The extent of our conversation about them has so far has been this:
Me: ‘Are you OK?’
Mum: ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
I haven’t pushed her. But I can’t think about anything else. Sarah’s parents. The people who made her. Where were they off to? What was wrong? It didn’t look like a good-news sort of call.
Sarah looks like her mother. Although, actually, she looks like her father, too. I could have stared at their faces for hours, scouring them for tiny details of her.
We get back to Mum’s and I heat the soup, put some beautiful-smelling sourdough under the grill, but I know she’s not going to eat. She seems angry at me, although I’m not sure why. Was I meant to go over and punch Sarah’s parents for having created her? I stand in Mum’s kitchen feeling hollow and uneasy, wondering again who died last August. At the end of her garden, under the plum tree, there’s a little pool of gold where celandines jut bravely through patchy grass. I remember those wildflowers on the coffin and have to have very stern words with myself about the direction these thoughts are taking.
As predicted, Mum won’t eat. ‘They’ve ruined my day,’ she repeats. ‘I’ve no appetite now.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Well, I’m going to eat mine. You can always heat yours up again if you want it later.’
‘I’d get food poisoning. You can’t reheat twice.’
I’m about to say, ‘Mum, it’s tomato soup!’ but I desist. It’s pointless .
So, solo spoon chinking against china, I eat my soup, soaking in big chunks of buttered sourdough. I finish, wash up, offer Mum her present, which she says she’ll open later, and eventually get my coat.
‘I can stay and talk if you want,’ I say. Mum is burrowed into the corner of her sofa like a cat.
‘I’m fine,’ she says stiffly. ‘Thanks for coming.’
I go over and kiss her. ‘Bye, Mum. Happy birthday.’
I pause by the door. ‘Love you.’
I’m at the front door when she calls, ‘Eddie?’
‘Yeah?’
I go back in, and this is the moment that will change everything, although I don’t know it yet.
‘There’s something you should know,’ she says. No eye contact.
I sit warily on the chair opposite her. Over her shoulder is a photo of Alex on a swing, shortly after she started primary school. She’s screaming with happiness as she flies towards the photographer. Totally ecstatic. Over the years I have wondered if perhaps Mum got pregnant deliberately, to try to stop our father leaving – the affair with Victoria Shitface had been going on for a long time apparently – but whenever I look at that picture, I remember that it doesn’t matter. Alex brought nothing but joy to our lives, with or without Dad.
‘Seeing the Harringtons earlier has ruined my day,’ Mum repeats after a pause. She bites a fingernail.
‘I know,’ I say tiredly. ‘You said earlier.’
She looks around her, runs a hand along the edge of her side table, checking for dust. ‘I don’t know how they can forgive that daughter of theirs . . .’
I stand up, ready to leave again, but something in her face makes me sink back down onto the arm of the chair. She knows something .
‘Mum, what was it you wanted to tell me?’
‘Hannah’s turned out well, at least,’ Mum says, ignoring me. ‘She still visits me, you know. She still cares, even if the parents don’t.’ She pauses, alternately clenching her fists and splaying out her fingers. ‘Although in truth I haven’t seen her since just before Christmas. We had a bit of a set-to.’
‘What about?’
Mum continues to look anywhere but at me. ‘About that witch of a sister of hers.’
‘Sarah?’ I lean forward, staring at her. ‘What did she say about Sarah?’
Mum offers a little shrug. Her face is jammed tight and I’m suddenly petrified of what she’s hiding.
‘Mum . . . ?’ I can feel my heart pounding. This has something to do with Sarah’s parents, rushing out of the cafe today. ‘Mum, please tell me.’
Mum sighs. She untucks her legs so that she’s sitting formally on the sofa, as if being interviewed. Her hands are folded tidily in her lap. ‘Hannah came over just before Christmas. She told me she had some news I might find difficult. Well, she wasn’t wrong there.’
She stops, as if unable to find the words, and I begin to feel sick. What happened to Sarah? Oh God, what happened to Sarah? My hands scrabble like spiders, although what they’re clutching for, I don’t know.
‘What did she tell you?’ I ask.
Mum doesn’t say anything.
‘Mum, it’s very important that you tell me.’
She clenches her jaw and her temples bulge. I can’t remember the last time I felt so anxious. Eventually, she says, ‘Sarah’s moved back to England. She moved back in August last year.’
Blood rushes to my face, and I lean back in the chair. I thought she was going to tell me . . . I thought she was going to say—
I’ve wondered, again and again, who that funeral was for. Whose life was being mourned and celebrated by those beautiful wildflowers. I’ve done my best to talk myself down from paranoid theories, but those insidious questions never quite went away. What if she died? What if it was Sarah in the hearse?
Sarah is alive and well. She’s in England.
It takes a while for all of these words to register. ‘Hang on,’ I say, sitting up. ‘Mum, did you say she moved back here? To England ?’
Mum springs out of the sofa with an energy I seldom see. She stands in front of me, her tiny frame rigid with anger. ‘How can you look so pleased?’ she hisses. ‘Look at your face, Eddie. What’s wrong with you? She—’
‘Where is she?’ I interrupt. ‘Where has Sarah been living?’
Mum shakes her head and walks over to the window. ‘With her parents, from what I gather,’ she mutters. After a moment she turns round and walks back to the sofa, looking at Alex’s photo. I suspect this is for my benefit. Just look at your poor sister.
‘Living with her parents, like some sort of parasite. Penniless and . . . apparently . . . pregnant.’ She shoots a hand up to her mouth, as if she hadn’t meant to say this. After a pause, she sits back down, closing her eyes and sinking back into the sofa. She shudders. ‘I mean, if at her age you still haven’t got your act together, then what hope is there?’
I stare at her. ‘Pregnant? Sarah’s pregnant?’
I feel a pain so sharp it’s as if she’s guided a blade between my ribs.
Mum doesn’t answer.
‘Mum! ’
Just once, and with palpable disgust, she nods. ‘Pregnant,’ she confirms.
‘No,’ I say, although the word doesn’t quite make it to my mouth.
No. No, no, no.
Sarah can’t be having another man’s child. Mum slides out of focus and my head begins to explode with misery, a hundred different shades of it, spattering in all directions. But then the rollercoaster dips, yet again, and another sensation bursts in: hope. The speed at which I’m feeling all these things is dizzying. But the hope stays – two seconds, three, four, five . . . It doesn’t go away. It could be mine , I’m realizing. It could be mine.
‘She came back because her grandfather died,’ Mum says tightly. ‘That funeral procession we saw was probably for him.’
I register relief, somewhere, that it was her grandfather, but I’m far too shocked to feel guilty about such a thought. Sarah is pregnant, and it could be my child.
‘What else do you know, Mum? Please tell me.’
Mum picks up her still-full soup bowl and takes it to the kitchen. I follow her like a faithful dog. ‘Mum.’
‘It was Hannah who called her sister with the bad news,’ she says eventually. Her voice is barely audible. ‘Apparently the shock of hearing Hannah’s voice on the phone almost killed her. Walked out into a road, nearly got hit by a truck, stupid girl. But’ – she puts down her soup bowl and gazes around her spotless kitchen – ‘for better or worse, the truck swerved, so she stayed in one piece.’