‘I am much better,’ Amy says. Then, ‘Mad, indeed . . . Huh!’
‘Not from me,’ Joe says, raising his palms.
‘No, that didn’t come from me, either,’ I say.
They head out just before twelve, leaving Joe and me alone with the girls.
‘So what now, Batman?’ I ask him. ‘Do you have a plan?’
Joe, who is perched on the garden wall just beyond the open kitchen door, replies, ‘Well, I need to go and get some paint for in here.’
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ I say, smiling at him. ‘A plan about Ben.’
He runs one hand across his face like a flannel and sighs. ‘Well, I guess it has to be the same deal as with Ant,’ he says. ‘School holidays. As much access as she wants. But school holidays only.’
‘As much access as Ben wants, too,’ I point out.
‘Yeah,’ Joe says. ‘Yes, it’s going to have to be a sort of multilateral peace deal, isn’t it?’
‘And if she says no?’ I ask. ‘If she wants him in term time?’
Joe’s eyebrow twitches. ‘Do you think she might?’
‘No, no, I don’t,’ I tell him. ‘But if she does, then I think we need a plan.’
‘Then we let Ben choose, I guess,’ he says. ‘He’s nine. He’s old enough to say what he wants.’
We call the girls downstairs and eat sandwiches in the garden.
‘Is Amy going to take Ben for good?’ Lucy asks, once I’ve explained why he isn’t present.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘No, she’s definitely not going to do that.’
‘Is he still coming with us to Daddy’s next week?’ Sarah asks.
‘No, I expect he’ll go and stay with his mum,’ Joe tells her. ‘But it’s just down the road from your dad’s, isn’t it? So maybe you’ll still get to see each other.’
‘I hope we can still use the pool,’ Lucy says.
‘Are you going to go and live with Amy again?’ Sarah asks Joe, channelling my most irrational fear. In a way, I’m glad she’s asked the question, not because I don’t know the answer, but because hearing him answer it reassures me.
‘No,’ Joe says, sounding definitive. ‘No, we’re a family now, aren’t we?’
‘Good,’ Sarah replies cutely. ‘I like playing families with you.’
‘We’re not playing families,’ I tell her. ‘We really are a family.’ Just saying it makes me feel a glow inside and I glance at Joe, hoping to catch his eye, but he’s busy tossing the salad.
‘Oh, OK,’ Sarah says with a shrug. ‘Even better.’
Amy
It was my mother’s death that did it. That’s what sent me over the edge.
I’d been doing fine, following Ant’s departure. Well, I say fine, but that’s probably overstating things somewhat. I was, I’ll admit, feeling angry, sad, lonely, and from time to time quite severely depressed. But I was still functioning, just about. I was eating and cooking and working. All things considered, that didn’t seem too bad.
Ant had left without argument, and though that had clearly been what I wanted, his easy acceptance, his, ‘Oh, really? OK. Fine,’ had also been a fresh source of trauma. Because how could I ever have let myself believe in that relationship? I wondered. How on earth could I have got things so very wrong? When you fuck up that badly in life, it makes you doubt your judgement about everything else as well.
On the third of May, I got the call. Mum had died in her sleep, the warden informed me. She’d slipped ‘peacefully from this world’.
Even then, I managed to hold it together. I emailed Dad to tell him. I arranged the death certificate and drove out to Ashford to book a funeral.
Only three people attended: myself, my friend Wanda, and an old lady called Clare.
Afterwards, as we were leaving, she came up to speak to me. ‘She’s in a better place,’ she said. ‘Such a troubled soul, your mother.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘She was.’
‘You’re OK, though, are you?’ she asked, rather intensely.
I frowned and leaned towards her, unsure if I’d understood her meaning correctly.
‘It’s just . . . these things do tend to run in the family,’ she said.
‘You know that’s not true,’ Wanda told me, as I was driving her back to her flat.
‘What isn’t?’ I asked. I’d been thinking about the cavernous silence of the house back in Chislet, and was wondering if I could stay at Wanda’s for the night.
‘That it runs in families,’ she said. ‘You are fine. You know that, right?’
But neither of those things was true. That was what I knew. These things do tend to run in families. And I definitely wasn’t fine.
Back home, I went to see my GP. He prescribed benzos and put me on a waiting list to talk to a counsellor. But as the first available appointment was in September, I could barely see the point.
By the end of May I was falling apart. I felt broken, but, worse, believed that I now understood that I had always been broken. And from my fresh viewpoint of broken-ness, it struck me as inevitable that I would finish my days like my mother. Unless, that was, I got proper help. But I was terrified that returning to my GP would lead to my waking up in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – with Nurse Ratched dishing out the pills.
Wanda suggested a clinic in Switzerland she’d heard of, but though it looked to be as far from the Cuckoo’s Nest as a clinic could possibly be, the prices were absolutely astronomical. It was impossible, I told myself: selling my house would barely cover the cost of a course of treatment. But though I tried to resist, I kept being drawn to the dreamy images on their website, photos of smiling, happy people who looked somehow like better versions of me.
My father coughed up the cash without argument. He was old, I guess, not to mention obscenely rich. Plus, I can only suppose that, having been the cause of so much of my trauma, paying to ‘fix me’ seemed only fair to him. ‘It’s your inheritance
