing, and the comments—“If it’s a psychic café, how come she didn’t know the code?”—all the way back to the station. Leo thought it was cool after they’d all gone, but neither of us much fancied cake after that. I’d driven us to Kemp Town in Brighton to get us ice cream from a late-night supermarket instead. Later on, when I called Amy to tell her that I’d had to change the code, she said she’d already done it earlier that day because Keith had called to remind her that we hadn’t changed it in a while. And had she not told me? And had he not told me? And, oh, did the police really laugh and laugh at you? And Keith never did really say you were lucky you wouldn’t be charged with wasting police time, did he?
If I didn’t know the pair of them better, I would have thought it was a stitch-up, but Keith has no humor in such things and it just isn’t in Amy to play that sort of practical joke.
After the alarm is disabled, I dump my bag on the desk in the little broom cupboard we call the office. My keys clatter loudly in the darkness, reverberating out into the main seating area with the counter and the coffee machine.
I’m momentarily blinded as I flick on the kitchen lights and brightness bounces off all the metal and white surfaces. I yank up my sleeves and from the drawer by the door I retrieve my white mesh cap and jam it on my head, before tying on my apron, which hangs on a hook by the door. I move to the big metal sink and scrub my hands clean.
While Keith sits with Leo, I’m going to make some cakes and cookies so Amy doesn’t have to worry about ordering them in for a few more days. Poor Amy has been running Starstruck, my café, all alone for more than two weeks now and she hasn’t uttered one word of complaint. She hasn’t even mentioned how tired she is, that she’s been running low on supplies, that she needs cash to order more stock. She has carried on as normal, so I don’t have to worry.
I sat at the back of a café with Leo.
“Incy wincy spider climbed up the waterspout,” I sang. Leo’s big, dark russet-brown eyes stared up at me, fascinated, agog, as I leaned over him, tapping my fingers together while twisting my wrists. His mouth opened into a smile.
He was only three months old and I wasn’t sure if he really understood that much, but he seemed to love this song and “Round and round the garden like a teddy bear” more than the others I sang to him. His mouth would curl up at the corners and he would gurgle out the kind of laugh that made a mother’s stomach flip. I was lucky, I knew. My son was an angel, a newborn miracle. He slept when he was put down, he drank his milk, he responded when I played with him. I saw so many mothers struggling, cowed and broken by exhaustion and lack of support, that I knew I had been blessed. I also knew that it might not last. He might at any moment decide that I’d had it too easy for far too long and I needed to learn about motherhood by being baptized in fire. I sometimes wondered if it was because on some level he understood that there could only be one unruly newborn in our relationship, and that role was currently being filled by me. I lay awake at night fretting about our future, crying because I felt so alone. I found it hard to eat because I was so unhappy, and I literally had to force food down my throat because I was breastfeeding and needed to give Leo the right nutrition. I longed more than anything to be hugged and cared for and pampered. I longed for someone to lift me up out of the crib of this life and rock me better.
The table we’d chosen was at the back of the café, not far from our house in an area of Hove called Poets Corner—the names of the roads were of the great poets; I lived on Rossetti Road, which was a ten-minute stroll from the seafront. For someone as young as me, I had been incredibly lucky with property so far. The flat in Forest Hill that I’d scraped all my cash together to buy when I was in my early twenties, when people wouldn’t even think about traveling through that area of London to get somewhere else, had made me an obscene amount of money when I sold it two months before Leo was born. Forest Hill had suddenly become the place to be for those who couldn’t afford to live in über-expensive Dulwich. I’d been able to buy a three-bedroom house with a garden on Rossetti Road for the money I got for my flat, and had some left over.
As I sat in the café, playing with Leo, I was thinking that I needed a job. I hadn’t worked in many months and my savings were running dangerously low. We’d be able to live comfortably for at least another year, but after that, we’d have nothing. And nothing put away for the future. I’d been thinking about updating my training and going back to my original career plan to be a clinical psychologist. Although I would probably feel like a fraud. How could I listen to other people, help them, advise them where necessary, when my life was such a mess? I was the prime example for how not to do things. Having said that, wasn’t it someone who messed up who could see where you were heading and maybe stop you? Wasn’t it someone who knew of pain that could help you heal it?
The thought, though, of having to be supervised, having to reveal my secrets to someone else, was not one that appealed.
The only other thing I was qualified to do was be a waitress or restaurant manager. Which meant working odd hours that I would have to fit around Leo. Maybe Mum won’t mind coming to stay with him a few days a week, I thought. Then I realized what a stupid thought that was: she’d be down on the next train, ready to move in permanently. She, Dad, Cordy and Aunt Mer had all been unsubtly trying to get me to move back to London.
“I don’t suppose you want a job?” the tall woman with dead-straight black hair to her waist, who had served me coffee, asked.
I blinked at her. Had I been thinking aloud? She towered above me, a giant, beautiful goddess. She had clear, creamy skin, dark brown, slightly slanted eyes and a small, perfect mouth. She wore a tank top that exposed her flat stomach, and skin-tight, faded blue jeans with a big belt buckle that read “Diva,” the same name as the café. Around her belly button was an intricate tattoo that had gothic elements but also looked like kanji-origin Japanese script.
“Do you?” she asked. “Want a job?” She tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing a row of tiny hoop earrings.
“No,” I said. This place was rarely even half full, and the coffee, cake and cookies I’d sampled were nothing to write home about. I only came here because it was close to my house—the only café in Po
ets Corner—and the goddess always looked pleased to see us and would coo at Leo as though he was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. If I did work here, there’d be nothing to do and I’d probably be laid off after a few weeks. I needed stability.
“You can bring your baby to work with you,” she said. “He can sit in the back, we’ll have a baby monitor, and when we’re not busy he can be out here.” She looked around the empty café and back at me. “He’ll be out here most of the time.”
“Thank you for the offer, but no.”
She sighed, chewed on her bottom lip. “All right,” she said.
“Why did you offer me a job?” I asked. A couple of times I’d cleared plates off the tables when she was—rarely—busy and I wanted somewhere to sit. I stacked them and carried them to the side of the counter; maybe that had shown her I’d been a waitress before, but there was a wild leap from that to offering me a job.
“OK,” she said, pulling out the chair opposite my little sofarette. I glanced at Leo in the carrycot beside me; his lips were pursed and his eyes kept fluttering shut. He was about to fall asleep. I pulled his blanket up to his chin, stroked his stomach a few times. “This is going to sound completely crazy, but I had a dream and you were in it. And you were working here.”
She did sound crazy. As crazy as I sounded to people most of the time. Going along with things because of dreams and feelings.
She sat back, folded her arms triumphantly, as if my silence had just confirmed that she sounded completely mad, when in fact, I didn’t say anything because I had a feeling she was going to keep talking.