Love Lee and love Bean. Make more babies from your love and all be kind to each other
Go back to school and go on to uni if you want to. Anna and Nanna Doris will help with Bean. Promise me this
Don’t fight all your difficult emotions, including those you’re having right now; all your feelings are valid. Feelings are how we know we’re alive
NEVER EVER forget the WAWA!
So, please carry my words and know that I will always be with you. I will be a gentle movement within you, every other heartbeat, every other breath.
Everything that’s happened has proven that it doesn’t matter WHO you are from, Minnie, but WHAT … and you are from love, my sweet child.
There was another Minnie before you. For her, for me and, most of all, for you, please have a good, honest, optimistic life, and laugh a lot.
Remember this also, Min: I can go because you have Anna. She is your home whenever you need her. She is a fantastic person. She is your mother too. Please call her mum if you want to, pronounce her name loud and strong, “Mum”, and I’ll be there too, when you do.
Believe me when I tell you that I rest in soft peace. I’ve done my job the best I can. I live on in you. So, I can go home now.
I love you so very much,
Your mum
Hope (Chairperson of the Wawa Club)
XX’
Anna looked up.
The room was silent.
Hope’s words to her were ringing in Anna’s head: ‘I can do this because of you …’
Minnie rang the buzzer on the side of her bed, and it was Dr Chandra himself who rushed in. Minnie asked him to come close. He leant in; she kissed his cheek and whispered, ‘That’s from my mum,’ and she took the stethoscope from around his neck. She put the ear tips in her ears, she gave Bean to Lee, and she placed the flat diaphragm on her chest. She listened. There, loud and clear, was
Hope.
Acknowledgements
THANK YOU SO MUCH
Malcolm Dalrymple-Hay – heart stuff
Veronica Eagles – registrar stuff
Judge Angela Du Sautoy – legal stuff
Claire Hamilton-Russell – divorce stuff
Amy Dunstan – midwife stuff
Emma Kilcoyne, Carol Noble, Jon Fink – friend/writer encouragement stuff
Louise Moore – editor stuff
Jill Taylor – more editor stuff
Liz Smith & all who look out for me at Penguin stuff
Maureen Vincent – agent stuff (& so much more)
Robert Kirby – literary agent stuff
Neil Reading – PR stuff
Sammy, Dave, Mike & Karen – home-front stuff
Biggs – for claiming it’s his book stuff
The Mighty B.F. – sanity stuff
LAST & BEST: Sue – for other-half-of-me stuff and all the bleddy endless typing!
AN EXTRACT FROM
Landed
As if tightly choreographed by Pina Bausch, every puffy face in every serried row on the British Airways 747 is obediently upturned, staring at the seatbelt sign overhead. An elastic moment where a random group of strangers are united, some don’t even breathe so suspended are they. Bing bong. The familiar cue releases them from their airline aspic, and all at once the plane bursts into a chaotic scuffle of bodies racing to grab their belongings, rushing to be first to stand still in a queue to get off. Everyone is frazzled, perhaps it’s the lack of fresh air that makes people so grumpy. They all seem to have somewhere very very important to be. Somewhere that just can’t wait. So, come on, hurry up. Me first. Shuffle. Push. Jostle.
In 26A, Rosie is the only person who remains seated. She gazes calmly out of the window with her forehead tilted onto the glass. She has been sitting just like this for the best part of the journey, lost in thought. No, not lost. Found in thought. Thinking such a lot, working out how she feels about flying away from everything and everyone that she knows and starting an impetuous new adventure like this. She feels strangely calm, accepting. She has surely surrendered to her future, whatever it might bring. So why is she the only one still sitting, whilst the others have filed off the plane in an impatient orderly line, exiting past the very polite, well-rehearsed air stewardesses?
‘Thank you for flying British Airways.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you for flying with us today.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Have a lovely day.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Thank you for flying British Airways.’
‘Cheerio.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Yes, thank you, yes, get off, yes, go away, sod off, goodbye.’
Why isn’t she moving?
You know that tiny fragment of time, just exactly before the point of no return? The golden moment where you might … could … just maybe COULD change your mind, and reverse it all? Take it all back, say no, don’t jump, be safe, go home. That moment? That’s where Rosie is. Part of her wants to remain on the plane and let it bounce her back home on its return journey with all the new crew that will come aboard, fresh faced, fresh make-up, fresh hairdo, fresh smell. Spit spot. Bound for home. For home. For lovely familiar drizzly comfy old England. Where, even if she knows it’s wrong, at least she knows how to be. That’s where Rosie Kitto, thirty-eight, primary school teacher, is assuredly grown up, reliable and emotionally tuned in. This new Rosie Kitto seems to be running away like a ser iously immature selflsh twit. Very ungrown up.
Who is she?
Well, she is the person who, a couple of weeks ago, said no to all the even keel, and yes to grabbing life by the throat, yes to jumping off the edge, yes to what the hell’s it going to be like?, yes to being afraid. YES, YES, YES PLEASE!
That’s right.
So, get out of your seat, Rosie, this is New York … here goes … COME ON!!
‘Thank you for flying British Airways today, goodbye.’
AN EXTRACT FROM
ONE
Ed
Wednesday
