Page 63 of Am I Allergic to Men?
‘LUCY!’ he squeals, running into my arms. Joe. He’s Beth’s eldest, my other nephew. The lad is a force of nature, a super cute one at that but I’m biased. My sisters have introduced me to all these kids and they are truly works of magic. I have formed an immediate love affair with all of them. Behind him is dad, Will, carrying what looks like a camping rucksack.
‘Are we having fun, Daddy?’ Beth asks.
‘There are no toilets so I am going to hope he just did an extraordinary fart and wait until we get off the train,’ he explains, kissing Beth on the forehead. Will is new to me but he seems to love Beth and these boys completely and this warms me. She deserves nothing less.
‘FART,’ Joe announces to the carriage. This boy is great, I like this one.
We’re on the train today to go and meet the others at Kew Gardens for a final summer fling with the family but also to celebrate my birthday. I am thirty today. And I should be singing and dancing into my next decade but I’ve opted out. I just want to spend quality time with my nearest and dearest. Next week, schools go back so Grace must return to Bristol, Meg’s kids drive back up North and Emma is going to move back to hers to settle her daughters back into routine. They’ve done all they can to remedy my amnesia. We’ve all shared a bathroom, eaten meals together and danced in the front room so hard and with so much passion that Meg pulled something and is now having to use Deep Heat daily. And I’ve lain there at night, in the grey of our old house, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the fact my memory is so shockingly absent. Listening to Emma, who still sleep-talks, this warm feeling of a full house in a deep embrace, but none of it works. Ideally, I’d have them just stay here forever but they all grew in the last twelve years, out of that house, expanding the family wings, and it’d be selfish of me to make them stay any longer for my benefit, watching old nineties teen dramas in our jammies.
‘Train go brooooom…’ Joe tells me, scrunching his face at me.
‘It also go choo-choo!’ I say, maybe a little too loudly as I seem to wake a man who was asleep in the left corner of the carriage. The sound of Joe’s chuckle makes me want to eat him up. Over the way, I notice the old lady staring and I glare back at her as she continues to suss out the arrangement here. Beth and I could still be lesbians. Maybe this is our manny. Maybe we’re in one of these new modern three-way relationships. Instead she waves at Joe, who looks back at her with a furrowed brow and sticks out his tongue.Yes, you are now my favourite.
Kew Gardens is around the corner from our house so when we were little it was a go-to day out with five girls because parts of it were free and occasionally Mum said it was important we were aired. There is a very stately magic about it, like any park in London to be fair, and it seems the perfect place to picnic and bring this huge gaggle of children that we’ve amassed. There are nine cousins altogether: Tess, Eve and Polly belong to Meg, Iris and Violet are Emma’s and Grace’s girls are Maya and Cleo. Beth broke the cycle with her boys, Joe and Jude.
This is the thing that annoys me the most: that in all of this amnesia drama, I missed out on my sisters becoming mothers. I did see Meg with Tess and it was just such a pivotal moment for her and us as a family: the first niece, grandchild and mother. We all sobbed when we met her, it was phenomenal, heartbreaking, bloody fantastic. But then it happened for all of them and I missed all of it, the birth stories, the cuddles with freshly popped-out bubbas and, most importantly, Grace’s story, as her girls are adopted and they found each other in the most beautiful and serendipitous ways. Hell, if I can’t remember any of those initial encounters then maybe all I can do now is pick up where I left off, I can still be this wild and crazy aunt that they remember, everyone’s favourite. I can give them sugar when I’m not supposed to and inappropriate life advice.
As we walk through the turnstile, it’s Maya I see first as she runs towards me with open arms, weighed down by quite a large rucksack and, knowing Grace, a fair bit of sun cream. I bend down to receive the tightest of hugs and a kiss on the cheek for good measure.
‘Happy birthday, Aunty Lucy. Your hair is growing back!’ she calls out.
‘So I don’t look like a pumpkin head any more…’ I remark. She giggles and I’m bombarded by tiny people who come over to say their hellos. Look all these little faces, just shining bright and gorgeous. They all get gradually bigger and the last one to say hello is Tess. She’s almost as tall as me and the hug is ganglier but sincere. Christ, I have a niece with boobs. I hope your mum bought you some nice bras because being the youngest I didn’t have that luxury and it’s a wonder my breasts survived the trauma of wearing your mother’s old crop tops.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks me tentatively. There’s a feeling that when I first woke up I traumatised this one a little by declaring her some fake imposter of a niece so she seems cautious with me.
‘Stronger. Don’t tell Aunty Ems but the physio’s been working even if the physio is really really not very good-looking at all.’
She laughs and hooks an arm around mine and I don’t refuse it as older sisters at the front of the group take charge and start walking to a green space where we can all sit down and eat the many sandwiches Mum seems to have made. A pair of arms appear around my midriff. Eve. Eve is another mini Meg but this one seems to have more of a gob and I like that plenty. They all have these Northern twangs to their accents too, which are bloody adorable.
‘Have you remembered anything yet?’ Eve asks. Tess glares at her.
‘I haven’t. Remind me of your name again? Is it Fanny?’
The smiles that response produces are everything. ‘Yes, Fanny. That’s my name. It’s short for Fanjita.’
She’s only inherited the best parts of my sister.
‘That is a beautiful name. And what is your name again?’ I ask Tess.
‘Mum named me after the place I was conceived so my full name is Shepherd’s Bush but they call me Bushy for short.’
‘Bushy and Fanny. She did so well there with the names.’
‘And she couldn’t think of anything for the youngest so just called her Dave,’ Eve says.
I nod and we all giggle, arms linked. The youngest is actually Polly and she sits on her dad’s shoulders, blonde curls trailing down her back like mine used to.
‘But no, Fanny. I still don’t remember a thing. Go on… fill me in. Tell me your best Aunty Lucy story…’
‘You came to visit us one summer. We went scrambling and found a lake and you stripped off completely naked and went for a swim. You told Mum to come in and she refused and then you pretended a giant fish was attacking you so she had to go in to save you but it turned out you were faking just to get her in the water,’ Eve explains.
‘Did you girls come in too?’
‘Yes, it’s now an annual thing. The girly skinny-dip. Dad isn’t allowed to come,’ she continues.
‘Well, that is a brilliant thing for me to have initiated. The female form is a marvellous thing. You should embrace it.’
Tess studies my face. ‘Do you remember I came down to visit you recently? You showed me around some theatres one weekend.’
