‘Have you told anyone?’ Audrey said, eventually.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Really?’ She narrowed her eyes.
‘I know what it’s like to be gossiped about. And who you choose to spend your time with is none of my business. I’m not going to mention it to anyone.’
One eye unnarrowed itself a micrometre.
‘I promise. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to be your friend, Audrey. Which, if successful, would make the grand total of my friends four. I really don’t have the capacity for enemies.’
‘If you told the other Larks, then it would be a funny story and you’d make more friends. Nice ones.’
‘The kind of people who would want to be my friend because I told them the private business of a fellow Lark for a cheap snigger do not count as nice.’ I rubbed my face, exasperated. ‘Look, I have to get back. All you can do is take my word for it. But if I was going to tell them, surely I’d have already done it. There’s Mel leaving, why don’t you ask her?’
Audrey shifted from one foot to the other, still unsure. Then, her gaze focused on someone behind me and a hint of a smile twitched at her pale lips. ‘If Nathan heard you’d been spreading rumours, he’d think you were a right bitch. Probably ask you to leave the Larks. Definitely stop giving you the special treatment.’
‘Okay, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it makes you feel better to think you’ve blackmailed me into not spilling your secret, rather than choosing to believe I’d not say anything because I’m a decent person with a shred of integrity and not, actually, a right bitch, then… Whatever, Audrey. I’ll see you around.’
And with that retort reverberating around the square, I stomped home and proved I wasn’t a right, or a wrong, bitch by emailing Sean and telling him he could communicate with his abandoned son, as long as he had a phone conversation with me about it first.
* * *
An almost instant reply. Did this man do anything apart from sit at his computer waiting for emails to ping through?
It asked if I would be prepared to meet him face to face.
What!?
I answered almost as quickly, before I had time to think about it:
How? Aren’t you in the US?
Three seconds:
I can be in England in ten hours. Just tell me when and where.
Don’t even go there,I instructed my non-bitchy self, who was starting to seriously waver.No point wondering why, if it’s that easy, he hasn’t been here before. Count to ten, think of Joey and be prepared to give him a chance to explain.
Joey speaking to Sean on the phone, messaging – even FaceTiming was bad enough. Meeting face to face? That was a completely different level of stress migraines, queasiness and spiralling day-mares. Sean, here, all real and hugging Joey and taking him to places I can’t go and telling him things that I can’t like, ‘Call me “Dad”!’ and ‘I’m proud of you, son,’ and being actually, reallythere.
It was my worst nightmare. And I’ve got some bad ones.
Joey’s dream come true.
I might not be able to sleep, eat or think straight until it happened, and possibly not until he was safely back on the other side of the Atlantic, but it was time to get over my own fears and harrowing memories and put my son first.
I would give Sean Mansfield a chance to meet the child he abandoned. But I decided to wait a bit longer than ten hours before I told him when and where.
32
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Seventy-Four
Monday afternoon, I spent a jittery one hour, thirteen minutes and four seconds in the back garden. It was a glorious new stage of the Programme: Time Outside During Daylight. To begin with, I pressed myself against the wall of the house and simply waited for the ground to stop spinning like a demented merry-go-round. But after a while, I noticed a humungous dandelion growing in a bare patch of dirt near the back fence. Inching towards it, arms out for balance, because planet Earth was clearly moving faster than usual that day, I wobbled down to a squat and yanked it out with a satisfactory cloud of damp soil. But there, a couple of feet away, was another one. Hardly a surprise. Cee-Cee had always tidied up the garden, and the weeds weren’t going to pull themselves up out of respect for her memory.
I sucked in a nose-full of wet earth, mingled with the scent of rotting leaves. Stood up again and observed how the light reflected off the droplets still clinging to the grass, the richness of the autumn foliage – so many shades of orange and gold, bronze and russet. Sunshine yellow and deep chestnut brown. There was a slug on the concrete fence post. Fat and glistening, its back patterned like the bark of a tree. If I focused in small, to about a square foot, I could do this. If I gave myself something to do, kept my mind and my eyes and my hands working together, I could block the anxiety, keep it waiting at the top of the slide into panic.
