Page 34 of A Part of Me and You
‘What the hell are you all staring at?’ Shelley yells at them, in a very uncharacteristic outburst. ‘Do you know how long you’ve been staring at me now for? Three years! Three long lonely years of being stared at! Yes, it’sme, the Jackson lady who left her daughter for seconds and it went terribly wrong! Yes, it’s me! Stare and stare and stare like you always do and whisper your own conclusions! Stare all you want but it won’t help me or my pain! Nothing will so you can all feck off because nothing is going to make this easier or harder on me. Nothing!’
She turns away from us all and marches off, Merlin catching up alongside her with his stray lead scraping along the ground.
‘Come on, Merlin,’ I hear her mutter. ‘Let’s go home now.’
‘Mum, go after her please,’ says Rosie. ‘You always know what to say. Please help her.’
I push back my shoulders. My daughter thinks I always know what to say and that fills me with the courage and strength to help Shelley. If Rosie thinks I can, then I can and I will.
‘Shelley, you don’t have to leave!’ I call out after her. ‘You were doing nothing wrong by being here! Please just stop! Listen to me!’
To my surprise she stops, but I realize it’s not because I asked her to. It is because she can’t physically walk any further and she collapses into my arms when I catch up with her, sobbing uncontrollably as she clings to me.
‘I only went to answer the phone,’ she says through her streaming tears. ‘I told her to be careful! I told her not to go near the water even though it was just a shallow pond but she fell and hit her head and within minutes she was gone. She drowned, Juliette! She drowned in a shallow pond at her own home and everyone blames me. They say I shouldn’t have left her and I know it was my fault. They’re right. It was my fault.’
I gulp and a lump forms in my throat, so big that I am not sure I can speak to her. I can’t imagine what she has been going through. She has lost her own child and she blames herself … I am about to lose mine and though we are on opposite sides of that loss right now, it chokes me up to believe that this has really happened to her. How cruel! How bloody cruel!
‘Shelley, Shelley,’ I say into her hair when I manage to find the strength to speak. ‘Look at me, please.’
She looks into my eyes and I shake my head.
‘You made a mistake,’ I tell her. ‘Surely you’ve been told that before? A mistake! It’s something we all do. We aren’t perfect, none of us are. You can’t go on like this. You have to learn to live again, do you hear me?’
‘I’m losing him now too,’ Shelley whispers to me, her voice breathy and desperate. ‘Matt hasn’t called me all morning and he normally does as soon as he wakes up. He’s had enough of me. Everyone has. I’m a wreck, Juliette. I don’t deserve to be here. It’s all my fault.’
I look over her head and up the street to where the shopfront ofLily Lovessits proudly and I shake my head in defiance.
‘You are not a wreck! Look, Shelley,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t want to talk to you about this here, out on the street with those nosey parkers almost dropping their teeth into their chowders as they watch, because their own boring lives aren’t enough to occupy their gossip hungry souls. I swear, their mouths are so far wide open you could park buses in there, and it’s not an attractive sight at all.’
She smiles at that, but just a little.
‘That’s better, now come on. Lift that chin up,’ I tell her.
She doesn’t, so I do it for her.
‘Up!’ I say.
‘I can’t go back over there,’ she whispers, wiping her eyes. ‘They all think I’m nuts. Matt thinks I’m nuts. I’m even more nuts than my mother-in-law and that’s saying something.’
I link her arm and turn her around towards the restaurant.
‘Oh yes, you bloody well can go back over there,’ I tell her. ‘We haven’t had dessert yet and I don’t do lunch in half measures, didn’t I tell you so? I don’t have too many lunches left do I? Now walk and talk and don’t look their way if you don’t want to. You did nothing wrong. We are all perfectly entitled to have a public meltdown as and when we feel it, especially when we’re going through what we both are. Let them stare. Life is too short for that shit, believe me. Chin up, Shelley. Up!’
We walk together back towards the restaurant’s vast patio which I notice Merlin has made his way to already, back into the comfort of Rosie’s grasp, who smiles at me with great pride when Shelley and I return to the table. She pets Merlin protectively and hushes him like a baby and I fill up in wonder at how the human spirit can stand together when in need. I could be wallowing in my own self-pity right now, I suppose, and I would have every God given right to, but I refuse to do so when I see someone else going through so much unnecessary pain.
My days here may be numbered, but Shelley’s aren’t and I want to make very sure that before I leave this place, she realises that her life is still worth living and that every single day we have here is a gift – we should always try to make a difference, however small. I may be the one who is dying, but she needs a reminder how to live and I’m going to make sure she does just that.
‘Excuse me,’ I say to the waiter on his way past our table, just loud enough for the earwigs beside us to hear. ‘We’ll have a bottle of your very finest, coldest champagne with three glasses and your dessert menu when you have a second, please.’
‘Of course, madam,’ he says in reply. ‘A day of celebration for you three beautiful ladies?’
He is a charmer and a handsome one at that so I give him my most flirtatious smile, much to the amusement of Shelley and the embarrassment of my daughter.
‘Yes indeed,’ I reply to him with a bat of my eyelids. ‘We are celebrating something very special.’
He waits for more, as does my company – not to mention the gossips at the next table.
‘We are celebrating this beautiful sunny day in this most magnificent place. We are celebrating being alive and all that life has to offer,’ I announce. ‘Nothing more, nothing less and I think that’s as good a reason to celebrate as any, don’t you?’
