The Family Gift Read online

  This is one half of what I am afraid of: that Elisa’s friendship is casual and therefore will destroy Lexi when she realises it. If, on the other hand, it’s a real attempt to connect with her long-lost child, I will be destroyed.

  Dan and I keep gazing at each other. In the grand scheme of things, Lexi is the one who must be taken care of. I know that.

  She is mine but not a possession. She is entitled to have this relationship with her birth mother.

  Under the guise of tidying, I pass Dan and hug him briefly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mutter to him. ‘It’s just . . .’

  He puts a long arm around my waist. ‘We can manage,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Our family can get through this.’

  After I drive everyone to school, I sit in the car and search for victim support meetings. There are lunchtime ones, helplines. I need something now. In two days, Lexi will be off school and will be starting her ballet camp, which is shorter than the school day. The summer is a tough time for the working mother, so I need to get myself organised now.

  I don’t want to spill my guts to anyone but if it helps, if I am calmer and able to sleep like a normal person, then I can handle all the rest of my life better. I search up another victim support meeting and make myself go.

  STRENGTH meets in a church parish hall at 1 p.m. and as soon as I enter, I feel out of place. I am easily the oldest person there and while I don’t know the exact statistics on crime, I do not think that only older people are victims.

  ‘Don’t pull the chairs: lift them,’ says a lady with a blonde cap of hair and some sort of flowing outfit.

  I put down my chair and go up to her.

  ‘This is a victim support group?’ I ask.

  ‘We support everyone,’ she says with the benign gaze of a woman who has been on many committees. ‘Fiona’s a widow and poor Harry is only buried a week. We got her to come, didn’t we girls?’ she says to her assembled ladies.

  Poor Fiona looks shell-shocked, as if she’d rather be at home in bed with her TV remote and a big box of tissues while she tries to begin the painful negotiation of life without Harry.

  ‘It’s for widows?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh no, it’s for everyone.’

  Everyone except me, I think.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Wrong meeting,’ and I run back to the door.

  15

  Be happy – it drives people crazy!

  The week trundles on. I stare at my recipe books but don’t go into the office.

  I make Lorraine cancel a demo for the weekend because I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will not be able to manage it.

  I stop looking up sleeping pill withdrawals online and jump like a nervous small dog every time Lexi’s phone pings with a WhatsApp in case it’s Elisa asking her for another ‘coffee’.

  Worse, I can barely speak to Dan.

  In bed every night, he holds me and we lie there, cocooned under our duvet, while he asks me what’s wrong and tells me he’s worried about me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lie. ‘Just tired.’

  Which is not a lie at all. I am tired. My guilt at lying to him has turned into something heavy that lies in my heart but I feel too shattered to fix it.

  ‘Maura can take care of the children on Thursday,’ he says. ‘I can drive you to your support group meeting.’

  I shake my head.

  I still don’t know if I can go back to the first meeting. The threshold for pain in my heart has been reached. I don’t know how any meeting can help that. And another session with fragile old men who’ve been hurt, or Ariel with her sad eyes and her pretend-happy voice . . . I can’t take it.

  But I know I must.

  That dingy room might be all that stands between me and falling apart.

  I don’t ring Ariel to say I’m going. Instead, I climb the stairs beside the dilapidated phone repair shop on Thursday evening at five to seven and close my eyes before pushing open the door.

  The crowd seems different tonight but Ariel is there, this time with hair that’s blue-tinged.

  ‘Freda!’ cries Ariel delightedly, standing at the tea table stirring sugar into a cup of herbal tea.

  ‘Sit here,’ says a white-haired woman of my mother’s vintage and pats a sofa on the far side of the room. There goes my plan to sit near the door again. ‘We’ve got cushions and everything for your back, this is the best place to sit. And Ariel, honey, you go on my other side.’

  Ariel squishes in beside her, takes off her shoes and sits cross-legged like a Yogi.

