My Mother's Choice: An utterly heartbreaking and emotional page-turner Page 2

  The bike had a substantial D-lock securing the front wheel to the frame. No sign of any key. I imagined Dad standing here, snapping the lock into place, stepping back to admire his handiwork and imagine my reaction, then driving off. Or maybe he’d asked someone else to leave it here. That was the thing with Dad – I never knew. He was a mystery.

  Anyway, I’d have to get hold of the key to the D-lock or I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Maybe he’d left it with Aunt Carrie at her office in the town centre, to dole out after a short lecture about road safety when she got back from work.

  I unlocked the front door to find a big white envelope on the doormat. My name was written on the front in Dad’s spiky, almost illegible handwriting: Dani. I tore it open and a key fell out. I scooped it up and held it. Freedom! Freedom, direct from him to me.

  The card said HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the front, with balloons. It took me a while to decipher what he’d written inside.

  Bob from the bike shop reckons this’ll be the right size for you. Take it to him to check and he’ll make sure it’s OK. Ride safely, and don’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to.

  He’d signed it, Dad x. The kiss looked both hesitant and deliberate, like something he’d thought about.

  I dumped my schoolbag and went back out. Everything fit: the key in the lock, the helmet on my head. I tore off the pink ribbon and left it lying there. It looked like the aftermath of a party. But as far as I was concerned the party was only just beginning. I straddled the bike and found – not to my surprise – that it was exactly the right size for me. That was the power of Dad; people tried to do things right for him, to please him. Apart from me. I didn’t see why I should, and anyway, what could be worse than to make an effort and still be mostly ignored?

  But I owed him a big thank you for this. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to feel grateful. Couldn’t he at least have put the card through the door this morning?

  I took off down the road. It had been a while since I’d ridden a bike – I’d outgrown my old one a couple of years before – and I’d forgotten what it felt like, the sense of speed, the lightness of it. Of not being in contact with the earth. Like swimming if water was air. Or flying.

  Maybe he really did love me, after all.

  But in that case, why did he make it so hard for me to love him back?

  Two

  It all started with a broken rule. I’m not one for blindly following orders, but I will say this. If you ever decide to do the one thing you’ve been explicitly instructed never to do, you should be prepared for consequences.

  Once I had my bike, I wanted to make the most of it. As far as I was concerned Dad had given me the keys to my freedom – the chance to get away from home, Aunt Carrie, Kettlebridge, anyone I knew and all the old familiar roads. Aunt Carrie didn’t see it like that, though, predictably, and it wasn’t long after my birthday that she decided to lay down the law.

  She tackled me after dinner, which was the usual time for her to give me a talking-to about anything that was bothering her – I spent most of the rest of my time in my bedroom, and she knew I hated her coming in when I was up there. She was washing up and I was drying, and I could tell that something was wrong. She looked hot and flustered, more so than she should have been, given that the heat had gone out of the day. Then, all of a sudden, she came out with it.

  ‘I hope you’re being careful when you go out on your bike.’

  Was she about to try and put some kind of limit on how far out of Kettlebridge I was allowed to go? ‘Sure I am. I always wear my helmet. You don’t have to worry. The bike shop checked everything, so it’s as it should be. And I promise you I’ll always make sure I’m back in time for dinner.’ I had a sudden burst of inspiration: ‘It’s good exercise, isn’t it? Better than sitting home playing on the computer.’

  Aunt Carrie looked up towards the ceiling, frowning slightly as if checking for cobwebs. I held my breath. Then she fixed her gaze on me. Aunt Carrie had green eyes; Mum’s had been brown, like mine. In the photo of Mum that I had on my bedroom windowsill Mum’s eyes looked warm and loving. They were the eyes of someone you wouldn’t mind hugging you. Aunt Carrie looked like someone who probably wouldn’t want to hug you even if you let them.

  ‘This is all very well right now, but when the nights start drawing in I want you back before dark.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Well, that was no big deal. Autumn was ages away, anyway.

  ‘There is one other thing. I know your father would say this as well.’

  How bad could it be?

  ‘No swimming.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘No river swimming, I mean,’ she said. ‘You can go to the pool anytime you want.’ She looked as stern as if we were talking about drugs, or thieving, or sex, or the kinds of things that mothers of teenagers were supposed to worry about. But she wasn’t my mother. And she was talking about something it had literally never even occurred to me to try.

  ‘OK, fine, but why are you making such a big deal about this all of a sudden?’

  She put her hands back into the washing-up bowl. ‘Because it’s dangerous. River water is dirty water. You get a mouthful of that, heaven only knows what kind of shape you’ll be in.’

  ‘I’m not planning on swallowing any river water, Aunt Carrie.’

  She gave me the disdainful look that meant I was being facetious when she was trying to talk about something important. ‘Kids are always getting into trouble in open water. You get a heatwave, like now, they suddenly think it would be a great idea to cool off wherever they like, and next thing you know they’re getting tangled up in the reeds and not making it back up to the surface. There’s a reason why we have swimming pools, you know. Besides, you shouldn’t swim anywhere unsupervised.’

