I woke with a start. I opened my eyes and waited for the room to come into focus. My body was stiff and hot, my heart beating heavily in my chest, my clothes drenched with sweat and clinging to me. The room was darkened, the curtains drawn, but it was clearly still daylight outside. The remnants of a nightmare faded into the light.
My mum appeared in the doorway with a tray. “How are you? Did you sleep?”
I nodded.
“Here you are.” She placed the tray on my lap and lifted me up, plumping up the pillows behind me. My limbs were weak and I moved with difficulty.
“What is it?”
“Chicken soup. It’s homemade.”
“Thanks. It looks better than that disgusting drink. What was it?”
“Salt and orange juice. You were dehydrated. It did the trick though, didn’t it?”
I nodded and looked round the room. I was in my sister Keri’s bed. It no longer smelled of plasticine and old apple cores the way it used to. It must have been years since I’d set foot in here. In the meantime, it had undergone a complete transformation. The childish crayoned pictures of houses and flowers that she’d stuck to the walls with blue tac had been replaced, and the room was now a splash of red and white. The Liverpool team photo took pride of place in the centre. Surrounding it were individual pictures: Ian Rush heading the ball, John Barnes striking, Peter Beardsley in mid-air looking over his shoulder at his backside, both legs flung out beside him. Mug shots of the less prolific goal scorers were dotted around the window opposite. At the end of the bed sat a scruffy, one-eyed teddy bear wearing a red and white bobble hat. With a pang, I found myself wishing for one very long moment that I could come home again, that this was my room.
I finished the last of the soup and was relieved to note that it was staying down. “Where’s Keri?” I asked.
“At her dad’s.”
“Oh. Him. She sees him, does she?”
My mother’s face tightened for a moment. “He’s her dad,” she said.
“He was supposed to be mine, too. Ours; mine and Pete’s. And look how that went.”
“Let’s not do this,” pleaded my mum.
“Why not, Mum? It’s time we talked about what happened.”
“Because I can’t. That’s why. Because we’ll both say things that we regret and then we’ll both be hurt. I know how you feel. It doesn’t do to keep raking it over.”
She sat on the bed with her back to me and began undoing the bandage on my foot.
I sighed and put my soup bowl down on the floor. “So, what were you doing in Cambridge?”
“Shopping. Keri needed some new school things. I thought I would stop by and see if you were home. I did try to phone. I can see now why you didn’t answer. It’s a good job I came by when I did.”
“I know. Thank you. And I am grateful.”
I watched my mother as she then got up and moved around the room, picking up errant socks and crumpled t-shirts and putting them into Keri’s washing basket. She opened the curtains and the late afternoon sunshine lit the room.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked her.
My mum looked up. “You got dehydrated. You have low blood pressure. Hypotension. You know that. Did you eat yesterday?”
“Not much. I had a bad day.”
“Oh, love,” my mum put my foot up onto a pillow and turned to face me. “What’s happened?”
I told her about Larsen, and Jude, and the baby. She sat on the bed next to me and listened, stroking my hand tentatively, and didn’t speak until I’d finished.
“It must hurt,” was all she said.
“I can’t believe he could just replace me like that,” I said. “It feels like she’s pirated my life. He wants her to move in, sleep in my bed, and bring up their baby in my home. And he wants me to just... go.”
“Poor Lizzie,” said my mum, unhelpfully. She stroked my hand, back and forth, over and over again. I could feel the calluses on her work-weary fingers rubbing gently against my skin. Then she asked, “Did you want him back?”
I picked at the throw on Keri’s bed. “Maybe. A part of me did, at least. I think that’s what I had hoped for when we first decided to break up, that we would work through our problems. Be there for each other, perhaps. And maybe after some time apart... I don’t know what I expected. But I should have seen this coming. I should have known.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
I sighed. “So anyway, I’m going to have to move out.”
“Do you really have to?”
“Either that or find forty grand. I can’t afford to buy him out.”
My mum paused. “I wish I could help. But you know I don’t have that sort of money.”
“I know that. I wasn’t expecting you to do that for me.”
I collapsed back onto the pillow with a thump. A book slid off the bed and dropped onto the floor beside me. I picked it up.
