Laurel visits her mother the next day. She’d seemed a bit perkier during her visit last Thursday, interested in Laurel’s romance, gripping Laurel’s hand inside hers, her dark eyes sparkling. No talk of death. No empty gaze. Laurel hopes that she will find her in a similar mood today.
But the joy seems to have seeped out of her in the days between her visits and she looks gray again, and hollow. Her first words to Laurel are “I think there’s not much time left for me now.” The words are seamless, said without pause or hesitation.
Laurel sits down quickly beside her and says, “Oh, Mum, I thought you were feeling better?”
“Better,” says her mum. And then she nods. “Better.” “So why the talk of dying again?”
“Because . . .”—she stabs at her collarbone with stiff fingers—“. . . old.”
Laurel smiles. “Yes,” she says, “you are old. But there’s more life left in you yet.”
Her mother shakes her head. “No. No. No life. And y . . . y . . . you. Happy.
Now.”
Laurel takes a sharp intake of breath. She feels the meaning of her mother’s words. “Have you been staying here for me?” she asks, tears catching at the back of her throat.
“Yes. For y . . . y . . . you. Yes.”
“And now I’m happy, you’re ready to go?”
A huge smile crosses her mother’s face and she squeezes Laurel’s hand. “Yes.
Yes.”
A heavy tear rolls down Laurel’s cheek. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, Mum. I still need you.”
“No,” says her mum. “Not n . . . n . . . now. Ellie found. You happy. I . . .” She prods at her collarbone. “I go.”
Laurel wipes away the tear with the back of her hand and forces a smile. “It’s your life, Mum,” she says. “I can’t choose when to let you go.”
“No,” says her mum. “N . . . n . . . no one can.”
 |
That afternoon, Laurel takes Poppy shopping. It’s raining, so she suggests Brent Cross as an alternative to Oxford Street.
Poppy greets her at her front door wearing smart trousers with a jade-green round-neck cardigan and a floral raincoat. Her hair is in two plaits, one on each shoulder. She loops her arm through Laurel’s as they run through the rain to her car across the street. Then she rolls down her window and waves frantically at her father, who stands in the doorway in his socked feet waving back at her.
“How are you?” Laurel asks, turning to glance at Poppy as she pulls out of her road.
“I’m superexcited,” she says. “Good,” Laurel replies. “And how are you?”
“Oh, I’m OK, I guess. A little the worse for wear after last night.” “Too much champagne?”
Laurel smiles. “Yes. Too much champagne. Not enough sleep.”
“Well,” says Poppy, patting Laurel’s hand, “it was your birthday after all.” “Yes. It was.”
The rain is ferocious and Laurel switches on her headlights and pushes the wipers up to the top speed.
“What have you been up to this morning?” Poppy continues in the precocious way she has that Laurel is quickly becoming used to.
“Hm,” she replies, “well, I’ve been to see my mum.” “You have a mum?”
“Yes, of course! Everyone has a mum!” “I don’t.”
“Well, no, maybe not one you can see. But you have a mother. Somewhere.” “If you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” “It makes total sense.”
Laurel frowns at her passenger. “So, what about New York? I can’t see it.
Neither can you. Does that mean it doesn’t exist?”
“That doesn’t count. We could see New York on a thousand webcams right now. We could call someone up in New York and say please send me a photo of New York. But with my mum, well, I can’t see her on a webcam or in a photo, I can’t call her up, I can’t even go and look at her remains in a graveyard. So my mum does not exist.”
Laurel feels thrown for a minute and breathes in sharply. “Would you like her to exist? Do you miss her?”
“No. I never even think about her.”
“But she was your mum. You must think about her sometimes, surely?” “Never. I hated her.”
Laurel glances at Poppy quickly before returning her gaze to the road in front of her. “Why did you hate her?”
“Because she hated me. She was mean and ugly and neglectful.”
“She can’t have been that ugly, to have had a daughter as pretty as you.”
“She didn’t look anything like me. She was horrible. That’s all I remember.
Horrible and she smelled of chips.” “Chips?”
“Yes. Her hair . . .” She peers through the rain-splattered windscreen. “It was red. And it smelled of chips.”
Laurel can’t quite form a response. This awful woman with greasy hair sounds so far removed from anything she’d have imagined as a mother for this self-assured, groomed, and brightly shining girl. Not to mention as a romantic partner for Floyd. But then she remembers the photos she’d found online of Floyd when he was younger and rather more seedy-looking and she remembers that everyone blossoms at a different point in their life: clearly Floyd is blossoming right now and maybe his life was once much, much darker.
“Would you say that your father is happier now than he was then, Poppy?”
It’s a leading question but she needs an answer. She’s only known Floyd for a couple of weeks. He’s without context, a man who walked into a cake shop and
changed her life from the outside in. She’d love a little insight from someone who’s been on the inside for a long time.
But what she gets is not what she expects. Instead of offering bland reassurances Poppy says, “What’s happy got to do with anything? Look, we’re here for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You do know that, don’t you? People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t. We’re a bunch of freaks. That’s all there is to it. A big bunch of stupid, inconsequential freaks. We don’t have to be happy. We don’t have to be normal. We don’t even have to be alive. Not if we don’t want to. We can do whatever we want as long as we don’t hurt anyone.”
Laurel exhales audibly. “Wow,” she says. “That’s some philosophy you’ve got there.”
“It’s not a philosophy. It’s life. Once you learn how to look at the world, once you stop trying to make sense of it all, it’s blindingly obvious.”
