Page 30 of Days You Were Mine

‘Traitor,’ I say, handing him over with a goodbye kiss, and Alice says what she always says: ‘Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine.’

It’s hard to know how we managed without her. As well as looking after Samuel all day, she washes and irons his clothes, cleans the house and cooks for us. Hannah and I come back to these beautifully prepared dishes – shepherd’s pie, tagine, lasagne – classic fare but always with an undercut of sharpness, chilli or ginger or preserved lemon. I find myself looking forward to her food from mid-afternoon onwards.

She buys us things too, even though we ask her not to: fresh flowers every week, clothes and toys for Samuel, little gifts of chocolate from the delicatessen.

Today Hannah is interviewing Rick, a lead feature for theSunday TimesCulture section. Returning to work with aRichard Fields profile in the bag, she jumped straight to the top of the class. Her editor said, ‘Thank God you’re back, we’ve really missed you,’ and she came home that first day jubilant.

I’m back just a few minutes after six, the official end to Alice’s day. In the kitchen, I find her stirring a chicken casserole at the hob, Samuel bathed and dressed in a clean sleepsuit, flopped up against a beanbag.

There is something consoling about the care she takes in creating beautiful food for me, her son, reunited after twenty-seven years apart. I like to think that Alice – who I find more reserved and conversationally restrained than I expected – pours her love into cooking for us instead.

We’d like to see more of her at the end of the day, but she always rushes off, refusing our offer of a glass of wine.

‘You need your time with Samuel,’ she says.

I did persuade her to have a drink with us once, and I came to regret it. She sat at the table with her glass of wine and told us about the things she had done with Samuel – a visit to the library to look at picture books, a walk around the park – and it felt, this drink I had forced upon her, exactly like the sum of its parts. Two parents catching up with their nanny. Nothing more. Nothing less. I’ve decided that our relationship, Alice’s and mine, needs to be conducted outside the restraints of the parent–nanny dynamic.

When Hannah arrives home, moments later, she is euphoric from a whole day spent in Rick’s studio.

‘Oh Alice,’ she says, slinging her bag down on the floor and holding out her hands for Samuel, ‘he was so generous. We talked for hours and hours. About everything. His time at the Slade. His relationships with significant others, or rather the lack of them. He says there’s only ever really been you.’

‘Did he talk about the early days with Luke? When it was just the three of us?’ Alice asks.

‘Not really.’

Hannah shoots a look over at me. She knows how I long to find out about the first weeks of my life.

‘It’s hard for both of us to go back to those days. Such painful memories.’

‘I understand,’ I say, although I don’t really.

I think these parents of mine have a duty to share everything they can remember about newborn me. Missing me. The me I can never access. It’s not that I want them to feel pain, far from it; more that this surging quest for identity runs right through me. Sometimes I feel it’s all there is.

‘How was your day?’ Hannah asks, so I tell her about Reborn, the new band I’m obsessing over.

‘I went to meet them at lunchtime, H, and they are even better than I thought. They’re so political, like The Clash reinvented for the noughties, but with a disco edge. I feel like I’ve been looking for them my whole life.’

Hannah leans forward to kiss me and deposits Samuel in my arms.

‘You say that every time.’

Alice says, ‘The casserole is on low, ready to eat whenever you want it.’

‘Sit down for five minutes before you go?’ Hannah asks as she does every night.

‘I can’t, I’m afraid, I have to be somewhere. I’m already late.’

Alice is off, coat on, striped canvas bag over her arm, and I watch her leave the kitchen with a strange mixture of gratitude and regret. Wanting something, but not quite knowing what.

Then

Alice

This, exactly this, is what I spent my teenage years dreaming of, holed up in my bedroom, surrounded by sketchpads and pencils, as if I could somehow draw myself away from my father’s scorn into a world of decadence and liberation.

From my first incendiary meeting with Jake a few weeks ago, I have morphed into the band’s ‘artist in residence’, a title he jokingly bestowed upon me when I sketched them picnicking in St James’s Park.

The idea has grown from me creating an image for the album cover to documenting the fledgling stages of a band already being talked about as the new Rolling Stones. I’ve drawn them on stage, drinking halves of beer in the French House, playing football in the park. My favourite is one of Jake dressed in a black polo neck and his flared black jeans, cross-legged on the floor, a mug of coffee beside him. I like the everydayness of it, the reminder that I see him in a way no else does; he is mine, that’s what I think when I look at this drawing.

---