‘I see,’ I replied, even though I had no clue what he was talking about.
*
I’m standing at the sink, looking out of the window, watching the last of the light outside recede into early evening darkness through the gaps in our curtain of butterflies. When she was ten, Phoebe spent weeks stringing together multicoloured crystal butterflies. Night after night she’d take up her seat on a cushion in the corner of the living room, using a large needle to string butterflies onto jewellers’ wire, before twisting a knot on either side with jewellers’ pliers then adding another butterfly. When she’d finished, her dad tied them to a curtain pole and hung it up over the part of the window by the sink.
The curtain dots our kitchen with splashes of different-coloured light during the day, intensified, of course, when the sun is out. Some mornings I come in here before the sun comes up and sit at the table with a cup of coffee, staring at the blackberry stain while the room gradually becomes a multicoloured glow.
‘Who’s the father?’ I ask Phoebe, clattering our plates onto the butterfly-covered place mats I have laid on the table in the two minutes it took to cook the gnocchi.
Phoebe picks up the fork I placed in front of her earlier, and spears a rocket and basil pesto-covered potato dumpling. When I ask my question, she doesn’t raise the food from the plate to her mouth, instead she leaves it there, jammed onto the fork, sitting against the plate. Eventually, she gives a small, discreet shrug of her bony shoulders as her reply.
Panic billows up inside. ‘You don’t know who the father is, or you’re not going to tell me?’ I ask.
Phoebe treats me to another shrug, this time with one shoulder.
I inhale slowly and deeply, then exhale at length. I know what Joel would say right now. He’d remind me that she’s fourteen, she’s terrified and that there are worse things you could do than get pregnant. He would tell me not to scream. He would tell me to remember how it felt to be in a similar position to her. He’d tell me all these things and he would be right.
Picking up my fork, I remind myself of the sheer terror of sitting in front of a parent you are already scared of upsetting after they’ve been to the headteacher’s office about you, after they’ve learnt things about you that you thought would go away. I remember the words that came quietly spilling out of my mother’s mouth when I was in a similar position to Phoebe, how each syllable was a stinging blow that I can recall without trying too hard. I remember the way I didn’t speak at all until she stopped, and how I stayed silent as she ignored me for a whole week because I’d brought such shame onto our family.
This is different, though: ignoring this will not make it go away; pretending it’s not happening is not going to cure anything. I lower my fork and rest its prongs up on the edge of my plate. ‘The thing is, Phoebe, you can’t shrug this away.’ My voice is calm and reasonable, not at all how I feel inside. ‘It might be the way you want to deal with this, but you can’t handle an adult problem by behaving like a child.’
‘That’s how you see me, isn’t it?’ she says on the edge of a screech, her face screwed up like a wounded, cornered wild animal about to attack. ‘As a problem! That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? A problem!’
I have no idea what I’m doing here, of course. Joel would probably know. He’d work out how to deal with this, the right thing to say, the correct way to act. Me?
I keep thinking: SHE IS PREGNANT.
I keep thinking: SHE HAS BEEN HAVING SEX.
I keep thinking: SHE DIDN’T TELL ME.
Twelve months ago my daughter was still asking me to buy her cuddly toys. Six months ago she was still racing her brother to the top of the slide in the park and screaming in joy as they slid to the bottom. Three months ago she was thirteen and still a little girl. My little girl. But she’s been having sex like an adult for God knows how long. And getting pregnant like an adult. Then reacting like a child. How am I supposed to know how to deal with it?
‘Are you going to deal with this situation like an adult or a child, is what I meant to say. You can’t shrug what is happening away. I need to know what’s going on. Who the father is. If you’ve told him. What he thinks if you have told him, if we’re going to tell him if you haven’t already.’
Despite her outburst, Phoebe has been eating, but now she stops shovelling down food and instead moves gnocchi around her plate with the tip of her fork, smearing the creamy green-flecked pesto in its wake. Joel used to do that with the sauce on his food. He would move it around and around as if trying to paint a picture on the plate. Phoebe probably learnt it from him – or maybe it’s a genetic thing, something they were both predisposed to.
