Romany sighed. ‘Actually, he wouldn’t mind parties. He’s pretty chill about that kind of thing. More than Mum was anyway. But what if I want to take someone back to mine? Can you imagine us in my room with him sitting on the sofa listening?’
‘Well, that’s no different to how it is at my house,’ said Laura. ‘I swear my mum can hear if me and Matt go within a metre of each other, and as soon as we do, she pops in to see if we want a cup of tea.’ Laura rolled her eyes and it made Romany smile.
‘Well, there’s no danger of that at my house,’ Romany replied. Her mum was never going to catch her with a boy again.
Laura looked momentarily horrified, but then gave her a sad half-grin. ‘No,’ she said. And then, ‘At least Matt’s got a car.’
‘Have you ever tried that?’ asked Romany. ‘It’s bloody uncomfortable. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that Mum has abandoned me with all these misfits when all I want is her, and it’s crap.’ Romany could feel her throat starting to tighten and hot tears burned the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away savagely. There had been enough crying. She just wasn’t going to do any more, not in front of other people, at least. Well, maybe a bit with Laura, but no one else. If she was going to be treated like the adult that she kept saying that she was, then she was going to have to stop behaving like a little girl.
Laura put her arms around her, pulling her chair back on to four legs. ‘It’s okay, hun. I know it’s tough.’ She whispered her words so that the boys sitting in the row behind them didn’t hear.
It was tough. In fact, she doubted whether it got much tougher than losing your mum when you were still at school. And she hadn’t even had that long to get her head around what was coming. When her mum had finally stopped trying to shake off whatever bug she’d thought she had with macrobiotic diets, obscure food supplements and reiki and actually gone to the doctor’s, they had discovered that it was stage 4 ovarian cancer, terminal, and with little chance of any life-prolonging treatment being successful. She had been dead within two months.
To start with, Romany had blamed her mother for not seeking help earlier. How could you get so close to death and not even realise that you were ill? But the Macmillan nurses had explained that it was sometimes the way. Symptoms got missed or misdiagnosed. Even if her mother had been to the doctor, there was no guarantee that they would have picked it up any sooner. Ovarian cancer was called the silent killer, apparently. Or the whispering killer, at least, but in her mum’s case it had whispered so very quietly that no one had heard it.
Then Romany had blamed the doctors for being incompetent, and then finally herself for not making the connection between her mother’s rounded stomach and uncharacteristic lethargy and the deadly disease that was eating up her insides.
It was a process, apparently, grief. She had looked it up on Google, desperate to find some hope in the experiences of others. She reckoned that she was stuck somewhere in Stage Three, which was Anger, but some days, sometimes even some hours, she still fluctuated around Stage Two – Pain and Guilt. Of the two, Romany thought she preferred the anger. At least she could scream and throw stuff. The pain was unbearable.
And yet here she was, sitting in double chemistry and pretty much holding it together. Her form tutor, all sympathetic looks and tissues, had said that if she felt she wanted to take some time out then that would be perfectly fine. They would tell the exam board and allowances would be made. But what would Romany do if she didn’t come to school? Sit in the house all day with Tiger? The idea was unthinkable.
No. The one good thing that she was determined would come out of this horrible situation was that she would get her A levels and go to Durham University to read biochemistry and make her mother proud of her. What else was there to do but carry on?
Mr Johnson strolled into the classroom and stood at the front, waiting for silence to descend. It took some time before everyone noticed that he was there.
‘Good morning, year 13,’ he said when the room was finally quiet. ‘I trust we are all well and ready to get on with the biodegradable qualities of polymers. Get your homework out and we’ll see what a dog’s dinner you managed to make of it.’
And then there was no time to think about anything other than polymers, and that suited her just fine.
After school, Laura had a job looking after a couple of primary school children, and so Romany was left to wander home alone. At least she knew now that Mum was gone, and there was no danger of things having got any worse whilst she was at school. She found herself dawdling, though, wandering home the long way, window-shopping in places that normally she wouldn’t have given a second glance. Anything to avoid having to chat to Tiger. She felt bad about that. He was a nice enough bloke, but they had nothing to say to one another. What did he know about teenage girls? What did she know about middle-aged men, come to that? They seemed to have no point of connection other than her mum, and she was the one subject of conversation that they were both desperate to avoid. And so they hovered around each other in a strained kind of benign silence, neither having the raw materials nor the energy to begin a conversation other than to ask each other what they should eat. It was impossibly awkward, but there was nothing she could do to improve it. So, she spent as little time as she could at home, and when she was there, she hid herself away in her room to study or watch CSI on her laptop until it was time to go to bed.