Something Old, Something New. Darcie Boleyn
She removes her earphones and I realise that she probably didn’t hear me.
‘Everything okay?’ I sit on the edge of her bed and look around her room. I come in here all the time to drop ironing off and to speak to Evan on the laptop but I rarely actually register how it has changed. The little-girl pink was painted purple a few years ago then covered in posters. It makes me smile as I meet the eyes of long-haired rockers and smouldering movie stars, the beautiful people who grace our screens and make us dream of another life. The room could do with a fresh lick of paint but Janis would not be happy at all if she had to remove all her images of rock gods and stars of the silver screen, as well as her inspirational quotes and study notes. It seems that every spare inch of wall has a yellow sticky note bearing some literary quote or revision tip on it.
When did she grow up? When was it that her feet grew so much that she now wears a size and a half bigger than I do? I’m often struck by how quickly time passes. I take each day as it comes and work busily through it but at moments like this, when an evening stretches out before me, these niggling thoughts creep in and I feel sad that time has passed so quickly, that my babies are growing up and I’m hardly aware of it until another stage in their lives has passed.
But I can’t stop it can I?
It would just be nice if I had someone to share it all with, someone who understood.
I think then of my mother, the woman who gave up so much for me. She worked all hours and never once complained, not even when I had to tell her that I’d gotten pregnant, that all her hard work had been in vain. She surrendered some of the best years of her life working two jobs just to make ends meet and saving every spare penny so that I could go to university. She wanted me to achieve my dream of being a globetrotting photographer, to be independent, self-sufficient and to experience a freedom she never could. How did she feel when she found out that I’d risked all that for love? She didn’t try to encourage me to get an abortion and she didn’t even shout or cry, she just nodded and asked me what my plans were. She must have been disappointed, yet she took it all in her stride. Did she ever look at me in the same way I look at my children and think how quickly I’d grown? Did she ever wonder when I changed? These are questions I’ve never asked her, things I fear questioning her about in case she tells me something that hurts, that confirms my worst suspicions – that I did hurt her when I let her down.
I briefly contemplate ringing her but she’ll probably be on her third glass by now, surrounded by her sophisticated French friends and her doting husband. She lives in France on her husband’s vineyard and I’m happy for her that she has a second chance at love and happiness. After my father died, she remained strong. She never revealed distress or weakness, although I knew that she suffered; she just did it silently. I always wanted to make her proud and I swore that a man would never leave me in the situation that my father left her in. I couldn’t bear to be abandoned like that.
‘Studying going well?’ I ask Janis and she colours.
‘Yeah I guess.’
‘What is it?’ I smile. ‘Social networking distracting you?’
Her colour deepens and I move closer. I don’t want a chasm to open up between us. I want to keep my children close and to be there for them, to be a good mum. But a good mother ensures that her children are achieving their potential and doesn’t let them underachieve.
She takes a deep breath as if she’s going to divulge some deep, dark secret. I wait, afraid to move in case I deter her. Then she exhales slowly and says, ‘I’m okay Mum… honestly.’
‘I’m here to talk, you know. Whenever. I know the younger two keep me busy but you’re my child too and I love you, Janis.’
‘I know, Mum.’ She nods her easy acceptance of my fierce maternal devotion, evidently unable to comprehend exactly how much I love her, then plugs her earphones back in. I stand there for a moment and smooth out the patchwork quilt again. I want to say more, to have a meaningful conversation with my baby girl, but I can’t seem to find the right words because I’m afraid of saying the wrong ones. So I say nothing at all.
As I pull her door behind me, then walk out onto the dark landing, I am suddenly overwhelmed by sadness. There is no manual to help with this stuff, to tell you how to negotiate your way through having three children by two different men and two divorces, while dealing with your own guilt at getting it wrong before you’d even really begun. There are manuals on parenthood, sure, but I need a precise one to help with my particular situation.
And as I descend the stairs, heading to the living room where I’ll sit with a book or flick through the television channels for an hour before heading up to bed alone, I wish again for all that I miss. For things to have been different from the start. Yet at the same time, I know that what I want is impossible and that, therefore, I would change nothing.
Getting pregnant when I did gave me Janis. Marrying Dex gave me Henry and Anabelle. Things happened as they did and I wasn’t wholly to blame. Yet I wasn’t totally blameless either.
****
I jump awake, dragged from a dream about being in the jungle. Strangely, Lady Macbeth was there, talking about when the owl shrieks and the crickets cry…
Crickets?
I hold my breath and will my heart to slow down as I listen.
But I am not mistaken; my house is filled with the song of crickets. It’s as if I am abroad and they’re chirruping away. But I am not on a Greek island in a café eating date and walnut scones filled with honey and yogurt; a pleasant image inspired by a recent novel. I am, in fact, in England, inside my own home, clad in my fleecy pyjamas and it is February. So why, then, can I hear crickets?
I sit up and rub my eyes. My neck is stiff from sleeping on the sofa and I am cold. I need to go to bed and snuggle beneath the duvet. I pick up my phone and check the time. Three-thirty a.m. I head out to the hall and nearly fall over Dragon who is sleeping across the hallway guarding the stairs like some ancient mythical creature guarding its gold. Fairy Princess is not far away, snoring her head off in a very un-princess-like way. They clearly don’t need to go out, so I step carefully over them and tiptoe up the stairs. The house is immersed in darkness and I usually like this time when I can listen to everyone I love breathing in unison under one roof. But tonight, there is another noise and it is incongruous in my Sutton semi.
The crickets! The central heating must have encouraged their journey to maturity and some of the larger ones are chirping.
Upstairs, I pop my head into each child’s room to check on them. Anabelle and Janis are sleeping in their beds, but when I enter Henry’s room, he is sleeping on his knees in front of the vivarium. How can children do that? Fall asleep in some strange sort of yoga position. The lights inside it are off but I can make out the small dark shape of the baby dragon underneath the fibre-glass cave. I gently scoop Henry up and shuffle him into his cabin bed – not easy when he is getting so big and I have to lift him up four steps too – then pull the covers over him. As I turn away and head for the door, something crunches under my foot.
And again as I take another step.
There is a slimy wetness beneath the crunch.
I pause as my sleep fuddled mind tries to conjure an explanation.
Lego.
Henry probably sneaked a grape up here too and that somehow got mixed up with the Lego and that’s what’s now sticking to the ball of my foot and oozing between my toes. It must be Lego that Henry has left out again, even though we’ve had the discussion about putting it away once he’s finished playing with it. The dogs don’t brave the stairs very often, but if they do and they decide to consume some of his plastic building blocks or his intergalactic pirate ship, then there will be an expensive trip to the vet and Henry will lose what is now being hailed as a better investment than stocks and shares. I will certainly have to speak to him about tidying up properly tomorrow.
But as I take another step, the chirruping gets louder and something scuttles across my