Laurel turns quickly to look at Poppy. “You’re a very unusual girl, aren’t you?” “Yes,” says Poppy firmly. “I am.”
|
In the shopping center they head straight to Nando’s for something to eat. Laurel skipped lunch after seeing her mother and now she’s starving.
“How do you get on with SJ’s mum?” she asks as they sit and wait for the food to be delivered.
“Kate?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yes. Kate Virtue. She’s nice. I like her. She’s not very clever, but she’s very sweet and kind.”
“And SJ? Are you two close?”
“Ish. I mean, we’re very different.”
“In what sort of ways?” Laurel asks, thinking that they’re both certainly rather strange.
“Well, she’s an introvert, I’m an extrovert. She’s good at art. I’m good at maths. She cares about everything. I care about nothing. She’s humorless. I’m hilarious. She’s not close to Dad. I’m superclose to Dad.” She smiles.
“And why do you think that is?”
She shrugs. “I guess I’m just more like him. That’s all.”
They stop talking as their food is delivered. Laurel watches her for a moment, studies the intensity of her focus on a bottle of ketchup, the way her forehead bunches into lines, and suddenly she finds herself thrown headfirst out of her own continuum and into a moment from her past. She is here, in this very spot, with Ellie. She doesn’t know where Jake and Hanna are in this isolated vignette; maybe it’s an INSET day at Ellie’s school? But she is sitting here and Ellie is sitting there and everything is exactly the same but completely different. Her head spins for a second and she grips the edge of the table and breathes deeply to center herself. She blinks and looks again at Poppy and now she is Poppy. Definitely Poppy. Not Ellie.
Poppy has not noticed Laurel’s brief moment of extracorporeal time travel.
She bangs the ketchup bottle to dislodge some sauce and then replaces the lid. “I’m really looking forward to meeting your family tomorrow night,” she
says. “Do you think they’ll like me?”
Laurel blinks slowly. “I’m surprised you care,” she says drily.
“I don’t care,” Poppy replies. “I’m just interested in your opinion. Caring and being interested are two very different things.”
“Yes,” says Laurel, smiling. “Yes. They’ll like you. You’ll be a breath of fresh air.”
“Good,” says Poppy. “That’s nice. I love being with other people’s families. I sometimes wish . . .”
Laurel throws her a questioning look. “Nothing,” says Poppy. “Nothing.”
|
Laurel takes Poppy into New Look. She takes her into Gap. She takes her into H&M and Zara and Top Shop and Miss Selfridge. But Poppy refuses to countenance anything fashionable. Eventually they find themselves in the John Lewis childrenswear department where Poppy heads steadfastly toward a rail of printed jersey dresses.
“These,” she says. “I like these.”
“But don’t you already have a dress like this?” Laurel asks, thinking of something she’d seen her wearing that weekend.
“Yes,” Poppy replies, pulling a dress sideways from the rail. “I’ve got this one. But they’ve got it in another print now. Look.” She pulls another dress from the rail. “I don’t have this one.”
Laurel sighs and touches the fabric of the dress. “It’s very pretty,” she says, “but I thought we were going to, perhaps, break you out a bit, you know, of your usual style.”
Now Poppy sighs. She looks mournfully at the dress and then up at Laurel. “We did say that, didn’t we?”
Laurel nods.
“But all that other stuff. In the other shops. It’s all so trashy. And scruffy.” “But you’re young, and that is the joy of being young. You can wear anything
and look amazing in it. Scruffy looks great when you’re young. So does cheap. And trashy. You can save all the smart stuff for when you’re my age. Come on,” she urges. “One more whizz round H&M? For me?”
Poppy beams and nods. “Yes,” she says. “Fine.”
They pick out patterned leggings, a soft, slashed-neck sweatshirt, a brushed-flannel checked shirt, a fitted T-shirt with a mustache printed on it and a gray party dress with a chiffon skirt and jersey bodice.
Laurel stands outside the cubicle, as she has stood outside so many cubicles for so many years of her life and waits for the curtain to be drawn back. And there is Poppy, stern and uncertain in the leggings and T-shirt. “I look vile,” she says.
“No,” says Laurel, her hands going immediately to the waistband of the leggings to center them and make them sit properly. “Here.” She pulls the flannel shirt from its hanger and helps Poppy thread her arms into the sleeves. “There,” she says. “There.” And then she removes the neat bands from the tips of Poppy’s plaits, untangles them and fans the corrugated waves of her hair out over her shoulders.
“There,” she says again. “You look incredible. You look . . .”
She has to turn then, turn and force half her fist into her mouth. She realizes what she has done. She has dressed this child up as her dead daughter. And the result is unnerving.
“You look lovely,” she manages, her voice slightly tremulous. “But if you don’t feel comfortable in it, that’s fine. Let’s go back to John Lewis. We’ll get you that
dress. Come on . . .”
But Poppy does not acknowledge Laurel’s suggestion. She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She turns slightly, from side to side. She runs her hands down the fabric of the leggings, plays with the sleeves of the shirt. She strikes a pose, and then another one. “Actually,” she says. “I like this. Can I have it?”
Laurel blinks. “Yes. Of course you can. If you’re sure?”
“I’m totally sure,” she says. “I want to be different. It will be fun.” “Yes,” says Laurel. “It will be.”
“Maybe you could be different, too?” “Different? In what way?”
“You always wear gray and black. All your clothes look like uniforms. Maybe we should find you something swishy.”
“Swishy?”
“Yes. Or colorful. Something with lace and flowers. Something pretty.” Laurel smiles. “I was just thinking the same thing myself.”
