Page 53 of Jenny James Is Not a Disaster
“Ha!” I snort in reply. “You’ve clearly not met my mother. I heard a dog, by the way, so maybe keep Betty on the lead until we know whether it’s friendly or if it eats dachshunds?”
He nods and hooks her up, and I open Joy’s door. I stand on the stairs for a moment, too nervous to move, and I see that my mother is doing exactly the same. She has opened her own door and is standing at the top of the small flight of stone steps. Her posture is perfect, and her arms are folded across her chest. Our eyes meet, and there is a second where I simply cannot move.
And then she runs down those steps, and I jump down my steps, and we both fly toward each other. Within seconds, we meet in the middle, and then I am in her arms, and she is stroking my hair back from my face, kissing away tears that I didn’t even notice shedding. I can’t quite describe that feeling—the feeling of being back in my mother’s embrace. I am safe and secure and it is as though nothing could ever harm me again. All the pain, all the worry, all the anxiety of the last years are swept away, and I simply sob on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, darling,” she murmurs, rubbing my arms and holding me back so she can look at me more clearly. “It’s okay. I’m so happy to see you. I’ve missed you so much...”
I swipe my eyes clear and look at her properly in return. Her hair is shorter than it was, cut in a bob that ends at her chin. It’s now more silver than brown, and it suits her. She’s gained a little weight, feels more comfortable than she used to, and there are lines on her face that were never there before—but none of thatmatters. It is still her, and I don’t think I realized until this exact moment how much I have missed having her in my life.
“Me too,” I say, clinging to her hand and letting my eyes roam over her, catching up on every new line. She is returning the appraisal, and I wonder how strange it must be for her—I left here as a seventeen-year-old child, and I stand before her as a grown woman, marked by the passing of time, changed by the life I’ve led. I hope she’s not too disappointed by what she sees.
“Not so bad,” she says, smiling, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “I half expected tattoos!”
“No tattoos,” I reply. “You?”
“Nothing apart from a busty mermaid on my left calf,” she says, still staring at me intensely. “And the blessed face of Saint Monty Don on the other.”
I don’t remember my mum having a sense of humor, but she must have. Maybe I’ve simply chosen to block out all the good things about her; maybe that’s made it easier to stay angry with her, to stay convinced she was purely bad. To stay away.
I hear footsteps shuffling on the gravel behind me and Betty’s snuffling sound as she sniffs the ground. For a few moments there, I completely forgot that we weren’t alone.
I hold my mum’s hand, surprised to see the skin wrinkled and her knuckles more pronounced, to feel the papery flesh. I lead her to the others.
“Mum, this is my friend Luke,” I say simply, nodding at him.
She says hello and runs her gaze over him, taking in the hair, the crumpled rock T-shirt, the motorhome in the background. I have a fleeting worry that she will snub him somehow, judge him and find him wanting, and am surprised at how protective I feel. Luke treats her to the full-wattage smile, and I swear she almost sighs. Maybe she is judging him, and not minding what she sees.
“And this,” I say, looking at my son, who is suddenly all gangly arms and nerves, “is Charlie. Your grandson.” Her eyes widen, and her hand flies up to her mouth. I see tears squeezed away as she registers what I have said, and I think that this is the first time I have ever seen my mum cry. I always used to take that as a sign of her inhumanity, her harshness, her lack of empathy—but now I remember that moment in Luke’s motorhome, just after the house fell, when I had a mini-meltdown. “You never cry, Mum,” Charlie had said to me.Of course I do, I’d thought at the time.I just hide it from you.Maybe my mum wasn’t inhumane and harsh back then—maybe she was just really good at crying on her own. She walks toward him, reaches up, and holds his face in both her palms. He looks a bit like he might cry as well as she envelops him in a hug. He is a good head and shoulders taller than her, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his arms.
She pulls away and says: “Charlie, I’m so pleased to meet you. We have a lot of catching up to do, don’t we?”
“That’d be really cool,” he says, grinning. “This is Betty.”
He picks the dog up, and she immediately licks my mum on the face.
“What a dear! Is she good with other dogs?”
Charlie confirms that she is, and Mum replies: “Righto. Well, shall we all get in out of the sun? Cup of tea maybe? I didn’t know you were coming, but I made some lemon drizzle cake yesterday...”
“Excellent,” says Charlie, “my favorite.”
In fact, his favorite cake is Black Forest gateau, but I am impressed at his superior levels of flattery.
He walks in behind Mum, and Luke hangs back with me.
“Are you all right?” he whispers as we climb the stone steps and enter the hallway.
I look up at him and smile. “I think so,” I murmur back, “but ask me again in an hour’s time.”
As soon as we are inside, a blur of white and brown runs in and zooms around our ankles. I do a double take and remind myself that, no, it can’t really be Jem—but he looks just like him.
“Jem’s line,” Mum says, seeing my expression. “I’ve lost track of how many greats. This is Frank. He’s only eighteen months old, and a complete hooligan.”
I kneel down and stroke him, amazed at how much he looks like my childhood pet. After I left, I initially missed Jem more than I missed anyone else, and it is almost too emotional being here, in the coolness of this familiar hallway, looking into the deep brown eyes of his doggie doppelganger.
Frank breaks away from me to investigate Betty’s nether regions, which she reciprocates, and then begins to lick her ears. Frank and Betty: A Love Story.
I stand up and look around the farmhouse. It is the same, but not. The hallway has been decorated, the slightly fussy floral paper replaced with deep green paint. The phone table is still where it was, but the phone is new. I glance through the open door to the living room and see that, again, it has been decorated, and that the Chesterfield sofa that seemed almost as old as the house is gone, replaced with a beige velvet suite.
