Lorna turns to her daughter. ‘I think this used to be my bedroom.’
9
Theo
The grave is looking bare. The yellow roses that Theo placed there last week are already brown and wilted. The hot weather must have speeded up their decay.
‘Your dad hasn’t been again, then?’ says Jen, at his shoulder, voicing what he’s thinking.
‘Are you surprised?’ he asks, trying to keep his voice light.
Theo’s wife raises her well-groomed eyebrows in answer. She squeezes his arm gently but doesn’t say anything. He knows she doesn’t like his father – and why would she after the way he is with her? – but she never bad-mouths him. She hands him a bouquet of brightly coloured blooms that they bought on the way here. ‘I’ll leave you alone for a bit …’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know you like to talk to her.’
He flashes her a small smile. ‘You think it’s weird.’ He’d told her once, early in their relationship, then instantly regretted it. He didn’t want her to think he was some sad mummy’s boy.
‘Of course it’s not weird. I just wish I’d had the chance to meet her.’
‘She’d have loved you.’ And she would have. Everyone does. Jen is instantly lovable with her effervescent personality and her warm nature. Straight away she puts you at ease.
His wife reaches up and kisses him. She has to stand on tiptoe. ‘I’ll be over there, reading the old graves.’
‘Now that is weird …’ He laughs.
‘Hey! It’s interesting!’ She throws him a smile over her shoulder as she wanders off towards an old cracked tombstone with a huge angel perched on top.
He watches her go in her long swishy summery skirt and tight T-shirt. Her shoulders are pushed back, her walk confident, the knot of strawberry-blonde hair on top of her head wobbling as she strides away towards the older part of the cemetery.
Then he turns back to his mum’s grave. ‘She’s being brave, Mum,’ he says. ‘She’s still not pregnant and I know she’s worried. We’ve been trying for nearly a year.’ He wonders if he’d have been so honest about this stuff if his mum was still alive. He stoops to take the dead roses out of the vase. The foetid smell of the rank water rises up his nostrils and hits the back of his throat. He shoves them into his plastic bag ready for the compost heap and replaces them with the fresh bouquet.
Theo visits every Saturday – mostly without Jen as she’s usually working at the beauty salon in town and only gets one Saturday off a month – and each time he hopes to see something other than his decaying flowers from the previous week, something to show his dad has visited. That he actually cares. But for years there has been nothing. It happened gradually over the first year or two, he supposes, looking back, his dad’s lack of interest. He suspects that his dad no longer visits the grave because he finds it too emotional. If he doesn’t visit he can pretend it hasn’t happened.
Theo kneels down on the dry grass and traces his fingers along the date on the headstone. Wednesday, 12 May 2004. Today is the fourteenth anniversary of her death. How can it be fourteen years, he wonders, when it still feels like it happened yesterday? Theo had been away at university in York when he got the phone call that changed his life. He’d been nineteen. And despite the heat of the day he shivers when he remembers. His father’s deep, commanding voice, thick with emotion at the end of the line. She’s fallen, he’d said. She’s fallen down the stairs and she’s dead. I’m so sorry, son. I’m so sorry. Theo had been standing at the student-union bar with a group of mates jostling either side of him, the mobile in his hand, unable to comprehend what his dad was telling him when everyone around him was drinking, jolly and singing. You need to come home. He’d taken the bus straight away, thankful that the bender he’d been envisaging had just begun and he’d had the chance to drink only half a pint. He remembers the journey from York to Harrogate clearly even after all these years. He remembers hoping that his dad was confused and had got it wrong, even though he knew there was nothing wrong with his sharp mind.