What Goes Around

chapter SIXTY ONE

Lucy

I don't really have many choices.

I really can't turn this client down.

Things haven’t exactly taken off.

Simone insists that I don’t drop my price.

It’s quality that people want.

Anyway the phone has rung and this woman needs me to come on a Sunday – she works all week and her husband is out for the day. It’s the only time she’s got.

I’m sorry, I can’t tell you who it is.

I pride myself on my confidentiality.

I can’t leave Charlotte alone all day. Well, maybe I could leave her, but we’ve only been in the new home for a week. The sale and move just happened so quickly. I want to make sure she’s okay with it all before I leave her here alone and I’m still a bit wary with all that happened on Facebook.

I’ve made some friends at my slimming club but one’s skiing and one’s got twins and an autistic child and a teenager from hell (no wonder she eats), so I don’t really feel I can ask her, and Yolanda’s working. Though Charlotte sort of talks to Felicity now I’m not even going to go there.

I think of Gloria.

So too does Charlotte but I don’t really feel I can ask.

Anyway, there’s someone else I can fall back on now.

Someone who really deserves to be asked, so I take a breath and I ring Mum instead.

She’s delighted.

She’s been waiting for twelve years for this – for me to trust her with my child and I do, I think I do. Yes, I do, or I’d never leave her.

I’m not worried about Charlotte as I work, as I sort a whole lot of chaos out – and I do a great job, she tells me.

She’ll be recommending me.

I’m so sorry that I can’t tell you who she is, or go into greater detail. Women are trusting me with their guilty secrets you understand.

But, given that it’s you…

I mustn’t.

I can’t.

Okay, I’ll give you a clue.

It’s someone you’d expect to be a little more prepared…

Be Prepared!

Get it?

Of course, given her status, she knows an awful lot of mums in the village.

An awful lot.

‘Lucy,’ she tells me as she waves me off. ‘You can expect to be busy any time soon.’

I’m still grinning like an idiot when I park my car.

I’m a Personal Organiser and I’m paid fifty quid an hour to do what I completely love.

I turn the key in the door and as I walk in I stand there for a moment, still smiling, as I watch myself in the kitchen with mum.

I’ve never seen the likeness between me and Charlotte so clearly – it must be the braces, because there she is in profile and she’s a mini pre-peroxide me. She’s making chocolate crispies with mum – and we did that.

Mum and I did that.

Yes, it was crap and there were so many bad times, just so, so many bad times, but I’d forgotten that there were good times too and I stand there for a moment remembering them.

‘Hi, pet.’ Mum looks over and smiles. ‘How was work?’

‘Good,’ I say and I walk over and she digs out another spoon from the drawer and I fill it.

‘She used to lick the bowl,’ Mum tells Charlotte and Charlotte laughs. ‘She’d put her face right in it.’

Mum suggests that we go for a walk, the three of us. Christmas is coming and Lucy will be getting fat, so I say yes and we head to the park I used to go to sometimes when I bunked off school. There's a massive old manor house and a lake at the front and it’s all frozen over. Some kids are skating on it and Charlotte sees the sign that tells them not to.

‘What if it cracks?’ Charlotte asks. ‘What if they fall in?’

‘They won't.’ I know that sounds definite, but I sort of know it to be true –they’re hardy kids, tough kids, they remind me a little of me. Yes, what they’re doing is dangerous and yes, I might be wrong and the ice splits and they all tumble in, but something tells me that they’re here every day, unsupervised and surviving.

‘But what if they do?’ Charlotte persists. I look over to her little anxious, pinched face. She's been through so much, for all I did to make her childhood precious and safe and pampered, in the end, I couldn't shield her from life.

From the shit it flings at us at times.

I couldn't even shield her from me.

But sometimes I can make things better.

Sometimes I do know what to say.

‘What would you do?’ Charlotte begs. ‘If one of them falls in?’

‘I’d call an ambulance,’ I say.

‘But wouldn't you go over?’

I don't actually know what I'd do. We can all say how we'd react in an emergency, we can all hazard a guess but a guess is all it is. Some of us will be the heroes, standing shivering and wrapped in a blanket on the evening news, insisting that anybody would have done the same.

I wouldn’t.

I don't want to be a hero, because Charlotte doesn't want me to be one.

I can see the fear and the terror in her eyes and I wonder how long it will stay – you see, it's not just about losing her dad, she is so scared of losing me.

‘I think you have to find a big branch,’ Mum tells her. ‘And lie on the grass and stretch it out to them…’

‘But it wouldn't reach!’ Charlotte is frantic with her imagined scenario, she doesn’t just look like me, she thinks like me too. She's watching these robust kids disappear beneath the ice; she's standing by the water’s edge screaming as her mother dashes in to save them. ‘I know you’d do something!’ She tells me about this show she saw once, where everybody had formed a human chain across the ice.

‘Your mum?’ It’s my mum that starts laughing; it’s my mum who’s the hero today. ‘Can you imagine your mum, for even a moment, forming a human chain?’ But that’s exactly what Charlotte is doing and I don't want her to have to worry about me any more, I want her to laugh, I want her to be a kid, I want to be her mum.

‘Me!’ I say. ‘You really think I’d lie on ice, holding onto Nanny’s feet…’

‘Sod that.’ Mum says putting out her fag.

Charlotte starts laughing and we walk away from the lake and towards the car and, if I hear a scream, I’ll just call an ambulance and try to find a big branch. I look over to Mum and I know she’s thinking the same. I know she is because we start running to get to the car and we’re all still laughing.

And no, I won’t lie on ice for anyone but Charlotte – I’m far too important to lose.

And if I sound shallow and superficial, I don’t care.

I know I'm not.

I know what I'm here for now.

And I know why I'm staying.