‘Julia,’ I say, louder this time, ‘Julia, time to get up. Last day of work before maternity leave.’ Across the decades, words echo back: last day of school before holidays; last day of holidays before school; last day before we leave you at Granny and Gramps’s, and take Jack on holiday. Last day.
Julia moans and turns over, her back to me. ‘Just five more minutes,’ she mutters.
‘Julia.’ My voice is strong and strict. ‘Get. Up. Now.’
This is talk my baby understands, that she knows, and she groans and sits up.
She complains the whole time about how terrible she looks, so pregnant. But to me she has never been more beautiful. I feel sad for Daniel that he’s missed this, but that only lasts a minute before I feel angry at Daniel and his stupidity, and instead, I feel sad for Mike that he can’t see this, even though I tell him all about it.
And Jack. Since the day Julia turned up on my doorstep, that day I had decided to die, I have thought about Jack almost constantly. Often I find myself about to say something before I remember that Julia still doesn’t know anything about him. Sometimes I open my mouth to tell her, but the words won’t come out.
Julia rubs her face. ‘Maternity leave,’ she says.
I smile. ‘From tomorrow. This party is going to get started pretty soon.’
She takes a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I can do this.’
‘You can do anything.’
‘Including have a baby on my own and totally screw up my life?’ She’s smiling, but I can see it is forced.
‘Julia,’ I say, ‘we are not doing this again. A baby is always a good thing and your life is not screwed up.’
Losing a baby, that screws up a life – is what I want to tell her. Having a baby does not. The only problem I can see with having a baby is that you might lose it. But I can’t think like that.
I turn to leave her room.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘I couldn’t have survived this without you.’
My heart swells with a feeling I have seldom felt: pride at being a good mother to Julia; pride at having done exactly the right thing. I want to tell her that it is my pleasure, my joy. But I don’t want to make her feel like she is weak.
‘You would have been fine, Julia,’ I say. ‘You’re a strong woman.’
And then I go into the bathroom and I cry, and I don’t know if it is from joy or sadness or fear of what is to come.
Julia
As my mother leaves my room, I smile. Her answer is so typical – emotional outpourings don’t go very far with her: no hysterical declarations of love. But in the last four months I’ve been back living here, I’ve learnt to read my mother better, and there is a shift in her. There’s a tiny bit of softness showing through her hard shell, and today I see it in the moment when she pauses before she answers me, the love showing in the way she holds her shoulders.
I didn’t expect myself to be back living with my mother, twenty-eight years old and pregnant with a married man’s baby. That was not on my script. Even that morning when I arrived on her doorstep, I wasn’t expecting to stay. But Daniel was gone. Of course, I knew that he’d gone to Claire. I hadn’t realised that he’d actually followed her to Mauritius. And that he wasn’t invited. He’d just gone. But I knew I had lost him.
I wasn’t going to stay with my mother. I arrived on her doorstep, expecting that she would, in her strange, unemotional way, comfort me and help me back onto the path of my life. I thought I would spend an hour or two with her telling me stiff-upper-lippish things, and then I would return to the business of Daniel leaving me in the same way I’ve had to handle all the other challenges of my life – essentially, but not entirely, alone.
But there was something different about my mother that morning. For a start, she was in her pyjamas and she looked terrible. My mother never looks terrible. She never looks great either, but she always brushes her hair and teeth and dresses in neat, clean clothes. Recently, she’d started to look really good – she’d actually had her hair coloured and cut, and her clothes seemed to be a bit smarter. But that morning, she looked terrible – her face was splotchy and ravaged. If it was anyone but her, I would’ve thought they’d been up all night crying. But that obviously couldn’t have been the case, and I will admit that I was too distressed to think about it much more.
But that wasn’t the really strange part. The really strange part was how she reacted to me. She opened her arms and let me throw myself into them, and then she led me into the house, stroking my back and making soothing sounds. And then she made me a cup of sweet tea, and one for herself, and we curled up on the sofa together and I told her everything. And she didn’t give me any practical advice. She just stroked my back and made supportive noises.
When I’d finally cried myself out, I looked at her and said, ‘So, what must I do?’
And then instead of Helen’s Practical Step-by-Step Life Advice Guide, I got a shrug. ‘You’re really sad,’ she said. ‘I think maybe you should just stay here.’
‘With you?’
She smiled. ‘Yes, with me.’
‘But you like being on your own,’ I said.
‘Do I?’ She looked confused, almost, and – I don’t say this lightly – almost vulnerable.
‘Well, that’s what you always tell me,’ I said. ‘And
