In Mum’s house, I give the heating a boost and make her some toast before she goes to bed. I give her a sleeping pill and hold her hand until she’s asleep. I have never had the experience of watching my own child sleep, but I imagine it’s a similar feeling. She looks, somehow, both lost and peaceful as she lies there, curled against my hand like a safety blanket, twitching occasionally, her breath barely audible.
Then I step outside and call Derek, and I leave a message on his answerphone, saying, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I have hit a wall and need his help.
On returning home, I watch three episodes of some Netflix series and – exhausted but unable to sleep – spend most of the rest of the night on my garden bench, wrapped in my duvet, having a one-way conversation with Steve the squirrel.
Chapter Forty-Five
DECEMBER – Three Months Later
Dear You,
Well, ho, ho, ho! Merry bloody Christmas.
I’ll be thankful for the end of this year.
This is my first letter to you in more than three months. I guess I’ve had a lot to think about. I’ve also been very busy trying to effect change with Mum without her realizing. That’s been Derek’s plan: liberate Eddie by stealth. He’s been magnificent, of course.
He set up a meeting with Frances, the vicar who’s been visiting Mum for years. She said there are a few people locally who are happy to visit isolated parishioners. Derek said that the idea was to establish a friendship between Mum and a volunteer – however long it took – so that eventually she’d trust them enough to want them to take her shopping, or to the odd medical appointment. Someone other than me she could call, someone to open her world up, just a chink.
So a chap called Felix is visiting Mum, alongside Frances, once a week. Felix is a Gulf War veteran. Lost his arm out there. Then his wife left, because she couldn’t cope, and then he lost his son in Iraq in 2006. So Felix knows about pain and loss. And yet, you know what, Hedgehog? He’s so jolly! I’ve only met him twice, but he seems like the most positive chap. Listening to him and Mum is quite something – her response to just about everything is negative, whereas his is unfailingly upbeat. Sometimes when he’s talking, I can see her thinking, Is he completely mad?
‘Give her another few weeks,’ Derek said to me the other day. ‘I don’t think she’s far off going out of the house with him.’
Derek even persuaded her to spend Christmas with her sister so I could have a break.
So . . . slowly but surely, I’m getting a bit more space. A bit more oxygen. I get glimpses of myself, from time to time – how I was before all of this. How I was during that week with Sarah. How I was when I was young. And they feel good.
Anyway! Here I am, on Christmas Day, in Alan’s new spare room in Bisley. It’s 5.45 a.m. and Lily’s already up, pounding on Alan and Gia’s door. I went mad and bought her a whole stocking’s worth of presents. Alan says I’m a selfish turd and that I’ve shown him up.
For now, though, I’m looking out of the still-to-be-curtained window at a gunmetal sky and I’m thinking about you. My dearest, most precious Alex.
I have no idea if you’re there. If you’ve stood at my shoulder all these years, reading the words I’ve written to you, or if you’ve been no more than a vibration of spent energy. Whatever you’ve been, though, I hope you have somehow known how dearly loved you were, how desperately missed.
Without you, or these letters, I don’t know if I’d have made it. In death you were as in life: kind, colourful, warm, a friend. I felt you, through these purple pages. Your vitality and silliness, your nosiness, your goodness, your innocence, your sweetness. You kept me putting one foot in front of the other. You helped me breathe when life was strangling me.
But the time has come for me to go it alone, as Jeanne says. To stand on my own two feet. And so, my little Hedgehog, this is to be our last letter.
I am going to be OK. Jeanne is certain of it, and – actually – I am, too. I have to be, really; I see every day in our mother what the alternative looks like.
I am even going to give in to Alan’s insistence that I start dating. I don’t really want to, but I accept that I have to at least give myself the chance of loving someone else.
Because that’s the thing: Mum can’t change, but I can. And I will. I will march on through winter, I will finish my commissions, and I’ll take on more. I’m going to start offering summer workshops for young people. I’m going to do this stupid Tinder thing. I’m going to get fit, too, and get better at stonemasonry, and be a stupendous godfather to Lily. And I’m going to do all of this with a smile on my face, because that’s the person people think I am, and that’s the person I want to be again.
That’s my promise, Hedgehog. To you, and to myself.
I will never forget you, Alex Hayley Wallace. Not for a day. I will love you until the end of my life. I will always miss you, and I will always be your big brother.
Thank you for being there. In life and in death.
Thank you, and goodbye, my darling Hedgehog.
Me xxxxxxxxxxx
Chapter Forty-Six
EARLY MARCH – Three Months Later
The day my life changes forever, I’m gearing up for my first Tinder date. I feel quite stupid with nerves. (It doesn’t help that Alan is texting me on the hour, every hour, to check I’m not backing out.) She is called Heather, and she has nice hair, and she seems smart and funny. But I still don’t want to go. I actually caught myself earlier, wondering if I could hammer a nail through my hand so I’d have the excuse of an afternoon in A&E.
I have not admitted this to Alan.
It’s also Mum’s sixty-seventh, so I’ve taken her for lunch in Stroud. We’re in Withey’s Yard, which has always been a safe place for her – presumably because it’s hidden up an old stone alleyway, visible to almost nobody – and today she’s full of chat. Felix took her shopping yesterday, and he’s better at it than I am. His only downfall is that he can’t carry as many shopping bags because he has only one arm.
In all honesty I’m only half listening, because I’m busy imagining tonight’s terrible silences and oddly pitched laughs – so it takes me a little while to realize Mum’s stopped talking.
I look up. She’s frozen, staring off to her right, soup spoon hovering centimetres from the bowl. I follow her line of vision .
I don’t recognize them, at first. They just look like two middle-aged people eating salads. She’s wearing a checked shirt and is talking on a mobile phone. He is wearing a cord jacket, and he’s watching her. Like Mum, both of them appear to have stopped eating. I feel a vague shift of recognition, looking at the man’s profile, but nothing more.
But as I glance back at Mum, I know exactly who they are. The only people who could have this sort of effect on her. Her spoon has been dropped into the soup now; its handle is slowly disappearing like the stern of a sinking ship.
I look back at Sarah Harrington’s parents. I do recognize them. Of course I do; they often came to pick up Alex for playdates, or to drop little Hannah off for the afternoon. I remember them always being friendly. So much so that I sometimes wanted to go and play in Frampton Mansell, too. They seemed so solid together; a proper family, whereas mine was made up of a father hundreds of miles away with a new baby on the way and a mother crippled by bitterness and depression.
I have two distinct thoughts: First, what am I going to do with Mum? She cannot be here, two tables away from Michael and Patsy Harrington. And second, if it’s not Michael or Patsy Harrington who died last year, who was it?
I distinctly hear the woman saying, ‘We’re on our way.’ And then they’re both up and gone, not pausing even to straighten up their chairs or apologize to the lady behind the cafe counter. Sarah’s mother is pulling on her coat as she hurries down the alleyway towards the High Street. Mum and I sit still for a few moments, silent amid the hum of conversation and clinking cutlery. It’s not until the milk steamer starts screeching that we look at each other .
In the end we go to the farm shop on the Cirencester Road to get some nice soup to have at Mum’s: after the Harringtons left, she said that her birthday lunch was ruined and she wouldn’t eat any more.