‘Have you told the father?’ I ask.
She shakes her head, staring at that piece of gnocchi as it continues its round-plate journey. I stare at it, too, a plump, creamy oval of potato and wheat flour and milk solids and all the other things the manufacturers add. Joel made gnocchi once. He’d used egg, though, and cream, I think. Or was it parmesan? Or was it both? He never made it again, because the effort-to-gain ratio was all wrong for him. Every week, whenever Joel made pesto, Phoebe and Zane would try to convince him that he wanted to make gnocchi, too. That nothing would be better. He held firm, though, unmoved by their appeals to his better nature.
‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I ask Phoebe, snapping myself back to the present. I keep falling through those potholes in time, finding myself back there, with him, with them, with us, how we used to be. This isn’t the moment for that, though. I need to stay focused, I need to stay now.
Phoebe pauses, then nods once. Stops. Shakes her head four times. Nods five times. Then ‘shrug’. The ubiquitous shrug. I could scream the house down because of those shrugs.
‘Are you in love with him?’ I ask. I need to know what this pregnancy means to her. I need to know if she is thinking of this as something that will become her love child, something she possibly did on purpose so she could bind herself to this boy without a name or if it was a huge mistake that she is horrified as well as terrified by.
Phoebe doesn’t reply, or even look at me, because we both know that is a stupid question. Fourteen-year-olds are always in love. They are made up of the fizzy, popping, spinning feeling of falling in love. Love is something that happens for them with every in and out breath.
I want to tell her that this isn’t ‘love’. That ‘love’ doesn’t stay the same, it changes like we do, it is shaped by our experiences, by what we do, who we meet, what we learn. I’d like to explain that falling in love now is not how it’ll be for ever, and even if you stay with the same boy for the rest of your life, this incarnation of love won’t stay the same, it never does.
Apparently, in relation to the teenager in front of me, it’s a stupid question for different reasons: ‘Everyone hooks up, Mum,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean love or anything like that.’
‘What do you mean “hooks up”?’ I reply. I’m not thick, I simply need to clarify that I’ve understood her properly.
‘You know, hooks up.’
I really don’t. Or, rather, I don’t want to. ‘So you’re pregnant as a result of “hooking up”?’
She says nothing because her food is suddenly very interesting, and it’s absolutely necessary to put two pieces of gnocchi into her mouth at once and chew very slowly, rendering her incapable of speech.
I lower my head to my food, too, and we eat in silence. After five minutes I look up at her. Her childish afro-puff pigtails, her grey, turquoise-trimmed school uniform, her friendship bracelet on her left wrist that is studded with pink, clear plastic butterflies. Hooking up? This girl in front of me has been hooking up?
‘You’re fourteen,’ I remind her. ‘Who “hooks up” at fourteen?’
I can’t see her abdomen, the place where the answer to my question is growing, because of the wood of our table. Who hooks up? Everyone ‘hooks up’ apparently.
5 months before That Day (May, 2011)
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‘For the love of … Why are you doing this to me, Joel? What Earthly reason could you have for trying to scrape away the inside of my head like this?’
‘I’m only making porridge,’ he laughed. His laughs always filled the room like the divine scent of freshly baked bread, slipped through me like syrup to remind me of all the good things in my world.
‘No, you are making porridge in a metal saucepan with a metal spoon. You know what it does to me. And why, anyway? Why?’ I indicated the metal container beside the stove, crammed with upturned utensils – a potato masher, a handheld grater, a spatula, and most importantly, loads and loads of wooden spoons of various sizes. ‘You’ve got a million wooden spoons there, we can’t move sometimes for wooden spoons, and you insist every time on using a metal spoon with the metal pan.’
‘I’m trying to save on washing up. If I use this I can eat with it, too.’
