Page 60 of Jenny James Is Not a Disaster
Today is a Saturday, and it’s the first time since we arrived that Richard is driving over. Shannon and Ethan are coming with him, and Charlie is excited to finally meet his uncle. Me, less so. I still remember him as my big brother, the one who was usually mocking me, jump-scaring me, or making it clear I was cramping his style.
As we emerge onto the gravel driveway, I see that they are, in fact, already here—at least I presume the silver Audi parked up belongs to him. We go into the house, and Richard strolls into the hallway holding a can of lager. He pauses, staring at me, and I see that he has a touch of gray in the sides of his hair and a tiny beer belly poking over his jeans. He looks me up and down and laughs, before saying: “Bloody hell! When did you turn into a grown-up, sis?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, giving him a cautious hug, worried in case he drops a worm down my top or kidney punches me, “maybe about the same time you turned into an old man?”
He pulls my hair so hard it hurts and goes over to shake Charlie’s hand.
“So this is the famous Charlie,” he says, and I am childishly amused to see that Charlie is taller than him.
“Ethan and Shannon tell me you’re the most exciting person they’ve ever met.”
“What?” says Charlie, looking confused. “Me?”
“Yeah. You went to three theme parks in one day, didn’t you?”
“Oh, right! Well, in that case, yes—I am indeed the man! Nice to meet you... erm, Uncle Richard?”
“Just call him Dick,” I shout over. “Everyone else does!”
“Nobody calls me Dick,” my brother asserts, correctly.
“Maybe—but they all think you’re one!” I reply, then run away into the kitchen. Ah, it’s good to be home sometimes.
I find my mother busy at work peeling vegetables, and she hands me the chopping knife and board as soon as I walk in. I resist the urge to pull a face and say, “I’ll do it later!” which I really want to do—something about seeing Richard again has unleashed my inner teenage brat. Instead, I start to slice carrots and am immediately told that I’m doing them too thickly. I grimace and bite my tongue.
“Charlie was wondering if he could use the old caravan,” I say as we work. “He’d like to clean it up a bit, set up some kind of den for him and the other two. I was surprised you hadn’t passed it on to them anyway.”
Her peeling becomes slightly more vigorous, and she eventually responds, “Yes. Well. If you want the truth, Jennifer...” She is using my naughty name, and I am not at all sure that I do want the truth. As she’s holding a knife, I think I’d actually prefer a pleasant fib.
“We shut it up after you left. Not immediately, but after a while. For the first year... well, we thought you’d be home soon. We kept expecting you to turn up. Your father was forever trying to get the police to look for you as a missing person, and we even considered hiring a private detective at one point. Your father was convinced that something terrible had happened, that you simply wouldn’t leave us like this. He never could quite believe that you’d gone of your own free will, no matter what you said that night.”
I remain silent and concentrate on the carrots. This is obviously hard for my mum to talk about, and hard for me to hear.
“He used to go and sit in there, in the caravan. He’d sit there for hours, on his own, just to be in the same space as you. Didit for months. And then your postcard arrived—the one you sent from London. A couple of sentences, wasn’t it? ‘Mum and Dad—just letting you know I’m still alive and I’m okay.’ You probably thought you were being sensitive, putting us out of our misery... but the day that arrived, I found him inside the caravan, crying. You know your dad. He was always a big man, a proud man—but he was just sitting there slumped over the table, sobbing. He said he realized when that card arrived that you were gone because you didn’t want to be with us anymore, that you were going to stay away forever. That it was our fault. That we’d driven you to it, and he’d never forgive himself.”
It is a simple description, but I can see it vividly—and it almost breaks me. My poor dad. My poor mum. I feel like such a selfish idiot.
“Mum, I—”
“No,” she says firmly, interrupting me. “I need to say something, and now is as good a time as any, so please don’t stop me. You know I always think more clearly when I’m cooking.”
I nod, and stop chopping carrots for the time being. My eyes are blurred with tears and it would be folly to continue. Nobody wants to find a fingertip in their veg.
“I want to say that, in some ways, he was right, Jenny. I’ve thought about it all incessantly over the years, as you can probably imagine. I’ve gone over and over it, looked at it from every possible angle—trying to convince myself that we’d done the right thing, that it was all down to you, that we were blameless. I desperately wanted to believe that, but I found that, eventually, I couldn’t—I couldn’t even fool myself any longer.
“We never gave Rob a chance, which I regret. We never gave you a chance, which I regret even more—we should have hadmore faith in you. Should have trusted you. Should have believed that eventually you’d make the right choices. That the right choices might not look exactly like we wanted, but to accept that. Instead, we tried to force you to agree with us. We bullied you, and we coerced you. I can’t believe we actually used to lock you in your bedroom, or that we... that we called the bloody police! If I’d seen someone else doing that to their child, I’d have called it abuse... What on earth were we thinking?”
My mother never swears—she doesn’t really need to; she can convey most negative emotions through tone of voice alone. The fact that she has just reflects how messed up she feels right now, how hard this is for her.
I try to speak, to comfort her, but yet again she stops me, holding up her hand and shaking it.
“No, let me finish! We did the wrong things, but for the right reasons—we were worried for you. We saw you letting your whole future slip away—we thought you were going to end up losing everything, and you were only a baby, our baby, our little girl, and we did what we thought we had to do to protect you. And by trying to protect you, we forced you away, into a situation where we couldn’t keep you safe at all. We did it all wrong—but we only did it because we loved you, and we didn’t think you were old enough to be in such a serious relationship, not with...”
She flounders here, and I can see her trying to find an alternative for what she wants to say, for the words that she is trying to hold back.
“With someone like Rob?” I complete for her.
She looks away from me, as though she can’t bring herself to meet my eyes, and nods.
