Page 18 of After the Accident
I hope I haven’t sounded insincere here. I know how it might have come across, but I find it so difficult to talk about Emma. Sometimes I overanalyse the things we talk about, or her reaction to things.
I suppose I just want her to be happy. That makes sense, doesn’t it? She’s the best person I know, but she has a really good way of hiding it.
Chapter Ten
THE UNICORN HEAD
Emma:It was Chloe who answered the hotel room door when I knocked… or at least shesaidit was Chloe. The girls were wearing identical pink pyjamas and had tied their hair into these topknot ponytails. It was really hard to know for certain who was who.
Julius:Emma was running late, but I didn’t want to ask what was going on. I was trusting her that she hadn’t been drinking, or anything like that. I suppose there was a second where I thought leaving her to look after the girls might not be the best thing – but we’re still family, aren’t we? I wanted her to prove herself.
Emma:Julius left more or less straight away and I suddenly realised this was the first time I’d been alone with a child since before prison. It would have been about three years at that point, maybe a little less. I try not to think about it, but it never leaves you…
…
I wouldn’t want it to.
Amy:I liked having Auntie Emma there. She wasn’t always telling us to put things away, or to keep quiet.
Emma:Julius said that the girls were eager for me to be spending time with them, but they both seemed quite happy to be playing on their iPads. I had a thought that it wasn’t like that when I was young – but I guess everyone feels like that. It used to be pop music, then TV, then video games. There’s always something. When I was a girl, I would have been watching music videos on TV all day.
Chloe:She asked us what we thought of the hotel.
Emma:I was happy to sit with them while they played their games, but I remember that, when I was young, I always liked it when people asked me for my opinion. Adults don’t always do that. You might go out for a family meal and someone always asks the grown-ups what they think of the place, or the food, or the price. The kids never get asked – or, if they do, it’s in a sort of babyish, condescending way.
So I asked them what they thought of the hotel. I didn’t think they’d heard me at first and then they both lowered their iPads at the same time. It was almost as if they’d planned it – although I don’t think they had. Sometimes they do things in unison and it takes a moment to realise they’ve done it. It’s like your eyes don’t believe that something can be happening with such symmetry.
Chloe:I said it was nice – but not as nice as the Center Parcs that Mummy had taken us to at Easter.
Amy:Center Parcs is lush.
Chloe:It’s really lush.
Emma:They brought up Simone, not me. She was my sister-in-law, but we were never really friends away from when we were in the family group. At that point, it would have been three to three-and-a-half years since we’d last spoken.
Amy:Dad said that, when we were with him, it was his time. When it wasMum’s time, we could talk about her as much as we liked.
Emma:They asked if I thought Julius and Simone would get back together. I didn’t know what to say, so told them that it was a question they’d have to ask their dad when he got back.
The truth is that I can’t see any way they’d ever get back together. Julius told everyone that Simone had been having an affair with her spinning teacher – and that she’d gone off with him. It’s not that I necessarily thought that was untrue, more that there was probably more to it. Julius could be like that sometimes. He’d tell the truth – but only a half-truth.
When we were kids, Julius once told Dad a boy had been picking on him, so he’d turned around and knocked the lad to the ground. Maybe it was a generational thing, but Dad liked to hear things like that.
It was true… except that the boy was only picking on Julius because Julius had been bullying that boy’s younger sister. Then Juliushadknocked the lad to the ground – but only because he’d run at him from behind and hit him with a rock. He didn’t lie to Dad – but it wasn’t the whole story.
I thought that’s probably what he was doing when he used to tell the family stories about Simone.
When it comes to things like divorces or separation, it’s rare that the blame is all on one side…
…
Except with my divorce, of course. That was nobody’s fault but mine.
Extract of a letter received from Tite, Tite and Gaze Solicitors, on behalf of Simone McGinley:My client would like to point out that the document agreed to between her and Mr Julius McGinley citedhis‘unreasonable behaviour’ as grounds for divorce. There was no need for any further notations in the agreement. That is a fact which speaks for itself.
Emma:Chloe said that her mum doesn’t cry as much any more. It was really direct, in the way kids can be sometimes. I didn’t know how to reply, so I probably said something like: ‘Oh, that’s good.’
Luckily they moved on, because they wanted to know what had happened to their granddad.