  For the first ten minutes I can barely listen. My breathing is incredibly shallow and I’m just trying to concentrate. A man called Steve announces how this group has been set up to help people recover from the pain and suffering resulting from crime. It’s a bit of a broad brief, I think to myself. It’ll take more than this place to unlock all the pain inside me. And then I realise I didn’t even hear this bit the first time round: I must have been so anxious, all I heard was noise.

  ‘Who wants to go first?’ says Steve.

  ‘I will,’ says the cosy lady sitting between me and Ariel. ‘I’m Eileen and this has been a really hard week. Last week was so good. I was walking and doing my garden. I did my Daisy rituals, obviously: went to the grave, put flowers on it, prayed. But this week is different. Sometimes it comes and goes like that – you’d think I’d be used to the ups and downs. I know you all know it you have heard me say so before. This week is difficult. It’s the twentieth year school reunion and she’d have loved that. Daisy was brilliant at school, brilliant. She wasn’t wildly sporty or terribly academic like that but they loved her, they all came to the funeral, everyone in her class. They were genuinely heartbroken. But that wasn’t what made me think of it,’ said Eileen and out of the corner of my eye I can see she’s starting to cry wordlessly.

  Equally wordlessly, Ariel opens her backpack, finds tissues and hands a handful to Eileen who mops her eyes. ‘There was a car death on the news the other night and I don’t know why it hit me but . . . The person was a teenage boy not a girl but I just kept thinking of Daisy and how Daisy had so much life in her and now it’s gone. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that. I’m sorry,’ she holds up a hand, still crying silently. It’s like the tears are such a part of her that she just lets them flow out. ‘I know I’m trying to say the right things and convince myself all the time that I can get through, that we can get through. I mean Ken just goes into these silences sometimes, for weeks on end, but we manage. We have the dogs and, and . . .’ Eileen’s voice trails off as if she can’t think of anything else to say. ‘I miss her,’ she says finally.

  Reaching across me, Ariel’s hand is now clutching Eileen’s larger, older one and I think I might cry myself but I can’t. I’ve never heard anything like this except on the TV when people talk about children dying. I can’t even allow myself to think about it. There are so many questions I want to ask Eileen, like: what age was your daughter and what happened and did they get whoever hurt her in the car because if the person responsible goes to prison that must help?

  But I can’t ask anything. Because she’s in so much pain and to ask would be to add to that. And even if the culprit is in jail, so too is Eileen. There is nothing simple about this pain: it’s layered. It can’t be solved. Eileen lives with it, day by day and this room helps.

  I feel ashamed to think I imagined this room would be full of nuts. It’s a room of healing. Ariel was right.

  Nobody speaks for a while: it’s as if we are all in silent communal prayer, the type of spiritual prayer that’s sending love and hope towards Eileen. A young guy with a shaved head and quite a lot of tattoos has got up and he brings a cup of tea over to Eileen and swaps it for her existing one.

  ‘That’ll be cold,’ he says gruffly.

  ‘Thanks, Shane,’ she says, ‘thank you, I feel
better. Needed to get it out – better out than in.’ She sighs. ‘I wish Ken had come with me but he doesn’t see the point in this raking it over, talking about it again.’

  This time, I pat her hand. I have no wisdom to offer but my presence.

  Eileen smiles. ‘That’s me done,’ she says and everyone looks around, waiting for the next person to speak.

  ‘I had a good week,’ pipes up Ariel. ‘It was a gift. I didn’t feel sad or scared. Imagine, I didn’t feel scared,’ and she beams round at everyone. I wonder briefly if Ariel is not quite all there. But when she starts talking again I realise that she’s every bit there, she’s just suffering.

  ‘There was another of those syringe robberies in town. I just saw it on the internet and I didn’t let it get to me, I said no, not going to happen.’ She says that in a sing-song sort of voice and I’m not sure I believe her. ‘So I went to my friend’s house, the one with all the cats.’

  Everyone laughs. This is clearly an in-joke.

  ‘I stayed there for a few days. We even went out and I stayed late, till nine o’clock.’

  ‘Hey,’ say a few people, ‘way to go, Ariel.’