  I could feel my face beginning to crack into a grin the way it always did when she was stern with me. I couldn’t help it. Being told off by anybody made me want to laugh. It was a reflex reaction that inevitably made people even more annoyed with me than they already were.

  ‘But I don’t even like swimming.’

  Swimming lessons at school had not been much fun – too cold, too much hanging around. The only redeeming thing had been that I could actually swim, so was spared the humiliation of being in the bottom group.

  My dad had taught me, back when I was little. It was one of my earliest memories, maybe the earliest of all – being suspended in blue water, very deep, and him just a few inches away, within reaching distance, having let me go. What I remembered was the feeling of panic – of my body moving almost involuntarily, like someone scrabbling at a cliff edge before falling – and then realising that I wasn’t going to sink. That the blue water was holding me up. Dad was still there, just a few inches away, and what he had wanted me to learn was that I didn’t need him.

  I knew now that the water hadn’t even been that deep. That had been at the leisure centre in Barrowton, a few miles south of Kettlebridge, and he’d taken me there because at the time Kettlebridge didn’t have an indoor pool of its own. Looking back, I was impressed that he’d bothered. I’d already been living with Aunt Carrie then. He hadn’t been around for all that much of my childhood, but at least he’d taught me something.

  ‘I just want you to promise me that you won’t do it,’ Aunt Carrie said. ‘How would I explain it to your dad if anything happened to you?’

  ‘He probably wouldn’t care.’

  ‘Don’t be such a brat. Do I need to ask him to talk to you about this?’

  I looked away, shrugged. Suddenly I felt like crying. All this fuss over something I didn’t even want to do and had no intention of doing.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I promise I won’t swim in the river.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Aunt Carrie said approvingly. ‘As long as we’ve got that clear.’

  I made my escape to my bedroom as soon as I’d dried the last dish. Back to the world of my computer game, where all the families and their lives and their hou
ses were under my control, and there was nobody at all who could tell me what to do. At least Aunt Carrie had given up on attempting to ration my screen time; I think it actually suited her to have me quietly occupied, so she could have the telly and the living room to herself.

  If it hadn’t been so hot, I might have found it easier to keep my promise. But as it was…

  One day, after school, I found a spot that was a little like a beach: a small sandy patch by the edge of the Thames in a village called Little Tipthorpe, a few miles downstream from Kettlebridge. The river was wide and slow there, and the bank sloped gently down to meet it. There were some people swimming a little way downstream. I stayed at a safe distance and watched them, bobbing around in the water and laughing, and I remembered what Aunt Carrie had said about dirty water and people getting tangled up in the reeds, and tried to tell myself that they were making a stupid mistake.

  The water wasn’t that tempting, after all. It wasn’t as if it was blue and sparkling. It was the colour of diluted mud. It was just that the day was so sweltering, and the breeze coming off the river offered a little of the same kind of relief that you might get from being by the sea.

  The next afternoon was even hotter, and when I got to the same spot by the river I had it to myself. I sat on the sandy bank and took off my socks and shoes and edged forward so I could dip my toes in the water. That couldn’t do any harm, surely.

  Cold! But it was good. Such a relief!

  I put both feet in. I could still see them through the water: perhaps it wasn’t quite so dirty after all. I watched the movement of the surface, the current rippling and threading across it. It was like watching the flames of a bonfire – it was always changing, and yet it still kept going. Except a fire would burn itself out, eventually, and the river just kept on flowing. It was lower today than it sometimes was because we had gone so long without rain; all the grass was parched, and the worms and snails were in hiding. But it would take a lot more than a heatwave to dry up the Thames.

  I didn’t even consciously decide to go in. One minute I was sitting there on the river’s edge and I was still a good girl, abiding by the rule Aunt Carrie had made. And the next I was taking my T-shirt off over my head.

  When it was really hot we were allowed to wear our PE kit to lessons, and I had on black cycling shorts and a black sports bra, which could have passed for a bikini. But anyway, there was no one around to see. I let my feet down into the water and touched earth, soft and boggy. Then I stood and it took my weight. A few more tentative steps and I was in – in up to my neck. I swam a couple of strokes and then I was in the middle of the river.

  It felt so good – so right! This was how a swan would see it: the banks with all their raggedy grass and pink flowers at eye level, high as hills, and the blue canopy of the sky stretching overhead. And the water was so soft and smooth. Like silk. Dirty silk. No, like familiar old clothes you put on for comfort. How could anybody deny themselves this? It was so free. Like flying might be. But why would you want to fly, when you could float instead?

  A dragonfly looped by, its body as bright blue as a jewel. I circled round and headed back towards the bank. A quick dip, that was all. Nobody would ever know.

  I clambered out onto the patch of sand without difficulty and sat there for a while longer, watching the river go by. I was dry within minutes. I smelt of the river, though – of mud and rain. And I didn’t look too clean. That was all right, though. I’d be able to shower before Aunt Carrie got home. She thought I was always showering and took much too long over it. It wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary for her to come back and find that I’d already washed and changed.

  It was all going so well… until it wasn’t.

