Page 39 of The First Time I Saw You
‘So, when can we meet her?’
‘I’m working on it,’ I answer.
Week Fifteen
Sophie
My fifteen-week check-up has gone well, no problems at all except for when I stepped on the scales; I’ve put on half a stone already. It’s only the third week in May and yet my time with Samuel seems so long ago. As the time passes, I worry more about whether the decision to do this on my own is the right one, but then I think of the hurt I felt. I let down my defences before and look at what happened to me. I have Bean to think of now; I need to protect us. I’m setting up my new life. The website ‘S B (for Bean) Williams Accountants’ is almost ready; I’ve had a couple more interested potential clients.
The air conditioning in the car is on full as I drive home and I still feel hot even when all I’m wearing is a blue jumpsuit – one of my purchasing mistakes. What is the point of a maternity jumpsuit when you have to unbutton a million buttons before you can take it down so you can go to the toilet? Fashion over practicality. I laugh at myself as I notice a chocolate Mini Milk stain on my chest . . . how many times have I worn crippling heels and a white suit, even though I know my feet will hurt and I will inevitably have to avoid anything vaguely colourful on the menu, just so I can look the part?
I stare at my back garden, a jungle that I have been trying to tame for the last hour. Sweat dribbles down my back and expands into crude circles under my arms. This time next year I will have Bean here, and my child will need a place to play. The difference between the grass and weeds is indecipherable and there is no hope of being able to get a lawnmower anywhere near it. The hedge at the back scratches and fights in all directions as the fence panels sway and groan, their backs broken, their discs slipped. I’m trying to clear a way for Handy Huw to be able to get his rotovator into the garden. There’s an old gate that we never used to the right-hand side, which is barely hanging on by its rusted hinges, and in front of it there’s an old fence panel that has fallen over where our old garden table used to sit. Brambles have woven their way through the slats and attached to the furniture I know is behind it. The veins and innards of this overgrown monster have taken over my mother’s garden.
The bruises of Ian’s abuse could almost be forgotten when we were out here. The garden would be filled with the scents and colours of the plants she would grow from seedlings in the small greenhouse; a skeleton is all that remains now, the glass skin broken and exposing its brittle bones.
My palms are itching inside the rough gardening gloves and my lower back is starting to ache as I snip away with the shears. I cut away, and little by little the panel becomes freed of the monster’s grip. The sweat slithers down my back as I begin to pull at the wood. A small piece splinters away but the rest, I worry, is too heavy for me to move.
‘What now, Bean?’ I ask as I take thirsty gulps of lemon squash. Bean loves all things citrus at the moment. The Book says my baby might be sucking its thumb this week; this thought brought me to tears. Mum still sucked her thumb all the way through her adult years. Never in public or in front of Ian, but she did in front of Helen and me, her middle finger running left and right as though she was rubbing a moustache as she sat with her feet tucked beneath her while reading cheesy romance novels. I can hear Charlie moving around in his garden: the sounds of a radio and some kind of gardening machine – not a lawn mower but something like it. I pull at my earlobe. The garden needs doing. Handy Huw cannot get into my garden. The fence needs moving but I can’t move it. I need help. I lift my arms and grimace at the patches beneath. Oh well . . . it’s not like he hasn’t seen me looking worse. I wade through the monster’s tendrils and peer through a crack in the fencing between our two gardens. The machine sound has stopped, and I squint my eye and look through the knothole in the wood but can’t see anything other than something propped up next to it. I sidestep along the fence and peer through another gap, registering that his garden is in a much better state than mine.
‘Looking for something?’ I snap my head back and look up to where Charlie is leaning, bare-chested, over my fence in the exact spot that I was just peering through. Once again, this man has caused my embarrassment to roll its eyes, begrudgingly adding wood to the fire as my cheeks flame. It must have been his torso blocking my view, which means he’s just watched my progress from where he is standing peering over at me with an expression that is either amused or irritated. I can never tell with him.
‘Hah, um, yes. Glad you’re in, actually,’ I say, shading my eyes from the sun with my hand and trying to salvage some dignity. ‘I was wondering if you could help me move this fence?’ I point to the wood in question.
‘Now?’ he asks, as though I’ve just interrupted an important meeting to ask if he wouldn’t mind massaging my feet.
‘Yes, please,’ I say, smiling, I hope, gratefully. ‘Handy Huw is coming tomorrow, and he needs to get a rotovator or something in through that gate.’ I signal towards the gate in question with my thumb.
‘Well, we can’t have Handy Huw stuck outside with his tools, can we?’ I’m not sure if he’s being kind or sarcastic. He disappears from view and my feet are confused as to what to do next: do they walk towards the front door and open it, or do they wander back to the broken fence panel because the conversation has ended? They needn’t have worried, because he then strides through my doors into the garden.
Seeing him inside my house shocks me and I chastise my baby-brain. I must have forgotten to lock my door.
‘You should lock your door,’ he says, but I’m not really listening because, I’ll be honest, I can’t take my eyes off his chest which is bare, tanned and very, very nice. My libido has just woken up from a very long nap, and it is hungry.
Week Fifteen
Samuel
I’ve been at the hospital for almost the whole day. And the news is good: the ligaments in my back and neck are healing well, and I’ll be out of this carcass in three weeks’ time. But. The bad news is bad. My sight is diminishing ‘much faster than we’d hoped’. This phrase bothered me.
Than they’d hoped? They’d hoped? They have only just met me. They are not going to spend the rest of their lives in darkness; they won’t have to learn to walk again, learn to eat again, learn to fecking wipe their own arses again.
I check my email. I don’t have time for Gemma to take all day to reply to her emails; I imagine she probably doesn’t even work in Sophie’s office now anyway. I press refresh again, but the screen tells me cheerfully: ‘Yay! Your inbox is empty.’
‘Mam! Did you post those letters?’ I shout from the lounge. I’m holding my arm up in front of my face while I swipe the screen. I’m searching for repair garages in Shropshire and there are hundreds of the bastards. I’ve called every Helen Yates I could find, private-messaged the ones on Facebook and come up with nothing. My last resort was to write to the few Helens that I found in the phone book who I called but couldn’t get an answer from.
‘Mr McLaughlin!’ she shouts. ‘Did you post Sammy’s letters?’
‘I’m having a shite, for the love of God, woman!’ The toilet flushes and Da shuffles into the lounge; I can hear him wiping his hands on his jeans. ‘I sent them yesterday. What is it you’re doing there, Sammy?’
‘Looking for garages in Shropshire. Sophie had her car fixed there when she first left London . . . it’s the only place I know she’s gone to.’
‘Isn’t that like looking for a needle in a haystack? Shropshire is a pretty big place, I think.’ I ignore his reply and continue alternating reading my phone, putting it down and lifting a notepad up so I can write notes. ‘Ah, Sammy, give me the whatsit.’ He snatches the phone out of my hand and sits down on the sofa, hidden in the tunnel’s walls. ‘She worked for a big hotshot bank-thing, right?’
‘Yeah. Sandwell.’
‘So, let’s ring Sandwell and offer them some business.’ I can feel that he is winking as he says it. ‘How do you—? What the—? Mrs McLaughlin! Fetch me that laptop, would you? I can’t see a thing on this phone of Sammy’s!’
‘Da, I can do it, just—’