  Ariel looks at me. ‘I know nine is not very late in the real world but it is for me. It happened after nine and I just keep trying to get past that barrier. Like nothing bad will happen before nine o’clock and after, I have to be scared.’

  She turns to me, clearly finished.

  ‘Everyone, this is Freda. Do you want to talk, Freda?’ she says. ‘You don’t have to. It’s totally up to you, you can just sit in and see how you feel.’

  Suddenly I know I can’t lie to these people.

  ‘My name isn’t Freda. It’s actually Freya and I’m sorry I lied.’ Nobody looks shocked or angry. Their faces are still warm, interested. ‘I – I feel so stupid. I have this job that puts me on TV sometimes and so some people recognise me and I just wanted to be able to come in here and be normal.’ I laugh with a hint of bitterness. ‘Or try to be normal.’

  ‘Hey,’ says Steve, ‘none of us are normal, why should you be any different?’

  And there’s more laughing.

  ‘I was mugged over four months ago and I can’t sleep at night.’ The words spill out of me. ‘I’m angry and stressed and I’m different. I don’t know how else to explain it, it sounds really stupid but . . .’

  ‘It’s not stupid,’ says Eileen.

  ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘I want to stop feeling different from everyone else.’

  I’m waiting for someone to give me some wisdom but they don’t. They’re silent, and I can feel them, their love and kindness. They understand.

  And then I allow myself to cry because I’ve been bottling it up for so long and it wants to come out, now.

  Eileen’s arms are around me, Ariel is patting my back and I feel safe.

  Lorraine and I had made three trips back to my car in the underground car park.

  ‘We need one of those old lady shopping trolley yokes,’ said Lorraine on the last trip, when our arms were killing us both and I could feel the ache in my neck from setting the whole thing up, prepping, then an hour-long demo and Q & A afterwards, signing books, talking about recipes to people who wouldn’t go home, then packing it all up again and schlepping it all back to my car.

  ‘We need a weightlifter to join the team,’ I grumbled. ‘Why does nobody ever understand that we have to get all the stuff into the venue and then get it out?’

  ‘Life of glamour, huh?’ said Lorraine.

  We finally slammed the boot shut.

  ‘I’ll do the parking ticket for you,’ said Lorraine, who wasn’t coming with me but was going on to meet someone in town because she was still in her twenties, still had energy.

  ‘No, go off and have fun,’ I said. ‘I can still move.’

  We laughed, went to the stairs together because the lift was slow, and made it up to the ground level where we hugged goodbye at the door and I went to pay for my parking at the automated machine.

  My mind had gone into that other land of being tired and not paying attention. We’d been up and down the steps so many times that evening: the garage felt familiar, friendly.

  I shoved open the door on my floor, finding my phone because I could stick some relaxing music on as I drove home and let the stress of the demo flow away. I was at the car, bag still open, searching yet again for my keys when he struck.

  I don’t know how he got there without me noticing. But then, I’d stopped noticing. Somewhere in my gut, the fear alert was probably pinging frantically, but I’d overridden it by the sheer familiarity of the place.

  The first blow went to the back of my head and in truth, it wasn’t hard but the shock – nobody tells you about the shock. I fell to my knees and then he hit me again, still weakly, so that if I’d been thinking at all, I’d have turned around and screamed, scratched him with my keys, yelled blue murder, run away.

  But no, the second blow made me fall to the ground, my arm slamming into the ground, my collarbone breaking as nature designed, my face following suit so that I felt the sharp abrading sensation of the cement on my cheekbones.

  I saw the glint of the knife as I lay there and pure terror meant I was unable to move.

  ‘Gimme your bag,’ he said, his voice croaky and I shook, unable to do anything but smell the dirt of the street, of long unwashed clothes, the pungency of drugs.

  ‘Your fucking bag!’ he hissed again, and I moved, wincing at the pain of my body.

  He ripped it off my arm and ran, leaving me lying on the ground with fear.

