She had dual nationality, it transpired. She was both Canadian and English, and had alternated, since her parents’ divorce many years before, between Toronto and Kent. She had a boyfriend back in Toronto too, though I suppose ‘she’d had’ would be the correct tense. Because other than to collect some things during her single trip back to Canada, she never saw him again.
Amy was so bright and funny and sexy that none of my mates could believe she was mine. Even Dad was under her spell. ‘Well done, son,’ he told me. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself this time.’
But no matter how much everyone liked Amy, Amy didn’t seem to like Whitby at all.
‘Do you have to live here?’ she asked me, halfway through our second week of living as a couple. ‘Or would you consider moving down south?’
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’ I asked her, feeling quite shocked.
She shrugged and pulled a face. ‘It’s a bit . . . you know . . . gritty.’
‘Gritty?’ I said.
‘It’s a bit like living in a documentary.’
‘Well, my dad’s here,’ I pointed out, doing my best to ignore the slur on my home town. ‘And he’s not getting any younger. My mates are here, too. My business is here . . .’
‘Yeah, and my mum’s in Kent,’ Amy said, ‘and she’s even older. My friends are all in Canterbury.’
‘I thought they were all in Toronto,’ I said.
‘Not really,’ Amy replied. ‘Not my real friends.’
And I was in love with her, wasn’t I? It wasn’t the calm, deep, meaningful kind of love that my parents had either. It was the hormonal, raised-heartbeat kind of love, where you struggle to work out where sex ends and love begins, where you end and the loved one begins . . . And there’s not much you can do to fight that kind of love. It makes everything seem possible. It makes nothing seem unreasonable.
So we moved south. What else was I going to do?
We rented a flat in the north of Canterbury, and Amy introduced me to her friends. They were all crystals-and-homeopathy kind of people, and I didn’t feel I had a huge amount in common with them. If I’m honest, I struggled to convince myself that they were particularly good friends to Amy, either, but I never would have said that out loud.
I found work easily, and putting up kitchens in Kent rather than Yorkshire made little difference; if anything, I was simply better paid. There was more money down south, that much was clear.
I made some new drinking buddies through work, and though these weren’t the deep friendships I’d left behind, they were enough to stop me feeling lonely. Amy found work teaching Pilates and jazz dance at the local gym, so between us we started to live quite well. For a while, everything seemed fine.
But Amy wasn’t happy in Canterbury, either, it transpired. The people were superficial, she said. City life was too aggressive. She wanted to get closer to nature.
We started visiting villages around Canterbury, but none of them really suited Amy.
They were too small, so she’d never be able to earn a living. Or they were too big and didn’t feel like the country at all. It was the same with the houses we looked at: too big, too small, too draughty, too new . . . The hormones that had fired up our relationship for two years were finally wearing off as well, so I was starting to be able to see Amy more clearly. I was beginning to understand she had a problem. Nothing was ever enough.
Amy had skeletons in the closet, too. Something about her fabulous family wasn’t quite right.
Her mother lived in nearby Ashford, and Amy would visit her most weeks. But me? Though Amy would tell me often how kind or clever or funny she was, I didn’t seem to be allowed even to glimpse the woman, nor did I ever speak to her on the phone. I began to wonder if she existed; wondered if Amy wasn’t seeing another man.
The day I challenged her about it was the day we had the biggest row we’d ever had. But though there was lots of shouting, it was an argument that provided no answers.
‘She’s my mother!’ was all Amy would tell me. ‘She’s not your mother.’
‘You’ve met my dad,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘And he loves you to bits.’
‘So what?’ Amy asked, her voice trembling. ‘I mean, for fuck’s sake, Joe. It’s up to me, isn’t it?’
Eventually, I scratched my head and conceded. It was up to her, wasn’t it? And if she didn’t want me to meet her amazing mother, then who was I to complain? ‘Think yourself lucky,’ a joiner I worked with told me one day. ‘My mother-in-law’s an absolute bloody nightmare.’
The next time Amy returned from Ashford she showed me a photo she’d taken on her Blackberry. It pictured her wearing the clothes she’d left the house in that morning, next to a grey-haired woman. They had the same shape of nose, the same distinguished jawline . . . It was obvious they were mother and daughter.
‘Happy?’ Amy asked. ‘Convinced?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Fine. Whatever.’ My business had really taken off by then, and there was far more work than I could manage. So Amy’s mother wasn’t that high on my list of priorities anyway.
I took on a twenty-year-old apprentice, who, amusingly, was also called Joe. Our clients began referring to us as ‘the Joes’, and eventually that’s what we painted on the side of the van.
In 2008 we bought a house, a red-brick doer-upper out in Chislet. Actually, though I did all the work on the place, it was always more Amy’s than it was mine. Her dad, in Toronto, had retired and sold his business, sending her a chunk of money in the process.
It had been Amy’s idea to buy the place, too. What with the financial crisis and everything, she didn’t trust the banks, she said, so buying a house was the logical choice. In theory, she was going to grow organic vegetables in
