You Me Everything Page 2

  “They won’t.”

  “How do you know?” he asks.

  “If anyone was going to break into a house on this street, ours would be the last one they’d choose.”

  I bought our tiny terrace in south Manchester thanks to a financial leg up from my dad shortly after I’d had William and before the neighborhood became fortuitously trendy.

  I’ve never joined in the ironic bingo nights in the falafel bar at the end of the road and must’ve only bought one quinoa-laced sourdough since the artisan bakery opened. But I’m all for these kind of places, as they’ve made house prices soar.

  It does mean, however, that I am probably the only thirty-three-year-old single parent on a salary like mine who lives round here. I teach creative writing at our local sixth form college, which has always offered more in the way of job satisfaction than financial rewards.

  “Jake Milton was burgled,” William tells me somberly as we turn down the street. “They took all his mum’s jewelry, his dad’s car and Jake’s Xbox.”

  “Really? That’s awful.”

  “I know. He’d got to the final level on Garden Warfare,” he sighs, shaking his head. “He’ll just never get that back.”

  It will take four or five hours to reach the south coast to catch our ferry, but we’re leaving earlier than we otherwise would, so we can make a stop-off, not far from our house.

  We arrive at Willow Bank Lodge ten minutes later and pull into the small car park at the front. The building looks like an oversize Lego house from outside—with uniform mud brown bricks and a grey tiled roof. But then, nobody chooses a care home for the architecture.

  I key in the code for the two doors and sign us in as we’re hit by the smell of overroasted meat and mushy vegetables. Inside, the place is clean, bright and well maintained, even if its interior designer must’ve been color-blind. The swirly wallpaper is a thick avocado green, the floor covered in patterned navy and red carpet tiles, and the skirting boards tinted with a marmalade varnish that someone misguidedly must’ve thought looked natural.

  The sounds of lunchtime drift out from beyond a set of double doors and the television area, so we head in that direction, instead of turning down the corridor towards Mum’s room.

  “Are you all right there, Arthur?” I ask gently, as one of the long-term residents wanders out of the bathroom with an expression like he’s just stepped into Narnia. He straightens his back defensively.

  “I’m looking for my pans. Have you taken my pans?”

  “Not us, Arthur. Why don’t you come and try the dining room?” I’m about to rescue him before he steps into the broom cupboard, when the double doors open and one of the nursing staff, Raheem, appears to offer him a reassuring arm and guide him away.

  “Hiya,” says William. In his midtwenties and of Somalian descent, Raheem also owns an Xbox, so they always have plenty to discuss.

  “Hey, William. Your grandma’s about to have lunch. There might be some pineapple turnover left if you fancy it?”

  “Yeah, okay.” My son never declines an offer of food, unless it’s something I’ve gone to enormous effort to make, when he invariably looks at it like I’ve presented him with a plate of steaming industrial waste.

  As Arthur shuffles through the door, followed by Raheem, the figure of a man appears in their place. The skin around his temples is etched with years of spiraling pressure, which has surely had a more potent effect on his health than the fact that he’s a reformed alcoholic.

  “Granddad!” William’s face erupts into a smile, and my dad’s pale grey eyes sparkle into life.

  Chapter 2

  It’s one of the small miracles of my world that, even in the face of unimaginable strain, every bit of my dad smiles when his grandson is around. “Are you all set, William?”

  “Yep. Packed and on our way, Granddad.”

  Dad ruffles his thick, curly hair and steps back to examine him. “I could’ve taken you for a cut before you left.”

  “But I like it long.”

  “You look like a burst cushion.” William chuckles, even though he’s heard this quip more times than he could count.

  “How many minutes in four and a half hours?” Dad challenges him.

  “Hmm. Two hundred and . . . seventy.”

  “Good lad.” He pulls him in briefly for a hug.

  That my son is on a gifted and talented register for maths is not something for which I can take credit. Arithmetic is definitely not my forte, and the only figures at which Adam excels are of the hourglass variety.

  But then my dad, an accountant, was always more of a father to William than Adam ever was. My parents’ semi is only ten minutes away from where we live, and it was a second home to William before he started school; the place he’d puzzle over jigsaws with my dad and bake fairy cakes with Mum.

  Even later on, it was Dad who’d wait at the school gates and take William back to their place to supervise homework or ferry him to karate club, while I finished up at work.

  Everything’s changed in the last couple of years.

  My mum is no longer the grandma she once was, someone who, seven or eight years ago, would be the first in line to shoot down the big, wavy slide in our local soft play center with William on her knee. She was never concerned about looking like a big kid; she just kicked off her shoes and got stuck in, as William shrieked with delight and other women her age remained at the sidelines, sipping their lattes.

  “Let me give you something to spend,” Dad says, rooting in his trouser pocket.

  “You don’t need to do that,” William murmurs unconvincingly as my father thrusts a twenty-pound note in his hand.

  “Buy yourself a comic on the ferry.”

  “Could I get some Coke?”

  “Of course,” Dad replies, before I can say definitely not.

  “Thanks, Granddad. I really appreciate it.” William skips into the dining room to find his grandma, while I hold back to talk to Dad.

