‘This woman here is my reason for living. She makes the good days even better and the bad days go away.’
A mist descended over my eyes, making everything blurry, but I could just make out Mum staring out from the circle, wide-eyed.
Adam turned to look at me. ‘Honestly, I adore you. I couldn’t live without you. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’
Embarrassed, I ruffled his hair in an attempt to lighten the situation and get the spotlight away from me. But then he dropped down onto one knee.
The ahhs turned to short, clipped gasps as I struggled to keep my vision steady. What the hell? Is he doing what I think he’s doing, or is this a big joke? I looked around at all the pensive faces peering their heads into the bubble I’d created around me. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion, as if I was watching myself from outside my body. Adam’s voice sounded as if he was under water and, all the time, the inane grins and wide eyes kept getting closer and closer. All except one, whose face, crumpled with grief, seemed to get further and further away.
‘Will you please do me the honour of being my wife?’ Adam said, one knee still on the ground.
I can’t remember exactly when the whoops of joy turned to screams of horror. But I know I had a square-cut solitaire diamond on my finger by the time I was stroking Pammie’s hair as she lay on the beer-sodden floor.
Adam was kneeling beside us, holding his mother’s hand, and James was pacing the floor, telling the ambulance where to find us.
‘Please hurry,’ I heard him shout. ‘She’s out cold.’
It had all happened so fast that my brain couldn’t process it. I’d lost the ability to put things in the order that they were occurring, no longer able to determine what was real and what I’d imagined in my head. Had Adam just asked me to marry him? Did Pammie really collapse? The edges between reality and make-believe were becoming more and more blurred with every passing second.
‘Mum, Mum,’ Adam was saying over and over again. His voice becoming more animalistic with each frantic call.
Her head moved ever so slightly and she murmured her confusion.
‘Mum,’ Adam called out again. ‘Oh, thank God. Mum, can you hear me?’
She didn’t answer, her eyes just flickered open before closing again.
‘Mum, it’s James. Can you hear me?’
She murmured something inaudible.
A shaft of light pierced through as the crowd around us parted to let the paramedics in. They laid the stretcher down beside Pammie.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ said James, kneeling down beside me. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
He looked at me, panic-stricken, as if he expected me to say something that would take his pain away. I wished I could give him what he needed but, as I stared down at Pammie, I had nothing to offer him.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, please save her,’ cried Adam, his shoulders beginning to rise and fall.
Mike put a steady hand on his back. ‘It’s going to be okay, mate. She’s going to be okay.’
I watched numbly as they called her name, got no response, and lifted her onto the stretcher.
It wasn’t my place to go in the ambulance. Adam and James went with her, whilst I was left in the surreal void they left behind: a celebration that had so abruptly been halted. The music had stopped, the lights were on, and the heart-shaped balloon that had carried my ring lay shredded on the floor, its shrivelled rubber now unrecognizable.
Shocked guests filed past me with sympathetic smiles, bidding premature farewells and their best wishes to pass on to Pammie and her boys. I vaguely remember one or two awkwardly wishing me luck for our engagement, their congratulations at odds with the commiserations that quickly followed.
‘I’m so sorry, Em,’ said Seb, reaching out to embrace me. ‘I’m sure she’ll be okay. What do you want to do? Shall I take you home, or do you want to stay here?’
I looked around the hall that, just fifteen minutes earlier, had been bursting with friends and family. The place where Adam had celebrated his thirtieth birthday and the place where he had asked me to marry him. Neither seemed to matter anymore.
‘I guess I should see everyone off?’ I asked, unsure of the right answer myself.
‘We can get rid of everyone pretty quickly,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You get your stuff together and I’ll chivvy the stragglers up. Okay?’
No. Nothing was okay. I’d just been proposed to, but could barely remember it now, the memory blurred and the occasion forever marred.
‘Darling, I don’t know what to say,’ said my mum, arms outstretched, pulling me into her. ‘Come here.’
The first tear fell then, and once the floodgate was open, I couldn’t stop. Big wretched sobs racked my chest as my mother attempted to soothe me.
‘Ssh, it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay.’ There’s something about your mother’s voice that nobody else can replicate. That takes you back to school, when you were little and waiting in the nurse’s office for her to come and pick you up. I remember being pushed over in the playground by a bully called Fiona, and hitting my forehead as I fell onto the black tar floor. A bump, of Tom and Jerry proportions, had throbbed just above my eye and the nurse had hurried me away to her office, which was actually just a little bed and desk behind a curtain in a side corridor.
I’m sure I would have been as right as ninepence if I’d just sat quietly for a few minutes before rejoining my class for our music lesson. But, by the time I was on that tiny chair behind the screen, all I wanted was my mum: to take away both my physical and emotional pain. My bump would no doubt disappear within hours, but the mental scar would remain. What if Fiona was mad with me for going to the nurse? Would she do it again tomorrow? Would she bully me forever? They were conundrums that only my mother could answer, well, at least in my nine-year-old’s head. I felt guilty for making her leave work, but not guilty enough to say no when the nurse asked if I’d like to go home. I fretted over whether she would be cross with me. Whether my injury would be sufficient to warrant calling her. But I so needed to feel safe, it was a risk I was prepared to take. It felt like hours before she arrived, though I knew she was there even before I saw her. I just sensed her, and when she peered round that curtain I felt as if my heart was about to burst. That feeling, when only your mother will do, never really goes away, and as she whispers in my ear that everything will be all right, my heart breaks for Adam, who no doubt has the same memories, but is now in danger of losing the only person who can make everything better.
12
It was six o’clock in the morning when Adam called. Mum and Dad had come back with me, but had figured that I needed to sleep and had left me, with strict instructions to call them as soon as I heard anything. I couldn’t have slept if you’d paid me. My mind was full of whirring thoughts, and I paced the kitchen floor with a large glass of red. Back and forth, until the shrill ring of my phone made me jump.
‘Em?’ He sounded tired.
‘Yes, how is she?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening?’
‘She’s okay,’ his voice broke.
‘She’s going to be okay?’
I could hear soft sobs at the other end of the line.
‘Adam . . . Adam.’
‘I’m just so relieved.’ He sniffed. ‘I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to her, Em. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do.’
‘But she’s going to be okay?’ I asked again, desperate for confirmation.
‘Yes. Yes. She’s sitting up in bed, drinking a cup of tea, looking like she doesn’t have a care in the world.’ He let out a tight laugh.
My voice caught in my throat. ‘So, what happened, then? What have the doctors said?’
‘They’ve carried out all sorts of tests – blood pressure, heart, urine – and she’s as good as new.’
I stayed silent.
‘Em?’