Page 10 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
‘Problems?’ Joyce asks, studying my face as I walk back through the gate.
‘Maybe.’
‘Nice to see the school gate hasn’t changed since Tom’s days. Still the same old cliques and horror shows. There’s a woman over there in actual house slippers.’
‘You should be here in the summer. Sometimes the dads don’t wear shirts. It’s a real feast for the eyes.’
‘I bet that one is trouble.’ She gestures to Carrie. Carrie is standing and gesticulating to Liz and a couple of her other parent disciples. She glares over at me and Joyce. I don’t need to deal with that, right now. I just pray Maya isn’t biting one of her kids. If that happens, she’ll start advertising it. She’d rent out actual billboards.
‘The playground mafia has been around for years,’ Joyce carries on. ‘In my day it was Jeanie McGovern. I had her son round to play and he came to my house and crapped in a drawer. When I told her, and I was discreet about it, she told me I’d made it up and then spent years spreading rumours around about Tom.’
‘What sort of rumours?’ I ask, mortified at the thought of someone defecating in a drawer.
‘It was such a bizarre reaction. She made him the centre of every nits outbreak for years. It ended with me slapping her in the playground.’
I grin. I can imagine that; I like the gumption.
‘Choose your allies in this place. Avoid people in Barbour coats and who come to the gate with full make-up. No one has time for that shit,’ she says.
‘Why Barbour coats?’
‘I just think they look rubbish. They remind me of fox hunting.’
Joyce links her arm in mine. I love that she’s still a part of my life. She’s like a security blanket, a human connection to Tom. He inherited her eyes, that smile – the Tom twinkle, she used to call it. The plan is to go off and find a tasty coffee now. It’s the arse end of winter, those lost months post-Christmas when no one has any money and the misery of the cold envelops us and makes us debate the merits of hibernation. I huddle into her.
‘So, the memorial thing. I think we should call it Project Major Tom.’
Joyce smiles broadly as we turn away from the school, down towards Whiteladies Road to find a warm cafe with cinnamon rolls and sofas. Bristol has plenty of these on many a street corner – there are lukewarm pastries and flat whites in its very foundations.
‘I think that’s lovely,’ she says, the emotion clear on her face.
‘I’ll get out my travel journals, scan social media for contacts. Tom did so much exploring after university, all that charity work too. There’s a list of people who I know would like to be there. People who didn’t get to the funeral. But…’
‘There’s a but?’ Joyce asks hesitantly.
‘Let me think about the book thing. I don’t mind sharing our story for good but I need to think about me. It’s taken me this long to just find some sense of normality, to know how to exist without him, so I’m just worried about revisiting it all.’
‘Of dredging it all up? I get it. Oh, Grace…’ We stop in the street and embrace for a moment. ‘You do you. Whatever you feel comfortable with. We can focus on the ceremony thing too. You’re right. When he died, it was a complete shock, we were all numb and the funeral felt very rushed. This gives us some time to do things properly. I knew I’d asked the right person to help. The school have also asked if they can release balloons.’
‘No. He hated balloons. He was scared of them.’
Joyce chuckles heartily. ‘I said exactly the same thing. He once shat himself after one burst in his face when he was thirteen.’
‘That story never made your book.’
She laughs, tears in her eyes. ‘It didn’t. Feel free to use that one yourself.’
3
Dear G,
I hate writing this. I hate having to leave you, that we’ve fought so much over this, but this is where we are and if I don’t do this now then I will regret everything. I will resent you and our relationship and I never want to do that.
The fact of the matter is I’m not done. I’m not ready to just leave university and start some suburban life with 2.4 children in some new-build house near a good school with excellent travel links to the city. I want to travel. I want to see more and do more and swim in different seas and sleep under different skies. I want a passport full of stamps. I want to have a story that starts, ‘So there was this one time when I was in Mongolia being chased on a horse…’ I want really bad tan lines. I want to come back and tell you all about it. Everything.
Don’t hate me. I love you.
T x
