Page 1 of If I Could Say Goodbye
Prologue
Jennifer
I always knew that I was different from the rest of my family.
They’re all tall, blonde, waif-like. Mum doesn’t walk . . . she glides. She is the type of woman that you would presume had been to finishing school, except for when she watches the football, when her true roots tend to fly from her mouth in a flurry of expletives. Even Dad has this elfin king look about him: gentle, elegant, commanding; it often feels that time slows down when you’re around him, his words are always precise and measured, words that should be savoured. And then I came along. Their adopted daughter. I am short, dark, I don’t glide, I’m heavy footed; my words don’t need to be savoured, they generally tend to skitter and slide across the room like a puppy on a polished floor.
I know this description might make it sound as if I felt that I didn’t belong, and that’s not the case. I have always felt like I belonged to the Hargreaves; what I’m trying to say, is that when I look back on those early days of my childhood, the days where it was just the three of us, my memories don’t quite feel . . . whole; those memories always feel like they are missing something, like I wasn’t fully alive. I suppose my memories only feel whole from the day my sister was born, when my life truly began.
My younger sister is enigmatic and beautiful but also quirky and lovable. She is the perfect mix of both Mr and Mrs Hargreaves.
Kerry is the name I gave her. Mr and Mrs Hargreaves – or Brian and Judith to their friends – wanted to call her Beth, but I had insisted, and for the first week of her life, she bore two names: one from her father and the mother who had given birth to her, and one from me. Kerry suited her much better: there is a perfect balance to her name, the beginning and ending lean against each other, just as she has always leant towards me. If you take the first part away from the second, there is no whole, just two parts that don’t make sense when they stand apart. That was the first compromise I forced on my parents, the first step in our new dynamic as a foursome, right from the beginning . . . Kerry was more mine than she was theirs.
Kerry is one of those people who other people want to be. She’s tall, beautiful but unusually so, like a model but more like one of the models where they make the headlines because they have an odd-shaped nose or really wide-apart eyes. Her blonde hair turned to grey when she was fifteen – there is no explanation why, no massive shock or trauma, it was as if her body just decided that she is different from the rest of us, that she should stand out. Kerry has always cut her fringe herself – poker straight – and has always worn the rest in a plait.
If Kerry were asked to describe me, she would say that Jennifer Jones is happy with her life. She would say that I’m happily married to Edward, the awkwardly handsome other half of me – the jam in my doughnut, as Kerry would put it. Jennifer is happy, she would say, with the way her children have turned out, a perfect pair – one of each, Oscar, five and Hailey, eight – who are both well behaved, polite and intelligent.
She would go on to say that I’m pretty. I’m not. I mean I’m not unattractive, I guess, but I have a gap between my two front teeth that I can roll a twenty-pence piece between, my hair is dark and heavy but whenever I have it cut into a bob, I always look like a Lego figure, and since turning thirty, I have this ring of chub around my waist that never seems to go no matter how many times I try to cut down my calorie intake.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Kerry’s voice, soft and hoarse all at once – like she has the beginnings of a sore throat – interrupts my thoughts as she pulls up the handbrake in front of the carpark barrier and retrieves the parking ticket through the open window.
‘Hmmm?’ I question as she closes the window, cutting off the icy December wind, and rounds the car into the only free space, turning off the engine.
‘You’re looking off into space.’ I drain the last of my coffee and return the cup to the holder.
‘I was thinking about my fat roll.’
She laughs and shakes her head. ‘You don’t have a fat roll, you have a home-cooked, too many nights in front of the telly with my sexy husband, and not enough sex with my sexy husband to burn off my home cooking . . . softness.’
‘How do you know how much sex I’m having?’
Her eyebrows raise as if asking her this question is ridiculous. ‘I always know how much sex you’re having . . . you get a flush.’
‘I do not.’
‘Ask Ed. Honestly, Jen, you should make more of him.’ She winks and I stick my tongue out at her.
Kerry and Ed always had a flirtatious relationship; to those on the outside, I’d imagine it bordered on inappropriate. When we were at a wedding once, Ed and Kerry had been dancing to ‘Mustang Sally’. We’d all had a lot to drink; it was one of those weddings that starts at the crack of dawn and doesn’t end until the early hours. The drinks had been so expensive that we had nipped out to a local supermarket in our finery and returned with bags of wine hidden in our handbags. By ‘Mustang Sally’ time, we were all tottering around a two-day hangover. Ed and Kerry’s moves were like something out of Dirty Dancing and I had sat in the corner watching them. Lucy – the bride – had leant in and with prosecco-soaked lips asked me if I was worried. I looked over to where Kerry was now leaning her body back while their hips rotated, Ed holding on to her waist, her hands on his, while her back arched and her hair fanned out behind her.
‘No.’
‘No?’ Lucy arched her eyebrow at me, pointing to the dance floor with a lipstick-kissed glass. ‘They’re practically having sex right in front of you.’
Ed pulled Kerry up, both laughing as she looped her arms back around his neck.
‘Ed’s not her type,’ I had countered.
Kerry clicks the central locking; I pull the collars of my coat up against the wind, as we begin walking into town; trust Kerry to go shopping two weeks before Christmas. I look up at the elephant-grey sky and wonder if we might be in for a white Christmas for once. Shrewsbury always looks beautiful in the snow: it’s like the set of a Dickens adaptation, except with a shopping centre sandwiched between the Tudor buildings along with various high street shops.
‘You’re going to have to stop saying things like that once you’re officially engaged, you know,’ I say, bringing my focus to the job in hand. ‘Nessa might not like you constantly flirting with my husband.’
‘Nessa has watched me flirting with your husband since we met. Where did you say the new jeweller’s is?’
The day Nessa first saw Kerry, she had been showing off on the ice. Kerry used to be a figure skater and competed nationally until she decided it wasn’t the career she wanted. The first time they had met, Kerry and Ed had taken the kids on the ice; Nessa had thought they were a couple until, well, until Kerry met Nessa’s eye over Ed’s shoulder.
This brings us to the point of our trip. Kerry is going to propose to Nessa and I’m here to help choose the ring. Kerry’s face holds still for a moment, her hand resting on my arm. There is an emerald ring on her thumb that catches the last of the sun before it disappears behind a cloud.
‘What if she says no?’
