Page 66 of Out of Control

“He’s notmyMeeko,” Fiona whispered into the down on Natalie’s head.

“I thought you just had a dirty weekend together? Did you bother turning up to the wedding or did you spend the whole time in that massive posh bedroom? The pictures you sent were unbelievable. That one room was the size of our student flat.”

The whole occasion felt like a fairytale gone wrong. “The wedding was good.”

“Good? That’s all you can say about two nights away at the poshest do that we plebs can only dream about?”

“I’m tired, Adele. Make me a cup of tea and then I’ll watch Natalie while you get your head down for a few hours.”

“It’s a deal.”

Nuzzling Natalie was the best stress reliever. Pacing the floor with her upright and burping was even better. It stopped the mind from doubting, questioning and second-guessing. Natalie was comfort and solace personified. After a shaky start, the longer Fiona’s house guests stayed, the better.

On Monday morning reality stampeded back. Fiona’s habitual jog to the hotel and breakfast with her best friend would be too awkward. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table and ate a bowl of porridge with a giant spoonful of golden syrup (who cared if she broke her own healthy eating rules — her life was a train crash anyway) and far too many slices of toast loaded with marmalade.

“Incredibly, she’s still asleep.” Adele crept into the kitchen and filled a dish with cornflakes. “There were a couple of episodes in the night but she quietened after a feed.” She swiped at her phone as she ate. “Oh my God!”

“What?”

“Mum is back in communication. She’s on a plane home. No, that’s wrong. She sent that message in the middle of the night. She’ll now be on a train from London. She says she’ll get a taxi straight to your house.”

“Here? How does she know?”

“She must have picked up the message I sent when I first arrived here.”

“But she doesn’t know about . . . ?” Fiona pointed at the ceiling. “Or about me and Joe splitting up?”

“Not unless Dad’s told her, which I doubt.”

Life was spooling even further out of control — like the brown tape that spewed out of broken cassettes when she was a teenager. A pencil could get the tape wound back in, but sorting out Fiona’s life would take infinitely more effort than twisting a pencil round and round. “I need to clean the house.Buy food, plan what to feed her.”Get in control of the situation and then the appearance of your ex-boyfriend’s wife won’t faze you.“Should I go out and stay out? Give you time to introduce Natalie to her proper grandma?” Where to? Not Meeko’s; there’d been no word from him since they’d parted at the station. He’d even refused her offer to order him an Uber. There was only Dorothea, who’d want chapter and verse on the wedding and then lament the imminent loss of her granddaughter- and great-granddaughter-by-proxy. Fiona wouldn’t be able to talk about either without crying.

Adele looked surprised. “Why should you care about making things easier for Mum? Even though they were divorced, she was sort of your rival.”

Good question. Until Joe had started citing her domestic inadequacies compared to his ex-wife, Fiona had never seen Rose as a rival; merely someone from his past who would become increasingly insignificant as time went on. But his constant harping back to Rose had been one of the key factors in Fiona ending their relationship. Now she felt grateful to Rose for saving her from wasting any more time on a man who would never be her soulmate. And, for reasons she couldn’t understand, Fiona wanted Rose to like her. That unruly brown tape had just unwound a bit more.

She couldn’t give either of these explanations to Rose’s daughter and so she just shrugged.

* * *

Fiona had barely got back from the supermarket with the ingredients for a chicken casserole plus an expensive box of granola because Rose would have to be offered somewhere to stay for the night, when the doorbell rang.

“Take Natalie and answer it,” Fiona urged. “I’ll stay upstairs until you signal that you’ve got all the explaining out of the way.”

“Where do I start?” The girl looked terrified, and then a flash of hope passed across her face. “Perhaps it’s someone else at the door?”

Meeko?Don’t even go there, Fiona. That relationship is now an official mess.

The doorbell rang again. “Answer it!” Fiona hissed from the top step. She heard the door open and an unfamiliar female voice. She went into her office, closed the door and waited. The indecipherable conversation in the room below ebbed and flowed like waves in the ocean. Fiona tried to put herself in Rose’s shoes. If Amber had lived, Fiona would never have run away and left her without a single word. She’d often visualised Amber as she passed through the major milestones of life: starting school, becoming a teenager, leaving for university. When Adele had given birth, the emotion of how it might have been for Amber had been unbearable. Now Fiona tried to spool back to that moment in her imagination and panicked. She no longer saw the familiar image she had fabricated of her daughter in adulthood — instead it was a hazy female face that could fit any one of a million people. She rewound further in her mind, but as the versions of Amber grew younger, so did their genericness. Fiona gripped the edge of her office desk. She was losing the Amber of her imagination.

She lost track of how long she sat there, staring at the black screen of her laptop. No one had understood the depth of her grief over the miscarriage. And she couldn’t tell anyone about this devastating second loss, of the imagined face of her daughter. They’d think she was mad. Except . . . Meeko. She looked at her mobile. Would he even take the call? She’d implied that she only wanted him for sex, not a total emotional commitment, and yet here she was wanting to unburden a deep fear. But even that wasn’t the same as handing over her whole self to someone and trusting them to take care of it. Alight of understanding came on as the indistinguishable multi-age images of Amber faded completely. The very fact that she wanted to talk to Meeko about her fear that these imagined images of her daughter were receding forever showed the level of trust she had in him. She trusted him, and only him, enough to reveal this vulnerability. From this point it was only a small step to trusting him with her whole future.

A knock made her jump and the office door opened.

“Fiona! I’ve been calling up the stairs. I’m putting the kettle on. Will you join Mum and I for coffee?”

“What? Are you sure you’re ready for me? How’s it going? Get the best chocolate biscuits — they’re at the back of the cupboard.” All introspection fled from Fiona’s head as she tried to read Adele’s face.

“It’s OK. I’ll introduce you.”

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