Fionnuala Kearney - The Day I Lost You - A heartfelt, emotion-packed, twist-filled read

Leah tuts. ‘She needs help,’ she repeated. ‘The GP has recommended him for a care package. All we have to do is put the wheels in motion and, even then, it could take time.’

‘Look, you’ve tried. Let me talk to her?’

‘Tell her we’ll find someone who looks like Daniel Craig,’ Leah says, removing her laptop from her bag and putting her glasses on.

I smile, despite myself. My mother has a thing for Daniel Craig, though I’m certain care workers who look like him are probably quite rare.

Gus grins at me in the rear-view mirror. Leah has snapped into work mode. There’ll be no talking to her now until we arrive home. Her work is her life. I remember when Anna became pregnant with Rose, together they had cried. Leah with a rare frustration; sadness that since she had willingly decided never to have children with Gus, already a father, it brought it home that she would never have ‘her own’ child. Anna because she, having slept with Sean only once, found herself with an unplanned and very inconvenient pregnancy.

By the time Gus drops me and Pug off, my watch says seven forty and I feel like it’s much later. I am planning a cup of tea, an hour of recorded Downton Abbey , a chat with Anna and then sleep – lots of it. With Rose away still with Sean, I take any opportunity to sleep longer and later. There’s a pile of mail lying on the hallway floor. I open the cupboard under the stairs and, anything with Anna’s name on it, I throw into the black refuse sack full of her post. The only thing bearing my name that I choose to open is a small brown padded package with my address in Doug’s handwriting. Pug is yapping to escape the travel carrier as I rip it open. Inside, there’s an item in a clear plastic bag, the sort I use for Rose’s school lunch. A yellow Post-it is attached.

‘You said you wanted this when we got it back. The police sent it through this week. I charged it but Anna has a lock on it and I haven’t been able to open it with any code that I thought she’d use … Let me know you get it okay? Doug’.

I let Pug out and she immediately wants out in the back garden for a wee. Opening the door, I look at it through the plastic cover. Anna’s phone.

Just as I’m staring at it, as Pug runs back in and I shut the back door, the front doorbell rings. I head towards it, removing the bag, feeling her phone in my palm. It’s as if I’ve been plugged into her once again.

When I open the door, I’m startled by the shape of a man in my porch.

‘Mrs Powers?’ He approaches, a shy hand outstretched. He’s dark blond, with tanned skin, blue eyes and trimmed facial hair. I don’t correct the title he uses for me and he retrieves his hand when he senses my reticence.

‘My name’s Max. I’m a friend of Anna’s.’

Hearing her name aloud makes me catch my breath. Hearing him say ‘I’m a friend’ makes me hold it. He is saying ‘I am’, not ‘I was’. Whoever this guy is, I decide immediately that I like him.

‘Come in,’ I say, kicking Pug’s travel carrier to one side. ‘We haven’t met before, Max, have we?’ I know he’s not one of Anna’s local friends. ‘How far have you come?’

‘Hertfordshire,’ he says. ‘And no, we’ve never met.’

Max. I’m racking my brain to try and remember him. ‘Do you work with her?’

He stares at me a moment as I roll Anna’s phone over and over in my hand.

‘I did,’ he says. ‘We worked together.’

Past tense. ‘Were you … were you?’

We’re standing in the hallway. I point him to the back of the house, to the kitchen-diner that would fit in my parents’ larder. ‘Were you …?’ I try again. My heart thumps a rapid clip-clop beat in my ribcage. My lips are dry.

‘I was on the ski-trip,’ he says, meeting my eyes.

Raw Honey Blogspot 15/10/2014

Mama’s just been screaming at me to ‘move my shit from the front door’. It’s her standard rant and I’ll do it – I’ll move them but can’t promise the pile of shoes won’t build again. I’m a messy cow. One moment Mama tells me I get it from my father, and the next she’s shouting, telling me that laziness is not genetic.

She’s mad! She’s the best mother in the world and I adore her, but , she’s a tough act to follow; sees things in a very black-and-white way, whereas I seem to live in grey. In my world, nothing is crystal clear and I don’t believe in spending too much time figuring shit out. She’d say that if my world is muddy, it’s because of choices I’ve made. And (tough act to follow?) she’s right, of course.

But there’s still something about mothers and daughters – sounds crappy happy – but it is a special bond. Mama and I have it and I have it with DD. It’s there and nothing can ever break it. (Keep telling yourself that, Honey.)

When I was little, before Dad left, I remember Mama and Dad as if they were one, inseparable. If I have a memory, they’re both there: rock pooling in France on a camping holiday, peering up at me from the audience at the nativity play. He left when I was twelve and apparently I should be damaged by that but, honestly? How bad can it have been when all I can remember is good stuff. At least, that’s how I recall it, but maybe, maybe when we look back, we just make people seem better than they actually were?

Anyway, suddenly, there was just the two of us, Mama and me. Sure, she’s had lovers over the years, but she never introduced any to me. She kept our home a sanctuary and I loved that. If Dad had to be gone, then I loved growing up with just her and me.

But I don’t seem to have inherited her selfless gene. I don’t seem to have inherited the tidy gene and I certainly have no ability to see things clearly! Perhaps I am more like my father (though he has always said that leaving Mama was absolutely the right thing to do for him. Crystal. Clear. Carpe diem and all that). What I do have is a nagging conscience. It pokes me more often than friends on Facebook but I force myself to ignore it (and then, afterwards, worry I’ll go to hell in a rusty wheelbarrow).

Comment: Solarbomb

You said your dad left when you were twelve. Were you really not angry at him?

Reply: Honey-girl

I remember being upset. I remember knowing everything would be different, but no, strangely, I don’t think I was angry. I still saw a lot of him, and Mama and I, we worked well together. I missed him but … it was okay. I think I was meant to feel different, devastated, but I didn’t. I still had a mother and father who adored me and somehow we worked it out.

Comment: Anonymous

REMOVED BY USER

He wasn’t imagining it, the woman was flirting with him. He tried to remember her name – Jane, Janet; something beginning with a ‘J’. She offered him a slim hand. Long tapered fingers with short but manicured nails grasped his in a firm handshake. ‘Jacqueline,’ she said. ‘You’d forgotten, hadn’t you?’ She smiled, though Theo had to look down to Finn’s height to see it. She was tiny next to his own six-four frame. But that handshake had been strong and, as she stood next to Finn, all kitted out in Lycra and cleats, there was something very self-assured about her.

‘No, of course I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said.

‘Yes, he did. He forgot.’ Finn snorted. ‘Dad forgets everyone’s name.’

‘Jacqueline,’ she repeated. ‘Think French. Think you have to make it sound French even though I’m not. That will give you something to hook onto if you forget again.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I definitely won’t forget again. French.’ He nodded.