“The Water Babies,” I said, wiping my eyes and turning the yellowing pages. “I haven’t seen this for years.”
“I found it in the attic. We must have brought it with us when we moved,” my mum said, a little apologetically.
I flicked through the pages, pausing to marvel at the beautiful fairy-like illustrations of dragonflies and lobsters and little rounded babies, with ‘Lucie Mabel Atwell’ printed on them at the bottom, and captions underneath which I used to read myself. There was an ink stain on the corner of the back cover.
“This was my favourite book,” I said, spellbound. I turned back to the beginning, looking for my name inside to prove it had been mine. On the imprint page was an inscription. It said: ‘To my own Water Baby, with love from Daddy,’ which took me completely by surprise. I hadn’t remembered it being there at all.
“I didn’t know my dad wrote this,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. It felt strange, sitting there looking at it his handwriting. It was big, slanted, and old-fashioned; it was proof that he’d really existed. “Why did he call me that?”
“He used to take you swimming; he taught you to swim. Don’t you remember?”
“No. Not really.” I waited for my mother to tell me more, to remind me, but she didn’t. I looked again at the cover and tried to remember. “I didn’t know he gave this to me.”
“Oh yes,” said my mum. “For your birthday, that year...” she tailed off, got up off the bed and opened the curtains further, letting the sun beam in onto the bed. “And the doll,” added my mother. Her voice sounded tight. She was looking away, out of the window, onto the street. “Don’t you remember the doll we gave you? We chose it together. For your sixth birthday.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t. But I should. I should remember being six, right? There’s so much that I seem to have forgotten.”
My mother turned to face me with an expression that looked almost like relief. She gave me a quick smile, picked up my empty soup bowl, and started to leave the room.
“Only things have started coming back to me,” I said. My mother stopped in the doorway, turned, and then came back again. She placed the soup bowl down on the oak chest of drawers next to Keri’s bed and sat down again beside me.
“Little things,” I continued. “Like the street that we were living on. I close my eyes and I can see it. A quiet avenue, leafy. Lots of trees.”
My mother nodded. “That’s right.”
“And I had a pink dress.”
“It had a kitten on the front. You loved that dress.”
“Was the kitten white? And furry? When you stroked it?”
“Yes.” My mother smiled.
“And I remember, dad was a postman, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. But you knew that.”
“You told me that. But I didn’t have any memories of my own of him dressed like that, in his uniform. Until now, that is. It’s just a tiny picture of him in my head, though, just a tiny picture of this big man in a postman’s uniform, that’s all I’ve got. I can’t remember him.”
“He was very handsome. He had your lovely red hair.”
“It’s auburn, mum.”
“Auburn, then.”
“And I remember the ambulance coming. And there was no one there. Just me and the ambulance.”
My mother’s face tightened. “I was there. I was there as soon as the ambulance arrived, Lizzie. I know it was awful, you seeing him die like that. But I didn’t know until I heard the siren... it was nothing we could have helped...”
“I’m not saying it was, I just—”
“You always went to the end of the garden to wait for him to come home at the end of his round... you waited for him, you sat on the gate and waited for him, every day. And that one time... well, you just stayed there, you didn’t come and get anyone. You just stayed there, standing in the street, and that’s where we found you. You must have been in shock...”
“The car came too quickly,” I said.
My mum looked at me for a moment as if she had seen a ghost. “That’s what you said. ‘The car came too quickly.’ Those are just the words you used. That’s all you said. All you would say.” She reached out her hand and touched my arm. A tear slid down her cheek.
“I remember the street,” I said. “I remember his uniform. I remember the ambulance. I even remember the words. But I just can’t seem to remember him.”
“It was a long time ago.” My mum put her arms around me for a moment and we were still. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Then she stood up and picked up the soup bowl. I noticed her wiping her face with the sleeve of her cardigan as she turned. “Get some rest,” she said. “You’re tired.”
I nodded.
After she had gone, I picked up The Water Babies and read it from cover to cover.
