Page 8 of A Part of Me and You
‘Juliette, you don’t need to make any more plans!’ she says. ‘Your life has been one big long plan that never got completed.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The thirty things to do before you’re thirty plan? I think you managed to do five? The list of life plans you decided to make for Rosie when she turned thirteen but didn’t finish? Dan’s most magical book of wedding surprises?’
She starts to laugh and I can’t help but laugh too. She does have a point.
‘Michael says I should go away for a few days to reflect, you know, a change of scenery,’ I tell her. ‘Somewhere quiet, away from reality if you like just to let this all sink in.’
‘What? Away where to?’ she asks. ‘Is he … is he sure you won’t …?’
‘He is pretty sure I won’t die in the next week or so,’ I say with a nervous laugh. ‘I’m thinking of going to Ireland, me and Rosie, what do you think? I want to go there and stay by the sea for a few days and think about … life and well, death I suppose.’
But there’s no pulling the wool over my sister’s eyes. She knows exactly what Ireland means to me.
‘No, Juliette, you just stop right there,’ is her adamant reply as she opens and closes my kitchen cupboards and drawers, but then I didn’t expect her reaction to be any different. ‘Don’t say that. You’re not thinking straight, Juliette. You’re in shock. Just stop.’
‘But Iamthinking straight,’ I say to her. ‘Even Michael said it would be good for me.’
‘Michael doesn’t know your history there!’
‘No, well, yes, but actually he knows a lot more than you think he does,’ I try to explain. ‘But that’s not why I want to go back. It’s a spectacular place, Helen. It’s my favourite place in the world.’
‘Cornwall is a spectacular place,’ says Helen. ‘Scotland is a spectacular place. It has scenery and the sea and good food and it’s—’
‘Yes, and so does Barry Island and Weston-super-Mare and bloody Blackpool but it’s not where I want to go, Helen,’ I say. ‘I want to show Rosie the one place in this world I loved the most and I want to tell her how special it was and how it still is for us both. I want to go there and switch off, and if anything else happens, then that’s a huge bonus, but that’s not the only reason why I’m going, believe me.’
My big sister is going to take a lot more convincing than that, but I was expecting this. I didn’t think for one second that she would be helping me pack my bags and cheering me on my merry way to Killara, with Rosie in tow, to find a man who once sailed boats there – when here I am, back in the real world about to pop my clogs. No way.
‘So, what are your other reasons then? I don’t believe you for one second and have you thought about Dan in all of this?’ Helen is still rifling through the kitchen drawers.
‘Helen, Dan will understand,’ I try to explain. ‘I’ll give him a call and tell him everything.’
‘Juliette, you don’t need any stress and you certainly don’t need to be chasing unicorns and rainbows at this stage,’ she says to me. ‘At last, goodness, how can it be hard to find something to write on around here?’
She opens an old notebook of mine, and then licks her finger to flick through the pages until she finds a blank one.
‘Why do you need something to write on?’ I ask. ‘I just want to go there and spend quality time with Rosie. It will be great for us both, you know it will.’
She starts to write.
‘You’ll never find him,’ she says, still writing. ‘You hardly know anything about him. You said you don’t even remember his proper name.’
She has a point. Except it’s not that I don’trememberhis proper name. I neverknewhis proper name in the first place.
‘I do remember the rest of him though,’ I reply, and it’s true. I remember his dark hair and his muscular back and the fumbling and laughing and urgency and the smell of alcohol – and the shame I felt when I woke up alone and the fear on the way home to Birmingham when sobriety kicked in and I realised how stupid we’d been not to have used any protection whatsoever.
I remember how I looked for him before I left the village the next day, just to see if he cared or wanted to see me again or would acknowledge what had happened between us but he had disappeared. I remember the hurt and shame I felt and then how Birgit and I had laughed and laughed at the very thought of me, a good Catholic girl from a convent school having a one night stand with a handsome Irishman when I didn’t even get his real name, never mind his number.
But most of all, I remember the emptiness I felt when I got on the plane home to Birmingham without Birgit to laugh about it with, and the feeling that my life had just changed forever. And oh, how it had.
All of that, I can remember loud and clear.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask my sister who is still making notes in front of me while I daydream down memory lane.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘You’re writing nothing?’
