Page 18 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
Zara:We tried the one called Paris but she said she’d rather the one called Marrakech because she’s never been there and would quite fancy going. So that’s what I gave her. All good.
Zara:Also, she made me buy extra milk, flour, sugar, eggs and tape. Said people might need to borrow some?
Me:Yup, she’s convinced a neighbour will pop by and ask to borrow some milk like the old days.
I’ve tried explaining about next hour delivery, twenty-four-hour supermarkets and Amazon stores. Pointless. She simply doesn’t accept that neighbours don’t need her to stock emergency baking ingredients any longer. But somehow seeing the extra bottles huddled together in the fridge, like a group of friends, settles her. So I keep buying them.
Me:Tape?
Zara:She says it’s one of the things you never know you need until you really need it...;)
Me:Any luck finding a picture of Sven yet?
Zara:Nothing. Do you think she got angry when he didn’t show up and threw them away? Burned them?
Me:No idea. Anything’s possible with Mum...
I sit for some time opposite the water until the sun starts to hint at me that today is running out, and the distant voices of a groupof teenagers have disappeared on bikes. The water is flat, dark and framed by soft grey cliffs with ledges and pockets to jump off.
I google the woman I met today. Nothing. The only result for her name is a high school theatre production where she stands at the end of the group looking off-camera. No Facebook, no Instagram, no LinkedIn.
Find two semi-professional hockey players with the same surname, and I find her shop. Pull up the pictures and look at it. A small florist business with pots overflowing the pavement outside it in a way that health and safety would crack down on within hours in London. The website tells me it’s a family business and has a picture of a couple with a blonde, almost white-haired girl between them. Parents? Grandparents? No, too young. There is a link to order flowers for next-day delivery, but that’s it.
I pull out one of the letters. I’ve read them all but find I turn to them whenever I think of Mum lately. This one is a single square page with a wisteria illustration on it. I read the short lines.
Svennie,
I keep coming back to our spot. Thinking about what could have been if we’d met there like we planned to.
E.
Then I jump. Was that anowl?The only wildlife I’m used to is rats and city foxes. Yep.Definitely an owl.I throw myself on the bed, which leaves a lot to be desired, and press the pillow over my head, blocking out the nature sounds, remembering the ones my mum used to have on CD when I was younger. Relaxing dolphin sounds. Bird song. Somehow ‘Over the Top Owl Hooting’ never made it into the recording studio. The surrealism of it all hits me. How have I been nestled in my mum’s old love story? And why am I starting to feel like it’s somehow my story too?
Edith
London
When I can’t sleep the way I used to, I lie still and allow myself to flit in and out of dark stillness, without forcing it or feeling angry. I often don’t know where my thoughts end and a dream starts. But last night I’m sure I dreamt. People retelling their dreams are up there with the world’s most annoying human habits, like biting into Popsicles. So when I walk downstairs I don’t share with Zara that I was back in 2000 and that it was a sunny day and my insides felt soft. I go back to that year a lot. It’s as if my dreams have regressed more than my brain currently and are showing me a new reality I will one day be living in once I get sicker. I try to think why that year, why then? It wasn’t my happiest time, but I did feel safe. Stable. Having gotten rid of Blade’s father. Having given up the destructive habit of dating bad men, which I’d thrown myself into following him and Sven. Having just bought the house, having enough work and enough love through little Blade. Perhaps stability really is more important than joy?
I hear Zara before I see her. It is rather delightful having a female presence in the house. A girlfriend of sorts. I love my son but he can tell me he’s domestic all he wants, modern man this and modern man that, I still find his socks next to hisbed and my tea served in the fine china because the everyday mugs aren’t clean and a total disregard for standards. Zara likes candles with strong, earthy smells and says it’s our little secret because Blade says ‘No candles. Not even a little one.’ Or a birthday one. Zara is different to Blade in many ways. She is not into cooking. Or food shopping. She is into meal deals and has a standing supermarket delivery slot on Tuesdays, even though there’s a Tesco Express five minutes’ walk away. I enjoy checking the long receipt the delivery person hands me. Sometimes substitutions are nice surprises—did you know they don’t charge you extra for a more expensive alternative item?—but sometimes you wonder who packed it. We once ordered a Victoria sponge and got a three-pack of sponge scourers, which made for a rather disappointing teatime.
Zara spends most of her mornings hammering away on her laptop, occasionally grunting about a Pomodoro, then walks around the room six times before she sits down again.
‘Reckon I can add random words to reach the word count, then colour them white and no one will notice?’ she asks me now. I asked what she is writing on her first day here and she said it’s manuals for a flatpack furniture company and I haven’t asked again because at sixty-four life is short and explanations about flatpack instructions can be very long indeed.
At eleven o’clock Zara closes her laptop with the force of someone closing the lid on a box containing a poisonous spider and says,
‘Right, what do you say we find a change of scene?’
I want to tell her that you never have to find changes they will happen to you anyway. The landscape, the people, the air. It’s not changing the scene we should be trying, or yearning for, it’s keeping it. But, of course, people who aren’t sufferingfrom memory loss don’t understand; they’re missing these small details that make the human experience.
‘I wouldn’t mind going to Kensington,’ I say instead, innocently.
‘I like Kensington. It’s certainly better than Knightsbridge,’ Zara replies, just as innocently.
She packs her bag, and when we get to the hallway I watch my son’s best friend put her shoes on. Those thick soled, athletic things that she insists on wearing even with smart straight-legged trousers. Did I teach Blade how to tie his shoelaces? I can’t remember. I think that I must have, as his mother. Zara ties hers differently to me, I observe now. She folds up the strings into two hoops then simply ties them. Like a knot at sea. Or a knot at the end of a sewing thread. I can’t recall how Blade ties his, and for some reason I feel desperate for this knowledge. A good mother would remember those details.
We sit on the bus, and Zara writes notes on her phone whilst I watch the rain outside. It’s only a friendly drizzle. When we get off, Zara hooks her arm underneath mine, and she is so much taller that I hang off her like a child.
