Maybe one day, p.1
Maybe One Day, page 1
Dedication
For Mr Hedgehog, with love
Title Page
Contents Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Acknowledgements
About the author
Credits
Copyright
Chapter 1
Thousands of songs and poems and stories have been written about love. Millions of pages have been filled with trillions of words; countless sad songs have been sung in countless sad bars by countless battered men with battered guitars. Endless nights have been fevered with the search for the perfect match that will make everything all right. For the ‘one’ that will make everything – everything – feel better.
It starts early, if you’re lucky. With parents who adore you, with attention and kindness and indulgence. With books filled with pictures of cartoon hares challenging you to guess how much they love you. With friends or siblings or aunties or granddads, a whole world of love surrounding you like a sheltering, cocooning bubble.
Before long, though, it’s not cartoon hares or Mum and Dad. It’s a whole different world of love. It’s that boy who sits in front of you in Geography; the one with the gorgeous hair and the cocky smile and the cool trainers. The one that makes you giddy when he smiles, and whose name you doodle surreptitiously on your pencil case, trying out his surname for size in advance of the inevitable wedding.
You talk to your friends about him, all the time, and you think about literally Nothing Else At All. You analyse every word, every movement, every casual chew of every gunked up wad of gum. He is the only thing that matters, the only thing that feels real. It might not be the same for everyone. It might be a girl pining for a boy, a boy pining for a girl, or any combination of the above. It might happen when you’re fourteen, or when you’re forty. But at some point, it probably will happen – the search for love will begin.
You won’t be alone in your obsession. In fact, rarely has a subject been so well discussed and yet so badly understood – because it seems to me that nobody has a clue what love is all about. We’ve all experienced it, but we all have a different version of it.
The voices on the radios and the iPods and the record players all around the world; the words on the pages of books in libraries and stores and on dusty shelves, the names and heart shapes carved into tree trunks – they all have a viewpoint. They just don’t seem able to agree what it is.
Is it a many splendoured thing, or a crazy little thing? Is it a battlefield, or is it a drug? A red red rose, an unchained melody, a labour lost? And is it really all you need, like The Beatles would have us believe?
I’ll be buggered if I know – it’s confused me since the beginning.
But I do know this one thing, with complete certainty: I have lived with love. I have felt its touch, and blossomed beneath it, and been transformed by it. I have been blessed by it, and burned by it. I’ve felt the scars it leaves when it’s snatched away, the pain that lives in the void of its absence. I’ve seen it packed up, in a small white box, and wheeled down the aisle of a church.
I’ve lived my life with love, and for so many years now I’ve lived my life without it – and I know which I prefer. It’s what the kids might call a no-brainer.
So tonight, as I lie here beneath a too-familiar duvet in a too-familiar house surrounded by too-familiar noises, I’ve decided that I need to be brave. I need to find my courage, and look for love again. I need to reach out, and see which way my story ends. To find him, and hold him, and tell him how much I regret the terrible things that happened between us. The terrible things that happened to both of us.
Nothing so far in my life has led me to believe in fairy tales or happy endings. I am not a Disney princess, and my world is completely devoid of picture-perfect moments and moving speeches and passionate yearning.
But tonight, I have stayed up late, reading by the light of a full, silvered moon shining through my open curtains. And tonight I have made my decision – to reach for that happy ending, even if I never find it.
The sun crept over the trees about ten minutes ago, gold usurping the silver. It’s a fresh dawn. A new beginning. The start of rediscovering everything I thought I’d lost.
Only twenty-four hours ago, I was getting up, brushing my teeth, drinking tea alone in a silent kitchen as I was preparing for a funeral. Preparing to say my final goodbyes to a woman I loved. Hard to believe that was only a day gone by.
A day that started with a funeral – but ended with hope. Hope that I discovered wrapped in tissue paper, hidden in a box, among the forgotten clothes and broken sewing machines and decaying cobwebs of a long untouched attic. Hope that I never knew existed, and which now illuminates my being like sunlight filtered through lemon-washed linen.
Hope. How did I ever live without it?
Chapter 2
The Beginning – the day before
My mother’s funeral is a small, sad affair, held on a sunny early summer’s day that somehow makes its lack of fanfare feel even worse. Nature is having a party, but nobody else is celebrating.
The crematorium is picturesque, its tree-lined routes shaded by pink and white cherry blossom, the blooms so heavy and full with life that they droop and spill onto the pathways. The petals flutter and dance in the breeze, settling on the hearse as I follow in the solitary funeral car, vibrant against the sombre black as I drive alone towards our destination.
I look through the car window and see life and energy and rebirth; I hear the sound of birdsong and the low-level hum of insects. I feel the soothing warmth of the sun on my skin through the glass, and I close my eyes and try to stop myself enjoying it. It seems disrespectful to enjoy anything on a day like this.
