At the hospital I see two things.
Hurrying through the main reception, the headline of the local paper outside the shop:
PEAKS BIKER DIES IN INTENSIVE CARE
And I think of the brief conversation I had yesterday with Ruth, Jeanie’s Ashbourne neighbour.
I hurry up to the second floor in the lift.
The second thing I see is Frankie, before he sees me. He’s sitting in the corridor outside Jeanie’s room, desolate, drinking a can of pop, staring down at his dusty trainers.
My heart clenches.
‘Frank!’ I wave, and he looks up – and barely bothers to wave back.
Oh God, what does that mean? I sprint down the rest of the corridor towards him, my soles squeaking on the lino.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Well’—he stands now—‘they’re waking her up.’
‘Oh God.’ I feel the tears spring to my eyes, hot and sharp. ‘Are they? How amazing, oh, Frankie, how amazing, oh thank God, thank God…’
And I’m sobbing now, and he’s hugging me.
Frankie, my son, who I couldn’t look after, who I gave to Jeanie when he was just three months old, because I was scared I’d hurt him, like our mother hurt me.
Because I knew Jeanie could do a much better job than I would. And she took him, and she didn’t argue, not after she’d understood that I was buckling. She said, ‘It can be temporary,’ but I knew it couldn’t. Only seventeen myself, I didn’t want to mess him up. I didn’t want him to feel he’d been rejected. I loved him, of that there was no doubt. But I was too scared of my own black feelings; the post-natal stuff, the savage dog of depression that was hauling me down into the pits, its jaws clamped around my head.
I look into Frankie’s freckly face – he gets those off his dad, those freckles. His dad, Sammy, a freethinking musician who didn’t believe in bonds, whom I loved fiercely. And whom I could never trace after I told him I was pregnant.
He went to America, I think, Frankie’s dad. Vanished. Me, who could trace anyone; I’ve never found him. Sammy really didn’t want to be found.
And I see Frankie is crying too. Tears on his cheeks, sparkling in his eyes, which are so very like mine.
I wipe them away, those tears, from my boy’s face, and I think, However much I want to, however much I’m tempted, I can’t tell you the truth.
I owe Jeanie that much; I can’t ever tell him now. I’ve left it too late.
But I’ll love him till the day I drop dead – I’ll love Frankie with every tiny sinew, with every cell and vessel of my being.
Take love where you find it I say, if it’s the good and pure type.
We hold hands, and we walk into Jeanie’s room to see her eyelids flutter for the first time in days.
Sixty-Four
Jeanie
The Last Part
It took me a lifetime to understand that, all too often, people are just plain nasty. They can’t see beyond their own stuff. They’re scarred forever, and they want to take you down too.
I refused to believe it for so long – too long – and it was painful to accept, but I know now absolutely that it’s true.
Marlena always knew, of course, and it was natural she would. We are so very different, my sister and I.
She was too hard, sometimes, maybe. It was just a layer of protection. And I was always, no doubt, pretty na?ve.
I’d believed in the fairy tale. I’d subscribed to the myth. A bit like – before Otto – the daft way I believed in all the smiling faces on Facebook, all the snaps of blue skies and turquoise seas. The cuddling, kissing selfies; the couples that couldn’t live apart. Families having brilliant times.
I missed what lay beneath: I just saw the fantasies and sucked them up. I believed it all and aspired to it.
But when it happened to me, the ‘fantasy life’, it wasn’t long before the beautiful idyllic stuff fell away, shiny and unreal. It all fell apart.
How daft could you be?
As daft as me apparently.
Though I wouldn’t have said daft or na?ve back then. I would have said… optimistic. Always looking for the best in people.
But actually I always had ‘unrealistic expectations’, as the doctor in Hove said after I resigned from Seaborne; as he breathed too loudly and, not meeting my eye, prescribed pills I couldn’t pronounce the names of.