Darling Read online

  My babylove, meanwhile, needed me as much as ever. Have you any idea how much it costs to access regular hydrotherapy? A hell of a lot. We had a great girl there, Sally, who was only about nineteen and full of giggles herself, never mind my Stevie. Each Wednesday she put his proximal muscles through their paces and she advised that I should look into getting her on the NHS while we were still in the earliest stages. I told her I would. It was a real postcode lottery when it came to things like funding hydrotherapy, as any DMD family would tell you.

  So on such afternoons we changed into our costumes, me as well as Stevie, and I assisted Sally by supporting my son, who hated getting too much water in his face, and filling her in on his progress; together we helped him strengthen his still-good muscles.

  That was just one of the special activities Stevie needed. Our weekly list was uncompromising:

  Make sure Stevie does his daily stretching exercises every morning

  Go to the doctors

  Go to swimming classes, Monday and Thursday

  Answer emails and update Stevie’s Wonders on his progress

  Give massages to ward off cramps

  Take him to hydrotherapy with Sally on Wednesdays

  Clean and dry the KAFOs

  Coordinate diaries with Ange, the childminder

  Update his health app with calories consumed etc every day

  Avoid fractures

  Read more about Duchenne

  Avoid fractures, avoid fractures, avoid fractures

  It was unlikely that Stevie would ever become incontinent, although he did sometimes have trouble getting to the loo fast enough in his KAFOs. If the disease followed the route it normally did – but who knew what breakthroughs might come before then? – then the list would extend to include complex arrangements around ventilation, antibiotic courses and anti-flu vaccination, anaesthetic avoidance, steroid use, standing frames and the management of every last discomfort. Some cases even needed spinal surgery, but I chose not to think about that. Discomforts would be managed, long lists would be completed with love, and that would be enough.

  Lola. Dear Lola! Lola was moping in plain sight because she presumed her clunky sabotage (I was no fool) had spoiled my surprise, but quite the opposite. I hated surprises when it came to the most important things of all. I liked to know where I was. So after she spilled the beans, not only did I know – he wants to marry me – but I could get that special secret kick out of knowing. I could prepare; become ever-ready and energised, like an old battery about to be put to use. From that day on I intended to walk taller and with that knowing sway that only the luckiest women had reason to adopt as they moved through the world. From that day, some ponderous wheel turned in me that meant I would never smoke again; I breathed in the pristine future. La! I would be primed, polished and ready to shout out my love in reply to his question. I did my toenails, my nailnails. I managed my body hair with extra care and monitored every inch of me for readiness. I prepared to be thrilled. Every time he pushed back something else, everyone else, in order to spend time alone with me, whenever he suggested a stroll or a dinner, I knew that my stomach would be sure to shiver, to shimmy. I planned my proposal-acceptance outfit, my selfie-for-two hair. I was just like Lola, standing on her great stage of the future, except the spotlight was on me, on the two of us and it was happening.

  A gift of stomach-twisting delight. And all thanks to the lovely Lola.

  It was Friday night. I had opted to make my poorly step-daughter-to-be (shh!) a real Jamaican chicken noodle soup. Saturday Soup, my mum used to call it – but la-la-la it taste gud all week long, Darling! She made it with a scrawny, scrumptious chicken back, but they didn’t grow on trees round here (even if the neighbours’ maverick Buff Orpingtons did keep trying to roost in Thomas’s horse chestnut). My muscular broth was therefore a next-generation, localised version that used chicken wings, but Stevie knew no better; he loved my Saturday Soup. It might have been more than a little delicious, but most of all I think he loved the time it took me to chop hard-arsed vegetables like dasheen and to knead dumplings; time he could spend perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar, watching me cook.

  I had planned ahead and got everything I needed from Pattie’s that morning. Lola was still in her room. Not that she would have had any urge to descend and see how much love went into my pot, but I cooked as if those silvery eyes were upon me all the same.