There are only five of us at the funeral, and that includes the vicar. Or the celebrant, whatever the official name is for the middle-aged lady who stands at the front, attempting to string together a coherent tribute to a woman she’s never met. Who had a life that feels too small, too narrow, to fill a whole five minutes’ worth of platitudes. She was my mum, and I loved her – but there isn’t much to say.
We all sit there, dappled by stained glass light, in one small row. The sum total of my mother’s world: me, my aunt Rosemary and uncle Simon, and my cousin, Michael. My mother hadn’t planned this funeral – she wasn’t one of those people who made special requests about how the end of her life should be marked.
Of course, she might have done, if she hadn’t been incapacitated by a series of strokes four years earlier. After that, she was barely capable of eating a jelly on her own, never mind articulating her last wishes.
The service is blessedly short; the awkwardness over quickly. I’m struck again by the confines of my mother’s life, the controlled environment in which she failed to thrive. A stage lit entirely in shades of beige. I wish there’d been more joy, more abandon, more rule-breaking.
I cast glances at Rosemary, my mother’s sister, who sits upright and rigid throughout. If she feels any emotion at all, she doesn’t show it – not even a sniffle into a clenched tissue, or a hand held in her husband’s. Nothing to mark the fact that my mother, who she grew up with, must have played with and laughed with during simpler times, is gone. I struggle to imagine them as children together, carefree and adventurous.
I always wanted a sister, always dreamed it would be joyous. Someone to share my triumphs and sorrows, and help me through days like this. But perhaps, I think, looking at my aunt, it wouldn’t be like that at all.
She is the very epitome of a stiff upper lip, and it’s infectious. It sets the tone, and informs the way we all behave, as we say our goodbyes to a woman who was a wife, a mother, presumably at some point a lover, an angst-ridden teenager, a little girl with gaps in her teeth. She must have had hopes and dreams and wild moments and passions and regrets – at least I hope so.
I don’t remember her being anything other than Mum – and Rosemary isn’t the type to share stories. Perhaps it’s too painful for her. Perhaps I am doing her a disservice, and beneath her calm, cold exterior is a deep well of pain, barely held together.
My pain is there, too, my very own barely-held-together hell. I’ve looked after my mum for years; my life has been dominated by her routines and rituals and needs. By understanding that although her body was broken and her ability to communicate was compromised, she was still there, still inside, still my mum.
I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments where I dreamed of freedom, of being liberated from the scheduling and the carers and the hospital appointments and the constant awareness that I could never risk a spontaneous moment of my own.
Now, of course, I have that freedom, and it’s an unwanted gift that I’d quite like to return, unopened. Right now, the gift of freedom feels overrated, especially when it comes wrapped in guilt and tied with a big shiny bow made of grief.
My mother was not young. My mother was not well. My mother was suffering. My mother, as everyone involved in her care has either implied or said out loud since her death, had probably yearned to be at peace.
Whether their view is that she’s sitting on a cloud in Heaven surrounded by celestial angels and reunited with all her loved ones (her care assistant, Elaine), or that she’s at least out of pain (our GP), or that she lives on in the Spirit Otherworld (the lady who works at the pharmacy who wears crystal pendants), the agreed wisdom – reduced to a few harsh words – is that she’s better off dead.
Maybe they’re right, who knows? None of us do, but it all adds to the whirlpool inside my head. I feel guilty that I ever wished for freedom. I feel guilty that I want her to still be alive even though she was suffering. I feel relieved that she’s gone, for her and for me, and then I feel guilty that I feel relieved. I basically feel too much, all the time, and with absolutely no consistency. I’m trapped on a deeply unpleasant roller-coaster.
I keep all of this hidden, of course, for the time being. Wouldn’t want to let the side down, or give Aunt Rosemary a heart attack. It’s safely tucked away – damped down, coiled inside me, angry and eager to break free.
I won’t show my weakness in front of people. Not the vicar, or the ushers, or the funeral director, or what’s left of my family. My mother would have been mortified at the public display of emotion. She saved her tears for characters in soap operas, weeping along with their lost loves and failed marriages and lothario love rats. In the real world, until she was ill, she was always precise, tidy and controlled.
That’s how she would have wanted this thing to be done, I think. This funeral, this farewell. With minimum fuss, no weeping and wailing and beating of chests. Quiet and dignified and quick. Like her, this also needs to be precise, tidy and controlled.
So I hold it all in, and barely hear the words, and train my eyes to skim over the coffin that looms so large in front of us. I can’t look at that box, and stay controlled, because that box contains my mother. That box proves she is really gone.
When it’s finally done, the coffin slides along its tracks and behind the magic curtain. It’s all extremely strange and surreal, like this is happening to somebody else entirely, and I am witnessing it from outside my own body.
We leave the room and stand outside together in the shade of the Victorian Gothic building, hands shielding our eyes from the rude intrusion of sunlight that contorts around corners and pierces through gaps in the guttering. We form a small, awkward huddle of social niceties all dressed in black.