‘Like you do the washing up!’ I scoffed at him. ‘And, by the way, in case you haven’t noticed despite me telling you this all the time – that is not porridge, it is cement.’
‘It’s the only way to eat porridge,’ he said. As he spooned the ‘porridge’ into the white bowl with the ring of red flowers around its rim, he made theatrical cracking sounds as though the cement-like substance was breaking the bowl.
‘I’ll go get the kids up,’ I said, while he switched on the television. His fingers reached for the remote to click on BBC breakfast news, and he took his seat at the table. As I passed him on the way upstairs, I ran my hand over his hair, pausing to twist a tiny section between my fingertips, twirling the black strands back into its piece of a budding dreadlock.
Joel caught my wrist before I moved on, pulled me back and kissed the palm of my hand. ‘I’m proud of you and how you’re doing,’ he said quietly, before going back to his beige cement and catching up with the world news, his few minutes of peace before the world became full of our family.
Like his smile, like his laughs, those words diffused warmth through every cell in my body.
*
The sickness is still turning, but now it’s burrowing itself deeper and deeper into my stomach. I probably need to eat more to make it stop, I feel this more acutely when I’m hungry, but I can’t eat any more. My mouth will not allow me to chew any more, or swallow any more. The sense of failure I’m feeling right now, the horror that is accepting I am a bad mother, has dragged me closer and closer to actual vomiting. Once I’ve done that, have stopped this pervading sense of wanting to chuck up, maybe I’ll feel better, maybe the nausea will subside enough for me to think clearly.
‘Do you have any idea what you want to do?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head.
‘Do you want me to stop talking about it?’
A nod.
‘Me, too,’ I admit. ‘Look, I know it’s early, but let’s go to bed, sleep on it. Talk about it again in the morning.’
Shrug. ‘If you want.’
I squeeze my fingers onto my temples, close my eyes and fight the bile that has gushed unexpectedly up my throat.
I will not scream. I will not throw up and I will not scream.
‘You know what, Phoebe, it’s not a case of what I want, actually. I’m trying to be … This is something I seriously never thought I’d be dealing with. You don’t go out to parties or even ask to go to your friends’ houses – as far as I know you go to school and come home. This is not something I thought I had to worry about right now.
‘And because this is all such a shock, I’ve not thought through how I was going to react. So, I don’t know what to say or do right now at all, let alone what to say or do that won’t set you off. Also, I’m trying not to take it personally that you decided to tell some teacher at your school before you told me, like I’m some ogre who’s going to shout at you. I thought you knew you could trust me. After last time, after – What I’m saying is, I didn’t shout at you last time, did I? I understood, I did what was best for you. But still, you go off and tell some stranger this news first.’
‘He’s not a stranger,’ she states simply.
‘Well he’s a stranger to me!’ I snap, astounded that amongst all the other things wrong in this situation she’s defending her teacher. I inhale to push air right to the bottom of my lungs, to gather all my strength together. I exhale to release the anger and tension. ‘Look,’ I sound normal again, ‘let’s go to bed and talk again tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll both have clearer heads and maybe you’ll be able to tell me more. OK?’
Shrug. Then: nod.
I stand first. Both of us have left little mounds of food on our plates, me more than her but I think for a moment to tell her to finish it, to remind her she’s going to need her strength in the coming weeks and months whatever she decides. I can’t do that, though. It’s wrong on every level, and it’ll become something else for us to fall out over.
Before she can escape, I move around the table to her and swamp her in a hug. I may want to scream at her right now, but I love her and I want her to know that. She’s my world. She and Zane are my world, especially after what happened to Joel, especially after the secret I was forced to keep and the choice I had to make. I want Phoebe to know that I did what I had to do, it wasn’t easy, but I did it for her because I love her so much.
In my hold, she freezes. She’s unable or unwilling to accept anything like that from me. I hug her and Zane all the time, and while he hugs me back or rolls his eyes until it’s over, this is almost always Phoebe’s reaction nowadays: a rigid body in my arms as another reminder that no matter how hard I try to pretend, our family is shattered and my attempts to put us back together aren’t working.
