People LIke Her(34)
“And what did eventually change your mind, Emmy, about having children?”
I shrug.
“Circumstances changed, I guess,” I say. “It finally felt like the right time.”
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the_mamabare: They go so quickly, don’t they? The years, the tears, the am-I-doing-it-right fears. But the tiny humans don’t care if you’re slightly sweaty, totally knackered, and all your clothes look like someone has been sitting on you. #greydays might loom in the underbelly of your mind, but sometimes, in the most miraculous of ways, a sparkling interlude appears, unicorn-like, and the clouds lift. I call these the #yaydays—when you feel like a superhero and your circle of mama mates are your able sidekicks. The gang that reminds you that it’s all about celebrating the small wins. And today, as Coco turns four, is one of those days. So with love and cake and just the best, best friends in the room, I want to know about your own #yayday. Tell me about it below and tag your mama crew to each be in with a chance of winning a ￡1,000 voucher. #yayday #MamaWins #CocoTurns4 #ad
They were all there, at the party. All the mamas. They seem to have posted about nothing else for the past forty-eight hours. Here are the coach one and the Hackney hipster one and the one with the boobs and another mama I have never come across before, all holding champagne flutes and laughing with their heads thrown back. Here is another one of them, posing with a child dressed as a dinosaur. Here are some other kids with painted faces, making claws with their hands and pretending to snarl at the camera. I click among the feeds, staring at a single photo for a while and then checking back to see if Emmy has posted anything new. I can spend hours doing this. Days, almost. And what you notice if you do that is how carefully coordinated it all is. The hashtags. The way they all like one another’s posts and comment on them. The way they are always promoting one another, mentioning one another, tagging one another. The way they are always harping on about the same messages, the same themes. Today the theme is obviously female friendship, the importance of mums looking out for one another. Mamabare gets the ball rolling with a picture of five or six Instamums from behind, arm in arm, looking over their shoulders, with a caption about how lucky she is to have such great friends. Within two minutes they have all responded.
Do you want to know something strange, though?
Not a single one of these people was at Emmy’s wedding. That was five years ago. She posted a picture the other month, for their anniversary, and the first thing that struck me, as I was looking at it, was, Who the hell are all these people? Her husband I recognized, of course. But not a single one of the five or six other smiling young people gathered around the happy couple on the church steps looked even vaguely familiar. And as for the tall girl, the one holding Emmy’s train, the maid of honor, I have never seen or heard Emmy mention her anywhere, ever.
Which frankly strikes me as a little peculiar. A bit suspicious, even.
One of the things Grace found hardest, after what happened, was the way so many of her friends dropped her, how some of the people she thought would be in her life forever just vanished.
My daughter was always someone who would do anything for her friends, someone who had pictures of her pals on her fridge, was always the designated driver, the one who would make sure everybody got home safe. She never forgot a birthday.
Half the people we invited to the funeral didn’t even bother replying.
There were some people who would make the effort to come and see her, especially at first, of course. But it was always awkward; you could see, Grace said, that they were worried about saying the wrong thing, afraid that whatever they said would upset her. There would be long silences. She would catch them looking at the clock.
The worst thing about that, I often used to think, the cruelest thing, was that after George died, when I was first on my own, Grace was the one person who always knew what to say. How to cheer me up if I was down and just couldn’t see the point of it all anymore. She’d tell a story or a joke just the way he would have done to make me laugh. Or she’d say to me that her dad wouldn’t have wanted me to spend the rest of my life moping and moaning and pining away. Or, if the time and the mood were right, she might remind me of all the little things he used to do around the house that would drive me up the wall. Other times, she’d just reach over and squeeze the back of my hand and let me know that she missed him too.
That I, her mum, couldn’t do the same for her, could never seem to find the right words or the right gesture when she was going through her grief, that whatever I said or did always seemed to annoy her, to upset her—it devastated me. I suggested she go out—to dinner, to the cinema, even just for an errand or two to get her away from the house—but she said she didn’t want to. That she didn’t think it would be appropriate, that it wouldn’t look right. She said she felt that whenever she went out she was being judged. She would catch someone’s eye and they would look away. She would walk past people talking, and they would fall silent. Once or twice she was sure someone had actually shouted something at her from across the street. I told her not to be silly, that she was being paranoid.
It put a lot of pressure on her and Jack.
I remember one day I drove over to see them. A Sunday it was, late November, one of those days when the sun never really breaks through the clouds. I was supposed to be coming for Sunday lunch, had brought a cake with me for dessert, and when I got to the house and turned into the drive there was Jack’s car halfway up it, pulled over to the side. And as I got closer I could see Jack, hunched over in the driver’s seat, his head down and his arms crossed on the steering wheel, and as I got closer still I could see that his shoulders were shaking, and when he looked up his face was streaked with tears. I drove past and up to the house, and Grace heard the car on the gravel and came to the front door to let me in. We went through to the kitchen where the table was set and the food ready for dishing up and Grace did so. And about twenty minutes later, when we had both almost finished, Jack came in and said hello and sat down and joined us, and not a word was said about it.