  I didn’t even realise Aunt Carrie was already home until I was halfway up the stairs to the bathroom. Then I heard my name and turned to see her standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me as if she already knew I’d done something wrong.

  ‘Dani? Couldn’t you hear me? I called you.’

  Would she be able to tell? I could still make out the whiff of the river on me, and Aunt Carrie had a particularly acute sense of smell. She was always opening windows and changing air fresheners and sprinkling scented oil on bowls of potpourri.

  Also, my stupid hair would give me away. I hadn’t checked what it looked like, but it always went extra curly after getting wet.

  I said, ‘What’s up?’

  My heart was hammering. I liked to think that Aunt Carrie couldn’t get to me, that it was a matter of indifference to me whether she was angry or not. But right then and there I discovered I’d been kidding myself; I did care, and I really didn’t want to have to face her if she found out that I’d been swimming in the open after she’d explicitly told me not to.

  Maybe she even had a point. Maybe it had been a stupid, reckless thing to do, rather than a cool adventure that was just too tempting to resist.

  ‘I’m not well,’ she said. ‘I have the beginnings of a migraine. That’s why I came home early. I think I’m going to have to lie down. How was your day?’

  ‘Not bad. Hot,’ I said. ‘I’m just going up for a shower, actually.’

  I turned my back on her and made to start back up the stairs. The next minute she said, ‘Dani?’ in the sergeant-major voice she used when I’d done something specially wrong, and I knew the game was up.

  ‘Yes?’

  I sounded too innocent by half, but once you’ve committed to behaving as if you’re above suspicion, it’s hard to stop – even when you know you’ve been rumbled.

  ‘Get back down here,’ Aunt Carrie said, and it was clear that at least one of us was about to go in for some straight-talking.

  I went down the stairs to face her and caught sight of my reflection in the hall mirror. My hair looked pretty wild. It had been relatively subdued during the hot dry days, but now it had sprung back into action like a drought-hit plant that finally gets a good long drink of water.

  Aunt Carrie wrinkled her nose. ‘You smell like you’ve been rolling round in a bog.’

  I shrugged, tried a smile. I couldn’t help but look sheepish, and I knew I looked it, too.

  ‘You’ve gone and done exactly what I told you not to do,’ Aunt Carrie said. ‘You have, haven’t you? I asked you not to do one thing. Just one thing. How could you deliberately disregard me?’

  I gave the tiniest shrug. ‘It didn’t do any harm,’ I said. ‘It was just a tiny dip. To cool down. I was only in the water for a few minutes. Other people do it all the time.’

  ‘You have no idea what harm it could do.’

  ‘Look, OK, I know I shouldn’t have done it after you asked me not to…’

  ‘Not asked. Told. I told you not to.’

  ‘It was just a one-off thing, OK? I can see it really bothers you and I promise I won’t do it again.’

  She folded her arms. She was looking at me as if she absolutely hated me. I’d never seen her like that before – staring at me as if I was an actual enemy, rather than a kid she’d ended up being saddled with and had brought up out of a sense of duty. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Her lips tightened in a little grimace of disgust.

  ‘I’m not going to do this any more,’ she said. ‘He can deal with you.’

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry, OK? I know it was stupid to do what I did.’

  She shook her head. Suddenly she looked more sad than angry.

  ‘I’m going to call your father,’ she said. ‘He has to be the one to talk to you about this.’

  ‘But Aunt Carrie… is that really necessary? I won’t even go out on the bike after school any more if you don’t want me to. I’ll come straight home and do my homework.’

  ‘I need to tell him.’ She picked up the phone, which lived on a little table next to the hall mirror.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. It was the kind of look she might have given to someone who was trying
to sell her something, before making it clear that she wasn’t buying.

  She said, ‘You’d better get in the shower and clean yourself up.’

  Then she went into the living room with the phone and I heard her saying, ‘Jon? It’s Carrie. We have a situation here.’ She closed the door and I couldn’t hear any more.

  We have a situation here.

  Why was she reacting in such a wildly over-the-top way?

  She’d said she had a migraine coming on. Probably she wasn’t feeling too great.

  Dad wouldn’t take all this as seriously as Aunt Carrie had… would he?

  I trudged up the stairs to the shower. If only I hadn’t gone into the water… If only Aunt Carrie hadn’t come home early… but what was the point of regret? I’d screwed up, and now I was going to have to face the consequences.

  Better the devil you know. Aunt Carrie could be difficult, but I’d lived with her long enough to be mostly immune to her. Dad was the devil I didn’t know at all.

  Aunt Carrie knocked at my bedroom door while I was getting dressed after the shower. I was sitting on the bed, putting my socks on. Left to myself I’d have gone barefoot as much of the time as possible, but Aunt Carrie had a horror of bare feet. Bare anything, in fact. I said, ‘Come in’ as politely as I could manage, and she came in and stood with her arms folded and looked down at me.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ she said.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Oh, he can be fast when he wants to be.’

  This was as close as I’d ever heard her come to saying something critical of him. She put her hands to her temples and rubbed them. Then she let out a sigh.

  ‘Is he angry with me?’

  ‘More concerned, I think. Understandably so. I’m going to go and lie down.’