  I washed a pound of fresh chicken wings in vinegar and cut up chunks of yam, sensual green cho cho – yuh know to dem Spanish it mean a woman’s parts? Serious! – pumpkin, the dasheen and cassava. I browned pale flesh and diced, chopped and crushed. I stirred. Then, the authentic cheat: a packet of powdered chicken noodle soup chucked into the mix; that was just how it was done. I brought it all to the boil as Stevie coloured in a farmyard scene from his book in which froufrou chickens featured. No moral dilemmas were raised except whether, as the pigs were purple, the cows should be green. Thank heavens for being five.

  Down to a simmer. Soon come. I skipped the cassava as Pattie was all out – they had gone bad too fast – so I upped the quantity of yam. One Scotch bonnet was thrown in, instead of the advised two. I could hear her, my mother, chanting the same mantra for every single recipe:

  Yuh put a likkle bit in, tek a likkle bit out. Mek it yours.

  I made spinner dumplings and chucked them into the bubbling pot, gathered Stevie into a hug. Soon enough it was time to finish with coconut milk and serve.

  Lord, Darling, it smell gud, yuh see?

  Though simple, Saturday Soup was one of my best Mum-given gifts. As I prepared to serve it to my step-daughter-to-be, our motherless girl, I knew I was passing on more than nutrients, or piping nourishment, more than the knowledge behind creating an exquisite hot-sweet-sour-salty broth. More than bestowing the time it took to cook it, or care to ensure that vegetables and poultry were of equal succulence. More than my heritage, or even my mother’s voice with its kaleidoscopic wisdoms. There were women, and then there were those of us who chopped and blended and stewed together ingredients of all kinds, whatever they might be. Those of us who made the very best of even the butcher’s scraps of womanhood. I was telling her to watch and learn.

  Later that rainy midsummer evening, we dived with soup spoons into our brackish Caribbean pools. Lola returned to her room straight afterwards, Stevie hung around for seconds and then was enticed up to bed by nothing less than a hot chocolate in the much-coveted ‘big-man sippy cup’ that Thomas drank coffee from in morning traffic. Peace, and the freshening pit-pit-pat. Once it stopped, the two of us sat alone on the terrace in the hot washed air. There were stars out, of course; stars that I liked to think of as clearer and larger, as nearer than normal, wrong though I may have been. He deserved his big stars for us.

  We were drinking red wine from the cellar, a label boasting some chateau, some reputable clos, good and grimy. With hushed bursts of laughter and pausing often to marvel, we strolled our memories around the small but dramatic landscape we had created since coming together: the supermarket meeting, the meals out, Lola’s fall, my first ever evening here and the now-fixed cellar door. I thought about telling him what she had done, locking me into that dark and dust, now that the time was right – see, look at us now, no harm done! But instead I stared upwards and soon we were taking the mickey out of ourselves for how few constellations we could name:

  ‘Orion’s belt?’ I ventured.

  ‘It doesn’t look like that though, does it?’

  ‘It might!’

  ‘I think that would be a pretty tight belt.’

  ‘Maybe he buffed up, went on a diet, or something …’

  ‘Darling,’ he stopped us.

  And it began.

  The words. As they were said, we knew we would be the only ones who would ever hear them. That was important: old magic. I could not ever repeat them; I would not ever share them. They were words that would not just bind us forever though. Nothing so safe and sacred. T
hey were words that made things in me come a bit undone. Words with plain and unequivocal meaning that I could barely comprehend.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We merged in a kiss, then he pulled away and went to get another bottle of French wine, an older date, a dustier label; he returned barefoot and whistling. It was as if I was fresher to him even than the rain on the grass beneath our feet and this made my heart crack. Not sing, not heal, not soar: crack.

  ‘I have never fucking felt like this,’ he said, as he poured.

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘But we do.’

  ‘Then … “I do.”’

  Soon we were twisting ourselves around each other, both of our arms and feet the same slate blue by the light of unknown stars. We drank in silence a while longer.

  ‘Hey,’ said Thomas, looking up. ‘This means we’ll be a blendered family.’

  ‘I think you mean “blended”, darling.’

  ‘That’s what I said, Darling. Just one mixed up, happy mess.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Crack. There, in that moment.