  ‘It made me scared,’ I say now. ‘Really scared. I moved house because I wanted walls to hide behind. My daughter’s birth mother is back and it makes me terrified. My father had a stroke months before and now I see illness everywhere. We’re so vulnerable,’ I cry out loud. ‘I can’t stop any of it.’

  Ariel hands over the tissues, I murmur thanks and let the tears flow.

  ‘We don’t give advice here,’ says Steve, ‘but we talk about what works for us. Anyone got any wisdom for Freya,’ says Steve.

  Nobody says anything for a full minute but the silence is OK, not weird.

  ‘I come here because nobody judges and because here, I know that I’m not alone. Nobody tells me I should be “over Daisy”, or that if I take up a hobby, it’ll help. Here, I learn to live with it,’ says Eileen, and puts an arm round me. ‘That’s as good as it gets.’

  I nod and still cry, but there’s more relief in my tears now.

  Living with it.

  I’ve no idea how to do that but if that’s what works, then that’s what works. Because anger and avoidance don’t.

  People talk and I sort of listen until a very quiet woman with long, mouse-coloured hair begins to speak. She looks at me as she does so.

  ‘I’m Farrah and I was attacked by a couple of teenagers. They stole my bag, kicked me, scared me,’ she says. ‘It was four years ago and the police told me there wasn’t much hope of finding them. I don’t know if it would make any difference if they did,’ she says. ‘It made me jumpy, I jump at the slightest thing and sometimes I get really angry and I don’t know why. I’m on antidepressants but I’m still scared. It took me ages to come in here. I still don’t know why I’m not better. That makes me angry.’

  I stare at Farrah, shocked.

  ‘You just said everything I feel,’ I say. ‘Like I should be over it and yet my temper is on hair trigger and I never used to be like that and, and I do jump at everything. We moved in to a new house and I’m scared when I look out the window at night because all I can see are these black dark shapes and I imagine they’re intruders. I never used to be that sort of person. I keep thinking we could get a better alarm or . . .’

  ‘You want to be safe,’ says Farrah, shrugging, ‘but safe doesn’t come from the locks and the alarms. I
know that because I did it and I still don’t feel safe. Safe is an inside job.’

  I grin.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ariel, ‘it is, isn’t it? Helps me.’

  The meeting goes on for another forty minutes and stops when someone comes round with tea and some very nice biscuits with coffee icing that I’d never have looked at before in the supermarket. But now in this cosy, safe, place they are delicious and I eat six of them in a row. I love sitting here in this dull little room with these people I hardly know, but there is a connection between us all. Steve works in a bank and the bank was held up by armed robbers. There was counselling but not enough for him and he still feels scared. He can’t tell anyone, not his wife, his kids, his bosses. ‘Everyone else is fine. Except me.’

  He’s afraid he’ll lose his job and he needed something else. He started the website and I can understand its quirkiness the more I listen to him, because he’s pretty quirky.

  ‘I don’t think anyone else understands it unless you have been through it,’ he says, ‘and we all have different stories. But somehow they brought us together and we try to get better,’ he shrugs. ‘It’s simple. If I’m feeling stressed during the week I hit the chat room and send out a message. Someone always gets back. I’m not alone. There’s loads of us around the country and not everyone can get here, but when you can get here you feel good, a bit more normal.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ laughs Shane, the shaven-headed guy.

  We end by holding hands and saying we are here for each other and we are here for ourselves.

  ‘Do come back,’ says everyone, as Ariel and I walk out the door.

  Even though I hadn’t wanted to go, now that I have, I almost don’t want to walk away. I’d had visions of a crowd of people telling me to ‘get over it’ and ‘be strong, you can do it!’ like my old gym teacher yelling at us all to get out onto the basketball court on days when the rain came down like shards of glass.

  But this had been nothing like that. We’d all shared stories and nobody had commented that one person’s tale was less important. There was no scale of fear. No points system for our pain. And after comparing what I’d been through with the tragedy of Dad’s stroke, and the ongoing agony of Scarlett desperately trying for a baby, it felt good to talk about what I was going through.