‘I love you, baby,’ I whisper, as I used to do every day when she was a newborn, a toddler, a child. ‘I love you, baby’, I used to whisper because she had saved me. In ways I didn’t even admit to Joel, she’d helped me to put my life back on track and overcome some of my greatest fears. And then she turned twelve and a half and those days ended; cut short by the guillotine of losing Joel.
I’m treated to another shrug from Phoebe, this time to get me away from her. She doesn’t need me, she’s telling me. And she certainly doesn’t need my declarations of love.
I hold out my hand as she is about to turn for the door. ‘I need your mobile.’
‘What?’ she asks, incredulous.
‘You need to sleep, you can’t do that if you’re texting or on the net all night. Phone.’
‘No!’
‘Phone,’ I insist.
She bunches the two plump lines of her lips together over her gritted teeth, her eyes narrow to slits of naked disgust. I stare back at her, silently reminding her of the rules: after what she did last time, she can only have a phone if she gives it to me whenever I ask, and as long as I know the password so I can check it whenever I want.
Her breath comes in shallow, outraged bursts as she reaches into her rucksack that she’s decorated with blue, purple and red jewelled butterflies like the ones she used to sew the curtain, and throws the retrieved shiny silver and black gadget onto the table. Before I can pick it up, she snatches it up again, fiddles with the back until it is open, then slips out the rectangular battery and pockets it. She doesn’t want me to know the secrets that live in her phone.
That isn’t part of the deal, but I’m not sure I have the energy to fight about it right now. I certainly don’t think the sickness is going to be held back much longer. I am breathing through my nose, trying to stem the flow but even that’s ceasing to be effective.
Without bothering to reassemble her little box of secrets, she throws it onto the table and storms out of the room.
‘Just so you know,’ I call, causing her to pause on the fifth step to listen to what I am saying, ‘I’m taking the router up to bed with me, too.’
After she realises that I am cutting her off for the night, that she won’t be able to email or get onto social media on her iPod or the computer in her room, every stamp u
pstairs is increased to earthquake level. The slam of her bedroom door is so hard I swear the very foundations of the house shake.
I don’t make it to the upstairs loo. I dash to the small tiled room with a little wall-hung sink, that’s just off the kitchen. I drop to my knees, lift the lid of the toilet and finally let go of the anxiety and worry and horror that have been mixing inside me since the phone rang and my life took another turn for the worse.
That Day
My fingers are numb, my body is numb, my entire being is suddenly without air. There are a dozen little splattering thuds of blackberries falling onto the ground, there’s a crash of a white ceramic bowl hitting a white ceramic tile.
I snap myself out of there, drag myself from the pothole to the past and into the present where I need to be. And where I need to be is outside my daughter’s bedroom.
She’s quiet, careful, but I can still hear her small sobs, only partially muffled by her pillow. She needs to sleep, and she needs to cry. She needs to be alone with herself so she can feel this. Hiding from the pain will not help her, it’ll become a habit that’s virtually impossible to break. That’s why I took away her interactive distractions, made her come up here to be alone, so she can start to feel this. I don’t want to punish her, just help her to start to accept what’s going on. Unlike losing her dad, there’s a clock ticking over this situation; avoiding it, pretending it’s not happening, will only work for a very short amount of time. With losing her dad, with losing Joel, we can try to defer that grief for the rest of our lives.
I walk past her room to the main bedroom – it always smarts like a flick at my heart how quickly it became my bedroom after being ours for nearly ten years – but I don’t enter. Instead, I open the door, place the router inside, then shut the door as I usually do, so Phoebe thinks I’ve gone to bed. Next, I navigate the uneven, noisy corridor floorboards and creep back to my place beside her room. I sit on the floor and briefly touch my fingers to the mottled dark wood door. ‘I love you, baby,’ I mouth and I hope she feels it. That it seeps through the wood, that it floats through the air to her and she can breathe it in.