  ‘Hey,’ he said again, growing more American by the minute. ‘We’ll need a new house, a better house. One that’s right for Stevie …’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart, I would love that. But don’t stress yourself, we have plenty of time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, we’ll take a while just to be engaged, then to plan a wedding. No one marries fast with kids, right?’

  ‘We do,’ he said.

  ‘Do we?’

  He pulled back – the lightest catch of breath – then folded me tighter to him.

  ‘Every moment counts.’

  I tried to thank him but the words were too heavy in my throat.

  I could not rest though, could not leave it alone. I had lied to myself that I did not mind her puerile scribblings about me; I thought I might somehow be able to ignore the rich source of information about what she had done. But few of us are so strong; I was not. I could not unknow anything, so now I wanted to know everything.

  Before I had even concluded the thought, I was back there, alone once more in Lola’s room while she was at a friend’s. Thomas had gone to a meeting and Stevie was consuming some loud entertainment product featuring late teens bouncing around in primary colours.

  I could not hold out a moment longer, I needed to know what had been DONE. As I reached down to the drawer, I knocked the make-up mirror, which toppled on its stand, then landed and smashed on the cream surface.

  I grabbed for the broken glass, stupid with shock. A second later I felt the pain cut through. I watched as a drop of my blood fell to the floor, soaked into carpet and immediately leached outwards.

  I gathered myself, ran for a cloth, the stain remover and dustpan, and cleared it up fast. My skin tightened and prickled and my hearing strained for the familiar ker-chunk of the front door.

  Seven years of bad luck, in old money. Mum had known them all: the spilled salt, a pinch of which had to be thrown over your left shoulder, the ladders to be walked around unless you were a foofool, the spotting of single magpies that could ruin your day and threatened worse still for your life. Superstition, which had fallen somewhere between folklore and religion in our house, was not to be ignored. What bad luck might come, and for whom?

  I gave the carpet one last sweep, then finally bent to the drawer. There it was: her DONE LISTS, now with a DONE LIST 2 completed. I read fast, then again.

  Then I tucked the book away, knelt on the rectified floor and wondered. The trick would be not to overreact. So, she was following my phone – it hardly went anywhere beyond the town centre and back, nothing to hide on that score. Best not turn off the app, or she might suspect I had read her book. And therefore learn that I had spied upon her unabandoned pleasure in telling herself she had lost her virginity (presumably) to someone – Will himself, was it? It was not entirely clear – as if she dared not quite believe it. Funny, though: the big event did not seem to have slapped a smile on her face anytime that I had noticed.

  My phone went again. I checked: my usual caller. I would never block the number. It scared me more not to know when the calls were coming, not to know when I was being contacted. And who knew how far they would go to find me as soon as the calls stopped getting through? No, you had to be tough. If you could not block it or switch off the phone, you had to switch off key parts of yourself instead; that simple.

  By the time I rose from my knees, I knew I was up to the challenges ahead. Time well spent, worth a few broken shards. One should always go into a marriage with one’s eyes stark staring open.

  A blast of sun, a heatwave at last, falling around 21 August, Stevie’s sixth birthday. I was on high alert all day – he was hyper, a pent-up danger to himself, a jack-in-the-box tightly coiled, just like his dad. All it had taken was the brief visit from a few of Lola’s friends and a couple of licks of the chocolate buttercream on his cupcake (I had skipped the silver balls – last thing we needed was a trip to the dentist on the hottest day of the year).

  My boy loved it all. Unfortunately, he loved the cake and me at the same time, and grabbed me with his chocolatey fingers. Lola laughed out loud, a startlingly natural giggle, and whipped out the phone to capture me next to my son, smears of dark icing on my new yellow dress: we had all given in to his delight. At last. Having opened presents chosen for their limited physical impact, Stevie moved on to shrieking and trying his best to perform a splinted, slow-motion career around the garden.

  ‘Careful, Stevie!’

  Laughing, he moved behind the bushes, back towards the miniature orchard of apples, peaches, cherries and pears.

  ‘Relax, Darling,’ said Thomas.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘At least we knotted up the swing.’

  ‘Mummy, look!’