  “You should’ve gone straight off for your ferry, love,” he tells me. “You didn’t need to stop here on the way.”

  “Of course I did. I wanted to give Mum lunch before I go.”

  “I’ll do that. I was only popping out to buy a paper.”

  “No, I’d like to do it, if you don’t mind.”

  He nods, inhaling slowly. “Well, listen. Try and relax in France. You need a holiday.”

  I smile dubiously. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

  “You’ll enjoy it if you let yourself. And make sure you do. For your mum’s sake, if it makes you feel any better. She really wants this, you know.”

  “I still think it’s too long to be away.”

  “We’ve lived with this for a decade, Jess. Absolutely nothing is going to happen in five weeks.”

  * * *

  —

  Mum is on the far side of the dining room, next to the open patio window, with William sitting next to her, chatting away. It’s the plum spot at this time of day, when the sun is high and she can feel a cool summer breeze against her skin.

  She is in her wheelchair, wearing the turquoise dress I bought her from Boden a few months ago, and in a position you could call sitting, although that implies keeping still.

  In reality, Mum is rarely still these days. Thanks to her hefty medication though, she no longer jerks as violently as she used to.

  Still, the drugs do not work miracles, as I am painfully aware.

  So she squirms and twists, her facial features and bony limbs contorting into improbable shapes. She is thin these days, joints protruding from her elbows and knees, her cheekbones so pronounced that I sometimes look at her and think her eyes seem too big for her face. Her hands are gnarled too, twisted beyond her years. She looked young for her age once. Now, you’d never know she was only fifty-three.

  “
Hi, Mum.” I bend down to give her a hug, squeezing her a little longer than usual.

  When I pull back, I look at her drooping mouth to see if she can return the smile. It takes a long time for her to respond to me, but eventually she manages a disjointed: “Eh . . . sweetheart.”

  I can still understand Mum most of the time, though I’m one of the few who can. She only speaks in three- or four-word sentences, and they’re always slurred, her voice hoarse and quiet.

  “I see you’ve managed to get the best spot. Everyone will be jealous.”

  A long interval follows, during which Mum visibly searches for words. “Bribed them,” she says eventually, and I laugh.

  A new member of staff appears and places Mum’s lunch on the table, before unfolding a large plastic bib and tying it gently round her neck. I reach across to smooth it down, but her left arm continues to flick it upwards. It floats downwards momentarily, before flying off again.

  I consider picking up the baby spoon at the side of her plate but decide to leave it in case Mum wants to have a go at feeding herself. She hardly ever does these days, though she was full of indignation when anything else was first suggested.

  It’s been nearly a year since she moved into Willow Bank Lodge. We all wanted her to stay at home for as long as she possibly could, but it became too difficult, even when Dad set up a bed for her downstairs. Dad still works, which kind of gets in the way of being a twenty-four-hour carer—it had become obvious to everyone she was going to need more than only him, ideally in a place where just getting to the bath didn’t represent a life-threatening journey. And she’s never short of visitors here. In fact, she has a small circle of friends who’ve helped her through every dark moment of the last ten years. Her best friend Gemma comes every weekend, usually with a new audiobook or a batch of the deformed cherry scones she calls her “signature dish.”

  “Excited?” Mum asks William.

  “I can’t wait!” he replies. “Dad’s planning loads for us, Grandma. We’re having the best cottage, aren’t we, Mum? We’re going kayaking and rock climbing, and he’s going to let me help him do some DIY jobs.”

  I seriously worry about my mum’s expectations of this trip, which was all her idea. Not that I was surprised when she suggested it, adding rather dramatically that it was her “dying wish.” She openly admits this is a surefire guarantee she’ll get her own way.

  After Adam and I split up, Mum was as furious with him as I was and understood why I wanted to keep him at arm’s length. But while she never had any aspirations about us getting back together again, she did assume, or at least hope, that William would have some kind of relationship with his father.

  Then Adam moved to France, and it became apparent that wasn’t going to happen.

  Adam is not a neglectful father, strictly speaking. He pays his maintenance on time, remembers William’s birthday and Skypes when he says he will. But our son is no more than a small piece in the jigsaw of Adam’s colorful life. They see each other twice or three times a year, if that. And I’m not even sure Adam would protest any longer at the accusation that he was uninterested.

  Mum has always had a bee in her bonnet, not only about this lack of contact, but about the fact that I’ve never said or done anything about it. I willingly let Adam drift away. If I’m honest, I welcomed it. I had enough love for William for both of us.

  I’m fairly sure she never envisaged Adam and me sitting round the dinner table every Sunday for William’s sake, hating each other’s guts as we passed the gravy, but she has banged on for years that he needs a “real” relationship with his dad. Perhaps it’s because she was adopted, so never knew her own mother and father. Either way, these days Adam lives a luxurious lifestyle in the Dordogne, while we live in a two-up two-down terrace in Manchester, and the fact that there’s a fancy bread shop on the corner of the road doesn’t bring our circumstances any closer. Still, I hear what she’s saying. I don’t agree, but I hear it. And every time I look at her these days and think about what she has to contend with, I’m reminded that I am hardly in a position to dig my heels in. So I emailed Adam and suggested we pay him a visit. I suspect he nearly keeled over in shock.

