Don’t be sad about your baby. Unicorns are magic and if they know you are sad they will bring your baby to you on a rainbow. But Granny Helen thinks I have an active imagination because she told me that I was not one of those adopted children.
* * *
Please can I come to see you if you are there?
* * *
Love,
Rosie
Chapter Fifty-One
‘You moved back home, have you?’ John said grinning, handing me my mother’s house keys.
John wore the same circular wire spectacles that he had worn for twenty years. They were still trying to sit on the top of a nose that was not designed for spectacles.
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the keys. ‘Only for a few days.’
As teenagers, my sister and I had often knocked on his door when we were locked out. My situation now had strange echoes of those teenage mishaps, when I’d had dramatic imaginings of being stuck outside in the cold all night. But John or Sarah had rescued us. Just as they had done in the early days of my mother’s single-parent status, when they had taken us in on the afternoons she worked late.
‘What’s it like having your mum living with you again?’ He pushed the bridge of his glasses up and I watched them slip down again.
‘Not as bad as I expected,’ I beamed.
‘Another one on the way, I hear.’
‘Three months gone.’ I looked down at my belly covered by my suit jacket, wondering when the jacket button would have to be left open.
‘And I hear Noah likes chocolate muffins and Rosie never wants her hair cut.’
‘Mum’s informed you well,’ I laughed, remembering that Imogen’s friend had had such a terrible time with Social Services. I wondered how much he knew about my situation now. ‘Imogen still in New Zealand?’
He nodded with a glum smile. ‘It’s a long way for a cup of tea.’
I glanced behind him at the stacks of newspapers lining the walls. When Sarah was alive, the hallway was always swept and clear.
‘At least you get a sunny Christmas every year.’
He grimaced. ‘Anyhow, can’t be helped,’ he said handing me a tin of cat food. ‘Minxy likes this horrible stuff. And don’t forget to water the spider plants.’
‘I might kill them off on purpose.’
He laughed conspiratorially. ‘Those things’ll out last us all.’
‘Thank you, John,’ I said, grateful to him for still living there.
Instead of going down the steps and around and up again to my mother’s front door, I stepped over the low wall dividing their small front gardens, for old time’s sake.
‘Old habits die hard, eh?’ John said, winking at me as he closed his door.
Inside, the old smells of childhood hit me in a comforting wave. Dusty books and cooking spices. Then the creak of the wobbly floorboard, third from the left, the crack that wiggled up the wall next to the radiator cover, the brush of the spider plants that dangled from the hallway table. I was home.
When I had brought my friends back as a child I had been embarrassed by the stacks of books in corners, the mish-mash of different patterns on the copious throws and cushions, the muted light that was sucked up by the dark blue walls and jungle of plants in the window. But now I saw bohemian charm and style, unaffected by the decades of various trends of interior design that have come and gone. When I thought of the fortune I had spent on decorating our house, I cringed. There seemed so little point to it when I thought of how often I had wanted to tweak and change it since, wishing I had chosen wood panelling instead of tiles, or slatted blinds instead of curtains.
In her kitchen, I opened her cupboards to look for provisions. I was hungry after my thwarted supper with Peter. I hadn’t stayed in the restaurant. Our waiter had passed me as I wove through the tables towards the door, and I was too embarrassed to say that I was leaving. I supposed Peter and I could never go back to that restaurant. A slump of regret weighed me down.
It felt strange to be in a kitchen without having to think about what Rosie and Noah wanted to eat. It didn’t feel liberating to be without what I had so often considered a burden.
I decided to make tea instead.
Among the usual array of mismatched cups, I spotted a mug that took my breath away for a second. World’s Best Dad it said on the side. It had been a birthday present for Dad from Jacs and me, a few years before he had announced he was moving out to live with Jill – his secretary. After he left, I had hidden the offending mug under the sink in the newly painted pink bathroom, behind the loo rolls. I hadn’t wanted to break it or throw it out, I had simply wanted to get it out of my sight.
I couldn’t believe my mother had found it and kept it. It reminded me of the other possession of my father’s that she had kept after he left.
Urgently, I climbed the stairs two at a time to the loft room on the third floor, which had been my father’s workspace. My stomach was looping in anticipation.
I expected the room to be different – crowded with boxes or transformed into my mother’s study – but it was almost exactly as it had been. My mother had never allowed Jacs or me to commandeer it for a television den or a bedroom, telling us that she planned to get a lodger. A lodger that had never materialised.
The strip of oak that stretched along one wall was empty of his music books and scores and HB pencils, but his stool sat in the same place, centrally, as though he had only yesterday jumped off it, leaving it twisting around and around for Jacs and I to play on. The leather armchair was pushed into the corner, and my mother’s guitar was resting against the arm. In the eves by the window, there sat the chest that I had come up to look for.
The smell as I opened it brought back memories of me sitting crossed legged at the spot where I now knelt, waiting for my father to choose a piece of music for me to play.
I had never been any good at playing the guitar, unlike Jacs who had reached grade eight, but I had loved the attention and patience my father had given me when his large, calloused fingertips had prized my clumsy little fingers onto the right strings.
When we were small, we had not been allowed to rifle through the music scores, in case we ripped something precious, and I felt a little sinful for going through it now, as though he would know somehow.
Frets and Fingers with its brown cover picture and the dog-eared Easy Guitar Songs were still there, on the top. Flicking through them felt like shaking hands with old friends. The surge of feelings and memories gave me goosebumps. I wished Jacs were here with me to rediscover them.
Further down into the chest, I found the music sheets covered in treble clefs, beats, note heads and stems in complex rhythms scrawled in pencil by my father’s hand. Before computers, he would handwrite all of his songs.