  Stevie stopped and returned towards us holding out his hand with extreme care, his mouth a silent scream of shock. A&E, I thought, some apocalyptic bump or graze I had just missed.

  ‘Look!’ said Stevie.

  But no, it was a ladybird resting on the base of his thumb.

  ‘Ladybird, see?’

  ‘Wonderful. Pretty,’ I said. ‘And did you know? They’re lucky.’

  ‘I am lucky, aren’t I, Mummy?’ said Stevie.

  And I coughed hard and nodded; barked with some sudden bad tickle, turning away so that not even Thomas could see my eyes.

  Another celebration. Lola whupped all her GCSEs: 10 A*s and a B, Thomas whispered down the phone, while I wondered why he was whispering.

  ‘Come over,’ he said. ‘She wants fajitas and ice cream, which even I can manage. See you here by seven-ish?’

  I brought her flowers, a bright fanfare of tulips, and a not-very vintage mirror, to replace the one I had shattered while dusting. And a congratulations and good luck card, as she was to start at her new college within the fortnight. She was in no mood for any of them:

  ‘How do you know, I could have failed everything?’

  ‘Your fa—’

  ‘Of course she knows, Lola,’ said Thomas. ‘Now be happy, you should be really proud.’

  ‘Hmm,’ and she left the room. I could see my own face in her mirror.

  ‘Gutted about the B,’ he said low. ‘Ten A*s and all she’s talking about is the B in Physics, I mean … you know.’

  ‘Kids are so tense, these days,’ I said as the front door went.

  ‘Gone for a walk, clear her head,’ he said. ‘She’s also scared about starting college, don’t forget.’

  Lola returned and we tried to enjoy the fajitas, even as she tried not to. Neither of us needed to say out loud that it was not a night for me to stay over, so Thomas dropped Stevie and me back to my house. Third along in the row of squat terraces. Didn’t look much from the front, but there were flowers somewhere in the darkness and I had only just painted the gate.

  Thomas had already pulled away again by the time we walked in and I saw that our kitchen window, around the back,
had been smashed.

  ‘Stevie! Wait, stay there …’

  The black hole gaped at us, a jagged sneer. Light. Should I put it on? Would they spring dazzled from corners, attack us – were they here?

  I forced my arm to move and reached back for Stevie, standing in the already lit hallway.

  Lights. I pressed the switch, turned, and saw it. There was a red mass near the table, among the shattered glass.

  A cricket ball. It had come through our window and rolled into the far corner. We backed on to the smallest edge of the smallest park, Addlington Road Rec. I phoned Thomas:

  ‘Our window, someone’s smashed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a cricket ball so—’

  ‘Oh, fine. Listen, stay there, I’m coming back.’

  He stayed on the phone with me for the five minutes it took him to turn around and collect us. Although I was failing to recall one time I had seen the assorted ruffnecks in the park putting down their spliffs to bowl a single over, by the time we were settled once more at Littleton Lodge we had decided to call the glaziers rather than the police.

  At last, a kind surprise: we were to marry on 24 September 2016, just three months after our meeting outside the supermarket.

  ‘Insane,’ I had said when he told me that we could use a client’s country estate, that the folly had a licence for weddings, and that there had been a cancellation and wasn’t that so completely perfect because he loved me à la folie. And it was perfect because I understood enough French for that, but still I had breath enough to say:

  ‘It will barely have been three months. Are you sure?’

  ‘Never been surer.’

  ‘In three weeks! Can we—’

  ‘We can.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Just the people we need to be there. Or the four of us. You’re in control.’

  Nothing more. He was giving me everything:

  ‘I don’t deserve you.’

  The dress was a cinch, I had always known the one I would get. From the bridal boutique in the Old Town; a size too large around the waist, but otherwise perfect. It was taken in, accessorised at first with only anglicised amounts of bling, soon increased to more Jamaican levels – more diamonds, more white gold, more diamanté, sparkly shoes from London – when I felt Mum peering down in dismay at my dull taste. La-la-la! she would have cried. Spice it up a bit, girl! A bit of twinkle also mesmerised a restless, whining Stevie.