Page 36 of A Part of Me and You
I open my eyes.
‘Keep going,’ I whisper.
‘I won’t be able to call my mum though, will I?’
‘Rosie, come on. Keep focused. Job in hand. I can’t wait to see what you can do with an old hag like me.’
I hear her take a deep breath. She is such a brave little girl.
‘I bet she’s laid down on the bed for a rest,’ she says. ‘I’d better just check that she has in case she’s been kidnapped or something.’
Rosie skirts down the hallway and back again within seconds satisfied that, yes indeed, her mum has taken a sneaky lie down.
‘She gets tired so easily,’ she says to me. ‘I think it’s probably her age as well as her sickness. She turned forty on Friday you know.’
At that I burst out laughing. She is winding me up and I know it.
‘What’s it like to be older?’ she asks with a smirk, moving on to her foundation application.
‘I beg your pardon?’
She giggles and so do I.
‘Not that you’re old or anything, like, but my mum is forty and that’s pretty old,’ she says. ‘You don’t look forty, though. I mean, neither does my mum but then it’s hard to judge without her own hair. She used to look totally different, before the ‘you know what’. But you definitely must be younger.’
‘I’m thirty-five,’ I tell her, with a smile. She really is making me laugh with how she is digging a hole for herself on this age conversation. ‘I’m a whopping twenty years older than you are, imagine? I can still remember when I was fifteen so very clearly and I can tell you, I didn’t have the makeup collection that you do. We didn’t know what fake eyelashes were and fake tan was a luxury and something we made a mess of. You are an expert in all of this, believe me!’
She takes another big breath again.
‘Do you think she’ll die soon?’ Rosie asks me in a whisper and I shut my eyes a little tighter, a little too tight for makeup application though she has stopped now, either in deep thought or planning her next move.
‘I think it’s good that none of us know when we are going to die exactly,’ is all I can think to say, with my eyes still closed. ‘Sometimes though, when you do get a warning through illness it means that you can perhaps do nice things for as long as you are fit to, before your time runs out. You know, make some lasting memories while you still can or carry out ambitions.’
I hope I’m saying the right thing.
‘You didn’t get a warning with Lily though, did you?’ she asks me, and this time I do open my eyes. She is looking in her makeup case, what for I do not know, and even though my fight or flight intuition is challenging me to the max right now, I am not going to run away from this question. I will not have another meltdown. I will answer the young girl. I will face up to my demons.
‘I didn’t get any warning, no,’ I tell her, matter of fact. ‘I shouldn’t have left her when I did, but I did. I never in a million years thought she would go near the pond but she did. It happened in seconds. Time waits for no one. When I got to her, it was too late. We never know when our time is up. That’s just the way it goes.’
I say it like it’s a script I have rehearsed in my head, a script from my bereavement counselling days, but these are words that I have never said aloud until now. Rosie looks back at me and I can see her face is so full of questions. Part of me wants her to keep going, to keep asking questions, to keep talking about Lily. She doesn’t though, so I do the talking anyway as she applies my eye make up with another one of her special brushes.
‘She was just three years old when she died,’ I tell her. ‘Yesterday would have been her sixth birthday and I would give anything in the whole world to have spent that day with her. I miss her every single second of my life. Do you remember when you were six, Rosie? I’m trying to imagine what she would have been like.’
‘I don’t remember much, sorry,’ says Rosie. ‘Oh wait, I do, yes.’
She laughs at the memory.
‘We went ice skating for my birthday but I couldn’t do it so I huffed and sat on the benches while my friends glided around like they were on Dancing On Ice or something and I was so jealous,’ she says, talking at the speed of light. ‘Plus I was mortified because David Clarke was there and he was the most popular boy in the class and I fell slap bang on my bum on the ice as he skated past me,andhe was holding hands with Patti Smart. Not that I blame him. Who wants a girlfriend who can’t ice skate after all?’
I can’t help but snigger.
‘A girlfriend at six? Are you serious?’
‘Well, yes, of course I’m serious,’ she tells me. ‘Do you think I’d lie about such things? I don’t remember my seventh or my eighth birthdays so well, but my sixth birthday with David Clarke and when I fell on that ice, well … that will live with me forever. Damaged for life, I was. Mind you, he isn’t much to look at now so it was all a big blessing in disguise.’
Rosie expertly moves the brushes across my eyes and asks me to open and close them periodically which I do so obediently and I can’t honestly believe I am here, in this cottage, with a teenager chatting to me about her life on a Sunday evening, when I’d normally be cooped up alone in the house with only Merlin to stroke, Matt to argue with or Eliza to avoid. I feel, dare I say it, a tiny bit more alive for it.
‘My mother always threw the best birthday parties for me,’ I tell Rosie and she smiles as she listens. ‘My favourite one was the time we all went horse-riding and everyone wanted this one beautiful silver-grey mare called Sixpence but I got to ride her because I was the birthday girl. I think that was my best birthday ever. I had a blast.’
