The Child(13)

“On your birthday? I thought Paul might be taking you somewhere for lunch. Did he forget?”

“He’s having to work this weekend, but we’re going to celebrate tonight.”

“Good. Well, sorry I didn’t send a card. I forgot to post it. It’s sitting here on the desk. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on . . . Anyway, how are you?”

I pause, wrong-footed by this chitchat.

“Er, so-so.”

“Oh dear,” she murmurs.

“How are you?” I ask. Keep to safe subjects. “How’s your hip?”

“Er, aching,” she says. “I’m all right. Emma? Are you still there?”

The tension in my throat is making me gag and I don’t speak for a second or two. I retreat to the secret place inside my head, where everything is known, where I am safe.

“Yes,” I croak, eventually. And wait. I should say something, preempt it. Say, all casually, that I’ve seen they’ve dug up the body of a baby in our old street. Fancy that . . .

But I’m not sure I can have a pretend conversation about it. I might break down and cry. And she’d start asking questions. She used to put me to bed with a hot water bottle—her panacea for all that ailed me—when I was a teenager and say: “You are getting yourself all upset again, Emma. Have a little sleep and things will look better.”

But of course they didn’t. It must have been terrible for her, having to cope with my moods, but she said a lot of teenagers went through the same thing. “Hormones. It’s all part of growing up,” she said. At first. But the excuses started to pall. And patience never was her virtue. I stopped crying when she stopped reacting. Tough love, she called it. It didn’t solve anything for either of us. I started shouting and breaking things instead. Until she threw me out.

I try not to blame her. Not now—I might have done the same if I’d been the mother. But then . . .

“There’s someone at the door, Jude,” I say suddenly, wrapping my fist in my sleeve and rapping on the table to support my lie. “Sorry, I’ll call you back later.”

“Oh, Emma,” she says.

“I’m expecting a parcel,” I say desperately, tangling myself in the fabrication.

“Oh, go then,” she says. “I’ll call back.”

I put down the phone and the relief makes me giddy. But I know I’ve only postponed the inevitable.

The phone rings again five minutes later, and for a split second I consider not picking up. But I must. She’ll only keep ringing until she gets me.

“Why don’t you come over?” Jude says, as if there has been no break in the conversation. “You’ve never seen my flat and it’s been months since we saw each other.”

I react immediately. Guilt and shame—the Catholic twins and my Pavlovian response to my mother’s passive-aggressive parry.

“It’s a bit difficult. I’m trying to finish this book by my deadline.”

“Well, if you’re too busy. You must prioritize, I suppose.”

“That’s not fair,” I say. “Of course my work is important to me, but so are you.”

“Right,” she says. “But not enough to spend some time with me. Never mind. There’s a new Sunday serial starting on the radio. I won’t be bored on my own.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come,” I say, back to being the sulky teenager.

“Lovely,” Jude says. “I’ll cook a birthday lunch tomorrow, then. Will Paul be coming? He’s always welcome, of course, but it might be nice to just be the two of us.”

I’m silently furious on Paul’s behalf, but he wouldn’t want to be there, anyway. He has tried his best to like Jude, but he struggles.

“I admire your mother’s intellect,” he’d said after meeting her for the first time at a particularly sticky Sunday lunch in Covent Garden. “But she is determined to be the cleverest person in the room, isn’t she?”

His tiny revenge is to call her Judith, a name she detests.

“Actually, Paul’s busy with an open day at college, so it will only be me, anyway,” I say.

“See you at twelve, then. Don’t be late,” she says. “Lots to talk about.”





ELEVEN


    Jude


SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2012

She’d put the food on to cook far too early in her eager anticipation of Emma’s arrival and she could smell it beginning to catch.

The fug of simmering lentils had fogged up the window when Jude went into the kitchen. She whipped the saucepan off the electric ring and put it on the draining board, ready to reheat once Emma arrived.

She went to look out of the sitting room window again. Hovering. Restless. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been looking forward to seeing her spiky only child. It had been at least six months since the last time—maybe nine. She didn’t know why she bothered. Emma clearly didn’t.

From the moment she’d brought Emma home, she’d been determined to have a completely different bond with her daughter from the tense relationship she had had with her own mother. She played the big sister card, treating Emma as an adult instead of as a child, but it had exploded in her face.