Page 64 of The Trouble With Love

‘So, what’s the next step? Do you write to her, or what?’

He stopped picking and stared down at the floor. ‘No. She wants to see me, well, I’m not giving her any time to prepare, I want to see her as she really is, not as she’d have me see her. Does that make sense?’

‘Isn’t it a bit unfair on her?’

‘I don’t think I have to be fair. I think I’m entitled to be as fucking unfair as I feel like.’ He kicked his feet off the stool and stood up, opening cupboards at random and slamming doors.

I watched him for a moment as he turned his fear and longing into anger and activity. ‘When do we do it?’

‘Soon,’ his voice was muffled in the boiler cupboard. ‘Yeah. Soon. Before Christmas anyway.’

‘That’s only a couple of weeks away.’

‘Yeah. Maybe New Year. Or . . . Oh, here’s the vacuum. Jesus, more beetroot, what did she do, bath in the stuff?’

‘It makes you go orange.’ I didn’t want to think about Christmas. With Ma and Dad so far away in Scotland, the last few years it had been Nicholas and me, with the occasional addition of Megan if her dad and step mum had taken off on another cruise. I’d shopped and cooked and we’d gone to midnight Mass and it had all been a bit . . . thin, somehow. Nick couldn’t drink on his medication and I hated drinking alone, so we’d sat stone cold sober and eaten fruit cake neither of us liked. Now Nick was going to have his first true family Christmas with Cerys and the twins and her mum and dad who, apparently, adored him and I was here, looking down the barrel of the festive season alone. Kai had only mentioned Christmas once, in the context of how much he was looking forward to escaping it by working on a piece about Afghan rebel fighters in their native habitat.

‘Before Christmas might be best. She’ll spend Christmas knowing that she’s got a granddaughter and two great-grandchildren.’

‘Come on, Holl, you’re behaving as if she’s been in stasis since she gave me away. She’s probably had a bunch of children and loads of grandkids and I’ll just be one more, tacked onto the family like some kind of prosthetic.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘No. I don’t.’ He stopped slamming around and stood in the corner, resting his head against the wall with his back to me. ‘I am so, so bad at this.’

‘I don’t think it’s something you can practise.’ A little bit tentatively I went over and touched his shoulder. I had to stand on tiptoe to do it.

‘I meant, forgiveness. I know, deep down, that it probably wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t want to . . . to leave me, but then I think about Cerys. You know she got pregnant by accident? She and her boyfriend’ — he spat the word as though it was the same as steaming pile of shit — ‘had only known each other for a matter of weeks. And then she’s having twins and he’s having second thoughts. But she never, never considered giving them up.’

‘Kai.’ I ran my hand up and down his arm. ‘Thirty-six years ago the world was a different place.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘No, but I did history at school,’ I said sharply. ‘You can’t make any judgements until you know, that’s all I’m saying. Yes, Cerys kept the twins, but she’s got a rich, successful journalist for a supportive father, and a nice mum and an extra dad who were both behind her all the way, and her own flat . . .’

‘Bought by her rich, successful journalist father,’ Kai put in, but he was sounding a bit more cheerful now.

‘You see? Not exactly life on the breadline for our Cerys.’

‘Cerys would toast and eat the breadline.’ He turned round now, biting his lip. ‘I am such a jerk, Holly. A screwed-up, cowardly jerk.’

‘You forgot self-pitying.’

‘Oh yeah, that too.’ He traced my cheek with a finger. ‘Why do you hang around with me?’

‘I’m after your money.’

‘Ah. Thought that might be it.’ He smiled and I tried to keep my knees from wobbling. ‘How about tomorrow?’

‘How about what tomorrow?’

‘We go and find my mother.’ Now his look was challenging, as though he was expecting me to bottle out.

‘Okay, yeah. Right. Fine.’

‘Holly.’ Kai grabbed my wrist. ‘Don’t go home tonight. Stay. Please.’

‘Kai, she’s your mother, not a man-eating hyena, this isn’t your last night on the planet.’ I felt that I had to be sensible for both of us.

---