  Anyway, if I could at least get them, I don’t know, bonding, then I’d feel as though I’d achieved something that would give my mum a sliver of comfort. Plus, I’ve got backup, at least for some of the time when we’re there. My friend Natasha is joining us for a few weeks, then Becky and her husband and kids will arrive.

  “I . . . love France,” Mum pipes up, as her eyes land falteringly on William. “Take pictures.”

  We had a handful of French holidays when I was William’s age. We stayed in a mobile home on the same campsite year after year—it was heaven, a new world of endlessly sunny days and breakfasts that involved pastry with actual chocolate inside.

  “Try a pedalo,” Mum says. “Your mum . . . loved them.”

  I feel my throat tighten at the memory of Mum and me pedaling round the lake at the edge of the campsite, giggling together in the sunshine.

  As William starts babbling on, something about a bunk bed, I have to look away to stop either of them seeing the film of tears on my eyes. I swallow hard and remind myself that we’ll only be gone for a few weeks. It’ll do nobody any favors if I start crying now, no matter how much this is making my chest ache.

  I look down and realize Mum hasn’t touched the baby spoon. So I pick it up and tentatively scoop some of the mush, raising it to her mouth.

  “Silver service,” she mumbles, and I let out a snort.

  Chapter 3

  We begin our 825-mile, 28-hour journey in high spirits, singing along tunelessly to a playlist that includes everything from the Beatles to Avicii. We chat about what France was like when I was little—the soft, sandy beaches, the dreamy ice creams, how Mum taught me to master a mean game of blackjack for francs and centimes.

  William plays on my iPad for a while, hunched over the screen until I become concerned he’ll get stuck like that and finally pry it off him. Instead, we put on the audiobook of Billionaire Boy by David Walliams and are soon laughing so much that my cheeks hurt. Then a particular story line crops up involving a character who dates a glamour model. I’m not even sure he knows what one is. All I know is that I have a similar feeling to when he asked me to explain where babies came from earlier this year. I rushed out and bought a book addressing this and other related issues, suggesting he read it by himself, before asking me any questions. That way we’d avoid any embarrassment. “Why would I be embarrassed?” he asked innocently, forcing me to try to sound cheerfully relaxed when reading out phrases like, “and that’s what some people call wanking.”

  By the time we get onto the ferry, William is feeling significantly less inclined to talk. His cheeks are pale as we park in the vaults of the ship and make our way upstairs to sit by the window.

  “We’ll get a good view from here,” I remark brightly, to which his response is: “I’m going to puke.” He chucks up seven times over the course of the six-hour overnight trip—the one we’re supposed to be sleeping on—and emerges from the ferry looking like that child in The Exorcist. We stop at the first picnic area we encounter on French soil and wait for his nausea to pass, sipping water as we watch the stream of British families attempting to drive the wrong way at a roundabout.

  William sleeps for the rest of the journey, waking only for pee breaks as we speed along the motorway. This leaves me alone with my thoughts until we reach the Dordogne, crisscrossed with woodland and fields, and we slice through the countryside, brief visitors to dozens of sleepy hamlets dotted with pots of fiery geraniums and creamy stone houses with shuttered windows.

  Despite the beauty of the landscape, I can’t stop dwelling on Mum, haunted by the same thoughts that have left me so anxious that—for the first time in my life—I started taking antidepressants earlier this year. I’ve never thought o
f myself as the kind of person who’d need medicinal help for her mood. I’d always thought of myself as fun. The first to put on a silly hat at Christmas, or leap up and butcher a song on karaoke, or join in one of William’s water pistol fights. The most I’d ever need to get over a bad day was a Magnum ice cream, with an occasional pinot grigio chaser, while work appraisals highlighted my “boundless energy and popularity with the students”—and I never even had to pay anyone to say that.

  But since Mum was admitted to Willow Bank, as great as I think the place is, there’s been a creeping change in me. Six months ago it went off the scale. Not that most people can tell. I put on a good show of being the same old Jess. But inside, things are different.

  What started out as an understandable level of worry took on a life of its own as Mum’s deterioration accelerated. Depression was the wrong word for it. It was a crushing anxiety, an inability to think about anything other than a future that seemed bleaker the harder life became for my poor mum.

  The pills have helped, even though I still don’t like the idea of being on them. They haven’t changed the fundamental fact that kicked it all off: that my mum is in a home, slowly losing her grip on the person she is. And there’s not a thing anyone can do about it.

  Chapter 4

  As we’re surrounded by serried rows of walnut trees and swirls of lush foliage, our GPS finally announces that we have reached our destination. Given that we’re miles from anywhere, our GPS is very clearly talking crap.

  I root in the glove compartment for the map I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to use and, after several wrong turns, find my way to a junction pointing to Château de Roussignol. I crunch onto a sandy driveway, as the flutter of my heart makes me wonder for a moment whether I’m actually pleased at the idea of being on holiday. I suppose it is allowed, even if it does mean being around Adam.

  There was a point when I hated him, but that’s not an emotion that comes naturally to me. I found it exhausting.