Amy put a hand to the side of her own mouth and whispered, ‘Me too, Mum.’
‘We might get her back,’ whispered Joy.
‘We might,’ whispered Amy.
Joy’s eyes danced and she spoke again at her normal volume. ‘Anyway. Thank you for coming. I know how busy you are but you don’t need to worry about me because I’ve got Savannah!’
‘Yes, you do,’ said Amy, deflating.
‘She’s doing everything! I don’t need to lift a finger. I’m treating her to a shopping day tomorrow to thank her.’
‘A shopping day.’ Amy shuddered at the thought. ‘That’s nice of you.’
‘It’s not nice of me! It’s the least I can do for her. Do you know – I can’t remember the last time I cooked a meal?’
She said this as if it were something to be marvelled over.
Amy couldn’t remember the last time she herself had cooked a meal either, unless heating up leftover Uber Eats in the microwave counted. Brooke had mentioned that their mother was obsessed with the fact that she didn’t have to cook anymore.
‘It’s like she’s had this secret loathing of cooking all these years,’ Brooke had said. ‘Once Savannah moves out we’ll have to do something about getting her help.’ She’d paused. ‘If Savannah ever moves out.’
‘How much longer do you think Savannah will be staying for?’ Amy asked her mother.
‘Oh, gosh, we’re not even thinking about that right now. I need her,’ said her mother. ‘For example, who would have cooked for your father when I was in hospital?’
As if that – her father’s dietary requirements – was the most significant thing about her hospital stay.
Amy said, ‘Well, I guess we would have. Or he could have got takeaway, or he might even have cooked for himself.’
‘Very funny,’ said Joy. ‘Anyway, I’m sure she will want to be on her way soon. I don’t want to take advantage of her. She’s doing so much now that I feel like we should actually pay her some sort of a wage.’
‘Like a live-in housekeeper?’ said Amy.
‘Imagine that,’ said her mother dreamily.
‘The thing is, if you were employing a live-in housekeeper, you would get references, so I’m just thinking –’
‘Well, obviously I’d never get a real live-in housekeeper!’ said Joy.
‘I’m just saying that we don’t really know that much about Savannah,’ said Amy, and she lowered her voice and looked towards the door.
‘I actually know lots about her,’ said Joy. ‘We’ve had some long chats while I’ve been recuperating. Do you know – and I find this just so interesting, so fascinating!’ Joy’s face lit up. ‘Savannah has something called highly superior autobiographical memory.’ She ticked off each word on her fingers as she said it. ‘She can remember whole days in her life with a degree of detail that you and I, ordinary people, would find impossible.’
‘Really?’ said Amy sceptically. She bristled at the way she had been lumped into the category of ease ‘ordinary people’。 She herself felt she could remember events from her life in quite significant detail, thank you very much. ‘She’s actually received a diagnosis of that?’
‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know if you get diagnosed with it, I don’t think it’s an illness, as such, although she did say it’s both a blessing and a curse, because while it’s nice to remember the good events, she said she also remembers the bad ones, and, as we know, she has not had a normal happy life – poor girl.’
‘Huh,’ said Amy.
She took the hairbrush that her mother had left sitting on the bed in front of her and replaced it carefully on the dressing table, then she went and quietly closed the door and sat back down again.
‘What is it?’ Her mother sat up straight and propped a pillow behind her back. ‘What’s happened? Has something bad happened?’ Panic flooded her face. ‘Dammit, I thought that new counsellor was helping? I thought you were good at the moment!’
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ said Amy testily. Why did her mother always assume there must be some crisis or other in Amy’s life? She registered the irritated ‘dammit’ that accompanied her mother’s panic. Her mother would never shout, ‘Stop being so ridiculous, Amy, pull yourself together!’ like she had done when Amy was a kid – she now knew all the correct supportive modern things to say about mental health – but Amy knew that there was an unconscious part of her that still wondered if Amy did indeed need to just stop being so ridiculous and pull herself together. Amy was like a defective household appliance that would never be replaced but that everyone knew could break down at the most inconvenient of times.