As we exit, the next party arrives on the conveyor belt of death – this one is huge, a convoy of shining cars, noisy, wet crying, massive floral arrangements that spell out the word ‘Granddad’ in carnations and lilies. The sound of Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’ floats in the air as the tear-stained family make their way inside. There will be a ‘do’ afterwards, I’m sure – pork pies and Scotch eggs and a lot of drinking and crying and possibly a fight. They’ll do it their way.
Their way, of course, is not our way, and Rosemary looks at it all with distaste, as though expressing grief is unforgivably common and lower class. She flicks a stray blossom petal from the shoulder of her black jacket, and says nothing.
There is no wake for us, no reception. No tearful karaoke at a pub, where we all share war stories and precious memories and mournful laughter. We simply prepare to go our separate ways.
‘At least she’s not suffering any more,’ Rosemary says.
‘It’s a blessing, really,’ adds Simon.
‘You’re right, of course. Thank you for coming,’ I reply, because that is what is expected of me. Because for the sake of my mother’s memory, I will remain precise, tidy and controlled, at least for a few minutes more.
My aunt and uncle politely hug me, as this too is expected – it is clearly in the Bereaved Family Book of Acceptable Etiquette. It is a brief hug, keeping all physical contact to the required minimum, offered and received with an equal lack of enthusiasm. I watch them walk away to Simon’s Jag, awash with relief.
Michael stays with me. If I am being kind, I will assume this is to offer his support in my time of need. If I am not being kind, I will think it is because he will do literally anything to avoid spending more time than is absolutely necessary with his parents. There is, now I come to think of it, no reason that it can’t be both.
We have all come to the funeral separately – me in the funeral car, Michael in his Fiat 500, his parents in their Jag – and you don’t need to be Freud to analyse that. We couldn’t be any more obviously broken, even if we wore T-shirts with the words ‘Dysfunctional Family’ emblazoned on them.
Now, the big black cars are gone, along with the undertakers, away to cause simmering road rage elsewhere. After a brief discussion with my cousin, he offers to give me a lift home and I gratefully accept. I’m not in the mood to make casual conversation with a taxi driver. He crams his awkwardly tall frame into his tiny Fiat, and I sit next to him, thinking he looks like a giant behind the wheel of a Lilliputian car.
We’re quiet as we drive, both still infected by our family’s entrenched belief that silence is the only dignified way of communicating. You can’t cause a scene if you’re silent, or say anything embarrassing if you say nothing at all. He puts on some music, and we both smile guiltily as Katy Perry roars. It feels jarring, out of place, funny. Rosemary would hate it, which makes it even more of a naughty pleasure.
Together, me and Michael and Katy, we come home, back here, to the place where I grew up.
It’s a handsome house; detached and Edwardian, built in mellow, pale stone. It’s double-fronted with large windows and five big bedrooms. It is a house built for more people than it ever held during our time here; for more living than it ever experienced during our custodianship. For more noise than we ever made.
It sits in a quiet part of what was once a village, but after the arrival of a large estate in the 1950s expanded into being a small town, almost against its will.
The older village buildings are pretty and timbered, with a touristy black-and-white painted pub and a quaint village hall and a higgledy-piggledy row of old cottages that are now sweet shops and craft centres.
The newer part – the part that developed after the estate – has a Wetherspoon’s and an Aldi and some truly ugly concrete blocks that contain betting shops and places that sell vaping equipment and unlock mobile phones. Pretty much Sodom and Gomorrah as far as my family were concerned.
Our house is firmly enclosed within the posher side of town, on a tree-lined street, near a duck pond and the post office and the primary school where I work.
Now, after I unlock the big wooden door and walk inside, I am standing in the cool air of an old building on a hot day. Around me, I see the splinters of my mother’s existence, burrowed beneath the skin of the house. I see the zimmer frame she rarely used; the recliner chair she practically lived in; the side table laden with pills and potions and her blood pressure monitor, wires curled like a slumbering snake.
I see the days and months and years and decades, embedded in the walls, in layers of wallpaper, in outdated lamps that were popular in the 1980s, in the swoosh of heavy brocade curtains that kept the glare from the TV screen as she sat and stared at the soaps she always claimed to hate while my dad was still alive.
He despised them with every ounce of his being – watching the trials and tribulations of common people with common accents was never going to appeal to him.
After he died, I thought maybe my mother would break free. That she might emerge from the confines of her oh-so-proper life and start going to raves and eating Pot Noodles in the nude or join an acapella choir.
In reality, all she did was start watching EastEnders and Coronation Street. Maybe that was rebellion enough for her. Maybe that was all she had left inside her by then.
Michael shakes his head and looks spooked. His expression resembles that of Shaggy from Scooby Doo when they first enter a haunted mansion.