*
The following day I felt much better and decided to go for a drive and a walk. There was a forest nearby that I remembered visiting as a child. I ate a big breakfast and soaked for a long time in a hot steamy bath. I hadn’t brought anything with me except the pyjamas that I had been wearing when I arrived, but my mum offered me free reign of her wardrobe. I settled for a pair of black tracksuit bottoms and a black polar neck jumper. I looked like a cat burglar but I didn’t care. I was just glad to be well again. I found a pair of Wellington boots in a cupboard that my mum had bought in a jumble sale and that were two sizes too big for both of us. Mum offered me the use of her car.
“Lizzie,” she called, as I left. “Here’s something you might want to think about.”
“What?”
“You know my old friend, Lynne?”
“The paediatrician? The one who lives in London? Hampstead, isn’t it?”
“Marylebone. Baker Street. Except that she’s just been offered a job in Edinburgh. It’s only a two year contract, a locum position. But I think she wants someone to look after her flat for a bit.”
“Me?”
“Well, anyone. But she’d be happy for you to take it, I am sure.”
“I don’t know. It’s a long way to and from work.”
“Just a thought.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
As I drove through the Essex countryside, looking for the forest, I realised that I was near Dunmow, heading towards Takeley, the village where we’d once lived. I smiled as I recognised the post office and the sweet shop. I turned right at the pub on the corner and drove past my junior school with the climbing frame and the house where we’d bought lettuces and tomatoes in summer, then halted in confusion and horror at a roundabout I’d never seen before. The house was gone, so was the neighbouring caravan site and Lesley Mead’s house, whose barn we used to play in. The barn was also gone. And Mrs McCormick’s garden, and the wall we used to climb over, and the apples we used to pinch (only it wasn’t really stealing; it was called scrumping).
Instead, spread before me and glimmering like the Emerald City, was London’s third airport. I looked at the road signs that had sprung up like weeds in my absence, and guessed that I must have lived somewhere in the region of the departure lounge.
The road ended there. There was nothing left to do but leave. I stood in my mum’s wellies on the oily tarmac and watched a plane that was heading down the runway and taking off in the distance. When it was lost beyond the horizon, I got back into the car and drove south towards the river.
It was late afternoon. I parked beside the lock and sat for a while, looking through the windscreen at the water rippling gently in the breeze. The sun was low but the clouds had disappeared, and the tops of the fir trees stretching into infinity beyond the river were tipped with an amber hue. I climbed out of the car and locked the door. I crossed the little wooden bridge to a dirt track on the opposite bank. I reached out to touch the shrubs that flanked the pathway and the edge of the forest where willows and poplars loomed up through the undergrowth, camouflaging the birds that whistled and twittered invisibly around me. I trailed my hand over thistles and catkins and squeezed the tip of a snow-white cornucopia, which dutifully popped out of its bud and landed at my feet. I felt a sudden pang inside me at the sheer beauty of it all, combined with a newfound nostalgia for a feeling I’d loved and long forgotten, the kind of feeling you’re left with after all the best flying dreams. My mother’s wellies were rubbing at the back of my legs and I could feel my socks had worked their way down and bunched up under the arches of my feet, like they used to do when I was a kid. The ground was dry and the path by the river covered in a springy layer of mossy turf. I squatted down and yanked off one boot and then the other, and pushed them under a bush.
It was only a few months since my life had begun to change forever. But it felt like forever, an eon ago, in my head. I’d floated along for so long, with everything just happening to me, but now I had come to a fork, where several branches led off into uncharted waters. I needed to make some decisions. But I didn’t know how, or what to do for the best. What I really needed, I told myself, was a big hand to come out of the sky and point me in the right direction.
I peered into the water and studied my murky reflection, looking back up at me. A twig bobbed backwards and forwards over my nose. I looked confused. Was Greg right? I wondered. Did I really sell myself short? Was I really that good at what I did? And why did I need Greg to point it out? I had always cared far too much what other people said about me. I’d always seen myself as a reflection of what everyone else saw when they looked at me, or at least what I thought they saw.
I thought, I must be giving away a lot of power.
For a moment I stood on the bank and looked deep into the water. It was unusually clear, so clear that you almost couldn’t see where the rushes began and the water ended. I could just make out the silhouette of a lone minnow as it fought its way determinedly through the tangled weeds and up the river.
I turned and followed, padding in my socks over a carpet of springy moss.